Tween Beat

No one needs to tell Nancy Dennis about this influence. As the 43-year-old founder of the Toronto-based Ch!ckaboom girls' retail clothing chain, Dennis, along with partners Glenn Stonehouse, 49, and Arif Noor, 36, courts preteen consumers on a full-time basis. Convinced there existed an underserved market--and inspired by the success of Limited Too--Dennis opened the first of two Ch!ckaboom stores in 1997.

"I saw Ch!ckaboom as going one step further than Limited Too," Dennis explains. "We really make this a store for [preteen girls]. We market to them, we talk to them, we serve them. [We view the shopping experience] through their eyes."

To that end, Dennis and her young sales staff regularly sponsor in-store events and contests geared toward the tween girl. Perhaps Ch!ckaboom's most effective marketing tool, however, is the company's birthday club--on their birthdays, each of the 3,000-plus names in Ch!ckaboom's database receives a card and a $5 gift certificate. "These little girls aren't getting mail," Dennis points out, "so when they get something from Ch!ckaboom, they're thrilled."

For her part, Bokram is struck by the strength of mail-order catalogs such as the much ballyhooed Delia's--an upstart teen clothier looking to take its winning formula to tweens. "For most people, trying to reach this girl is like trying to market to someone on Mars," Bokram says. "Delia's does a wonderful job. It managed to build a business where there had been nothing. No one was marketing to these girls on a catalog basis; nobody thought it would work."

So much for conventional wisdom.

This article was originally published in the September 1999 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Tween Beat.