Carmela customer they come back in at the start of the following season to see what’s in the next collection”. We are known as a “wardrobe staple brand” offering the customer a chance to “buy once and buy right”.
Carmela gives my retail partners the opportunity to deliver style and comfort at more affordable prices. We have leather ankle boots with built-in comfort retailing at less than £100 and this is also helping us to gain more clients.
Q: Your brands continue to grow in the UK market, so how do you plan to build on that going forward? CS: Season upon season we are growing our client base. We are already a very popular brand in Ireland and the UK is now catching up. With the growth of online retail we are finding that our bricks and mortar businesses are looking for more help trading online. As a result, we have been working in partnership with Modular Commerce, which provides expert support for every aspect of a company’s online journey. We found that last season with the support of XTI and Carmela B2B we were able to repeat multiple times throughout the season. The increasing usage of this B2B model is helping to keep retailers agile and increasing their best seller sales.
Product has always been King and once we understand very early in the season what our best sellers are, we are able to repeat on these very quickly. I had a customer last season who repeated 14 times on one white leather boot style!
Q: How are your e-commerce services helping your independent retailers? CS: We recently redesigned the e-commerce site for Heidi Boutique in Wellingborough, creating a fresh, user-friendly Shopify experience that reflects their unique brand. I’ve
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worked alongside Heidi for over 10 years, selling her CARA shoes and now Carmela. Heidi was struggling to grow her online presence; she’s used influencers in the past but although she was increasing her sales she wasn’t making profit. She tried a local digital marketing agency which set up Google Ads for her, but she just felt she was throwing money into a black hole.
She decided to give Modular Commerce a go and we set her running her Google Ad campaigns. It was fair to say the process to onboard was not straight forward. There had been some violations on her Google Ads account which she was unaware of, which we had to solve.
Once the campaign was set she then received weekly check-in calls with us to measure how the campaigns were performing. Heidi also used this check-in time each week to brainstorm creative ideas for marketing her business. After a few months working with Heidi she instructed us to redesign her website for her, creating a fresh, user-friendly experience that reflected her unique brand. We are now delivering an impressive 5:1 return on ad spend, taking Heidi from a spend of just £250pcm to between £2,000 and £4,000pcm! When asked what she likes about working with Modular Commerce, Heidi said: “You make me feel at ease, you explain everything
properly, if I don’t understand something I’m not afraid to ask.”
We are currently onboarding new clients to start the AW25 season, so if anyone would like a free no-obligation demonstration to see how we can help your business, please email hello@
carolinesheppardfashionagency.co.uk or phone 07909 525519.
Q: How do you engage with your end consumer via your retail partners and other channels? CS: I really enjoy going back to the shop floor and selling. Whilst in store I will quite often jump in and help sell – I’ve also been known to do this whilst on holiday and I’m just “popping in” to see a customer! I also enjoy offering to help at season launches in customers’ stores and this gives me invaluable insights into how my brands are performing against our competitors.
JUNE 2025 • FOOTWEAR TODAY • 15
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