EP02: Brand Authenticity, Selling Direct to Consumer and Gaining PR Traction — Oliver Cabell

Hi everybody, welcome to the Physical Product Podcast, part of the 2x eCommerce podcast and today, we’re going to be talking about brand authenticity and launching from zero to a significant amount of sales that actually brings in traction.

I have with me, Scott Gabrielson, founder of Oliver Cabell. A minimalist high-end bag and accessories company that launched less than 6 months ago.

Here’s the Video Interview:

In this episode, you will learn about:

• Using Social Media to build a Fashion brand / Instagram marketing tips
• Direct to consumer commerce — opportunities and efficiencies of vertical integration / “killing the middleman”
• Gaining PR traction for a fashion brand
• email acquisition of 30,000 in 3 and a half months in business
  Team size and more…

Scott’s company, Oliver Cabell is a direct-to-consumer brand focused on:

• Transparency
• Quality
• Price

The formation of the brand came about in 2013 specifically looked at accessories as a way to figure out how they can disrupt the high-end market, why the market wasn’t as high as they were and what approach to go through in building the plan.

Their production is in Italy, doing all sourcing of materials and bring them to production, cutting out the traditional middleman/markups and sells directly online.

They revealed their cost of production on their website — a unique action taken by retail sites. They’ve done this because of the company’s focus on transparency, quality and price setting themselves out from other high-end fashion companies who are mostly big public companies that made them incredibly opaque.

They surpassed $1M in retail sales in less than 6 months which is mainly attributed to the PR and social media, and because they have high-quality products, the customers became the biggest supporters in initiating the next sales for the company.

With that, here are the Top 3 options to drive brand awareness in sales from Scott Gabrielson:

• Email — they built a referral/reward program that helped them grow their email list to 10,000 during launch using personal connections, relying to press, and social media.
• Influencer reach out — they reached out to 100 different influencers with social media following between 20,00 and 200,000.
• PRESS — build a brand that is different and interesting, this makes the press notice you. They also built an email list of 300 different PRESS contacts and worked on building a relationship.

Product sales come from:

• PRESS — at the beginning it’s much more leaned on the PRESS side. This is because there is no word of mouth to be spread and there are no repeat customers because you have not sold anything yet.
• Word of mouth. At this stage, they are much more in the word of mouth stage and slowly dripping down to the repeat customers.
• Repeat customers.

What are your future plans?

Domestic route

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