Going into Small Business Saturday (and the Cyber 5 as a whole), apparel brand Carve Designs had a checklist to work through.

Although co-founders Thayer Sylvester and Jennifer Hinton launched Carve Designs in 2003, it didn’t start selling online until the mid-2010s, and it didn’t participate in Cyber 5 promotions until 2023, vice president of ecommerce Megan Porteous told Digital Commerce 360.

Now, about 60% of its sales are direct-to-consumer, with the remainder coming from wholesale. It also sells on Amazon. Sales require a fine balance between participating in cultural moments like the Cyber 5 and simultaneously not training customers to expect that Carve Designs will always be on sale, she told Digital Commerce 360.

Promotions during the Cyber 5 are “so widely adopted at this point that if you don’t participate, you’re just leaving money on the table,” she said.

So this year, Carve Designs tweaked its digital marketing approach, launched a gift finder quiz and introduced a gift-with-purchase incentive.

Carve Designs’ sales during the Cyber 5

Although Carve Designs’ story fits well into Small Business Saturday — a women-founded brand using organic cotton — its sustainability-driven messaging is not always enough, she said.

“That’s the hard thing,” Porteous said. “It’s a great story and consumers say they like it, but what they really like are offers and deals and promotions.”

That led Carve Designs to offer promotions during this year’s Cyber 5, which she said was “an exceptional success.”

As a whole, Carve Designs grew sales 48% year over year during the Cyber 5. And on Small Business Saturday, specifically, it increased sales 65% year over year.

Porteous attributed the results to effective marketing strategies and customer engagement.

The retailer had a successful direct mail program dating back to 2017, Porteous said, but the challenge associated with it was that Carve Designs had to plan it months in advance.

“Once you’ve committed to that cost, it’s a fixed cost and your paid media spend has to either pull back or even throttle in the best-case scenario, depending on how that direct mail piece resonates with the consumer,” she said.

In years past, the retailer’s holiday catalog would drop in early November. Because the whole month of November is promotional, she said, it was a “huge cost” to release the catalog while consumers were waiting for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Plus, with 2024 being an election year, Carve Designs decided against releasing a catalog in favor of more flexible marketing spend. Because of that, the retailer spent more on paid digital media marketing this year compared to 2023.

Digital marketing during the Cyber Weekend

Two key digital marketing successes Carve Designs achieved recently were with influencers and its loyalty program.

Social media influencers post on their own channels about Carve Designs, which Porteous said helps expose the brand to new consumers.

“It helps us with exposure to brand new consumers, but what’s really been successful is to take content from our influencers — it’s known as user-generated content — and run that content as ads, and that’s a big shift for us,” Porteous said.

In the past, the direct-mail catalog would require photoshoots with models, the images from which would then be used to run ads. Even Carve Designs’ employees are creating user-generated content (UGC).

UGC that Carve Designs runs as ads are “going to outperform some sort of highly produced graphic every day of the week.”

Meanwhile, through its loyalty program, the company offered certain days that earn customers more points from their purchases than usual.

“Loyalty points are great for us because it’s not actually reducing the price of the products on the site,” she said.

They incentivize consumers to complete a purchase in the moment. From there, Carve Designs puts those customers into an email marketing list. As a result, the loyalty program has driven urgency to buy during promotions and then drive repeat purchases at a faster rate than other consumers.

Impact of MAP policy on Cyber 5 sales

Moreover, she said, loyalty points don’t violate the minimum advertised pricing (MAP) policy that Carve Designs agrees to with its wholesale partners. MAP policies are among the key reasons Carve Designs does not normally offer sitewide promotions.

Some holidays and promotional periods, such as Labor Day, are MAP holidays. That means DTC websites can offer lower prices than usual, as can their wholesale partners, Porteous said.

“But the challenge with a business like ours where we have a spring business and a fall and winter business is the selling period to promote full-price items is fairly short because we only launch after Labor Day,” she said. “And then we have this Black Friday-Cyber Monday period, and then we mark down a significant amount of our fall/winter products starting right after Christmas, and so we need to really protect our full-price selling, and we need to protect our wholesale partners. So that’s why we can’t do a full sitewide. It’s because of this delicate balance between wholesale.”

Learning from the 2023 Cyber 5 to find that balance, the retailer tried something different this year. It offered 30% off a small selection of fall and winter 2024 products while also promoting its permanent markdown on products from prior seasons, on which the retailer offers up to 75% off.

Carve Designs launches gift finder quiz

In the spring, Carve Designs had found success in a quiz that helped its shoppers find their preferred swim style. In the fall, before holiday promotions, it launched a similar quiz to help consumers find sweaters.

The gift finder quiz is the third iteration, which Carve Designs launched in November. The conversion rate of consumers who have completed these quizzes is considerably higher than for consumers who did not take or complete the quiz, Porteous said, exceeding the brand’s benchmarks.

During the Cyber 5, the quiz saw a 10% higher completion rate and a 130% increase in conversion rates than the prior period in November.

The gift finder has driven incremental revenue and increased average order value (AOV), she said, but what piqued her interest was that the first question asked who quiz-takers are shopping for, and most of them said they were shopping for themselves.

And as Christmas approaches, Carve Designs leans more into gift cards.

“Gift cards are always a strong business, especially after the shipping cutoff,” Porteous said. “So when we no longer can ship products to guarantee delivery before Christmas, then we really switch to gift card messaging.”

But before that cutoff, Carve Designs is offering its consumers a faster shipping speed than usual when they reach the brand’s $99 free shipping threshold. Rather than going with ground delivery for its orders that meet the free shipping threshold, it’s offering two-day air shipping.

Part of that is because Carve Designs uses a third-party logistics (3PL) provider based in the West Coast, limiting delivery times during the holiday season. So although Carve Design’s ground shipping cutoff is slated for Dec. 13 this year, it’s offering two-day air shipping through Dec. 19.

Gift with purchase during the Cyber 5

Carve Designs also introduced a gift-with-purchase (GWP) incentive during the Cyber 5. It offered a free Carve Designs hat, which it normally values at $38, on orders of $200 or more. This helped drive a higher AOV, Porteous said.

“A key takeaway from this year was the need for better preparedness for last-minute pivots,” Porteous said. “For example, we introduced the GWP offer late Wednesday afternoon, which required the entire team to work quickly to execute it effectively. Moving forward, we plan to have pre-developed marketing assets and contingencies in place to make such adjustments more seamless and turnkey.”

Carve Designs still has time before its Christmas shipping cutoff dates to drive sales.

“As we gear up for the holiday season, we plan to apply the insights and strategies that worked well during Cyber 5 to our end-of-year sales,” she said. “This includes leveraging tools like a quiz if relevant, ensuring we have compelling promotions, and being ready with backup levers like GWPs to drive sales and engagement.”

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