4 ways storytelling can make your wholesale business more sustainable

When it comes to wholesale selling, storytelling has become paramount for brands to engage with customers digitally and remotely. Better storytelling means investing in content production and this can be daunting for brands of all sizes. However, the benefits of better storytelling can make your process more efficient, engaging, and sustainable. Here's what storytelling is all about, and 4 ways it will make a difference.

Storytelling turned 'Storyselling'

Storytelling triggers chemicals in the brain that are linked to meaning-making and sense-making. When trying to engage, influence, teach, or inspire others, storytelling is the way to go. When it comes to wholesale selling, including storytelling in your experience can significantly increase the buy-in from your customers. This is what we like to call “The storyselling framework”.

This framework combines the art and the science of fashion to generate excitement and alignment across customers. Translating into better sales for brands and retailers, while at the same time having less dependency on physical samples to conduct business. Storyselling is the framework by which businesses create story-driven content to boost sales efficiency. But it is not only an effective tool for increasing sales, when done correctly, it can massively impact a brand’s sustainability.

1. A stronger story makes for more aligned buys

Having an engaging story to guide buyers through a collection gives a brand greater control. Leading their buyers to the products they want them to fall in love with. This results in more aligned buys across customers leading to a higher level of repeatable and predictable production, which causes less constraints to the supply chain process downstream. Building a predictive and repeatable model for the key buys of a season, allows your production facilities to focus their resources as efficiently as possible, and might allow your brand to move towards a "made to order" model. Creating more opportunities for less waste.

2. Build seasonal collections for value, not volume.

As outlined in the State of Fashion 2021: “More products and collections do not necessarily yield better financial results”. Build seasonal collections for value, not volume. When the focus is on providing a story you can decrease the option count per season while increasing the productivity per option. Instead of offering 300 shorts with no clear selling points, focus on offering 150 with a clear story. Less is more.

3. Make samples an asset in your story, not the driver.

When selling story-based collections, it allows to be more critical about which samples are part of that story. By thinking strategically about the production and display of your samples, it unlocks structural sample reduction potential. This in turn results in a real reduction in sample production costs and waste. A great example of this is Tommy Hilfiger, where they embraced storytelling and reduced their salesman samples by 80%.

4. Storytelling enables remote sales

Storytelling can make your remote sales process a powerful experience that gives customers the confidence needed to buy remotely, even beyond the pandemic.  This means less travel, less samples, and with the fashion industry being responsible for 10 % of annual global carbon emissions, this will lead to a happier planet.

Now it’s time for you to start storyselling

To summarize, when your collection story is on point, customers align better with your proposals, leading to better synergies across regions, better assortment planning, decreased need for travel and samples, and ultimately a better experience for consumers overall. If there's one thing we know to be true, it's that: the better your brand story is told, the better your collection is sold.

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