411: From 0 To $140M Selling Boutique Clothing – The Story Of PinkLily With Tori Gerbig

00:01
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today I have Tori Gerbig on the show and she runs a hundred million dollar business selling clothing and boutique fashion over at pinklily.com. Now for business sounds intimidating and if you’re thinking to yourself that starting your own a hundred million dollar clothing business sounds unreachable, keep in mind that Tori grew up from a working class family in Kentucky and started with nothing.

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She never took any funding and she bootstrapped her business completely from the ground up. And today she’s going to teach us how she did it. But before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people will want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce.

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and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store, and I depend on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider.

01:25
Well, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores, and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought. Piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash mywife.

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That’s KLAVIO.com slash my wife. And then finally, I want to mention my other podcast that I released my partner Tony. And unlike this one, where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:29
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter Job podcast. Today I have Tori Gerbig on the show and Tori and I were recently featured on the Ashley Banfield show where we shared some tips on how to start an online business. And Tori is the founder of pinklily.com, which is a nine figure business that sells clothing and boutique fashion. Now, what I find impressive about Tori is that she grew up in a working class family, nothing out of the ordinary, and turned a side hobby of selling clothes into a hundred million dollar company. And within her first year of business,

02:59
Pink Lily hit the multi-million dollar mark and it’s grown to a business of over 200 employees. She’s been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffing Post, and she was in Inc 5000 Company in 2018. And what I actually admire more is that she is a mother of three and she works with her husband just like I do with my wife and our business. And in this episode, we are going to find out exactly how she did it. And with that, welcome to the show. Tori, how are doing? Hi, how are you? Thank you so much for having me on today.

03:27
Yeah, know, Tori, so I actually teach a class on e-commerce and what I always tell people is that clothing is actually one of the hardest types of products to sell online. Absolutely. So I’m just very curious how you got started. So it kind of was by accident. I went to school for marketing and sales, not fashion. And I knew that I really wanted to sell a product. So I learned how to do outside sales. I thought, you know, I would do

03:53
personal selling, maybe medical device selling something along the way. I actually went into insurance industry and it was okay. I was in it for over five years, but after my husband and I got married, we really weren’t making much money combined. I had no experience. It was right after, you know, a recession was going on. We’re talking 2009 to 2010 when we got married. So really hard to find a job. Um, come 2012.

04:19
We were just really struggling and could not make ends meet. So we started selling items on eBay and Etsy and started out with very random products. I’m talking like golf clubs, USB, hard drives, random stuff. And it did pretty well. We sold items on eBay and Etsy for about a year, year and a half. And then fast forward to 2013, I was pregnant with my son, looking over my benefits, my maternity leave options.

04:47
and freaking out about having unpaid maternity leave. So that was something that made me so nervous. So once my son was born, really were like, look, we’ve got to pick up this online selling just to supplement our income. So I invested a little bit of money, I think maybe just a couple hundred dollars in some little girl boutique clothing and some adult boutique clothing and started a Facebook group at that time. The Facebook group,

05:12
was primarily just local people from my town, but it grew pretty quickly and it grew from, you know, a couple hundred girls to over 10,000 women by the time I started back to after my maternity leave. So I started selling clothing on there. I didn’t really sell clothing on eBay or Etsy. It was just mostly through the Facebook group. So I was showing the items. I was PayPal invoicing them. I was shipping the items, all of this at nighttime after I worked my full-time job. And after I got my son to bed,

05:40
And so I really didn’t sleep much at all in 2013, like that last quarter. And at the end of about November, my husband’s like, we cannot continue doing it. It’s so manual. We have to start a website. Like this is too manual. You PayPal invoicing people, you going to stamps.com, creating the labels and it’s just too much. So we are going to start a website. We’re going to take the money that we’ve made, the profits from selling on online so far. And we’re going to just start this website.

06:08
So December 31st, January 1st of 2014, we kicked off pinklily.com. It was really a right out of the box, horrible website. Like it wasn’t good at all. So slow, site speed, everything. We had no prior experience, but it was like just him and I who did it. And we were like, okay, our goal for the year is $50,000 in revenue. That will help pay off our credit card debt and some of our student loans. I’ll still work my full-time job.

06:37
He’ll work his full-time job. It’s just a side hustle. By month two, we had already hit the 50,000 and then by six months in, we hit a million dollars in revenue. I walked away from my job in April of 2014. It was terrifying. Everybody was like, no, you can’t quit your job with benefits just for an online site. And then my husband walked away from his job in July that same year.

07:03
And then rounding out in December that year, we hit $4 million in revenue and had seven full-time employees. all from like just this starting in our house and by the end of year one, having, you know, a team of seven and hitting $4 million in revenue very quickly. In the first seven months, we actually still were in our house too. So like we were packaging the orders up to the very like first million dollars of sales all on my dining room table. Tori, what’s funny is your story is almost exactly like mine. We started on eBay.

07:32
We were just selling some handkerchiefs and they were running it all over my house. And then my wife, she didn’t like her job. And when we had our kid, we were like, okay, we want to stay at home with the kids. And we ran everything out of the house. And our goal was actually $50,000 our first year also. We hit it really quickly. And then my wife was like, okay, we got to start a website. Cause I was making the rounds at this post office carrying like a car full of boxes and they all knew me and they actually hated me.

08:00
I’d occupy the line for like a long time, right? But it’s funny. Let’s take it back to the beginning. I’m very curious. So where did you source those first clothes for Etsy and eBay and that Facebook group? Yeah, so we I worked with some vendors out of LA to get some products and mostly for eBay. I think one of the biggest things we had that sold in 2013 were bubble necklaces. So a lot of jewelry really did well on eBay. Same with Etsy. So Etsy also

08:30
monogrammed on the side like to I was like, well, I’m gonna buy a monogram machine. do that too. Yeah. So that was very time consuming. I realized that was not the best use of my time. I sold that monogram machine. So yeah, it was just kind of like scarves and jewelry mostly. And I sourced them from, you know, places, LA, China, fashion district or do it fashion. Okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cool. And then these are not with your brand on them, though, right? These are just

08:59
Already made. OK. Already to sell turnkey products. Yeah. So how does one grow a Facebook group so quickly, actually? So you mentioned in the beginning it was just Kentucky folks, right? How did you attract other people? So I think at the time, of course, the timing was great for Facebook and it was, you know, back before the shifted where now it’s more paid placement. was very organic back then. So it was easy. But I also have a social media

09:29
I have a social media or I have a marketing degree. So social media was always something that I loved and I learned it as quickly as I can when a new platform comes out. So Facebook was something that I knew very well and I knew certain strategies of how to grow it, know, build it as a community, you know, do fun giveaways, get women excited about the product, do the live videos or the,

09:52
photos, you know, and kind of just go off what works well. If you see that this photo is getting a lot of response, continue to do photos similar to that style and, and just kind of like taking it. It was very scrappy too. And I think that people loved it. It wasn’t like this put together beautiful photos, literally like an iPhone photo of me in my house wearing the product. And I think women just could relate to that a little easier than just that, you know, your typical models that you see on Victoria secret or places like that.

10:22
type sites. So were people just finding your group through word of mouth or were you advertising it? It’s just word of mouth. It was a group. So it wasn’t you couldn’t do paid ads for a group at the time. So it was really just like by having people add more people to the group. So can you kind of walk me through like how often were you posting and how did you build a community? So I would post several times a day. I think that’s the strategy to with any good social media platform is to

10:49
make sure you’re consistent with your posting. But building the community, was always on there. So even while I was working my full-time job, I was answering girls questions and they felt like they can ask me, hey, how would you style this or what would you recommend size I go with? And really to like give them that personal shopping experience almost from the very beginning and to also like allow them to tell me what they wanted to buy and what they were looking for for us to carry and such. really

11:17
to listen to them and always put them first, really helped to elevate it. And that’s kind of been behind the brand since the very beginning, as we always put the customers first and foremost. So were you going live in your group or was live available back then? Probably not, right? Live wasn’t available back when it very first started, but it quickly became available. So yeah, we’ve been doing live since the beginning of live creation. is Facebook group still around? Are you still active in the group or?

11:45
group? No, I closed it down after we started Pink Lily and then we started a Pink Lily group right after and our Pink Lily group has I 120,000 women in that private group. So our sales, I imagine since you have a website now, you don’t do sales directly into the group, but is that a way to like showcase new products and get feedback? Yeah, so we do it. We showcase products, but

12:09
We also definitely get feedback on like, are you wanting for us to buy for fall? Or, know, what kind of styles would you like us to carry? And really giving them more of that inside behind the scenes feel. But also the biggest thing that does so well in our group is we allow all of our customers to post their own photos. So all of them are actually running the group for us by posting content because they’re excited to share what the dress looks like on over their outfit. And then all these women are supportive on them saying, oh, you look great.

12:38
how does this fit and they’re answering questions and they’re together on this group and it works really well that way for us. Cool. So are the moderators of the group just super fans of your brand for the most part? Yes. We actually have, most of them are workers here and then yes, anyone is allowed to post in the group. We approve it. We approve it here internally. Right. Nice. Okay. So you go from this Facebook group, it gets out of hand because you’re manually invoicing everyone. You start this site,

13:08
It looks bad. It’s slow. How do you get your first sales on your site? Is it just driving through the group to the site? Yeah. So at that time, right after we launched the Facebook or the website, we launched a Facebook page and that’s where primarily most of the sales would came through in year one was all through Facebook. So I did not have any knowledge of Google ads. have no knowledge of anything else. Instagram really wasn’t big yet.

13:33
Pinterest, probably some too actually. We did go viral on Pinterest a few times our first year. So Pinterest and Facebook were those key drivers. The Facebook page, I did start doing paid ads on there by the end of January, 2014. But again, I kind of taught myself all of that with not having background knowledge on any like paid placement, paid social. Right, right. So, but to go from, did you say you hit 4 million in that first year you said? Yep.

14:00
Okay, so how does one go from just a couple hundred thousand to four million? Is that ads or is it just the size of your group? Like how do you grow exponentially like that so quickly? So I do think ads was a little bit of it, but I think we were very lucky on our timing too and to have things go viral on Facebook and on Pinterest that year. So we had one photo of a cardigan that

14:26
had over 700,000 repins on it, like after it launched and we sold all 300 in a day. And that was just luck of the nature. know, it’s really hard now to go viral. And so I do try to explain that because eight years ago, social media and today social media, but you can, still can go to TikTok and go viral. There still are opportunities. So we just had those few moments.

14:50
And then we kind of played off of it from there. You know, we did spend a little bit of money in ads and I don’t know the exact amount, but it was very little and it wasn’t, it was really just curating that community on Facebook group and being very consistent with social media. So most, would say year one and two, most of the sales were organic sales. Okay. And then in terms of product sourcing, did you have like a steady factory at that point or were you still just kind of sourcing stuff from the fashion district and whatnot?

15:19
So yeah, no, years one through three all came from LA Fashion District. We did not have any factories. We still don’t have our own factory. We do work with manufacturers now versus paying as much wholesale. We still work both ways, but yeah, I would go to Fashion District up until 2016 even, I think 2017, it all came from there. So when you go to the Fashion District, you can say, hey, I want you to sew my label on there, right? And make adjustments.

15:49
Yes, correct. It’s been a while since I’ve been there. I we did shop there also. The minimum order requirements are generally lower there also, right, depending on who you find. Yeah. But we got to a point quickly about 2016, 2017 that we were needing three to four hundred per style that we carry. So we hit them very easily. Yes, the order requirements are very low, but the more you buy, the more willing they’ll work on pricing with you. Yeah. I mean, one of the challenges of clothing also is

16:18
the sizing and the return rate. How do you, how’d you deal with that early on? So sizing will still always be the biggest issue and we’re still trying to figure out the best way to overcome that. One of the, some of the couple recent changes in the last two years have been having several different size models on the site and then also doing videos that explain how the item fits. Yeah. So the sizing will always be the number one issue because it’s very hard to know your size when you’re shopping online.

16:46
But we definitely have implemented new strategies the last two years by having several size models and then also to do videos on the site that try to explain the fit. if they should size up or size down or stick with their true size in a size chart. In the beginning, I will say it was probably the number one reason of returns was this just didn’t fit me. So it’s always going to be a battle with clothing online, there’s hopefully even…

17:13
in the near future, more things that come out on helping women to, men too, to really understand what size that they should buy before purchasing. How much money did you start with and did you invest into Pink Lily when it launched? So when we launched the site, we had been selling on eBay and Etsy for about, in that Facebook group for about six months. And I think we had about $10,000 in our bank account to save aside from all of

17:40
the profits to reinvest. So we started very little, like a couple hundred dollars for eBay. And we’d always reinvest the money and put a hundred percent of the profits back into the account to grow the inventory. So when we started pinkfully.com, we had about 10,000. We I think spent $500 on the website and then the remainder all went to inventory to launch. So we had, you know, a small selection of clothing to, you know, I think 20 to 30 styles when we launched.

18:08
Wow, okay, so 10 grand for 23 styles. That means it’s not that many units of each, right? No, at the very beginning I would get like one pack, like maybe six units per style. And so it was basically up to you to understand and know what was gonna sell, right? Or did you just buy that many styles to see what would sell and then focus on your winners? What was your strategy? Oh, I didn’t really have a strategy. I kind of just would buy what I personally would wear and what I thought would sell well and then go off trends. So back in the day,

18:37
in 2014, like Chevron was huge. So, okay, I sold a Chevron Maxi. It did really well. It sold out so fast. So then I would turn around and use all of the profits to buy five more Chevron Maxi. So I kind of played off what was selling well to turn around and buy more product in that same area scope to see if that continued to do well. And when did you start introducing models for your clothes? I mean, that costs money, right? Yeah, immediately. we immediately. Yeah. When we launched, we launched with models.

19:07
We did some flat lays, but typically the clothing for us sold better on a model. Yeah, so where did you find the talent and was that a huge investment on your part to hire these models for photo shoots? We found the talent. have a college here in town and we found the talent just by I actually looked on Instagram and I was like I want to DM a few girls see if they’re interested. I did all the photography in the beginning for the about the eight months too. It took most of my.

19:36
time doing every single job. But then we hired a full time photographer, I think by August of our first year and we’ve had now we have I think three full time photographers. We have like seven models that are here most days and yeah, it is an expense. But for us it it’s necessary. It was always worth it. That’s amazing. So you bootstrap with $10,000. That’s amazing for clothing. Yeah. Yeah. What does your husband do? I’m kidding. Since I’m a husband and wife team also and yeah.

20:06
Yeah, she’s kind like the face of the company because I can’t talk about handkerchiefs or that sort of thing. What is his role? So his role is he is the president of the company. He oversees all of the operations side, the HR side and the finance. So he has a degree in finance and his MBA. So that’s his specialty.

20:24
but he also did logistics at his previous corporate world. So he has a lot more operation knowledge than I do. So we kind of split, I’m over product, over customer service, I’m over marketing, face of the brand. He’s on the back half of it on the operation side and the HR, all the harder stuff, but it’s all hard, but it’s stuff that it’s just like people don’t always understand like the backend of a business. Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. Actually in the beginning when my wife and I worked together,

20:52
closely, we kind of overlapped in our roles and we just kept clashing and fighting and it wasn’t until we separated everything out and things are good now, but it took a while for us to get there. Yeah, we don’t overlap very much at all. There’s really not a lot to them. The product development and marketing side, he has not much to other than money. That’s about it. That’s really the only like, okay, here’s your marketing budget for the month. And I’m like, no, we need more. And he’s like, no, you can’t go over this amount. So that’s about the only thing that we really

21:22
a lot of like conversations on, but we have demand planning and forecasters now. So he’s out of that budget, you know, a finance team that sets the budget. So he just oversees them now. It’s not him setting the budget. Right, right. Yeah. So you’re growing really fast. And I know that when you grow fast, it’s extremely uncomfortable. It seemed like you were switching out warehouses like every year or less. Walk me through that time, if you will. Things are growing fast. What were the first things that you’re implementing in terms of infrastructure?

21:51
during that growth period? Yeah, so our first warehouse, what we thought was a warehouse, we moved into in July of 2014. It was 1,500 square feet. So we’re like, oh yeah, this is huge. At least it’s out of our house. And we quickly realized it was way too small. And by the November of 2014, we found a 3,000 square foot warehouse and we moved the week before Black Friday.

22:15
So we did have, we had a one year lease on the first one, but we were like, you know what, makes sense just to go ahead and move. We need more space to grow. Otherwise we’re going to be stuck at this smaller amount. So we moved and by 2015, we were like, we still need more than 3000 square feet. So my husband and I bought this, the land right up the road. was two acres and started building our current warehouse facility. So we bought it in 2015. built.

22:44
25,000 square foot warehouse and completed that in 2016. We added on an additional 25,000 square feet by 2018. And then by 2019, we’re like, we have to have another warehouse. we bought, or we rent, we signed the lease on one right up the road. That’s 160,000 square feet. So last year, 2020 Black Friday, we were actually operating out of both and trying to like makeshift up there just for more room. But we currently are operating out of both warehouses.

23:15
Your offices are in Kentucky, right? Correct, yeah. In California, that would have been like a hundred million dollars. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Wow. No, it’s not that much here. That’s amazing. So when you were scaling also, so the way, how many skews are we talking about when you moved into that first 1500 warehouse? Like what was all the room for? Was it just inventory? Were you carrying inventory or was stuff made on demand? It was a lot of inventory for

23:43
girls to work at that time we were hiring people to come in and package orders. So they’re not doing it on my dining room table. So we had like packaging stations and we also had all the inventory stored there too. Oh, wow. Okay. So you don’t use a third party logistics firm or anything. You’re still fulfilling all of your orders. Yeah, we, we do not do three PLs. We do all of it fulfillment too. Wow. Okay. So that, can you just walk me through what your facility looks like? Is there like,

24:12
conveyor belts like amazon.com where boxes come down and you have these automated stations or? So they did quote that it was going to be about $20 million to put in. We’re not doing that. So we do have some really cool things, but we don’t have conveyor belts. We have like our inbound, know, they have, they receive the boxes, they put the way the boxes, have overflow, we have really high racking. So we, you know, we have those little things that they go up on the

24:41
whatever they’re called. then we have about, we have a day shift and a night shift. So we are operating seven days a week out pretty much, think 20, 20 something hours. They’re 10 hour shifts. So 20 hours a day, the warehouse is open. And I think that the, the skew count currently is about 13,000 skews. 13,000. Wow. Okay. Can you walk me through just like the calculations and going three PL versus owning your own warehouse?

25:11
So I, still doing a lot of deep diving into that and it’s not out of the question in the future. The hard part is with three PLs, it works very well. If you have less skews, the more skew you have, especially being more of a fast fashion brand, it’s a lot harder for them. So for us, it makes, think in the long run, makes sense to keep our fulfillment. Um, but three PLs, you know, they work very well when you have a limited skew, you know, if you’re only selling 10, 20, 30 products and you’re always replenishing those.

25:41
makes sense, but if you’re changing out styles every season, it doesn’t really make that much sense yet. So actually, I walk me through that side of the business. So once something goes out of season, are you stuck with the inventory or what do you do with the inventory when it goes out of style? Yeah. So one thing that, especially with our brand is we’re not too trendy and that we do that on that. That reason, if there’s a trend that hits the market now, but in two months it could be gone like that.

26:08
doesn’t really resonate very well with me because I don’t want to invest in something that I’m going to just toss out of my closet too much from now. You know, so like our pieces are more staple that can last for years versus it being so trendy. We do occasionally have some trends that we want to test out. But again, if you go to our site, it’s really a little bit for, we offer so much for everyone, but it’s not super, super trendy. It’s just good classic styles. But there is that case where you do have inventory that you’re sitting on.

26:37
and the trend goes out, say tie dye 2020 was huge. And then we didn’t sell it all the way through tie dye. And then the trend quickly died. So at that point, we work really hard on, you know, what kind of sales do we need to put it in? What kind of liquidation process do we need? have once a year, typically we do an in-person warehouse sale where people can come shop items, very discounted. And then the clearance as well. So we do have a clearance section on the site, sales section. And those are typically for styles that are, you know,

27:07
maybe there are 20 or less left in stock or they’re just out of season and we are not carrying them in the future. So we just want to discount them to get them out the door. When did you start designing your own clothes? Are you designer clothing designer? I’m not a designer. I have ideas, but I am not like an actual designer. So we started working with our vendors in LA and then some in China and Korea back in I think about 2018.

27:33
on our own ideas. So from there, it’s transitioned very quickly with manufacturing our own items. And we’re currently actually hiring for a full-time designer, but I’m not one myself.

27:48
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28:46
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. So, I mean, you’re the brains though, right? I mean, you know what’s trendy. So walk me through like, how do you design without being a designer? So I’ll look for concepts. I see things that do well within, again, it goes back to the very beginning. Like what sells well on the site? What are people loving?

29:13
and keep continually playing off that. If there is something that they love, let’s innovate it. Let’s make it newer for next year, but let’s keep the same concept of it. If there’s an animal print maxi dress that every single time we restock it, sells out. Let’s take that and let’s come up with three more animal print designs. Let’s work on that. So I see things that I like and I put them together in my head or on a horrible Photoshop. Like here’s the idea for the swimsuit, but I cannot draw.

29:43
all and I do not know AutoCAD at all. So I do work with our graphic designer here and she’ll draw prints and you know, I do oversee a lot of that with her. But we also, we know our customer pretty well. So it’s like we know what they love and we continue just to play off what they want. And so if you’re working with like a designer, I imagine it takes multiple iterations before like the stitching and this, I mean, there’s so much they can do from a picture, right? Exactly. Yes.

30:12
Yeah, there’s a lot of different fit samples and a lot of like proto samples that it takes two or three rounds. Okay. Wow. This just sounds I mean, running a clothing business just sounds so much more complicated. It is very complicated. Looking back, I’m like, maybe I should have started something else. But it’s okay. I love that because I wear clothes every day. so yeah, buddy, also, it is a necessity. And the way of the world is, you know, turning to shopping online, which is great for the future. But yeah, it is it is very complicated.

30:42
Of those 13,000 SKUs, how many would you say kind of turn over in a given year? We do four to five turns a year on our complete inventory. But in terms of like the styles that kind of go obsolete or that you’re taking down, you mentioned you had staples and then you had new styles. Of those 13,000, how many of those are just kind of staples that just lasted the test of time?

31:07
So for our staples, we still don’t always keep them in stock. We do let them run out and then restock them at the season that they are appropriate for. There’s some staples like bodysuits, if they’re long sleeves, we may not have them in stock in May and June. So we do still let them sell out at times. And so I would say 90 % of our business turns and it’s not a staple. Goal would be maybe getting it to maybe 40%, 60 one day. But yeah, most of our stuff is it turns. Amazing. Okay. So

31:37
Okay, so where we left off was you’re at $4 million. How do you go from four to 100? I mean, so what were the primary drivers for growing, you know, past, you know, nine figures? Yeah. So 14, 15, 16, we grew, you know, four to 12 million. We kind of stayed at 12 million for a year or two, just because we kept outgrowing our space and we, was just my husband and I, it was our money, you know, so like,

32:02
We reinvested all the profits, but we didn’t put additional in to continue to scale. So by 2016, we started working outside of just Facebook and Instagram. We started doing more paid ads. Influencers, we introduced those influencer partnerships, I think in 2018, which really helped elevate. And then 2019, we teamed up with a minority investor company and they really helped elevate and scale.

32:29
we started building out our teams with director level, because at the time it was still my husband and I doing most of the work. So they invested in director level positions and really those positions helped us elevate even faster. Our director of U-Com, our warehouse director, our marketing director and such. So by getting a little bit of expertise on board by 2019, that really helped us go from 30 million to 100 million within two years.

32:59
Was that just all online or was that due to, are you in retail outlets? We have one retail store here in our town and it is under a million a year. So it’s very small since we were just a college town. It’s not like a big city. So it is, it’s a very small amount of revenue. Okay. So it’s, all online sales that you scaled and it was, it sounds like it was scaled through mostly just paid advertising Facebook and Instagram, would imagine. Yeah. Paid advertising and yeah, pretty much. What’s, are you guys on TikTok?

33:28
We are, yes. How’s that going for you guys? So TikTok is, it’s great for like Legion, but it’s not great for building the community. So we are consistent on there. And I think we have about 150,000 followers. We were one of the first brands to jump on there quickly, because anytime a platform arises, I’m very quick to like make sure that our brands on there and people know about us and see us. But

33:55
people don’t respond to brands as well on TikTok. So we’re still trying to learn to navigate that. But yeah, we do have 150,000 followers. We just try to get them over to Instagram or get them to our email list. You we’ve run some TikTok ads that, you know, they go to it and it signs them up for our email newsletter. That’s a key driver to get them to actually shop. Yeah. Speaking among my colleagues, it seems like people will find you on TikTok, but you have to drive them to either your own site, get their email or Instagram to actually complete the sale.

34:24
Exactly. Yes, it is a good for Legion, but not really for conversion. Yeah. Are you guys on YouTube also? Or is it just so we have a YouTube we really pushed it last year until it just bandwidth we couldn’t keep up with keep making the videos every single week. It was really more behind the scenes on the brand side though than like product, which people love. They love seeing you know, the behind the scenes of the brand. Yeah, what is your philosophy of you personally being in the post? Are you still in a lot of the posts that you’re in either tic toc or

34:54
or Instagram? So TikTok not really, or Instagram. I mean, they’ll repost photos that I get and share and stuff, but for sure YouTube behind the brand more so and like behind the scenes stuff, but I’m not like the model. You know, we do, they do have TikTok models and, and photographers and such that. And I honestly just don’t have the time to go to all these photo shoots and do that part of it too.

35:19
Yeah, I was just wondering. So that transition probably took place once you cross like eight figures, I would imagine, right? And you could hire a whole bunch more people to handle everything. Right. Yeah, we did a lot of the live videos for the first few years and people really did enjoy, know, seeing the CEO do the videos. And I would love to do more of those live videos on Facebook. But it’s just right now I’ll leave it to the marketing team to do it. Yeah. So I want to switch gears a little bit. And I want to I know you’re a mom and you have three kids, right?

35:47
So how does one, I know we have some problems doing this. How does one juggle three kids who running such a large business? With help for sure. my, have a, our two older ones are in school, but then my two year old, has a babysitter that comes during the day. So we come into work while she is at home with her babysitter. If we ever have to travel, she’ll stay the night too. She’s great. But my husband is really good too. Like we,

36:14
We both are great parents versus it just being like the mom’s role or the dad’s role. So we tag team a lot. And if I have to work late, he’ll go home at four and let our babysitter go and like he’ll cook dinner and such. So it is a lot at times and where it’s so much at work and then you can’t get your work done and you have to do it. But I try really hard to, you know, four to eight o’clock is.

36:37
Kids time, we play, we do fast, we do that. And then if I have to finish working, I’ll do that after I get the kids to bed to complete the emails for the day. Yeah, so your kids are younger than mine. Mine are teenage years now, and I feel like I’m a full-time driver starting at one o’clock on. I can’t even imagine.

36:58
So my work hours, I work from about seven until about noon or one o’clock. And then the whole afternoon is just devoted to me being like a glorified Uber driver. Like I go to all the practices, I coach and that sort of thing. Can you walk me through your typical day? Actually, I’m very curious. Yeah. So in the morning it is wake up, get the kids ready for school, do my daughter’s hair. They just started riding the bus.

37:22
Two weeks ago, they’re super excited about it because we moved into our district so they could ride the bus. I don’t know why they begged to ride the bus. I was like, I hated the bus when I was a kid. I did too, actually. They ride the bus and they like it. So I’ll get them out the door. My husband does too. And then we play with our two year old for just a little bit before her babysitter gets there. And then I will come into work. I’m still working on, we just recently moved. I’m still working on getting my home office so I can actually work at home some. It looks nice.

37:48
Just a mile away, so it’s not hard to get here. So come in and I’m typically here every day from eight to four or eight to five depending on the day. And then go home. have right now, this is a crazy season. We’ve got soccer, we’ve got cheerleading and baseball. So every single night there is an activity for a kid to get to. Yes. And so spring, especially it’s a little harder, but

38:12
that nights are usually either driving one of them and staying at a practice or staying home with the other two kids and feeding them dinner, cooking on all that stuff. It’s nuts. from you said nine to four, you’re at work. What are your primary duties at work right now? I am over so many things. So, I basically oversee all the products. So, I’m over the buying team. We just recently hired a director of merchandising, so she’s still learning the ropes.

38:42
to work with them and demand planning to ensure we’re hitting the numbers that we need to hit on the sell through percentages on our inventory coming in. I also oversee the marketing team. So I work with them directly, the marketing director on just strategies and overall implementation for marketing. Also oversee the customer service team to ensure the CSAT scores are going up and everything that all customers are satisfied.

39:07
And then from there, if there’s ever other issues that arise or just things like today, this afternoon, going over to the warehouse just to see new things that we’re doing and dealing with some issues with new contracts for our ambassadors and influencers, et cetera. So hands in a lot of different things at all times. Tori, that made me tired just hearing you say all that stuff, actually. I do say pretty tired at night, I’m like, OK, I need to go to bed. You probably sleep very well.

39:35
I do, yes. Okay, so I want to kind of shift this last part of the interview towards people. Like, so as I mentioned before, I run a class and oftentimes people want to sell apparel. So I want your advice here. So whenever someone asks me to sell, whether they should sell apparel, I usually say no, because I think it’s just going be extremely difficult. But you clearly pulled it off on a bootstrap budget. What advice would you give people who actually want to go the apparel route? I would say,

40:04
this time and age, eight years post when I started. Total different world, obviously now with clothing and even things like Amazon fashion was not a thing when I started. So I would say the only way for it to be successful at this point in time would just find a gap in the market of something not being sold. So that’s gonna be like, if there is an idea that you have, I’ve seen great brands pop up like Viori, they sell.

40:31
Really good lounge where and such and they are huge brain that just popped up, know a few years ago, but they had that gap in the market and there wasn’t great lounge where everybody who’s staying home and they wanted that stuff so to really look to see what that gap is and you know, I agree on trends changing way too fast. I think if you go that route, you may not be successful. I would think it’s going to be much more successful if you have.

40:58
classic styles that work for people long term. And also even going into the route that we’re trying to go in the future is just having a sustainable clothing line. That could be something huge if you wanted to start out that right now. Have you guys had problems with knockoffs? Yes, absolutely. So we always have issues with that. And even as far as graphic tees and graphic designs that we do on our

41:22
ours that our graphic designer hand draws, then we see it all over Etsy a month later. So yes, we always have issues with that. What would you say like a good starting budget would be for someone new who wants to go into apparel? Do you think it’s possible to bootstrap it just like you guys did today? absolutely. Yeah. Okay. think I’m always in favor of walking before you run. You know that. And where would you start in terms of marketing? Would you start with influencers? Would you start on social? What would you do if you started all over again?

41:50
Right now I would do both. would start definitely with influencers and TikTok and Instagram, media. think that there’s still lot of life left in some of those platforms and there’s also new platforms always starting up. So a lot of women have, or a lot of boutique owners that I know have great success with both of those, especially TikTok right now. Yeah, yeah. Take some dance lessons, throw up some TikToks. Start dancing and showing them how to do great. What’s your influencer strategy?

42:20
What do you We work with a variety of influencers and we really, we ensure that we’re getting a good ROI on them though. So I mean, it does take a lot of like after the fact, here’s what they are posting. Here’s what this what’s sold. Here’s what their coupon code brought in for us to be able to rebook them. You do have to bring in a certain ROI, but our strategy it’s really it’s ever changing because the influencer world is always, always where do find them? Do you look on Instagram primarily?

42:50
Yeah, so we were Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. We work with all influencers on all those platforms. So do you give them like a trial? Like you mentioned ROI, but it’s really hard to figure out whether someone’s going to be ROI positive, right? Most influencers don’t do a trial. It’s just, they’re… So what I meant by that is do you cast your net wide and then and figure out who works and then just focus on those? Okay. I think if you’re starting out now, that’s exactly what I would do. Do you focus on the smaller or are you guys looking at bigger people or…

43:19
So for us, it’s really good mix. The ones that really drive the conversion and the sales are the bigger girls, but it’s very hard to book larger girls. And it’s also very expensive to book larger girls. I think if you take the money and split it amongst smaller ones, you’re going to get a whole lot more new audiences. And in the long run, it can be better for just that top of funnel marketing. what do you negotiate as like the deliverables? I mean, obviously you’re not

43:49
Sometimes one post isn’t enough, right? So what is your typical like minimum book for them to post for you? Usually it is just one post. one post, interesting. a session too. I mean, there’s definitely some that we do like, okay, two posts a month and two story sessions, but a lot of them like to have a variety of things that they cover on their platforms and they don’t want to just be like only showing one brand all the time. Interesting. Are you looking for ROI positivity with influencers or do you, I would imagine your repeat customer rates pretty,

44:19
Pretty good, right? Because you have a closing We have about a 74 % retention rate. OK, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. It’s very above average. Yeah, that’s amazing. So that means you can probably afford to lose money on these influencers, right? Just to get someone in we don’t, though. We make sure that we do not lose money on any of our investments. So we do make sure that we have a positive ROI. OK. So if you’re brand new, would you just recommend going after the small guys? Do you actually just give away product for the small people?

44:49
In for. In the past, yes, in the past, it’s getting harder now. It has changed so much that very little influencers do it for free product. Everyone considers themselves an influencer. These days it’s changed drastically in the last even two to three years. The way of the world in 2018 with influencer world is drastically different than it is in 2022. Yeah, OK, so that sounds like a good overview. So you could probably bootstrap with like 10 grand if you were doing it all over today. Focus on social, maybe tick tock the free organic methods.

45:18
Yeah. And then find some influencers, find out, hopefully try to just give away the product in return for some mentions and then just. Yeah. sure. And be social, create a community. Yeah. I think the community is a really big factor. I think that that’s just the way of the future with online selling overall. And, you know, people want to feel like they’re, my husband’s in this bourbon group community and he spends a lot of money in there and he’s like, I love it. I’m addicted to it. And I feel like.

45:44
people actually do get addicted to these groups and that they want to check it every day. And then they’re like, oh, well, let me buy that. You know, they get excited and they want to feel a part of a community. You know, people are spending less and less real time together. So they want to have an alternative. And that’s a community on social media. Facebook still the best place for communities or have you branched out elsewhere? I think a Facebook group is probably still the number one. Still the number one. Tori, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I know you’re a busy woman just based on your nine to four schedule. It sounded ridiculous.

46:14
Where can people find more about you, your clothing, everything? Yeah, so my Instagram is just my first and last name at Tori Gerbig and our website is pinklilly.com, Instagram at Pink Lily. So super easy, both just the names. Cool. Well, Tori, thanks a lot. I’m sure this audience will get a lot out it, especially the ones who want to start apparel companies. Well, yeah, thank you for having me. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, Tori’s story is super inspiring.

46:43
and she truly is an amazing person. For more information about this episode, go to mywebquaterjob.com slash episode 411. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. Now SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

47:10
I also want thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win-back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com.

47:38
and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.