FullBeauty Is Building a Plus-size Fashion Empire
After a 123-year history in plus-size fashion, FullBeauty Brands is moving fast and looking to learn some new tricks as it seeks to bring in younger shoppers.
The company said on Wednesday that it acquired Dia & Co., which has both a size-inclusive marketplace and a styling service that uses algorithms and human stylists to recommend looks to shoppers.
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It’s the third deal in less than a year for FullBeauty, which also recently bought intimates brand Cuup and the trendy Eloquii, which was owned by Walmart.
FullBeauty — which grew out of the Redcats mail order business that was owned by PPR before the luxury giant changed its name to Kering — already has a host of plus-size brands targeting Boomers and older Gen Xers, including Catherines, WomanWithin and Jessica London.
Now, the company is pushing for more.
“We’re good at taking a woman into one brand and introducing her to our other brands in the portfolio as well as introducing her to other categories,” said Jim Fogarty, who’s been FullBeauty’s chief executive officer for nearly five years, in an interview. “We had this really good network built for Boomers and older Gen X [shoppers] and we had always wanted to do a better job serving the younger demographic and younger Gen X and into the Millennial [customers].”
Now the market fallout in direct-to-consumer brands has opened up an opportunity for FullBeauty to both expand its established business while aggressively going after younger shoppers in the $81 billion women’s plus market.
“What you don’t want to do is take brands that are positioned to serve a certain demographic and somehow overnight try to make them younger,” Fogarty said. “It never works. It’s not true to who the brand is.”
Dia & Co. brings in younger shoppers and also some new skills.
Lydia Gilbert, cofounder of Dia & Co., will join FullBeauty and oversee the Dia styling business, which will be put to work across the company’s portfolio of brands.
Fogarty said the styling business, which resembles the Stitch Fix’s approach, ran into something of a squeeze.
“The cost of [customer] acquisition became enormously difficult for them driving that business,” he said.
“One of the things we have is we have over 5 million active customers in our own portfolio,” the CEO said. “We saw a lot of value in their own existing subscribers in their styling business as well as our ability to use that styling business with our own existing customer base.”