Last month, fashion stylist Courtney Mays described to Glossy how she gets to know her clients, many of whom are in the WNBA, and why that’s important.
“I’m in their homes and with their families, learning about who they are inside out,” she said. “Getting someone dressed and helping to identify their look is a really intimate experience. I want to make sure their look is a reflection of the person they want to be off the court and that they feel like their best, most confident self.”
While many brands have yet to realize the value of dressing athletes, Mays said a growing number of brands are “excited to be a part of the conversation.” She called out Tibi as an example, saying she often counts on the brand to dress New York Liberty forward Breanna Stewart, among other athlete clients.
In recent months, along with Stewart, WNBA players Skylar Diggins, Caitlin Clark and Alysha Clark have worn the brand.
According to founder and creative director Amy Smilovic, athletes wearing Tibi “completely makes sense.”
Athletes aren’t the only new focus for Tibi, as the brand homes in on marketing that reaches high-potential consumers, considering its unwavering focus on catering to “creative pragmatists.”
In an interview with Glossy days before Tibi’s Spring 2016 show, Smilovic shared her take on who and what is influential today — touching on athletes, fashion shows and Substackers — and how Tibi is strategizing accordingly.
In general, who is Tibi’s target customer?
“We put ourselves in front of people who think exactly the way we do and may not be aware of Tibi. And we do the work to get people to understand more about themselves and how Tibi helps them visualize that understanding. Our customer has an ease about her, she has a very modern outlook, and she also likes familiarity, but she doesn’t want to be constrained by it. She knows it’s important to dress in a way that brings that to life. And she knows, from having put Tibi on her body, that’s when she feels like it all comes together: how she thinks, how she wants to look and how she wants to be. People who do not know about Tibi or reject it are people who don’t crave that for themselves — it’s not who they are. And when they put it on, they just don’t get it. I have no need to convince these people that Tibi’s for them, because we’re not trying to be everything to everyone.”
Who would you be excited to see wearing the brand?
“Context is critical for influence. In the past, if someone accepted an Oscar in your brand or you were on a two-page spread in Vogue, the watersheds would open up; that would be your tipping point or your big moment. But today, for us, that is absolutely not true unless it was the right person in Vogue or the right person accepting the Oscar. It cannot be just anyone. When it’s just anyone, it falls flat; people don’t understand the ‘why’ behind it, and they don’t make the connection, so it reduces the stickiness. And without stickiness, you have nothing. In fact, it may cause more problems, because then you start having people come [into our stores] and they have a different set of expectations [about the brand]. We probably spend more time pushing people away [than trying to convince them] because they’re not right for us. They waste our time, and we waste their time. It’s like, ‘It’s not you, it’s us.’ We’d rather not go there.”
So if a pop star randomly wore your brand, and all their fans started buying it up, …?
“It would be my worst nightmare.”
Why does it make sense for Tibi to dress athletes?
“You’ve got these women who are super busy and super active, but they still want to look good. They actually need to look good — they know it’s part of their business. Athletes, more than almost any other category of people, can look so awkward when they don’t feel right in their clothing, because you’re so used to seeing them move with so much ease. All of a sudden, when they’re walking stiffly and they’re uncomfortable, it is a complete counter to your perception of this individual. … With Brianna [Stewart], Caitlin [Clark], Skylar [Diggins] and Alysha [Clark wearing Tibi], it clicked. We knew that we were getting the CEOs and the Supreme Court justices — women doing serious shit. But these WNBAers were a major ‘aha’ for us. And they fit in our clothes — we’ve never [tailored] anything.”
Once the right customer discovers Tibi, I would think they’d be amazingly loyal. Is that true?
“They’re here to say — so much that it’s a problem. There are now so many Substacks dedicated to telling people how to buy less Tibi! But I get it. They’re saying: ‘You’ve gone down the rabbit hole, and [realized this brand suits your style to a T]. Now, how do you bucket out what you really need? What’s going to add value? People will write to me and say, ‘What else can I buy besides Tibi? Because everything seems to be perfectly engineered for me.’ They’re not wrong if they share our mindset. When they buy from a brand that is heavily ‘algorithmed’ or created by committee or according to the merchandising rules, our customer will never feel fully in love or part of it. I tell customers that, if they want to buy something from somewhere else, they should think about the other brand like a side piece: ‘What do I want from that guy? He’s my one-night stand. This is what I’ll get out of them.’ But they know who they’re going to come home to.”
Does this knowledge and confidence come with brand longevity, after doing this for 28 years?
“Yes, it took a lot of years. It took Covid, and it took me diving into social media — and I mean the discussions around it, rather than the influence of it. [Tibi and Smilovic have about 800,000 Instagram followers between them.] But it absolutely has to be coupled with being an independent designer. I do not care how great you are and how ‘authentic’ you are — if you are playing within a big organization that has a different set of objectives and way of measuring your success, you will never get to be what you can be. You can’t [get here] unless you have a structure around you that allows for it. And until everyone starts going independent, it leaves us in a place where we don’t have a lot of competition for that type of righteous, independent thinking.”
Are you able to achieve your goals while focusing on customers with such a specific style?
“A sustainable business is your break-even, and everything above it is open for risk and trial and pushing. I’m always looking for people who share our mindset. If a store doesn’t share our mindset, we don’t work with them. If someone walks into the Tibi store and is not nice — which is different from being direct — we don’t want to work with them. Success, for me, is always being able to do what we want creatively, if we can defend it. It means staying small enough that it [allows us] to always do good things. Things go off the rails all the time when you have too much money and too much choice. By nature, I don’t desire to be so big, because I see it as a conflict with being able to be creative.”
You mentioned Substack. Are you putting more marketing focus on the platform?
“It’s a place where we’ve been able to go in and tell deeper stories and give more context. No matter what you do on Instagram, it requires a bit of pithiness, and with pithiness comes shallowness — and it also [opens the door for] misinterpretation. Any platform that allows us to be real and for more people to understand the full 360-degree [lifestyle] of the brand is incredibly important. We’ve put out books, we put out music on Spotify, and we have a podcast, “(Almost) Reckless.” People want to know what we’re into, from music to restaurants, because they know that it [transcends] geography and demographics of age and income. It just is.”
What’s inspiring you now?
“I find inspiration from the people around us, from our customers and from our team at Tibi. And I think it’s because I find inspiration in conversation, and I love connecting the dots. Once the dots start to connect, then I start seeking the visual that will help tell that story. Sometimes, once I’ve had all these conversations and feel something so strongly, then when I’m out, and maybe an art exhibit or a movie hits at the same time, I [realize]: That visually expresses what I’m feeling right now.”
What are your objectives for Fashion Week this season?
“I was craving to do something much smaller and more intimate, but we still had some pragmatic needs that had to be met. So, we are doing two different events on the day of the show: We are doing one old-school runway-style show in our studio loft space. It’s for a very small number of store buyers and editors. And then we are also doing a very intimate and private event for [top] customers, where we’ll be showing them the new collection on models, and I’ll be working one-on-one with stylists. Some of our amazing luxury stores, like McMullen, will be bringing their VIC clients. And I’m excited, because, after we decided to do this, I heard from some of our VICs that they were craving to do something new this year, after being invited to our last three runway shows.”
What’s the future of fashion influence, and how is Tibi planning accordingly?
“We know that having a company around you that is simply authentic by nature, rather than [driven] by annual business objectives, can be incredibly influential and is a path to success. And so I think marketers will take that and be like, ‘OK, how can we pretend like the new head of whatever giant house is truly allowed to be authentic and creative?’ Because, by definition, they can never be. They can be luxury and they can be wildly creative, but they can’t be authentic. And so, now it’s up to small businesses to remember what got them to where they are, and not to dismiss that and be bought out and try to be something they are not. That’s where it crumbles. It requires a lot of conviction and guts to stay the course, because there truly is no [established] course. You really are just staying due north, or whichever way you’ve set your compass.”
