MoveActive: How fewer e-commerce sales helped this Smart50 Award winner

Activewear label MoveActive is having a good month.

The grippy sock innovator just won the Smart50 Retail Award, recognising the company’s cult status among pilates enthusiasts at home and abroad.

Now, the brand is witnessing a record-breaking Black Friday sale season, with its direct retail channel volumes more than double that recorded in 2022.

One secret to building MoveActive’s direct-to-consumer success: running fewer sales, and working to make the big ones count.

Speaking to SmartCompany, Chloe McQuoid, MoveActive’s marketing manager, explained how the philosophy of ‘less is more’ helped the wholesale powerhouse become an e-commerce winner.

Black Friday sales breaking records

Founded by Melissa Pain in 2009, MoveActive burst into the market with socks specially designed for use on pilates machines.

The market for MoveActive products grew as pilates, yoga, and barre studios proliferated across Australia, and the company built a robust wholesale business to serve its retailers.

MoveActive has operated an e-commerce store for a decade.

However, its online operations came to the fore during COVID-19 lockdowns, which shuttered studios across the country — and the bricks-and-mortar retailers offering the company’s products.

The e-commerce side of MoveActive now accounts for 23% of the business’ sales, McQuoid said, thanks to a significant change in how the brand operates its retail business.

“We were running a lot of sales in the past,” McQuoid said on Tuesday.

Now, the brand runs just three annual sales events: Afterpay Day, Click Frenzy, and Black Friday.

For MoveActive, the latter sale kicked off last Thursday, as part of a growing trend to open Black Friday sales well before the date (and Cyber Monday) itself.

It proved to be the biggest single day in the life of MoveActive’s online business.

“Pretty much everyone in the business is out there helping pack orders because we’ve never seen so many retail orders in this business before,” she said.

The business had projected its e-commerce sales volumes would jump 50% compared to its 2022 Black Friday sales, but early indications show more than 100% growth compared to last year.

A model displays MoveActive products in a recent campaign. Source: Facebook/ MoveActive

Fewer sales, but better outreach strategies

Cutting down the number of sales is just one part of the equation.

Ensuring customers stay engaged with the brand and are ready to spend big when the time comes, is another challenge entirely.

For McQuoid and the business, it involved a major shift in how MoveActive treats its product launches.

The brand now releases three new collections each month, revolving around one new major launch, and two ancillary product drops.

To really drive these releases, MoveActive has invested a significant amount into photoshoots, its social media presence, and its influencer marketing efforts.

The strategy “allows us to talk seasonally, instead of just having more and more promotions, like all the other brands on the market,” McQuoid said.

“We’re actually able to talk about our product quality, the new innovations in the market.

“We’re able to increase our sales reach through new products, and introducing new products, rather than just having a promotion.”

MoveActive’s influencer marketing strategy is informed by McQuoid’s own decade-long tenure working in the field.

“With our affiliate program, what we’re really doing is turning our real customers into our loyal brand advocates,” she said.

The program is contributing to revenue, but also to growing brand sentiment and awareness, McQuoid added.

Keeping wholesale customers happy

But what of MoveActive’s wholesale customer base, which forms the majority of the company’s sales?

“We do have wholesale customers first and foremost in every business decision,” McQuoid said.

Retailers still have priority access to the latest MoveActive product launches, including a Christmas-themed pack, which is yet to hit MoveActive’s e-commerce site but has nearly sold out to wholesale.

The business is also careful to ensure wholesale buyers get sales whenever e-commerce shoppers do.

“With Black Friday, we ran 30% off storewide for our [online] customer base, but in the weeks prior to that we ran a 12% off wholesale sale,” McQuoid said.

A bespoke wholesale customer loyalty program is well on the way.

The brand plans to roll out its e-commerce customer loyalty strategy in the first quarter of 2024, the next step in a strategy that celebrates online buyers without putting its core wholesale base offside.

Note: A prior version referred to sales growth across both e-commerce and wholesale channels. This has been revised to reflect e-commerce sales growth exclusively.