The 5-year-old fashion brand Cider has positioned itself as an American competitor to brands like Shein by focusing on speed and quickly hopping on trends as they appear in the market. Its latest move is partnering with Pop Mart — it’s the first U.S. company to team on a product collaboration with the buzzy Chinese toy company.
Cider co-founder Yu Oppel told Glossy that Pop Mart made sense as a partner because both companies target a female Gen-Z customer, a valuable demographic many fashion brands have been trying to crack.
Cider is growing in popularity among Gen-Z shoppers — nearly 70% of its customers are between the ages of 18 and 24, and it sells several million garments per month in over 130 countries. Since raising $130 million in funding in 2021, Cider has seen its revenue increase by 7x, and its app has been downloaded over 50 million times. And the way Cider approaches its community, particularly on TikTok, offers a lesson for brands seeking to target young shoppers.
“Right now, it’s a lot harder to control how many views your own content gets as a brand,” Oppel said. “Objectively, the content we post now is better than it was five years ago, but it’s harder to get hundreds of thousands of views now than in the past. What you can control is who you work with and your community.”
Every week, Cider puts out hundreds of videos on TikTok, through the official Cider account, which has nearly 1 million followers, and through dozens of official influencer partners. In September, for example, it ran a Fall Mood Report campaign released with the Canadian fashion influencer Isabelle Allain (@izzipoopi; 745,000 Instagram followers).
The Mood Report, in which Allain highlights trends and aesthetics like “Coastal Core,” tied to Cider’s “Pick a Mood” feature on its website, where customers can narrow down its thousands of styles by mood or aesthetic. Moods currently shoppable on the site include “corpcore,” Halloween and K-pop.
“We do thousands of customer interviews, and this is a feature they really love,” Oppel said. “You can also search by picture to get really granular.”
The feature has quietly become one of Cider’s strongest selling tools. More than half of its customers use “Pick a Mood” to shop, and featuring the tool’s functionality in TikTok content magnifies its selling power. Recently, a lace skirt was featured in both a viral TikTok from the brand and in one of the moods on the front page of its e-commerce site, leading to nearly 4,000 of the dresses selling in one hour.
The products on the “Pick a Mood” page are a combination of hand-picked pieces by the merchandising team and algorithmic recommendations based on a consumer’s profile. Searching by photo is entirely algorithmic. Oppel said Cider is heavy on tech and many of its systems, including its algorithmic recommendations, are built in-house rather than licensed from an external partner.
Oppel said she and the social team are “chronically online” and spend parts of their days engaging with the community, responding to comments and following the same people that their customers are following. They have also built dedicated communities across multiple channels — for example, they’ve set up a dedicated Discord server for the brand with 15,000 members.
“The Discord is a great way to get detailed feedback,” Oppel said. “But it could be as easy to just email some of your top customers and ask to do a Zoom call with them. We’ve done more than 1,000 one-on-one interviews, but even if you just talk to 10 people, you’ll probably start to see some common themes.”
