Navigating E-commerce and Ethical Fashion with Hernest Project's Cassandra

Great. Thanks for having me, Stephen. My name is Cass. Cassandra for my parents, but Cass for everybody else. I am an e-commerce brand owner of Hernest Project. I’ve been running the brand for about five years. It’s a loungewear lifestyle brand. And before that, I was an accountant many years before that. Yeah, that’s a very short introduction.

Yeah, it took quite a few years to get to launch and I fought it at every step of the way. I had worked for another brand for a number of years, Morris Finance and Operations. And my family and I, my husband and I and my two young kids moved to Europe in 2016. And for us, it was, for my husband’s job and for me, just a different perspective. We just wanted to try something new. And at the time, I was home a lot with my two young kids. And I knew that I wanted to do a complete switch in careers and find something new to do when I moved here to Europe.

I didn’t want it to be apparel because I’d been in that business already for a number of years, but I was home. I was feeling different in my body, a different person. I had a one-year old and a two-year old and I just kept coming back to this idea that I wasn’t finding clothes that were fitting for me in this new person that I was. Wasn’t finding the flexibility nor the sort of values that I was looking for.

And one thing led to another. I kept taking small steps and kind of developing this idea, seeing if it was worth it. Europe gave me the perspective that I didn’t have within North America at the time, because there’s so much more advanced sustainability. So I started going to trade shows, starting to educate myself. And, you know, from the first idea to the launch was about two years. It took me two years to develop the idea, find a supply chain, figure out what my point of difference was and how to do things. So I run the brand from Europe, but I sell to a Canadian, predominantly Canadian and US.

There’s a bit of an echo, but.
Okay, so I started with five styles: t-shirts, long sleeves, joggers and shorts and a tank top. And I really went deep into fabric and fabric innovation and development and trying to find things that were really comfortable yet breathable on the skin. And I wanted to develop styles that even though we’re uber comfortable could you know, you can still answer the door in and feel totally comfortable with or drop the kids off or, you know, those kind of clothes where you don’t immediately feel like you need to change out of and you still feel good in, but yet are super comfortable and also fit within my original value system of ethicalness and fairness and sustainability. So I spent a lot of time developing that and still today, five years later, that’s still core to what we do and how I position the brand, really go into fabric, trying to bring to market things that not everybody is doing.

Yeah, you know, I’ve worked on this a lot over the years and I feel like, you know, at the beginning I was always talking about age demographic and what they were doing, but now it’s really just connecting with people who want to feel more of a connection to their clothing. People who are interested in sustainability and, you know, people who want comfort without the compromise, without the compromise of style or ethics.

I think the clear focus for me, I’ve really tried to stick to a focus on a small collection of clothing that fits within a conscious wardrobe and doing it purposefully and consciously. Yeah, and just continuing to focus on that fabric and the fit and are known for the way that our clothes fit. So even though we’re uber comfortable, we’re still quite stylish and have some design lines that have carried through from the very, very first collection until today. So, you know, those are the points that I stick to and that our customers keep coming back for, again and again.

I’ve had the same bestseller for about four years and it’s a top called the Lucille and I’m actually wearing it right now. I wore the black just not to be too, I don’t know, not to contrast too much, but most of our customers have multiples, if not almost all the colours. It’s just a really functional, versatile top and actually this is one of the fabrics that I developed with our fabric mill in Portugal. And so it’s not proprietary because I didn’t patent it, but we are one of very, very few people who use this fabric. And it’s sort of the introduction to the brand for most people. And yeah, that’s one thing that comes back again and again, as people get the loose seal and it’s an instant hit. So yeah, that’s been our best seller for about four years now.

It is, well, yeah, I don’t know. I feel like I personally, every time I launch something, it is my favourite. It’s my new favourite. And everything stays with me for quite a while. I don’t cycle through lots of different styles very often. So we’re coming up to, you know, I still only have 12 styles in our collection and I keep it tight and we evolve those styles, but yeah. The loose seal has been a constant for sure for four years.

good question. I am still figuring things out as I go. And I feel like that the answer evolves every six months to a year. But my real goal is to influence, you know, I started by like, I want to influence 1000 people, and I want to influence 10,000 people.

Now I’m headed to the Gorswa, I want to influence 100,000 people to think more consciously about their wardrobes and feel more connected to their clothing and doing that through a sustainable business model through fashion. And that’s what I’m aiming for at the moment. And yeah, I guess that’s my future plan and continues to be my future plan.

Okay, there’s a lot of challenges. I think that the main one is constantly putting yourself out there. For me, that’s been a big challenge, because it comes back to that, for every challenge is always, stepping up to the challenge and constantly putting yourself out there. And I guess, it has a tendency to affect, you know, your business becomes all consuming and it becomes your identity and what you sort of, yeah, how you portray yourself. So I feel like it’s hard on your mental health. And the only way to overcome that is to have a great support network. And yeah, that’s, that’s been one of the main challenges, of course, financial challenges, supply chain challenges. Yeah, that for me is the one that continues to, you know, be constant through all of those other challenges. It’s just, yeah, constantly putting yourself, yeah.

So I’ve tried the gamut, everything. I think where I’ve landed now, what my most successful activity is in my newsletter. So I have a weekly newsletter that continues to engage and sell. It is my most profitable activity, even though I don’t do any hard selling on my weekly newsletter. I really just share a lot of the stuff that I find online that aligns with, you know, who’s following me and who’s interested in the brand. So that’s my main marketing activity. And then there’s just kind of an ecosystem around that where I also do paid ads, I do a little bit of SEO and social media.

man, I could tell someone how not to do a lot of things, but I think for me, if I were to go back, I would tell myself to focus on doing one thing really well and to know how you’re going to sell something, you know, upfront, come up with a sales strategy and just work that strategy. I feel like there’s a lot of ways to market yourself and sell, but there’s not every way that works. And I, yeah, three years into the business, I chose a lane and I picked a lane and I picked email marketing. And I’ve been working, that strategy for two years and that’s finally working. And yeah, I just feel like I wish I’d known a little bit more about how to do that upfront or how I was actually gonna sell the product when I first started.

I started at the end of 2018, so I launched in November 2018.

I don’t think so. I think I’ve shared pretty much the big points and what we’re doing and yeah, I appreciate you asking me.

Thank you. Appreciate it.