Welcome to Executive Action Items, a Glossy+ member-exclusive series driven by monthly focus groups with subject matter experts. The bi-weekly series offers immediately actionable takeaways for workers navigating the rapidly evolving beauty and fashion industries.
This month, Glossy brought together a group of executives from the fashion industry to talk about the challenges facing e-commerce. The executives compared notes on topics like charging for returns, working with Amazon, educating customers about products and cutting down on SKU counts.
Focus group members:
Aaron Luo, the co-founder and CEO of the handbag brand Caraa. Luo founded the brand in 2015, primarily as a travel brand, although it has since expanded into other categories including baby bags. Luo is also the founder of the Spanish charcuterie brand Mercado Famous.
Brian Berger, the founder and CEO of the menswear brand Mack Weldon, launched in 2012. Prior to Mack Weldon, Berger worked for companies including Comcast, WebMD and Excite@Home
Hadley Pollet, the Connecticutt-based founder, CEO and designer of her women’s accessories brand Hadley Pollet. The brand was founded shortly over 20 years ago and has since expanded to a wide number of categories in apparel, yoga and accessories.
Educating the consumer
Berger: “We try to weave product education through the entire customer journey. There’s a lot of education on the site about our product and our different fabrics, which we apply to our silhouettes. We’re ensuring that every interaction the consumer has with the product presents an opportunity to learn what makes it special. Sometimes it’s upfront, and other times we just make it easy to find if that’s what they’re seeking. ”
Pollet: “Product comes under the brand umbrella. Everything we do drives toward our purpose, which is to empower women. Imagery and storytelling are really important for that. I want women to see themselves in the product but also in the photography and video we do, which include stories about how we empower women. Eighty percent of the factories we work with are women-owned. So it’s about putting that messaging into imagery, into product and into the stories we tell.”
Competing with Amazon on shipping and returns
Berger: “Brands that are not Amazon don’t have the scale that lets Amazon do what they do. One way to handle that is to just get real about shipping — about charging for returns, charging for shipping, lowering the threshold for returns. In all the cases where we’ve increased the cost relative to the service level or increased the hurdle for customers, we have not seen an adverse reaction on conversions. So consumers are seeing the cost of returns across a broad spectrum where they shop, and they’re accepting it.”
Luo: “For shipping, since we couldn’t beat Amazon at shipping, we joined them. We started using their services for one of our warehouses, and so far, it’s been a pretty pleasant experience. The pricing is good and the service is good. And a lot of customers are OK now with restocking fees and return fees. It’s helped us grow our international business overnight. We had double-digit international growth in one quarter.”
New e-commerce tech tools
Berger: “We recently added a new tool called Measured, an incrementality tool to measure digital and non-digital ads which lets you understand the true ROI of your ad spend. That helps you optimize things in a way where you direct your dollars toward what’s providing the biggest gains to the business. We’ve never had something like that before, and it helps to give credit to the right channel so you’re not overindexing on something that isn’t valuable.”
Pollet: “We’re dabbling in AI for design purposes — mostly for things like simple line sheet stuff if we don’t have all the colors in yet. I’m particularly interested in cross-pollinating technologies across all the countries where we conduct product development and manufacturing. We have an artisan training program, for example. And we’re looking for ways to bring the tech we use in Taiwan to Peru.”
Managing SKUs and seasonal newness
Luo: “We’ve always been non-seasonal. For fashion brands that rely on seasonal freshness, that will impact the number of SKUs they’re making. For us, with a seasonless product, we’re actually probably growing our SKU count. We still see gaps in our assortment, and only occasionally do we retire old styles that aren’t selling as well, but then we introduce new categories.”
Berger: “Our customer today is much more interested in fashion and novelty than our customer of yesterday. That has to do with guys spending more time on Instagram and TikTok and being exposed to more than they would have been historically.”
Luo: “In terms of inventory, we’re relaxing our inventory turnover. We used to have a much more aggressive target about inventory. My thinking is: The inventory I don’t have and need to buy is more expensive than the inventory I have right now. So I’m okay with sitting on some containers and waiting to see what happens, especially with this administration and tariffs.”
