How True Classic Grew to Over $150M

Who has ever tried to re-invent the T-Shirt?

That sounds like an impossible challenge, right?

The classic T-shirt was invented in the late 19th century, began to be issued by the US Navy in 1913, and continued its journey to stardom ever since.

Nowadays, tees come in a variety of colors, textures, and shapes but no one has really been able to revolutionize the product, until now.

Meet - True Classic Tees.

What’s so special about them? What’s so new about their tees? And how are they doing in their marketing?

Keep reading 👇

The problem - regular tees are baggy!

It’s really hard to find a good t-shirt. They all look baggy, their size doesn’t match and it’s always a loose fit.

Classic Tees solves it by customizing their product really well.

The solution - customization

They got this awesome “find my fit” widget that takes into account your height, weight, and the type of fit that you are looking for. Got a beer belly? No problem. They’ve got the shirt for your dad bod.

The value prop is crystal clear

This is a marketing case study, so let’s get back into marketing. What I love the most about their home page is how clear their value proposition is. They explain it in one quick GIF -

Here’s what it looks like on the home page. And look at that CTA copy - ‘discover the difference’. Super clear, makes me want to click and find out.

Site optimization

They have all the right widgets on their site. They have a chatbot that features the top FAQs that their customers ask under the ‘Quick answers’ section.

They also have an exit-intent popup that takes the user to their sale page.

Pro tip: having a sales page is a great strategy for eCommerce brands. Why? 3 reasons -

1. It ranks well for discount keywords ‘true classic discounts’ and retains more of the revenue for the company.
2. It converts users.
3. It helps get rid of old inventory

Checkout process

The checkout process starts with a cart popup (big props for not making it a separate page, makes the user experience so much smoother). Here’s what it looks like:

It has two really smart upsells. First, they display how much more you have to add to the cart to unlock free shipping. And second, they display a series of bundle updates. That’s brilliant.

Next, the checkout is a standard Shopify checkout with some additional things. It has Shop Pay and Amazon Pay options in there and some nice discounted add-ons (another upsell) that the customer can choose to add to their order.

They display all their guarantees on the next step of the checkout.

And they clearly state their shipping policy and set those expectations with the customer.

Facebook ads

True Classic has a big community on social media and they use it to their advantage. They re-purpose videos that customers send them and use them for Facebook ads. Here’s a great example of a video they took, added an offer, and used it as an ad. There’s a lot of humor, there are dad jokes, it’s great.

Organic social media

On the organic front, True Classic is doing some great things but is also missing out on a lot of opportunities.

Instagram - they are absolutely nailing it on Instagram. They got all the right stories, and 200k+ followers and they are staying really consistent with their posting.

Here’s an example of an Instagram story they did:

YouTube - there are a ton of review videos of influencers reviewing True Classic Tees, but no content from the actual brand. They are missing out on a lot of top-of-the-funnel video content here.

BeardBrand has a similar target audience (men, 24-65+ years old) and has done really well for themselves with their own video content. They have over 1.9M subs and over 444M views.

They got so big they even started 4 other YouTube channels.

Our recommendation - True Classic should go all in and make their own video content to row that community, boost brand awareness, and create a new traffic channel for their business. They could create videos about all the wonderful philanthropic work they do in the community (they donate 15k tees a month to homeless vets, shelters, and people in need).

Pinterest - here’s another channel that True Classic is under-utilizing. Their organic Pinterest reach is well... crickets. They’ve posted their products on there and stopped at that. They could do so much better.

Here’s a close competitor - Everlane. Their Pinterest is popping.

Here’s Buck Mason, a clothing company that does a lot of lifestyle pins and short 8-second video clips.

Our recommendation - they should post their community photos and videos, and post different lifestyle photos or looks based on season, geography, and target segment. They should post 10-15 pins per day, experiment with videos, and actively engage with users to build a community on Pinterest. They should probably use a top-notch Pinterest growth agency to get this channel going.

Content marketing

Last but not least, let’s talk about content. I’m not going to lie, I’m super biased here cause content is my thing. So True Classic is doing pretty well on SEO, they have around 300+ keywords they rank on the first page for, but if they could tweak it just a bit they could really see a lot more traffic from this channel.

What the brand is really missing out on is the content marketing piece. They have a blog but haven’t written anything since Feb. Also, they don’t have any long-form pieces for the top of the funnel. They need more comparison posts, shopping guides, and outfit tutorials.

Here’s what the informational keywords they rank for look like:

They only have 200+ keywords and they could 10X that number easily by publishing more long-form content (3k+ words) and combining that with their own YouTube video tutorials.

And that’s about it.

The score we would give True Classic - B+.

They are so close to absolutely exploding, just need a few tweaks, a few expansions to under-utilized channels, and they could become a really strong player in the market.

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