‘Here at TopVintage, we work towards the same goal every day’ - Anne Dolman, content marketeer for Europe’s largest online retro boutique. ‘That goal? Making women happy around the globe, through our feminine retro fashion, excellent service and lifestyle content. The latter is realised through our own channels - with Klarna being the latest addition to that.’
About TopVintage
Founder and owner Angelique, started TopVintage in 2008 from the comforts of her own living room in Kerkrade, Limburg - with a startup capital of only 1000 euros. These days TopVintage has grown to be the largest online retro boutique in Europe, shipping their products to 90 countries.
Keeping the focus on a personal, service-oriented approach has remained at the heart of TopVintage, despite its impressive growth. The webshop is currently available in four languages and for the webshop the main focus has always been stellar content, which you will notice when you visit their website.
The result of this strategy? 47.045 consumers say TopVintage scores a 9.4!
Customer is Queen
Content marketeer Anne alludes: ‘From the get-go, we’ve had a fairly large group of loyal followers sharing pictures of their outfits. This made us a part of their life - holidays, parties and activities - like we were friends of theirs.’ This personal approach is what we took to heart and became the main way of communicating with our consumers, website visitors and social followers. For us, our customer is Queen, which meant we had to provide them with the optimal online shopping experience. The convenience Klarna offers consumers when paying for orders fits our approach seamlessly; you pay for the products you keep and don’t pay in advance.
‘The discount code in the newsletter resulted in 95% new traffic to our webshop!’
Content is King
‘In our marketing strategy, content is King. Every day we post authentic content to expand our reach. You’ll notice a lot of interaction with our customers across our channels, we also use various win-promos to boost our reach. Last July we were incorporated in a Klarna newsletter for the first time, which ended up providing us with some excellent results. With one press of the button we gained 1500 new website visitors. The setup for this was a single discount code in the newsletter. Which leads us to ponder what we could achieve with a branded campaign or a combined promotion on socials.
‘We’d like to expand our business to Scandinavia in the future. Klarna offers multiple currencies and is a well known name worldwide.’
Why Klarna?
‘For our market expansion it’s interesting that Klarna offers multiple currencies according to Maurice Foppen, CFO at TopVintage. ‘We’re currently offering Buy-Now Pay-Later in the Netherlands, Germany and Austria, with Belgium and Finland joining that group next year. We’ve also been investigating the name recognition of Klarna in our target market and, considering our intention to expand to Scandinavia, Klarna’s reputation in that region offers us numerous advantages. Besides this we have another advantage: a seamless connection to MultiSafepay. They’re responsible for collecting our payments in Europe and support multicurrency, which allows us to fully automate our administrative work.’
2020 was the year of the pandemic. Webshops had to deal with delays in their stocks and online shopping grew to be more important than ever before.
Effects of COVID-19
‘Here at TopVintage we noticed a decrease in sales in March’ Anne explains. ‘Our content strategy runs on a monthly schedule, which involves certain themes. The delays in our stock made that basically impossible. The online sales are now on par with our sales in 2019 but our physical store is difficult to compare as it was opened in 2019 as an addition to the online shopping experience. We do see that our consumers still value a visit to a physical store however.’
‘Since COVID-19 we’ve been creating more content, Happy moments at home has been a key theme for our content.’
Content had to be revamped
‘We basically had to re-do our entire content calendar’ Anne continues. ‘We’re now looking at our stocks and supplies weekly, which allows us to finetune what we want to post. It’s also essential to take into account the overall atmosphere and situation per country. The overall theme has been to create happy moments at home. We did a giveaway in May in which the prize was a jacuzzi which, understably, was a great success.
‘The smoooth shopping experience Klarna provides falls right in line with the vision we have for our webshop’
Community is the future
‘In the future we’ll keep investing and dedicating ourselves into our community’ Anne explains. ‘That large, loyal following and the online connectedness are things we want to enforce and grow in the future. In 2021 we’re starting a loyalty program which will focus on user-generated content. I see a lot of opportunities in a partnership with Klarna, mainly the smoooth payment experience, which seamlessly matches our ambitions. In the future I see many ways of expanding our reach through Klarna, perhaps through joint campaigns or a reward system in our loyalty program.
Golden tip
‘At TopVintage we work with sizing charts, these allow us to reduce the percentage of returned items. Every new piece of clothing is tested and fitted by us, when necessary it’ll also be measured per size. We carefully judge the fit, material and the amount of stretch in the item. Based on those findings, we created a sizing chart which will give the customers a good idea of what they’re buying. If necessary we’ll also add a footnote which will allow customers to select the right size easily. That’s another part of the value that we’re offering our customers. Online shopping is only complete if the product matches the expectations.
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