From Paid Media Struggles to 70% YoY Growth: Veiled’s Dashboard-Driven Strategy With Kareem Elgendy

Kareem Elgendy is the Chief Executive Officer of Veiled, an eight-figure fashion brand for Muslim women. Under his leadership, Veiled has achieved impressive growth, with consistent revenue increases and a strong emphasis on analytics to optimize the company’s ecommerce strategy. Kareem previously served as a Senior Marketing Strategist at Baked Bouquet and held project management roles at Frank Seta & Associates. His multifaceted background, including roles as a sustainability expert, software engineer, and unit manager in banking, adds a unique perspective to his approach in the fashion industry.

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

• [2:33] From consultancy to CEO, Kareem Elgendy shares his career trajectory at Veiled
• [5:03] How strong analytics and dashboarding fueled a 70% YoY revenue increase
• [6:53] Daily metrics Kareem tracks as CEO and how they inform business decisions
• [9:23] How to distinguish between normal performance fluctuations and actual anomalies
• [13:53] Leveraging merchandising data to optimize product assortment, color, and sizing
• [17:03] Kareem shares his preferred analytics tools

In this episode…

Ecommerce founders often face mounting pressure to make quick decisions without clear data, leading to stalled growth and missed opportunities. From inconsistent revenues to underperforming SKUs, using analytics to guide merchandising and marketing plans can make a huge impact on profitability. What if you could cut through the noise and confidently steer your brand using data-driven insights tailored to your business?

Kareem Elgendy, an expert in ecommerce analytics and merchandising, shares how a strategic focus on data dashboards and inventory insights has helped his brand grow consistently — surpassing 70% year-over-year growth. Kareem emphasizes the importance of understanding every metric inside and out, using internal scripts, Google Cloud tools, and custom dashboards to analyze traffic, stock velocity, and product demand. He outlines a practical merchandising framework that breaks down collections by category, style, color, and size, ensuring supply aligns with proven demand. Kareem’s approach emphasizes the importance of founders remaining curious and optimistic about what their numbers reveal.

In this episode of the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, Raphael Paulin-Daigle interviews Kareem Elgendy, CEO of Veiled, about leveraging analytics to drive fashion ecommerce growth. Kareem shares how data-informed merchandising decisions lead to more consistent revenue and dives into daily performance tracking, marketing efficiency, and forecasting demand using internal algorithms.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Raphael Paulin-Daigle on LinkedIn | X
• SplitBase
• Veiled
• Kareem Elgendy: LinkedIn | Email
• “Bootstrapped Growth: Inside Tumble’s DTC Journey With Justin Soleimani and Zach Dannett” on Minds of Ecommerce

Quotable Moments:

• "Be very curious about how that number is generated and calculated and understand it inside and out."
• "If you have what people want, they're going to buy, as long as they're aware it exists."
• "90% of that we can attribute to having really good dashboards and analytics systems in place."
• "We dissect it in those different dimensions, and then the design team applies their fashion sense."
• "We've been above eight MER for... four years and actually growing every year."

Actionable Steps:

1. Create detailed daily performance dashboards: Clear, daily metrics enable swift action when anomalies arise, directly protecting revenue.
2. Track true inventory velocity data: Accurate inventory snapshots ensure you restock high-demand products appropriately, avoiding missed sales.
3. Analyze merchandise by detailed segments: Categorizing by style, color, and size helps align supply with real customer preferences, boosting profitability.
4. Use predictive algorithms for product forecasting: Data-driven forecasts ensure precise inventory levels, minimizing wasteful spending and overstock.
5. Remain curious about your analytics: Deeply understanding your metrics fosters proactive business decisions and ongoing growth.

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. In the last episode, you heard from Justin Soleimani and Zach Dannett, who are co-founders and co-CEOs of foldable rug brand Tumble. And they've shared how they've optimized their entire product creation process to scale through ecommerce efficiently. Now, today on episode number 47, get ready. Kareem Elgendy is the CEO of Veiled, an eight-figure fashion brand for Muslim women. And today, we'll be talking about how they've optimized their analytics strategy to win at ecommerce. Now I'm your host, Raphael Paula Daigle. And this is Minds of Ecommerce. Now this episode is brought to you by SplitBase. At SplitBase, we help leading eight and nine figure brands such as Dr. Squatch, Hyperice, Amika, Once Upon a Farm grow through customer focused conversion optimization programs. Our programs pinpoint exactly where your store is losing money most. And then we help you fix it. The result? Well, you get increased conversions, higher AOV, and of course, more money, which in return allows you to scale advertising profitably. We've been at it now for about a decade, and we can help you manage CRO from A to Z. So that means from customer research, conversion design strategy, copywriting and development. We really focus on growing your e-commerce sales while you get to focus on what you do best. So request a proposal today on splitbase.com to learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend and, of course, increase conversions. All right, Kareem, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 02:06

Hey. My pleasure. Raphael.

Kareem Elgendy: 02:07

Now, you know, this podcast is all about going deep and dissecting one key growth strategy so our listeners can get the most value right away. Now, you've had a lot of success growing your ecommerce brand to eight figures Veiled. So just for people to get a bit more context, can you tell us a bit more about, you know, maybe how long you've been running the brand and some of the highlights of those that growth trajectory?

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 02:33

Yeah. So Veiled was founded back in 2016. I'm not one of the original founders. I was working with the brand as a consultant in 2019, and I became the CEO in 2020. The founders are still involved. We're kind of like a three headed chimera I run, I'm the executive chief executive officer, so I run the growth. I'm also kind of like the head of revenue. Everything related to like, money and and the business overall. And then Nora, she she's the one who actually really started the brand. And her husband Yasir, who's the other co-founder, kind of tagged along but has obviously been instrumental ever since then. So she's the creative director. She's a Muslim woman. She, you know, created the brand really for herself. And then it kind of took off from there. And, you know, the goal from day one has been to create garments that are modern yet modest. And that's been a very interesting, you know, challenge in and of itself beyond the, you know, the e-commerce and all of that. And then Yasir is head of operations for the company. So I'm here in new Jersey. We're in our fulfillment center. We have across a corporate team and the warehouse team, about 40 employees in total. all. And yeah, I'm excited to dive into to the conversation here.

Kareem Elgendy: 04:07

Yeah, I think something I noticed, which is is, which is great is obviously you do you guys do have a great focus on analytics user experiences top of mind. I mean, your website and for our listeners, you know, for those listening to this, go to the website and you'll see that it really strikes the perfect balance of a very high end, beautiful, refined fashion brand. Yet the website remains highly usable. Now, I know that performance when it comes to that is very important to you guys, so I'm not surprised to see that. And you've mentioned earlier that analytics and optimizing your analytics strategy has been very, very key to the brand. Before we dive into how you've done that, could you tell us how analytics and optimizing your analytics, what type of outcomes and successes has led to the brand decisions you've been able to make? Let's start backwards, and then we'll break down what you guys have done in order to make that happen.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 05:03

Okay, cool. Yeah. So, I mean, whenever I speak to my peers in e-commerce, I notice everyone is really struggling with paid media, a lot of complaints about Facebook, etc. but we've been above eight MER for us since like last four years. And and actually growing every year. So this year to date we're at like 11.2 or something. But yeah north of 11 and and also we're up and in revenue and a lot of people are seeing a decline or a plateau. So we're up like 70% year to date year over year, which is also a surprise for us. Our goal has been for the last like 2 or 3 years, somewhere around 20 or 30% more for cash flow reasons. But we've been able to and the reason we're able to kind of hit that growth target is we've sold out of product a lot faster than we expected, which does create a little bit of a cash flow challenge. But we've also improved our profitability. So it's less of an issue this year. But yeah, all of that I would say like 90% of that we can attribute to having really good dashboards and analytics systems in place.

Kareem Elgendy: 06:21

Amazing. So all right. Well and 11 you know more marketing efficiency ratio for an eight figure brand is is obviously a great achievement now. So tell us more about those dashboards. What do you as a CEO look at. Because I think it's probably easy to get too much in the weeds when running a brand. But obviously there has to be some sort of level that trickles down from the executive team to the rest of the team. So what do you look for? And I think we can look, you know, yeah, I'll let you answer and then we'll dive deeper.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 06:53

It's a lot of goal seeking. So in the beginning. So when I open up you know the daily performance which like we'll get all the data's in I don't really stress out too much about what's happening intraday unless there's a big promo going on. Then I kind of want to watch what's happening hour by hour in case something is wrong. I try to catch it, which actually we had recently. We actually were underspending and that was something I caught myself and I made sure that we we spent appropriately. But you know, say, you know, you have revenue targets that we really cut up the year by, by day and every day there's a number that we're hoping to hit, or at least like an average within a period. So maybe I don't know exactly that I need to hit like 10,000 or whatever, but the average should be about 10,000 within a, you know, two week span or whatever. And if the performance is off, then we we just dig deeper. And we dig deeper in like a sort of branching hierarchy based on the high level metric, which is, you know, revenue growth, whatever. And then, you know, okay, well, what what specific metric is off, and you need a little bit of business intelligence to be able to. I mean, like, you know, inherent to the brand itself, like knowing like the brand converts at, you know, 2% versus 1% knowing that your AOV is usually here. And then when there are anomalies, being able to dive in and isolate what the issue is. And sometimes that will lead to, you know, upper funnel issues. Like like I mentioned the spend was off or something deeper, which could be the website or, you know, you sold out of your top performing product or collection. And you kind of go from there.

Kareem Elgendy: 08:42

How do you separate? So I think one of the things, and this is where a lot of, you know, founders, marketers, operation people get stuck is that they look at the day to day signals. Just like you're explaining here. But I think the day to day performance sometimes can also be misleading, right? Meaning there are going to be some daily fluctuations. Sometimes what happens in the news is going to influence what's going to happen, you know, in our dashboards. So how do you separate and what's kind of your process for for figuring out what is some normal daily fluctuations versus what is an anomaly? Because I think that's a bit of a challenge for a lot of brands.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 09:23

Yeah, it's for sure not a perfect science by any means. There's a lot of a lot of thinking discussions that happen. And doing like, you know, constant reality checks or kind of like revising the hypothesis and reiterating, but generally speaking. So actually the the big change in measure and this is something I've always tried to optimize through upper funnel tactics like let's improve the creative, the messaging, the audience targeting, etc., you know, yada yada. You know, that got us maybe to like eight, right? Like ma, but then to get to like pushing past nine, ten, 11, etc. all of that has been through optimizing our merchandising strategy, which which required a whole different set of analytics than I was accustomed to being someone who, you know, came from more like the upper funnel side. And I realized that I had to become like more of a merchandising expert. One big caveat is in Shopify, when you're analyzing something like units sold per day, like you want to know how well your best dress is moving, how many units, and you know if you want to reorder it or create something similar to it. You you want to know how many units were sold per day. But Shopify only tells you units sold per day over a period of time, not units sold per day in stock. And the only way that you can access that data is if you're snapshotting your inventory in some, you know, third party warehouse on your own. So that's something we started years ago. So if you could go in your Shopify store, pick any product, and they have that metric units sold per day, but if it says 30 units sold in a in a month. You don't know if that product was in stock for ten days, 15 days, 20 days, 30 days. And then that changes the velocity completely. So something like that actually makes a massive difference when there is three x the demand for the color black on a product, then then white. And you have no way of really gauging that, especially when you have a lot of SKUs. So that yeah, I mean, I'll leave it there and we can, we can kind of.

Kareem Elgendy: 11:33

I think that's that's a great strategy. You know, that's like one of the things that I think often isn't talked about, but people end up having to figure out on their own or just by having these conversations. Right. It's like The Unwritten that really helps unlock other things.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 11:48

So so going back to like the to answer the question better, because I think your original question, if I'm not mistaken, was, you know, how do you know what it is? So, you know, when we're seeing all right. Well, in a similar period in the past, we're converting at such rate, and then suddenly you're not. If everything else is about the same, like you look at the creative, etc., everything is kind of doing its job. I think that you have to be optimistic and believe that people want to buy your product, and that's very important as an operator. Like there is a demand and I just need to reach the right people. Then then the mentality, then maybe like the analysis shifts a little bit where like you're, you're, you know, you're checking your, your, your stock and making sure you have what people really need. Because if you have what people want, they're going to buy. As long as they're aware that it exists. So you don't need to be super creative and do a lot of like creative gymnastics to get someone to buy and go deep into psychology and like all of that. Of course, that's helpful, but if you just have what people want, they'll they'll buy it.

Kareem Elgendy: 12:54

I think you know something I always say with fashion and apparel brands, right? At the end of the day, people will buy what they like. You know, there is a limit compared to, like, if you were selling a blender, right? There's a lot of education, there's a lot of feature selling, there's a lot of psychology and benefits that you can talk about when you're selling a fashion product. The benefits, I mean, it's, you know, the person imagining themselves looking fantastic, wearing the product you're selling. And if they don't like it, they're not going to convert. And that's where merchandising becomes so important, because if you're not putting the right products in front of the right people or the products that are most likely to get bought, those products are going to get missed and ultimately will. People just won't be able to make that purchase. So I do want to go back to what you were talking about, merchandising. Tell us a bit more about some of the merchandising strategies that you've been able to implement using, you know, some of the dashboarding you've walked us through or through other means?

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 13:53

Yeah. And I want to I want to put out a disclaimer like, I am by no means a merchandising expert. No one on our team is a merchandising expert. We've we've used like kind of kind of a structure around it our selves. and it seems to be working. So until it's not like we're probably not going to go super pro where that's concerned. I have tried to pick the brains of people I've ran into who are merchandising experts and just see, like, am I doing things like in a way that makes sense? And they're like, they're kind of like, yeah, you're doing pretty good. Just keep it up. Whatever. So hopefully they're not just giving me a pat on the back and they they mean it. But what we do is we take our entire collection and we break it up into categories. So that's the first level of optimization is like how many units should I order of say, a dress versus, you know, a pair of pants or whatever? I'll say like bottoms versus like dresses, just like high level like category optimization, because we found that like that demand like gauging that demand is important. Like when we've done the sell through analysis, we found that there's actually we're actually supplying way less, you know, say tops than we should be. And then we've made those optimizations and we've actually sold at that rate. So if it was like, hey, you should be selling, you know, 100 units a day of tops, then it's like we actually supplied 100 units in the next subsequent period, and we actually sold at that rate. So first level of optimization that we found is like at the category level, then intra-category, you know, by style and, and then and also like analyzing it by size and color. So we, we, we look at it in those and we dissect it in those different like dimensions. And then the design team because it's fashion. So we can't just go off of the, the draft, you know, purchase order that the system generates. The fashion team will then apply their fashion sense to the data and place the order accordingly. And then, you know, the only other thing we do is we have like an internal like algorithm that helps us gauge like the total demand based on prior periods in reference. And we do a lot of adjustments so that it like operates correctly, but it will read basically like the amount of traffic that came to the site. The mix of units. ET cetera. ET cetera. And and then we just try to supply at the end, we basically just it spits out what the demand should be. The design team creates the order. We try to supply that demand. And then all we do then from there is basically give a mandate to our media buyers to supply the correct breakdown of traffic that had resulted in that demand in the past. So like, you know, whatever we spent, that's key, etc.. Yeah.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 16:40

I'm also curious, as we've got just a couple minutes left, you know, we're talking about dashboarding. We're talking about merchandising. At the end of the day, we're talking about analytics. What are some of the top tools that you like using? You know, whether they're Shopify apps or or maybe there are some very basic tools as well. But what what do you use and like to use.

Kareem Elgendy: 17:03

Yeah. So I, we like to use a lot of Google Cloud Services. So whether it's like scripts that we run on different sheets and we connect the sheets using scripts or setting up like a, you know, repository in Google Cloud and running a function piping data from Shopify's API into, say, Google's BigQuery and BigQuery to looker for data visualization. That's most most of what we're doing. Like, it's either like custom spreadsheets, scripts or functions that we've created internally. And then our, you know, the agency that we work with provides a dashboard that we've worked with them to spec out so that it has key data available. And we're both on the same page, which helps us with managing them.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 17:53

Awesome. Now for my last question, Karim, if there's one lesson you've learned as a CEO growing an eight figure brand, what would that lesson be?

Kareem Elgendy: 18:06

I would say be very curious about the numbers. Every number that you're either presented or you analyze. Like be very curious about how that number is generated, calculated and understand it inside and out in great depth. And then and also, as I said before, be optimistic about your business. People want to buy good products, but you sometimes have to be honest with yourself and be willing to like, really see what people want and supply them with it.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 18:42

Awesome. We've been talking to Karim Elgendy, who's CEO of Veiled. Now, Kareem, if people want to learn more about you or the brand, where should they go?

Kareem Elgendy: 18:52

So our website is veiled.com and I'm on LinkedIn. So they can they can they can find me on LinkedIn or email me at Kareem@veiled.com.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 19:02

Awesome. Well, Kareem, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Kareem Elgendy: 19:06

Thanks, Raphael. Appreciate it. It was a pleasure.

Outro: 19:12

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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