“There’s not been an iota of paid spend to date. Everything is organic”
Priya Chandé is the CMO of &SISTERS, a sustainable period care brand. She joined from L’Oreal, and in this interview she reveals how she’s building a brand that’s organic in nature for both products and marketing.
Q. How have the tactics for customer acquisition changed over time, and what informedthose changes?
The founders, Lucy and Clare are a mother and daughter team, with a background in brand strategy and personal care. The original strategy was to build a solid trade customer base, and they managed to get products stocked in over 200 retailers across 25 countries.
As demand grew and the pandemic hit, we wanted to shift our focus to our DTC business. But when we looked at the paid-advertising model for our products, the numbers just didn’t stack up. The cost of acquisition for our low priced products, even over a lifetime value, meant it wasn’t viable for us strategically. So we took a different approach, instead focusing on word of mouth, partnerships and community.
Can you give us some examples of what you’ve done?
On the trade side, we’ve partnered with unconventional, disruptive grocers. For example, we are the only sustainable femcare brand on the speedy convenience app Gorillas, where we’ve helped grow the whole sustainable femcare category by 40%.
We’ve also used customer data to inform community initiatives. Our data from Shopify showed us that while we have a higher concentration of customers in London and bigger cities, the LTV(lifetime value) is higher in rural areas, where our reusable cup and pants were selling well.
The reusables help tackle the issue of landfill and ocean plastic. So we researched communities who would feel most passionately about this and landed on wild swimmers. They’re a huge community, and more engaged with these issues than, say, ‘traditional beauty’ influencers.So we created content with these communities which was seeded across ours and their channels.
We’ve also been investing into building visibility at physical spaces for our community. For example, we pitched up at prestigious Women of the World festival at London’s Southbank where we set out to normalise conversations across generations about everything from period sex to period poo.
What does the future hold for &SISTERS’ marketing?
We want to build a world that is better for sisters. In our view menstrual education is inadequate; why should boys be excluded? Excluding boys leads to a lack of understanding, which can mean thatw omen experience all sorts of issues later on, such as judgment around menstrual leave in the workplace.
Education is going to be central to our marketing efforts. We’ll be looking to double-down on platforms like Instagram and Tiktok to reach audiences through bite-sized “edu-tainment” content so consumers get to know who we are but most importantly can learn something that leaves them feeling empowered.
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