Welcome back to the Brand Marketing Spotlight, where we analyze the ad campaigns and marketing techniques of the world’s most successful companies. Today, we’ll showcase Habitat Clothes to find out how this boutique-friendly brand cultivated a coast-to-coast presence.
Suzanne and Rich Collins founded Habitat Clothes in 1999, although the brand looked quite different from today. The Collins’ sold clothing from larger brands while attending trade shows at the time. When Suzanne noticed that these offerings didn’t meet customer needs, she began designing clothing that emphasized comfort and style – inspired by her then eight-month pregnancy.
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Habitat’s clothing line started as eight women-focused t-shirt styles offered alongside larger brands. Despite having no advertising, Suzanne managed to sell $50,000 worth of products in a single day, prompting her to expand. Today, Habitat Clothes produces regular bi-annual collections sold online and from clothing boutiques across the United States.
The Habitat Clothes story is not dissimilar from other successful American brands, but it manages to crystallize several vital elements of its brand identity:
- Far too many large clothing brands cannot meet the needs of today’s women.
- Habitat prioritizes comfort and style with clothing that matches different body types.
- The brand is small-scale and personalized, focusing on specialty boutiques for in-store sales.
- Habitat clothing items speak for themselves without needing to rely on advertising.
Each of these elements speaks volumes about Habitat’s brand values and marketing practices. While the company is nation-wide, it strives for a small-scale, personal touch that emphasizes a greater community. Meanwhile, Habitat’s small batch production size and boutique-focused distribution help customers feel like they can always find truly unique items.
Focused advertising with a light touch
Many small brands turn to word-of-mouth marketing for financial reasons above anything else. Advertising is expensive, after all, and gaining an impression is never a guarantee of a sale. Yet there is an undeniable value in word-of-mouth techniques. When deployed effectively, they let customers feel like they’ve discovered a secret instead of stumbling across a product.
Habitat Clothes is an excellent example of this model. The brand deploys a light touch for promotional materials; blog posts are used sparingly to focus on a new collection or the arrival of a new season. This practice helps Habitat narrow its focus on upcoming products while spreading awareness to potential customers.
The light touch is particularly notable in Habitat’s social media presence on Facebook and Instagram. While updates are few and far between, posts focus primarily on new clothing items. Instagram’s gallery display lets users quickly look at multiple high-quality outfits and focus in to share a comment.
Bringing personality to ad creative
Showcasing your products with word-of-mouth marketing or minimal advertising isn’t easy, but it’s certainly possible if you have a strong brand identity. Habitat’s approach is to find opportunities for personal touches wherever possible. A quick scan of its blog provides frequent reminders that Habitat is family-owned and follows a creative direction set by Suzanne Collins herself.
Yet there are subtler ways that Habitat highlights a healthy community. Anyone browsing its Instagram page or online storefront will notice the same clothing models repeatedly, even for collections launched before this year. We cannot be sure whether these are professional models, employees, or personal friends of the Habitat team, but it doesn’t matter — it suggests Habitat values long-term relationships. As a customer, seeing the same models over and over helps them become familiar and creates an association with the brand as well. It also helps them understand the sizing better of the product they want to purchase, especially when ordering items that were worn by the same model.
Then you have little touches on Habitat’s website, such as an unobtrusive pop-up ad listing recent online purchases. Each notification includes a customer name, product, and time stamp of how recently the transaction occurred, usually within 24 hours. While revealing customer names may be a privacy breach — assuming they aren’t algorithmically-generated — these notices still have value. They make the website feel active while representing customers as unique individuals instead of a faceless audience. For a brand cultivating a boutique atmosphere, that can be the factor that helps you stand out from the competition.
The benefits of growth with a personal touch
Habitat Clothes may be a small brand that focuses on personal touches, but they have a long reach. Its clothing is available at over 1,000 independently owned women’s boutiques located across the United States. And it accomplished this with a focus on community and word-of-mouth marketing — Habitat doesn’t even have an app for mobile customers! The company’s size lets it make agile business decisions while sustaining performance. For example, with the COVID-19 outbreak in full swing, Habitat Clothes is including free face masks with every online purchase.
By dedicating physical sales to specialty boutiques, Habitat places a strong emphasis on local industries — even with its coast-to-coast presence. It even showcases individual boutiques in the store locator section of its website, highlighting the strength of its community. Habitat’s retail partners also give the brand freedom to focus mainly on its online distribution chain and clothing designs for upcoming seasons.
When every business launches, they usually seek out opportunities to grow and expand. While Habitat Clothes is no exception, it managed to do so without compromising its small-scale roots. Whether that means producing clothes in limited batches or supporting independent boutiques, Habitat is proof that it’s possible to benefit from being large and small at the same time.