Sustainable ecommerce is a hot topic in the fashion industry. There has been an explosion of brands with a clear sustainability message, some achieving incredibly fast growth such as Pangaia and Everlane. There’s also been an interesting trend of ecommerce industry folk deciding to launch their own ecommerce businesses. The convergence of these two trends is where we find ourselves for this episode.
Our guest, Emma Bonar, is clearly braver than we are! She’s a highly experienced ecommerce leader, having run ecommerce functions for brands including Hunkemoller and Karen Millen. However, she gave up the security and reliability of the big brands and is now a retailer, running a cool boutique fashion label 69b Boutique (do check it out!) based in London. Emma recently launched a new ecommerce storefront on Shopify to start building out an omnichannel customer offer.
Given Emma’s background running ecommerce for large fashion brands, this episode provides an interesting exploration of the challenges running a smaller business and launching an ecommerce store without a big team to depend upon.
Sustainable ecommerce brand & Shopify
The advantage of Shopify is the reliability and scalability of the platform, regardless of which version you use. Boasting brands that deliver more than £200m in annual online sales revenue, handling traffic peaks and large transaction volumes without impact performance is one of the main reasons people turn to SaaS platforms like Shopify.
However, no platform is perfect and one of the realities of launching a sustainable ecommerce store is working out how to operate within the constraints of a platform and your business resources.
Emma shares practical advice for other small business owners and brings a wealth of ecommerce and omnichannel experience to the table.
You can also listen to our episode on launching a sustainable fashion ecommerce store via the following:
Key discussion points
- How do the challenges differ when switching from massive brands like Karen Millen to a boutique brand?
- What are your key trading challenges with a smaller team?
- How did you make the platform decision?
- What surprised you the most, in terms of challenges you hadn’t expected when using Shopify for your business?
- How do you align your physical retail store with your ecommerce store for a customer service?
- How do you prioritise your time and effort – there are so many facets of ecommerce that drive revenue, what are the short-term essentials?
- What’s the plan in 2021 in terms of roadmap?
- What’s your key advice for other small business owners when launching or migrating an ecommerce store – what should they focus on and why?
