After filing for bankruptcy last year, the retailer just relaunched as an online-only brand. And as part of the resurrection, it’s looking at nostalgic twenty-somethings as a new market.
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In case you haven't heard, Delia's — better known as dELiA*s — is back from the dead. And while the brand is focused on winning teens over right now, BuzzFeed News has learned that the teen-focused brand is thinking about offering up sizes that would fit nostalgic 20-somethings next year.
Makes you want to update your away message with joy, right?
Delia's relaunched as an online-only brand last month after filing for bankruptcy in December of 2014. Steve Russo, who bought Alloy from Delia's in 2013, purchased the Delia's brand and its intellectual property for $2.5 million in cash earlier this year, struck by the overwhelming sadness that engulfed former 90s youth after the chain's demise.
"It was hard to not buy Delia's when everybody was crying that Delia's was closing," he said in a telephone interview last week. "There's a huge following…when some of these lesser retailers exited, like Wet Seal went through a liquidation or DEB Shops went through liquidation, there wasn't that same message that was communicated through their diehard customers."
Indeed, Delia's has a unique cache among today's 20-something women — though that might be the wrong word to use, given Caché is yet another hot-in-the-90s retailer that filed for bankruptcy in the past year.
Russo says he was enticed by the brand's popularity online, where it has 318,000 Instagram followers and more than 700,000 Facebook Likes. Hilco, the firm that handled the sale, said in marketing materials earlier this year that the company's website received an average of about 1.5 million visits a month and that its customer database included more than 4.9 million individual records, though only somewhere around 700,000 were active in the prior 12 months.
Delia's main focus right now is connecting with its core customer of 7th- to 10th-graders, who are a little too old for Justice but too young for Forever 21, Russo said. But he said the brand is working on providing sizes that would fit women in their 20s and perhaps even 30s, who have pounded the digital media drum of grief for the brand since Delia's went under.
"We're working on doing a throwback flashback catalogue that will probably be done at the beginning of 2016 that brings together the old and the new," Russo said.
"There are certain aspects of the business that are actually being bought by some of the older customers," he said, citing jeans as an example. "We're gonna start to extend that out to be more where the sizing will be a little more fitting to someone slightly older…there's a nostalgia element to it. And we want to bring back some of the old models. We've already talked to them and met with them, and they're actually consulting with us in some cases."
"We don't want to confuse the customer," he continued. "But we're working on some things that will make it so older customers can get products for themselves as well…we want to make sure we're meeting expectations and then do some really fun things."
Russo said that while he was "a little bit worried" at first, Delia's was hitting its August projections as of last week.
"It's a misnomer that there's no expense in e-commerce because there's no stores…basically, when you're in the cloud, which is what e-commerce is, you have to kind of go door-to-door, saying come to my site, because nobody sees you, you're not a store on 34th Street," he said. "It's a process but we started with a very, very loyal base, and we're seeing it in the sales."
Delia's is one of a few retail brands currently attempting a resurrection after a bankruptcy.
Just last month, Xcel brands announced that it bought C. Wonder's trademark and intellectual property for about $12.5 million. C. Wonder,