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Social Media: A Springboard For Starting A Fashion Brand

Posted by Léa Ferrand on May 3, 2016 4:46:33 PM

Linas Gudaitis-Rūkas, Beeleever & CEO at Rüke (Lithuania), a natural knitwear brand, shares his story from the moment when he met the founder & designer – his wife- to the creation of their company – a brand deeply rooted in a longstanding tradition- and their decisive sales strategy.


 
We work on our brand RŪKĖ together with my wife. She is a graduate of Fashion design and I am a graduate of Telecommunications engineering.
 
Everything started when I met my wife - 5 years ago. She was working as: a stylist on TV shows, an advertisement and filming stylist, a fashion designer assistant etc. At the same time, she was creating her brand RŪKĖ and looking for a manager. I was working in a manufacturing company in various positions such as constructor, manager and IT specialist.
 
In the beginning of our friendship, I heard her worries about a girl she hired who wanted to get big money only for creating a Facebook page, a web page, for accounting and so on. So, I told her about my skills in web programming and other fields. And we started our journey not only as a family, but also as business partners. Her created sweaters are something new in the fashion framework, I haven't seen anything like that before. They are modern and sometimes even futuristic. Our knitwear is mostly hand-made custom and produced in limited quantities. It determines the high quality of every garment and keeps its best features for a long time.
 
Our biggest challenge is reaching the right clientele. For some people, it was hard to understand that our garments were only in OneSize. Some were sceptical about fashion knitted products and we had to gain their trust. Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram - these are social media pages which gave us biggest traffic to our e-shop and helped us gain trust from our clients. As our apparel brand grew in quality, it took few years to acquire loyal followers on Facebook and Pinterest. Indeed, in comparison with organic searches in Google, sales on our e-shop grew by 200%, after we started an advertisement campaign on Facebook. Regarding Pinterest, it was a good tool in the beginning to get the first orders, as it was still a young social platform and our visuals for the clothes were looking original at the moment.

Our main differentiation is that we do not have a local manufacturer and stock. We work with women based on their individual license who live in other towns, most of them are seniors and knit garments for us. We collect all parts of garments with local courier from knitters and assemble them in our headquarters. We save money for additional taxes and we have the best knitters in a 100 km perimeter around us.
 

Never give up! Ups and downs are normal expressions of every change in life and the same goes for good ideas and business. Only time will give growth for every idea.

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