A Letter to Our Customer Community
To our customer community,
We’re excited to launch a new website next week. Things will look a little different, so we wanted to give you a heads up, tell you a bit about what’s new and what’s staying the same.
When we launched Brass in September of 2014, we had 5 dress styles and an idea of what the business was about. 20 months, 10 dresses, 3 tees, and thousands of customers later — we can safely say that our vision for the company is much more defined. We have learned so much from you, our customer, and we have grown this business in direct response to your feedback.
Here’s a look at how we’re improving and adjusting things over the next 6 months:
Product Photography. We launched our Body Guide last year and we heard rave reviews. You told us how much you love seeing the clothing on real women, so we’re going to be doing a lot more of this. We’re creating a database of Real Models and we’d love to have you participate. (As of writing this post, we have more than 70 women signed up — yasss!) Head on over here to sign-up. We’ll be putting photos of our Real Models directly on the Product Page so you’ll be able to see more quickly and easily how items look on different body shapes. We will absolutely do our best to get every size represented, but it will take some time. Bear with us as we grow this part of the site and if you ever have questions about the best style for you, shoot us an email. We love to give personalized recommendations!
Product Selection. Next week, we are launching our first pair of pants and two blouses. You’ll finally be able to wear Brass head-to-toe and not be in a dress! With these new additions, we’ll be creating Closet Kits — 4 to 5 pieces of clothing that can be easily mixed and matched to make multiple outfits. The Kits will be great for women who want to start a capsule wardrobe or just want a little help with styling. We’ll also be curating our product to fit your needs better. For example, our best-selling items (our core foundational pieces) will form our Everyday Collection. These pieces will be available throughout the year. We will then launch new pieces according to season and customer requests. This summer we’ll be releasing the perfect Summer Sweater, The Sleeveless Shirt Dress, The Midi Tee Dress, and a few other pieces. We’re pretty psyched.
Better Fit. The number one reason for online returns is fit. We know it can be difficult to shop online because you can’t try-on. One way we can make this experience better is to ensure that if you are a medium in one Brass dress, you are a medium in all Brass clothing. We currently have a few items that do not fit true-to-size, so we are doing our best to streamline all of our product and improve the fit. For example, with The Tank Maxi, we received overwhelming feedback that the bust was too tight. We added a zipper and increased the bust area by 1”. Based on customer feedback, we are working to improve the fit of The Shirt Dress, The Band Dress, The Pencil Dress, andThe A-Line Dress. Our best-selling styles will be even better than before and consistently offered in more colors. As a result, some of these pieces will increase slightly in price, but we’re confident that you will love them even more. In addition to improving the garment fit, we will have more information about the product and measurements on the Product Page.
Shipping, Returns, Exchanges, Alterations. This isn’t the fun stuff, but it is a large part of an ecommerce business. Right now our shipping costs are high. Our $4.95 flat rate policy only covers a percentage of shipping costs because USPS increased their rates in January. We held off on increasing our shipping costs, but alas, the time has come. In order for us to be able to provide excellent customer service and a great return/exchange policy, we will be increasing our shipping costs. We don’t want to do this, but we do want to stay in business. Our new policy will be in line with our ecommerce peers (Everlane, Cuyana, MM Lafleur). As for alterations, we will continue to offer a version of our Perfect Fit policy. It was becoming increasingly difficult to call tailors over the phone and pay the bill. Often they did not accept credit cards over the phone. So, we’ve adjusted our policy. If you take your item to be altered, simply email us the ticket. We will provide you with $15 in merchandise credit per item altered. The credit does not expire and can be used towards any future purchase.
As the business has progressed, we have listened and learned so much from you. We’ve read every email, every review, and every comment from our customers. Your notes of praise and support empower us and make us feel like we’re onto something. At the same time, your notes of dissatisfaction let us know how to improve. This business is our baby, so as you can imagine, we are humbled by comments about how our baby could be perfected. While it can be hard to hear at first, we remind ourselves that constructive feedback is an opportunity for us to make this business better. And to have a community of smart, thoughtful, helpful customers is truly something to be thankful for. So, thank you. We are incredibly grateful for the chance to build a company for a community of badass women.
With love and gratitude,
Jay & Katie
PS — If at anytime you have questions, comments, or feedback you know we’re hear to listen. Email us at [email protected] and we’ll get back to you. Always.
