"Quirky, full of personality and sparkly." This is how Aubrie Pagano, founder of women's clothing brand Bow & Drape, describes her customer. In fashion, she says, you want to out-niche people, and then you can actually find millions of those people nationally and globally.
Gone are the days when luxury meant having the thing that all your friends, acquaintances or idols owned. Today, luxury is less about exclusive products and more about what you can experience and what story you can tell, Pagano says. Hence why customization has proven such a success for her e-commerce business. "Bow & Drape is a 'Build-A-Bear' for fashion where women can create something of their own."
It's key to capitalize on your community, too, especially when your brand lives online. For Bow & Drape, Instagram has been a wonderful tool. The company relies on customers to create their own unique sayings printed on their shirts, most of them choosing relevant idioms or witty puns like "I love you from my head tomatoes" or "You had me at Merlot." In other words, the content is naturally shareable. "Our shirts almost serve as captions in and of themselves."
Congratulations to @emilylovesy0u for being this week's #pun_isher! Each week we choose one design shared out with #pun_isher to win all the glory and a free sweatshirt!! A photo posted by @bowanddrape on Feb 2, 2015 at 8:57am PST
The startup even has a #Pun-Isher contest where one community member's design is featured each week on the site and on Instagram. "We now get about 10x the designs on our site as we did before we started the competition, so it really incentivizes people and inspires people to create a lot on the site. And the more they create, the more they end up buying."
It's hard to replicate the experience of walking into a fitting room with your best friend. But by creating a platform where users can share out their own designs and communicate with one another, you see high engagement on the site, Pagano says. And when your brand has a relatable, engaging personality, customers will flock.