- Challenge: If you live in the US, finding a bridal cheongsam is frustratingly difficult.
- Solution: East Meets Dress: a modern cheongsam brand for Asian-Americans. They match brides with their ideal dress style using a beautifully illustrated quiz.
- Result: Thousands of brides across the states and beyond are getting married in the cheongsam of their dreams.
In 2018, Jennifer Qiao was planning her wedding, with her maid of honor, Vivian Chan. To honor her Chinese-American heritage, she wanted to wear a cheongsam. That is, a beautiful bridal garment, traditionally red silk with brocade details, figure-hugging but comfortable enough to kneel in for a tea ceremony, a Chinese wedding tradition.
She started looking around her California neighborhood for an elegant and contemporary cheongsam. The pickings were slim. Jenn visited small tailors, but most of their designs were old-fashioned. She also trawled endless websites, but had no way of knowing if the photos of their dresses were accurate, or good quality.
After quite an odyssey, Jenn found the cheongsam, and had a beautiful wedding. But she and Vivian realized: this had to be a common problem. The US wedding dress industry is enormous, and millions of Americans have Chinese or Vietnamese heritage. Stylish bridal cheongsams shouldn’t be so hard to find.
After the confetti settled, the two friends set out to rectify that. They founded East Meets Dress: "the first modern cheongsam brand for Asian-Americans."
East meets best dressed
East Meets Dress launched with a single cheongsam style. But it flew off the virtual rail. The business expanded quickly, and they now offer over fifty.
Jenn wanted a radically different customer experience than the online trawling she’d been through. How could she make online shopping feel less impersonal and overwhelming, whilst still giving brides plenty of options? She decided to make a style quiz with Typeform.
Six questions to discover your dream Cheongsam
Jenn’s quiz, Discover Your Dream Cheongsam, is front and center on the East Meets Dress landing page. It asks customers six multiple choice questions about what they’re looking for.
This isn’t something you shop for every day. So, many brides need an overview of what’s out there. The quiz helps them understand which design factors to consider. Do they want a dress in lucky red, or a white version, as per western traditions? What kind of sleeves do they envisage? Will the fabric be brocade, lace or silk?
At the end of the typeform, respondents are emailed three dresses that match their answers. From the customer’s perspective, it’s virtually effortless: a handful of questions, then a curated selection of potential winners.
“Shoppers feel they’re getting a personalized experience when going through our website. It feels like they're talking to a stylist.”
From Jenn’s perspective, this "personalized" service is completely hands-off — after the initial setup of the typeform. When making the quiz, she used scoring to assign a number to each multiple choice answer. Every different answer combination leads to a different score, and therefore, a different selection of cheongsams.
At the end of the quiz, customers get personalized recommendations — and the feeling of having been understood.
“Brides will often tell us, ‘thank you, this helped slim down my options and gave me a good starting point for my browsing’. ”
The typeform is integrated with the email marketing tool, Klaviyo. Klaviyo automatically stores the responses to this typeform in a database, including customers' email addresses.
Email marketing that knows when to leave you alone
Since respondent’s answers are stored in Klaviyo, targeted remarketing is easy. For instance, Jenn’s typeform asks brides for the date of their wedding. If the big day is in a few years' time, then marketing emails will be seriously spaced out. If someone is eloping next month, then they'll get a faster pace of nudging. The quiz is East Meets Dress' main lead generation tactic, and crucial to growing the business. Some visitors might just idly fall into taking it. But once they have, they can be nurtured into enthusiastic customers.
Another typeform, for good measure
East Meets Dress is a startup, so they try to squeeze the maximum value out of every tool they use. Naturally, Typeform is integrated to other workflows on their site beyond their trademark quiz.
The vast majority of East Meet Dress' cheongsams are altered to fit the wearer perfectly. Therefore, Jenn needed to find a way to record brides' measurements and pass them on to couturiers in China.
To smooth the process, she created another typeform about measurements, and integrated it with the database software, Coda. Customers answer the typeform, and their measurements are automatically sent to Coda, along with the Shopify ID of their order. Her couturiers also have access to the database, and can see it being updated in real time.
This solves a lot of back and forth emailing across time zones. It also reduces the room for human error, and makes it less likely that any bride will receive the wrong size cheongsam. Win-win!
And they lived happily ever after
Most reviews on East Meets Dress' site are glowing. Needless to say, the founders have successfully reversed Jenn’s own frustrating shopping experience.
Typeform automations allow them to offer a white-glove service without a big team. It's wonderful, because Jenn and Vivian need all of the operational streamlining they can get! Their business is booming, and attracts customers from all over the world. What's more, people are increasingly buying East Meets Dress cheongsams for other occasions, especially high school proms.
“It's an amazing experience to be part of. It's wonderful to see kids these days being proud to show their culture.”
For Jenn, this cuts right to the heart of East Meets Dress’ mission. To empower women to dress as their whole selves in life’s biggest moments — in an outfit that shows pride in their eastern cultures while combining western elements of their style too. What could be chicer than that?