Inclusive fashion brand — channel operating system for live commerce

An emerging Italian curvy clothing brand, a community built through TikTok live sessions — a high-emotional-intensity and low-infrastructure channel — and the need to transform an artisanal in-flight sales system into a replicable operating system.

Sector: Clothing · curvy segment · live commerce
Geography: Italy, national distribution
Mandate type: Six-month · 2025
Practice: Capital & Performance

The context

The brand is one of those Italian cases that tells well the paradigm shift in fashion retail of the last three years: a founder with a loyal community built through TikTok live sessions, capable of selling dozens of pieces in a single sixty-minute live, but with a channel infrastructure behind that resembled more a sophisticated market stall than an e-commerce company.

The problems were cumulative. The website existed but was outdated and inconsistent with the founder's aesthetic. TikTok lives generated significant sales volume, but post-live management was chaotic: orders lost in DMs, payments collected with multiple unreconciled methods, returns managed case-by-case, acquired customers who often did not return. Loyalty lay in the founder's identity, not in the brand machine — a precious but fragile asset.

Beneath, a queue of poorly coordinated external suppliers: an agency for graphics, a freelancer for some sporadic advertising campaigns, a developer for small interventions on the website, an e-commerce platform managed semi-manually. The founder, beyond being the voice of the brand and the principal testimonial, had to direct all these parties — with the cost in time one can imagine.

The mandate

The six-month mandate had a structural objective: to transform an artisanal but effective sales system into a replicable operating system, capable of sustaining the growth of the brand without the founder having to continue to be the bottleneck of every operational decision.

The approach

Four parallel workstreams, conducted over six months.

Stream one — website rebuild. Complete rewrite of the platform on a stack coherent with anticipated traffic volume, mobile checkout flow optimisation, integration with payment and inventory systems. The website was no longer to be a passive showcase, but the conversion engine of the TikTok lives.

Stream two — structured advertising. Opening of recurring campaigns on Meta and TikTok Ads, built to amplify the best-performing lives and bring new qualified audience to the brand. Campaign logic was thought in symbiosis with the calendar of lives, not as an isolated parallel channel.

Stream three — CRM and loyalty. Construction of a customer relationship management system integrated with the website and with WhatsApp, with automated post-purchase sequences, frictionless returns handling, and personalised notifications for new collection launches. The customer acquired in lives could now return in subsequent months without depending on a new live to be reactivated.

Stream four — live optimisation. Operational support to TikTok lives: scripting, real-time link management, integration between what is shown live and the active product pages on the website, monitoring of conversion minute by minute to learn what works best for that community.

Live commerce is not a channel intuition. It is an operating system — and like any operating system, it works if the infrastructure beneath holds up at the moment of peak.

The output

180% growth in sales volume over the six months of the engagement, sustained by an operating system that allowed the brand to serve this new volume without multiplying the founder's effort.
50% reduction in customer acquisition cost on advertising campaigns, obtained through the realignment of live content, advertising creative, and landing pages.
A structured CRM system integrated with TikTok, website and WhatsApp, today automatically managing the lifecycle of the acquired customer.
60% increase in repurchase frequency in the six months following first order, produced by the activation of loyalty sequences.
An operational reconciliation of orders, payments, returns in a single governed flow — the pre-mandate chaos became a replicable process.

The general lesson. Emerging Italian live commerce lives a typical contradiction: the founder has built a real community asset, but often without the infrastructure to scale it without burning themselves. Capital & Performance intervenes at this junction: leaving the founder the voice and the identity, building around them the operating system that allows the brand to grow without depending daily on their personal presence.