Preparing Retail for Holiday 2020: Q&A with Gerry Vire, Missouri Star Quilt Company
With the holiday season right around the corner, most retailers’ marketing teams are busy preparing. This would be true in any year, but the preparations look quite different in 2020. This holiday season is clouded in uncertainty, as many retailers prepare for their first primarily digital holiday season and questions around heightened competition and decreased consumer spending power run rampant.
To get a look inside what this means for marketing leaders, we sat down with Gerry Vire, Director of Marketing at Missouri Star Quilt Company, a quilting supply retailer that sells online and through its own stores based in Missouri.
Vinit Nagaich: Tell us about your role at Missouri Star Quilt Company
Gerry Vire: I’m the Director of Marketing and lead our marketing communications and creative teams.
VN: What are you most proud of in your work with Missouri Star Quilt Company?
GV: I’ve been here a little over a year, and we’ve already done so much. We’re a 12 year old company and we’re experiencing a ton of growth right now, so a lot of the things we’re building from a marketing perspective we need immediately. Two of the biggest initiatives have been bringing on Bluecore as our ESP and moving to Shopify Plus for our eCommerce platform (versus using a homegrown platform, which has various limitations).
VN: What has been the biggest change for your team since the onset of COVID-19? And what, if anything, has stayed more or less the same?
GV: Not too much has really stayed the same for us — COVID-19 has had that large of an impact on our business. As unfortunate as the situation is in the world, our business has boomed since COVID hit. Our business started really picking up around March, and since then we’ve seen month-over-month records for revenue goals, new customers, you name it. We’re talking 20-25% increases in website traffic and revenue, which is huge. We recently did a big “Christmas in July” sale, and we broke the revenue record for single day sales for the brand’s entire 12 year history — and it wasn’t even close.
It makes sense. We sell quilting supplies and our best customers are women who are 65 and over, so they’re staying in more and making projects for friends and family. We were pretty uniquely positioned for something like this, so we’ve been very lucky compared to others.
But it hasn’t been all roses for us. Ninety percent of our revenue comes from online, but we have a presence in Hamilton, Missouri, a small town where we have 12 individually themed fabric shops, an education center and a retreat center where we host groups that come and stay for 2-3 days. It’s really become a destination for the quilting industry and attracts people from all over the world. We temporarily closed those stores and centers in March, but in June we decided to close them permanently until Spring 2021. We’ve been able to make up for that 10% revenue loss online, but the kinds of events and experiences we provide there are a big part of who we are. So that’s definitely had a big impact on our business from both a financial and a brand standpoint.
VN: Have there been any specific changes around what people are shopping for?
GV: When the need for face masks really hit our fabric sales skyrocketed. That activity has kind of leveled off as people find other outlets to buy face masks, but it’s still having a big impact on our sales. And overall since people are staying in more, they’re ordering more supplies to do projects.
VN: How are you thinking differently about planning for the 2020 holiday season given everything going on?
GV: The quilting industry is a bit different when it comes to holidays. For most retailers, the traditional holiday shopping season spans from October through December, or even into January in some cases. Quilting is different because people need a lead time for projects if they’re planning on making their gifts, so we start our holiday campaigns in July and continue to run them through the end of the year.
This year, we went hard with pre-awareness for our Christmas in July sale to drive awareness and recognition for the Missouri Star Quilt brand. We have our loyal customers who we love dearly, but we also welcomed in so many new customers this year since COVID-19 hit. That’s been huge, and we want to use these campaigns to help them learn more about us and to give us an opportunity to learn more about them so we can engage with them in meaningful ways.
Bluecore will be instrumental in all of that. When we came to Bluecore, we had a pretty straightforward email marketing program that consisted of three main emails a week and then various one-offs. Bluecore has changed that, helping us introduce new evergreen campaigns like best sellers and new arrivals that have had a big impact on our business. The last couple months, email revenue has been up 40-50% month-over-month from 2019. COVID is a big part of that, but a lot of the new campaigns we’re launching with Bluecore have also contributed to it. Previously our emails were one-size-fits-all, so for us to be able to use Bluecore to personalize that experience, for example with dynamic product recommendations, is huge. Doing all of that through email is also important because that’s the number one channel in terms of driving revenue for our business by far.
VN: What is your team’s top goal for the 2020 holiday season? And how, if at all, is that different than your goals in past holiday seasons?
GV: I tell my team we can’t take anything for granted and I don’t want there to be a false sense of security. We can learn from what happened in the past, but there’s no manual for what’s going on right now. With COVID and everything going on socially and politically in the world, there’s a lot of planning that has to be done upfront. But just because we launched our holiday plan last week, we are by no means done. We want to keep engaging our customers and we built our brand on education, so matching education and experience with the products we offer is going to be huge for us this holiday season.
Along those lines, a big part of our brand is social media. In fact, we built our business on YouTube tutorials. We have a loyal following on social media, so giving customers opportunities to engage with our products and educational resources is key. We do a Facebook Live every Tuesday, and we’re planning to do more soon. We’re also looking into more ways to create experiences where customers can engage with us and with other quilters digitally. For instance, we launched our first Facebook group earlier this year and plan to take the learnings from that to launch even more.
VN: What do you foresee as your biggest challenge heading into the 2020 holiday season?
GV: We’ve done a bit of surveying with all the new customers that we’ve welcomed in, and they’ve come to us primarily through referrals or social media. We asked if they’d shop again and over half say they don’t know. So there’s a big opportunity for us to surface the right products for them and also to tell them our story, which we feel is rich in the industry. Ultimately, we want to give them a reason beyond products and price to shop with us again. We want to be the one-stop-shop for all of their quilting needs — products, education and community. That’s where our educational resources and community-driven experiences that allow them to engage with us and other quilters make a big difference.
Growing our fanbase on social media and taking advantage of opportunities to monetize those channels will also be important. So will engaging with those customers more through email by using Bluecore to set up different campaigns so that we can talk to those new customers differently rather than taking the one-size-fits-all approach we used to have.
VN: What is your advice to other marketers preparing for what’s sure to be retail’s most unique holiday season?
GV: Overall, I think focusing on experiences is going to be an important problem to solve. It’s going to be one thing to have the right product at the right price, but you also need to give people a reason to shop with you beyond product and price. No one knows what the brick and mortar situation will be like, so making sure the online experience is engaging and keeps people coming back will be essential.
Get Your Team Ready for the 2020 Holiday Season
The 2020 holiday season will be unlike any other, and preparing ahead of time will be more critical to success than ever before. Is your team ready?
