Countless independent fashion brands have reached out to our agency inquiring how to leverage and use capsule collections. For the fashion startup owners who don’t know, capsule collections are essentially those little deliveries and drops that happen mid-season, outside of your regular collection deliveries.
Imagine this: you have a Spring collection (Spring I and II deliveries), and you do a third or half the number of styles you did in your bigger collection to introduce a High Summer. That’s a drop from 70 SKUs to approx. 15 to 20, significantly diminishing the number of styles but providing an extra boost of visibility to your fashion startup or growth stage business with content that’s more marketable and easier to use.
Here, a closer look at how to leverage capsule collections…
1. Drive Customers to Your Website.
Capsule collections and more frequent deliveries are effective for driving customers to your website. Diversifying your distribution and product lines, and having something on your site that is new and exclusive to you is a fantastic way to view online capsules exclusively for your business.
2. Create Exclusive Partnerships with Retailers.
Companies like MATCHESFASHION.COM, Net-a-Porter, The Webster, and other select online retailers as well as brick-and-mortar retailers are looking for newness in independent fashion brands. They’re looking for ways to continuously drive customers back to their stores. Partnering up with any one of them for an exclusive capsule collection is a great form of promotion. It can also increase your open-to-buy (OTB) with any of these potential retailers and begin to draw in newness and more visibility to your partnerships, even if you’re a newer fashion startup.
3. Develop a Capsule Collection Business Model.
Looking at capsule collections is a new way of looking at business modeling. Companies like VETTA have done an amazing job of including certain kinds of products, such as seven different styles that can be worn in 30 different ways. It’s a core part of their offering.
What I love so much about this business model is that if you purchase all of the pieces at once, you get a small discount. This business model really drives the idea of having additive wardrobes – not over-consuming – yet every few months they release a new capsule. Not only are they having them in terms of groupings of products, but they’re having them more regularly. If you become a fan of the brand you’ll find you may want to continuously buy these small groups of products because you can see how easily they merchandise with one another.
Attention needs to be drawn to the benefits of using business model capsules like what VETTA uses. They actually increase your average order value online as well as units per transaction, resulting in your getting more of the market share – more often – by creating extremely brand loyal customers. Other independent fashion brands out there like Sézane have introduced collections four times a year with capsules, boosting their visibility.
Ready to learn more? Read our blog post on how to optimize your product pages for higher online sales. Also be sure to get your free copy of “How to Design Your Assortment for Maximum Impact”.
When you’re ready to take your business into overdrive, developing and executing amazing sales and marketing tactics, shoot us an email at hello@scalingretail.com.