Web Site Focuses on Single Custom Made Garment

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 fashion designer friend Joseph Walker and started BoutiqueOohLaLa.com, which sold skirts and other apparel.

As time went on, they discovered they could do better if they concentrated 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 (http://www.skirtspot.com).

“Having the name of our product in our name and Web address is great for visibility online,” says Cochrane.

Skirt Spot sells about 80 to 100 styles. “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,” he says.

The site is primarily marketed through organic search engine optimization. Cochrane notes the company has also amassed a mailing list of several thousand names, many of whom are repeat customers.

He admits search has been something of an eye opener thus far.

“We did ad words for a while and discovered that it’s better left to the experts because the process is so complex that you’ve got to be great at it to see the return on your investment,” he says.

While changing the name of the site has definitely helped with search marketing, there have been some unexpected results.

“The most popular phrases that involves skirts are ‘look up her skirt’ and ‘camera up her skirt'” he notes. “So I try to concentrate on phrases like a-line skirt, or color-based or style-based phrases.”

At present, Cochrane is working to rewrite some of the site’s URLs to make them more reflective of specific product offerings and less computer-jargon-like. Skirt Spot is also simplifying some procedures for navigating around the site, he says.

On top of that, Skirt Spot has also just started an affiliate marketing program.

“I recently met an affiliate/pay-per-click expert and he is going to take over our pay-per-click marketing,” says Cochrane. “This will happen after the URL rewriting. I’m hoping that’ll be done in the next two to three weeks.”