The Glossy Podcast

The bridal industry, one of the many markets that rely on in-person customer experiences, was not spared by Covid-19.

However, “snowmageddons, hurricanes, Covid, murder hornets -- nothing can cancel love,” said Kelly Cook, chief marketing and IT officer at David’s Bridal, on the latest episode of the Glossy Podcast.

“It’s a fun time to be in our business,” said Cook, who spent a year facilitating virtual wedding gown and bridal face mask shopping. She expects a 25-40% increase in weddings in 2021, “now that vaccines are out and the country’s opening up.”

The height of the pandemic last year did not equate to a full stop in the bridal industry, however. While “about 10% of the brides just canceled their weddings,” according to Cook, “out of the remaining 90%, about half of them already moved their weddings into this year. The remaining half moved their weddings into fall of [2020].”

For the brides that did get married during the pandemic, David’s Bridal was quick to adapt to their needs with solutions, like the production of “70,000 [face] masks in all colors," as well as improvements to its technology, according to Cook.

“We've modernized and digitized our company,” said Cook. “Within a two-week period, we implemented curbside pickup and we implemented virtual stylists.” The latter was possible through partnerships with augmented reality-focused company Vertebrae, as well as Zoey, an automated concierge system, she said.

“We sold $1 million in gowns just through text,” said Cook. “We wouldn't have been able to do any of that if we had not had a culture here of serving her and being relentless about solving problems.”

Additionally, David’s Bridal hosted its first virtual fashion show in May 2020. It also found success with a YouTube Live channel “of nothing but wedding videos,” as well as with new TikTok and Instagram Reels accounts.

Customers have benefitted from the changes, as well -- particularly those who have signed up for the company's new Diamond Loyalty Program.

“It’s not a loyalty program for the number of times you get married. It’s a loyalty program around everybody at your wedding,” said Cook. “We launched it on December 8 of last year and have had 55 people earn enough for a honeymoon.”

As for the future of David’s Bridal, “the power of our store [is] in making everyone feel absolutely stunning and beautiful in whatever they're wearing,” said Cook. “The trend is that people are going to want more human interaction and want to see more humanity in brands because we are becoming so digital.”

The human touch of the bridal shopping experience is not fully replicable via digital. Until life returns to normal, Cook emphasized the importance of David's Bridal “partnering with people that make the [wedding] process easier,” such as WeightWatchers, Black Tux, popular venue Rustic Wedding Chic and micro-influencers.

“We partner with the right micro-influencer, and we give her the product, and all of the content is in her own voice and style,” said Cook. She called out that David's Bridal has featured “employees, friends, and family” in shoots, in place of models, since last year.

“It’s authentic and real, and it’s representative of who we are as a brand,” said Cook.

Sam Edelman co-founder Libby Edelman is a step ahead when it comes to knowing what shoe trends are going to take off.

“It’s our job to come up with what's happening in fashion,” Edelman said on the latest episode of the Glossy Podcast. “So every time we design a product, it’s got to [reflect] a trend that’s going to hit the following year.”

Trendspotting is a skill she’s perfected over the last 40 years at Esprit Shoes, and co-founder of Sam & Libby and Sam Edelman footwear brands, along with her husband, Sam Edelman. The latter brand launched in 2004 and is now sold at retailers including Shopbop and Nordstrom, as well as through its own e-commerce site and 13 stores.

But that’s not to say that it’s easy to get a leg up on the industry’s direction. The reason: "It's hard to move fast in the footwear industry,” Edelman said. “There are a lot of components. You have to own the right leather, you have to buy it, it all takes time.… It’s 180-plus days to take [a style] from an idea to a store.”

Luckily for Sam Edelman, it was able to expedite its processes to get in on the pandemic-hot slipper trend. “There was this big resurgence of slippers, with nobody going out of the house,” Edelman said. “It was [a style] we’d never done before, so we had to jump on it.”

Edelman discussed the brand’s other mid-pandemic moves, including its marketing expansion to catalogs and its new bid for higher-end shoppers.

Erin Carpenter, Nude Barre founder and CEO, quite literally walked a mile in “pink ballet shoes” and “beige tights,” and felt the pain of finding hosiery in the right shade. It's a struggle that has been experienced before by current customers of Nude Barre, which offers hosiery and underwear in 12 complexion-matching shades.

“I’m sure you see this in the market where you go to stores: You ask for something in nude, and usually they bring you options that are beige. I’m not beige,” said Carpenter, who is a former professional dancer and actress, on the most recent episode of the Glossy Podcast. “What I would have to do, and many other artists would have to do, is dye their tights and undergarments to match their skin on a weekly basis to be in uniform.”

People of color and white dancers alike have long complained about the lack of hosiery options and the fact that most are “[a] strange shade of beige,” said Carpenter. That led her to start Nude Barre. 

The demand for diversity in the industry has not yet died down. “There was a petition out about a year ago for the bigger brands like Danskin to make more pointe shoes and ballet shoes in different skin tones,” said Carpenter. “Thousands of people signed this, including dancers, so there’s been a big push for this from consumers,” she said. Carpenter specifically honed in on the intimates category, with a focus on items like bras and stockings. 

Nude Barre was not exempt from the shift in consumer desires, as a result of the pandemic. “Our customer is at home, and she wants comfortable underwear,” said Carpenter. “So we wanted to give her options other than just our seamless thong.” In turn, the brand launched a bikini panty, a girl short (a female-empowering twist on the classic “boy short”) and face masks. 

While Nude Barre is carried in retail and dance stores, most of its sales are direct-to-consumer. “We really love [that], because we get to control the narrative of how we want to talk to our customers,” said Carpenter. “We get to have those intimate and deeper conversations around standing up against colorism and fighting against it in this category and in this industry.”

Carpenter’s passion to bring diversity to the dance apparel industry is exemplified by her own financial investment into the company. “One of our challenges was that, when we would sell out of inventory, we’d have to scrape up enough money to fulfill that,” said Carpenter, who initially launched Nude Barre with $3,000 of her savings. 

Over a decade later, Nude Barre has accumulated stable investors. However, acquiring financial support didn’t come without roadblocks, as she approached “a lot of people that didn’t understand the problem that I was solving,” said Carpenter. “They didn’t quite understand the impact and the importance of changing this narrative of beige being the standard of beauty and why that matters.” 

Eventually, this problem was solved when Serena Williams, who started off as a customer in 2018, became an investor of Nude Barre in 2019. "It helped get other investors to believe in what we were doing and to validate the business,” said Carpenter. 

With the rise of intimates brands like Kim Kardashian-owned Skims, and the push for inclusivity and diversity in the intimates and lingerie space, Carpenter asserts it is a multi-billion-dollar industry. “Growth for the company definitely means more categories,” such as bodysuits, she said. But when looking for more partners, Carpenter ensures that Nude Barre will remain committed to pushing back against investors who may be “excluding certain pieces of the equation” in their focus, in terms of both sizing and skin-tone inclusivity. 

In the age of Covid-19, Ministry of Supply is a work-from-homer's go-to brand for comfortable yet professional clothing. While the concept of wearing sweatpants to a work meeting may be new, the lovechild of workwear and athleisure came into fruition in 2012, at a time when “performance materials,” such as moisture-wicking fabrics, first started to explode among the athletic wear industry. 

“We designed an entire line of machine-washable, four-way-stretch suiting and clothing for the office and commute,” said Gihan Amarasiriwardena, Ministry of Supply president, on the latest Glossy Podcast. Amarasiriwardena co-founded the tech-focused apparel company with fellow MIT graduate Aman Advani in 2012. “What's been interesting is that, in the past year -- while people are not wearing dress shirts nearly as much as they used to, nor are they wearing suits -- this idea of the importance of comfort has been elevated. Our days are so integrated, both in terms of where we are and what we have to do. Our clothes should be designed to do that.”

As the pandemic shifted the American workplace from the office to the couch, the demand for even more comfort called for a corresponding adaptation to the current “work-leisure” apparel sold by Ministry of Supply. According to Amarasiriwardena, when sitting down, one’s waist expands by 5-7% -- a fact that was made undeniably apparent by the couch-to-bed pipeline facilitated by working from home.

In response, Ministry of Supply found that, rather than starting from scratch, “It was about tweaking our products,” said Amarasiriwardena. “We've always been using performance, functional fabrics that are soft and stretchy, and machine washable. So it was about adjusting the silhouette.”

Just as many offices closed down as a result of the pandemic, Ministry of Supply closed its six stores across the country, with plans to reopen only the Boston store. This doesn’t mark the end of customer interaction, however, as the company has begun offering live chats and video chats with customers. 

As for the return to a normal state, Amarasiriwardena expects rebounds to happen in “waves” within the next few months as customers start returning to the office. And in addition to focusing on recovery, Ministry of Supply is focused on “being a leader in this new category of work-leisure.”

Marketplaces were among the big retail winners of the past year, and Farfetch was no exception.

“We performed really well, as an overall company,” said Kelly Kowal, chief platform officer at Farfetch, on the latest episode of the Glossy Podcast. In its first-quarter earnings, released on May 13, Farfetch reported a 46% year-over-year revenue increase, to $485 million. “Nobody ever wants to capitalize off of a pandemic, but one thing that we were really excited about, and something that we really championed on the marketplace side, was keeping our boutique [partners]online and able to trade. And then on the platform side, we saw an increase in new clients and in new technology being adopted. We were really fortunate to be able to have both sides of our business firing on all cylinders.”

And that’s despite the fact that new competitors, including The Yes and Amazon’s Luxury Stores, entered the market. What’s more, some luxury brands remained hellbent on keeping to their own sales channels.

“What we find sometimes is that customer demands are way ahead of what retailers can do,” Kowal said. “But we spend a lot of our time thinking about what we call ‘the now, the next and the future.’ Keeping our eye on that has allowed us to scale at pace. Innovation is at the heart of our platform.”

Focused on what’s next is Sandrine Deveaux, Farfetch’s evp of Future Retail, and her team. “We know only one out of 10 [new technologies] will work, and sometimes one out of 100,” she said. “But because we are a tech company and we can take those risks, and we have this investment in the backend to support our vision, we are the best place within the industry to [explore] them.” 

Often worn by influential women including Michelle Obama on the red carpet, 12-year-old fashion brand Sachin & Babi is best known for its eveningwear. But luckily, prior to the pandemic and the mass cancelation of formal events, founders and married couple Sachin and Babi Ahluwalia had started to expand their product focus.

“For the last three years, we've been looking at the business to see how we can make it a little bit more 'all things occasion,' [for] day or evening,” Babi Ahluwalia said on the latest episode of the Glossy Podcast. “We made a deliberate attempt at [around] the start of 2019 to showcase how you could wear certain pieces of clothing during the day. [So] that gradual shift had started. And the pandemic helped us to push it a little further, faster.”

Now, Sachin & Babi customers can shop styles from linen shorts to peasant blouses.

What also changed during the pandemic was the brand’s sales-channel split, moving from 60% wholesale to 60% DTC e-commerce sales. “It's [all] such a shift at the moment, and every month is a different game,” said Babi Ahluwalia. “So here we are, weathering the storm of fashion.” 

In addition, she spoke about the dwindling importance of fashion week, as it stands; the future of formalwear; and the way she and Sachin Ahluwalia were able to get a second fashion company, The Good Kloth Company, off the ground mid-pandemic. 

Vanterra Capital was better positioned than many businesses going into 2020.

“The pandemic just pushed us to double down on our thesis,” said Steven Himmel, partner at Vanterra Capital, on the latest Glossy Podcast. “Everything that we were focused on before is even more relevant today.”

With its venture-specific fund, launched about two-and-a-half years ago, Vanterra invests in mission-driven consumer companies, which on the fashion side include Naadam. 

“A big focus for us is what we call the ESY [Investing]: [companies that are] better for the environment, better for society and better for you,” he said.

And those businesses are set to especially resonate in the post-pandemic world: “As the media cycle scales down the Covid conversation, we believe it's going to scale up the conversations around better-for-the-environment initiatives... It will [create] more of a 360[-degree] awareness around: How are you living? That’s in terms of: What are you eating? How are you treating your body? How are you treating your mind?”

Himmel broke down how that shift will impact Vanterra's future investments in fashion and beauty brands.

Heading up a startup, as opposed to a large corporation, has its pros and cons, said Mickey Drexler, the former CEO and chairman of J.Crew Group and CEO of Gap Inc. Today, Drexler is the executive chairman of Alex Mill. The fashion brand was founded in 2012 by his son, Alex Drexler, and Somsack Sikhounmuong, who formerly led design at Madewell.

"When I started Old Navy, I had the bank of Gap to fund it… Then I started Madewell, which I owned the name of and sold to J.Crew, and [it was] the same thing: I had the bank of J.Crew,” Drexler said on the latest Glossy Podcast. “But with this business, there are no big banks. There's my bank and my son's bank; we don't have any investors other than us. And it's much more difficult.”

Still, he said, “I love it. Because you're involved in every decision. You're looking at everything in detail. And you're micromanaging like crazy, which I like to do.”

Rather than investors, Alex Mill has an "unofficial" board of directors, largely made up of people who work in the industry. “Understanding the fashion business is a rarity if you're not in it,” he said.

While Alex Mill is not yet profitable, Drexler said business is “seven times what it was two and a half years ago.” And, he said, the company is getting ready to “step on the gas,” in terms of accelerating its growth. That includes linking with a marketing agency; adding to the company’s one store, in NYC’s SoHo; getting inventory right and continuing to sell at full price.

“If we weren't direct-to-consumer, the goods we sell would all be marked down somewhere,” he said. “The most successful department store today is TJ Maxx.”

When Paige Mycoskie launched 15-year-old fashion brand Aviator Nation, she was looking to solve her own pain point.

“I was most excited to wear vintage clothing -- stuff that was made in the ’70s and early ’80s. And so I found myself looking for clothes at flea markets and thrift stores. But it’s not easy to find good T-shirts from the ’70s,” she said on the latest Glossy Podcast. “I’d spend a whole day looking for one T-shirt. Then it dawned on me: ‘Why don’t I learn how to make this?’ So I started sewing clothes for myself and I taught myself how to screenprint within a couple of weeks.” 

That led to a buyer from Fred Segal placing a hefty order, solely based on the shirt that was on Mycoskie’s back. And the brand took off from there.

In the last year, with staying home being the norm, the level of comfort that comes with wearing a vintage-inspired T-shirt has been in demand. Brands have been adjusting their product offerings accordingly, which has meant new competition for Aviator Nation.

But Mycoskie isn’t concerned: “Now that athleisure is such a big deal, people are [OK with wearing] a tracksuit or a sweatsuit pretty much anywhere they go,” she said. “It obviously works to my benefit -- but it’s definitely what we’ve been doing since day one.

The L.A.-based company now has 13 brand stores, and 90% of its sales are direct-to-consumer. Mycoskie said more stores are on the way. 

“When my friends ask me about business, one of the things I always say is to just go for it,” she said. “Don’t waste too much time on the details; just put it out there.” 

When Karla Welch and Clea O’Hana launched fashion styling app Wishi in 2019, the idea was to democratize the fashion styling experience, which is usually reserved for celebs.

“Karla’s dream was to bring styling to everyone,” O’Hana said, on the latest Glossy Podcast. “It’s a great partnership -- because I had the technology and the business idea, but I didn’t have the styling or the fashion part of it…[Together] we’re replicating the relationship that she has with her clients, online.” 

Welch has 20 years of experience as a stylist; her clients to date have included Justin Bieber, Tracee Ellis Ross and Karlie Kloss, among others. Meanwhile, O’Hana’s background is in business and finance, though she’s worked in merchandising for fashion companies including Net-a-Porter and Belstaff. 

In February, Wishi secured a partnership with Farfetch, granting the retailer's high-spend loyalty members access to Wishi’s styling services. (Typically, clients pay Wishi $40 to be styled in two looks and $90 for five looks -- stylists are not paid on commission.) Thus far, the partnership has revealed some interesting data points. For one, customers who take advantage of the service are returning fewer items. 

“When you're shopping for yourself, and you don't have the eye or the confidence, or you're not sure [about] the fit, you overbuy, and then you send things back,” said Welch. “It’s a huge waste environmentally, and it's really damaging to a lot of businesses.”

Wishi is getting the word out about its services via its Style Council of stylists, who promote their bookings. It also invests in digital marketing and Google search. “[However] people are looking for this service now; there's really a lot of demand,” said O’Hana. “We don't have any problem marketing it.”