Welcome to 2026! I don’t usually advocate for “best practices”, but here are five things I think every fashion brand should do this year.
Before we get into it, I want to thank this week's sponsor: Layers.
Layers is the first search & merchandising platform built exclusively for Shopify Plus. Faster, smarter, and more capable than the legacy tools, for a fraction of the price.
#1 Analyze Your Repeat Rate
What is repeat rate? The percent of new customers who make a second purchase from you. Believe it or not, a “good” repeat rate for a pure play eCommerce brand is 26-29%.
Why is repeat rate important? For two reasons: first, winning the second purchase is the bottleneck to customer loyalty and lifetime value. Most churn happens between the first and second purchase.
Second, repeat rate tells you a lot about the health of your business:
- If your repeat rate is below 21%, you have merchandising issues that must be fixed if you want to grow profitably.
- If your repeat rate is between 21-25%, your retention strategy needs work.
- If your repeat rate is north of 38%, you might have a customer acquisition problem.
To calculate your repeat rate, analyze transactions that took place in the last 12 months that have at least 6 months of tenure. I know that sounds confusing at first. What it means in practice: analyze orders placed between July 2024 and June 2025.
Why do this? Because customers take time to come back and repurchase. So “analyzing” the repeat purchase behavior of customers you acquired last month isn’t a fair analysis.
Fix repeat rate, fix your business.
#2 Check Your Site For “Leaks”
A lot of the aesthetic conventions of fashion websites are conversion rate nightmares. Here are some examples:
- Using huge image and/or video files on the homepage that take >5 seconds to load
- Product images with “tricky” styling that obscure just what is being sold
- Wasting “above the fold” space on category pages with huge image banners
- Bombing the user with a million popups (cookies, email opt-in, chatbot) before they can actually see the content
- Teeny tiny font sizes
There are two ways to combat this issue:
- Check your web analytics software for the pages with the longest load times and highest bounce rates, and start your audit from there.
- Seek out paid user testing, or have an objective outsider do a walkthrough of your website while a team member watches, records and asks questions.
If your brand runs on Shopify, one of the easiest ways to lift your conversion rate is to upgrade the default site search and filtering capabilities.
Let's face it: Shopify's built-in search and filter capabilities are weak. And if you run a brand with dozens of SKUs, using Shopify's OOB search and filters are costing you missed sales.
So, how do 9-figure brands with thousands of SKUs like Rainbow manage to scale on Shopify? They use Layers to enhance their site with best in class product search and merchandising capabilities.
Layers lets you deliver AI-powered sort orders and lightning-fast visual discovery on the front end, without synonym spreadsheets, ranking rules, hours-long catalog syncs or manual merchandising on the back end.
Brands that use Layers have cut bounce rates, reduced “no result” searches by 30% and cut site merchandising costs.
It's up to 60% less expensive than the legacy search & merchandising tools like Bloomreach or Searchspring, while providing superior functionality.
Layers is offering my readers a free 30 day trial. No seat limits, No usage caps, full onboarding and training included–click here to sign up.
#3 Hone Your Elevator Pitch
The new year is a great time to confront the “big questions” like…why do people buy from you?
There are a number of different ways that fashion brands can differentiate:
- Eye-catching visual design (the “see it, like it, buy it” approach)
- Outstanding price to value ratio (clothes that look more expensive than they are)
- Functional attributes (sweat wicking, soft and stretchy, stain resistant, etc)
- Unique materials and/or manufacturing process (craftsmanship)
- Status or identity signaling
The best brands use a combination of all of the above to fill white space in the market.
You can get a brand from zero to $1M in revenue by making trend-driven, eye-catching product. But additional scale and sustained growth require a strong “why”.
If you’re not sure about your brand’s “why”, here are some things you can try:
- Study your best selling styles and get feedback from customers–what do they like about these styles?
- Come up with a few “elevator pitches” based on the list above, add them as headlines to your best performing ad, and see which version drives the most ad spend
- Give your website URL and a list of top selling styles to ChatGPT and ask it to explain why your brand resonates with the market
#4 Audit Where Your Time & Money Are Going
First, check out this amazing post from Mehtab on X.
Harsh truth: in eCommerce, we spend a lot of time and money on things that simply don’t matter. The brands that continue to grow profitably year after year have a laser focus on their most powerful growth levers. For a lot of folks reading this, that growth lever is Meta ads.
If Meta ads are your brand’s top growth channel:
- What % of your photo and video production is dedicated to Meta ads?
- How much are you investing in media buying vs other marketing functions?
- Are you building your line plan based on the products that resonate on Meta?
- Is your path to purchase optimized for impulse shoppers?
I’ve worked with fashion clients who depend on Meta to create cash flow, but the team’s primary focus is producing a runway show or supporting efforts to get print PR placements. That simply doesn’t make sense.
Conversely, I’ve worked with fashion clients who throw six figures a year at website optimization when what they really need is more traffic. That doesn’t make sense either.
The first step in this process? Calculate the profitability of each line of business–eCommerce, TikTok shop, and wholesale accounts down to the retailer level.
If you have high maintenance, low profitability sales channels, you need to right-size your investment.
#5 Finally Feel Confident In Your Meta Ads Strategy
When I work with fashion clients on their Meta ads strategy, there are typically three big questions:
- Why do my ads drive conversions for one or two days, then die?
- Why aren’t my ads making my Shopify sales numbers go up?
- Why have I hit a plateau in daily ad spend–is there something I'm missing?
When brands have these questions, it’s typically because they’re making one of these three common Meta ads mistakes:
- Featuring the wrong products in their ads, in the wrong way
- Testing the wrong things, or lack of a structured testing process
- Using outdated media buying tactics with the wrong KPIs
Here's the rub–if your ads agency or media buyer hasn't worked with fashion brands before, they probably won't be able to help you navigate these problems.
Many of the Meta "best practices" that work for supplements brands don't work for fashion brands. Fashion really is different.
It's a big reason why I started this newsletter. Many past issues are dedicated to trouble shooting these problems. But the issues persist.
In 2026 I want to put together some streamlined, step-by-step resources for helping fashion brands scale with Meta ads. The first one of these resources is going to launch next week: a simple, five step process for finding your first winning ad.
Believe it or not, finding your first winning Meta ad is about more than creative strategy. I've worked with a lot of brands that kill winners before they can scale, or set internal performance benchmarks that ensure they will never scale.
That's why this course is going to cover the following:
- The basic technical account setup that you must get right to scale
- How to pick the right products to feature in your ads
- How to set good KPIs to manage your ad spend
- The 3 ad creative formats that have the best "hit rate"
- How to interpret your campaign data the right way, so you don't kill your winners prematurely
- What to do once you've found your winner (so you can keep scaling)
This course is going to cost less than $50. Keep your eyes on your inbox for the launch email, which will be coming next week.
P.S.–this course is not just for beginners. If you've had a few wins on Meta, but your performance isn't consistent, this will help you too.