Case Profiles
Case Profile: Joe Button on Creation and Communication
- 15th December
- Natasha Sholl 100
Joe Button founders Modi Song and Melissa Lee share their tips about succeeding in online retail, from 3D models to how to engage your customer. When it comes to getting what you want online, all you have to do is ask!
Joe Button Founders Melissa Lee and Modi Song have already taken us through their online journey and what they learnt taking their mass customisation shirt business online. Now they tell us their e-commerce tips and what tools help them stand out from the crowd.
The 3D model makes designing a shirt step-by-step as easy as can be
When it comes to customising business shirts, you have to have the technology to help your customer through the process. “The core piece of technology behind Joe Button is the site’s 3D model that lets customers design their own shirts and shirtdresses and watch as a simulation of their customised creation takes shape in real-time,” says Song. “This model was created by rendering thousands of images for each of the different variations of the customisable components of a shirt.” Helping your customers visualise their purchase is crucial for online retail in general, but especially when it comes to customising products.
Being able to communicate with customers is also essential. “We also adopted a live chat box very early on and this has been an instrumental tool in helping us engage with our customers in real time. We have found that people are time-poor or have very short attention spans and want answers to the enquiries immediately. This program has provided the platform for us to deliver the highest level of customer service as well as increase our conversion rates,” Song tells us.
Mass customisation has been a stand-out trend in 2011, from Joe Button to Sneaking Duck, Shoes of Prey, Mooo and the latest edition, Vinspi. It’s a trend that excites the Joe Button team “We really believe in co-creation, not just as a current trend, but we believe it has longevity. The beauty of it is that it engages your customer – customers want to spend longer on your site because they’re having fun creating their own products. They also want to tell all their friends about it because they designed it themselves.”
Despite its success, Joe Button has had to contend with the challenges facing online retailers in Australia. “A big challenge for Australian e-commerce retail businesses is that geographically, we are very far away from the rest of the world and it’s very hard for us to compete on speed of freight and logistics with continental Europe and the US,” Song tells us. “This was a very big issue for us whilst we were setting up our business, which was why it was so important for us to partner with a tailor that would drop-ship our products directly to the customer.”
“With that being said, the Australian online retail space is changing and growing at a rapid pace. Previously, there were a lot of ‘chicken or the egg’ issues where people were afraid to innovate because they thought the market was too small or too far behind the US and it was precisely these reasons that ironically slowed us down. With some fantastic Australian online start-ups now gaining significant traction both domestically and overseas, we can finally start to see a shift in the momentum of the whole online industry in Australia.”
Song and Lee’s biggest piece of advice when setting up an e-commerce business is to be pro-active. “Having only worked in large corporate companies previously, it took us a while to gain the confidence to negotiate on the opposite side. We realise now that all you have to do to get what you want is just to ask – the worst that can really happen is that you get turned down, but even then you’re no worse off than when you started!”
