Freedom Rave Wear (or FRW) is a fashion brand that specializes in bright, colorful freestival clothing. Founded in 2014, FRW creates unique styles made in San Diego, California, and is known for a commitment to sustainability and quality. For this podcast, we spoke to Co-Founder Michael Hodgen.
In this episode Michael reveals the core values - and tech tips - that have driven the firm to new heights over the last year.
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
Freedom Rave Wear (or FRW) is a fashion brand that specializes in bright, colorful freestival clothing. Founded in 2014, FRW creates unique styles made in San Diego, California, and is known for a commitment to sustainability and quality. For this podcast, we spoke to Co-Founder Michael Hodgen.
Transcript highlights:
- “We like to say FRW is the world's most sustainably-made rave fashion. That's arguably a pretty small segment of the apparel industry, but also arguably the most fun! We really enjoy what we do, making clothes for people that go to music festivals like Coachella and Glastonbury.”
- “Me and my now wife Alyssa started the business after going to festivals together. Alyssa made us outfits and people were always asking where we got them. We decided to start an e-commerce brand. I remember in school seeing the graphs of e-commerce adoption over the next 10 years and being like, well, clearly that's a pretty safe space to go. So all those things led to the moment of us being talented enough and hardworking and competitive enough to just take the risk and start the business.”
- “We invested just over $300,000 in new sustainable equipment on the manufacturing side in the middle of the pandemic because we knew it was the way out, especially with supply issues. We also focussed on building a community of followers. Then when society started to open up and festivals started again, it was like a rocket engine was attached to the business - it’s just been absolute growth ever since.”
- “Inventory Planner was a key investment for us. The insight into what’s selling quickly alongside our ability to quickly create new items meant we could start doing weekly collection drops. That accelerated this really awesome growth.”
- “We know exactly which products people are really responding to because Inventory Planner is connected to Google Analytics and Shopify – these things have come together to turbocharge our growth.”
- “People resonate with our commitment to sustainability. You can have the best inventory planning system on the planet but if people don't like your stuff, it doesn't matter. We have a 48% retention rate currently and around 26% of our customers come back and make a second order within 30 days.”
- “There's a lot of really exciting technology coming to the market and audiences are tuned into that, specifically things around artificial intelligence being able to understand the customer experience using natural language. That would mean they could answer a question in an even more relevant way than maybe a Google search. We're currently working on integrating an open AI dolly for an image generator that we then use to print on our products. That's really cool and exciting.”
- “Being named on Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 is definitely positive reinforcement. But there's still a lot of work to be done. So it's cool to get the validation and we will continue to provide the best products possible to our customers and we will certainly have as much fun as possible doing it.”
Top takeaways
- Freedom Rave Wear ranked in 24th place on the Brightpearl Lightning 50 USA
- The tech that’s driven their growth includes Inventory Planner and Segments (an analytics tool)
- The business uses Inventory Planner to accurately forecast real time demand for its made to order items, which has helped it reach triple digit growth
- FRW has stayed true to its core values of inclusivity and sustainability, which has also helped with scaling