In December 2019 SBPR launched a fashion brand, the Perfect Dress Company, through our innovation hub to fully understand the process clients go through from concept to customer purchase.
Back in 2017, our Founder Sunny Bird set us the challenge to launch a product from initial concept through to market to demonstrate and educate the team on the process our clients go through.
As an agency with no experience in the fashion industry, we chose this as our product sector because as a predominantly female office it was an interest of ours and we wanted to set ourselves a challenge and gain knowledge in the world of fashion.
Identifying a need in the fashion industry
Whilst other fashion brands develop the product first and then engage with consumers, we took the unorthodox approach of first identifying a need within the fashion market and working with consumers from day one to help build and shape the brand. From our experience in the PR industry we knew we needed a unique product and to identify our key USPs for it to be a success. We made it our mission to create a new space in the fashion industry and do something no other brands were doing.
Through an intensive research process, we organised focus groups, conducted surveys, and built a social media community, which in turn influenced the direction of the brand. We soon discovered women of all shapes, sizes and ages didn’t feel represented within the world of fashion.
We also found that they struggled to find dresses that flatter a woman’s body of all shapes and sizes, and the more we researched the market, the more there seemed to be a gap for figure-enhancing and flattering dresses for real women. As a result of our survey, we found that the top two areas women felt least confident about was their tummy area at 69%, followed by 42% feeling least confident about their upper arms, which meant these were the areas our dresses needed to focus on and offer flattering solutions.
On the back of our focus groups and research process we found that 69% of women said they fluctuate in weight and this was an issue when it came to ordering dresses online as from one month to the next they could be different dress sizes. As a result of this, we identified another need from our consumers and developed our own unique 4 way stretch material and adapted the size grading so our dresses would fit women if they went up or down a dress size.
Thus, creating our own dual sizing model from size 6-8, 8-10 up to size 18-20, 20-22.
Target audience
We then needed to confirm our mission as a brand and what we stood for. We had received some negative feedback for our dress name ideas which were originally ‘Tummy Tuck Dress’ and ‘10lbs Slimmer Dress’. Some people felt that they were too strong and made them feel uncomfortable, we also received feedback from some of the body confident crowd who thought that slimming dresses went against feeling body confident. We had some doubts as a team and thought about how we could change the messaging to ensure women didn’t think that we were telling them they needed to be slimmer. We needed to think about how we could appeal to both those women who wanted to look slimmer and those who wanted to feel body confident, and we certainly didn’t want to offend anyone.
After many internal discussions and surveys asking women what they thought, we decided we could never please everyone, and we needed to stick to our key messaging, and be consistent. We identified our target audience as those women who wanted to feel slimmer, perhaps hide some lumps and bumps, and wear clothes that flattered their figure. This doesn’t mean they are ashamed of their body or not body confident, it just means they want to look good in what they are wearing – which was 97% of women according to our survey.
Branding
Once we had our product and knew what we wanted to achieve, we needed a name and branding to reflect our ethos and key messaging. We worked with brand designers to come up with logo ideas which reflected a luxury women’s fashion brand, one that people would recognise and understand straight away as a brand designing the perfect dresses - the Perfect Dress Company.
Product design and manufacturing
In year one, we worked with a technical design consultant to produce 12 slimming dress designs, with up to 10 prototypes made of each design to ensure our fit was as perfect as possible. To make sure that we had hit our aim of making the ‘most flattering dresses in the world’ we ordered over 200 competitor dresses to compare fit and the overall flattering look, to ensure we met our objective.
Once we had our prototype dresses, we needed to make sure they were practical too, so before being signed off for production, each dress was put through its paces by Sunny to ensure it could withstand a long commute, the perils of public transport through the city, hours in countless meetings and engagements, and still look fantastic.
But getting the designs exactly right did come with its challenges. We worked with a factory in Leicester to make our bespoke material, which was designed to smooth lumps and bumps, and a factory in Portugal to manufacture the dresses. Along the way we experienced delays in production with errors in fabric, prototypes, and a factory fire which meant the launch had to be pushed back. What we thought would take year, ended up taking just over two years.
Price points
From the beginning, we wanted our dresses to be luxury but also affordable for the everyday woman. A lot of thought has gone into our bespoke material, making the dresses long lasting, reliable, and adaptable to wear either casually or formally, so the dress can have multiple purposes. Our offering isn’t fast fashion, so our prices needed to reflect that and also, we needed to make a profit. We researched other brands and reached out to our community to see what they would be willing to pay, which in turn determined our price points.
Website
Once we had our product right, we had to make sure our website reflected our ethos and USPs. What our audience wanted had an instrumental impact on our website design. Our audience told us they were fed up with seeing just the two sizes of women ‘normal and plus-size’ modelling clothes for fashion brands as they didn’t fully represent all shapes and sizes. This is backed up by research that revealed 78% of women felt ‘ignored’ and not represented by the women they see in advertising, TV, runways and generally the fashion industry. So, we made the decision to use models that represented all the sizes we offered at the Perfect Dress Company.
By sourcing models of each dress size to showcase our range, it allowed us to implement another USP of ours on our website that no other fashion brand does in the UK. We created a functional website where you can select the size of the model you want to see in our clothes, so that you can see more realistically how our dresses will look on someone of a similar size and shape. You simply select your dress size, and the whole website changes to the selected size.
Sourcing Models
However, sourcing models of all sizes was not as straightforward as we thought it would be. We reached out to model agencies to source women from sizes 6 – 22 and to our surprise there was not one model agency we contacted in the UK that could offer us a model of each size, and most agencies only had models that went up to a size 12.
What we thought would take us a few days to source the models, ending up taking four months as we decided to reach out and find real women who wanted to model for us who were all different dress sizes. On our first photo-shoot we ended up using a mixture of real women, models and influencers.
We knew that if we worked with an influencer who had followers of our target demographic, we would have an increased audience to sell to through theirs. We sourced Slimming World influencers and body positive women whose followers would be our ideal consumers – women who wanted to look great in what they are wearing no matter what size they are, women who had struggled with weight and wanted to feel slimmer and wear a dress that flatters their figure. As a result of the influencers sharing their photo-shoot images, it also directed these target consumers over to our social media channels and website to shop for dresses.
As well as sourcing models for the first photo-shoot, we decided to hold our own model search competition as a brand, to find real women and ambassadors from all over the UK for the Perfect Dress Company. We wanted to celebrate women of all shapes and sizes and teamed with First Model Management in London to offer two of the women professional modelling contracts, as well as the final 8 winning modelling contracts with the Perfect Dress Company.
Postage and packaging
We wanted our customers to feel excited when they received their Perfect Dress Company package, so we researched what other brands do, and how their packages arrive by ordering over 50 different packages from women’s fashion and beauty brands. We also wanted the packaging to be as eco-friendly as our budget would allow. We sourced high quality boxes, tissue paper, branded stickers, and designed postcards, mirror stickers and personal thank you cards to go inside each box, all reflecting our branding and messaging.
Next, we needed a method of sending out the boxes to our customers, so we met with postal companies such as DPD, InExpress and Royal Mail to find the best deal and ended up going ahead with DPD local.
Launch
Once we had our dresses confirmed and ready for production, our postal service set up, our website ready for pre-orders, and our packaging designed we were ready to launch the brand. We had already built a loyal community of followers on our social media channels who were eagerly waiting for us to launch, and as a result we instantly received sales not just from the UK but requests from all over the world.
We teamed up with NEO restaurant, Bournemouth, to hold an official launch party to celebrate our achievements in February 2020, where we also announced the winners of our model competition that we held looking for real women to be ambassadors of the brand and held a photo-shoot earlier in the day for the selected winners.
Challenges
We’ve faced a lot of challenges along the way, with suppliers letting us down or going bust, factory fires, delays in production and learning everything from scratch. Another challenge we faced was launching a fashion brand on a budget. To overcome this, we worked with suppliers and partnered with other businesses to offset costs and trade services. We used the business community platform BBX to exchange spare capacity for goods and services such as marketing and print materials, packaging, travel and accommodation for model competitions, beauty and hair appointments for models, and the launch party venue. We saved over £90,000 by doing this.
What we have achieved so far
Since we launched, we have already featured in national press including the Mail Online, The Mirror, Grazia, and Draper’s for doing something completely unique and as a result of our excellent media relations as a PR agency. The Perfect Dress Company’s innovative website feature which allows you to see a dress modelled on a real woman of your size has been compared to brands such as ASOS, which use AR technology instead to show outfits on different sizes.
As an online fashion brand, we have had a low return rate so far of just 5%, which is very low compared to other online retailers which report return rates of between 30% and 50% for online sales, with ‘poor fit’ cited as the number one reason Our low return rate demonstrates our research of what women want is working and by using real models on our website, women have a better idea of how the dress will fit their body before it arrives. We have lots of exciting PR campaigns planned and more styles and accessories to launch in 2020 too!
By launching the Perfect Dress Company as team, we have gained valuable knowledge as to what our PR agency clients go through from initial concept through to product sale. We usually meet our clients once they have just launched, with no real insight into what they have gone through beforehand from research, product production, branding, manufacturing, packaging, and postal services. As part of our innovation hub, the whole team has been involved in launching a real brand to market, and we now have a more realistic idea of their journey and the experience and knowledge to help our current and future clients further.