You’ve seen her play the role of a smart and honest new host on Apple TV’s original series, The Morning Show. Despite being one of the most visible celebrities in television, film, and the digital media landscape, Reese Witherspoon has remained relatively unknown as a business powerhouse despite launching two successful e-commerce brands.
Following in the footsteps of other famous entrepreneurs such as Jessica Alba, Beyoncé, Rhianna and the Kardashians, Witherspoon launched and helped create Draper James, her lifestyle clothing brand, and Hello Sunshine, her production company.
The two brands have reached a combined value of over $1 billion. Hello Sunshine was sold in 2021 for $900 million to a media company backed by private equity firm Blackstone Group Inc. Witherspoon just sold 70% of Draper James to Consortium Brand Partners for an undisclosed amount.
It’s true that Witherspoon has the star power behind her and a built-in consumer base willing to spend money on whatever she supports. However, there are several simple but effective e-commerce strategies that the businesswoman has used to ensure the success of her brands.
Here are some ecommerce growth strategies employed by Witherspoon that could be applied to your business.
Create an authentic customer experience
Witherspoon brings southern charm to her social media presence and the way she talks about her brands. This southern charm is the inspiration behind Draper James, a contemporary clothing line.
Draper James is renowned for his focus on creating authentic customer experiences. This Southern charm, this sense of Americana, is reflected not only in their fits, colors and fabrics, but also in the customer experience, and it is a central part of how they create an authentic experience for their customers.
Whether you shop online or in-store, the brand strives to remind you to embody distinctly Southern sensibilities and style and creates a virtually seamless experience across both channels.
From their iconic blue and white striped wall of their Nashville flagship, in front of which customers happily pose for playful UGC, to the silver packaging with stools placed for friends to chat and admire the dressing room’s looks, Draper James really thinks about authenticity. , a shareable experience, which helps increase customer loyalty, encourages brand ambassadorship and builds brand loyalty.
There are many cases where a challenger brand’s experience doesn’t match how it was marketed or lacks consistency, which can seem disconnected, disjointed and otherwise disappointing to a potential customer.
Some of the most successful brands have built customer loyalty and increased lifetime value by setting the tone for building authentic connections with their consumers and maintaining that authenticity in how they conduct business.
Every element, every touchpoint of the customer experience matters. Build your brand universe with intention and commitment to your core values and those of your ideal audiences while keeping in mind how you want your customers and prospects to feel. Innovate ways to not only anticipate their needs and concerns, but also ways to surprise and delight them to make the experience with which they shop and engage with you far better than any experience that ‘they have had in the past with another brand.
Using Conversational SMS Marketing to Create Meaningful and Valuable Experiences
Draper James is legendary for his SMS marketing campaigns. They leveraged platforms like Attentive to create authentic conversational campaigns (true to their southern brand) and developed effective SMS campaigns in kind, achieving a 152% increase in subscribers over five months and ROI of the program by more than 29x.
These campaigns served two purposes: they helped shift slower-moving inventory and, more importantly, gave the brand a larger window of visibility into what customers want, which created new opportunities to well serve them.
As of July 2022, 71% of traffic to online retailers came from phones and 61% of online orders were placed on mobile. Conversational or two-way SMS marketing has quickly become a must-have for brands looking to more effectively and intimately reach a larger portion of their customer base who might otherwise miss messages sent via email or paid traffic.
Take a thorough multi-channel approach
Reese Witherspoon is a highly visible celebrity who can be seen on social media, in the press, on e-commerce platforms and on her website.
Other Draper brands James and Witherspoon use a multi-channel approach to e-commerce marketing and customer acquisition. They understand that to reach a multitude of consumers, you must reach them on the platforms they frequent.
Optimizing your e-commerce marketing using a multi-channel approach allows you to diversify how you build an audience and reach consumers. It will allow you to adjust targeting to be laser focused on a particular platform in the most effective way for that platform.
When you think about how many touchpoints consumers typically require from a brand before making a purchasing decision (at least 20, according to most e-commerce marketing analytics) and the average length of the process consideration for an ecommerce prospect (18+ months old), according to $93 million in customer journey data from The KR Agency), it makes sense that relying on one or a few platforms to reach, convert, and nurture leads consumers is a woefully ineffective strategy for most e-commerce brands.
However, taking a multi-channel approach allows brands to establish an environment that allows for numerous touchpoints that ultimately make consumers feel like they are everywhere, which tends to drive stronger overall trust in the brand.
Adopt customer-focused policies
Witherspoon’s companies value a high level of customer service and do so by taking a customer-first approach. These policies ensure that customers are heard, employees are engaged in the process, and multiple touchpoints are designed to make the experience exceptional.
One of the most critical aspects of creating a brand that scales and becomes recognizable is your customer service. Creating customer-focused policies sends a clear message to your team and your customers that it shows how much they matter.
To do this, Draper James pays great attention to reducing return rates and ensuring strong brand experiences, even in the rare cases where a customer is disappointed with their purchase. The brand considers return requests as opportunities to conquer and win back its customers, which has a real impact on its results.
Borrow the Draper James playbook and walk through your entire customer experience. What can be changed or improved? As you provide your customers with exceptional service, systematize and automate the process. Create SOPs that guide new team members through customer- and experience-focused policies and continue to evolve that experience as new data arises.
Reese Witherspoon has used her fame to build billion-dollar e-commerce brands using principles you can apply to your brand. This may seem like common sense, but it takes skill to implement what seems simple.
Create authentic customer experiences, use modern modalities to reach consumers, strengthen your customer service, and use your brand authority to continue growing your e-commerce business.
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