Craig Cochrane knew he wanted to break into electronic retailing. Armed with an MBA from the University of Southern California and several years in network and digital television production, he just needed the right concept. That materialized in the spring of 2005 when he got together with his fashion-designer friend Joseph Walker and started BoutiqueOohLaLa.com, which sold skirts and other apparel.
The two eventually discovered they could do better by concentrating on custom designing and marketing just skirts for individual customers, and having local Los Angeles-area contractors make the garments. To reflect the new focus, the name was changed to Skirt Spot (www.skirtspot.com).
“Having the name of our product in our Web address is great for visibility online,” Cochrane says. Skirt Spot sells about 80 to 100 styles, he adds. “Because we make them when they're ordered and don't produce them [in quantity], when fabric is gone we take the skirt down and replace it with new fabric. So the products are always changing.”
While changing the site's name to Skirt Spot definitely has helped with search marketing, there have been some unexpected results.
“The most popular [search] phrases that involve skirts are ‘Look up her skirt’; and ‘Camera up her skirt,’” he says. “So I try to concentrate on phrases like a-line skirt, or color- or style-based phrases.”
