Today, we catch up with Caden Lane, a Texas-based, female-founded mother and baby brand. The retailer launched as a wholesale brand in 2007 selling door-to-door to bricks-and-mortar stores around the USA, but opened a direct-to-consumer Shopify webstore in 2018 and never looked back.
Katy Mimario, CEO and Designer at Caden Lane speaks to us about the brand’s incredible 4th placement in the Lightning 50 list of fastest-growing US brands, and the tech tools and strategies she believes led them to win fastest-growing Baby & Toddler brand in the States, with an impressive 132% rate of growth.
Show Notes | Series 2, Episode 3 | Caden Lane
About our podcast
Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 E-Commerce Growth Hacking podcast, hosted by Caroline Baldwin, is a bitesize podcast that gets under the hood of highly successful e-commerce brands to discover the key technologies they are using to power growth.
About our guest
Caden Lane is a Texas-based, female-founded mother and baby brand. The retailer launched as a wholesale brand in 2007 selling door-to-door to bricks-and-mortar stores, but opened a Shopify webstore in 2018 and never looked back. The brand placed 4th in the Lightning 50 list of fastest-growing US brands, and won fastest-growing Baby & Toddler brand in the States, with an impressive 132% rate of growth. For this podcast, we spoke to Katy Mimari, CEO and Designer at Caden Lane.
Transcript highlights:
- “I started 15 years ago when I was pregnant with my first child and grew the business to what it is today. As a single mum of three I’m very proud of that. I think working mothers can do anything.”
- “When we first launched it was before e-commerce had exploded. We had diaper bags and crib bedding and literally went door-to-door trying to sell it that way, asking bricks and mortar stores to sell our products. We also went wholesale and to market. As I was pregnant when we started, I actually ended up taking a six week old around New York to sell to stores there for the first time. That was when we got mass merchants like Nordstrom, one of our first very large accounts.”
- “Our biggest transition was four years ago where we went from wholesale model to direct-to-consumer. It was about wanting to talk and communicate to our customers ourselves - rather than have a middle man. Our stores were talking to our mums, and we wanted to have a touchpoint with them. So we started a website, completely closed off our wholesale model and figured out SEO all by ourselves.”
- “These days I could talk all kinds of dorky SEO things with you – and now we have multiple channels on social media, we’ve started our own podcast and a youtube channel, and have great touchpoints with our customers to find out what they’re looking for and what they need. We’ve gone full circle - going from being excited to ship 100 items a day to now; if we’re not shipping 50,000 in a day we’re worried.”
- “We have no bricks and mortar stores - I do own a second company called Nursery Couture which is a freestanding flagship store in Texas. It acts as a focus group where we get to ask mums what’s trending and so on - but aside from that we’re all online. Not to rule out bricks and mortar - there’s something about expecting your first baby and walking into a store and being able to touch and feel things - but for now Caden Lane is completely online.”
- “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and I traded that 9-5 for a 24/7 job. It is a lot of nights, evenings and weekends as I live and breathe this company. It’s been a rollercoaster with a fair share of challenges but it’s awesome to be recognised for our hard work. It’s been a lot of effort from a lot of people - our whole company is primarily women with some fantastic men, but mostly a lot of working mums and stay-at-home mums. We just bought big new offices in Texas, and our growth is credited to this amazing work family that I’ve built. We’re close to 40 people now.”
- “We’re still growing - the crazy growth started before Covid. A lot of people talked about how Covid affected e-commerce brands - especially in homeware, clothing etc - but we really weren’t impacted hugely, growth wise, by Covid. We were growing already and had great momentum when the pandemic started. We try to stand out from the rest and it’s just been growth after growth.”
- “What makes us different is we only sell through our website, so not through Amazon or Etsy, etc. It’s 100% our own site so we really own the process ourselves and are responsible for the customer experience from beginning to end. I like to think we run a very unconventional business the way we do things - we want to do what feels good to us. Our growth numbers prove I should probably write a business book or have a reality show because clearly it’s worked!”
- “We haven’t done any international expansion yet but have huge demand for it. It’s crazy expensive to have something shipped across the pond and I don’t think that’s fair on our customers - we want mums overseas to enjoy our products at a reasonable price. I’m excited to learn more about the UK and what your parenthood traditions are, and I hope we get to touch even a small market of new mums across the ocean. We hope to do that right after the holidays this year.”
- “Every year Black Friday gets more and more insane - it used to be one day, but now we’ve already launched our Christmas pyjamas (October) which is crazy because it’s still so hot in Texas but people are excited so early on. Taking a cue from last year, we saw a backlog of shipping issues and inventory issues and it was tough to keep up and manage costs. Many had the same problems - there’s no question that costs have increased for every company around the world on multiple levels. We’re managing it as best we can as we want to stay affordable for everybody; that’s very important to me. I want it so that a first time mum who is 25 years old can still afford to give her newborn the best.”
- “We use Inventory Planner to help us project sales trends and give us a forecast for what we’d potentially be selling in the next 60 or 90 days. We’re using it to optimise our run rates for products, watch ageing of products and manage our inventory altogether. This is a conversation our COO would love as he’s obsessed with Inventory Planner.”
- “We use a variety of platforms and apps - we are hosted on Shopify which has all these extensions to different developers who have honed in on different concerns in e-commerce - rewards programs, inventory management, how we use our shipping labels, tracking info. You don’t even have to be a developer to use it, they really make it user-friendly. I studied Marketing in the late 90s and we barely knew what e-commerce was back then. These days you can major in development or coding and it’s crazy to think what might be coming up 10 or 20 years into the future.”
- “What I really want is something that’s not available… I’ve had lots of experience in bricks and mortar retail and what I think e-commerce is not able to replicate is that emotional connection you get when shopping in person. That amazing customer service and help, educating you on what you’re buying. Not chatbots - someone who has passion and is really interested in the product and helping the customer. I really hope there’s an app or software that answers this problem in future.”
- “I love that we scored so highly in the Lightning 50. From a woman’s perspective, working women in general are much more humble about their success. I spend so much time working hard without taking a moment to step back and look at what we’ve done. So I think that means the most to me - the recognition. I think women should be a little bit more boastful and able to say, ‘I’m badass - look what I did’.”
Top takeaways
● Caden Lane placed 4th in the Lightning 50 list of fastest-growing US brands, and won the Baby & Toddler category with a 132% growth rate.
● The retailer started out in bricks-and-mortar stores, then adopted a direct-to-consumer e-commerce model to increase contact with customers and cut out the middleman.
● The tech they deem essential to their growth includes Shopify, Inventory Planner Premium and Youtube
- Despite the Mother and Baby sector seeing negative impacts from the pandemic, Caden Lane seems to have bucked the trend.
● Caden Lane says its loyal community and customers sharing love for the brand has also been one of its key drivers for growth.