Formalwear Industry

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Background: This site was developed as a community gathering place for the international formalwear industry. The requirement was for interactivity such that members of the formalwear industry including retailers and manufacturers would visit site regularily to keep updated on what is happening in the industry.

Strategy: The makeup of the community required that we consider the needs of several different customer markets. The retailers who wanted to interact with each other and keep up with trends and the manufacturers who want to reach the retail audience. After consideration we anticipated that we could monitize the traffic through memberships but through vendors as well as manfacturers. The goal: make the meeting place attractive to retailers so that traffic and the audience was large enough to interest manufactures and vendors to see the site an an effective vehicle to reach their target audience.

Tactics: Implement several interactive components such as:

Forums - where everyone could chat and share ideas and industry advice.

Classifieds - a marketplace for inventory control as well as bargain hunting and special needs fulfillment.

A secial section was created in the classifieds labeled "I need it now". Which is an urgent request for needs fulfillment for speical orders, sizes and out of stocks. The price for the ad is cheap thereby making it a utility to be used as often as needed. This would also create tremendous value for the members who could buy and sell to each other.

News - another traffic builder. World news, U.S. Political news and special news feeds for the formalwear industry. This section was place outside of the members area so new potential visitors could get a taste of the benefits they would receive.

A stong, benefit laden sales letter along with a free trial membership was created to capture prospects. An autoresponder series of emails were created to follow up on the benefits and features of the membership and close additional sales and renewals.

A members directory was created to make it easy for everyone to display their contact information (more value).

Advertising was a central component to the design allowing for various size of ad and banners as well as a special section where advertisers could use stream video to provide product presentations. With fashion the central theme in everything, the manufactures showed a strong pre-launch interest in this feature.

Pre-launch: In order to "rev up the engine" and create content for the site prior to launch, manufacturers and special guests were invited to a free 3-month pre-launch membership giving them time to provide content for the forums and classifieds and well as other advertising opportunites, including product presentations.