News What’s more, even successful brands feel tired after a
while, and 18 months ago the Seatons felt “unhappy with the catalogue, store design, and PR”. They were getting a “bit bored”, and found that product was being “driven by sales rather than inspiration”. The invigoration of the brand started with a pop-up
store in Cheltenham in December 2009. The couple wanted the store to have the same brand values as the catalogue. Initially, it was decorated sparsely in the run up to Christmas, with lots of natural wood, lights, stencils on the walls, and trestle tables. The Spartan layout caused a real buzz for the brand. As you would expect from Toast, each store is different from the next, and when the store was reopened after Christmas, Toast took over the entire regency townhouse decorating it with individual pieces of furniture, such as wardrobes and distressed doors, rather than using impersonal retail fittings. Toast’s revamp was carried through to its website and
catalogue with the aim of making the shopping experience richer than ever. Toast introduced extra features such as films from the photo shoots on its website. It also introduced more copy, such as the “style stories” section where customers can find out about where the fabrics come from and what inspires the designs. In the catalogue, Toast uses more nonselling pages, for instance, in the autumn/winter 2010 edition there’s an excerpt from a piece written by the arts commissioning editor of The Times and a fiction piece inspired by a medieval Welsh myth. Toast also commissioned a series of podcasts by travel writer Robert Macfarlane. This nonselling copy helps encourage customer engagement, said Seaton; in turn, Toast’s customers appreciate the soft
sell. This noncommercial approach is working for the brand; according to Seaton the emails that promoted Macfarlane’s podcasts helped generate £100,000 in sales even though they weren’t directly selling product. So what makes an iconic brand? If you ask Jessica Seaton
it is about “tapping into something” as Toast did back in 1997. Seaton was too modest to describe Toast as iconic, but says that in creating Toast they have been “passionately devoted to the way we present what we do and have always been motivated to do things differently”. This might box Toast into a niche, unable to grow much bigger without losing its founders’ unique, personal touch. In order to appeal to
a wider audience, and remain at the top of its game, Seaton knows that Toast needs to have a better understanding of the market in which it operates. To this end, it has embarked on its first- ever customer research programme to help it gain an insight into its customers and become, as all icons should be, a leader, and not a follower.
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Tactics Views
Toast, by the numbers
Toast was founded in 1997 by husband and wife Jamie and Jessica Seaton.
It became part of fashion group French Connection in 2000.
Toast is now a £14 million business.
It opened its first store in 2001 and now has nine retail outlets.
Approximately 160,000 customers have shopped with Toast in the past 13 years.
Toast added menswear to the range in 2010. INTELLIGENT WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTION
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