Richer Poorer CEO Iva Pawling on the company's abrupt shift to DTC: 'We had to rebuild and restructure overnight'

In a three-week period shortly after the pandemic outbreak, Richer Poorer sold three times as many sweatpants than in all of 2019.

That was a small part of an overall trend for the basics clothing brand: The first five months of 2020 have greatly boosted online sales, transforming it into an e-commerce business first and foremost.

"We essentially had to kind of rebuild and restructure our team overnight to now go, 'OK, we're a DTC brand,'" the company's CEO Iva Pawling said on the Glossy Podcast.

Richer Poorer had already been planning to gradually shift to a focus on e-commerce over wholesale. The plan was to grow direct sales to 40% of revenue in 2020 and reach parity next year on the way to a primarily DTC model. Now, Pawling estimates e-commerce is set to make up roughly 75% of the company's bottom line this year.

Pawling said that a pivot in branding, already underway before the pandemic struck, has helped the company pitch its products as right for the moment. "We very much had rebranded under this belief that what we're here to do is deliver confidence and comfort -- that your comfortable clothes don't have to be these items that are just stay-at-home because they look sloppy and you don't feel comfortable going outside in them."

In a stroke of luck, the company's fall 2020 collection -- planned as far back as last November -- conceptualized around "being the most comfortable at home," Pawling said.

And because it's now seeing a much higher return on digital advertising, it's increased spending on that front. "We had suddenly way more eyeballs on us and traffic coming to us, which helps. And then on the other side, a lot of people that we were competing against from an ads perspective, digitally, had completely just turned their ad spend off when this happened. So we really were able to fast forward quite a bit of growth based on those things."

As for retail, Pawling said that a previous plan to open a brick-and-mortar store in late 2020 is now completely off the table. The earliest the company will tackle physical retail is 2022, she said.

Pawling is pretty used to tumult. She co-founded Richer Poorer in 2010 -- as a purveyor of midrange socks for men, exclusively -- before she and her co-founder Tim Morse sold it to Shoes.com in 2015. But their new owner's business model wasn't as sound as they had expected. "The whole thing just imploded," Pawling said. She and Morse had to convince two board members to buy the business out. Weeks later, Shoes.com filed for bankruptcy.

Richer Poorer's ownership has since returned to Pawling and Morse, who have turned it into a clothing line that caters mostly to women. As for the socks? "They make up about 8% of the business at this point," Pawling said.