"'How hasn't anybody done this before?' That's when you know you're really onto something."

Swimwear and the power of an engaged Instagram community with Kitty and Vibe founder Cameron Armstrong. ??

Meet Cameron Armstrong - founder of the 7-figure swimwear brand Kitty and Vibe, who still sends her customers voice memos.

What makes Kitty and Vibe so special? For one, they’ve pioneered an updated sizing metric for bathing suits, which Forbes called "the future of swimwear." Or, as Kitty and Vibe says on their Insta, it's “bikinis based on your butt size.” ??

They’ve also been featured in spots like WWD, Real Simple, and Refinery 29. And attracted aligned celebrity investors like actress Zoe Colletti and professional tennis player Sloane Stephens .

Other things I love about the brand:

-Their motto: Kind is our vibe.

-They don’t use Photoshop - ever.

-Styles are made of sustainable materials.

-Their models are real Kitty and Vibe customers. (And if you want to be one, you can head over to their site to sign up).

Plus, Kitty co-creates styles with their Instagram community - which has led to a more predictable demand for certain cuts and colors. They've never had to “dump” a style - they’ve sold 100% of everything they’ve stocked. Pretty cool.

Cameron and I covered the above and a lot more in our convo - hope y’all like it. Some of my favorite bits are below.

?? For the full interview, listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

PS. Kitty and Vibe is giving all Content People listeners a 20% discount. Just use code CONTENTPEOPLE at check-out. (I have my eye on their PJs. Love this baby tee and matching bottoms.)

When you talk about bikinis based on butt size - I think that's ingenious. How have we not been doing that up till now? It seems so important and so simple. I remember when I first came up with the idea for this I was talking to a patent lawyer because the first thing I was trying to do was get a patent for the sizing metric. And he was talking about how the best, most ingenious ideas are the most obvious ones, but nobody's come up with them yet.

So when [people] feel just that clicking moment of: “Wow, how have I never thought about this before? How hasn't anybody done this before?” That's when you know you're really onto something.

What made you think: I want to revolutionize how we sell and size swimwear? I'll take you back to 2017 - the peak of direct-to-consumer.

And I was seeing so many incredible female founders pioneering new businesses - but a lot of those businesses were taking products that had been around forever and just creating a fresh spin on them.?

Think: Mattresses with Casper, suitcases with Away, and toothbrushes with Quip. It was just like these household items, but they needed a fresh perspective.

And I was looking at swim. I was just struck by the negativity that surrounded the category and the product. Like, the way that you react towards a swimsuit is very different than a pair of jeans or underwear. And I think it's because it's the least amount of clothing we wear in public.

It is the most that your body is on display and you just really feel that spotlight on you when you're wearing a swimsuit. And I just feel we deserve to feel beautiful and confident in that swimsuit. I think the industry was doing us a disservice and not giving us the best options.

So you could see that there was a big gap in the market - but how did you start to make Kitty and Vibe happen? Did you know anything about clothing manufacturing? I had no experience in designer fashion. I was working in marketing at the time I started my career at L'Oreal. I was working on Giorgio Armani and Yves Saint Laurent. So I had a really incredible experience early in my career on how to build a global footprint and also how to bring a product to market in a specific location. But when it came to designing a physical product, I did not have that experience.?

But I did have the curiosity. So starting with the focus groups - that was big. The first thing I did was to start holding focus groups in my apartment in New York. I invited women over for brunch on a Saturday and had like muffins and mimosas.

And I was like, can you just come talk to me about your swimsuit experience? And it was really great because I just had this think tank - and we started just complaining about what we didn't like - and that's when I started just intuitively measuring people.?

I started measuring all of my friends and I found that the inseam size was the biggest differentiator.?

So, I'd have two friends with identical hip sizes. So they would order the same swimsuit bottoms because they had the same size hips. But one person's inseam - the belly button through her legs to the top of the tailbone - would be like three inches longer than the other.?

So those two women who would order the same swimsuit, one would have way too much fabric because their inseam was shorter and thus the swimsuit would sag. And then the other person would never have enough fabric, and then you couldn't get enough coverage on the seat. I was like: This is crazy. We're three-dimensional figures, so we should be able to shop for something that caters to these different dimensions. So that's how the Kitty size was born, which is really incorporating that inseam size into every hip size.

And then, my next step was getting on the F train and taking it to the garment district and just walking around. I was like: Okay, I'm gonna go find some swimsuit fabric and just took the subway up and walked around and got, I remember getting a color card of a really standard swimsuit fabric from a place that I had Googled.

And I was so proud. I just went home with such a spring in my step because I was like, I did it. I made the first move, and now I have colors to choose from. Granted, I did not work with that supplier or anything, but it was just something tangible in my hands. From there, I looked for a manufacturing partner and found an incredible partner who is still the partner making all of our suits today.

What’s a day in the life like for you right now, five years later?? Oh, gosh, the truth is that no day looks exactly the same. The biggest difference from when I started five years ago versus now is I actually have people to talk to. The first year or two, it was just myself and our manufacturer and maybe one freelancer. But now I actually have people day in and day out working on Kitty and Vibe, which is so incredible.

And I'm also in our office space in Austin, surrounded by our product and our samples and our swatches, which is so exciting.?

A day in the life for me now is really working on operational things. I still manage the majority of our finances and the operations of getting the product from the factory to our warehouse, etc.?

And then, creative-wise, we have a couple of freelancers that help us with graphic design and paid media. So we have great partners, but no two days look the same. I have to be honest, as a solo founder and leading this company, sometimes I'm like: I would love a performance review, or I would love to know what my job description is! You wear so many different hats. But that's what keeps it interesting.?

You’ve built an incredible community there and I want to get into it. We have just over 70,000 followers on Instagram, and I think around 130,000 on TikTok. And they're so engaged, which I think is a real differentiator.

I think engagement is so much more important than the follower count these days. If you have 2,000 followers on Instagram, but they're actually engaged, that's so much more valuable than having a hundred thousand followers who aren't engaged. What matters is are the people who are following you care about what you're putting out. For us, I think our secret sauce was the dialogue that we created with our community. If you're engaging with Kitty and Vibe, it's not a one-way relationship. You're going to get something back - we are going to respond and it's probably going to be either myself or my marketing manager, Sarah. And we're not just going to send a heart emoji, we're going to send you something back, or I'm known to send voice memos back to customers.

You do a lot of co-creation with the Instagram community - where you ask them to vote on colors, styles, and prints. Do you notice stronger sales when there's been a lot of engagement and co-creation? Oh, that is really fascinating. So our repeat customer rate is super high - it’s 32%. But when we launch a new collection, it spikes to 45%. And that's because in those first two weeks, the people that voted on the product are the first to want to buy it.

And what's fascinating is we always see at least the first 30 days of a new collection perfectly matches the data that we got from the co-creation survey. So say, for example, we're launching a print in two different colorways and we asked which one they like more and it's a 70 / 30 split. We bought that in the inventory with a 70 / 30 split and the sales are identically 70 / 30 split - and it's only after we start opening it up to paid media and other channels that aren't our direct community that we might see those numbers shift.