Brick, Click and COVID: The Retail Reality for Bravado Designs

Digital Marketing / July 14, 2020

About Bravado Designs

CHRIS KREUTER, MANAGING DIRECTOR AT BLOOM: I’m Chris Kreuter, Managing Director of our Toronto Office for Bloom, digital marketing and I’m with Tom who’s a president of Bravado Designs. Tom, maybe you could talk a little bit about Bravado Designs and your role.

TOM WOLFF, PRESIDENT OF BRAVADO DESIGNS: Okay. Yes, as you said I lead Bravado Designs and, we, at Bravado, have been making nursing bras for the last 26 years and we started in Toronto, and we’re still in Toronto. We are pretty obsessed with making the world’s best nursing bras and that’s what we do.

Investing In Digital Marketing

C: I did want to talk a little bit about your experience over the last few months and going through COVID-19 and the state of emergency and how that’s impacted your business. But, before we start, we started working with you just at the end of last year. You brought us on to help you with your digital program. Can you kind of talk a little bit about when you guys decided to like look at your digital program and figure out that you needed to make some investments and make some improvements? Tell me what your outlook was at the time and what your plan was.

T: Yeah, well, it’s interesting. It actually had a lot to do with our decision to launch a new product line. As I said, we make nursing bras. But, we would hear from so many of our customers that they would want to wear our bras after nursing.

They would wear them for years afterward. We kind of came up with the idea that we should try making normal everyday bras. We decided that we would do it on our website and we would focus on selling on our website. So, it got us very focused on how do we make sure we are much better e-commerce. There were a lot of things: the digital experience on our e-commerce site had to improve, we had to really improve the back end logistics which our logistics team, and focusing on our warehouse partners.

Then, the final piece of the puzzle is we had to get much smarter about how we engaged consumers, about digital advertising. We had to make sure we understood return on investment, which we understood, but we really did not ever take it super seriously before.

It’s funny because this all started with how do we launch this new product line, but then, there was the convergence of the launch of the new product line with COVID-19 and it all kind of came together at the same time, this spring.

C: The timing was perfect essentially, right? You started to lay down the framework, built the structure for all of your paid media programs, started working on the process, started getting our feet wet trying to get a real program in place and then as you said, starting in March, the wheels fell off the bus as they say.

T: As the leader of the company, I was very concerned at the end of March. I mean, for the entire company. We had to go from everybody coming to the office, working nine to five, to working remotely. We also found that the entire brick and mortar channels froze and really stopped. Even some of our major e-commerce customers had to focus on more essentials like toothpaste and toilet paper. They even stopped taking shipments. So it was really interesting because, late March, even early April, we were concerned about our business. And I am still, I’m paid to be concerned but what happened in the interim is we’ve seen a massive shift to e-commerce purchasing. 

Launching A New Product During COVID-19

C: You talked a little bit about launching the Everyday Bra. Now, I can imagine launching a new product line after being 27 years in the business in nursing, launching this product during the state of emergency, retail shutdown, wholesale shutdown must have been challenging. Can you talk a little about what that experience was like?

T: You know, luckily, we’ve done a lot of the work as far as product development and working with our vendors prior. We knew we had products on the way to our warehouses, so that part was less concerning. But, the interesting part was that before we launched that product line in May, we already started seeing a shift in how people were buying.

We saw people buying more from our website and more from our big partners on e-commerce, so I actually wanted to get that started as soon as possible. By the time we launched in May, I was much more focused on how quickly can we get going because we’re seeing people shift their purchase behavior online, at an incredibly rapid rate.

C: Absolutely! You know, my expertise is more in media buying as opposed to the creative aspect of marketing, but you didn’t have access to large productions or studio work because everyone needed to remain at home. 

You really leveraged influencers and the content that was created in their own homes and I think that probably helped make a connection because people could relate to that situation. This is how they were living every day. Now, they see products being presented to them in a very similar type of environment and I think there’s probably some sort of connection that was made between the consumer and your advertising.

T: Yeah, no, you’re actually right. I mean, what is the expression? “Necessity is the mother of all invention”. Our marketing team did a really good job at engaging influencers in new ways.

They were able to get frankly all the required marketing communication materials we needed. And it’s turned out just fine. In fact, you know, I think we may have learned things that will probably stay with us much after COVID-19 is all over.

Bloom x Bravado Designs

C: I really want to thank you again for taking the time. I really enjoyed our conversation and I’m looking forward to us continuing to work on growing your business. 

T: Well, thank you! You guys really have made a great impact. I really mean that and it’s really nice to be able to see that, I can see the increase in top line. And, I can also see the metrics. And, you got to see both. You got to see your top nine numbers grow. And, you also have to see the metrics on return on investment, on advertising and stuff like that and working with Bloom, I’m seeing both. In Canada, North America and now we’re even expanding to Europe which is a lot of fun. I think it’s you guys are really providing a lot of value to our company and I appreciate it and your team’s a lot of fun to work with so, it’s all working. Keep it up!

C: Thank you so much, Tom. I really appreciate it.

We’d like to thank Tom for taking the time to chat with us. We’ve also had a similar discussion with Ian Richards from Group Dynamite, watch the interview here.