Member Article

Behind the business with Jeanography

Jeanography are a demin e-tailer, looking to corner the market with their ’fit first time’ service, which uses body metrics, customer preferences and product knowledge to match people to jeans. Founders Alex and Jon Heaton, and Joe Simons, take Bdaily behind the business.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

Fundraising has been an interesting challenge for a number of different reasons. Firstly we’ve created and presented 30 different versions of the same presentation based on feedback, minor changes to strategy or context. I can truly say that we are pretty good at pitching our deck now! Through the process we’ve learnt a lot about the investor eco system in London and how to navigate some of the pitfalls. The other major challenge for us was to launch our new Fit First Time recommendation and home trial service for jeans at the end of February. Six months of hard work has gone into creating this service. There is nothing else like it in the world right now so we had to develop most of it from scratch including front end user experience, back end integration with our ecommerce system and fulfilment and order management processes and many other issues and challenges.

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

Certainly the launch of Fit First Time. Since launch we’ve seen our site conversion rate more than double, sales are up 100% month on month and our order with no sale and combined refund rate has massively decreased which is pretty amazing. The results so far have made everything worth it.

What is your biggest focus for the coming year?

We have lots of improvements in the pipe line to make our recommendations better and provide and more engaging experience for our customers. Our core priority to build a loyal customer base, this translates into month on month sales growth combined with maintaining or improving our key metrics. We hope to raise a larger investment round later this year.

If you had to choose one top piece of advice for someone just starting out in business, or is currently operating within your industry sector, what would it be?

Test using minimum viable products as much as you can. Talk to your customers as much as possible then try and delight them at every step. The successful ecommerce businesses of the future will either have unique products or have a unique service or a combination of both.

Can you share with us your view of the current landscape of business, in your region or generally, and where your organisation sits within it?

Jeanography’s competitors can be divided into 2 distinct categories:

• Independent specialists
• Large General Premium department stores

Net-a-Porter.com, My-Wardrobe.com, Selfridges.com and HouseofFraser.co.uk are key players in the large store category.They stock thousands of products including ranges of premium denim. Their main competitive advantage lies in their generally well-known and trusted brands. However they offer little specific product knowledge or fit service.

Both Trilogy and Donna Ida are premium denim specialists. Their in-store boutique experience is exceptional. However, their strengths seem to be physical retail based rather than online.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .