How Andie Swim Uses Disco to Test Drive New Audience Segments
Jessica Granata is the VP of Growth at Andie Swim, a swimwear brand created to simplify swimsuit shopping with stylish and modern designs. Andie Swim launched in 2017, and in a short few years, is already earning more than $20M in annual revenue while growing 75 to 150% in topline year over year. We had the chance to sit down with Jessica and hear how Andie Swim manages its growth using Disco, covering:
- Leveraging the digitally-native growth playbook for early wins
- Expanding acquisition channels in the digital world and beyond
- Turning to Disco to facilitate acquisitions with partnering brands
“We grew incredibly quickly across digital channels right out of the gate. Over time, we’ve turned to compelling tools like Disco to augment that growth.”
Leveraging the DTC Growth Playbook
Over the past five years, Andie Swim leaned heavily on the digitally-native growth playbook, primarily by leveraging Facebook and Google paid ads to scale the core business.
Jessica’s team continues to focus on their DTC channel through their site while also looking into expanding their channels with strategic wholesale partnerships to boost sales and reach.
She suggested that there could be digital components to those deals as well. In diversifying their channels, the team saw value in broadening their paid acquisition channels as well.
1. Paid Acquisition Channels
Andie Swim primarily invests its resources into digitally-focused ads. Jessica shared three examples of how her team currently acts on that concentration:
- They persistently work to boost Andie Swim’s SEO rankings and presence on typical channels, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok.
- The team hired an affiliate agency to push out more paid publisher content with publishers that have overlapping audiences with Andie Swim.
- The marketing team made their biggest investment yet to bring brand awareness to televisions this Spring, ahead of the peak swim-suit season.
As of today, the brand is also testing out direct mail for acquisition (in addition to retention) and is continuing to rely on influencer marketing to raise awareness at the top of the funnel.
2. Focusing on Cohesive Branding
Andie Swim finds success in diversifying its spend across channels that tie back to the identity of the brand. At the same time, overextending their marketing too much has diminishing returns.
From Jessica’s perspective, it’s both unrealistic and unnecessary to exhaust all channels–it's more effective to maintain consistency across the channels they do use. Their messaging adapts to each given channel to avoid repeating copy but still telling a cohesive brand story.
The same applies to the brand’s visual identity, which can be challenging for seasonal brands.
3. Compelling Lifecycle Marketing
Brands typically need to regularly audit each channel to ensure cohesion throughout the year, but Jessica’s found an advantage in Andie Swim’s seasonality. Her team evaluates its growth channels on an annual basis and, outside of peak season, refines its lifecycle marketing.
With thoughtful touchpoints and collaborations, Andie Swim creates brand advocates and returning customers. The growth team references Disco to gather information about their customers' tastes and preferences, informing their merchandising and messaging approach throughout the year.
“When your brand grows as fast as Andie has, there are always growing pains. Disco helps us identify opportunities to facilitate seamless growth by leveraging a new data set.”
The Disco Model: A Rising Tide Lifts All Brands
Disco was created with the sole focus of empowering the world's ecosystem of independent brands helping limit their reliance on big tech to acquire customers.
In Jessica's words, Disco is building a future where independent brands can work together and create a collective power as a means of acquisition. Despite only recently joining the Disco network, Andie Swim has already reaped some benefits during their low volume season.
Jessica also sees promise in many of the functionalities Disco is building out and testing. More specifically, her team is looking at Disco for new use cases, including optimizing post-purchase campaigns and test-driving new audience segments.
In the meantime, her team enabled Disco’s post-checkout upsell feature for their shoppers and the cross-sell feature for other brands. But Jessica is most looking forward to collecting more data while the brand amasses greater volume over the coming weeks, ahead of peak season.
She anticipates interesting patterns between Andie Swim’s customers that will help identify great fits between their brand and others in the Disco network to collaborate with.
“We’re already testing out Disco’s new functionality on some target audiences, while our team continues to improve brand visibility across the Disco network.”
Post-Onboarding: Smooth Sailing with Disco
Before Disco, connecting with other brands for collaborations and benchmarking felt inorganic.
The platform now enables Andie to create both unexpected and straightforward partnerships to materialize while also creating more actionable data. More importantly, it’s easy to use Disco.
1. Seamless User Experiences
The Andie Swim team onboarded with Disco shortly before Jessica started, but that didn’t hinder her experience in navigating the platform.
Jessica described her first impression of Disco’s product as incredibly seamless and intuitive. It provided real-time insight into other brands in the network and how they leverage Disco’s tools.
2. Scaling with Disco Support
Straying from what seems to be typical practice for e-commerce tools, Disco is not only open to feedback but in Jessica’s experience, eager for product requests. Andie Swim’s account success rep made it clear that their feedback was valuable in improving their product.
3. Measuring Quant Returns
Within Disco specifically, Jessica’s team has seen improvements across three metrics.
- Net new customer percentage
- Direct return on ad spend
- Cost per user acquisition
“Disco’s team is always looking for actionable feedback to improve the product, demonstrating clear dedication to improving the end-to-end user experience.”
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