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How Live Streaming Saved This 40-Year Fashion Brand: Lauren French Talks Bold Moves Behind Motto’s Growth | #459

In this episode, we sit down with the incredible Lauren French, the brains behind Motto Fashions 2.0. While this Australian brand has been around for over 40 years, Lauren has successfully transformed the family business into an absolute digital powerhouse. She shares how the pandemic forced her to pivot from bricks-and-mortar stores to daily live-stream fashion shows, a move that helped the brand go on to make more than $5 million in revenue in 2021— five times more than in 2019! Lauren reveals the bold strategies behind her success, including focusing on customer acquisition over retention, leveraging hero products like the Miracle Pant, and partnering with celebrity ambassador Julia Morris.

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About your guest:

Lauren French is the driving force behind Motto Fashions, a renowned Australian brand that has been empowering women over 40 with bold, versatile style for over 40 years. Since taking the helm, Lauren has transformed the family business into an ecommerce success story, leading to a staggering 127% growth in just 12 months. With features in 7News, The Audacious Agency and Medium, she’s also caught the attention of high-profile influencers, including comedian Julia Morris. Recently ranked 21st in Smart Company’s Smart50 Awards 2023, Lauren’s innovative use of live-stream shopping and hero products has made Motto a standout in the fashion world.

About your host:

Nathan Bush is the host of the Add To Cart podcast and a leading eCommerce transformation consultant. He has led eCommerce for businesses with revenue $100m+ and has been recognised as one of Australia’s Top 50 People in eCommerce four years in a row. You can contact Nathan on LinkedIn, Twitter or via email.

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Duration:: 56m
Broadcast on:: 27 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

"Welcome to the f*ck at era." "The last thing I want to do is go viral on TikTok because there's no point in getting a bunch of Gen Z's looking at a brand that's targeted at over 40 women. I'm a shop pay check out girl, I don't even realise I've bought stuff and I've bought stuff and it's suddenly, you know, it's too late and I can't change it. That is what big commerce needs right now." "I think if we can get shop pay on big commerce, we can solve world peace as well." "Welcome to adtacart, Australia's leading e-commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast-moving world of online retail. Here's your host, Bushy." "Welcome back to another episode of adtacart, my name is Bushy and I'm joining you from the land of the terrible people here in Brisbane, Australia. I once tried to run away from home, but I did not make it past lunchtime. Today's guest tried to run away from the family business, only to be pulled back in, not by a chicken sandwich, but by e-commerce and lucky she did because she's made this business thrive online. Today's guest is Lauren French from Motto Fashions and she shares her journey of transforming a 40-year-old bricks and mortar fashion label business into an e-commerce powerhouse. When Covid forced Motto's physical stores to shut down, Lauren and her team quickly pivoted by live streaming fashion shows to an audience hungry for connection and entertainment. Now years on from that, the live streaming continues and last year alone when most people are struggling for growth, Motto had a staggering 127% growth in the last 12 months. This is a story driven by necessity and resilience and Lauren has been working with big-name influencers and celebrities to turn Motto into a household name for stylish, confident women over 40 who are in their fucking era. More on that at the start of the chat. In this episode, we dive into how Lauren used live streaming as a lifeline during the pandemic and how they continue that on today. We talk about her unique approach to product launches and we learn how she managed to secure Aussie comedian, Julia Morris as a brand ambassador and her tips around celebrity ambassadors. Now whether you're a fashion enthusiast or an e-commerce entrepreneur or just someone who loves e-commerce, this conversation is littered with practical insights that you can use. As always, a very special thank you to our partners Shopify Plus and Deliver in Person who make this podcast possible. Now, let's jump into my conversation with Lauren French from Modo Fashions. Lauren, welcome to Bad Decart. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. So good to have you here. I was doing research. You were. You were good. I did some. My team helped me a lot. I can't claim to do it all. But one of the taglines that we've found was Welcome to the fucking era, which you don't say that, you kind of like little apostrophes and stuff going on there. But I love that. I love it. I love it. It was bold. It was straight out there. It was straight to the point. I think it was on your About Us page. What does that mean? And how did that come about? Yeah. So that, unfortunately, we have to put the asterisks and all the other bits and pieces. I wish we could just put the words up there. That came about. How did it start? I can't remember. It came about because Modo's whole philosophy is really about like you do you and we get so many people that contact us and say, I've just turned 50, for example, like what do I wear now? And we're like, what do you mean? What do you wear now? You wear whatever you want. Like you need to be you. So we kind of thought, okay, how can we make that a really marketable eye-catching, crazy headline to get the message out there, basically? So because it is so eye-catching and different, it definitely went out there. So that's where it came from. No, full credit to for not being boring, I love that. And is that your market over 50s? Probably more about over 40s. We kind of step in there as soon as people have their kids off their hands. That's really when they come in because they want to be all about themselves. You get this like new lease on life. You can be like 2.0 version of yourself. That's where Modo comes in because they just want to start investing in themselves. Oh, that's cool. So that tagline makes so much sense. I was having this conversation with Sarah and my wife over the weekend. And our goal, when the kids leave home, they're 8 and 10. So I might have another 30 years ahead of me yet. It was mainly fun. Is that we kind of have the gap year that we never have and we move to the south of Italy or something for a year. Oh my God, me and my husband have almost the same thing that is so funny. Yeah, the reverse gap year? Yeah, totally. And we're going to Italy too. That's our plan. I'm crazy to meet up. I've got a daughter who's 10 as well, so I'll see you there. I'm going to tell you an e-commerce story over there. That's funny. I love it. So tell us about Modo. We'll go back to the history, I understand that it's family business. Tell us how you got involved with Modo and where the business came from. Okay, so Modo went to have 40th birthday next year, which is wild. So my parents started the business with predominantly being bricks and mortar for the entire time. And in like around about 2007, I remember my mum said to me like, you know, I think it might be time you join the family business. And I'm like, I don't want to do that. I hate Modo, you know, all that because I was 20 at the time. And she's like, well, you know, there's an opportunity to start the online store. How do you feel about that? And I remember at the time, I was like thinking, who would shop online? It just was not done back then. Like Blackberries were still the phone that we were using. So it was like really, really early days. This is two, well, 2006 was the start of kind of my journey coming in tomorrow. So anyway, fast forward. I ended up going, oh, stuff it. Give it a go. So came in, started the ecom side of the business. And that just tracked along growing, you know, naturally over the period, but still bricks and mortar were our predominantly, where our revenue came from. Then fast forward, you know, 13 or so years, COVID happened. And during that time is when ecom really became a huge, huge part of our business, obviously all our stores were in Melbourne. So they all shut during that COVID time. And ecom really kicked off. So since then, it's kind of like, it feels like we're a new business. It feels like we've just started because the business is completely different. We do still have bricks and mortar, but ecom is where we focus. And that has been completely our growth over the last few years. Because you had a crazy time in COVID, didn't you? Hey, young baby. Oh my god, wild. And I think it was 80% of your revenue ish was physical. Yes. Yes. Yep. That's exactly right. So 80% of it came from our bricks and mortar stores. And we had about eight and then obviously, you know, we had what a couple of days noticed that everything was going to have to shut. And I did have a new baby at time too. So I wasn't even working in full capacity. And I remember I got a call from my mum and she's like, Oh, honey, I think you've got to come back to work. This is like, you know, basically, shit's going down. So came back with baby. And we just thought, okay, how number one, how are we going to connect with our customers? Because I thought if we close our shops, they're just going to forget who we are. We didn't know if we were going to be closed for a week, two weeks a year, like we had no idea. So then I thought, okay, what if we kind of like do a live stream had never even done one before that I didn't even know how to do it. And we kind of do like, what are those TV, you know, TV shopping type things. And we can just be because we still had stock coming in, how like, how can we just sell our clothes to our customers? So they remember who we are. They don't forget the motto name. And whether they buy it online or they don't, who cares? It's when we open, we want customers still and we don't want to be sucking all our stuff. Like what do we do? So we started live streaming and that was a total game changer in our business. That was kind of like the start and that happened very, very quickly, but that was like the start of this new business that we now have, even though we're 40 years old. What did the first live stream look like? I was terrible. Please don't anyone go back. It was so bad. We looked awful too. It was like the fashion really changes quickly, but I think we live streamed at that point, we did twice a week and we went for about like over an hour, I don't know how we talk so much. And we were just constantly showing clothes, showing clothes, getting excited. And I think because it was just like me and mum in the room, it was just really natural and we had that real mother daughter banter that at the time we didn't realize that that's kind of what people were craving connection with their family. So I think that's kind of where it all took off, but they were so bad. It's evolved a lot since then. Were you broadcasting that on Instagram, was that your main channel or Facebook? No, our main channel is Facebook, funnily enough. When we hire social media people, they're like, "Facebook, what?" "Yeah, I suppose I have an old account there somewhere." But Facebook is our bread and butter. We have a huge sense of community, so that's really where I think people can get to know each other and chat and Facebook groups and things like that. And we do live stream as well on Instagram, so that kind of came into it maybe a year later or something. Okay. And you're still live streaming today? Every day, 4pm Melbourne time, it's like every Monday to Friday, yeah. So it's just part of our world, wouldn't have it any other way. It's become really easy and really natural and it's actually fun and it's the one time being, because me and my mum are the designers of the company, it's that one time where we can actually try stuff on with the range that's all been dropped and with prior pieces and it's kind of like, it's actually like a research piece because we're putting it on in real time, getting feedback in real time and seeing what's missing from the range and hang on, that would be, you know, we've tried to do outfits and we don't have a pair of black pants or, you know, all the basic stuff. So it's been, you're learning a lot while you're doing it and a lot of designers don't get to be in amongst their customers trying clothes on, so it's kind of like the silver spoon. It must be days where you're like, I just don't want to get in front of camera today. There is, Paris. Especially for a big day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is. But I find doing reels and stuffs so much harder. For me, is a struggle because it's a little bit more scripted. I can't be as natural, you know, whereas the lives really, now it's like, there's no prep. Like it's five minute prep. We're walking into the live stream room three minutes before we're live, quickly getting dressed. It's very fast. Whereas the reels and prerecorded is for me a little bit more effort, so I'm always avoiding our social media guy. He's like, real time. And I'm like, oh, oh, let me alone. So yeah, it isn't easy, but now it's just part of day to day. And you said that you walk in three minutes beforehand, but is there like a structure in place to be able to kind of come up with something interesting every day or your mum and you obviously just have such a great connection that you can easily create some banter. Yeah, we do. Well, the one thing that we do structure it on is we have a new product to drop every single day. So every day we are sort of focusing on those pieces. So like if it's a denim shirt, for example, we'll be like, okay, six ways to wear a denim shirt. So it's still very, very minimal prep. And because you're the designers too, there's a brilliant backstory and thought that's gone into what you're wearing that you can talk to authentically. Yeah, absolutely. And we can just tell stories and share style hacks and that just, you know, we're selling without meaning to sell. Yeah. So and customers love it. So we'll just go. We go with what they like. And obviously no direct link to check out from the videos yet. No, but I'm waiting for the day. I have gone, ran in circles trying to find solutions. And there's a lot of solutions you can get for on website, you know, up, live shopping, but really the key for us is if we want that brand awareness and exposure, it's got to be done on social. But yeah, there's always that little, they've got to click through the website to go find the products on the website. So it's not as seamless as I would like, but hopefully in the next few months, maybe something, something comes up, we'll see maybe a little bit of TikTok shop or something along those lines. Yeah. That's it. That's a lot of different platforms, but it's just not, not there yet. Amazing. And do you use some of that live content to package up for other bits of content, like to give to your team to go, all right, cool. Now you can create, you know, when you're creating descriptions or benefits around these products, here's us talking about it in real time. Use this. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. They splashed it up into rules. I think it's all about leveraging your content. So if we've got two people doing the live doing, we're putting on the outfits, it's like, how can we save time and not put those outfits on again? And how can we just leverage massively to what we're already doing and amplify that everywhere? That's the whole goal. Some people like long form videos, some people like short form. How can we splice it up and do it all these different ways? Although our social media guy says that we move too quickly and we talk so fast, he can't even splice it sometimes. So he's always like, slow down. I'm like, I can't, I can't do that. You've always been just really giving your authenticity. This is it. Exactly. That's right. I can't be structured. I'm not that girl. So yeah, we use it as much as we can everywhere. I'd like it times 10 even more places, but you know, I don't want to give my team a heart attack. Yeah, that's fair. It was so funny, though, wasn't it? Like you do live streams every day and then in preparing for this conversation, I said, oh, can you just shoot us through a headshot? And you're like, actually, I don't think I've got a headshot just by myself. I know. And I was kind of thinking, can I like crop her out that we're always like touching and arm around each other? So yeah, no. I found one. Bad juju if you crop someone out of a photo. Oh, true. Oh, yeah. No. Good point. We got there. We got there. And you've done a great job in bringing video into the website. So first thing I noticed is that when you do log on to the motto website for the first time, it's video straight up, it's product video, but it's video straight up. Is that something that's come about from the live shopping or from feedback from your customers that they really need to see it in person, kind of in movement to know what the product is? Yeah. I think it's a bit of both, really. I think that when we saw what doing live streams did for our business, I think there's this element where people want to be educated and it doesn't have to be like a proper education video. It's just about seeing how many ways people are doing things differently. Body shapes is another huge one. I know there's been like a real trend of showing different models like you can have size 14 model. And if you're a size 14, you select that model and that's what you see, but the logistics of that, any fashion brand will know is absolutely exhausting. Anyone in the game would know fashion retailing is a beast of its own. Luckily, our partners at Shopify Plus have put together a fantastic guide with the latest trends, opportunities and threats to help fashion e-commerce retailers. The fashion and apparel checklist is a highlight for me. To get your hands on the free Shopify Plus fashion industry report, visit shopifyplus.live/fashionreport that's shopifyplus.live/fashionreport to download your copy today. So, we kind of input video to tick the box of style education, tick the box of different body shapes and sizes and also we've got it anyway. So why not again leverage it? It's there. A lot of people aren't on Facebook or aren't on Instagram and, you know, once we post a video, well, a week later, there's so many new products that have come in. How you even find, because we've got such a volume and high turnover of things, it just gets lost. So video, we haven't actually had video on site for that long. It's sort of new just because the logistics of lot load times and finding the right apps and making it fast for backend processes, but we've found great apps called Tolstoy and that's what we're using at the moment. So it's been good and, you know, it does, it really helps conversion assuming it doesn't slow site down. It's come up three times in the last two months, I think, with guests and in our community. There's so much talk in our community around Tolstoy at the moment. So it's interesting that you say. Oh, really? Oh, wow. Yeah. No, it's one of really, like a lot of the apps are so expensive and they're very, a lot of them, it's all about having your video actually like loaded from your website, which is all fine, but we don't want to have it there. We want to have it on social media so people can find us and we get so many new customers through just people exploring video. The last thing I want to do is I only have it on our website. So it's kind of like we looked at it in reverse and Tolstoy is a good app that does that. It's simple. Simple use. Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose it's that simplistic because going through my head, just then I was like, why isn't Tolstoy making all this video shoppable? Because they can take in video from most social platforms, right? Yes. For you to be able to add a check out over the top of those videos when you're hosting it. Like that to me seems like such a, almost like a shortcut, but if I know, well, they might be trying. It's just the logistics of tech will never make sense in my mind. It's like, you know, hurdle after hurdle. It seems so simple, but who knows? Hmm. I want to go back to the sizing piece because I think that's really interesting in having a look through your community and you do a great job in going and modeling clothes and you always get the feedback to go, oh, you know, you're this body shape. So how will it look on me or I don't think it'll do this for me? How do you go around helping customers with sizing? So obviously sizing charts are a thing, but do you do anything above and beyond to help customers find the right fit and to reduce your returns? We've tried a few things on site and I still find that considering like where we are in the world of tech, they're still not as advanced as I would like. So we've recently just installed like a little, it's just a little graphic widget that says either true to size, small to size, it's got like a little sliding scale. That has been helpful, we also have another app that plugs in that's like a quiz and it tells you your size, but again, I don't find them that accurate because everyone's interpretation of their measurements. If someone measures on a waste or just below the waste, the sizing is very different and unless someone's in the fashion industry, often they're not measuring correctly. But I think the biggest thing for us has been we've got like a Facebook group and in that community is where all of our customers share photos, they're sort of, they've become sort of our most engaged audience, but they're giving each other advice on what size to get, this is what it looks like on me, it's a big, big on my waste. What do you guys think? It's this whole kind of conversation back and forth without motto being involved. So it's very honest and genuine. That's probably been the biggest thing of how we get around sizes, often that's post purchase, so that's not that helpful, I wish we could bring it on site. But everything does fit so differently whether it's denim or something stretchy. So it's still, I think an area that has a lot of improvement to be made in general in the space. I saw a post from Michaela Wessels the other day, she's the founder of Stylarcade, she's been on the show before, but she had this amazing graph because they get all the data of what people are ordering in terms of sizes across the range. And she had this amazing graph where the site, the amount of smaller sizes, the excess and the S was actually rising stupidly in the last couple of years, compared to where we were trending towards going towards larger sizes, and she was putting it down to weight loss drugs and weight loss. I was literally just thinking, yeah, I had the word in my mouth and you were saying that probably, probably, I mean, why not? That means people need a new wardrobe, I'm down with that. Shift shapes as much as you can. Now going back, we got to that point because we were talking about COVID and what you did to kind of pivot out of COVID there when you were very physical, heavy, but in the last 12 months, you've had incredible growth. I read that you had 127% growth in the last 12 months, which a lot of retailers listening to this were like, oh my God, like that would be amazing at this time. That was amazing. What's struggling for any growth, let alone 127% growth. What are you putting that down to? Is there any key initiatives that you feel have driven that? Yeah, there's been a few and this whole journey for me started off with reading this book and it's called, I've talked about it so many times and I'll put it up front. The book is a little bit on the boring side, so you've kind of got to commit and power through. It's called How Brands Grow. Have you ever read it? Yes, I haven't read it, but it's been recommended a few times. Yes, yes, that book completely changed my life, like it changed my way of thinking. I had it all wrong, everything wrong. I was thinking about like, I was the person in the book, he's like, do you think this and do you think this? Well, that's wrong. I was that person. So, I just literally gobbled up every single thing he said in that book and I read it now, we've got like a thing in our office where we read it once a year because it means such different things the more you read it and when I read that, it really gave me an understanding of how my entire business was actually focused on retention and loyalty. It was not focused on acquiring customers. Like I invested in UX, we invested in customer service, we invested in community and doing all these really beautiful things for customers and email and all that stuff, that is all retention. I just wasn't thinking about it like that. So, my customer base, yes, it was growing, but it really wasn't growing at the rate that it needed to and when we first started doing the lives, that was the first time that we saw a huge shift in revenue and I mean, of course, our stores shut down so we got all those customers effectively, but we were doing higher sales online than we were with all stores and online open and that happened within, I'm going to say like a month period, like it happened so quickly, we were very under-prepared, it was quite funny, but that all came down to getting a lot more eyeballs on our brand. So that's pretty much what we did last year, after reading the book, having all those moments a bit mulling around my head, I had an amazing team, I just bought on a new head of econ and she shared the same passion and enthusiasm as I do for growth. So we just knuckled down and we pretty much got as many people looking at the brand as humanly possible and we did that through many, many different ways, influencers were a huge part of it, paid advertising was a huge part, so many different things, PR, doing offline activity like flash mobs and wearing our pants and all this fun stuff, but the other thing we did was really focus on one particular product and allowed that product to drive all that type of funnel growth. So the combination of the two, I think that looking back in prior years, I always wanted to grow brand and when we did any form of acquisition, it would be about the brand, but as soon as I changed my strategy to only look at one product, what is that product going to be and how we're going to amplify it, so there's not one person in Australia that hasn't heard of this one product. How did you do that product? It kind of happened accidentally. It was just a product that we had had for years and years and years and it was always a really good selling product, but there was a lot to say about it. It was kind of like a body sculpting, booting, lifting, like there was a lot of kind of tag lines you could attach to it, which I don't think it needs to be now learning about our journey since, but we just absolutely smashed it like every single person we could get our hands on had it as many celebs as we could, you know, as many article write ups as we could and that was all we focused on, so if that's our top of funnel strategy, then underneath that, all that retention comes into play where I've spent the last 17 years building out that strategy, so that has been, we've been lucky, but most, well, most, you know, a great amount of people have become second time purchases then third, we've just got to get them in the door. So it's about picking the product and having it everywhere. And with that strategy, say the black bodysuit, I can imagine that that goes well with a lot of your other clothing, whether it's tops to go with it or accessories, it would be fairly versatile like that. Do you think for anyone choosing a hero product? You also do need to make sure it's versatile that it can be upsold, cross-selled like to connect with the rep of your range? I think so, but I mean, I'm sure there's people that have done this wild thing that makes no sense but we often go for something that is in the realm of being affordable for a first time purchase, so not something at the top end of our range and something that a lot of ages combine. Often we go for something that's black because it's really easy to repeat. You can always get more in because you're going to get in a situation where if it sort of kicks off and goes viral, you're going to be losing, you're going to be missing sizes. Well, there's a hugely wasted opportunity there. So you've got to be able to repeat, repeat, repeat, have something that's not so seasonal if you can. It's actually a pair of pants, this body sculpting thing and they are very seasonal, they're very suited to winter. So in summer, if we don't have a backup product, we're going to be paying for it in sales. So we've already kind of used that philosophy, designed a summer, it ended up being a top. So nothing like it but it's sort of similar philosophy and that becomes the upsell. So anyone who bought that pant, we already know they're going to love this top and it kind of goes in circles. But yeah, they're basic layering pieces, I mean, it's something anyone could buy, doesn't matter if you're 20 or you're 60, it's going to suit anyone's wardrobe. Amazing. So, and when you're doing that, you're putting the hero product out there trying to get in front of as many eyeballs as you can, saturate the market with that product. Are you still doing the personalized targeting around products or categories to people who may have looked at them or look like audiences to say, hey, older customers might like this, younger customers like this, are you still trying to pick bits out of your range to target to more specific groups or it's literally just focus on that one hero? We really just focus on that one hero because in my mind, because we're women's fashion, it's probably a category. You can do this. There's no reason that someone who buys a pant wouldn't buy a shirt. There's no reason someone who buys a t-shirt wouldn't buy something dressy. So I think by, you know, just by going all out there and giving them the choice, all we need is them to come to the website. If they can just come to the website, they've shown interest, that's when all of our other strategies kick in. So we pretty much focus on that one product, where possible. And then obviously, bottom of funnel and retargeting and all that sort of stuff. That's more product specific, but at a top level, we're just going for that hero product. Yeah, brilliant. And so you mentioned there that the strategy was much more focused on acquisition and going into all channels from paid media to social to PR influencer, they're all very different right and very not all easy to track. If you're doing all this activity at once in market, how are you measuring what's making an impact? That is the hardest thing to do. And I don't even know if we got it right. Obviously when you're doing paid advertising, that's a little bit easier to track, but even still, they're all taking each other's bit at the pie. And with influencers, we did so much with that, well, effectively, that's all coming under social media, when we're looking at our reporting, so it's like, well, hang on, was it our organic? Was it the influencers? Met it obviously paid. We can segment out, but look, it's not easy. We've got some very sort of weird attribution metrics that we use, which we're having to change as we grow, because the bigger you get, the harder it is to measure whether something actually made an impact. But at the moment, we're just looking at, okay, what was last click attribution in GA4? And then we're going to give that, for that specific channel, we'll give a percentage of sales that's in that channel to that influencer or whatever the other thing is. But yeah, it's certainly not easy, especially offline activity. It's very hard. But one way we do measure how hyped up these key products are. We look at organic search, because if someone's searching, you know, motto, fashion, miracle pant or just miracle pant, that's when our searches really rise for that, when they're not just motto, they need to be specific of that product. That's when we know we're really penetrating, because it's hard to get. It's not an easy one. And do you find mediums such as PR, do they have an immediate impact on those search trends? Sometimes, sometimes they get really hard to track. And I think with PR, it's just about kind of being everywhere. If someone might see it on a celebrity, then they happen to see it on an article, then they happen to see you on a podcast advertisement. It's kind of like the sum of everything. So we spend cautiously. We make it that, okay, if we lost that money, is it going to have impact? We're not relying on it to grow our sales. That's for sure. You can't. But it's, we're just, we're doing a little bit and then agreeing that it's the sum of everything. Our Google search has gone up. That's kind of the only way we can do it. You just can't track everything. It's impossible. And how would you know anyway? Someone sees it on an ad and then they go, you know, into a shop, into a motto store. So you really can't track it. I think it's just overall, we're always looking at our mer and we're always tracking our sales. They're the two most important things in that place. That makes a lot of sense. And does that take a lot of discipline to look at it from a mer perspective rather than an individual channel? Well, individual channels is more the team. They go down that hole and they love it. I'm always looking at mer, but, you know, there's a lot of, you know, what is the right mer? That's like, that's the whole other thing. Should it be higher? Should it be lower? What are other companies doing? And does that even matter? So it's hard to stay on budget. That's for sure. But the marketing team, it's hard. Yeah, I could imagine. When you first had this realization from how brands grow and you went, I really haven't spent enough time on acquiring new customers and we need to kind of open the floodgates into different approaches to bring new customers into the model brand. Was there any channel or execution that really surprised you that you were like, look, I'll give it a go, but I'm not entirely sure on it. And it's actually working for cancer. Yeah, probably most of them. I was very skeptical because over the years, I've tried so many things. And my biggest learning there was when I was trying these things, I actually didn't have the right people executing or driving that space because really, you know, up until COVID, well, a well after COVID, the team was not as specialized as they are now because the revenue wasn't there to justify it. So even, you know, 20, 20, only two years ago, like we were still, you know, we were still operating as a retail, physical retail based business. And then, you know, so I've tried influences before. I've tried average. We've done it all, obviously, but I think the execution wasn't there to really understand the numbers, therefore it didn't work, or I didn't know if it had worked. But coming into this, or last year, at first I was even like, influencers, they're over, you know, like I had such a blasey approach to them and how we're going to measure it and are they hard work and, you know, all this stuff, but I had to become like, they work and I'm like, all right, cool, if you're going to handle it, you go for it. And they are hard work, but you'll handle it. Yeah. Yep, that's great. Yes. I don't have to do it. So, look, that one really did surprise me, but honestly, everything surprised me in the last 12 months. I couldn't believe that, you know, 17 years pretty much into my business that I had that kind of growth and that was a learning in itself. Everything was always there. It was just that one thing that we didn't do or that we didn't try. So it's never too late and it's never too early. You don't have to kick off crazy numbers the first few years of your business. It doesn't matter. And there's been many, many stories of businesses who are huge now that had very similar stories. So that it like took them about 13 years to actually start making momentum. You know that nervous feeling you get when you place your checked in luggage on that airport baggage machine, you're kind of just hoping that your luggage arrives at your destination on time and in perfect condition. It's the same in e-commerce. You place a lot of trust in your last mile partners to deliver the final crucial element of the customer experience. Now, imagine you are a premium product with over 100 years of customer experience expectations. That nervousness increases a lot. That's why Samsonite has chosen a delivering person for their reliable on time delivery to drive outstanding shopping experiences, enhance brand reputation and significantly improve key delivery metrics. I mean, you can never be too careful when it comes to making sure luggage arrives on time and undimaged. Don't settle for less. Make your last mile experience the first thing that customers remember. Learn more about the incredible performance uplifts Samsonite has experienced since working with deliver in person at deliver in person dot com forward slash case study Samsonite. And do you manage all of that in house from buying the ads through to creating the ads all the way through from an acquisition perspective or do you partner up? Yeah, we do everything in house. I always find that anything that's sort of caught to our business growth, I really want to do in house and then anything that's kind of an offshoot or not as important to our success. That's when we'll funnel it out. But again, that comes with growth. You can start building out a great team when you've got those numbers. So everything to do with meta and social media is done in house. I wouldn't have that anywhere else because we want to be really responsive and on the spot acting based on demand very, very quickly and we're retail. So one day today, we're not doing a sale tomorrow, we might be doing a sale. No one has much notice. We can't be that planned out because it's based on customer feedback. And I feel now it's so different running meta in house than it was even two years ago with the AI tools and the ability for you trust the machine and the majority of the time rather than having really specialized skills to have in house, to be able to find the right audience. It's changed so much so quickly. It has. It has. And it's a lot easier to do in house. You still have to have the time. And there's a lot of money being spent. So you still want the right mind to be strategic about it, but you know, you can do a lot more testing and checking and we've used agencies before and I think it just delays things. Interesting. It's another theme coming through. I'm not pro or anti agency, I think it's going to be the right fit for your business. And it's obviously that you've found what's right for you. You mentioned there that all you need to do is get customers to come to your website for the first time. That's the goal with the acquisition is get to the website, we'll use the black pants to get you to the website. The other thing that I saw was that you are in the top 50, I think for the inside retail, number 67 on the inside retail CX index, which is a new index, but done by our friends over at Hueme, who a great online mystery shop platform. That's really cool. If you think about all the e-commerce brands in Australia for you to come in at 67. Oh, you taught me. I had no idea. I was like, Oh, wow, that's cool. Thank you. They're marketing. Yeah. Yeah. We've used them before too. So we know them well. The guys at Hueme. Look, I think it's because that's what I focused on really for the majority of my time in business. And I am very passionate about the customer as our team and staff. It's a culture of motto that really the customer truly does come first. So everything's just about enhancing their experience. And that's what we've always done. So for us, that's kind of the no brainer that's ingrained in what we do. There's always ways we can improve. Of course, as you get a lot of traffic to your site, unfortunately, sometimes your conversion rate goes down. That is what happens. And I still debate whether, OK, are you better off cramming more people into your site, getting your conversion rate drop, or are you better off just working more to get your conversion rate up? I actually don't know the answer. There was a sweet spot for us where it didn't matter if our conversion rate dropped. Just drive the traffic to the website. That worked up until roughly now. Now we're finding there's a huge amount of money on the table if we can raise our conversion rate a little. So we've just started doing some testing with our high products of optimizations. We're not rolling it out across the whole site. It's too much work for that because we had so many moving products. But yeah, we had a real win last week, actually, one of our top products conversion rates went from 1.5% to 3.17% can you believe it? I was like jumping for joy when I was sharing it with my team. So we'll see. We'll see if that maintains. And it's just about, what can you do to those core products that you sell a truckload of to make them better? And when you're talking about those conversion rates, what's the downside of having a lot of traffic to your website, but having a low conversion rate versus having medium size and a higher conversion rate, even if the revenue is the same, what's the benefit of holding a high conversion rate? Is it on your advertising? Is it on your search? Yeah. I suppose you can look at it a few ways. I mean, my gut initially would be telling me I actually prefer the traffic because they'll fall into your middle of funnel advertising. So you've got the opportunity to keep getting them and no eyeballs on your brand or lower eyeballs on your brand, just me and your brand's not going to have the potential to grow. So I prefer the potential. But, of course, you don't want to be paying for all these irrelevant users, which happens. It happens everywhere. I mean, going viral, I think we had this funny conversation with our social media person last week. And he's like, the last thing I want to do is go viral on TikTok because there's no point in getting a bunch of Gen Z's looking at a brand that's targeted at over 40 women. They're just going to make it's a vanity metric. That's what it has become. People are obsessed with going viral. Well, what does that even mean? So as long as we're not getting a ton of completely irrelevant traffic, which we shouldn't because you can target mostly the right people, I prefer the traffic. Yeah, okay. That makes sense. But my ecom person might disagree. You've got a few parties to manage there. Yeah. I've got everyone to please. I'm like, she's staring at me now. She's like, oh, no, no. She agrees with me. She's like, traffic. We'll have a group therapy session together. And you're running all of this on big commerce. I love to get your insights on big commerce, the pros and cons of using a platform such as big commerce first. So a Shopify. That's a tricky one. This is a very controversial subject in here. Look, big commerce. We've been on big commerce since around 2017 or 2016 or so. So back then, when I made the decision, the platforms weren't where they're at now. So there are a lot of pros to big commerce. I think the biggest thing for us is that Shopify are doing different types of developments and they're the developments we hear about. And it's like, oh, I want that. I want that. So it's more like a shiny object. You want it now, but it won't be long before in general that big commerce catches up. I love with big commerce that there's not as much reliance on paid apps. That was originally one of the reasons that we went there or a Shopify is very app-heavy. There's a downside on an upside, big commerce has some other limitations. But the one thing I wish we had, if anyone from BigCommerce is listening, write this down. I want shop pay because I'm a shop pay check out girl. I don't even realize I bought stuff and I bought stuff and it's too late and I can't change it. That is what BigCommerce needs right now. But everything else is fine. I think if we can get shop pay on big commerce, we can solve world peace as well. Yes. I agree. I agree. Done. Oh, that's a great insight. Thank you. I wanted to move down to Julia Morris. You had her as an ambassador. Tell us how that came out. We kind of talked about influencers and then being a pain in the butt. Was Julia a pain in the butt? No, she's anything but the pain in the butt. She is phenomenal. She's hilarious. She's even better than what you can imagine. So that came about where, again, we wanted to amplify those miracle pants as much as we could and we said, okay, we need a really big name and who embodies the bucket era. And we came to Julia because I think fashion can be so serious and it can be so polished. We wanted to mix fun with fashion with a woman who is in the prime of her career when society says, oh, hang on, no, she shouldn't be doing that anymore. I don't know exactly how old she is. I think she's in her 50s and she's absolutely nailing it with her career. So I couldn't have thought of anyone better to align. So we reached out. We had a ton of nose from an agent. They're like the gatekeeper to, you know, everything. Eventually we wore them down, got her in and it's just become a really beautiful friendship actually between us and Julia. She visits often our official contract has finished. We had her for a year, but she's still a very, very, very close friend to motto and it's a very natural arrangement. So that was really good. We will trial things like that again. I can see that we probably didn't do it right looking back to capitalize on her name and her face. We thought she'd be like the ultimate influencer. But someone of that significance in the industry, really, they can't be treated like an influencer. They are a celebrity. You need to invest money into getting them portrayed correctly, like it needs to be potentially TV advertising. And it can't just be a social media reel. It's just not enough. She needs to be on billboards. Like it really needed to be amplified differently and we were growing so quickly. We just didn't have time to execute all the things that we wanted to with her. So stay tuned. If we do a 2.0 version of a celebrity ambassadorship, then we'll know a lot more. Awesome. Is it difficult finding influences or celebrities for your target market of 40 plus your old women, especially as traditional media is becoming more diverted, like it's more diluted, I suppose, is like before everyone was watching the same programs, knew the same people, but now everyone's watching different things and celebrities, I suppose, aren't as big unless you're in Hollywood. But, you know, even locally, it's like, oh, well, a lot of people might talk about people that they know. It's like, I never heard about that. Everyone's in their own little circles or silos. Is it hard finding celebrities who will resonate across your audience? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's funny because like people can get self-communated on whether they like someone or not. So that's always a risk, but it's a lot of work because you've got to have a lot of different ones, but effectively, we know no different. So for me, it's still about you can have so many different faces representing your brand. Why would we just stick ourselves with one? If we even if it was like that, and there was, you know, a smaller pool of talent that you could get, I'd still want every single one. So this is no different, but we can actually just penetrate different markets, catch people when they're watching TV or they're watching, or they're on Instagram or they're doing whatever they do in a Facebook group. I mean, that's just a golden nugget in itself. Facebook groups have this crazy hype and loyalty to them. There's so many different avenues you can catch someone, and often you're going to catch them in a lot of different ways, right? People don't just live in a Facebook group. There are many different things. So yeah, it is hard, but again, it's not something that I do. So it's easy for me. I like this one, this one and this one. Yeah, exactly. When we were hustling, because I said, when we first started to grow and we started to, you know, get some influences on board and we were seeing significant growth already, so we changed our strategy to that we wanted an influencer a day. And that hasn't stopped. Sometimes we have three influencers a day. So try and put an attribution on that, but it's all about the volume. It's really in the volumes and in the numbers and even coming back to our hero products. Again, it's in the numbers. You need to have big numbers of a few things. So for us, we want big numbers of units sold of at least one item. We want, I want big numbers of sessions. Don't care about the conversion rate. Again, that's controversial, but you know, there needs to be big stuff going on. You can't just have, I find, like even, you know, revenue per day, as soon as we get to a point where we're, our revenue per day is, you know, each day is about roughly the same and it's good figures. We need spikes. We need that one day that's like off the chart and because then you can go in and research, well, what happens? How can we replicate? There's no point in just having a nice clean line. I know that is, you know, the healthy approach to business, but from what I've seen in my last few years, that you need to have big spikes because one big spike, yes, it goes down, but the next big spike is a little bit higher. And that's kind of how the momentum starts. And if you're aiming for those spikes, obviously a fashion brand where you're designing your own ranges, producing your own ranges, how are you doing forecasting on how much stock you need to have? Yeah, it's not easy. Okay. I go really, I'm cautious with it because I've been in an overstocked situation like pre-COVID, you know, we ended up not being overstocked, we ended up being understocked, I was just crippled with anxiety at the thought of how much stock we had with no shops. So there's that double edged saw because as soon as your overstocked, you've got to go and sail. So what we did as we were growing, because we didn't plan for this level of growth in the last 12 months, we, as we were selling, we were actually, we've got a very close relationship with suppliers. So they will stop everything they're doing to make for us. One of them only makes for us. So if we want her to rush something, it just comes at the expense of another product that she was making for us. And then we started air freighting in. So we've never done air freight before, but for us, it's a lot cheaper to air freight than but to potentially be overstocked with cash tied up and then have to mark down. So air freight for us has been an absolute savior. That's how we got through most of last year. Most of last year, our stock was pretty much 50% sold out. Most of our products would sell out within about four hours of going live. And that is an awesome, really exciting, but actually you get angry customers, your VIPs get absolutely furious, they're missing out on things. You can't hype anything, you can't put anything out there because you don't have stock to put out. So it's like you're chasing your tail constantly. But what I would say is always be cautious and just back that product that you're deciding is going to be the hero. So all you need to do, because then all you need to do is repeat that product and get that air freighted. You're not air freighting in the whole range. I guess it's a situation most people wouldn't mind finding that problem. You know what I mean? It's like, I know, yes. I feel very, very blessed and trust me, my 17 years haven't been this rosy as last 12 months. So I've done the time. I've done the time. No, it's full credit to you and the team. Congratulations on those last 12 months, especially. I saw that you have a big goal of $40 million by the time you're 40, which I understand is two years away. It is. How you going to get there? Oh, gosh. I don't know. I don't know. Can you help me? One big spike. Yeah. I wish. There'll be a few different things. Again, it's just amplifying those hero products and, you know, what we're very data-driven here. So let's break it down. How many units do we need to be selling per day of that product? Is that feasible in Australia? So I do feel in my bones that we can get to that within Australia without cracking, you know, the US or anything. We do sell internationally, but majority is still in Australia. I think once we pitch past that and four stages post that number, we will have to be international expansion. I don't think it's possible maybe to do it in Australia, but our strategy is going to be no different to what it has been. And it's about amplifying those hero products, getting as many people seen what I was possible and then making sure our attention strategy is still very aligned up until where we've got what we've always done has worked. Obviously, we optimise, but probably from here on, I think it's going to need something a little bit more sophisticated to keep driving that first time purchaser because we're kind of dangling this shiny product in their face and they're buying, well, they're not really buying into our brand, they're not learning about our products, they're not learning about values, they're not forming this relationship. So it's about how can we do that differently to what we've done in the past? I think it needs to be a bit more fancy. Makes sense. These other e-commerce and newer e-commerce data seed brands expanding into physical stores, we're saying that as a trend, you've obviously gone the other way, you have eight stores. How many have you got today? Five. Five. Do you see that increasing again, or do you see it kind of holding steady or shifting all online? That's a tricky one. It depends on the day, really. I think at my core, I would love to have all of our growth in Econ and the reason is because bricks and mortar, they will get you to a point but you can cap out very, very quickly because it's all about the geographical area. So unless you want to keep popping up store, store, store, store, store, store, your growth will be limited. What we saw last year was our growth online had a significant impact on our stores in a positive way. They had immense growth as well. I can't imagine that our store's growth is going to be able to continue purely because there's not that many people that live in the area. So for that reason, I see a lot of risk with retail because the costs are very high and after what we went through with COVID, I had like serious PTSD after that, just negotiating with landlords. You are locked into a lot of things, you can't be as agile. So for today, no, they're not on the cards, but if you talk to me again next week, it might be a different story. It will never be mass. It will never be never shopping centre. I want to be exclusive. Fashion, too much of the same passion is not a good thing. If you want to maintain your growth and that desire for your brand, you can't be everywhere. You can't be because eventually, that top fashionable end of the market will stop buying you because you're seeing on more people and then it's this sort of trickle effect and you've got to keep reinventing yourself. So for today, it's just how it is, that was a long answer for a short question. We'll play the podcast back to you tomorrow and see if it changes any answers that we need to hear. Last question I've got for you, I'd be remiss of me, given the beautiful relationship you've got with your mum, Faye. Are you going to pressure your daughter to join the business when she turns 20? I hope that I can, but I feel like she'll come in and change everything, you know, she's one of those girls. She already comes in and says like the other day, she was, you know, just helping in the warehouse. She's only 10. She's like, how much am I getting paid? You know, she's ready to be the boss. So we'll see. If she wants to do it, absolutely. I would love to have a long generational brand. I think that's really beautiful, but, you know, it's about what they want to do and knowing kids these days, they're going to say, oh, no, I don't want to do that. They want to be a YouTuber or something. So, yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I'd love her to join them. You get bumped out of your own live shopping videos. Oh, yeah. Totally. She already does. Lauren, I really enjoyed this chat. Thank you so much for joining us on Add to Cart. If people want to learn more about motto, maybe even tune in to the 4pm lives and maybe get in touch with you. What's the best way to do that? They can email me, lauren@moto.com.au and I am on Instagram. I think my handle. Oh my God. Lauren, motto fashions. One word. I don't know. Yeah. How's Lauren? My fashion. I'm like, hang on a second. What is it? That's what it is. Wonderful. Lauren, thank you so much for sharing the story of motto and your incredible growth journey, especially over the last 12 months. It's brilliant to hear success story in this time. So, congratulations to you and the team and thank you for joining us on Add to Cart. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Now, I swear, after having that conversation, I've told at least five different people about Lauren's story, all different parts went from the live streaming to the family business to her strategy around focusing on a core product. There is so much in there that is relatable and useful in all types of ecommerce businesses. What I really love in there is that she has fully embraced the business and ecommerce, as you would after 20 years, but she has done things the motto way. Here are the main takeaways from our chat. Number one, when one door closes, the live streaming starts. During the pandemic, when models brick and mortar stores were forced to close, Lauren and her team quickly pivoted to daily live streaming fashion shows at 4 p.m. Melbourne time. It wasn't just about selling products, it was about keeping the brand top of mind and maintaining a strong connection with their loyal customers, many of whom were women over 40 looking for style inspiration and connection during lockdown. This has continued on. This isn't just a covid fat by creating engaging informative content that showed how to wear pieces in multiple ways, Lauren not only retained but substantially grew her customer base. It goes to show that when a little hard luck hits comes opportunity. Those who rise to the challenge can not only survive, but even transform their business for the better. Number two, when in doubt, focus on hero products. By focusing on a single standout item, the item that you want to be known for. In motto's case, the Miracle Pen, a body sculpting versatile piece that resonates with their target demographic. Lauren and the team have been able to build top of funnel awareness and capture the attention of new customers, rather than trying to put every product in front of the audience. This one products appeal across all ages, body types and seasons meant it has become an easy entry point for new customers who have then gone on to explore the wider motto range. This hero product became the foundation for many of motto's influencer campaigns and marketing pushes, helping drop 127% growth in just 12 months. The repeatability of this strategy allowed motto to scale quickly while maintaining a streamlined approach to inventory. It's a really great template to feel looking for focus points in your marketing strategy. And number three, it's all about building authentic relationships. I think you get a feel for it there. Lauren is an authentic person, what you see is what you get. And Lauren has expertly leveraged both influencers and celebrity ambassadors like her partnership, which turned into a friendship with Julia Morris. And that has helped grow motto's brand awareness. With Julia, the goal wasn't just to have her wear the clothes, but to showcase her fun, confident personality, which perfectly aligned with motto's message of self-expression for women over 40. However, as Lauren discovered, working with celebrities requires a completely different approach from traditional influencer marketing, it's more about creating a broader narrative and presence across multiple platforms, including PR and potentially even above the line placements like billboards to fully capitalize on the association. So big difference there between celebrities and influencers and some great lessons from Lauren. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on Spotify or Apple podcasts or share it with your colleagues or your friends. Thanks again to our partners Shopify Plus and Deliver In Person who make this podcast possible. Before you go, we'd love to invite you to join our free e-commerce learning platform at Descartes campus. Meet other professionals and learn from e-commerce experts to take your business and your e-commerce career to the next level. Register to join campus at adtacart.com.au/campus. Now, if you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with a friend or a colleague or even better. Leave us a review on Spotify or Apple, it really makes a difference. [MUSIC]