Episode Summary

Courtney Klein is the Founder & CEO of Storq, a maternity focused apparel brand. Having worked in creative & design for over a decade, at Razorfish and as a parter at NYC design firm Hard Candy shell, she saw a gap in the market for luxe basics for pregnancy, nursing, and parenthood.

Episode Notes

On this episode of DTC Pod, Courtney joins Blaine & Ramon to talk about leveraging a niche audience to find scale in apparel. They cover topics including finding your market, your first production run, starting limited but focused, seasonal vs. season-less products, subtleties of niche markets, bootstrapping & growth, affiliates & influencer channels, influencer management tools, tiktok strategy, and more.

Episode Highlights

‍2:30

More children are being born to women over 30 than ever before in American history. When women give birth later and stay in the workforce longer, they have more money to spend because their incomes are usually higher. Also they have different needs when you're having a baby in your 30s you're established and you're in the workforce. When you're younger and in your 20s, those are totally different needs. So as we started digging into it, I realized there was a real market opportunity to address what we now call millennials

5:00

And so, unlike a lot of companies that are seasonal, we really strive to be season-less. And so, we put out into the market like, okay, here are the four things we're going to get really good at selling these four things. And that's what we did for the first three years of the business was just get really good at selling pregnant people, those four things. And then from there we expanded the product line once we got good at selling those things.

35:00

And with Tik TOK, what we found is most of the people we work with on TikTok, they don't even ever mention us. They're just creating like 10 pieces of content a day. And they happen to be wearing like our nursing bra in all 10 of those pieces. And in every TikTok, someone will say, where'd you get that? But they know it's not like “hi, I'm here to tell you about Storq”. It's off the cuff. It's just in the background and someone is subtly seeing this bra over and over and over again.

This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:

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Courtney Klein - Founder & CEO of Storq
Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.io
Blaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

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