At A Glance

Midnighties is a luxury sleep/loungewear brand that features built-in padded support, breathable OEKO-TEX certified bamboo, and flattering silhouettes so women can wear them at home or traveling for a comfortable night’s sleep or a quick run to the coffee shop. They’re made for sleep, but designed to be seen. 

Who is Julie Coin?

Meet Julie Coin, Founder of Midnighties.

About Midnighties

Midnighties is a fresh, new company, founded only a year ago by Julie and her three sisters. Launched with a desire to create the product they had always wanted, Midnighties offers bamboo, luxury pajamas, with built-in padded support.

The idea is something that’s comfortable, high quality, and great for hanging out in your pajamas, no matter who’s around.

But the entire experience of launching a company, and especially one in the women’s sleepwear space, is new for Julie. Prior to launching Midnighties with her sisters, Julie actually spent most of her career on Wall Street and in fintech, blockchain, and crypto startups. 

Julie’s Journey

With a new company, keeping things small at the start is important, and that’s exactly what’s happening at Midnighties. The company currently consists of just a few team members; Julie herself, a part-time graphic designer, and someone who helps out with the shipping. But that keeps Julie more in control of the details of what’s going on, and the invaluable help she’s received from family and friends.

Business Growth and Revenue Strategies

What’s the best part of being a founder of Midnighties? For Julie, it’s being her own boss and controlling her own day, time, and calendar. In finance your schedule is dictated by markets, world events, and investor or client demands - so you find yourself missing personal events or canceling vacations. 

With Midnighties, and being her own boss, however, she’s finally in control of her own destiny and able to do what she wants, when she wants.

Plus advancements in technology and platforms like Shopify make it easier than ever for an entrepreneur to launch an E-Commerce business without the heavy upfront costs of building and hosting a custom website or investing in a brick-and-mortar shop. There’s so much involved in starting up a business, but with the help of AI and the advancements in technology in general, it’s much faster and less expensive than ever before to get started.

Building on the Brand

Julie’s number one area she wishes she could spend more time on? Product and partnership expansion. With a new company and so much to do there’s just never enough time for the extra things you’d like to do. And for Julie, that extra time would be spent on developing more relationships in B2B and retail.

Where her previous experience allowed her to build or transform businesses and grow startups, she’s never run an E-Commerce or fashion company before. It’s an entirely different experience and building and scaling rapidly in this area requires something entirely different. With the help of a dedicated designer, full-time, Julie believes she would have more time to free up for those extra tasks that are often put to the back.

Midnighties’s CX Philosophy 

What does it all look like from the customer experience side? Well, Julie wants it to look like the kind of customer experience that she would want when buying from other brands. Every one of us has had positive and negative experiences with customer service over the years, and Julie says that means we all know how we want to be treated.

Her goal is to make things as simple as possible for the customer and to make sure that problems with shipping, or exchanging for size, should be pain-free for the customer. The business’ CX processes should allow the customer to get what they need in as little time and as few steps as possible. 

Creating an Ideal Experience

What’s one way that Midnighties is looking to do exactly that? Well, one way is to offer them the best possible experience from the very start. Julie acknowledges that many of her customers are experiencing some kind of change, whether it’s gaining or losing weight, going through postpartum or peri/menopause, or any other body changes. And, as a result, they’re looking for something that’s going to make them look and feel great with a body that might look different than they’re used to.

Having one-on-one conversations with customers helps them find the right product and size for themselves or their gift recipient. 

For those customers who are less tech savvy, however, Julie has taken additional steps to help them feel more comfortable, including designing training materials to explain how the ShopPAY checkout process works and even responding personally to their concerns. Midnighties is looking at ways to become even more advanced, but so far has not fully implemented AI customer support.

Julie has found that AI is still not skilled or fast enough to answer the questions customers ask. Everyone’s experienced AI chatbots that put you into a loop that is time consuming and never answers your question. Midnighties won’t use AI beyond basic Q&A until it can provide a better experience for customers than humans. 

Humans can offer that special touch to make sure customers are getting the information they are looking for, quickly.

Innovation and Adaptability

The future of Midnighties is strong, especially when you consider where they started. Midnighties launched just as tariffs hit last year and certainly suffered as a result. They also have been experiencing supply chain problems as a result of the situation in Iran and situations that are happening elsewhere in the world.

However, they’re looking to continue growing and expanding their product line with new styles, colors, and sizes coming soon. The process has been slower and more complex than expected, even requiring visits to the manufacturer.  The time investment however, in both the production process and listening to customer feedback and survey responses on style preferences and product performance will hopefully create future collections that meet the needs of a wider customer base. 

What else are they planning? Well, the future is all about listening to customers and designing to their requests.. After all, their customers have been requesting both smaller and larger sizes, new styles or fits, plus completely new extensions such as maternity and even men’s products. Julie definitely hasn’t ruled it out, and she loves the continued feedback and ideas from her customers whenever she can get it.

Advice for the Next Generation

For future generations of entrepreneurs Julie starts with some simple advice, just do it.

While Julie had years of business experience before starting her own company, she says that there are so many free or low cost founder networks where you can access experts to get the training or feedback you need on the areas of the business where you lack experience or skills. They can teach you about marketing, advertising, finance or other areas depending on what you need. Plus you can hire virtual assistants to provide leverage, and if you’re lucky, get friends and family to help for free. Most people are excited to help you in the early stages. 

The second piece of advice? Make sure that you understand how to do it all yourself and how to reach out to others to bounce ideas off of or brainstorm. Finding a founder community that you can share with and that will help you get an outside perspective is important. And talk to your customers directly to make sure the product/service is something they want, need, and most importantly, will pay for. 

Paying attention to your cash flow and your bottom line is another essential element. Making sure that you don’t spend all the money you have up front without understanding what you’re doing or how you’re doing it is crucial. As an entrepreneur you need to stay on top of cash flow, avoid financing and debt if possible, and don’t pay outside consultants at market rate to do work for you. Too many entrepreneurs overspend early and either go bankrupt or lose control of their business when they take on investors whose agenda may be very different from the founder’s.