Australian sportswear brand LSKD has been preparing for its weeklong Black Friday Festival for an entire year, and the hard work is finally paying off. The online retailer generated more than a month’s worth of orders in the first 24 hours of the sale, which kicked off last Thursday, and it surpassed last year’s entire Black Friday volume in the first 48 hours. “We’re still live, so [orders are] still rolling through,” Jade Cameron, head of customer support and community engageme
ement, told Inside Retail.
Some of the marketing emails related to the sale have had a click-through-rate of 51 per cent, which Cameron said is “extremely high for any kind of email marketing”, while text messages have had a click-through-rate of around 12 per cent. SMS marketing is a relatively new channel for LSKD, which partnered with Yotpo around six months ago.
“It’s an extra lever that we weren’t really utilising to its full potential,” Cameron said.
Customer-first
But even when it’s not Black Friday, LSKD enjoys a high level of customer engagement. Since it was founded by motocross racer Jason Daniel in Queensland in 2007, the brand’s social media following has soared to more than 600,000 people.
This is thanks in large part to the engaging content created by its team of international influencers and athletes. Recent posts show millennials performing tree pose on mountaintops, freestyling BMX tricks, and exploring city streets in LSKD’s seamless workout leggings and minimalist caps and hoodies.
“Our mission is to inspire people to ‘chase the vibe’ through sports, fitness and adventure. The way we do that is by developing functional sportswear with a streetwear aesthetic,” Cameron said.
Earlier this year, LSKD launched a closed group on Facebook to better enable its followers to interact with one another, rather than just the brand. It already has over 38,000 members.
“We’ve always had a highly engaged community on social media, so we thought why not have this platform where we can foster those relationships and have a safe place for people to post photos of themselves and ask questions around size, fit, styling options, and that kind of thing,” Cameron said.
“It took off really quickly and grew organically, but what it’s become is this amazing place for feedback. We post a lot of content on there that’s different to what’s on our other social media [accounts] to give them behind-the-scenes access.”
A few months ago, a group member posted a photoshopped image of an LSKD jumper in a different colour and asked the brand if it would consider making the product available for purchase. The retailer said it would if the post received over 500 likes.
“We got so much engagement within the first hour that we had no choice. We spoke to the design and production team the next morning and said, ‘Sorry, but you’re going to have to make this jumper’,” Cameron said.
“It was good because it was a colour we had already worked with, so the turnaround time was about six weeks, which is huge on a new garment.”
LSKD offered the jumper exclusively to members of the Facebook group for the first 48 hours and sent a freebie to the customer who came up with the idea in the first place.
“It’s a feel-good story, but it’s little things like that where we listen to their feedback. We make adjustments to different cuts, styles, and fits based on what we see from them.”
Overseas expansion
LSKD is reportedly on track to reach $50 million in revenue by the end of this year, and next year, it plans to expand into the US. Currently, nearly 90 per cent of customers are in Australia, with around 8 per cent in New Zealand.
Cameron said the brand’s success doesn’t come down to doing one thing right, but many things.
“It’s the product, it’s the investment that we’ve made in our customer support team, it’s having the right people focusing on our core vision and core values and working cohesively to get to where we are today,” she said.