Building an intimate community for an intimate brand with Willo Marchais, Malucette
How championing a cause they care deeply about allowed this menstrual lingerie brand to build an engaged and intimate community
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Malucette is an e-commerce brand of menstrual lingerie, launched just a year ago. We had the wonderful opportunity to chat with Willo, their 24-year-old co-founder, about their community of customers and ambassadors, and learn from her how they practically grew it from zero to what it is today.
We’ve spoken earlier about how a brand’s community gets shaped from the personal experiences and ideas of the founders, and this couldn’t be more the case for Malucette.
The idea of the brand and product came from personal experience — when one day Willo told herself that she’d never wear a pad or tampon again in her life and decided to find menstrual panties, only to find those that weren’t the nicest looking or the most comfortable. That’s how the idea of Malucette came to be.
One week per month of menstruation is a lot, it’s basically a quarter of our time as women. Are there other women who think the same way and want a better alternative to pads and tampons?
So I did a market survey on my Instagram account, and realised that half of the women surveyed were indeed looking for menstrual lingerie, something sexier, more low-cut, colourful and modern. That’s a market that wants a product that doesn’t exist.
And so I called Robin, my best friend and now business partner, and told him about the subject. He’s a super curious person and he’s now super passionate about what we’re doing, and that’s how it all started.
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I had learnt that if I ever had an idea, I should sell the product first — just to see if there are people that will really buy it. And if they do, only then create the company around that. So that’s what I did, even before the website and the Instagram.
We started with pre-orders when the products didn’t even exist, with just prototypes to prove that we could build a product that worked. And in one month we had more than 400 pre-orders, even as a new business that no one knew of. That’s what validated our idea, and that’s when we launched the Instagram account.
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Building the community from scratch
We actually started building our community even before we formally launched the company. We launched our Instagram account and started posting photographs that we shot ourselves, and started posting stories too. It’s something I like doing a lot, creating content and building a community.
Obviously in the first days it’s not easy, when your only followers are your second account and your mom. But as time went by, as we launched our website, we started talking about our brand everywhere around us, we did several launches, that’s how we created excitement about the product.
And since we love doing it, we did a lot of shooting ourselves, which was quite interesting. I think that’s what made people come to us — they liked the photos, the products, and it spread through word of mouth a lot.
Nurturing an engaged community
I think we’re really lucky because since the subject around our product category is so strong, intimate and federative, the community surrounding our product tends to reflect that.
We co-create our new collections with our followers. We’ll put out questions like would they prefer printed or plain, ask them whether they prefer one shape to another, as well as open-ended questions like “what’s a comfortable bra for you?” and by doing that we have hundreds and hundreds of answers.
It feels like 13,000 followers aren’t that much, but we get a LOT of messages, answers and comments. Even on a daily basis, we receive dozens of photos from customers that photos of themselves with our products, which goes to show the level of proximity we keep with our community.
A casual style of communication
In our communication, we use a lot of “tutoiement” — in French, this is when you address someone casually rather than formally — and we use language of a friend-to-friend relationship. We use words that are familiar, close and intimate. We want our approach to be personal, and that’s why we sometimes even send voice messages directly to people.
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Working with Ambassadors
For several months now, we’ve been doing product gifting to people with fewer than 100k followers — and the approach we take is that we send them a product, and we give them no brief or specific requests. Our idea is that we want them to have the product for free, and then if they like it and feel good trying it, they can share it freely and be sincere about it. We can then give them a promo code for their community too.
Customers turned into ambassadors
A large part of our ambassadors were already customers, so they already bought the products by themselves, and they liked them as customers would. When this is the case, it’s great because we know that they are exactly the target. So then we offer them new models as free previews, and continue the relationship like that.
Besides them, there are a lot of other girls that don’t know Malucette yet — and for them we contact them directly. We select them based on the vibe that they give off, what we see on their feed and in their stories, what their life interests are, and so on.
Knowing that we are a brand that is super-inclusive, super colourful, very “pop” — we look for those things. And as soon as we find someone who reflects these values, we contact them directly.
What a successful collaboration looks like for Malucette
A successful collaboration is always when an ambassador is a true fan of the product.
We look for people that can speak honestly with their community. For example, one of our top ambassadors is Aurore — she made stories about us, and then I check and see that she actually ordered 9 thongs from our website. And she spoke so clearly to her community, sharing her experience of being on vacation for a week and being afraid to stain white hotel sheets, but thanks to Malucette thongs, they “saved her life”.
When ambassadors share their stories and experiences, and when that is super honest and sincere, and especially if they’re already a customer with a community that trusts them a lot, that’s what works best for us.
Content Strategy
We have a capsule collection coming out every month, so it means that every single month we shoot, create product sheets, create the Instagram feed — it costs a lot of money but also a lot of time in organisation.
But for last month’s collection, we sent out free products to girls, fans, customers, and in exchange we asked for some pictures — all of our communication, is then based on our community. We didn’t create the content, they did. I think this is a really cool and authentic way of doing things.
Whenever we post anything that was created by our community, we always make sure to tag the creator, and give information about their height and size worn, so that customers can make informed choices about what they buy.
We also use user-generated content as ads, and it works very very well.
We also internally make a lot of Reels, videos and stories every day — and we usually find inspiration on Pinterest.
What is good and bad content on Instagram?
For us, bad content is when there’s poor lighting, looks like it was done quickly, and published with a caption that doesn’t make any sense. Basically, brands posting because they feel like they have to post. It’s basically spam.
A good post, and good content, according to us, is when you put all bodies in front. At Malucette, we choose our models not for their bodies. We are tired of women thinking that their main quality is their physical features or their beauty. We like to go the other way round by choosing girls for their personalities and the stories that they have to tell.
Wrapping Up
Thanks a lot Willo for your sharing! What did you think of this issue? Let us know by hitting “reply”.