Using Content & SEO to Generate Demand at Scale at Stitch Fix

 

Snapshot

Company: Stitch Fix
Audience: Women aged 25–40
Role: Content & SEO strategy

Goal:
Generate demand for Stitch Fix’s highest-value customers by using content and SEO to attract, educate, and convert new users.

The Problem

In its early years, Stitch Fix benefited from strong organic buzz and a novel product. By 2016, that demand was starting to soften.

Organic traffic had dropped by 25% year over year, costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. At the same time, competition in online fashion content had intensified, with established publishers like InStyle and Who What Wear dominating search results.

Stitch Fix needed to:

  • Reignite top-of-funnel demand

  • Build trust with potential customers

  • Compete in search against major fashion publishers

  • Do all of this without compromising the brand’s differentiated experience

Strategy

We approached demand generation through a single guiding idea: become a trusted authority for the style questions customers were already asking, and meet them at multiple moments of intent.

Rather than relying on one content format, we built a layered SEO strategy designed to:

  • Capture high-intent informational searches

  • Address common conversion barriers

  • Introduce product value without feeling transactional

Execution

1. Fashion advice content to capture discovery intent

We relaunched and rebranded the blog as Stitch Fix Style, which became our primary engine for organic discovery.

Keyword research surfaced strong opportunities around:

  • “How to wear [trend]”

  • “What to wear to [occasion]”

These topics aligned with a key persona: customers actively seeking fashion guidance and inspiration online.

We negotiated 25% of the content calendar for SEO-driven content and focused on:

  • High-quality, reader-first articles

  • Long-form content (~1,500 words)

  • Consistent publishing and content updates

  • Strong internal linking and mobile performance

Results

  • Traffic in our largest SEO category grew from 20K to 300K monthly visitors (+1,400%)

  • This became our largest traffic channel

  • Signup rate was 1.5x the site average

2. Body shape content to address fit anxiety

Fit was one of the biggest barriers to conversion, and a core Stitch Fix differentiator.

We created a body shape content ecosystem built around:

  • A hub page explaining body shapes and helping users identify their own

  • Spoke articles tailored to specific shapes and related fashion challenges

Over time, we expanded this cluster to address increasingly specific problems (e.g., jeans, dresses, skirts for particular body types).

Results

  • #1 rankings for high-volume keywords like pear, apple, hourglass, and athletic body shape

  • 385K new visitors in the first year

  • ~6,000 new customers, converting 0.5% higher than site average

3. Visual content to reduce uncertainty and drive conversion

One ongoing conversion barrier was uncertainty about what customers would receive in their box.

While leadership didn’t want traditional product listing pages, we saw an opportunity to meet customers halfway.

We redesigned and rebranded the Inspiration Gallery into an Outfit Ideas gallery, competing directly with visual search results like Pinterest and ecommerce pages.

Key elements included:

  • Inventory-aware image curation

  • Visual-first browsing

  • SEO optimization for high-volume queries like “outfit ideas”

  • Filters based on on-site search behavior

Results

  • 115K organic visitors in the first year

  • Top-converting page on Stitch Fix Style

  • Conversion rate 2.5x the site average

  • #1 ranking for “outfit ideas” (60.5K monthly searches)

4. Content hubs to scale choice and discovery

Building on the success of the gallery, we created 20 content hubs targeting seasonal and outfit-based searches (e.g., fall outfits, leggings outfits).

With limited design resources, we partnered with engineering to create a flexible template that combined:

  • Visual galleries

  • Editorial content

  • Internal links

  • Custom CTAs

Results weren’t immediate, but when they hit, they hit.

Results

  • Fall Outfits ranked #3 and drove thousands of monthly visits

  • From late 2017 to early 2019:

    • ~200K organic visitors (4% of total organic traffic)

    • Conversion rate 2x the site average

Impact

Across formats, SEO-driven content became a primary demand-generation engine for Stitch Fix.

  • Drove sustained top-of-funnel growth

  • Converted at or above site averages

  • Attracted high-quality customers who:

    • Had better first-order experiences

    • Stayed longer

    • Spent more over time

Perhaps most importantly, the work shifted how the Content Team viewed SEO: from a constraint to a creative tool. Over time, teams baked SEO best practices into their workflows, allowing me to focus on higher-impact strategy and expansion.