In August New Zealand label Kate Sylvester launched its online marketplace Kate Sylvester Reloved.
The site encourages users to list and buy past season Kate Sylvester pieces to keep them from going to waste and extend the garment's life beyond its first owner.
The initiative is the first of its kind from the designer so Ragtrader was interested to find out how the site is tracking so far.
Kate, since the site's launch how is performing?
After the initial surge of traffic generated around Reloved’s launch over New Zealand Fashion Week, we have settled into a nice consistent stream of visitors.
We are pleasantly surprised with how popular the site has been and now are into the swing of items being uploaded at a similar rate to them being sold.
We had anticipated a slight delay before users started to list their items as we had to prove that there was a customer base using the platform willing to purchase them.
However, by engaging KS friends, staff and family with the platform for a soft launch a week before and also injecting some archive samples into the mix, we quickly had users listing items of their own within the first week or so.
How many people have uploaded garments?
Around 50 people have listed items for a total of 116 listings.
What’s the oldest garment that’s been uploaded to the site?
A beautiful quilted wallpaper-print jacket from the 2001 ‘Home’ collection.
Are there patterns in the uploading and purchasing behaviours?
Thursday nights tend to have the most selling action, and as you would expect, Sunday’s are the most popular when it comes to listing items.
How have you made consumers aware of the site? Which channels are you using and which are the strongest?
We launched the platform alongside our New Zealand Fashion Week show, seamlessly mixing in pieces from the Kate Sylvester archive with our upcoming Winter ’20 runway looks to highlight the timeless quality of Kate Sylvester garments.
We have Reloved postcards in our stores and send these out with our eCommerce orders which have helped to build the discussion around Reloved and get people directly using the platform. Publicity around the initiative has also been strong.
Targeted EDM’s have directly generated a fifth of our Reloved web traffic and the rest is made up from a fairly even spread of referrals from our main site and online press (blog posts etc), Facebook discussion and posts and our regular Instagram stories highlighting exciting listings.