M.M.LaFleur bets on Substack as its next big marketing play amid branded newsletter boom
M.M.LaFleur, a women’s workwear brand, has spent more than a decade cultivating a content-first marketing strategy. Now, the brand is bringing that strategy to a new frontier: Substack.
In February, M.M.LaFleur officially migrated its long-running editorial platform, The M Dash, from its own website to Substack, making it one of the first in fashion — and among the earliest companies, in general — to launch a branded newsletter on the subscription platform. To date, the brand’s Substack newsletter has around 90,000 subscribers, the vast majority of whom were already part of M.M.LaFleur’s existing audience.
“We’ve always seen content as a critical part of our brand,” said Maria Costa, M.M.LaFleur’s director of brand and integrated marketing. “Our customers aren’t buying new clothes every week, but we want to stay in their inboxes, sharing stories and styling advice, so we’re top of mind when they are ready to shop.”
M.M.LaFleur’s move to Substack isn’t happening in a vacuum. While brands have experimented with Substack, largely through sponsored posts and founder-led accounts, a shift is underway. More companies like luxury resale marketplace The RealReal are now establishing their own Substack accounts and publishing newsletters under their brand name, using the platform as a direct-to-consumer marketing channel.
Why Substack made sense
M.M.LaFleur first launched The M Dash in 2014 as a WordPress blog, mixing style advice with career stories, book recommendations and personal essays aimed at professional women. The blog became a key retention tool for the brand, helping M.M.LaFleur stay connected to customers between purchases.
Over time, however, M.M.LaFleur sought reach a wider audience beyond its core customer base. Substack was appealing because of its built-in discovery features — which allow users to find and follow newsletters based on their reading preferences — offering a way for M.M.LaFleur to tap into new audiences.
“Even though brands are sort of just getting on it, Substack has been on our radar for a long time,” said Maddie Kim, M.M.LaFleur’s head of editorial. “It just made sense with the type of content strategy we’ve always had.”
While brands have historically used Substack for sponsored content or paid partnerships with independent writers, M.M.LaFleur’s approach is different: The brand owns and produces the content directly, just as it did with The M Dash. For M.M.LaFleur, the appeal of Substack lies in its two-way communication. Unlike a traditional blog, where engagement is limited to passive pageviews, Substack allows readers to like, comment and share posts directly within the platform.
“The goal of The M Dash is, yes, to sell clothes,” Kim said. “But it’s also to build this community and to drive awareness and to make sure our customers get to tell us what they want to hear, and hear that reflected back.”
A growing trend
M.M.LaFleur isn’t the only brand exploring Substack’s potential. In January, The RealReal launched its own branded newsletter, The RealGirl, Modern Retail previously reported. Other brands including Tory Burch, Saie and Loftie are also using Substack to author branded editorial content.
For M.M.LaFleur, Substack’s organic discovery features were a big part of the appeal. In its first month on the platform, the brand gained about 200 new subscribers directly through Substack’s recommendation and discovery tools, despite no paid promotion. “We haven’t even linked to Substack from our website yet,” Kim said.
While M.M.LaFleur’s Substack newsletter currently mirrors much of the content that previously lived on The M Dash — styling tips, career advice, and interviews with authors and public figures — the brand is also experimenting with new formats.
Substack, which boasts more than 35 million subscriptions, has been overhauling its offerings in recent months, pitching itself not as a newsletter subscription service but as a creator platform. To that end, Substack has released a variety of new tools and features, such as live videos, which it rolled out widely earlier this year. M.M.LaFleur did not disclose exact details but said it plans to experiment with Substack’s video capabilities as part of The M Dash’s migration to the newsletter platform.
Brands experimenting with Substack’s full range of features early could gain a competitive advantage, according to Grace Clarke, a marketing consultant and the founder of GraceAI. Very few brands are currently using all of Substack’s features, and being an early adopter could help brands understand the platform before it becomes more saturated, she said.
“Right now, most brands are treating Substack like a blog with an email list,” she said. “This reminds me so much of that blue sky feeling when brands were just excited about Instagram in 2012. The people who were early to experiment with it not only had a presence there already and had an audience, but they also understood what strategy needed to look like.”
M.M.LaFleur is also slowly bringing over its archive of older M Dash stories, prioritizing content that features prominent guest contributors who already have a robust presence on Substack, such as the brand’s interview with Harling Ross Anton. The idea is to promote M Dash’s archive of stories on Substack and then tag their existing partners on social media channels. Hopefully, interested partners and collaborators on these posts will cross-promote with their own social media followers, as well.
While driving direct sales isn’t the primary goal, M.M.LaFleur is tracking conversion metrics for Substack readers. So far, the data is encouraging: Dollar-per-session and conversion rates for Substack visitors have ticked up each week since launch.
“We’ve always seen The M Dash as more of a top-of-funnel awareness tool than a hard sales driver,” Costa said. “But if we can build that relationship through content, eventually, we hope, they’ll become customers.”
Kim emphasized that maintaining trust with readers is critical. That’s why M.M.LaFleur has no plans to sell ad space in its Substack or introduce a paid subscription tier. “We want this to feel like a safe, high-quality space, not just another sales pitch,” she said.
Being among the first brands to establish a strong editorial presence on Substack also gives M.M.LaFleur a competitive edge. “We’re used to being early adopters in content marketing,” Costa said. “We see this as an opportunity to define what good branded content looks like on Substack before the space gets crowded.”
We want to hear from you. Take this quick five-minute survey to help Modern Retail learn how to make our products even better and you’ll be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card.