The Challenge

When I began working with Dia & Co, we were presented with a couple marketing challenges. The first was that their brand was in a state of transition and they were in the process of deciding on how they’d like to refresh their look and feel, as well as reevaluating how they wanted to position themselves in the market. This granted my team with the opportunity to help guide their creative vision with our performance marketing perspective, and offered them the ability to test out new directions and ideas through their social advertising to gain some quick learnings to inform their decision making.

The other challenge was how we could best present their three different shopping options to the right audiences, without coming across as overly complicated, or leaving an impression that Dia & Co is only one kind of experience, at the risk of turning off potential customers. To achieve this, we separated our creative testing strategies into two lanes: “Shop” and “Style”. “Shop” was for promoting the more traditional shopping experience, and “Style” was for the personal styling subscription service. While there was a certain amount of cross-over in what worked for both lanes, we found some distinct differences in the creative approach that worked best for each individually. 

For both “Shop” and “Style”, successful creative tended to boldly highlight the exclusive size range of 10-32, show the variety of style and item options, and feature clearly plus-sized models who exuded confidence, fun, or joy. Copy that emphasized fit, comfort, style, freedom, and confidence, and a position that encouraged viewers to celebrate their individuality and express themselves with fashion that was made specifically with their body type in mind worked best. For “Style”, we found that on-model studio images featuring colorful outfits, along with copy encouraging viewers to take the style quiz, emphasizing “stylist-picked” or “making shopping easy” drove performance. Videos, both studio and UGC, that explained the experience and showed off a range of outfits also worked well here. For “Shop” we found that lifestyle or colorful studio images were most engaging. Showing the wide range of styles, items, and brands available, paired with an emphasis on discovery, with the confidence of a great fit, as well as seasonal shopping, were also part of a winning strategy. Eventually, the business shifted to their position to favor the traditional online retail experience with a lower commitment from the customer, as subscription services overall had begun to fatigue with consumers. While we saw successes with our approach to the “Style” lane, over time we leaned more into the “Shop” strategy to achieve the most efficient performance.