Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What level did you reach in 2019?

Hannah Fastov: In 2019, we did $4 million. Then the pandemic hit.

Sramana Mitra: How did that go?

Hannah Fastov: That was an interesting time for us. We’re selling an on-the-go bag and everybody’s staying home. We just had our shipment come in at the beginning of March 2020. All of our wholesale partners either postponed or cancelled their orders. We had a ton of inventory.

We really focused on two things. One of them was we heard from a customer who was a nurse in Nashville. She said, “I bought a bag a year ago. Being a nurse right now and having to go to work and having to change my clothes, wash my hands, and do everything, your bag has been so useful. It’s machine washable. I can fit extra clothes in it.” It was this message that spoke to me.

I was feeling so useless. How can I ask people to buy a bag when we’re going through what we’re going through. There’s a whole demographic of people that need this right now. Because we had a ton of inventory, we ended up donating a thousand cross-body bags to healthcare workers across the US. We got great press for it, but it also helped us tap into the healthcare demographic. That was helpful.

Also one of the other things that I focused on was not to drive revenue. Asking people to buy something from you just didn’t feel right at this time. We focused on community and creating a place where people could come and congregate and do something that they love. We’re all about being active. That means going to the gym, but it also means cooking. It also means buying new makeup and getting dressed up.

Every single day for six months, we offered a free workout class every single day by our huge network of fitness instructors. We hosted cooking classes and demonstrations with all kinds of chefs and food bloggers. We did makeup tutorials. We partnered with Bobby Brown and did different makeup tutorials. We did a lot of work with makeup artists. We saw a pretty strong growth not only in our follower account but our engagement on our social media. People were coming to us every day to see what we had to offer.

Once people were moving again, they were coming back to us to purchase. That was great. We had to identify other revenue channels. B2C is challenging to sell a bag when no one was going anywhere. What else are people doing and where are they going? We identified that there is a large booming country club business. We went off the idea that there are great tennis bags or golf bags. We started to sell to country clubs. Then we also started to drive our private-label business.

Sramana Mitra: For influencers?

Hannah Fastov: No, we got more in the promotional space.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov
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