Modern Retail Podcast: What it takes to build a true lifestyle brand
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It seems like every company wants to bill itself as a “lifestyle brand” these days. If a company can truly integrate itself into a customer’s lifestyle — versus just selling them a single product — it can build a more powerful connection over time. But what does that actually mean in practice?
In this episode of the Modern Retail Podcast — recorded live at the Modern Retail Marketing Summit in Huntington Beach, California — Mandy Fry, co-owner and president of Southern California-based apparel brand Z Supply, talks about how she built Z Supply into a full-fledged lifestyle brand.
For Fry, building Z Supply into a lifestyle brand meant, first and foremost, expanding the company into new categories. Fry joined Z Supply in 2019, roughly six years after the brand launched. At the time, Z Supply only carried T-shirts.
Fry decided to first launch loungewear. At the time, “it was a really trendy category,” Fry said. And given that many customers said they liked the soft feel of Z Supply’s T-shirts, loungewear was the next logical step.
The loungewear launch came at a very fortuitous time: February 2020. The success of loungewear gave Z Supply to enter new categories like jackets, resortwear and even sunglasses.
But building Z Supply into a lifestyle brand required a mindset shift. As Fry put it, building a lifestyle brand is all about meeting your core customer “at every moment of the day.”
“I wanted to wake up with her in our loungewear. I wanted to go to the school drop-off with her. I wanted to work out with her, I wanted to go to work with her, I wanted to go to drinks, I wanted to travel [with her],” she said.
The episode also gets into:
- What new category launches didn’t work
- How Z Supply had to shift its marketing strategy to position itself as a lifestyle brand.
- Z Supply’s retail distribution strategy (the brand sells through roughly 3,000 boutiques) and why it has largely said no to big retailers so far.