We caught up with luxury resale business owner, Julie Yoo of I Miss You Vintage, who was recently interviewed by Beyond Fashion Magazine about her recent shift to purely digital channels. We were eager to hear more about her experience with Entrupy and the role we’re playing in the switchover.
Her top recommendation for luxury resellers everywhere is to leverage e-commerce to expand your business from local to global markets. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, she’d been selling primarily in store to local clientele in Toronto. She sold a bit online, but it didn’t become a priority until she was forced to shutter her doors and move completely online — a common story that certainly resonates with retailers and resellers worldwide.
To make the sudden shift a successful one, Yoo focused on enhancing her digital marketing strategy. Through SEO, pay per click advertising, content marketing like blog posts, and email marketing, she’s been effective in attracting new customers and retaining current ones. She also advocates taking advantage of marketplaces in addition to selling via your own properties. She’s currently doing a large portion of her sales via eBay, and her new mantra is, “the more you list, the more you sell.”
Yoo also made a strong point about the importance of reputation in the increasingly-digital world, noting the outsized impact of negative press. Yoo emphatically expresses, “It takes just one bad review online” to damage your business because the anonymity of the internet for both buyers and sellers creates a barrier to trust. It’s an impediment that she didn’t experience in the same way when selling person-to-person at her boutique. Now that she’s transacting online, she finds third party authentication a necessity, because customers are demanding items be authenticated before they’ll make a purchase. Entrupy has become an “invaluable tool” for her business that “removes the layer of doubt in the minds of customers and helps propel conversions”.
Even with trusted consignors, the 20 year industry veteran told us that, “You can’t rely on your relationships alone with clients” to ensure that the goods procured are, indeed, authentic. For example, she recently had a longtime consignor bring her a “superfake”
which are counterfeit goods of such high quality that they appear to be identical to their authentic counterparts. Some superfakes are reportedly even produced in the same factories as authentic items, and the unscrupulous counterfeiters are incentivizing online communities to tout the products’ accuracy so they can sell more. . “You just have to be more careful, especially in the era of superfakes,” Yoo cautioned.
