Adore Me's Camille Kress on accompanying a woman's journey through life with satellite brands

With a pandemic driving its six brick-and-mortar stores to little use, lingerie company Adore Me has relied on a try-at-home model.

"We basically send you a bunch of items, you decide what you keep, and you only pay for what you keep," Adore Me vp of growth Camille Kress said on the Modern Retail Podcast.

At the height of the pandemic, half of the brand's new customers were shopping this way. "The key metric for this model is the 'keep rate.' You definitely want people to keep as much as possible, otherwise you're basically paying for shipping back and forth, which is really not the best use of your time or your money," Kress said.

The company also seizes the mail-in relationship as a chance to send prospective customers products from other categories like swimwear and sleepwear ("anything that you could basically find right now in our assortment, which is not only intimates," Kress said).

This direct connection the company has long fostered with customers has helped Adore Me launch brands beyond lingerie, like Joyja, a line of period-proof underwear. "We want to accompany women through all the different stages of their life," Kress said. "So we know that we're going to need something for their first period, then for their pregnancy, for menopause, and anything that comes in between."

Looking at all of these stages, the company tries to find the next untapped market on which it can capitalize. "We're thinking that there's an appetite somewhere," Kress said.