Find Out How This D2C Brand Thrives in a Traditionally Retail Market

In episode 102 of the Customers Who Click podcast I spoke with Amanda Holberg, the Director of Growth at Clare, a next generation paint brand that’s completely re-imagined the paint shopping experience for today’s consumer.

In this episode we’ll be talking through how Clare has managed to thrive in a market which has traditionally been driven by retail.

“We’ve pioneered an easier, faster, more inspiring way to shop for paint, and our mission is to help people everywhere create beautiful spaces”

At Clare, they know that the customer has a tough, and very important decision to make, as painting your home isn’t something you do every month. So they place a huge emphasis on education, and the sampling experience to ensure that customers are fully prepared for what they’re getting in to.

Amanda is the Director of Growth at Clare, disrupting the home decorating industry. Amanda has spent years building sustainable growth strategies for brands spanning D2C, eCommerce, Consumer Electronics, Subscription, and education. You can connect with her on Linkedin, or check out the Clare website.

Key highlights:

02:07 - 06:19 - Biggest Opportunities for Growth at Clare - Quite simply, the value proposition that Clare offers. They’ve completely re-imagined how people shop for interior paint, and they’ve managed to do it with a completely D2C offering. Given that the traditional experience involves looking at a booklet of a thousand different colours, trying to identify which specific shade you'd like, buying a small tin of it and testing it out on your wall only to still not really know how you feel about it, it seems like a no brainer that this is an industry that needs disrupting.

Clare are super transparent about what goes into their paint, and they really focus on helping customers with their project, there’s a lot more involvement to it, advice, inspiration etc, than just ‘here’s some paint, off you go.

07:22 - 16:03 - How Does Clare Educate the Customer? - Customer feedback has told them that their customers don’t want to see 1,000 different shades of paint, they find the experience a bit overwhelming, that paradox of choice effect hits and people find it easier to put off the project than to buy some paint and get on with it.

Clare uses a Colour Genius Quiz which involves a sophisticated set of questions, designed by their founder (an interior designer). It asks questions about what room they’re painting, how much light it gets, what the existing decor is, and then suggests colour based on those answers. So not only does it massively cut down the number of options presented to a customer, but they are recommendations from an expert, based on what the customer has told them.

It’s pretty much a case of ‘here you go, this is the right colour’.

In addition to this though, Clare put a huge focus on more general education around the whole experience. Providing information for those who have never painted before, how to go about preparing the room, and showing off loads of inspiration via their social media channels.

16:04 - 22:30 - How does Clare use Sampling - At Clare they really encourage customers to buy their new swatch packs. They send you a pack of several different shades, or colours, and these are peel and stick swatches, allowing you to move them around the room and try them in different rooms. You’re not being asked to put streaks of paint all over your walls until you find the colour you like. They’ve also put an emphasis on sustainability and waste, so have streamlined their mailer. This is becoming more and more important to customers, and just because you want to cut down on waste, doesn’t mean your mailer has to be cheap and plain.

23:28 - 28:10 - Clare’s Colour Genius Quiz - Customers want the type of experience they can get in-stores, but online. They want to be asked questions and want to be guided to the right products for their needs. This happens a lot in shoe stores for example, Games Workshop are another brand that put a focus on really helping their customers in-stores, but this experience rarely translates online, because brands don’t know how.

Quizzes are a great way of doing this, because they do ask those questions that a customer wants to answer. They provide that guidance, and offer up recommendations based on what the customer has told it.

And this is what Clare has gone for. They want the quiz to feel like someone is asking you thoughtful questions about your space, and that you can be quite custom if your response, but without the grey area that may cause confusion. And this all just takes 3 minutes, so its super quick and simple, and gives the customer their custom recommendation.

28:23 - 29:30 - Testing & Optimising at Clare - As a D2C business they need to ensure the website is optimised, because its the only sales channel. So optimisation plays a key role for Clare, but as a startup they have to balance high impact / high priority, vs the other pieces they’d like to implement or test with.

30:24 - 35:37 - Approaching Lifetime Value in a One & Done Industry - People only paint their house every 10-15 years, which makes lifetime value a bit of a difficult one for brands like Clare. However, they’ve found that actually, its rare for someone to paint their whole house in one go. Customers will paint a room, come back 6 months later to do another, maybe another year goes by before they do the next room. So while this means that lifetime value is just spread over time rather than being that lump payment every 10 years, it also means that customers have much more frequent touchpoints with Clare, and it becomes a bit easier to retain them because they are actually buying quite frequently.

39:41 - Who Would Amanda Like to Take For Lunch in the D2C Marketing World?

Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, shes a female founder who has done an incredible job growing her brand, and focusing on her team and employees.

40:56 - Amanda’s Must-Have Ecommerce Tools:

Funnel.io
Peel

If you’d like to hear more from Amanda, you can connect with her on LinkedIn or head over to https://www.clare.com/.