00:28
where he sells sensory toys for kids. And what I love about his story is that he started his business for his kids and he is quite possibly one of the most passionate students I’ve ever had regarding his niche. Enjoy his story. But before I begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider.

00:54
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 single 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 my wife.

01:23
That’s KLABIYO.com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source from my e-commerce store. And I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce and e-commerce is their primary focus.

01:53
Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcasts, which I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce,

02:22
the Profitable Audience Podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it 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.

02:43
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Jason Shea on the show. Now, Jason is a student in my Creative Profitable Online Store course, and he runs a six-figure e-commerce store, soon to be seven figures, selling sensory tools for the home and classroom over at LockyKid.com. Now, Jason’s story is extremely compelling because he started his business after his son Keanu was diagnosed with autism and ADHD at a young age. And after struggling to find affordable quality products for his son,

03:12
he decided to create his own brand instead. And what’s even cooler is that he has created an amazing community where families can help each other and share their journey on the LockieKid parent support group. And what I admire about Jason is that he’s not only just out there selling products for profit, he is running his business with a purpose. And with that, welcome to show, Jason, how are you doing today?

03:33
I’m doing great. was honor for me to be on your podcast. I’ve been listening to your podcast for many, many years. And thank you for all the incredible information that you share with the e-commerce community. I’m so happy to have you. And hopefully I did not butcher your story in the intro, but please tell the audience about your store, what you sell and how you got started. Yes. So 2000, this is going to be a little bit of long story, but I’m trying to make it short.

03:59
Okay. 13, uh, me and my wife used to live in Japan. I’m from Taiwan. My wife is from Japan, but I do speak Mandarin and Japanese as well. And, however, Japan, just like any of the Asian countries, that’s a huge taboo and a huge stigma around disabilities. When we first find out our son was down as autism and ADHD, we couldn’t find help. There’s no support. There’s no.

04:28
There’s no parents support group in Japan. There’s no resources to give you a perfect example. We live in Tokyo, one of the largest metropolitan area in this world with 14 million people. We can only find two therapy center to take our son to. Yeah, that’s crazy. I know just an Asian cultures. It doesn’t exist. Or if it is, you just kind of keep it under wraps and no one talks about it. A hundred percent. That’s exactly what happened to us. And you know, because

04:57
What make it worse is autism ADHD is an invisible disabilities, which means it’s a lot easier to hide. You couldn’t hire kids on wheelchair, but you can hire kids with ADHD. problem. I can, can actually completely understand what you’re talking about. mean, anything that’s not visible, like mental health issues are generally taboo among Asian cultures. Yes. Yes. That’s unfortunate, but you know what? I’m going to change that. That’s my callings and that’s my passion.

05:26
And I’m going to use my business over the next 10 years to change 1 million lives. 1 million lives of those families just like mine that are being affected by learning disabilities. And I want to change that to my business, to my teams. I want the university to use me as a vehicle for positive change. That’s very admirable. Why physical products of all the things that you could have done? So let me kind of complete the story there. So 2013, we got the analysis. We couldn’t find help in Japan.

05:54
Fortunately, I have dual citizenship. have Taiwanese citizenship and US citizenship. I actually went to high school and college in California. So we decided to move back to US because US have the best resources for kids with special needs. Of course, US is not perfect. There’s still a lot of things that we need to do here in US to make it even better. But compared to Asian countries, it’s a lot better.

06:20
And then I started to connect with parents, therapists, and even teachers in the special education space. This is what I find out. I find out there’s a gap. It’s hard to find affordable, high quality sensory product created by someone also used the Dane product. So interesting. Who are the ones creating them then? A lot of the people, if you just Google them, Google any of my competition, you look up their CEO is a random single guy. It’s not even married. And of course this guy doesn’t have any kids.

06:51
Okay. So you already know they are in it for the money. I’m in it for a passion. mean, this is why I always openly share about everything I do in the business because guess what? You can copy my entire strategy. You can copy every single product I ever launched, but you can never copy my passion. And you can’t copy your community that you’ve developed either. Exactly. So I’m not afraid of people trying to compete with me because you can’t. There’s no way you can compete with me, unfortunately.

07:20
So, I mean, you saw a need for yourself for these sensory products, but how did you know that they were going to sell? Like, how did you go about validating what you wanted to sell before you began? This is something very unique. think a lot of the e-commerce seller doesn’t do enough is to talk to the customer. I, this is, I always advocate when I talk to, was follow e-commerce entrepreneur. Talk to your customer over the phone. This is what I do on a weekly basis. I talk to my customer over the phone for like 30 minutes.

07:49
just trying to understand what kind of struggle they have, what kind of product they have tried, what do they like, what do they don’t like, and you get so much product idea. You don’t need to use jungle scout. You don’t need to use healing pen. That’s all BS because every single person is looking at the same data that you’re looking at. One of my mantra is if you follow the herd, you get slaughtered. I absolutely agree. So I have somewhat of a different philosophy. So I feel like you can either go broad,

08:18
and just do marketing really well, or you can go extremely niche in an area that no one else is really at and just dominate that market. Anywhere in between is much more difficult. So this is also going back to, depends on which direction you want to go, right? You want to go like a Walmart or you want to go as a niche store. Okay. So what was your first product then based on your research?

08:43
My first product is actually very simple product is a fidget chair band that is really just a giant rubber band that you put in front of the classroom chair, but it’s great for kids with ADHD and sensory issues. And it’s a very popular product used by the teachers. And we just redesigned it a little bit using a better material. And ours is only lettuce free, a chair band in the market. Latex free late latex free. I know that you saw an Amazon.

09:13
like a good portion of your business. How do you make your brand stand out? I just kind of cursory checked these products and they’re super competitive. Yes, it is. It is. So unfortunately, when I first started, I didn’t have the bandwidth and the design power to do something totally unique. So I would say a lot of the initial product when I first launched is almost like a me too product was minor modification, but all the new product I’m launching this year is so unique that no one have something even closely similar to ours.

09:44
Okay. So what was your process for that first product? Did you just, actually you speak the language. So did you actually go to Asia to get the product? No, I don’t need to go to Asia. just, on WeChat, I just talked to them over the phone using Chinese. And of course you don’t need to speak Chinese to talk to the supplier. Correct. But you help. Okay. And these suppliers, did you find them on Alibaba or? Yes, Alibaba. That’s how I started. Yeah. I think I purchased one of those e-commerce course. I forgot which one I purchased many, many years ago when I started back in 2016.

10:14
Okay, I mean, we were just talking about Jungle Scout and these rubber bands and stuff. And it was a Mewtwo product like you just said. So how did you get sales on this product? Back then, I don’t have an email list. I was a typical Amazon seller. I buy review. Okay, so this is back before they were cracking down. That’s 2016. mean, 17. That’s the wild west of Amazon. You can do any kind of crazy strategy and Amazon allow it.

10:42
But of course now you cannot do it and I don’t do it anymore. right. Well, let’s talk about your newest products that you’re designing from scratch. How are you getting those designed and manufactured? So right now, most of our product, have four manufacturers we use in China because of the relationship we built over the year. One of the latest product we are designing, my wife helped with the design. It’s a weighted lab animal we’ll be launching next month.

11:12
Knock on wood, hopefully we don’t have any delay with the container, but we’ll be launching this product next month. You know what’s funny is the last time we had talked on the phone, you mentioned that you and your wife don’t typically work together because you want to keep everything separate, right? But it seems like just now you told me that she’s, she’s actually working in on the business now. That’s a part-time consultant. I would say on a very, very part-time basis. Okay. Okay.

11:39
Yeah, so he’s not, she’s not in the daily meeting, the weekly meeting I’m in, but when I, but she is a much better designer than me as far as creative idea for products. She’s so much better than I am. I’m the worst. cannot, I can barely draw a monkey. cannot. Yeah. I’m not, I’m not a graphic designer and the idea person and the visionary of the business, but I’m not a designer. Right. Okay.

12:07
Just be careful there because I work with my wife and it’s not always smooth. So, okay. So, okay. So this product that’s launching, uh, actually I wanted to just back up a little bit. most of your sales on Amazon or your own store or partners? 2021 80 % of our entire revenue. And we did a little bit over 600,000 last year. Just to be transparent. 80 % of that is Amazon. 20 % is from ClickFunnels and Shopify.

12:36
Okay. And I know we had talked earlier when COVID hit your business got hit, right? Oh yeah. So 2020 is the darkest point in my entire e-commerce journey and maybe the darkest point of my life. I was on the edge of a bankruptcy and a divorce because most of my customers are school and most of the school buy our product. And we all know what happened to all the school in 2020. Every single school got shut down at the same time.

13:06
Yes. business pretty much got shut down alongside with the school in 2020. And right now, looking back, I’m actually grateful for what that actually happened because it forced me to reset. It forced me to relook at my business. And since then, I was able to come back even, even stronger. Like I shared with you earlier, before we go live here is my favorite animal is a Phoenix. And I’m also moving to Phoenix, Arizona in July this year.

13:35
Because that was me. was my entire business got burned into ashes in 2020. But guess what I was able to come back in 2021 and did 600,000 and this year and I’m attracted to 1.2 million was my brand. we talk about what happened? So so the school shut down, no one was buying your products on Amazon. How did you recover from that? I lay every single team member off. I did as I unsubscribe so my subscription pretty much

14:04
I try to run as lean as possible, reduce all the expenses, all the subscriptions. I look at every single software I was subscribed to and cancel almost every single one of them. Okay. So this inventory was just sitting in Amazon’s warehouse, right? It’s still selling, it was not, it’s nowhere close at the value that we were selling. But I have debt. I took a loan against my house to fund a business that I still need to pay off. So that, that pressure won’t go away, but

14:32
the inventory is not selling at the same velocity like before. So that’s where the older pressure cooking situation built out. And that’s where I have a very, very difficult conversation with my wife because I wasn’t very honest with her. I didn’t tell her how much debt I put on through the business. I was just, I was there to say, okay, I’ve took a little bit of debt, but actually I took on 200,000. Wow. Okay.

14:57
So that was a very difficult conversation with my wife when I show her the numbers. So yeah. I can imagine. So, so you just went super lean. You got through 2020 and then what happened in 2021 that allowed you to recover and make $600,000 in revenue. I will say a few things. First of all, if you haven’t read the book Tractions for the listener, a hundred percent read that book. That book literally transformed my business and my life.

15:27
Do want to talk about, I’m sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with traction, but what are some of the things that you implemented with your business that had made a big difference? about six major component people, data, vision, factions, processes. And, that’s one more, but anyway, I spent six months studying it, master it and implement it throughout my entire business structure. that transformed my business and turn my business around.

15:56
because of that business structure. for those of you who doesn’t know, Traction is written by a wonderful gentleman. His name is Geo Wickman. He is also a serious entrepreneur. He created a business operating system called EOS, which stands for Entrepreneur Operating System. And it’s just really a specific way to run a business. And this way of management philosophy can apply to any business, not just an e-commerce business. And I implement the system into my business to a T. I follow every single thing that was listed out in his book.

16:26
I almost treated it like my business Bible for the, for the past year. So what about this system specifically contributed to sales, or is it just the fact that all the schools opened up again and you were generating sales again? It’s the vision in the book. You talk about the importance of have a very clear vision, have a core value for the business. Right now I have five core value for the businesses and I hire, I fire.

16:55
I train my entire team using it. So I know, I think it was in 2020 or I remember you telling me you ran out of stock and then Amazon sales dropped as a result of that, right? it’s actually one of the most frustrating things because of the limited cash flow we have. We always get inventory in and we couldn’t buy enough because I don’t have enough money on hand. So we are sold out after like one month.

17:21
Then the lead time for China is like three months, two to three months. So I was sold out for at least a few weeks waiting for the next shipment to arrive. But then I lose all the ranking, I lose everything. And I need to redo from scratch again for the inventory to come back. And this happened multiple times. So what I’m trying to get at here is, sure, you can, and I’ve read the book before, but any system that you implemented takes time, right?

17:47
And so I’m just kind of curious, I’m sure going forward for your business, the systems that you’ve implemented will be amazing for what you’re going to accomplish. But in the period of just from 2020 to 2021, what would you say change that allow you to achieve your revenue numbers?

18:07
I say besides the implementation is also we got a loan from SBA. Okay. That’s also a huge one that able to keep us cashflow positive. So I have enough money to buy inventory because that was the biggest struggle is I don’t have enough cash to buy inventory because with a container that I’m purchasing is like 30 or 40,000 for each container. And that’s a lot of money for me to put out from my own pocket when I have very limited

18:35
And I already max out all my credit card, I max out all my loans and I don’t have any other additional resources. So when the, I don’t know if you heard of the EIDL loan, which is a special loan that you can apply for, for, I think it’s stand for emergency disaster relief loan. I forgot the actual name for the, we are lucky enough. got 400,000 from SBA. So in 2020, you said you weren’t selling that many products. So you had an inventory glut.

19:03
But then that changed in the latter part of the year and then you sold out. I’m trying to get an idea what the timeline was. Uh, it’s kind of, it’s a mix. think it depends on the product because we have about six, seven products. Some product was, was doing okay, but we don’t have enough. Some product is not selling well and we have too much. So it’s a mix of both. Right. And you needed money to launch this new product, obviously. A hundred percent. Yes. So I know you’ve been burned by Amazon, uh, multiple times.

19:32
Yes. And at some point you were like, okay, forget Amazon. I’m going to, I’m going to start creating my own brand. Can we just kind of talk about what initiatives you took on to accomplish that goal? Yeah. And this is actually a perfect segue because I like to share an example for those that heavily focusing on Amazon for the Amazon seller that’s listening. We are playing in the casino called Amazon and

20:00
We have a fancy slot machine that print out $1 million a year. But guess what? Jeff Bezos with someone on Amazon can kick us out of the casino at any point. And that was kind of what happened to me.

20:16
I didn’t realize, sorry, when you’re talking about getting kicked out of the casino, did you mean the fact that you went out of stock and then your rankings tanked? Well, in that way, and I also have some of our listing shut down as well. So it’s a combination of those. Has Amazon knocked you off actually with their own private label brand at all? Not yet, because we’re in a smaller niche. Usually Amazon go after much bigger guy than I am. So what are you doing to

20:45
diversify off of Amazon? We focus heavily on email marketing. So currently we have about 35,000 email subscribers on our own email list and email marketing have been one of our core focus in 2021. So how do you build your email list? So I think we also learned something from your course and I bought so many different courses. So it’s just fun. All the different email marketing course I have bought, but it’s about building email sequences.

21:14
having weekly broadcast with newsletter. And I also write personal email sharing about what’s going on with my life sometimes just to build that relationship with my email list. And on the front end, we do two major strategy. First is we have a lead funnel. For those of you who want to check out all of my funnel and 100 % transparent, just go to SensoryDio.com. You’ll see all the funnel we have. We have like 20 different funnel right now. Do you want to spell that out just so people can go there? Yes, it’s Sensory.

21:42
S E N S O R Y deal D E D E A L dot com. Sensoradeal.com. Got it. That’s one of my domain. I own a lot of different domain. So that’s one of the domain. And what we do is we have two major funnel and you can actually go check out the page and you’ll see all the funnel we have, but two major types that were generating email is a free ebook download. And we drive directly into one of the funnels from Facebook to get email addresses.

22:12
The second funnel we run is a free plus shipping funnel, which is a very popular funnel for e-commerce businesses where we will sell the product for free. We only charge for shipping and usually the shipping is only $6.97. So it’s really affordable and it’s almost like impulse purchase on Facebook.

22:31
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

23:00
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

23:29
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 dot com. Now back to the show. Let’s talk about that actually. So I know, and I’ve taught free plus shipping offers in the class, but you know, it’s or miss depending on what you do. And for us, like it was hit or miss for us until we finally found that one product that worked. What is your one product and what is your process? Yeah, that’s a certain criteria you need to hit for it to work.

23:59
So what was your process for determining that? We tried then launch it and see if worked. If it doesn’t work, we launch a new one. Well, let me rephrase that question. So what is like the cost of your product and are you taking a loss? Oh no, we are profitable without funnel. The idea for the free-flow shipping funnel is in the digital marketing world is often called self-liquidating funnel, So we generate enough profit from the funnel to break even so all the lead that’s coming through

24:28
We got free unlimited free lead. So can we talk about the funnel? So the product costs you how much? Uh, less than $2.00. Okay. And then to ship that is maybe like another $3.00. Okay. So you’re making like a buck maybe, right? Well, again, in the funnel, we do a lot of upsell and downsell is not just single product. Usually people buy multiple product. Our average car value for the funnel is about $25 right now, even though it’s only a $7 product.

24:58
So can we talk about the upsells? So what is the product? The product itself, if you go visit SensoryDio.com, you’ll see in the middle of the page is a Fidget Marble Maze. It’s a very basic sensory toy that we designed it with a marble in it that the kids can push through the marble. It’s great for fine motor skills and, know, tactiles and, you know, great. It’s just a great silent fidget toy. And it’s our best selling product that got suspended by Amazon, by the way. Okay. Let’s not get into that. But okay.

25:28
So that’s the offer. And then what is the upsell and what is the downsell? Upsell is we have multiple offers. So usually you get the best price if you buy three. So most of the customer will buy three. That’s the best like a bundle offer. Then we also have digital product because as a company we sell physical product, we sell digital product, we also sell digital courses and we also sell paid membership. Okay, wow. That’s okay. So what is working the best in terms of the upsells?

25:58
Digital product. I’ll take rate for a ebook bundle we sell for $10 is 20 % and ebook is 100 % profit and we just make $10 prior profit out of the funnel for the buyers. is this ebook about? I would imagine as a parent of an autistic child, I would want to buy anything that could help me. It’s a behavior blueprint ebooks about different strategy you can use with your kids to manage the behavior issues. Yeah. Nice. And how much do you charge for this ebook?

26:27
It’s a ebook bundle. So it’s multiple ebook in that bundle. I forgot how many ebook we offer in the bundle five or six or ten dollars. Ten dollars. Nice. Nice. Okay. And that’s a hundred percent profit. Okay. Yeah. For the ads, is it pretty easy to target people with? I don’t know how much you want to talk about that. But I’m just curious. I mean, because Facebook is getting harder and harder, just like Amazon’s getting harder and harder with the iOS update.

26:56
We are kind of struggling right now to really break even on a funnel like we used to before. So I know that all the audiences that Facebook generates is getting harder, but the ones that are interest-based, you know, like with the sensory autism, always take away the interest targeting as well. know, know. The basis, did they take away that category for you? Not an entire category, but some of the interest targeting we used to use got taken away. Yeah.

27:25
Okay. You know what, let’s talk about community. Cause I know, let’s see, what do you have? You have like a whole bunch of different clubs, right? You have the, I have them written down here somewhere. So we have a free community called Sensory Deal, which they can search it on Facebook, then you can join. But it’s just a free community that we share deals of our sensory product. It could be a physical product deal. could be a physical product deal or a deal with some of our partner, you know, and

27:54
that is one of the free community. Then we have a pay community where we charge $20 a month is called Sensui Adventure Club. For $20 a month, you get like lessons that you can watch alongside with your kids. As we partnered with a gentleman, he owned a wonderful business called Sensui Fitness, which his name is Matt. He had over 10 years of experience of being a personal trainer, a special education teacher, and a certified occupational service assistant.

28:23
And he create program to help kids with special needs. You have a lot of businesses all in one. I’m counting like five off the top of my head here. Yes. How people do you have and how do you operate all of these entities? It’s all under the same roof. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. So let me just list off the ones I saw here. You have sensory adventure club, ask an autism mom live and then sensory fitness live, right?

28:50
Yes, that’s the show. Those are free. Those are not generally revenue, just like a show that we run. Okay. But the club is the paid membership, right? The club is a new pay. We just launched it few months ago. We are still working on some of the back end set up to make sure it’s running more smoothly, but it’s a pretty, it’s a pretty new membership. Let’s talk about the content that you’re putting out. What is your strategy there?

29:13
We are actually revamping our entire strategy right now. I want to be very, very more hands-on, maybe starting next quarter, because I have two startup companies, LockyKey is just one of them. Oh my goodness. Okay. Yeah. The second startup is actually a, I don’t know if I can share it on the podcast, but it’s an e-commerce digital marketing agency. We help seven figure e-commerce businesses to grow beyond Amazon. Nice. Okay. And is content part of the strategy?

29:42
Yes, 100%. Uh, so we have a show, we have a podcast that I would love for you to be a guest on my podcast as well. Cool. You want to tell people what the podcast is called? It’s called Scent, uh, seller feel life seller S E L L E R F U E L life seller fuel live. Okay. Yeah. So the fuel life is so talk about your current content strategy for Locky kid. Yes. How often are you putting out content and what, what type of content is it?

30:12
So since COVID, we kind of scaled down a lot of the content marketing play that we used to do, but we used to do a lot of content marketing. Our core strategy is Facebook live stream. Then we repurpose our live show, which is a one hour interview into multiple different meaning content, which is exactly what Gary V does with a vendor media, I believe. We just do it on the smaller scale compared to Gary V, of course.

30:38
but we’ll repurpose it for Instagram, for YouTube, for TikTok, for every other social media channel based on our pillar content, which is the live show. I see. Okay. And then is the live show an interview based show or do you come up with an interview based? Usually it’s interview based. Sometimes we’ll share a strategy like a webinar based, but most of the time it’s interview based. We’ll interview expert in the space. For example, we’ll interview occupational therapists, we’ll interviews teachers.

31:07
Sometimes we’ll also interview other entrepreneurs that serving the same communities as well on our show. So outside of Amazon, the physical products on your own site, how are you driving? Is it mainly just your Facebook funnels that are driving traffic and sales to that? Yeah, all the cold top of level funnels, we use ClickFunnels. So this is something very unique that I don’t see a lot of people do is we use a combination of ClickFunnels and Shopify.

31:36
And ClickFunnels is for all the direct, what’s it called? Direct to consumer ads or direct response. Direct response is all to ClickFunnels. For branding, it’s all Shopify. So we use Shopify as a branding website where we use ClickFunnels as direct response advertising. Here’s what I’ve always wondered. I think ClickFunnels is kind of overpriced. What does ClickFunnels do?

32:04
that you can’t implement in Shopify. You make it a lot easier because this is the main difference. I’m a funnel fan boy, so I’m going to talk very highly about funnel because the main difference between a funnel and the website. Website, when people go in, there’s 100 different things they can do. They can click on your top menu, bottom menu, a button there and here. A funnel, that’s only a single call to actions. They can either buy or don’t buy. That’s it.

32:31
But that’s just a page. You can rip out all the headers and the footers on your Shopify store. you have integration with digital product inside the ClickFunnels and our membership inside ClickFunnels. We can do unlimited upsell and downsell. I know you can also do it similarly in a Shopify setup. We just prefer ClickFunnels. OK, so it’s just worth it from an ease of use perspective, basically.

32:55
Yes. And my sister, who is also my chief marketing officer, she is the best funnel builder on earth. Nice. Yeah. And then, so these communities, once you’ve developed them, you get them on the email list through one of your lead magnets and then you, and then you email them regularly. Is that the strategy? That’s okay. have a welcome sequence, abandoned car sequence, all the typical e-commerce sequence. And then we do weekly newsletter.

33:23
And sometimes I also send out personalized email about like what’s going on with my personal life, because I really want to create that personal bonding connection with our customer base. And we also run ambassador program and our ambassador program is very unique compared to a lot of other e-commerce brand as well. I think that’s really important. Actually. One thing that was compelling about your store when I went on it was the about page where you basically spelled out the main reason why you started the store in the first place.

33:53
And if I’m just shopping for sensory products, I’m to go to you because you actually have a story as opposed to just some random person who’s selling for profit. Yeah. But you know, not everyone look at that. Sometimes I think some, I think some of our customer by far is because of my story, but some people still will just buy on Amazon. Yeah. mean, Amazon, you don’t have the opportunity to tell your story, right? So a little bit, very limited. So yeah.

34:22
So you said you’re projected to do 1.2 million this year. What is going to be the primary revenue driver for that? We are launching seven new products this year. Seven new physical products? Seven new physical products. Yeah. Okay. And these are all custom designed private label products. That’s correct. Yes. Do you project this revenue coming from Amazon or your own store? I mean, you have 35,000 email subs.

34:47
So that RB, this is where I want to be by the end of this year. want to be at least 50, 50 instead of 80, 20 last year with 80 % Amazon. really want to increase my own Shopify and ClickFunnels sales this year. So it’d be 50, 50. Yeah. 35,000 email subs though, in this space. That’s really valuable. Can I just ask you what percentage of your revenue is email right now? On the Shopify side, I will say I need to check my Clavio account. haven’t checked for a while.

35:16
At least 20 % or 25 % from email. are you using this list to launch your Amazon products as well? 100%. Yes. Okay. All right. That’s our entire launch strategy is email plus PPC. That’s it. I see. So do you, how do you structure your launches? So are you sending email to take people directly to the product or you know, so what are you doing? We learned from SR Firestone because he does very, very well product launches and

35:45
I think his message is he will create an early bird page and have his entire list sign up for early bird discount. Then it’s just kind of do a lot of buildup before the product launch. Then he will do email like crazy. He would write like 14 emails during the product launch week and just promote a lot out of the product. what we do is we do a similar setup, but for Amazon, we will still do early bird for them to sign up to a dedicated email list. Then during the launch week,

36:15
We send out 14 emails to our list with a link to Amazon and Amazon coupon that’s embedded in our Amazon listing. So it’s very easy for them to redeem the coupon. They don’t even need a coupon code. All they need to click is just they need to click this button and you auto apply to coupon. So you’re just going for sales velocity here and not keyword searches. Because you are naturally rank. Okay. This is the beauty of external traffic when you deal with Amazon.

36:44
Amazon treat external traffic differently than anything else you do within Amazon. So you don’t have anyone do any searches, you’re just relying purely on external traffic velocity to launch your product. 100%. I do not do any of the shenanigans and like search, and buy. I mean, they work. is why it used to work. anymore. So they still work as long as it’s natural, like none of the two step URLs and that stuff worked that well, but just a plain old search actually works.

37:12
Yeah, but it won’t work if you do a Facebook ad anymore because technically it’s against the latest Amazon TOS where you cannot give out rebates. Sure. Assuming. Yeah. You know, what’s sad about all this is that people still do this all the time. Yeah, but you know, this is where the casino analogy come back is you’re going to get kicked out of the casino because the house always win doesn’t matter how house always win. Okay. So yeah.

37:42
Okay, so outside of Facebook ads, are you doing any other ads? Shopping, AdWords? We do Google ads and our Google ad strategy is all the ad traffic directly to one of our blog posts and the blog posts have embedded link in there that go directly to our Amazon listing. Okay. And in terms of inventory, is it all FBA or do you have your own like warehouse or intermediary?

38:09
We have a warehouse in Oregon and I actually just switched my warehouse from Chicago to Oregon because of the whole shipping debacle going on last year. And right now, instead of going to LA and Long Beach port, I’m using Tacoma port. Seattle. Seattle. Okay. Yes. Cool. Hey, Jason, I didn’t mean to grill you. I’m just very curious, you know, about your business. For anyone out there who wants to start a business,

38:37
I just want to ask you a couple of questions that are just kind of quick fire that I always ask my students. How much did you invest to launch your store?

38:46
Oh man, how much did I invest? Like just to get up until getting your first sale, let’s just say. I will say I didn’t start out with private label. So I started out with retail arbitrage for the first year. And what I did is I go to a surf store and buy used textbooks and I flip them on Amazon and eBay for like one year. That’s how I got my initial investment. Okay. But for Locky Kid. Yeah. I flipped all that profit from the textbooks into Locky Kid.

39:14
Well, yeah, I know. But how much did you spend to start Locky Kit? Not the retail arbitrage stuff? I would say at least $30,000. $30,000. Is it because you were doing your own private label products? Yes. Yes. So you must have made a pretty sizable first shipment then? Because I didn’t know better. I thought I need to order more. I see. Okay. So is it the bulk of that $30,000 inventory?

39:41
inventory and also shipping costs and also marketing costs because you know back then you can buy reviews so part of that goes away. yeah. In terms of your website are you technical person? I am not. No, I’m the visionary and I’m not a technical person. Yeah.

40:02
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It 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, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

40:29
is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce 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. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut out ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue,

40:57
We are also offering an exclusive Mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of Mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

41:23
Was that one of the hard parts at all or was that one of the easier parts? Just getting your website and everything set up. That’s part of the 30,000. just hire someone. Okay. Got it. Got it. Okay. So if you were to encapsulate your experiences, what would you say is your biggest challenge in getting started? Staying focused. Because I also have ADHD myself. So I always go, I always chase after the shiny object. Okay. Let’s try dropshipping.

41:51
Uh, let’s try wholesale. Let’s try private label. I mean, you have a lot of projects on your plate. have to admit, like I can only handle like a handful of projects at any given time. It’s just, I just can’t do it. Right now my focus in my business is I want to be the field Jackson on my industry and I want to be the head coach and uh, Phil Jackson is very well known for being a Zen master. And this is why I do with my team. do a group meditation every single week during our

42:21
team meeting and because I believe 90 % of all of our success is based on our mindset. It’s not a strategy. It’s not a tactic. It’s the mindset. I actually agree with you now. Back then, I used to think it was all strategy and tactics, but just in the course of teaching my class for like over a decade, a lot of this stuff, it’s not rocket science, right? It’s really just following through and being consistent about it.

42:49
And most of it, can hire a VA to do it. I mean, you don’t really do. I don’t do anything myself nowadays with my businesses. My main goal is to talk. Everyone else do. talk. So how much time did it take you to make your first sale? And again, I’m just talking about lucky kid here. It was pretty fast. If you assume as we listed on Amazon and we have some review going, the the sales already start happening the very next day.

43:18
Okay, so within a day or two? Yeah, yeah, yeah. was so easy back then. Oh my God. I miss those days. What about today though? Like you first all over from scratch. Let’s say you didn’t have that email list. That will be, I will go back and build my own email list from scratch again, because that’s very, very important in the ecosystem nowadays. Is your content strategy more valuable than your ads right now in generating email subs?

43:48
Well, I will say I’m actually still weak on organic social media. That’s something I’m still working with my team to get better on. Like we were not really good with Instagram, to be honest. We are okay with Facebook. We have about $13,000, but Instagram, kind of suck at it. So pay marketing is still one of the big focus for us right now. Okay. All right. So for someone who’s listening to this right now, who’s waiting on the sidelines and wanting to start a business.

44:17
What would be the main advice you would give them? would say think differently. Think differently in the turn as all the group out there always teach you to find the next gadget that you can make money. Don’t do that. Find the next tribe that you can serve. I completely agree. how, actually, how important is it to you to be passionate about what you’re selling?

44:43
100%. That’s my entire spiritual being. The whole reason of my existence on this earth is to serve, is to serve the family like I have. That’s why what all the things that happened to me happened. To give you another personal story, back in 2017, a few months after I started Lucky Kid, my older daughter got diagnosis with leukemia. Oh no. And that was really, really tough.

45:10
having a full-time job and a side business and two kids with special needs, one was autism, one was leukemia.

45:20
It was very bad. can’t even imagine. But you know what? I’m already at the end of the tunnel. She’s already in full remission now. But during that two and a half year, I really don’t know how I even wake up in the morning.

45:35
You know, the reason why I asked you that question is because I am not passionate about our products, but I am passionate about our business. So it’s, it’s interesting to get a different person’s perspective on all that. I think it helps if you can become passionate for both, then you get so much momentum. That’s why I always tell my team, I don’t drink coffee because I get high with water. I can only imagine you on caffeine. That’d be kind of scary.

46:05
Hey, well Jason, if anyone has any questions or if anyone out there listening has a child with ADHD or autism, where can they find more information? They can visit our corporate homepage, lakikid.com, which is spelled as L-A-K-I-K-I-D.com, or they can visit sens3do.com. That’s also one of our pages. And for the teachers out there, you can visit

46:33
sensoryinclusiveclassroom.com. That’s a special program we have for the school. You know, one thing that just struck me is how come you have three different websites for the same business? Different business. Like I say, the luckykid.com is really just a branding website, a branding page. SensoryDL is more for direct response and it’s called a funnel hub. That is a, I think, a concept pioneered by Russell Bronson.

47:01
because he’s like a king of funnels and we have built so many funnels over the year but no one can find any of our funnels because we have so many so we decided to okay let’s put it on the same domain so we can find it. And for teachers rather than putting like just a wholesale tab on Locky Kid what is the reason for having a separate site for that? Because this is a new program we are working on launching this year actually. Originally this program is supposed to launch in 2020 and you know what happened to the school.

47:30
The idea of the program is to give you a 30 second overview is we have an ongoing partnership with a wonderful nonprofit organization called Culture City. They have over 600 locations across the United States, Canada, UK and Australia. One of the biggest programs they have is called Sensory Inclusive Initiative, which they have participating locations like NBA stadiums, football and baseball arenas, zoos, aquariums, cruise ships and airports. And last year they got into police stations.

47:58
And what they do in all those locations, they will do three things. They will provide staff training. So the staff aware of the sensory challenges when family like bind, when I take my son to the stadium, they’ll get sensory overloaded. You’ll have a meltdown, you’ll have a tantrum. So the training is important. Second, they also provide sensory backs. Inside the sensory backs have a physical tool like noise canceling headphones.

48:24
and also one of our product, which is a writable weighted blanket that we designed for Culture City. And then last but not least, they also help all those locations to build sensory rooms, which is a safe and quiet space for the family to go to. And this year we want to take this same program that we’re doing with Culture City in the NBA stadiums, we want to take it to the public school environment by providing training to the teacher, providing sensory toys and tools to the teachers.

48:52
and help school to build sensory rooms. That’s amazing, actually. I just, you have so many projects going on. I know you’re going to be successful. So maybe we’ll check back in like a year or two and see how everything’s going. But I really appreciate you coming on the show, Jason. Thanks a lot for your story. And my long-term vision and my dream is go back to help the family in Asia. And I’m happy to say I’m ready to do that.

49:18
This year we’re expanding into Amazon Japan and Amazon Singapore and Amazon Canada. Nice. Wow. That’s a lot of, a lot of stuff to do in a year, man. I believe my team can do it. Uh, I’m the cheerleader and I’m the coach of the team. My team will go, go out and accomplish all this goal. Well, best of luck to you, Jason. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much.

49:41
Hope you enjoyed that episode and that is a wrap for student month. Now, bringing these student interviews to you, I hope you got an accurate view of what it’s like to start an e-commerce business from complete scratch. For more information about this episode, go to mywebquaterjob.com slash episode 397. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing 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.

50:06
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. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, I’ve got a banner 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 K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

50:32
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLA V I Y O. 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 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.

00:28
And prior to meeting Annette, I did not believe that the combination of these two sourcing models was possible. Enjoy her story. 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 and you can segment your audience just like email.

00:58
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 T R I P T dot I O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show and I’m always super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another email provider. 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.

01:27
Klaviyo can track every single customer who’s 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. Now Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony.

01:57
And unlike this podcast where I interview 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.

02:24
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Annette Delancey on the show. Annette is a student in my Creator Profitable Online Store course and she’s made millions selling orthopedic soft goods such as cast covers, boot covers and more over at castcovers.com. And that’s spelled C-A-S-T-C-O-V-E-R-Z.com. Now Cast Covers is actually the worldwide leader in this space. She sells over 2000 skews that she manufactures herself.

02:51
And her business is almost 100 % virtual, which means that she doesn’t have a warehouse or local employees. And in fact, she has constructed her business to have the best of both worlds, private label products that are her brand without the need to carry inventory or have her own warehouse. And with that, welcome to the show, Annette. How are you doing today? Thank you, Steve, for having me. I’m doing well. I’m so happy to have you on. I think the audience is in for real treat because you are like a bundle of energy. So Annette.

03:20
please tell the audience about your business, what you sell and actually how you came up with the idea. Sure. So Cast Covers is, you did an outstanding job of introducing the company. We’re 13 years old international company. And I got the idea, well, it’s actually 14 years old now, but I got the idea from my then 10 year old daughter who broke the humerus, which is the big bone in your upper arm when she was 10. It was her sixth broken bone. Oh my goodness.

03:49
six, one, two, three, four, five, six. And she felt so betrayed by her body again. My cooking was no longer comfort. And, and when she had the cast put on, was an emergency room physician. And it was, and excuse my language, I guess, but it was the butt ugliest cast I had ever seen. And she just was so, so downtrodden. So I decided to just cover it. So I pulled out my old trusty sewing machine, covered it and made us in a really happy sling.

04:19
made her another set, another set. And that was when people started stopping us in the street that I realized, hmm, I’ve got an idea. And I had three other businesses before, but this was my first manufacturing business. And I became the accidental entrepreneur. And that pun is intended. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an attractive Cassie for usually these nasty white things, right? That are sweaty and yeah. And they and they’re they’re

04:46
A lot of people are germaphobes and they get dirty and they get smelly. And the other thing that happens with cast, which is a nasty byproduct is they scratch and snag everything near you, whether it’s your sheets, your sofa, your car upholstery. I’ve got a great story about that, by the way. Uh, and the cover actually prevents the scratching and snagging that occurs. So you save your sweaters. had somebody tell me how it saved her 800.

05:15
count sheets, which I didn’t even know was a thing at the time. So great stories, great stories. So what were your motivations for starting the business then? I were you working full time at the time? Well, had. Yeah. Great question, Steve. I had a, uh, it was a consulting business and I was running political campaigns and I knew I was done with the world of politics. Done. And I, and also I thought my children really needed to see me.

05:44
getting out and working and creating something. I was doing campaigns and or marketing research campaigns, there’s not a tangible thing. And so I said, this is going to be a great experience for them. And it did. Every night we’d sit around the dining room table and talk about customer service stories. We talked about supply issues that I had even back then. We talked about employee issues. It’s been a great training ground for them. They’re young adults now.

06:13
I mean, that one’s married and one’s and the other one has a baby my grandchild. I actually I didn’t realize so this was a family business from the start. It was and my husband helped me very early on and and I often like to say that my daughter inspired me. My son came up with the name and my husband provided the capital at the beginning. And so that’s so it was a family business without a doubt. Yes.

06:40
But you were mentioning that you would chat with your kids about these issues like inventory issues and that sort of thing. So did they get a lot out of it as well? Very much. I can’t believe the conversations we have today. My son is 25 and he’s in law school. one of his essays that got him into one of the top law schools in the country was about the fact that I was audited by the IRS.

07:05
and how he felt that this was a travesty to a small business and how onerous and burdensome it was. And it was just fascinating. This would not have resonated with him, of course, I not drawn the children into the business. And then my daughter has got a real marketing sense that she’s now utilizing in her job, which is a social media content manager for other companies.

07:33
definitely can talk about the customer experience and whether it’s online or unboxing a product. they definitely, whether my daughter never liked to talk about it because it was about her broken bones. I was actually kind of surprised it was something that I found out much later or realized later, she just didn’t want to talk about it because it reminded her of such a very painful time period. either of them help you with the business today? No.

08:03
Well, it’s funny because my daughter’s working for an agency and they now handle all my social media and she’s handling my social media, but I don’t manage her at all. It’s wonderful. a good thing. Oh yeah. Very good. So, Annette, it’s one thing for people to compliment the cast covers, but how did you know that people are actually willing to pay money for this? Like, how did you validate this niche before you began? Yes. So, the

08:31
The strangers coming up to me in the street was definitely a good, good sign. So what I did is I did a research, I did research that identified that there was nobody out there covering CAS and I knew I wasn’t the only one. We’ve got some doctors in the family. And so I asked to talk to some orthopedic surgeons, which none of my, my family, my family is our orthopedic surgeons talk to them. And they said, Oh my gosh, this is a real issue. I never even thought that we could solve this problem. So I knew then it was creating a product.

09:01
Basically creating an industry from scratch, which is, by the way, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that, but, it does, it can be done. And, and so what I did is I tested the market and I sent it to, had some friends that were doctors and said, would you mind? They were small town doctors, rural doctors. And so they did everything. Would you mind giving these as gifts? You know, just as, just to try the response was phenomenal. So what I did is to.

09:29
price it out is I reverse engineered. typically when you manufacture something to have good profit, you have to have four to five times cost of goods. So you can actually reverse engineer whatever you see on the web or at a store or anything like that and reverse engineer what it actually costs the company to make. so what I did is I figured out the labor to make it and the materials.

09:59
And the packaging, which of course my first iteration was so bad anyway, but that’s, that’s also part of the journey of being an entrepreneur and how you iterate your products and make them better. And it’s all based on what your customer says, but circling back. So what I did is I figured out what my cost of goods are and multiplied it by five. And that’s what I sold online. And then that gave me enough margin to sell business to business. But I will tell you, I thought my low hanging fruit. Now this was 14 years ago.

10:28
was the orthopedic surgeons. So I purchased a booth, contracted for a booth at the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. This is a very expensive trade show, very expensive. Not just my booth was expensive, but I mean, when they had operating room makeups that were two to three stories high, I knew I was in big buck territory when it came to a trade show. And I got

10:56
quite a bit of interest from the orthopedic surgeons and got a couple of orders and big orders. And there’s an interesting story for that too. But I realized that the orthopedic surgeons just like to be orthopedic surgeons. They didn’t want to inventory the product, take the sales tax. They didn’t want to worry about any of that. They wanted to refer their patients to our product. And so that was a really big learning experience for me because I, that’s where my focus was going to be was B2B.

11:25
And so that’s one that I just, shifted gears and went direct to consumer. So, uh, do you have an affiliate relationship with these surgeons today? the affiliate relationship is one-on-one with me. am responsible for all the business to business. And I’m shifting that into an automated process, though. I loved the relationship building. Um, but we’ve been able to generate quite a bit of B2B business just with.

11:53
my relationship with these orthopedic practices. you know there’s demand and you had a couple orders. How did you actually make the products at first? Did you sew them yourself? no. No. So I love to sew Steve. I love to but I sewed for my daughter. I made bedspreads for my sister when she was in New York City, know, 3040 years ago. I mean, things like that as gifts, but I would never ever do that to a customer. I’m not that good.

12:21
And I certainly know sewing and I certainly know, and I can have the discussions about sewn manufacturing and cut and sew and apparel manufacturing. I can definitely have those conversations on both ends, but I wouldn’t subject my customers to my sewing. The other thing though is I made a decision. I knew I was going to have a group of sewists eventually. And they’re called sewists now have been for about 15 years. That I didn’t want if we got into a real tight bind,

12:50
to have them say, Annette, come on in, we need your help to sew. That was not gonna be my job. And so I made a decision from the very beginning not to do that. Now that being said, I would hear my team in the production facility and they’re talking about a machine that jammed or something like that. And I would listen to them and listen to them, because my office wasn’t far away from the production facility. And then I would just get up, said, do you want me to try? And so I sat down, boom, boom, boom, fix it and walked away. And they just looked at me like,

13:19
You know, and it was just, would fix the machines, but I would never ever sew. But to circle back to your original question, which is, know, how did I have them made? I hired local sewists to make them. And that worked for a while. was, it was a great way to bootstrap the company because I would buy the material. I would get in, oh, maybe five or six orders a day. And then I would pick the fabrics and then I would run them to the, to the sewist and she’d make them and I’d pick them up late in the day.

13:48
flip down the gate of my suburban and put them in the packaging materials and take them to the post office. Very, very- That sounds familiar actually. That’s kind of how we did it. Yeah. And you know what? I have fond memories of that. And the woman that sold for me originally, sold for me probably for about a year and a half, but I got to be too much and she was a daycare mom as well. And so then I made my first hire.

14:14
And she was phenomenal and brought in another one and another one. And then I had to move out of my, had, I was an outbuilding on our property. And then I moved into an actual facility in town. So there’s been a real growth process with the business. Let me ask you this. How did you come up with the patterns to make the cover? Are you experiencing that? did you? Yeah. Yes. So that has to do with grading and marking and, and, but a lot of it was trial and errors too. So, um,

14:44
there are, let me take orthopedic boots, for example. And I think Steve, you were in a boot. I was, don’t remind me. I’m having trauma just like your daughter. Exactly. Um, remind me to ask you to ask me about the email campaign that we did before we finished our conversation. Okay. Definitely. Um, so, orthopedic boots, they came out. um, I mean, they’ve been around for a while, but I started really selling them probably about 12 years ago.

15:13
a couple of years after I started the business and they were pretty easy to size. They were pretty easy to size. And I fashioned them after a skate, actually ice skates, where the ice skates cover the boot, but the bottom is left open with a hole for the blade to come through. Well, you can’t walk on fabric. So the hole then just went around the perimeter of the boot. So if I explain that well, but…

15:42
So what happened is all of a sudden, lot of these third world countries started making boots and they’re very, very different. Well, not just third world, many, many manufacturers started coming out with orthopedic boots and they were very different sizes. It used to be Don Joy, aircast was kind of like your bread and butter and they were in, know, a small medium and large was a small medium large. That’s not the case anymore. Just like when you purchase any clothes from, I don’t care if it’s untuck it to, you know, uh, Abercrombie Fitch and your different size in every store.

16:12
So what I did is I realized that the one common denominator was the perimeter of the boot. So I measured around the perimeter of many boots and got average sizes. And then I could come up with a new sizing. So that explains a little bit about how you figure out sizing and, uh, and your question, because casts are irregular, but the product that we use is stretchy fabric, also known as spandex or like, so it accommodates many sizes and many

16:42
different bumps and things like that. So that’s the other thing. So, but you had the skills to come up with the pattern. Yes, I did. And it was only because my years of sewing, but again, again, I am, I, I enjoy sewing, but I am not production capable. And one of the women that I hired to sew, uh, was she used to sew. She was just closing her business down Irish, uh, dance costumes.

17:11
These were exquisite. Oh my gosh, I couldn’t believe it. She brought one in to show me. She would sell them. She would get the custom order and sell them for $3,000. Wow. But so in my process of my employees and particularly my production employees, I wanted them to understand cost of goods that a product has to be made. And we were doing bulk as well as just in time manufacturing for each individual order. We had a lot of custom orders back then.

17:41
and we would get some back quite a bit. And I realized my return rate was too high. So what I would do are these weekly tutorials about cost of goods and would cost this much for fabric and this much to warehouse and this much to ship and this much for packaging and et cetera, et cetera, based on the customer’s order. She came to me a few months later and she said, you know, I just realized I thought I was making a lot of money. I realized I wasn’t, I’d get a $1,500 deposit, go out and buy all the material and all the embellishments on that Irish dance costume that there’s.

18:10
stunning, stunning pieces of art really. And then I would sew for 20, 30, 40, 50 hours, I realized now I was making under $2 an hour. And it was because of what she learned through my company. And so it’s really important to really value your time, your time is critical. know, you have 2000 skews, did you design all 2000 of those? So the skews are also not only just sizes, but they’re also fabric choices. Okay. And, and so that

18:38
The fabric choices, some I’ve had fabric made, which is called sublimated. And those are some of the things that I do for, for example, children’s hospitals want their logo on the fabric. And so we do that for them. And then we sell them and then we provide a finished product, of course, for them and, some orthopedic clinics, the really big orthopedic clinics, like having personal logoed products as well.

19:05
Where do you source your fabrics from? it in the U S or is it overseas? Yes, I try. Oh, try so hard. And I manufacture only in the U S and I purchase in the U S and, and I do know that it’s getting, it is getting harder, but it’s getting easier now again, because I’ve got such a history of what works and what doesn’t. For example, we’re on Amazon and, and FBA, which is fulfillment by Amazon. So I send in bulk. so about October, I send in a lot of red.

19:35
fabric designs, styles, because of Christmas is coming up. And then I also know Valentine’s is right after that. And so I send in a substantial amount of red or red with white dots and that type of thing to meet the seasonal demand of the fabric choice. And Amazon often says, no, no, no, you only sold, you know, like 4 % of that in the last six months. Yeah, okay. It’s seasonal.

20:02
There’s, there’s a problem with seasonal stuff. Yes. Definitely. Yep. Yes. And then of course, then my weatherproof products are really big in during this time of the year, which is the winter time. Uh, but my waterproof products are much more in demand in the summer though. That’s starting to spread out.

20:23
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

20:51
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

21:21
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show.

21:31
Actually, do you make most of your sales from Amazon or your store or would you like to break down a great question? Volume is Amazon, but my margin, my profit margins, my website without a doubt. So Amazon and I’ll share this with you and your and your listeners that my return rate is 13 to 14%, which is still low for apparel, quote unquote apparel. But on my main website, it’s less than 1%.

21:59
Interesting. So let me ask you this. Do you Amazon and what are your motivations for? I am, uh, and of course Amazon’s probably listening. You just never know, but I am reducing my dependence on Amazon by increasing my other channels. Actually, since we’re on that subject, what are your other channels? Like how do you get business? I’ve got eBay Etsy, but also it’s my B2B channels. So I am, I’m beefing up my B2B.

22:27
That’s where I see the monthly recurring revenue as well. The one thing that’s every business owner thinks that their business is unique and I’m no exception to that. The one thing that is really unique about this business is I liken it to bail bonds and funeral homes. hopefully funeral homes you only need once or bail bonds you only need once. Well, hopefully you break your bone. You only do it once, hopefully in your lifetime. You might know somebody down the road, a neighbor or a colleague.

22:56
And you say, by the way, hey, I had this great experience with cast covers, go check them out. But as a general rule, we’re not selling pate or cigars, as I call it, because it’s not a recurring, whereas B2B is a monthly reoccurring. They continually refresh their inventory. I mean, in a lot of ways, our business models are similar, right? Because we’re in the wedding industry, and I mean, 50 % of people get divorced. I don’t know what the percentage they get remarried, but it’s the same thing, right? Hopefully you only do it once in your life.

23:25
Yeah, that’s exactly. And my daughter completely skewed that because she ended up with 22 broken bones that I know of. Oh my goodness. I know she went to college and didn’t share them all with me. Is she a skateboarder or something? mean, what? No, she’s very active. We actually, uh, she broke two before she was two years old. And so we had her tested for brittle bone disease, but she does not have you either have it or you don’t.

23:47
And so we actually think she has a cross fiber that’s missing. They just don’t have a test for it because you just don’t break that many bones in just natural childhood. And luckily we were very good friends with the town pediatrician and the sheriff. they, I didn’t know, but there’s a whole process you look at when a child comes in repeatedly with broken bones. I found that out later and we’ve never been investigated because they could tell she was, she just kept breaking bones.

24:16
They could, they can tell by the bone, they can tell by the break. They can tell by a whole bunch of things, which is kind of sad actually, when you think about it. So do you run any paid advertising then? Yes. Yes. I’m on a Google shopping and I also do some text ads and I have done Facebook and they, and Facebook is, we are not a candidate, a good, um, a good company for Facebook because you can’t identify groups of people who broke bones plus.

24:45
Facebook, if you try to say anything about fractures or broken bones, they blacklist you. They think- Interesting. Okay. Yeah. And I’ve been blacklisted. I’ve had to say, no, I’m an orthopedic soft goods. I’ve had to go to, you know, and so it’s just not worth it. I’ve tried it three, four times. It’s just not worth it with Facebook, though it’s good for social, you know, hey, here’s here’s a, you know, a USA stripes and stars pattern for July 4th. You know, that’s good for that, but it is not good to advertise. And then I advertise on Amazon as well.

25:15
That’s similar to my business. It’s hard to track down when someone’s engaged or to get married because they don’t keep that information up to date. It is available, but it never really converted that well for me. That is interesting that we both have that. That is interesting. I can see where maybe they might look up Brides magazine or something and you might be able to catch them, but I can see where it could be, you know, loose and kind of smoky, just like mine.

25:43
Yeah, yeah. So but search ads work fantastically. Yes, they can work really well. Yeah. And image image. Yeah. You know, image and dynamic retargeting and that type of thing. We have a very short window of opportunity. You break your bone. Often I can’t get over how many times I get contacts, calls, emails from parents that are in the ER with their child or themselves or their mother doesn’t matter. And they and they’re in the ER. It’s like just just get

26:11
come back to us after the ER, get home, settle in, we’ll be here for you. But within, if we don’t get them within the first week, they’re gonna say, I’m gonna be out of this in four weeks, I don’t need it anyway. Is now a good time to ask about your email campaign? Yes, before I do that, the one thing, one of the products that I carry that I distribute, I do not manufacture is Cast Cooler, it’s invented by a dad. And it’s a product that inverts the air in your cast so it blows fresh air.

26:40
because that cotton lining right next to your skin absorbs everybody perspires. don’t care if you’re just sitting there watching TV 24 seven, it can’t evaporate with a cast. And so that’s where the smell on the itch comes from. So it’s a phenomenal product. I’ve carried it for years. Well, the, the owner, Rick, um, was always like, Oh, you cute little company cast covers you cute, you cute little Annette you, and, uh, well he broke his arm and he started scratching up his family dining table. And his wife said, you call Annette.

27:10
And you get a cast cover and he’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, then he scratched the upholstery of his classic car. Oh, and he called me immediately. And then I sent it to him. Of course, as gratis, I sent it to him and he sent me a picture. I still have that picture. And he called me a few days later and apologized. He thought my product was just this cute little thing. And I love that story. So that’s a, that’s a good story. So you just never know. You know, what if people say things to you?

27:40
if you’ve got a good idea, keep pursuing it. Because if I had talked to him originally, maybe I would have disbanded the idea. But to get to the email question, so I thought it’s a we have a t shirt called member of the broken bones club. Okay, shortly before Christmas, maybe around Thanksgiving time, I sent out an email, and it was just the people that had purchased the maybe the 60 days before, hey, here’s a great stocking stuffer. 20 bucks, you know, I just thought what, you know, let’s just try it.

28:10
Ask me how many sales we made. How many sales did you make? Zero. Okay. was thinking that email marketing wouldn’t be good for your company. That’s why I’m very curious. Yep. And it was zero and I tried it two other times. Zero, zero, zero. it, and I, so I picked up the phone and I called some of the customers and they were customers that we had some

28:31
voice to voice contact within the past, you know, they had an issue with the shipping or they asked a question about size. So they had some knowledge of our care and concern for our customers. And I asked them, said, you got this email and, I also made sure it was people who had opened the email and we had a huge open rate. In constant contact called me and said, what did you do? You’ve got the largest open rate we’ve ever had and zero sales. Um, but anyway, they, they, every single one of them said, I don’t want to be reminded of that time. So my daughter was right.

29:01
My daughter was right. You you just don’t want to be reminded of that time. Not one sale. So now if we really screw up something, which it does happen, we send them that t-shirt because we got a few of those in inventory still. Interesting. So, okay, so you’re, collecting emails, but do you use them for anything? Nope. I mean, sure. use them for abandoned cart notification. So we do it within, three, we do it the first one within 12 hours and then 24 hours and 36 hours. I think it is. And, and we do get.

29:30
We do get good conversion rate on that. But that’s it. Okay. can see like when I tore my Achilles, I would not want to be reminded of that. In fact, whenever I look at pictures of when I was in my peg leg, I don’t have fond memories of that. that’s something else that I learned. So I’m learning along with my customers, you know, my daughter, you know, it’s a, we have to be open as business owners. And I have

29:59
learned over and over again many, many, many things about it. And my customers have often come to me with some great product enhancements or new product ideas too, which I’ve put into the system, put into the product mix. Let’s talk about B2B. So how do you get your B2B customers? So originally, because I went to AOS, I don’t know, four or five times, which is again, the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons.

30:27
Uh, by the time I went to the last show, it was a big booth and I invited the products that I also distributed, which was one of them was the cask cooler. Another one was a waterproof product. And so we had this huge booth and, I collected a lot of names that way and stayed in touch with them that way. Okay. Uh, now you can do some searches and orthopedic clinics, the triage clinics, as well as the surgery centers.

30:55
are becoming more and more visible. And so you can find them if you just do a geographic search. One of the things that I think is really important is to do things that are unique, different in marketing. So I send a die cut postcard and it’s of an arm cast on somebody’s arm and it’s die cut and it’s sent in a clear envelope. Phenomenal response on that. Phenomenal. Let me ask you this. You mentioned that these surgeons, don’t want to carry inventory.

31:24
Right. So how do you convince them to do that? So it’s so pediatric orthopedic surgeons are typically more open to that. So our sports orthopedic surgeons and so that’s where we get it. And then I can tell you the sort one of our best sources is our customers. They call us and say, I was just at Dr. Olson’s office, and they’re so excited they want here’s the office manager’s name. And so ideally buying case goods is a good idea. But if they don’t want to carry the case goods,

31:53
then they can refer their patients to our site and then they can get a percentage of this commissions. Okay, nice. So the affiliate program essentially, yeah. Yep, yes, exactly. Okay, one thing I forgot to ask you earlier when we were talking about manufacturing is how can you possibly do this without carrying inventory and without having any staff, like, you local staff? Yes, you know, I think…

32:21
You know, it’s a great question. When I think about what I’m doing, it’s like, wow, how am I doing that? Because I used to have the production facility, the warehouse, the shipping, the customer service personnel. And then there was a time in my life, and it was two years before the pandemic, that I changed my business model to make it all virtual. And two things happened. My…

32:48
husband asked for a divorce and I was this is not what I wanted. But I thought I would then travel around the country with a truck and a trailer. So how can I do that? And so I all I could do is think of that, that vision to get me to that place. And the other thing is I’m in California and employees and California and employers is not always a good thing. And I got burned a couple times. And so I was burned professionally as well as personally. So

33:17
What I did is I pivoted the business and then I moved to San Diego to be near my sister because I was up in the Bay area. I moved down to San Diego to be near my sister just to kind of regroup. And when I got down here, I realized I’m exhausted. I don’t want to go on any road trips. I don’t want to do anything. But what I had done, and then I realized it wasn’t a bad thing that I thought that it got me through a very difficult period. This, this dream, this vision, but what it does, it just changed the way I.

33:46
I, how I operate it, that’s all. And so I’m, so here I am almost four years later, um, still running the business. Now I have an employee and she’s based out of Utah and she runs my customer service operation. I have very good quality partners. consider them partners, partner contractors, and they’ve been with me for years. And so they just amped up their services to accommodate me.

34:15
And the only inventory you really carry is handled by Amazon FBA, right? Well, I do have inventory. have a sewing contractor that handles our individual site sales that come from our main website. OK. And so she does pick and pack and she and her team pick and pack and get those out. But there’s no question Amazon is the is the bulk of the inventory. We do a lot of customs also. And so that

34:44
is a unique so when those customs are done, then those are shipped out also by a sewing contractor. So those are not not inventory, of course. Right. So for those customs, does it make economic sense? I imagine you charge a lot more for those or? Oh, yes, a lot more. Got it. Okay. Yes. Yes. They’re very profitable. And they’re also I have to tell you, they’re they’re very satisfying, because these are people with really unique situations. And if you’re familiar with the halo around your head and your neck,

35:13
is as an example, they do that. Those are called external fixators. They do that now for leg and ankle and feet and finger and shoulders. And they’re just hard to look at. And you and you want to go outside? Well, you can’t because they have pins poking in your leg or something like that. And it still shows the scarring and the bruising. So they cover. So we cover those up as an example, but each X fix is different. And so we help them through things like that.

35:41
So I would imagine I was actually looking on your site earlier and you have all these press mentions. Were those just natural? Did you actively go out and seek them? No, I actively went out and sought them at the beginning of the business. And partly because of what I went through personally, I just stopped doing it for probably about five, six years ago. And I just started to reengage again to get press again. So what is your secret to getting press? One of them is Harrow.

36:10
help reporter out and you just always do just make sure you send something quickly on time, if not sooner, but you say some catchy subject heading. The other thing that I do and it was a lot easier, uh, 12, 10, eight years ago is when a celebrity would break a bone or something, I would reach out to, would find them, I would hunt them down. And I mean, I would do this and found them. Lori Grineer of shark tank is an example.

36:38
I don’t even remember how I found her, but she ended up being a customer of ours for, I don’t know, three different operations. Wow. Yeah. And she would always then tweet shout out, you know, it was great. was, was, she was one them. Kelly Rippa’s another one. You know, there’s, there’s a bunch of them.

36:57
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It 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, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

37:25
is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce 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. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue,

37:52
We are also offering an exclusive Mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of Mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

38:18
All these questions are just kind of popping in my head. So DTC or is B2B, DTC is greater than B2B, right? But you’re hoping to increase the B2B side. Yes, exactly. And it used to be a 50 50 years ago, but because of things had changed and my focus wasn’t there, I backed off on the B2B. And so this is a really important part to understand when you, when you have a business and things happen in your world, you can, you know, expand and contract as the needs in your life require it. And it’s okay.

38:48
I can’t tell you how hard it was to fight my inner critic that, know, you’re not doing this. Yeah, I know I’m not. I can’t right now. So it’s really important to know it’s okay to expand and contract based on the needs of your world, your life, your family, what goes on. I’m sure everybody had to do some type of contraction and or expansion during the pandemic, that type of thing. Yes, that’s absolutely correct. Actually, that’s the nice thing about having a business is that you can make these adjustments.

39:18
Whereas if you had a full-time job, it might be a little bit more rigid. Yes, exactly. the, uh, I mean, even think about when you move, you, even if you move your, your, uh, facility and I know you moved your warehouse and you really have to just focus on that for like a week. You couldn’t, yes. Oh yes. Much longer. And you, you can’t really do a new initiative at that time or start a new campaign because you’re so focused on what was so it’s okay. want people to understand that it’s really okay.

39:46
Okay, let’s pretend that you’re just starting out again. I don’t know if you can even remember back this far, but did you have any problems like with the website? Are you technically inclined? Oh man. Well, it would be easier today because there are platforms in a box, as a, know, like whether it’s Shopify or big commerce or something like they do make it easier and the drag and drop editors do make it easier.

40:12
Yes, back then I used to do it all. used to do the WordPress blog. I used to do the order, but I did eventually quickly realize if I wanted to do it fast, I had to hire somebody. So I hire where somebody’s expertise is in. In other words, I don’t do my own legal stuff. I hire a lawyer. I don’t do my own taxes and bookkeeping. I hire a bookkeeper and a CPA. I mean, I’m very, very, very clear about that. And so I do have somebody else handling now.

40:41
and has been for years, my my back website needs including Amazon, I don’t want to do anything with the listing. But was it like that when you first started? No, I did it. I did it. And it was very clunky. I went back and looked at an old site. Oh, it was funny looking. We all do that. Yeah, was platform. Did you choose? I’m curious. That well, it was it was a hybrid hybrid software. I can’t even remember now. And then but I quickly realized and I was growing to

41:11
that it wasn’t going to be able to accommodate my growth and how I wanted to scale. So then I opted for big commerce and that was a multi-faceted decision. put it that way. Yeah. mean, changing platforms is always a huge decision. Yeah. Poking bamboo things in my eyes. Oh my gosh.

41:37
Oh, changing platforms is so painful. That’s why people always ask, they always ask me, Hey, if I choose this one to save money, is it easy to migrate later? And I’m always like, no, just start out with the one that. no. And, and, big commerce is great for the user experience and there, I think they’re better platform for a lot of different industries. think starting out maybe Shopify, but the add-ons sometimes create broken code. And before you know it, you’re spending a lot of money anyway.

42:07
So that’s my opinion. But the other thing I wanted to add is there were not people out there like you, Steve, that were teaching people how to create an online store and or how to create a profitable, you know, have an audience. And your programs, which I am a member of, are phenomenal. They’re great information. You’re not dramatic. You don’t change, you you keep staying on the same course.

42:35
which, I don’t mean courses in course, but I mean, you talk about the important elements and foundations that are important to an e-commerce store. And you keep saying the same thing over and over again to reinforce how important, with no drama and there’s no, it’s just fact driven with experience. And that is unusual. And it’s not a flash in the pan kind of thing.

43:01
So I always refer people to you. You don’t even know how many people I’ve referred to you. it’s just, Oh, Oh my gosh. You’re, know, and I’ve looked at a lot and I’ve looked at many and you’re, and you are without a doubt top notch in what you’re trying to accomplish, which is getting people profitable online as quickly as possible. thank you. I’m an engineer. think people like that. Like I don’t like fluff. just jumped straight to the details and the execution part of

43:30
So, And I like that. And I’m kind of, I’m, uh, uh, more marketing focused and more. So I really appreciate and value people that are more fact driven. And that’s probably one reason why I was so attracted to what you, what your programs offer and what they, results they get, the results are huge. then what were, I mean, looking back, I know you’ve been doing this for a long time now. What would you say? Cause there’s a lot of people listening here who actually want to start a business also. Yes.

44:00
What would you say was your your personal biggest challenge in getting started? Believing in myself. Just strike me as someone who lacks confidence. No, I don’t. I don’t. But you know, it’s it really is interesting. Back then, it was a I should I do it this way? Or should I do it this way? How about this? How about that? You know, and I just had to believe that I had this vision. The vision has come true. I have my

44:28
vision statement is to become the world’s largest online specialty retailer providing orthopedic aftermarket products. We became that. So now we’re in total web domination version 2.0, but it truly is, well, how am gonna get the money? Where am I gonna do this? How is this gonna work? I am a mom with two small kids. How is this gonna work? So I had to have the confidence to move forward, but.

44:55
Boy, I tell you those inner critics, those little gremlins in your head can really do a number. And you just have to just say, you’re not welcome here right now. I know what I’m doing. And you do, you just have to say, sorry, you’re not invited to this party. And because the world will give us so much competition, our customer shipping, you know, supply chain issues. had enough problems. don’t need to have our inner critics giving us more. And if you’re really stumped.

45:24
Do not be afraid to reach out and ask for help. And when you ask for help, make sure you feel that flow with that individual. If it feels stilted or clunky, that’s not the right one. Find somebody else. It doesn’t mean that it’s… I remember a woman, I would give talks at local colleges about entrepreneurship and a woman came up to me and she was so excited. And she was actually the mother of one of my children’s fellow students.

45:51
And so I recognized her and she said, oh my gosh, I’ve got this great idea. And it’s something in the frozen food, I don’t remember, and frozen food area. And she wouldn’t tell me what it was. And I said, that’s okay. And she said, I said, I’d be happy to sign a non, you know, a nondisclosure agreement. And she’s, so she talked to her uncle, her uncle said, don’t tell anybody. And I explained to her, you know, how hard it is to get an idea to fruition and then execute it. It would be so rare if somebody really took it and ran with it.

46:21
know, and you have to have some trust in that and some trust in people that you talk to. And she never ever did anything I ran into her. Oh, I don’t know. 10 years later, still hadn’t done anything. I still don’t know what the product was. And isn’t that sad? happens all the time all the time. And everybody has to understand that some people I was at the orthopedic convention and a wife

46:49
dragged her husband over and she said, see, see, I told you this would be a good idea. I’m looking at him and he said, she came to me with this idea years ago. And I said, and did you do anything about it? I looked at her and she said, no, I said, we all have ideas. The difference is executing them, period. I mean, I have hundreds of ideas and other people have had this idea that I have the cast cover idea, but it’s the executors. You have to execute and you can’t.

47:16
you don’t know what the customer and the market can bear until you get your product out there. And the first iteration I had of Cascovers products, oh, and the logo and the packaging, so ugly, who cares? In and out there. And I didn’t know how ugly it was. I was kind of proud of it actually. Now I look at it say, oh, yeah, funny. You I look back using the way back machine. I’m thinking the same thing. Yes, exactly. Way, way back. Go back 13 years.

47:45
But hopefully does that answer your question? does. Okay, so just for the people listening, how much money did you risk to start your business? Oh, Well, over it was over time, it was this and then this and then this. I would say probably about 100,000 over the first five, six years. Okay, but what about just to get the website up and get your first set up and go and probably 15,000 15,000. Okay. That’s interesting. That’s much higher than I would have expected. Actually. Well, I had to buy a lot of fabric.

48:12
Well, and then one of the last stories I’ll leave you with is so, you know, I bought, excuse me, I went to the American Academy of orthopedic surgeons and one office bought quite a bit of product. was a big deal. was champagne popping kind of, you know, it like 600 units, which is huge when you just get started. Yeah. So, and I had found a sewing contractor actually down in San Diego who made them for me because they’re bulk purchase. And I had got the, you know, I got the elastic and I.

48:40
you know, medical product and the fabric and all this kind of stuff and get everything together and shipped it off. But a week later, she called me and she being the office manager, head nurse, and she said, so is the elastic latex free? That was the longest pause in my world. I said, you know, I’ll get back to you. I went back to my elastic provider supplier and said, was this latex free? And he said, oh no, you didn’t ask for it.

49:09
And even though I told it was a medical product, I was not happy. so latex allergy is typically an exposure allergy. So in the medical dental fields, if you have latex gloves and latex products, you will probably get a latex allergy. It’s very rare to have a latex allergy that you’re born with. And so guess what? Even though their patients probably didn’t have a latex allergy.

49:37
Here they were touching elastic that was in my product that was, they had latex in it. I had to take them all back. So this is an expense. Yes. So this is where I’m saying some of this expense. So the next time I went down to the sewing contractor, she wasn’t available, but she said, just look around the shop. That’s okay. And so I was talking to her, looking at some, and she was sewing tattoo sleeves, which is a very similar to my product. Very similar.

50:05
And I looked at the ends and they didn’t have elastic. And I said, well, these don’t have elastic. And she said, no. And I said, well, what’s the stitch? She said, this is a cover stitch. And I said, well, why didn’t, why didn’t we do that with my product? She said, you didn’t ask. Oh my gosh. So I was maintaining my composure. And then the one question I will leave people, I don’t, if you manufacture a product, I don’t care if it’s software, if it’s linens, if it’s t-shirts.

50:33
If you have a vendor, ask them, what would you recommend that you’re, if I was your daughter or your mother, whatever, what would you recommend? How would you have them manufacture it? And I can’t tell you how that has saved so many people and the people that I help today with that are product entrepreneurs. And was just shocked. you didn’t ask me for it. Oh my gosh.

50:59
That happened with my Asian vendors. And I don’t use elastic anymore either. I use this very special stitch that keeps the stretch of the fabric. Nice. Nice. I mean, these are all things that you learn on the job, right? Absolutely. And again, it didn’t stop me, but they’re just great stories to share. And I love helping shorten the curve, the learning curve for other product entrepreneurs. Love it. Love it. Yeah. And that if anyone has any questions about your business or

51:27
heaven forbid if they’ve broken something. Where can they find you online if they have any questions? they can they can. There’s two ways you can always email me at Annette at Cast Covers. That’s with a z.com. So it’s Annette, A-N-N-E-T-T-E at Cast Covers with a z.com. Or you can call our 1-800 number, is 1-800-CAST-COVER, which is 1-800-227-8268. Nice.

51:57
Well, Annette, was a pleasure talking to you on this podcast. mean, we met up on a number of occasions. think the last time I met you was either Seller Summit or maybe it was in San Francisco at an ECF event. It was one of the two and I’m going to an ECF tomorrow morning, a regional one in LA. Oh, you are nice. That’s right. That’s right. You’re very message me about that. Yeah, I can’t make it down there, but I’ll for sure see you at ECF live, right?

52:23
Yeah. And, but more importantly, seller summit for conference. Oh my gosh. That’s another program that you have that is phenomenal. Seller summit is action packed full of take home. So many ideas. You don’t know which one to start. That would be one workshop you could have how to discern which projects to start first when you get home. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a, it’s as good if not even more so because of the opportunity for the community, just talking to other online sellers. It’s great.

52:52
Actually, I was going to mention since I’ll close with this, when you mentioned earlier, when people when you’re doubting yourself, it always helps to have someone who’s done it before, talk to you. yes. Because as soon you talk to someone who’s done it before, you know, it’s possible. And that actually gives you confidence also. Yep. And that’s when I help women product entrepreneurs with my side hustle, which is she makes products.com. Oh, I I help women product entrepreneurs. And it’s exactly the same thing.

53:21
Oh, is there an email for that as well? anyone’s interested? it’s Annette at SheMakesProducts.com and it’s SheMakesProducts.com and the phone number is my direct dial, which is fine. 760-757-2650. Amazing, Annette. Amazing. I don’t know how you do all this, but… It’s a love. I truly believe that business is a creative outlet, just like cooking or gardening or golfing.

53:51
And it is one of the last really true ways to show our creativity. I love business. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. Well, that thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me, Steve. It’s been a pleasure. I look forward to seeing you at your event. Absolutely. It’s L or seven may looking forward to it.

54:16
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now I thought that selling handkerchiefs online was kind of random, but I think Annette outdid me with her cast covers and I love her business model, it’s amazing. More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 396. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce 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.

54:43
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing 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. 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. Now we talk about how I these tools on my blog,

55:12
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifecoutorjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and assume the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:28
But her story is the perfect example of how persistence and perseverance go a long way when it comes to running a successful business. Enjoy her story. But before we begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. 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.

00:56
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 is full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used. You can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

01:25
If you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store. And I couldn’t have done it without Postscript.io, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is the tool easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data.

01:54
and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. And not only that, it’s priced well too, and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscoop.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

02:23
No topic is off the table and we tell it 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.

02:39
Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Saba Yazdani on the show. Now Saba is a student in my Create a Profitable Online Store course. I think she’s been in the class since 2015 and she runs a six figure store selling solar lights over at sunsharesolar.com.au. That’s right, Saba is in Australia and this is actually a fairly tough niche to crack, but Saba has managed to create a great brand over at Sunshare Solar. Now she doesn’t sell on Amazon.

03:09
And she does sell in a couple of other marketplaces, we’ll talk about during this interview. But Saba is going to teach us how she grew her store to six figures, how she got started, how she gets her sales, everything. And with that, Saba, welcome to the show. Thank you, Steve. Nice to talk to you. Yeah, it’s great to talk to you, actually. After all these years, I know we’ve exchanged a bunch of emails and that sort of thing. Yes. And yeah, I should have contacted you earlier.

03:37
That’s exciting. I think I am one of the oldest students in your course. I don’t know about that. I actually launched in 2011. You know, the oldest one is Joel Cherico, the one who makes six figures selling pottery. He’s probably my oldest student ever. Really? He was like the first person to sign up in 2011. That’s interesting. But I don’t want to take credit away from you. You’re definitely one of the older students.

04:05
So tell the audience about your store, what you sell and how you got started. Yeah. So my store, as you mentioned, is sunsharesolar.com.au and I’m selling solar powered lights from small house, house, or garden lights to the commercial lights and street lights. And how I get started. Basically, I’ve been thinking of doing some side hustle for myself.

04:35
for a while in 2015, but I had a full-time job. In 2015, after like five years with a company, with one company, I applied for a promotion. And basically, what can I say now that fortunately they didn’t give me that promotion. And it was like, it hurts me because I’ve been like my

05:05
perspective was that I’ve been very fit for that promotion, but it did hurt so much that I decided to quit. Oh, wow. Okay. Yes. So I quit my job and I like search on the internet, what can I do with $5,000? And the $5,000 was credit card that I had at that time.

05:34
And then I found that I can do online business or I can start an online business, an online store. And then I searched how can I start an online store or how can I open something in this case? And your course was the first search result on the Google page. And actually it was your blog, my wife,

06:03
job and yeah, and all it starts from that search, Google search and understanding about your five day course. started the mini course, did it for like five days and immediately after that I joined the course and it turned out that it was the best decision that I made in my career. I was just curious, what were you doing? What was your job before?

06:32
Yeah, I’ve been working in an educational institute like a college. Okay. And I’ve been this actually after I moved to Australia before that I’ve been working in a national statistical bureau. But when I moved here, I started to work in an educational center and I’ve been a student administration or student support officer. And I’ve been also teaching

07:02
One day per week or one or two days per week. I’ve been also teaching in the same Institute. So kind of casual teacher and a student support officer. Yeah. So when you quit, you didn’t have another job or income lined up. Oh, no. Wow. Okay. No. So take me back. Why solar lights? Why solar lights?

07:32
It is based on the steps on your course, actually. Oh, really? OK. Yeah, I followed all the steps in finding a niche and testing a niche. following those steps, I came up with a few niches and I tested them. And the things that came up, I can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure I tested five or six niches before.

08:01
solar lights, which one of them was silver, for example, silver plates or silver dinewares. One of them was educational games. One of them was wooden toys. And I think another couple of them, which I can’t remember at the moment, but I reached to

08:28
In my search, I reached to renewable energy or items that are related to renewable energy. I found that then I’ve digged into different types of things that are there in that space. And I find that, OK, solar energy is or the applications of solar energy is more accessible. And actually, there are, again, wide range of

08:58
applications for the solar energy and at that time based on the searches on Amazon and on Long Tail Pro, the solar light or solar lighting was less competitive and more accessible for me to start with. As I mentioned, the only thing that I had, I’ve been like…

09:24
not in a very good financial position. And the only thing that I had was a credit card with $5,000 limit. So I wanted basically to fit something in kind of data space. Which I ended up with the keyword that was SolarLight at that stage. I can remember that the keyword

09:52
The volume was 8,800 per month in Australia and the KC was 28. So it fits the criteria that you mentioned and I can remember that something around at that time was something around 8,000 per month and KC below 30. You mentioned close to 25, but definitely below 30.

10:19
which that keyboard, solar lights, fits that criteria. yeah, and also there were another couple of related, a few related keywords fit on that criteria, which I could add to my store. at the time I planned for five keywords. So I chose also solar garden lights.

10:46
LEDs or something around that area, which all of them, had something around between 1000 to 8000 search per month and all of them had KC below 30. Nice. So yeah. I know that the Australia market for search is much less competitive than it is in the US. yes. Yeah. That’s amazing. So you did it just based on the search guides. You had nothing

11:15
You had no attachments to solar products or anything when you first started? No, not at all. Not at all. It just, I found it through the searches. You know, I must say that it took a lot of guts for you to just quit your job and do this. I don’t know if I would have been able to do that. Just cold Turkey. Yeah. Yeah. Actually they were, it was frightening for me. Really.

11:41
stressful time and many people around me actually told me that it’s not a good idea. But and it was hard at the time, I should admit that. But turns out that it was a good decision. Although it was really hard, like the first two, three years was really hard.

12:07
But at the end of the day, now when I look back in one sentence, I can say that it’s worth it. Nice. All right, so you decided to sell solar lights. How did you actually find product? Again, followed all the steps on your course. In your course,

12:33
No, I’m serious. anyone listening, I promise you this is not like staged or anything. Yeah. Yeah, actually it is first time that I’m talking to you. So, uh, probably you wouldn’t know you even wouldn’t know that, but, uh, in the, um, the section of your website, which is about suppliers, I, uh, copied that email template that you had, um,

12:57
to the suppliers and I remember that you mentioned that you need to show you are much bigger than than what you are and at the time I basically haven’t been like I had nothing but I started with those templates and asked for samples. The first products that I asked for samples was solar lanterns

13:25
and solar battery charges or solar phone charges. So these two keywords, solar battery charges and solar lantern, they were among those five keywords that I told just a few minutes ago. And in terms of price range, they were cheaper. So I start with the companies that had those plus

13:55
other products that I needed or I thought that I would order later on in the process. yeah, I got samples. The first samples that I got was in just a pack of 10 of a few different models of solar charger and different models of solar lanterns.

14:24
I can say that the most time consuming process of the setting of the websites was this process of contacting supplier and testing, asking for samples and testing them. I ended up to contact over 30 suppliers. Wow. Okay. Yeah, it was a huge number of them. Ended up with basically spending all my, not all of them, but

14:52
almost 50 % of my credit card on ordering samples. And I took samples from something around 15 suppliers. And it was, as I mentioned, the major time in setting up, in the process of setting up the store for me was this process. And it took almost four months for finally to, to finally

15:20
find a supplier that is reliable and we could communicate and the sample that they sent, they could understand what I mean. the sample that they sent was exactly what they promised. I started with three of them. I found the three of them and I started with all three. And it is interesting that now after almost six years or maybe

15:50
Yes, six years. Still, I am working with two of them. Actually, these two are my suppliers at the moment. I never order battery charger and solar lanterns again from them. But for the solar lights, those two that I found, still we are working together, which is basically, I think one of my major achievements is finding these two

16:19
great, great suppliers that I have. So let me ask you this. When you were looking for suppliers, did you end up changing anything about the product or were you just putting your brand on it at first? No, at first I just put my brand on them. Okay. Yeah. it. Okay. Yeah. I didn’t actually change anything, but just put my brand on them. Yeah. What was your minimum order quantity for those products?

16:49
in your first order? Okay, wow, very few actually. Yes. Yeah, I ordered only 10. But and I had solar lanterns in two models and solar charges in five models. So I started my the website, actually the website went live with only these five models, these five products. Let’s actually talk about your website for a little bit. Sure.

17:18
Would you describe yourself as technical? No. I describe myself as like a person who is patient enough to work with the softwares and learn them, but not technical at all. So I haven’t done any coding, but I spent time watching videos.

17:44
for my website is OpenCard and I watched the video or the read the documentation about how to set up things on the OpenCard and also followed your videos because you have tutorials on installing the website and setting up the OpenCard these things. So that time was the first time that I heard about all of these things.

18:14
You know, it’s funny, back in the day, like I was really big on OpenCart because I thought it was up and coming. It was like way better than what I was using. And it was back then, I don’t think like the Shopify’s and big commerce’s were the leaders they are today. And the reason why I asked you whether you were technical or not is because you know, using OpenCart requires some technical chops, you know, to get installed. And it’s really impressive that you got it launched in your site looking the way it has. It’s amazing. Yes.

18:41
Thanks. Just curious, the platform, so you chose it presumably for the price or the open card? Yes. Oh, no, not really. I chose that because you recommended it and because I had the technical support if I needed. My husband is a computer software developer. Got it. OK. And yes, I knew that if I need some technical support, I

19:11
can ask him. But to be honest, the start, basically he didn’t know that I’m doing that. He knew that. So basically I didn’t ask or I didn’t need any technical support for the first year because I was supposed to look for another job.

19:40
So I’ve been searching for the jobs in job interviews and been busy sending my resume and this thing. I didn’t ask for, and fortunately nothing come up, nothing so technicals come up that I needed technical support or something that I couldn’t handle. Everything was based on your tutorials and open card documentations.

20:08
Nice, nice. There was a couple of times that I needed to contact the support desk, open card support. And at the time they’ve been very helpful. a couple of times that I contacted them, they helped me. And but after that, like from the second year, my husband

20:31
joined the group and yeah, he did the technical support basically for me. Okay. Do you know how much you were paying per month when you first got started? How much? Just for like the hosting to run the website. I’m just curious. Oh, to run the website. Open card was free. I think the domain and the hosting was

21:00
Not more than $15 per month. Nice.

21:06
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

21:34
Now, first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copywriting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

22:04
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 dot com. Now back to the show. So let’s go back to the products now. So you said you just ordered 10 as your first shipment. Is that correct? Yes. Yeah. Okay. And so you have this website now with five products, you said? Yes. Five products. So how did you make your first sales?

22:33
How did I make my first self? It was a few months. My major marketing or basically sales channel was SEO. And I know that your emphasis is on SEO. especially at that time, I think at that time you haven’t added the Facebook things and.

23:02
there wasn’t such a big Facebook marketplace and these things, but it was SEO. And I did everything, but haven’t got any results, haven’t got any sales and nothing changed in SEO as well. So I started opening up eBay to sell those 40, 50 items that I have on eBay. So I started

23:30
opening up eBay and listed those items. I’ve been kind of very disappointed at the time, suddenly a sales come through, which I don’t know how, but it was certainly through the website, like someone looked and the first sale was solar lantern. And when the first sales comes up,

23:58
which I don’t even know where it comes from, but it changed me. Actually, I can remember that I’ve been feeling disappointed and I’ve been feeling that it’s not going anywhere, but out of the sudden this PayPal notification came and just one person purchased two solar lanterns.

24:28
And then after that, actually it really changed me and I thought that that’s it. It started and I started to basically do some advertising or do some boost posts on Facebook. created my Facebook page, did some boost posts on Facebook page and I got some sales through Facebook on solar battery charges and against solar lanterns.

24:57
At that point, haven’t got any results on eBay, but immediately after that, everything that I earned or sold from those cells, I put to another order. And in the second order, I started to import or to get the small samples of solar lights. So I mentioned before the suppliers that I chose,

25:27
they had much more like a wide range of product which I believed I could use them in my past so I start using them. the next time I ordered solar lights and five, this time five solar lights and five of them and immediately I start putting more products on my website and then

25:54
I started again, I have continued with boosting posts on Facebook and yeah, gradually got sales. I must admit that the process was very, very slow for two years. two years, it was very slow. I had maybe, if I had a month that I had $300 sales, it was like the best month.

26:23
I remember those feelings. Yes. So only $300 would be per month, like made me happy. I ended up in 2017, I ended up to back to part-time teaching. So I ended up to go to teaching, like work as a casual teacher and I worked part-time.

26:52
like part-time as a casual teacher in 2017. And the thing was slow, but what I did in those two years was just adding more products to the website. So everything I earned from teaching and everything I sold from the website, I put it in the adding more products. So even I purchased only five from OneLight,

27:22
I would do so to basically expand the range of the product in the website. So I started categories of solar garden lights and solar security lights in 2016-17 and was working on SEO in terms of having blocks, creating backlinks. I started to going to the networking communities

27:51
and like the community websites and then the local business websites. These things I got my business listed. And yeah, in 2018, something that happened in 2017, which again, the time that I’ve been very low in terms of energy or hope, maybe you can maybe understand.

28:20
something happened and it was a Sunday and me and my husband we’ve been partying in one of the friend’s house and my phone got pinged like PayPal pinged and I said okay it was a sales and it was a solar charger and I’ve been very happy that

28:42
it’s okay that’s not Saturday and it’s a really good feeling to sell on Saturday when you are not working or whatever you relate to do especially at the start when you are under a lot of pressure I think and it pinked five minutes late or maybe one hour later and pinked again another one third one fourth one and went to tens or twelve at that day

29:10
out of the sudden we sold 12 in one day and it was in one day at the time was $800 worth of sales which was like I’ve been very very excited and happy and really eager to know how what the hell what happened what happened I had them the

29:36
My highest record was $300 per month and now it’s $800 per in one day. And I couldn’t understand where they, what is this, where it comes from. I haven’t been on SEO and I remember the day after on Monday, one of the customers who purchased call to ask a question. And when she calls, I asked her, by the way, how did you find my solar?

30:05
did like this product. And she said that you’ve been featured in the Sunday, one of the local newspapers on the Sunday feature or Sunday special, they featured us. They featured or Solar Lantern. was exactly, was in January around again, the same time in January. And it was back to a school collection.

30:33
that they’ve been because in Australia, kids go back to school at the in the last week of January. Right. So they had a collection back to school collection and or solar charger was was featured on that collection. Amazing. How did they find you? I don’t know. Right. Probably. Right. Maybe probably to SEO. Yeah, probably to SEO. But no one contacted me to.

31:01
ask me any question and no one. So it just happened out of the blue. And to be honest, it was again another boost in my energy and my determination to continue. So then from there, what happened then? Then again, nothing happened till from that day. Nothing happened till 14 months later.

31:29
14 months later in mid 2018. It was exactly May 2018. I mean nothing happened. It doesn’t mean that nothing happened. It means that we grew very slowly. Yes, sales grew up month by month and by May 2015, I reached to something around $1,000 per month, May 2018. And in May 2018,

31:59
Again, we’ve been on holiday and everything happens. It’s interesting that all the jumps happen when we’ve been on holiday. We’ve been on holiday and again my phone pinged a few times a day and this time it was different. They were different purchases, different solar lights. And then

32:28
I told my husband that something is going on. Maybe like we went to check the website and we found that, yes, we came to the first page for the keyboard of solar lights. after, yeah, it was like amazing feeling that happened for after more than 24 months. But since then,

32:56
We stayed in the first page of the Google for Solar lights and like we grow from there $1,000 per month in sales to now that we are like much more than this. know, search engine optimization always takes a long time. Yes. I don’t know about two years, but yeah, I mean, it sounds right. It just depends on…

33:24
you know, how much work you are doing back linking and that sort of thing. So you continue to put out blog posts and add new products to your website basically, right? During those two years. Okay. Yeah. We, in terms of SEO, did, yeah, keep adding blogs and adding products. So basically every month we added a few pages to our website, either blog or products. Okay.

33:51
Did you do any paid advertising during this period outside of boosting Facebook posts? No, no, there was no paid advertising. turned on at that time, we started doing Google ads for three months in 2017, but it wasn’t profitable. So we turned it off. And just recently, we started Google shopping ads.

34:19
Actually, by recently, mean in 20 now it’s one year early 2021 we started that. But this time is profitable and we keep that that’s good. Google is shocking. Nice. OK, can we talk about email a little bit? Because I know before we started hitting the record button, you had told me that Clavio is not compatible with the latest version of OpenCart. So have you been doing email marketing?

34:49
or how long have you been doing it for? Yes. Yeah, we started email marketing from 2019. So it’s our third year. we doing like last year, we did once email per month. So and we are getting some interaction from the emails again, same as I think, same as everything else. Maybe it’s a slow a little bit.

35:18
at the start. in 2020, we haven’t got any, we got interactions, but not sales. But in 2021, we started to get a few sales out of the emails. I think it will make a huge difference when you integrate Klaviyo properly, because anyone who buys will get on the list. And then if you email those people, I’m sure you’ll get a lot more sales. So yeah, this is just the tip of the iceberg for you, Saba. Yeah.

35:48
Yes, so yeah, actually it is and as the sales grow and as the as I can see the evidence that the these things or works as you know, I get also more serious in and not not that I haven’t been serious but more probably consistent in adding value to the website and growing it and I have like

36:17
plan for growing to other applications of solar energy this year. For example, solar gate openers or solar panels for campings or this area is also in my list to add to the website and basically diversify the range of products in the website.

36:48
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It 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, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

37:15
is deep in the trenches of their own ecommerce 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. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut out ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an ecommerce entrepreneur making over 250k or 1 million dollars per year in revenue,

37:42
We are also offering an exclusive Mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of Mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

38:08
So I know you’re not selling on Amazon and you do hold inventory. So where do you keep your inventory? How do you do fulfillment for all the products that you carry? Yeah. I do inventory. Actually, I keep the inventory in our storage room, basically, currently, or it’s been like this for the whole time. And at the moment I have a mix

38:37
kind of the model is mixed. carry inventory for some models. I do drop ship for other models. Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. And also for the sales channel, we have, we also launched another website in 2020, late 2020. So we have now two websites selling solar lights. And also we have

39:06
eBay and Catch, are eBay is like less than 5 % of the sales, but Catch is better. Catch is something like eBay, but local, like Australia-wide. Got it. like kind of local eBay or local marketplace in Australia, which is together Catch and eBay contribute to 15 % of our sales.

39:36
And we also have a wholesaler. So it’s a lighting store who purchase, they purchase from us and they basically resell. So we have these five selling channels now. And in terms of inventory, yeah, still I keep the items that I carry inventory, I keep in my storage room.

40:05
Yeah. Nice. So I’m just curious, what was the rationale for that second website? Is that like a wholesale only website or? Yeah, the purpose of that website was to target wholesale only and was to target basically commercial and government customers in Australia. So it’s mainly

40:32
commercial grade solar lights or solar street lights and bigger outdoor lights. So how did you get those big customers, like government customers? Yeah, got actually we got a couple of them through SEO. We haven’t got many of them like so far, but

40:59
Our plan is to target more and more and as you know, there is always areas for improvement. we had, I think three of them through SEO. So they found us and we had one through our wholesalers. So our wholesalers also got a government customer and basically they were in the middle and we supplied

41:29
to do that. So from what I understand, you said you drop ship and you carry inventory, but you drop ship first to figure out what sells and then you carry inventory of your best sellers or your good sellers? Yes, I do that. sometimes it is hard to or I can say most of the time it is hard to have the exact product that

41:58
sells well in drop shipping, it is hard to find the exact supplier or the exact product. But when I see a keyword gets ranked or when I see a product is getting interactions, then I find something similar to that one. Yeah. And yeah, and I then I

42:25
basically look at the functions and look at the specifications and find something similar to the one that the dropshipper supplies and I carry inventory for them. A quick question about your dropship suppliers. Are they based in Australia or somewhere else? Dropship supplier based in Australia. Based in Australia. Okay, so the delivery time is pretty quick. Yes, pretty quick. Yeah.

42:52
Alright, so I’m going to ask you just some quick fire questions that everyone always asks me about the students in my course. Okay, so how much money did you actually spend to start? I mentioned that I had only the only found that I had was the $5,000 credit card. $1,000 I paid out of that to the for the course at that time was I think around 1100 Australian dollars.

43:19
And the rest I spent on samples and getting all the websites done. Yeah, that $5,000 was plus. I borrowed another $1,000 from a friend when I needed basically for the second order. I had like less found, but I borrowed another $1,000.

43:46
So that was $6,000 that I started with. Okay. 6,000. then it, from what I remember from our conversation, finding your product took four months. Is that roughly correct? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And then your first sale came a couple of months after that? After that. Yeah. First sales came in March, 2016. Wow. You remember these months and days. Yes. All right. So

44:13
How did you keep going when things were slow during that first year? How did I keep going? Because a lot of people just give up, right? Yeah, actually, I know. I’ve been very close to giving up many times. but just I kept going because I knew that it will work and I could see

44:42
you, your students or other students in the class, did that. So I just kept pushing. I kept pushing and whenever I, the times that I’ve been very discouraged, I tried to watch more videos on your website and try to attend the classes and like just see other people are getting results to encourage myself. So

45:12
Yeah, I think the only thing that I could do was to do everything to to to keep to a stay motivated and to keep going nice nice What would you say is the hardest part about everything that you’ve done so far like the hardest part? The hardest part technical no, it doesn’t have to be technical just anything about the related to the business. Just keep continuing

45:41
Yes, keep going. think keep going is the hardest part. Yes, to be honest, there are a lot of points that I can remember, lots of points that I get discouraged, disappointed, felt that it’s not working. And then, of course, 2020 COVID hit. And there was another shock, especially in Australia, logistics and supply chain

46:10
basically was unleashed or was broken. Getting things into the country was really, really hard. So I think the hardest part was just keep going, just continue, like keep continuing. Did it help that your husband was a partner in this also? Were you working closely together back then? No.

46:38
No, not back then, but we started working together from 2017. So it was a couple of years after I started. And then from last year, basically he started to reduce his workload and working with me more often. I remember critiquing your website. Yeah, do you? What year was that? that 2000?

47:07
17 or 18? 18. Yeah, it was 18, 19. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember like sometimes, sometimes students get their critique and they don’t do anything with it. But clearly you’ve you follow those instructions. Yeah, that makes me very happy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your course and your classes contribute to a lot of work to basically major my major.

47:37
Mainly my website is based on your course and your website critics and your classes. So yeah, you have, you get the credit. No, you did the work. mean, you persevered. Yeah. Here’s another common question I get asked. So if you were to just, if you have like one piece of advice to anyone who’s listening to this podcast who wants to start a business, but

48:04
hasn’t been able to pull the trigger or give it a try. You went the drastic route and just quit your job cold turkey and started with a credit card. But what advice would you give to people who want to start but just haven’t been able to do so? So if I want to say something to myself, my 2015 version, I would advise, I would tell myself that just be more…

48:34
faithful, have more faith and just keep going and keep going strongly, keep going with higher energy and make sure that if you keep add a little bit, even not every day, every week, you get somewhere. So I would love myself to be much more faithful.

49:03
to the process and to the like being more easy with myself, with the process and more like flow, being in the flow more often. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I do. Yeah. Yeah, it has. But when I go back, I think that maybe I it wasn’t necessary to be

49:30
disappointed, it wasn’t necessary to be doubtful. If I could, I would eliminate the times that I’ve been doubtful, the times that I’ve been disappointed, and I would enjoy the process and I would enjoy the past more. It’s still not, it’s not late. I learned all these things through the past six, seven years, and still

50:00
is applicable even now because I guess you agree with me if I say that not there is no two months in a business that is are the same. So almost always something happens and but now I learned that I get it like I get I flow with the with whatever it comes and I am more faithful now less doubtful now and I enjoy more.

50:29
and I enjoy more and I am more serious now and I have more like bigger plans now. But it is as a result of all these learnings. I mean, it changes all the time. There’s always stuff to learn. That’s what I like about it. that’s right. So Saba, where can people check out some of your products? I know we got some Australian listeners here. Where can they find your solar lights?

50:55
Yeah, they can find it from our website sunsharesolar.com.au. Share is S-H-A-R-E. So sunsharesolar.com.au. And our second website is solarlightingoutdoor.com.au. OK. And if anyone has any questions for you, do you have like a social media account or wherever where people can ask you questions?

51:23
Yes, I have my Facebook account and my Instagram account. Okay, is that under Sunshare Solar? Solar LEDs. Solar LEDs. Okay, got it. Okay. Well, Saba, it’s been a long time coming. I’m so happy you agreed to come on the show and it’s really great to actually live vicariously through the fruits of your labor, so to speak. Like whenever I have a student that’s successful, it always makes my day.

51:52
really does. Yeah, thanks. All right. Well, thanks a lot for coming on. Thank you for having me.

52:01
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now in bringing these student interviews to you, I am purposely choosing an eclectic range of backgrounds and stories for you. Not everyone’s knocked it out of the park right away, and I hope to provide you with a realistic view of entrepreneurship. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequaterjob.com slash episode 395. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing 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.

52:28
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. I also want to 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 mywifequoterdob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-O-I-O.

52:55
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and assume the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:30
since those niches are so competitive. But Julia has created a successful business and we’re gonna find out exactly how she did it. But before we begin, I wanna 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 would 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.

00:58
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 div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode, and I’m always super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use from my eCommerce store, and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider.

01:24
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 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. Now 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.

01:54
That’s KLAVIO.com slash my wife. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview 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 run entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:25
Welcome to the My Wife, Quarter Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Yulia Villegas-Gaya on the show. Now, Yulia is a student in my Creator Profitable Online Store course, and she runs a near seven-figure brand selling unique jewelry, bags, and accessories over at studiocult.co. Now, I’ve said this before, jewelry, bags, and accessories is actually one of the hardest products to sell online because the internet is flooded with jewelry, handbags, and accessories. And in general, these categories are quite saturated.

02:55
But Yulia has managed to create a great brand over at Studio Cult. And actually, if you see her jewelry, you’ll immediately understand why. And I encourage you guys to just go to her site and check out her stuff. Now, Yulia does not sell on Amazon, and all of her sales are from her own site. And I decided to bring her on the show to tell her story and reveal how she has managed to build a successful jewelry and accessory brand with just TikTok and Instagram. And Yulia, welcome to the show. So happy to have you.

03:23
Thanks for having me on. I’m really excited to talk to you about my business. Yeah, Julia, tell the audience about your business, what you sell and how you got started. Yeah, so it started as a passion project while I after I quit my job, I used to work in architecture and I live with my mother for a little bit and I was trying to reorient myself because I wasn’t really jazzed about my previous career. I used to work in architecture.

03:49
And I wanted to do something that was more freeing for my career. I felt like I was very stifled and what I was doing before. So, yeah, I was browsing the internet. I was taking your course. I was really just totally committed to starting my own business because I couldn’t really find any jobs where that would be either a call me back for when I submitted a application for the job or just

04:16
There’s just not really much interesting work to be had. I knew that I had to forward to my own way. I found a, uh, uh, community of people who made these things called like enamel pins. are these little brooches basically put them on your backpack, you can put them on your jacket. And, um, I noticed that there were like big brands and small brands making them like everyone from H &M to like, you know, you’re like Instagram artists, like 18 year old Instagram artists. So.

04:42
I’m like, could probably make one of these. I did a bunch of research and I studied the community for a month and I got to this conclusion where I’m like, I know exactly what is the perfect pin to make. And I made it. And then I, you know, did a whole like launch process. found people to send it to, uh, that would post about it. It was a pretty, um, detailed plan I put together and it was actually an overnight success. I like it wasn’t viral.

05:12
overnight. It’s kind of crazy. But before that, I actually had a business that fell apart to where I was importing tea kettles from China to the US and selling them on Amazon. So it wasn’t entirely an overnight success story. But that product was I’m curious about this pin. Can you describe it? Yeah. So if you Google msp enamel pin, it’ll come up. And basically what it is is a

05:40
pin that looks like a three dimensional version of the program and that’s paint. And it had like a dry erase surface. So you can actually like write your name on it and use it as a name tag. And yeah, the way that I got to the idea was actually like, I was looking at the product. I’m like, why are people buying these little things? Like I never actually cared about pins before, but I found them to be these really like beautiful objects. Like I could see myself collecting them. And I realized that

06:09
people really valued things like the amount of detail, the amount of colors used, if there was some significant cultural or pop cultural reference. everything kind of came together in my mind, I guess maybe after years of practicing design and being able to synthesize these types of things. to me, it just became blatantly obvious, I need to make MS Paint as a pin. it just, yeah, it blew up overnight.

06:37
Who bought them? Like what was your audience? People who collected pins. So at the time, yeah, at the time, this was in 2017. And Instagram was a bit different back then. It was much easier to just reach your audience on there. I’m sure you kind of heard over time how like the algorithm changes. lot of people, a lot of like small creators have really been in a lot of pain trying to grow their audience on there.

07:07
But at the time it was a lot easier. More people would see your content. I can’t really explain to you technically how it changed, but it’s just kind of like a known fact at this point, right? Sure. So yeah. So yeah, it was mostly pin collectors, but then also when it did go viral, I think it was just anyone who had this nostalgic kind of connection to old technology or they had the memory of, you know, as a child or as a teenager playing on that program.

07:36
It is for some reason MS Paint is like this. There’s an article about it that described MS Paint as the crappy. What was it? was like crappy program for making like lovable art or something like that. I don’t remember. Yeah. So I think that was the appeal to it for like an average person. Well, how did you spark the viality? Did you just literally post it on Instagram and it just took off or? So what happened was

08:06
I did do a lot of research, like I said, into like what made a good pin. So I think that’s really what propped it up. Like it was poised to have success as just like a product, right? But the other thing that I did was I really understood the community and I understood where people who were looking to buy pins hung out. And at that time in 2017, pin post accounts were a big thing. So like anytime there was anything cool coming out in the community.

08:33
these accounts that had like, I don’t know, two or 300,000 followers of posts about it. So I sent, I like paid them like a, like a influencer fee. They have like rates for how much a repost costs. And I think I paid off like, I don’t know, like five to eight accounts to repost it. And, um, that’s when it went viral because they have all posted the same day and just like people, they really resonated with it. And, um,

09:01
Yeah, I don’t think it would have gone viral had I not went through those channels. Okay, so you did the research, you figured out who these influencers were, you did the research on the pin, and you created a great product that you knew had had viral potential, and then it just took off from there. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it was one of like, one of the most unforgettable like moments of my life, because I went from having like, just like a kind of like a

09:28
It was a really crappy store. There was nothing really. I had just the listing of the one pin, a really weird banner I created. It was kind of laughable, really. And I remember my phone was on my desk, just buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, order after order. I think I made 10 grand in a night, on my first night. Wow, that’s awesome. So Yulia, how much did you invest in your initial inventory for these pins? Presumably you didn’t know that it was going to be an overnight success,

09:58
No, I honestly had no idea. think that I must have spent, I don’t remember the exact number, but something between $500 and like $800. And this is after my first business fell apart. So that I invested more than 10 grand into. Right. Okay. So for these pins though, you said you made 10,000 overnight. Presumably you had to take back orders for that then, right? Or were the margins just that good?

10:25
The oh so that was yeah revenue. I mean the margins are also really good on pins. So like I noticed when it comes to like fashion hard goods like sunglasses or jewelry pins the margins are very big like sometimes you can have margins of like 90 depending on what it is. So yeah most of it was profit. So okay so that that initial 800 order was enough to fulfill that first day’s worth of orders?

10:54
Yes. Wow, that’s incredible. Okay. I noticed do you still sell those pins today or? Oh, I stopped selling them mostly because I just wanted to do something more interesting. I wanted to evolve as a designer and I felt like it making pins is kind of keeping me back. Right. Okay. Can I just ask you questions about your background? You were an architect before not a jewelry or pin designer.

11:23
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Did any of skills translate? And do you design all your own stuff today? Yeah, actually, it translated beautifully. What’s really funny is that the software that we use in school to 3d model our buildings, it’s called Rhinoceros 3d actually was originally developed as a jewelry program. So yes, yeah, so it was kind of a flawless transition. Like I still like I learned how to make draftings of buildings. Now I make draftings of jewelry and hand

11:53
It’s like it couldn’t have been like a more opportune situation. So in terms of manufacturing, do you get your stuff produced in the US? No, so I mostly I mostly produce my jewelry overseas. Our fine jewelry is made in India and our the rest of like the fashion jewelry like stainless steel or acrylic or anything that’s made in China. And honestly, it’s kind of hard to

12:22
get things manufactured in the United States, you get much better service overseas. Like if you want to get something made in the United States, you have to like, let’s say you want to make a ring, right? You have to, depending on how you make it, you have to make a wax. In order to make the wax, you can go to a caster, they can probably print it and then they will cast it for you to create the metal. And then if you want to go set a stone into it, you have to go to another person and set a stone. If you want to do some other kind of process to it, have to

12:52
find that guy for that process. But overseas, it’s more of like, my experience has been that it’s been like just a one-stop shop for a lot of things. And also less kind of gate kept jewelry is kind of notorious for having like, if you’re someone new in the industry, you can easily get ripped off for the cost of materials and the cost of labor for something. So it has been kind of like this boys club for.

13:20
many years here. Interesting. Yeah, so that’s kind of been my experience. I know from the experiences of other students, whenever they tried to contact someone in the US, they often didn’t want to give them the time of day. And this is for textiles. And, you know, everyone always talks about sourcing in the USA, but oftentimes, vendors in the US are pretty reluctant or it’s just significantly much more expensive. And it’s just not feasible.

13:49
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I just think that it’s a very outdated way of doing business and they don’t really want anything to do with you until you’re established. Like now I can probably come into a place in New York City and be like, hey, this is how much money I’m making. You know, let’s do business. Then it’ll take you seriously. But I don’t think that they will. Yeah, they’re not very welcoming to newcomers and they don’t really want to deal with you.

14:16
Okay. And in terms, so you saw on your own website, in terms of setting all that up, would you consider yourself a technical person? I think you probably are, right, since you design stuff, but was getting the website stuff intimidating at all for you? To be honest, well, no, I think I was kind of one of those like children of the internet very much. Like the internet kind of raised me, I would say, as an only child. So I feel quite comfortable with that. I don’t know how to code, which is an important thing to know, but like I’m able to…

14:45
I have enough of a design sense to get the website together and make it look presentable, right? Now we have people that we work with that have really elevated our branding. Like now we work with a graphic designer and people who make renderings for us for the jewelry. So now it’s much more elevated and adult than it was before. But at the time it was fairly simple for me, I would say.

15:11
Would you say the jewelry is most of your business or like the bags and the accessories? I would say right now it’s kind of half and half. Okay. Honestly. Yeah. And why did you decide to move towards bags? It’s just part of the collection or the look or the style? I see the business as a platform for me to make whatever I want.

15:34
Um, honestly, yeah. So that’s kind of how I approach it. Like I wanted to make bags, so I’m going to make bags. And then I guess the next few things on my mind that I really want to get into are shoes and actually fragrances. So all of these elements are kind of building this wonderful little wholesome colorful world that I’ve been trying to create.

15:58
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

16:26
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

16:56
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s EMERGECONSCL.com. Now back to the show. And if you’ve ever seen Yulia, and I’ll post a picture obviously of Yulia, like when I saw you on Zoom, I was like, okay, you are like the brand. Yeah, yeah. It’s very much, all of the work comes from my heart. That’s for certain. It’s very impressive.

17:25
Let’s talk about marketing. do you generally, well, presumably you couldn’t go viral on Instagram all the time. So how do you, what are your main marketing mediums and how do you generate your business regularly? Yeah. So that’s a good question. And that’s been kind of changing, especially over the past year with the changes in iOS, we really did depend on advertising a lot too, to get new people in. We would focus on trying to make good and funny content.

17:53
And yeah, like it’s kind of like the luck of the draw. Like some of it, just recently posted a video. I would have never even thought that it would get 7 million views, but it did. Right. And we always are asking ourselves, like, how do we keep generating this type of response? Right. So that’s what we try to do on that front. 7 million views on which platform? Sorry. Oh, sorry. That was on TikTok. TikTok. Okay. I definitely want to talk about TikTok, but I’ll let you finish your thought.

18:21
Yeah, yeah. And we have depended a lot on advertising, like on Facebook and Instagram ads. But it’s becoming less relevant. in order to sell something on there, you either kind of have to start having like higher ticket items, which is also the reason we’ve moved to more like semi luxury kind of route with some of our more expensive styles of jewelry. So we’ve been advertising those on there. And then we have, you know, we do our email, of course, we

18:50
We also have an app as well, which has been a really great exercise in the world building as well. Okay. Can we just, I’m just curious about that. mean, most of the stores that I know who have an app are very large to warrant an app because it’s very hard to get people to sign on. is your, what has been your experience with your app? So the thing with the app is that we already have, I don’t think we would have a lot of success with the app.

19:19
having not had a community, but because we do, people do want to use it because that’s where we do our first release. So it’s almost kind of like a club that people can be part of. So what happens if we have a new item is that we do an early release on Thursday for the item, and then we do a web release on Friday. So it’s kind of like first dibs for the true fans that care. Get to buy it on the app. Yeah.

19:49
How many new designs do you put out on a regular basis? Oh, so that’s, um, it has been growing each year. So I actually design everything in the store. Um, we’re hoping to do probably like 50 designs this year. Okay. Wow. Nice. Yeah. Last year we had maybe closer to something like 20. Yeah, that sounds about right.

20:19
So I want to talk a little bit about your ads before we move on to like the organic stuff. What would one of your, like take your highest performing Facebook ad, what did that look like? So first we had a very interesting situation where we, whenever we would advertise something, what would happen is that we really start super well, would sell really well for like a week and then would fizzle out. But sometimes we have like one product or two that just are in a way,

20:49
kind of evergreen. And the product that has been forming well for us has been this bag that looks like a binder clip. Yes. Thanks. Yeah. So that one really, for some reason, keeps performing. And I think that’s because that like the product has just so much massive fielders, like almost everyone that I talked to is like, oh yeah, I used to put binder clips on my Barbies and they could wear the purses. I think figuring out like,

21:18
how to strike that balance between creative and really relatable, I think probably is what helps us have more of those evergreen results. I think for your stuff, mean, it’s almost like a picture would just sell the product itself. You wouldn’t have to do anything fancy on Facebook, Were any of your ads like elaborate video ads or? Anytime we’ve tried doing something elaborate, it just…

21:45
flopped, honestly, like we had actually, tried to do this whole stop motion campaign that we put so much effort into, no one cared. And I think that’s just more the result. if that’s a, because of the short attention span we all have when scrolling, think, I think that’s kind of been like my, kind of big, uh, I’ve been upset about it because it’s also affected the way that we make art because you have to make things that are super consumable.

22:15
And it’s a shame. It’s a shame. I feel that way about writing today. Like Google, if you want to rank, they want just the facts. If you tell a story, it actually hurts you sometimes, you know? Yeah, like I feel like if it’s not like a listicle style, like points type thing, people won’t read it. And it’s just it’s a sign of our time. Yes. OK, so I see the nature of your products. And again, if anyone’s listening to this, just go check out the products. They’re all very unique.

22:44
So if you just saw them in your feed, you’d probably just stop scrolling even if there was just a picture of the product. Okay, so let’s move on to TikTok actually. Actually, I you to compare TikTok versus Instagram, first of all. Like if you were to start over again today, which one would you start with if you were starting completely from scratch? Well, I guess that has to do with the history plays a bigger role in this, right? Like in 2017, it was awesome. Now,

23:13
It kind of sucks. wouldn’t try to, if I was starting a business now, especially if it’s something kind of fun and creative or something that you can maybe even make educational content about where you can explain how things work, TikTok all the way. And what I would do is I would still make an Instagram account. I I would repost everything that I make on my TikTok, post it to Instagram, make sure that you link your Instagram into, there’s like an Instagram button.

23:41
that is in your like about section of your TikTok, link it there. And that’s how I’ve been funneling followers from my TikToks to my Instagram because I will never get 7 million views on a video on Instagram. It’s just not gonna happen. But on TikTok it’s possible. And we’re still kind of in that place where it’s a young and hip platform and they haven’t completely shifted their business plans to sucking out all the money that they possibly can like they have on Facebook.

24:11
and on Instagram from their users. So yeah, I would definitely be on TikTok. And there’s also much stronger communities on there. I’ve been really disappointed with what’s been going on with Instagram as a platform. They’re really not concerned about their users in my humble opinion. I mean, it’s been like that for years. I’ve been burned by Facebook almost every single year with something. Like I started out with pages.

24:39
Then they nerf pages, then it was groups, they nerf groups, then it was messenger, they nerf messenger. I think I’ve learned my lesson at this point. Yeah, I don’t love it. don’t love it. TikTok is a fun place to be and I think the community aspect of it has been what keeps people there. I am curious though, why do you link your TikTok account to your Instagram and not to your site? Oh, there is a link to my site as well. Oh, yeah. there’s like,

25:07
a button that basically appears with the Instagram logo. You can link to YouTube too, think. Yeah. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. So how, how do you go viral on TikTok? It’s a million dollar question here. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the important part is to, uh, part like take time to look at the content on there and be kind of disciplined about what you’re liking. So you get the content that you

25:36
actually want to see and you train your algorithm and then you get into a place on TikTok where like, you’re like, you’re really enjoying all of it. So on my feed, what I get, I get a lot of art. I get a lot of like, just like comedic kind of skits and cat videos. So what I do then is I keep scrolling until I find a trend that’s funny. So there was one video that I made recently.

26:03
where I’m kind of making fun of myself, me walking into the studio the first day of the new year. And I’m like, I’m going to be making more things that look like other things. And there was kind of a trend, like under that soundbite that I use, because that’s what TikTok is all about is these like soundbites. And then you make your skit or your joke or your content over that soundbite. the trend, original trend was like people taking

26:32
mental health walks on the first day of the new year because they had to, not even the new year in the winter because they had to. And there was this kind of like funny music in the background. I know this probably sounds all kind of cryptic. does if you’re on TikTok. If you’re on TikTok, I’m actually following you here. Okay, you’re following me? Yeah. Yeah. So I really do recommend just get on the platform and look at the content and don’t be discouraged if maybe you’re older because like there’s

27:01
Lots of wonderful, there’s doctors on there making content about things. Like don’t get too discouraged. So can we just kind of talk about your overall strategy? First of all, do you do your TikToks all yourself or do you have someone on your team help you with it? So for part of the time I have someone on my team help me with some of it because making content all the time is kind of exhausting. But I think out of everyone in the company, because it is

27:29
my vision, sometimes I do make the ones that really fit. I do my best to make them. But yeah, I basically just try, look at trends, I see what’s funny. And then I try to make my studio called version of that trend. And that’s what works best. And what is the frequency that you post? So it took us a little while to be consistent, but what we’re working to is posting at least like five times a week. We post almost every day on

27:57
Instagram, but now we’ve started focusing more of our efforts to switch over to TikTok as our main platform. So the goal is like five times a week, but right now we probably do like three times a week. All right. And so for those three times, do you just have like this running list of ideas kind of written down somewhere so you can kind of pump them out? Yeah. So we have meetings every Monday and we talk about like, you know, everything going on in the business and we have a social media section, then we’ll kind of

28:26
bounce around ideas and we have someone on our team that’s part of Gen Z. So she’s even more plugged in than I am. And she presents us all these ideas of what to do and what she thinks is funny. So that really helps. you film everything using the app or do you film externally? I’ve actually, yeah, just done everything in the app. Okay. And if you were to just systematize this process, there a way you would describe your TikTok strategy?

28:56
Yeah, I think, like I said before, I think the easiest thing to do because it’s kind of intimidating looking at a blank canvas and like, okay, well now what? Find something that you find hilarious. Like you will scroll, you’re like, ha, that’s wonderful. How do I model my behavior on this and make the video and post it? Because a lot of the work is kind of done for you with the trend because there’s kind of a formula, almost kind of like a Mad Libs style, but like in video, right?

29:25
You follow that format and you make the video and sometimes it’ll flop but then sometimes it’ll take off and you never quite know. I still after five years of doing all this crazy social media stuff that I’ve been doing, I still can’t ever really tell when something’s going to be a success. You just have to try. And then in terms of people finding your brand, like you don’t really explicit mention your URL or anything like that, right? People just look at your bio and find the stuff.

29:51
Yeah, I think this is also another interesting talk about I think the age of grow marketing is over. And like by that I mean just like the really hard sell the pushing like the shop now like that kind of language. It’s not people don’t like it and people are very aware of it even more so like kids now are so smart. They don’t like being pushed to right.

30:19
So like if someone sees something that they like, trust me, they’ll go and look at your bio is like the first thing we try not to do like, kind of like these like hard sell language style things. Yeah, I noticed none of the product TikToks even mentioned anything. They just kind of demonstrate the product sometimes and that’s it. And then if you’re interested in it, you’ll go to the bio and find the product or they’ll Google it.

30:46
Yeah, right. Yeah, people people it’s very easy to find. It’s almost kind of a common sense like, oh, yeah, this tick tock makes jewelry. It’s pretty clear that this is like some sort of shop. So we almost don’t even have to like tell these things because you know where to find the link. It’s going to be in the bio. You know, in case you guys are listening to this episode, I mean, the easiest way to it’s really hard to describe this stuff in words on the podcast. So the easiest way is just head on over to the studio called Tick Tock and just see what you’ll he has been putting out.

31:16
Can we talk about Instagram briefly? You mentioned you used to post a lot. What is your Instagram strategy? So I think Instagram, what we’ve been trying to do is encourage any type of engagement as much as possible. So I think things that really work on there still are like, let’s say that we have a ring and then we have six different like styles of like colors or

31:46
stones or treatments to the thing. And then we’ll ask the audience, which one do you like the most and why? And people love giving their opinion. like, it’s also like kind of collecting data as well. So it helps us to make better decisions as to what we should release and like what people are most excited about. But I think, asking people questions is great. And I think the stories are also a really wonderful way to get people to interact. Something that we really do focus on is being like,

32:14
almost in a similar way to the post I just described, be like, hey, what do you think of this? Or even like sometimes we’ll be like, how are you doing today? And people will just tell us. We don’t know why, but they like sharing it with us. we kind of have like this, I don’t know, I guess it is kind of like a parasocial relationship in a way, but it’s kind of like people feel comfortable telling us their opinion because it’s kind of like this hodgepodge group of like weirdos and artists and outcasts that are all passionate about.

32:43
things that look like other things. I know I said a lot right there, but you’ll understand when you see the stuff and why people would be compelled to talk about it. I think that there are just a lot of design nerds who wanna discuss their opinions on designs that we There’s actually a lot of nostalgic value in the products that you make actually. Yeah, yeah. I’m pretty sure I’m older than you, but I actually can relate to a lot of your products. I mean…

33:12
Yeah, they kind of speak to me. And maybe that’s what is causing people to just kind of reply. So can you just give me an idea of how often you post on Instagram and stories also? We try to post every day during business days. I think we kind of take a break on Sundays or I might throw something up, but I have someone on my team, the Gen Z girl, she’s been starting to take over and I’ve been giving her some responsibilities of.

33:40
You know, I think it’s time for me to pass the baton. I’m starting to see myself aging and just not being as with it as before. So you mean like one story a day or one post a day or both? One story? so stories will post like a few. Usually they’re like a sequence of thoughts or views of a product. It kind of depends on what we have. But you can kind of think of stories as a really great way to

34:08
like post questions, show behind the scenes, we usually, I don’t know, maybe like four or five slides, I guess you can say, individual stories, and then posts usually one a day. If there’s something exciting happening, maybe two a day. You mentioned you’ve built a community. When you describe this community, is it through Instagram or do you actually have like a Facebook group or some community? It’s mostly through Instagram, and I think it’s

34:37
It’s a loose community. Like we don’t have like a Facebook group per se. But I think what defines our community is the interest in objects is the best way that I can describe it. The people that are our fans really appreciate well-made, funny, clever, funny kind of visual puns. And I think that’s a very specific niche of

35:07
audience. I noticed that you’ve been featured in number of magazines or websites like BuzzFeed and all that. How did you get those features? Sometimes it’s random, but we did start working with a PR firm that’s helped us a lot, especially with celebrity placement. I would say it’s something while it definitely put a lot of feathers in our head, I wouldn’t I don’t think that press has really helped us a lot with sales.

35:37
It helps a lot with trust, but it doesn’t help a lot. Like just because a celebrity wears something, it definitely doesn’t mean that you’re gonna get, you know, hundreds of sales the next day. Interesting. Do they not post, if they post on their Instagram, you probably would though, right? If they tag you sometimes. What’s kind of interesting that I’ve noticed, even with influencers, they might tag a product. A lot of them don’t have the ability to convert.

36:06
their followers into sales. And that’s something else that’s been, I kind of have a bone to pick with that whole industry because it’s, we get these like press kits from people all the time that are in the ones that want to work with us and they never add the metric that I care about the most is the conversion to sale. That’s That’s tough for them to do though. Yeah, but I guess like they could at least follow up and ask because like there are ways to

36:34
there are ways to track it, at least with like a custom discount code. know? Yep. I mean, what’s ironic is that that’s how you launched your pin, right? I mean, you had these influencers post your pin and that caused all these sales to happen overnight, right? I think what the difference between that and this situation is, is that was a niche community with like,

37:01
the general influencer. it’s like, like the pretty kind of alternative girl, let’s say. Like that right, right now is kind of like an archetype of influencer on the internet. Yeah, I know it’s really interesting to see that they, I think their fans love following them, but they might not necessarily be the best salespeople. Okay, that makes sense. I mean, so are you still using a PR firm today or, or was that in the past?

37:30
Oh, no, we still do. It’s definitely helpful to this day. I think it’s it’s something to do when you’re a little more established. I wouldn’t say it’s a huge. It doesn’t affect our sale as much as I thought it would. Interesting. So I know PR firms are pretty pricey. How do you justify the the outlay? How I justify it, I think how I see it is that

38:00
Especially when you have a business that’s online only, I think there’s so many people who have been burned by these drop shippers who are selling essentially garbage. Yeah. Yeah. And oftentimes they don’t even receive the product. Anything you can do to show like, Hey, no, we’re legitimate is, is very important to the trust of your business. So if you have a whole, you know, section on your site that says press.

38:30
know that must mean that you’re doing something right and you’re actually a safe place to shop. So that’s how we justify the calls.

38:39
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And not like other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

39:06
is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce 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. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut out ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue,

39:33
We are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

39:59
I guess the question is, once you have certain amounts, like we’ve been in all these magazines for weddings, and if we were using a PR firm, we have enough, we can list those logos on our site. And at that point, if the additional press isn’t generating sales, and you already have the credibility, then what else are you expecting from the PR firm? Do you have a set of metrics that you actually work with your PR firm to make sure you hit?

40:29
Um, I think they, how do they quantify it? Um, I’ll have to look into like the numbers later, but basically what they do is they, um, give you a fit, like based on a certain placement, they will give you a figure of what that placement is worth in dollars. Had you had had to like pay to be in there instead of being selected. Cause essentially what happens with, uh, with a PR firm, you will give them your product and they will do their very best to try to place it on celebrities or.

40:59
send it out to writers and hope that they like it. And they’re able to provide you the service because the people that work at the PR firm have, like the individuals usually have relationships with all these people and outlets and stuff. So that’s how they quantify the value that they give you. So essentially they want to try to increase that, the theoretical dollar amount of what they have given you.

41:27
And it’s still worth it to us because what happens with PR is that like, let’s say you’re in a showroom for like six months and if you’re, then you have like stylists come in and they’ll pull pieces from you. And then they’ll start to kind of develop a relationship with your brand where they’ll like come in and the next six months and they’ll ask like what’s new. So I think for us, it’s still a relationship that we’re trying to grow.

41:57
because we’ve been with our pure firm for one year now and they’ve done like really cool stuff for us. Like we got our earrings on Halsey. That was like one of the big things. Yeah. We got our earrings on Carol G. Like, so like they’re giving us some like serious, you know, placement of really cool. It’s, and it’s the more feathers in the hat that we can get the better. But I also think that it’s kind of a long haul relationship.

42:26
as opposed to like, oh yeah, like spend money on advertising and see what happens. I think it’s a little more complex than that. Cause we’ve also gotten a lot of findings from working with the PR agency too. Like we get feedback from stylists and then we’re able to make decisions based on that to improve it so that more of our pieces are pulled. So it’s actually like, it’s a kind of a complex relationship that’s.

42:52
Yeah, it’s more like a long-term play. And you can actually brag about these press messages also, which leads to content for everything also, right? Exactly. Yeah, it is beneficial. It’s not as… The returns aren’t immediate, but it has already made us… It’s elevated our brand completely. Right. I mean, they’re not easily quantifiable, like running an ad, for example. I’m just curious about ads. Are you doing any Google ads at all?

43:22
We’ve tried, but I think that our stuff is just so like off beat that it’s not something that people are looking for. You know, I think if you’re looking for like, I have a friend who has a business and they make kind of like Gothic alternative, like imagine crosses and like spiky stuff. Uh, right now that’s really trending. So I think they’re having a good time with, uh, Google ads, but we’ve tried it personally doesn’t work for us, but I think we’re an outlier in that.

43:51
Maybe not. mean I think for jewelry and accessories those keywords are just really expensive Right. Yeah, that’s true. I was just kind of curious. Yeah, how are you doing fulfillment? Do you have a warehouse or we yeah, we use a third party fulfillment service and Yeah, we’ve been with them for the past. I don’t know three years and they’ve been great And is that is your 3pl local or is it somewhere in the middle of the US? They’re actually local. Yeah, they’re in New Jersey. Nice. Okay. Have you ever had to go over and

44:21
and visit or? Yeah, yeah, that’s kind of what’s nice. I can go there, I can see what’s going on. Sometimes I stop by and just check on the stock to see if everything looks great. So that’s the benefit. All right, so here, I just want to kind of end this interview with some rapid fire questions. These are like the common questions I always get asked for anyone who wants to get started in this. What were some of your biggest challenges in just getting started with e-commerce?

44:46
Um, yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s, there’s just so many variables. Uh, like there’s, it’s, it’s almost kind of like what I said before, like when you’re looking at a blank page, it’s almost like you don’t even know where to begin. I think, uh, establishing a proper strategy and finding something that is worth making, finding that gap, I think is what is going to define the success of the rest of your business.

45:16
because it’s, I think you really need to be providing something of value. And without that important part, everything else is gonna either fall apart or not work well or, know, it’s not gonna be fruitful. I mean, one thing I wanted to ask you is why did your tea kettle business fail? So it was with, cause I used to sell them on Amazon. It was so expensive to advertise. There are so many fees and I’m just not

45:45
the number crunchy kind of business person. think Amazon, if someone really wants to focus on Amazon as a business, I think like you need to be kind of like, like that guy that loves spreadsheets. I don’t. I know that I have good ideas and I can sell them, but Amazon was just way too stifling for me. would almost kind of compare it. So I kind of felt like I was back in my architecture office and like, this isn’t an improvement in my life at all.

46:12
Well, I mean, you’re an artist at heart. I can already tell just from talking to you for the limited time we’ve spoken. So how much money did you risk to start your jewelry business? Yeah. So it’s the second when I started this one, I started with five hundred to like eight hundred dollars somewhere between there. Well, yeah, like I said before, my that only came after my first business where I sunk like ten grand into it. Sure. I mean, that ten grand, I mean, that

46:41
imagine was for product, right? Mostly? Yeah. OK. Right. Mostly product. How long did it take you to figure out what you were going to sell the second time around? Yeah. Well, so at the time, I took a break. I’m like, you know what? I’m going to spend two months and just focus on this passion product of mine. So I think like two months, like day in and day out, like almost like nine to five, I spent researching this pin community.

47:10
Okay. And then once you figured out what you were going to do, how long did it take you to actually execute on that idea? So yeah, I was able to make the, you know, the drawings for the design myself. And that took maybe a couple of days, not very long, because the idea that having the concept, that’s the very important part. It has to be a good concept. The actual making of the drawing, which doesn’t take very much time at all. Right. that. Yeah.

47:39
The thinking is what takes the longest basically. Yes, yes. Understanding the prompt and creating the solution, that’s the key thing. And that took as long as it took me to research this community, Drawings took me about a couple of days. then finding a factory actually took me a while because I was trying to show this design to a few factories and they couldn’t make it because it was kind of complicated.

48:04
Yeah. But after like, I don’t know, we talking to 10 different places, I finally found someone that would do it. And then the production took about like a month and a half or so. Did you use Alibaba or sourcing agent? How did you end up finding your factory? Yeah, actually, I found them through Alibaba. Okay. terms of like the minimum order quantities, did you have to order a bunch or? It wasn’t. It wasn’t a huge amount. There is a minimum order quantity, which was I think 100 units, but that’s not bad.

48:34
Yeah, it wasn’t bad. You know, Julia, there’s going to be a lot of people listening to this that are going to be very inspired by your story. Question they’re all going to ask me to ask you is like, what sort of advice would you give them if they’re just kind of scared to get started? I mean, we’ve already kind of broken certain things down here. I mean, you didn’t spend a lot to start this second business, like less than a thousand bucks, right? And once you figure things out executing, it sounds like you had product in hand and maybe two months, we should say, maybe.

49:02
Yeah, it was fairly easy. It’s a simple product. It didn’t have many moving parts. It’s a very relatively straightforward thing to make. it’s for me, it took about like, think, two months to get everything together to a point. Yeah. So mean, given that you failed in one business or you decided to shut it down and then you found success with the second one, if you can just give some advice to the audience on, you know, how to avoid, I guess, failing that first time, what would you tell them?

49:30
What I would do differently and what I realized after the tea kettles, when I did the tea kettles, I felt like I was following a formula which is supposed to work. Like I felt like I’d gone through all this stuff to the course and like I made this tea kettle. But I think what I realized for me is that I wasn’t passionate about this tea kettle. I didn’t love it enough. And I also didn’t love like the style of business that I had to do.

49:59
with Amazon. So I think like really finding something that comes from your heart as corny as that sounds is super important because that’s really what gives the product that important amount of spice for it to be something that other people are crazy about. I think if that’s not there, running a business for me would be very dry and really hard, especially as someone who’s

50:29
not a number crunchy person. am an artist and I’m a designer and artists and designers are very capable of doing business. But I think if you are anything like me, really take time to build something that you are really in love with and you’ll nurture it. And it will be something really special and certainly really successful. Yeah, I mean, I’ll tell you why it’s important. Actually, what I find is like a lot of people, they kind of lose motivation. And really,

50:59
It’s hard to stay motivated when you’re doing something that’s hard. And if you’re really into what you’re doing, it’s much easier to follow through. Yeah, yeah. I think in general, when you teach e-commerce, you always have to have some sort of guidelines to follow. But really, the best way to be successful is to just find your own way. Follow the guidelines to a certain extent, but then feel free to just veer away from the guidelines and make it your own. That’s just the best way to be successful.

51:28
I in the long run. that and like really listening to what your gut is telling you because I knew when things weren’t working and I did them anyway because I thought I was supposed to because you know, this is e-commerce TM. I knew like inside of me before the failure even happened that it probably wouldn’t have worked and I ignored it because I was being almost too cerebral. Right. Yeah. So Julia, where can people find you online?

51:55
if they have any questions for you about your business or if they’re interested in the cool products that you sell. By the way, if you guys are listening to this, go check out the products. They’re really cool and unique. That’s all I had to say. I’ll leave it there. Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s, it’s, it’s a treat. Even if you don’t want to buy anything, it’s, it’s fun to see, but yeah, you can find us on our website, studio cult.co and that’s the same thing for our Instagram. It’s studio cult.co and our TikTok is just studio cult. So you can find all of our

52:25
fun stuff on there. Yeah. And if they ask you how your day is and you respond, they’ll respond back. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, feel free to DM or, um, yeah, we also have an email. You can reach out to that. Hello at studio.co. Cool. Well, Julia, it was a pleasure speaking with you. mean, it’s always great to see students in the class so successful and I’m pretty sure you’re, you’re going to do really well and grow a lot in 2022. Yeah. No, I owe a lot of my success to digging your course. Honestly, I really recommend it. Thanks a lot.

52:55
coming on. Thank you. Take care.

52:59
Hope you enjoyed that episode and remember, I’m going to be bringing on a different student every week to talk about their businesses for the entire month. And all these students started from complete scratch with little to no experience. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoupterjob.com slash episode 394. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce 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.

53:29
So heading over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing 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. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog.

53:59
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.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.

00:28
by talking about the character traits of the successful students in my class. You’ll learn what sets the successful students apart from the ones who fail. But before we begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Now I’m super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. 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.

00:57
Klaviyo can track every single customer who is 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 hanky 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 my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife.

01:26
I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store. And I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce, and e-commerce is their primary focus.

01:53
Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I run with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce,

02:22
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.

02:44
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Now for this entire month, you are in for a real treat. Every single week, you will hear from a different student in my Create a Profitable Online Store course that is making six or seven figures online. And none of these students had ever started an e-commerce business before. They all started from complete scratch with little to no experience and they now run successful online store brands. But before you listen to those episodes, which are coming up this month,

03:12
I thought it would be an interesting exercise to analyze what sets the successful students apart in my class. What makes one student more successful versus another? Now in the past 10 years, well over 5,000 students have joined my Create a Profile online store course, but I want to be straight up with you. Not everyone who has signed up has been successful with their e-commerce business. Now when it comes to being a successful entrepreneur, the biggest variable in the equation is always you.

03:41
Do you have the necessary motivation and drive to succeed? And do you have the persistence to push through the initial learning curve? And do you have an open mind for learning? Now, after teaching my class for over a decade now, I found that the most important aspect of running an online business is execution and persistence. Can you carry out what needs to be done? And do you bulk at the first sign of adversity? So in this episode,

04:07
I want to talk about some of the patterns that I’ve noticed with the students in my class who’ve done well. And I also want to point out some common pitfalls with students who have failed. Now, a couple of years ago, I conducted a survey of the students in my class, and here’s a snapshot of the data. Of the students who have been in my class for at least a year and launched a product, 56 % are generating at least four figures per month, and 9%, almost 10%, are doing over $50,000 a month in revenue. Now,

04:35
While these statistics are pretty impressive by online core standards, the real question is what is happening to the other 44 %? And why are there so many students not making much money? So in this episode, I’ll give you my take on what the successful students in my class are doing versus what the failing students are not. And hopefully this analysis will set the proper expectations for those who are thinking about starting an online business or quitting their existing job. So the first trait is that successful students

05:03
don’t sit around waiting for traffic to magically appear. Now, in any given group of students, there’s always those who refuse to spend any money or do any additional legwork after their store or product has launched. They come into the class with the grand vision that they’ll start ranking immediately in the search engines within a month, and then traffic and sales will be free flowing like water. Now these students usually start out very diligently by finding a pretty good niche, acquiring vendors, and even putting up a decent looking website or an Amazon listing.

05:32
But then they launch and they refuse to spend any more money or do any additional marketing because they’re waiting for the magical Google Amazon traffic spigot to open up. And what usually happens next is that they’ll waste time rearranging different parts of their site or doing other silly things that are irrelevant when they could be writing content, buying ads or Amazon ads, building backlinks, running giveaways, gathering emails, or doing some good old legwork.

05:59
And within a few weeks, they quickly become discouraged by their lack of sales and they start doubting themselves. Was this the right decision? Did I just waste all my time on a shop that generates no income? Meanwhile, it’s only been a couple of weeks and they haven’t really done anything proactive to build traffic to their site. Now here’s just a public service announcement to all new business owners. The launch of your product is just the beginning. After you launch is actually when the real work begins. And oftentimes you’ll either have to spend money to acquire traffic

06:29
or do some legwork to get customers in the door. And the legwork is the key. Early on with our online store, we did a combination of cold calling, form marketing, content marketing, PPC marketing, and funneling prospects from eBay to attract our earlier customers. And we started before Amazon FBA even existed. In fact, search engine traffic for our store was non-existent until about the six-month mark. And without our other efforts, we probably wouldn’t have generated many sales at all during the first six months.

06:59
Now, whenever I think of students who have done the legwork, I think of Abby Walker of VivienLiu.com. And this was an interview which I’ll link up in the show notes. And this is a student I interviewed a long time ago. You should check out her episode. But because of her persistence and tenacity, she designed her own website. She learned Facebook ads. She cold called vendors, flew across the country to give product pitches, and eventually ended up on the Home Shopping Network and Oprah Magazine. Now, the legwork is never glamorous, and it’s not always fun.

07:29
But early on, you need to do what you need to do to get customers in the door. The next trait is that successful students choose winnable niches. a large part of my class is devoted to helping students find the right niche, and there’s always a delicate balance when deciding what to sell online. On one end of the spectrum, you need to sell something that has sufficient demand, but on the other hand, the product category must not be too competitive or saturated. And I can’t tell you how many students sign up for my class with a preconceived notion of what they want to sell. But here’s the thing.

07:59
Even after running the numbers and realizing that selling t-shirts or jewelry is probably not the best idea, they go forward anyways. Now, I don’t want to say that’s impossible to succeed in a highly competitive niche. And if you know how to advertise well, you can make any niche work. However, it will be much more difficult and your timeframe to profitability will be significantly longer. The niche that you choose is important and picking the right product to sell will make things much easier for you in the long run. In fact,

08:27
I wouldn’t even consider launching a product of any kind without running a quantitative analysis of my potential profitability. It’s not a guessing game. There is a science behind choosing the right product. And the best students in my class spend a good amount of time carefully researching their niche before they fully commit. And they find alternate ways to test their products before spending a large sum of money. Now, even though they’re anxious to jump straight into the implementation phase, they take their time to make sure that this first crucial step is done correctly.

08:56
Not only that, but the best students in my class make sure they can provide a unique value proposition which makes their shop stand out among the competition. Successful students also take action. Now, the majority of my unsuccessful students never get past the starting line. In fact, I hesitate to say that these students failed because you can’t really fail unless you’ve given something an honest try. Now, the most common symptom among brand new students is analysis paralysis. They get so hung up in the research process that they never take.

09:26
action and believe it or not, engineering majors are actually the most susceptible to this because they expect to have all the hard answers before they begin. Hey Steve, is this product gonna be a winner? Steve, can you guarantee that this is gonna work? And Steve, how much time is it gonna take for me to break 100K? Well, in business and life, there are never definite answers. You can do all the research that you want, but you’ll never know whether something’s gonna sell until you throw it up and try to sell it. And the best students in my class are comfortable

09:56
with taking action with imperfect information. They’re comfortable investing a small amount of money as a test just to see what works, and they’re willing to take a small leap of faith. My successful students always follow through. Now, this point is critical, and oftentimes the most difficult aspect of teaching my class. Now, as part of my class, I actually take the time to thoroughly critique a student’s site or Amazon listing before they go live, and oftentimes I’ll even redesign their entire website for them.

10:25
And the hope is that by providing early and actionable feedback, a student can avoid wasting time and money on PPC ads or other forms of marketing for a non-converting site. As far as I know, there’s no other class or online program out there that does this. And not only does it take a tremendous amount of my own personal time, but I also take a lot of pride in providing honest and actionable feedback. Anyway, there are times after a website critique where I notice that a student never ends up acting upon any of my feedback.

10:55
Now I’ll be the first to say that I’m not always 100 % correct, but I’m usually pretty close. And in general, it really frustrates me to see someone failing, even though I know that a couple of tweaks here and there could make a huge difference. Now running any online business is not a stagnant affair. And even after you’ve launched, you should be constantly tweaking your site and making small changes to improve conversions. And testing is the key. The people who fail are the ones who are not willing to make any major changes after launch. So don’t fall into this trap.

11:25
What defines a successful entrepreneur versus a failing entrepreneur is how you behave when things don’t go as planned. So failing entrepreneurs tend to wallow in self-pity at their lack of progress. Failing entrepreneurs tend to stay on the same path even though things are not working. And failing entrepreneurs feel helpless, make excuses, and play the victim card. Meanwhile, successful students take a step back, analyze what went wrong, and plot a different course of action.

11:55
Successful students also don’t get bogged down with the little details. Almost all my students who run successful companies have this uncanny knack for staying focused and not getting sidetracked by my new details. Now there’s a reason why this is very important trait. Not only could it quite possibly be the most important one, but it used to be and still is actually one of my greatest weaknesses. Now looking back, when I started my wedding linen store, I kept getting stuck on stupid, meaningless details. So for example, when I was working on the first iteration of my website,

12:25
I remember spending hours tweaking the look at the sidebar and header for my online store. I would move our logo 10 pixels to the right, make the sidebar just a little bit wider and move things all around. And after all that tweaking, everything still looked pretty much the same. And I wasted many hours that it could have been using to grow the business, especially in the early stages. Now, if you’ve taken my free six day mini course, you’ve probably seen me talk about various shopping carts like WooCommerce, Shopify and BigCommerce. And here’s what I come to realize.

12:55
Even though I’m still a huge proponent of owning your source code and having the flexibility of an open source platform like WooCommerce, most of you, and I would say 90 plus percent of you are probably better off using a fully hosted solution like Shopify or BigCommerce or Shift4Shop because the little details of site design can bog you down. Is your time better spent tweaking your site or formulating your sales plan? And good entrepreneurs know their priorities and will rarely waste time in any activity

13:24
that doesn’t directly affect their end goal. And speaking from experience, it’s all too easy to becoming gross in something that appears to be significant on the surface, but actually doesn’t matter at all. So you got to prioritize.

13:39
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

14:08
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

14:37
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. Successful students also know when someone else can do the job better and faster. Now, one of the easiest traps to fall into is to try and do everything yourself, especially if you aren’t the right person for the job. Now, a lot of new students will often try to save money on a bootstrap budget, even if doing so is not in line with their goals. They don’t take into account the time aspect of their work.

15:07
and think strictly in terms of dollars. But the best entrepreneurs I know optimize their time for maximum throughput. They know what they’re good at and when to outsource. All right, confession time. Those of you who know me well know that I always try to do everything myself, even though I’m not the right person for the job. And I’ve been known to code up entire plugins on my own in order to avoid getting nickel and dimed with a monthly fee for a simple feature. So for example, I coded up my own review system instead of paying for a popular review service.

15:37
that would have cost me hundreds of dollars per month. But hear me out here. When I take on the task of doing something myself, I do so for the sake of learning, and I rarely have a strict timetable. In addition, because I teach a class on e-commerce, I feel like I must have detailed knowledge of everything that I teach. That’s why I always get my hands dirty. And in fact, what differentiates me from a lot of other teachers out there is that I actually do everything myself and know all the little details. But if you’re a brand new entrepreneur just starting out,

16:06
you need to consider the trade-offs of going cheap. When I first started out, I designed my own website, even though I knew nothing about web development or programming. And as a result of my lack of experience, I ended up spending a lot of time writing code that was probably already written by someone else before. I devoted many hours learning and struggling through something that I couldn’t easily hire someone else to do in a quarter of the time. Now, I don’t regret my decision to learn about web programming because I’m now self-sufficient when it comes to web design. But realistically,

16:35
My wife and I could have launched our store several months earlier had we hired someone just to do the job. So you got to figure out your timetable, your budget, and adjust accordingly. Now, successful students also know how to do the bare minimum just to get by. Now, if you’ve followed me for a while now, you probably know that I’m a lazy entrepreneur and you don’t need to be great at everything. And in fact, you don’t need to be an expert at anything unless it’s one of the core competencies of your business. Now, successful students are adept at learning

17:02
and doing just the right amount of research and work to get by and not an ounce more. Now going back to the web design analogy, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel in order to create a high converting website. 90 % of the features you need have already been written by someone else. You just need to do your due diligence and find the required bits and pieces to put it all together. So for example, before you even hire a developer to implement something custom, spend some time looking for a plugin that already does what you’re looking for. Personally, before I start any coding project,

17:31
I just do a bunch of Google searches to see what’s already out there. And I would say nine times out of 10, I can simply piece together and adapt existing code for my own needs. Great entrepreneurs don’t create anything from scratch unless they have to. Now this is another trait that I’ve noticed with successful students. They are excellent with people. Now going out of your way to help others is actually my favorite trait of my successful students. Now, I’m not sure if it’s just a coincidence.

17:56
but my most successful friends have gigantic networks of people who are always willing to help. And they’ve established these mutually beneficial relationships by helping each other out without expecting anything in return. In fact, I’ve never met a successful entrepreneur who also wasn’t an excellent people person. And it seems as though making friends and helping others just comes with the territory. And this is the main reason why I started my podcast. Now, as an engineer who likes to hide behind a computer screen,

18:23
Podcasting forces me to reach out and meet other entrepreneurs. And as a result, I get to talk to someone new and successful for a solid hour every single week. Now fostering lasting relationships is what I love about networking with new people, which is why I try to attend as many events as my wife will allow me to attend. And incidentally, it’s also why I started my own conference called The Seller Summit. By the way, tickets are on sale now and are going up in price every two weeks. We are almost sold out, so grab your ticket now.

18:52
But above all else, being a successful entrepreneur is about listening to other people’s problems and finding solutions. And great entrepreneurs just simply have a knack for fixing things. And the more people they can help, the more successful they become. Recently, I actually had a successful student, Maria, come on office hours to talk about how to avoid getting mind-effed with your business. And she’s helped out on a number of occasions as well with the class. I’m very appreciative of her time. And it’s no wonder that she’s running a successful e-commerce business as well.

19:22
It’s just in her personality. Now the final trait I want to talk about is that successful students have an open mind. My best students are constantly learning. Now you’ve probably heard the story that the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the world read an insane number of books. So for example, Warren Buffett has been known to read between 600 and a thousand pages per day and devotes about 80 % of each day to reading. Bill Gates reads about 50 books per year. Now I don’t read nearly as much as Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.

19:50
But one thing that I’ve learned from the great entrepreneurs of the world is to keep an open mind. After all, just because you’re successful today does not mean that it will last forever. And you have to be constantly evolving your business in order to stay relevant. My favorite example of this is with Netflix. Even though they obliterated Blockbuster and were killing it with their mail order DVD rental business, Reed Hastings made the tough decision to focus the business towards streaming video. Now in hindsight, this seemed like an obvious decision, but back in the day,

20:18
DVD rentals were still 99 % of their business. One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Andy Grove of Intel, who once said, only the paranoid survive. Now, if you’re stuck in your ways and unwilling to change, then someone will eventually overtake you. And the only way to change is to expose yourself to new and different ways of thinking. Now, based on all the character traits that I just talked about in this episode, do you have the character traits of a successful

20:47
e-commerce store owner. If so, then I really want you in my class. I love running my class, but sometimes I get frustrated when a student does not follow through. And what can I say? I’m just very passionate about making sure my students succeed because when they are successful, I’m successful. I talk about them. I brag about them, which always leads to more business. I want everyone to make money online. And I hate seeing someone give up when they are so close to the tipping point because sometimes it’s just a matter of time until things start clicking.

21:17
Sometimes it’s just a matter of time until search engine traffic or word of mouth kicks in. Now the main thing is that you need to set the proper expectations for yourself and your business. And making money online is not something that just happens overnight. It’s a marathon and not a sprint. So you need to give yourself the necessary runway to give things a fair shot. In any case, I encourage you to tune in for the next four weeks and enjoy student month on the My Wife, Quitter Job podcast. Hope you enjoy that episode.

21:46
Now one last thing that I wanted to mention is that no one was born with all these character traits and many of them are just naturally acquired over time. And once you see even a little bit of success, you’ll be inspired to continue on. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 393. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing 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.

22:14
SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postgrip.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce 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 mywifeclutterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

22:41
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLA V I Y O. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and they’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.