Launched in May 2020, Ryan Muir Vintage (RMV) was an online clothing retailer specialising in vintage and retro clothing, unsurprisingly, the venture of One Route founder, me. Existing during the initial COVID lockdown, industry competition was rife and I found myself struggling to differentiate RMV from fellow vintage/retro Depop retailers. So, to extend the brand’s reach, I took RMV to Instagram. However, this decision harboured its own difficulties, with industry competition being similarly fierce on the social media platform.

With RMV competing for attention on two platforms now, I couldn’t divert enough attention to regular business operations, and things started to slip. Despite social numbers climbing, stock was moving slower and my passion for the business was fading. So, in a last ditch attempt to revive the business, I bought ad-space on a fashion-themed Instagram page, with hopes to direct the community his way and give RMV the social media boost it needed to foster natural growth henceforth.

What happened? Growth… until the post reached its time limit and was deleted.

But that sparked an idea —instead of paying others to promote my business, I can promote it myself. So, I created One Route Fashion (ORF), a fashion-themed Instagram page centred around vintage/retro clothing and streetwear. By pulling inspiration from popular short-form content in the Instagram fashion space, I was able to build a recognisable brand with over 15,000 followers in just a few months. With this success, I regularly promoted RMV, building the business’ Instagram following to over 4,000 and Depop following to over 52,000. By subtly implementing conversion tactics and call-to-actions within his RMV and ORF content, the increased growth of RMV was reflected in the business’ profits as marketing expenses decreased and sales increased.

So, I then had two streams of income and hadn’t changed his workload. Of course, additional benefits included brand deals with companies like ASOS and BooHooMAN. But, at the end of the day, this experience taught me the most valuable lesson I’ve brought to One Route —great marketing can show itself in many different ways, so always think outside-of-the-box.