Spoke menswear CEO on TV ad spend lessons and tailoring the perfect-fit media plan

I did a liberal arts degree, so I was essentially ‘good for nothing’ on graduating and for six years I joined the ranks of graduates and professional services, and in management consulting, I cycled through lots of different industries.

In that kind of role, you get quite accustomed to bluffing your way and climbing up a learning curve. You learn to think dangerous thoughts like ‘How hard can it be?’ and ‘I’ll figure it out’. It gives you the confidence (or foolishness) to have a crack at something in which you are not deeply schooled.

I enjoyed it more than I often admit but I did also feel institutionalized by my years in consulting. I needed to do something dramatically different. If you’ve got the impulse to build something, it isn’t really a choice. People often characterize the decisions I’ve made as being brave but you could argue I started on this path out of fear – the fear that I might wake up in my mid-40s having done nothing but make PowerPoint presentations. I still make a lot of PowerPoint slides, but don’t let the truth spoil a good story!

The first thing I did was start a mobile banking business in West Africa. Splash presented itself as the most radical and inspiring opportunity in front of me, and I spent three years in Africa. That venture was a success, but having recently married, I wanted to return to the UK. I arrived back here in a very suggestible state of mind, looking for a new venture. The window was closing on high-risk career choices.

In that context, I made the fairly wild decision to start an apparel brand, with no background in the industry.

I always thought building a consumer brand looked fun. It would be an intellectually engaging task and one that I would feel at some really basic level gratified by. Also, the consultant in me saw a real need. I wanted a thing and couldn’t find it, so decided to make it myself.

I had become frustrated by menswear. Most brands were talking past me about things I didn’t care about. I had ambition. I wanted an elevated wardrobe. I was prepared to spend money on it but I’d long since arrived at the conclusion that there was no point worrying about the finer details of style if you can’t get things to fit.

I felt like most ready-to-wear brands were doing a really poor job at that. I’m bang average. I’m six foot tall and 80 kilos on a good day. I’ve got a 33-inch waist, not a 32-inch and not a 34-inch. And I’ve got a 31-inch leg – not a 32 or a 30.

Spoke was created for men fed-up with the contraints of poorly fitting high-street clothing options

When you collide those two odd numbers together, you find that it’s actually sensationally difficult to get stuff off the rack that will actually fit. If I bought a 34 waist, I was cranking up a belt in a bid to make it fit in, and it would flap elegantly around my rear. If I bought a 32, I’d be feeling pretty uncomfortable and surreptitiously undo the top button by about 11 o’clock in the morning.

If somebody as deeply average as me, has to take everything to the tailors to get it to fit, then something here is broken. And there is a fairly obvious opportunity to fix this. It was 2011 and we were all bearing witness to the explosion of direct-to-consumer brands in the US and to a more limited degree in the UK.

I thought, in e-commerce, there’s an opportunity to fix all this. I thought if you consolidate all of your inventory, all of your stock, in one place – rather than spreading it thin across lots of stores and stock rooms – you could potentially run to more sizes and furthermore, you can finish to order. And between those two things, probably arrive at a set of size options that is an order of magnitude greater than most brands will offer. And that's where Spoke finds itself.

We will offer 400 variants of trouser, where most brands will offer you between 30 and 40 fits. Anybody that tells you they’ve cut a product for better fit, that they’ve come up with some curved waistband, or some new way of, you know, modeling the thigh – it’s nonsense.

If there were a better way of cutting trousers so that ‘they fit well’ then everyone would be doing it. The only way to offer people a better fit is to offer them more size options so that they can fine-tune. That’s what Spoke does, powered by e-commerce.

The history of direct-to-consumer brands over the last 15 years is quite a troubled one. But the difference between Spoke and so many of them is that we’re using e-commerce to make a better product. We’re actively engaged in creating a product that’s better. We're not kind of clinging to the idea that the channel itself is the answer for why this business model should work.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) is just a channel. But it does create the opportunity to make a slightly different offer to the customer, one our target market deeply values.

Spoke offer 400 variants in trouser measurements

Our readers will be fascinated to hear about your relationship with ITV, where you cut a very specific deal: a media for equity deal. Are you able to walk us through it? How did it come about and how does it work?

DTC is a great model for getting from zero to 10 million. It’s incredibly hard work, but 10 years ago, Facebook advertising was enough to get you started and introduce you to a wide range of potential buyers with great efficiency when compared with the alternative ways of connecting with your customers.

It was an entirely new and unusual opportunity for small brands to acquire customers directly, without having to rely on traditional and really expensive wholesale channels. But there was a snag – and it’s the inherent problem with the direct-to-consumer model: ultimately, you will run out of truly qualified eyeballs on any given day. You have to find a way of building future demand.

It’s relatively easy to grow by 100 customers a month, but by the time you need thousands of customers a month, it gets progressively harder because the truth is, there are a finite number of people in market at any moment in time.

The answer to that is the same as it has always been: you need to invest across the marketing funnel, and specifically at the top, to build brand equity and awareness. It’s only by doing that that you can continue to deliver efficiency at the bottom of the funnel when you make your direct pitches to the consumers to buy your products.

So, I was in the market for a bit of a bazooka to reset or rebalance my marketing mix. We had tried TV before in 2019 but we did what DTC brands are naturally disposed to do: we tried to treat TV like any other performance channel.

That’s the problem with direct-to-consumer: it conditions management teams to make marketing investments only where they can see and measure immediate results. That makes them very nervous and poorly adapted to invest in channels where that immediate validation and reassurance isn’t available.

TV is a channel that is well-calibrated for delivering a result at the top of the funnel. But if your background is DTC, you might use TV to make a direct response ad, and you’ll use clever tools like TV squared to measure impacts in a really scientific way, just as you might use Facebook or any other digital channel. You try to calculate your customer acquisition cost and hope that it is a fraction of the lifetime value of the acquired customer.

We created a direct-response ad for TV. Our partner agency optimized the play out of that ad. But we immediately found ourselves being chased to weird parts of the TV schedule. Parts of the schedule that are so unattractive that they’re virtually free.

And guess what? If your ad is showing up on the Discovery Channel at 3am, that is absolutely no way to build brand equity or drive brand awareness at the top of the funnel. You won’t reach that many people, and those that you do reach won’t be that impressed.

We fell between a rock and a hard place. Using TV like a performance channel was never going to drive any meaningful change in awareness. I realized we needed to use the TV channel to drive brand equity. That meant walking away from the Discovery Channel, finding more popular parts of the TV schedule and making a brand ad that made people feel something about the brand that would in turn drive future demand in a way that would serve us over the long term and ultimately push our existing performance channels further.

If you want to make TV ads of some caliber, you are being asked to cut cheques that are of an order of magnitude higher than you have ever done before. It couldn’t be more different to Facebook. When I serve Facebook or Instagram ads, you turn it on and off like a tap and watch in real-time if it is working. You might spend £10,000 a day and then just stop on a dime if it’s not working.

With TV, in the first instance, you need to make the ad. If your ambition is to build your brand, it’s got to get above a certain bar, especially if you’re a fashion brand, and you have a certain level of aspiration.

You can make an ad for £50,000 and it might be great. But there’s lots of risk. If you go down that route, it’s more likely that you’ll make an ad that you can’t really use. £100,000 - £200,000 is the level that we were at. For that, we got some great work – but compared to the cost of Facebook ads it’s a huge leap in cost.

The Spoke TV campaign starred ‘Jack – the not so standard mannequin’

Then there’s the media, and you’re not going to do a deal with any channel with any serious reach for less than £100,000. As a business owner, you have to persuade yourself to write these enormous checks and be comfortable with the fact that you’re not going to get any short or even medium-term return. It’s terrifying.

Against this backdrop, enter ‘media for equity.’ The idea is that instead of that enormous cheque, you can exchange some equity in your business for a significant chunk of media inventory. Their offer essentially helped us to take the leap of faith. That ITV inventory gave us much more reach than we’d ever had before.

We measured it in two ways: firstly by measuring the marketing funnel directly. So in a very traditional way, we’ll do a YouGov survey and measure aided and unaided awareness and each stage of the funnel down to final consideration and though I had to wait six months to see the results, I’m delighted to say that the validation came. We’ve more or less tripled our aided awareness over a relatively short term. Rather than creeping up, we’ve made multiple percentage point gains every six months.

Before we started advertising on TV there was literally no pulse on unaided awareness. Now things look much healthier across the marketing funnel. If you have a larger number of people in market, and they know you exist, that will ultimately translate through consideration to trial and eventually repeat business.

Alongside marketing funnels, the other direct way of measuring it is to look at the bottom and ask how we’re doing with our direct response ads through the usual digital channels. Despite tricky economic headwinds, we have been able to continue growing our digital marketing spend without losing efficiency and we continue growing on a topline basis. It’s nice to do something that feels like it takes account of prevailing marketing wisdom.

Through their website, Spoke offers the opportunity to fine-tune your clothes fit

What’s on your agenda for Spoke in 2025?

In pure marketing terms, you’ll continue to see more of the same. Our agreement with ITV is coming to an end (on good terms), but it raises the opportunity of broadening our portfolio with media partners at the top of the funnel.

Our current ‘ridiculously well fit’ campaign works through the line across lots of different media. There’s a great outdoor campaign waiting to go, conceived at the same time as the ads. If we can hit consumers from lots of different angles and lots of different places, the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

In terms of other growth vectors, it still feels like there’s plenty of headroom to increase our product range. We started as a trouser brand. We still consider that to be our heartland. But If I was to identify two secrets to successful and profitable e-commerce, that would be repeat business and an average basket value.

We have a track record of delivering brilliantly on repeats. 20% of our customers shop with us again within 30 days of their first purchase, and that number rises to close to 50% in the first year and a half. That’s kind of the best kind of endorsement you can get from your consumers and it’s a massive driver of lifetime value.

For us, the kind of connected metric that really matters is order value. You need to amortize the quite significant cost of any given purchase and logistics to sit behind any order across the biggest basket you can. The way to drive basket sizes is to make and sell more stuff.

I get caught between those two twin pressures: the pressure to be famous for something – quite a brand-led pressure – and the importance of making sure that there’s a sufficient range for people to buy from once you’ve earned their trust in delivering in your core category.

Spoke’s product range expansion includes tailored jackets

In summary: I think there’s plenty more of those categories where fit matters and Spoke can make a credible offer. Very recently we launched a tailored jacket and we’ve run out of jackets in a heartbeat. That’s a good illustration of a category where I think there’s tonnes of room for us to grow across lots of different expressions and fabrications.

The question I always get asked at this point is: what about our distribution channels? Would we get into wholesale? Or are we some sort of D2C purist? What about our own shops? These possibilities are all part of the picture over the medium to long term. Building our own shops is a ‘no-brainer.’

I don’t think you’ve fully rounded out a brand until you have some physical manifestation of it somewhere. But we don’t have the muscle for that in the business today – no experts in traditional retail – so this is a medium-term goal, for late 2025 or beyond.

What advice might you give your younger self: if you could go back in time, what might you do more of and what might you avoid?

So much entrepreneurial success is down to luck. The hard work, graft and willingness to withstand is a given. But ‘be lucky’ is no kind of advice.

The thing that will determine your success more than anything else is to really understand the direction of traffic in the market that you are playing in. How’s it doing? Is it on the upswing? Can you ride an updraft? Because it’s so much easier to do things when the tide's rising. It just creates breathing room and gives you the capacity to absorb the inevitable mistakes.

I love my brand. I know that we’re doing a thing that consumers want and need and that ultimately we’ll find a way to do really well. I’m not really rewriting my own history here and saying, “I wish I’d participated in a different market than kind of online aspirational menswear.”

But I would say to anybody considering kind of entrepreneurship, and especially something in the consumer space, to be utterly preoccupied with the fundamentals of that choice at the outset. Ask yourself: “What market do I want to be in, and is it one that, genuinely, after much interrogation, appears ripe for kind of an upswing?” If you can ride a wave, life is just so much easier and much more fun. So my advice would be: before making entrepreneurial decisions: ask yourself searching and uncomfortable questions.

If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…

Never, ever assimilate. No one’s really paying attention. So figure out what makes you different, how you want to articulate it – and repeat it endlessly.

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Little Grey Cells is Tim Healey, founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier Senior Marketer meet up.