Since 2002, New York-based luxury brand rag & bone has distinguished itself by combining British heritage with directional, modern design. While traditionally focusing on wholesale, the rise of direct-to-consumer brands in the market led rag & bone to seek a new way to connect with their shoppers. But growing DTC presented new, unfamiliar challenges. The team at rag & bone found that the most popular paid channels favored the lower price points of these competitive startups.
“There’s a lot of challenges that come along with trying to transition from a wholesale-led model to a more DTCfocused one,” explained Aaron Detrick, VP of Digital at rag & bone. “You’re competing with these DTC, digital-first companies who are inherently born with different ways of working, and frankly, often have cheaper products. In luxury, acquiring customers and dealing with the conversion rates that come at such a high-price-point business is very different.” They identified abandonment emails as a cost-effective way to convert customers in the luxury market, but with only an 8% identification rate, limited scale kept that channel from being a true difference maker.