Demi Marchese
I can't make a fashion line or I can't make a product line because I need $40,000. And I can tell you firsthand that you don't.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. It's the last interview at eTail, I think. Welcome to the show Demi Marchese, the CEO, Founder, Chief of Everything at 12th Tribe. Welcome to the show.
Demi Marchese
Thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
I'm excited to chat. Little inside baseball here. This might be take two. So it's going to be twice as good.
Demi Marchese
We only did this once, right?
Chase Clymer
We only did it once. That's why it's going to be so much fun.
Take me back in time. Well, first, I guess, what are the products we're selling at 12th Tribe?
Demi Marchese
Yeah. Everything from head to toe for a woman. Hats, accessories, dresses, tops, bottoms, shoes, you name it. Full head to toe look.
Chase Clymer
How did you start this company? It's a little interesting.
Demi Marchese
On accident, as some of us do. After I graduated college, I went to San Diego State, studied communication. I really wanted to go into the fashion industry. I wanted to work for a really well-known fashion brand at the time.
I was like, either work there or I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. However, in the midst of doing that interview, I also had this blog that I started in college. I probably had it for two years and it was just this kind of personal style dump.
I really didn't think anyone read it. It was really just to myself. And I started to source one of a kind vintage pieces. I really loved styling my friends and would invite them over and put together outfits for them. My mom would take photos of the products that I got. And then I eventually put those items that I sourced onto a website, which at the time wasn't actually even called 12th Tribe. It was called something else.
But I put it on this website. It was an extension of a blog and I stayed up all night trying to figure out how to make a Shopify website, which at that time Shopify was, it wasn't even public yet. No one knew what it was. It was also the wild, wild west. And I figured it out though, and launched a website on my Instagram with my 200 followers and my blog that I guess people read and overnight order started coming in. And I guess I had this following that I had built through my blog around personal style and fashion. It was just something I was so passionate about. So I quickly saw success there.
Within six months, I moved down to Los Angeles and I said, I'm gonna dress every single girl at Coachella. Mom was like, what is Coachella? And no, you're not. It's like, yes, I am. I have to, I just have this like calling. I had never even been to Coachella, but I went down, booked 30 sorority pop-ups.
Styled all these girls from head to toe, had them in my apartment. The guy across the street at the gym would just send girls and be like, hey, across the street, this girl's dressing can dress you for Coachella. And I was selling off the rack and off my online store. So quickly within a few months I became full time and obsessed.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, back then, it wasn't the products that you were manufacturing for the brand. Now, back then it was vintage and started working with other partners. Let's talk about the transition between selling other people's goods and then selling your own goods.
Demi Marchese
Yeah. I always like talking about this part because many times I get the question of how much do you need to start a company? I can't make a fashion line or I can't make a product line because I need $30, $40,000. And I can tell you firsthand that you don't.
I started with $800. I was sourcing these one of a kind items, turning around for a pretty strong margin. And then also when I could afford, you know, six items of one style or 12, I went to other designers or brands and started selling their product.
And then, my half rack turned into a full rack into a warehouse and expanded from there. But it was a good way to build capital, just not having to invest in a full line yourself. You could test styles from other brands and see what worked as a part of also finding out what my customer, my audience really loved before I went and took that next jump.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. The insights from those customers probably helped you decide what to invest more in what types of products.
Demi Marchese
Yeah. It's like a test. It's a test market in a way. And allowed me some research and my own developments from there.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, we jumped around a little bit with the timeline. Walk through the growth of the company at the beginning and the marketing avenues that you took back then. Obviously, you were styling people in an influencer route. Let's talk about the difference between marketing back when you started versus now here in 2025.
Demi Marchese
Back in 2016, paid media was a wild, wild west. So when my good friend/mentor told me that they were scaling on Facebook and Instagram by putting in thousands of dollars. I had no idea what that meant. I was like, you're telling me that I can put money into this platform and it's going to bring me customers and I'm going to make more money. That sounds very simple now, but it was a huge level of trust that you had to have into this. What I would consider a black hole.
Chase Clymer
Exactly. Especially for a bootstrap company.
Demi Marchese
Totally. Where is it going? So the first three years of the business, I totally leveraged the organic social side of Instagram. I will say it's a lot like TikTok is today. It was way more lucrative when someone posted you're getting thousands and thousands of followers. If you put an Instagram story up, you could sell hundreds of products.
So that was really leveraged for the first three years. And then we were growing triple digits during that time regardless, but taking that step into the paid side of the business, it just skyrocketed the brand even more.
But from then and now, we're sitting in a very unique place with the capabilities of AI. There's a new TikTok. It has been incredible for brands. There's so many different avenues to market. Creators are a whole other world. That was another wild, wild west back then. People did not believe in the creator world. Today, it's like your CPAs are lower going through creators than Meta, to be honest. And if you're not leveraging the creator space, well, you need to.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, your products were more lifestyle and kind of active per se until COVID happened. Talk me through kind of expanding the product line and what happened.
Demi Marchese
Yeah. So when I was sourcing these pieces, they were globally inspired. It was very Bohemian aesthetic, something you would totally see the 2016 girl wearing to Coachella and traveling the world. The brand was rooted on being globally inspired and then COVID hit and it was like, if you say you are getting into a plane and traveling, you will be canceled.
So you will absolutely not talk about it. So we did it and the consumer demand shifted us into the world of sweatpants. So immediately within days of the world shutting down, we sourced sweatpants and all of a sudden became a place to sell sweatpants.
And then from there, we come out of COVID and the surge of bachelorettes and women who are getting engaged go through the roof and we're launching bachelorette collections. We're the first online fashion marketplace to launch collections like this. And then quickly you saw these other fashion companies like a little brighter line, a bachelorette line.
From there, we then have expanded into officeware where we collaborated with a pretty big influencer and we've tapped truly almost every single avenue of the lifestyle space, which is super exciting and has evolved with our consumer over time. I always said I wanted to grow up with our customer and that's exactly what we've done. We can target her at 18 all the way up to 45-50. And we can truly offer her an assortment that is going to serve her within any time of her life there.
Chase Clymer
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We talked a lot about the success and the growth of the 12th Tribe. Is there anything looking back? Any mistakes that were made along the way?
Demi Marchese
The mistake question. Looking back on the mistakes, I would say and this is something that I urge anyone that's innovating products often and have to resonate with the demand online with social and Gen Z and millennials is that for a year and a half, there was all these micro social trends that were happening, especially in the fashion industry.
And it was like, grandma core, grandpa core, all these wild, many trends. We were still coming out of COVID, we lost our voice, lost our voice a little bit, I would say, because we were targeting, we were trying to meet our customer in all these different places. And we were spread way too thin. And this is really, really common after COVID.
Having spoken to a handful of friends that own brands, Nike published a handful of stories about this and like getting back to your roots.
A mistake that we made is that we were trying to be too much to too many people. And that took us away from what we truly were. And I would say, where are we? February? Last year in December, me and my team truly sat down in a room for hours and we're like, who are we? What is our core? Who is our girl? Why did we start this company? Like, let's get back to that.
And so, I'm super thankful for my amazing supportive team. They're like, Demi, we need to get it back to how you started it, what you started it as, what the vision was, because that's what made it what it is today. And we all sat around and agreed. We've gone away to too many places. So sticking true to your roots is so important. And with how fast-paced and how many opportunities there are to market to different consumers online, you have to take a moment, pause, and recollect with your team sometimes and make sure you're going to true north.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I know that your team is doing some pretty interesting stuff with AI. Can you talk to us about how you guys are using AI within the business? And what are some of the strategies?
Demi Marchese
My goal here is I'm going to walk away with one more AI tool and implementation. So I'll report back on what I find here. But from what we have already built into the organization is leveraging ChatGPT. I know this sounds kind of silly and like no brainer, but truly one of the hardest things has been to scale the voice of this brand because I handled a lot of the copy and now I have like, you know, 15, 20 people trying to mimic the copy on different platforms.
But we've trained Ryder, our ChatGPT name and Ryder now will get like a director’s story. And that comes from me and then it'll start. The team will start to train ChatGPT on knowing how to develop that voice a little bit more similar. So that's really interesting. The operator is also so interesting that I really want to dive into more utilizing it on ChatGPT. But I mean, our customer service platforms are utilizing our SMS platforms attentively and it builds out really specific segments utilizing AI. So we've seen a pretty pretty impactful lift on the ROI from implementing AI on SMS. A lot of great tools.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, if I'm listening to this and I'm curious to learn more about the corporate wear or the sweatpants or just the boho inspired looks that you guys started with, where should I go? What should I do?
Demi Marchese
Well, unfortunately, we don't have our sweatpants anymore because COVID is over. Yeah. So we got to dress girls for the memories they're making out of the house for the most part. It's available online, 12thTribe.com. And then of course, social media, shop 12th Tribe. And we will have another store opening soon. So if you're on our social, you can follow along there.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Demi, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Demi Marchese
Thank you.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
