A large part of online sales growth at Carve Designs has been through top-of-funnel marketing, one of its cofounders told Digital Commerce 360.
Thayer Sylvester, who cofounded the brand with Jennifer Hinton, said Carve Designs’ focus has largely been on growing its brand awareness. Carve Designs is a sustainability-focused women’s apparel brand.
“It’s so easy to focus on that last click-search or last-click conversion,” she said. But today’s ecommerce industry is “super competitive.”
“The barriers to entry in our types of businesses have become lower and lower over the years,” Sylvester said. “They’re coming up again. … Five years ago, you could throw up a Shopify website and start to sell a T-shirt and spend some marketing dollars and all of a sudden you have a brand. So you have to be super sharp to succeed in selling online.”
She also noted that brands need to have “the right product,” an authentic story that resonates with customers and “the right technology” to be successful long-term. Although a brand can succeed for six months or a year without those three factors, it won’t have year-over-year double-digit growth and be profitable, she said.
“Like lots of other ecommerce brands,” she said, Carve Designs’ tech stack is “dozens of lines long.” It highlights what the brand is investing in, as well as all the different apps it adds on as “part of the Shopify ecommerce environment.”
Currently, 118 of the Top 2000 online retailers in North America use Shopify as their ecommerce platform, according to Digital Commerce 360 data. In 2025, the combined web sales of all Top 2000 retailers that used Shopify’s ecommerce platform reached $10.458 billion. The Top 2000 Database ranks North America’s largest online retailers based on their annual ecommerce sales and more.
How Carve Designs has grown its online sales
To the extent that Carve Designs can, she said, it is building brand awareness through retail partners and online via TikTok and YouTube. In 2025, it invested in connected TV and “saw a very significant halo effect very soon after that,” Sylvester told Digital Commerce 360.
Carve Designs advertises across streaming platforms, targeting certain shows and channels where it expects to reach its core audience of women “in child-rearing years” who place an emphasis on sustainability.
Carve Designs also has a B2B ecommerce site where wholesale partners can place orders from the brand. Retailers buying from the brand “place orders on a daily basis,” Sylvester said. In addition, the brand sells on Amazon and through Nordstrom, using dropshipping for the latter.
Sylvester said brands selling online ultimately have to “automate the integration between your ecommerce site, your ERP site and your distribution, and you have to limit the number of exceptions that you have in the human intervention that’s necessary between those three things.”
She added that “anyone can set up an ecommerce site,” but a key challenge is in scaling and processing tens of thousands of orders a day.
“That automation between Shopify or whatever you’re using and your ERP system and your 3PL or your own warehouse is absolutely critical,” Sylvester said. “And there are a lot of companies out there that still have people trying to push orders here or pull orders there that they don’t have clear visibility into their inventory allocation. Us really becoming fully automated has made it so that we can scale.”
She said Carve Designs uses a third-party logistics (3PL) company for shipping and delivery.
Why Carve Designs agreed to be acquired
In January, apparel company Charles Komar & Sons announced its acquisition of Carve Designs. The companies completed the acquisition in December 2025, Sylvester told Digital Commerce 360.
She said Carve Designs “has been growing for some time” and reached a place where its founders wanted to continue to scale the brand.
“Komar has the resources to allow us to do that,” Sylvester said. “They are a very successful organization that focuses largely on a wholesale business, and they’re interested in growing their ecommerce business.”
She praised Komar for its commitment to sustainability. That includes a LEED-certified facility in Sri Lanka, fair labor and waste.
Carve Designs is still operating as its own entity based in Northern California, Sylvester said. Komar sells mostly in wholesale. It’s learning some of Carve Designs’ best practices in ecommerce through the acquisition, she said.
“There are a lot of companies out there that will chase revenue and then not really understand what their customer acquisition costs are, not understand what their customer retention costs are, not know what their lifetime value is, their first order economics, and two years in, they’re out of money,” Sylvester told Digital Commerce 360. “We’ve been doing this for a long time. We grow year over year, and we’re profitable. And that is because we make sure we’re always looking at that flywheel effect between the authentic marketing product that she wants to have and technology that works.”
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