Small Business: How Clique Fitness is navigating supply issues

Sisters Carena and Bex West founded fitness clothing brand Clique Fitness in 2017. Photo / Supplied

Carena West, co-founder of fitness clothing brand Clique Fitness, talks raising $500,000 for expansion, manufacturing product offshore and working around ongoing supply issues.

What does your business do?

Clique Fitness is a women's performance wear brand that makes compression tights, sports bras, sports tank tops, sweaters and will slowly roll out new garments. We received our first sample in January 2017 and it took about seven months for us to perfect that sample and we launched in July 2017 online.

The response has been quite incredible. The first few months we ticked along not really sure if people would like our product and then in January 2018 the business just took off and all of our products sold out basically overnight. Since then it has almost been a matter of trying to keep up with demand, which is a really exciting position to be in. At one point we had a waiting list of 4000 people for our tights and since we started we've sold about 45,000 pairs.

In the beginning we started with $10,000, that was a bunch of savings I put together, so we had to be clever about what we had made and how it was marketed, which is why we started with social media marketing - it's quite a good bang for your buck.

What was the motivation for starting it?

Bex and I come from different exercise backgrounds, I used to be quite into lifting weights and fitness competitions and Bex has more of a yoga background and so we wanted a product that served us both, and looked really cool as well. We wanted to create a product that was performance based, but was for anyone; we noticed that anything compression-wear based was really marketed towards professional athletes or serious competitors and we wanted to make the ability to enhance your performance available to anyone.

How big is your team?

There's five of us. Bex and I are full time, we've got Liv who is our sales co-ordinator, Chloe does our customer service and Brent who is our production and logistics manager.

Why is social media marketing so effective?

We use influencers a lot in our marketing, we've had a bit of trial and error along the way, but we've found that there are certain types of influencers that we prefer to use - women who have an authentic voice, not just someone with a large following who's career it is to sell products. Our customers respond better to influencers who have a genuine voice and so we've been really lucky to partner with a few really cool women.

The first influencer we ever used sold out all of our stock straight away; that was basically a catalyst to having our product in the market. We've extended our marketing now so we do more traditional magazine and print marketing. We've also started doing digital marketing that isn't in the social media space as well, but social has always been really big for us and we find that our customers are really responsive to us on social media, we can create genuine conversations with them rather than just advertise things.

Talk me through the supply issues you have faced, how you are dealing with those?

In January 2020, we found out that we were going to have a stock delay of about six months due to Covid-19. It was an interesting time because New Zealand hadn't really been touched by it yet or affected in anyway so we were communicating to customers that there was going to be delays on stock and it was a bit of a touchy subject, so when the rest of the New Zealand caught up we felt a little bit better about it.

We had some pretty serious delays last year but everything is sort of coming right now apart from sea freight. We did have stock stuck out in ships in the Waitemata Harbour, but luckily it arrived last week. At the moment we are air freighting pretty much everything to avoid any other delays. It is more expensive but it also helps us with our planning and our scheduling. If something is delayed it delays everything else for us so it is worth it in the long run.

Clique says its sales increased by 1700 per cent in its second financial year. Photo / Supplied

We have deliveries monthly at the moment, a couple of thousand pieces coming in each month. Sometimes it will be five thousand pieces, sometimes two thousand pieces - it depends if we have classic stock coming in or limited-edition releases, which we do approximately every six weeks.

Where do you see the business in five years' time?

Our plan for the next year is to expand into Australia. At the moment about 5 per cent of our sales go to Australia, so we really want to increase that, but also we'd love to push into America as well. We have some sales going to America, so we have an idea of which cities to target - the plan is to really push our core range of products in other markets and ramp up production and marketing. We also have some exciting plans to partner with some interesting people as brand ambassadors.

What are you focused on right now?

We've just done a private equity raise of $500,000 with Foster Capital so we're concentrating on ramping up production of our classic collections so we can get stuck into marketing here and overseas. We also have some exciting new limited edition collections coming out and some new technical sports bras for larger busts, we have also extended our size range up to NZ22, and want to help women wherever they are on their fitness journey.

What's been your biggest lesson running the business?

From our first to second financial year our sales increased by 1700 per cent so being able to facilitate that level of demand and organise ourselves has been our biggest learning process. Next up would probably be creating relationships with our factories in China and really getting to know them and making sure that we are a good fit with them because we're not just here to create tights, we want to make sure that our environmental impact is as minimal as possible.

What advice do you give to people who want to start their own business?

Do your research around your market, but in saying that, maybe it is a good thing to just go for it and do your best and see what happens because that's what we did and it's working.