Direct-to-consumer is one of the most evolving, talked-about, and exciting trends in business at the moment, seemingly touching and transforming almost every sector. In this Q&A, DTC Daily talks to Jessica Mason (pictured below), founder, Piglet, a direct-to-consumer brand selling stonewashed bed linen online, to discover how Piglet is making waves in its sector, and how the brand will continue to evolve.

DTC Daily: Tell us how Piglet differs from more traditional, legacy brands in your sector? What niche is your company looking to fulfil?

Jessica Mason: We are definitely not the only option on the market for linen bedding and sleepwear. Where we distinguish ourselves from our competition is by selling a really high-quality product at fair prices while putting massive efforts into customer service. We want our customers to feel as comfortable as possible buying from us online, and so we make sure that we are always on hand (across many channels) to provide advice and support.

What platforms do you use to acquire your customer base? Outside of CRM, do you use any data-management technology (e.g. DMP or CDP) to manage and activate your first-party data?

While we acquire customers on a number of different platforms, Instagram is by far the most import for us. Areas such as attribution modelling are therefore very important for us, to be able to know what is and isn't working as we are always experimenting with new platforms and campaigns. We don’t use any data-management technology outside CRM, at the moment, but this is something we would like to focus on more this year.

Jessica Mason, Founder, Piglet

Do you have your own store or do you work with third-party platforms like Amazon?

Currently the bulk of our orders are from our own store. We have worked with a couple of smaller marketplaces and will continue to evaluate these options.

What does the future hold for your company?

We are growing very fast and with that comes a lot of exciting new developments. In the next couple of months, we are opening our first pop-up store in Notting Hill, which should help us to solidify our thinking around physical retail. We are also launching a postal catalogue, which could be an interesting new channel for us to acquire customers.

In the more long term, we are focused on maintaining this growth by expanding both our product offering and international presence.

What priority do you place on online advertising, compared with traditional media such as TV and OOH? How do you think this will change in the next 12 months?

We are yet to test TV and OOH, so I can't really comment on how successful they would be for us. For the foreseeable future, I imagine that online advertising will continue to be central to our growth strategy.

What is your customer retention strategy?

We have found by implementing our loyalty programme and by offering discounts to existing customers (to either use on a second purchase or to share with a friend) we have been able to  maintain a level of customer retention that we are very happy with.