D2C is today and the future
How shopping from D2C brands has redefined my expectation customer experience
Working on building a new line for an early childhood education start-up meant understanding customers better.
The one best thing to learn- do when one joins a start-up, be is retail, lifestyle products, ed-tech, food-tech or trading, is to sit in customer support for a week.
I did this at Flintobox and later at Flintoclass, for sales, renewals, and support. And later did this while at The Hindu Digital as well. No other better place for customer insights, new product ideas, strategies but more than anything else, making the user feel they are heard.
I am a big fan of D2C brands, always fascinated about the thought and effort that goes into creating landing pages, the quirky emailers, the fun tag-lines and the lengths the brands go to to provide a great customer experience.
Highlighting top 3 D2C brands that I have shopped from and why I love them.
Tailor & Circus
What does Tailor & circus sell? Underwear, and bralettes
What problem is Tailor & circus solving? Making soft, comfortable innerwear that look, and feel incredible.
I discovered this brand from my friend G’s post Pretty much ordered immediately.
Why?
This was a website I have never seen before. They had models who looked like me and not the usual ones I see on retail websites. Big lessons on marketing communication right here.
The images were fun, the pictures were of real people, with stretch-marks, scars, tattoos and what not!
This part of the story telling through images for a brand selling “comfortable” innerwear is a winner.
I wrote to Tailor and circus about a product flaw (after almost a year) and they replied almost instantly to understand fault in the product and offered a solution (a replacement), they needn’t have but small brands, the D2C brands really strive for excellence both in products and customer experience.
Sugar cosmetics
If you are an Indian woman with dark skin and tried to buy a shade of lipstick that would suit your colour tone, eye-makeup and foundation that wouldn’t melt in the heat here, you were in for a task until Sugar cosmetics came into place.
They made make-up for Indian colour tones and they made them bold! Completely redefined buying make-up online, the colours and shades they offer are inimitable, truly have disrupted the market.
How did Sugar do it?
The role of Instagram influencers in the marketing of beauty brands is well-documented. SUGAR too rode the wave of ‘unboxing videos’ and ‘before and after’ transformations to create awareness.
The brand’s influencer strategy on Instagram is carefully nuanced. Their most popular videos include one with acid attack survivor, Anmol Rodrigues. You can spot influencers with large follower bases like Shubhangi Anand, but videos with micro-influencers are equally popular.
Not just that, they had images (100s of them) Indian women with different complexions, tones and darker skin colour wearing their products, and also heavily used Instagram influencers who posted photos, videos of their sugar cosmetics (lipsticks especially), remember this was the early days of influencer marketing so it was as real as it came. So this lead to customers blindly coming to Sugar website, type the shade number and make a purchase.
Customers are very scared of getting the wrong color (online purchase problems)
So every month Sugar actually offered exchanges to almost 200 women, who came and said that, “Hey, I bought this color. This shade of red. But it's actually slightly different. And I'm not very convinced. I wanted this other one.” And Sugar just giave them a free replacement. No other company did that (nor does that.)
But Sugar was trying to sell her makeup online and thought it was their responsibility to ensure that great customer experience . They made sure it wasn't the customers fault for having chosen the wrong colour and Vineetha quotes"And if because of our inability to show her the exact color and demonstrate it properly, we're not able to satisfy her, we want to replace. We want to make it up to her."
I think that really helped Sugar build loyalty because this lead to customers to keep coming back and taking more and more risk. And honestly, like most customers just are very happy to get that perfect lipstick. And then once we're able to get a customer to experience that joy, Suagr has her for life.
The Whole Truth
One of the best ads made last year was this— Our food is screwed
Food especially snacking as a segment is tough to crack. One has to disrupt if they need our attention and that is what whole truth is doing.
Having personally tried their products (the bars and muesli), they are tasty.
What is more interesting? How they communicate. Their boxes, labels, packs all carry a ton of information about what goes inside + have a lot of fun stuff to read.
Once they sent a full pack of their oats muesli with a message telling that they were not happy with the quality of the first batch, so they sent another batch to all customers.
See, D2C brands truly care about customer experience.