AVESTE was born out of a problem. The problem being that it's hard to find clothes online. Hard to find brands that you like. Hard to remember all of the great individual brands that hit you with ads on social media. And hard to know if the clothes are going to fit when they arrive.
The lockdown of 2019 gave us all an abundance of time, that was clear. How we were all going to use it effectively was not so clear. Once the initial idea came into fruition, we became tunnel visioned on making it happen, with the first line of code being written on 1st September 2019.
You only have to scroll through Instagram for 5 minutes and you will likely be hit by ads from some very unique clothing merchants. The artistry of some of the brands is far beyond anything you would find in the classic high street stores. We knew we had to get these guys all in one place and show them off to the world. We wanted to build a clothing marketplace, not create a clothing brand. Honestly, the thought of creating a clothing brand terrified us given the vast amount of competition out there. We honestly didn't feel we had the creativity and prowess to compete with some of the brands we held in high acclaim. However, we felt we could build an unbelievable technology platform given our backgrounds in data science, web development, influencer marketing and sales.
AVESTE was going to be there to help elevate their brand and open them up to more customers whilst allowing them to maintain their own sovereignty. The classic wholesale model of retail means that brands are often at the whim of the stockists. Working with them often involves long shipping times, huge discounts, complex payment terms and buyback clauses. We felt we could eradicate this.
We knew there were an abundance of independent brands all competing for customers attention, and after some quick research (builtwith.com), we found that 90%+ of them were using Shopify. It's a no brainer really, Shopify is a fantastic platform for getting an E-Commerce business up and running in no time at all. The suite of apps that plug into it mean it is beyond customisable. It's no wonder that even large enterprises such as GymShark are using it as their platform; it takes away the headache caused by some of the behemoth web platforms, enabling e-commerce businesses to tap into a modern microservice architecture.
Anyway, the beauty of Shopify is that it has extensive developer API support, meaning we could achieve everything we needed to. We just needed to put our heads down and graft.
The natural solution seemed somewhere that brings brands together and goes the extra mile to give customers as much information as possible. Is AVESTE a dropshipper? Haha we don't like to use that word, but I guess at a fundamental level it is. The word dropshopping to us has negative connotations. Dropshipping to us means selling cheap plastic toys from far away contintents with long delivery times. AVESTE was going to be a technology company blended with a fashion brand.
So, we built it. We got our app approved on Shopify 1 year after we wrote the first line of code. That process was actually not as bad as we thought. They had a great onboarding team and the hoops we had to jump through were all really sensible. When we first coined AVESTE, we didn't even realise we'd have to build an integrated Shopify app, so this felt like a huge hurdle that we'd overcome. However, we knew this was just the start of even more hard graft.
We now had a website covered in stock photos, a Shopify App, a very primative looking Instagram page and a mission. To be the best online clothes shop in the world.
To be continued...