Area of interest marketplaces providing a curated choice of merchandise that cater to particular wants have been rising for fairly a while. From vegan-only shops to sustainable trend platforms, curated marketplaces foster a way of group and personalization by addressing particular client calls for, usually filling gaps left by bigger, extra generalized retailers.
Launched in 2021, Tall Dimension is a market the place tall girls should purchase, promote and uncover garments and sneakers which are designed to suit their our bodies, offering a tailor-made resolution in a market that has lengthy neglected their wants.
The ideation part: Developing with Tall Dimension
Nicole Murphy, a advertising and marketing government within the consulting and promoting industries, and Kayla Alexander, an expert basketball participant for the WNBA and the Canadian nationwide crew, have been buddies since childhood. Each over 6 ft tall, the 2 girls shared the frustration of discovering garments that match them correctly. “I wasn’t in a position to simply stroll into any retailer or go on any web site and discover one thing that really matches,” Murphy recollects.
Murphy and Alexander had been evaluating notes on the place to buy garments once they realized there was solely a small choice of manufacturers providing tall trend, and lots of the names weren’t well-known. “All their cash was going into stock, designing and manufacturing the merchandise, so that they actually did not have any cash to place into advertising and marketing,” Alexander mirrored. This sparked the concept for Tall Dimension—a curated market tailor-made to the style wants of tall girls.
What units Tall Dimension aside is its mission to create a spot that looks like house—a group that celebrates and empowers tall girls, bringing them collectively. “The style business has lengthy neglected tall girls, and we needed to create an area the place they really feel seen, understood and celebrated,” Murphy explains.
The design part: Selecting {the marketplace} mannequin
From the beginning, Murphy and Alexander’s concept was to launch a platform that might assist tall girls discover manufacturers catering to them whereas serving to manufacturers higher attain their clients. That’s the successful concept behind curated, multi-vendor marketplaces: they bring about collectively fragmented markets and join manufacturers with their target market.
Murphy’s background in advertising and marketing and expertise helped form the platform’s imaginative and prescient. Though she wasn’t accustomed to the technical necessities of establishing a market, she knew there needed to be a solution to associate with a number of manufacturers with out holding stock.
The early days of Tall Dimension
Establishing a market comes with a sequence of technical challenges. Murphy and Alexander selected to launch their platform on Shopify.
Centered on providing the widest and absolute best choice of clothes for tall girls, the co-founders strengthened the group side of their platform. The truth is, Tall Dimension’s success is essentially based mostly on word-of-mouth referrals and community-building efforts. “Tall girls have felt extraordinarily neglected and underserved by the mainstream trend business for his or her whole lives, like myself and Kayla, and to lastly discover a model that sees them and understands them led to quite a lot of word-of-mouth referrals and a few media consideration,” shares Murphy.
The function of expertise: Scaling Tall Dimension
Tall Dimension’s success resulted in elevated operational wants. {The marketplace} required extra refined expertise to handle each {the marketplace} and the suppliers, streamline delivery and combine with distributors utilizing platforms apart from Shopify. They determined to go together with Onport, a multi-vendor market platform.
“It actually got here all the way down to discovering one of the best ways to create one of the best expertise for each our suppliers and our clients,” says Murphy. Since launching the platform, Tall Dimension has supplied a white-glove expertise to their suppliers, and with Onport, it takes lower than quarter-hour for distributors to hook up with Tall Dimension’s retailer. “They obtain the steps, ship us their API credentials and we get all their merchandise prepared.”
Onport’s skill to combine seamlessly with numerous platforms, together with its superior stock administration capabilities, proved important for Tall Dimension’s development. “Onport helps extra refined and stronger stock administration wants, akin to managing orders with multi-currency choices. Mixed with with the ability to handle completely different delivery charges relying on the place the orders are being positioned and the place the merchandise are being shipped from, this makes it the proper resolution for us,” the co-founders clarify.
The flexibleness of Onport’s composable structure was key. Tall Dimension may plug within the instruments and programs they wanted as they grew, with out being locked right into a inflexible tech stack. “The customizability of the Onport platform and the technical recommendation we obtain from Onport’s assist crew, have proved invaluable for us,” Murphy provides.
The way forward for Tall Dimension
As Tall Dimension grows, Murphy and Alexander are able to face the challenges of scaling up their market as demand will increase. The platform’s flexibility permits Tall Dimension to streamline vendor administration and offers it the benefit of being able to onboard new manufacturers, evolve and proceed to supply a procuring expertise with out friction. “There is not even a world the place we might have constructed one thing like we have now now with out the assist of Onport in any respect ranges,” mentioned Murphy.
The success of Tall Dimension additional confirms that area of interest, curated, multi-vendor marketplaces are responding to clients’ wants and are quick turning into the dominant mannequin in e-commerce.
And as they develop, Tall Dimension stays true to its mission: empowering tall girls with trend that matches and a group that celebrates them.