Objectives & Marketing Strategy

Sell as much of the existing Ava Swimwear inventory as possible, while keeping marketing costs as low as possible.

Marketing Strategy:

We had a staff meeting after your visit to Green Dot to brainstorm the best course of action given all of the information we collected. Here’s what we came up with.

We had the wives of 3 of our employees (including mine who has a Fashion Merchandising degree), plus the girls in the office review the inventory. The news wasn’t that encouraging. This 5 rat study concludes the designs combined with the pricing don’t inspire confidence. The low prices actually cause concern. All of them are worried about quality, and most don’t like but a handful of the designs.

As to redesigning the site – internally we all agree this site won’t ever look classy with the models and photography it has today. Some models are posing badly. Some images have backgrounds, others not. Some swimsuits are on mannequins, some are not. The time it would take to redesign the interfaces is manageable from a cost standpoint, but the time it would take to get the photos to look consistent is absurd. And it would still be the same photography and the same swimsuits.

As a result, we recommend going in a different direction. Instead of spending four or five thousand dollars to redesign the site, we suggest investing that money into offering free shipping and free returns. That removes all risk of ordering online. Additionally, we recommend advertising a “75% off blowout sale”. Change the prices to be higher – between $60 – $80 per swimsuit. Then mark them down to between $25 – $12 each, as most are priced that way anyhow.

We’ll simply update the home page with blowout sale graphics while your team updates the pricing for the swimwear. Then we’ll run a social media and Google banner ad campaign to aggressively promote the sale event. We want people clicking through that are looking for a bargain, not people expecting the best, most amazing swimsuit. Our feeling is that if we can get people into bargain hunting mode, and they have no risk because shipping and returns are free, you’ll get more conversions and sales than if we try to build up the Ava brand now with design, blogging, brand awareness and the like.

Once most of the inventory is liquidated, let’s huddle up and decide what you want to do next. If you want to continue with Ava, the site will need to be totally redesigned, you’ll need to invest in the Ava store brand and make it exciting, stylish and fun. And you’ll need to work with someone who is really good at merchandising. We’ll shoot the photography to ensure it’s all consistent and the result will be 180 degree turn in terms of positioning for the store. That said, step 1 is liquidating inventory.