Back to basics

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, interviews Toti Moreland, head of brand for Quince, an affordable luxury e-commerce store.

I’ve never been much of a basics girl. I’ve always gravitated towards statement pieces, colorful garments and accessories that demanded to be noticed and complimented. Neutrals, I naively thought, were for the meek. But about two years ago, in the midst of TikTok’s micro-trend mania, something changed. I made the decision to revamp my closet, starting with the essentials. My tastes were swayed by collections coming out of labels like The Row and TOTEME and retailers like NakedCashmere—brands that produce high-quality garments with no distinct logo, which TikTokers now describe as “quiet luxury.”

One day, while shopping for holiday gifts, I came across the site Quince with its Everlane-like line-up of cashmere sweaters, silk skirts, Tencel tanks, and affordable, gold jewelry. The slip skirts reminded me of Réalisation Par’s but without the bold patterns, and the cashmere sweaters were like White + Warren’s at half the price. The site also carried 14k gold earrings similar in style to those on Mejuri. Quince doesn’t sell exact duplicates of viral products, though there are similarities in its supply chain with popular brands’ manufacturers. The retailer sells items that fall in the nebulous category of “basic essentials.”

In an age where shoppers are obsessed with dupes and buying the best of everything, branding reigns supreme. But the behind-the-scenes reality, as those who work in e-commerce know, is that known retailers often source their goods from the same reputable manufacturers. The difference is in the marketing, branding, and the price. Unlike D2C companies, Quince avoids branding entirely. The site also lists competitor information on its product pages, including the location of the factory the item was produced in.

“Oftentimes, we’re using a lot of the same manufacturers that our competitors do, who end up adding a 40 to 50 percent mark-up rate to their products,” explains Toti Moreland, Quince’s Head of Brand. “It’s a pretty small manufacturing world. Yes, there are a lot of brands, but a lot of us are using the exact same factories.”

Big-box stores like Target, Costco, and Amazon have long engaged in the practice of producing private-label basics, hoping customers would opt for their alternative instead of the brand-name items sold at a higher price. Depending on what your definition of a dupe is, retailers have a history of duping—and sometimes pricing out—their competitors.

Moreland and I discussed the retailer’s business model, dupe culture from a retail and manufacturing perspective, and the dwindling power of brand names. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

Terry Nguyen: What does the manufacturer-to-consumer (M2C) model for Quince look like?

Toti Moreland: Unlike most retail brands, with the M2C model, we’re able to reduce overhead, which is reflected in our product pricing, by not having distribution centers. We’re shipping directly from our manufacturing partners to customers. Our margins are actually quite slim.

Quince doesn’t have a sales team. We don’t have in-house designers, which is common among brick-and-mortar and direct-to-consumer retailers. We have an incredible product merchandising team, who can identify what basic essentials are trending in the market. These luxury essentials are our bread and butter. We’re doing market analysis all day every day. If our product team realizes, for example, that there’s demand for white sneakers, we have people trying to source and figure out where we can get a top-grade Italian leather shoe or an organic cotton one in the market. We’re not designing a new sneaker.

We also have an incredible engineering team, and for a lot of new products, we debut them on a “crawl, walk, run” model. We don’t start off buying a ton of inventory and hope it sells out. We do a very small trial run with light-touch marketing, letting our current customers know that this is a new item. If that sells out, we’ll buy a slightly bigger order. If the second order sells out, we’ll then secure the raw materials for a bigger purchase. What that means is, sometimes you’ll go to our site and see certain things are sold out. That’s because we really prioritize ordering in small batches so that nothing goes to waste if it doesn’t sell out.

TN: How is this different from dropshipping?

TM: The big difference between dropshippers and M2C is that we have long-standing and ongoing relationships with factories that manufacture our items, even if we’re both shipping items directly. Dropshippers often can’t vouch for the quality or authenticity of their product. We also don’t just buy in bulk. But because of the prevalence of dropshippers, I think customers are cautious. They’re skeptical whether something is of quality at such a low price, even if we try to be transparent about pricing. We also live in a world where people are trained to get something quickly. Amazon Prime with next-day shipping has pushed D2C folks to get stuff to people within the week, at most 3-5 days. With M2C, our shipping timeline is about 5-7 days. We want to bring it down further, but that’s one of the tradeoffs. You’re getting amazing quality at an amazing price, but you have to wait a little longer for it. We also offer free shipping and 365-day returns.

TN: Would you say Quince is selling dupes? A product that Daisy and I both really like from Quince is the Tencel Rib Knit Maxi Slip Dress, which has a silhouette similar to the viral SKIMS dress.

TM: We are by no means replicating the exact same garment. There are only so many styles or colors a cashmere sweater can come in, so there might be similarities along those lines, but it’s a proprietary design for us. If a brand releases a garment and it goes viral, we aren’t going to hop on that trend and launch a similar product two days later. You do see this with fast fashion and even retailers like Target, but we want to make sure the product has staying power in the market, that it’s become an essential for people. It definitely has to be produced or carried by more than one brand. With the dress you mentioned, I would say it’s become a popular enough garment for everyday wear, something people want in their closets, regardless of the brand it comes from.

TN: Would you say what Quince does is curatorial then? And how much of that depends on data?

TM: That’s definitely what we provide: top-level curation. The e-commerce market is pretty segmented into expensive, quality items that cost a lot or cheaper, lower-quality products that don’t cost a lot. Or even expensive things that aren’t well-made. Quince has an advantage in that we’re M2C offering luxury items. It’s a market that hasn’t been adopted in the States, especially for fashion or home goods. Americans are very brand-first, so it’s crucial for retailers to establish relationships across a multitude of categories. M2C is more prevalent in Asian countries, specifically Southeast Asia, and Europe. We love to say that we’re half a fashion-retail company and half a tech company. Data is really important from a research and development standpoint, in figuring out what’s resonating with consumers. We’ve also begun experimenting with AI, using it as a supplement.

TN: Who is the target Quince consumer?

TM: We fully over-index among women, over 90 percent. Our customer tends to be in that mid-to-older millennial range, even skewing slightly older. We have been, as of late, testing some items that skew younger towards Gen Z. She has a decent disposable income. We’re looking at average household incomes above 100k, which surprised us. It means our customer has the money to spend on competitors if she chose to, but she’s discerning enough to choose Quince when it comes to buying the core essentials and testing it out.

Over 50 percent of our month-to-month revenue is from returning users. If we get someone in the door and our quality is up to her standards, she’s consistently returning for new items. We get a lot of feedback on how our items are being worn too. Shoppers love to pair, for example, a basic cashmere sweater with maybe a more upscale item from their favorite brand, like a fancy shoe.

TN: Why has the M2C model not picked up as much traction yet in the US?

Consumers and retailers love to focus on American-made products. That’s a good thing. We’re also trying to push back against the fallacy that things produced outside the US are of low-quality. That’s so far from the truth. I would say it’s less so today, but there was once hostility to buying and selling goods manufactured in certain Asian countries. American consumers have certain cultural biases and were, in many ways, resistant to buying things online before Covid. We are trying to change those biases. Part of this is also proximity to manufacturers. Consumers in China or India, for example, are closer to these businesses and implicitly understand how they work, whereas in the US, things are a bit further from the end-consumer. Distance is also a deterrent for other US brands who want to assume this model.

The Dirt: There is nothing basic about basics.

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