Capsule Studio has turned one year recently, and we wanted to celebrate by writing a post about what we’ve been through during that first year. What has our experience been like, and what are we planning for the next year of Capsule Studio? Find out in this blog!
How we started
Capsule Studio started as an idea already in late summer 2019, with the first reach out to suppliers done in September. The company was officially founded in October of the same year, and we consider that the true birthday of Capsule, however we didn’t start selling anything before much later. Those first 6 months all went into planning, preparing, designing, negotiating, and in general just hoping for the future!
When we started selling
We started sales of our first collection in April 2020, with a few friends buying the first suits, and giving us a much needed confidence boost to pull the trigger and finally launch our online store which we had been building up since February. Our sales started, but we still remember the first day of business, hoping someone would buy a suit, but of course we needed to get in front of people's eyes, so we started running ads on Instagram. This helped a bit, and we started seeing some customers place orders. When the first “online” customer wanted to return their suit, we almost wanted to cry.
Quarantine summer
That period between April and June when we were first starting out was a period we all remember as the quarantine summer. Many of our friends said “we love the suits, but where would we wear them when everything is closed” and of course we get that, still, we were hoping for more sales in those first months than what we actually achieved. But we didn’t give up, and while we were hustling selling suits left and right, we already started planning for our next collection.
Events and influencers
That quarantine summer eventually came to somewhat of an end, with bars and restaurants opening up, and we did manage to squeeze in an amazing event with 15 of the brightest local influencers who joined us in an evening of champagne, bouquet making, and suits in all colours. We immediately started planning more events, but as we all know, a second lockdown was around the corner and we had to put those plans on hold.
The launch party
The pop-up that never happened
Part of our plans for the summer was to open a pop-up store for a week. We would have taken time off from our jobs, to spend the days in the store, meeting customers, arranging events, and inviting influencers and media to meet us and the brand. Even if some pop-up stores were available, and rents kept going down, we did feel it was too much of a risk to commit so much money to renting a store, when at any point a second lockdown might have happened, and we would have lost all that money, which we instead wanted to spend on making our next collection.
The new collection
Already in June we started the first discussion about what our next collection would be, and early on we decided that it had to be something casual that people would be able to wear at home, our outside, but it should conform to this new reality where many people still work from home. We want to support everyone to look their best on those days of Zoom calls and coffee runs, or if you still work outside your home, then we wanted to make the weekends the most comfortable days of the week. The new collection eventually was split into two parts, where one would become our first Portuguese collection.
Sales after the first six months
So how did we do in those first six months of sales? Well without giving too much of our business secrets away, we can say that after our initial investment that we did together in February, we have not had to add any more money into the company. That means that the sales of each collection always have supported the production and promotion of the next one. This makes us really happy, since Capsule Studio was created with our savings, and was always meant to be self sustaining. We try our best to offer a great product at an affordable price, and if we can do that while not losing money ourselves, then that is what we consider a success.
What’s happening now
So what is going on at Capsule Studio right now, about a year after founding and around six months after the start of sales? Well many things actually, we are starting to get noticed by more and more retail stores, we have recently launched in a cute store in Amsterdam called T.I.T.S. and we have officially translated our whole site into Dutch (finally) and are planning our next translation project. We are gearing up for international sales, and we are in full force planning our coming Spring Summer 2021 collection, which will bring back some fan favourites, but also take us in a new and unexpected direction, so stay tuned!
