In this episode of Chase Your Dreams, SEO + AI Visibility Strategist, Glynis Tao, breaks down why SEO in 2026 should focus on aligning with real business goals to drive growth. She introduces the concept of “business-first SEO”, an approach that prioritizes buyer intent, revenue-driving pages, and clear brand messaging over vanity metrics like traffic and impressions. She discusses how AI search recommendations have transformed brand discovery, what SEO metrics actually matter—such as organic revenue, conversion rates, and brand demand—and how real fashion brands use business-first SEO to achieve 300%+ increases in organic purchases. Shifting from traditional SEO to a business-aligned strategy focused on intent, product visibility, and long-term growth is the key to driving conversions in 2026.
🔥 My Online Visibility Roadmap uncovers the hidden technical + SEO issues holding you back and gives you a clear plan to fix them.
With over 20 years of experience in the apparel industry, Glynis is an expert in creative entrepreneurship and fashion business operations. Driven by a mission to empower and help her clients build e-commerce businesses that are purposeful and profitable, Glynis uses her industry experience to develop data-driven strategies.
Beyond SEO consulting, Glynis is passionate about fostering a community of like-minded business owners. Through her Chase Your Dreams podcast, e-commerce blog, and collection of free resources, Glynis provides guidance and inspiration for entrepreneurs striving to grow their brands.
Takeaways
Business-first SEO focuses on long-term, sustainable growth
Rankings and traffic alone don’t drive revenue, alignment does
SEO should start with business goals, not keywords
AI search favors recommendations over rankings
A clear and consistent brand voice helps AI understand and recommend your brand
Themes
What does “business-first SEO” actually mean?
Business-first SEO starts with business goals, not keyword lists. Instead of asking “What can we rank for?”, you need to start asking, “What will bring in the right people and turn them into customers?” This approach prioritizes revenue-driving pages, high-intent searches, clear messaging, and the full customer path—from journey to decision—so SEO can function as a growth strategy.
Why doesn’t higher SEO traffic always lead to more sales?
Visibility alone doesn’t drive conversions. Many brands rank high, gain impressions, and see increases in traffic, but their revenue remains flat because their traffic isn’t aligned with buyer intent. SEO that only focuses on rankings often attracts the wrong audience—people that are disconnected from products, messaging, and purchase readiness. In 2026, SEO must align with how real customers think, search, and buy.
Which SEO metrics actually matter in 2026?
Key metrics of success include organic revenue, conversion rate by landing page, branded search growth, product feed and shopping performance, and indexability of product pages. These metrics help answer the most important question: “Is SEO helping my business grow?” Measure the outcomes of your SEO strategy rather than vanity metrics for a better understanding of your business growth.
How has AI changed brand discovery in search?
AI has turned search engines into recommendation engines. Instead of asking search engines for products and services that exist, people are asking AI search to make purchase recommendations. AI systems interpret brands using signals like clear product information, structured data, trust, authority, and consistent messaging. AI doesn’t just rank content—it decides when and why to recommend a brand.
Why does my brand voice matter?
Your brand’s voice is no longer just a marketing asset—it’s a visibility signal. AI systems look for clarity, consistency, authenticity, and cohesive positioning across a site. When a brand’s voice is generic or inconsistent, it’s more difficult for AI to understand who the brand is for and when its products or services should be recommended. SEO that actually sounds like you builds trust faster, converts better, and grows your brand over time.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome to a New Season of the Chase Your Dreams Podcast
00:26 The Disconnect Between SEO and Sales
01:50 What is Business-First SEO?
06:03 The Shift from Traditional SEO to Business-First SEO
08:54 SEO Metrics That Matter in 2026
11:16 The Impact of AI on Search
12:37 The Importance of Brand Voice
13:30 The Five-Step Business-First SEO Framework
15:47 Case Study: Business Growth Through SEO Optimization
18:07 Looking Ahead: Future Conversations
Transcript
Glynis Tao
Hi everyone, welcome back to the new year. It's 2026 and I'm so happy to be back with a brand new season of Chase Your Dreams podcast. I'm so excited. I have so many new guests lined up for this year. And as a matter of fact, I've already started recording with a few different industry experts and professionals, as well as stylists, designers, and PR strategists already coming up, so make sure you stay tuned and look out for that.
Let's get to today's topic. If you've ever celebrated a keyword ranking win and then you opened up your Shopify analytics dashboard to only realize that sales have not moved at all, then you are not alone, my friend. I see this all the time. I work with a lot of fashion and lifestyle brands. They often tell me that they are trying to do everything, and to them, it sounds right on paper. It looks right, but they could be ranking higher, having more impressions, more traffic, but when it comes to revenue—flat. That disconnect is exactly what we're talking about here today, because in 2026, SEO is no longer about rankings alone, it's about alignment. Alignment between your visibility strategy and your business goals, alignment between your messaging and how real customers think, search, and buy, and alignment between who you are as a brand and how search engines and AI systems understand and recommend you.
Today's episode is called, Business-First SEO That Sounds Like You: Why Brand Voice Is a Ranking Advantage. If you're tired of SEO that looks impressive in reports, but doesn't move the business forward, this one's for you.
I'm Glynis Tao and I'm the founder of Chase Your Dreams Consulting. I'm an e-commerce SEO expert and AI search strategist with over 20 years in the fashion industry. I've been on both sides of the screen as a founder of a clothing brand staying up late at night, looking at the numbers, and thinking that I've been doing all the things, but the numbers may not have necessarily matched or reflect the effort that I put in. And so, I bring that experience as a founder and now into my business as a strategist diagnosing why traffic isn't converting. What I want to share today is a shift in how we think about SEO—one that prioritizes business outcomes, clarity and brand voice, not just vanity metrics.
Here's a quick rundown of what we are going to be covering today. In this episode, I will be walking through what business-first SEO actually means, why rankings alone don't drive growth anymore, the SEO metrics that actually matter in 2026, how AI search has changed brand discovery, why your brand voice is now actually a ranking advantage, and I'm going to give you a real fashion brand example that led to an impressive 333% increase in organic purchases. Let's do this.
So what is business-first SEO? You may not have heard this term because I pretty much made it up. Business-first SEO is exactly what it sounds like. It's SEO that starts with your business, not just a keyword list. Instead of asking, “What can we rank for?”, a better question to ask is “What will bring in the right people on a site?”, help them understand what we offer and turn them into customers. That shift matters because SEO should be a business strategy and not just a checklist. In business-first SEO, what we do is we prioritize revenue-driving pages like focusing on product collection pages, making sure that we understand the high-intent searches that reflect real buying behavior. Also, having clear messaging on the website that will remove the friction and confusion and thus helping to increase your conversion rate. We're not just thinking volume here—we're thinking about the entire customer journey from discovery through to interest, consideration to final decision.
I know a lot of SEOs kind of just think of top-of-funnel traffic driving activities, but I mean, getting traffic to your site is one thing, but converting them into sales is another thing. This is just thinking more beyond traditional Google rankings. It's all about visibility now and how you show up across AI-powered search results, shopping feeds, recommendation engines, and zero-click summaries.
Search has really changed a lot from your traditional search engines into now AI-powered search engines. You can be visible and still not be the chosen one. What I mean by that is, I've had discussions with people who spend a lot of time working on blogs and content creation, and they're seeing that traffic coming in and perhaps, yeah, they are getting those rankings, but that traffic that they're getting is completely disconnected from the products and the intent and ultimately the sales. For growing fashion brands, it's not just inefficient, it's actually very exhausting to be on this constant content creation hamster wheel. Whereas when I look at a more business-first SEO approach, we are actually treating visibility as a long-term growth asset and not just a short-term win. When your SEO aligns with your business goals, your brand voice, and your customer journey, it stops feeling so overwhelming and starts to feel more supportive.
I'm just going to talk briefly about the difference between traditional SEO versus business-first SEO. Nothing wrong with that. I spent years doing this exact process of working just solely on traditional SEO and working on increasing rankings and traffic. Ultimately, at the end of the day, what do brands really want? They want sales, right? Let's take a little step backwards. Traditional SEO is what we tend to focus on more activity metrics like rankings or impressions and traffic volume and looking at the numbers in our monthly report. Content is often created to chase those keywords without really fully considering what buyer intent is or product relevance and revenue impact. Business-first SEO starts with the actual business goals. What is the customer intent and long-term growth strategies? We want to be sustainable and grow beyond those initial rankings and traffic. We want to grow the business long-term and be profitable and sustainable, right? The way we would measure success through a business-first SEO strategy is that we will measure success through qualified organic traffic. Not just traffic, but is this traffic actually qualified? We can look at different metrics just within your Google Analytics dashboard. You can tell whether or not the traffic is qualified or not by conversion rate—a big indicator—revenue generated through organic search, engagement rate, or how long and time spent on site, as well as your overall brand demand. Are you starting to feel more momentum coming as a result of this traffic that you're getting to your site? There are ways to be able to measure this. Instead of reacting to every algorithm update, business-first SEO really focuses on clarity, consistency, and building the foundations that will perform well across both traditional and AI-driven search.
I'm going to talk a little bit about why rankings alone don't drive growth anymore. There was a time when ranking number one felt like a finish line. That time is now over and I'll tell you why. Firstly, because of AI-powered search. With AI overviews and summary style results, users often get answers without even clicking. Secondly, zero-click searches. Many searches now are ending up in result pages. Third, shopping and visual results of product carousels and feeds often appear above organic listings. And finally, misaligned content—ranking for keywords that don't actually convert or grow a business. So SEO today is really about understanding how people move from discovery to consideration to decision. And if your strategy stops at “we rank”, then you are solving the wrong problem.
I'm going to talk about SEO metrics that actually matter in 2026. If rankings aren't the goal, then what is? Here's what we track in a business-first lens. We track organic revenue—not just traffic, but actual sales that are driven by organic and shopping visibility. Number two, we also track conversion rate by landing page. Which pages are converting and which attract attention without action? Number three is brand search growth. More branded searches usually mean trust and demand are growing. You can monitor and see how much of your search traffic is a branded search versus non-branded. Number four would be product feed and shopping performance, this is especially critical for fashion and lifestyle brands. Making sure that your product listings are very clear and concise for search engines as well as shopping channels to really be able to understand and show your products on various shopping channels, Google shopping. The fifth thing is make sure your product pages are indexable to search engines because if search engines and AI can't index your products, then they can't recommend them. All these little components are really important. These metrics answer a better question, which is, “Is SEO actually helping the business grow?” As a founder, the better question to ask is “Is SEO actually helping the business grow?”
I'm going to talk about how AI search has changed the game. AI didn't just tweak SEO, it has refined discovery. Search engines are becoming recommendation engines, basically. People aren't just searching for what exists, but they're asking about what they should choose, like one thing over another. They can make comparisons now. This means that AI systems will be prioritizing clear product images, clear product information, consistent brand signals, structured data, trust, and authority. You want to build trust and authority across your website. Here is the key thing to note: AI doesn't just rank content—it actually interprets brands by recommending them based on someone's search. AI is not just there to rank content. It's using all these signals to interpret the brands, which then brings us to something that more SEO strategies completely overlook. This is the part that no one really talks about or that no one talks about enough. Your brand voice is no longer just a marketing asset. It’s actually a visibility signal. What AI systems are looking for are things like consistency, clarity, authenticity, positioning, and cohesive messaging across your site. When your brand voice is vague, generic, or inconsistent, it's harder for AI to understand who you're for and when to recommend you. This is where my SEO guiding principles come in.
When I talk about our SEO guiding principles, what I really mean by that is that we believe that SEO should serve your business and not the other way around. SEO is not just about rankings, but it's about aligning your visibility with your business goals, brand voice, and long-term vision. These principles really guide everything that we do. When your SEO reflects these principles, it doesn't just rank—it resonates. SEO that sounds like you builds trust faster, converts better, and compounds over time.
I'm just going to walk you through my five-step business-first SEO framework so you get an idea of what that is. This is the framework that I use with fashion and lifestyle brands. I conduct an audit and we're not just looking at technical issues, revenue drop-offs, and conversion friction. Step two is that I prioritize high-intent keywords. That means ones that are product-led or at the category level, solution-aware searches. And number three is that I align content with the customer journey. You've got to make sure that the content aligns with where the customer is within their search journey. We have to create awareness content that should support purchase decisions. Step four is indexing a product. Feed visibility. If products aren't eligible to appear, then they basically don't exist. You have to make sure that your pages on your website are being properly indexed and visible to search engines so that they can bring them up in the search results. In step five, you want to measure your revenue and know where your revenue is coming from, how much you're generating month over month or year over year, and just looking in terms of perhaps seasonality. What are the trends that are common within your business so that you know that, okay, if it's a seasonal product, then perhaps that’s why there is a dip in sales for one month. You want to also look in terms of like, if that is the case, then what are the opportunities there to create demand or more evergreen products that could be sold more on a year-round basis? And so you're seeing less of those dips in revenue and hopefully seeing more consistency in your revenue and adjusting your strategy to those fluctuations.
I just want to mention a case study for a client, one of my favorite examples, which is one of my clients who runs a golf, tennis, and pickleball brand. When they started out, they had traffic, they had rankings, but their sales were flat. What we did was we focused on clear product aiming, stronger intent alignment, improved internal linking, clean product feeds, and bio-first optimization. Through that, optimizing their product feeds was a huge one that really helped boost their organic purchases in Google Shopping. We tested it out at the end of Q3, early Q4, and throughout Black Friday, Cyber Monday, which to them, Q4 is typically their slower quarter because majority of their products are golf, tennis-related. It was very seasonal. By applying this strategy, we were really able to see a huge lift, which was a 333% increase in organic product purchases, higher average order, and stronger brand demand. We just use very simple, straightforward SEO strategies and we were able to see these results quite quickly in quite a short amount of time. I can say that these strategies actually do work because we have tested them out firsthand with our client site.
I just wanted to give you a little preview of what is coming up next and this is exactly why you'll be hearing more founder-focused conversations on this podcast. I have upcoming episodes that include stylists talking about positioning, designers sharing how they communicate their value, and publicists breaking down their visibility and credibility, because SEO doesn't live in a silo. It interacts with brand, PR, merchandising, and messaging and that's where real growth happens.
So to close off, I would just like to say that SEO is not a checkbox, but it can actually be used as a growth engine when it's aligned. If you're ready to move beyond rankings and build SEO that actually supports your business, I would recommend you start with an online visibility report or please reach out if you want to learn more about how we can help you build a strategy that will future-proof your brand and website in this age of AI. Feel free to reach out to myself and my team, and we'd love to help you with your strategy. Let's help you turn visibility into momentum and traffic into sales.
Thank you for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.
In this episode, Glynis Tao reflects on standout moments from this year’s Chase Your Dreams podcast, highlighting three fashion ecommerce strategies for entrepreneurs. Through expert insights from founders, this episode explores how to optimize your content for AI search, ecommerce growth strategies that work, what it takes to build a community-driven brand, and more! Learn how to stay authentic, stay adaptable, and continue to grow personally and in your ecommerce business.
🔥 My Online Visibility Roadmap uncovers the hidden technical + SEO issues holding you back and gives you a clear plan to fix them.
With over 20 years of experience in the apparel industry, Glynis is an expert in creative entrepreneurship and fashion business operations. Driven by a mission to empower and help her clients build e-commerce businesses that are purposeful and profitable, Glynis uses her industry experience to develop data-driven strategies.
Beyond SEO consulting, Glynis is passionate about fostering a community of like-minded business owners. Through her Chase Your Dreams podcast, e-commerce blog, and collection of free resources, Glynis provides guidance and inspiration for entrepreneurs striving to grow their brands.
Takeaways
AI search engines are becoming top funnels for online discovery.
Helpful, original blogs are integral to improving AI visibility in AI search.
Building community is essential for brand loyalty.
Customers resonate and connect with genuine, values-driven brands.
Systems help businesses scale and reduce burnout.
Entrepreneurship is both a personal and professional growth journey.
Interview Themes
As a small business, how do you build an authentic audience/community that connects with your brand?
Consumers are valuing authenticity more than ever. A cookie-cutter online persona just doesn’t work anymore. When you share a genuine and human side of your brand online, people connect with it. They get a full glimpse of the real, tangible person behind the business. Customers aren’t just buying the products anymore. They’re buying into the company, their story, their values, and the feeling that they provide.
How is discovery changing for ecommerce brands with the rise of AI?
AI-powered search is quickly becoming one of the top funnels for discovery. With tools like Google AI Overviews and Perplexity summarizing information online with ease, shoppers spend less time searching and more time relying on these AI summaries. This means that your product pages, blogs, and other webpages are now data sources for AI. The clearer and more detailed your content is, the better your chances of showing up in AI search results are.
How can blogging help my ecommerce business be discovered by the right customers?
Company blogging is gradually shifting away from traditional, diary-style posts and is instead being written as educational, curated content. Modern blogging is essentially content marketing. They establish credibility, prove expertise, and send trustworthy signals to AI search. The result of well-written, optimized, and helpful blogs? Strong AI visibility and organic growth for your ecommerce business.
Why are systems essential for scaling an ecommerce business?
Without systems in place, founders become bottlenecks resulting in minimal growth. As Laura-Jean learned through The E-Myth, documenting processes, defining roles, and creating structure within the organization will help transform a chaotic small business into an efficient scalable company. Systems allow founders the freedom to focus on innovation rather than fixing issues.
Chapters
00:00 The Journey of Entrepreneurship
02:42 The Evolution of Blogging and Community Building
05:55 Building Brands with Heart and Values
08:36 Adapting to AI and the Changing Retail Landscape
14:26 The Importance of Systems in Business
19:43 Navigating Personal Growth in Entrepreneurship
Transcript
Laura-Jean Bernhardson
Anyone can start a business. It's so fantastic. And yeah, it is great and anybody can start a business, but don't expect it to be easy. Expect it to challenge your sense of yourself. I think that would be the most important thing. If you can deal with yourself and your blocks and hangups, then you can learn all the rest of the stuff. You just have to be able to be ready to embark on the journey.
Jeanel Alvarado
It's funny because everyone that I talk to thinks that blogging is dead. No, it is not dead. Maybe blogging about your cat, what your cat ate today is dead. Okay, maybe that's Substack. You can get a small niche of people interested in that day to day. That sort of blogging is what people think about when they think blogging. No, the same thing is how the retail industry changed. Blogging has changed from what it was. So the new blogging is really that influencer marketing hub, right? So even when you see nowadays, when you see a content creator, an Instagram girl, and she is talking about her 10 best picks, that's what used to be a blog. You would blog your top 10 picks, right? But now people showcase their top 10 picks. I think it's about how you think of blogging and the essence of blogging is not dead.
Rhea Lana Riner
I think when you operate by a set of values and you stay true to your word, your customers see that. I've learned that community naturally builds around brands that we all love and that we love to share. I love this about this brand and this is this wonderful product that I got. And this is this incredible customer service that they gave me. And I think those things all build community.
Glynis Tao
This year on Chase Your Dreams, I sat down with founders who built seven figure brands from kitchen tables, living rooms, consignment racks, daycare pickups, and old school blogs. Today, we're pulling together the biggest lessons from 2025 so you can build a brand that actually lasts in this wild new AI-driven, always changing world of fashion and retail.
Glynis Tao
Welcome to Chase Your Dreams, a podcast for fashion entrepreneurs who want to build a purposeful and profitable clothing business so they can make a living doing what they love. I'm your host, Glynis Tao, an apparel business consultant and SEO specialist with 20 years apparel industry experience. I'm also a mom to a wonderfully energetic little boy named Chase.
Glynis Tao
This year, I had conversations with some incredible founders and leaders, women who bootstrapped from their living rooms, retail and media pros who've watched e-commerce evolve over the last decade, franchise founders creating community-driven values-led brands, and leaders at the cutting edge of AI and retail search.
In today's Best of 2025 Roundup, I'm weaving together seven of my favorite conversations into three big themes that kept coming up again and again. Theme number one. Build with heart and community. Theme number two, adapt and systemize in a changing retail and AI landscape. Theme number three, know yourself, own your season and play the long game. Think of this episode as a highlight reel and mini workshop. As you listen, I want you to ask yourself, where am I already strong and where do I need to grow next?
All right, let's dive into theme one. When you look at the founders who are still here, 10, 20, even 30 years later, they have something in common. They don't just sell products, they serve people. They lead with heart, community, and values. No one embodies this more than Rhea Lana Riner, founder of Rhea Lana’s Children's Consignment Events, which she started as a small clothing swap in her living room in 1997, and has now grown into a multi-million dollar franchise with over 120 locations. Let's start with how she thinks about values and community.
Rhea Lana Riner
I think for me, it has always been about connecting to the heart and making sure that I understand the needs of their family and their children. We have certain values that we go by—honesty and positivity—and I think when you operate by a set of values and you stay true to your word, your customers see that. They see how you fill orders and how you, if someone complains, how do you handle customer service?
Are you kind and are you authentic? All those things play out in normal business operations and I think those things build brand loyalty and they build community because I've learned that community naturally builds around brands that we all love, know, and then we love to share, I love this about this brand. And this is this wonderful product that I got. And this is this incredible customer service that they gave me. And I think those things all build community.
Glynis Tao
What I love about that is how simple and practical it actually is. Rhea isn't talking about some big, shiny community strategy. She's talking about how you fill your orders, how you respond when something goes wrong, whether you're kind, transparent, and consistent. That's what creates loyal customers who say, hey, I love this brand, you should check them out. And that came up again and again this year.
Brands that aren't built on hacks, they're built on how you treat people. Another guest who really reinforced this was Laura-Jean Bernhardson, a longtime Toronto designer and retailer behind Fresh Collective who ran multiple boutiques for over two decades and now coaches women entrepreneurs. She talked about how her brand became memorable because it was fun, human, and distinct, and because she built a sense of belonging around it.
Laura-Jean Bernhardson
I had no real intention of like, I'm going to start a business in fashion, because it was so insane. Like, how would I do that? But I had been making things and selling them as a teenager. I had a bikini business in high school, and I made jewelry and stuff like that. I kind of had this like, you can make things and sell them kind of mentality. But another thing that really stood out was the Knitting Queen.
So that's the cover of the catalog. This is a catalog that fell apart, sadly. So there you can see some of the styles and stuff. But I did this kind of shtick of like, I'm Laura Jean the Knitting Queen. So you can see I've got a yarn wig and I'm wearing a crown. And then I called the assistants who worked in my shop and who helped with the production, I called them Knitting Princesses. And that Knitting Queen thing became so sticky, like years after I stopped knitting. People would be like, wait, aren't you Laura Jean the Knitting Queen? You know, I was unexpectedly getting these lessons in business in terms of branding and in terms of making yourself stand out.
And oh yeah, another thing. Now you're making me realize how much that made me stand out. Another thing I did was, this is at the back of the catalog, and I made handmade buttons. So my buttons were shaped like a cat face or a flower or like all of these different things that made it really unique. And in my shop, you could even pick out, I had those little drawers where you store like nails and things. I had buttons where people could pick out their buttons. And so that became a sales lesson of mine where I would see someone trying on a sweater and if I told them about the buttons at the right moment, their decision would switch from, should I get this sweater to, which buttons should I pick? So I realized that was another thing that ended up being like, this makes it really unique. And suddenly they're fishing through, trying to find all the blue cats that are gonna make their sweater look perfect. Or we had letter buttons so they could get their name.
So yeah, even though it was a totally different time, the basics still apply. It's the exact same thing of like making your business unique, your unique value proposition, your branding that stands out, that's catchy, that makes people excited. All that stuff, it's all the same.
Glynis Tao
There's a common thread here. As you can see for Rhea Lana, it's values and service. For Laura-Jean, it's playful, distinctive branding and a joyful in-store experience. In both cases, people weren't just buying clothes—they were buying into a story and a feeling. And that connects beautifully to my conversations this year with sustainable fashion founders like Andreanne Mulaire of Anne Mulaire and Shannon of Simply Merino, who both talked about building brands around values and connection. You hear the same pattern. When your brand is anchored in something deeper than sell more clothes, people feel it and they stick around. So I want to turn this back to you for a second.
If you're listening and you run a fashion e-commerce brand, here are two reflection questions you can actually journal on later. What values do I want my brand to be known for? How do you treat customers when things go wrong? What do you refuse to compromise on? And two, where concretely does community already exist around my brand and how can I nurture it? Maybe it's your best customers who always DM you on Instagram or a local group who shows up to your problems or people who always reply to your email newsletter. You don't need a giant Facebook group to build community. You just need to serve people well, consistently invite them to what you're about.
All right. Now let's move into theme two where things get a little more AI-flavored. If 2024 was the year everyone noticed AI, 2025 has definitely been the year we started feeling the impact in search, shopping, and retail. Over and over again, my guests talked about adaptability. Adapting from brick and mortar to e-commerce, adapting from blogging to media brand, adapting to Google's AI overviews and AI powered shopping tools, and adapting internally by building systems so your business can actually scale beyond your brain. No one captured the big picture of where retail and search are headed better than Jeanel Alvarado, founder and CEO of RETAILBOSS and co-founder of Stylebuy. Here's how she described the shift from social discovery to AI-driven discovery.
Jeanel Alvarado
I know there are a lot of people resisting the AI and it was almost the same thing with people resisting the e-commerce back when e-commerce was becoming something where it's like, sure, we'll just launch a site, just to have it. AI, same thing. Some people are maybe, okay, we'll maybe tweak some things. But over time, it may become the number one funnel, right? We got to think about that. So right now we talked earlier that people discover through social media. I really think Google, as well as Perplexity, really they are trying to be that they want to be it. Social media had its run for discovering products. Google and these AIs want it back. They want to be, hey, you want to discover new things? We are the place. So that is where I'm seeing things going and just how they're doing things because same thing—social media doesn't really encourage people to leave the social media app. They like people to stay there. Google is trying to figure that out. How can we make people stay here, right? And we can feed them ads and we can feed them products that they like and we can provide them news that they might be interested to. How can we keep them here? That is what I believe on the real behind the scenes of what really is going on here. So that's why people really need to see this as, okay, if social media is so saturated and there's just so many people dancing around and there’s just too much noise, where are people going to go next to discover? And I think Google AI, AI Search is really trying to capture and be that new top funnel.
Glynis Tao
I love how blunt she is about it. Social is noisy. AI search wants discovery back. That's huge for fashion brands. It means that your website and your product pages are no longer just online brochures; they're data sources for AI. The brands that will win in this next phase are the ones who actually describe their products properly, talk about materials, sustainability, fit, certifications, and build up content and credibility so AI tools trust them enough to recommend them. And that ties so nicely to another thread Jeanel emphasized. Blogging is not dead, it's evolved.
Before we jump back in, I want to take a moment to share something that can genuinely move the needle for your e-commerce brand heading into 2026. If you've been wondering why your traffic has slowed, why your products aren't showing up in Google, or how to get your site ready for AI-powered search, my Site Audit Plus is the place to start. It's a complete deep dive into your website that includes your technical SEO, keyword and ranking opportunities, performance insights, a full competitor and content analysis, and now your AI visibility score, so you know exactly how search engines and AI models are interpreting your brand. You'll walk away with a clear roadmap, prioritize fixes and actionable recommendations to help you increase visibility, traffic and conversions. Future-proof your brand in AI driven search. Start with my complete site audit. Go to glynistao.com to learn more.
Jeanel Alvarado
I was just bombarded with so many requests just from a few blogs and that's when I realized, this is a great way to gain credibility. And one of the strategies or one of my takeaways for people today, I would definitely tell them is something that was told to me and it was let your work do the work for you, right? So like let your work network for you. Maybe one day you're thinking, I wish I could get more sales or I wish I could get more of this. Always think about, how can I make my work work for me? So if I want to gain attention, I need to put in some work. So that's what I always say and with that, yeah, we just kind of upped the content. We upped what we were doing. We upped the insights, right? If in the beginning, when you give insights, it does seem interesting to everybody. But then it comes to the point where it's just like, we've heard this before. You always got to up it to something else—correlate, benchmarks. So I always have to try to be ahead of the industry. So right now, a lot of our content is related to AI tools or what kind of AI solutions can help you grow your brand. That's what keeps us interesting. It's not just about a strategy that's the oldest and tested time. People want this strategy today and who's using it and who's doing it well. And because if it's timely, relevant, and successful right now, let me pivot and do it right now because any kind of strategy, it might just be a blip. It might just be a moment in time where that's working because what I learned in economics, there's so many external factors and timing is huge with any kind of trend you're going to jump in. And I'm sure you know this with social media, think about TikTok. The brands that got on TikTok when TikTok was hot, when people bought on TikTok and those live feeds, they really gained momentum there.
Glynis Tao
I guess what you're saying in terms of the brands who adapt quickly are the ones that will see success. I love what you said. Let your work do the work for you.
Jeanel Alvarado
Don't be out there trying to convince anyone. Do the work. If you say, I, it could be anything. I do SEO really well. Okay, well show me something that you do on a constant basis that's working. Okay, for me, I could be like, yeah, well I have scaled a publication that gets between 40 to 100,000 visitors a month. It's like done—the work speaks for itself. And then you yourself, like with the case studies and I've taken this company to this. People need to see the work. It's no longer, I don't think it's ever been about saying that you're good at something. People see you're good at it. That's when they contact you.
Glynis Tao
If you listen to this podcast for a while, you know I'm gonna say it. This is exactly why I keep banging the drum about creating helpful blog content, building up your case studies, having your FAQs and how-to guides clearly listed on your website, having story-driven articles that show your expertise, right? Want to think about EEAT because AI tools look at patterns across the web, not just your homepage. The more your brand shows up as being helpful, consistent, and trusted by others, the more likely AI is to pull you into those answer boxes, shopping carousels, and long-form AI overview responses.
And adaptability came up again when I talked to Leticia Viedma, founder of KAMI, about her transition from being an M&A lawyer to growth marketer at Rent the Runway, and now to building a Spanish-crafted footwear brand. She talked about bringing her growth marketing brain to product-based entrepreneurship and why serving customers with a truly high quality product is still the core.
Glynis Tao
You led the growth team at Rent the Runway. What were some of the biggest takeaways about scaling a DTC brand?
Leticia Viedma
Yeah, I think I touch on one of them, which is that the product is super important. You really need to build a company around the product that solves consumer needs. So I think that's kind of like number one for consumer businesses. And number two is really being customer-obsessed. What I mean by that is people have limited bandwidth and limited head space. And so I really believe that the way to grow your brand is if you're able to tap into people's needs and problems and position yourself as a solution to those needs and problems. So those two things like product and customer first are really important.
Glynis Tao
And so are you able to apply some of the lessons that you learn from working at Rent the Runway to KAMI's early stage growth?
Leticia Viedma
Yeah, I mean, hopefully. I definitely am trying to, on the one hand, really nail and scale a performance marketing engine. By that, I mean optimizing the site, really delivering on a solid email program, kicking off paid advertising across paid social and paid search channels. And so that is table stakes and you need that. But then I'm also really focused on growing that authentic organic community of people that gravitate toward the brand and that are going to become your advocates and that are excited to hear about the brand. And so I'm doing two things. I'm starting to really spend some time on organic social content. I had to get over myself. I don't like social media. I didn't have TikTok before and now I'm just trying to get out there and film some content and really put a face behind the brand and create that personal connection.
So that's on the one hand. And then on the other hand, I've started to build connections with creators and influencers who I feel are brand-aligned and are also passionate about the brand and that story resonates with them. I'm starting to build that community of future brand ambassadors, hopefully.
I think one thing I'll say is that one of the themes of my nonlinear career path is that I think everything is figure-outable. I really think that the difference between people that are able to do it versus people that are not is just a matter of how passionate are you about this problem? How many hours are you willing to invest in trying to solve this, in trying to figure this out? In trying to find the resources, the network, whatever it is, like how obsessed are you with this problem? And then you figure it out. So I think it's a combination of passion and hard work.
Glynis Tao
I love how her story mirrors so many of ours. Your first business or first career isn't quote unquote wasted. You're building a toolkit. And when you decide to launch a brand, you can bring all of that into a more aligned and purpose-driven direction.
But there's one more piece to this adapting puzzle that came up again and again. It's really hard to adapt if everything lives in your head and that's where systems come in. Laura-Jean described this so beautifully when she talked about reading The E-Myth and realizing she had built a business that could not function without her.
Laura-Jean Bernhardson
What really allowed it to grow was putting systems in and really for me it was a big shift between sort of my small business and a company. And that took like a long time, you know, building those systems and documenting them and training people on them and having them really just flow throughout the whole business. But it allowed me to not be the bottleneck anymore. So people didn't have to come to me and be… Like prior to that, my small business, everything lived in my head. So it was like, can we buy this fabric for the clothing line? Sure. Can we do, you know, we need a new stapler for Kensington. Okay, I'll add it to my list or go buy one. I've approved it or whatever. It was all me. And I, of course at the time, didn't really know what to do and how to make it anything else. But then I read the book, The E-Myth, The E-Myth Revisited, subtitled Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, and that book talks about really building your small business into a company. It described me perfectly as the sort of frantic business owner who was running around doing everything. If I got hit by a bus, the business was gone. And this really, the step of adding the systems and creating all of that stuff, including like an org chart, different positions, we really created like a company flow to it where people had their jobs and it was understood what they could make decisions on or not and we had like meetings to review the things and you know, all that stuff.
So that made it run a lot smoother. If there was one thing that made a difference, that made a difference. I couldn't have got to a seven figure business without that. After I read The E-Myth book, I did hire a coach from E-Myth worldwide. They have a program. So I did that for about six months and I cried most of the time through it because I think I was 17 years into my business at that point, and I just felt like, God, I've been doing things so chaotically and there was a better way and I just didn't know about it. And so it really just felt like, oh my God, this sort of, I guess regret that I didn't do it sooner. So then I really understood the value of coaching and expertise and so on. And so over time, I've hired different coaches for different reasons or different, or I take a course on like, you know, marketing or whatever. I'm always looking to build something that's like, whether it's self-improvement for myself to be a better entrepreneur, or it's something to build into the business or whatever. There's kind of always room for expert help, basically. I just saw the difference of like, can struggle through things on my own, or I can hire someone who knows how to do this and then I know how to do it.
Glynis Tao
This is one of my favorite quiet lessons of the year. You can't really take advantage of new opportunities like Google Merchant Center, AI-powered shopping, wholesale deals, or even just consistent content marketing if you're stuck in reactive mode—putting out fires all day. Systems aren't glamorous, but they are what allow you to adapt fast without burning out.
So here are two questions for this theme. Number one. Where do I need to update my business for the AI era? Are my product titles and descriptions clear, detailed and customer friendly? Do I have at least a few substantial blog posts or guides that show my expertise and values? And number two, where am I still the bottleneck? Is there a repeatable task I can turn into a simple SOP checklist or a Loom video this month? What's one system that I can put in place so my business runs more smoothly, even on my tired days? And we all have those days, right?
Alright, we've talked about heart and systems. Let's end with the most human theme of all, the one every founder wrestles with. How do I navigate this as a person with a body, a family, and a finite amount of energy? If there's one thing all seven guests agreed on, it's this. Entrepreneurship is not just a business journey, it's a personal growth journey. It will challenge your sense of self, it will expose your fears and your patterns, and it will ask you to grow again and again. Let's come back to Laura-Jean for a moment. Near the end of our conversation, she said something that I haven't stopped thinking about.
Laura-Jean Bernhardson
Anyone can start a business. It's so fantastic. And yeah, it is great and anybody can start a business, but don't expect it to be easy. Expect it to challenge your sense of yourself. I think that would be the most important thing. If you can deal with yourself and your blocks and hangups, then you can learn all the rest of the stuff. You just have to be able to be ready to embark on the journey.
Glynis Tao
I love how honest that is. You don't have to be born a business person. You can learn marketing, SEO, systems, hiring, finance, but the hardest part is often you versus you. Working through your fears about visibility, selling without feeling pushy or salesy, letting go of perfectionism, allowing yourself to be seen as a leader. The theme of inner work and seasons of life came up powerfully with Rhea Lana as well, especially around motherhood and capacity.
Rhea Lana Riner
I think a great perspective for women is to think through that there are seasons of life. Life is different. When I was getting started, I had three small children. Well, now I'm a grandma and I've got an empty nest and I've got five grandchildren. And I think if we can have that perspective that life does change, then it gives us the long-term view and some seasons, at least in my journey, I had to work a lot of hours. I mean, entrepreneurs. I'm sure you experienced this too, Glynis. I mean, there are some years where I worked a lot. I mean, probably 60, 80, 100 hour weeks. Now, I don't want to do that for 20 years, but there are some times when we do have to do what it takes and I think if we can, again, think through the seasons of life, and we don't want to do that when our kids are small, they need us. They need us to be present. But as life changes, we do have more to give. We've got more bandwidth. We've got more time. And it is fun. I've always looked at building a business a lot like raising children. You nurture it and then you get to watch this beautiful thing grow that you've poured your heart into. And so it is a wonderful thing, but I do think we have to balance the demands of family and business and think through what season of life am I in.
Glynis Tao
As a mom myself, I felt that deeply. There are seasons where you can take on big projects, travel and stretch yourself, and seasons where your capacity is smaller, maybe because of kids, caregiving, health, or just life. That doesn't make you less of a CEO. It just means you have to build a business that respects your season.
And finally, I want to end on one more note from Rhea Lana that ties together purpose, resilience, and legacy.
Glynis Tao
If you could go back to that first living room clothing swap that you did, what would you tell yourself now about the journey ahead?
Rhea Lana Riner
I would say, first of all, Rhea Lana, you can do a lot more than you think you can. So be brave, buckle up, and just give it your best shot. There's a wonderful path down there, but you just got to keep putting one foot in front of the other and it'll be a remarkable journey.
Glynis Tao
I love that as a closing note because it honors how hard this is, but it also honors how capable you are. You don't have to see the whole 30-year path right now. You just need to keep taking the next brave step: setting up that email opt-in, publishing that first blog post, fixing your product titles, saying yes to help, or finally raising your prices to match the value you provide.
Alright, let's quickly recap the three big themes from today's best of 2025 roundup. Number one, build with heart and community. Number two, adapt and systemize in a changing retail and AI landscape. Number three, know yourself. Own your season and play the long game because entrepreneurship will challenge your sense of self. You can do more than you think. Just take one step at a time.
So here's my invitation to you. Before you jump back into your day, pick just one small action from this episode. Maybe it's rewriting a single product description so it truly reflects your values and materials. Maybe it's starting a simple SOP for something you do every week. Maybe it's blocking off time to journal about what season of life you're in and how your business needs to honor that.
And if you want more support as we head into this new AI driven era of e-commerce, I'd love to help you. You can learn more about my Sit Audit Plus and my SEO Plus AI search services at glynistao.com.
Thank you so much for tuning into this best of 2025 episode on Chase Your Dreams. If you enjoyed this roundup and it gave you even one idea you want to try in your business, it would mean a lot if you hit subscribe, follow me, and share this episode with another fashion founder. And it would be great if you leave a rating and review so that we can reach more entrepreneurs who need this kind of honest practical support. Here's to building fashion brands that are profitable, purposeful and built to last in any search algorithm, in any season. See you next episode.
Glynis Tao
Thank you so much for tuning in. You can find me on Instagram, @glynistao, and my website, glynistao.com. Please subscribe to Chase Your Dreams podcast if you haven't already. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others who you think this may help. Lastly, it would be great if you left a rating and review for our podcast. See you next time!
In this conversation, Glynis Tao discusses the importance of adaptability in today’s changing e-commerce landscape. With the popularization of AI-driven search, Glynis emphasizes the importance of foundational SEO best practices that still apply. Through a case study, she shares how one of her clients used strategic blogging to earn a citation from AI Overviews, resulting in an increase in visibility and organic traffic. She also discusses what makes a valuable blog, how to build trust with your audience, performance metrics that you should be monitoring/measuring (besides just clicks), and more. Websites and SEO are not disappearing—they are evolving.
🔥 My Online Visibility Roadmap uncovers the hidden technical + SEO issues holding you back and gives you a clear plan to fix them.
With over 20 years of experience in the apparel industry, Glynis is an expert in creative entrepreneurship and fashion business operations. Driven by a mission to empower and help her clients build e-commerce businesses that are purposeful and profitable, Glynis uses her industry experience to develop data-driven strategies.
Beyond SEO consulting, Glynis is passionate about fostering a community of like-minded business owners. Through her Chase Your Dreams podcast, e-commerce blog, and collection of free resources, Glynis provides guidance and inspiration for entrepreneurs striving to grow their brands.
Takeaways
Adopting an adaptability mindset is key to staying ahead in the e-commerce industry.
Creating consistent and helpful content will keep your brand relevant.
Strategic blogging will drive visibility and organic traffic to your site.
Valuable blogs are often ones that answer common customer questions.
Schema and metadata helps search engines understand your content and increase your site’s visibility.
Establish trust with your audience by sharing expertise.
The earlier and faster you adapt to industry changes, the better.
Interview Themes
Why is adaptability so important for e-commerce brands today?
Consumer behaviour and new technologies, such as AI, are constantly and rapidly changing the online retail landscape. If brands aren’t adapting to these changes, it’s easy to fall behind. It’s more important than ever to adopt the adaptability mindset and be open to learning new tools, platforms, and strategies to gain a competitive edge and stay relevant in the e-commerce world.
What is AI search? How can brands use SEO to rank higher and increase organic traffic through AI search?
AI search is a search tool that uses artificial intelligence to parse through, summarize, and cite webpages with relevant information in response to search queries. It’s a new way for people to streamline their search. Instead of manually clicking through websites to find the information that they need, AI search does that for them.
This affects how consumers discover brands, how they perceive brands, and how they shop. For brands to increase their visibility and organic traffic through AI search, they can optimize their websites with SEO strategies. Best practices like strong metadata, schema markup, and keyword optimization will help your website rank in AI search alongside well-structured content.
What are the benefits of blogging?
Consistent, helpful, and question-driven blogs help build authority and trust which increases the likelihood of a website’s content being cited in AI-driven search. Knowing what content your audience needs and will find valuable is key to creating blogs that will drive organic traffic.
What practical steps can brands take to improve their site’s visibility?
To adapt to the changing retail landscape, brands can do the following:
Identify the most relevant customer FAQs and turn them into blogs.
Optimize product pages for title tags, metadata, and schema.
Build trust through founder stories and customer testimonials.
Commit to creating consistent, high-quality content.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:30 Adopting the Adaptability Mindset for SEO
04:14 Fashion Brand Case Study: Increasing Visibility in AI-Driven Search with Blogging
13:07 Visibility in Search Engines That Aren’t Google (Bing, Yahoo, and More)
14:43 Practical E-Commerce SEO Strategies in the Age of AI
18:19 Q&A Session: SEO with GoDaddy, Squarespace, and Wix
23:01 Conclusion
Transcript
Glynis Tao
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Chase Your Dreams podcast. I'm so glad you're joining me again for Ecommerce SEO Strategies in the Age of AI, part two. If you haven't listened to part one yet, I recommend going back to that episode first. In it, I shared how the e-commerce landscape is evolving, the key challenges brands are facing, and what SEO strategies are working today. In this second part, we're going to dive even deeper. I'll be walking you through real world case studie—including a fashion brand success story—and showing you practical action steps you can take right now to future-proof your online store in the age of AI search.
This is a continuation of the webinar presentation I hosted on October 9th as part of my SEO School educational series. If you want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and AI trends, follow me on Instagram @glynistao or visit my website at glynistao.com. All right, let's jump into part two of Ecommerce SEO Strategies in the Age of AI.
Glynis Tao
Welcome to Chase Your Dreams, a podcast for fashion entrepreneurs who want to build a purposeful and profitable clothing business so they can make a living doing what they love. I'm your host, Glynis Tao, an apparel business consultant and SEO specialist with 20 years apparel industry experience. I'm also a mom to a wonderfully energetic little boy named Chase.
Glynis Tao
Another quote from Jeanel is, “If you're not adapting to how consumers shop today, you're already behind. Agility is the new competitive advantage.” I know all this tech is changing so fast. You're like, “oh my God, I’m not a techie person.” “I don't even know what to do.” “Where do I even begin?” It's so overwhelming and you're probably being bombarded by all these other messages of what you should be doing and I totally get it because I can relate to this. I feel like I'm in the same boat.
What I want to present to you is just very simple, very strategic ideas and concepts and strategies that you can implement when you get off this webinar today because really, it's not that hard. I want to keep things very simple and to let you know that even though things are changing fast, a lot of the SEO best practices still apply. Okay. So making sure that your foundation is there and then layer on the AI stuff. Having that adaptability mindset is important right now. It's not like, well, when I change—you have to change now. Even if it means taking small steps right now, or at least just having the level of awareness and knowing what's happening right now and being prepared for it, I think, is important.
That can mean testing a new tool, like AI assistance, chat box, personal search, if that works for your business. Tracking performance, making sure you're measuring the right data, how your impressions are performing versus your clicks. How much brand visibility do you have? You're not just looking at clicks, but you're kind of looking at the overall picture. What are people saying about you? There's lots of data that you can look at just to make sure that it's not just one thing, like your traffic giving you a very pretty picture right now, but maybe there's other signals that are happening out there, other conversations people are having on your brand. You need to understand that as well and monitor those impressions and know what your AI visibility is, beyond just clicks. Make sure that you are staying nimble because whether we like it or not, AI search will keep evolving.
I want to share a real-world example from client work that we did that we used the blogging strategy that I had just mentioned previously to help land their blog content into an AI overview placement. This AI overview citation that showed up also increased their visibility and we saw a revenue lift from organic traffic. There's so many benefits to having your brand or your page or website show up in AI search because it also helps to build that authority and credibility within AI-driven search. Even doing a few searches within the search engines themselves and seeing what comes up and if your content is even showing or coming up. You don't even need any fancy tools to do that. So, you could just do a search for a particular question or topic or something. What every article is covering or talking about, you can just look that up and see what comes up.
So for example, what we did for one of our clients, Nomi Designs, which is a fashion brand based in Victoria, BC. I'll show you this case study will show you how they were able to grow their visibility in traffic using content clusters that I mentioned and blogging. So the results were that they had a higher AI overviews visibility, increased sales from organic traffic—organic traffic is their highest traffic channel. This really shows you the power of blogging. Here's an example of what we did, in terms of building up the content clusters and having them write their blogs.
This shows you a few examples of blog articles on their website, but if you notice, there's these two articles here, “How to Pack Linen Clothes for Travel.” This is, by the way, a linen clothing company. This article that they wrote on “How to Pack Linen Clothes for Travel” and “Can You Wear Linen Clothing in the Winter?” These all came about as me asking questions to the founder and owner of the company. I'm like, what questions do you get asked a lot? What are some FAQs that you've got? And she's like, you know people will firstly have this misconception that they think that you can't wear linen in the winter and we're in Canada, right? So our winters can get cold and she's like, well, I really want to break that myth. I want to give them some truth and some information that linen can be insulating and you can layer it and wear it with other fabrics like wool—you can layer them and they can be very warm. So she wrote this whole article just around this topic of being able to wear linen clothing in the winter. Well, this article is one of her top performing blogs and shows up in AI overviews.
Same with this, “How to Pack Linen Clothes for Travel”, because as we all know, what is the one characteristic of linen fabrics? They tend to wrinkle, right? Nobody wants to travel or take linen clothing with them for traveling. So again, she wanted to break that myth and write this whole article on how to pack linen clothes for travel. Again, this is one, another one of her top-performing blogs.
So I'll show you just what that looks like here in terms of the type of results that she got for, “Can You Wear Linen Clothing in the Winter?” Say we did a Google search here for the benefits of wearing linen in winter. This comes up in AI overviews and also the first result links to the Nomi Designs blog, “Can You Wear Linen Clothing in the Winter?” She's also the number one organic result too. So there you've got three—like there's a link here, there's a link there, and there's also the organic SEO link. So there’s three places where this page shows up. This really shows you the power of blogging. Lesson here is consistency plus helpful content equals being relevant and we said relevance is very important.
I'll show you these results here. It's a screenshot of Google Search Console that shows you top pages, one being her homepage. Second is this blog, “Linen Clothing for Canadian Winters.” It's our second highest performing blog. In the last three months, you can see the number of clicks and impressions that this blog has received and you can see that it just goes on an uptrend. So this blog is definitely driving traffic to their website—to the Nomi website. And I can tell in their Google Analytics, their direct and organic traffic channels are their highest revenue-generating traffic channels, even better than social media. And she's not even running paid ads and she does a little bit of email marketing. But right now organic is totally driving her traffic and bringing in the revenue. I'd say about 50% of her revenue right now is coming from organic search. That all-in-all shows you the power of blogging and how it can help your site establish itself or build a sense of authority and be a trustworthy brand, but also help show up in the search engines, results pages and being cited in AI overviews. This is also a way for new customers to discover your brand because through this popular search, can you wear linen in winter is a very popular question. This helps with discoverability and brand awareness. If somebody is just typing that in Google Search and your article comes up, that's another way for them to discover you.
Also when you are creating this content, like I said, if you're a founder, owner, designer, sales marketer, you want to make sure that your content is working for you. So not only are you writing this piece of content and it's working for her right now, bringing in sales, but also, you could take this content. You could repurpose it into an e-letter, into your social media posts. I use the same strategy for myself. I also take it and I also create podcast episodes, YouTube videos, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts. It's endless what you can do with this one piece of content. And then that way it makes sure that everything that you create is all aligned. And then, if you think about it, your distribution, right? You want to make one. Create the content once and then distribute it everywhere across all the channels.
So have I convinced you yet on the importance of blogging? Yes, awesome! I really believe in it and I do this myself for my clients and it really works and you can see the results here. And just another quote from Jeanel, the founder of RETAILBOSS, she said, “Brands that survived the retail shifts are those that adapted fastest to digital and content-first strategies.” Now, you know a little bit more of what's happening in the AI landscape—how commerce and retail is changing, what are some of the challenges people are facing and, a case study of a simple strategy that you can use to get your brand to show up and increase its visibility.
Somebody has a question. “I do all these things and Google isn't showing my site in search results, only my social media channels. DuckDuckGo has no issues. I think about it everyday.” Well, you know what? If it's showing up on Bing, then that's not a bad thing because ChatGPT is pulling their data from Bing. Nowadays you're not just optimizing for Google. You're optimizing for Yahoo, DuckDuckGo as well. So I wouldn't discount these other search engines because ChatGPT is saying that they are citing from Bing. So don't be discouraged and don't give up. Another thing is I would check your indexing on your Google Search Console. Check your indexing and see if those pages, like your blogs, are being indexed on Google. This could be a matter of that, you know, they should be indexing it, but sometimes it could use a little push because the Internet is such a vast place and there's so many websites. You can do a manual index and submit it to Google. Make sure you have a Google Search Console set up. Make sure you submit your site map to it to trigger its crawling and indexing. Also index those individual pages as well. So check that. Hope that helps.
I want to give you a few practical steps that you can do today to get started. Like I said, it doesn't need to be this big, overwhelming, daunting job. You can just start small. You can identify the top three customer questions and turn those into blogs. Like I said to Helen as well, make a list of top questions that you get asked all the time from customers and those could be potential blog article topics. Audit your product pages for technical SEO basics. Add schema markup and optimize your metadata. Basic SEO best practices here. Title tag, meta descriptions, image alt text, H1 H2 tags are still important. Building trust is important. Showcase your founder story, values and reviews. I don't think a lot of brands do that. It's unfortunate because I work with friends and on one site, they're looking and I'm like, their products are so beautiful, but their “about” pages really don't do them justice and they don't really tell the full story. And so I will really try to build that up and tell your story, your brand, your founder story, why you started it. Why does it exist? I also had written a blog specifically about AI search optimization and that's what that QR code is here on the screen. If you want to learn more, you can just scan that QR code and you can read the blog. The blog actually covers it more in detail and goes through it.
You want to make sure that you’re checking your Google Shopping listings because it's been found that they're pulling like… Google shopping is another way that you can be found. You don't have to pay for ads—Google Ads. There's also Google Organic listings. So it's just a matter of optimizing your product pages, making sure your titles, pricing, images and policies all meet Google's standards. You could start by updating your top product pages, having more specific product descriptions, photos, and including keywords within the titles and the descriptions and, like I said, writing helpful blog posts that answer common questions that you get from your customers because AI tools are often pulled from blogs. So when you're giving the answers to those common questions, then your content is going to be readily cited more. Just make sure that your content is original and helpful. Commit to consistency. So even starting with one blog a month. It's better than none.
Okay, I'm almost done. I know we're reaching the end of this session, so I just want to say, in summary, websites are not going away, but the role of the website is transforming. SEO is not dying—it's evolving from ranking for clicks to structuring your site for AI agents. The brands that are able to adapt early will become preferred sources for AI systems, thus winning visibility and sales in this new ecosystem.
So now I’ll open up the floor for any questions that you have or feel free to share any current SEO challenges that you're facing with your e-commerce business. Does anyone have any questions? If you have questions, you could put them in the chat or unmute yourself.
Webinar Attendee #1
Actually, Glynis, hi, thank you so much. I have a question. So I actually run my own online nutrition business consulting and I used GoDaddy to create my website and then I also do a blog on there as well. I'm just wondering is it better to use a different platform just for SEO and ranking because currently with GoDaddy, I just have a website builder and I have limited access to SEO.
Glynis Tao
Does it have a place for you to edit your title tags with meta descriptions?
Webinar Attendee #1
It does, yeah. It has that feature.
Glynis Tao
Have you checked your rankings in Google Search Console?
Webinar Attendee #1
Yeah, I have been. So I have been looking into that, but it's not performing very well, so that's why I'm just asking the question. I think you kind of answered it in one of the questions. I do a lot of recipes, so I don't have recipe schemas on there. So I wonder if that would help.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, I'm not sure how robust GoDaddy is, honestly. I’ve come across a few of those. I haven't worked on GoDaddy sites. I mostly work, I'd say like 90% of my clients’ sites are on Shopify, a few on Squarespace and Wix. So I'm actually curious to know how GoDaddy performs on SEO, but I feel like if you have the ability to do those optimizations and that you are doing them and tracking them as well, because you want to be able to measure, right? And see, is it even making any difference before and after you've gone through and optimized. Go through those recipe pages. Just see if you can add schema and then just ask their support and so the important part of your website, you want to make sure that those are showing up in search engines. Technical backend stuff is important and making sure that there's nothing potentially blocking your site too, on being crawled and indexed. There's some checks in place that have to be done to make sure there's nothing potentially venting your site from being indexed in the first place and then knowing how your site is performing currently and then start to make a few improvements on it. Maybe picking a few articles or recipes that you think are more popular amongst your audience and going in and optimizing. I always say, optimize for one focus keyword, that way you're able to track it and see if you are even ranking for that keyword and how high you are currently ranking. And then it may require some on-page tweaks as well.
Webinar Attendee #1
Okay, thank you.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, hopefully that helped.
Webinar Attendee #1
Yeah, that's great. And in your opinion, I was thinking of switching over possibly to Squarespace or Wix just so that I have more functionality. Which one do you recommend or prefer?
Glynis Tao
Between the two?
Webinar Attendee #1
Yeah.
Glynis Tao
Well, in my experience, I'm with Squarespace over Wix. I think Wix has a lot of these customization functions. Either can, if you know how to use them, they're good, but if not, it can be very confusing and even for me, I find it a little hard to work with a Wix website. Squarespace, I find a little bit more user-friendly.
Webinar Attendee #1
Yeah, like they're pretty much drag-and-drop, right?
Glynis Tao
Yeah. I feel like it's a cleaner interface.
Webinar Attendee #1
Yeah, no, for sure. Thank you.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, no worries. And if you do do that and you move to a new website platform, I would recommend that you make a list of your current web pages because you want to make sure you redirect them. Say if your pages are performing and a page in particular is performing, you want to preserve that traffic, right? So make sure you map it out and then make sure you put the proper redirects in place.
I know we're reaching the top of the hour, so I really do appreciate and thank everyone for attending the session. And as a bonus for attending this live session, I am offering all attendees a mini site audit and strategy session where I will provide custom recommendations on how you can future proof your brand for AI. So to take advantage of this offer, scan the QR code you see on the left, book a call with me, and the first three people who book a call will also receive an AI visibility report. I think it's really important to know where you are right now and where your site stands in order for you to then decide on the next steps and what to do. And I would love to help you with that.
So I hope you all found this webinar to be helpful. I know there's a lot of information, but I try to bring you the most important and relevant information for you. It's a simple, easy way that you can hopefully take and start to implement some of these steps in your business.
Glynis Tao
Thank you so much for tuning in. You can find me on Instagram, @glynistao, and my website, glynistao.com. Please subscribe to the Chase Your Dreams podcast if you haven't already. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others who you think this may help. Lastly, it would be great if you left a rating and review for our podcast. See you next time!
If you need help building your SEO strategy for the age of AI, please reach out to me. Call or visit my website, glynistao.com, for SEO strategy and services. I have a new page up now dedicated to AI SEO, and I'll have other free resources and more to help support you along your journeys. Until next time, take care.
In this episode, Leticia Viedma shares how she transitioned from being a lawyer to the founder of KAMI, a women’s footwear company with an emphasis on Spanish craftsmanship. She discusses what inspired her to enter the fashion industry, the challenges she faced developing a DTC brand, and why she believes delivering a high-quality product that serves customers is essential. Tune in for insights on shifting from corporate life to fashion entrepreneurship, developing effective growth marketing strategies, and building an authentic brand that resonates with an audience.
About Leticia Viedma (LV)
Leticia Viedma is the founder of KAMI, a modern women’s footwear company rooted in traditional Spanish craftsmanship. Before starting KAMI, Leticia was a successful M&A attorney. After leaving her practice, Leticia went on to earn her MBA at Wharton School and transitioned into marketing. By 2020, she had joined Rent the Runway as the head of growth where she helped scale one of the leading fashion tech brands in the world. Leticia’s most recent career pivot has led her to build KAMI, a footwear brand whose mission is to create designer-quality shoes that balance style and comfort for everyday wear.
Focus on your brand’s “why” to anchor you through challenges.
Long-term success requires dedication and time investment.
Products should solve real customer problems as they are the foundation of brands.
Develop customer trust by maintaining an authentic online presence.
Networking is key to establishing a presence in the entrepreneurial space.
Interview Themes
Why is it important for ecommerce brands to have a clear “why”?
A “why” is the purpose or vision for your brand that acts as your company’s guiding principle. Leticia shared that her entrepreneurial journey has been filled with moments of fear and uncertainty, but reminding herself of her “why” helps her stay grounded. For Leticia, KAMI’s purpose is to craft accessible, designer-quality shoes that empower women. When entrepreneurs lead with their purpose in mind, it is easier to make aligned decisions and stay motivated.
How does long-term thinking shape the way entrepreneurs should approach building their businesses?
Building a brand isn’t a sprint—it’s a marathon. Developing a loyal customer base doesn’t happen overnight. Instead, relationships with customers are built through a development of trust, emotional connection, and meaningful interactions. Leticia advises that in order to achieve long-term success, entrepreneurs should be willing to invest time into processes that will compound over time.
Why should product quality and customer satisfaction be the foundation of a brand?
According to Leticia, it’s nearly impossible to “market your way out of a bad product.” Customers buy solutions to solve their problems. For instance, KAMI started as a direct response to a real problem that Leticia had identified: women lacked high-quality shoes that were stylish, comfortable and affordable. With this in mind, KAMI set out to craft women’s footwear that solved these issues. For brands to grow sustainably and organically, a product that addresses customer needs is more important than any marketing tactic.
What role does authenticity play in connecting with customers in the ecommerce space?
Authenticity builds emotional connection and emotional connection builds trust. Leticia believes that for a brand to create genuine connections with its customers, social media platforms can be used as tools. Gradually, brands are drifting away from polished corporate branding, favouring relatable and transparent content instead. By showing the behind-the-scenes, sharing imperfect moments, and revealing the humans behind the company, brands can strengthen customer loyalty and cultivate community.
Chapters
00:00 Building a Women's Footwear Brand Rooted in Spanish Craftsmanship with Leticia Viedma
03:16 Transitioning from Corporate Life to Fashion Entrepreneurship
06:06 The Beginnings of KAMI: Premium Women’s Footwear Brand
21:30 Building Customer Trust Through Authentic Content
23:29 The Importance of Creating Solutions with Products
29:29 Networking and Finding Community as an Entrepreneur
30:51 Managing Uncertainty as a New Founder
35:04 Long-Term Growth for KAMI
Transcript
Leticia Viedma
Just my friends and family have been super supportive. I call my mom, my chief psychologist officer, like I call her almost every day. She knows more about footwear than she ever cared to know at this point, I think. So I think having a community is really important. And then the other part of it is really connecting with your why. Why did you start this in the first place? And really feeling solid, profound conviction around your why, since the start, and then reminding you of that whenever you have moments of doubt or moments of, I guess not much inspiration. So I think going back to your why and trying to connect and project with that vision of where you think this can go, those two things have been important.
And then one last thing is I think when you're an entrepreneur, there's a big tendency to just work, work, work. There's always something to do. You're always sending an email or talking to someone. The limit is the sky in terms of work. What I found is that you actually sometimes need a moment for yourself and you need to create spaces for inspiration, spaces to connect with other sides of you that are not just this and spaces to get in a flow and enjoy life, so you can come back to your work with more energy, more inspiration.
Glynis Tao
Welcome to Chase Your Dreams, a podcast for fashion entrepreneurs who want to build a purposeful and profitable clothing business so they can make a living doing what they love. I'm your host, Glynis Tao, an apparel business consultant and SEO specialist with 20 years apparel industry experience. I'm also a mom to a wonderfully energetic little boy named Chase.
Glynis Tao
My guest today is Leticia Viedma, founder of KAMI, a women's footwear brand that blends Spanish traditional craftsmanship with modern design. Every pair is handcrafted in her hometown in Spain from premium leather, offering designer-level quality without the designer markup. Before starting KAMI, Leticia led the growth team at Rent the Runway, where she helped scale one of the most iconic fashion tech brands in the world.
She's also a graduate of the Wharton School and began her career as an M&A attorney before transitioning into marketing and entrepreneurship. In this episode, Letitia shares her incredible journey from corporate law to fashion founder and the lessons she's learned about growth, storytelling, and building emotional connections with customers. We also dive into what it takes to grow a DTC brand from the ground up, how to bridge heritage and innovation, and why trusting your intuition is key to building something authentic.
So whether you're a founder navigating a pivot or someone dreaming of starting your own brand, this episode is full of inspiring insights you won't want to miss. Welcome, LV. It's so nice to have you here today. Thanks for joining me on the podcast.
Leticia Viedma
It's so nice to be here. I'm so excited. Thank you for having me.
Glynis Tao
My pleasure. So you started your career as an M&A attorney before transitioning into marketing and entrepreneurship. Can you walk us through that journey and what inspired you to make such a big career pivot?
Leticia Viedma
Yes, so I'm Spanish. I'm originally from a small city in the southeast of Spain called Alicante. And in Spain, law is an undergrad degree. So I did that as an undergrad and started my career working in M&A doing advisory on transactions, buy side, sell side, a lot of private equity deals. And I did that for about three years, but I quickly realized that I was missing something very important or something that I've learned that is very important to me over time, which is the sense of ownership. And, you know, when you're a lawyer, ultimately you're always advising. You're on the sidelines, but you're not really owning the decision making. I just noticed most of the time I was so much more interested in learning about the business and not so much the legal work around it. That's kind of what moved me to slowly change over and make a transition to the operating side. I'm really happy I took the plunge and made the pivot.
Glynis Tao
Okay, and so did you have any background in fashion up until then?
Leticia Viedma
No, not at all. Just to continue on my trajectory, I left law, I transitioned, I wanted to go abroad. I moved to Luxembourg to join the European Investment Fund. That was my next step in my career. For those who are not familiar with the European Investment Fund, it's essentially a public-private institution with a mandate of investing in the European startup environment to really reinvigorate that layer of small and medium-sized businesses. I believe the European Investment Fund is an LP in 75% of European venture capital funds. That was kind of my segue after law and got me closer to the startup world and really solidified my wish to operate. I really think the US is the best place to start a company and learn. I wanted to come here. That's when I applied to Wharton and I got in and just came for a business school. Right after business school, I joined Rent the Runway and I had no prior experience either in fashion or as an operator. I learned a lot on the job.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, I think we'll go back to your experience at Runway, but before I get to that, what was the aha moment that led you to create KAMI?
Leticia Viedma
It started really as a passion project and then not so long ago this summer, honestly, I had this aha moment where I thought, no, this is kind of what I really want to do with my life. I want to give this a lot of energy. I think there's a couple of things that inspire me. First of all, I love fashion and I love shoes in particular and whenever I had to buy shoes here in the U.S., I always found myself having to trade off on either price or style or quality. So I really felt that there was a need to deliver a product that nailed the value equation between quality and price. Part of it was just like my personal journey and observations and then on the other hand, I started to get really energized with the idea of building my own company. Fundamentally, I'm really like a builder—that's what I enjoy doing. So I just put all of my passions together and that's how KAMI was born.
Glynis Tao
So how did growing up in Spain and your connection to traditional craftsmanship influence the vision behind the brand?
Leticia Viedma
This is honestly a not so well-known fact about me, but my great-grandfather actually made shoes. He had a factory, he made espadrilles. So I never met him—that was like three generations ago—but maybe there's a genetic component to it. No, jokes aside, as I mentioned, I come from Alicante, which is a city in the Southeast. It's very well known for its craftsmanship and shoe making and traditional leatherworks. So growing up, I was always super exposed to the shoe making industry, in indirect ways. I went to school with girls whose parents owned factories and I was very exposed to that through my personal connections. And so having worked in fashion here in the U.S., I really thought about how can I connect all of my worlds and create something that is special and unique to me and somewhere where maybe I can do this better than average. I brought together easy access to manufacturing in my city, which I knew was gonna help me deliver a really good product and then all of my inside work in marketing and fashion in New York, I kind of put everything together.
Glynis Tao
Okay, so that makes a lot of sense now because I was going to ask you why it was important for you to manufacture your footwear in your hometown. Specifically, it's being manufactured right in your hometown, right?
Leticia Viedma
Yeah, correct. The city is Alicante and it's in one of the little villages in that region. The reason that I wanted to do it there is because product is so important for consumer businesses. You cannot really market your way out of a bad product and I would never want to create a company around a product that isn't top notch, right? And so I really had very high trust that the product was going to be amazing based on my experience growing up there and having been exposed to Spanish shoe craftsmanship. That's the reason why. And then obviously I'm so proud that in my own way I can contribute to my hometown.
Glynis Tao
So what does the design and production process look like from concept to a finished pair of shoes?
Leticia Viedma
So shoes actually have a pretty long lead time as I've come to learn because they are actually handmade. I was talking to my manufacturer a couple of months ago and I think he mentioned that every single shoe that is made is touched by at least 30 pairs of hands. And so it's heavily manual, heavily operational. From start to finish, a shoe takes at least 48 full hours to complete. So that means that you need to really think ahead. I'm starting to think about 2026 Summer Collection now and I think I'm already kind of late in the game. We're just getting started and nimble, so we can move a little bit more quickly. But there's a lot of lead time and a lot of thinking ahead that happens. And that's the first part.
The second part is that shoes are very technical because you actually need to be able to walk in them. It's not like ready to wear. I mean, not all ready to wear. Some ready to wear are really structured. Let's say more mainstream ready to wear. It's easier to design without specific expertise. And so in my case, I know what I'm good at. I'm definitely not a shoe designer, so I partnered with a design partner. His name is Alvaro. He lives in my hometown. He has decades of experience, both designing and producing shoes. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted the collection to look like, and so I put mood boards in a deck together and just sent them to him. We had conversations about my feel and my vision for the brand and then he sent me sketches. I gave feedback, but you know, I think we're pretty in sync in terms of taste. So that process of aligning on the look and feel of the shoe was actually pretty seamless. And then after that, you have to kick off sample development, sourcing the different components. So like one thing you'll notice, KAMI’s heels have a very specific iconic shape—they are a bit slanted. So we had to source that specific heel from a specific component and provider, also in my region. That process is lengthy and just figuring out the different components, the different parts, like where are going to get the leather from? What kinds of leather are we talking about? I knew I didn't want to do hardware—I just wanted to keep things as simple as possible. Once you have the samples locked in, then that's when you decide to go into production. Yeah, it’s definitely a few months.
Glynis Tao
I'm just curious to know how long that whole process took from the time you had the idea for the brand to when you had your first sample to when you actually had your products ready.
Leticia Viedma
I guess this is one of my character traits. I have an extreme bias for action, so I started this honestly as a passion project at the beginning of the year. I wanted to explore whether I could have a side hustle. It was just more out of passion. Let's say probably overall, it took like six or seven months to get everything and then launch the site. So I guess around nine or 10 months all in. Yes, I moved pretty quickly.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, and you recently just launched your brand, is that correct?
Leticia Viedma
Yeah, honestly, the site has been live for three or four weeks. It's four weeks.
Glynis Tao
It's a baby. You had led the growth team at Rent the Runway. What were some of the biggest takeaways about scaling a DTC brand?
Leticia Viedma
I think I touched on one of them, which is that product is super important. You really need to build a company around the product that solves consumer needs. So I think that's number one for consumer businesses.
And number two is really being customer-obsessed. What I mean by that is people have limited bandwidth and limited head space and so I really believe that the way to grow your brand is if you're able to tap into people's needs and problems and position yourself as a solution to those needs and problems. Yeah, so those two things like product and customer first are really important. And then what I will also say is that I feel like 10 maybe years ago, growth marketing lived on its own orbit and brand marketing also lived on its own orbit and growth was super focused on demand capture and essentially customer acquisition costs and it was very heavily driven by how you were doing the media buys. And then the brand on the other hand was very focused on more upper funnel, demand generation tactics and not as analytical. And I think those days are kind of over. I really believe that brand is growth and growth is brand and you cannot really separate the two. I actually think that the only way to build sustainable long-term growth is if you're able to solidify an emotional connection with your customer. You have to do that in every touch point because from a user perspective, they don't care if it's a paid ad on Instagram or they're seeing your organic post.
So something that I have a strong conviction on is that there needs to be really strong brand alignment across all of your marketing touch points. You'll be successful if you really touch on that emotional connection and not only build a brand on the back of paid performance, but also organic and community and their traditional brand channels.
Glynis Tao
And so are you able to apply some of the lessons that you learned from working at Rent the Runway to KAMI's early stage growth?
Leticia Viedma
Yeah, I definitely am trying to, on the one hand, really nail and scale a performance marketing engine. By that, I mean optimizing the site, delivering on a solid email program, kicking off paid advertising across paid social and paid search channels. So that is table stakes and you need that. But then I'm also really focused on growing that authentic organic community of people that gravitate toward the brand and that are going to become your advocates and that are excited to hear about the brand. And so I'm doing two things. I'm starting to really spend some time on organic social content and I had to get over myself. I don't like social media. I didn't have TikTok before and now I'm just trying to get out there and film some content and really put a face behind the brand and create that personal connection. So that's on the one hand.
And then on the other hand, I've started to build connections with creators and influencers who I feel are brand aligned and are also passionate about the brand and the story resonates with them. I'm starting to build that community of future brand ambassadors, hopefully. So really moving on the two tracks at the same time.
Glynis Tao
What has been the biggest challenge in moving from a corporate leadership role to now starting your own business from scratch?
Leticia Viedma
Right now I'm pretty much alone. I am having to do everything myself. In my prior life, I had access to resources and obviously Rent the Runway was an established company that had a team. Now I'm literally on Canva, doing ads myself—like creating the ad—having to DIY everything. And so I think that's been a challenge because, in many ways, I know what good looks like or what really good looks like and what execution excellence can look like. I'm a marketer. I'm not a graphic designer and so I think the hardest thing for me has been just wrapping my head around the fact that this is where we're at today and I'm just trying to do things as best as I can in the most cost efficient way and just trying to be very resourceful. I'm also tapping some freelance help just to add more leverage to my time, but with the understanding that we'll improve and get better over time as we scale. Kind of detaching from perfectionism and really embracing the fact that done is better than perfect. And also that I'd rather move quickly versus being paralyzed and not get the word out there. Honestly, people are quite understanding. I know that the content in my site could be a hundred times better, but I'm just getting started and I think good enough sometimes has to be good enough. Those are my ongoing qualms as I move from team support to on my own.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, oftentimes it's a really big change for someone coming from corporate who had a team behind them to do those things. Like you said, you're not necessarily good at doing graphic design. You had a graphic designer there to do that, but now it's up to you to do many of the things, right?
Leticia Viedma
Totally, yeah. I think one of the things I'll say is that I think one of the themes of my nonlinear career path is that I think everything you can figure out. I really think that the difference between people that are able to do it versus people that not is just a matter of how passionate they are about the problem. How many hours are you willing to invest in trying to solve this, in trying to figure this out, in trying to find the resources, the network? How obsessed are you with this problem? And then you figure it out. So I think it's a combination of passion and hard work.
Glynis Tao
And are you sharing that process with your audience as well? Like sort of the journey that you're going through right now and showing those behind the scenes and maybe not so perfect moments?
Leticia Viedma
I think I need to do a better job of that. And so yes, my plan is to. I'm actually just working on this—a much more granular content plan. So I actually capture that and offer vulnerability and hopefully inspire other people to do the same, because guess what? If you wait until it's perfect, you'll never do it.
Glynis Tao
That's very true. And I think it probably what makes you authentic as opposed to showing such polished everything, looking so perfect, but showing the reality of what is really going on. I think it also builds more of that emotional connection between you and your audience and not just making yourself look like you're a super polished big brand or something, right? So I think that whole storytelling aspect is a very important part of the journey.
Leticia Viedma
Yeah, no, you're totally right. I have to say at the very beginning, a couple of months ago, I was a bit daunted at this idea of, oh my God, having to produce content is actually a lot of work too. I mean, I've never in my personal life been a big social media person and now I've had this moment of realizing, oh my God, this is so much work.
You have to be strategic. I'm really good at executing, but then guess what? Volume and frequency really matter a lot as well. I'm in the phase of acknowledging that it's a really important part and a really important piece of the marketing puzzle. So now I'm just working to build a system of scale to be able to actually weave this with my everyday and operationalize it in a way that is approachable, right? So that's where I'm at. I mean, I've definitely started to post more. I'm starting to use some AI, like apps to make some fun content and that's easy. I think for anyone who cares that is listening, more will come over the next couple of weeks. I'm kicking like a robust plan off. Yeah, for sure.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, wow. I look forward to following you along your journey as well. And so just kind of like you had mentioned, it's important to be solving a problem, right? Just curious to know what was that gap that you had identified in the market and what was that that KAMI was hoping to fill.
Leticia Viedma
Yeah, I mean, guess two things. Having worked in fashion for… I was at art here for like five and almost half years. I think I always knew this, but I had a realization. Women are really smart and they really care about value and what I mean by value is getting good quality at a reasonable price point and my insight is that people are actually willing to pay a little bit more to get higher quality. Right. So I think that's part of what informed the KAMI strategy. KAMI is really all about that. I want to deliver value. I want people to feel this is a good investment because I'm getting a hundred percent leather. It's handcrafted. It's versatile styles. I'm going to be able to wear them everywhere. And you know, it's not like a crazy expensive product. Our products range from 270 to like 350, but you're getting designer level quality. That was rooted in that insight of I don't want women to have to compromise anymore because I don't want to compromise. So that's part of it.
And then on the other hand, I mentioned this at the top of our conversation. When I wanted to buy shoes here, I mean, in Spain, there's a lot of really good shoes. When I was here, oftentimes I didn't know where to buy. There's a lot of options where you're getting maybe not so good quality shoes for like, you're already paying like a hundred plus by the way, or you know, you just have to go and make a commitment and invest in designer for 600 plus. I think the other part of the insight that I had was I think there's an opportunity here mid-market, if you want to call it that, or like entry, like contemporary. So yeah, I think those were the two sort of user problems or it's the same user problem really that I identified and like built the opportunity around.
Glynis Tao
And you have some really nice shoes too. I saw the pump with the signature heel on it. I think that looked great as, I mean, it's a classic shoe, right? But just with a little twist to it. But I feel like that's worth the investment to pay for high quality shoes that will last for years, right? I don't just buy shoes once, wear them and throw them away. I keep my shoes for years. I've had some from 10 years ago and they still have lasted and maintained their quality. So if you think about that longevity of the time, that's really important.
Leticia Viedma
Totally. I think the other thing that I didn't touch on is the pump is the name of the shoe or the name of the style is ‘No Regrets’ because, I don't know if this happened to you, but in my opinion, there's nothing worse than leaving your house in the morning and less than a one hour into your day, you're already regretting the shoes that you're wearing. And I was like, I'm done with this. I am shoe obsessed—I'm like a shoeaholic. I have so many shoes, but I have so many shoes that I've only worn like once or twice. And so all of the KAMI shoes are actually designed with a woman in mind who is going places. We got things to do and all of the women in my life, I'm so lucky to be inspired by women who are professionals, they're moms, they are creators, they travel, they need to go places. And so can we please deliver some shoes that are stylish and comfortable at the same time? That's what I had in mind too. The heels, for example, they are like two inch heels. I walk around with those shoes in New York and I don't want to have regrets. I take the subway stairs up and down, I go dancing. And you know, that was part of it too. It's shoes that you can actually use and you'll get value out of everywhere. And they're really made for versatility and a wide range of use cases.
Another example is the Chelsea boot. That one is called the ‘Nine to Five to Nine’ because I really think it's a style that you can wear to work and then go to dinner with. You don't even have to think twice, right? The shoes are designed with usability in mind and hopefully people are able to wear them everywhere all the time.
Glynis Tao
You're originally from Spain, but now you're based in New York. How has living in New York City influenced your entrepreneurial mindset approach to building a brand?
Leticia Viedma
I love New York. I feel so grateful that I live in the city. I think New York is just the city of opportunity and what I mean by that is you leave your house on a random Tuesday morning and you don't even know who you're going to meet. So many things can happen to you. This city just has such a special energy. There's an incredible drive. Obviously there's a lot of ambitious people, but there's also a lot of art, a lot of beauty, a lot of restaurants. So I think it's a big city of inspiration for me and a big city of exposure where I really connect with that feeling of believing that anything is possible because it's just such a magical place. I don't think I could have ever done this if I weren't here.
Glynis Tao
Do you find it easy to make connections within the New York design or business community?
Leticia Viedma
Yes, honestly, that's been an amazing sort of part of this process. I met you through the female founder collective, for example. So I've joined a couple of entrepreneurial or female founder related organizations that really create a lot of space and opportunity. I've also had the chance to meet other founders through my personal life and then they introduce you to people. I mean, today I just had an amazing opportunity working with Chase. That's the bank where I have the bank account for KAMI and they organized these super cool events. They invited me, so I just went and what I really noticed is everyone is very generous with their time. So yes. You have to put yourself out there, but if you make the effort and you attend events and are just fundamentally a nice person, it's not that hard.
Glynis Tao
That's so great. You mentioned Chase and you're on the Chase Your Dreams podcast. I just wanted to mention that tie in. So as a solo founder, how do you stay motivated and manage uncertainty during these early stages?
Leticia Viedma
Yes, I’m generally a positive person, but obviously, during this process, you have moments of self-doubt or you’re thinking, I'm completely reckless and crazy to have changed my life so much in such a short time span or you also get scared, was this a bad idea, you know? So those moments definitely happen. I think first of all, community has been really important for me. I joke around with my friends saying that I become their neediest friend because I'm always texting them with questions. My friends and family have been super supportive. I call my mom, my chief psychologist officer. I call her almost every day. She knows more about footwear than she ever cared to know at this point. So I think having a community is really important.
And then the other part of it is really connecting to your why. Why did you start this in the first place? And really feeling solid, profound conviction around your why since the start and then reminding you of that whenever you have moments of doubt or moments of not as much inspiration. I think going back to your why and like trying to connect and project with that vision of where you think this can go. Those two things have been important.
And then one last thing is I think when you're an entrepreneur, there's a big tendency to just work, work, work. There's always something to do. You're always sending an email or talking to someone or the limit is this sky in terms of work. And what I found is that you actually sometimes need a moment for yourself and you need to create spaces for inspiration—spaces to connect with other sides of you that are not just this and spaces to get in the flow and enjoy life so you can come back to your work with more energy, more inspiration. So that's been hard for me because now I just want to work every day, but I'm really trying to carve out and give myself Saturdays or Saturday mornings for no work time—absolutely nothing and just do my thing.
Glynis Tao
It's important to set those boundaries and make time for the self-care aspect. As entrepreneurs, yeah, we could just keep going forever, and if you don't have those limits or boundaries, you could easily burn yourself out, I find.
Leticia Viedma
Totally. Yes. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
Glynis Tao
It is a marathon, yes, because we want to be in this for the long term, right? It's a long game. It's not a sprint. You're right. It's a marathon. And I'm really happy to hear that you have the support of your friends and family and the community behind you as well, because it's so important as founders through this podcast. Having spoken and done many interviews, I find this common thread that's among all the founders and CEOs from early stage startups to brands that have been around for decades and they're all saying, yeah, your values are important. Always stick to your values and also your community is also important as people who will be there to support you through all the ups and downs that you will be experiencing throughout this whole process and this journey.
Leticia Viedma
Yeah, I feel very blessed to be honest and I've been surprised at how supportive my friends and family have been. So yeah, that's been an amazing added bonus.
Glynis Tao
And do you have any friends in the industry?
Leticia Viedma
I do have a couple of friends who are founders, just in very different kinds of business. KAMI is fundamentally bootstrapped. I did raise friends and family around, but we're not VC funded or anything. I do have friends who have their own more tech or SaaS type companies. And yeah, I definitely go to them with questions when I have them. One of the best pieces of advice I got from one of my friends who started his own business was, don't overthink. He's like, 90% of the decisions are reversible, so just go for it.
Glynis Tao
What's your long-term vision for KAMI?
Leticia Viedma
Oh my God. Yes. Part of me is like, don't know, I haven't even thought that far, but honestly, I'm just excited to grow the business and have fun in the meantime. I think I really just want to scale it. I want to become a sort of staple or staple brand in the footwear space. Hopefully globally at some point. Right now, we only market in the U.S. and in the process, building a team that I love working with and we just like to have fun and try out different things. That's my vision. Hopefully, we empower women to go places, to believe in themselves, to take the plunge and to feel proud to walk in their shoes.
Glynis Tao
Yeah. How do you see the DTC footwear space evolving in the next few years?
Leticia Viedma
I think honestly, footwear online purchases were always lagging a little bit behind in fashion because there's more barriers to purchase, when you're thinking about the sizing and the fit and all of that. And so over the last few years, it's starting to accelerate. I was just reading a report recently. I believe it's like a 9% estimate for shoes e-comm growth. I think it's definitely gonna become more ubiquitous in terms of buying it online and not going to the store. I do think that footwear will always remain somewhat of an experiential purchase. Also because the leather and the feeling and you having to try it because you have to walk in it. I think there's always gonna be an in-person aspect to it, but the e-comm like aspect will continue to grow.
And I do think that we're gonna see more brands, more independent or not heritage brands rising. I mean, we're starting to see some of that. I think this will continue. I think there was a huge indie trend in beauty then came ready to wear and I think we'll probably see that too in footwear. I think it's been harder traditionally because I mentioned shoes are harder to make, but I do think that we'll see a little bit more of that—more new independent brands emerging.
Glynis Tao
What's next for you and your brand? Are there any upcoming launches or projects that you're excited about?
Leticia Viedma
We just launched our first collection, as I mentioned, literally a couple of weeks ago. So right now, we're really focused on building the marketing channels behind it and starting to grow that community and the performance. Getting our marketing to a decent place and building those systems of scale. But I'm already thinking about the spring summer collection. That won't go live until 2026 in the spring, but I’m already starting to work through that. So I'm excited about that.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, sounds great. What's a piece of advice that you would give to aspiring entrepreneurs based on your own experiences and lessons learned?
Leticia Viedma
There were a few things that were important to me. I think one thing is you have to really know your why and really want it and really connect with your energy behind starting something because once you're in it, you're in it and you're going to have to love the reason why you're there and continue to find that to be a source of inspiration. So I would really encourage everyone to kind of think hard and deep about that before they start a business.
I would also say, and look, this is something I'm trying to practice by myself. As I mentioned, I'm someone who has an extreme bias for action, which I guess is a polite way of saying that I'm really impatient and I always like to move really fast. But like we said, you're in your business for the long run and so something that I've learned is sometimes you need to take a beat and you need to, instead of trying to go, go, go and deliver on everything super fast, it's more about slow cooking and taking some perspective and moving with a little bit more so that you can execute better. That's something that I'm navigating now. I think you don't build a brand in two days, you need to get to people. Really build those emotional connections and that takes time. Just as with anything in life, any deeper relationship, people need to get to know you and who you are and what you stand for and try you and then come back hopefully. And so that's not gonna happen overnight. So I think not losing the plot and knowing that you have to be consistent and show up every day and eventually things will compound and you'll have a brand trajectory, but that takes some time.
Glynis Tao
Where can people find you if they want to get in touch with you?
Leticia Viedma
Yes, of course. Well, I think first of all, we're growing our Instagram so you can follow us at shopkami.official. So that's our Instagram channel. And as I said, we're really committed to starting to post more and hopefully deliver entertainment and fun content. So that's our channel. then
I mean, yeah, if you want to reach out to me personally, I'm also really happy to share my email. It's lv@shopkami.co
Glynis Tao
Thank you so much, Letitia. And I'm so happy that you reached out to me. Thank you so much.
Leticia Viedma
Thank you for having me. I mean, that's another piece of advice that I didn't mention: things happen for yourself. I'm shameless and many times people say yes and like they take you up. So thank you.
Glynis Tao
I really think that's great and I'm so happy that you did and you're putting yourself out there and telling your story and now more people will get to hear about it and learn about you.
Leticia Viedma
This is amazing. I love your podcast. You have an incredible roster of guests. So I'm just honored to be part of it. Thank you.
Glynis Tao
Thank you so much for tuning in. You can find me on Instagram, @glynistao, and my website, glynistao.com. Please subscribe to Chase Your Dreams podcast if you haven't already. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others who you think this may help. Lastly, it would be great if you left a rating and review for our podcast. See you next time!
In this episode, Glynis Tao discusses the evolving landscape of e-commerce SEO in the age of AI, focusing on how e-commerce brands can adapt their growth strategies to remain competitive. She highlights the importance of understanding the changes in consumer search behaviour, the AI challenges brands face, and effective SEO strategies that work today. Glynis emphasizes the need for original content, technical SEO foundations, and building trust with both customers and AI systems for long-term success.
🔥 My Online Visibility Roadmap uncovers the hidden technical + SEO issues holding you backand gives you a clear plan to fix them.
With over 20 years of experience in the apparel industry, Glynis is an expert in creative entrepreneurship and fashion business operations. Driven by a mission to empower and help her clients build e-commerce businesses that are purposeful and profitable, Glynis uses her industry experience to develop data-driven strategies.
Beyond SEO consulting, Glynis is passionate about fostering a community of like-minded business owners. Through her Chase Your Dreams podcast, e-commerce blog, and collection of free resources, Glynis provides guidance and inspiration for entrepreneurs striving to grow their brands.
Takeaways
SEO is evolving due to AI advancements.
Consumers are now relying on AI-driven search to make purchase decisions.
EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) is vital for content.
Strategic blogging can significantly help establish trust, authority and credibility.
Content that is high quality and original will likely rank higher in search engines.
E-commerce brands need to focus on unique value propositions.
Technical SEO foundations are essential for visibility.
Interview Themes
How is consumer search behaviour changing?
Consumer search behaviour is shifting as online buyers become more reliant on AI-driven search and conversational e-commerce when making purchasing decisions. An e-commerce brand’s website is no longer the main point of discovery or sales channel. E-commerce sites are turning into data sources for AI to parse through. Whether an e-commerce website will be visible to potential buyers through AI-driven search is based on the quality and trustworthiness of the site’s content. Online shoppers aren’t searching and clicking anymore—they’re asking and buying through AI.
What is technical SEO and why is it important?
Technical SEO refers to the backend optimization of websites that allows search engines to better crawl and index through a site’s content. Optimizing technical SEO is important, specifically for AI search, because it helps determine which e-commerce brands will be visible on search engine results.
What is EEAT and how can e-commerce brands improve their EEAT?
EEAT stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness. It is a framework that Google and AI systems use to evaluate the quality and credibility of a website’s content. This framework is important because it is how search engines decide what website content to prioritize on a results page. To improve EEAT, e-commerce brands should create original and helpful content that is developed for a certain target audience.
What are SEO strategies to help e-commerce brands adapt to the age of AI?
The e-commerce landscape is drastically changing as we enter this era of AI. To adapt to these changes, e-commerce brands can implement key strategies.
Optimize for AI Visibility
Ensure that your website’s content is original, high-quality, and well-structured so AI summaries (like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity) can easily prioritize and summarize your site.
Create EEAT-Driven Content
Focusing on creating content, such as blogs, that answer customer questions and demonstrate experience and expertise will lead to the development of a strong customer relationship. Being a credible source of information builds trust and authority with potential buyers, eventually leading to conversions.
Strengthen Foundational Technical SEO
Improving site speed, maintaining a clean architecture, and prioritizing a mobile-friendly user experience will help search engines index and crawl your site, leading to higher site visibility.
Chapters
00:00 Navigating SEO in the Age of AI
02:48 Understanding the E-commerce Landscape Shift
05:32 Key Challenges for E-commerce Brands
08:45 Effective SEO Strategies for AI
11:25 Building Content Authority and Trust
14:11 Technical SEO Foundations
17:24 The Importance of EEAT in Content Creation
20:04 Practical Blogging Tips for Unique Brands
Transcript
Glynis Tao
Hi everyone, I'm so pleased to have you here today. In today's episode, we're talking about SEO strategies in the age of AI. There have been a lot, a lot of changes in the SEO search world, so the purpose of this episode is to inform you of what these changes are and how you can adapt to these changes to future-proof your brand in the new AI-driven search landscape.
This is a recording of a webinar presentation I did on October 9th as part of the SEO School Educational Series. If you want to stay up to date with the latest trends in the e-commerce industry, I encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter. Simply go to info.glynistao.com/newsletter-opt-in. This webinar is packed with so many valuable nuggets from my five years of experience working directly with client websites.
I decided to split it into two parts. The purpose of this webinar is to help e-commerce brands navigate SEO in an AI-driven landscape. This is part one where I will be covering how the e-commerce landscape is changing, key challenges brands are facing, and SEO strategies that work today. In part two, I'll be showing you some case studies, an example of a fashion brand success story, and some action steps that you can do to start right now. Let's do this.
Glynis Tao
Welcome to Chase Your Dreams, a podcast for fashion entrepreneurs who want to build a purposeful and profitable clothing business so they can make a living doing what they love. I'm your host, Glynis Tao, an apparel business consultant and SEO specialist with 20 years apparel industry experience. I'm also a mom to a wonderfully energetic little boy named Chase.
Glynis Tao
Welcome to E-Commerce SEO Strategies in the Age of AI. The purpose of this webinar is to help e-commerce brands navigate SEO in an AI-driven landscape. In this presentation, I will be covering the AI-powered e-commerce landscape, key challenges brands are facing, and SEO strategies that work today. I'll be showing you some case studies and examples and some action steps that you can do to start right now.
So a quick introduction, my name is Glynis and I'm the founder of Chase Your Dreams Consulting. We specialize in SEO services for fashion, beauty and lifestyle e-commerce companies. I have over 20 years of fashion apparel industry experience and I help fashion e-commerce brands create optimized content and track potential customers through organic search.
So before we get started, I just wanna do a quick little poll and see, show of hands, how many attendees are actively creating content right now? That could be blogs, videos, shorts, reels. You could just say “me” in the chat. Who's creating content out there right now? Awesome. And do you know if that content is showing up in AI search? That's the big question. Not sure. So you'll be a little bit more informed after this webinar and in terms of how to get that content to show up in AI search, as well as how to check to see if that content is visible in AI.
Let's talk about the new e-commerce and AI landscape. If your traffic is down, even though your rankings look stable, it might not be you—it might be AI changing the rules. There have been a lot of changes over the last several months—weeks even—and things are changing so quickly. So it's good that you guys are here and so that you can be prepared, know what the changes are, and know how to adapt to the changes.
The shift from traditional SEO used to be ranking for those 10 blue links, which you see an example on the left-hand side, to now, AI SEO is optimizing for visibility in summaries and cited sources, such as Google AI overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing, Copilot, and so on. The way consumers are searching is changing. It’s resulting in fewer clicks and they're getting more direct answers without having to click on the links.
You see here, Google, below sponsored would be like your organic search results and those blue links used to be where people would go and they land on these results and then they would click through it, take a look through the website, see if they can find what they're looking for. If not, then they just move down the list sort of thing. But now you see with AI overviews here on the right-hand side, so same query, right? How to optimize for SEO. Same query, but different result. Here you get a little snippet of AI overviews. Here's your answer right here in the search. You don't even have to click anywhere. You get your result. But if you want to learn more, go a little deeper, then fortunately, AI Overviews cites the website and adds a link here, which is what you see on the right-hand side, which people can go and click through to the website if they want to learn more.
I'm sure you all heard of the latest development on September 29th. ChatGPT introduced instant checkout and agentic commerce protocol. Instant checkout is a new feature in ChatGPT that lets users buy certain products within the chat interface without even going to the website. They are rolling this out to the US users first and so far it will be supporting single item purchases from US-based sellers. But over time, the plan is to expand to multi-item shopping carts, more merchants, like Shopify and other merchants, as well as regions that are beyond the US.
So the question is, is your shop ready for this change?
How consumer search behavior is changing, right? This is absolutely changing the game for consumers. What does it mean for DTC and commerce brands? Well, you have to look at your visibility, trust and customer acquisition challenges. Right now, consumers are looking for trustworthy brands and they rely on the AI filters to give them their answers. It's important that your brand is seen as an authority, as a trustworthy expert in your space, in your niche, so that it's important to build trust with both your customer as well as for AI search engines. Up until now, most brands are treating their websites as the primary sales channel. That's the place where shoppers are discovering and browsing and buying. Now with instant checkout, AI searching conversational commerce is rising. The discovery and transaction layers are starting to move outside the website into ChatGPT. So that means for your website, you need to increase its function, such as having a trusted data source for AI agents to pull from, being a branded hub for storytelling and owned content, and being a backend system for inventory fulfillment payments and customer data, which is often through a Shopify site or it could be through a headless CMS.
So you still would need a website. There's some rumors out there. People think that with this new agentic checkout that you don't need a website anymore. You do because they still need to transact, make the purchases from the website. With all this happening right now, it's like everything, everywhere all at once, one of the key challenges that e-commerce brands are facing today.
I did an interview recently with Jeanel Alvarado who's the founder of RETAILBOSS and she said that “Retail strategy today is about being where your customers are—online, in content, and in community.” During this conversation, we both agreed that SEO is not dead—it is evolving. It's moving away from traditional SEOs which used to focus on ranking and search results, driving clicks to your site, and then converting that traffic into sales. But with AI search results and instant checkout, websites are starting to see a reduced number of clicks even when the rankings remain steady.
SEO is shifting toward AI readiness and making sure that your content is structured, detailed, and trustworthy in order to be cited in places like AI overviews and to make sure that your site and the information is being summarized and accurately by ChatGPT and Perplexity. So what does that mean? This means that you have to make sure that your product data contains the right information, your pricing is accurate and consistent, the product availability and your attributes are all correct. This is through a technical SEO that's structured data structure and markup and schema markup is really important. Making sure that your website is also clean and has a clean site architecture with canonical tags and making sure that the content is high quality and the answers to people's questions and queries are descriptive and that they're fully answering the questions that people are asking in search. Because now people are not just typing in keywords like the old days, they are now having full conversations right inside search.
All in all, right now, relevance is greater than presence because of rising competition, paid ad saturation—paid ads are starting to cost more—a lower ROI, organic traffic is declining, despite steady rankings and people are having content overwhelm right now because everyone is publishing but not everyone is credible. We're going to talk a little bit more about technical SEO, what you can do to prepare and make sure your site is structured and the technical back-end is good. Have a mindset that's important to adapt because the brands that adjust fastest win. SEO is no longer just about getting found. It's really about being understood, trusted and transactible by the AI systems.
So now that you know how the commerce landscape is changing, let's talk about some SEO strategies that work in the age of AI. If anyone knows me, I'm always talking about how content is really important because content really builds authority. A big part of the strategy that I use a lot for myself as well as for my clients is blogging because blogging is a great way to be able to establish trust, credibility, and thought leadership. I have a little bit of a model that I use in terms of how to build up your blogging content because it's not just about blogging for the sake of blogging. You want to be strategic about it because creating a piece of content requires a lot of time. A lot of us are probably founders, entrepreneurs, brand owners—we're busy. We're juggling a lot of things. So if you're going to be putting in the time to write an article, you want this piece of content to work for you. Correct? I'm going to talk about the strategy that we use and show you a case study as well on how to build content clusters to be able to build your topical authority. You also want to create content that answers the question so that AI is pulling those into the summaries. I have a podcast episode where I talk about the importance of blogging. That is in episode 43. I talk about how brands that blog consistently become trusted voices and have shown an increase in conversions. So it's important to answer your customers' pain points.
There's various ways that you can create your content and blogs. There's some examples here of a topic cluster that we built up for one of our clients who is a contemporary woman's fashion brand. We built up a cluster around travel. They have written a travel essentials guide, what to pack for a 10-day vacation, what to pack for a beach vacation. These are all articles that fall within this travel cluster. And then, we built up a contemporary woman's fashion cluster here, in which they have a pillar article that is focused around contemporary women's fashion. Then, they built and wrote sub articles, like how to style statement pieces, what to wear this week, and how to put together a fashion-forward capsule wardrobe. As you can see, this cluster all works together. As well, there's a travel cluster. And within those clusters, they all have internal links that link to each other. That just strengthens the whole way that the content and the pages will rank in search.
Just to get a little technical with you, but this is important and this is what happens on the backend of your website. It's important to make sure that your technical SEO foundations are in place. That includes optimizing your images, checking your site speed. Nowadays, people's attention spans are shorter than goldfish now. It's like you've got two seconds to pretty much convince a person whether or not they want to stay on your site or leave. So you have to make sure you have a fast loading website and make sure that it's both viewable on mobile as well as on desktop. Another thing is to have schema markup for your product pages. This helps AI understand and surface your products more easily. It's a universal language for LLMs to be able to read your website content and understand what it is. This way, it helps your pages or your website to be cited on search and on AI. In those product pages, you could also include FAQs and have detailed product descriptions. I talked about site speed, mobile-first design. If you're working with a developer, make sure that they are focusing on a clean architecture. Making sure the site is very clean, easy to navigate. You don't have orphan pages that are just floating around that are not linked anywhere to other pages. Making sure the site is indexable and crawlable to search engines is really important and having that structured data.
Your website is important. It's still important to have a website because your website is not just made for search engines, but it's made for humans. The human-facing content is there to build the emotional connection and long-term brand equity. And then with the technical side combined, the machine-facing content ensures that AI agents are able to surface and sell your products accurately. So that's why you need to have both and make sure you combine these together because you're not just optimizing for AI search engines, you are also optimizing for your audience, buyers, customers who land on your site. You do need to build up that trust, credibility, and the relationship too. It's really important.
Do we have any questions so far? If you have any questions, just feel free to pop them in the chat. I will also be taking questions at the end.
So I just want to talk about EEAT and that stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trustworthiness. This is important for search and traditional search. Last year, Google did a major algorithm update, one of the core updates, and that was to make sure that the content is written by humans for humans because they discovered that once people discover ChatGPT, people are just pushing out content like crazy. We know that content that's created in AI is mostly regurgitated content that already exists on the Internet. Once this came into place, we saw a lot of these big websites that used to generate a lot of content and blogs that were not the most original, unique, creative. They got penalized and they saw a hit to their traffic. You may have seen sites that previously had a lot of traffic take a hit because of this change and Google saying, ‘No, your content is not really unique. It's not original. It's really spammy, so we're just going to rank your site lower.’ Whereas smaller websites who had been consistently writing helpful original content, they were seeing more of an increase in traffic because of this.
At the end of last year, if you had been following me and I was telling people that it's important to create helpful original content and that it's important that this information is coming from you because you are the expert in what it is that you do. No one else has this information or this knowledge or experience like you do. So if you are able to create this content, then you have a better likelihood of search engines showing it and bringing it up in search results. But this now also applies with AI. They're looking at authoritativeness and citing these sites a lot higher or more frequently than other sites. But the algorithm's improving. They were favoring a lot of the, you know, things from Reddit and different things like that, but over time, they're changing the algorithm to make results a lot more relevant to what the customer, the user is looking for.
Just to emphasize that EEAT is not just an acronym. AI models are trained to cite these authoritative sources. And in order for you to rank, write original content that comes from you. And another thing that you want to make sure is to have author bylines that talk about who you are. Byline as a credit line that attributes a piece of writing to its author. And you also want to include things like case studies or founder stories, customer reviews. All of these things really do help to build that trust.
Hi, Helen. I'm just reading your question. What kind of blogs do you recommend to write about for a candle boutique that can provide the maximum amount of value to audiences? Yeah, that's a good question. I always start off by asking, what makes you or your brand unique? What makes you different from everybody else? As a starting point. I know your brand and you make really beautiful handmade candles from soy and they're like pieces of art—they're decorative. They're not just a scented candle that you burn and forget about, right? I remember you telling me that your candles can be decorative. They're just so beautiful. They're pieces of art that people don't even want to burn. So you could write a guide even on how to incorporate candles within your home decor. So yeah, I would really start off by brainstorming and thinking about what are the things that make your brand different and more unique than anybody else? And how is that relevant to your audience or potential customer? And also, what are the common questions that people are asking—the questions that you get from your buyers? Those are often good starting points because if people are asking that, then probably more people are asking the same question. Those could be ideas that you could use to write your blog content on. Okay. Does that help? Awesome. Thank you.
Glynis Tao
Thank you so much for tuning in. You can find me on Instagram, @glynistao, and my website, glynistao.com. Please subscribe to Chase Your Dreams podcast if you haven't already. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others who you think this may help. Lastly, it would be great if you left a rating and review for our podcast. See you next time!
If you need help building your SEO strategy for the age of AI, please reach out to me. Call or visit my website, glynistao.com, for SEO strategy and services. I have a new page up now dedicated to AI SEO, and I'll have other free resources and more to help support you along your journeys. Until next time, take care.
In this episode, Evelina Kaganovitch explores why building trust is more important than increasing traffic for e-commerce fashion brands. She shares her journey from fashion school burnout to becoming a messaging strategist, emphasizing the need for authentic storytelling and meaningful communication. Discover what the key to a successful email marketing strategy is, why brand messaging is crucial to long-term success, and how to enhance engagement and drive conversions through content.
About Evelina Kaganovitch
Evelina Kaganovitch is a data-driven copywriter for fashion brands looking to connect with their customers and drive conversions through engaging content. After burning out in fashion school, Evelina turned to the startup world to combine her passion for writing, fashion, and entrepreneurship. Building off of her own experience in the fashion industry, Evelina connected with fashion entrepreneurs looking to improve their brand messaging to help them better communicate with their audience. Today, Evelina is a successful messaging strategist, using email marketing, ads, and sales pages to increase customer engagement and sales.
Building trust is more important than just driving traffic.
Genuine, quality connections with customers is what sells.
Email marketing is a powerful tool for driving conversions.
Speak like a human to your audience.
Authentic storytelling resonates more than salesy messaging.
Interview Themes
What are the benefits of email marketing?
Build trust with your audience
Emails are not only a powerful marketing tool, but also a great way to build trust within your customers. They allow for personal, one-on-one communications, helping brands connect with their subscribers.
Higher conversion rates
Email marketing typically converts better compared to other channels like social media. They operate at around a 36:1 ROI, often outperforming SEO and paid ads.
Email marketing is measurable
Social media and other communication platforms only provide a small snippet of your marketing campaign’s statistics such as follower count and the number of shares and likes. Conversely, email marketing platforms provide a much more in-depth analysis of how your campaigns perform. You can see who has opened, clicked, and engaged with your emails, making it easy to refine your messaging based on real data.
Reliability and ownership of contacts
Email marketing uses reliable platforms that allow brands to have complete ownership of their contacts list. Unlike social media platforms where things can crash, accounts can be locked, and followers can be lost, companies will always have access and ownership of their email lists.
What is a common brand messaging mistake to avoid?
Brands can get caught up in creating elaborate, overly polished personas for themselves in an effort to sound cool and sell more. Unfortunately, this strategy often backfires. These personas make brands feel too distant and convoluted, resulting in a brand narrative that doesn’t resonate with the target audience. Evelina’s advice? Keep it simple and human. Avoid using technical jargon that can be challenging for your audience to understand. Instead, be straightforward and talk to your customers the way you would in real life. What do they need? What problem are they trying to solve? How can you appeal to that? Focus on clarity and genuine connection and your brand messaging will resonate.
Is nurturing your current audience better than acquiring more?
Yes! When it comes to growing a brand’s audience, always prioritize quality over quantity. It may be the case that your website has a lot of first-time visitors, but it’s unlikely that they are going to immediately buy after one interaction with your brand—it’s not always love at first sight. The people who are going to drive the long-term success of your brand and the ones who have fostered a trusted relationship with it. Loyal customers are the ones who will continue to support the brand through repeat purchases. By prioritizing meaningful relationships with them, brands will grow and ensure long-term success.
What are some actionable steps brands can take to improve their brand messaging and email marketing strategy?
Revisit your customer avatar
Even if you’ve already done customer research, it’s worth revisiting. As a business evolves, so do their customers, which is why it’s important to stay up-to-date with your customer persona. Redefine what your customers’ pain points are, what their preferences are, and what their needs are. Then, revise your brand messaging accordingly.
Map out your email marketing strategy
Setting up an email marketing plan can feel overwhelming. Start simple by mapping out your customer journey beginning from the discovery phase. Once you’ve mapped out the customer journey, identify any gaps in the flow and ideate how email marketing can fill those gaps.
Chapters
00:00 Building Trust Over Traffic
02:40 The Journey from Burnout to Brand Storytelling
05:34 Crafting Authentic Messaging
08:40 Understanding Customer Pain Points
11:41 The Importance of Clear Communication
14:29 Nurturing Customer Relationships
17:38 The Role of Email Marketing
20:51 Identifying Trust Gaps
23:36 Automated Email Sequences
26:28 Driving Revenue Beyond Sales Announcements
29:32 Balancing Email Frequency
32:28 Success Stories in Messaging
35:38 Keeping Copy Human in an AI World
38:31 Actionable Steps for Better Messaging
Transcript
Evelina Kaganovitch
The chances of somebody buying that first moment that they see your brand is very low. So you need to build that trust with somebody through different touch points on your socials. Then, if you get them on your email list and they're going to check your website there, if you've got customer reviews and testimonials. So then the chances of that one person looking at your brand and buying from you and then buying from you again and recommending you to their friend or their work colleague goes up and up.
I always say it's better to go for quality than quantity cause when you are acquiring a customer, it's good to think long-term, not just ‘I want this person to buy from me right now.’ It's like, ‘I would like this person to come into my brand and into my journey and have a really nice experience.’ So then that hundred dollar purchase of their first product turns into ongoing. So the lifetime value of that customer goes up.
Instead of chasing these vanity metrics and also being really disappointed and burnt out, because if you're seeing these large numbers of traffic to your website and they're not converting, it's just exhausting and it's already so much pressure building your own brand and being a business owner that if you see those conversions also higher, like less numbers, but higher conversions, just on a mental, like emotional level, you feel better and more secure and that confirms to you that I'm doing the right things.
Glynis Tao
Welcome to Chase Your Dreams, a podcast for fashion entrepreneurs who want to build a purposeful and profitable clothing business so they can make a living doing what they love. I'm your host, Glynis Tao, an apparel business consultant and SEO specialist with 20 years apparel industry experience. I'm also a mom to a wonderfully energetic little boy named Chase.
Glynis Tao
Today we're diving into a topic that every e-commerce founder has wrestled with at some point. Why is my website getting traffic, but no sales? My guest, Evelina Kaganovitch, believes the real problem isn't traffic, it's trust. Evelina is a messaging strategist and copywriter who helps creative founders turn their content, especially their email lists, into revenue engines. After burning out in fashion school and rebuilding her career in Berlin's startup scene, she discovered that most launches don't fail because of bad offers—they fail because of broken messaging.
Since then, Evelina's worked with over 50 brands and founders worldwide, from Amazon Web Services and the Australian Fashion Council to indie fashion labels and coaches, crafting copy that doesn't just sound good—it sells. Known for making complex marketing feel simple, human and wildly effective, Evelina now runs her business on her own terms while raising her 3-year-old daughter Her work has been featured on the Successful Fashion Freelancer, the Content Bite Copywriters podcast, and more.
Welcome Evelina. It's so nice to have you here today. Thanks for joining me on the podcast.
Evelina Kaganovitch
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. I'm a listener of your podcast, so it's really nice to be here with you.
Glynis Tao
It's so nice to have a fan come on as a guest. And you're based in Melbourne, Australia, right?
Evelina Kaganovitch
That’s right, the other side of the world.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, that’s nice. I haven't had anyone from Australia come on as a guest yet, so you're the first.
Evelina Kaganovitch
That’s pretty special.
Glynis Tao
Evelina, your journey from fashion school burnout to becoming a sought-after messaging strategist is incredible. How did that experience shape the way you approach brand storytelling today?
Evelina Kaganovitch
Yeah, the experience of burning out in fashion school, I actually hear this narrative over and over again from my clients and community and it's very common because it's just such a highly stressful, highly competitive industry. A lot of the time, the business owners I work with, they've gone through something similar, whether it was like a physical burnout or a mental burnout. So we have that connection to start with and they've gone into business for themselves so then they can live their life on their terms and they don't build their business but still have a work life balance. And a lot of the time when they start their business, they actually create a new job for themselves and get stuck into this flywheel as well. And on top of that, have the pressure of making enough revenue to pay and cover their own bills.
So it's quite a layered approach. For me, I was always interested, always curious and very entrepreneurial. This kind of progression from going from fashion school to working in the startup world, abroad to then coming back, I mean like I want to do this for myself and work with business owners. It was very natural. Like it didn't feel forced at all and a big reason why I feel that I am in the right space. So it was like a very natural progression and around the time of COVID, as most of us had a lot more time, especially in Australia, when everything was in lockdown and there were very strict restrictions, I was able to commit that time to like really honing in my skills and asking myself like, what do you want to do? Like, what do you want your future to look like? And that's led me to where I am today.
Glynis Tao
And so many founders in fashion struggle to communicate their value without sounding salesy. How did your background in fashion shape your approach to writing copy that actually sells while staying authentic?
Evelina Kaganovitch
I think the great thing coming from a fashion background and working with similar business owners is that creativity is so strong and the stories are really strong and powerful. It's about blending those human stories, like where somebody's come from. A lot of the time, if the brand is a smaller business, the values of the brand are the reflection of the founder themselves because they started it based on something they wanted for themselves or where they were in their life a couple of years ago. And they help these brand owners pick out this story, like draw it out from them, and I've got like some tactics that I use to do that to really make sure that when we write the copy or when their marketing goes live, it genuinely sounds like them because that's what builds trust and what people connect with rather than the salesy like ‘buy now’ like ‘discount’ or really powerful, really strong messaging that's just feels a bit icky. That's not what I'm about and the clients I work with are also not interested in that.
I also think marketing, and I'm curious to hear your perspective too, tends to have a bad reputation. It's slimy and tacky and almost shameful if you're marketing your business or your product, but I try and reframe it in my client's head to say like, ‘if you've got like a wonderful product or service that you've been working on, it's almost like you're doing your audience a disservice by not sharing that message.’ If you've got this great line and they're actually looking for something like that and they buy from you and they're going to be so happy and keep coming back, then that's actually a really positive thing that your marketing did. So it's also getting over that mental state and those limiting beliefs. Then it actually comes quite naturally as well.
The founders I work with are always really impressed with how this sounds really like me. Like this is how I would talk, but it's framed in a way that really entices the audience to come into their world, to learn more about their products, to buy in as well at the end, but in a really genuine human way.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, I can relate to that as well as a former clothing brand owner. I would be hiding behind my clothing and be really afraid to tell my story, but I am a small business, you know? I produce a lot of this stuff myself, but I made this illusion that it looked like it was a big brand, I'm very corporate. I don't know why I did that, but I was kind of afraid to really tell my story. I guess I had this feeling that if people knew that these products were made by this girl on her kitchen table, that it wouldn't be good quality and it wouldn't have that credibility and they wouldn't trust it or something like that. It was just really hard for me to even put myself out there without feeling like I was sounding salesy just to ask people to take a look at the product.
So I really struggled with it. I really understand what you mean about getting over that block with sales.
Evelina Kaganovitch
And that's the magic, like where you do talk about your story and your audience buys from you because they're like, ‘I resonate with her’ or I know that you talk about your son and they'll resonate with you, maybe at that stage, not yet, but they'll resonate with parts of your life. That's what will make them buy in because realistically, especially in the fashion world, there are so many different brands, there are so many different products. Even if you, you know, you've got a unique way to design or do something, the chances are that there's nothing comparable to it at all is very low, realistically. So it's that story—opening up to your audience and just sharing like, ‘I've created this brand out of my love for this,’ or ‘it came out of this place and was going through this stage of my life.’ ‘This was my creative outlet.’ That's what makes people connect as well and talk about it more and say, ‘I want to be a part of this journey with you.’
Compared to going on Shein or on Temu and buying something fast fashion, like most of the time, that's not the audience. That's not the customer that a smaller business owner is going for, so don't compete with them. Do it in your way.
Glynis Tao
Yes, I've gotten better at it over the years, I would say—telling the story now. You often say most launches don't fail because of bad products, but because of broken messaging. What does that mean for fashion e-commerce founders?
Evelina Kaganovitch
So firstly, what comes to mind is that I see a lot of, just to understand where it comes from, a lot of fashion brand owners, especially smaller businesses, start their business because they have this great idea or they come from a fashion background and they want to share their ideas. Once they start their business, they start realizing that the actual designing creative part is like 5% of everything it takes cause then you've got production, you've got your sales, your marketing, your customer service, and the list goes on and on. Then you're trying to create all these things and scrambling.
Now a lot of brand owners are turning to AI as well. So one of the things that is making these launches, I don't want to say fail, but not be as successful as they could be is this like generic messaging because if you start seeing, as a customer, if you start seeing ads that just say like, ‘unleash your inner goddess’ or something along those lines and then you scroll and then you're getting similar ads for similar products and the next ad says the exact same thing, you're just turned off by it. Even if people on social media, if they're not working in this field and they can't straight up say, this is AI-generated, they'll feel like something is off and that initial like intuitive connection. And I also feel like women have that more too, naturally biologically, you just feel like something is off and like it didn't feel right. So that messaging also in communicating your story is one thing and making it sound authentic.
And the other layer is a lot of brand owners, I see them jumping straight to targeting people who are ready to buy, and when we look at like the levels of awareness in marketing, it's actually like a bit of a slope or it's linear in terms of somebody goes from they don't even know they have a problem to the extreme, the fifth stage of ‘I'm ready to buy in your product is the answer to my prayers.’ A lot of the time, what I see is brand owners targeting that like ‘I'm ready to buy’ stage rather than somebody who's never seen or knows anything about your brand, like showing them a little bit more, like educating them or pointing out like, if you're getting breakouts after you go to the gym on your legs and you can't work out, it could actually be that the leggings you're wearing are really high in plastic—made from synthetic materials—so when your skin clashes with the chemicals in it, it can create this rash. And then proposing if you swap to a more natural alternative, then this problem could be eliminated and then introducing your product. If you know, you're a more, natural sports brand in that sense. Just to paint a very literal example for your listeners.
So that's another disconnect that I see happening a lot of the time. Those would be the top two. A lot of the time, it actually stems from not having been super clear on who your audience is, and that comes down to the research. Really go deep—who is your audience or your customer? What are their pain points? What do they want? Really deep, not surface level. Also blending that and balancing it with who you are as a brand and how do you find that middle point between your values and what your customers want and then communicating effectively.
Glynis Tao
Because many fashion brand websites look and feel and sound beautiful, but they have problems with conversions. What are the common messaging mistakes that you see on products and sales pages?
Evelina Kaganovitch
So specifically in fashion, it's funny because it's such an elusive, glamorous industry. You see the couture shows and all this. It's like a different world. You're transported to somewhere else, which is really beautiful and very magical. But then when you filter it down to the average customer, they're not buying into that fantasy. They need something that solves a certain problem. They need a new workout outfit. They've just had a baby and their body's changed. They need something to suit their life now.
What I see with fashion specifically, and I think it comes down to this creativity that lives inside—like just creatives and fashion designers and people who have started their own brands—you want to overemphasize things. So I see the language is very over the top and confusing. It's very complex words, very complex language, which when you break it down and you read it, and especially to a consumer/a customer who's on your website, it's just confusing. It doesn't say anything. Talking about ‘this is a mystical so-and-so with like elaborate this type of sleeve.’ It's just confusing, and someone will click out compared to if we look more at say the information space or products, like food brands. It's just really straight to the point. It's really clear. A fifth grader would understand what it means. So I see a big part of that in the fashion space specifically. And a lot of the time, and I think it comes from this conditioning, maybe in some ways from fashion school, the more you over-complicate, the more glamorous and deconstructed you make it sound, but you have to remember that your customers don't come from that space, at least 99% of them. So speak to like that normal person that's just out in their day.
Glynis Tao
Don’t use the really technical or industry lingo.
Evelina Kaganovitch
Exactly. Yeah. It's like most people don't understand that. They like your product. They think visually it's beautiful. It suits whatever function they need it for. Say they're going on a holiday for the summer and they need a new bikini or bathers. Firstly, of course it's fashion—it’s a creative space. Visually it needs to stand out. Then they'll be like, does it tick my boxes? And the more clearly you can communicate that, then the more likely you are to get that sale.
Glynis Tao
When we first met, we chatted about the importance of building trust and credibility, not only with your customers, but with AI search. Studies show that it really matters what type of content you put out there. I've been having conversations with other retail e-commerce experts, and the consensus has been that it's important to emphasize building trust factor with your customers and AI search engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity because people are asking complex questions. So the better you're able to answer people's questions—answer their pain points and challenges—the better you're able to build that trust with them. And as a result, AI search is picking that up as well.
You had said that traffic isn't a real issue—trust is. Why do so many fashion founders focus on getting more visitors instead of nurturing the ones they already have?
Evelina Kaganovitch
I feel like it comes, it's also this conditioning that we have, the more, the better. The more people see it, the more chances that they'll buy instead of focusing on a smaller amount, but more quality because even if we're looking at it from the perspective of where does your customer find out about you first, a lot of the time it's going to come either from your organic social media content or from paid social media. There's so much scam online on the internet everywhere that the chances of somebody buying that first moment that they see your brand is very low. So you need to build that trust with somebody through different touch points on your socials. Then if you get them on your email list, they're to check your website there. If you've got customer reviews and testimonials. So then the chances of that one person looking at your brand and buying from you and then buying from you again and recommending you to their friend or their work colleague, goes up and up.
So I always say it's better to go for quality than quantity, cause also when you are acquiring a customer, it's good to think long-term, not just I want this person to buy from me right now. It's like, I would like this person to come into my brand and into my journey and have a really nice experience so then that hundred dollar purchase of their first product turns into ongoing. So the lifetime value of that customer goes up. So instead of chasing these vanity metrics and also being really disappointed and burnt out, because if you're seeing these large numbers of traffic to your website and they're not converting, it's just exhausting. It's already so much pressure building your own brand and being a business owner that if you see those conversions also higher, like less numbers, but higher conversions, just on a mental, like emotional level, you feel better and more secure. That confirms to you that I'm doing the right things. I'm showing my product to the right people and they like it. It's resonating with them and they're buying. So I'm going to do more of what's working rather than plastering everything everywhere and hoping it sticks. So rather than trying to be everywhere at once and posting here, there, and everywhere, just focus on what is working and do more of that content that resonates with your audience rather than posting everywhere and just exhausting yourself. It's so much work and not seeing those numbers convert as well.
Glynis Tao
What are some signs a fashion brand has a trust gap where customers are landing on their site but not buying?
Evelina Kaganovitch
You'll see that, as we were saying before, a lot of traffic coming in, but those actual conversions of people purchasing or at minimum signing up to your email list, being really, really low. What I see when a website gets a lot of traffic, but really low conversions, is that typically it just means people are turning. Something on the website's not sticking. It could be the messaging, it could be visual—the site, how it looks. It's also partly the text. If it doesn't make sense or if you've got large chunks of text everywhere, a lot of the time people get overwhelmed and turn—they go and leave.
If you're seeing these people leaving and exiting your site or not buying and not exploring the website and looking at it, you can check this data on the backend to see what is the average time that somebody spends on your site. Is it a first time visitor, second time visitor? I'm sure you are really knowledgeable and experienced in these elements yourself. And then you're also not seeing people signing up to your list. That's a sign that something, you know, is not resonating. It could be a mismatch between the ad that they're saying or your social content, and then they're going on your site and it's just not matching up. They don't feel like it's a smooth continuation of that user journey and it's worth looking at the numbers and looking at where that drop off is in your funnel and identifying those pain points and working on fixing it up. Even just improving those numbers by a couple of percent in each stage of that user journey. By the end of it, you'll see such a big difference in your actual conversions.
Glynis Tao
Why do you believe email marketing is a missing link between traffic and sales for e-commerce?
Evelina Kaganovitch
I think because email is a really powerful way to build brand trust and it's also a very measurable platform. Compared to social media where the data you get is ‘how many people saw your content or your reel’, on email, what it tells you is exactly who opened, exactly who checked, how many times and who clicked. It's also not rented land like social media. That means that anytime the social media platforms crash, you lose everything you've done. Email is such a powerful way to build trust and be with your audience one-on-one. Also if your email company crashes or goes out of business, you can just take your list somewhere else and sign up to a new platform compared to this social grind. And the data on email shows that it’s the highest conversion rate across like SEO and also ads. The statistics show the 36:1 conversion rate. Of course, take it with a grain of salt. Every business and every industry is a little bit different, but that just gives you a bit of an idea that email is very powerful and it's worth investing in.
And the other reason is because a lot of the time when somebody first finds out about your brand, they're not so likely to buy from you, but they are likely to sign up to your list if you offer like a small discount for the first purchase or you've got something special going on to entice them in. And then over time, you can nurture them and educate them through your emails. If you've got a launch coming up or a promotion, you can send that to your list and they can buy directly from there. So when we look at some of the biggest ecom brands in the world, they're very email heavy—very focused on that part of their marketing channel. It's like that middle funnel point.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, and it's true that you own your email list, you don't own your followers on social media.
Evelina Kaganovitch
Exactly.
Glynis Tao
And if it were to shut down, then you wouldn't be able to take your followers with you.
Evelina Kaganovitch
It's so heartbreaking. I've had it happen in my partner's business. It's a small business and you work for a long time building your community and then something happens and you can't get it back. I'm working with a client right now who has built a big Facebook community and then it just crashed. It's like years of work. It's just really disappointing. It's really like a stab in the heart a little bit.So on email, luckily, you don't have that problem.
Glynis Tao
Can you explain how automated email sequences like ‘welcome’ or ‘post-purchase’ flows can help create familiarity and credibility over time?
Evelina Kaganovitch
Automated sequences are so good because you create them once and then they get sent automatically to certain people on your list. You don't have to think about it. You do the work once you set it and you forget it. And there's some key flows that, especially for e-com brands, are really powerful and can really set a good tone. Say for the welcome sequence, when you are just building that relationship, when it's the first touch point with somebody.
And then if we're talking about abandoned cart emails, a lot of the time, people are so busy. You might have something in your cart and then like your kid needs you and they're hungry and you have to go make them a banana smoothie. So you forget! Abandoned cart email could be like, ‘Hey, we noticed this was still in your car and are you interested?’ Even maybe after some time you can give a little incentive, like an extra $5 off or something.
Those little, triggered emails really help either a) build trust and nurture your audience or b) get that sale over the line. I think it's also worth explaining that automated email sequences are the ones that you create once and they are sent to a list based on a certain trigger or behavior. So when somebody signs up to your list, they automatically get sent an email. So somebody could sign up on Monday and they get that email on Monday. And if somebody signs up on Friday, they get that exact same email when they sign up on Friday. Compared to broadcast, more evergreen emails, campaigns that you create and you send to your list weekly. If you send your campaigns on a Wednesday and somebody signed up to your list on Thursday, then they would miss out on that campaign on that week cause it's just triggered by the time you send it.
Glynis Tao
From your experience, what kinds of emails actually help fashion brands drive revenue beyond the typical sale announcement or product drop?
Evelina Kaganovitch
A lot of the time, the ‘welcome’ emails are really powerful because that's the first impression somebody has with your brand. I would really focus on that and make it quite personal, like sharing your story, sharing your journey, and then obviously sharing your products as well. A lot of the time, people buy from people—we buy from humans. If somebody's on your list, they're probably interested in a smaller, founder-led business that cares and shares the same values as them.
So showing that you're human, showing the person behind it, sharing your story, where you came from, sets a really good first impression. And then building on that with time cause I understand everyone has different levels of time to dedicate to their emails and different resources to invest in it. But if you start with one thing to get it right, set that tone nicely and then build on that.
Glynis Tao
Is there a number of how many emails you should be sending out weekly, monthly?
Evelina Kaganovitch
There's no one perfect answer. Every brand is different. If we're talking about the weekly emails or things that are ongoing, one thing to consider is—this is more on the backend of your systems—how you're tagging your audience and making sure people are not receiving like numerous emails a day because that just feels spammy. I'm sure you've seen that in your inbox—unsubscribing when somebody tries to email you like every single day. And that's a lot of work if you're running your business by yourself.
So I always say, get your sequences set up, the most important ones, and then when you go to do your normal like marketing emails, get into a routine and rhythm that works for you. Perhaps that could be starting with one email every two weeks. Once you're in a good flow, you've worked it out, you've gotten faster at it because you know what to do and how to do it, then you can go up to one email a week.
Typically for clients, I would do two emails a week, like on a normal week where there's nothing major happening. If it's more of an e-com or even service based business brand, there seems to be a nice middle point where you're checking in twice a week, like a friend, but you're not like love bombing them. And then when you do have a promotion or a sale coming up, I think it's fair to send a few more and people expect that, but not all the time. My mom told me the other day that she purchased this product and she was really excited and the product was really nice. And then she's like, I just got so turned off because they email me every day. How do I turn it off? I'm sick of it. So just thinking about the end user’s mind as well. People are busy. They don't need to hear from you every day. It's too much.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, well at least have some sort of option—I don't want to unsubscribe completely. I still want to receive them, but not as frequently. That would be nice.
Evelina Kaganovitch
Yeah, actually, I think a lot of the time, brands are not intending on sending so many emails, especially the more small to medium sized ones who now have somebody supporting them with their marketing. It just may even be that on the backend, it's not set up in the correct way and what I mean by that is it's not tagged. Like if this person receives this email, don't send them the next one. So they're actually getting a bunch of sequences at once, even though the general idea is well-wished and the idea is that they get like two a week, but it's just not configured correctly on the tech side. So they're getting everything.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, because there is a techie component to doing your email marketing—setting up all the automations and stuff like that. You’ve got to be considerate. I'm on both sides because as the sender of emails and as receiver as well, I'm on a lot of email lists and I sign up because I want to hear from them. I want to hear from them, but when the emails get to be a little too frequent, then it is a little bit of a turnoff. So I feel like there is this balance there.
Evelina Kaganovitch
100%. It's like dating. Like if you just met someone and they're texting you every day, like, ‘let's hang out.’ I don't know about you, but I'd be like, no, thank you.
Glynis Tao
Everything can relate back to dating.
Evelina Kaganovitch
Yeah, exactly. It's just annoying. It's like, no, let me be slow. Do it in a classy tasteful way. If you're not sure, less is more.
Glynis Tao
Could you share a success story example where great messaging turned an underperforming campaign into a win?
Evelina Kaganovitch
Yeah, so a few things come to mind. I've been working with a client for like two years now. What we saw at the start when I came in was that they had a really big list, but their engagement was very low. People weren't clicking. I think the clicks were like under 5% or something. And I was like, this is odd because we're hitting all the marks—we're talking to the pain points. What’s going on?
So we ran a re-engagement series of really value-driven emails that we knew the list would be interested in, like sending some free downloads, some really valuable advice. And what we did was we started with a smaller list segment, so the ones that were really engaged, to build up that trust factor and also for the email service provider to stop sending us to spam and basically for it to say, ‘yeah, this is a credible company.’ ‘It's not spam.’ ‘Send it to the inbox.’
We started seeing open rates up 70%. As those opens went up, we started increasing the list size. We started adding in less engaged subscribers, and by the end—it was like a four to six week process—we managed to revamp that list and bring it back to life. Now it's been such a powerful communication and sales mechanism for my client, which is really great. We also cut a lot of subscribers off the list. That's also nice to do to—clean them out. You don't need to hold onto people that don't want to be there.
And another win, which I was really excited about, cause this is like a very small business, was I was working with a woman who is an expert in the pattern-making stage with six plus decades of experience. And she's written a series of books. Her life mission is to get them out there and share her work, which she hasn't done up until this stage. So what I did was implement a basic funnel system to start getting her audience into her ecosystem. I call it a wardrobe—a content closet—to get them to learn more about what she does. In the first week or like the first 10 days from when we started posting, we're focusing on getting her audience from LinkedIn, which is about 300 people to her email list. And then slowly sharing about her and her story and then sharing her books and through a lead magnet. And she had 30 something people sign up in the first week, which I was like, wow, like this is great to go from absolutely zero to that is a really, really positive outcome. And she made a sale from that really tiny list. I don't remember if it was like 150 or 250, but she was stoked. It's not a huge amount, but it shows that it works and out of 30 people that received her email, at least one purchased. So that was a really nice win. made me really happy for her.
Glynis Tao
That's wonderful. You had said in the very beginning of this interview that one of the drawbacks of AI is that it sounds very AI and most of us can recognize it. Unleash your email marketing, something blah, blah, blah. It’s always those words that always come up. So with so many AI tools writing content today, how can fashion founders keep their copy sounding human and true to their brand?
Evelina Kaganovitch
So I actually have this one technique and I use it for myself and my clients. I really love it because it's like utilizing this power of AI, but also having you speaking it. What I do is I pull out notes, conversations, transcripts from meetings, from calls—whatever that may be where you're speaking— then asking the AI to analyze and say, ‘what are those common themes that I talk about?’ ‘What is relevant for me?’ And then turning voice notes—I ask for my clients to send me a story through a voice note—into an email because a lot of the time when we speak human to human, that's natural. You don't overthink it, but for somebody who's not a writer or a marketer, they sit down to write something and you get brain fog and you're stressed and you're overthinking it. A lot of the time how somebody would speak with their friend sounds so different compared to when they sit down and write an email or a social post. It feels stiff. It feels not right. It feels awkward or corporatey or they're using AI and it sounds really spammy or they're blending the two and it just doesn't match who they are. So I use voice notes and actual transcripts to turn that into content that sounds like the actual person.
Glynis Tao
That's a really great tip because I record all my meetings I have with people and I found that even just using the transcript or the meeting summary notes and feeding it through and asking it to pick out the important points and maybe taking that and turning it into a blog outline at least gives you a starting point to start to work on that content. At least you've got something to work with and AI will help you do that. And it’ll still keep the messaging and it's coming from you. It's not completely AI-generated.
Evelina Kaganovitch
Exactly, and it can be really hard to come up with this content, like ideas and constantly being like, what do I post? But you already have, as you said, that plugin to your meetings, those transcripts. Going through the content you already have and recycling it, just like recycling clothes or re-wearing things. Reuse what you already have because that just takes so much pressure off you. And then also it's relevant because you're having those conversations already. You know your customers, your audience is asking those questions or talking about it. So use that to your advantage. Like you said, if you are blending this human and AI element, run it into the AI.
And one tip is to upload—don't copy and paste the content. Download or upload a PDF or a text file for some reason, ChatGPT reads it better like that. And you can say, ‘pick out the exact words that I use, don't change anything’ and that's a really good starting point. That's already the 80% that people struggle with the most—getting the first draft ready and getting your ideas out on paper. Once you've got that there, then you start getting into the zone and it comes more naturally. It flows.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, that's great advice. What's one or two steps that our listeners can take this week to start improving their messaging or email marketing results?
Evelina Kaganovitch
I would say go back to basics and just have a look at your customer. Also, your customer may have evolved from where you started, so recheck that research. Check what are their pain points, create this avatar, give them a name and really build out this persona. So then the next time you are working on your marketing content, whether it’s emails or it's something else, you just have this one person and visualize them—we're creative people. Picture somebody and write and speak to them to make sure that your message connects and speaks to the right audience.
And the other thing is if we're talking about email specifically, it can be a bit overwhelming when someone's saying like, set up your email marketing, do this, this. It's easier said than done. What I encourage you to do is not to overwhelm yourself cause I don't like that idea. It has to feel natural and comfortable. Just write out. Whether you hand write it on your computer or create a table with two columns, identify what you already have. What flows are set up or working and what do you not have? And then make a little list. You'll see where those gaps are and you can even on a piece of paper, sketch out that journey. Where does someone come from? They find me on socials and then they come here and here. And then you'll see there's a gap in this spot, so I'm going to pop something in. I think being a visual community too, it helps to have it in front of you in a visual sense where you can see and start filling in those gaps.
Glynis Tao
Where can people find you if they want to get in touch with you?
Evelina Kaganovitch
So you can find me on LinkedIn at Evelina Kreative and I've recently started a YouTube channel, so you're welcome to have a look at some videos. There's some helpful advice and tips on copywriting, specifically email marketing as well, and that's @evelinakreative with a K. I'll leave the links with you as well. That's a good starting point. I also have a guide that might be really helpful for somebody who just wants a quick win on their emails and that's a guide of a subject line swipe file that you can use for subject lines I've used and tested. Ones that perform well and don't sound AI generated. You can kind of plug and play to get some quick wins—some higher clicks on your emails.
Glynis Tao
Great, we will have those links in the show notes. Thank you, Evelina, for sharing your journey and expertise with us today.
Evelina Kaganovitch
Thank you so much for having me.
Glynis Tao
Thank you so much for tuning in. You can find me on Instagram, @glynistao, and my website, glynistao.com. Please subscribe to Chase Your Dreams podcast if you haven't already. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others who you think this may help. Lastly, it would be great if you left a rating and review for our podcast. See you next time!
