Most consumer brands pour money into paid acquisition and treat it as the growth engine. Dagne Dover spent the past couple of years doing the opposite: pulling back on Google and Meta because the returns stopped justifying the spend. Word of mouth now drives close to half the brand’s growth.
Melissa Mash built the accessories brand with cofounders Deepa Gandhi and Jessy Dover, growing it from a business school focus group and $40,000 in pre-sales into more than 250 retail locations, without ever raising venture capital. Drawing on her wholesale background at Coach, she’s spent 13 years proving that high-touch channels can outperform paid ads. Here, Melissa shares how Dagne Dover replaced performance marketing with events, sponsorships, and showing up where customers already live.
On what product-market fit actually means:
Product-market fit means what you’re putting out there is hitting, and not just with one product. You’re able to engage the customer, cut through all the noise, and give them something they can’t find elsewhere, something they keep coming back to you for.
Over the past 13 years, I’ve watched a lot of brands pump their businesses with marketing, willing to lose money on the first, second, and third order with a customer. Is that product-market fit, if you’re just overpaying to acquire someone to try your products? In my opinion, no.
Real product-market fit is when you’re creating something unique for a customer who needs that product, they keep coming back, and over time you’re building consistency and reliance, where they have a dependence on what you make. When your repeat rates are climbing and word of mouth is spreading beyond your existing network, those are pretty good proof points that things are working.
On being one of the first brands to run Instagram ads:
When we launched in 2013, Instagram advertising didn’t even exist, so we were one of the first brands to try it, around 2015. Very quickly, Instagram came back to us like, “Hey, you’re one of our top-performing brands.” This tiny little brand over here, beating out Chanel, beating out Dior. It’s crazy.
They asked what I thought the success was, and honestly, it came down to the content. These were still images of the functional interiors of our bags, shot in a beautiful, lifestyle way. We were getting straight to the core reason people would choose us. When someone sees the inside of our bags and sees the functionality, that’s relief. That’s “I’ve got my life together.” That’s feeling empowered and confident, with everything exactly where you need it.
That’s very different from something that just looks beautiful. Since the very beginning, we’ve been focused on what we do for you and how you rely on our products.
On why she cut paid spend:
Over the past year and a half to two years, we’ve really taken down our paid spend, and the reason is simple: The return on investment (ROI) was just unjustifiable compared to our more organic, direct methods.
We’ve been doing events, partnerships, and sponsorships that give us a different kind of visibility. Sure, it’s more high-touch than throwing money at something on digital. But those relationships are so much deeper and more meaningful to the audience. So we decided to decrease our spend on Google and Meta specifically, and as a result, we’ve actually seen double-digit return on ad spend (ROAS) and ROI on the digital investments we kept.
When I’m judging what’s healthy, a ratio of about seven times or more is good, in our opinion. But I wouldn’t tell every brand to go do events or partnerships. It really depends on the product and how you connect with your customer. For us, it makes sense, because we crush events. We do a great job, it brings a lot of people, and they’re excited to come into our spaces and interact with us. But not every brand has friendly founder faces or those kinds of assets. A consumer packaged goods or food and beverage brand probably wants to get into more distribution points instead. So it completely depends on what the product is, what price you’re at, and where your customers are living their lives.
On generating close to half their growth through word of mouth:
For us, it’s closer to 50% at this point, and it comes from having visibility in a lot of places at once. Part of it is people seeing our bags on their coworkers, seeing them in transit, seeing them on people at the gym, seeing them on people on the street. Part of it is brand recognition.
And part of it is tuning into your favorite podcast and hearing about us, or reading about us on your favorite best-products list, or clicking through from a content creator you follow. It’s about being relevant wherever you’re living your life. You have to get in front of the customer where they are.
On sponsoring League One Volleyball to reach an audience no bag brand was chasing:
In March we announced our sponsorship of LOVB, League One Volleyball. Not a lot of people know about it yet, but people who follow volleyball do, and it’s up and coming. Volleyball is the fastest-growing sport for girls that age, which is incredible. There are clubs all across the US, especially in the South and the Midwest.
Getting in front of those audiences lets us say, “We support women’s sports, and this volleyball community specifically, and here’s how we’re showing up.” We’re doing fit checks, we’re doing tunnel walks, all of it. That goes a long way. It’s a more unconventional form of word of mouth, the kind that didn’t really exist five or 10 years ago, or at least wasn’t leaned into by brands like us. But you have to get in front of the customer where they’re living their life.
On the organic NFL relationship that started with the Steelers’ rookies:
LOVB is our only official sponsorship, but NFL players have been using our bags for a long time, especially the Landon Carryall in the large size, as their walkout bags. At one point the Steelers reached out and said, “We love these bags, we’d love to get some for our rookies.”
We asked if they could create some content while handing them out, and they said, “Better yet, why don’t you come deliver the bags, say a few words, and create your own content?” That’s really how it started. Then a bunch of NFL teams reached out wanting us to come do entrepreneurship talks. We’ve built all different kinds of relationships with teams, and it’s been completely organic. It’s not official yet, but we hope to do more.
On training retail floor teams to retell the founder story:
When we moved into wholesale, I personally went and trained a lot of the teams selling our products across our retailers. It takes time, but it’s one of the biggest word-of-mouth channels we have. Those salespeople are retelling the founder story firsthand, and the number of people who’ve heard that story and passed it on is exponential.
That’s also why I never wanted to expand too fast. Instead of going into 50 doors with a retailer, we’d start with 20 that we felt we could crush, make sure we had the inventory, and make sure we could train the teams properly. If you expand way too quickly, how can you train everyone? You lose part of the magic of that scale.
One of our employees is a perfect example. She used to work at Nordstrom, she was someone I’d trained, and she became a best seller of the brand. Eventually she said, “I want to work for this company,” and applied for a customer experience job with us. She does a lot more than CX now, but she was one of those really important nodes of word of mouth.
Hear Melissa’s full conversation on Shopify Masters for more on surveying 1,000 people before making a single bag, why she never raised venture capital, and how the Indi Diaper Backpack became the Rolls-Royce of baby bags.
