In this recurring series I am going to analyze the eCommerce strategy and path to purchase of successful fashion brands. If there is a brand you’d like me to feature in this series, email me with your requests.
We’re kicking off the series with Dôen.
Before we get started I want to thank this week's sponsor: Segments Analytics.
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This brand is incredibly popular and influential within a specific community: fashion-adjacent moms who hate everything Ballerina Farm stands for but probably have a ton of her posts secretly saved in their IG bookmarks.
I think Dôen is interesting because the brand started eCom-only but grew to eight figures without Meta ads. You can read about the brand’s rise to fame here. That’s not what we’re going to talk about today; instead, I’m going to break down their current digital strategy.
Meta Ads Strategy
You can view Dôen’s Meta ads library here.
Dôen invests a lot in branded photography with a very distinct art direction and POV. You can find it on their website, on their Instagram page, and used liberally in their Meta advertising.
This photography style is interesting, because it has some overlap with organic content posted by the highest echelon of fashion and mommy lifestyle bloggers. So it doesn’t automatically read “catalog” and trigger the viewer’s internal ad blocker.
Dôen also mixes in some more iPhone/organic style photography, but the models and settings make it look very elevated. You can see some of their more “raw” ads here and here. (links may take a minute to load)
All of the brand’s live ads feature a logo, and sometimes a tagline highlighting the collection or the product featured in the photo. This is relatively new; as recently as six months ago they didn’t put the logo on every single ad.
I advise brands not to do this when they’re first starting out on Meta unless the brand has massive IRL awareness. The reason? It’s another indicator that the viewer is watching an ad, which typically drives down CTR.
The brand is doing a great job highlighting best selling styles. Aside from best sellers, ads are also highlighting new product drops. Because the brand often sells out of new styles quickly this is a valid strategy.
Landing page strategy is a mixed bag. Ads featuring a specific product either point to the relevant product page or the featured category, but the product in the ads isn’t always easy to find.
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Merchandising Strategy
When Dôen launched in 2016 it was filling a definite hole in the market: an alternative to contemporary brands for moms. The contemporary market focused on two main use cases: dressing for the office and dressing for events. The offerings were typically very sexy or very structured.
Dôen’s core customers were moms who used to shop contemporary, but found that those brands were less practical in their new lives. The dresses were nursing-friendly, durable and flowy–perfect for spending hours on the floor with a toddler.
Natural fabrics like cotton made Dôen’s dresses easier to care for, floral prints disguised stains, and a price point that sat ~20-25% below Contemporary made moms feel less anxious about wear and tear.
Dôen benefitted from the prairie dress boom of 2020, but has evolved beyond that trend by focusing on more tailored silhouettes and exploring a broader set of vintage references. Silk and lace slip dresses now regularly appear beside the cotton prairie dresses.
The brand has core, best-selling styles in a number of categories including the Henri top, the Sebastiane skirt, the Quinn dress and the Anisa cardigan.
One of the brand’s most popular fit innovations is a smocked bodice that can be tightened and expanded manually using ties made from self fabric. I own a dress with this feature and it is incredibly flattering and forgiving when your weight fluctuates in pregnancy and postpartum.
This detail has been worked into a number of dress silhouettes, although it’s become harder to find in more recent seasons.
The brand has expanded into a number of new categories since its founding: denim, sweaters, footwear, childrenswear and intimates. Denim and sweaters appear to be the most successful, high unit volume expansions.
The brand has successfully applied its aesthetic lens to these new categories; they don’t feel like an afterthought. I can’t speak for quality or execution because I’ve never seen product from the new categories in person.
Wholesale Strategy
Dôen is carried at a select group of established multibrand retailers, including Net-A-Porter, Goop and Saks.
Each wholesale account carries a very tight edit of pieces compared to what is available on the brand’s website. Each account is carrying at least one best-selling style, like the Henri top. NAP has the broadest, most adventurous selection.
Dôen’s Google search results are clean. Their wholesale accounts are not bidding against brand terms for text campaigns and Dôen dominates its branded shopping terms.
This strategy allows the brand to use wholesale as an awareness vehicle. The best selling pieces allow Dôen to make a strong first impression, but customers must turn to the brand’s own website if they want to expand their collection or purchase hottest items in each new product drop.
Website Experience
Dôen’s website flies in the face of nearly every eCom UX “best practice”. All of the photography is editorial; there are no standard eCom shots and few, if any, flats.
Instead of a 3x grid, product categories are presented in a scrapbook-style layout with “frames” and photos of varying sizes. Sometimes a single photo will be larger than the desktop viewport. The experience is more standardized on mobile, but only slightly.
The brand uses two custom fonts online that are nearly illegible, and a lot of the text is too small to read without really craning your neck.
Product is not removed from categories when it sells out, or even sorted to the bottom of categories. The website’s search function isn’t great. As a result, it can be really hard to find specific items. The experience enforces meandering and vibing.
One feature I personally appreciate is an indication of how sheer the garment’s fabric is on each PDP. This feature is buried in a hamburger menu, so I’m sure that many first time visitors miss it (I did).
This summer I ordered about 10 items from Dôen–a mix of dresses, shorts and tops. Most of the dresses were so sheer that they were essentially transparent. This was more pronounced on the solid colors vs the prints. The web photography does NOT make this clear.
The return process is close to punitive–you need to provide a hand-typed “reason for return” for each item you send back. It gives you the feeling that they blacklist folks who return too much. I think they might also charge a restocking fee–can’t remember.
Summary & Learnings
Don’t Copy/Paste Tactics From Other Brands
Does Dôen’s website look cool? Yeah (as long as you’re not trying to find something specific). Does that mean you should throw usability out the window and do whatever your heart desires? No.
Dôen created a strong pool of brand awareness outside of Meta and paired it with a “drop” strategy that stokes consumer demand. TL;DR they can make potential customers “work for it”. Can you really say the same?
Sometimes Macro Forces Work WITH You
Dôen was moderately successful in 2019. But the brand really blew up during 2020 when prairie dressing became a market-dominating trend. Officewear became markedly less relevant and women were looking for new dressing formulas that suited a more casual way of life.
If this happens to you it is important to be clear-headed about why these new customers are pouring into your brand and when the spigot is likely to run dry. I will cover this in more detail in a future issue.
You Must Balance Evolution And Revolution
Every product you sell has a lifecycle, and the end of that lifecycle is obsolescence. You can’t lean on a best seller forever, but most design-driven brands can lean on their hits for a lot longer than they want to.
Designers are early adopters. They often tire of a trend around the same time the masses have finally warmed up to it.
Smart brands have a merchant who reigns in those wandering urges. Self-destructive brands kill best sellers early and pivot design direction often, alienating loyal customers.
Dôen is navigating the transition away from prairie dressing while holding on to the core styles and styling details that made women fall in love with the brand.
You CAN Balance Performance And Brand Objectives
Dôen was a great case study on balancing branded and performance elements in Meta advertising…before they decided to slap the logo on every ad. Maybe they don’t have to anymore?
When I tell you to experiment with formats that mimic organic content, I’m not saying you have to make ugly ads.
It Was Easier To Build A Brand 10 Years Ago
Could Dôen launch the same playbook from scratch today successfully? Maybe…
There is an element of luck in every success story, but it’s possible to become more lucky. Luck is when solid brand positioning meets a cultural moment, and is accelerated by good business strategy (marketing, financial and operational).
If you’re going to use Meta as your GTM channel, you have to lean into it fully. If you want to use word of mouth/press/wholesale instead, expect slower growth and less cash flow initially. That said, this approach can result in explosive growth that appears to come “out of nowhere”, as discussed in the High Sport case study.
That’s a wrap for our first brand breakdown. Reply to this email and let me know what brand you’d like me to cover next!
Dôen is a brand straddling the line between stage one and stage two of growth. They drove impressive initial growth via strong positioning and word of mouth.
Elements of the digital experience were streamlined to support phase one growth as the brand got bigger and financial fundamentals became more important. (Believe it or not, the website used to be even more “branded” and user-unfriendly).
From a merchandising POV, the brand is attempting to navigate life in a post-nap-dress world. In doing this, they risk losing some of the design features that attracted their core customer in the first place.
The silhouette has become less forgiving over time. But maybe the original cohort of moms has “snapped back” and that no longer matters.
Dôen was a great case study on balancing branded and performance elements in Meta advertising…before they decided to slap the logo on every ad.
The brand is also proof that you do not have to follow every performance marketing and UX best practice…as long as you’re generating sufficient demand IRL. If you are a stage 1 brand using Meta as your GTM, do not copy their website approach.