Overcoming 'Growth Paralysis' With Uber Popular Gen Z Fashion Brand Goose & Gander...

Launched in 2013, Goose & Gander is a unisex clothing brand based in the South West of England, UK. The brand was the brainchild of childhood sweethearts, Olly and Maz. What they lacked in fashion industry experience, they made up for with vision, creativity and a bold determination to succeed.

In today's episode, we speak to founder Olly White, who recounts the 'terrifying' challenges associated with rapid scale, and how they overcame them to see huge success and  140% growth last year, resulting in a 13th place spot on Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 UK.

Transcript

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

Launched in 2013, Goose & Gander is a unisex clothing brand based in the South West of England, UK. The brand was the brainchild of childhood sweethearts, Olly and Maz. What they lacked in fashion industry experience, they made up for with vision, creativity and a bold determination to succeed. Today, the business is seeing huge success with 140% growth last year, resulting in a 13th place spot on Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 UK. For this podcast, we spoke to founder Olly White.

Transcript highlights:

• “Unisex has been big thing in the last few years, but we've been unisex for nine years. We've prevented ourselves from going into shoes or jeans and stuff like that. We've just kept things streamlined with affordable unisex clothing that's really easy to wear.”
  
  
• “A platform called ASOS Marketplace, which is for independent clothing brands, was key to our early growth. We ended up becoming the number one independent brand on it and things took off for us. But all of a sudden we were getting thousands of orders and we would wake up at 4am and go to bed at one o'clock in the morning. It was a steep learning curve.”
  
  
• “You think growing rapidly is gonna be like ’this is amazing’ but actually it's terrifying. You're just trying to put the fire out. It was definitely a pretty rough few months. I used to have to manually enter the address for every single order into a shipping system and then print the label off myself.”
  
  
• “We've been with Shopify from day one and I still think it's the number one e-commerce platform – you just can't go anywhere else but Shopify. We also use Brightpearl. It integrates with Shopify so easily and it’s easy to use like Shopify. It was a perfect fit for what we needed to do. Brightpearl has been a massive help – we don’t know what we would do about Brightpearl, it just makes our life much, much easier.”
  
  
• “We’ve been working hard on developing the website. We have a product launch coming up and we've managed to create a way to push that collection live on the website with ‘coming soon’ banners, but prevent any customers from buying it. We can then run Facebook and Instagram to the collection page. It creates hype before a collection drops.”
  
  
• “We’re also using a tool called Rebuy which is an onsite personalization tool. It pops up after you’ve paid to say ‘here's an item that you might wanna add to your cart’. It really helps us increase average order value so that’s really cool.”
  
  
• “The two crucial things for maximizing growth are people and planning. Make sure you've got a strong and committed team around you and then plan as much as possible. There's so many curve balls that life can throw but if you’ve planned, you’ll still get there one way or another.”
  
  
• “It's amazing to feature on Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 and we're really grateful to have that. We’re really enjoying growing our business for sure. I was shocked to be honest. I didn't even know we compared that favorably.”

Top takeaways

• Goose & Gander ranked in 13th place on the Brightpearl Lightning 50 UK
• That followed 140% revenue growth in 2020/21
• The brand credits technology including Brightpearl, Amazon and Inventory Planner with driving growth
• Founder Olly says his biggest lesson has been: “If you don’t have the operational ability to meet demand then sales are pointless.”