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!
In this conversation, Rhea Lana Riner, founder of Rhea Lana’s Children’s Consignment Events, shares her 28-year-long entrepreneurial journey. What started as a simple clothing swap in her living room transformed into a multi-million dollar franchise, striving to make high-quality children’s clothes accessible and affordable. With an emphasis on community, values, and personal growth in entrepreneurship, Riner offers insights into what it’s like starting a business as a woman from the ground up. She discusses how she started her business, challenges she overcame, and rewarding experiences that made the challenges all worth it. The conversation highlights the significance of storytelling, the resale market, and the power of franchising in building a successful business.
About Rhea Lana Riner
Rhea Lana Riner is the visionary entrepreneur, CEO, and founder of Rhea Lana's Children's Consignment Events. In 1997, Riner held a simple clothing swap in her living room, seeking low-cost, high-quality children’s clothes. Since then, she has transformed her clothing swaps into a multi-million dollar national franchise with over 120 locations across 26 states. As a mother of three, Riner has always known that this business is about more than just clothes. Her events aim to empower moms, build community, and create flexible pathways to entrepreneurship. Riner has helped thousands of families access high-quality, affordable children's merchandise and has mentored franchise owners to grow professionally, personally, and spiritually. For the past 28 years, Riner continues to be a leader in the ecommerce space, building a values-driven business and inspiring women to take on leadership roles.
Franchising offers a unique way to scale a brand sustainably.
Connecting to the heart of your customer is essential.
Fostering a community around your brand builds loyalty.
Women can lead and grow businesses without compromising family values.
Storytelling is a powerful tool for brand connection.
As a leader, personal growth is the key to long-term business success.
Interview Themes
Why does storytelling and emotional connection matter to a business?
Storytelling and emotional connection with your audience are essential because they help bring authenticity and humanity to a brand. Riner emphasizes that customers want to know who the people are behind a business. Customers value having that relationship between themselves and the brand, which is why having a story for customers to connect and relate with is important. An authentic brand fosters community and builds loyalty and trust.
What does holistic leadership look like in a business? Why is it important?
Holistic leadership means leading in a way that embraces the whole person. For Riner, that means integrating values of personal growth, family, and faith into her business. This results in a balanced and sustainable leadership that cultivates a work culture where people feel genuinely valued and empowered to grow professionally and personally. Through this approach, the well-being of the leadership team and the employees are equally valued.
What are the benefits of franchising?
Franchising allows businesses to scale in a sustainable, community-driven way. By empowering entrepreneurs to own and grow a portion of the brand in a local market, the company can expand its reach organically. Franchising also results in the formation of a network of like-minded entrepreneurs—a meaningful support system with shared business goals. Taking a slow, intentional approach to franchising helps ensure that growth is both effective and aligned with the company’s core values.
How does being a mother impact how you run your business?
For Rhea Lana Riner, going from a stay-at-home mom to a successful franchise leader was more natural than it may seem. Her experience as a mother deeply shaped Riner’s leadership style and approach to business. Lessons from motherhood equipped her with valuable skills—problem solving, crisis management, and communication—that are all applicable to leadership roles in the business world. Rooted in strong family values, Riner’s business also reflects her empathy for her customers. As a mother herself, Riner knew what moms needed and how her business could fulfill those needs. For Riner, motherhood was essential leadership training.
What advice would you give female entrepreneurs?
Don’t underestimate yourself
Riner often finds that many women hesitate to take the first step toward entrepreneurship or leadership because they doubt their own abilities. Recognize the strength and skills you already possess and put them to good use. Confidence develops with action, and oftentimes, women are far more capable than they believe. Be brave enough to begin.
Stay balanced
There is no need to sacrifice your personal values for the sake of success. Embracing holistic leadership is a great way to ensure that you’re focusing on not just the success of your company, but also your personal well-being. By aligning your business with your core beliefs and maintaining boundaries, you can build a company that thrives whilst supporting your personal lifestyle.
Always be open to learning
As a business owner, expect the unexpected. The life of a business is unpredictable and difficult challenges are inevitable, which is why learning to adapt is vital to running a successful business. Whether it’s learning new skills or adjusting your business strategy, staying adaptable and open to learning will prepare you for the ups and downs of running a business.
Chapters
00:00 Building a Community-Driven Brand
09:39 The Journey from Living Room to Franchise
19:28 Balancing Family and Entrepreneurship
29:28 Lessons in Sustainability and Resale Models
Transcript
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. 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? And all those things play out in normal business operations. 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, you know, and then we love to share. I love this about this brand. This is this wonderful product that I got. This is the incredible customer service that they gave me. And I think those things all build community.
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.
Today on Chase Your Dreams, I'm thrilled to welcome Rhea Lana Riner, visionary entrepreneur, CEO, and founder of Rhea Lana's Children's Consignment Events. What began in 1997 as a simple clothing swap in her living room has since grown into a multi-million dollar national franchise with over 120 locations across 26 states. But for Rhea Lana, this business has always been about more than clothes. It's about empowering moms, building community and creating flexible pathways to entrepreneurship. She's helped thousands of families access high-quality, affordable children's merchandise and has mentored franchise owners to grow not just in business, but personally, professionally and even spiritually. In today's conversation, we'll explore how to build a community-driven brand that goes beyond products, why finding balance as a mom and entrepreneur is possible and essential, the lessons fashion ecommerce founders can take from franchising, resale and consignment models, and how to grow a profitable business while staying true to your values. Welcome, Rhea Lana. It's so nice to have you here today. Thanks for joining me on the podcast.
Rhea Lana Riner
Hi Glynis, it is a pleasure to be here.
Glynis Tao
Wonderful. So Rhea Lana, your business began as a clothing swap in your living room back in 1997. Can you share that moment when you realized this idea could grow into a franchise business?
Rhea Lana Riner
It was several years after I started. I didn't have a business background, didn't have a business education, and so really it was an accident, if I have to be completely honest. I started in my living room. I was a stay-at-home mom, and at the time my husband had left the corporate world and had gone into nonprofit work. Our money was tight and I was looking for a creative solution to be able to buy and sell my own kids’ clothes.
I loved shopping secondhand, but I just didn't feel like there was a high-quality experience at the time. And so, I invited some friends and I moved the furniture out of our living room. We had that very first sale in my living room.
And then the second sale, we decided to computerize it. My husband developed our software on the side. It was kind of just a little passion project. That doesn't mean anything now, Glynis, because we all carry around phones in our hand and they’re little, mini computers. But back in the mid 1990s, that was a big deal. Stay-at-home moms like me did not even have computers in their houses. So from early on, we were able to use computerization and technology to create this high-quality secondhand shopping experience.
And you asked about when it felt like it could turn into a franchising concept. It really took several years, but it did grow. They're pop-up events, so I only did it twice a year, but each time it would grow and take over another part of the house. I realized that there were so many moms like me out there that were also looking to not only sell their children's things for a fair price that they had taken good care of, but they wanted to be able to buy things at a fair price. So gradually, it grew and I could tell that I was meeting a need.
Glynis Tao
Fashion entrepreneurs often start small and sometimes even out of their homes. I did as well when I had my clothing brand I started on my kitchen table. So what lessons from your early days would you pass along to those building e-commerce brands today?
Rhea Lana Riner
Well, I think for one thing, stay true to your heart. What is it that you want to do with your brand? I think I was that mom and I knew who my customer was. For me, I needed to start small. I think this probably applies to other people. I didn't take a lot of investment money from people. We bootstrapped it and we only grew as we could afford to grow.
And then I think it's important to just stay in balance. I also had small children at home and I wanted to still stay true to my family values while I was trying to build this business. And so, it was important for me to be able to align both of those values. I didn't want to give up my family just to build some brand, cause I didn't want to get to the end of my life and be by myself. And so, I do think it's important to keep our priorities and our values combined so that we can find balance and do both.
Glynis Tao
Mm-hmm. So I read on your about page, your story, how you started this business out of your garage—just out of a need that you saw from families needing to make some extra money and selling their products consignment. They weren't able to get very much money from consignment stores. And so you thought of a different way, a different model that you created that didn't even exist at the time, to be able to solve this problem and this need, which you probably experienced yourself as a mom, right?
Rhea Lana Riner
Yes, I definitely did. You're right.
Glynis Tao
And so, from your story, it sounded like your husband had helped you in the early days, suggesting that maybe you use some computerized technology and you're like, ‘well, I don't know if moms really even use computers.’ But then, you found out that he was right and it really then helped you to launch your business and grow.
Rhea Lana Riner
You’re right!
Glynis Tao
Is it by embracing that aspect of it? Can you tell us a bit about that story?
Rhea Lana Riner
Absolutely, you're exactly right. When he first suggested it to me, I told him he was crazy. Like, there is no way that moms were going to do that. I absolutely did. Because again, moms didn't have computers in their houses. I didn't even know how to use a computer. We joke that he was definitely the visionary. Another joke we like to say is we had the only barcoded garage sale in the world in the 1990s because we were scanning tags and had barcodes and we would be able to give each consigner a report of exactly what she had sold.
And yes, it did come from my own experiences. I had consignment stores, but I just kind of felt when I would take things to sell at the consignment store, for one thing, I made a very small percentage of the earnings. I never knew what sold or for how much, and I just felt like I wanted to create a very authentic experience. And so, from that very first time with my husband's software, we would give each consigner, all 11 consignors or 15 at the time, a report. They could see each item that sold and exactly how much. And then we gave a very high percentage back. Back then it was 70%. Now we have to give 65%. We lost a fight with the government and had to change our percentage a little bit. But, we were able to give a very high percentage and I loved doing that cause I thought moms should get more of their money for their items.
Those were some of the unique things that we were able to do because we were in this event. We weren't having to open a store and people would say through the years, ‘Rhea Lana, when are you going to get serious and open a store?’ And I said, ‘never, never.’ That was never my goal—to open a store. I really wanted to do just these pop-up events. That way moms could gear up and clean out their house in the fall and then in the spring. That's what we love doing—just doing it twice a year. I just felt like that also fit with moms. Moms are so busy and have so many demands, but if they could just do once a year, really focus on cleaning things out and then as far as shopping, they could buy everything that their children need for the whole season. And so that's how it started.
And yes, technology has always been part of our solution. I would have an operational challenge at my events and then we would use technology to solve that problem for us. And it has definitely been a reason that we could continue to grow and have this now. I remember when it was small, Glynis, in my home, and I knew I could do it well in my home. I knew I could make it look like a boutique and have nice items, but I wondered, could we ever do it at a large scale? And so, it's really rewarding for me that we can now offer really large events in a space that's like 50,000 square feet—like a large Walmart or a large department store—and it's this beautiful marketplace where things are run excellently. It makes my heart happy because we can bring families in and they can have this excellent experience.
Glynis Tao
What is the process like when a franchisee first starts to work with you and how do you get them set up and started?
Rhea Lana Riner
Well, once a person is approved to be a franchisee, they of course have a fee that they pay to us. And then we take them through training. They get the Rhea Lana branding, they have our marketing materials, an operations manual. We do have some extensive training that they go through. They even come to our flagship event and train with my team. I still run our flagship event. And I love it because it's kind of a laboratory where I can still see our customers and I can test out new things. And I have my team, so they train with our flagship team. Once they have their first event, we will send someone to help them launch. And then we have continued support. We like to think about franchising as doing business in the community. We have this wonderful community of women helping women and we just know that we all rise together and we're all building this brand together. I love the idea of franchising. It's been a real blessing to me because you can build these deep friendships, but all around the same brand that we are all building together as we're serving families.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, and that just leads right into my next question on building a community-driven brand. You've created not just a business, but a marketplace that fosters community among moms. How did you intentionally build that sense of connection and what can fashion e-commerce founders learn about creating loyal customer communities online?
Rhea Lana Riner
Well I think it starts with understanding the heart of your customer. What is in their heart? What are they looking for? What needs are you meeting as the provider of that product? But 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 just values that we go by—honesty and positivity. 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? 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 and then we love to share. I love this about this brand and this is this wonderful product and I got and this is this incredible customer service that they gave me. And I think those things all build community and loyalty.
Glynis Tao
In fashion, storytelling is critical. How have you leveraged storytelling for both your own and your franchisees to strengthen your brand and movement?
Rhea Lana Riner
Well, storytelling is, it's just authentic. It's because we all are living out our own lives and our journeys and I think our customers want to know what those stories are. I do think we have to get good at how to communicate them and express the emotion of the stories.
At our events, we get to see so many families whose needs are met. There was one time a family came in and their daughter had just finished cancer treatments—I think she was 10 years old—and the way they celebrated the end of each treatment was that they would buy her a hat. And so she had found this special hat at our event. Anyway, it just brought so much meaning to us because for us it was just a hat, but for them, it was this milestone in their daughter's health journey. When you can capture those stories in your business and tell them to your customers, those build even more community, they build loyalty, they build emotion. They show the emotion behind the brand. And then I think people also do want to know the people behind the brand. Who are the people that are building it? As we can tell those stories of our lives and our challenges, then people want to associate with that and they want to be part of that. It makes the brand come alive. It's not just a piece of clothing, it comes alive.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, but it also creates that support that people just want to get behind it as well.
Rhea Lana Riner
Yes.
Glynis Tao
It's not just about business, like I said, it's like a movement that you've created to be able to help moms get themselves off the ground, like get their businesses going, help to support their families. You often speak about helping moms navigate the many hats they wear. What advice do you give women entrepreneurs who are trying to balance scaling a business with family and personal responsibilities?
Rhea Lana Riner
I think a great perspective for women is to think that there are seasons of life. Like, life is different. And when I was getting started, I had three small children. Well, now I'm a grandma. I've got an empty nest and I've got five grandchildren. If we could 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, you know, entrepreneurs—I'm sure you experienced this too, Glynis—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. If we can, again, think through the seasons of life. 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’s 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. 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
Yeah, and I can 100% relate to that. I'm a mom as well. I have a very energetic little 9-year-old boy, but prior to that, I also had a clothing brand which I ran for over 10 years. I called that my first baby because of the blood, sweat, and tears that I had put into that business and the countless hours. It just felt like it was another child of mine. And now, raising a real person is just a whole different level of responsibility. So as a mentor and leader, you've guided franchise owners to grow not just financially, but also personally, professionally and spiritually. Why is a holistic approach important and how can e-commerce founders apply that to their own teams?
Rhea Lana Riner
Well, we're all multi-dimensional people. We all have our values. We have our faith and we have our family and we have our work and all of those things are important. If we get it out of balance, it's like a wheel that's lopsided—it kind of clunks down the road. But if we can stay balanced, we get to create something beautiful. All of those things are important. And I love encouraging women though, as they are on this journey, to be sure that they're always growing personally because we want to become someone amazing down the road, right? It's one thing to be 20 years old. It's another thing to be 60. And you get this lifetime of experiences to keep growing from and challenges to overcome. And you can build resilience. But I do think part of that is stepping outside of our comfort zone and doing some new things. Overcoming challenges, you know. There were some years where we experienced big challenges. We fought the government. There was a regular regulation that they tried to say that we weren't up to it. Anyways, it was a long fight. It was like a nine year battle. But during that, it was such a great thing for me personally, because I got to grow as a leader. I ended up going to Washington, DC and testifying before Congress in the US.
Also while I was doing that, I was leading my franchise owners and teaching women how you can fight with grace, stand on what is true, and don't give up. We want to just lay on the floor and cry, but we really, we got to fight this thing and we got to have grace. And then once you get through those things, it gives you the capacity and the ability to fight the next challenge that comes along because there will always be challenges. And then you get to develop this skillset that you didn't know you had. I think that's what I've learned. When I first started, I was very introverted. I was very insecure. I wasn't confident in speaking. But you learn those things. The more that you're forced to do them, you get better and then you have these skills. I do encourage women to really keep growing in areas that they didn't even know that they were good at because then you end up somewhere at the end of your life or you can look back and you can leave a legacy that impacts generations to come behind you and really leave the world in a more positive place. I love for women to keep discovering their passion and their purpose and keep pushing themselves to get better, become leaders. The world needs them.
Glynis Tao
I love that. Yeah, moms just don't often get the credit that they deserve for what they do. It's a full-time job being a stay-at-home mom. No one can imagine how much work it is. It's a 24/7 job, which I didn't know and have a lot more appreciation for now that I am a mom myself. Yes, definitely. Thank you. I love what you do and I love how you really empower women to build that confidence because I think women really don't think that they are strong, right? But they don't realize just how strong they are until certain challenges come up. They often find it within themselves. It just comes out and they're probably even surprised that they were able to get through something as hard or as challenging as it was.
Rhea Lana Riner
You're right. I agree with that so much. I often look back on the years when I had three children under four years old and I sometimes think those years were harder than being a CEO of a company. Moms are doing really hard things and they don't realize the skills that they are developing. So you are 100 % right. And I think that being a mom, it is 24/7. You're constantly doing crisis management and creative problem solving and communication and moms end up with an incredible skill set that's very valuable.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, I often feel like my brain is split in half—mom brain and I have the business brain as well. Half of it's focused on my son's learning at school and having to prepare him for some test— coming up with spelling tests. And I'm like, okay, I got to get back to this client, respond to these 10 emails that I have before the end of the day. It just goes back and forth.
Retail can be tough, whether it be in consignment, fashion, or e-commerce alike. How have you kept your business profitable and relevant over decades? What advice do you have for founders trying to build brands with staying power?
Rhea Lana Riner
That is such a great question. You know, I have recently visited with some founders and it is tough. Not every business is guaranteed to have lasting power. For one thing, I feel really grateful. I think it starts with your product. You have to make sure you have a product that has staying power. If you have a product that has staying power, that's a great place to start. I always say we're never going out of business because moms are going to keep having kids and kids are going to keep wearing clothes. So I am thankful for that. But then, I think you have to have a model that can stand the test of time. You also have to be able to pivot and change. For us, we went through this battle with the government and ultimately we did lose the battle. We're still very glad we did it. We had to make a pivot and we had to make some changes and it was a risk, but it worked out for us. So you have to be able to pivot when needed and watch the times and how do you make those changes?
And I think too, as a founder, you have to grow. I remember I had heard of so many founders that held their businesses back—they were the reason their business didn't grow—and I never wanted to be one of those founders. And I think because I've always been so afraid of that, I may not be the best founder out there, but I'm going to try to be the best version of myself that I could be for my company. I think that's why personal growth has always been so important to me. I never really had a mentor, but I've read lots and lots of books and I'm always trying to see, who are the leaders out there that I can grow from?
Part of being successful and staying in business is building teams around you. That's one of your first transitions as a founder is to go from being the lone person to then having people around you who understand the heart of the business, understand the operations, because if there's only one of you, you're gonna bottleneck really fast. That's part of growth—being able to duplicate yourself and then build teams. That's one of the things I've enjoyed doing. It's not easy and it's hard and you invest in people and sometimes people let you down or they betray you, but then you also find nuggets. You find these diamonds along the way of amazing people who you end up working so well together. Your strengths and your weaknesses complement each other. I love that I've got some women who've been with me for a very long time. And then even now, we're hiring new young women to our corporate team. I love putting teams of women together. And really, I think that's ultimately the key to long-term. You have to have layers of leadership, of buy-in, and that gives you a chance to stay in business for a long time.
Glynis Tao
And many of our listeners run fashion brands and are also thinking about scaling. What lessons from franchising could apply to entrepreneurs trying to grow their stores into bigger businesses?
Rhea Lana Riner
I do love franchising. Franchising gives you a way to grow a brand that you're bringing other business owners in. You don't have to necessarily personally spend out a lot of money creating products, but you have these other business owners that are coming in. They love this brand, and so they're going to go build it in their community. And that's what I love about franchising.
I'm the franchisor, so a portion of their sales comes back to the franchisor and that helps us to create this corporate office, corporate team, where we're constantly researching the best marketing methods. We're creating the marketing products, creating operations and support. And so it's been a wonderful way to scale and grow a brand that feels sustainable. It's like having, little many brands out there, but all under this umbrella of building this Rhea Lana's brand. We all want to serve families in all these markets. And so, I think franchising is a wonderful way to scale.
My approach has always been slow and steady. I think some franchising companies want to grow super aggressively. My strategy has always been more of a slow growth because I want to make sure that I have a corporate team here that's equipped to provide adequate support for our franchise owners. And so, we have about 120 franchises right now, which is a lot. It's a great size, but we'd love to be 150. But we also want to have just enough that we can still provide adequate support.
Glynis Tao
Your franchise model provides women with flexible entrepreneurship opportunities. So what gaps did you see in the traditional business model ownership that made this path so powerful for you?
Rhea Lana Riner
I saw some gaps primarily in women leadership. I was trying to figure out a way that a woman like me could enjoy leadership, business, and growth while still having a family. Being able to stay true to all of her values and faith. My faith is the filter through which I make decisions and I wanted to stay true to who I was and not have to feel like I needed to compromise my values.
I think if I were going to say some of the gaps I've seen, that's what I have seen. The opportunities that I want to create for women, both as franchise owners and on my corporate team here, I'm trying to create an environment where women can raise their families, they can stay true to their faith, they can also have a wonderful career. Those are some of the gaps I've seen that I hope we have filled and we continue to fill and create more opportunities for women.
Glynis Tao
The resale and consignment space is booming now in fashion. What do you think fashion brands, especially smaller e-commerce brands, what can they learn from a consignment model about sustainability, pricing, and customer trust? Does a consignment model, could that even work for someone on an e-commerce level who owns an e-commerce business or is it more to do with in-person selling?
Rhea Lana Riner
I was thinking about some of the brands, some of the nice brands that I buy online, I have seen them reach back out to me and say, ‘hey, when you're ready to sell that, we would like to buy it from you.’ And I think they do have an e-commerce portion of their site where they sell gently used items. So it's just something to think about. I thought it's a great idea, honestly. And so maybe your audience can think about that and how to unpackage it.
But, my background is, you know, I didn't come from a family with a lot of money and so I've never been able to afford expensive brands. And so, I think that also set the stage. It's one reason I loved secondhand. I like the value that high expensive fashion brings, but I couldn't afford the price tag. And I think that's what consignment has done. It gives you a way to afford the high-quality, high end brands for a cheaper price. I do think that families care about the price point. So if you can make your products, find that price point that families can afford. Make it high-quality enough though, so that they can resell it.
I remember back when I was getting started years ago thinking about what I was gonna do, I lived in a small town in Texas in the US and there was only two places to shop. There was Walmart. Everybody knows what Walmart is, right? And this was in the 90s and clothes that came from Walmart, if you washed them once, they fell apart. They were terrible. So I didn't really want to buy clothes from Walmart for my kids. Or there was this really expensive boutique in town where, you know, one little onesie for my child cost, you know, over a hundred dollars. And that was in the 90s. And I knew it was a good brand, but I couldn't afford that. And so that's what made me think, ‘how can I create this middle space for moms like me who don't want Walmart, but they also can't afford the high fashion?’
I would encourage your audience to keep thinking about the middle market, moms like me, who want high-quality at a reasonable price and make sure that as you're creating these products, make sure they're not the kind that are gonna fall apart the first time you wash them. Because I think that's what builds loyalty as well is when moms know they're gonna keep this piece of clothing. It washes well, I can resell it down the road, and then people talk about that brand that has the resale value. I hope that makes sense, but through the years we watch some brands, hey, this is a great brand, because if I take care of it, I'm able to sell it for a really good price. And I think that creates some longevity for some brands.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, absolutely. I think certain brands can be passed on and they just have this, you know, I guess, a longevity.
Rhea Lana Riner
And style maybe too?
Glynis Tao
Or style to people in terms of what the brand means to them. And so, I think there's also that personal connection too, that people have with clothing.
Rhea Lana Riner
I agree I'm so glad you said that, Glynis, because there is a personal connection and we have moms who come into their event and they're getting ready to sell their children's things and they're crying. I mean, because we remember our children when they wore certain clothes and I still have great pride when I think about how hard I worked to buy nice things for my kids. And so, there's a lot of emotional connection with clothing, especially children's clothing, if they're things that our children wore as moms, we have deep emotion. And that creates loyalty to brands.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, I mean, there are certain pieces that I will never give away. I'm going to keep forever because it just has meaning to me and I just want to hold on to those forever. So this is a very interesting space. I think it's different because I was just looking up, you know, like online consignment stores or resellers and there's a lot bigger brands like Depop where it's an online marketplace for resell. That's more for maybe designer clothing, but not so much in the children's wear space. So, I mean, there's perhaps an opportunity there.
Rhea Lana Riner
You know, what's interesting about that is back years ago, I mean, this was honestly probably in the late-90s, I actually had a website and we actually did sell some things online. And I personally didn't love it. We still like selling in-person. And so, we might do online. I know there's a need out there. I do a lot of my shopping online, but it's like you said, it's an interesting thing to be, to be thinking about.
Glynis Tao
And not for everyone, I think. Not for everyone. You've built a multi-million dollar brand while staying grounded in your family and values. What has been the most rewarding part of this journey for you?
Rhea Lana Riner
The most rewarding part is watching my own children. They were what motivated me to get started. I have two daughters and a son. I wanted them to see, and I'm sure you see this with your son, I wanted them to watch their mom work hard. I wanted them to know that you have to work hard in life. Money doesn't just appear on the doorstep. You do have to work hard. And I wanted them to see me solve problems and serve customers and serve families and meet needs in our community. Now my children are adults and just watching how they have this foundation of watching their mom work hard has brought me so much joy.
And then truly, these franchise owners that I have, they are women who have had zero business experience and now they have become business leaders—not just business women, but business leaders. And they’re building teams and they're affecting their communities, and now several work on my corporate team and they're helping me build a company. And it's just really rewarding to know that you're positively impacting other people's lives and making their lives better. I think this is the most rewarding thing.
I'm honestly grateful that we are still in business and still growing and that we still have a footprint even after 30 years. In many ways, we're sort of just getting started. It takes a while to figure things out. And so, I'm really proud that we're still relevant. Part of our job is to connect with the next generation of new moms out there, and so I love that people are still discovering us and they're like, ‘huh, I've never heard of this.’ And we're like, ‘well, we've been here for 30 years.’ But it's kind of fun that families are just discovering us. I love to watch young families realize how we can help them save so much money and get high-quality things for their families. So it's a lot of fun. It's very rewarding. And I feel very blessed to still be doing this.
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. And so be brave, buckle up, and just give it your best shot. There's a wonderful path down there, but you just gotta keep putting one foot in front of the other, and it'll be a remarkable journey.
Glynis Tao
Amazing. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch with you?
Rhea Lana Riner
Well, first you can find us at rhealana.com. It's R-H-E-A-L-A-N-A, rhealana.com slash podcast. We don't have a podcast, but if our audience would like, there's a form there that you can fill out and I'm offering a free, 30-minute consultation just to chat about personal growth. Or if anyone is interested in franchising or just about leadership, it's just a free opportunity we're giving. And then we're also on LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook. I'm Rhea Lana Riner, or you can find us at Rhea Lanas. We're just grateful to be here with your audience. You're doing great things. I love the message that you are giving and your journey is wonderful as well, Glynis.
Glynis Tao
Thank you so much, Rhea Lana, for sharing your incredible journey with us. From living room clothing swap to a national franchise, your story is proof that businesses rooted in purpose, community, and values can truly change lives. For all the fashion e-commerce founders listening, I hope you take away the importance of not just chasing revenue, but creating a brand that empowers others, builds trust, and lasts for the long haul. Thank you so much.
Rhea Lana Riner
Thank you 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!
What does it really take to thrive in the ever-changing e-commerce world? In this special live edition of the Chase Your Dreams podcast from Ecom North, Glynis Tao interviews several inspiring leaders in the e-commerce space. Hear from e-commerce founders Gillian Liu of Kiyoko Beauty, Hannah Wang of The Aesthetics Studio, Andy Hsu of MotionGrey, and Hellen Harbilas of Hellen’s Boutique, as they share success stories, challenges, and valuable insights on running successful businesses in the rapidly changing digital landscape. Each guest shares their unique experiences and growth strategies, emphasizing the need for adaptability and innovation in the e-commerce industry. Ready to chase your own dream? Tune in and get inspired by real founders shaping the future of ecommerce.
🔥 My Online Visibility Roadmap uncovers the hidden technical + SEO issues holding you backand gives you a clear plan to fix them.
Gillian Liu is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Kiyoko Beauty, a Toronto-based online retailer for authentic Asian beauty products. While working her 9-5 corporate job, Liu started Kiyoko Beauty in 2021. With skincare, haircare, and makeup sourced from Japan and Korea, Liu strives to make Asian beauty accessible to everyone. What initially started as a side hustle has now grown into one of the top Asian beauty brands in North America. Through content creation, Liu has grown a following of nearly 300,000 people on social media and continues to showcase her successful entrepreneurial journey alongside her 9-5 lifestyle.
Hannah Wang is the founder of The Aesthetics Studio, an Ontario-based sticker and stationery shop with a focus on promoting mental health awareness. At 17 years old, Wang graduated from high school in the middle of the pandemic. During lockdown, she was inspired to embrace her creative side and open an Etsy shop, designing and selling her own stickers, washi tape, and assorted stationery. As an advocate for mental health, Wang’s business has evolved to promote mental wellness through journaling, creative expression, and coloring as a form of self-care and connection.
Andy Hsu is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of MotionGrey, a Vancouver-based ergonomic office furniture company with a mission to make standing desks and chairs more accessible and affordable. With a background in civil engineering, design, and marketing, Hsu combined his passions and decided to pursue his own entrepreneurial journey in 2018. Through authentic storytelling and strategic marketing efforts, Hsu has grown MotionGrey into a successful multi-channel business with products available on Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, and more.
Hellen Harbilas is the founder and creative director of Hellen’s Boutique, a Toronto-based brand specializing in luxury sculptural candles and handmade home decor. Frustrated by overpowering scents and synthetic ingredients in candles, Harbilas set out to create soy candles that were both beautiful and gentle on the senses. Launched in 2021 during the pandemic, Harbilas built Hellen’s Boutique from the ground up, teaching herself everything from product development to web design. Through pop-up markets and content creation, what began as a personal solution evolved into a successful ecommerce business.
Consistent and quality content is crucial to e-commerce growth.
SEO is a long-term strategy that requires consistent effort.
Building trust with customers is essential for success.
Authenticity and storytelling are important for standing out in crowded markets.
A good product must be paired with a strong brand identity.
In-person connections can enhance online business growth.
Continuous learning and adaptation are vital for future proofing your ecommerce business.
Interview Themes
Why is finding a niche important for brands?
Finding a niche allows brands to stand out in crowded markets. By targeting a specific niche with a specific audience who want specific products, brands are more likely to match with the right customers. Gillian Liu focused on breaking the misconception that Asian beauty is only for Asian consumers, striving to make Asian beauty accessible to all. Andy Hsu found a gap in the market for affordable ergonomic office furniture, designing high-quality products that are accessible to a wider audience. Hannah Wang combined mental health advocacy with stationery products, turning creative expression into a purpose-driven niche. Hellen Harbilas identified the niche for decorative and allergen-free candles for people with sensitivities.
Identifying and building a brand around a specific niche enables better brand positioning and a stronger emotional connection with your target audience.
What marketing strategies are vital in the stages of a growing ecommerce business?
According to various ecommerce founders, several key strategies were highlighted as vital marketing efforts during the early stages of their businesses. Digital marketing strategies such as SEO, content creation, and email marketing were identified as important tactics to grow a small business. Gilian Liu emphasized the importance of organic social media content, underlining its effectiveness when cultivating a strong relationship between the brand and its customers. Andy Hsu credited his brand’s success to email marketing, citing it as an effective marketing strategy to build long-term relationships with customers, starting from their inbox. In-person marketing was also found to be effective with Hannah Wang and Hellen Harbilas, both claiming that face-to-face conversations and physical interactions with the product helped grow their business and drive sales immensely.
Why is storytelling important when building a brand?
Storytelling gives brands an emotional presence, making the brand more personable and easier to build trust with from a consumer’s perspective. An authentic brand story humanizes the company and invites customers to invest in the brand’s journey, not just the products.
How has AI changed the digital retail landscape today?
AI is reshaping how brands show up online, specifically in search. With AI Overviews and ChatGPT gradually becoming primary sources of information for searchers, discovering new and small businesses has become more challenging. This is where a curated brand narrative comes into play. By establishing a clear brand narrative with problem-solving content, ecommerce businesses can break through the noise and take advantage of algorithmic search instead of letting algorithmic search take over them. Essentially, AI is forcing ecommerce companies to rethink content, visibility, and the customer experience, so learning how to work with AI instead of pushing it away will help your company more than hurt it.
What does the future of ecommerce look like?
AI-Integrated Tools AI continues to work itself into the ecommerce space, affecting how consumers discover your brands and its products. Luckily, using these AI tools for your brand’s benefit is becoming easier. Multi-Channel Selling With new ways to shop being created everyday, a multi-channel sales experience has never been more important. Relying on one channel, such as a Shopify store, limits who can find your product. By diversifying your sales channels, you ensure that your products are easily discoverable on various platforms.
What advice would e-commerce founders give to new entrepreneurs?
Start before you’re ready You don’t have to know everything about running an ecommerce business before becoming an entrepreneur. As Liu and Harbilas mentioned, every ecommerce founder begins their entrepreneurial journey with uncertainty. What’s important to keep in mind as an entrepreneur is that you need to be ready to learn and adapt. You learn by doing, so start now!
Create authentic content to connect and build trust with your audience People want to invest in companies that they can trust and it starts with how they perceive your brand. Creating an authentic online presence that your audience can relate to will encourage them to cultivate a strong relationship with your brand. Stay rooted in your ‘why’ You’ve found your niche, established your mission statement, and turned your personal passion project into an ecommerce brand. With the ever-changing online retail landscape forcing businesses to consistently adapt and re-strategize, it’s important to not lose sight of why you started your business. Carry that why through every business decision you make.
Chapters
00:00 The Future of Ecommerce and the Founders Defining It
01:06 Gillian Liu of Kiyoko Beauty: Content Creation for Asian Beauty
07:11 Hannah Wang of The Aesthetics Studio: Advocating for Mental Health Awareness Through Stationery
14:08 Andy Hsu of MotionGrey: Brand Storytelling for Ergonomic Furniture
21:20 Hellen Harbilas of Hellen’s Boutique: Finding Your Niche with Luxury Candles
Transcripts
Glynis Tao
Hi everyone and welcome to a special live edition of the Chase Your Dreams podcast coming to you from Ecom North. I'm your host, Glynis Tao. Normally on the show, we dive into the journeys of founders, fashion entrepreneurs, and e-commerce leaders. But today, we're on the ground at one of the most exciting events for digital commerce in North America. Over the next few minutes, I'll be speaking with founders who are building brands in real time, facing real challenges and pushing the boundaries of what's possible in e-commerce.
We'll talk about what's working, what's keeping them up at night, and where they see the industry heading, especially in the age of AI, rising ad costs, and shifting consumer behavior. So let's get started and hear directly from the voices shaping the future of e-commerce.
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.
My first guest is Gillian Liu, who is the co-founder at Kiyoko, a Toronto Bay station beauty e-commerce business. With a focus on organic content marketing, Kiyoko has achieved impressive mid-seven figure revenue while the founders maintained their full-time careers. Gillian leads the brand's marketing strategies, driving the company's success through authentic, engaging content that resonates with audiences. Here, Gillian talks about how a viral video boosted e-commerce growth and how they use content and SEO to drive traffic to their website at the very beginning of their business.
Please introduce yourself. Can you tell me your name and what you do?
Gillian Liu
I'm Gillian Liu. I'm one of the co-founders of Kiyoko Beauty. We're an online Asian beauty retailer. Think of us like the Sephora for Asian beauty. We sell Korean and Japanese skincare, haircare, and makeup.
Glynis Tao
Amazing. And so this is probably your second year at Econ North. Is that right? Last year was your first year here.
Gillian Liu
Yes, I was just an attendee last year and it was my first time attending a conference like this. And then this year I'm lucky to be back as a speaker.
Glynis Tao
That's amazing. Was that one of the highlights of the conference so far for you?
Gillian Liu
Yeah, I think so. It was really nice to just see how many people connected with my story and my narrative. What my talk was about was just to challenge people’s conceptions about escaping the 9-5 and trying to do the traditional entrepreneurial path, but I think my story is that you can do both. You can do your 9-5 and use it as a tool to scale your side hustle.
Glynis Tao
And can you tell me quickly about your brand and what makes it stand out?
Gillian Liu
Yeah, so Kiyoko is a Japanese girl's name and we decided to make it because our mission is to make Asian beauty for everyone. So I think for a long time, a lot of people thought of Asian beauty as only for Asian people and what we've been trying to do is make information about Asian beauty super accessible.
Our organic content has almost 300k followers and we make content every single day to make Asian beauty really accessible and understood by everyone and our customers range in ethnicity, age, and different demographics across North America.
Glynis Tao
Can you tell me, how did you get started in e-commerce?
Gillian Liu
It started off as like, “we'll do it for fun.” We started carrying maybe 30 Japanese skincare products and maybe had a couple orders every week and then it just really started taking off. I never thought I would be in ecommerce, but it just happens to be one of those things where you stumble into it and you really enjoy it and so we continued.
Glynis Tao
And in the early days of Kiyoko Beauty, what marketing strategies did you use to grow your business?
Gillian Liu
I think that very early on, we realized that content is an amazing way to market because it is free. You post it once and then you don't have to pay for it ever again. Early on, we found that if you make a viral video, it can change your business trajectory and that's exactly what we've had. We had a viral video in 2021, with 3 million hits on TikTok. And that was really the signal for us to double down on content.
Glynis Tao
And so, in a crowded e-commerce space, what do you think builds the most trust with customers today? Is it reviews, content, brand story, or something else?
Gillian Liu
I think it’s content because I think when you are known for content, people have established a trust and a relationship with your account and your brand. And so you're not just some other website. People have been watching you for months on their social media and they've come to trust you—that way that you can stand out across. Especially in my space, I'm a commodity. Anyone can start an Asian beauty store, but I think the difference is that people have built up that trust with us.
Glynis Tao
And if you had to place one big bet for the future of e-commerce, whether it's channel, technology, or strategy, what would it be?
Gillian Liu
That’s such a good question. I don't think about e-commerce as a whole. I very much stay in my lane. Like I think about Kiyoko and I don’t think about the industry at large. I think that in the world of AI, you will see a lot more AI-integrated tools. But also, I think when you sell physical goods, you're kind of like AI-proofed in a way because you're not selling software. It can't easily replace toiletries for example. That’s why I think it's a good time to be in a product business.
Glynis Tao
And I think I saw an interview that you did where you had mentioned that you had done some SEO at the very beginning of your business. So how important is SEO to you now considering all the changes happening with AI search and more? Has that taken a hit on your organic traffic?
Gillian Liu
It actually hasn't because I think SEO is like a long game—you build up your SEO over time. At first, it was something that you just have to make sure that your product descriptions are optimized and things like that. I don’t think that we do anything crazy on SEO, but we have been doing a lot more affiliate lately and that also helps with SEO because blogs and other sites are linking back to you. Slowly and steadily our SEO score can increase, but it's not something that I'm thinking about all the time. There’s no golden key that will just unlock SEO. It's a long-term game.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, absolutely. But you did mention that you create content and sounds like you do blogging as well, so I’m sure that helps to bring some of the traffic in as well.
And so if you weren't running this brand, what would you be doing? What would you be doing today?
Gillian Liu
I mean, I think that I would be working a 9-5 corporate job. I think that this world has opened up to me because of Kiyoko. Even coming to this conference last year, it's where I met so many people that just opened up this whole world of alternative career paths. I think that if I hadn't started Kiyoko, I wouldn't be in this. Now, if I were to start over today and I was like, I'm going to start a new brand, I don't know. I don't really think about this too often, but maybe something about pets. I feel like people love their pets and more and more people are not having children and choosing to have pets instead. So it's a growing market.
Well then, maybe in the future.
Glynis Tao
Well Gillian, thank you so much for sharing your story and insights on the special live edition of Chase Your Dreams at Econ North. Thank you.
Gillian Liu
Thank you.
Glynis Tao
What is your name and what do you do?
Hannah Wang
My name is Hannah. I run the stationery company called The Aesthetics Studio where I design stickers, stationery products like bookmarks, greeting cards, keychains, pretty much any gift items you can think of with all original designs. I currently sell directly to customers on Etsy and my website as well as to retailers on Fair Wholesale.
Glynis Tao
And is this your first time at Econ North?
Hannah Wang
Yes, this is my first time here.
Glynis Tao
What has been the highlight of the conference so far?
Hannah Wang
I think just connecting with other entrepreneurs, especially in the e-commerce space and also hearing the talks from different brands that have done really well and seeing how they've been able to scale and grow their businesses has been really inspiring.
Glynis Tao
And so can you tell me quickly about your brand and what makes it stand out?
Hannah Wang
Yeah, so my brand has a very strong focus in mental health awareness and promoting mental health coping strategies through the art of journaling, creative expression, and even coloring. We have a coloring book that's been doing really well, both in retail spaces and online. And it's because of how we've designed it. It's different than other coloring books where each item that you color is very small and digestible compared to a huge page that you usually find in coloring books. And so we've had a lot of customers find that more approachable and it's made our book very unique that people will come and buy it. We've had a lot of great feedback about that book.
So for us, being able to advocate for mental health awareness, letting people know that the benefits of journaling of mental health through the art of journaling has been really great. And we hope to promote that through stickers because we find that using stickers, using cute stationery really gets you wanting to use your journals, planners more, and in turn you definitely see an impact on your mental health.
Glynis Tao
Amazing! So how did you get started in e-commerce?
Hannah Wang
Yeah, so I started when I was 17. I had graduated high school and I was right during lockdown and I was like, I need something to do. So I started an Etsy shop and I was working on my Etsy shop. Everything was going great. But, I honestly don't remember fully what happened, but Etsy had to suspend my shop. I think it's because something I inputted was wrong. My mistake, I put something in wrong, but Etsy had to suspend my shop.
When Etsy suspended my shop, I started looking into it and I realized that while this time they'll probably fix it, there's a chance in the future that Etsy could just shut off your shop for no real reason. I've seen it happen, I've read about it happening to other creators, other artists. And I was like, I can't just have all my eggs in one basket. I need my own platform that I have control over.
So then I started my own website and now I ship directly to customers on my website. But I also still use Etsy just because there are benefits to Etsy too, but I don't want to rely solely on Etsy. So that's why I have my own website. I do all of the shipping, fulfillment, customer service, product listings, chronography, all of that on my own.
Glynis Tao
And you've been doing this for about five years?
Hannah Wang
Yes, five years.
Glynis Tao
In the early days of your brand, what marketing strategies did you use to grow your business?
Hannah Wang
Primarily Instagram. It's still the biggest platform that I use in terms of social media. I really relied heavily on Instagram and it was great because everybody was online pretty much all the time. So I would say Instagram was definitely the key. Now that we've switched back to more in-person events, I've been slowly doing more markets, more in-person events, doing pop-ups and things just to get that in-person connection as well.
Glynis Tao
And so in a crowded e-commerce space, what do you think builds the most trust with customers today? Is it reviews, content, brand story, or something else?
Hannah Wang
I think all of it plays a role. I think your brand needs to be unique to you, but it also needs to have products that are good on its own. So if anything is out of balance, it doesn't work. You need to have a good brand that's recognizable, but you also need to have products that actually live up to what you say they are. So your stickers need to be good quality. They need to be printed well, they can't be blurry, the cut lines need to be good. There's a lot of things that go into the production that needs to be really well made. And then you also need the brand side to be recognizable, reputable, like working with other companies. Doing content collaborations for example, is a great way to get your brand recognized with other companies as well as other customers. So I would say it's a mix of everything.
Glynis Tao
And if you had to place one big bet for the future of e-commerce, whether it's a channel, technology, or strategy, what would it be?
Hannah Wang
I have seen a lot of people talk about live shopping as one of the things that's growing and emerging. I think that is really cool. What I envision is kind of similar. It’s live shopping in a sense where, it’s not like VR exactly, but you would have products listed out and it's almost like a live auction where people can talk. You can walk through and share with a customer what's going on.
Because I think that a lot of times with online shopping, you don't get that in-person touch—people can't touch the product, they can't feel it. They can only look at the reviews, only look at the photos, but with live shopping, they can say, can you just show me the back of that? You can turn the camera around. Or can you flip through to this page? Or can you tell me how thick it is? Things like that, you can actually talk to your customer and it's almost like you're at a market event, but it makes it more accessible for people who aren't able to make it to market events. Or say they live too far away, but they still get a lot of the benefits that they would get if they were shopping in person. So I think that is really interesting. I'm not exactly sure how that will go, but I have heard of live shopping as one of the things that are emerging right now.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, that's very interesting. And if you weren't running your brand, what would you be doing other than that today?
Hannah Wang
If I wasn't running my brand, I would probably be running a different brand, to be honest. I really also enjoy crocheting and I've been getting more into crocheting. I started crocheting a few years ago and I've been designing patterns and things. So I think if I wasn't doing my brand, I would probably focus on crocheting. Looking at selling crochet patterns, looking at maybe even a crochet e-commerce platform because there are other platforms out there, but they're generally more restricted.
And I'm envisioning something more like Etsy, but like on a wider scale. So there are things I would love to do, I just don't have the ability to do it right now.
Glynis Tao
Maybe in the future.
Hannah Wang
Yeah, in the future.
Glynis Tao
Well Hannah, thank you so much for sharing your story and insight today and thank you for being here.
Hannah Wang
Thank you for having me. It was really nice talking to you.
Glynis Tao
Let’s start off by introducing yourself. What's your name and what do you do?
Andy Hsu
Sure. I'm the co-founder of MotionGrey. We are an e-commerce business focusing on ergonomic office furniture. So things like standing desk, office chairs, we are specializing in that niche and we've been doing it for eight years now.
Glynis Tao
Awesome. And so this isn't your first time at Econ, right?
Andy Hsu
No, actually the second time.
Glynis Tao
Second time! Awesome. So what's been the highlight of the conference for you so far?
Andy Hsu
For sure. So I think the first time I've been here, even now, I feel like there's a lot of buzz and energy around the room. I think in many ways, when I come to these events, I get the passion and the drive. It gets re-lit all the time. So I think just being around different entrepreneurs really propels another level of motivation that I can bring back to my own business. So yeah, just being around great people is the highlight, I would say, for Ecom North.
Glynis Tao
And so, tell me quickly about your brand and what makes it stand out.
Andy Hsu
Yeah. So the evolution of MotionGrey has been eight years. We focus on standing desks and office chairs, but we're really trying to bring the most value to our customers. We focus on innovation and product, but delivering that at an affordable price. So I think when we first got into the market, the options out there were very expensive and we wanted to close that gap because as users, we don't want to pay $1,000, $2,000 or something like that for what is essential. So from there, we really focused on product quality and pricing as well. Things from warehousing, logistics, even marketing, everything is done in and out to provide the best solution and cost effective model for the customer.
Glynis Tao
Wonderful. So you've been in this business for eight years now. What made you decide to get into e-commerce?
Andy Hsu
Wow, that's a good question. I actually didn't start off with e-commerce. I started as a website designer for small businesses. I was always very interested in being an entrepreneur, but I didn't know how to go into the market, but I really love the element of marketing. I like the element of designing. And e-commerce kind of combines both of that. It gives you a tangible product and also a way to market that product as well.
Coming from a civil engineering background, I do really resonate with product design, how to improve on an existing, visible product, and the creative part of myself, which is marketing, is a complete circle of what my passion is. So e-commerce really puts the two together for me. So I really, really love that.
Glynis Tao
Yeah. And you started off selling gaming chairs, didn't you?
Andy Hsu
Yes, I did!
Glynis Tao
In the early days? I remember that. Jason was so excited about those chairs. I think he got one for himself.
Andy Hsu
And we used to do conventions together to sell the chairs to a lot of passionate people. But yeah, like at the time, as a younger 20 year old, people around us were gaming. Esports was a huge, huge thing then and even now. But that's the initial idea of the office furniture brand which is MotionGrey. Gaming chairs were the initial product that we tapped into because it was a little bit bigger, a little bit bulkier, higher gear of entry to enter. So we found a good gap within that market. And then from there, it expanded into what we see as MotionGrey today.
Glynis Tao
Okay. Do you still sell gaming chairs?
Andy Hsu
We do, but it's expanded into MotionGrey.
Glynis Tao
Amazing. In those early days of MotionGrey, what marketing strategies did you use to grow the business?
Andy Hsu
For sure. I think the first one that I really locked in was email marketing. I think even with organic traffic or just people talking about MotionGrey, you really want to capture the customer information as soon as you can because that is where the real gold is, which is the emails, the phone numbers, and also the contact to the customer. So I really emphasize on making sure we were really diligent in our email marketing and email marketing campaigns. And from there, once you understand your funnel, then you can start to expand into paid ads. But the foundation was email marketing.
Glynis Tao
So, in a crowded e-commerce space, what do you think builds the most trust with customers today? Is it reviews, content, brand story, or something else?
Andy Hsu
I think you need the essentials. You definitely need to have a really great product because that's what would speak volume and that's what can extend the company to be in this market. But I would say authenticity in this crowded market is quite important. Not so much where ads can just deliver a direct sell, but I think the authenticity of a brand and also founder-like content has really risen in the last couple of years because in a crowded space, like where we're at now, I think being open and authentic from the founder perspective can really push a brand in the next couple of years.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, so storytelling you would say?
Andy Hsu
Storytelling is huge.
Glynis Tao
So if you had to place one big bet for the future of e-commerce, whether it's channel technology or strategy, what would it be?
Andy Hsu
Yeah, I think so with MotionGrey, we really maximize on marketplaces—Amazon, you got your Walmarts or your Best Buy. I think many sellers in the DTC space, they only focus on Shopify, but from the standpoint of visibility or just being able to generate a high top line and to use that cashflow to really build out your DTC business. I think being able to have your products on different marketplaces can actually simultaneously grow your business as a whole. I think implementing that strategy can really push a brand forward really quickly. So that's how we've been able to build an $18 million company. Not because we will rely strictly on Shopify, but we had to mix up Amazon, the Walmarts, the Best Buys, the Staples with our Shopify site. So cohesively, you can grow a company a lot quicker and get more visibility and eyes to your brand.
Glynis Tao
So having that diversity of distribution channels.
Andy Hsu
Multi-channels, yes.
Glynis Tao
It’s huge.
Andy Hsu
Yes.
Glynis Tao
Okay, and on all these different marketplaces.
Andy Hsu
I would say so.
Glynis Tao
And so, what would you be doing if you were not running this brand?
Andy Hsu
I think I might go back to website design. As a kid, I really loved designing shoes. I loved to play basketball. So in high school, I would actually draw basketball shoes. So like that design element, that design passion has always been there. I think a website designer or an element of that would probably be something that I look into. So, I'll be an entrepreneur still.
Glynis Tao
Still an entrepreneur!
Andy Hsu
Hopefully.
Glynis Tao
That's in your blood.
Andy Hsu
I think so, yeah.
Glynis Tao
Amazing. Well, Andy, thank you so much for sharing your story and insights today and for joining me on a special live edition of Chase the Dream's podcast at Econ North.
Andy Hsu
All right. See ya!
Glynis Tao
Tell me, what's your name and what do you do?
Hellen Harbilas
So my name is Hellen and I'm the owner and founder of Hellen's Boutique. I sell luxury sculpture candles, handmade pieces, and decor.
Glynis Tao
Is this your first time at Ecom North?
Hellen Harbilas
It is, yes.
Glynis Tao
What's been the highlight conference for you so far?
Hellen Harbilas
I think it's been very informative. I was a little scared coming in here and you like you got to spend a little bit of money to come here and some of these conferences don't really have added value, you know? You've seen that in the past, some little things are like false promises, but this has been great! In just the first day, the topic that resonated with me the most was AI storytelling. I feel like we need to be masters of telling our own story and sometimes it's so difficult to get out of your head as a business owner and see, okay, what do our customers want to know about us and how can we clearly define that message in our ads, copyright, our website, everything?
Glynis Tao
So tell me quickly about your brand. What makes it stand out?
Hellen Harbilas
Well, my story in general started off with me hating candles. I absolutely did not like candles on the market. It gave me headaches and nausea. You know how you're like opening up a candle in the store and you're like, oh my god, I can't even breathe. That's what inspired me to start Hellen's Boutique. I wanted a candle that not only looked really good, but also smelled really good and that you can actually be like this is such a relaxing fragrance and not a boom in your face. So what makes this different is like our premium soy wax and our premium fragrance oils. Our premium fragrance oils just means that there's less allergens than a typical fragrance oil. They irritate your sinuses less. So, I think that powered with the craftsmanship and our decor part of the business makes us stand out. I call it a little pretty air freshener. That's what I call it.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, well air fresheners can be so bad for you.
Hellen Harbilas
Absolutely.
Glynis Tao
Right? Because they're all made of chemicals and toxins. So did you start the business because you identified there was sort of that need in the market?
Hellen Harbilas
Absolutely. Yeah. Everybody was telling me, I don't really like the candles at like, I'm not going to start naming name brands. You know who I'm talking about, but very strong scented candles. There was definitely like a need. There's a lot of people like me and I was literally like my biggest tester. Like if they didn't work with my sinuses and my allergies, I wouldn't produce it.
Glynis Tao
And so how did you get started in ecommerce?
Hellen Harbilas
Learning like everybody else, I actually started my business in the pandemic, so I had to learn everything from scratch. I researched all of the products and I made my website. I just started and did my website by myself. I had learned everything from A to Z on how to even program the site and enter some code. I actually did something where I chose a theme that was no longer available on Shopify and I only found that out like last year. I had a full mental breakdown, by the way. I was like, oh my goodness, I have to change the entire theme. I hadn't updated my website because when you're doing your own coding and your own theme, you absolutely have to update your website every year so you can match Shopify and then you can bring out the most updated tools. I wasn't doing that.
So now I learned my lesson. just choose the default theme and I add what I need.
Glynis Tao
So a lot of learning in the beginning.
Hellen Harbilas
Absolutely and consistent learning throughout the years. I don't think you're ever done changing your website as a business owner.
Glynis Tao
Always a work in progress.
Hellen Harbilas
Every day you're like, oh my God. I don't really like this button and I don't really like this section, this doesn't make sense. And you gotta change it over and over again.
Glynis Tao
That's usually how it is, I find. So in those early days building a brand, what marketing strategy did you use to grow your business?
Hellen Harbilas
Man, like it was a tough time, right? Like I was literally in the midst of a pandemic and I think my first strategy was to get my products out there to the people in-person so they can see it, test the market to see if people will buy it and validate that product.
I spent three months researching and then all of a sudden I was just walking in my neighborhood in Toronto and I saw people popping up there and it was September 2021. And people were doing markets outside of Arta Gallery, actually. Arta Gallery was doing this thing where they would take small businesses and allow them to pop up in front of their store outside. Like a little outdoor flea market. I saw that and I was like, you know what? I have nothing to lose. Let me go ask. And then they accepted me. And then my first ever pop up was October 10th, 2021. That was almost four years ago today. I tested the market and I remember making like $500 on one day, just popping up.
I think, pop-ups was, at least in my first year of growth, was getting my product in front of customers, getting my website, using the Etsy platform, and getting into the wholesale portion of that, but that was only like the second year of business where we started to grow even further. Then we were able to concentrate a little bit more on the growth part, less on the product and testing part.
Glynis Tao
And so you've been doing it for five years now?
Hellen Harbilas
Four years, yes.
Glynis Tao
Started during pandemic time. So in a crowded e-commerce space, what do you think builds the most trust with customers today? Is it reviews, brand story, or something else?
Hellen Harbilas
Well, as we are learning with this conference and I know that you've gone to several sessions, I think it's an all-encompassing of all of those three plus a few more things. I feel like as a business owner, you realize that when you're posting content online, sometimes you have to post the funny things and you have to be your own influencer of your business, but that doesn't really generate sales. So you need to find a way to tell your story, but also attract the right audience. And that's what I struggle with the most too—getting my content out to the right people. I've had videos gone viral, but they went viral to other business owners, which is great. But the other business owners are not really my target audience. So it's like, how do you align your content with the things that actually are gonna get your customers to buy it?
And then obviously, the website is important and SEO. Everybody talks about SEO. It's something that I still try to… I think all business owners keep trying to master it every day—trying to try to change things on their website. But I think the most important thing about SEO is you have to be focused on actually, not putting keywords into your site. More like, tell me about your product and be specific and descriptive and focus on the actual problem that you're solving rather than just say like, like this is just a soy candle. Okay, well, if you type in soy candles on Google, guess what comes up? A lot of stuff that's not my stuff. So you have to be very specific and that's also what I'm trying to work on as well. They’re kind of marketed in a way, as you saw, my candles are more like decorative pieces. So kind of like switching the narrative a bit and more of like a decorative sales pitch than an actual candle that you can burn because everybody tells me that my candles are too pretty to burn. And that's not the problem. I want you to burn it, but you don't have to burn it. It's a pretty air freshener.
Glynis Tao
They look like little sculptures, right?
Hellen Harbilas
Yeah. And they still freshen your space.
Glynis Tao
You can display them like pieces of art. You don't have to burn them.
Hellen Harbilas
I actually want them to burn it. It's better for me. I always want more money. Anyways, it's an investment piece. You have to invest in your home and the way that it looks. It will literally last forever. One of my first customers who ever bought from me in October, had bought like October 2021, had bought a candle from me and she says that it still smells now to this day. So four years later. I mean, lasts forever. Literally.
Glynis Tao
Yeah. Well, that is a good investment. If you had to place one big bet for the future of e-commerce, whether it's a channel, technology or strategy, what would it be? Sort of like, where are we headed?
Hellen Harbilas
Hmm. Where are we headed? A very scary place. That's what I'm thinking of. First off, I just did a session. They went through like the SEO and like the future of SEO and then they said that basically maybe at one point or another, we won't necessarily need Google to pop up. People are going to be using a lot of AI. So you're going to go to ChatGPT and you're going to say, give me the best of the best candles with the most amazing reviews and all of that. And then that's going to be able to search all the websites. If you don't come up, you basically don't exist and that kind of freaked me out because I'm like, man, that's freaky.
Glynis Tao
It is. Like, what’s the point of your website? Yeah, because you put so much work into it and you don't even show up. I think this is a big challenge for a lot of brands right now and there's a lot of confusion I think around what AI search is and how it works and most importantly how do you make your brand come up in AI search. Interesting conversations. I think it's a hot topic which I would like to continue and have more conversations around.
Hellen Harbilas
Absolutely.
Glynis Tao
But anyways, let me just ask you if you weren't doing this business now, what would you be doing?
Hellen Harbilas
Oh my goodness. Well, part of me could tell you that I would be living in Paris, France, going to school to become a fashion designer. That's one of my other dreams as well. So I've always wanted to be a fashion designer ever since I was like seven years old, I started drawing and stuff. And this year I recently got a chance to live there for two months and I did take my sewing classes over there and I absolutely loved it. And I would be like, yeah, absolutely. I would totally come here and live here in a heartbeat and start working on this slowly. That's part of my side projects as well is like working on developing that art person, that fashion person on the other side. So that's what I would be doing. I would be in Paris.
Glynis Tao
We should just trade lives because I was working in fashion for a little while. That was sort of my past life working in the fashion industry. Now I switched to more tech, I guess. But yeah, that sounds like fun. And so thank you so much.
Hellen Harbilas
Thank you.
Glynis Tao
For being here and sharing your story and insights with us on the special edition live at Ecom North.
Hellen Harbilas
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Glynis Tao
For our listeners, if you like to learn more about Hellen’s business, we'll have the links in the show notes. And if you want to share your social handles as well to the audience.
Hellen Harbilas
My Instagram is hellens.boutique with two L's for Hellens and then it's just hellensboutique.com or hellensboutique on TikTok.
Glynis Tao
Awesome! Thank you so much!
Hellen Harbilas
Thank you for having me!
Glynis Tao
For our listeners, if you'd like to learn more about all the founders interviewed in today's podcast, we'll have the links in the show notes.
And if you're a founder who's been listening and thinking about how to get more visibility and sales through SEO, especially with all the changes happening in search right now, you can connect directly with me at hello@glynistao.com or you can DM me on Instagram at glynistao.
Thanks again for tuning in. Hopefully you enjoyed these conversations with incredible founders from Ecom North.
Thank you so much for tuning in. You can find me on Instagram at 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!
Jeanel Alvarado, founder of RETAILBOSS, has built her career helping entrepreneurs navigate the fast-changing world of retail. In this episode, she shares how she went from starting a blog to building a global consulting firm, and the lessons you can apply to your own business. You’ll hear how consumer habits are shifting, what AI means for the future of online shopping, and why blogging and content creation are still powerful tools for building authority. By the end, you’ll walk away with practical steps to help you future-proof your retail business and stay competitive in a market that never stops evolving.
About Jeanel Alvarado
Jeanel Alvarado is a visionary leader in media and retail and the founder and CEO of RETAILBOSS, a platform she launched in 2011. With over 15 years in the retail industry, Jeanel has grown Retail Boss from a blog into an internationally recognized retail publication and consulting firm trusted by professionals around the world. She's also the founder and head of marketing at Stylebuy a B2B wholesale platform and fashion label offering women's, men's, kids' wear, and lifestyle products.
Through her partnership with Glow, Jeanel hosts, manages, and produces fashion events and influencer gifting experiences. Her career includes serving as senior managing director at the School of Retailing at the University of Alberta School of Business, where she led consulting projects for major brands like Victoria's Secret, Tiffany & Co., and various real estate firms that own shopping centers and malls.
Leverage AI search early to capture new customer discovery.
Learn core e-commerce metrics to guide smarter decisions.
Blog consistently to build trust and credibility.
Optimize product pages for long-tail, detailed searches.
Create content that proves your expertise versus making claims.
Understand and embrace AI tools to stay ahead of competitors.
Use physical retail to deliver memorable brand experiences.
Pivot quickly when trends, tech, or consumer behavior shifts.
Interview themes
How did blogging spark a career in retail strategy?
Jeanel’s journey began with a simple blog where she shared case studies, brand opinions, and retail observations while still in school. What started as commentary on campaigns and retail experiences soon caught the attention of boutique owners, who began reaching out for her advice. This opened the door to consulting work and planted the seed for Retail Boss. Jeanel shows how putting your ideas into the world—through blogging or content—can establish credibility and lead to unexpected opportunities.
What were the biggest challenges of early e-commerce?
Launching her first e-commerce business in the mid-2010s came with steep learning curves. Platforms like Shopify were still in their infancy, offering limited themes and straightforward functionality at a low subscription cost (which was beneficial to new entrepreneurs) but, analytics, and bounce rates were foreign concepts. Jeanel explains that the hardest part wasn’t getting a site online, but learning to optimize and maintain it—figuring out why visitors weren’t converting, testing photos and pricing, and using data to improve performance.
How has retail marketing shifted over the past decade?
Ten years ago, physical retail was the main priority, and e-commerce often existed as a side channel. Today, the order is reversed—new brands typically launch online first, with physical stores establishing later on or not at all. Jeanel highlights this dramatic shift, noting that foot traffic in malls is no longer a reliable driver, and direct-to-consumer websites have become the first point of contact for most shoppers. The retail playbook has been flipped, and businesses must adapt their strategies to meet customers where they are.
Why is adapting early to new technology a “must” for e-commerce success?
From e-commerce to AI, Jeanel sees a clear pattern: many brands resist change at first, only to realize later that the new technology has become essential. Just as e-commerce went from optional to unavoidable, she believes AI will soon be a core sales funnel. Platforms like Google and Perplexity are positioning themselves as the next discovery engines, reclaiming ground once dominated by social media. Her advice: don’t wait until it’s mainstream—adapt early so your brand stays competitive.
How is Google AI changing search and shopping?
According to Jeanel, search behavior has permanently shifted. Consumers no longer search only by brand names—they’re using detailed long-tail queries like “100% cotton eco-friendly shirt.” Google’s AI shopping features now surface products that match these specifics, often allowing customers to purchase directly through Google without visiting a brand’s website. For retailers, this means product pages must be more descriptive, optimized with clear details, and ready for discovery outside their own storefronts.
Why is blogging still a powerful tool?
Despite the perception that blogging is outdated, Jeanel argues it’s more relevant than ever—just reimagined in new formats like video blogs, influencer roundups, and Substack newsletters. Blogs remain a top source of data for AI search engines, helping establish expertise, credibility, and trust. For brands, blogging isn’t about random updates—it’s about documenting your story, showcasing authority, and giving AI and consumers alike the proof points they need to trust your brand.
What role does credibility play in standing out online?
Jeanel believes that in today’s retail market, success isn’t about what you claim—it’s about what your work proves. Whether through case studies, blog content, or consistent publishing, letting your work “do the work for you” is the fastest way to build authority. She emphasizes that consumers and AI alike look for evidence: brand backstories, sustainability practices, certifications, and partnerships. Sharing this information consistently builds the trust that drives visibility and conversions.
What advice does Jeanel give to new entrepreneurs?
Her first piece of advice: learn the basics yourself before outsourcing. You don’t need to be an SEO or e-commerce expert, but understanding the fundamentals gives you control and prevents costly mistakes. Second, be willing to pivot. The market moves quickly, and clinging to an idea that no longer works can sink a business. By staying adaptable and building a foundation of knowledge, entrepreneurs can scale more sustainably and seize new opportunities as they emerge.
Chapters
00:00 The Evolution of AI in Retail
02:47 Jeanel Alvarado's Journey in Retail
05:46 Challenges in E-commerce Development
08:45 The Shift to Online Retail
11:45 Navigating E-commerce Platforms
14:31 Adapting to Changing Marketing Landscapes
17:33 The Importance of Physical Retail Experience
20:27 The Role of Blogging in Modern Marketing
23:23 Strategies for Scaling Retail Businesses
26:15 The Impact of AI on Consumer Behavior
29:16 Future-Proofing Retail with AI
32:06 Building Credibility Through Content
35:27 Advice for Aspiring Retail Entrepreneurs
Transcript
Jeanel Alvarado
I know there are a lot of people resisting AI and it was almost the same thing with people resisting 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 are trying to be that they want to be it.
Social media had its run for discovering products. Google and these AI 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 of the 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 in. How can we keep them here? That is what I believe in 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, they're 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
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.
Today's guest is Jeanel Alvarado, a visionary leader in media and retail and the founder and CEO of Retail Boss, a platform she launched in 2011. With over 15 years in the retail industry, Jeanel has grown Retail Boss from a blog into an internationally recognized retail publication and consulting firm trusted by professionals around the world. She's also the founder and head of marketing at Stylebuy a B2B wholesale platform and fashion label offering women's, men's, kids' wear, and lifestyle products.
Through her partnership with Glow, Jeanel hosts, manages, and produces fashion events and influencer gifting experiences. Her career includes serving as senior managing director at the School of Retailing at the University of Alberta School of Business, where she led consulting projects for major brands like Victoria's Secret, Tiffany & Co., and various real estate firms that own shopping centers and malls. I'm thrilled to have her here today to talk about her entrepreneurial journey, scaling a global retail brand and navigating the future of e-commerce and AI in retail.
Welcome Jeanel, it's so nice to have you here today. Thanks for joining me on the podcast.
Jeanel Alvarado
I'm so happy to be here. Thank you so much for reaching out. I am ecstatic about this.
Glynis Tao
Great. So we had met through a mutual friend of ours, lovely Adila Cokar from Source My Garment.
Jeanel Alvarado
Adila connected us from Source My Garment, who has just an incredible wealth of knowledge on how brands can be more sustainable, or if you're not already a brand, that you can become more sustainable. So yeah, she connected us both, and I'm super glad that she did.
Glynis Tao
Yeah. And I interviewed Adila on this podcast as well a few years ago during COVID. So she offered some really great advice, but I'm actually surprised that our paths didn't cross sooner. And we share a common thread having worked in the Canadian fashion industry for so long. I'm based in Vancouver. I lived in Toronto for 15 years and you are currently based in Edmonton, right?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yes. Edmonton, Alberta, yeah.
Glynis Tao
Yay! I've been to Edmonton several times for trade shows and conventions. It's a great city. A lot of good food there actually.
Jeanel Alvarado
Yeah, we have a pretty good foodie scene, especially in the summertime. We have a lot of events like Taste of Edmonton, as well as Heritage Days. But yeah, Toronto's known for having some really good restaurants though, top of the chain.
Glynis Tao
So I feel like I've been meeting people who I swear are living parallel lives. My last interview was with Laura-Jean Bernhardson, who owned three fashion retail stores in Toronto. And she spoke about building a fashion retail business with heart and strategy. And I think your journey has a lot of parallels, especially when it comes to adapting, scaling in a changing retail market.
Jeanel Alvarado
I know. Changing almost too much. I mean, I can't think of any other industry other than retail that has been just flipped over, slam dunked so many times over this last decade here. It has been a crazy whirlwind of events.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, so much. You know, she started her business in the 90s and went up to the, I think she closed her store in Kensington Market and Queen Street around 2022 due to pandemic. But she was saying how, you know, in those early days, before the internet, she had to call her customers and tell them about new products and sales and stuff like that. So she's been through like two, two decades in retail.
So it's just amazing all the changes that have happened, but you've built a successful career as a marketer, retail strategist. Can you tell us about your background and what inspired you to start your first business?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yeah, so my background was blogging to start. So I always had an interest in fashion. I went right after high school to university and the goal was to become a fashion designer right at the time I was 17 years old. I got into school and then within the first year I realized no, sewing is not made for me. And what was also interesting is although I wasn't taking any sort of business specific courses, we were having to take economic courses because I was at the University of Alberta. So we did have to in our first year also along with fashion design classes, have to take some economic 101, 102. And that's when I learned a lot more about supply and demand, how the economy works and how much we rely on so many external factors such as the retail industry or how consumers behave in shops. And that got me really interested in the business side. And then from there, I pretty much pivoted into business and yeah, I ended up finishing. Well, I have a BCOM in marketing. And then I also have a certificate in real estate, both from the U of A. And when I was there doing real estate, it was focused mainly on commercial, so shopping centers, strip malls, all that good stuff when it comes to securing a store in physical retail.
And so how did your background and early career experiences shape the vision for Retail Boss and your other ventures?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yeah. So I had, while I was actually just finishing up that degree, I launched Style Buy. So I was already trying to do a lot more with e-commerce because we had actually gone to Toronto and we were at the Shopify head offices back when the stock price was in the forties, right? A good time to buy. And we were there. We were there in Shopify. Yeah. And you know what's funny when I was there, yeah, our tour person was like, hey, buy some Shopify stock. I'm like, okay, I'm still here in school. And yeah, that's kind of what opened my eyes to, okay, e-commerce, learned a bit what Shopify was. This was in the early days. So this is in 2015, 2016. yeah, so Style Buy was launched using Shopify back when I was in university. And so, yeah, that's just kind of how my journey started.
Prior to that, I was already blogging. I was already working also at the U of A as I started out as a senior consultant, moved up to a managing director, then a senior managing director. When I graduated, they kept me on for the school of retailing, which is just a center that was in the school of business at the time, that where we would work with retail partners to do any kind of consulting, as well as like you had mentioned, some of the real estate firms that own some of the malls like West Edmonton Mall and different malls and we're always looking for, how can they bring in more traffic and how can they diversify their retail mix of stores for it can entice people to continue shopping?
Glynis Tao
Okay, and in those early days, what problem were you most determined to solve in the retail industry?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yeah, I would say during that time, things were just becoming digital. It's so funny. And we talked about this before on an earlier call that now it is the norm for someone to have an idea and just jump into a website builder. It could be Shopify, it could be Wix and get their brand off the ground. When back in 2015, 2016, almost 10 years ago, this was not the norm. If you had an idea, you would look for a consultant or someone, right, like myself, to help you along that journey. And so during that time, we were actually just in the infancy of figuring out how these physical retailers also have an online presence. So we were mainly focused on that omni-channel.
Seeing e-commerce is just an extension of the store, similar to how the stores were just seeing social media as an extension, right? Not the main drivers. But now fast forward 10 years later, e-commerce is the main driver. Social media is the main driver. And, you know, it's the store that almost takes the backseat.
Glynis Tao
So what were some of the biggest challenges that you faced in getting your business off the ground in the beginning?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yeah, I would say in the very beginning, especially like I'm saying, Shopify only had a few tools at the time. The pro was that the pricing of the plans were a lot cheaper than they are today. The challenge was learning how this works. I mean, it's one thing to have a website builder and it's another thing similar to what Shopify and WooCommerce, which have that whole backend, right? Which is for inventory management, analytics. So I would say it was understanding and learning this new e-commerce world.
So yeah, great, we have traffic, but only half are buying. Why? Right, so figuring out and then what tools or apps can we add to fix this? Is it communication? Is it that we don't have good photos? Is it the pricing? Is it that at checkout there's something happening there or we're not, you know, we don't have an abandoned email, right, going out to kind of get that customer back.
So I think the main challenge wasn't just launching, because I think back then, for me, that was still easy. It was easy for me to get up there and do it, but it was that maintenance on, how do I utilize all this data back here? What's the bounce rate? It's just learning the whole new jargon of e-commerce that took the longest.
Yeah, and so it was really that time period I would say in the mid 2000s to 2010s right? I guess when e-comm started to take off.
Jeanel Alvarado
It was already taking off and Shopify made it where you could do it yourself, a one-man team that you could do it. So e-commerce definitely was already becoming a thing. But also like so many stores had it like big we're talking about big name stores still didn't have a robust e-commerce sites where you could order or buy. That still wasn't the norm.
Glynis Tao
Mm-hmm. And so is there one e-comm platform that you prefer over another?
Yeah, I think it really depends. There's so many in the market right now. I mean, with all this AI technology, there's places where you can just have AI make your whole site, even select what product you should sell to what market. So there's so much out there. I think Shopify was definitely the pioneer of DIY do it yourself. You don't need to hire someone. You can figure this out and do it yourself. And it was very simplified. Like I'm telling you, I was in university. I was still taking full-time classes and I was able to easily get it all started and launch on my own on a plan that was, think, you know, between the $10 a month range that handled everything. So definitely at the time Shopify was the number one, if not the only pick to do something like that without having to really learn too much of the complex things, right? What was really interesting was Shopify at the time when I got on there, they only had maybe three themes. Three or four themes that you could pick from. And you couldn't really customize them, which actually was great because you couldn't really spend time tweaking something. It was just, this is what it is, put your products on. They've already figured out that this layout works the best for mobile and desktop to convert. So they really took all that pressure off designing. So that was number one.
But now, like I said, I can't say that they're the number one. There's so many other platforms that would provide more customization. So WooCommerce would probably be one of them, which is like part of WordPress or one of the backend for WordPress. And you can completely customize and the same thing, they got apps, but that takes a bigger learning curve there, I think. But yeah, I think there's just so many things out there, but yeah, Shopify is definitely way more expensive now than it was back when I was there.
Glynis Tao
Mm-hmm they’re now maybe a couple hundred dollars a month?
Jeanel Alvarado
They are actually more expensive. Like I still have my invoices from back then and even apps were way cheaper. I think some apps that I had were maybe $2 a month. Now an app usually is $29 a month. Back then also it was in Canadian dollars. I think Shopify now has everything in US dollars. I'm not sure how they do it or they tell you in USD and now you can pay in Canadian. But again, it's substantially more expensive. And I couldn't tell you that really it's any better than what it was 10 years ago. You know, it was so simplified, get on there, get out. Now I think it's a little bit more complex. You got so many options, so many apps. I'm not sure, but again, maybe that's just their strategy to have you have 20 apps plus the plan. And then that's what, 300, 400 a month.
Glynis Tao
Shopify definitely changed the game for e-com. I had my online e-commerce store before Shopify even existed. I think I had a CS cart or something. Wasn't that great. I know Shopify would have made my life a lot easier if it was available at that time.
Jeanel Alvarado
Absolutely, yeah, it was definitely a game changer. I, like I said, they pioneered it and then I'll definitely give them that.
Glynis Tao
Yeah. And so how have you seen the retail marketing landscape change since you started and how have you adapted or even have seen your clients adapt?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yeah, I would say huge, huge. It's just not something that is even negotiable to have you, if you're launching a brand. Now it's like a website first. I mean, store location is like last, if even on their radar for starting a brand or selling products at all. So that's a huge change. Back then the only, you know, clients that particularly we had were people who already had physical stores or boutiques, right? So they already had a physical presence or they were selling in retailers, right? And their main website was primarily just for those wholesale customers. So it was more like you can log in once you're a customer. Yeah, right. So the brands didn't really have even their own sites. So yeah, now looking into today, it's like a no brainer. I mean, D2C is the first thing, having your own online storefront is the first thought. So when I do have clients that reach out, it's always they have an e-commerce store or it's like, that's usually the priority here. And then everything else is kind of secondary, which is just so different from how it was just 10 years ago. It is a totally different industry.
The biggest thing has just been a lot of the retailers, I think, scaling down or making smaller, making their larger retail footprints, not in terms of having multiple stores, but having smaller stores, right? Because it's not that many people are walking the stores as much as they used to, right? And malls aren't as big a draw factor as they used to for customers. So you can't just, hey, I'm the new Forever 21, you know in this era and we're going to open up a bunch of stores and malls and people are just going to buy because people are always there. Those days are over. That was the playbook, right? 10 years ago, you can attest.
Glynis Tao
I can, yeah. I know, I guess different generations too. And who is shopping online compared to, you know, in the malls, if you walk into a mall these days, you kind of look around and scan the demographic, right? And it gives you an idea as to who's still shopping at shopping malls. And I guess everyone else is online. So I feel like I'm sort of that in-between. Still enjoy the mall experience. And seeing, especially when it comes to clothing, I still like the experience of feeling, feeling and trying it on as opposed to ordering something online. I mean, I've ordered online, but usually after I've gone into the store and have seen it or tried it on and I know for sure and I'm like, maybe I can find a better price online. And then, yeah, but I don't know, I guess I'm still sort of that old fashioned person who still likes the physical experience.
Jeanel Alvarado
Yeah. And I would say, you know, I also like the physical experience too, because here's the thing. I ordered online multiple times and it never looks like how it looks on the model. Right? The sizing also, you never really know what the size is. You're a medium here, you're a small here. There's no consistency across all those e-commerce brands. But what I'm saying is the main differentiation here is that brands used to let, like I said look for high traffic areas. They would launch into these stores, in these malls, in these strip centers that already have the traffic. And they would just rely on that to build up the brand. And those customers, it would be their first touch point, right? You would learn about a brand because it was there in the mall. Okay, the gap. And then that's your first experience. You can touch, you can feel like you said then you can go online, kind of have, you know what the sizing is, you have better ideas, and then now you can kind of go there.
But now, it's almost reversed. A lot of these Gen Z or these younger people, they're finding out about these brands first through social media, right? Social media is number one for that kind of first touch point for a lot of this next generation. then, also myself now, right? So you learn about so many new brands through social media, and then your next touch point is their website, right? You get their website, and then probably your first purchase is through the website, because they don't have physical stores. And then so it's almost like the store, the touching and being in that brand's physical presence would be the last thing, or if they ever do choose to do that. So that's almost like what I'm saying, the new launch strategy is flipped completely.
Glynis Tao
Just going back to what you're saying about when stores used to be like, if they're in a mall, then they just rely on foot traffic, right? It's like instant visibility, though even having to do much marketing, they can just completely rely on that. But now being an online world, I think it's a whole different ball game because you're up against so much competition. And so I think that's sort of where these retailers struggle. You know, say if they were formerly just brick and mortar stores, physical locations. I have a client actually who owns a physical store in Toronto selling sporting apparel and she moved online to e-commerce and she was like, I don't know what to do here. Like you're going to have to help me with this because you know, I'm used to selling physical, selling in-person selling, you know, this whole e-comm thing is like new to me. So is that kind of what you're seeing out there as well?
Jeanel Alvarado
Absolutely, absolutely. And the friend you just messaged is probably my ideal client, right? For me, because there's a lot of now the new generations are doing a lot of that DIY. So they're actually learning a lot more about that e-commerce side of things and how to manage it themselves, opposed to, like you said, those existing brands who have storefronts or boutiques anywhere. Launching e-commerce is a full-time job in itself.
And that's a whole other arm of the business. It's not just, you know, okay, once in a while, this is an ongoing, everyday, customer is emailing all the things. So it's really something that a lot of those physical stores struggled with. And yes, they did need outside assistance to carry that on. They cannot shut their doors down to be working on a website all day. So that was the perfect moment. And that's a lot of what we were doing, even when I worked at the center, helping with figuring out their e-commerce strategy, digital strategy, and understanding how to connect, you know, store inventory and e-commerce inventory, or should you have separate inventory? Or if you have multiple stores, how do you manage all the inventory?
And again, I'll give Shopify that because one of my clients that I work with, and she has a boutique in Edmonton, she uses Shopify and it does a really good job with the POS because they also have POS systems that can connect to your e-commerce store. So you can see, right, you can see sales across all the stores. So she knows this location in the north side made X amount today. This one in the south side made this amount today. And this is how much we made on e-commerce, which helps them prioritize their marketing budget because they got to kind of now split that up between an extra source there. And that's the thing that you just mentioned. Yeah, how do I sell online? And again, now you need a new budget just for that.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, so for this particular client, they are using Shopify as their POS. So I can see on the back end analytics, their POS sales from the store and their e-comm sales. And when she reached out to me, she was like, my goal is to increase e-comm sales, increase my online sales. I got the retail business down, right? Like, how do I increase my e-comm side of the business. And I'm like, you know what, this is a huge opportunity here for you because like with your physical store, you're serving the local GTA Toronto market, right? And she both built the name for herself and people know about her as the go to for this sportswear apparel. But I'm like, with the e-comm store, you have this opportunity to serve so many other people across the country, in the States, like, you know, she gets customers buying from the US. This is huge. I think now more retailers are beginning to understand that and realize just how important the e-comm, DTC side of their business is. But I think they still need help with it.
Jeanel Alvarado
Absolutely, they need help. It's new, either they've got to outsource it or they need to hire an in-house team for it. Like we just chatted about, it's no longer just something to pass time to just put up a little flyer now and then. That's not what the website is anymore.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, exactly. Or the thought of like, if we build it, they will come. If you just launch the site that magically the customers will just appear.
Jeanel Alvarado
Yeah, no, unfortunately not. Yeah, so no, it's definitely something that is a whole, and I think we're still at the beginning of even like jobs because it's funny because I'll be out here and I think right now it's been a good time for people like us to get a lot of new clients because it's still not something that's really taught in school. So it's not like every year there's an influx of people who are master e-commerce or SEO experts like yourself.
There's, it's not taught, right? So those roles are still being outsourced. They're looking for experts, looking for an external agency or team or like you said, consultant or strategist to take on either giving them a game plan or managing that day to day and helping them get to those goals. Because there's just not anything right now. And that's being, I think, taught across the board to feed into this new department that's needed for probably every single store, every single store across the world.
Glynis Tao
Yeah. And if you're a small boutique owner, you definitely will not have a marketing department that's going to be able to handle this.
Jeanel Alvarado
But they don't know marketing is different from e-commerce. When I finished school, I knew lots about marketing, lots about real estate. Like I said, with my business, my style buy, that one was me learning hands-on e-commerce. That's what I'm telling you. That was a huge learning curve because the most we learned in business school is like, e-commerce is a website, end of story. Right? There's nothing really else here for you. It's when you actually have to start using these platforms where you're like, what is bounce rate? What's organic traffic? What's this traffic paid? How do I get paid? Right? They're just so many things that you find out and what's abandonment rate? So many things. Bounce rate. They're just too many things.
And again, unless you have the time to DIY and learn it all yourself. But if you're someone who's already managing something successful, it's better to just bring in an expert or a team to externally to manage that because they can easily take what you've done if you're successful physically. It's so much easier to be successful online because one of the biggest drawbacks online is poor customer service, right? Having tested out the product.
So maybe what they're selling isn't the best, but you've already tested all these products. So even online, they can go in with just their best sellers and start tapping into different markets.
Glynis Tao
I just want to go back to your business for a second. You had said that you set up Style Buy when you were just finishing your degree and then, so that was your first e-comm business.
Jeanel Alvarado
I was already working on it while I was in school. Yes.
Glynis Tao
And then Retail Boss came after that.
Jeanel Alvarado
So I was already blogging. So I already had Retail Boss before that. So Retail Boss was the first, but that was just for blogging. And then also I was getting booked to do consulting and local boutiques, which prior I was just blogging specifically related to what I was learning in school. So many interesting things. And I felt like this is so interesting. I might as well blog about it. So I would just have random case analysis that I would do about random brands or opinions on brand campaigns. And I would post it and I was on, I think it was blogger.com at the time. And so I was just always there. And from there, I had a local boutique reach out to me and they're like, I really like what you said about how stores should have more experience in store. Cause I was, I wrote up something related to Build-A-Bear and how they've done something so interesting that brings kids in all the time and they focus on, know, if you look at the stats, how many babies or kids have birthdays every month? And that's just, they really tapped into that. And she was trying to figure out, that's so interesting that you wrote about that. Do you help, you know, people do that or figure out ways to do that? And at the time I didn’t, I just had the blog, but I said, sure, I don't mind coming down and seeing what you're doing and see if I have any ideas. And that's kind of how it pushed me into this could maybe be a career for myself to provide advice or solutions based on what I've learned.
Glynis Tao
Yeah. So Retail Boss has become a leading platform for retail professionals. Would you be able to share some of the key strategies that helped you scale that business?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yeah. So Retail Boss specifically. And it's funny because I also, now that I've successfully built up, guess what you would call a media platform. I also help people who are looking to do the same. I actually just had a contract that I was almost done with her media website and they actually also sell services in a whole different industry. What I would say is I just kind of, I just was just bombarded with just 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, okay, 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? 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 test of 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 blimp. 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 TikTok, people buying on TikTok and those live feeds, they really gained momentum there.
Glynis Tao
I guess that's all 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, hey, 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 a hundred thousand visitors a month. It's like it's 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
Yeah, I think it's about building credibility and trust for your brand. And this really leads into this next hot topic discussion. So you have written a blog about Google's new AI-powered shopping tools. What do you see as the biggest implications for our e-commerce brands?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yes, so many things. And we talked about this on an earlier call as well. My main takeaway, because I just love giving just main takeaways, right before I just write it down, is that the search, Google search, and just the behavior of how customers search is changing. And it's changing forever. It's not going to go back ever to how people used to search. The way people are searching is changing.
And especially in particular here, what we're talking about is searching for products. All right. So before people would search online again, a lot of the times when people would search, it was very brand heavy. Those days are over because people are open to discovering new brands online. So that's a pro that that's a good, a good thing. So before people would have really searched like, you know, pink shirts, like things like that.
But people now are searching for very specific long tail keywords, things like cotton, sustainable brand, eco-friendly, or 100% cotton, eco-friendly. People are writing, getting very long with what they're searching instead of just a GAP sweatshirt, which was probably back in our days, right? Was just a GAP this, Victoria's Secret, you know, top, Juicy Couture tracksuit. It was very brand what it is, brand what it is. This new generation is looking. They're discoverers. They don't really put brand this. If they did, they would just search the brand or go to their social media and click the link. So I think that's something that's really interesting. So even with putting out what your product is, you want to be as descriptive as possible. I think that's a huge thing. And we were chatting about even eco brands being very specific.
If it is a hundred percent cotton, you have to have you know, maybe even logos or photos or like have something more that encompasses that, whether somebody searches and then clicks images and then an image of that and then says a hundred percent cotton is part of the image. So you're going to want to get more descriptive with even photos. You're going to want to have more things next to that photo. And that needs to be something that would rank higher because people are looking and discovering and they want something specific. And if they land on you, they're most likely to buy because they already put in exactly what they want and you were recommended. So I think that's one good takeaway.
And the other thing I talked about was that, you know what, your e-commerce store may not be as important as it was before, right? Because Google is now encouraging when they will give that recommendation, they want you to appear in the shopping section. So they want to pull that product, right? So that same example, searching for a cotton, 100% cotton eco-friendly sustainable brand, UK based, who knows what long thing they sent. Want them to click shopping and have those products there to select from. And right through there, they call it a agentic, I believe, checkout where they want you to just do your whole checkout process right there through Google. So that means the customer never goes to your site.
And I truly believe that's based on what I mentioned earlier. It's just the way that customers are searching today. People are searching to discover something new and Google wants to provide them that because they're not really too focused on the brand name as much as they were in the past. And that's why we've seen a lot of luxury brands struggling a bit here because people are interested in no label brands or what they call quiet luxury, right? Because it's like brand-less, but it checks what I'm looking for. I just want 100% alpaca blazer. Give it to me. And Google wants to do that. So the other takeaway is you might want to invest less on your e-commerce, making it look pretty, at least on the aesthetic, because people may never actually reach there in the future.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, it's so true. So you're a hundred percent right in terms of how search behavior is changing and how Google's offering these new features like virtual try on, agentic checkout. People may not even need to go to the site anymore to make a purchase. They can do comparison shop, look at prices right there in Google.
Jeanel Alvarado
Yes, you know what you just brought up a third thing is exactly that. Google also wants to be the person to do all those price comparisons. You can do your pricing alerts. And again, it's actually encouraging you as a brand or a retailer to have regular sales, right? And not fake sales, because a lot of brands have gotten trouble over this past couple years here, right? With the class action lawsuits regarding them having fake sales where they just always are 50% off. Have you heard of those?
So a lot of online brands have gotten in trouble from always having 50% off, right? But the product is never regular. So it's always $20. When you launch it today, it's 50% off, which is a false advertising. So some have gotten in trouble. And you know what? Actually by Google allowing price alerts, it almost makes it where you actually would have to have a regular price and then go to a sale price to benefit from that feature where customers online can get pricing alerts from your brand when you decrease the price by 10%, 20%, et cetera.
Glynis Tao
So let me ask you this with Google encouraging price drops. How can brands protect their value and avoid getting stuck in a race to the bottom?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yeah, I think they need to embrace where things are going. So a lot to do with AI is going to be determining who is going to be ranking and outranking who, right? So to be competitive, it's to understand how they are going to be ranking. So I know Google did put out some information for retailers on how they can show up and be the ones most recommended. Again, it was making sure having the best photography you possibly can, right? So make sure you have great photography, number one. Number two was well thought out product descriptions. Do not just rely on your brand name. So many brands rely on their name, but they will begin to be outranked by those who are more specific in matching with what people are searching for in these long tail keywords.
Number three would be pricing. Make sure to have a pricing where you do have a plan for maybe in two weeks, you're going to decrease the price by maybe 10%. If that inventory is still there, you're going to decrease it by another 40%, you know, a couple of weeks or months after that. Google likes those things because they want to encourage people to again, sign up for the price alerts to see when your product does go on sale.
So those are the top three things. And then the other four, like I mentioned, is people may never make it to your site. So try to make it as clear as possible on those individual product pages, everything that customer needs to know. If you are a sustainable brand, that needs to be in every product description, not just about the product, but that you are a sustainable brand. You might even want to put where you're based. You might even want to put that this is woman founded.
Whatever keywords that you think people may be searching for you need to put that on the product page because the new AI isn't looking to pull all the information from your website. They are just trying to match people with a specific product.
Glynis Tao
Yeah and I just want to highlight this article that you wrote on your Retail Boss website, Strategies for Online Retailers and E-commerce. You list these four points and what retailers can do to future-proof their business.
Jeanel Alvarado
For AI. AI search, AI shopping.
Glynis Tao
And one thing I'm actually looking into incorporating within my SEO strategy is optimizing for Google Merchant Center and organic shopping. So I'm just wondering, like, are you starting to consult, like, work with your clients through this transition and sort of what's happening right now to sort of help them to evolve, adapt to the changing search landscape right now?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yes. There are tons of just like it's so interesting because e-commerce is almost becoming like the app store or it's like once you're a part of it you got to keep updating. This is how Google shopping is just like you just mentioned a key point Google's Merch Center, you can sign up your brand and your site on there and then that's how it'll feed into being in that Google shopping area so again, you have to keep up with that information or enlist a team, right?
Yourself or myself or any other expert to help you navigate that because just like any update, you need to then adjust to fit their terms and conditions. We're still early in this AI search. So what works today to get your products and say that yes, they're okay to be on here may change tomorrow. And then you're so busy in your business that weeks and weeks go by.
And maybe you have been taken off the Merch Center or you're way low in the rankings because you haven't kept up with the updates on what you need to have on there and what needs to be taken off those individual pages or needs to be on your site. I do know one client I work with and it was something as easy as not having a privacy policy, why their site wasn't showing up, right? Because there are certain things that you need to have on your site to be pulled up in these listings.
Glynis Tao
Exactly. I think it's the eligibility factors and what Google looks for to the requirements to make sure that you're eligible to firstly have your products listed in the Google shopping, but also making sure that your product titles and descriptions are also up to date. Like you said, also mentioning, you know, if you're a sustainable brand, talk about it, right? Mention the certifications that you have because right now it's really about building that trust and credibility aspect, not only with your customers, but also with AI search. Because I've just been watching so many of these, you know, video webinars and stuff on the latest AI playbook, how it's working, how it works, how AI search engines pick up your content and how they display it and show it to people.
It really matters, like the type of content that you put out there. And so, yeah, it's just such a, it's a hot topic and it's something that is just changing so quickly, almost every day now, something new is coming up. So having to keep up with that, even as professionals like ourselves, it's even hard to stay on top of it, but I feel that it's important just as my job to do that. But yeah, to me, I think emphasizing on building the trust factor with AI search and your customers gone are the days of, you know, trying to just rank for keywords and get a lot of traffic.
It's nowadays that people are having these conversations within the search engines, like within chat, GPT, Perplexity, they're asking complex questions. So I think the better that you're able to answer their questions and solve people's problems and pain points, the better you're able to build that trust with them. And hence, you know, with AI search picking up your content as well and showing it.
Jeanel Alvarado
Absolutely, are spot on. Everything you said was just genius. Really on point. I couldn't agree more with what you're saying, yeah. I know there are a lot of people resisting AI and it was almost the same thing with people resisting e-commerce back when, you know, 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 gotta think about that. So right now, we talked earlier that people discover through social media. I really think Google, as well as, like you just mentioned, Perplexity, which is backed by Nvidia, who recently keep trying to put in their bid to buy Google. Really, they are trying to be that they wanna be it. Social media had its run for discovering products. Google and these AI 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, right? It doesn't really encourage them. 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 in. How can we keep them here? That is what I believe in 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 gonna go next to discover? And I think Google AI, AI search is really trying to capture and be that new top funnel.
Glynis Tao
When we had our first chat, we had both talked about blogging and how content marketing would help for brands to stand out against fast fashion competitors and that sort of thing. I think we're both sort of in that same, like we agree that blogging is still important, would you say?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yes. And it's funny because everyone that I talk to you think 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 maybe get a, right, 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 as 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, girly, let's say, 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. It's just, there's new forms of how we are sending out these blogs. Either it's a video, you can still have the blog post, right? And because people want to be able to click and easily find the source, it could also be you just linking to your Amazon store, but in the essence of blogging.
People are blogging all the time. They're blogging where they traveled. You can call it vlogging, right? It's all of these new words, but really blogging is not dead. It is what people are most interested in right now. And if you check out Substack, that's growing and that's still written blogging. So we got video blogging. We got these influencers who are posting all the time, which are a form of blogging. So that is not dead.
Blogging is just really just when you take experiences or things that you like, you kind of package it up and then you send it out there. And if people want to know, well, where was that hotel stay at? Where was that product purchased? So blogging is still here.
And I think you had mentioned a great point in where Google does like to prioritize brands and retailers who are being talked about, who are part of these conversations. So remember what I said, let your work work for you. Blogging is the number one way you can do this. If you want to be known as a hundred percent sustainable brand, you can start by having blog posts that clearly make you the expert in sustainability, right? You can have multiple blog posts and then you can reform those blog written posts into vlogs. You can then take that and make it into social media posts. You can even hire an influencer who then can go down those tips and maybe make a more influencer type video with your clothing, right?
Now it's more tied to the clothing, but also making sure they talk about how you are a sustainable brand based in XYZ that they love to shop. So it all feeds into the same thing. All that chatter is what helps Google say, Hey, yeah, these people don't just say they're sustainable. Other people say they're sustainable, right? Their blogs also create them more as an expert. And that's the number one thing with more written blogs, right? Create that more expertise.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, I was just listening to a recent webinar about this and they were mentioning like where AI gets their data from and like number one was blogs. So that still definitely justifies the importance of it. And not just like, you're not just writing content for the sake of content, but you're creating helpful, original content that establishes your expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, right? So you're building all this credibility and establishing yourself as the expert in your industry or niche.
Jeanel Alvarado
Yes. And I also have another saying that someone told me a while ago and a couple of years ago, and it resonates with this completely. It says, tell your story before somebody else does something along those lines. And the point is if you don't tell your story, right. And that could be the story of yourself, the story of your brand, the story of whatever it is, like your campaign. Yeah, you put out a campaign, but why? That could be a blog post. That's blogging.
Blogging is telling, giving all the insights, right? So people need to document, it's documentation, proof, authority. So just like you're saying, and that saying is really good because it's almost like if you don't tell your story or what's behind your campaign, you leave it open to too much interpretation as to what you are trying to get at, which just doesn't work. And you're going to just end up getting canceled. Cancelled culture is huge.
But how about instead of just putting out new visuals, you have more in-depth blog, more information of what, okay, what was the whole backdrop of this? The behind the scenes, the why did you pick this location, this, this, this. All of that feeds into all that information that you're talking about, that credibility. And then you're telling the real story about your brand because nowadays if people never get to your website, how are they learning about you?
And you were just spot on once again. What if somebody never goes to your site, sees something on social media, and the first thing that they search, and the AI search is, and this is usually something that's very high search, is like, who owns X brand? And let's say you don't even have anything about yourself. It'll just be unknown. They already don't trust you. Already lost. What about, what is this brand legit?
Yeah, you already lost. So what will AI pull? They have an online site, unknown. So yes, just like you say, you're gonna have to feed it constantly for then when somebody searches, is this legit? go, right? They're polling from the blog. yes, this brand was launched and this is this. They recently had two campaigns featuring this, blah, blah, blah. Their philosophy is based on XYZ. They recently did a collaboration with some not-for-profit, da da da da da da da event is actually happening next week. All that information it will not have if you're not blogging.
Glynis Tao
Yeah, actually everything that you just said is 100%. I totally agree with it and this is such great advice. I think it's a great takeaway for people who are listening right now, just in terms of how the content that you create will also help you with your visibility and being found, right? So definitely blogging, we both agree that blogging is not dead.
Jeanel Alvarado
Not dead at all. It is reimagined in tons of different formats to get the same message across.
Glynis Tao
Yeah. And so before we wrap up here, I just wanted to end with some advice from you. So for entrepreneurs who are listening today and want to break into retail or scale their business, what would be one or two pieces of advice you'd give them?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yeah. So one of my biggest pieces of advice would be to make sure that it's something that you can consistently do something that you are able to do yourself. I think you have to have that DIY mentality at least to start. And then of course you can outsource, but your own, your business will be only as good as what you know.
So I do see a lot of brands or retailers kind of just jump in without really knowing much and maybe they pay people who know what they're doing and then yeah, they're up and then they're just sinking. It's like you got the boat in the water and then now the first tide and now you're under the water. So take the time to learn what you're getting yourself into and every little piece of, you don't need to know, be the SEO expert, but you need to know the basics. You need to understand the basics. So know what you're getting yourself into because e-commerce has so many different layers and then same with content marketing, because there's ways you could do it wrong. And you can get penalized by Google if you're just, you know, getting on these automated.
There's so many things and we'll leave that for another day, but don't try to shortcut to start, learn the basics. And then if anything, you can then, once you have those frameworks, you can then outsource people to do it the way that you've determined would be best for your business. Because just like we talked about blogs, you yourself should figure out exactly the tone, the audience, the type of blogging you want, you should have that kind of a guideline first before you hire someone to start putting out a lot of content.
So I would definitely challenge anybody to kind of just get maybe a template of each, then they can go ahead and outsource. And then the other piece of advice is be okay with pivoting. Like I said, the market is always changing, so be okay to pivot. My most recent client, just like we were just talking about, I've been helping them also with a little bit of SEO, but SEO is not the core of what I do, right? What I know, but it's a new skill in my toolbox, right? So that is something that I'm like, okay, yeah, I could definitely do some minor adjustments here and get you on the right track with your SEO a bit. But I think people in whatever they're in, whether they want to also maybe do an e-commerce store or they want to do physical retail because we all also help people who just want to do physical retail.
And I also help brands who just want to get into stores and sell wholesale who don't really aren't, aren't interested in doing all this marketing and branding for G2C. They rather do that or even try to like private label. Yeah. My, like I said, the second piece of advice there would just be, be able to be adaptable. You might have an idea that you go in and then it just isn't a fit and don't keep trying to make the peg fit. Right. Get a new peg, get a new idea. It's the quickest way to success.
Glynis Tao
Those are wonderful, amazing advice. I love it. Is there anything that you would like to share with the audience? Any events that you would like to share?
Jeanel Alvarado
We love to partner with different events. I guess if there's any people interested in beauty, we are partnering again with the Beauty Connect LA, which is happening in November for anybody who may be interested. It's an event that happens all the time. So if you miss this one, get on it for next year. And that's a great event. If you are a beauty brand looking to get into beauty retailers, they have a lot of the like, you know, top merchandise and buyers there.
And yeah, it's just like you get a lot of great information and then also trends. And then even if you're starting out, it can be good because they have these breakout rooms and sessions that are really great to help you figure out how to take your product or launch your products successfully, either on e-commerce and then also in store. So that's something that we're doing. And then, yeah, so just keep up with us. Follow Retail Boss across any social media platform. Find us at retailboss.co and if you have an interesting story about your brand, feel free to reach out.
Glynis Tao
Mm-hmm. And where can people find you if they want to get in touch with you?
Jeanel Alvarado
Yeah. So the best way to reach out is to send us an email. If you're interested in being featured on our publication, you can reach out at media@retailboss.co. If you're interested in working with me professionally, you can just go to hello at JeanelAlberto.com or just find me at JeanelAlverado.com. Do keep in mind for clients right now, we do look for clients who are making over 1 million in revenue. Okay. But like I said, we also have tons of events on Retail Boss. So if you're making less than that, jump over to retailboss.co, keep up with the news. We've got so many tidbits and yeah, that's how best to reach out and work with me. I'm always looking for people. Right now we're actually looking for somebody on social media.
Glynis Tao
Thank you so much Jeanel for sharing your journey and expertise with us today.
