Truvelle blossomed with online match
Wedding gown firm embraced the Internet and the company took off
Gaby Bayona had always dreamed of becoming an engineer, but after high school the newly minted grad took a lastminute detour into wedding gown design.
While engineering is a common default choice for students strong in math and science, Bayona had been an active student leader and found herself deeply attracted to leading a business.
“I liked having people rely on me,” she said.
A self-professed nerd — “I’ve got math competition medals” — Bayona started out helping her seamstress mom by creating invoices and setting up basic digital business systems for her custom dress shop.
“She was using those carboncopy invoices you would get at Shoppers,” said Bayona, now 23.
Before long, Bayona had built a website, and was designing and sewing gowns herself. By the time she was 18, her mother Merly Bayona had put the business in her daughter’s name.
Two years later, the younger Bayona was working 10 to 15 hours a day and sleeping at the shop. That’s when she cracked. “It must have been on one of those late nights when I was working seven days straight,” Bayona said. “My friends wanted to hang out and I couldn’t. I just felt really trapped.”
She quickly identified the need to scale. She’d create standardized sizes for her designs, buy fabric in bulk, hire seamstresses and point customers elsewhere for alterations.
“I was on Pinterest and saw all these links coming from Etsy (the website where people buy and sell handmade items). I realized it was so easy to set up. The fee is 3.5 per cent per sale for this huge online representation.”
So in the summer of 2013, she launched her new business, Truvelle, on Etsy.
“Here I was travelling Europe and this girl from Brooklyn commissions me to make her wedding dress,” Bayona said. “I had brought a suitcase full of fabric. It was so lucky and fluky. I bought a sewing machine in London. Then a retailer found me on Etsy, sent me a private message, said she was opening up a shop in Ottawa and she wondered if I wholesaled.”
Luckily for Bayona, her existing costing permitted attractive wholesale prices.
By summer’s end, things were snowballing. Etsy featured her and bloggers paid attention. Etsy gave her direct contact with clients worldwide.
That fall, Bayona moved out of her mom’s New Westminster apartment and into a $2,300-a-month Gastown livework studio.
“I rented an apartment that I couldn’t afford,” she said. “Me being 21 years old, if you (as a client) came into a small basement suite, you wouldn’t get a wedding dress from me.”
She now sells to 23 retailers in the U.S., six in Canada and six in Europe and Australia. She has a 2,000-square-foot studio space, a 1,300-square-foot retail store in Vancouver’s Gastown, plus storage in her live-work apartment. She has 17 full- and parttime employees working on everything from design to vendor outreach and shipping, and she’s selling some 200 dresses a month.
The key to her success was inadvertent. Her gowns retail between $1,750 and $2,450, compared to most North American independent labels at $2,400 to $4,000 with current exchange rates, she said.
“Because I was already custom-making gowns, I just took what I was pricing for custom and made it just a bit lower.”
What’s more, bridal industry norms have brides paying a substantial deposit, followed by the full balance before a dress is shipped.
Bayona is a masterful online marketer. Before attending her first New York trade show, she softened up target retailers by engaging them on Instagram because “people get emails all the time.”
Truvelle’s soft, flowy dresses are intended to evoke women who spend slow afternoons in coffee shops with friends or reading a book. Bayona’s latest challenge is the need to cap Truvelle’s growth, because exclusivity is important to brides.
“In the States, we can probably be in only five more stores before we saturate the market,” she said.
Bayona is already creating a second, more “fashion edgy” brand, Laudae, at a similar price point. She’d been considering a higher-priced line, but a retailer advised her to maintain her pricing for an immediate edge.
The Internet has made it possible for independent labels to grow. There was a time when some stores “would rip off labels in samples, so you couldn’t shop around,” Bayona said. “You didn’t even know what designer you were purchasing from. They were worried you’d find the designer and shop around and get the best deal. Now there’s just so much information out there.”
She’s still on Etsy and has learned how to make the best use of the tiny listings. “I have this gown with a gold sequined bottom. I focus on that. That’s what you see first rather than the model’s face or the bodice. That’s what going to catch their eye.”
The gowns that sell best online are edgy. “I’ve sold none of the gold-sequined gowns in my Vancouver flagship, but on Etsy it’s my biggest selling gown. Girls buying online are more likely to take risks.”
When it comes right down to it, Bayona loves creating systems.
“I consider myself more business minded than creative,” she said. “‘This is my buying process, this is what’s missing in the market,’ as opposed to ‘Oh, I have this dream.’ I’m not abstract.”