Torrid Holdings Inc. (Torrid) operates as a direct-to-consumer brand of apparel, intimates and accessories for curvy women in North America.
The company’s primary focus is on providing fashionable, comfortable, and affordable options that meet the unique needs of its customers. The company’s extensive collection features merchandise, including tops, bottoms, denim, dresses, intimates, activewear, footwear, and accessories. Its products are exclusive to the company, and each product is meticulou...
Torrid Holdings Inc. (Torrid) operates as a direct-to-consumer brand of apparel, intimates and accessories for curvy women in North America.
The company’s primary focus is on providing fashionable, comfortable, and affordable options that meet the unique needs of its customers. The company’s extensive collection features merchandise, including tops, bottoms, denim, dresses, intimates, activewear, footwear, and accessories. Its products are exclusive to the company, and each product is meticulously crafted to cater to the needs of the curvy woman, empowering her to love the way she looks and feels. The company’s collections are artfully curated to suit all aspects of its customers’ lives, including casual weekends, work, dressy and special occasions. The company strives to be everything its customer needs in her closet, consistently delivering products that make her feel confident and stylish.
The Torrid Approach
The company has developed a proprietary approach to designing stylish, commercially relevant apparel and intimates that resonates with a diverse range of customers and appeals broadly to their sense of style. The company’s loyal customer base provides it with valuable insights that enables the company to refine its products and experience. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle that solidifies the company’s leadership in the plus- and mid-size apparel markets.
The company’s diverse assortment caters to the curvy woman's unique needs, offering:
A tailored fit she rarely has access to that meets all of her individual style aspirations;
A rigorous design process where every single article of clothing is fitted on a real woman, and not simply ‘grading up’ non-plus-size apparel;
A proprietary sizing process constantly updated through continuous customer feedback and data, until the company fits to perfection; and
An expanded brand that provides a fusion of trendy and on-point style with exceptional tailoring that satisfies the unique needs of the curvy woman.
Product Offering
The company offers a comprehensive product line that inspires its customers with new and exciting options for her entire closet. The company’s assortment spans tops, bottoms, denim, dresses, intimates, activewear, footwear and accessories. Combined with an unparalleled fit, the company’s products make it a destination for the company’s customers to shop for every occasion, from casual to dressy, and everything in between.
The company also brings her offerings built on a foundation of timeless year-round styles and colors (‘Basics’) that are constantly replenished. The company’s core offerings include products that are on-trend interpretations of its Basics merchandise (‘Core’) that it updates with new fabrics, prints, embellishments or features. For example, the Harper Blouse represents a Basics item with Core iterations that feature different lengths and sleeve designs. The company’s trend-driven items incorporate fresh styles available in the broader market to excite and engage its customer but are bought narrowly and reordered as demand dictates to minimize inventory risk.
The company’s focus on bottoms and intimates, both attractive growth categories where technical expertise is critical, drives customer loyalty and serves as an entry point to the Torrid brand. The company’s intimates’ line is designed to inspire confidence and allows its customer to move in effortless comfort throughout her day while feeling confident and sexy. The company offers a full range of bra frames, sizes and solutions, continually testing new innovations. Over the course of approximately two decades, Torrid has developed the requisite design and engineering expertise for the highly technical bra category through a rigorous in-house research and development process.
Product Design and Development
The company is dedicated to creating youthful, sexy and commercially relevant products that cater specifically to the woman in its size range. The company’s in-house design, development and merchandising teams work tirelessly to bring its vision to life under the company’s portfolio of brands, including Torrid, Torrid Curve, CURV, and Lovesick. The company’s products are exclusive to it and provide a consistent quality and fit.
The company’s product development is led by a team of highly skilled designers, artists and product engineers. The company’s core competency is its differentiated, market-leading fit that the company achieves through the following strategies:
Laser focus on fit across the company’s entire organization;
Differentiated technical fit created through building and continuously refining a database of fit specifications derived from testing, measuring and cataloging garments on the company’s fit models;
Proprietary fabrics specifically engineered to enhance the fit;
Fit all the company’s products on fit models and its staff, not mannequins; and
The company often tests new fabrics, new silhouettes and new product lines on its staff and community of loyal customers before launch.
Additionally, the company employs a data-driven approach to design and product development, proactively and quickly incorporating sales and operational performance information alongside customer feedback from thousands of product reviews, and its ongoing dialogue with customers through social media and customer surveys.
Merchandise Planning
The company’s strategy is built around a consistent and stable base of core products that provide its customer with year-round style. At the same time, the company introduces new lines of merchandise approximately 16 times per year, thus providing a consistent flow of fresh merchandise to keep its customer engaged, encourage repeat business and attract new customers.
The company regularly uses the depth and breadth of its data to assess sales, market trends and new product development to inform purchasing decisions. As a result, the company has the flexibility to react quickly to product performance, make in-season inventory purchasing adjustments where possible and to respond to the latest sales trends by ordering or re-ordering as appropriate. Further, the company utilizes a read-and-react testing approach, with small purchase quantities, to introduce its new product offering, minimizing fashion risk. This strategy also allows the company to mitigate inventory risk, particularly for new products or styles, while simultaneously providing its customers access to fashion.
Customers
The company’s typical customer is an employed, youthful woman between the ages of approximately 30 and 44 years old with above-average annual household income, and wears sizes 10 to 30 (average of size 18). Approximately half of the company’s customers are under 40 years old, and the ethnic composition of its customer base largely parallels that of the U.S. population.
Torrid Loyalty and Torrid Credit Card Programs
The company drives customer loyalty and engagement through its three-tier loyalty program, Torrid Rewards. Torrid Insider members are those who spend up to $499 annually, while members of Torrid Loyalist spend $500+ annually and Torrid VIP spend $1,000+ annually. The company inspires loyalty by continuously engaging with its loyalty members through birthday gifts, social media, dedicated customer service lines and exclusive events. Members of the top two tiers of the company’s loyalty program, Torrid VIP and Loyalist, are its most loyal customers who purchase from the company more often and spend significantly more than the average customer, accounting for an outsized share of net sales.
Additionally, the company provides its customers with access to the company’s Torrid Credit Card Program through which customers receive points, discounts and other perks. Torrid Credit Card holders are among the company’s most loyal and valuable customers. The company’s credit card program encourages customer loyalty, serves as a valuable source for data and allows it to further invest in marketing efforts while limiting exposure to incremental credit risk as the company’s bank partner substantially manages all administrative processes, including underwriting, and bears a portion of the credit balance risk.
Torrid Rewards and the company’s Torrid Credit Card program provides it with a strong ability to attribute sales and behavioral data to individual customers, which informs the company’s decision-making process.
Unified Commerce Platform
Through the company’s unified commerce platform, which includes its e-Commerce and retail stores, the company delivers a seamless brand experience to its customers wherever and whenever she chooses to shop. The company is agnostic to the channel where its customers choose to shop, as it is highly profitable across both e-Commerce and store channels. The company delivers a consistent brand message by coordinating its strategies across channels, which influences the company’s customers’ buying decisions. This customer-centric strategy enhances customer acquisition, retention and customer lifetime value. The company’s e-Commerce and store channels complement and drive traffic to one another, creating more loyal omni-channel customers.
e-Commerce
The company’s e-Commerce channel is central to its unified commerce platform. The company’s online platform provides customers with a highly engaging shopping experience featuring access to its full product assortment, an aesthetically rich and easily navigable website, and seamless ordering and fulfillment. Additionally, the company successfully uses its e-Commerce platform to expand the company’s selection of styles, colors and merchandise meaningfully beyond what is available in its stores, making the online shopping experience highly engaging and additive to the company’s in-store experience. The company’s website and mobile app feature updates on new collections, guidance on how to wear and put together outfits and a selection of web-only exclusives, all of which facilitate customer engagement and interaction.
Majority of the company’s e-Commerce orders, and a material portion of all orders are placed directly from her phone. The functionality and features of the company’s mobile app enables it to deliver enhanced personalization such as allowing her to find her recommended size while suggesting complementary items to expedite purchase decisions and increase frequency and order size.
Stores
The company’s stores are highly valuable strategic assets that remain core to its strategy and continue to play one of the most important roles in the company’s customer acquisition strategy. A majority of the company’s new customer relationships begin in its stores. The company’s stores enhance brand awareness, drive traffic to its e-Commerce platform and encourage customers to shop across multiple channels of the company’s unified commerce platform. The company provides a sophisticated presentation of products that has an emphasis on outfits, which presents creative styling ideas to its customer and encourages incremental spend. The company’s stores include large, comfortable fitting rooms with features, such as cooling fans, that are specifically suited for its customers' needs. Additionally, the company’s stores offer customers the opportunity to connect with a like-minded community, through exclusive in-store events and interactions with its store associates, who act as brand ambassadors and are often customers themselves.
The company operated various stores in the U.S., Puerto Rico and Canada. The company’s stores are located primarily in premium malls, shopping plazas, lifestyle centers and outlet locations. The company’s stores are designed to deliver an immersive fit discovery experience and serve as desirable customer destinations. As a result, they exhibit resilience to trends in traffic volatility and perform consistently across all formats. The company’s average store size is approximately 3,100 square feet.
Data Analytics
The company has a significant volume of customer and transaction data, collected from a variety of sources, including e-Commerce and in-store interactions, its loyalty program, social media and customer surveys. For example, the company has the ability to track page views, search history, clicks, linger time and purchase route for visitors to its e-Commerce platform. The company uses its data to drive decision making across the organization. This customer data is largely based on information provided by customers who have opted-in to be part of the company’s loyalty program. The company’s extensive database contains valuable customer information that helps it better market to the company’s customers.
The company has significant visibility into its customers' transaction behavior, including purchases made across the company’s channels. The company uses its customer database to acquire, develop and retain customers. The company leverages this customer database to drive data analysis and insights that it uses in managing the company’s business. For example, to grow the penetration of intimates’ sales, the company is able to offer a promotion targeted at customers who have bought its apparel but not the company’s intimates, which will encourage shopping across categories.
Marketing and Advertising
The company’s marketing collateral intentionally represents the diversity of its customer base, including curvy women of all sizes from 10 to 30, and communicates the confidence and sexiness the company’s product is intended to deliver.
The company uses a variety of marketing and advertising mediums to increase brand awareness, acquire new customers, and drive repeat purchases across its channels. These programs include the company’s online marketing, such as paid search and social media, product listing ads and retargeting, combined with direct mail, store marketing and public relations initiatives. Further, the company has introduced a multiple brand strategy, including niche concepts like Festi, Nightfall and Retro Chic with more coming in 2025. This will enables the company to reach new customers and increase its brand awareness. The company strengthens the connection with its most engaged customers through special events, like Casting Call, which feature plus- and mid-size models, celebrities, bloggers and other influencers. The company uses its customer database to strategically optimize the value of the company’s marketing investments across its customer base and channels. This enables the company to efficiently acquire new customers, effectively market to repeat customers and reactivate lapsed customers.
The company’s investments in digital and physical marketing drive customer acquisition and engagement across all its channels. The company coordinates the introduction of its collections across the company’s e-Commerce platform and stores, allowing a customer to experience a consistent brand message wherever and whenever she chooses to shop. The company has a large and growing following on its social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok. The company uses these channels to communicate with its customers, disseminate the company’s outbound marketing messages and collect feedback about their lifestyles and product preferences.
Intellectual Property
Trademarks that are important in identifying and distinguishing the company’s products and services include but are not limited to, Torrid, Torrid Curve, CURV and Lovesick. The company also owns domain names, including its website, www.torrid.com.
History
Torrid Holdings Inc., a Delaware corporation, was founded in 2019. The company was incorporated in 2019.
