• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, July 14, 2023

The Black Tux was founded a decade ago to ease the considerable pain that prom goers and wedding parties feel around renting formal duds. It promised to bring DTC efficiencies in digital virtualization to bear on removing some of the friction and the cost from a process none of us enjoyed.

The company verticalizes the supply chain by bringing manufacturing in-house, and it virtualizes the fitting, rental and returns process as well. Andrew and his friend, Patrick Coyne started the company in 2013. Despite pandemic hiccups, The Black Tux has been on a comfortable growth path, now with retail presence in select Nordstrom outlets and four showrooms of its own. You can listed to the entire podcast at this link.

MediaPost: You're a decade old, starting as a digital native brand. What main media channels grew this brand? And what are the main media channels that you still use?

Andrew Blackmon: When we first started the brand, we didn't use any media channels at the very beginning. I think there was a lot of latent demand. People wanted something different than what was normally out there. We had more demand that supply for several years and that continue to compound on itself, because in our business, if a groomsman rents from us, he'll often end up getting married or vice versa. And so, it has sort of like this network effect built in. A couple of years into the business we wanted to add a little more fuel to the fire, and so we started experimenting with paid media. We've tried pretty much everything. The main areas where we're spending right now are AdWords, social, podcast. And then we do just like kind of a lot of brand marketing things.

MP: Is it particularly search-driven? Somehow it seems intuitive that this would be a very search initiated.

Blackmon: Very competitive search dynamics as you can imagine. Like, if somebody's looking for a tux rental, the first thing they're probably going to do is search. So yes, very search driven. 

MP: So, what are some of the places where you found maybe lower cost and better, different access outside the box access to this audience?

Blackmon: A couple of years ago podcasts were very productive for us. Broadcast is an interesting channel because it's somewhere in between getting in front of a lot of people and influencer marketing. I don't know exactly what to call it but if you can get the podcast host to do a read that makes it clear to the audience that they've used the service, they support the service, you're getting the person's brand behind what you're doing. So, we did a lot there. Costs have equalized. I think there's less of an opportunity on that channel now than there used to be. At least that's what we found. So that was a major one. And then the rest are really kind of unique to our business. Since we cater to a lot of weddings, there are a lot of decisions that are made before one makes the decision of what the groom and the group will wear at the wedding. And so, we can partner with all those companies. We've had partnerships with a lot of people in the wedding space. It's different in every partnership, but we're sort of leveraging the information they have and getting in front of their customer.

MP: And tell us a little bit about your customer profile. Who are you targeting for this?

Blackmon: Yeah, it's challenging. So, we would love basically to target anybody who is engaged. And as you can understand, that's a challenging thing. You used to be able to target the “engage” status on Facebook. But number one, less people make that change in their Facebook profile and number two, it's hard to even get in front of those due to a lot of changes within Facebook. So, anything that we can do or anything that we can read that gives sort of like an external signal to the market that this person is engaged are areas where we play. So, we have to like look at things such as age range. It's a pretty tight age range where most people are getting engaged between 27 and 35. And so if we can get tight in age demo, then we can really maximize the amount of people that we think are in that demographic. But it is a marketing challenge looking for those signals. You have to be sort of very crafty in what you do to figure out where those signals exist. 

MP: How does that retail footprint now impact the rest of the marketing and your relationship with consumers? Is that a whole separate class of consumers that you're getting there, or is it really extending your services in different ways to the same base?

Blackmon: You know what, it's somewhere in between the two, actually. We are doing these because there's still some skepticism of being able to rent something online. I don't think this is a market that will ever go fully DTC. We plan to open quite a bit more stores in the future. We find at the stores people spend more, they have experience they really love, because our stores look so different than any of the competitors in the suit and tuxedo rental market. And we're just really able to control and give a better experience to the user who may or may not have converted online. 

MP: Has it impacted your media mix at all? Are you doing things deliberately to let people be aware of, say, this retail presence and driving them towards it?

Blackmon: Yes, certainly with Google's focus on local having a store allows us to drive more people there. So not necessarily the paid media but in terms of SEO, there's just like a natural SEO benefit from having a store when a lot of people are searching things like tuxedo rentals in Santa Monica, or something like that.

MP: So, one of the things that drew us to you guys is something that you've been doing of late that's highly personalized. It involves a direct personalized letter that you're sending to customers, but also giving out your phone number so that you can start texting with some of them. 

Blackmon: If I take it back a little bit, what I and my CMO Matt were observing in the market is that a lot of direct-to-consumer brands start with a story. The first couple of years of the business the story is very related to the founding team, and it's very, I would say, understandable and it's something that a lot of people can identify with. And people really enjoy being very connected to the people who are giving them the service. And I think that's a trend that we've seen over the last 10 years, whether it's groceries wanting to be bought from, the person who grew it, or farm to table restaurant. I started observing that a lot of DTC brands as they grow, they actually lose that connection to their customer. Their story becomes a little bit more corporate. They slowly kind of remove the founding team from the experience and what they're telling their customer. And we started doing that as well. I couldn't think of a good reason why people were doing that other than it's what you do. Like to be a big corporate company you don't have the founder and the story highly relevant to the audience. And so, we started making sure that we do appear very transparent to the customer, that they know the people who are behind this business, whether they're calling customer service or anything like that. 

We wanted to basically send a letter to a bunch of customers who have purchased multiple times or rented multiple times from us, saying thank you and then giving them a pretty substantial promo code if they want to do it again in the future, or discount. Truly, just to thank them. 

And so, as we're writing the letter, we have the marketing team and the copywriting team write it, and I read this thing. And I was like, okay, if I'm a consumer reading this, this is not going to feel like this is real. It's full of marketing speak. It's full of just something that every direct-to-consumer brand says.

And so, I told the team, let's see what happens if I write this. So, I wrote the letter, and it was kind of funny and a little bit cheeky. And then at the end of it, I was like, Matt do you think people are going to believe that I wrote this letter, and we're like, I don't know. And so, I wrote, “P.S. I actually wrote this letter. If you don't believe me, send me a text message.” And I put my phone number in there. And it went out to like 10,000 people. 

And the response was phenomenal. I probably exchanged text messages with somewhere between 200 and 500 people. I don't know exactly how many. So many people were like, is this really Andrew? Is this a bot? Everybody was saying, are you AI? And so, when they would ask, I would just take a selfie of myself and say, no, not AI, this is really me. So, I got to have these amazing conversations where I would ask people, what did you think of the brand? What can we do better? etc., etc. And I just learned so much about our business, and it made me sort of connect back to the customer in the same ways we had in early days of business.

MP: When you take an initiative like that, how do you leverage it? How do you scale intimacy? 

Blackmon: This was an experiment. But the response was so strong that then we were like, oh, this is interesting, people are catching on to this, they like this. The experiment showed us there is something to what we're saying about the involvement of the people within the company. It's not just me. It's like the people who make the clothes, the factories. It's just the overall sort of removing the corporate barrier between the people of the company, the people we’re selling to. And what we're doing now is less prophesizing this individual experience with the text message and looking for ways to kind of put this in our entire experience. And so, we’ve done a lot of our email flows to be more personalized, tell more of the story of my co-founder and myself and our experience. We're doing a bunch of things in the box. So, we're almost just like going back to our roots because we did a lot of these things early in the company. So, we're currently in the process of looking for ways of how we can better put this into our service just to make people smile and feel connected to us.