An influencer's Business

Meet the Brand

*For the sake of anonymity we won't disclose the Brand's name and shall refer to it as Brand U

Brand U is a fashion clothing brand that was created by an influencer who desired to encourage women to embrace their body and embody fashion at every stage of their growth . The brand's target audiene was millenial women and similar to the audience of most influencers, they were activated to participate only when the owner engaged them through social media.

Challenges

Brand U had 3 major goals with the intent of generating revenue more organically without having to "Go Live" to sell merchandise. The brand ultimately wanted to understand how to transition or separate the influencer aspect of their life from the business. They wanted the business to live up to industry standards and to evolve into a business that could measure and optimize growth on a monthly & quarterly basis.

Début outlined their challenges into 3 primary buckets. The main challenge was to design a strategy that would slowly incorporate and highlight other "Hero's" to transition the influencer from the center of attention.

Challenges:

1. Improve Organic Search

2. Increase Revenue & Profitability

3. Return customers to the business

Solutions

I would be lying if I told you that replacing the influencer as the center of the business was easy. It was not! The influencer's audience had expectations to be in the know of the person's life and that would go away with the Hero Models replacing the influencer. The second layer to this challenge was mentally preparing the influencer to let go of the wheel. The hardest thing to do in business is shift! We sourced models that were a representation of where the Brand wanted to go and persons that were a solid reflection and embodiment of the influencer. We settled on one plus size and one standard size model, both equally fierce and poetic in their model styles as well as speech.

To improve Organic Search: We optimized URL slugs to populate in search engines in correlation to how the Brand's target audience searches. Additionally, we optimized product titles and descriptions on their shopify website, utilizing popular keywords and creating long tail keywords that were similar to how most audiences search for similar item types.

Increasing revenue & profitabililty: Was the most fun! We started by reviewing industry standards for similar item types and deciding where we needed to cut costs to be more cost-friendly to our customers but also more profitable for the bottom line. In some cases this looked like reviewing and re-negotiating brand-tagging contracts & wholesale purchases. In other cases this looked like re-assigning profit marginability. We saw larger profit margins in accessories and thus made larger investments to increase the bottom line. To validate our prices in other categories we created demand by only having early releases and giving the audience a chance to be featured in "who wore it first". As prices came more in line to the industry standard, sales went up and so did profit margins.

Returning Customers to the business: We say it all the time, but apparently not enough! Customers love transparancy and communication, make it easy for them and that's just what we did. We started by looking at customer emails that were left unaddressed and re-engaging them with an explanation, an apology and an incentive to shop the site. Secondly, we improved our site's security and displayed the security chip near the checkout to increase our customer's confidence in our ability to protect their data. Lastly and most importantly for retailers, we created a return's portal for our customers to seamlessly return items to our headquarters.