How to Build a Brand That Doesn’t Need Discounts #609

Danielle Pearce, founder of Merry People, has avoided discounting for over a decade. In more than 12 years of building her premium gumboot brand, she hasn’t run a single sale. Not once.

By making pricing part of the brand, she removed hesitation. By attracting the right customers, she built loyalty instead of chasing volume. And by backing it all with a product that holds its own, she made full price feel justified, not risky.

In today's Playbook:

• How Merry People built a premium brand by never discounting in over 12 years
• Why removing promotions can actually increase trust and conversion
• How discounting shapes the type of customers your brand attracts
• Why the best brands break free from the promotional calendar
• And what it takes to build a product that can hold full price long-term

Connect with Danny
Explore Merry People
Merry People’s main episode
Culture King’s main episode
Outland Denim’s main episode

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

When your brand is riding away that just keeps growing, you need more than just the right platform. You need the right partner. Gander Clothing was scaling rapidly, but their e-commerce tech just couldn't keep up. That's when they partnered with Convert Digital. Since launching a Headless Shopify Plus site in 2021, they've seen incredible results: a 300% increase in daily orders, 16% revenue growth, and a 12% conversion boost. With faster load times, seamless checkout experience, and powerful omnichannel integration, Gander is transformed into one of Australia's biggest retail success stories. And it's all powered by Convert Digital's commerce expertise. It's commerce that stacks up. Read the full case study at convertdigital.com.au. When did you last run a promotion? And let me ask you this. Was it because you wanted to, or was it because you felt like you had to? Because there's a difference and it's huge. Most brands, if they're honest, I think, would say the latter. You've got targets to hit, you've got stock sitting in a warehouse, a Black Friday calendar that the whole industry just froths over, and opting out is starting to feel a bit weird. So you run the sale, it works, you do it again, and slowly, without really deciding to, you've taught your customers something that your regular price isn't real. And once you've taught them that, it's almost impossible to unteach. I've spent a lot of time in e-commerce watching this pattern play out. And what I've come to believe, and the conversations on this show have only reinforced, is that the brands who figured out how to hold full price aren't doing it through willpower. They've just made a different set of decisions about what kind of customers they want to build with. Danny Pierce has run Merry People, a premium gumboot brand, for 12 years without a single discount. Not one. And the way she talks about it, it's not a rule she's white knuckling her way through. It's actually become one of the things her customers really, really respect her for. And that's what today's playbook is about. Let's start with Danny. Great strategy. And I guess that all dovetails into what you mentioned before around never going on sale. It was something that we spoke a lot about five years ago, and that was a key philosophy for you. Obviously, retail kind of had a beautiful period during COVID, and then things got a bit tough, and it's been tough for the last couple of years. Have you been able to hold on to the never going on sale philosophy?

SPEAKER_01 2:43

Yes, we have. So yeah, we still to this day think being in business now for this will be my 12th year. And yeah, we've never discounted. So yeah, I think it's actually something that I think our customers really respect of our business. And to the point where I would say it's just probably a key thing that we're known for definitely with our customers, but yeah, just as a business and as a brand. And yeah, something I still want to hold on to as long as I can. And you know, I had I just had a meeting before we've got a new person doing our merch ordering, and that was the first thing I said to her was that having worked in other companies, for me, this is probably the one thing where you just need to not take as much risk and just do that extra level of work and look at other ways that we can, whether it's through inventory supply chain flexibility and things like that, but where yeah, that's just something I don't want to have to do. So we just need to keep our inventory very clean and yeah, tell me what I need to do to help support that. But yeah, it's something that I'm really proud that we've been able to keep doing that and something that, yeah, I hope we do forever. But yeah, we'll see.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Do you have anything in place of a traditional promotions calendar that others might have to try and boost even like interest or engagement with your audience at key times of the year? Or are you just aiming for a steady year-on-year increase just from being better year on year?

SPEAKER_01 4:19

Yeah, so I guess for us, we think in terms of from e-com, we think about, you know, our peak season is like March, April through to July. So we're trying to bring people, I guess, into the funnel early in the year. And that could be through creative marketing things and lots of different things through new product, through being seasonally relevant, whether it's through weather or what have you. So I think for us it's more around trying to create great content and when it's kind of coming into our seasonally relevant time. And yeah, I think we're aware that a lot of the retail businesses have a calendar where they discount and we're just aware that that's a more saturated time to be marketing in general and the types of messages that are out there. But generally during those moments, we'll increase the level of ads or messaging we do around never going on sale and why we do that. And that actually helps and does that performs well for us during that those times. So yeah, I think we we try to have a product launch or something that we think is, yeah, it's like how do you drive interest at that time? So yeah, we just try and plan it like that.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

I mean, most retailers would kill to have a peak season where you've got your peak season when ad costs are at their lowest.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

Yeah. Well, yeah, I guess. Like if yeah, that's I've actually not really thought about it in terms of when they're selling, yeah, during Black Friday and what have you, the cost of advertising during that time. And but for us, it's it's it's good also. It's great with planning. You kind of have a good view of the previous year, and yes, we'll look at okay, why did that perform the way it did last year? Was it like a weather anomaly or what was it? But you're not getting the slackiness that you would if you were to be using a discount strategy.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

What Danny is describing here isn't just a pricing philosophy. It's a set of decisions that compound over time into a structurally different business. Here are three things that are worth taking from her story and considering in your own e-commerce business. Number one, make your policy visible. The thing that I find the most interesting about how Danny runs Merry People isn't the no discount policy itself. It's that she's made it become part of the brand. Her customers actually know about it. It's on the product page, it's part of how the business presents itself. And that changes the psychology of the purchase completely. Most brands use promotions to create urgency. What Danny's done is remove the alternative. There's no waiting for a better deal, no gaming the system, no checking back in in November to see if what you want goes on sale. If you want it, you buy it. If not, discounting is your position, own it publicly. A quiet internal rule does almost nothing. A visible brand commitment, it does a lot. And there's a structural advantage here that Danny mentioned almost in passing that I think is worth flagging. Her peak season runs March through to July, which means that she's doing her biggest acquisition push when ad costs are at their lowest, while everyone else is burning budget in the most expensive auction of the year. That's not luck, obviously. That's what happens when you're not tied to the promotional calendar that everyone else is chained to. She's free. Number two, know who you're actually attracting. Here's what nobody really talks about when it comes to discounting. It's not just a margin decision, it's also a customer acquisition decision. And the customers that you attract through a sale are likely to behave differently to the ones who found you and bought at full price. Every brand has a version of the customer pyramid. At the top, the people who bought because they genuinely believed in the product. At the bottom are the people who bought because the price dropped far enough to make it feel worth the risk. They're not fully bought in. That bottom group is your most disloyal segment. The moment the sale ends or someone else goes cheaper, they're gone. And the customers at the top, the ones that you worked hardest to earn, they see the sale and they feel like they got played a bit. Simon Beard talked about this on the show and put it better than I can. He said, you're trading down, getting a more disloyal customer, and burning a loyal one. It's really a double-edged sword. The question isn't whether you ever run a promotion. I think that's a silly question. Some brands have legitimate reasons to do so. Clearing warehouse stock, rewarding existing customers, a one-off event that doesn't define your pricing story. The question is actually whether it's a deliberate decision or it's a habit. Because those two things look identical in the short term, but are completely different after a few years. The last lesson, number three, the product has to carry the price. Brands that successfully hold price long term aren't always the ones with the most compelling brand story. They're the ones where the product, if you stripped everything else away, that product still wins on its own merits. James Bartle built Outland Denim on one of the most ethical missions in Australian fashion. But he'll be the first to tell you that mission doesn't necessarily close the sale. When someone is trying on jeans, they're asking, do they fit well? Do they feel like good quality? Do they look good? The mission deepens the relationship after they've already decided to buy. It's likely not what gets them over the line in the first place. If your price relies on your story, customers will always find a way to justify a cheaper alternative. If your product stands on its own, price becomes part of the signal, but not the barrier. So the honest question to ask yourself is if you took your brand name off the product entirely and put it next to a competitor, would you all still win? If yes, you've got the foundation to hold full price. If not, that's probably the thing worth working on before anything else. The brands that have figured this out, and Danny is probably the clearest example that I've come across, they haven't done it by being precious about pricing. They've done it by making deliberate decisions early about what kind of customers they want and then building the product and the experience to match. Discounting isn't always wrong. It shouldn't be a dirty word, but it is always a positioning decision. And most people treat it like a tactical lever. The gap between those two ways of thinking about it is where a lot of margin quietly disappears over time. If you're curious about how other operators are navigating pricing and discounting, whether that's figuring out how to hold full price without losing customers or working out where discounting still makes sense in your business without damaging your brand, that is exactly the kind of conversations that are happening right now over in the Add to Cart community every day. You can join for free over at adtocart.com.au. That's the playbook for this week. I'll see you Friday.