Web designer and Actinic ecommerce partner, Mark Fraser from Green Jersey Web Design talks to Larry Jarrett-Kerr, marketing multi-tasker with multi-channel clothing brand, Plain Lazy, about how he is pushing the boundaries of his ecommerce website and building the customer base through use of social media and online PR
How would you describe the Plain Lazy brand and products? Who are your typical customers?
Larry Jarrett-Kerr: Plain Lazy is a tongue-in-cheek clothing label and lifestyle brand, appealing to people who don’t take themselves too seriously. We have a growing product range which started originally with T-shirts and other clothing, but has expanded to include skateboards, bean-bags, bedding, greetings cards and more. We sell these online, mail order through our catalogue, in our four shops and through retailers like Free Spirit, Cotswold Outdoor and Blacks.
Our customers typically range from kids to men and women in their twenties. They’re usually involved in active sports like boarding and surfing, or the music scene perhaps, but they all like the Plain Lazy ethos of “work less, play more!”
What’s the history behind the business?
LJK: It was Mark Hagley who started Plain Lazy back in 1993 after he dropped out of university at 19. After only a few months Mark proved that his idea had the potential to be a success by winning “Live wire”, a competition for up and coming entrepreneurs. He toured the whole country persuading independent shops to stock his T-shirts and in 1998 opened the first high street shop. Now we have shops in Newquay, Bath and Brighton and Lewes.
The ecommerce site was first set up in 1999 and initially was a very small fraction of our turnover. But with the swing towards online retailing, the growing strength of fashion sales online and the release of the mail order catalogue in Q4 of 2008, the website is now 20% of our revenue and currently turns over slightly more than our largest store. However, we expect the ecommerce site to start turning over more than all our bricks and mortar stores in the near future.
How important has ecommerce become to your business over that time?
LJK: It’s essential. For a start, our online shop allows us to offer every product in our range in one place – we have more than fifty T-shirt designs alone. And now our customers are used to shopping online, so ecommerce is even more important than ever. Plus it is driving our brand awareness and will become our main sales channel for the entire business in the future.
Which systems and technology are used to operate your ecommerce?
LJK: Plain Lazy’s website is built with Actinic Business ecommerce software which has been heavily customised by Green Jersey. Actinic provides the website’s shopping cart, content management, order processing and despatch.
We also use i-Level’s back office software for stock control across the business.
As well as a sales channel, how does Plain Lazy use the web and online services?
LJK: Plain Lazy’s web store is a little different to a lot of other retailers’ websites because, as a single brand, we need it to serve other purposes as well as making online sales. It has to entertain our customers and let them interact with us, and each other too.
And on the wholesale side, the independent stores who buy from us rely upon the site for product information and brand developments, while our overseas partners use the site to understand who we are and what the brand is about.
How do you use your website to engage with your customers?
LJK: This year we decided to really focus on online PR. We’ve used social media in the past anyway, but we wanted to push it and get our name out there more. We asked online PR specialists, Content & Motion to advise us, and the campaign we call LazyWeb was the first result of this.
Plain Lazy uses social media and online PR to drive sales and brand awareness, to give our customers influence, and to stimulate talk about purchasing in a way that the brand itself doesn’t try to control.
The two key actions we want to drive are simple: gaining quality email sign-ups, and making online sales. At the same time, we want to increase the volume of tweets, retweets, photo uploads, photo comments, video uploads, blog discussion, and so on – which all create a relationship with us. These all enhance our website visibility and have search engine benefits such as keyword content and creating back-links from other sites linking into ours. All this helps drive traffic to our website.
LazyWeb built on our existing online social presence, but focused on quickly building up that presence using content generated by the user community. Otherwise we would have to spend a lot of time ourselves producing the content and managing the community, but this way works better as our followers are involved.
How does LazyWeb create a customer community?
LJK: We use Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Flickr in particular. For example, we’re running a Flickr-based photo competition at the moment and the winners all get to shoot photos for our next catalogue. Another current competition is YouTube-based – the person submitting the best lazy video wins lots of our products.
LazyWeb shares content beyond the Plain Lazy website too. For example, it hooks up with existing Flickr photo groups, and we use Twitter hash tags to help people talk to one another, as well as making sure tweets are fed to our website.
Over the long term LazyWeb also allows us to identify our most active “top fan” customers, and we can approach them to upload, comment and respond – a little like the eBay and Amazon reviewer communities.
What value do you get from LazyWeb?
So far the campaign has been a great success in terms of branding and increasing traffic. Email sign ups are key to driving revenue and half way through the project we had 668 new followers. Visits to the LazyWeb page totaled over 3500 hits in a month, and on Twitter we had 310 followers at one point making 227 click-throughs. Plus we are getting a lot of interest in our Flickr and YouTube pages as well.
What software and technology does LazyWeb use?
LJK: We were keen to exploit existing free or low cost applications and services rather than building or hosting our own, which would be expensive. And using public video-sharing and photo-sharing services also means that the content is available to all, not just through LazyWeb. So content is featured twice – for example direct through YouTube as well as on our website. By using third party online services the technology has already been tried and tested and accepted by our target audience and we can easily aggregate content from lots of different sources.
Which online services do you use to aggregate your own content and customer-generated content?
LJK: The main services are YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress and Plebble which all publish through our Actinic-powered website.
Plebble might not be that familiar to people: it’s an independent customer service feedback system, and we feed our Plebble score and customer comments to LazyWeb. Plebble encourages “tamper free” comments from customers – both positive and negative. We think it gives customers faith in our brand.
What are the key metrics, and how do you track online performance?
LJK: We use Google Analytics and Actinic’s sales reports to measure site performance. Ultimately, our key metrics are email capture and online purchases. We’re also tracking volumes or tweets, back-links to our website, blog coverage, YouTube views, etc.. This way we’re measuring both actions and brand awareness.
How does Plain Lazy generate online PR and drive customers to its website?
LJK: Just getting involved in conversations generates back-links. But social media aren’t a replacement for traditional PR. We also approach key media to run competitions and news stories and to offer feature ideas, for example. And we do a lot of email activity and blogging to drive interest.
Recently we ran a Twitter hash tagging competition which went down really well. We had people tweeting slogan ideas for Plain Lazy t-shirts; we picked four winners and their ideas will be manufactured.
We also sponsor a number of sports people: skateboarders, mountain bikers, and free runners, for example. Each person has their own page on our website with their own Twitter feed, photo stream and videos. They come along to events such as Glastonbury Festival, and we use them in our photo shoots, videos and catalogues. In exchange, they get press coverage and products from us.
Are there any search engine performance benefits?
LJK: The social nature of LazyWeb means the website’s content isn’t controlled entirely by Plain Lazy, but important keywords tend to appear anyway. And there are the back-links benefits that we talked about earlier.
Finally, how do you see Plain Lazy’s online activities developing in the future?
LJK: With LazyWeb we now have a campaign platform that can be adapted and developed for whatever we need in the future – to support festivals, sponsorship, events, who knows?
We’ll continue to increase the links between the social media side of our website and the product side. There is a huge range of opportunities that we’re just starting to map out. But in the short term, we have the next set of competitions and our new season’s catalogue on the agenda.
And before the end of the year Green Jersey will upgrade Plain Lazy’s Actinic software to take advantage of the latest version’s features, and to scale the system up for increased business. They’ll be beefing up the underlying hosting infrastructure too.
Green Jersey is also working with us to integrate our back office systems so we can streamline operations, and make full use of customer and sales information for marketing purposes.
But most importantly we’ll keep encouraging people to interact with us, and we aim to keep on top of the fast-moving world as new things emerge.
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