In 2020/2021, we reduced our overall production by 46%, keeping only the base clothing collection.
In 2022, we faced a very ambitious task: to return to the changed market without any experience in the new realities. Although we had never designed loungewear capsules before, coming back with our usual range would have been an obvious failure.
We started by studying our competition, especially brands specialising in cosy and comfortable clothing. Trying to apply the findings to ourselves, we designed the first capsules for spring-summer 2022, which expanded our range by 23%. But at a closer look, we saw that the new range didn't fit the brand's DNA. That made us realise how important it was to consider the preferences of our target audience when launching a new range.
So we began looking for marketing research on the subject. However, the existing articles were too generic and not relevant in regard to our target audience. Conducting our own research would cost us at least £ 6,000 and, most importantly, would take about a month, which was not an option in our situation.
This is when we discovered the GFAIVE platform. After testing out a basic version, which provides analytics for a selected region, we connected our Instagram account to the extended version, which offers analytics specifically for our company. It's very easy to use, you just select a category and the desired timeframe and get the trends you are interested in. With the help of this service, we were able to immediately answer our primary question: what should comfortable clothing look like, according to our subscribers, i.e. our customers and prospects?
Since the service doesn't limit the number of queries, we started to analyse trends for almost every new model, as well as check their commercial potential. To predict the popularity of a model, it’s enough to upload several versions of a future product and select a category. The service immediately delivers a result. This is an extremely important feature for us as we didn’t have such a range before and there was nothing to compare it with.
With the help of GFAIVE, we were able to expand our product range by 32% in the following capsules (April-May). We have thus achieved the following figures for the entire spring-summer 2022 range:
- The comfy capsule accounted for 33% of sales, with a 29% share of purchases.
- The comfy capsules April-May were 93% sold out (this is our standard pre-covid sales figure).
- The comfy capsules February-March were 84% sold out.
We have already used the service to create mood boards and analyse trends for the new autumn-winter 2022 collections, and we believe we will achieve the same or even better results.
Rodrigo, Designer