For ALIGNE, understanding its customers, developing a community, and building trust through brand partnerships are central to every stage of its growth. Founder Ginny Seymour emphasizes the power of direct engagement and in-person activations coupled with trackable customer data in shaping the brand’s decisions, from product adjustments to market expansion.
First, we unpacked the team’s global expansion strategies. Now, we’re breaking down the brand marketing, awareness, and partnership strategies that ALIGNE revealed in the Perfect Aligne-ment: DTC to Omnichannel Webinar.
Maintain brand perception to build trust
1. Understand customer sentiment: It’s important for brands to recognize the current market sentiment toward their brand, or like-brands, when entering new markets. By gathering data around shopping habits and psychological behaviours, brands can better predict how customers will shop with them, and how they’ll respond to their marketing and products.
Ginny recognized that her target customers in the US were savvy shoppers with developed personal style, who often go to particular brands for very specific items.
“They want to create their own looks. You can't expect a customer to come in and buy their whole entire wardrobe from one brand.”
To build positive customer sentiment for ALIGNE, Ginny has developed the customer experience around the Daphne waisted blazer, synonymous with the ALIGNE denim look. “I want everyone to be able to say when they walk into a store, ‘Oh, that's the ALIGNE blazer at this store.’”
2. Be transparent about brand values: Today’s customers are looking to clearly understand what brands stand for, and how they make their products. Ginny explains that while no brand is perfect, “You have to try to make sure the customer always feels you're making the best choices for them. And whether that's how you design it, what quantities you purchase, what your promotional activity is.”
Bi-annual sales: To maintain brand integrity, ALIGNE only runs winter and summer sales. “We don’t do summer promotion, Easter promotion. And we don't do Black Friday or cyber sales. And the exception is end-of-season sale, where we're cleaning up old season products.”
Promoting product value: “We're not a sustainable brand, but we try to make the best choices we can in every kind of element that that is.” For ALIGNE, that means not using price as a lever to increase demand. “We want consistent demand, and we want to have a really transparent conversation with our customers that that's the best value that item can be.”
3. Remain consistent: In order to retain the trust of shoppers, brands must keep consistent messaging and actions regarding their values. One way ALIGNE does this is by not surrendering to quick promotions in the event of poor sales.
“Sometimes it's hard waiting until the summer sale because I just want [slow sellers] off my site. But I have to hold my hands and say, no, we're not promotional. It's just going to live there, re-merchandise it to the bottom… that commitment to our customer is really important to me.”
Prioritize customer data as a growth tool
By treating customer data not just as numbers but as a tool for connection, refinement, and community building, ALIGNE turns every touchpoint into a strategic advantage.
Use pop-ups and brand activations as learning opportunities: When setting up their New York pop-up store, ALIGNE’s goals went beyond revenue growth to prioritize customer acquisition, customer awareness, and community growth. “It was about meeting our customer. It was about hearing what they wanted to say,” said Ginny.
Have a physical presence to gain local market insights: By acting as a silent shopper when the New York pop-up store first opened, Ginny was able to gather direct insight into the confusion and friction that arose around converting the clothing size from UK to US sizing. Based on the US being the bigger portion of ALIGNE’s sales, it was important for the brand to relabel their sizing, so the US customer was better served.
Invest in value-aligned partnerships
“I'd rather mean something to fewer people than mean very little to a lot of people”
Ginny emphasizes the importance of appealing meaningfully to a loyal core audience through well-matched partnerships, rather than diluting the brand with mass appeal.
Nurture authentic brand partnerships: Having affiliate and influencer marketing platform, ShopMy’s support for ALIGNE’s NYC opening party meant the businesses mutually benefited from the experience, with creators attending simply out of their loyalty to ShopMy.
Prioritize tech partnerships with actionable data: ALIGNE has a natural affinity for tools, including ShopMy and Style Arcade, that provide real-time customer insights with granular data into net promoters and sales drivers. This data enables synergy for smarter buying, planning, and brand alignment.
“It comes back to data. And that's why I love Style Arcade. That's why I love Shopmy.
They're the first two partners that come up for me as kind of the systems that I use for how I'm driving the business, because they're both data-driven tools.”
Drive community-led growth
ALIGNE takes a two-tier approach to influencer marketing to create a holistic strategy that balances authentic brand awareness with trackable insights and metrics to inform future decisions.
- Measuring the success of content creators: The commerce aspects and data-tracking features of the affiliate and influencer marketing platform, ShopMy, allow ALIGNE to measure how affiliate links and influencers are performing, and why. The team can align their brand strategy against creator metrics like:
- What creators are creating authentic engagement with their audience?
- What creators are generating traffic to the site, and what are the conversion rates from that traffic?
- What are the return rates based on these conversions?
- Are customers converting on the item or are they buying into brand perception, based on how the creator’s content promotes the item?
- Prioritizing authentic alignment over paid placement: By partnering only with creators, communities, or athletes who genuinely love the product, ALIGNE ensures credibility and long-term connection with their audiences.
Build brand recognition across markets
Maintaining global brand positioning: ALIGNE’s social media strategy is designed to unify brand messaging across regions to develop a singular handwriting. However, while acknowledging the global reach of social media, the brand localizes the customer experience, adapting content and product shopping feeds to resonate with local market preferences and seasonal needs.
Balance unified identity with local merchandising: ALIGNE keeps 70% of its assortment global to foster strong brand recognition of its signature styles, whether a customer shops online, in the US, or in the UK.
Ginny suggests 30% localization between assortments for different regions, adapting slightly for wholesale with a different colour mix. This also goes for localizing the fit of the product based on regional preferences. “The UK can have a bit more oversized fit, and the US can have a bit more of a neater fit on 30% of the product.”
Ginny’s final words on brand marketing success? “I think you have to commit and trust your gut and realize that the highs come with lows… You have to know when your timing is right to just have perseverance and keep pushing through, because it's not going to be a linear journey.”
For the full in-depth discussion of ALIGNE’s trajectory, watch Ginny Seymour and Style Arcade’s Morgan Polinelli in the Perfect Aligne-ment: DTC to Omnichannel Webinar.
