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 using AI to source affiliate partners, prioritizing products, and managing shipping and fulfillment.
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, though it has since expanded into other categories like baby bags. Luo is also the founder of the Spanish charcuterie brand Mercado Famous.
Brian Berger, the founder and CEO of menswear brand Mack Weldon since its inception in 2012. Prior to Mack Weldon, Berger worked at companies including Comcast, WebMD and Excite@Home
Hadley Pollet, the Connecticut-based founder, CEO and designer of the women’s accessories brand Hadley Pollet. The brand was founded just over 20 years ago and has since expanded to a wide number of categories in apparel, yoga and accessories.
The state of e-commerce and the importance of product
Berger: “If you think about the arc of e-commerce, Covid was very much the peak. And since Covid, it’s just been getting more and more challenging, especially if you’re entirely reliant on that channel. It’s a competitive environment. There are lots of brands with really similar value propositions, and it’s harder and harder to differentiate. The things that really made us all stand out in the early days are sort of priced-in now with the consumer.”
Pollet: “Covid and the growth of influencers all trying to sell products at the same time created what I think of as an infection of sameness. And that sameness was propagated down through Nordstrom, Saks, Bloomingdale’s, you name it. And so, our strategy, aside from typical e-commerce strategies, has been, from day one, to create a unique product that no one else has. And that has proven, time and time again through all the highs and lows of things, to work best for us.”
Luo: “I think product is king. Even when we first started the brand in 2014, that was the high of Warby Parker, Allbirds, all those brands. And not to talk shit about any of these brands, but we always felt that some of these DTC brands put product second, and it was always about the fancy marketing and cheap customer acquisition. And we always felt that the product should be central, and we invested a lot in our manufacturers, in our material science.”
Pollet: “We don’t produce in China, so we’re not hit with those tariffs. But we manufacture different pieces of the product in different places to get the best components, because one supplier may be really good at buckles or something. That’s helped keep product quality high.”
Expanding categories and staying competitive
Luo: “We started the brand with two kinds of bags, and now we have over 150. Baby bags have really become a huge hit for us. Now we’re divided into four collections, and baby is a big one. Baby bags are on their seventh iteration for us. And we work with moms and dads to find out what they need.”
Pollet: “We have sold in Saks, we’ve sold in Nordstrom, we’ve sold in all of them. And quite honestly I’m happy right now that we’re not in any of them, given where many of them are right now.”
Berger: “The way we go to market is very distinct from traditional retail, where a brand would go to a retailer to sell their product and hopefully get bigger and bigger orders. We mostly rely on new customer marketing and retention marketing to drive sales and sales growth. And the new customer marketing side of our business is subject to things that are within our control: what type of ads we create, what it looks like, how frequently we update them, et cetera. And a lot of things we don’t control, including algorithms that are programmed to do a lot of things that are in service of what we want, but also a lot of things that are opposed to what we want. And changes to those things we can’t control sometimes can throw brands into a tailspin, because you get used to marketing one way, and then all of a sudden. overnight, that way doesn’t work anymore. And the best example of that is the iOS 14 change that happened post-COVID in 2021, which essentially turned the whole way in which brands like us go to market on its head. And since then, I think we’ve all sort of found our footing, but it’s not the same.”
What’s working
Pollet: “We’ve been doing lots of event-based marketing and working with some really interesting unexpected partners. There’s a really high-end sandwich shop in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the owner knows us. And one day — I’m a customer there — he said, ‘I want all you friends to come here. I’ll throw a party for you. And so we partnered together and did this really successful event. So we’re doing more unlikely partnerships, not just in product development, but also in sensory experiences, with food or other unlikely retail partnerships that drive sales and awareness for the brand.”
Luo: “One thing we start realizing on the operations side of e-commerce is we’re getting more efficient because of technology. AI is a big part of this. I spent yesterday talking with our social media team about our influencers. And we use the classic platforms like LTK, ShopMy. And we’ve started using AI to help us sort through all the people we could work with. Historically, it would take 30% of my team’s time to source the right influencers to work with. Now, with AI, we can do it in minutes. We still have to build the relationships with them and vet them and everything once we source them, but the actual sourcing and finding them is becoming a lot more efficient.”
