Off the Charts

About two months ago, we decided to provide our customers with the actual specifications for our dresses. When you go to the site you’ll see that upon designing a dress, the specifications for bust, waist, hips, and length are displayed. We feel really good about this change, particularly after looking into the history of sizing charts. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the “size chart” came about as a result of The Civil War (bet they didn’t teach you that in American History) which necessitated the mass production of uniforms. Standardized women’s sizes didn’t come around until the 1920’s and since that time these “standards” have been subject to everything from the arbitrary whims of different manufacturers to the fact that women are becoming heavier leading retailers to sell bigger clothes labeled with smaller size numbers.

By giving the precise measurements of the dresses, we think we’re helping our customers select the best possible dress. Why standardize when you can be specific, right? One of the nice advantages of selling online is being able to provide this kind of information. While we still provide a sizing chart for reference purposes, we do ask our customers to order based on the dress’s actual specs.

Two Thumbs Up for Personalized Fashion!

It’s a great feeling when someone finds us and is impressed not only with our dresses and website, but our concept of personalized fashion as well. Both The Budget Fashionista and Dahlia's Day - The Wedding Talk Blog checked us out and really liked what they saw. We hope those positive blog posts keep coming!

What's With the Blog?

Feeling inspired by the beautiful Sunday morning sunshine, I hereby commence the official Coco Myles Blog!

The goal here is to provide a two-way forum where we can openly communicate with our customers (and prospective customers too). We’ve been impressed by the amount of suggestions that people have provided us over the past six months. To date, these suggestions have resulted in our maternity wear, junior bridesmaid dress, and soon-to-be-offered short- and long-sleeved tops. We hope this blog further frees up the collective wisdom of our audience and provides us with excellent ideas and suggestions for years to come.

We’ll freely post all your comments here – both good and bad. There’s no need to sign-in or create a user name. We will, however, remove any comments that we think are irrelevant or inordinately profane. We know our concept of having our customers design their own dresses on the Internet is new-fangled and we hope that the open forum that this blog represents will help foster trust for both our concept and company.

I’ve just recently read Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. While reading, I became really excited about the possibilities of creating a blog for Coco Myles. To quote the book:

Businesses need to join the conversations [with their customers via blogging] because they build trust. Most companies know the value in that. Blogs also humanize companies, or at least the people who work inside of them. Your blog lets your potential customers see who the person is on the other side of the desk before they engage you in potential business. The more you talk with someone, the better you understand who he or she is, and you are more prone to conduct transactions with people you know well enough to trust.

We know that for some, buying a dress online requires a certain amount of trust in the vendor. As Scoble and Israel state, we hope this blog provides you with an opportunity to know us better and that this knowledge will result in your trust as well.