6 ways to sustain your brand through product-market fit
Achieving product-market fit is an important step in ensuring the success and longevity of your brand. Here, we outline the key market-focused factors to consider when working towards PMF.
Key Takeaways
1. Reaching a repeat customer rate of 30% is a key component of achieving and maintaining product-market fit.
2. Use customer personas throughout the product development process to focus design and range building as well as marketing will maximise the market potential of your products.
3. Test the market to gain feedback rather than relying heavily on online analytics is key.
4. Integrating feedback, however you get it, into your product and marketing processes is key to growth.
Marc Andreessen, entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer defines product/market as being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.
When considering PMF within the context of the fashion industry, it’s worth remembering that the market is both impatient and not particularly good at giving second chances, so for a brand to achieve optimal results, it should be at the core of every decision a brand makes, in every area of their business, and at every step of the process. According to Ada Yi Zhao, founder and CEO of Curated Crowd, the world's first integrated crowdfunding and e-commerce platform for emerging designers, reaching a repeat customer rate of 30% is a key component of achieving and maintaining PMF.
1. Leverage sustainability credentials
The brands that perform best in the ethical fashion space are those that leverage the added dimension that sustainability adds to a clearly identified market opportunity.
Footwear specialists Veja, Allbirds and Good News are all good examples. They satisfy market demand for trainers that fit the current athleisure trend, while also meeting the increasing demand for vegan and sustainable products.
According to Google, searches for veganism quadrupled between 2012 and 2017. Lyst registered a 47% increase in consumers searching for ethical products in 2017 while activewear represents 24% of apparel sales globally, according to the NPD Group.
This has afforded all three brands a significant amount of organic word-of-mouth, press and social media coverage, and celebrity endorsement.
Fashion product search platform Lyst ranked Veja’s V-10 sneaker third in its fourth-quarter ranking of the hottest women’s products online - a metric which is based on a combination of sales, organic search, social interaction and page views.
Veja has experienced exponential growth in recent years which has resulted in a reported growth increase of 70% in 2018 for Veja, with sales reaching €30 million. Trading since 2004, Veja is a good example of a brand performing steadily in that market then experiencing a comparatively sudden and massive surge in recognition and growth - purely organically - because of optimal PMF.
2. Use personas to ensure focus
“Having a very specific customer in mind when building the range plan and creating the designs will really help maximise the integrity of the product market fit...it sounds simple, but basic principles like this can easily get lost in the creative process.”
There’s an inherent advantage to working to meet market demand with a product: venture capitalist and executive chairman of California-based automated investment service firm Wealthfront Andy Rachleff even goes so far as to say that “you can screw up almost everything in the company and you will [still] succeed”. This comes down to the strategic opportunities you have, the initial customer research you conduct - from face-to-face interviews and focus groups to online surveys - and the quality of the resulting customer profiles that you create.
3. Make time for gathering feedback
A key element to effective product strategy is acknowledging that research and ideation take time, and can extend almost indefinitely if you let it - in fact, it’s been estimated that startups need up to three times the amount of time initially estimated to validate their market. During this time, fickle markets can (and will) change, a potential setback which delays getting to the stage where you can get tangible sales feedback. “When you’re in the product development stage, make time to get feedback from as many relevant perspectives as possible – potential customers, and any press or buying contacts you have – to get to that all-important launch stage,” says Emma Pull, “but understand that it is something you’ll be able to (and should!) do post-launch too”.
4. Test the market
What must be avoided is where an overly cautious approach causes unnecessary delays. Zhao recommends not getting too bogged down in market research prior to launch: “At the end of the day you want to sell a piece of clothing: so just get out and try to sell it. If it doesn’t sell, start asking yourself why: maybe the price is too high or the quality isn’t right… the only way to find out is to actually do it”. This works for positive market response too: to take advantage of and further stimulate demand, a brand will build out colourways and style variations.
5. The limitations of digital data
Product and brand evolution as a result of internal and external evaluation should be thought of as an ongoing, evolving and necessary process. Ethical shoe label Dear Frances reaches out to customers to find out more about returned purchases, while contemporary womenswear label RIXO, in the early days of the brand, having regular in-person appointments in their living room with customers, celebrities, buyers and press.
Zhao cites temporary pop up stores and trade shows as an important way of gathering qualitative data which can then be translated into online curation: “Being a digital platform we spend a lot of time looking at Google Analytics and the [onsite] data set we have [but] we quickly learned the accuracy of this data can be questionable - that’s when we decided to do a pop up”.
6. Fully integrate feedback for growth
“Constantly ask yourself ‘Who is my customer, what does she want, am I providing it, and what will she want in the future - how can I guarantee newness?’.”
This idea of newness and product development is important, and should be considered right from the outset: in a moment where many customers have less disposable income, and shop more cautiously, oftentimes building out a brand is the best way to guarantee loyalty, as well as secure attention from buyers and press. To take Los Angeles-based men’s and women’s lifestyle brand Simon Miller as an example, when it seemed likely that its bag offering was capping out, it diversified by introducing a shoe line.
