How would you do to reach out and pitch to secondhand fashion store owners about an analytics tool ?
Hi Everyone,
How would you do to reach out to secondhand fashion store owners in a way they will be open to talk about an analytics tool that will change their game ?
I have been trying cold calling fashion stores I found online after checking the success of their accounts on popular C2C sites (the kind like EBay).
I pitched them about how I was starting a project and explained the concept, but I only got disbelief (scam suspicion) or mild responses.
All I wanted was beta testers (though I said things way more smoothly than that) and provide them with free advice until they got better results, but they either weren't convinced or cut it off.
Prior to the cold calling, I sent emails (to the email adresses on their websites) but none of my emails were even opened (I had set a canarytokens.org token in the email).
I'm from a country speaking french. But even so I should be able to get positive responses if I do things right to a highly targeted niche. So I must be doing things the wrong way.
I'd be happy to hear from you.
Thanks in advance.
The problem I see is that your solution doesn't help. It doesn't solve a problem and this comes down to the principle that once an item has been sold, it can't be sold again. So I worked with a company selling an analytics engine to Gucci, Inditex, a shoe retailer etc...
If we take a major, fashion label, Gucci, for example, in the early 2010s, they were selling an item for $250,000 USD and this, at the time, was their biggest seller, globally. So they made a few more, ramped up advertising campaigns around this etc... A used fashion house can't do it. If they sell something, it's gone.
Sure, analytics can indicate if stuff is generally selling. So coats in winter as an example. However, this is, unfortunately, useless. Inditex, for example, checks exactly what influences sales at a granular level. So for coats, how many buttons, what type of buttons, what colours (I'm just on buttons here) and then specifics around linings, sleeves, dimensions, collars, stripes, studs, spikes, numbers of pockets, locations of pockets etc... and then they take these trends and move them into other items such as shoes, handbags, blouses etc... So if you were physically to walk into say, a Zara, it always looks as if it is on the cutting edge of fashion because it is. They see what customers are buying most of and then manufacture it back into their products.
One guy I worked with built a predictive analytics engine around purely womens shoes. So womens shoes increase in heel height each year until they reach a certain point and then start to diminish until they reach another point. Ditto with other parts of the shoe. And this means the shoe company he was working for was able to do production planning and work out what would sell ahead of time as well as what lines were likely to sell. So that type of engine is useful but again, it doesn't work in used shoe sales because there is a randomness about what becomes available and no, two items are ever the same.
Use cases for used fashion are so simplistic that strong, analytical engines are unnecessary. Gucci, Inditex and the shoe company all buy an analytics platform from the same vendor and this isn't a coincidence. The big players tend to use the same platforms (with a couple of exceptions) while smaller players use Excel or maybe run analytics through an inventory or SME ERP system. So, for example, one of my customers is a fashion house selling womens fashion, has around 15 staff and was visited by the British Prime Minister who described it as a 'great British success story.' They live off analytics but it's Excel.
Have you considered changing use cases? Maybe focusing on SME fashion houses? Or adapting it specifically for individual markets like handbags or shoes? If you're in the UK, if you ping me, I'm happy to have a chat because I've done a lot of work around analytics in womens fashion. Incidentally, I'm in video production and worked with analytics firms selling to fashion houses as well as fashion houses so see all this stuff.
Thanks for taking the time to answer me, I really appreciate it.
You nail an important point in your introduction (diversity of used items). And as you state it further, there are workarounds one can think of regarding this fact (like through specialisation or the study of trends).
Thank you very much for sharing the story of your friend who built the engine for women shoes. My approach is different, but could you maybe point me towards that.
Up until now, I focused my product on helping these secondhand sellers sell better on platforms they are already present in. Rethinking the use case is a great idea.
Incidentally, it turns out (successful) secondhand fashion stores also tend to use analytics too. I had an exchange with someone I pitched to. I hadn’t expected that to be honest.
I don’t have names about the software or anything though, it’s probably an ERP, but maybe something else.
Have you ever thought about that ? I’ll work on my scripts so that next time I take the occasion to speak to a retail owner I may get an answer.
Have I thought about it? I have 25 years experience of talking with analytics firms, fashion retailer CEOs / board members and management specifically about analytics or CRM as well as seeing their data. I see the data from my customers detailing who buys what, for how much and most importantly, why they buy.
Before filmmaking, I was a middle manager for a couple of analytics and CRM solutions. One of those had a retail specialism.
As a filmmaker, my role is to make my customers more successful and I'm genuinely passionate about this. That's why I understand the market for the product you're trying to sell.
I did not mean my question to sound like that. It seemed to me that you did not really speak well of the secondhand industry and I wanted to know if you had any positive thoughts about analytics in that area.
I understand your great experience regarding the fashion industry –you worked with top dogs– and compared to them, secondhand fashion would seem like a "sniveling" market. But it's the market I had been targeting.
I think about adjusting my market as you mentionned because you make excellent points, but before making a big shift I want to ensure that what I might leave behind does not actually have a silver mine in it.
You also wrote:
Use cases for used fashion are so simplistic that strong, analytical engines are unnecessary.
What do you mean by analytical engines are unnecessary ? That's what got me confused. I understood it like "analytical softwares won't be of use to them" or it won't change anything (since they don't have series of the very same products), hence my (misspelled) question.
I wrote exactly what I wrote. Specifically, I wrote 'strong analytical...' because they don't need 'strong, analytical engines.' They can get what they need from 'lighter' analytics engines. This one is more than they need and it's completely free:
https://www.microstrategy.com/us/get-started/desktop
At MicroStrategy, the nickname is 'MicroStrategy Light.'
Frankly, Excel would be more than enough for most, although bigger firms can be using analytics tacked onto whatever solution they're using.
I've seen everything from Gucci to small players and my current customer base is SMEs. At no point did I denigrate the used fashion industry or smaller players who are my customers. They have needs and the question is whether your product meets their needs.
You want to try and good luck to you.
How did you get your leads (email)? Was it from their websites? Google Maps? If you're targeting people who would benefit from analytics, such as retail owners, unless they're focusing on moving their stores online and processing sales there, I think you're targeting is a little off. Ebay is sometimes a side thing for retail.
Consider what the core value of analytics actually is. Analytics is primarily an aftermarket product by nature. You have the core value generated through the main product and analytics run for additional insights. In a perfect world, analytics would not be necessary b/c we would be able to watch closely how each of our customers are interacting with our products and process that information. We can't do that at mass scale (via online), thus the need for analytics.
So look for online presence and an effort to move business (cash flow and revenue) online and scaling issues. The way I would do that is going into aftermarkets like Shopify, SquareSpace, or Weebly. If you can find the owners on these aftermarkets, they would certainly need some type of analytics.
Thanks for your feedback. Yeah I contacted stores that had a lot of products listed online (which means their online activity was a thing), and through some exchange, I learned some had analytics tools. But your point helps me see the bigger picture and a few issues with my approach, so thanks.
Regarding the aftermarkets, you're right! That's definitely a good idea to explore, and I'll look into that.
Then when it comes to the targeting, maybe educating the ones I cold called could be a thing ? (I know it's not scalable though, but for starters and maybe word-of-mouth). I tried to educate them a bit by teaching them my approach, but it did not seem to convince them either... I'm also spinning my brain wheels to get a new way to educate the ones I already contacted.
I mean, everyone is cold calling online retailers right now, so they're bound to have a negative attitude towards that.
Some case studies might help if you want to educate them, probably the best way is to make them come to you with content marketing.
You're once again right!
I had been thinking about making a real case accompaniment with an actual beta tester store to then showcase it, but since that doesn't work, the content marketing seems like the next thing to do.
I already have content I published elsewhere about the same topic and similar analytics so I can reuse and adapt that. I plan to put up a little spot about that on my product's site.
That should interest some people and I'll monitor that.
I really thank you. Your comments are like triggers I needed to hear. I had things prepared but somehow I needed new orientations.
I'll keep in mind to update you here, maybe it'll interest you.
Sure, @catsarebetter98 I'll reach out. Thanks for the clarification.
And woah I'm surprised ! I also dove into e-commerce! And actually scraped some e-commerce data.
I actually tend to gather high quality datasets and ensure I provide some metrics. Most other datasets don't have those and only show you basic informations.
Contrary to that, when posting a products dataset (for instance), I also want to include either of the interactions of users/clients (such as #likes) or the number of sold products or anything else that might serve as a metric for quantitatively quantifying success or trends.
Since you have interest in analytics, you may find some of my datasets useful
On data.world: data.world/jfreex
Or my Kaggle: kaggle.com/jmmvutu
Ahhh ur a super technical, data-driven guy like me, right?
Something to consider, you might be like 4-5 steps ahead of the market in what ur offering, I can imagine most of the customers that you talk to can't match you technically, maybe take it down a few steps and try to see things from their perspective and what their problems are?
I'll throw a few ideas your way to get your creative juices flowing:
A few high-level trends that we're seeing right now are online retail exploding, real-time logging and monitoring of backend and cloud systems, and a business need for SaaS, ecommerce, to understand their customers at the granular level that facebook can. People think that a trend is bootstrapping is exploding, but that's actually not true if you set the bar high enough. Though it does seem like IH is doing reallly well as of late.
Connect with me dude, let's be friends, I'll send you some more stuff, but I don't want the IH'ers who are downvoting all my stuff to see it too ;).
I'm happy to know you're a tech guy too!
omg… I hadn’t considered things that way 😂
Now that you mention it, I remember a cold call that points towards exactly this. A shop owner told me it would be a product for super big enterprises (suggesting it would be too pricey for her shop), but at the time I didn’t really get it. Even with the rejections I got, I learned valuable lessons.
I take it into note to take it down. With your feedback I see lots of improvement in perspective.
I’m not a native English speaker so I did not really get this part (because of the commas I guess I do not know how/when to read the « pauses » in speech).
Yeah I’ll contact you
I also sent you an email so that we can continue there ;)
Just reach out to me dude: catsarebetter98@gmail.com, let me know how it's going, I love talking about analytics. Actually spent a bit of time deep diving into ecommerce so I'm a little familiar with basic principles and trends.
FYI, what I meant by content marketing was: grow an email list by putting an email newsletter sign up at the beginning, end of your written articles, and just start posting and reusing content from each article, adapt it to IH, Twitter, Quora, etc. Wherever you're target audience reads stuff. Then you can "warm email" ppl that sign up for your newsletter.