LDMA Told Its Story by Listening
● The innerwear brand's founders share how they harnessed expertise in communication to build a community with a multifaceted lifestyle.
When Leland Drummond and Michele Thomas launched LDMA (which stands for “Life Deserves More Action”), on Nov. 11, 2021, it was in response to a clear white space in the market — underwear that can be worn for both exercising and everyday life — but in the past year, the brand's ongoing interaction with fans has effectively cultivated a community that thrives on its lifestyle.
Like many small business owners, Drummond and Thomas “believe in and live for what they're creating.”
With LDMA, the duo shared with WWD that they “knew there was a gap in the market, which offered huge potential to tell a unique story and build brand loyalty quickly, but we never could've anticipated how quickly consumers would embrace LDMA and how much they would connect with our product and lifestyle.”
With more than 11 years of experience running the Azione public relations agency, Drummond and Thomas were armed with insights into the activewear and innerwear markets but more importantly, they knew how to tell a story and communicate with consumers at scale.
“Since communication is really at the core of who we are as founders, we've been very considerate and intentional about how we (the brand) speak to the LDMA woman since Day One,” Drummond said. “Most importantly, we always want to be listening. We filled a void in the market for an active woman with our underwear, but we didn't want to tell her how, when and when to wear it — we wanted her to tell us.”
LDMA has a direct line to its consumers through social media where they get an influx of customer feedback as well as showcases of various use cases from the brand's “Action Babes” on how they use the product throughout their busy days. The conversation is constant, revolving around how the brand makes consumers feel, what they want next, fit, fabrication, function and even what they would change.
Armed with consumer insights, Thomas and Drummond said they learned a lot in the first year by forging their own path and making their own rules about seasonality and how they drop collections, where and how LDMA retails and how to engage with followers.
“We learned that the more questions you ask your customers, the more they'll help you navigate your next moves,” Thomas said. “We also learned quickly that developing consumer products from scratch is completely different from marketing a brand, and we had to remove our expectations about timelines, and about getting things perfect the first time. We thought certain cuts and colorways stood out and would resonate with a specific age range, but we learned quickly that our company could apparel to women of all ages.”
From the onset, LDMA was designed to be simple and consolidated so that they would immediately see what consumers would gravitate toward in terms of styles and colors. The strategic intention paid off quickly, according to Drummond and Thomas who told WWD they started to see patterns in behavior were influenced in large part by both fashion trends and social media posts.
“Because of the size and succinctness of our launch collection, we were able to see clear patterns right away and interestingly, certain styles resonated that weren't always the ones we predicted would be the greatest hit,” Drummond said. “For example, a High Sculpt Brief was one of our top requests from fitness influencers, when we had predicted that a Thong would be the most popular with this demographic. But then, those same influencers would come back requesting a Low Hide Thong for their everyday pair or workouts because they fell in love with the fabric, the fit and the performance aspects.”
Soon, consumers shared that they were purchasing LDMA to replace their entire underwear drawers, buying in multiple styles and colors.
One social media fan posted, “I can't even tell you how obsessed I am with your underwear and now your bras. I never thought I could love a set so much. I change between LDMA styles for my workout and then my workday and I even sleep with them for support because they are so comfortable. I'm literally wearing your brand all day every day.”
Drummond and Thomas shared they also learned a considerable amount about the consumer from being intentional about getting LDMA in retail, saying they wanted the brand's first non-direct-to-consumer retail channels to be “nontraditional” in terms of the intimates category. Going this route, they said, allowed them to have a “more intimate connection with the buyers and the consumers because we saw them experiencing our products in a very tailored way for the first time.”
As the team considered its second drop, Drummond said they took all of these buying patterns into account, building more products around a multifaceted lifestyle and “incorporating sets and colors that we knew would resonate with this clientele. We knew we had to be intentional with our consumers in terms of both communication and product. As we continue to evolve, it's clear that scaling the line slowly and more intentionally and ignoring the raise more/build fast/drop product frequently mentality has been an advantage for us.”
Importantly, as a self-funded business, knowing LDMA's consumer buying patterns has helped with inventory planning, which greatly reduces waste and helps the company budget better to scale in a smarter way.
“The products in our core line aren't going away, we're just building on them so even if we're sitting on inventory for longer than a season, it's not wasted, it just needs to have a new story told around it,” Thomas said. “We've also engaged consumers to inspire additional styles and silhouettes. We're releasing products with a high level of intention to avoid holding and storing masses of inventory based on fleeting trends or styles.”
With the first LDMA drop serving as a brand introduction, Thomas said the underlying goal of the second drop “was to expand upon the way women perceived the categories of activewear and intimates to include one another. We utilized our network to vocalize the first drop and really relied on our PR and marketing backgrounds and our word-of-mouth tactics. The second launch was different. We already had an extremely loyal fanbase, we had established our narrative and understood the multitude of use cases. We had proven our concept and this was really our more complete offering. We clung to our ethos and improved. We also took advantage of the opportunity to seed more products and sets, which was a first.”
The second LDMA drop launched last month on Nov. 11, for a reaction that Drummond described as “flooring.”
“Aside from the continued spike in sales since we launched this collection, most importantly to us, people are loving the new product and it's proving to be a complement, not a replacement, to our core styles,” Drummond said. “We hosted a packed workout class to launch the collection on [Nov. 11] in New York and we couldn't be more grateful for the way this month has gone since.”