Coyuchi, a 30-year-old organic bedding brand, successfully transitioned from a wholesale-focused model to a dominant e-commerce presence by leveraging its retail partnerships to build brand awareness around sustainability. The brand differentiated itself in a crowded DTC market by refining its sustainability messaging from 'scare tactics' to value enhancement and by strategically targeting a customer demographic beyond the typical millennial focus of many DTC brands. This episode provides a blueprint for legacy brands looking to adapt their marketing playbooks for modern retail.
Home goods brand Coyuchi has been around for 30 years and has seen the industry transform. Its core focus is on providing organic cotton products. It's perhaps most well known for its bedsheets, but has expanded into other areas like loungewear and napkins. But the focus has always been to grow keeping its promise of organic products that speak to its target consumer in mind -- which it considers its competitive advantage against the ever-growing DTC home goods space. CEO Eileen Mockus joined this week's Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about Coyuchi's growth and strategy. The company first launched before DTC was a buzzword -- and as such grew via wholesale. "It was a lot of small retailers," she said. But over the years, the company invested more and more online -- and its e-commerce presence is now its largest sales channel. "It's a big shift," Mockus said. Mockus said that one of the ways Coyuchi was able to grow its online presence so much was by establishing its brand via these retail partners. Through that, the company was able to let customers know about its focus on sustainability. The marketing behind its organic focus has also shifted. Sustainability-focused marketing a decade ago, she said, was "almost a scare tactic." That is, telling a customer about all the perils of using non-organic products. But now, the brand has realized it's better to use this focus as a way to explain why the product is enhanced. "We were really able to shift the conversation," she said. But Coyuchi isn't the only brand having such a conversation. Search for DTC bedding on Google, and you'll be presented with dozens of different options. But Mockus said that Coyuchi being an early arrival -- as well as its focus away from the target millennial demographic most DTC brands go after -- has helped it stand out. "It has definitely been a crowded space in the bedding market," she said. "We have always had a view to who our customer was."