514: Behind My Brand: 2023’s Big Wins and Brutal Losses in E-Commerce

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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 what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Now, my wife just closed the books on both of our businesses and this podcast episode will do a recap of the year. I’ll talk about the highlights, the lowlights and what we have planned for 2024. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com.

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The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

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Now I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th, and right now this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be.

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Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that does not require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still access my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book.

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fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Coder Job podcast. My wife just closed the books on our two seven figure businesses. So in this episode, I’m going to give you the rundown on how both our businesses performed in 2023, including all the highlights, lowlights, and what we have planned for 2024. So first off, let’s start with my e-commerce store over at bumblebeelenns.com. If you’re not familiar with my online store, I sell handkerchiefs online and I’ve been running this seven figure store for over 16 years now. And as with any business,

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there are always going to be ups and downs. Now the beginning of 2023 got off to a shaky start because we purchased a brand new office building at the end of 2022. The landlords at our previous office where we rented for the past six years decided to jack up the rent 30%. So we finally decided to bite the bullet and buy our own office. Now give you an idea of the numbers. Our rent was going to go from about $5,000 a month to roughly $6,500 a month for a tiny 2300 square foot place.

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and we didn’t think it was worth it to continue renting. So during the first week of January, we shut down the shop for a couple of weeks to move into our brand new office and it was a major pain in the butt. But I’m happy we made the decision because our new place is big enough to last our business a long time and we no longer have to pay any rent. Now, in case you are curious what it looks like, I did a full tour over here that you can watch. But overall, January was very slow because we lost half the month to move and stuff was all over the place. But once we settled in,

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sales started rolling in. And in fact, from February until about September, October, we were experiencing record sales. Now I’m looking at our product sales right now for 2023 and almost all of our personalized linens, including handkerchiefs, napkins and towels, shot up by double digits to triple digits year over year in growth. Meanwhile, our non-personalized linens dropped about 8 to 9%, depending on the category. Now overall, I attribute the drop in our regular linen products

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to increase competition on both Amazon and other marketplaces. Now, fortunately for our store, many years ago, we decided to double down on personalization, and it’s paying off big time. Today, we’ve got six industrial-strength embroider machines running all day to create personalized products for our customers. These machines are heavy and expensive, which provides a nice barrier to entry from people wanting to copy us. Plus, learning how to embroider carries a steep learning curve

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and there are lot of steps involved in the process. Now my philosophy has always been that you never want to do what’s easy when it comes to business because there’s just going to be a lot of competition. This is why I will never recommend dropshipping as your primary business model. Sure, it’s easy and there’s low upfront costs, but there will be hundreds, if not thousands of stores out there selling the exact same thing. And it’s just going to be a race to the bottom in terms of price in the long run. Similarly,

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If you’re just buying stuff from Alibaba and then selling on Amazon unchanged, you might be able to make a couple bucks here and there, but eventually you will get squeezed. Instead, you want to sell stuff that very few people want to take on and you must build a brand by creating content. Now I teach Amazon to the students and my create a profitable online store course and I’ve consulted many sellers in the past and people have been drinking the Amazon Kool-Aid for so many years that they never bothered to learn any marketing skills for their own online store.

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Now today you have to be omnichannel and sell on as many different marketplaces as you can with your website as your home base. Anyway, sales are really good for bumblebeelindens.com until about October when Google decided to launch four consecutive core updates to combat spam. And unfortunately we were hit by one of them. Right now because of artificial intelligence, Google has a spam problem and it’s changing SEO dramatically to fight the onslaught of AI generated blog posts. Now if you look at the search results today,

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You’ll notice that sites like LinkedIn and Reddit and other user generated content sites have shot up for a bunch of different search terms. And Google is putting way more weight on established websites like Amazon and Etsy. Now, fortunately for us, most of the traffic loss was for blog posts on Bumblebee linens that got traffic, but did not lead to many sales, but we did take a slight hit of our sales. Now the one saving grace was our email list. Back in November of 2022, I implemented a service called retention.com

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that allowed me to gather emails from visitors to my site without an opt-in. Now I know this may sound a little grey hat, but it’s 100 % legal and it works great. For more information about this tool, watch this video here. But overall, retention has added me about 50,000 new emails in the past year, and many of these are new and repeat customers today. The other saving grace was that we released a brand new product line, our custom printed linens on November 24th. Now looking back, it was pretty crazy and borderline dumb

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to launch a new customized product on the busiest shopping day of the year without any fulfillment processes in place. But we did it, and it was a crap show. Here’s the backstory behind that decision though. During the middle of 2023, we decided to purchase a brand new DTF printer from Sublastar so we could print any image on any of products that we sell. Customers were asking for graphics on their linens, and our embroidery machines just were not cutting it.

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Now whenever you get a cool new gadget, it takes a while to learn how to use it and all the little tricks and quirks, and running a DTF fabric printer is nothing like printing on your inkjet at home. It’s a lot more hands-on, you have to keep the print heads clean, and there are many steps involved in the printing process. So for example, to print a design onto a handkerchief, you have to print on a special film. Then you have to put special powder on the printed design and then bake it in an oven. And then finally you have to take a heat press and then press the design onto the fabric.

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Now pressing a design one at a time is easy and it’s actually kind of fun, but imagine getting hundreds of orders all at once and if you don’t have a process in place, you’ll end up beating your head against the wall. And this is exactly how I felt on Black Friday. In fact, I was so scared of having a lot of sales volume that I didn’t even mention our new line of printed linens in the email that we sent out. Instead, I just created new categories for these products on our website for our customers to discover and launched with about nine custom design choices.

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Now on Black Friday itself, we sold exactly 23 of our brand new printed towels and handkerchiefs. Not a whole lot, but man, did we screw up that first batch. Now to provide some perspective, we got over 500 SKUs in our shop and we actually didn’t do any test prints on every single product, because it’s a lot of products. So what ended up happening was that we set the heat press temperature too high and burned a whole bunch of our linens in this first batch. Also, I was actually the only one who knew how to use the printer, so I was actually going in every day during the holiday season.

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put together SOPs for the fulfillment process on the fly. Now I don’t want to go into too much depth because I filmed a full length video here about my adventures with the printer that you can watch. But our brand new printed line of linens contributed several thousands of dollars to the top line. Not a whole lot, but enough for us to iron out the fulfillment process. In fact, one of my tasks this month is to train our employees to take over. Now going forward, I anticipate that our custom printed linens will become a major profit center for our shop.

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and we had the flexibility to print anything on anything that we sell. So all told, we started out the year weak in January, strong in all of the months until about October, where we got hit by Google, but email and SMS and our new product line allowed us to end the year up in terms of revenue. However, in terms of profit, Bumblebee Linens was way more profitable because we didn’t have to pay rent any longer. But overall, the groundwork has been laid and I think this year will be a good year for us. So what’s in store for 2024?

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I’m going to be experimenting with AI, specifically an AI bot to handle basic customer service calls. We hired a new customer support person toward the end of 2023, and she has made a huge difference. Now, because our clientele tends to be older, they like to talk on the phone, and we get a bunch of orders this way. I’m also working on creating a new handwriting embroidered product to the mix. Lots of brides have been asking us to have a handwritten message embroidered on our handkerchiefs. Now, of course, this can be done, but I need to think about how to automate this process

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so as few humans have to touch it as possible. But all told, I’m very happy with how Bumblebee Linnens performed this past year. It wasn’t a huge growth year for us, but more of an infrastructure year as we lay the groundwork for the future. Meanwhile, my other business over at mywifequitterjob.com had an incredible growth year. All told, revenue from mywifequitterjob.com increased by about 60%. Now, if you’re new to this channel, My Wife Quitter Job makes money with advertising, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, and core sales.

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I also run an annual e-commerce conference called The Seller Summit. So if you ever want to hang out in person, you know where to find me. I’ve been running this event for the past eight years and it sells out every single year. Now to be straight up with you guys, I didn’t really do anything different with MyWifeQuitterJob.com in 2023. But what amplified the growth was two main factors. In May of 2023, I launched my first book called The Family First Entrepreneur, which hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. Now how did launching my book grow my business by 60 %?

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It didn’t. And the truth is, is I made literally zero dollars from the book. Every penny of the six figure advance I received was spent on marketing and a book launch coach. But the main reason why the book caused my business to grow so much as a whole is because I nearly killed myself marketing the book in the first half of 2023. I went on over 50 podcasts from the middle of February till May. And I remember some days where I was doing four podcast interviews per day. Then all these interviews were simultaneously released during the first week of May.

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which caused a gigantic surge in traffic for my brand. All of sudden, I was getting random inquiries about my course. Meanwhile, my YouTube channel surged as well as my blog traffic, which contributed to a ton of new course sales. Meanwhile, on the content generation side, I hired a couple writers to help me increase my content production so I could attract more email side-ups and then guide them to my book. So overall, the book didn’t really contribute to my growth, but the process of marketing the book made all the difference. So looking back,

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writing the Family First Entrepreneur was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. I literally found out that I hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list just before the closing keynote of my conference over at the Seller Summit. So I was able to tell the entire crowd live on stage that I hit the list and it felt so good. The other major contributor to my income was that my advertising revenue went through the roof. Remember when I said that my YouTube traffic and blog traffic spiked? Well, at the peak,

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I was making almost 30,000 a month from YouTube ads alone and my blog was generating almost $10,000 in completely passive ad revenue. Now, unfortunately, the book launch hype eventually died down, but my YouTube channel now is over 280,000 subs and continues to be a huge contributor to email signups and ad revenue. So what’s in store for 2024 for my web Twitter job? My goal is to scale my YouTube channel. Now it’s still only the third week in January, but I’ve hired a script writer to help with my YouTube videos.

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In addition, I’ve also hired someone to help break these videos down into YouTube shorts. Now this is just a test and I’m currently weighing whether it’s worth it to hire a human versus just using AI. But the goal for 2024 is to be everywhere by producing more YouTube shorts, YouTube videos, Instagram reels and TikToks every day and multiple blog posts every single month. The goal is to continue to expand my personal brand. Hope you enjoy that episode. Now I’m really excited for 2024.

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And if there’s one key takeaway from all this, it’s that everything that I’ve ever been successful doing has been hard. So just go out and do hard things. For more information about this episode, go to mywebcoderjob.com slash episode 514. And once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go over to sellersummit.com.

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And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequaterjob.com 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.