Carve Designs is a beach lifestyle brand committed to making clothes for women. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Carve Designs co-founder and CEO Thayer Sylvester and co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Jennifer Hinton to learn more about the company.
Thayer Sylvester’s Background
What is Thayer Sylvester’s background? Sylvester said:
“I started my career within a large consumer product company at Procter and Gamble. I found it enormously frustrating that you could not influence change. Even when you identified something inefficient or flat-out not working, changing anything was unbelievably difficult. That drove me crazy. From then on, I always wanted to work on my own, because then as soon as you identify something’s wrong you can fix it. This inspired me and led me to co-found Carve Designs with my co-founder Jennifer Hinton in 2003.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Sylvester explained:
“For the fall season, our core products are these incredible recycled nylon sweaters. They feel like baby blankets but look like an elevated sweater. A popular one is the Woodward Sweater. It’s easy to throw on with rib-detailed sleeves, tall rib hem, and side slits.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Sylvester affirmed:
“We really approach our design with the customer in mind. We think ‘How can we make your experience easier and make shopping less stressful?’ Our customers aren’t always so excited to go shopping, but sometimes they find it difficult. With this in mind, we’re trying to think about how we make her enjoy this experience, whether it’s on the user interface on the website, the simplicity of the photography, or choosing fabrics to make sure they’re soft, or silhouettes to make sure they’re easy to wear.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Sylvester shared:
“When I was on the surf trip with my co-founder Jennifer Hinton, we lounged in a hammock waiting for the waves to roll back in and lamented how hard it was to find boardshorts that could keep up with us – real women with real bodies and a real passion for adventure. This led us to Carve Designs. While we started as a surf apparel company selling rash guards and boardshorts in 2003, we have grown into a complete beach lifestyle brand.”
Responsibilities At The Company
What are Sylvester’s responsibilities at the company? Sylvester emphasized:
“I got to make sure we stay in business, essentially trying to balance out and thinking about the different functional areas of the business. I also have to make sure that I’m spending time looking at both the short-term performance and then thinking strategically about the direction that we want the business to go in. I think the critical thing here is that when people realize that they’ve made mistakes we instantly go into problem-solving mode. We work towards how to correct for that mistake, not worrying so much about how it happened, but more so how to prevent it from happening again.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Sylvester reflected:
“My favorite experience is having a work partner with my co-founder Jennifer Hinton. As partners for 22 years now, we’ve been able to navigate the challenges of growing a business and figure out how to work well together. We push each other to be the best contributors to the organization that we can be and still maintain a great friendship.”
Challenges Faced
Have there been any industry challenges in your line of work recently? Sylvester acknowledged:
“Since COVID-19, many brands in the apparel and swimwear space misread the demand during the pandemic and started to overinvest in growth and inventory. We ended up in an over-inventory position as an industry. To correct that position, there’s been an enormous amount of discounting, which erodes the value of all of our brands collectively and sends incorrect messaging to our customer base around the value of the product. It confuses customers around the value proposition, so trying to navigate through that highly promotional competitive behavior and still hit your revenue targets is enormously challenging as we believe in the value of the product. There might be competitors that have a lot more inventory that they’re trying to sell for less than face value.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market size is the company pursuing? Sylvester assessed:
“It’s about 40 billion for the swimwear and apparel market.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Hinton noted:
“In the beginning, we had a website with these digital versions of our lookbooks of ocean pictures and pictures of our clothes, but you couldn’t shop through it since we were wholesale. It’s really funny to me that’s kind of where we started. We were late to the online commerce game because we were so immersed in the wholesale world. When we first launched our website, it was really beautiful but clunky. Ever since social media started, we’ve been just updating technologically year by year, depending on what the company needs but we had to scramble to catch up. We’re constantly updating and adding to our site or make it better, smoother, and faster. The biggest recent technological update for Carve Designs would be the launch of our swim and sweater quiz as it uses AI. It feels easier now to keep up with the times versus a decade ago.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Hinton cited:
“Around 2016 or 2017, we launched a catalog and started our direct-to-consumer business and that was a pivotal moment for us because it gave us an ability to capture more people and tell our story. Before then, a customer’s only touch point prior was seeing us in outdoor stores and we’re so much more than that. Then another great milestone would be launching our ‘Women x Good’ sustainability initiative.”
“We’ve always been conscious and had sustainability practices, but telling that story, especially through the movie that we made, was a pivotal moment for us. It put us on the map as far as a sustainability footprint goes, leaning into the stories that resonated with us the most like the fact that we are a women-led businesses. It was such an amazing moment to help these four women tell their stories. I loved that moment for us and was really proud. I feel like we climbed over this mountain of who we are in the world of sustainable clothing.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Hinton about customer success stories, she highlighted:
“Almost every season will receive a note or a letter from a customer saying how thankful they are that we feature very athletic, strong, real, bodied women. They love that their daughters see this out in the world, in our catalog, and on our website because they want their daughters to be healthy women have a good relationship with their bodies, and understand that they come in all different shapes and sizes. As a woman who grew up not a size two, it was a struggle for me that we weren’t allowed to be anything but that. At Carve Designs, we are allowing everyone to embrace their body type and be who they are because everyone’s beautiful. I love getting those letters because if you could just help one person love their body in the bathing suit or anything that they’re wearing, that’s such a success. Confident women are a force to be reckoned with. Every woman should feel beautiful and confident, regardless of body type.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Hinton concluded:
“One of the biggest goals that we’ve set in front of us is to become more circular where we take back Carve Designs clothing or any clothing and be able to upcycle or downcycle it into other products. We also want to be able to recycle swimsuits, which has proven to be really, really difficult to figure out how to do. I don’t think anyone has a successful model yet, but that’s one of our goals. Hopefully, we’ll be able to start implementing them in the next year to 5 years.”
