Building a global marketplace from scratch & embracing an unforeseen target market
Q&A with Nava Brief-Fried, CEO & Founder of ModLi
As a religious woman, Nava kept finding herself asking the same question, “Why is it so difficult to find fashionable and modest clothing?” She realized that the problem she was facing was indeed felt by several of her peers.
Looking to provide a solution to a problem, Nava dreamt up ModLi: an online platform that brings all types of modest fashion boutiques together in one marketplace. Today, ModLi curates over 100 modest fashion boutiques, offering shoppers an endless selection of styles.
Having been founded and created with a pre-selected marketplace in mind, ModLi soon found themselves repositioning to better fit a newly discovered market.
We sat down with Nava Brief-Fried, CEO of Jerusalem based and Siftech alum, ModLi to learn a thing or two about refocusing when thrown a curveball… which in this case turned out to be a lucrative opportunity.
S: So Nava, we all know starting a company isn’t a simple task. What was it that gave you the final push to found ModLi?
N: I don’t think I ever consciously decided to officially to start a company. What I did decide was that I wanted bootstrap an idea, using all the contacts and resources I had to solve a problem I felt in the fashion world. It wasn’t until ModLi started gaining traction that we were forced to turn it into a company for legal & accounting purposes.
It all happened very quickly, yet naturally at the same time.
S: That all sounds like it went too smoothly. Were there any hiccups or tough times?
N: Oh yes! There were definitely tough times. The hard part came not when founding ModLi, but after we were founded and orders started to roll in. They came in faster than we had planned and were really worried we couldn’t fill them. At that point though, we had no choice and we were forced to keep up with demand.
It was a really tough and exhausting time and I found myself thinking “is this actually possible?” It definitely wasn’t simple but what gave me the push to trudge through was the customer feedback. Hearing from happy customers and seeing how excited they were about ModLi and their purchases made it all worth it.
We also kept pushing through for our designers, the ones who supplied the merchandise. They were and are so thankful for the platform, which gives them the opportunity to sell to a global community of women in addition to a local one.
The thing to remember is that there are always hard times. We have tough moments now and there will be tough ones in the future. But, we’re ready to tackle ‘em.
S: When founding ModLi, who did you project its ideal customers to be and how did you plan to reach them?
N: We were sure that the women who would be interested in buying our items would be Jewish, since that really was the only market we were familiar with. That was the problem I personally felt and was aiming to solve.
We were planning on running locally targeted ads around Israel and in Jewish communities.
S: At what point did you realize that there were other massive markets out there, and what actions did you make accordingly ?
N: I think we made a mistake by not entirely understanding our customers from day 1. Then again, if we wouldn’t have jumped in head first and started selling, we would be no where.
We realized and understood our market a couple of months after we were actually selling to them. After sending out some customer surveys, we found that our customer base was actually a combination of women from many different faiths and much larger than we thought.
The most important thing we did was studying our analytics and learning our customers: who they are, where they live, what religion they are, what their modesty standards are, and most importantly, why they buy what they buy.
Once we had a good understanding of our customers, we started to personalize or ‘optimize’ our website. Now, we personalize the website depending on the customer’s geo location to appeal to them.
By optimizing and showing our customer that we understand them and that we have the items they are looking for, we were able to increase our conversion rate from ‘potential customer’ to ‘customer’ by hundreds of percents.
S: So is ModLi currently focused on any single market?
N: Right now we’re focused on multiple demographics we found to be interested in modest fashion. We are constantly running a/b testing campaigns and continuously work to personalize our customer’s experience on ModLi, based on the data we collect.
S: Where’s ModLi headed?
N: ModLi is in the process of launching in the UK, Canada, Australia & London and will soon launch in non-english speaking countries.
Our goal is to continue our impressive growth and improve processes to keep on making customers happy and looking their best day after day.
