Pulling Back the Curtain

We are so thrilled to have been invited to join a podcast with Dahna Borg, founder of Bright Red Marketing. Bright Red Marketing works exclusively with eCommerce businesses to help them scale and grow through Instagram and Facebook ads, providing comprehensive management and tailored coaching.

In this podcast episode, we discussed a heap of things about the ins and outs of running an eCommerce business, including tips on how best to run it and the challenges it brings.

Pear Collections was created out of frustration with the lack of clothing options for pear-shaped women, which often leads to horrible-fitting experiences, sometimes ending in tears.

We pulled back the curtain on what makes Pear Collections run, as our very own founder, CEO, and Head Designer, Angie Martin, discussed how she ensures the Company runs like a well-oiled machine.

How Pear Collections came about.

After a disastrous shopping outing for a simple pair of black pants. Angie was prodded by her partner, too, “Why don’t you fix them?”

After some consideration, she asked herself, Why can’t I do something about it? So, armed with her background in fashion design and knowledge of how to run and grow a business, she did.

Within two weeks, Angie coined the name Pear Collections, created the logo, and began designing her first pair of properly fitting jeans herself. And so began the journey to fix the ill-fitting clothing issue for pear-shaped women.

Pear Collections’ mission is to help our fellow pear-shaped and curvaceous women to #loveyourcurves with the creation of our capsule range that is specifically designed for comfort, timeless style, and of course, CURVES.

Rather than being an innovative fashion brand, our capsule range at Pearl Collections is more of a common-sense brand. We create classic, beautiful, comfortable, and practical clothing for women who shouldn't have to cry while shopping. In addition, we also offer simple style tips to help women look and feel great about their bodies.

Marketing and Automation

It is a great advantage for Pear Collections that Angie has a background in digital marketing. To get the business off the ground, she leveraged email and social media marketing. In addition, doing more organic SEO for content.

Everything we do at Pear collections is automated, except for warehousing. We use a WordPress website by choice because we have so many integrations, and it's more financially viable than using Shopify, which can get costly as more integrations are set up.

We handle RSS feeds and automatically trigger an onboarding email series once someone joins our Pear community. Everything is batched, and we try to get it all done at least six months in advance.

Being a clothing brand, it’s good to go visual, that’s why we do Tips & Tricks video blogs on our website, YouTube and Instagram TV (IGTV). Our marketing efforts centre around a holistic approach that is specifically designed and batched.

The beauty of our automation system is that as soon as someone does anything on our website, they are automatically added to our email marketing automation. Each purchase also goes into a sequence.

Once an order goes in, the system automatically sends a Sendle receipt, and the dispatch docket is printed out on our printer. All we have to do is pack the order and wait for Sendle to collect it from our premises! We use Sendle for our shipping since it integrates with our automation, and they come to us to collect the parcel very quickly.

Everything in Pear Collections’ backend is also automated, including our invoicing and bookkeeping. The system also alerts us via email when we are running low on stock, making it easier for us to communicate with our stockists. It also helps us communicate with our wholesalers and manufacturers if we want to do a top-up.

The whole system basically lets us do a day’s worth of work in an hour or two, which is fantastic. And if anything doesn’t automatically integrate with our system, we use Zapier to tie it all together.

Capsule Collection

Pear Collections, from the outset, was created by utilising the concept of Capsule Collections, as we also want to ensure we are a sustainable and environmentally conscious brand. Though Angie loves getting items from fast fashion with every new drop, the amount of waste from buying new items every month does not appeal to her much.

As part of our brand concept, we wanted to emphasise the importance of loving yourself and being comfortable with who you are and the curves in your body. Hence, Angie designed her capsule range around everything flattering for our pear-shaped bodies. Rather than focusing on fads, we focused on doing well by providing quality over quantity.

Every piece in Pear’s range is designed for a specific purpose and made to last. This makes it easy for our community to purchase our entire range (which they do) and for that range to last a long time. This works for our community and is a much more economical, environmentally sustainable option than getting new items for every single fashion drop.

Our Pear Community

We want to be a responsible brand, and in all aspects of the business, we do this by being environmentally responsible, recycling everything, and being as paperless as possible. We set aside 5% of every item purchased from us for buying clothing for the homeless. What this means for our clients is they’ll also be helping others while finding clothes that they absolutely love.

We're a clothing business, and while our operations may resemble fast fashion, we want to ensure our products are priced appropriately so they're affordable and support business growth.

With many years in manufacturing and in touch with amazing manufacturers, we calculate our collections' pricing by incorporating landed cost, shipping, and marketing costs over the products' lifespan.

Fast fashion’s clients usually purchase an item or two from their range, whereas our clients typically buy our entire capsule range. A feat that not a lot of fast fashion brands can guarantee on, as what you're really paying for is the label and current fashion trend… which will likely expire in just one season or less.

Pear collections don't run many ads, but we do a lot of affiliate marketing and collaborations with our community. So as not to miss anything, Angie reserves a day to focus on a specific area, whether that's email marketing, blog content creation, filming video blogs, or scheduling photoshoots. Angie makes sure to have content scheduled out, get it out of the way, and actually be part of the community.

We focus on both sides of the pear spectrum, so as soon as someone discovers us, we’re basically best friends and customers for life. This is why at Pear Collections, we don’t just focus on one area of being a pear.

Our community is robust enough that our clients are buying our capsule collection in its entirety. On the downside, we are so incredibly niche that it is difficult sometimes to be seen through the noise. Add to this the fact that there are some really amazing fast-fashion brands in Australia, so it can be quite a challenge to be seen in the realm of digital marketing.

But we don’t even try to compete with fast fashion. We don’t consider them our competitors.

We do superbly with organic growth within our expanding community base, rather than relying entirely on ads. Furthermore, we mitigate challenges through collaboration, giving us wiggle room to spend or give away as much as we can, which can be mutually beneficial.

Outsourcing

Running any business requires passion above all else. This also holds true for running an e-commerce business. The reality is that you won’t be able to do everything when running your business, especially if you don’t have a background in process automation, digital marketing, and integrations.

You have to constantly remind yourself why you’re doing it, what you love about it, and why you created the business in the first place. And there will be tasks that you will be clueless or not good at on how to proceed.

Our solution is to outsource what you don’t know or don’t do really well. If you are at a loss on how to do things, outsource it, get someone else to do it, but do learn the basics.

Listen to the podcast with Dahna here. And while you’re listening to this fabulous podcast, check out Pear Collections’ range of capsule clothing.