Summersalt’s Lori Coulter and Reshma Chattaram Chamberlin on success beyond swimsuits and e-commerce

The growing business is the brainchild of Lori Coulter and Reshma Chattaram Chamberlin, serial entrepreneurs with complementary skill sets who managed to find each other and make a go of an ambitious business plan from their shared home of St. Louis.

“I was creating strategy and branding for amazing brands while running my own agency. Then, after doing that for about seven years, I realized I wanted to eat, sleep and breathe a brand,” Chattaram Chamberlin said, regarding her road to Summersalt, on the latest Glossy Podcast.

As for Coulter, she was running a made-to-measure swimwear business, which had perfected the fits of its styles, mastered quick-turnaround manufacturing and maintained accessible price points. At the same time, she was tracking the evolving e-commerce environment and realizing the opportunities it presented. “I decided to create a business plan and develop a collection,” she said. She initially approached Chattaram Chamberlin about hiring her agency, and the partnership took off from there.

Now, six years later, Coulter and Chattaram Chamberlin are preparing for yet another year of growth. Their plans for 2024 include opening more stores and doubling down on collaborations, following their successful collections with brands including Diane von Furstenberg and Rifle Paper Co. 

Additional highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity, are below. 

Strategically filling a white space

Chattaram Chamberlin: “A major brand had just removed themselves from the category completely, plus you had highly commoditized swimwear on one end and then, of course, the true luxury swimwear on the other. No one was really owning that true direct-to-consumer experience at an affordable price. And given Lori’s previous background, we were able to execute on fit, function, style and amazing, amazing metrics. And so, for me, it was one of those big lightbulb moments, [knowing] that you don’t get these opportunities in life often where something you so passionately want to do aligns with what a customer actually needs. That’s when the magic really happens. And then you have two founders who have backgrounds to be able to execute it. So Lori was so brilliant on the business strategy side, on the production side and on the design side, and I knew I had the background on the digital marketing side and the brand side. And I truly felt like, ‘Oh, my gosh. We could truly be a Power team.'” 

Coulter: “It was obvious when we launched on day one that Summersalt had really hit on something, from a societal perspective — both from our brand messaging perspective, but also from a product perspective. We timed it just right.”

Leveraging data

Coulter: “Summersalt’s tech stack has been best in class since day one. But, even more importantly, we are capturing the data that’s important to optimizing across all functional areas of the business. We probably [use] about 70 different applications to operate the business on a day-to-day basis — anything from the website itself to digital advertising to the fulfillment and customer support side of the business, and all things in between. And all of that data comes back into our operational data warehouse. We’re able to optimize at every point along the customer journey. And also, from an efficiency perspective, internally, we’re able to make sure we’re putting forth the best experience for the consumer on a daily basis. It’s really exciting. We continue to expand our data capabilities. Many people know us for the brand, but our data capabilities are cutting edge; we excel, from a data perspective.”

A day in the life of a brand founder

Chattaram Chamberlin: “Sometimes I look at my calendar and I’m going from negotiating and addressing contracts to Lori and I chatting about big strategic initiatives, or investor meetings, or we’re working on hiring, or we’re working on a large collaboration. It’s kind of mental volleyball, from one topic to the next. … Founders are kind of like shock absorbers, right? We take in every input from every angle, and we work to make sure that our team is protected and secure and feels happy, that our customer feels looked after and happy, and that we deliver an exceptional product to her. So all those hiccups that no one ever sees are kind of shock-absorbed by the founders, whether that’s a flight path that’s delayed and the product isn’t arriving, or Covid is breaking out, or banks are collapsing. All of those things that seem to have happened in the last three years, we absorb that. And then we are the funnels to make sure that our customers and our employees and team feel the steadiness that we can provide.”