How To Grow Ecommerce Sales Through Lifestyle Marketing With Abby Fallacaro

Abby Fallacaro is the Senior Manager of Ecommerce at Edie Parker and Flower by Edie Parker, leading female-founded and operated lifestyle brands. With extensive experience in ecommerce management, she leads digital strategy and ecommerce operations for both brands, overseeing online sales, customer experience, and digital marketing initiatives. Abby has been instrumental in integrating lifestyle branding with product offerings, ensuring cohesive brand experiences across digital platforms. Before Edie Parker, she held various roles at Lewis, including Operations Manager, Ecommerce Manager, and Head of Ecommerce.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:36] Abby Fallacaro discusses Edie Parker’s evolution from handbags to home decor and THC products
• [3:27] The challenge of marketing in a highly regulated industry
• [5:41] How Edie Parker combines customer bases across THC products and accessories
• [6:44] Going back to basics and leveraging word-of-mouth marketing
• [8:05] The role of activation events in building a strong community around Edie Parker
• [14:32] How to leverage blog content and social media to drive conversions from in-person events

In this episode…

Marketing in regulated industries often presents unique challenges. With limited avenues for digital promotion, brands can struggle to maintain visibility and connect with their target audience. How can companies grow and scale their presence while working within these constraints?

Ecommerce expert Abby Fallacaro has helped build a lifestyle brand that resonates with its audience. She emphasizes the importance of understanding and nurturing a community that aligns with the brand’s values. Abby also recommends focusing on authentic marketing tactics such as activation events and leveraging organic word-of-mouth marketing, even in a space with strict advertising regulations. Combining customer bases across various product lines can help bolster growth, and leveraging content strategies like blogging and social media can increase engagement and drive sales.

In this episode of Minds of Ecommerce, Raphael Paulin-Daigle interviews Abby Fallacaro, Senior Manager of Ecommerce at Edie Parker and Flower by Edie Parker, about growing a brand in a highly regulated space. Abby discusses the importance of building a lifestyle brand, the challenge of cross-promoting various product lines, and how activation events can drive community engagement.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Raphael Paulin-Daigle: LinkedIn | X
• SplitBase
• Abby Fallacaro on LinkedIn
• Edie Parker
• Flower by Edie Parker
• "How John’s Crazy Socks Built a Mission-Driven Brand That’s Spreading Happiness Globally” With Mark X. Cronin and John Cronin on Minds of Ecommerce

Quotable Moments:

• “We're really building a whimsical, colorful lifestyle brand that’s exciting.”
• “Actually, marketing THC is extremely difficult. It’s practically non-existent.”
• “We host a number of events throughout the year that get people really excited.”
• “Joy is something that's easy to sell.”
• "The most important thing with events is really bringing it home to a digital selling opportunity."

Action Steps:

1. Leverage community-building tactics in marketing: Building an engaged community around your brand ensures long-term customer loyalty and advocacy.
2. Host activation events: Creating in-person experiences allows customers to connect emotionally with your brand, driving deeper engagement.
3. Cross-pollinate customer bases across product lines: This strategy encourages customers to discover and purchase complementary products, boosting overall sales.
4. Create authentic, word-of-mouth marketing opportunities: Word of mouth remains one of the most effective ways to build brand credibility and trust.
5. Use content marketing to nurture customer relationships: Blogging and social media content help maintain an ongoing connection with customers, increasing brand visibility and sales.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by SplitBase.

At SplitBase, we design, test, and manage high-converting landing pages and on-site experiences for fashion, luxury, and lifestyle ecommerce brands. Our optimization program pinpoints exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix that.

The result? Increased conversions and profits for our clients.

With our team of conversion optimization specialists, performance marketers, and conversion-focused designers, we've got your back when it comes to testing and optimization.

Request a proposal on SplitBase.com today, and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Don’t miss out on our exclusive podcasts at Minds of Ecommerce.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:06

Welcome to the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading ecommerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat. In a 15-minute episode, founders and executives take us through a deep dive of a strategy so you get to learn and grow your online sales.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 0:28

In the last episode, you heard from John and Mark Cronin, the father and son duo behind John's Crazy Socks. Today on episode number 57, get ready, we've got Abby Fallacaro, who's a senior manager of Ecommerce at Edie Parker.

And today, we'll be talking about how to grow a regulated brand by building, well, a lifestyle brand. I'm your host, Raphael Paulin-Daigle, and I'm the founder of SplitBase. This is Minds of Ecommerce. Now, this episode is also brought to you by SplitBase. At SplitBase, we help leading eight and nine-figure brands such as Dr. Squatch, Hyperice, and Amika drive growth through customer-focused conversion optimization programs. Our programs pinpoint exactly where your store is losing money the most and then, well, we help you fix it. The result you get is increased conversions, higher AOV, and of course, more money, which in returns allows you to scale advertising profitably. We've been at it for over a decade now, and we can help you manage conversion optimization from A to Z, from customer research, conversion design strategy, copywriting, and development. We focus on growing your ecommerce sales while you get to focus on what you do best.

So go to Splitbase.com to request a proposal today, and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend. All right. Abby, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Abby Fallacaro: 01:53

Thank you for having me.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 01:55

So as you know, this podcast is it's all about going deep, right? And dissecting one key growth strategy so our listeners can get most value right away. And today we're going to have a very interesting conversation because one, we have a bit of an unconventional brand, which means, well, we're you know, this is an unregulated or sorry, highly regulated, I should say, industry. But you also have another brand that is not regulated, which can be used as a lever to grow the regulated brand. So let's just maybe start to and give some our listeners some context.

So the brand for example, has been around for about how many years now.

Abby Fallacaro: 02:36

Eddie Parker is a handbag brand, was established in 2010 and became very popular with these acrylic handbags that had names plastered on them. They were on the red carpet carried by Kate Hudson and a number of celebrities. So that's how we really entered the fashion scene. And then also introduced with the same acrylic material, home decor. And then, as I'm sure we'll get into in 2019, we introduced a line of smoking accessories and also THC.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 03:09

Awesome. And one of the challenges with, you know, having that line of THC products is, well, you can't really be super innovative sometimes with a lot of, you know, marketing tactics. So sometimes you have to be innovative with conventional marketing strategies.

Abby Fallacaro: 03:27

So a little bit back to basics.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 03:29

Exactly. We got to go back to basics and then kind of use and be creative. So I'd love to you know, one of the things you guys have done is you've really leveraged the handbag and smoking accessories brand, I should say. As you know, the lifestyle pillar of the THC brand. Can you tell us a bit more about that relationship?

How are you utilizing both of these brands to ultimately build a lifestyle and feed, you know, customers to each of those brands?

Abby Fallacaro: 03:59

Yeah. Well, I think all of the products that we have, whether they are THC or accessories that you'd have on your tabletop or coffee table, they all speak to the same aesthetic. And we're really building kind of a whimsical, colorful lifestyle brand. That's exciting. So if you're carrying a handbag or if you're at a party, you have a fun little trick, you have a lighter, or if you have a jello mold on your coffee table, that's a really big conversation piece.

Oh, there's a hidden ashtray underneath. Or if you're in a dispensary, which we find ourselves as a company, and also a lot of the people that shop with us are doing more and more regularly. Now that legalization has become more prevalent in the US. Our packaging also speaks to that same aesthetic. So it's very eye-catching and it's kind of building this world and all these different, beautiful touchpoints.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 04:52

One of the things that I think I took away is that you're not trying to sell THC products or accessories. You're selling a lifestyle that's very highly defined and very, very specific to an audience, right? Once you sell that lifestyle, you have people in that ecosystem and it becomes easier to sell them the other products. One of the things I'm interested in knowing is how, in terms of marketing strategies, do you cross-pollinate? You know, your different, I guess, your customer base.

So for example, someone who buys the accessories are they also going to get the marketing from for the THC brand? How is that communication or dialogue happening within that same ecosystem?

Abby Fallacaro: 05:41

Okay, so we've already hit against one of the first limitations that we have. Actually marketing THC is extremely difficult. It's practically non-existent. So we rely on a lot of out of home word of mouth. And then that cross-pollination that you referred to, we have smoking accessories available for purchase online.

And then we have a companion website that talks about our THC products and where to find them in person. And the two websites are linked together, but obviously due to regulation, we're not transacting online for THC. So you can certainly discover THC through our accessories line. And I think that relationship has served us very well.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 06:29

One of the things you mentioned earlier is you had to go back to basics, and that was a great example where you just really can't market in every way you'd like. Can you tell me a bit more? I'm curious, what are some of those basics you feel you really had to revisit, and what's worked best so far?

Abby Fallacaro: 06:44

So we I think we do a really great job with our marketing activations. We host a number of events throughout the year that get people really excited. And I think the basic pillar there is just an authentic connection to the product and also to the audience and and staying nimble, failing fast when something doesn't work, and then identifying room for growth when something does take off. A really good example of this is two years ago we introduced our burn bags, which are oh, I have so many of them around me. These are the handbags that have these retractable lighters.

And these really took off on TikTok. So, you know, once there's demand, we develop into different materials and different colors. And that's really exciting. So that's an example of, you know, utilizing word of mouth, one of the most classic sales tactics.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 07:38

Amazing. I'd love to dive a little deeper into activation events. I think it's something that we don't talk about a lot, and it's maybe a bit unconventional for ecommerce brands to do so. What is your definition of an activation event? And is this something that you do just for like the THC brand, or are you also doing it for, you know, the accessories brand, and how does it work specifically?

Abby Fallacaro: 08:05

Yeah, at all of our events, there's a really big harmony between the products, obviously, because they are companion pieces. You know, you have TH,C and then you have a beautiful stash jar that you're storing it in at home. So at those events, both lines are present, and I think at the in-person events is when you can really see the brand in action. With our background in fashion, we do pay attention to, you know, the fashion calendar, for example, this year for New York Fashion Week. In February, we had one of the New York Housewives, Countess Luann, as our special guest for the evening.

And she sang. We had a cabaret. People were eating edibles, people were wearing our handbags. And it was a very joyous, colorful event that really captivated our audience. We got some really great press coverage from it, and I think that really sells what we're speaking to of having a good time.

That's one of our mottos. We're for a good time.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 09:07

I like that. Now.

Abby Fallacaro: 09:08

Joy is something that's easy to sell is something that I've found, you know, I'm sure.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 09:13

I'm curious when you guys are doing activation events, right? Like, it's one thing to do one event, but for it to become a marketing strategy, it has to be thoughtfully planned out. And it has to be more than just one event. So how do you know, when you're looking at your marketing calendar and what you do for the brand? How do you think of those events?

Do you think of it? Do you think of them as, like, oh, in each market we're going to do X amount of event every year. How do you decide when and how to do the events? And obviously it sounds like aligning with the fashion calendar, which to me says we're aligning with our key demographic that we're targeting. Very smart.

But then, beyond finding that customer and where they hang out, how often do you need to do it for it to be effective?

Abby Fallacaro: 10:02

Yeah, it depends on the market. I mean, we do have brand ambassadors in the 11 states that we're in or that have touchpoints in the 11 states that we're in for THC. So that's really up to them on what they see on the ground, what they need is, and what the appetite is for me from an ecommerce perspective. The most important thing with events is really bringing it home to a digital selling opportunity. Yeah.

So we can have as many in-person events as we want, but you have a very limited number of people who are going to buy tickets, who are going to be available on that evening. So how do we translate this into sales? And not to get too far from your question, but back to the website. One of the biggest things that I launched last year was a blog. And this is again, like one of those basic tenets for being online, having a blog, throwing it back a little bit.

Not only did that help, you know, SEO and all of those implications, but it also expanded the audience for those in-person activations.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 11:04

Interesting. Now, you said something that caught my attention. You said buy tickets. So these events. Am I understanding that they're not free events and people actually have to buy events to them as well?

Buy tickets? Sorry.

Abby Fallacaro: 11:18

Not necessarily. I think they've done a couple of ticketed events and then it's like you buy a ticket. I think they're all pretty low price point, pretty approachable. And then whatever your ticket is for. I remember an activation we had last year that was actually at a dispensary that was surrounded around the launch of one of our handbags, but hosted in a dispensary setting.

So then, you know, you get that cross-pollination. Yeah. The price of the ticket got you. There was someone there doing tooth jamming. So it was really exciting.

So we got to do that. People were, you know, enjoying the products, flashing a toothy smile.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 11:57

Yes.

Abby Fallacaro: 11:58

And posting about it online and then giving us a little bit of content to, you know, bring it back to that digital selling point, post about it on the blog, increase the reach, and then cross-promote the products.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 12:11

Would you say the goal of the activation events is to foster, you know, a base of customers in a specific market? For example, you know, we talked in one of the previous episodes with a shoe brand, Maguire Shoe, that was doing a lot of pop-ups, you know, as a way to just kind of test markets and better understand the markets. And even though their primary business is ecommerce, you know, they were doing that specifically to grow the ecommerce brand. But in your case, would you say it's kind of the same, where you're conquering markets for lack of better term? Or is it really just to get influencers into place and get them to share it online?

But to have, you know, something maybe a bit more interesting to share than just another marketing post?

Abby Fallacaro: 12:55

You know, it depends on the event. We have some that are definitely targeted towards, you know, inviting press, inviting VIP guests, having celebrity talent involved, getting influencers involved. But we also have events that are for our customers, which I think is really important and goes back to what I mentioned before of having a really authentic connection with our products, with the way that our customers interact with them. And one of the inherent issues with selling online is that, you know, you have an item that you want someone to. You want them to trade their money for your item, but they can't hold it.

They can't smell it. They can't, you know, see how this retractable lighter will actually work in their hands, right? So these in-person events give you a little bit of credibility with your audience, a little bit of that experience. And then also we walk away with photos that we can then share and show people, you know, this is the world that we're creating. And you can purchase and engage or, you know, just see a pretty picture and scroll by.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 13:59

I want to go back to what you said earlier about one of your key objectives. Obviously, working in ecommerce is to make sure those in-person events actually convert into ecommerce sales. Right. So can you tell us a bit more about how you're doing that? So we understand there's the blog that's there as a way to kind of nurture people and kind of keep that community alive.

But is there anything else specifically that you do to really bring that live person event and turn it into an ecommerce sale?

Abby Fallacaro: 14:32

I would say the blog is the primary way that events translate to sales, but we also have a highly engaged social following. So that's a really big piece of the puzzle. And I think that's been a really successful channel for us for growth.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 14:50

I think, you know, for our listeners listening, one of the main takeaways I'm getting from this is no matter what the brand is doing, no matter which marketing channel or activity that they're focusing on. Everything is centered around building a community. And in order to build that community, you have to understand your customer. And this is a recurring theme on the podcast. Sounds like all the best and fastest scaling brands that come on this podcast.

You know, there's one thing they have in common, and it's really a key, a key and a deep understanding of their customer. Now, Abbey, would I be correct if I'd say that at the end of the day, you guys are betting on community as your primary engine of growth?

Abby Fallacaro: 15:39

I think that's a really big part of it.

Abby Fallacaro: 15:41

Yeah. Identifying the right audience, fostering community. Because once they trust us. Yeah. You know, through building that community, they're willing to trade their hard-earned dollars for kind of wacky products.

We sell ridiculous and beautiful tabletop lighters. We sold one last year. That year. That was a stick of butter. That was one of my favorite items we've ever made.

And for someone to fully embrace our kind of dream world, they have to really be bought into the community and feel like they're they're a part of something.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 16:18

Yeah. And I think this is something that a lot of brands forget about, right? In your case, you don't have the luxury of, you know, thousands of different marketing strategies because most of them, at least for the THC brand. Right. Like they're not really available to you.

Abby Fallacaro: 16:34

So it's also for the accessories line, I want to make sure that's that's clear. We're facing this on every front.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 16:40

Interesting. Okay. That is something I had not realized.

Abby Fallacaro: 16:43

Yes. Anything that is cannabis, it depends on the channel where their policies lie. It's either because it's cannabis and CBD touching or because it's smoking in general. Interesting. Google is very sensitive to anything smoking.

So all of those marketing efforts are limited. SMS is a channel that we can't really engage with in a meaningful way, and even online, our payment processor has to be third party. We can't use any of the Apple Pay or Shop Pay or any of the quick payment portals. So it's really challenging. It's really, really challenging for us to get one conversion.

We're fighting an uphill battle.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 17:26

Yeah. And but I think you've kind of revealed the key, right? Which is when you can't do what every other brand does. Well, you kind of have to get back to basics and just get really, really, really good at it. And the basics still work, right?

But often, you know, marketers, founders, they're excited by the latest and greatest, the most innovative technique. But there is success you can achieve success in practically, you know, with practically every strategy, as long as you've got that discipline and that focus. And really, to me, that's my takeaway today. So, Abby, if people want to learn more about the brand or the brands, I should say, or they want to learn more about you or where should they go?

Abby Fallacaro: 18:12

Yeah, yeah. So edieparker.com is where you'll find all of our handbags, home decor, some smoking accessories, and then Flower by Edie Parker has its own website. That's actually really fun. We launched it last year. I think we've done some really interesting things as far as a web page goes or interactive menu, I think is it's really very fanciful and fun.

It's everything that I wanted to design in a website. So yeah, we're we're readily accessible and and ready to grow. So we're that's where we are. And I'm here at every touchpoint of our customer service. I hear about all of our outreach.

I'm in touch with our product team. Yeah, I'm around too.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 18:58

I love it. Abby, thank you so much for being here.

Abby Fallacaro: 19:01

Thank you.

Outro: 19:07

All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. And thank you so much for tuning in. Now, if you like what you've heard, and you don't want to miss any of the new episodes that are about to come out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast and well, bonus points if you also leave a review in the iTunes store or wherever you're listening to this. Now, if you're working on an ecommerce store that does over $1 million in revenue and you need help with conversion optimization or landing pages, well, I've got some good news because there's a pretty good chance we can help with that.

Go to splitbase.com to learn more or even to request a proposal. If you have any guest requests, questions or comments, tweet me @ Rpaulindaigle, and I'll be super happy to hear from you. And again, thanks again for listening. This is Minds of Ecommerce.

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