How My Wife and I Started Poet Dresses, an Online Store for Modest Dresses

Photo byRyan Cook

“Ugh, this dress is so cute, but I wish it wasn’t so revealing.”

This is something I seemed to hear from my wife, Kat, a million times on every trip we took to the mall.

As Christians (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), we try to live our beliefs, and Kat constantly felt torn between the cute dresses she wanted to wear and wearing the very limited supply of higher-coverage dresses that aligned with her values.

Kat says, “Just like every girl, I am on that age-old journey to self-love, and one way I like to express myself is through fashion! However, I prefer higher coverage in my clothing, and there isn't a lot of variety in ‘modest’ fashion. I find that most designs with higher coverage don't have the charm that I'm looking for. I wanted higher coverage clothing that fit my personality, that was modern and trendy, and that didn't cover way more than necessary–if ya know what I mean.”

One day after Kat vented her frustration I said, “What if we started our own company that sells modest dresses? We could make cute, spunky designs that are also modest.”

Kat loved the idea, and on August 22, 2022, Poet Dresses was born!

With my background in entrepreneurship and marketing, every frustration like this sounds like a business idea and the fact that this would help my wife so much personally was just the icing on the cake.

At Poet Dresses we don’t judge any girl based on what she wants to wear, but we do feel like there is a large population of women out there who want higher-coverage clothes and can’t find them at standard clothing stores. We love helping those women!

Photo byRyan Cook

Designing the Dresses

Although Kat didn’t have any apparel design experience, she had a love for fashion and just went for it. She kept her eye on popular designs and features trending on social media and found a way to put her own personal twist to make them more modest. She used Instagram’s survey feature to get thoughts and feedback from her friends about which dresses they wished came in a ‘modest’ option.

After she sketched up some designs, we started getting samples from suppliers until we chose a partner who had good prices, quality, and communication. When the bulk order of 1000 dresses came, we built out the website and got to work selling them with Facebook Ads.

To our amazement, we started to hear that blessed “cha-ching” notification on our phones that told us people were buying our dresses! We saw how thrilled our customers were, and their feedback gave us the confidence to push forward with the business.

Photo byNatasha Kimball

Why “Poet”?

Choosing a name for our business was a hard thing to do.

At first, we thought it might be good to have a word similar to “modest” in the name. We liked the name “Mod Ivory” until we remembered that that’s a character from the most recent Hunger Games book.

Other names just didn’t quite feel right. Crepe Dresses. Georgia Dresses.

One night as we were lying in bed, thinking about what kind of characteristics we wanted to be associated with the company, the name “Poet Dresses” came to mind, and we immediately loved it!

“And what if with every dress you got a poem in your order?” Kat said.

We reached out to the amazing poet Dorianne Laux to see if she would let us use her poems that would go along with every order, and she said yes! We were so happy to get her on board to write us lovely poems that gave each order a personal touch of gratitude and beauty.

Photo byNatasha Kimball

Looking Ahead

At the beginning of this year, there was a day when we were making amazing sales. It was only three in the afternoon, and we already sold nearly $800 worth of dresses. We thought we had entered some kind of twilight dream world where people give you money for no reason.

Finally, that night, I decided to open the Facebook Ads Manager and I discovered the real reason we had made so many sales.

I had added an extra 0 when I told Facebook how much money to spend on ads.

Instead of raising our daily advertising budget from $90 to $110, I raised it to $1100.

While this kind of error would normally be no laughing matter, we had made more than $1500 in revenue and broken even. This was a frame-breaking experience because we realized that the ads still work even when we dramatically amp up the daily budget. Since then, we’ve kept up the momentum and had several record-breaking revenue days, and a single day where we broke $2200 in revenue for the first time. Not bad!

Photo byNatasha Kimball

Now that we have scaled up our sales, we have hired someone to help with our emails, we connected with an awesome fashion designer in Seattle who is helping us with our designs coming this summer, and every day we make little 1% gains to our process.

Our journey has definitely come with a lot of setbacks and disappointment, but it’s exciting to be growing.

“I love our mission of empowering women to feel beautiful,” Kat says. “Finding cute clothes can already be so hard, and I love supporting other girls who are Christian or even just struggling to find high-coverage clothes for work or casual wear.”

If you would like to check out our collection, partner with us, or learn more about us, check out our website!