40+ replies a week from cold outreach

Outreach in fashion on the EU market is a different game.

Most playbooks are built for SaaS or IT — where LinkedIn is active, everyone uses English, and decision-makers are easy to find. In fashion resale, none of that holds true:

Many brands aren’t active on LinkedIn.
Roles are fragmented across CEOs, marketing, and sustainability.
And English-first messaging often gets ignored.

That’s the challenge The Fashion People — a European startup and ultra.vc resident — faced when testing their entry into the EU market. They build white-label resale platforms for fashion brands, and needed to find their first deals and learn which segments + messages actually resonate.

Over 3 months, we built a funnel that produced 27 meetings, 18 of them fully qualified. Here’s what worked (and what didn’t).

1. Finding contacts beyond LinkedIn

LinkedIn quickly hit a ceiling. Many brands had no presence there, and plenty of employees didn’t even have personal profiles.

If we had stopped at LinkedIn, the campaign would have stalled.

So we turned to Google Maps: pulled retail locations and boutiques, then uploaded them into Crona (our web-scraping & data enrichment tool). The tool filtered which ones were actual fashion brands vs. small local shops.

From there, we reached out through company emails or DMs on social media. Surprisingly, those channels converted — prospects redirected us to the right decision-maker, and that’s where meetings started getting booked.

👉 Standard LinkedIn datasets gave us a baseline, but the real traction came from going outside the platform.

2. Messaging that spoke to real pain

The sharpest pain in fashion resale is unsold inventory.

That’s what we led with in sequences, supported by relevant case studies.

We also added an interactive touchpoint — a profit calculator — where prospects could estimate potential revenue. It made the emails feel more engaging and lifted conversion.

3. Localization as a hidden growth lever

English-only sequences fell flat. But once we localized into French, Italian, Polish, and Czech, replies jumped from 4–5 per week to 40–50 per week.

In past campaigns (mostly in IT and SaaS), we’ve seen localization improve reply rates — but only moderately. Here, the lift was dramatic.

Our guess is that fashion brands are less progressive in how they handle international communication compared to tech. If you don’t speak their language, they simply ignore you.

4. Fighting ghosting at the booking stage

The classic problem: a prospect agrees to a call, you send a calendar link — and they disappear.

We changed the flow. Instead of a link, we offered specific time slots directly in chat:
“Would August 20 at 3 PM or 5 PM work for you?”

That small tweak noticeably raised conversion into actual meetings. Even when the suggested time didn’t work, prospects replied with alternatives: “3 PM is busy, but I can do 4:30.”

In other words, the conversation stayed alive — and that was the difference between ghosted leads and booked calls.

Results in 3 months

📊 27 meetings booked
– 18 fully qualified (right need, company size, budget, decision-maker engaged)

Takeaway

Cold outreach in traditional industries like fashion requires a different playbook. What worked here:

Creative data sources beyond LinkedIn.
Segment-specific pain messaging.
Interactive touchpoints.
Localization where it matters.
Simple tweaks to reduce ghosting.

The outcome: 27 meetings and first deals in closing — in a market many assume is “too traditional” for cold outreach.

✍️ At Sally, we’ve done this across 20+ client projects — building outreach systems that are both safe and effective.

Want the same for your team? We can set it up end-to-end or train your SDRs to do it themselves.

📚 Want more context before we chat?