Today, we talk to outdoors retailer Passenger Clothing, a UK-based surf and lifestyle apparel brand which prides itself on escapism and sustainability.
CEO of Passenger, John Lane, joins us to discuss how the business achieved an incredible 363% growth rate - leading them to place third in the Lightning 50 list of the UK’s fastest-growing brands and topping the Fashion & Apparel sector. John also speaks about the importance of sustainability to Passenger’s brand values - and to its future success.
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About our podcast
Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 E-Commerce Growth Hacking podcast, hosted by Caroline Baldwin, is a bitesize 15-minute 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
Passenger is a UK-based surf and lifestyle apparel retailer focused on escapism and sustainability. The outdoors brand launched in 2012 but recently pivoted, increasing its direct-to-consumer sales via its Shopify website, while still selling wholesale to leading retail stores such as John Lewis. Passenger took third place in the Lightning 50 list of fastest-growing UK brands, and won the fastest-growing Fashion & Apparel brand in Britain with an incredible 363% YoY growth rate. For this podcast, we spoke to John Lane, CEO of Passenger Clothing.
Transcript highlights:
- “Passenger is part of the outdoor industry - which has grown massively in the last few years - amplified by Covid of course. Some European data said the outdoor market for apparel has grown a lot in the last year, and we’ve not seen it slow down. People are still indoors working remotely and they need that outdoor time.”
- “We see Passenger as a brand for meaningful escapism, getting outside, reconnecting with nature, themselves, their friends - and that’s been our mantra from day one. We make responsible clothing and accessories in that area.”
- “The business has been going for 10 years. I started three years ago with Justin Stone (Executive Chair of Passenger) and we had experience building a brand called Surfdome, which aligned with so many of our ideals around what we wanted the business to be. So we turned it into a DTC business rather than wholesale. In 2019 our revenue was half a million, in 2021 it’s 11 million, so we’ve seen really really strong growth. That’s a result of switching to a consumer e-commerce focus, and building that out.”
- “We always say “Adventure first, product second”. Sustainability along with nature has always been a brand focus. For us it was always a case of wanting to put back more than we took, so we designed and produced everything as sustainably as we possibly could. It’s really hard - there’s a lot of big decisions surrounding what you do and don’t do - but our team even takes the lead on a lot of it, so it’s a bottom up process driven by everyone in the company.”
- “Sustainability is so important but we want to do it at the right value. We don’t believe there should be a premium price attached to sustainable products; it should be for everyone so we can all make a difference. One of the things we’re aware of is all our little actions can add up. We are not perfect and have a long way to go, but we’re making steps. It’s essential that we keep sustainability in our business DNA.”
- “We’ve been really lucky with fantastic suppliers so our product is exactly where we want it to be. The challenges over the last 18 months have been operational - shipping costs went through the roof last year, so we had to spend where we didnt want to so we could get products in and sell them.”
- “We’ve been fully focused on trying to build a technical platform that allows us to grow, because from day one we wanted a sustainable, scalable business. As businesses go through stages of growth, you’ll find one system works at one stage, but at the next stage it doesn’t.”
- “We’ve recently pivoted the business again to be 100% direct-to-consumer, then we opened up wholesale again with John Lewis, so had to integrate other services again. That’s where Brightpearl came in for us as it allows us to plug in to different services and grow easily. It enables us to manage our future direction.”
- “Our Brightpearl integration was swift, we got it live in 80 days. It helped us manage the wholesalers side but also conduct a big warehouse move very easily. As we look at future growth, whether it’s wholesale clients or opening up around the world - it’s important that we have that essential, central hub where we can manage our orders but also account for them.”
- “Tech-wise, we’ve been on Instagram since day dot; social in general has played an important role in our customer acquisition but really we’re all about being operationally efficient. For years we’ve worked with Shopify and a WMS called Peoplevox. When systems are tight and work together, we don’t need to hire too many people and can keep our fixed costs low.”
- “The low-code no-code movement is exciting to me - there’s a lot of very interesting stuff around being able to build your own apps using tools like Air Table or Stacker HQ, because it’s hard to find a service that does exactly what you want. It’s better to build it on a low-code no-code basis than use your development team. Companies that enable businesses to build apps and platforms cost effectively will be big, in my opinion.”
- “The Lightning 50 win is great. Everyone sees it internally as a mark of recognition of what we’re able to achieve - but it also shows us what else we can achieve. We see a clear pathway over the next few years to make us into a 100M business, so this is a stepping stone - a marker that we’ve made the right decisions along the way and a validation for everyone involved. But there’s plenty more to come from us.”
Top takeaways
● Passenger took third place in the Lightning 50 list of fastest-growing UK brands and won the top spot for the Fashion & Apparel category with an impressive 363% growth rate.
● The tech they deem indispensable to their growth includes Shopify, Instagram and Peoplevox.
● The business has puts emphasis on sustainability as part of its core brand DNA. Becoming sustainable is a company wide goal that is fuelled by everyone in the team.