It’s got millions of customers, revenue reaching nearly half a billion dollars and over a hundred profitable stores, but you’ve probably never heard of it – unless you live in the Midwest.
Evereve, a Minnesota-based womenswear retailer known for its styling services and denim, has been around since 2004. But, until about four years ago, the company had put little into marketing or brand awareness. It subsisted on organic growth, word-of-mouth and placement in malls across the middle of the country, yet its revenue reached the hundreds of millions. Evereve is privately owned by founders Mike and Megan Tamte and has been profitable for all 20 years of its existence.
Tom Nowak, a marketer with experience at Best Buy and the creative agency PMH, joined Evereve as its first CMO in 2019 with the mandate to finally get the company’s name recognition to match its size. Over the last five years, Evereve’s total revenue increased by 160%, its e-commerce revenue grew by 380%, and it doubled its customers to 2 million. This year, Evereve expects to reach $450 million in revenue.
Nowak’s strategy of combining organic top-of-funnel marketing produced in-house with smart paid ad buys offers a good case study on how to scale effectively.
“One of the first things I noticed when I joined was that growth was stagnating a bit,” Nowak said. The year before, Evereve had spent more on marketing than ever before, although the investment was still very small. And yet growth was slowing down, and customer acquisition dropped 5%.
“The first thing we did was elevate the look and feel,” Nowak said. “The brand could come across as a little mom-and-pop before, and I felt that was hampering our growth. We had to look and feel more like a brand with fashion credibility.”
That led Evereve to build its in-house influencer marketing team, which has since secured deals with influencers like Anna Mae Groves (469,000 Instagram followers) and Lindsey Weaver (259,000 Instagram followers). The program has grown quickly, with Evereve now doing campaigns with 30-40 influencers per month.
Working with influencers led Nowak to Evereve’s most successful marketing tool: its own employees. Evereve began a series of videos called EETV, which are posted on its social channels, hosted on its website and played in its stores. The videos feature a regular cast of employees at Evereve, including chief creative officer Heidi Watson and director of styling Ash Linsmeier. Posted four to five times a week, the videos feature new product drops, styling tips and previews of upcoming seasonal collections.
In 2024, Evereve posted 200 EETV videos and grew its Instagram following by over 300,000. On the brand’s website, users who watch the videos have a conversion rate of about 60%. And last year, nine of the top 20 best-performing videos across Evereve’s social channels were EETV videos.
“We use the videos in a lot of different ways,” Nowak said. “For each one, we run 15-second cuts introducing the topic as paid ads on social, which drives people to come to the channel to see the rest. Outside of the organic stuff, we spend pretty heavily on paid ads, and I’ve always believed you need both to work together.”
Evereve’s marketing budget has grown to be around 8% of revenue, up from around 2% in 2018. Part of the success of EETV, Nowak said, is the consistency. While performance marketing offers immediate visibility on returns, strategies like producing EETV only reveal their value after they’ve been invested in for a while.
“Now, people know the hosts,” Nowak said. “If Heidi doesn’t appear in a video for a few days, people ask about her. They get little followings of their own. And because they’re our people, they have authority on the product. And it leads to more customer acquisition, higher average order value, lots of good stuff.”
Evereve has 106 stores across the country with a plan to open 10 more this year. Currently, Evereve puts its brand awareness at 20% nationally but 50% in the regions where it has stores in middle America. That’s an increase of more than 50% in the last three years, but Nowak said there’s still a lot more room for the company to grow.
“There was a time a few years ago when you saw a huge swing in ad spend to performance marketing only, and things that were upper-funnel or awareness-focused were kind of pooh-poohed,” Nowak said. “I’ve never believed that. The balance of the two is really important.”