On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Emma McIlroy. Emma is the founder and CEO of Wildfang; a fast growing apparel brand on a mission to smash gender norms in fashion. We talk about gender-free clothing, building your own products, staying true to your brand's strengths, and so much more!
Emma McIlroy is the founder and CEO of Wildfang, a multi million dollar fashion brand on a mission to rewrite the future of gender.
Wildfang embraces your masc, your femme and everything-in-between. Wildfang has raised over $1k for charities that focus on racial justice, as well as queer, immigrant, and women’s rights.
Pre-Wildfang, Emma spent over a decade honing her marketing skills at brands like Barclays and Nike.
More recently, Emma has been named one of Inc.’s Female Founders 100, Oregon Entrepreneur of the Year, a Henry Crown Fellow and her "Yeah Maybe" TED talk has racked up over 100k views.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Emma McIlroy
Build something that works and resonates and lasts and is profitable. That's actually the goal.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today, I'm welcoming to the show Emma McIlroy. She is the CEO of WILDFANG, a fast-growing apparel brand on a mission to smash gender norms in fashion.
Emma, welcome to the show.
Emma McIlroy
I'm pumped to be here. Thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
I'm excited to chat. Just quickly, what are you guys actually selling online? What are you guys up to over there?
Emma McIlroy
We sell phenomenal blazers, really great workwear. Think about your coveralls, overalls, jumpsuits. We sell awesome fitting pants with real pockets. We sell a lot of button-ups without boob gaps. Those are some of the key things that we're doing over here.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. Now, take me back in time to Urban Outfitters.
Where did the idea for this business come from?
Emma McIlroy
Yeah, you know, I had a really sweet gig at Nike. I had no plans to leave and I'm a big sports nut, so I was at the best brand in the world doing the best brand marketing in the world. So I had no plans to start my own business, but my best friend had this idea.
We walked into an Urban Outfitters and I was looking for a graphic tee that was pretty bold and provocative. If I can look like I rolled out of Mick Jagger's wardrobe most days, that's a good look for me, I'm pretty happy. Maybe a little Keith on occasion.
And so I was looking for a really bold graphic tee. She was looking for a great blazer, like real pockets, real buttons, nice lining. And we were in the women's section and the only t-shirt option was wildflowers and florals that had really scoopy necks and flowy waistline, which is cool if that's your jam, but there was like no options.
And then she wanted a blazer, the only blazers in there are flared at the hips, they had the fake pockets where only your fingernail fits in. And we sort of wondered and chit chatted and we ended up in the men's section. And then it was like when you find the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones, all the noises and choirs went off.
And it was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, all the great blazers and graphic teasers in the dude section. Like what is that about?
There were just all these bold graphic tees, there were photographic tees, there were verbiage graphic tees, there were just super cool ranges. And then there were all these amazing blizzards that were really well tailored, really great fitting features, really great lining, really great pockets.
And of course, none of them fit us because we have slightly slimmer shoulders and slightly slimmer frames. And so I put the graphic tee on, it had a really high crew neck and it didn't fit my hips. And she's 5'2 and she put on the blazer and it just looked like it was drowning her, right?
And so that was a moment where it was like, well, look, I get that there's tons of different body types out there and we need to make clothes for those body types, but it's really weird to segregate and to remove style choices just based on gender. That's very odd. That doesn't really make sense.
That was kind of where it all started. It was right there and she was gonna do it. She was like, “I'm gonna open a small store in Portland. It's just going to be this little store where I take my dog to work every day.”
And I was like, “You know, this ecommerce thing seems kind of important. Seems like a lot of people have websites.” This was about 10 years ago. And so I came on board and we decided to make it a little bit bigger than that little shop in Portland.
And then 10 years later, we're still having fun.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. Now, she started the business and started the brick and mortar. And then you came along and helped with kind of establishing the Ecommerce presence.
How long was the brick and mortar running and going through the growing pains?
Emma McIlroy
No, we did launch it together. It was more of a... She didn't want it to be any bigger than that little brick and mortar. And I kind of ruined that plan. I kind of said, “You know, I think we can do something bigger. I think we can do something bigger.”
So we both quit our day jobs at Nike. We cashed in our 401k. We moved out of the places that we were staying in into friends' basements and things like that.
And we launched the website and the physical retail pretty much side by side. And made every mistake in the book as we did it.
Chase Clymer
Well, obviously, it's... Have you ever seen... There's this really funny meme on Reddit. It's about drawing an owl. It's like you draw the eye, you draw the thing here, then you draw the whole owl. It's like, whoa, hold on. There are a couple steps in there that you forgot to tell me about.
What was launching the business? Just walk me through it. It isn't just throwing up a shop and calling it a day. How long did that take from the ideation to actually turning, I'm assuming, the Shopify site live if that's what you launched on?
Emma McIlroy
I wish I'd launched on Shopify. Dear goodness, if only I'd launched on Shopify. What a terrible mistake. I told you I've made every mistake.
I launched on Magento, which is a great platform for some people who have very specialized needs, but it was completely the wrong platform and it was the bane of my life for about seven of those 10 years.
Actually, our launch was one of the most successful things we did. You have so much time to focus before you launch. So you have so much time to get things right. And then once you launch in retail, suddenly it's like, “Oh my God, like there's all this stuff that needs to constantly happen. We need to ship packages. We need to send transactional emails. We need to place ads”, it's like a constant whirlwind.
But actually, those couple of months before you launch, you really get time to focus. And I think that's actually a great lesson as you look forward to how to recreate that space in your business.
So we launched with a teaser site. I mean, some of this is gonna feel outdated for you, Chase, but at the time it was very successful. We learned a lot from Fab and how Fab launched. We did kind of a landing page with a really powerful video and a really powerful manifesto and just an email capture.
And we did not have paid media. We had no money, that's why we did not do paid media. 20, 30 people signed up in 30 days, just purely through press, word of mouth, and social virality, which obviously are the channels, as a brand marker, you hope you're good at, right? It's the earned and owned channels, particularly earned.
So yeah, we had this really great launch and it's funny when you look back on it because the manifesto didn't quite tell you what we did and the video didn't have any of our product because it hadn't arrived yet.
They were just these two like pieces of content that brought a feeling to life. Then a whole bunch of people decided they liked that feeling and signed up. We launched about a month after that landing page went live. We had a whole flurry of grit press hits.
I think the idea came at the right time. And like I said, the content that we put out there was pretty powerful.
And then by April, we were live and selling products. But we started as a third party business. So we were selling other people's products. We only became vertical, we only started making our own product about 4 years ago.
Chase Clymer
Okay.
You got to walk me through how you get 20,000 emails. You said the press played a big key in that. Did you guys have a PR team or were you writing journalists personally like, “Hey, maybe cover us, please?”
Emma McIlroy
Yeah, that was me. I pressured so many people. I did so many weird and wonderful things to get people to pay attention to us. But it's funny, again, I'm just thinking about this in real time. When you have no other options, it's interesting how creative you get and how good you get at the options you have left.
So we didn't have a penny to spend on paid. So, none of us had done paid [media] before. My background was brand marketing at Nike, so I didn't know anything about paid. So it just wasn't an option on the table. And we did what we knew how to do, which was we grabbed a group of celebrities and influencers who we could get to.
So Megan Rapinoe was in our first video, who obviously the world knows not of. Megan was not as well known at the time. We had Kate Moennig from the L Word, we had Hannah Blilie who's a phenomenal drummer in a band called The Gossip, who were pretty big at the time. We had a wonderful fashion blogger called Frou Frou, and then a journalist called Laurel Pentin who was writing for a bunch of great publications.
But we just grabbed this group of people who we somehow had very loose connections to and we sold the vision. We said, “This is what we're doing. We think you'd love it," and they were like, “Yeah, I would love that. And I want to be a part of that.”
By the way, there were 100 people who turned us down. So I'm telling you about the four or five that said yes, but there were 100 people who turned us down, but we just kept going until we could get to anyone with any kind of following and appeal that liked the idea.
And the key thing about those people is they came from different worlds. So they spoke to different audiences. So Megan obviously spoke to a sports audience. Kate spoke through the L word, she spoke to a queer audience. Laurel and Frou Frou spoke to it. Nadia spoke to a fashion audience. We were speaking to different audiences in the way that we brought it to life.
But, you know, I think what made it successful was we had these different personalities in there that also collectively were odd. You were like, “What the hell are these people doing in one place at one time together? This makes no sense.”
We piqued enough interest. We spoke to enough audiences. We were lucky enough that those phenomenal humans agreed to come and shoot a very cold video in Portland with us.
And then, I mean, man, we hustled Chase. Like we, the person who wrote our manifesto, Vanessa, is in a pretty senior position at Wieden+Kennedy, but she doesn't get to write because she's kind of like a strategist and an account director and she actually happens to be a phenomenal writer and so we let her do something that no one else let her do.
You know, we were like, “Wow, you're writing incredible, let's write a manifesto together”, and she did it on her nights and weekends. So it was just a lot of hustle, a lot of selling the vision. And thankfully some people bought into the vision and we produced some really great content.
And then like I said, PR picked it up. We got the New York Times, we got Vice. We got a lot of folks who may or may not be around anymore. And then it got shared really heavily on social media because the fan base of those people was like, what the hell are these people doing in a piece of content together. So yeah, we relied a lot on earned media in those early days.
Chase Clymer
Oh, that's amazing. That's the launch that a lot of startups aspire to.
You mentioned that you'd made a lot of mistakes along the way. Is there anything from that startup phase that you remember or that launch phase that you remember, like a mistake you made that if anyone out there is planning something, maybe to avoid?
Emma McIlroy
Oh yeah. I remember once, this is going to be really funny, especially if people listening to this actually know how to build a Shopify site and Shopify has changed the game considerably in this space.
But I remember we hired anyone we could afford who had the right attitude and qualities. No one in our team had built a website before. There was absolutely zero experience across the board of having built a website or operated it, and so I remember this one day.
We went to the... I'm trying to think of what we call it in America. I'm Irish, so I have to think about the words. We went to like the junkyard and we picked up all these old pieces of metal because we couldn't afford whiteboards.
So we got all these old pieces of metal and we brought them back to the office and they worked really well with Sharpies. You could write on them and wipe it off. And we wrote out how many steps, we wrote out each step to get the product live and someone wrote it up on a little spreadsheet, a little shared doc.
And there were 122 steps involving eight people to get a single product live. And now in my team, one person does that in like 30 minutes. So we've come a long way from there, you know?
So when there's 122 steps and eight people, a lot of things can go wrong. Fxample, one day my Ecommerce manager showed it across the office and was like, “Oh shit”, and I was like, “What is it? Can I help?" But she was like, “I turned the whole website off”. I was like, “I'll be right there.”
And she turned every product off. She disconnected the catalog for every single product just by accident. Kind of everything went wrong in the early days, but I would say the team that you put together at the start, it's really hard because you have no money. You have no background, you have no pedigree that anyone's like, “Oh, I'm going to go work for that person.” It's just a bunch of creative people talking.
So trying to get the right team…So you asked me about mistakes. If I could do it again, just having one single person on the team who had any experience of having built a website would have been a pretty key, key hire coming into that project versus loads of people who just had the right attitude and qualities and were smart and would figure it out.
So yeah, that's probably one that stands out.
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
Now, you mentioned something that I find fascinating – you started more akin to a marketplace selling other people's products and didn't start selling your own products until more recently. Would you look back on that as maybe a mistake? Or was that just a harder thing, a harder challenge to take on in earlier stages?
Emma McIlroy
Huge mistake. Don't do it. Yeah. So the reason I didn't create a product coming out of the gates is I didn't know how to. I'd never made a product before. I'd never designed a product. I'd never produced or manufactured a product.
I worked at a huge product brand, but I didn't work in product. I worked in brand and market. I just didn't know how to do it. And we thought we could curate a selection of other folks' goods that would deliver the mission. And the reality was even that was stupid.
We existed, WILDFANG existed because the consumer couldn't find what they needed in the marketplace. And all sorts of interests and problems popped up. So for example, when you sell other people's stuff, very few brands in America will sell you anything above a size 12, except about 65% of American women are above a size 12, right? So that's broken right there.
So until you start making your own products, you can actually service the consumer in the way that you want it to. But then the other big revolution is margin. You know, the margins are razor thin in a wholesale business and it's very, very, very hard to run it and our business just didn't work.
We were wildly unprofitable for several years to the point where it was like, “Hey, we gotta shut this thing down, it doesn't work.” And it was then that we said, “Let's be brave and try to build our own product because that might be the thing that saves us because of the product margin.”
Also, if you're not making your own product, you can never build a wholesale business, which typically having a multi-channel business is really important for most startup brands, particularly in apparel. You wanna have direct to consumer online, offline, and then you want to have wholesale.
So none of that is possible. The margin isn't there in the third party. You can't open new channels with third parties.
Then you're not delivering on the brand mission, like I said. And then we would have all sorts of... I remember we got this great hit with, it's either Kristen Stewart or Ruby Rose. It was someone wearing head-to-toe WILDFANG in the press, which is like everything you dream of as a little tiny business that no one knows of. You get someone at that size. Kristen Stewart wears your stuff, the whole game changes.
But because we're a third party, you could get to other places. So it essentially renders earned media useless because they're not going to come by a Levi's jeans for me when it's available at 100 other places that might have faster shipping and a better return policy. It also didn't work with the earned media model.
And so yeah, we were about 6 or 7 years in when we said, “You know what, let's rip the bandaid off and start making our own product,” which is, oh my goodness, it's so painful. You have to divest of your entire inventory. You have to figure out this massive commitment to your factories in terms of upfront materials and upfront inventory costs.
You have to hope you made the right stuff and you hope you didn't make any dogs, which you always do, right? So that's a tremendous lift in and of itself, much easier if you get it right, coming out of the gates. Trying to change a third-party business into a vertical business is very hard.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
What's the skew mix these days where you guys are manufacturing yourself?
Emma McIlroy
Yeah, 100% vertical. And our factories are great. We spend time with them every year overseas. We're climate neutral, which we're really proud of. It's a hard certification to get when you're as small as us. So it means we offset any climate, any carbon impacts.
And then we give back 1% of all sales. So our supply chain is pretty clean and we're pretty proud of it. But we spent time with our factories to make sure that we can stand that.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Now, you alluded earlier that you didn't do any paid ads, mostly because you didn't know how to. Is that still the case these days?
Emma McIlroy
No, of course not. It's the number one channel for demand creation for us. That is changing. I will tell you over the last 12 months, we've significantly pulled back from meta. I don't know anyone that is scaling meta right now. It's become so saturated since a lot of the privacy changes and stuff like that has become really hard to scale.
So you're seeing people move more of their budget into Google, move more of the budget into things like whitelisting, move more of the budget into influencer marketing, and then of course into the brand channels.
So PR is making a little bit of a comeback. Great social content and on social content. But yeah, you're starting to see a big makeshift from us in the last 6 to 12 months.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience?
Emma McIlroy
Oh god, what a hard question. I would just say one of the things, when you break into this club, I always tell people that I kind of know the rules of the club and I don't want to play the game. I think there might be a lot of people listening who can resonate with that because it's a very exclusive club.
I'm not going to name names because it’s not worth me bringing any negative energy to the podcast, but there were very, very senior partners at very, very famous VCs where I walked into the room. You know, I was a kid, I was 30, I knew nothing about anything.
We just launched, we'd had some success and they just pepper me with questions, like, “What's your CAC to LTV ratio? What's your first unit economics? What's your average overseas order shipment?”
I literally would sit there with a pen and say, “Will you just say that one again? LTV, what does LTV mean? To CAC. How do you spell CAC? What does CAC mean? So LTV to CAC ratio. So am I just dividing them?” Like I would literally sit and ask that. And I left the room and I felt there's one meeting in particular where I was on the verge of tears. And I don't cry very often, but I was truly on the verge of tears.
And it was actually a woman, which is interesting. It was a woman partner at this major VC, and I felt so small. I felt like an inch high.
And what I'm deeply passionate about is, to the people listening that don't know what an LTV to CAC ratio is, the good news is there's plenty of founders that will tell you what it is, and also you can Google it. But just don't let that stuff intimidate you, and don't let it alienate you from the club. I'm deeply passionate about the club getting bigger and more people having access to it.
And the reality is that all those acronyms and all that noise, at the end of the day, you need to make a great product for a great consumer and treat the great consumer well and build a team of people who are passionate about doing it. It's pretty straightforward. It's not easy, but it's pretty straightforward what you actually need to do.
So I would just say, don't let the noise and the bullshit intimidate you. When you show up at a conference and everybody's talking about machine learning and you're like, “I don't know what that is. I need to write that down.” It's all noise to make them feel important.
And the reality is what's happened over the last 10 years is that we watched this industry that was shaped and built by VCs make a lot of people feel small and stupid. Then their ass fell out of the industry, right? Suddenly, profitability became really important, which was what most of the small businesses have been doing for a really long time, really well, right?
Suddenly scaling your ass off with an unprofitable CAC was actually not the thing that you were supposed to do, right? And so the truth is, if you listen to those folks, you end up building something for them, which is a very high risk because they don't care about you. They do not care about you and they don't care about your consumer, right?
Do what you're good at, stay focused and don't let VC culture or some of the big voices intimidate you. At the end of the day, just build something great, build a great team, and service your consumer to the absolute highest level you can and you're going to be okay.
Chase Clymer
I think that's sage wisdom coming from over there, Emma, especially right now in this current economy where you're seeing a lot of the Directed Consumer Darling's file for bankruptcy that were scaling in a non-profitable way that you had mentioned.
And I think there's nothing wrong with building a business that's highly successful without taking outside capital, bootstrapping it.
It's all just about “How do you want to build your business? What is the vision for your business?” And that's a personal question. That's not to be shaped by outside factors.
Emma McIlroy
Yeah, I would even go so far as to say that's actually the goal. The goal is to build something that works. Not to build something that doesn't work. Building something that doesn't work, literally anyone can do it. My dog can build a thing that doesn't work.
To build something that works and resonates and lasts and is profitable, that's actually the goal, right?
I just feel like sometimes in Ecommerce, it's like, “Here's the shiny next thing, here's the shiny next thing, here's the shiny next thing”, and the truth is, if you spend all your time following the shiny next thing, you would be at a business real quick.
Like the number of times I've heard, “Have you seen this business? They're selling directly through Facebook Messenger”, and you're like, “Yeah, that lasted three minutes. And also, it works for their business. Their consumer is a 65 year old grandmother who is not technology phobic. That is exactly the way to sell to her.”
It's not right for WILDFANG. My consumers’ 32 in a professional environment and spend two hours a day on TikTok. I don't need to sell to them through Facebook DMs, right?
I would encourage entrepreneurs to just remember what they're good at and their strengths are and just be brave about following it, because sometimes that outside noise gets real loud and builds a lot of insecurity. And I've just been around long enough. I've been doing it for 10 years. I've just... It's just noise.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I think we call it the ‘Advice Tornado’. There's just so much going on here. And what works, ust like what you said, what works for them may not work for you because it's not what your customer wants.
Emma McIlroy
100%.
Chase Clymer
Building a business is straightforward and there’s a million different tools and bricks and blocks that you can use to make your business work. But it's just how you put them together. It all goes back to your customer and the problem that you're solving and how it does it for them.
Emma McIlroy
When we came out of COVID, Chase, In the midst of COVID, everybody said we were caught in three horrible crosshairs.
50% of our inventory came from retail. We had long lead inventory, so you place a bet on the inventory, do your inventory planning typically a year out, which means when you're up 75% and then you go down 75%, inventory planning is effectively broken because you now have three years of inventory on hand and you do not want any new shipments.
And then the last thing is we had a product that guess what? No one wore because no one wore a suit in 2020. They wore sweatpants and Crocs. And we did not sell either of those items. And everyone said to me, “You gotta kill your suit business. Just become jumpsuits, just kill all of your occasion-based stuff. No one's buying it.”
Do you know what the number one selling style was for us as we left the pandemic? Top selling category of 2022? Suiting. So where am I if I'd listened to the noise and killed that whole business and I come into 2022?
And you only have to look at brands like, who I deeply admire, by the way, brands like Crocs had the best year of their history in 2021. Couldn't match it in 2022, right?
That's my point about the noise. You have to sit in your bed at night in a dark room and say, “Did I do the right thing?” And none of those voices are going to be there when the shit hits the fan. So that's an example for me of just doing what you believe is right and blocking out the noise.
Chase Clymer
That's great advice, Emma.
Now, if I've been listening to this podcast and I feel that WILDFANG resonates with me and I want to check out the products, where should I go to do that?
Emma McIlroy
Come hang with us on social. We just got the most amazing new social managers then, and they are, they're doing a lot of fun stuff over on the old social so come hang with us on Instagram. We are WILDFANG.
Also, I'm sure everyone who listens to this can find WILDFANG on Instagram. That seems like a thing that they would be able to do. But yeah, come hang with us. If you decide that it's cool, obviously, you know how to get to the website.
But yeah, I would just say come hang with us on social and have some fun.
Chase Clymer
And I feel like there's another place they can go. It might be a little full circle, a little hilarious to how it worked out to maybe check the products out pretty soon.
Emma McIlroy
Yeah. I think you're speaking to the fact that last week, we launched our wholesale business which we're super proud of. People have been asking us to do that for a minute, and so now the product works and all those sticky customer metrics are good. We felt confident launching it.
And we wanted to launch it with Urban. They were our number one partner. We felt like they really were the cream of the crop that was out there for us to reach a younger consumer and to do it in the right way. And they did a fantastic job.
So we launched with Urban Outfitters and online last week and you'll continue to see drops throughout the year for us with them. And then you'll see a bunch of other retailers add it to the family.
So yeah, we're super excited to launch that wholesale business, hopefully bringing some new fans.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. And thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your story.
Emma McIlroy
Cool. Thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Until next time!