Keen to wear a fabulous fashionable frock to your next outing, not be seen in it again and save the environment all at the same time? Well Glam Corner has the answer.
The Aussie online fashion rental business, Glam Corner, enables the hire of a dress for a special occasion, “wear it like you own it’’ and then send it back to them – they also take care of the dry cleaning.
This isn’t the first online clothing rental store, however what makes the business exceptional, for the husband and wife team Dean Jones and Audrey Khaing-Jones, is that they have successfully executed their digital marketing strategy directly leading to their impressive growth.
When Jones was asked what proportion of growth was owed to their digital marketing strategy, Jones responded defiantly “all of it”.
The fundamental objective of any start up is understanding customer behaviour and reviewing purchasing patterns, to ensure the customer enjoys the journey. Knowing the difference between first-timers and repeat customers is vital to understanding their behaviour, and driving customer retention. “Being data-driven doesn’t mean you have to have a PhD in statistics. It’s just having insight into what your customer wants” says Jones.
Why else should Glam Corner be chosen amongst the savvy competition? Putting it simply - they have significantly more stock – and multiple options is a priority for fashion conscious individuals.
“We’ve got 9,000 dresses available for hire – ten times more than our next best competitor” says Jones.
But how is this helping Australia’s environment? Well, quite often when people have been seen in a dress or it doesn’t fit anymore, it heads to the garbage bin and ends up in the local tip. This is quite common behaviour for a number of Aussie’s who are forgoing the option of recycling preloved threads and instead sending them to the bin, adding to the burgeoning landfill.
According to Jones “Given Australian consumers send six tonnes of clothing to landfills every ten minutes, sharing clothing alleviates environmental impact significantly by allowing many different women to share the same item”.
“Australian women have been sharing clothing for a long time actually, so making that network bigger is allowing us to save them money while preventing tonnes of clothing from ending up in landfills every month” says Audrey Khaing-Jones.
In addition, Glam Corner can be regarded as being in business for the long haul, as the online retailer began in 2012; this gives the purchaser a sense of comfort knowing the retailer isn’t going to disappear overnight and be a short-lived seller.
Impact Investment Group’s Giant Leap Fund has invested into Glam Corner and the fund prides themselves on being a first for Australia - “the first venture capital firm that’s 100% dedicated to investing in impact startups, combing real and measurable social and environmental benefits with financial returns”.
“To invest in rapidly scalable, early stage business that fuse the profit and positive impact to demonstrate the power of purpose driven businesses in accelerating us toward a better future” is the mission of Giant Leap Fund.