Case Profiles
Case Profile: Joe Button – Customisation and the Customer
- 21st November
- Natasha Sholl 100
So you’ve got your great idea, you’ve done the ground-work and now your website is live. Now what? Founders of shirt e-tailer Joe Button, Melissa Lee and Modi Song, share their thoughts on dressing up a website.
The co-founders of ORIA finalist Joe Button, Modi Song and Melissa Lee, have already taken us through the journey of how they turned their virtual idea into an online reality. But how do you engage your customer and make your business stand-out as much as a custom-made shirt?
Sometimes the key to standing out is to go with your instinct rather than just making a decision for financial gain. “We have a few defining features that differentiate us from our competitors,” says Song. “Firstly, we offer customisable products for both men and women. We realise men make up the majority of the dress shirt market and it probably makes more financial sense to concentrate on where most of the demand is, however as we knew firsthand how limited the options for female shirts and shirtdresses were, we felt it was only right for us to offer our customisable products for women as well.”
While the idea of Joe Button came from the concept of customers designing their own shirts, they didn’t want to limit their reach. “We understand that not everyone wants to design their own shirts or shirtdresses but they still want something different, so we have the Essential Collection, inspired by some important literary and film characters,” Song tells us. (Their website features The Seth Cohen, so ‘important literary and film characters’ might not apply to all their designs!)
Song and Lee also recognise that people are often reluctant to make that initial purchase from an online store. The website’s first $59 First Shirt offer saw sales skyrocket. Premium cotton and shirts made to order mean that Joe Button products aren’t the cheapest on the market. While quality is important for Song and Lee, “at the end of the day, people won’t know this until they’ve seen or worn the shirt.” The First Shirt offer helps to “eliminate that initial purchase barrier…We have a lot of confidence in the quality of our product so we want our customers to decide for themselves whether or not our product is worth their money.”
Joe Button hasn’t embraced a mobile optimised site. “Joe Button is all about designing your own shirts and shirtdresses, so our customers generally spend much longer on our site than on your average online retailer,” says Song. “As a result of this, we find that mobile isn’t a really big market for us at the moment, as customers generally prefer to design their garments on a bigger screen. Tablets however, are picking up and we find that our existing site works quite well on iPads.”
The Joe Button team are also keenly aware of the importance of social media and engaging their customers. “Joe Button has a presence on Facebook and Twitter, but on top of this, we also publish our own blog on the website. Return on investment is something that you can track through your analytics, but we see our social media platform as a way to engage our audience as opposed to commercialising them. For us, it’s not really about how many new customers we can get to make a purchase on the site, but to make sure that our existing customer base has access to all the latest style trends and that we’re the go-to site for style advice.”
