Frances Valentine

In 2016, co-founders (and best friends) Elyce Arons and Kate Spade launched Frances Valentine, nearly a decade after their departure from Kate Spade New York, where they had made their permanent footprint on Americana culture.  While the mission remained the same – a continuation of their vintage inspired, joy inspiring legendary style for which the founders were known for and loved, the era of market entry of a start-up fashion brand was not.  

At the time of Frances Valentine’s concept, the distribution landscape had dramatically shifted to Ecommerce and a direct-to-consumer model, that were made scalable around the growth metrics of website traffic, customer acquisition from diversified online and offline sources, engaging and then converting customers, and increasing loyalty recognized as customer retention. 

Our first objective in our strategic planning with the original founders of Kate Spade New York, was to ensure that the introduction of the Frances Valentine brand via francesvalentine.com was successful in communicating a brand that centered around shoes as opposed to handbags; that it highlighted the origins of its famous founders and promoted their collective commitment to quality centered around Italian manufacturers as a quality differentiator. There was equal prominence in an effort to leverage significant press culled from Vogue, WWD and ensuring that FV was capturing fashionistas’ attention, who were eagerly awaiting the debut of Kate, Andy, Elyce and Paola’s 1st collection in nearly a decade, in order to meet eCommerce channel projections tied to its Valentine’s Day debut.

While publicists began to get the word out, and family-run factories tied the finishing touches onto Frances Valentine’s first line, netamorphosis stepped in to provide guidance on eCommerce best practice commenting on the designs produced by Partners & Spade, weighing in on primary UX Design, providing eCommerce supplemental wireframes and designs for the shopping cart, checkout, operational and ‘subscribe list’ email templates, in addition to customer care sections for Frances Valentine’s website. 

We provided content guidance by way of image asset art direction feedback, product copywriting and handled all copy for customer care and operational policies.  We were CMS administrators in essence functioning as an in-house digital department, while providing years of experience of establishing and running successful eCommerce operations for what would be the equivalent expenditure of 1.5 full-time employees, but with the skill set of 7 unique digital talents. 

We defined, communicated and performed UAT across business and technical requirements for all platform touchpoints, including the primary Magento eCommerce platform, email marketing software, social media plugins, the shipping integration and payment processor. We served as the lead on eCommerce development for all 3rd Parties, including the development partner and 3PL (3rd Party Logistics Provider).

We worked directly with Frances Valentine’s legal team to ensure policy alignment in accord with the operations that were implemented upon our recommendation following competitive analysis and established with the 3PL.

Platform launches, no matter how you look at them, are messy.  At neta, we use this post-launch time period, termed ‘optimization’, at the inception of performance management, to ensure revenue targets are being met. To support ongoing performance management, we provide top-notch analytics consulting that outlines metrics that should be evaluated as a baseline performance gauge. In the instance of Frances Valentine’s digital operation we also participated in the recruiting and on-boarding of 2 full-time key resources to ensure that their operation was set up for success within the context of the ever evolving digital and eCommerce landscape.

Our role with Frances Valentine was strategic and we served as the Head of their eCommerce channel during the stressful and demanding time of a brand launch. Once we secured the in-house digital team, to ‘man and run’ the channel, our focus shifted to more executive level strategic planning in accord with our business consulting and eCommerce channel strategic planning KPI’s for francesvalentine.com’s first three years, which exceeded the founder’s expectations and continues to, to this day.