Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 E-Commerce Growth Hacking podcast, hosted by Caroline Baldwin, gets under the hood of highly successful e-commerce brands to discover the key technologies they are using to power growth.
For this episode we caught up with Caden Lane, a Texas-based, female-founded mother and baby brand. The retailer launched as a wholesale brand in 2007 selling door-to-door to bricks-and-mortar stores around the USA, but opened a direct-to-consumer Shopify webstore in 2018 and never looked back.
We spoke to Founder and Designer Katy Mimario, CEO and Designer at Caden Lane about the brand’s incredible 4th placement in the Lightning 50 list of fastest-growing US brands, and the tech tools and strategies she believes led them to win fastest-growing Baby & Toddler brand in the States, with an impressive 132% rate of growth.
Here are some of the highlights from the transcript…
- “I started 15 years ago when I was pregnant with my first child and grew the business to what it is today. As a single mum of three I’m very proud of that. I think working mothers can do anything.”
- “As I was pregnant when we started, I actually ended up taking a six-week-old around New York to sell to stores there for the first time. That was when we got mass merchants like Nordstrom, one of our first very large accounts.”
- “Our biggest transition was four years ago where we went from wholesale model to direct-to-consumer. It was about wanting to talk and communicate to our customers ourselves – rather than have a middle man. Our stores were talking to our mums, and we wanted to have a touchpoint with them. So we started a website, completely closed off our wholesale model and figured out SEO all by ourselves.”
- “We use Inventory Planner to help us project sales trends and give us a forecast for what we’d potentially be selling in the next 60 or 90 days. We’re using it to optimise our run rates for products, watch ageing of products and manage our inventory altogether. This is a conversation our COO would love as he’s obsessed with Inventory Planner.”
- “We use a variety of platforms and apps – we are hosted on Shopify which has so many extensions to different developers who have honed in on different concerns in e-commerce – rewards programs, inventory management, how we use our shipping labels, tracking info. You don’t even have to be a developer to use it, they really make it user-friendly.”
- “I love that we scored so highly in the Lightning 50. From a woman’s perspective, working women in general are much more humble about their success. I spend so much time working hard without taking a moment to step back and look at what we’ve all done. So I think that means the most to me – the recognition. Women should be a little more boastful and able to say, ‘I’m badass – look what I did!’”
Want to hear more of what Katy had to say? Catch up with the full episode, and subscribe to upcoming ones, here.