Intimo brand manager Kirby Hughes dicusses how the business plans to maintain the changes it has made in 2020 into the future.
Prior to COVID, Intimo’s core business was face to face bra fittings.
With a party plan heritage, we have been guided by the amazing relationships fostered with our customers through in person fittings, so making the transition to an entirely virtual experience took a considerable amount of effort both by our internal team and our Fit Specialist community.
To their credit, our Fit Specialists adapted their skills almost overnight to ensure they could continue offering the same personalised service to their clients.
The response to this transition has been overwhelmingly positive, and has also enabled us to expand our service offering and reach women in more rural areas who we’d otherwise not have the pleasure of meeting and those that are time poor and wouldn’t usually make the time to connect with a Fit Specialist for an in person fitting.
To coincide with our virtual service in partnership with Australia Post, we also launched free returns and exchanges.
COVID really brought with it a lot of uncertainty for brands and consumers, so it was really important for us to prioritise peace of mind for our clients when shopping virtually without the ability to physically try the collections on.
While we anticipated an increase in returns and exchanges with the addition of this service and with some uncertainty around the new virtual experience, our return/exchange rate ultimately remained the same.
This is again testament to the commitment of our Fit Specialists and our 25 years of experience fitting and measuring women for lingerie
Further, to complement our lingerie collections, we also introduced loungewear, sleepwear and ready to wear capsules with a focus on high quality, trans seasonal fabrications.
The concept was to release whole looks of really versatile and wearable styles in natural fibres like our signature Tencel Modal and 100% Australian Merino Wool.
Our first drop in July sold out within 48 hours, and since then most styles haven’t lasted beyond a two or three week period.
The vision for these capsules started about 12 months ago and it was serendipitous that their release coincided with restrictions in early May.
There was an instant appetite for comfortable yet Zoom-appropriate attire and the ability to buy a whole ‘look’ made the process quite efficient and stress free for our customers, who were juggling kids and the transition to working from home.
Meanwhile, we are beyond excited for 2021 after all of the new opportunity and learning brought about by this year.
We’re working on a brand-new website and looking to further our technology stack to provide an even more seamless cross-channel experience for our customers.
We’ll be launching new ways to build your bra wardrobe – both with the assistance of a Fit Specialist and online at your leisure – as well as (hopefully) establishing a few more pop up experience boutiques where customers can book a fitting and receive the full Intimo experience.