Interview: Erik Zetterberg

Columbia Road: Singular Society has a unique business model. How did you come up with the concept and why were you sure it would work?

Erik: My co-founder Daniel and I both come from fashion retail backgrounds and what we learned about accessibility, democratising fashion, product quality and customer experience helped shape Singular Society in terms of doing things in a disruptive way that makes a difference and means something to people.

Of course, you can never be sure of anything in advance but we felt pretty confident that customers like good value and that a business does well with stable, predictable income and lower risk. The fact that Singular Society could contribute to a more responsible way of manufacturing products by focusing on high quality and minimising overproduction meant that it also addressed sustainability, which is a big challenge in the industry.

To us, that meant we were addressing some of the main challenges we saw in fashion and retail: customer value, sustainability, business risk and direct access to customers. This gave us the confidence to move forward, as we felt that we were making a difference and contributing something new to the existing retail offering by creating positive solutions to those four challenges.

CR: You’re focused on loyalty and retention rather than selling products in the traditional way — for example, you don’t have to buy external customer data as you know all of your customers and their histories. Does that change how you look at data?

Erik: Yes, absolutely, it means that we form a much closer relationship with our customers, where the focus is on the long term. Our only agenda is to serve them to the best of our ability. With that in mind, we look at sales and data differently. Our job is to show people that thanks to our model, responsibly made, high-quality products can be offered at fair prices.

If we look at what traditional high-end retail brands are offering when it comes to, for example, hand soap, the price tag is sometimes more than five times higher than the Singular price. We sell ours for 7 euros, so the monthly fee we charge members can be saved with just one single product.

CR: How has this approach changed your point of view as a designer?

Erik: A great deal, I’d say. We look at products from a service-level perspective, with the purpose of creating satisfied members. When looking at retention, the recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) factors are really important. If we introduce a new product we look at what proportion of our members we’re servicing with that product and how often they’re buying it. We want to make sure that what we offer is relevant to our customers, and we want them to keep using our service and feel that they’re getting value from it.

Our goal is to offer our members the things they need and want in their everyday life, so our process starts with understanding what they want and then trying to make that happen. Ultimately, it’s our members who decide what we should develop and offer, not us. So hypothetically, if all they want is hand soap, well, we’re a hand soap company!

CR: So effectively, your focus has shifted from sales to engagement?

Erik: Yes, that’s a good way to put it — the long-term relationship and the engagement that comes with that is our focus, so we make sure to respect and maintain that to the best of our ability. We started out with focus groups where we explained how our service works and asked what people would like to see in our offering, and we haven’t had any insights from the customer data that contradict what we learned from them. We want to build a relationship over time by looking at things like how much our subscribers buy and how often they return, rather than focusing on short-term profits.

CR: You could argue that there are two kinds of people — those for whom the logo on a product doesn’t matter, such as Singular Society’s subscribers, and those who identify strongly with a particular brand and only want to buy from that brand. Why do your customers identify so strongly with your ethos?

Erik: We don’t see ourselves as a brand that wants to replace traditional brands, more as a good alternative: keep the brands you love and use us for the other things you need and want, where the logo might be less important. We want to give our members the chance to buy high-quality products without the logo. They trust that when we launch a product, it’s going to be responsibly made with a quality level that stands the test of time. That’s encouraging to us, and it comes down to trust — I don’t think there’s any need to pay more for the logo. We have seen that our members will wait for us to launch seasonal products rather than buying them from elsewhere. That’s something we looked for in the data, as it shows that we’ve been able to build the trust we were looking for.

CR: When it comes to probing to see what level of trust you have with your customers, do you use direct or indirect means — or is it a gut feeling thing?

Erik: There are some ways to measure that I think — not new and innovative ways, but established ones like email open rates. We don’t spam, and we only send out emails if we have something to say that we think is relevant to our members. We use a weekly or biweekly pace. If people stop opening them, we’ll look into that as it means we’re doing something wrong. Fortunately, so far we’re very happy with our open rates.

Up until now we’ve been quite old school in our communications, with a lot of text-based product information online — but we are learning that some members are less committed to consuming long texts and emails, so we’re currently working on other ways to communicate and tell stories in order to remain relevant. We’re not alone in facing that challenge. We want our members to feel safe and decide how they share their data, and we want to use it exclusively to improve our service to them. By pivoting to this model, the by-product is a mechanism for building a healthy and trusting relationship.

CR: People are often very engaged and passionate about services where they pay a fixed membership fee and then use the service as much as they want — do you see that too?

Erik: When your intentions are good, and you’re obsessively passionate about what you do and encourage that almost nerdy attitude in your community, people seem to get really into it. Then you can get insightful and helpful feedback where members request a product that they feel is missing from the assortment or give great advice on how to improve something. From a retention perspective, we love getting that kind of input as it gives us ideas for products and ways to improve our service.

CR: We’ve been talking a lot about customer lifetime value lately. Do you follow that at Singular Society

Erik: Yes, we follow that closely as it’s tied to members' satisfaction with our service, so it’s a foundation if we are to succeed. We’ve just recently started to get those numbers back — how many customers stay on and how many leave, including how, when and why they’re leaving; we’re trying to learn as much as we possibly can from that. We’ve only been around for a little over a year at this point, and we know that most of our customers have stayed with us for a second year, so we’re off to a good start.

CR: Do you face any unique challenges when it comes to collecting enough data to optimise things like lifetime behaviour, churn rates, engagement rates and email open rates and putting it all together to make predictions?

Erik: It’s a very different game from traditional retail — the products are similar but the mechanics are very different, and that leads us to different places. Measurements and predictions are vital to us of course, as they’re key to telling us how well we’re serving our members and ultimately performing as a business. But as our model is so fundamentally different from the traditional retail model, learning what to focus on in order to set the correct benchmarks and KPIs is also an ongoing process.

CR: Is there anything you’d like to add?

Erik: It’s worth mentioning that on a more personal level, we all feel that it’s incredibly fun and rewarding to work with Singular Society. What we do is very straightforward — we’re simply trying to offer a good service and make great products that last and that our members value and enjoy, while building meaningful, long-lasting relationships over time.

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ERIK ZETTERBERG is the Creative Director and founding member of Singular Society, a pioneering membership-based retail brand. His wide-ranging experience across the fashion industry, from H&M to NET-A-PORTER to Amazon Fashion, has given him a unique overview of the industry and the challenges it faces.