Gonaïves
A Haitian Luxury Resortwear brand.
Services
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D2C
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Product Marketing
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GTM
Gonaïves, a Haitian luxury resort wear brand, came in with no brand or strategy, just product, and left with a fully working D2C e-commerce site. Launched a week earlier than scheduled.
13 total sales (3 pre-launch, 10 in launch week), ~$2,000 revenue, 8k site sessions, 100% organic traffic, zero paid ad spend.
Click here for the case study deck.
Opportunity
Gonaïves came in with the creative pieces — product, name, logo, photography,but no brand strategy tying them together. The founder knew who she was for (the "Gonaïves woman": self-assured, booked and busy, never settling) and what she wanted it to feel like (life on vacation, an ode to Haiti). What she didn't have was positioning, a competitive read, or a plan to launch.
Diagnosis
Brand Vision
Gonaïves started as a bikini line, but the founder's vision was never really about swimwear. Her story—Miami-born, raised with Haitian roots, and shaped by her mother and a childhood by the water—showed the brand needed to lead with identity, not product category. Her 5-year vision confirmed it: not just swimwear, but a resort-wear lifestyle brand built around community, meant to embody "life on vacation" as something bigger than bikinis.
Target Customer
She described her customer more by lifestyle than demographics: Not a customer being introduced to luxury — a woman already fluent in it. She shops SSense, curated vintage designers, Jacquemus, Dior, Missoni, and Pucci. She is 25-45, middle class and up, and vacations 3-4 times a year.
What she's looking for isn't another luxury brand; it's a community. Gonaïves is built like an exclusive beach club: small, known, curated, intimate. An elevated shopping experience for women who are booked and busy, full of duality, intentional, and belonging to a world that already looks like hers.
Competitors
High End: Jacquemus
Sits closest to Gonaïves in price tier and minimalist sensibility—personal, French-rooted storytelling that invites the audience into the founder's own life, positioned between Coach and Dior. But that intimacy is built around one man's individual story, not a shared cultural identity; a customer looking to belong to something bigger than admiration for one person is underserved.
Mid Tier: Ganni
Occupies the same vacation-ready, accessible-luxury lane the customer shops when she's not spending at full designer tier. Its community is real but public and broad—friend groups, social media, an open "everyone's invited" energy, not curated or exclusive.
Accessible Tier: MANGO
Is a realistic lower-cost substitute for the same occasion, versatile enough to mirror Gonaïves' "booked and busy" narrative. But it sells individuality and affordability to a broad demographic—not belonging and not a "one-of-one" feeling.
Across all three, one thing was consistent: none of them serve this customer through a cultural lens. Gonaïves' white space: luxury positioning, Haitian cultural rootedness, and a named persona (the "Gonaïves woman"). A combination none of them had.
Solution
Every decision on the Gonaïves site traces directly back to something the research said.
"Life on Vacation" as the literal headline, not a buried tagline, because the founder's 5-year vision was already bigger than swimwear; the brand needed to say that outright, not hint at it.
Full-bleed lifestyle photography over product-grid-first layout because the insight was identity before category; customers needed to feel the world before they saw the item.
Products named after places and things in Haiti ("Morningside" and "Mayi") because the origin story was personal and cultural, not a category decision that had to live in the product line itself, not just the campaign around it.
Minimal, bold layout closer to Jacquemus than a typical DTC swim brand because the target customer already shops that tier, the site had to read as fluent in luxury, not aspirational toward it.
This was a founder with creative pieces and no strategy to connect them.
The result: a fully built, launched Shopify e-commerce store, every choice in it, from positioning to imagery to naming to layout, traced back to the research and competitive reading built during discovery.
GTM
Pre-Launch
Started from zero — no existing list or following. Built an email newsletter landing page on Shopify to start capturing interest ahead of launch, and 20 people signed up. Rather than waiting for launch day to test demand, that list was converted into pre-launch orders, proof the brand had real pull before a dollar was spent on marketing.
Post-Launch
Launch itself ran entirely organically: TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, leaning on the founder's own social presence and content creation instead of paid acquisition. No paid ads at launch, by design.
Future Launch
The plan: layer in Pinterest, Facebook ads, and SMS marketing alongside continued email marketing to a list that already converted once.
Success Metrics
13 total sales (3 pre-launch + 10 launch week) · ~$2,000 total revenue · 8,000 site sessions launch week · 100% organic traffic, zero paid acquisition · 0.125% conversion rate