The Glossy Podcast

Sweatpants are a best-seller for Mack Weldon in normal times. But unsurprisingly, they're especially popular now, as many Americans have seen their commute to the office replaced by yet another day of getting comfortable at home.

"A lot of people are wearing sweatpants, that's for sure," Brian Berger, Mack Weldon CEO and founder, said on the Glossy Podcast.

The activewear brand's focus on e-commerce has also well-positioned it to weather the pandemic. The brand has only one brick-and-mortar store, at Hudson Yards, and no significant partnerships with department stores.

Berger talked about leveraging e-commerce, establishing redundancy in supply lines and being the "cheerleader-in-chief" to his staff.

Fashion designer Nicole Miller knows her brand is best known for its dresses, and she sees the pandemic as one more reason to diversify her product line.

"[We're] trying to become more of a lifestyle brand, giving our customer a broader range of things to choose from," Miller said on the Glossy Podcast. "I'm not just there for your party dress."

Miller talked about how direct-to-consumer isn't a silver bullet for challenged businesses, how she doesn't think there will be any fashion shows in September ("or it'll all be online") and how she learned to put more of herself into the brand's social media presence.

For apparel sales, under the pandemic, different items are suffering different fates. Swimwear sales are at a halt, while lingerie and sleepwear are doing much better.

Morgan Lane knows this first-hand, specializing in all three of these categories.

"Fall orders, for the most part, were being received in February. And for stores that are getting their budgets canceled, because they can't be selling right now, the first thing they're going to cancel is fall. They know it's not in production yet," founder Morgan Curtis said on the Glossy Podcast. "There's going to be a big gap between probably June and October, where there isn't that much newness, at least in the retail world -- from everyone."

Curtis talked about which parts of her global supply chain have seen the most slowdown, how to promote products online without leaving home and what a difference it makes to have well-timed product placement in a "Trolls" music video.

If much of the retail industry is feeling squeezed by the coronavirus pandemic, outdoor apparel may be especially hard hit.

"It's been kind of a mix," Jeff Johnson, co-founder of outerwear brand The Arrivals, said on the Glossy Podcast. "Sales, even traffic, has been lower."

Johnson still manages to find positives. The company's main sales season runs from August to January or February -- this year, that was before the pandemic was declared. And while the average order value has gone down, he said, order numbers are up. In other words, within a smaller group of online visitors, more people are making actual purchases.

"For the last two weeks, we've seen a 2x spike in conversion," Johnson said.

He talked about how the company is crowd-sourcing the apparel design process, how it's changing its communications and why he's thankful that The Arrivals didn't end up opening a flagship store just before the pandemic.

For Rebecca Minkoff, the coronavirus pandemic is a chance for her namesake business to accelerate pre-existing plans.

That starts with reexamining the brand's dependence on its own brick-and-mortar stores versus wholesale. "We always had a plan to have the ratios be more equal, and I think this has forced that to happen," Minkoff said on the Glossy Podcast. "I see a strong desire to return to physical retail when this is all over."

The tighter focus also extends to the brand's social media strategy. The content that's been proven to work on shut-in customers, she said, usually features Minkoff herself. "I'm not trying to sound egotistical, but that's what drives the revenue and the clicks and the sales," she said. "So we're saying, 'Enough with any other type of franchise or content pillars; we are going to do what works and what gets the customer excited.'"

Minkoff talked about how she's helping to focus attention on smaller, women-owned businesses, what she thinks of TikTok and why she had to take the podcast interview from her bathroom floor.

Ramy Brook Sharp opened a brand flagship store in Manhattan last fall, before the coronavirus pandemic shut down just about every brick-and-mortar store in New York City -- though since, the company's focus has changed to the company's e-commerce site, of course.

Direct-to-consumer was a priority even before the crisis. "That's definitely going to be the future of the company," Brook Sharp said on the Glossy Podcast. "We were going in that direction to begin with, but I think with everything happening, you realize how important that is."

Until then, the contemporary fashion company has had to furlough all 45 of its employees. "The hope is that everybody comes back," said Brook Sharp, adding that the company is continuing to cover affected employees' health insurance.

"We're not allowed to ask anybody to work; we can't expect people to work," she said, but she's found that "a majority" of her team is working despite that, unpaid. "Most of the people want to see the company succeed and understand that this is a unique time."

For Charles Gorra, whose company Rebag has bought and sold luxury handbags since 2014, the competition isn't Hermès or Louis Vuitton. "We like to say we don't compete against this or that company, but we compete against idleness," Gorra said on the Glossy Podcast.

His estimate is that nine out of 10 "luxury owners" have never sold those items and that most of his customers (on the selling end) are doing so for the first time.

It helps that Rebag buys such pieces upfront, in its nine physical locations in Los Angeles, New York State and Miami. Thirty stores is the "medium-term goal" for the company, said Gorra. Handbag sales, however, are mostly done online, with only 20-30% sold in store. "We're still largely a digital company," Gorra said.

Accordingly, Gorra thinks Instagram Checkout -- which is still in beta -- could be "game-changing" for e-commerce in general. And last year Rebag launched Clair, or Comprehensive Luxury Appraisal Index for Resale, a freely-available tool for appraising bags at a distance.

"Literally, it's three or five clicks, and we tell you right there: 'This is how much we pay,'" Gorra said. He previously told Glossy that unlike sneakers, designer handbags tend not to have product codes or SKU numbers, which come into play in the authorization process. Clair is Rebag's way of bringing some standardization to the market.

Gorra talked about Rebag's typical customer, his stores' experiential fixtures and the item appraisal tool that Rebag launched last year.

Jewelry company Gorjana is growing, self-funded and profitable, but its founders insist that it was a slow and tricky road. "No home runs here," Gorjana Reidel said on the Glossy Podcast.

She and her husband, Jason Griffin Reidel, first sold their jewelry in small boutiques before partnering with Nordstrom in 2014. "We were kind of the pioneers of the category that you see so many people getting into now, of gold, delicate, layering jewelry," Griffin Reidel said. Early on, Nordstrom partnered with the brand, launching it in 25 stores at a time (the Reidels got to pick which ones), and Gorjana Jewelry is now available across the chain's approximately 120 outlets.

But despite its success with Nordstrom, in recent years Gorjana has made the shift to selling direct-to-consumer via its own stores and e-commerce site. Three years ago, 90% of Gorjana’s sales were coming through wholesale channels and only 10% from DTC. Today, 80% of sales are direct-to-consumer.

Gorjana has nearly 200 employees and, by the end of May, the company plans to have 16 stores across California, New York City and Arizona -- the coronavirus pandemic notwithstanding.

Gorjana Reidel and Jason Griffin Reidel talked about the benefits of boot-strapping a business, their secret to growing steadily even through the financial crisis of 2008 and their advice for entrepreneurs.

For our final episode of Glossy Trend Watch: Influencer Edition, senior technology reporter Katie Richards sits down with Danielle Bernstein of We Wore What.

Danielle is a fashion blogger turned clothing designer, brand founder, author and entrepreneur.

When she got started as an influencer, payment schemes were a bit arbitrary. "There weren't any set fees for posting on a blog, taking photos for a brand," Bernstein said. "We sort of went off of what modeling agencies traditionally did for models."

Since those uncertain days, Bernstein has developed longer-term collaborations with brands and launched a workflow tool for influencers, and she has a book in the works.

Glossy Trend Watch: Influencer Edition features interviews with some of the most prominent fashion influencers on how they’ve used their success and social media followings to launch major brands. Our guests -- including Julia Engel and Moti Ankari -- made the leap from interacting with existing brands online to creating some of their own.

Amanda Uprichard's namesake fashion company has quickly reshaped its supply line to work in a world living with the coronavirus.

"Now, we make maybe 90% of our stuff here because of the virus," Uprichard said about her New York operation. Previously, half of the line's manufacturing was based in China.

"Anyone that's in manufacturing, you're just affected by the supply chain," she added. "But I do believe China will be completely normal in another month."

For Uprichard, making things out of New York was a return to the brand's beginnings. Everything was made out of New York City, "until about a year and a half ago, when we started switching to China because the resources are drying up here," she said.

Uprichard talked about the importance of influencers, the reality TV show "The Bachelor" and walking away from Amazon (and, just maybe, going back to it).