Interview with Tragic Beautiful

tragic beautiful

Today on the blog I am presenting another interview with the clothing company Tragic Beautiful.

Check out the interview:

 

  1. What got you interested in starting Tragic Beautiful? Share your story.

I have always been into alternative fashion. I would spend hours upon hours scouring the internet looking up alternative clothing and checking out the new breed of indie designers who were getting out there using the mediums of eBay and MySpace to start their own brands.

It was frustrating looking for amazing alternative clothing in Australia back then. There was just nothing around without paying ridiculous shipping costs, that’s if you could even find something you wanted. I realized that there needed to be some options for amazing stuff here that didn’t cost a fortune.

I started with $200 I had saved. I worked nights in the corner of my lounge room after my full time job finished for the day. I only got in and sold what I personally loved and wore myself and from there it just grew and grew. I was never trained in business, sales or marketing. I have just built this business on the idea that if one thing worked, I did more of it. If it didn’t work, I didn’t beat my head against the wall to make something happen. It all centered on what my customers were responding to and what they wanted.

Now we are the biggest alternative online store in Australia in terms of channels, turnover and people working for us. I am incredibly proud of this.

  1. Do you specifically only carry independent brands or do you also design and have your own clothing manufactured?

We used to carry our own brand of faux fur rave wear but stopped when the fur became impossible to import. We are definitely looking at options to produce our own ranges in the future.

  1. How have you gone about promoting your store to others? What’s working for you today?

We try to stay away from traditional advertising. I hate being ‘marketed to’ and I am sure our customer base does too. Our customers are educated and internet savvy, alternative and switched on enough to not want or need someone telling them what is cool or what they need.

We communicate heavily via social media – this gives us the perfect chance to interact, show our stuff, get feedback and actively participate rather than just selling stuff to people. This has always worked for us since the MySpace days.

  1. What makes your store unique from others in Australia?

We were the original online alternative store in Australia. We are the ones that find and bring brands into the country. Before we existed you couldn’t even buy Manic Panic in Australia online! We will always find the best new stuff first.

We won’t ever order in entire ranges of crap – just grabbing anything and everything for the sake of a quick buck. We curate carefully. We select the best pieces our more savvy customer base want and we then showcase them in lookbooks full of amazing images. This month one of our lookbooks was selected to be featured in Freque Magazine! See: http://www.tragicbeautiful.com/blog/freque-magazine/

People come to us because we know what they love and we don’t waste time on clutter and rubbish.

We also give heaps back – we have a reward points system set up for customers to get ongoing rewards and cashbacks on orders.

      5. What are your future plans for 2014 and beyond?

Global domination!

This year we have put on more staff, revamped our entire web presence and completely redone our website.

We actually have some extra special plans for next year that we can’t release yet but let’s just say they are incredibly exciting so stay tuned.

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