My first company, Dogmatic, was a B2C clothing e-commerce company where I designed, sourced, and shipped products internationally. However, we later transitioned into B2B with solely influencer marketing. I’m going to discuss why we made this shift and the benefits of collaborating with influencers.
Clothing is a saturated market, and ad spend is expensive. Before investing heavily in ads, I focused on increasing trust and reliability in my company by building interactive social channels that didn’t push products with constant “buy this” messaging. While we sold quickly, we spent time making videos and collaborating with musicians and artists behind the scenes. The content strategy took time, but quality and consistency paid off.
Through our collaborations with musicians and artists, we realized that influencer marketing presented a great B2B opportunity. Instead of having them promote our designs, we approached them to collaborate on designs that catered to their existing audiences. We pivoted to exclusively working with influencers for a few reasons:
- It’s much cheaper for us to utilize existing followings and email lists with tailored products to sell and fulfill for customers.
- We can target small to medium-sized influencers to build their product lines at a reasonable price.
- It’s a quick way to build credibility with future customers (influencers) after the first few contracts.
- Content creation and editing is easier.
And we were right.
Another decision we made at that time was to eliminate the D2C portion of selling our own products purely for the sake of focus. This is another key piece of experience I share with new founders: focus is crucial. Pivoting when necessary is essential. Letting go of non-essential aspects is important. Concentrating on what works and understanding why is key.
Lean into what works.
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Jan Gunash 