Today, we had an excellent opportunity to interview Eva St. Clair, who alongside Rebecca Melsky, is a Co-Founder at Princess Awesome. Princess Awesome empowers girls through honoring and supporting their full range of interests. Transcending gender stereotypes, they encourage girls to express themselves through their clothing.
Hi David! I'm the co-founder of Princess Awesome. My business partner, Rebecca Melsky, came up with the idea for our company in the spring of 2013. Rebecca went to buy her daughter pajamas from a big mainstream store. She bought a few sets of cute, pastel pajamas with ice cream cones and hearts from the girls' section and a few sets of red and blue pajamas with robots and rocket ships from the boys' section.
On her way out, she passed the girls' section and glanced through the dresses, the only article of clothing other than pajamas that her daughter would wear at that time (or currently, for that matter!). "It's too bad," she thought, "that there are no dresses with robots on them, because she would totally wear one.
She asked me to help her start a company making girls' clothes - I said, "Yes, absolutely, what a brilliant idea!" and Princess Awesome was born. In the fall of 2013, we created our first test batch of dresses in Eva's basement on a 1948 Singer sewing machine. In 2015 we ran a Kickstarter that brought in $215,000 to help us move into a factory, and we've been going strong since then!
Princess Awesome empowers girls by creating clothing that honors and reflects the wide range of their interests - think dresses with dinosaurs.
Our customers are parents who are raising strong, confident daughters - girls who love twirling, science, sparkles, and rocket ships.. We reach many people through Facebook but also through mom bloggers and our wonderful customers via word of mouth.
We regularly survey our customers to ask them what types of clothing and themes they would like to see us create next. Our customers have been pivotal in helping us create marketing materials by providing testimonials and responding to our frequent calls for feedback.
We love finding an influencer whose philosophy about girlhood matches our own - no matter how big their following. Sometimes we're fortunate to find them just scrolling through Instagram or via blog posts about girl empowerment, and sometimes (even better!) they reach out to us.
Their philosophy should match ours - that being feminine and being interested in the world around them are equally awesome.
We haven't done much coaching in the past, but I think it's a great idea to give influencers some basic brand information so that they can emphasize brand value to their followers. For example - we don't offer huge discounts because we are made in America, and sell direct to consumers. Having that piece of information is hugely helpful to influencers trying to convince others that a 20% discount is an amazing deal.
It's incredibly difficult to calculate ROI with influencers. We usually just guess!
Finding new influencers is always a challenge and a risk. We're never sure what we're going to get.
Instagram is invaluable, as we can easily find new influencers there and our brand does well with "show, don't tell" marketing - we usually just have to show people our dresses and they immediately understand what we're trying to do.
It would be so useful to have a tool that measures ROI as well as helps us find and evaluate new influencers while helping us compensate them fairly.
Up to now, we've mostly guessed based on the size of the influencer's following and how our own metrics have performed in the days after the influencer posted. We attempt to calculate ROI based on the increase in traffic and follower numbers, but some influencers' value is in how they write or the image they create based on our products, so different influencers are valued based on a variety of metrics.
Facebook is our best-performing platform because people come there ready to think about causes and comment on them. The more our ads and posts take on the character of a conversation about girl empowerment, the better they perform.
We were fortunate to have a celebrity post about our brand earlier this year. She sent a week's worth of traffic to our site in about three hours.
We love Kristen Howerton, the author of Rage Against the Minivan. She's down to earth and funny.
Nothing keeps us up at night except our kids.
We're introducing a new Sharks collection in early June and several new designs for fall.
If you would like to stay connected with Princess Awesome, you can follow them online at Dealspotr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterests and Twitter.
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If you would like more information on claiming your merchant page, or to how to become featured in one of our running blog series, please feel welcome to reach me at david@zipfworks.com.
Hi, I am David. I am a PM at Zipfworks. Always learning, I strive to help create great products.
