Dive Brief:
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Delia’s approach as a newly pure-play e-commerce retailer will include trading on nostalgia, according to new owner Steve Russo, who says he bought the brand and its intellectual property for $25 million earlier this year because he was impressed by the sad reaction and the brand’s hefty social media following.
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That will soon include a few clothes whose styles harken back to its nineties heyday, and clothes for adults, who may have shopped there as tweens and teens.
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The company is finding ways — including its catalogs, email, and especially social media — to beckon its old customers to come to its site.
Dive Insight:
Delia’s website had already seen some 1.5 million visits each month, but Russo told Buzzfeed News that the company has struggled somewhat to turn heads without the presence of brick-and-mortar stores to serve as a reminder of its existence and an inducement to wander in.
“It’s a misnomer that there’s no expense in e-commerce because there’s no stores,” Russo told Buzzfeed. “Basically, when you’re in the cloud, which is what e-commerce is, you have to kind of go door-to-door, saying come to my site, because nobody sees you, you’re not a store on 34th Street. It’s a process, but we started with a very, very loyal base, and we’re seeing it in the sales.”
Russo saw more potential in Delia’s resurgence than at other iconic teen retailers of the nineties that have also struggled with bankruptcy, like Wet Seal and Deb Shops, because of the indelible mark it left on its customer in the nineties.
That is making nostalgia a factor in the company’s rebound efforts. Delia’s will bring back its famous catalog, but with more magazine-like content (more enticements). And the nineties customers will be able to shop there again for jeans and other items that Delia’s plans to design and sell in adult sizes.