We are so thrilled to have been invited to sit down and 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 their businesses by using Instagram and Facebook ads, complete management and tailored coaching.

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

Pear Collections has been created out of frustration, due to the lack of clothing options available for pear-shaped women, which often ends with them having horrible fitting situations, sometimes ending in tears.

We pulled back the curtains of what makes Pear Collections run as our very own founder, CEO, and Head Designer, Angie Martin, discussed how she ensures Pear Collections 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 couldn’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.

In a span of two weeks, Angie coined the name Pear Collections, and she even created the logo and began designing her first pair of proper-fitting jeans herself. And so started the journey of fixing 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 should not have to cry when 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. For the business to take off, she exploited the power of 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 makes it more financially viable than using Shopify which can get costly as more integrations are set up.

We do RSS feeds and automatically execute an onboarding email series once someone comes into our pear community. Everything is batched, and we try to get everything done at least six months ahead.

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 whole 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, you get put into our email marketing automation automatically. Each purchase goes into a sequence as well.

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 makes it easy to work with our integrated 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 if we are running low in stocks through email, making it easier for us to communicate with our stockist. It also assists us to communicate with our wholesalers and our manufacturers in case we want to do a top-up.

The whole system basically allows us to do a day’s amount of work within an hour or two, which is fantastic. And if there is anything that doesn’t automatically mesh with our integration, we use Zapier to tie it all together.

Capsule Collection

Pear Collections from the onset was created with utilising the concept of Capsule Collections, since we also want to ensure we are being a sustainable and environmentally conscious brand. Though Angie loves getting item/s from fast fashion for every new drop, the amount of waste from buying new items every month does not appeal 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 that you have 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 there for a specific reason, and they are made to last. This makes it easy for our community to basically purchase our whole range (which they do) and have that range last for a long time. This works for our community and is a much more economical, environmental, and sustainable option than getting new item/s 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 environmentally, and also as far as into 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.

Admittedly, we are still a clothing business, and how we run things might seem as profitable as that of fast fashion, we wanted to ensure our product is priced appropriately to be both affordable and support business growth.

Being in manufacturing for many years, and in touch with amazing manufacturers, our collections’ pricing is calculated by incorporating the 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 your really paying for is the label and current fashion trend… which will likely expire in just one season or less.

Pear collections do not do a lot of ads, but we do a lot of affiliate marketing and collaborations with our community. So as not to miss out on anything, Angie reserves a day for a specific area to focus on, whether that be email marketing, blog content creation, filming for 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 just one area of being a pear.

Our community is robust enough that our capsule collection stream is being bought by our clients in its entirety. On the downside, we are so incredibly niched that it is difficult sometimes to be seen through the noise. Add to this, 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 rely entirely on ads. Furthermore, we mitigate challenges by collaboration, giving us wiggle room up to the extent we can spend or give away for collaboration, which can be mutually beneficial.

Outsourcing

Running any business requires passion above all else. This also holds true with running an eCommerce business. It is reality that you won’t be able to do everything in running your business, especially if you don’t have a background with 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 you 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.