Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The 'love' button may be the most-clicked on ModCloth's platform. But with $100 M in 2012 revenue, 'checkout' is a close second....

“The ‘love’ button is the most used button on our site,” ModCloth CEO Eric Koger told me this June on a visit to the East Coast from the company’s San Francisco HQ. Tuesday’s announcement that the company he founded back in 2002 with wife Susan Gregg Korger has reached $100 million in 2012 revenue makes another thing clear: the check-out button is closing in on ‘Like’ for number one.

ModCloth’s commitment to a mobile-first, unabashedly social strategy is credited with getting them to the $100 million mark according to today’s press release. According to the founders nearly a third of their traffic is same-day repeat traffic, meaning they’ve visited the site more than once a day as a result of a roll-out of a slew of social features over the past 12 months. Among them: a virtual buyer program that allows users to vote samples into production and a style gallery of user-submitted photos that’s turned the e-commerce platform into its own internal social network. Since its launch last year more than 6,000 outfit photos have been shared through the site....

American Giant was drowning in a river of digital praise.

Last December, Slate tech writer Farhad Manjoo published a story about the company’s signature product — a heavyweight hooded sweatshirt — calling it the “greatest hoodie ever made.” Orders flooded in — so many that American Giant couldn’t keep up with the demand.

As Christmas came and went, the orders kept rolling in, and the struggle to fill them continued. Unlike the massive multinationals making billions from fast fashion in sweatshops in Bangladesh, American Giant is selling an American-made ideal as much as a sweatshirt. It is making clothes you don’t wear for a season and shove to the back of your closet. It’s making durable, well-designed, good-looking sweatshirts you can wear for a decade and then pass down to your kid, the way American clothes used to be made — and they don’t cost much more than the disposable crap we’ve accepted as the standard for affordable apparel....

These small businesses use ingenuity, creativity and no budget to get results. They don't have an "ad agency" or even an "ad budget" — but they do the best with what they got....