Chloe Wickman, Owner of Zeenya Clothing, caught up with the PoweringON team all bright tights and smiles, to share her journey with digital and reflect on how it has helped her to realise her vision for her business.
Zeenya is a unique activewear line made to inspire women to express themselves and their vibrant lifestyle. Embracing Life Through Colour is not only Zeenya’s motto, but a way of living and a value they stand by.
Starting off with a website, Chloe knew that she would need to harness social media to market her business and draw customers to her online store.
“You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re up against it.”
Chloe focused on Facebook as a key interactive tool for her business, building a strong following of customers who have gone on to become passionate brand advocates, helping to amplify the reach of her business to many more potential customers. Their VIP Facebook group, ZAA (Zeenya’s Activewear Anonymous), is a highly beneficial space for customers to share feedback, ask questions, build a community and raise brand awareness for Zeenya.
“If a thousand true fans buy $100 worth of product off you every year, that’s a healthy base. Those are the ones who will support you and grow your base.
That’s where we’re going with our Facebook group”
“This is a great view and these are my great leggings!
People love to share their Zeenya adventures online”
Understanding the ‘just in time’ expectations of the digitally engaged customer, Chloe also invested in a pop-up chat tool on her website. This enables quick, real time interactions with customers on-the-go (in their colourful activewear, of course).
These digital optimisations meant that Zeenya was in a good position when the challenges of the COVID pandemic hit. “We’re grateful to have already been online,” she says, “and to have systems in place, like ordering, logistics, and a loyal New Zealand customer base while international deliveries were on hold.”
Whilst a lot of businesses were pivoting at this time, Chloe took the opportunity to reflect on what was going well and what could be fine tuned to improve how digital serves her brand.
Having already established a strong ambassador community on social media, lockdown was an opportunity to strengthen that online connection between the ambassadors through the use of communication technologies like Zoom. And there was plenty of opportunity for sharing colourful ‘activewear’ lockdown moments amongst the community, helping to continually reinforce that connection.
Zeenya Stretching and Expanding with Digital Learnings
For Chloe, investing in online learning, attending seminars and workshops has been crucial to continuing to build her digital capabilities and keeping ahead of developments in this space.
Asking the right people for help has also been vital: identifying providers she could trust, like Harper Digital to help with online advertising, and Rocketspark to build and support Zeenya’s ecommerce website, have helped to take Zeenya to the next digital level.
“So glad to have Rocketspark there to support us from the start and evolve together.”
Through leveraging these digital tools and capabilities, Chloe was able to further develop her understanding of sales funnels and of the customer buying journey.
“We learnt how customers were experiencing the website and how many clicks it took
until they bought your product! The data was valuable in improving our online experience.”
For instance, Chloe developed a database that she could leverage to drive more online sales conversions and this has proved highly beneficial.
Some of the successful tactics for building their database have been capturing online subscribers through a ‘Join us and get 10% off’ website offer, and using content like the Inspiring Humans monthly blog series as a click-through from Facebook Ads. Both have been a huge converter to sales.
We finished up our time with Chloe asking for her top insights for small businesses looking to leverage digital in the current environment:
- Be open to receiving help and engage with PoweringON for digital support. Use their free digital assessment to help develop an action plan.
- Stay on top in the digital space, as it is always changing. Sign up to receive updates from Venture Centre, attend workshops and take online courses, as they’ve been highly valuable.
- Pick your platforms and digital tools. Don’t try to do everything, be intentional with using digital platforms.
- Start small, it’s not just about what’s best for business, but what’s best for your lifestyle. If you are the 10-hour a week person, then you need to learn to automate some tasks.
“Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Having places like Venture Centre to help guide you is key.”
Visit Zeenya’s website
Follow them on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest.
The PoweringON programme is a programme delivered by Ventre Centre to help build the digital capability of local small businesses through a digital assessment tool and plan, one-to-one digital navigator session, workshops and connecting local service providers.
Try the Digital Assessment for yourself and see how you are benchmarked!
Venture Centre is a charitable organisation dedicated to entrepreneurship support. They build the capability, capacity and digital enablement of entrepreneurs in our region.
