00:27
which is one of the few podcasts that I actually listen to. And because Austin works with and helps a variety of e-commerce entrepreneurs with their email marketing and advertising, he has a wide breadth of business knowledge and he really knows his stuff. In fact, he is one of the few people that I asked for advice in growing my own businesses. So if you’ve never listened to his podcast before, take your favorite podcast app, do a search for the e-commerce influence podcast and go check it out because you will not regret it.

00:54
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 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 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 d.

01:25
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T.I-O slash D. I also want to thank Clabio, who is also a sponsor of the show. Now, if you’re working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined, you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business. Now, if you’ve ever wondered how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it, companies like Living Proof and Chubbies, well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning.

01:53
while also evolving in real time as their customers’ needs change. These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to do the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. Now, to learn more about how Klaviyo helps you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife.

02:22
That’s KLAVIO.com slash my wife. And finally, I wanted to mention a brand new podcast that I recently 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 it like 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.

02:57
Steve, man, I’m excited to chat with you. It’s been a little while since we’ve connected. It was pre-COVID, I think. It was, definitely. You were one of the first hit people to have to take down your event. Yes, that was the most miserable event. Thank you for reminding me of that. I was ready to go. I was excited to go to Florida. And then there was an increasing level of emails being like, we’re thinking about going?

03:26
We’re thinking about not doing it. Oh, now we’re definitely not doing it. And yeah, man, we haven’t chatted too much since then. So I’m excited to reconnect. mean, even rescheduling that thing is still a little bit up in the air because who knows when this whole, when people feel comfortable then going to conferences. So for sure, for sure. Well, I’m excited to chat today. We kind of had this idea of doing a joint episode and thinking about some of the things that we both do well.

03:55
and then talking about them and sharing some of the things that have helped us in growing our business. One of the things I’ve always respected about you and from the beginning I was like, wow, Steve is an incredibly sharp guy and somehow he does all of this just by himself with a VA and he’s figured out ways to automate and make things happen and do a lot with a very small staff. So that’s kind of the inspiration for today’s episode.

04:25
which is five or six things that you can automate in your own business to make your life easier. And- It’s funny, we were talking about this earlier and you are the exact same way. You have two people running this vast organization. That vast organization is a compliment for a small organization. But yeah, man. So I think it’s something really cool and fun. And I think as you stick around in entrepreneurship,

04:54
long enough, especially online entrepreneurship, you can come up with ideas of ways to automate things that maybe in the beginning you wouldn’t have thought of. So I can kick off with my number one thing that I’m excited about automating and that we think we’ve done a really good job and that is hiring. And hiring, I think for a lot of people, it’s something that they kind of dread. They’re like, oh.

05:21
I got to hire somebody, oh my gosh, it’s going to take so much time. It’s going to be so frustrating. I’m going to be doing all this work and then maybe get the wrong person. So I kind of take a different approach and this has come from having my first job. hired quite a few people, like over 30 people, and we learned a lot during that. And the way that I look about this automation process is we have really systematized down to

05:51
multiple, like, I guess it’s kind of a mindset. First things first, my mindset is I think about marketing our business to a potential new hire, just like I’m selling a product. So the same amount of work going into like a sales page for a product goes into hiring for a job advertisement. Because I know that hiring somebody who’s incredibly talented,

06:18
and is so valuable to the company, it’s worth my time there. So once I do that, I use Airtable to collect all of the applications that we get. Why don’t you talk about what that is, just in case people don’t know what that tool is. Airtable is one of the things I’m most excited about right now as a tool. It’s kind of like Excel on Google Sheets on steroids, in a sense that you can, it’s,

06:47
all the really good stuff that you get from Google Sheets and Excel, like being able to pull in information, look at it in different viewpoints, and also the ability to then connect it to other apps, applications, and tools, and pull in information and push information. So it’s extremely flexible as well. And so basically the way that we use it is when somebody applies to a job app, they go through a form that we’ve created on our website with Airtable.

07:17
and it’s hosted by our table. And that information is then pulled into our, what looks like a Google Sheet, but a Google Sheet that’s dynamic. And as people come into this, we can move them from round one to round two. We have little tripwires and stuff that we can see if somebody’s gonna pass the round one to round two requirement. That’s something simple like including a word in their cover letter that we’ve specified. Then from round two to round three, we can visualize

07:47
and move people through this whole process almost like a sales funnel. So by the time they get to the round three and four, we, and we’re ready to actually have an interview. We’ve, they’ve gone through these steps and we’re, I’m interviewing basically typically on an average of like four or five people for every 200 applications. it’s really, really helpful. And my time is saved massively. And also we tend to get higher quality people.

08:15
because they go through this step-by-step process. I’m just kind of curious since we’re talking about this. So round one is something stupid like include a word or subject in your application, right? What do rounds two and three look like? Round two and three include listening to a couple of podcast episodes, really episodes that are like very deep in like the ethos of what my business is about. So one with a guest and one with just me talking about our business. if people are really excited after listening to the podcast episode, then they write a blog post.

08:45
a very short one to understand if they can write. So writing, we’re remote team, and I found that the ability to write is incredibly, incredibly important with a remote team. So that’s the next step, is going through a blog post. After that, the next step is recording a YouTube video, introducing themselves for two minutes. So by the time we get to the actual meet them in person,

09:12
We’ve got a YouTube video, we know they can write and we know they can follow it, pay attention to details. So these are obviously for higher paid positions that are very skilled, right? Yes. Yeah. But actually I would do a similar version. I’ve done a similar version of this with less steps for lower level positions. And I actually think that they’re just as important for lower level positions because with a lower level position, the thing that often you really need is someone to follow instructions.

09:42
Yeah, you know, what’s funny about that is we followed a similar scheme for hiring for Bumblebee linens. Yep. But what we found is we got almost no applicants that could make it through that entire funnel. And like literally when one person finally made it through the funnel, we’re like, all right, great. We’re going to, we’re going to interview that person. It’s pretty sad really. So I think there’s like a happy medium, at least in my experience when, when hiring like the lower level types of employees.

10:07
Were you there at eCommerce fuel when I was talking with Bill D’Alessandro about the number one question he asked applicants that determined whether he’s going to hire them or not? No, I’d love to hear it. So he asked them, he says, so he gives them an assignment. Like, let’s say you work for me and I gave you an assignment that was due Friday at 4 30. But then over the course of the week, I gave you a whole bunch of other stuff and you weren’t able to work on that one assignment that’s due at 4 30 on Friday. So

10:36
Let’s say four o’clock rolls around and you find that you don’t have time to finish it before you have to complete your work day. What do you do? Oh, it’s a good question. And so some people might say, hey, you know, I’ll email you and I’ll tell you, hey, I didn’t get a chance to do it, but I’ll get it to you first thing Monday morning. But the right answer to that question is I’ll just stay as long as it takes to finish it up. Cause that was the due date was today. Yeah. Right. And so that’s it. Number one hiring thing.

11:05
That’s great. That’s his number one hiring question that determines whether you make it in or not. It’s really interesting. think I would frame it in a way where if you, the moment that you know that you are not able to complete it, what do you do? And I’d love to hear what people say, how they would communicate that. Right. It’s interesting, right? Cause everybody has too much on their plate at all times and trying to figure that thing out is what’s funny about that is like his best employees. They just say, what do you mean? I can’t finish it.

11:35
Of course I’m gonna finish it. Right. Yeah. Well, Steve, let’s go to something you’re really, really good at. And number two, I’ve got content repurposing. Right, you have a very small team, but you have a big footprint out there of the content you produce and you push out. How do you do Yeah, so every week, you know, for some reason, when we were talking about this earlier, I felt like I didn’t do that much in this area, but you kind of convinced me that I did, so.

12:02
We’ll talk about it now. So every single week I put out one blog post, one podcast episode, one YouTube video. And then I have actually Instagram and Twitter now on autopilot. And I’m going to be starting a TikTok channel in a couple of weeks. Now on the surface, that actually sounds like a lot, but I actually do a lot of content repurposing and it, for me, it always just starts out with the blog. Every single week on Sunday morning while my kids are in Russian math for four hours. Just thought I’d put that in there. I sit down.

12:32
and I write literally for four hours straight and I put out that one three to 5,000 word blog post. And from that blog post, sometimes for my YouTube video, all I do is just take the exact words sometimes, because I write like how I talk. Sometimes I take those exact words and just put out a YouTube video. Other times I’ll just take bullet points from that, just turn on the camera and just riff on it. And for YouTube especially, I think it’s important that you have a setup in your office where all you got to do is click one button and start recording.

13:02
Like the lights have to be set up and everything. If you don’t have that, forget about it. It’s not going to happen. So what I do then after that, so I have this blog post and for the podcast, that’s not really automated because the purpose of the podcast for me is just to get to know people. So I’ll just have someone like my assistant schedule out interviews in advance, which require no prep on my part for the most part. Cause I just riff based on the answers that they give kind of like how we’re doing it right now for Twitter and social media.

13:30
Uh, I actually hired recently a consultant that just consumes all of my content, YouTube, podcasts, everything, and puts together these little, you know, tweets that go out three times a day. And then I take those and I put those on Instagram and those are actually going to be the fundamentals of my Tik TOK channel as well. And so there’ll be the tweets, what do you post the tweets, like pictures of the tweets on Instagram or do you do something different on Instagram?

13:59
So the tweets are actually in this Google sheet, which ones are going out. And I kind of see how they perform on Twitter and I the best ones. And then I, this, this part’s manual. I’ll find like a family picture or some picture to go along with it for Instagram. Cool. Cool. And then TikTok. So how long have you been taking dance lessons to prepare for your TikTok entry? You know, I just finished, I finished a three month series on hip hop dancing, which is going to be the fundamentals of my TikTok channel.

14:29
It’s gonna be good. what’s funny about this is I told Austin this and you actually believed me. I did, I did. Before he went on, he was talking about TikTok and I was like, that’s impressive. Steve’s committed to his craft. Okay, so very interesting. So you’re repurposing everything here and you’ve got now from one blog post, that one blog post turns into Instagram, tweets, a YouTube video, and also an email. Does the email go out as well?

14:58
Email goes out, that, I mean, that part’s not automated, but yes, I email out all these pieces of content to my audience on a weekly basis. Cool. And does that come from the writing or is that a separate email that you’re writing? Usually it depends how much time I have. Like if I’m, if I don’t have that much time, sometimes I’ll just cut and paste like an excerpt from the blog post as an intro for the video. But you got to understand like all these pieces of content aren’t going out at the same time.

15:23
Yes. Right. So I stagger them. So like the YouTube video of that blog post might come out like months later. Okay. That makes sense. feel like it’s all going out at the same time. And how do you manage that? Do have any tools that you use to manage that? Or is that all Google Sheets? It’s all just Google Sheets. I mean, that part is kind of manual and there’s no real method. I just wait and see if it’s been long enough basically that I publish the other post. Cool. That’s awesome. And so you’re doing all of this. you have anyone helping you?

15:53
push, publish, or is it just you? So the Twitter stuff is all automated. Instagram, that’s all kind of curated by me because I feel like my Instagram is a little bit more personal. Yeah. I use a tool called planily to just schedule everything out. So I’m scheduled out for like three months already. Oh, awesome. So I don’t have to touch that podcast. My, my VA handles that. My, my VA actually edits all my videos. Also, she actually edits all my Tik TOKs as well. So that, yeah, she’s been amazing.

16:21
Steve, I can tell already you’re going to be going to have a massive TikTok following. Dude, I’m excited. I just actually interviewed a TikTok consultant this morning on my podcast. Cool. So she gave me all these pointers. think in terms of expanding your reach, it seems like TikTok is probably the best platform right now or the fastest growing one for sure. Cool. So let’s move to the next one here on automations. So outsourcing email.

16:50
And I think we can both talk a little bit about this. I can start and dive in a little bit about how, how I do it. This has been one of the best, the best changes that I made, I would say in the last five years was directing my email to help scout and getting some help filtering through my email before it gets to me. So both Steve and I put out a lot of content. And when you put out a lot of content, you get a lot of responses.

17:19
And some of those responses I really want to see. And some of those are actually 95 % of them are pitches to go on my podcast. I would say you’re probably familiar with that. You probably get the same. And so I’ve got it set up so that my email goes to a help scout. And then I have my assistant who filters through the email and then assigns the ones to me that make the most sense for me to respond to. And sometimes she’ll even include a note. And if I get an email that is important.

17:47
I’ll also just send me a message on Slack saying, hey, here you got a new email about this to go check it out. Saves an incredible amount of time. So Austin, how come my emails have not been making through your filters? That’s what I want to know. That was actually explicit instructions to my assistant. To forward your emails on to a Chinese factory that.

18:13
that is going to be hard selling you widgets for the next. I still get so, guess every once in I still get tons of emails from going to the Canton fair. And they’re usually very hard sell emails about like the newest widget. But yeah, that’s what I do. Steve, what do you do? I know you’ve got your own process here. Yes, I don’t use Help Scout. I use a tool called Gorgias. And the reason why I like Gorgias so much is because you can literally tie in all of your social media channels. So you don’t do as much social, I don’t think as I do, but.

18:42
Facebook, Instagram, every time I post one of those I get comments and I want to make sure that people get responses to those comments. So all emails, social, Facebook Messenger, even SMS, they all come into the same platform. And then my VA goes through and just flat out just closes the one for podcast requests actually, he just closes a whole bunch of those. And then for people who are actually, you know, sending me an email, like there’s canned responses for certain things and

19:09
Just like you, only the most important ones get filtered to me that I finally answer. Yeah, it’s incredible and Gorgias is a great tool. I think I’ll probably make the transition after this conversation to Gorgias because I’m doing more social and we’re ramping that up. Yeah. Does Help Scout not handle social? Doesn’t, it doesn’t. Ah, interesting. It just does email and also like support beacons. So people can click on the support beacon on my membership.

19:38
ask a question, it goes directly in. So yeah, I don’t want this to be a gorgeous ad, but what else? It also does all my e-commerce store stuff comes in and it imports all that information. So one click of a button. It’s amazing. It’s fantastic. There are also sponsors of our podcast, uh, e-commerce. So I, I, I’m a huge fan. I just need to make the transition. Cool. Well, the next one here is something that I think you’re really good at. And as we were going into this episode, I was like,

20:08
You know, Steve, I know you have so much automated and you do so much with such a small team. And one of the things you mentioned was you like to delegate a lot of stuff to the floor. What does that mean? What do you delegate into the floor and how do you think about what’s important in your business? So by delegating to the floor, that’s actually a nice way to say I drop a lot of things on the floor. You know, sadly enough, I don’t really have like a set method, but for me, like I have this

20:37
The way I do this is ridiculously primitive. I actually have a draft in Gmail of all the tasks that I want to get done in a given week, and those are prioritized. So in a given week, if there’s something extraneous that comes up, I always open up my draft in Gmail and say, hey, does it fall under these directives? If it doesn’t, and I don’t think it’s important for the long term, I literally just drop it on the floor. If it’s something that might be longer term, that’s something I need to do.

21:07
I add it to that drafts under the long-term to-do list. Unfortunately, what ends up happening is a lot of my wife’s things fall into that and I get in big trouble. don’t think she’s seen my email drafts yet, but there’s a lot of the stuff that she wants kind of below. Like if she found that draft, I’m sure she’d move them up. Do you do something similar, Austin? Kind of curious. It’s interesting. I don’t use a Gmail draft. That’s a ultra power move. I’ve never heard of that, but that’s for you.

21:36
I definitely, I think the way that we do it is we do a lot of like sprints. So we like to work on projects for like two to three weeks at a time and try to get something like shipped. And within that process, it eliminates a lot. So if we say we have like a hard deadline, we’re like, Hey, we’re to put something out on this day. Then when you look at that and you go look at all the steps, it automatically eliminates a lot of the extraneous stuff.

22:05
because you’re planning on moving something forward. Like when I launched our membership, the coalition, we did it in 30 days from start deciding to do it to launching. And that required us to really limit a lot of the features that we had to get something out. And then on a personal level, I try to limit myself down to like three to five big things a week that I do. And I think there’s also just a mindset side of just realizing that like,

22:35
At a certain point, when you’re an entrepreneur, you recognize that you’ll never have enough time to do all the things that you want to do. So just give up that mindset of trying to check everything off. And I think that that’s been really helpful is just recognizing that I’m always going to have 10 to 20 times more stuff to do than I have time to do. Do you have a running task list though of those things that aren’t as high priority? I don’t, no.

23:02
I don’t. So when you say that, you have like a running task list of things that aren’t high priority. It’s like the things that you consistently. Hey, let me open up my drafts right now. Great. I’m very interested in this. Yeah. Okay. So here’s something that’s been on my back burner for a little bit. Like I actually haven’t converted over to the Facebook conversions API yet. Okay. It’s something that’s on my list, but it’s not something that’s going to directly bring in more sales. Yes. Right. So that’s why I keep pushing it down. I know it’s important, but I keep pushing it down.

23:33
Yeah, so I don’t have a running list, but I definitely run it through like a mental filter around that. at the end of the day, I’ll look at like, we have like our rocks for the quarter and the things that we want to move forward and always be cross-referencing the rocks that we have versus the stuff that I’m doing. And it’s like, is this really related to what I said that I wanted to do 45 days ago? Cause usually the first 45 days of a quarter, it’s like really easy to stick to your

24:03
priorities, the second 45 days, you’re far enough away that you start to like forget, we had this great meeting and we made all these plans. So that’s when I’m more cognizant of looking at my plan for the quarter. I mean, I know one thing that I need is what I call a mind sweeper. I actually had one of these at my last job, you know, when I was working full time, like I’m really excited about the big things like the big rocks that move things. But then like I leave like this trail of destruction behind.

24:33
Right? Where I’m just trying to get things done. Things are moving forward, but it might not be polished. I need someone just kind of behind me polishing everything that I do as I lay my path to destruction. Yeah. That sounds like a great role. That sounds like something you could hire for using my air table set up. Yes, exactly. It’ll be an extensive interview automated process where I asked them, Hey, it’s four 30 and you didn’t get it done yet. What are you going to do? What are you going to do?

25:00
Yeah, and you give them some half-baked blog posts and see what they can turn it into. That’s actually amazing. So people actually write the blog posts. That’s actually more difficult to me than putting out a two-minute YouTube video, actually. Well, yeah, we keep it short, though. It’s like 500 words, like a 500-word answer to some sort of a response and see how well people… And for every role, it’s different. Like, for a customer service role, we didn’t do that. We did a reply to a customer.

25:30
So here’s a scenario, write their email response. That was fascinating actually, because it was like 90 % of people just totally blew it up and then 10 % of people got it perfectly. It’s so interesting. It’s like a very basic email response to a customer who might be frustrated and 90 % of them were just like, okay, even though everything looks good on your resume, there’s no chance we could ever hire you considering your email response for this customer.

25:58
I know your interview question. Let’s say Steve Chu emails you here. How do you deal with this? Do you A, forward to a factory in China? Well, let’s get to number five here. And number five is one we can both talk about, which is running automation for email marketing and SMS and what that means for your business and for also for our clients, the people that

26:27
have gone through our trainings in our communities. This is one, I still think email and SMS, email automation is one of the most powerful things you can do after we’ve both been in this e-commerce space, online space for quite a few years. And there’s always new flashy things that pop up and people talk about. But the end of the day, email is still incredibly, incredibly powerful to automate.

26:55
and provides so many levers for business owners to be able to do more with a smaller team.

27:04
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.

27:32
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.

28:02
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.

28:12
You know, it’s funny you say that over the years I’ve been drawn to new shiny objects. Like for example, I went on this Facebook messenger kick for two years. Yeah. But I just never learned my lesson with Facebook. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like I used to be excited about Facebook pages back in the day, then groups, but they keep just nerfing everything. And then they just did a gigantic nerf, partly because of Apple, think. But yeah. So email is the one stalwart that’s lasted the test of time. And then I think SMS is going to be another one of those platforms that last the test of time.

28:40
What are your, like, at end of the day, what are the most powerful automations, email automations that you have set up? So, I think the most powerful thing that I do is I keep it simple. Really, I had this one sequence where I only have one product, which essentially is to get people to the store and, sorry, not the store, to the course. Yep. And I have different autoresponder sequences depending on what they’re interested in. Sure.

29:09
Like if there’s interest in selling on Amazon, I have them click over, you know, with the drip, think we both use drip. It allows you to send them different sequences depending on what they’re interested in. But I just have forms and all of my blog posts. I have calls to actions on my podcast, my YouTube videos, and that’s how I build my list. The other thing that I do is I like to cross pollinate everything. So for example, one class might only be available on SMS. And so in order to get this, you know, I have them click on this link, which sends a text message and I say upfront,

29:39
you’re going to get one text message per week and that’s how it’s going to be delivered. And so that way I have like, you know, people on both places, which allows me to reach them more because the deliverability for both platforms, at least SMS is really good right now, but I just noticed that there was a junk folder in my messages on my Android phone recently. And I think that it’s going to probably go in that direction at some point as well. For sure. We can already tell that it’s going in that direction, especially as exponentially the number of

30:07
people texting me for random stuff. Politicians usually lead the way on some of this stuff. And if you get on any one SMS list, you’ll just get hammered to eternity about certain issues. And that’s not a good experience. When I look at some of the email and SMS automations that are incredibly powerful. One, like you, have like a onboarding series. So if somebody signs up, they go through a quiz funnel, ask some questions, and then they go into a sequence.

30:37
Uh, that will, it’s designed to send them to the coalition and sign up. Uh, other things that I’ve put in that have been really helpful have been browse abandonment emails related to that. it’s, you know, browse abandonment emails when people are checking around and I always try to personalize those. So it’s like, Hey, I you were on the, all the website, like hit me, hit reply, hit reply and let me know what you’re thinking about. And a lot of times I get interesting questions about whether or not they should join the course. And.

31:07
From a client perspective, those two are easy ones right away, like card abandonment, browse abandonment, onboarding sequences, and then also replenishment sequences. what’s been interesting, I’ve been working with someone for the last couple of months, they came in with zero email. Like they were doing, I think they were sending like one email every two months. And now we’re up over 30 % of their revenue coming from.

31:37
email marketing in a couple of months because it just got, like you said, like kept it simple, but focused on the powerful stuff. It’s an email mark, email every single week that goes out, like a broadcast email featuring some sort of a product. And then we focused heavily, their replenishables business on a repeat purchase sequence that goes on for literally months. So if you buy something and don’t repurchase, you’ll be followed up about

32:07
this for months and it’s crazy. There’s eight or 10 emails and the email like eight or nine is performing almost as good as the first email. They’re just, it just happens to be replenishable that people buy over time. And so it was inspired kind of by a, you, do you wear contacts, contact lenses? do. Yeah. Okay. Did you ever buy from 1-800-contacts? I do not. Okay. Well, if you do, if you want to see an incredible experience, they’re the most relentless business I’ve ever.

32:37
scene with follow-up because they know if you buy contacts, you have to buy more contacts and they know your prescription. So they just continue to follow up with you every two to three weeks for eternity by SMS and email. it usually and it’s like one click experience where I just can click and buy my contacts. It makes it so easy. So I’ve been replicating that. I’m curious since I know you work with a lot of clients, how do people combine the email and SMS experience for an e-commerce store?

33:07
So this is where it starts to get really exciting. And there’s been some like big rollouts of, you can do this now on Postscript and you can do this on Klavia. And if you are trying to combine the two of them, I think from a strategy perspective, something that’s very interesting is I like to think of like upgrading my email flows. So I’ve been talking about like, how do you upgrade your email flows? So if you take what you’re currently doing and you recognize that

33:34
Maybe a good open rate is like 35%. Well, that’s 65 % of the people have not seen this. So if you’ve got an abandoned cart flow and you’ve got people that are going through this email sequence and you’ve also happened to capture their SMS number, well, you can put in something called like a clean up text message. So if somebody goes through the email sequence and they haven’t purchased something, then maybe you send them a text message. So you add a text message on the end of that.

34:04
or on your welcome series, the same sort of thing. Send a couple of emails and then they haven’t made a purchase, send your emails to like a discount or an offer email, then also hit with them with an SMS message. So you’re kind of, you’re stacking these to work together and you’re taking whatever you’re already doing and you’re just upgrading your flows. And it’s the same like the post purchase replenishment flow. If you’ve got emails going out,

34:33
why don’t you pop in an SMS message every three emails so that you’re not overwhelming people, but you’re getting through to people. So just kind of interpreting what you were saying, would you say that if you sent out an email, but it was unopened, you would send a text message to someone who hasn’t opened.

34:53
Yes, I think it’s a little bit harder to do that specifically because the way that the systems are set up, you’re not going to be able to really tell if they opened or not. I was saying more like if they don’t take the desired action that you want them to take and a desired action of an abandoned cart is to make a purchase. Desired action of a new subscriber sequence is to make a purchase. So it’s more like if they’re not taking those actions, then send a message or two, but don’t treat it the same way. It’s a totally different channel, right? Like you can’t

35:22
You can’t SMS text people the way that you email people. It’s just not acceptable. about for like a direct campaign? Like what I like to do is I’ll start out with email. Yeah. And then I’ll wait like several days and then send out a text to the people who haven’t opened or that’s why I kind of brought it up. I was kind of curious if you do something similar for direct campaigns. Yes, I think that that’s a great and I guess I think of that as like a cleanup campaign, like clean up all the people who had not made a purchase.

35:50
That’s what I think about for campaigns. Yes. It’s a great way to look at it. And also, you know, another way to think about SMS from a campaign perspective, this isn’t really automation, but you know, asking questions and I know you are deep into Facebook Messenger. you kind of like, it’s, the same premise that if you’re trying to launch something from a direct, if you’re like a direct to consumer clothing company,

36:15
hey, we’re trying to decide between these two things, this pink or this green shirt, which one do you like? Having people respond back is a great way to drive sales. I mean, that’s actually the most important aspect of SMS in my opinion, the ability for someone to instantly reply. So the way I get people used to SMS is I say, hey, this is an open line for you guys. Anytime you have a question, just hit reply. Yeah. And that way they’re not going to mark my next campaign as spam. You know, it reduces the chances.

36:45
And I’ve actually closed so many sales through SMS. Yeah. Is it getting immediate response? Yeah. But we also did find out today that it isn’t actually a direct response back to Steve. goes through your filter system. And I found out that none of my emails make it to you because they’re for you. Yeah. So, but yeah, those those are great, great, great ways to do it. And there’s a lot of opportunity there. I love just.

37:13
the opportunity around, I think there’s very few things that are more exciting than automating something that you do consistently away so you don’t have to do it again. So fun. I agree with you. Actually, it’s kind of like engineering work. And that’s, it’s kind of like work I used to do at my full-time job. And it just makes things a lot more interesting and fun. Do you have anything else that you’re excited about? Like tool-wise, tools-wise that you’re using or?

37:43
to help you automate stuff or not? Well, you know my personality, right, Austin? I like to code a bunch of stuff up. Yeah, oh yeah. One thing that I, this has been on my to-do list for a long time. What I’m actually really fascinated about is the ability to text to purchase. Yes, it’s cool. So if already someone has an account, I don’t know if there’s tools out there, I’m sure there’s tools out there that already do this. I don’t know if you’re any your There is, there are, yeah.

38:10
But the idea is they have their credit card stored already somewhere and then they just text back a word in the quantity and then it instantly becomes a purchase. I wanted to write that for myself because then I have infinite control over what I can do. what tools are available that do this for you? Oh man, there’s two on Shopify. let me just think, I’m gonna look it up real quick. I think it’s Electric SMS. Have you used it before?

38:38
Yes, I have. your clients, okay. Does it work though? It does. So it’s, they just changed their name now to Recharge SMS, but it’s ElectricSMS.com. this only, so this one works for, I’m gonna tell you the use case of this. This is if people are on subscription already, and helps automate support and prevent churn. So what that means is that you’ll text somebody and say, hey, your order’s gonna come out scheduled for let’s say like,

39:07
May 6th, for example. And you could text back, modify order, and you can change the order by text. And you can, for example, swap a flavor. You could skip it. You could update the quantity, change your shipping address, your billing info, next charge date, whatever. you could also add a one-time item. So you could add another item to your order on a consistent basis, which is pretty cool.

39:37
And that works for anybody using recharge on Shopify. Actually, I think it doesn’t necessarily have to be Shopify, just anybody using recharge. Oh, okay. So it’s another feature of recharge, basically. It’s a feature of recharge, but it’s a totally different company. It’s like an agency built it. Oh. And that’s, yeah, so it works with recharge. And then I’m trying to think of the other one that I’ve heard of. The other one that I heard of was…

40:04
It’s a one, it’s different. It’s a one click purchase from email, which I thought was interesting. So you send an email and it would be able to just go directly to, you just press like, I think it’s called like a one trick pony or something like that. You press the yes in the email and it automatically purchases for you. So the use case that I was thinking of was you get on live and you try to sell something and then

40:33
It’s easier to say, just text this to actually make the purchase. Or if you do some sort of auction like thing. Basically, the whole premise is having their credit card information stored somewhere. So email would work, SMS, I mean, it doesn’t really matter what the use case. should get in the, so Dirty, I think it’s called Dirty Lemon. Have you been to that website? I have not. So Dirty Lemon, are like text first, a text first e-commerce business.

41:03
If you text them, you will have somebody live going back and forth with you and you can start your subscription directly through text. It’s pretty cool. And they do a lot of their sales using this text message thing. So it’s not exactly what you’re saying, but they’re incredibly good at it. You can be able to see what they’re doing and then code it up and then start your next, I mean, start your next multi-billion dollar app here.

41:31
You know what’s funny, Austin? Like I get so many emails now that I actually look forward to getting a text because it actually stands out. If that makes any sense. Totally agree. I texted you to set this up because I was like, probably should text Steve versus email. Well, that’s the only way I’m going to get ahold of you apparently. For, yeah, that’s, mean, that’s, that’s the beauty of automation. But yeah, this is awesome. And.

42:01
I this is a fun episode to do together. think if you’re listening to this episode on my podcast and you have not listened to Steve’s podcast, Steve, why should they listen to my wife, quit her job podcast? It’s because I bring on guys like Austin to talk about, you know, the latest trends in e-commerce or online business. And everyone I get there, they’re in the trenches. They’ve been pre-screened. Usually I’ve met them in person and they know their stuff. So you can actually trust.

42:30
the words that people say. On the same vein, I encourage all of you to check out Austin’s podcast. And Austin, why should they listen to eCommerce influence? Because I am laser focused on helping eCommerce entrepreneurs build more wealth and live a more fulfilled life. And the way I kind of think about that is by bringing in very interesting people that I’ve met that are doing cool things in our industry.

43:00
try to figure out how they’re wired and try to bring some of those nuggets back to you. awesome. Steve has been great and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Yep. Sounds good.

43:14
Hope you enjoyed that episode and once again, if you haven’t checked out Austin’s podcast, it’s called Ecommerce Influence, go over there now and check it out. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 352. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, 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.

43:40
So head on over to mywifecoderjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifecoderjob.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 Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

44:08
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 mywifequaterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:28
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 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-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div.

00:57
I also want to thank Clayview, who’s also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build a business you always imagined? Do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories, do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers’ needs change.

01:22
These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. Now, to learn more about how Klaviyo helps you own your growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash mywife.

01:51
Now, finally, I wanted to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell 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. Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Job Podcast.

02:19
where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Tu.

02:33
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Aaron Rubin on the show. Now, Aaron is someone who’s been a member of the e-commerce fuel community for a very long time. And I believe he’s actually the shipping expert on the forum and he runs his own 3PL or third party logistics firm and warehouse management software company called Ship Hero. He is also a longtime veteran of e-commerce where he started and built an online store at 19 years of age. He grew it to 7 million bucks in top line revenue. Now, so why am I having Aaron on?

03:03
Amazon has been tightening its grip on how many units sellers can send into FBA. And I’ve actually been getting a lot more questions about 3PLs lately. So today what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna do a deep dive into Aaron’s experiences with e-commerce, along with every question that I can think of when it comes to using a third party logistics firm to handle your inventory. And with that, welcome to the show, Aaron. How are you doing today? Hey, I’m good. Thanks for having me. How are you? I’m good. So Aaron, I…

03:30
checked out your interview on the Tropical MBA podcast and you have a very interesting startup story about how you got started in e-commerce and eventually had that led to starting your own 3PL. So I wanna hear first about that first painful journey and what lessons you learned first. Sure, so my first company sold apparel for martial arts, started it, yeah, like I said, 19 in college. had sort of the only…

03:56
The last real job, I’m 41, my last real job was when I was 16 working as a lifeguard. So after that I had made money online doing a bunch of different things. The most popular of which was had a website with scanned pictures of Cindy Crawford photo shoot from Sports Illustrated. I had banner ads on that. So that made me like 20 grand or something, which you know, 17 was great. I remember that Pepsi commercial, right? Is that?

04:25
Yes. That was Cindy Crawford, right? Yeah. I think so. Good old days. So, and it was totally like, you know, it wasn’t like Playboy. It was just Sports Illustrated. But at the time, it was popular on the internet. Different era. Yeah. So a family friend reached out, actually wanted to talk to my brother. My brother, my older brother was a computer programmer, wasn’t interested. So he punted it to me and he wanted to, he wanted to buy a website called kickpunch.com that sold martial arts.

04:53
Products and he wanted sort of a second opinion You know my second opinion was like I want to say like $9,000 or something that the guy was asking and like I was like it’s not worth 9,000 You could probably build it for less and he’s like well, why don’t we just build it together and I was like, okay cool I figured it’d be another little side project that had a bunch of these little things I was doing to you pay my way, know sort of pay my bills in college So yeah, I jumped on it figured that’s what it would be and then you know the

05:23
company still exists. That was my primary way of making money for 15 years or so. So you were selling karate geese, was that the one that grew to 7 million? Yep. All right. So can you, how did you grow it so quickly to 7 million? Well, so we had some up and down. So when we started, we were just buying from this supplier in, so I’m like a little bit outside of New York city. There was a physical store in Manhattan.

05:53
that sold these products and what we would do is we would just order from him. He would ship it to our warehouse, which was my co-founder’s father’s basement. And I would pack them because he was 10 years older than me. So he was married, had kids, and he lived a different spot. whatever, he was working a full-time job to make money. I was in college. I didn’t have to actually attend classes. So I would just pick and pack all the orders.

06:23
So that’s how we started and like at the time, this was like 1999, you wanted to buy these sort of products online. There wasn’t a lot of choices. And then also we bought the domain A1MA for A1 martial arts and there was no Google. So this is pre-dated Google. So everything was the Yahoo directory was the sort of definitive source. So we were in there and it was alphabetical order. So A1MA ranked first in our category and that was it. That was the entire strategy at launch.

06:51
Man. Okay. And so people just found you through that directory or did it just later become all word of mouth because Google and the search engines weren’t. Yeah, it was just, I mean, it started with all that directory over time. You Google took off the directories no longer became valid and people did, you know, a one one MA. You know what mean? Like that sort of, that thing doesn’t last too long. And we ended up switching the name to karate Depot because we wanted to rank for karate equipment and you know, having the, the domain.

07:18
have a key, the keyword was important back then. So we switched the name there and yeah, that we were just entirely focused on Google optimization, but it was always SEO focused. There was no paid at the time. didn’t do any banner ads. It wasn’t much you could do back then. was all, it was all search and asked for how much was word amount. was no Google analytics those days. There was no attribution. So we could see the refers, but that was, it was really tough to know where people came.

07:46
So what ended up happening with that e-commerce store? I think you had a falling out with your partner or something like that. Yeah, I I’ll spare you the painful story, but basically the company had grown. growing pretty nicely every year. took a few years to get to a million dollars and then we were growing it like a million dollars a year into the financial crisis. And then when the financial crisis hit, two things happened. Revenue dropped because our

08:15
primary audience was mothers or parents who were putting their kids in karate school and didn’t want to spend all the money that the school was charging because the school would charge full price. We were charging a little bit less so they would buy from us. But the karate schools all had a huge drop in enrollment when financial crisis hit because no one, know, was tough times, right? A lot of layoffs. So the business shrunk and at the same time everyone pulled

08:46
pulled their access to capital. So I had an American, we used a few American Express cards. One of them went from like a $50,000 limit to a $500 limit. And like I would buy on it. So I couldn’t even like, it wasn’t like it was floating. was just like, it wasn’t like it was rolling over month to month. It was just the cashflow, right? Which just wasn’t there. I couldn’t buy anything on a $500 limit. And then also we had a credit line with a bank called Citizens Bank.

09:15
which we had never been late a day on, but they said, you know, it was at will. And they said we had, think, 60 days to pay it off and it was like $170,000. So all that hitting at the same time caused a cash crunch, which we thought would be, which I thought would be fine, but in reality wasn’t because our financials were wrong. So we had more debt on the books, less cash than was on the books and…

09:43
all the profits that we thought we had been making, we thought we’d be pulling half a million dollars in in profit, we weren’t. We were making significantly less than that, because the books were all wrong. So along those lines, what do you do differently today? Were you using a bookkeeper at the time when that happened? Yeah, so my co-found, we had an outside accountant and my partner did the, handled the whole financial stuff.

10:11
So, and the outside accountant was my partner’s friend. So I had no relationship with him and I had no visibility into what was going on. I would just see like a, here’s a PNL, you know, once a quarter or once every six months. And I didn’t have any info deeper than that. And I just trusted it all. Okay. Okay. I see. So if you were to do things differently, you’d hire like an independent accountant and bookkeeper.

10:40
Yeah, exactly. mean, just, you A, just look at the numbers more, right? Not like, just trust the really high level info, sort of dig a little deeper, ask some of the tougher questions. Cause there was in the summer when the financial crisis started, he did tell me there was issues and I was like, okay, let’s, I want to understand everything. I want to dig into everything. And he was super resistant and then came back with like, yeah, everything’s really fine. I just understood anything. Like, don’t worry about it. And like,

11:08
just wouldn’t give me access to see, you know, get my own QuickBooks login and really understand the data. And I should have fought harder at that point. It would have given me six more months of time. But he was super resistant that I didn’t fight hard enough. I don’t mean to bring up memories like that, the disconnect for me is how does that lead to like a warehouse software company? Yeah, so what happened after that was

11:36
So we were insolvent, like we had more debt than assets and like a shrinking business with no profits. But then we also had a lot of debt that was personally guaranteed. So we couldn’t just walk away because that would require personal bankruptcy. I told him that, well, my first, we had started these like couple other side businesses when we were selling like nursing scrubs. like,

12:02
totally unrelated, he had never spent a day working on any of it. I’d just done it all myself. I’d set up the website, got the sourcing and I did it all myself, but it was part of this entity. So I told him, let me have that, you can take the rest of the business, but I don’t want any of the debt. Just give me this business that I started as part of this and let me walk away. He said no. So then I switched to, okay, I’ll even give you that, just take everything, but you need to pay off the debts. I don’t want to up paying any of these debts.

12:30
that are personally guaranteed, I don’t want to have to file personal bankruptcy, to which he also said no. So what we ended up with was I took everything. So I took all the debts personally. And the way I was able to do it is I, my father took out, who is a college professor, didn’t have a ton of money, but he had a house that was paid off. So he took off, took out a mortgage and gave me the money for that. And I used that to pay down the debts.

12:56
to get my partner out and then I, so then I was the only owner of it after that. That seems like an unfair deal to me, but go on. Yeah, it was either that or we were both going down. Right. So like, you know, it wasn’t gonna, he wasn’t willing to take it. So I didn’t have much of a choice. So I had that and then I had this business that was super underwater and I also had the debt to my father. So now I really couldn’t just declare bankruptcy because now like- Right, your dad’s involved, yeah. Yeah, I’d be sailing with a debt that he had no way to pay back.

13:26
because it’s a mortgage on his house. So I had to make it work and it was brutal. Like I worked, like if there was a job that I could outsource for like 12 bucks an hour, I’d it myself. I did it myself. I was just struggled for years to sort of get that company back to zero. And once I did, it got a lot easier. So then I grew it back to the point where we never got

13:52
We got to, I think we had been at, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was like 6 million pre this, and then it was, we got to like 7.3 million post this whole financial crisis thing. And we switched to the customer segment. started Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was an emerging martial art at the time. So we sort of got a pretty dominant position in that industry. went out, there was no good, there were good suppliers in Brazil and good brands in

14:22
The UK, no one great in the US. So I couldn’t get deals with any of the people in Brazil. So I went to the UK, made deals with a couple of the biggest brands for like to be their US distributors, started a website which still exists and it’s still super popular, is BJJHQ.com, which is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu headquarters. It’s a flash sale site. What I saw is, do you know back country? Yeah, I do. So back country had this thing called steep and cheap.

14:50
which was like their flash sale thing, which was a deal that they initially, and then it’s converted to like rolling where every 20 minutes was a different deal. But anyways, I was at, I think IRCE, no, I didn’t go to IRCE. I didn’t have the money to go to IRCE. So I bought the DVDs of speeches at IRCE and someone from back country spoke about how they launched steep and cheap and like it quickly became like 50 % of their revenue or something like that.

15:19
I loved the idea because I had no money. I had no money in the bank to buy inventory, but by doing a deal all day, I only had to buy enough stock for a few days ahead. I think at the time, were a lot of these companies kind of folding and you were just buying off excess stock? What do mean? For these deals, like your sourcing. No, no, so we didn’t do it really buying closeouts. We never really did it that way a little bit, but what we ended up doing was just buying totally

15:49
valid popular products, but what we were able to do is, hey, we’d buy a decent quantity, so we’d get a decent price, but also logistics were a little bit easier because it was only one product, so you didn’t have to store and ship a variety. But the biggest thing was cash flow. So I didn’t have any money, but if you got to stock 500 products, you have to have inventory of all these different products. But if you only sell one deal a day,

16:17
just need to buy like the next week worth of products, right? So like, and usually you could buy it on a credit card or get 30 days term. So like sort of was a really good cashflow, which is what I needed because I had zero money in it. had like zero dollars in the bank. So we went all in on that and it worked. So, you know, we ended up launching our own brands and sort of keep, keep going with that. But that was really the way we went from zero to actually like having a real business again.

16:46
And you used the 3PL for your inventory, right? No. we went back and forth. What happened was after the whole issue with my partner, we had no money. We didn’t really have much of a business. So we went with the 3PL. And that 3PL went bankrupt. us and a company called Everlast, which is a large boxing brand, outsourced to these same guys. And then, yeah, those guys went, well, those guys just

17:15
did an awful job, both us and Everlast sued them. They declared bankruptcy to get out of the lawsuit. And then someone else bought them. So they continued to exist, but our lawsuits got tossed or whatever. We had to start all over because it wasn’t the same company anymore. So that was a disaster. So we ended up going back in-house, but we didn’t really have to have a really significant warehouse because we just won item a day.

17:43
But you grew this business back to where it was previously. when did you decide to start Ship Hero then? Because you already have this successful e-commerce business. Why throw that away and do a SaaS company of all things? Yeah, so we had grown it. We grew it back to be bigger than it was and much more profitable. So it got to the point we were making just over a million dollars a year of profit. So I paid my dad back, cleared all the old

18:10
debts because we had credit card debts from they’ve been rolling for the last five years. Cleared everything out. Finally got to a place where it’s a little more comfortable. The martial arts business, I had just backed into it. I started doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu after a while and I actually like it. But most of what I was doing was sort of apparel manufacturing and design because that’s really what we were. that’s not something that I’m at all passionate about.

18:40
Okay. It’s not my thing. I did it because I needed, you know, like I had a wife and kids and know, bills, but it was great. Like I, you know, it, you know, paid for all those things, but it wasn’t something I cared about and would want to do if I didn’t need the money. So, my background is computer programming. That’s where I started. Um, and I always wanted to get back into it, but when I was making like just enough money to live, it, you know, it didn’t really have a luxury of, of doing what I wanted. did what I had to.

19:10
And then once the company got to the point where I was like, okay, I have extra money. Now I could bank some of that, save a little bit of it, and then start investing. And then instead of doing those $12 an hour jobs myself, hire a couple of people, let them do it, stop packing my own boxes, and go after something that I found just more personally satisfying, something I’m more excited about, which was gonna be software and…

19:38
shipping. mean, I’d run the warehouse for so long, done a lot of the work myself. I just was super familiar with it. I knew what I wanted, how I wanted the warehouse to run. I knew how the software I wanted to be. And then once I had this sort of the money, I decided to go for it.

19:54
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.

20:23
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20:52
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21:03
You know, one thing that I was, when I was listening to your tropical MBA podcast, I was thinking to myself, like SaaS businesses usually, because we have a similar background. I’m an electrical engineer and I was thinking to myself, I’ve always wanted to start a SaaS business myself, but it is very capital intensive and you almost need to get funding, but you bootstrap this whole thing, right? If I recall. Yes. Yeah. So how do you, when you’re starting this warehouse software company,

21:29
And I’m sure the listeners out there who are running e-commerce businesses, they’re thinking to themselves, okay, should I go 3PL or should I run my own warehouse? So how do you know which route to take? Yeah, so well, to make that choice, I would pretty much always go 3PL if you really have to debate it. So back in the day, there weren’t a lot of good 3PLs and it was super scary.

21:57
to outsource to a 3PL, because the standard 3PL business model is spend all your time and energy acquiring a customer and then spend zero time and energy doing a good job for that customer, because it’s super difficult to switch. So once they’re in your warehouse, they’re not going to leave. And all your competitors aren’t that good either. So there’s no one really great for them to go to. So unless you were a top 500 retailer, you sort of were stuck with these crappy 3PL options.

22:26
you got to run your own because you can’t trust your business to a crappy 3PL operator. But that’s changed over the last five years. So there’s a lot of good options. On the forum, we talk about that a lot. There’s people who leave lots of feedback. And sure, there’s still some poor quality ones. even on the couple of guys that are actually on the forum, there’s Big Sky Fulfillment on there. There’s Societa Industries on there.

22:55
There’s Phoenix Direct on there. Those guys are all like quality operators, right? And a bunch of others. So like now you have good choices and like the idea that you should build your own warehouse and figure out how to pick pack orders, hire your own team, you know, deal with all the labor and workforce management stuff that comes along with it. If you have a standard off the shelf product.

23:19
It’s just not worth it. If you’re doing custom products, which I think you might be, right? Do you guys do some custom? we do embroidery. I don’t think a 3PL, unless you guys do custom stuff. That’s funny. actually, in my e-commerce business, one of the big ways we stood out was we bought a couple of Tajima machines and make… Yeah, that’s like us. Yep. So we embroider the back of uniforms for schools. So yeah, I’m super familiar with that. there are 3PLs that will do that. I can actually name a couple, or I can find a couple.

23:48
You know, that’s more niche, right? So that might pay to do in-house, but that’s the outliers, right? That’s like 5 % of the population, 95 % of 95 % of people sit outdoors. What’s funny, Aaron, is I actually never recommend any specific 3PLs to anyone because I’ve been burned many times in the past. Here’s what usually happens. Like a 3PL I recommend because a colleague might use them or several colleagues. It’s always good for a bit, but then when things fill up or when things get busy,

24:16
there’s always some disaster that happens. And then, and I want the listeners to know I’ve never used ShipHair before and this isn’t an advertisement for your company, but I’m being frank here, like what makes like a good 3PL and what’s to stop a 3PL from being what I’ve experienced in the past? Like what makes your service different? Yeah, so mean, certainly that is the norm. We are, like I said, they get you in and then at some point they start doing a horrible job and you…

24:43
as the merchant, you pay the cost because the customers leave you, right? So yeah, totally get it. So just to get a little bit of the history, we didn’t actually start our own 3PLs for a long time. For many years, our approach was we had all these 3PLs, there’s hundreds of warehouses using our software. And we said, you can make deals with any of these 3PLs and use whichever ones you want.

25:10
and it’s all networked. if you wanted to, let’s say you were in one 3PL and you wanted to switch to another one, you could do it seamlessly. You don’t have to change your software and you don’t even have to move your product. You can just send your new product to a new warehouse and just let the old warehouse run out of stock. Cause that’s the hardest part is moving it. So we really wanted to just solve exactly the problem you said, which was the same problem I had when that 3PL went bankrupt. I wanted to solve and I did not want to do it by opening warehouses. I wanted to do it with just the software.

25:40
Which is still, the software still does it and we do still have, we do have clients that have moved between 3PLs and use multiple different ones and we totally support that. So I would definitely encourage people to look at any of the 3PLs that we serve and you could Google it. I think it’s marketplace.shiphero.com. can see a list. Okay. So let me, let me just kind of reiterate what you just said. So a lot of 3PLs use your software.

26:07
and those are part of a network. So the idea is that if one 3PL goes down, in theory, because the other 3PLs use the same software, you can just start using a new one and just pick up exactly where you left off. Yeah, exactly. a customer of ours is Universal Music Group, so they’ve got everyone from Lady Gaga to Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, everyone, right? So they had a couple of their own facilities, but then they also used all these other facilities for around the US and around the world. And if they’re not happy with one,

26:36
They don’t make a big deal about it. They just add a new one and they stop giving business to the old one. And it’s pretty undramatic, right? So you can do that today. It’s actually ecommerce3plfinder.com is the URL. And these are just clients that use us. You’re not using us directly. They’re just using us. And that works really well. And that sort of protects you from that downside. What about when shipments like, let’s say I ship a container in and…

27:02
and they never put it in or they claim they lost it or some disaster like that. Still you’re at a lot of money though, right? Well, I’ve never heard of someone saying they never got a container. That would be pretty awful. Well, not never got it, but like it took forever to get in. They lost parts of it or… Yeah, I mean, so that happens a lot, right? So, yeah, so that’s a horrible experience and hopefully that’s a lot less prevalent these days. You know, the other thing is there are…

27:27
we’ve gone from an era where it was mom and pops, which didn’t have a lot of accountability to being much more established brands. So the same way like, know, Coke can’t put out a really horrible product because like they’ve invested so much in their brand. It’s just not worth it for them. It’s the same thing with a lot of the modern three PLs where like, you know, us as an example, but anyone else, you can just Google

27:54
know, Shapiro fulfillment reviews, right? And like it’s on these platforms on, you know, the Shopify app store where I have no control. I can’t remove them. I can’t block them. I can reply, but if people are not happy, they can make it super obvious, right? So you can go through your top, you know, 10 three PLs and just look at them in the Shopify app store or any of the other trust pilot G2.

28:19
you know, anywhere, right? Or even just go on, you know, e-commerce fuel, if you remember, ask there, ask on Twitter. And like, you’ll see which ones are good and which ones are bad. And they’re definitely good ones and definitely bad ones. And where it used to be really hard to find that these days, I think it’s pretty much out there. You can tell who’s, who’s doing an awful job and some do an awful job still. if you are, if you’re considering a three PL, what should your sales volumes be like before you even consider it?

28:49
to make those numbers work. It’s usually once you’re beyond your sort of available space, right? So if you’ve got a garage, you’ve got a basement, you can ship it yourself, you have the time and space, like do that. But then once you get to a point where it’s like, I got to sign a lease, that’s when you should start looking at, maybe I should just out.

29:09
I’m just trying to think, let’s say, let’s try to put some numbers in the mix. Let’s say you’re selling a non-oversized Amazon product and maybe you’re doing six figures in revenue and you’re trying to make this comparison between 3PL and Amazon FBA. In general, would you say that the 3PL will tend to be cheaper than Amazon’s warehouse? No, mean Amazon, if you’re exclusively selling on Amazon, use FBA to the degree you can as much as possible. It’s going be cheaper than using a third party warehouse.

29:38
Amazon’s expensive if you’re selling like on Shopify and you want to ship directly to your customers using Amazon then yeah, Amazon’s pretty expensive. But for direct Amazon sales, Amazon’s the best option. So for people who have their own store and Amazon, do you recommend a combination of both or or Amazon fulfillment for your own store as well? Like what are the trade offs and when is the breakdown? When does it become when does it make sense to do one or the other?

30:05
Yeah, once you get above like 25 orders a day that’s shipping through your own channels, that’s when people start to send it on their own. Storage on Amazon is super expensive and the shipping’s not cheap for direct sales either. So, but if you’re just doing a few, it doesn’t matter, right? You just need to cost. It’s not worth the hassle of dealing with a 3PL. But once you get above like 25 orders a day that are off Amazon sales, that’s when you should probably start looking at if a 3PL makes sense. Okay. And

30:33
Are only smaller items generally a good fit for 3PL? And what parameters for products work best in terms of like size, margins, and that sort of thing? It doesn’t matter. mean, 3PL is just a warehouse. So every product needs to go through some warehouse, either it’s your own or it’s outsourced. Size is generally not a factor. It’s really if there’s stuff that’s non-standard and small that you can run into issues.

31:00
For example, like we mentioned embroidery or if you write custom notes on shipments to customers or you like to wrap it with pretty paper in a certain specific way. Like if you’re doing a thousand orders a day, you’ll have no problem finding many 3PLs that will be happy to do that. But if you’re doing 10 orders a day, they’re not gonna train someone at a 3PL to be able to handle like, this is how the customer X wants things done. So.

31:28
If you’re small and really custom, do it in-house. But if you’re standard, the 3PL is almost always a good option. And if you’re custom and big, 3PL is also usually a pretty good option. So what are some questions that you would ask for 3PL? I mean, you have the advantage of being a customer at one point for a 3PL. What questions do you ask? And are there any things to just watch out for? Yeah, so the big difference or a big

31:56
thing to look out for is how the pricing works on the shipping. So in general, just to pick round numbers, if it’s gonna cost you $10 to get a package to your customer, about $2 of that’s gonna go to the 3PL and about eight is gonna go to a shipping carrier like UPS. People tend to get really obsessed about the $2 when talking to the 3PL and forget the $8. You shouldn’t do that. You should look at what’s the total cost for me to get this package to my customers. Because what people see is like,

32:25
I’m just going to get this UPS account and there’s this list of pricing and the pricing that UPS provides is, you know, I do this for a living and I have a hard time figuring out what a package is actually going to cost, right? Because there’s residential surcharges, delivery area surcharges and a bunch of fuel surcharges and know, it’s 6 % for fuel and it could be $2.25 for delivery area surcharges. But how many go to a delivery area surcharge? I don’t know. And then there’s zones. There’s zones like one through eight.

32:53
you would think that, oh, well, half of them will go, you know, the same amount of, go to one as we’ll go to eight, but it’s wrong. like 10 times as much goes to zone eight as zone one, because the zones are increasingly large in size, because it works like based on a circle, right? So like the concentric circles get much bigger. So the math becomes, you know, to the point where even doing an Excel is really difficult. You pretty much have to use algorithms to understand what things are gonna cost.

33:17
Which of course is well beyond the scope of what most people can do. So what they do is they ignore that and they just focus out, okay, how much is it gonna cost to pick and pack the order, right? So you end up at a supplier or the 3PL that saves you 15 cents on picking and packing but costs you 75 % on the shipping charges because dirty secret, the 3PLs get kickbacks on the shipping charges. So they might say you can use our UPS account and it’s great, but they get a kickback from UPS off of what you spent, which is highly variable.

33:47
So, and you have, and it’s opaque, you don’t know what that number is, right? So, going in, you have no idea what those numbers are. So, what I would always recommend is get an all-in price. Just say like, I’m gonna give you this product, how much is it gonna cost to get to my customer? Don’t give me a breakdown of like, well, this is the pick and then there’s this UPS fee. Just give me a total amount. Ideally, with no zones. If you need to do zones, give me what the average is gonna cost me so I can know that it’s gonna cost me.

34:15
875 on average to ship this item to my customer in the US, right? If a 3PL can’t give you that, the number’s probably not that good. Otherwise, they’d be happy to share. It’s interesting, because I’ve looked at a number of 3PLs over the years, and some have really complicated pricing structures, which make it really hard to actually estimate what your costs are. There’s pick fees, there’s shipping fees, storage fees. I’m just kind of curious how you guys run it.

34:42
Yeah, so we just provide a… It’s just on the website. Go to fulfillment.shiphero.com, just click on the pricing tab and it’ll tell you. There’s no zones, there’s no multiple fees, there’s no receiving, no storage for the first product that sells within 60 days, no pick and pack shipping separate. just, it’s gonna cost you. It’s like a flat rate, basically. Flat rate, anywhere within the lower 48. Is there any savings on, do you pass any of shippings?

35:11
costs back to the customer? Like you’re getting kickbacks because you’re doing so much volume, right? Yeah, but so we just give you the total price counting everything. So you don’t have to think about like, how much is UPS or how much is FedEx? we’re just telling you what it’s going to cost to get it to your end customer. And what about the cost to like store stuff in the warehouse? Yeah, so that’s again, it’s all right there. I was just asking you just, just so people listening can just get an estimate in their minds, like how much roughly it would cost.

35:38
Yes, I’m just going to website now. So we do the first 60 days free. So any products that turn within 60 days, you don’t pay any storage on. Okay, nice. After that, it’s $5 a month for a bin and which is 4.4 cubic feet and $30 a month for a pallet. Okay. Do you do seller fulfilled prime? So seller fulfilled prime requires that the seller, not us, is certified. So we do.

36:08
but it requires that the seller is certified, which very few are, and they don’t really take a lot of people. I think it’s been closed for like a couple of years from the sign-up. it’s like I have it for my e-commerce business, where it was approved from years ago, and you can take that to any warehouse you want. And we have a couple other people that have it, but it’s a decreasingly small percentage, because they’re not opening it up a lot. And what would you say is your competitive edge, personally?

36:37
for Shapiro. So like me as a person or my company? Your company and you, guess, since you’re running it. I we have, I think we’ve got a pretty good team. It’s pretty, pretty aligned on where we’re trying to go. So like we’re not a venture-backed company like you discussed. So I think you mentioned, so we’re bootstrapped. do it like we’re pretty like blue collar and hands-on. I mean, it’s a blue collar business. mean, yep.

37:06
you’re unloading containers and putting them on shelves and making sure everything just gets there, Yep, exactly. like we’re a software, like I’m a programmer and that’s like we have 40 some odd engineers, but we’re pretty practical in terms of like the job is to put the right item in the right box and ship to the right customer and sort of not that complicated, but it requires showing up every day and doing the work.

37:35
Right? Like you can’t call out a day and not ship the orders for a customer. Like nothing else matters if you don’t ship it. So I think we’ve got the right attitude on that. also, again, not being, you know, venture backed. don’t, like we don’t sell like, oh, you’re to get stock options and you’re going to make, you know, $10 million when we IPO. Like that’s not the pitch we’re giving our employees. A lot of our employees, you know, maybe have had that’s

38:02
engineers or designers have had that experience somewhere else, which didn’t go well, right? Because most venture-backed companies don’t succeed. And even if they do, in general, the employees are not the ones that make out with a lot of money. Their options tend to not be that valuable, except for very few outliers. And they work you really hard, right? So it’s like, oh, work really hard, and then you can get this payoff. And then the reality is you do the really hard work, but you don’t get the payoff. So we pitch a different message, which is…

38:30
Like you’re gonna work hard in terms of like we expect you to do the work, not be delegating the work to someone else, but also like you’ll be done by five o’clock. You’re not gonna be working nights. You’re not gonna be working weekends. And we’re gonna pay you a reasonable salary so you can live your life today, not dream about in 10 years from now, a potential exit that may or may not happen is sort of out of your control anyways. You’re one employee in a fairly large organization.

38:57
I mean, I think we attract the right people there who care about their craft, they care about their job, they do well, and they stick. Like we almost never lose employees, which is super important and super rare, I think, in tech companies. Can you actually just give me an example of what good warehouse software does for you? Like as we talked about earlier, we run a warehouse ourselves, and I don’t want to say it’s a disaster, but it’s definitely not as efficient as it could be. So what are some just typical inefficiencies of doing it yourself that can be optimized?

39:26
So I mean, the first question is, are you scanning products or are you just selecting without scanning barcodes? We are not scanning barcodes. Right, okay. So basically, if the people doing the work in the warehouse are beyond the sort of founder and immediate family members and you’re not doing any scan-based verification, a couple of things happen. One, you make a lot of mistakes and two, so one thing we found,

39:55
at my e-commerce company was our top performing employee was doing twice the work of our lowest performing employee, but was getting paid like $2 an hour more, right? But we didn’t know that until we had put in software because how would you know, right? Just sort of eyeballing it is really tough and really tough to fire someone based on like, it doesn’t seem like he’s working that hard. And know, this guy seems like he’s working harder. Like, so real software will give you that, will give you the accuracy. You’re not gonna make mistakes.

40:25
label items, have barcodes, you scan them, you just, don’t make mistakes. And you see who’s doing a good job and who isn’t, which is super important to making sure you retain the people that are good and you get rid of the people that aren’t. Okay, that makes sense. I remember Kevin Steckow told me once that once he started doing barcoding, he immediately knew and then he implemented some three strike system for screw ups too. You can immediately tell who screwed up with the packing also of a particular order. Yeah, yeah. mean, it’s so eye opening. Like,

40:54
It’s so obvious once you have the data. I’m like, wow, that guy’s horrible. And then you tell yourself the story like, oh yeah, I always knew he seemed like he was kind of maybe taking a nap in the back. you don’t pull your trigger on it because it’s really hard to make those personnel decisions without hard data. Like you don’t want to fire someone when you’re like, I think he’s not great. But once you can see like, yeah, I mean, every day he ships an item wrong. I told him scan it and then he didn’t scan it and he shipped it wrong. Yeah, you have no.

41:22
You don’t feel guilty at all about firing that person. Like I told them to scan. Are you gonna get fired? He didn’t scan I fired him Interesting. So we have a lot of loose inventory lying around because we actually pack on demand So we sell stuff in different sets and then we have the personalized part And so there’s always and then there’s stuff that’s not sellable because there’s like a stain it you’ve done textiles before and so would it be the same thing you just have a barcode for that bin whenever you take one out you just scan it yeah, so we actually have sellable and non-solvable bins as well, so

41:52
you do want to track what you have that’s not sellable. But yeah, you track it and then you can do, like the system will never tell you to pick non-sellable, never tell like Shopify you have non-sellable available, but you keep track of what it is. Yeah, and you just barcode everything. Not everything is barcodable, but most things are. Right. So in terms of customization, inserts, custom boxing,

42:20
What do you guys charge for that? And when does it make sense? Yeah, so mean, a lot of people do custom boxes and do inserts. We include three picks. So if your order has one or two items in it and you want, and an insert is just a pick. So we just count it as a pick. So if you have less than one or two, if you have only one or two items, the insert is free. And if you have more, we charge, I want to say 25 cents, but I’d have to look it up. Yeah, 25 cents.

42:50
for each additional pick. Custom boxes, like that’s just on the merchant to provide that. We don’t pay for the actual box if it’s a non-standard box. But that’s it, we don’t charge extra for that. pretty common. So you also have the luxury of seeing like all the macro trends due to COVID. And what are you seeing in terms of people selling on Amazon, like types of products and people running their own stores? Are most people just kind of ditching their

43:19
their own in-house operations at this point? No, mean, everything’s up. you know, I mean, there’s certain categories that are down, but for the most part, you know, both Amazon, non-Amazon, like everything’s grown a lot. Actually, non-Amazon, we’ve seen been growing faster than Amazon. There’s been a lot of a lot of growth in big companies doing more online. So we work with like Mars, the chocolate company.

43:48
people like that who maybe didn’t have Frito-Lay, who maybe didn’t have a large direct to consumer presence that COVID really pushed them to do that. So that’s been big. But yeah, I mean- When you say you ship, you mean your software as opposed to your three people, right? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so in general, our software a lot is used by larger entities. you know, our largest ones are doing like $500 million a year, like on online sales.

44:16
And then our fulfillment is mostly smaller, so like a million plus. So realistically, to use your software, you pretty much have to be like an eight figure company for it to make sense or? 10 million is eight figures, right? Yeah, yeah. It’s basically where we start. And then from the 3PL standpoint, you’re recommending if you’re getting like 25 orders a day on average. Yeah, that’s basically where it starts, like 500 orders a month is sort of the bottom end.

44:46
our biggest ones doing, well we actually had a cool one, which is a customer called Byte, which does like Invisalign sort of things, which was a fulfillment customer and sold earlier this month for just over a billion in cash. So that’s on the top end of sort of the customers we deal with. So what are you seeing in terms of e-commerce growth right now?

45:12
So any projections for this year? Yeah, I think a lot in the US is going to depend on stimulus and the economy. Like Q4 was sort of disappointing. Really interesting. OK. Yeah. Well, Q3, we were up. I think we’re up 130 percent year over year. And then Shopify was up like they published their numbers also. So I want to say like 110 percent or something. Right. Which is huge. But then Q4.

45:41
We were up, I want to say about 110 % in Shopify. And I could look up these numbers in 70 after Shopify was up like 70 % year over year. like still big numbers, but much lower than the Q4 numbers. like we, we work with Shopify as part of Shopify fulfillment network and awesome. Everyone else’s, you know, their expectations are expectations. Everyone’s expectations were higher for Q4, you know, partially that was just sort of planning, right? You always want to plan for, you know,

46:09
the larger number so you don’t get caught unprepared. But I think we all expected a bit more out of Q4 than we got. And then Q1, it’s been okay. But again, I think there’s a lot of sort of the economy issues, unemployment, and it’s not as, and people are going back to stores a bit more than they were. it’s not like

46:38
the crazy growth that we were seeing earlier in mid 2020. Can you comment real quick on like just Shopify fulfillment network as a 3PL? Yeah, I Shopify fulfillment network is great. They are still pretty limited into a whole they’ll take in. A lot of those products shipped using our software and so we’re super supportive of what they’re doing. Yeah, and if you get in, they do great. Are they perfect? No, I think sometimes that’s…

47:07
In issue where people are just so you have such high expectations for Shopify Which is which is tough to live up to right actually shipping the packages. You’re just not gonna be as successful as you are with with your software because you’re gonna hand your products off to You USPS or whoever and a hundred percent of them are not going to get there on time And you know, you’re like well Shopify’s does great and they should get there on time But the reality is you’re you’re beholden to third parties that

47:36
They’re just going to make human mistakes, right? The warehouse could pick it wrong or USPS or UPS can be late or lose a package. So it’s tough for someone, know, anyone to really fix that. But overall, they’re a great service and they use a bunch of different warehouses and I would encourage anyone who sells exclusively on Shopify to look at them as fulfillment offer. So in terms of you personally, are you putting more emphasis on the software or the 3PL aspect of your business?

48:04
working really hard on both. we’ve got a pretty decent sized team at this point where we don’t really have to do one or the other. They’re both pretty decent sized businesses. So I spend my time mostly on product and engineering, which really crosses across both of those. So I’m working on both of them all day. It’s interesting because we have kind of a similar background. For me, the 3PL aspect of it would not interest me at all.

48:34
Whereas the software company, it’s much more scalable. So it’s interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s definitely a dearth of programmers with interest in warehousing, which I have. I love the warehousing. I love the logistics part. And I think that’s also been the struggle with outsourcing in the past is the people that the warehouses attracted, they had hard time attracting the really good

49:03
Engineers I think sure I think we got a little bit of an advantage being like we started with the software and then we added the warehouses I was gonna just say that I like how you guys are eating your own dog food so to speak right Presumably a lot of the features for your software come from actually experiences you have running your warehouses, right? Yeah, I mean our software runs. It’s the same software, right? We’re basically a customer of ourselves. Exactly. Yeah, exactly Hey Aaron, where can people find more information about you and your company? I get asked questions about three pills at least like

49:32
almost like every day. if you can just give us information about your company and maybe some other resources where people can do their own research as well. Yeah, so I mean, we’re just shiphero.com. You can find both the SaaS and fulfillment. I’m on Twitter. pretty active at Aaron, A-A-R-O-N and A-N-D-M-L, Larry, Larry. That’s my Twitter handle. I’m pretty active there and happy to sort of, you people.

49:58
ask me questions on there and DM me. I try to be pretty responsive. And then, I mean, for people who have access to the forum, it’s a great resource. There’s so many threads about 3PLs and fulfillment and running your own warehouse. So yeah, it’s a great resource there. And on YouTube is the other thing, like we’re pretty active on YouTube, but there’s also a bunch of other people that are pretty active on YouTube. And you could consume hours and hours of really in-depth content of like, like I did a series where I showed

50:28
Like as we were setting up one of our new warehouses and that’s gotten a lot of engagement and you can see like, it’s just like, it’s not scripted or anything. It’s just like, here’s what we’re doing. And I started going from zero up to a fully running warehouse. And you can see like all the details of like how everything works. pretty transparent. And I can tell you now just for people listening, like running a warehouse is not fun and we don’t do a really good job of it. We just feel like we have to do it because of the personalization aspects. But if you’re just selling off the shelf products,

50:58
I’m just looking at the rent that we’re paying right now for our tiny little place in California where the prices are ridiculous. It really just makes sense to outsource all of that. And it’s just something that we’ve been thinking about. Well, biggest cost you’re probably facing is how are you shipping your products out? What carriers? Mainly USPS because everything’s under a pound. Okay. so you’re able to do like first class. Yep. Okay. Yeah. First class isn’t bad trying to get to New York cost wise, but it’s pretty slow. Yeah.

51:28
I think that the biggest disadvantage people have fulfilling out of their own is they’ve got their own warehouse wherever it is and they’re stuck sending it cross country. I’m in New York and we used to sell to California and it’s either slow or expensive. You can’t get it there fast and cheap versus with 3PLs you can because you’ll be in multiple warehouses. I think FedEx OneRate has been really good for us too. FedEx OneRate is great. I don’t know how they do it but yeah.

51:56
It keeps it last, but yeah, if you could fit it in like that FedEx envelope, it’s what, like 9.50 or something you’re paying? Yeah, it’s dirt cheap. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a great service. Used to be USPS flat rate used to be great, but they’ve… It’s got more expensive and it’s not reliable. Yeah, exactly. Double whammy. Exactly. But yeah, I mean, yeah, it’s just, I actually get my wife on here to talk about some of these issues that we have. I’m sure it could be mitigated with the software that you were describing, but I think that would…

52:24
require like a pretty large F &R part, we’d have to think about whether it’s really worth it. We don’t have that many packers really. Yeah, the trick is always on the receiving end. So it’s like garbage in, garbage out. If your receiving process isn’t verifying the items, that is, making sure they’re barcoded, you’ll never be able to get your hands around a problem. So I wouldn’t start at picking a packing. I would start at receiving and making sure that’s right. And then once that’s

52:52
gone on for a couple of months, it’ll be very easy to make sure you’re picking up packing is accurate because that means your inventory’s right and you’re sort of, once everything’s right upstream, it’s easy to get the picking and packing right. Yeah, no, that’s great advice. I mean, it’s actually a pain because whenever we get a large shipment in, it’s like all hands on deck and we have everything on a spreadsheet, but that’s really not that efficient, I think. Right, yeah. Excel as the way to run your business is super common, but…

53:21
Yeah, you know not the best workflow. Yeah Hey Aaron, thanks a lot for coming on man Open my eyes for a couple things and and the cost seemed very reasonable Well, I think a lot of people are just afraid about the variable cost but it sounds like if there’s like a flat base cost structure It’s really easy to calculate whether it’s worth it for your business Yeah, the math is easy. And the flexibility is the other part which is like I don’t know how much you’re paying for On your lease if your business doubled you’d be like, yes exactly more space

53:50
And if your business drops in half, which is what happened to me way back when, I was stuck in that lease with, know, I didn’t have the revenue to fill it out of the space, but it doesn’t matter. You sign a lease, you gotta pay that bill. Yeah, I mean, especially for us, I mean, you’d probably be, actually, you’re probably not shocked. You’re in New York, right? Yeah. But yeah, for what we pay, like, yeah, you’re right. If business were to double, we would be screwed. And if it halved, it wouldn’t be as bad, actually. It’s only if it grew too hard, too much.

54:18
Because just everything is ridiculous here. But anyway, hey, thanks a lot, Aaron. I’ll be sure to link up all those resources in the show notes. All right. It was really good chatting.

54:29
Hope you enjoyed that episode. And with the rising cost of Amazon, more and more people are using 3PLs as an intermediary to store their inventory. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 350. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, like an abandon 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 KLAVIYO.

54:59
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLA V I Y O. 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 C R I P T dot I O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

55:27
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.

00:26
PostScript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and now for mywebquitajob.com actually, 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 and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

00:54
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klabio, who is also a sponsor of the show. Are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? Do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning.

01:21
while also evolving in real time as their customers’ needs change. These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business – the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife.

01:52
That’s KLAVIO.com slash my wife. Now, finally, I want to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. Now, 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. And 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.

02:21
to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast, where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chu.

02:38
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Mariska Harris on the show. Now Mariska is someone who I’ve known for quite a while and we actually had a chance to meet in person at Brand Accelerator Live last year. Mariska is the founder of Outlinematic, which is a design service catering to e-commerce entrepreneurs. do box design, packaging and logo design, inserts, infographics, enhanced brand content, eBooks, you name it, and they can help.

03:02
In fact, their company Outline Matic is where I refer my students for most of their design needs because of their incredible customer service and they’ll do unlimited revisions until you are happy. I still don’t know how they’re able to do that. In any case, in this episode, we’re going to dig deep into e-commerce package design and the right way to do it to maximize conversions. And with that, welcome to show Mariska, how are doing today? Hi Steve, great. Thanks for having me. I’m doing very well. Thank you. you?

03:30
I’m doing well. There’s a lot of fires here, but outside of that, as long I’m able to go outside, I’m okay. Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. And Florida, we don’t have fires, we just have a lot of water. So in Florida, it’s as if there’s no COVID either, right? Life is normal. it’s like, feels quite normal. So give us the quick background on how you got into design, ecommerce, and why you started OutlineMatic.

04:00
Oh, yeah, sure. So it’s actually a very long story, but I’ll try to keep it short. I used to work for a baby company called Bambo. Is that the chair, the Bambo chair? Yeah, yeah. Oh, I had one. Yeah. Oh, you did? Oh, yeah, those little soft chairs. So I actually studied product design and industrial design. And so I did product design for them.

04:27
kind of took an interest because we had a design studio and we worked along with graphic designers, kind of took an interest in the packaging design, looked like much more fun and it was much quicker than product design because with product design you have to do extensive research and it takes months to take something from an idea to even a concept to development to the final product can take more than a year sometimes. So yeah, and I told my husband,

04:55
I like packaging and he was like, hey, why don’t you just try and design packaging for people on Upwork and stuff like that. And I was like, okay. So I tried it and I loved it. And he was like, okay, no, but Upwork is taking too much of our profit. So let’s start our own website. He created a website for us and he said, okay, if we make this and this much, you can quit your job.

05:24
And then you can just do this because it was taking quite a toll on me because I work like normal hours till like 5 p.m. and then I got home and I worked from around 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. in the morning. And then I got up again at 6 a.m. to go to work at like 8 a.m. So yeah, it was quite something. And eventually we

05:53
just started doing Outlinematic and then we also started adding a few more services and we had to appoint designers because the influx of work was getting so much I couldn’t keep up. At a point I was sitting, at the start I was sitting with like 90 clients all by myself. Oh my goodness, that’s crazy. And yeah, so yeah, then we appointed designers and just so it grew from 2015 to where we are,

06:23
today. Is it a husband wife team? Yeah, yeah. So what does your husband do? What is his role? So he well, it was his brain. His idea from the start. And he gets he does all the marketing and gets all the clients and he does all the finances because he’s like he’s a numbers person. So he does all of that and I’m the creative. So I do the work and I talk to the clients and

06:53
and do that and then he gets the clients and he sorts out all of the financial stuff. am kind of curious, since we’re on the subject and this podcast about growing a business, how does one grow a service-based business? You mentioned you started out on Upwork, you know, with your skills. How did you end up with like 90 consecutive clients when you were off Upwork? Oh, off Upwork? Okay, so it was actually a very funny story.

07:22
We didn’t know exactly how to go about getting clients. So what I did was we went on a bunch of groups on Facebook and we just like kind of promoted me as a designer for people who want to work one-on-one with a designer. And we like pasted the website link and everything there. And one day, you know, these closed groups where you have to like

07:51
get someone to approve you. Yeah. They kind of take you off if you do anything that you’re not allowed to do. So the one one day, one of the people that we worked with, we begged her to just write a review on one of the groups, just tell them that she worked with us and that she was happy and for the price and everything. And she wrote such a nice review on one of Scott Falker’s page groups.

08:20
And that thing kind of went viral. Like, I don’t know how, and it got shared and people just started reaching out. And from that post, that post was what made us like get up from the ground. Okay. Yeah. So, and after that we tried it again, but it never worked ever again. Like for some reason that one post kind of just

08:47
a lot of people saw it and reached out. yeah, after that, we did try it again and it work. we eventually we got affiliates and stuff. So we actually got people who sell on Amazon, but are also gurus and who sell online. And they eventually started referring people to us and referring their students and people like you who refer to their students. So that’s kind of how we grew to where we are now. It’s just like

09:16
word of mouth, people sharing. We never even run Facebook ads or anything. It’s just like people just mention us. Wow, okay. Just in case people are listening, Scott Volcker is a good buddy of mine. He used to run the amazing seller group, but he recently did a complete brand change. I think it’s now called the brand creators group, I believe. Yeah, I think that’s But that group was very large. I want to say it was like…

09:45
60 or 70,000 people maybe? Yeah, yeah. I remember like around 60,000. Yeah. So if you were to do it all over again, you mentioned you tried to replicate this strategy. So you tried doing this in other groups and it just didn’t pick up as well? Yeah. Interesting. And so you have no idea what- And people banned us from their groups. No, but even if you had someone else leave a testimonial? Yeah. Oh, they got you got banned or they got banned or- They got banned, yeah. Oh, no.

10:15
Yeah. So then they were some people got only got warnings. Other people just got like straight out banned. I think at the time I remember vaguely that there were a bunch of fiber people that just bombarded all the posts with comments, their links. And I think it kind of upset the page creators and the group like owners and stuff. So I think eventually they just kind of

10:45
took all of that off. You know, they, if you were from Fiverr or wherever, it was kind of said like, okay, you cannot promote anything on here. This is just to help people out. And eventually people came around the owners of the pages and they were like, they didn’t delete the stuff anymore where people said for packaging, you can go to outlinematic.com. They really helped with this and this. So

11:12
they didn’t take that off anymore. then that started helping us quite a bit. But yeah, we didn’t let people like leave a kind of a testimonial on the pages anymore. Right. So when it comes to design services, it’s difficult to scale. You mentioned you have all these clients and there’s only one of you who’s the brains. How does one scale a design based business? So

11:40
we had to appoint more designers and then the work would kind of be divided between the designers. everything still, I still had to let everything go through me because I was just worried that the quality was not going to be where I wanted it to be. And then, so I would kind of play middleman and just give the work to my designers and let them

12:10
give it back to me and then I’ll send it to the client. So that’s what I eventually did. And is it still like that today because it’s okay. Yeah, it’s in some cases it is for the junior designers. It still comes through me and I would make like adjustments and stuff like that.

12:29
But we have other senior designers that work directly with the clients now as well because it took up too much of my time. I couldn’t handle all of it anymore. So now, yeah, at least now there’s like copy paste three of me and that helped quite a lot. Well, I’ve always been curious actually. I mean, I’ve been recommending you guys out for a while now, but I’ve always wondered like your pricing is very, very reasonable.

12:58
and you also do unlimited revisions. How are you able to offer the pricing that you do? Like I’m looking at competing companies out there and they charge, like for example, if you go with 99 Designs, it’s like 3X more, right? Yeah. Is there anything, like how do you guys differentiate yourself from some of the other services? So, the prices at the start were very competitive and then the other people started increasing their prices and we also increased our prices but

13:28
up to a point where we were like, okay, but we still want to help people who’s just starting out. So with the price to what you get, it’s a bit hard to explain, like with the unlimited revisions, people, some people are very reasonable when it comes to that. They’re like, you know, this looks nice. I don’t,

13:58
want to go back and forth, you know, you can finalize a file within like three back and forth revisions. we, most of the clients are like that. we, you know, we appreciate that, but then you get other clients where there’s literally like probably around 40 to 60 back and forth. They take unlimited revisions to the next level.

14:27
Sometimes it’s not worth it for us, but it kind of cancels out the easy clients, if that makes sense. There’s a nice balance between people who ask for lot of revisions and people who are happy with what we send them within the first few drafts. How it usually works is we send a first draft.

14:53
to make sure that all of the information on the package is correct. And if they like the layout and the design from there on, if they provide feedback and they’re not too sure about what we send them, then we send them more concepts. And usually from that concepts, there’s a final design in there somewhere with just a few tweaks. And that’s usually the way it goes. So obviously in some cases,

15:22
some packaging designs take up a lot more of our time. But once again, it just comes down to it kind of can evens out at the end because some doesn’t some, you know, yeah. So it really depends on the client. mean, one thing I like about you guys is that you pretty much specialize in e-commerce and that’s primarily where your experience is. Whereas if you go out to like a different service of just designers, you know, I guess in a broad based sense,

15:51
you know, lot of those people aren’t going to know the concepts of e-commerce. So I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about e-commerce packaging at this point. So first off, why is packaging important? And you’ve done probably thousands of packaging designs. What are some of the most important elements of your package? Oh, yeah, well, we definitely have done thousands. Maybe more than tens of thousands, whatever it is. So first of all, why is packaging important?

16:20
And yeah, you have any stories about conversions and whatnot, feel free to share those too. Okay, sure. Well, there is this one article I read the one time I can remember the website, but I just remember that these people, we didn’t do the packaging, but they mentioned that because of the brand overall that they had and changing their packaging, they had an increase of 200 % in their sales.

16:48
So packaging is important because it sets an image for your brand. mean, you have your logo. Your logo is everywhere. And then you have all of these little elements eventually that tie in together with your overall brand. And packaging is one that’s very important. The one thing that people like to mention if

17:12
If you look at all these influencer videos and stuff on Instagram where people get products from companies, the one thing they love is that unboxing experience. And that’s something that’s very important to people because that excites them in a way that’s almost the same as what the actual product excites them. So if you, for example, get the new iPhone, people are always excited to see what’s going to be new in that actual packaging, you know.

17:42
what’s because the packaging when you open their packaging it almost tells a story like when you open it you look into this nice new screen and when you lift it up it’s everything that comes together with that but just opening that box and the way it kind of feels in your hand that vacuum that it makes when you pick it up that that stuff excites people when you look at these influencer videos on social media

18:09
when people open their boxes and the one thing that they always says, oh, look at the nice packaging. Oh, it’s so nice and colorful. If you look at fat foot fun, yeah, fat foot fun. It’s a subscription box. People love those boxes. They keep those boxes to put the product store, those products or something else back into those boxes because it’s just such a nice design, a nice giftable design. And that’s one thing that’s

18:39
that we’ve seen with e-commerce packaging is it converts very well if it’s like giftable style packaging. You know, it’s not this information overload packaging with all this copy and different images that just overruns you. It’s just a nice looking package that kind of excites you to see what’s inside. It’s almost like you’re gifting a gift to yourself.

19:09
For example, if you order like foundation or something online and you know, you’re like, okay, it’s just foundation. It’s just a, you know, a little bottle full of stuff. But when it gets to you in a nice matte black box with a ribbon and you open that ribbon and you open the box and there’s tissue paper on it. And it just, makes that product feel so much more valuable.

19:37
I mean, even if you look at perfume bottles and things, the perfume bottles cost more than the actual perfume that’s inside. mean, that’s like that for a reason. It gives people that experience and it excites them in a way. So let’s talk about, I you mentioned a lot of things just now in that statement. So when it comes to packaging, let’s say you’re designing a package for somebody, do you usually guide them? Because oftentimes I know like if you’re brand new to this, like

20:07
people often don’t know what they don’t know, right? So you mentioned before, like a package shouldn’t just be a bunch of photos and value props. It should be something that’s giftable. How do you, let’s say I’m a client coming up to you. How do you guide me towards like the appropriate package design? Let’s say I’m selling, let’s say, you know, I’m in the wedding street. So we can use myself as a case study. Let’s say I came to you with these embroidered napkins. How would you suggest that design packaging? How would you guide me? Okay, sure. Well,

20:35
First of all, the product is definitely going to help us guide you into what packaging they’re gonna do. Because if you’re gonna do something like tools, then a giftable packaging is not really the way to go. But in your case, where you’re in the wedding industry of napkins and stuff, having a nice giftable package is definitely the way to go. Because I have seen yourself before and that’s definitely so, say for instance, you,

21:04
order a bunch of stuff for your bridesmaids or something like that and how nice is it to just get a nice looking box with that product, those napkins inside. So I would definitely do something like very clean and maybe like white matte box with you know not necessarily the product name on side but

21:31
you can even say something on that box in a four embossed foil, like something exciting inside or will you be you know, something like that, that will excite them before they even open that box with whatever is inside. yeah, depending on what the product is inside is what you’ll do on the outside. is this a type of box that you designed, first of all?

22:01
or do you do more, I guess, descriptive packaging? What do you guys specialize? Can you help someone design a box that’s classy, that doesn’t really have graphics on it? Except for Lickaloo. How does that work exactly? done jewelry and stuff before. Yeah, it depends on the template. So in your case, where it’s the napkins and stuff, I mean, I’m not exactly sure how it works in your case if people…

22:30
order like because it can be personalized, right? Yes, it can. But the like for a classy box, it would I was thinking what you were just describing, maybe with just our logo on it. And that’s it, right? Or I guess what I’m trying to understand here is like, if I want to do a fancier box, like how does that actually get designed exactly? Oh, I understand. Yeah. So that’s in some cases, people won’t need us.

22:57
for something like that, it really depends on the amount of artwork that you want on the box. So for instance, if you just want your logo on the box, that can easily be done by a supplier. You just send them your logo in vector format and they would probably just impose it on a standard sized box. But in some cases where we have designed jewelry boxes and things before for something that’s a bit more custom that

23:27
you can’t get a standard box for, we would not design the template, they would provide the template and something different will go on each panel. And so you would need someone to design that.

23:43
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.

24:11
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.

24:41
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. So let’s talk about jewelry then. So, okay, so let’s say, so when you say they give you a design file, that’s essentially like an open, unfolded box, right? Yes. A flat template, yeah. So that jewelry design that you were just talking about, how did you work with the client to design packaging for that?

25:08
So in that case, the client had a few Pinterest links of things that she liked. And she said, this is kind of the look that she’s going for. she sends us the template from the supplier. And then we would design on each different panel what she wanted on there and just provide like a 3D kind of mock-up of what the final design would look like. Because you can’t really fold a box like that.

25:37
in our folding program. So you have to do like just a mock-up to kind of give them an idea of what the end result will look like. Because if you just look at the flat template with the stuff on there, it doesn’t look that great. But as soon as you put it on a 3D rendering mock-up file, then it’s easier for them to see, to bring their vision more to life. And yeah, in that case, so that was also actually not a very

26:07
hard project because it’s simple elements, but it’s still intricate in a way where it has to be positioned correctly on those panels because when it comes together being a box that’s produced, if the things don’t line up, it’s not going to look good at the end. we kind of have an idea because we’ve worked with so many templates, we have a very good idea of how a box

26:33
looks like once it’s folded or manufactured so we know where to put what elements on that template. And that’s what’s important most of the time when working with things like these very giftable style boxes. I’m just curious though for this jewelry, like whenever I think of jewelry I just think of literally a plain box. Not a plain box but… Oh yeah, I understand what you mean, So what was actually on this box?

27:02
It was like a golden frame around on the top. Yeah, golden frame. then you are a special or so I can’t remember the wording, but there was nice wording on the top. And then on the sides were these, like curly kind of designs. So very classy design, not graphics or images, right? But just okay, I understand. Very classy design. Well, and then on the inside, there was a little paper that

27:31
like was almost like a translucent paper that was designed to lay on top of the jewelry and give like this effect of so you can kind of see the jewelry jewelry through it but with a with graphics on as well. Oh so you designed on like vellum? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So if you were creating a box for like a non giftable item what are some of the important elements that need to go on the packaging?

28:02
Okay, so yeah, also depends on the products. Say for instance, you have a tool like hard and rugged kind of product. Obviously you can do like, you cannot do something very feminine and soft. That’s something that has to showcase what the product is made of. It has to look rugged and tough. So you’re going to use colors that’s going to

28:32
say that like dark colors and a lot of tools have the black or a very dark color along with a bright color like a yellow or an orange or a green you know your standard two colors and then you would have to say what what the product is what it does top features of the product and something good to always say is that it is a high quality

29:02
rugged tool and people, if you have a warranty, it’s good to place the warranty on there. Think of things that you would look for if you’re looking for something, you would need to put maybe a size on there or how many of what’s included inside of that box. And in some cases, it depends on the product, but an image to show what’s inside.

29:30
is also helpful, especially when it’s like a bundle sort of package. You have to show in some way what’s inside, especially if it’s not something that’s very familiar that you see every day. So people can just see what it looks like. But in the case of a tool or, you know, yeah, a more functional sort of product. Yeah. You would definitely have to say what it is, what it does.

30:00
If it’s a multifunctional thing, the size or the quantity of what’s included, the top features of that product, maybe just a short how to use at the back. So there’s a quick tip guide or something like that on the back. So when people get it, they don’t necessarily always want to go through an instruction booklet, but just maybe a quick setup thing on the box. Yeah, maybe an illustration or something to show.

30:27
if there’s an assembly, just how to put it together or, you know, to show maybe what’s inside with either an illustration or just a few images, but like not too overwhelming, not too much, but just enough so people can actually know what’s going on. they don’t have to wonder what’s inside. Okay. Can we talk about the logo real quick? A lot of people get hung up on the logo. Do you have any like tips on just logo design?

30:55
Because I know the students in my course, sometimes they’ll take a first stab themselves without a designer. And I always look at them and go, oh, maybe you should hire somebody, perhaps, because it just doesn’t look right for some reason. So when you do logos, do you have, I guess, some sort of script or template that you kind of walk somebody through to help them decide how they want their logo to be created?

31:22
Yeah, it always depends on the client in this case. If someone doesn’t have a clue, we’ll just ask them a bunch of questions to kind of get an idea of what it is that they’re looking for because most of the time when people say they don’t have an idea of what they’re looking for and you just provide them with something, they actually have something in their mind and whatever you send them, they won’t like it. So it’s always better to just to get something out of the client so you can have just

31:51
even if it’s just a little direction to base your designs off of. So usually it would be things like if they want it to relate to their product. In some cases, people will sell in a certain category and then they will definitely want their logo to tie into that category. But you get different types of logos. So we’ll ask them,

32:20
if they want a certain type of logo, like an abstract logo where it can be applied to maybe more than one category. If they want something with a mascot, you know, like a little character or something, or a combination with a graphic and a word or a typography style logo where there’s something clever incorporated into the actual word and then they can maybe use that one.

32:47
letter or graphic separately and then also along with the word if they want something minimalistic or playful and then we’ll also ask them about the layout. At the end we do provide different layouts where the logo would be if you have for example a graphic and a word you’ll have the graphic on top of the word on the sides just the graphic just the word like different layouts and then also colors. So yeah we always try and get

33:17
as much information as possible out of the clients. But the thing that I would say people should just look for when they’re thinking of a logo is not to get too personal with the logo and not too detailed with the logo because you always have to think of where this logo will be applied. Say, for example, you have to embroider or emboss or foil this logo onto something. If you have something with very extensive detail,

33:47
It’s going to be very hard or impossible for suppliers to put that logo onto something. And it might even increase the cost. If there’s a lot of detail in that logo, flat, minimalistic logos is definitely what’s trending at the moment. like clever typography style logos, which is also flat and minimalistic, but it’s, there’s maybe like a little.

34:15
clever Easter egg there, you know, that’s hidden, but kind of ties in with the brand. Yeah. Like the FedEx logo. just recently realized there’s a little Easter egg in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So is that what you advise in general? I mean, I’ve seen logos with like, like you said, like little stuffed animals and whatnot, but you’re right. It would be hard to put that logo on a variety of different things.

34:39
Yeah, I mean it really depends where you’re going to use that logo. Say you just have a website and you sell, for example, baby products and you want a stuffed animal that has a lot of detail in your logo. You can do that because you’re just going to use it on your website. You may be going to print it on a card or something. But as soon as you have to embroider, emboss or mold a logo, I would just steer clear of anything with extensive detail.

35:07
because it just it makes it very hard for suppliers to do that and to prepare a logo for something like foiling or embossing can get impossible with in cases like that What about inserts? I know you guys do inserts for Amazon packaging as well. Do you have any guidelines on what to include in an insert? Yeah, I would say I wish to thank the client for their purchase

35:33
And then people to help with getting returning clients maybe provide like a coupon or if you want to get emails out of it, maybe have people register their product somewhere, asking to leave you feedback if it’s on Amazon or on Google or on any type of review. But yeah, the most important things I would say is just to thank the client and you obviously

36:00
do an insert to get something additional out of the client, like an email or somethings or another purchase. So definitely think how would you design that? So it’s one thing to like give a discount or one up, but how do you present it in such a way where someone might actually look at it and take action on it? So obviously you want that to grab attention immediately. So you would definitely use words that

36:30
are bold and clear like free gift or something or have like a bow on there or have a star badge with VIP and say like register for this and this. Definitely something to grab attention with like graphic and big words. guess I don’t know if you know the answer unless you talk to some of the sellers like what’s worth the best for Amazon sellers for example.

36:58
For Amazon sellers, they usually do both. They request review. That’s like a standard thing on the inserts. And then they would usually on the one side, they will have thank you and request to review. On the other side, they would have like a coupon code or like a VIP registration, something to get people to leave their email or

37:26
You know, so you have to email them to get a coupon code or register to get a coupon code in that way they get emails. if the one won’t work, they still have a shot at the other one. So that’s why they put both on the insert. think so if you put the request review on the one side and you put the register for VIP coupon on the other side.

37:52
you still have a chance of getting one of those too, at least. So I want to kind of give the listeners a holistic picture of the process. So I go to my factory, I’ve already decided what I’m going to sell, and I want to create packaging for it, custom packaging for it. So what do I ask for? Do I ask them for just like a design template? Or do you interact with the vendor? do you still use the person as like the go-between?

38:21
Do you ever interact with the factory directly or? Oh, no. No, we don’t work with the factory at all. We just work with the client. OK. And then so when people usually come to us, they will have an option for custom packaging, but they maybe won’t have a template yet. But at the end, we’ll need a template or a size. So how the process usually works is depending on what they’ll need.

38:49
We start with the logo. We provide six different directions to choose and combine from. We finalize the logo and then- What does it mean to provide six different directions? Oh, so it’s just, we send them in PDF with numbers one to six and six logos for them to choose and combine Oh, got it, got it. Six versions. Okay, got it. Yeah, six versions. Yeah. And then, so then they’ll provide us with the packaging template or a size and from that,

39:19
we will create a first draft. So obviously the supplier will usually send an AI or PDF. Okay. AI stands for Adobe Illustrator, just in case you get this. That’s correct. Most of the time people don’t have a template yet because they still have to put an order in with the supplier. As soon as you put an order in with the supplier, then they’ll provide you with a template.

39:48
I would recommend people just make sure that they can do custom packaging with the supplier or they’ll have to get a third party company to do the packaging with to print the packaging. I know you get companies that print the packaging and then you get other companies which pack your product into the packaging. And sometimes people think that we do that, but we only create the artwork. Right. Right. Yeah.

40:17
So we create the artwork and then we provide the files that the client can provide to their supplier or manufacturer for the printing of the packaging. So once you get your template from the supplier, it will be sent to us. We create the artwork on that template and we also provide like a folded version of the box so people can see what it will look like. And then there’s like… mean like a virtual model? Like a 3D model? Yeah.

40:47
from different sides and things, so can see what the folded thing would look like at the end. Because you won’t believe it gives you a much better idea of what it’s gonna look like. Because if you just look at that flat design, it’s not very intriguing, but as soon as you see the folded version and the effect it has once, because sometimes you’ll do something on the corner of a template, and as soon as you fold the box, it gives such a nice…

41:15
effect to that packaging and you’re not able to see that if you don’t see a folded version. So that’s definitely why we send that so people can see what that result will look like. And yeah, it’s unlimited revisions until they’re happy with the design. And then we prepare the file for printing, which is creating outlines of everything so the suppliers or printers won’t need the font.

41:45
and linked files and things are all embedded into that file. So they can just use that one file to print the packaging. It’s interesting. I always have my students not pay first, like work out the packaging before they actually pay for that first order, just because like there’s iteration involved in the package design as well, right?

42:10
Like they’ll still send you like they’ll print one for you, for example, and then show you what it looks like. And then ideally you get a sample with it fully packaged before you actually place that bulk order. Yeah, in some cases it does. It does work like that. And then we don’t mind working on an estimate of the packaging size before they have even a final size or something. We can always just change that. So but

42:37
I’m just speaking like what we have in most cases, but yeah, it’s, mean, if people want to do their packaging before they put it in order, that’s not a problem for us. We just change the template when it’s necessary at the end or change the size or something like that. And one thing we didn’t touch on, and maybe we can just touch upon this briefly, like enhanced brand content, you guys offer those services as well. Any sort of design tips or templates that you

43:06
use when just doing enhanced brand content? Yeah, the one thing that I have personally experienced with enhanced brand content is that when it’s very visual and it has some quick points to information that I was maybe looking for that I didn’t see in the listing, that always helps me make a choice when I’m purchasing something Amazon. And even in

43:35
on online stores if there’s that little bit more information. But I would definitely say it should be very visual and very big wording to get to the point, not a lot of copy to read through, but rather just maybe icons to quickly, so we can quickly make that connection between the feature of the product and then this.

44:02
and maybe then a little bit more information about that feature. Things you could maybe not have mentioned in listing images or the listing copy at the top. You can always put that in at the bottom. And which is also helpful is where there is some different images of the product in use and maybe a quick start guide even there. But yeah, definitely just big visual

44:33
maybe some just nice images about the product just to help people make that final choice between yours and a competitor’s listing. Okay. Mariska, we’ve been chatting for quite a while now and I want to be respectful of your time. Where can people find you if they’re looking for design services? Okay, so they can go to outlinematic.com and we have Do you want to spell that for everyone? Yeah, sure.

45:01
It’s O-U-T-L-I-M-E-M-A-T-I-C. So outlinematic.com. Yeah, we have a free consultation so people can book a 15-minute consultation with us and they can run us through their project and we will maybe have a few recommendations for them and help them if they have any questions. But we also have fixed pricing on all of our design services and

45:29
If there’s something that they don’t see, they can just reach out to us and we can provide a custom quote for anything that they might not see on there. Yeah. So, uh, I just want to say a couple of words here too. I personally liked fixed pricing because I’ve worked with people in the past where they charge by time or like they’ll have these little add-ons for certain things. just, like personally to know like how much I’m paying upfront. And I think for you guys, it just kind of balances out, right? Sometimes you have.

45:59
people who are more demanding, people are less demanding, and it all just evens out. But I just like knowing and having that peace of mind from the beginning. Last question, actually, I’ve always wanted to know this. How did you come up with that name, Outlinematic? Whose idea was that? What’s the history behind it? So we registered our company very long ago. We just wanted to start something. So our surname is Harris, and we started our company, Harrismatic LLC.

46:27
We wanted to do designmatic, but the domain was already taken and we were going back and forth between names and we couldn’t come up with something that fits design. And usually when you fill out a brief or you do a scope of a project, you call it an outline and an outline can be that or it can be the outline of the template. we just kind of got stuck with outlinematic.

46:55
And yeah, that’s how we came up with that name. Nice, nice. Well, Mariska, it’s a joy to speak with you today on the podcast. And if anyone’s listening here, if you ever need design services, I’ve worked with them in the past and I highly recommend them. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. It such a joy speaking with you as well. All right, take care.

47:17
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now I can’t stress how important packaging can be to establish a strong brand. And I really like the people over at OutlineMatic who are willing to work with picky people like myself. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 348. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

47:46
So head on 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 dv. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T dot I-O slash dv.

48:15
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 I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:28
My other cousin, Aparke, is an accomplished physician. My brother is a judge in California and my mom discovered the cure for a rare disease. But today we’re going to talk about a different cousin, my cousin Vic. Vic is the founder of Addaday, which is an e-commerce company that sells massage therapy devices. And right now it’s a seven figure business, but it will be eight figures by the end of this year. Now this interview is valuable because if you’ve ever been interested in creating a plastic related product, you’ll learn a lot about the process today.

00:57
But before we begin, want to thank Klavia for sponsoring this episode. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business that you always imagined? Do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change.

01:25
These companies connect quickly with their customers to collect their information and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you own your growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s klaviyo.com slash my wife.

01:55
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 customer contact list. This is why I’m focusing 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.

02:22
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-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony.

02:49
Now, 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. Now, 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. Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job.

03:14
podcast, where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chu.

03:28
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit a Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have my cousin Victor on the show. Now, most of you don’t know this about me, but my cousins are probably the most entrepreneurial people that I know. And Victor has actually started a bunch of companies in the past, but he’s currently running Addaday.com, which is a company that sells massage guns to roll out the knots in your calf, back, shoulder, and fight muscle tightness. And in fact, if you are a runner or an athlete, chances are you’ve encountered his products at your local running store, REI, or even Target.

03:58
Yeah, so that’s right. His massagers are at REI and every Target store nationwide. In any case, I believe this is probably the first guest that I’ve had on the podcast that has created his own plastic molds and everything about his product from complete scratch. So today we’re going to talk about how exactly Victor launched his business. And with that, how you doing, man? Good. How are you, Steve? I am good. I’m pretty sure most of the people out there didn’t know I had a cousin. Give us a quick background. know you’ve

04:27
you’ve done a whole bunch of stuff like including physical products, but how did you kind of get into e-commerce and why massagers of all things? So I have been in the tech business for over a decade and when I actually got into the massage business, I wanted to do something completely analog, something that didn’t have connectivity and that could, that didn’t have an expiration date on it or a need for that product to be updated every six months. So compared to

04:56
tech, how would you compare e-commerce versus like the software stuff that used to work on in the past? E-commerce, have to, the relationship with the consumer is completely direct naturally. And you really have to understand who your audience is for the product to move. Because there’s no one else moving it for you except yourself. So that’s the core difference. What about in terms of investment and difficulty? I mean, raising money for any business is difficult.

05:27
And I think what I’ve learned is you have to raise money from the right investors. And if you find the right investor for your project, it’s actually quite easy. But if you’re raising money from someone who’s not interested in your product, you can spend hours with that person and reach no conclusion. Well, what was trying to get at is with these massagers, you didn’t take investment, right? I mean, this is just kind of your own thing. Yeah. No, no. And so it sounds like to me like

05:55
you don’t need nearly as much money to do an e-commerce thing as opposed to all your software ventures were venture backed, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, you’re right. Yeah. To your point, you don’t, you can start very small and then build as you go. You don’t necessarily have to commit to, you know, millions of dollars for software development to get a product out. No. So why massagers again?

06:25
The core reason was because of my passion for endurance activities. So I run a lot so I found out that Lots of runners get injured. In fact, almost all runners get injured and they need the product So I thought this would be a good product to build for runners if they needed and you know The theory or the hypothesis was correct So you’re doing a hundred mile or in a week, right?

06:52
In a couple days actually. Friday. So let me ask you a couple questions just about product development. Why did you decide, so first off when you started making these, was there any other product like it out there? Because I see massagers. exactly. Absolutely. Yeah, and that’s the inspiration, right? You look at things in the market and you try to make it better. Sometimes you evolve the product, sometimes you come up with something completely new.

07:23
So how did you come up with your product? I mean, I’ve seen massagers all over the place. It feels like a saturated market to me. yeah. I mean, almost all products today are saturated in some way, or form, right? But to answer your question, I was on a trail run in Santa Monica and I had just joined this incredible running group called the SoCal Coyotes.

07:52
I finished the run and came down to run and there was a guy there with a stick roller. It’s like a roller that looks like a stick. And it happened my first time seeing it. And I said, Hey, you know, we, that’s very familiar to me because you know, in Asia, they would have rollers like that, except it was made out of bamboo. And I asked the guy in my K, where’d you get that from? He’s like at a running store and

08:19
I said, which running story he named off, uh, you know, this running story called fleet feet. And I had never heard about a running store before. So, and I asked him, how much is it? He’s like 34 bucks. I’m like 34 bucks for that. And, that’s exactly the impetus for me to kind of go back and, I went on to Alibaba.com and looked for similar skews.

08:45
and then found a product that I thought was comparable and ordered some. And they came to my, and then I had to learn how to, you know, forward, work with a forwarder so the product could get through customs, et cetera. So that kind of was the impetus to that product. Okay. So you ultimately decided to make your own massager from scratch, right? Did you actually sell the ones you bought from Alibaba? I couldn’t sell them actually.

09:12
Okay. So I tried and the everyone that I tried to sell to say, Hey, you know, this is very similar to what I already have. I don’t need, I don’t need to buy this from you. said, why not? I’m giving you a better price and giving you a better margin. And then, you know, they got to the core of it, but you don’t have the brand. And so that kind of woke me up. And I, cause I thought it was very price driven, but you know,

09:39
I’m wrong. There’s a lot of brand recognition tied into these products that help you help separate it from the pact. You know, so I listened to what, when they said no to me, I said, well, how can I earn your business? And a lot of them said, you know, what if you made one that was like this or they gave me some design concept? said, well, if I made it like this, would you be interested? They said, absolutely. So I listened to probably 30 stores,

10:09
across California, give me input on how to design the next recovery tool they had in mind, put that together, created a mold, built the product and then showed them the product in person. And they were all happy when they saw it because it reflected what they told me. And so that gave me a foot in the door. And then I said, you know, you don’t have to pay me until the product sold. So why don’t you just sell it first?

10:38
And they said, so it’s no risk. And that’s what essentially launched the brand. So it ended up, you know, ended up selling really well. And then it went nationwide. So interesting. You decided to go into retail shops before going online. Is that right? Yes. Why is that? That’s all I knew. I really, I really didn’t have that much knowledge in e-comm. So I went where I was most comfortable, which is,

11:07
dealing with retailers. And then from there I learned how to do e-comm really quickly. Did you literally just walk into like a Fleetfeet store and just say, you want to carry these? Yes. Can you just tell me exactly, is that pretty much literally what you said? May I talk to your owner or your buyer? I like to show them some products they would be interested in. Okay. That’s it. But the Fleetfeet, I guess that’s a small running shop. it owner or is it a franchise or?

11:36
Oh, they’re franchise. They’re actually the largest network of running stores actually in the world. have over. I did not know that. Yeah. At the time they were, I think they were 70 stores strong today. They are about 180 stores nationwide. I see. So the person that you’re talking to, is it the owner or is it the. That was the owner at the, the owner of the store at the time. Okay. And then so they each kind of operate on an individual basis.

12:04
So you just gave them a bunch of units and just see how they sold and they just kept ordering more because it sold. Right. They operated, they are a franchise by the way, but they also have company owned stores. I see. Okay. And then after that, are they still on that same arrangement or was that just like a test? Like you give them units and they only pay for what sells. After that, once they know the product moves, then you move into a

12:29
a term basis. So a lot of times it’s net 30, net 60, pending on the store and the relationship. Okay. Let’s talk about product development. Your first stick massager. Can you give us an idea of how much it costs to make one of those and like what the process is like for creating the mold? Yeah, I mean, for a massager, I mean, if you if you want me to get to the pricing, I mean, these molds, so let me let me preface this by

12:58
There are different kinds of molds. There are cheap molds that you can run pop products through that will last maybe 5,000 runs and the mold will go bad. And those are inexpensive. And then there’s good molds, you know, that can last you for a really long time. And when the product comes out, you won’t see the seams, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s very clean. And so those molds are

13:27
generally into five figures. And then you can get modes in four figures. And I would never recommend that. I just don’t. And then you can get like, you know, when you get into electronics, all your modes are in the six figures by default. Really? Why is that? It’s just more components. You know, there’s just so many pieces tied into it. Okay. How much did you invest in your first product? I believe

13:57
300,000 is the starting capital for that business was actually like 80K. We built it off of 80K. Yeah. Is most of that the mold? Most of it was the mold and a lot of it was traveling. Oh, traveling. Okay. Oh, traveling. Right, right. Going to door to door, which is what you’re okay. What about just the product though? Not the traveling costs. Just literally just the mold. you can get it done for under

14:26
If you’re really smart about things under 20 K, okay, you’re good. Yeah, you can get going. How did you find a place to make the mold and manufacturer? That is a very good question. So part of it was luck. I can speak the language fluently. So I was able to get to a manufacturer that could help me build the product.

14:52
efficiently and I was able to qualify that manufacturer actually through some family friends and that gave us some confidence in what they could do. And then we actually moved, you know, I don’t know if you know this, my mom’s side, my grandpa was in the manufacturing business. So we were able to kind of look at some of their old manufacturing partners and ask them for help. Ah, no, I actually did not know that. Yeah.

15:21
So is your supplier in China or where is it? It was originally in China, correct. Okay. then now it’s somewhere else? It’s still in China. Oh, it’s still in China. We’re thinking about another area, but it’s not confirmed yet. During this whole process of making the mold, how important was it? Like, did you actually camp out in China during this process? design process? No. No.

15:50
So it was completely, so you did this remotely. How did you actually convey the design to them? So I would draw that, that part is through iteration. So you would draw something, you would send it to them. They would come back with their like a CAD drawing or yeah, CAD drawing. And then actually it started with pencil and paper. Okay. And then they would CAD draw it for you because it’s cheaper there. Right. So they,

16:19
They would put it on CAD and they sent it back to you and you say, well, this is something I’m interested in. And then they would be fine it. And then they would create a sample around it, like a CNC. And then you see if you like it. And did you have to commit to a certain amount of units to start? Not at the molding. No, the mold is the mold. You don’t have to commit to it. You just pay for the mold. OK. Yeah. And then presumably this mold is really heavy, right?

16:48
Yes. Yes. So the block, it’s a, it’s a block of metal that they carve through. Yeah. So this supplier, they’re making the mold for you and they essentially store the mold for you, Correct. So are you kind of held hostage by that factory? I think that’s a very good question. As you become, you, you need to know where the factory is.

17:18
And we actually, if you’re on that topic, we had one instance where the owner of the factory fled. Oh, really? Okay. Like literally left and the workers went on strike and they wouldn’t let any of the molds leave the factory. And we had the center representative to give them cash to take the mold out and then give it to another factory. This is a true story. Oh my goodness. Okay.

17:47
And those are in October, it was September, sorry, this was August right before delivery for Christmas products. Okay. Yeah, it does happen. So how do you prevent that? Yeah. Do you have two factories that are running the same product? If you have the financial means to do so, I would definitely argue for that. And do we, yeah, and the question is, do we do that? Absolutely. Okay.

18:15
So you do your first production run. How long does that whole process take? Just making the mold. I’m just kind of getting an idea of the timeline here. a good mold, three months. Three months, okay. And then that factory makes it for you. Is everything like pre-negotiated? Like how many units you’re going to get or do you negotiate the mold first and then talk about production? You do the mold first and then in that mold discussion, you have an ideal dollar

18:43
figure you want to hit, right? So let’s say you say, want this product to be 10 bucks. And then they go, okay, well, if you want it to be $10, your injection molding has to be this way, because we only want to shoot it once. And that will add less labor, but the mold cost will go up. And so there’s that kind of negotiation that takes place. I see. Okay. And how big was your first production run? Our first production run was 5,000 units. 5,000 units. Wow. Okay.

19:14
Is that, I mean, that seems like a lot, but yeah, it’s still not that much, right? So 5,000 times 10 is only $50,000. Well, when you don’t know whether it’s going to sell or not, but I guess you had retailers already will. Yeah, we knew, we knew that it would move. We didn’t think it would move in, you know, we knew that over time we would sell through it. Right. Right. So, but we also knew that one of the things that I would,

19:41
There’s a fine line between having enough inventory that motivates you to sell and having no inventory that motivates you very little to sell. Okay. All right. Well, I know for you, 5,000 units sounds low, like for you, because I know what unit quantities. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I would, I think you could do it. think once you own the mold, you can do a 500 unit run if you wanted to.

20:11
Doesn’t matter. The problem is the factory is not going to be very anxious to produce 500 units for you, Because they have to produce like there’s different tiers of manufacturers. So you kind if you’re, if you want to be working with a tier one manufacturer, which means generally the quality delivery is the best, you’re going to have to vibe for that space. So you got to make sure you give them enough business to sustain that line. Right.

20:41
And if you ever want to switch suppliers, is moving the mold kind of a pain or? Yeah, I think generally people have this idea that if I’m going to switch suppliers, I’m going to take the mold with me. Generally, what happens is you don’t do that. You just have another set. Oh, okay. Yeah, you have another set. You should always have two sets. Interesting. At the minimum. Okay. All right. So you get your first units delivered to the stores.

21:11
Are you literally… How’s the payment terms in the beginning? do they just pay you? only. Cash only. So, just… There’s no… There’s no… You mean… You mean… Oh, okay. For the stores. Yeah. The stores is… I think when we started, we gave them like net 60. I see. So you just ping them after 60 days and then they just pay you based on the number of units and… And they either choose for you to… Okay. All right.

21:38
And then when could you start going after some of the larger guys? We actually, you know, when we didn’t really go after the larger guys, luckily they all came after us. So we’re really lucky to have REI asked us to pitch them on being a vendor. that was one of our bigger.

22:06
They found us through these running stores. They shop these running stores and they look at the latest trends. I see. we’re, know, once you, the specialty stores represent a lot of times it’s the newest, coolest things come out of specialty. So a lot of these retailers, they go to these stores to shop, you know, kind of for inspiration. And sometimes they’ll see something they like.

22:35
And in this case, they saw something they liked from Adaday and they contacted us and asked us if we wanted to meet them at a show. And we said, sure. And then we showed them some products and they said they were interested and we produced it for them. That was my next question actually. What type of marketing were you doing besides going from store to store? Were you going to like all the trade shows and everything?

23:02
There is a trade show that we would go to once a year called the running event. And that would be the only trade show we went to. And then we started to go to outdoor retailer and other niche shows like the health and fitness shows. I would say no more than three a year. Was there a positive ROI on those shows or was it mainly for networking?

23:30
Those shows are hit and miss. It depends on the staff you have on the floor. If you don’t know how to network or if you’re not willing to talk to people and be uncomfortable in making sure that people who don’t want to talk to you talk to you and so that you could create opportunities for your brand that you shouldn’t bother going. You know what I mean?

23:56
How big was your staff during all this? I remember it being pretty minimal, right? Yeah, just my wife and I were really the core. Yeah, so you guys were manning the booth probably, right? Personally, I’d imagine. Yep. Yep. Did you do any other marketing besides the retail shops and a couple trade shows? Store marketing, you know, we really made sure that we helped the store communicate our brand to the people who walked through those stores.

24:25
and they did a great job and that actually created the demand for our product online on the e-comm. I mean, what’s their incentive? Like, did you have to pay extra to get your products more visible or is there any? Do we have to pay more money? No, we, they, you know, we try to design the product so it’s catching to the eye and, and they have that, you know, they put it in a recovery session section. So that was pretty organic in nature.

24:54
Here’s what I’m getting at. Like when you go into a store, a lot of times the store has to do a good job of displaying or marketing your product in order for it to sell well, in addition to just being in the store itself, right? So did you do a lot of education in that regard? We did, but they didn’t follow what you wanted them to do. They would still do what they thought was best for your brand. If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter,

25:21
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. Now first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark.

25:50
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. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount.

26:19
That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show.

26:26
And so the fact that your product kind of was standalone and straightforward, it basically sold without any of that being affected. Yes. Okay. Yeah. All right. And then, okay, so let’s fast forward a little bit to today. You decided to move into electronics again. In the beginning of this interview, you said you wanted something that would last a test of time and didn’t need to be updated, right? Correct. And then you just did a 180. Correct. Okay. Explain.

26:57
So the reason that took place was we had seen the consumer move towards connect connected devices such as the Peloton, know, it’s connected to a treadmill or you have room. We saw a lot of tools that in the exercise and fitness domain offer connectivity and we started to see that in massage products.

27:26
And we knew that we had to be a part of that revolution to be relevant as a brand. And I thought long and hard about whether or not I wanted to jump back in and decided that I had taken long enough of break from tech that I’m interested again. And started to create not just one item, but

27:56
a of products, a suite of products that offered connectivity to our app. And we wanted to make those products intelligent and adaptive. that’s what we So why don’t you guys, for the people listening, they probably don’t know what you sell. Can you kind of describe what’s in Target today and what the connectivity and how it works? Sure. There’s three items in Target today. One is a percussive, oscillating, many people call it a gun.

28:26
So it looks it’s shaped like a gun and you It’s basically a massage gun right another product is an oscillating sphere And then another product is we call it call a foam roller that rolls itself So you don’t have to do the foam roller rolls for you. All three products are connected to the app so it learns about what your needs are and through our algorithm administers

28:56
unique therapies through those devices that changes every time you use it. So it’s having like a physical therapist. It’s like having a physical therapist in your home that kind of improves as your symptoms improve. Right. So, okay, so making the leap from just like a static massager, so to speak, to the electronic version, can you kind of

29:23
talk about what the investment was like and what needed to come together for that to happen? That I had to raise money for. Oh, okay. Absolutely. Yeah. I found my cause it’s not even raised money. It’s just you need to raising money means that you’re you needed more capital to do the business. So to get more capital, I actually put more, more money, more of my money in, but it got to the point where we needed more capital to build more products. So

29:53
we had other investors come in to help with that process. But for just that one product, let’s not even talk about money. Like what are the resources needed to make like a static massager into an electronic one that’s connected to your phone and an app and all that stuff? Would be probably 10X more resources. 10X more resources. So what was your first hire? Like I’m just trying to understand the transition. Yeah, we literally hired a

30:23
a app development team. So that’s six people there just to get that started. Is that in the US or overseas? Overseas and the US. Ah, interesting. Okay. Well, this was hybrid. And then we had to add at least four people on product design because it’s far more complicated than a static version because of its percussive nature. know, percussive guns, got to make sure that

30:52
as they percuss, they’re also vibrating the ancillary components. You got to make sure that those stay in place two years, three years, four years, five years down the line. So it’s no longer the supplier’s design team, so to speak. have your own design team. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Cause they, you’re going to know, you’re going to know that process a little bit better than that. I mean, you listen to them, they’ll give you ideas and they’ll give you some experience, some, some pointers based off of their experience, but

31:22
They’re not, the stakes are different. You got to make that investment on your own. Okay. Let’s not even talk about the software part. How about just making the gun percussive, like just a standard massage gun without connectivity? What would be the resource? Can you do that without a team? No, no, no. could go to Alibaba and source out a gun that somebody else has created. You just buy it and put your brand on it.

31:51
Um, the problem with those devices really is, uh, there’s no QC. So there’s no quality control. A high likelihood that battery is going to explode at some point in, in your house because there’s no, there’s no control. Right. You got it. Like we source our own battery. We source our own motor, like everything’s source that qualified from a quality qualified factory. When you get, when you, you know,

32:19
when you get a static stick, it’s not going to explode. The stakes are much lower, right? You don’t need to charge it. I really, I really, you know, there’s so many knockoffs now on Amazon and you know, they’ll, they’ll work for the first couple of months and then, then you, know, I don’t know if you want to use that on your children or, know, have that next in your household. I mean, would you say,

32:44
That if you’re going to do an electronics product or something with a battery, whatever, that you have to do everything in house and you just can’t source some random stuff on Alibaba. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely not. Unless you want to play Russian roulette with your business. I’m not talking about, yeah, just take a liability insurance. No, no, no, no. There’s things that like quality and safety is first and foremost when you get into that kind of product.

33:15
Okay, all right, so you have a team and sounds like it’s getting expensive at this point because you have engineers, probably have, probably, there’s probably a little circuit board in there, right? Yes. And then there’s the mold, there’s the percussive design parts. All right, how long did that process take to get that first gun out? 18 months. 18 months, wow. Okay. Yeah. How did you get into Target then? I mean, there’s no sales history for this thing, right?

33:42
How did we get into Target? Same thing, they approached us. But how did they know about the guy? I mean, it wasn’t even out yet, right? It was out. It was out. It was out. The non-connected version, right? The non-connected version was out and we had a really good business with REI that they knew about. you know, at that time, at that, they’ve been following, according to them, they’ve been following us for several years as a brand. I see. So we were on their radar.

34:12
So it just proves to anyone that if you do a decent job at building your brand, you will get noticed and people will take an interest in you if you do what you’re supposed to do in the marketplace. Let me ask you this. When did the online component come in? Cause I remember when we first started talking, you didn’t even have like a real e-commerce store really, right? No, the online business came when

34:41
We had a lot of people actually emailing us to buy direct from us because they couldn’t find the product on our website at a store because the store may not carry everything you offer in your catalog. I see. So we use that as justification to build our online store. And that’s how it kind of… So the e-commerce component seemed like an afterthought, right?

35:11
Yes, for us it was. Yes, I see. And then when did you start taking that more seriously? And how does that all kind of work together with the retail space? We started to take that well, first, to be frank, we had heard from our partners in our business that how much they were doing online. And we’re like, are you kidding me? That’s how much you’re doing. And so that really put the focus on econ for us. Like, it’s like, wow, we’re leaving

35:41
we’re leaving things on the table, right? So we just started to put more focus on that. So what are your main drives? So let’s just focus on the e-comm side real quick. how do you, what’s your biggest source of traffic on the e-comm side? Our biggest source of traffic on our e-comm side is actually we have a lot of direct searches that are related to people who know of our brand through either clubs

36:11
You know, like different running clubs, different triathlon clubs, these unique community groups that regularly come to us because they’re incentivized to buy from us direct. our second- Wait, hold on. How are they incentivized to buy from you direct? So we give them, you know, kind of group discounts in a sense. Okay. Not a lot, but just enough to incentivize them to come in.

36:40
and buy in bulk opposed to just one off. Almost like a semi Groupon kind of. Does that anger your retailers though at all when you discount? No, because we don’t discount more than 10 % normally. I see. Okay. And it’s very select, right? So it’s not a broad based coupon. No, it’s And you kind of, and it’s direct at these groups of these clubs around the country.

37:10
Okay. Are you doing a lot of paid advertising or social media? Yes, we generally, our paid media is strong. We spend the most Q4. Okay, that makes sense. So and most of the traffic for us, we do very well with Facebook. Facebook is good for us. Instagram is good for us. And

37:38
YouTube is actually not bad for us. I have not seen one of your YouTube ads yet because I actually launching in a few weeks. Ah, are you in it? No, I’m not. Yeah. Yeah. It’s tricky. know, there’s no, there’s you for every business. You just, you have to, you have to learn what funnel works.

38:06
And once you discover that funnel, then you put more resources in that funnel. In some weeks, it could be Instagram and some weeks it could be Facebook. In some weeks it could be YouTube or SEO. It really depends on the message you’re putting out and the product, the price, you know, the four P’s. It’s really dynamic. I call it plastic. It’s, there’s never a day where just like, Oh yeah, we’re just gonna.

38:34
do what we did last year, it’ll be fine. Actually not. Let me ask you this. If you were to start all this over again, would you still have gone the retail route first or would you have gone e-commerce first? I would go e-commerce first. Interesting. Okay. So how would you have proceeded then? If I had built my brand on e-comm 10 years ago, which is when I started, I would probably have a way more substantial e-comm business than I do now.

39:03
And I know that based off of what my competition is doing. Well, okay, let me ask you this. So before, like the way you kind of justified the spend in the beginning was you had all these stores committing to carrying it in their stores. How would you have done the same thing in the econ? How would you have validated this in ecom land? I would have just, um, I would have spent money on SEO way more aggressively than I did.

39:28
in 2010 or 2011. I basically spend no money there. And by the time I decided to spend money, there were other brands that had already cornered that. So when you, let’s say if you Googled massage stick, you know, our brand was nowhere to be found and it would have cost me very little money to make sure that we were one of the first to appear because, you know, because of the algorithm. when you say spend money on SEO,

39:55
What exactly are you talking about? Like what are you investing in specifically? So making sure now, so if you’re bidding for a word, say massage foam roller, that’s a good question, right? Foam roller. Okay. And let’s say 10 years ago, would it cost you like 10 cents to get, to make sure that your foam foam roller is one of the first that appear. Now it’s five to $6.

40:25
You know, it could be that high. And if you had built that base earlier, the algorithm will know that your pages as a foam roller site were the most viewed. And that helps you etch up to the top. So you end up paying less to be at the top of that search query. And then is the same true with social then for you? Yeah, same thing. Okay. Interesting. So when would you have started?

40:54
When is retail, like how does the retail piece kind of come in? Because I know your e-comm side of your business is growing really rapidly. Yes, like super rapidly. I guess what I’m trying to ask is which one is higher maintenance? Definitely. Actually, nowadays, I think e-comm is going to be your highest maintenance. To do e-comm right,

41:24
It’s not easy. Not easy. To get retail right, in my opinion, is easier. I have a bunch of friends who do retail and they’re in a bunch of stores. guess it’s a lot like e-comm in a way because you also have to go around to them and market to them as opposed to like the consumer, Yeah, but in consumer, it’s one-to-one. In retail, it’s more B2B.

41:54
Right. Right. So I mean, for us, it’s we’re making sure that, you know, five of our key customers are are and they know us well enough, they they’re going to execute these top retailers know what they’re doing. Right. OK, that makes sense. Right. You need to hold you. You don’t need to hold their hand. You just make you need to. Your job is to make sure your brand is top of mind when it comes to that category in the nation and they’ll

42:22
They’ll help make sure that it’s in the right aisle, you know, and that it’s presented correctly to their shoppers. mean, they’re professionals when it comes to it. Target knows about how to do that better than anyone. So I just want to give the audience an idea also. You mentioned like a large part of your budget is travel. Like how important is it for you to kind of make the rounds, so to speak?

42:48
I think if you’re, let me put it this way, let’s say you’re making candles and you’re selling candles to specialty shops across the country and these are mom and pop stores that are kind of gift stores and like coastal cities or, and you want to make sure that they sell your product well.

43:15
You should see the owners of those businesses at least once, at least once and get their name. And that’ll make a huge difference in how many candles you sell. Right. For sure. So I would say that if you had a hundred, let’s say if you had, say we had, you know, easily over a thousand retailers that sell our product in specialty, I probably visited all of them once. And some of them

43:45
five to 10 times because it’s relationship, right? Because candles are commodity, you know, so is, you know, a lot of these recovery tools, they’re kind of a commodity. So if you want to develop that relationship, makes a huge, huge difference. You guys on Amazon? Our non electronics are on Amazon. Our electronics are not. Is there a plan to get them on Amazon or? Nope. Okay. Why is that?

44:15
Too many knockoffs and we don’t want to put our brand next to them. Interesting. I view our biggest competition as actually Amazon to be frank. Like the cheap knockoffs on Amazon you mean? Yeah, Amazon itself because Amazon advertises the cheap knockoffs on SEO. Are you scared that Amazon will develop their own connected massage gun? No, no because it’s not their business.

44:43
We do such, what we do, our algorithm, it’s just not something. I mean, for them to do a non-connected device, sure. For them to produce connected device, that’s a whole different area of expertise. I mean, we work for like over 20, 25 doctors. That algorithm built by medical professions, not just like, hey, some guys.

45:09
It’s funny that you say that about Amazon. Like I read somewhere now that almost 70 % of searchers when they’re buying like a something like a massager, they’ll actually go look at the brand website first before making a purchase. I would think that once your brand I mean, it’s in target all across the nation. Now the brand is going to become really strong that the knockoffs won’t be as much of a factor on Amazon. I I would I would love to do a study on on that and see and do a B testing, you know,

45:39
between how many people actually go to Amazon to look for the product at a cheaper price than going there because they went to your brand site first and they went to Amazon to buy that product. Right. You follow me? Yeah. I know a lot of people prefer to just shop on Amazon, right? Because it’s easy. So I’m just wondering if you’re missing out on like 50 % of e-commerce, but by not being on there. That’s all I’m saying. Yeah. And I would dare.

46:09
I would be, you kind of have to pick a lane and then go down that lane. And the lane we picked is to support our retail partners such as Target and REI and make sure that we maximize our business there and have those and leave Amazon alone. Right. Okay. And then, you know, if you go to target.com, you’ll

46:39
you’ll see us having a very strong presence there or REI, know, those, those are, or even Fleetfeet. These are, these are brands that, you know, give us a lot of business. yeah, and a lot of support. Yeah. Yeah. So one thing that we didn’t really get into, but this app, just to add, add one thing, like there’s, there’s no curation in Amazon. So in

47:07
If you go to Amazon, you can find a lot of products on there that have not been qualified by a buying group such as Target. There’s no process. Oh yeah, I know. That’s why there’s so much junk on there. Yeah, the junk is, it’s very hard for people to decipher what’s junk and what’s not junk. And there’s a lot of fraud going on there too. There’s people.

47:35
copying your design and then it’s just not policed well. And so to be honest with you, Steve, if they start to police it better, maybe we’ll sell there one day. But right now it’s, it’s like the wild, wild West and we choose not to be part of that West. Yeah, I think that might be smart. mean, I’ve had many people or not many, but I’ve had a few people on the podcast where their entire product brand, everything, the box, everything got knocked off with inferior product, which lowered the reviews of that brand.

48:04
I lowered the brand equity because they literally copied everything. Yeah, it’s ridiculous. And how are they able to sell on Amazon is the biggest question I have. I don’t want to speak for Amazon, but to them, I think it’s just money, If someone chooses not to sell on there, someone else is going to jump right in. And that’s how they run their platform. It’s fine. I respect that, but that’s not our cup of tea.

48:34
So one thing that we didn’t talk about in this podcast was your master plan. mean, connectivity is cool and all, but this app that you have people sign on where you get the information and there’s, can you talk about the recurring revenue component? Sure. So our, our mission is to make sure that that app helps you deal with any ailments you have or your family has. So if you’re, if you’re sitting at the Thanksgiving table this year and your aunt’s across the table and she says, you know, I have this,

49:04
nagging back pain, we want you to download the Addaday app onto your device. And from there, you’re going to discover therapies that help you with that pain instantly, whether it’s with our device or without our device. And we believe those therapies that we show you through the app are good enough to where you will pay us on a monthly basis to use that app.

49:30
I mean,

50:00
Just like when you see a physical therapist, they’re not going to just use one motion on you for the whole duration of the visit. So speed one does not represent good therapy, neither does speed five. know, you need to have a good therapy means that it’s at different frequencies and amplitude throughout the duration of the session. This is actually the main reason why I am a believer in the product. It’s

50:30
You have a moat. You have IP that can’t really be easily copied. No, it’s actually you can have work. We can deliver up to 67 million various therapies through that through that app. Yeah, with the with the bio zoom. And it’s rare that I do this on the podcast. But I think it’s a no brainer because it is really inexpensive as well. Like typical typical massage guns. I was thinking about getting one a while back. And it was like four or 500 bucks.

50:57
I don’t know how, maybe you can come on and talk about this later, but yours retails for what? $150? $149. $149 with all this stuff. And you’re to have to tell me how you got the supply chain down that much. it, is it mainly just like a volume game or? Well, when you start to source the components separately and you have volume, you can get it to where it’s economical. Yeah. It’s hard. It’s really hard. I probably use every

51:24
all the experience I’ve ever had in manufacturing on this project. And you can find these in Target everywhere. if you guys are in the, was it the fitness section of Target? Yeah, you don’t, yeah, it’s a sports section and it’s under recovery and you don’t have to be an athlete to use it. If you have, you know, common ailments like back pain, plantar fasciitis, or just a sore neck, we have a therapy for you that you can use independent of the massage of the bio zoom.

51:53
which is the massage gun, or you can just use some of our therapies that are, will be shown, is shown to you by Dr. Mike, who’s our in-house doctor and his group of medical specialists ranging from MDs all the way to PT, DPTs. yeah, we’re trying to bring, we’re trying to make sure that if you have something that bothers you, you don’t necessarily always have to wait till you

52:23
get to your PT office for some relief to take place. We’re not saying don’t see your PT. The PT is definitely, this is not here to replace your physical therapist or your chiropractor. This is there to help and assist in between those visits. So if you’re doing 10 visits a year, we hope with this tool and this solution and this app, you can do eight visits. And where can people find your company online?

52:53
addaday.com like add a day to your life. So add a day.com. A D D A D A y.com. Correct. Cool. Hey, Vic, thanks a lot for coming on the show. It’s great to have like family on the show. I had my mom on earlier and that episode actually ended up being a pretty big hit. You should have our other cousin on which are Georgia. Nicole, Nicole. Okay. Yeah, actually, he started his company too. Right and got

53:22
which got acquired. yeah, he will have one. Yeah, that’s a good story too. All right, man. It’s been good. right.

53:32
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Like I said, Vic’s company is blowing up and hopefully I’ll have more to report later on this year about the progress of his growth. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequarterjob.com slash episode 347. 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. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash d.

54:00
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T.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 cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store,

54:30
heading 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
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, and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, who’s also a sponsor of the show.

00:55
Now, are you working around the clock to build the business that you always imagined? Do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies? Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. These companies connect quickly with their customers,

01:23
collect their information and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to do the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you own your growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife. That’s klaviyo.com slash mywife. Now onto the show.

01:53
Welcome to the My Wife, Her Job podcast, where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chu.

02:11
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Dylan Jacob on the show. Now Dylan is the founder of Brewmate.com, which is a company that sells beer cozies online. And Dylan grew this into a $36 million business in just three years. And the growth of his company was ridiculous. In his first full year, he made 2.1 million. The next year he did 20 and then last year he did 36. Not only that, but he owns the company a hundred percent and bootstrapped it to where it is today.

02:38
And in this episode, we’ll discover how he grew Brewmate so quickly and his strategies for growth. And with that, welcome to the show. Dylan, how are you doing today, I’m doing great, Steve. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, so Dylan, for those of you out there who have never heard of who you are, give us a quick background story about how you got into e-commerce and then how your experiences led up to starting Brewmate. Yeah, so I grew up in a little small town in Indiana, Greenwood. So it’s like 20 minutes south of Indianapolis.

03:07
And there’s not a whole lot to do there. You’re sort of surrounded by corn fields and, you know, people typically get in trouble. I was one of those people that was like what I did in my spare time. seem to find myself in all sorts of situations. And, you know, over time I sort of grew out of that and was able to turn that energy into something a little more positive. And entrepreneurship was one of those things I always gravitated towards. You know, I grew up fairly poor and I was always looking for like odds and ends ways to make money.

03:36
And I was running a little cell phone repair company, like eighth and ninth grade. So I would buy up broken devices. So like iPods and iPhones, and I would have wore the parts from overseas and then I would refurbish them and then resell them. And then sophomore year of high school, a few repair shops popped up locally and that market sort of started to dwindle away. And so I saw an opportunity, you know, I had already secured really good supplier overseas for electronic parts and.

04:07
I started reaching out to the local repair shop. I went in, made friends with them. And what I found a common thread with all of them was that they were all getting their parts off like eBay and Amazon. And I happened to know that all the parts that were on there were BNC grade parts. So they had dead pixels and dust under the screen or they were, you know, I had already navigated all of that. And so I saw an opportunity and I basically told all of them that I could supply them with local parts, you know, same day, a local delivery and.

04:36
that actually started my first real business, which is called GV Supply Company. So over the few years throughout high school, we scaled to a little over 100 bear shops around the US that we were working with at our own Shopify store. I would scout our Instagram for hashtags and send people samples and drop in their DMs and reach out to people in any way that I could. And then they could order the parts directly online and get them delivered straight to their door.

05:03
Um, you know, he had like a year warranty so they could pass that on to their customers. And it was something that, you know, was, was really challenging for me and really fun. And you did this in high school. You yeah, this was in high school. Okay. Um, and so, you know, senior year is rolling around and, I have a very successful business, at least at that time. Um, you know, I was making well in the six figures and I was still like,

05:31
pretty unsure about the whole entrepreneurship thing. It’s sort of like joining a high school acting class and you’re really good at it, but then trying to move to Hollywood and become a big time actor. And so I really just considered it to be a side hustle. I was planning on going to Purdue for engineering, so I had a full ride there. I also had an internship at Rolls-Royce. So I’d leave high school half day and go to Rolls-Royce for the rest of the day. I worked in their engineering department. That was sort of my

06:01
plan. My plan was to be an engineer. wanted to do product development design. I actually wanted to be an inventor. And, you know, that was sort of the direction I was headed in. But I again, like I grew up sort of in this low income household, and I wanted the stability of like, you know, having a college degree and being able to have a steady job and paycheck and something that like entrepreneurship didn’t really offer. And I was pretty scared of. So I went to I went to college there for a semester, I was running this business out of my dorm room.

06:30
taking 18 credit hours and wanting to rip my hair out. And, you know, I remember Christmas break rolled around, so we had a few weeks off and I was down like 20 pounds, like I hadn’t been in the gym and everyone was like, you don’t look very well. And I was like, I don’t feel very well. Like I’m very stressed out and unsure and I don’t know what to do. you know, my friends and family were supportive and you know, I sort of arrived at the decision that I was just going to take a semester off.

06:58
focused on my business. Like I already had a business that was earning me more than I would have been making as an engineer. And even though I didn’t consider it like a lifelong plan, it was a good plan for the intern until I sort of figured out what I wanted to do. This is still a cell phone business, right? Yep. Okay. So I dropped out of college. And I don’t call it dropping out at the time. I really just took a semester off. But four months later, I did sell that company for $100,000.

07:24
and I ended up fully dropping out of college. And that was sort of the turning point for me where I realized that like, you know, entrepreneurship was something that to me, it was everything, it encompassed like everything that I enjoyed. Like it had the building aspect of like what I enjoyed about engineering. You know, it had the potential for like the product development aspect of what I wanted to do for an actual career anyways. And so, you know, I sort of

07:53
was like, Hey, I’m pretty much already doing this. Why not just pursue it and see where it goes. And, you know, as a backup plan, if it doesn’t work out, then I can always go back to school and I have, you know, a nice lump sum of money in my bank account. And, you know, over a few months period after that, I again was pretty unsure because I had just sold my company. And at this point, I was like, well, I need to like start another company because I didn’t want to get a job. And so I actually bought a house. So I spent a year remodeling this house.

08:23
watch YouTube videos, pull permits myself, did literally everything. And that was a nightmare. I didn’t get into it for like flipping houses. literally just wanted, I thought it’d be a fun project. I like building things, but there’s just a little too in depth and I ended up getting sort of trapped doing it for a lot longer than I would have liked to. Okay. How did you end up in beer cozies though? mean. Yeah, so I’m getting there.

08:52
I, in the process of starting or of remodeling the house, I started another company called Beachy Design. And so it was a high end glass tile company. We would do kitchen backsplashes. And I, again, like just felt like there was something missing in this business too. Like, you know, we were importing and designing glass tile for showrooms and interior designers and things like that.

09:18
But it was missing this like product innovation aspect. And so I had always kept this journal, you know, sort of where I would jot down different product ideas that I would have, invention ideas, whatever. And when I first turned 21, I started getting really into craft beer. And so at the time, you, I was sort of done with my house. I was running Vichy Design, which is a glass style company. But I was also looking for something else to really pursue and something that I’d be a little more passionate about that included like

09:48
me being able to take a concept from pen and paper to, you know, product development and also like being able to walk around and see people using my product. Um, and so, you know, I started getting into craft beer and I noticed that like a lot of those cans came in 16 ounce versions and every time I would drink one, the last quarter would always be warm. And so I had just jotted down in my journal, like way to keep 16 ounce beer cans cold. Uh, and that was actually what sort of started like roommate as a whole.

10:18
Um, so the concept for roommate actually started with one beer koozie. That’s our hops later tree out now. Um, but that was like our flagship product. And, know, as I started to investigate that market and realize like, no one was making a 16 ounce beer koozie that actually kept things cold. also realized that like the insulated drinkware industry as a whole was really focusing on the hydration category. So water bottles and coffee mugs and tumblers, no one was really focusing on alcohol. Um, and so that was where I identified like the concept.

10:47
for Brewmate as a whole, which was a company that was designed to like create a better drinking experience and make products specifically for adult beverages only. Okay. How much did it cost to make that first prototype for the 6-in-1 Spear Can? Yeah. So, you the other two businesses, I don’t typically go super in depth on those, but I think they’re important to mention just because they sort of gave me the fundamental building blocks and understanding of like how to source a product, how to get a product created.

11:16
and also like how to do it pretty scrappy. And so, you had mentioned earlier that like I scaled the company without any funding. A lot of that just had to do with the fact that like I had identified little hacks and ways to create products fairly cheap. And as we continue to scale, you know, we’re able to do so properly. And so with that initial prototype, I invested under 10 grand. It was a very rough prototype. I did not include like our current version has three different components. This one only had one.

11:45
but so it was a lot cheaper than like our current version to make. But I had already had sort of a light digital background and so I was able to, you know, Photoshop the product into people’s hands and make a landing page and sort of do like our own version of a Kickstarter. And runs Facebook ads to that page and basically collect emails and then we did pre-orders for that product. Then once it was created. Did ads to that landing page or how did you get people to landing page? Yeah, Facebook ads. Facebook ads. So what are some of your hacks for creating quick

12:14
prototype. Yeah. So, you know, I think the biggest mistake people make is like, they’ll go to a designer first. Um, so they get, you know, they spend three, four months like designing the perfect product and then they’ll take it to a manufacturer. And then the manufacturer shreds it apart and says like, this can’t be done. This can’t be done. This can be done. Um, and their engineers will like re-engineer it to be manufacturable. And so I had actually identified that like, if you find a manufacturer that has a solid engineering team at house,

12:42
Like typically not only will they do the engineering component for free, but you can get there a lot quicker. So, you know, I was able to go to a manufacturer that again, like had a very strong in-house engineering team. is in the US or in Asia? This is overseas. Overseas, okay. there’s a drink where there’s no state-side manufacturers. Okay. Okay. So you actually physically traveled there, I would imagine, right?

13:05
I did, yep. Okay. So I had sort of created a list of different factories I wanted to visit, went and visited, interviewed their engineering teams, sort of went over the design that we had and then settled on the company that I felt most comfortable with. Did you have to commit to a certain number in order for them to do the engineering for you? No, I mean, their minimum order was like a thousand units. So that was something that, you know, I had to sort of negotiate with them on because I didn’t want to order a thousand units because I knew it wasn’t the final product. Okay.

13:33
I mean, just a higher premium to get a smaller batch done. Sure, sure. And this whole process of design, like, did you stay there for an extended period or did you do a lot of it back and forth in the States? I was there for two weeks interviewing engineering teams. And then once I sort of settled on the engineering team that I wanted to work with, then the majority of it was done stateside. So I worked with them directly through Skype and email to sort of dial everything in.

14:01
Did you do any validation on this product before you decided to manufacture it or did you just kind of go for it? Yeah, so the landing page that I mentioned, so before I had actually created or like placed our first order, I actually ran lead generation campaigns to our landing page and collected a couple thousand emails. I went to a couple of the local breweries here. They all had…

14:29
There were showrooms where they sell branded merchandise and chatting with some of the founders there and was like, hey, I think this would be a great addition to your showroom, like this is something you’d be interested in. So I got a commitment from those guys, Satsang King Brewery in Indiana. It like one of the first showrooms to ever carry that product. So I had had a commitment both from direct to consumer customers as well as wholesale customers on the concept. And that was what I used to sort

14:52
be comfortable to be able to pull the trigger on that product. So on this landing page, presumably there were pictures, right? So did you just kind of Photoshop mockups of what you thought it would look like? Well, we had CAD files for the product. So we just did digital renderings. Ah, got it. OK. All right. So it was basically the real thing, just not real images. Exactly. OK. But yeah, we able to take that and Photoshop it into people’s hands in different scenarios and do cut through so people could see how the technology worked and stuff like that.

15:20
Okay, so you spent under 10 grand, you get your first batch of about a thousand units. How did you sell those first units? So we already had a commitment for 240 of those from Sun King. So 25 % of those were already gone. And then the rest, you know, are from the email list that we had, I would say probably 50 % of the other 750 units we had leftover were purchased from customers on that list. And then I made a couple of giveaways on Facebook and then ran some actual Facebook ads after that. But we depleted inventory in under two weeks.

15:50
Wow. So on that landing page, did you talk about price at all or was it just pure interest? Nope. So it went over what the pricing was going to be. It also went over the fact that the product was not the final version. so it was sort of, you know, this is a product that never existed before. So again, it was like people were basically funny at Kickstarter. Like it was people that were interested in 16 ounce beers had had this same issue and wanted a solution for it and were willing to like invest in the original concept.

16:19
And that was how I positioned it. So a lot of those customers went onto an email list where as we were going through the design process for version two, they were kept in the loop and then we gave them a 50 % off discount code on the newer version when it came out, because they supported the original concept. I’m just curious, what was going on through your mind, whether to do a Kickstarter Indiegogo or versus what you just did with the landing page and Facebook ads? Yeah, I mean…

16:46
I had just interviewed a lot of people that had done kickstarters and IndieGoGo campaigns and like, you know, aside from the fact that they take a platform fee, I just felt like a lot of the marketing that went into, you know, driving traffic to their team and get to like the front page or get any sort of traction could have been better utilized, just doing it yourself. And like that was my hypothesis and it seemed to work. So.

17:09
So what’s nice about your product is it has really broad based appeal. So I’m just kind of curious though with that first Facebook ad, can you kind of describe what you targeted, who you targeted and like what your cost per lead was like? Oh, well Facebook ads back then were like very cheap. I honestly don’t remember like what the cost per lead was or anything, but I know like our return on ad spend was probably seven or eight X in terms of like the amount of people actually converted versus what I spend. Okay.

17:37
In terms of, you know, who I was targeting, was people that were interested in like craft beer. Okay. That was really all I targeted in the beginning. Even though like a lot of the light beer brands have 60 ounce can versions, it’s hard to like target someone, let’s say for like Bud Light, and then target someone that like drinks 60 ounce Bud Light cans. But most craft beer cans do come at 60 ounce versions. So like if someone’s interested in craft beer, the odds of them drinking out of 16 ounce cans are like much higher.

18:05
So in the beginning, like I sort of just targeted like men and women between like 21 and 45 that were interested in craft beer. And like that was sort of my target audience. I think with them too, you know, one of the hypothesis that I had was like early adopters are going to be really important. So like people that support Indiegogo or Kickstarter are like early adopters and people who are into craft beer are also sort of like early adopters. Like they like, you know, working with smaller breweries and like

18:34
you know, getting a variety of different beer and like supporting like new variances of beer and things like that. And so I was like, I feel like this is a really good audience to test this with because I feel like they’d be a lot more supportive than just your average drinker. Sure. It was a new concept and it seemed to work. So a lot of those customers were like, you know, very into craft beer and the product did what it said it would. And so they’re all happy. I guess the actual numbers don’t matter as much, but did you have any goals for how many leads you wanted to get?

19:04
and how did you kind of calculate or was it just, hey, let me just get a bunch of people and then enough to sell out this first batch and let’s go with it. No, you I had a lot of capital expenses at the time. So like I had my house, I had my other business, which I had, you know, warehouse for an inventory and everything else. I wasn’t trying to spend a lot of money. My goal, this was a side project. it literally was just something that I was doing on the side. wasn’t, never thought it would turn into what it is today. And so, you know, I wasn’t trying to garner like,

19:33
10,000 leads or anything. was really just, you know, I knew Insulated Drinker, where was one of the fastest growing sectors of housewares from my research. I knew that people liked the vacuum insulated water bottles and coffee mugs and things like that. I knew that there was a sector of the market that was being largely ignored. And, you know, I guess the point is, is like, if people like cold water, and they’re willing to spend $30 on a product to keep their water cold, why wouldn’t they spend

20:02
the same amount to keep beer cold, which one is more expensive and two is something that is like more important to people than water. Like not in terms of like from a health standpoint, but like people get more excited about alcohol than they do about drinking water. And so I was like, I just, felt like this was a market that was untapped, but I wanted to have some sort of validation. Right. Yeah. I I wanted some sort of validation before I sort of jumped the gun and like spending the money on the mold and

20:30
you know, investing in our first inventory batch and stuff like that. okay, it was. All right. So okay, so you sell that of your first batch, you said like a quarter of it was to already pre committed orders and the rest was to that list. Like, how do you go from there to like your first 2 million?

20:49
So after we sold through that first batch, we actually didn’t relaunch our second version until 2017, like beginning of 2017. So we didn’t do a second batch for the Hopsilator. That first batch was just about validation, getting customer feedback. I would send emails and surveys to those customers about what they liked, didn’t like, what they’d like to see in the next version, stuff like that. So in the meantime, again, I had identified that there was this entire market that was being ignored.

21:19
And I had some other ideas. so our, next concept that I was working on was called the wine slater. So it’s our insulated wine growler. So you pour a bottle of wine inside, insulates, uh, and maintains the temperature for over 24 hours. And the idea behind that was like, you can’t take wine in glass free zones. So, you know, parks, uh, beaches, uh, on people’s boats. A lot of times they don’t want you to have them there campsites. There’s a lot of places that you can’t take class and therefore you can’t take wine. And so.

21:47
If you transfer it into a container that’s not made of glass, it takes care of the glass free zone problem. And then the added benefit is that you don’t need to cooler ice. Like you can just pour this into the wine slater, throw it in a backpack and for over 24 hours, like you’ve got perfectly chilled wine. That product was a little easier to create. I had less moving parts. Um, was a lot cheaper to make. And so did the exact same thing over again. At this time I targeted female only again, sort of same, same age demographic, much.

22:16
broader in terms of like who the audience was. So it’s people that were like interested in voting and outdoor activities and wine and sort of this wide variety of people that all sort of fit into this category that I believe like would get benefit out of this product. And this time we actually collected a little over 7,000 emails. thing I think for the 7,000 emails I probably spent under a thousand bucks. What? Okay. We had a landing page.

22:42
Same exact thing, like I had the CAD files turned into digital renders, which then add Photoshop into people’s hands. They’ve got through, talked about the benefits of the product, everything else. I ordered seven. Okay, hold on one sec. So you’re saying you spent like 14 cents a lead? that? Did I do the math correctly?

23:02
I honestly don’t remember, but I know it was a whole lot of money because again, like I had all my money invested in something else. I know it didn’t spend like five grand to do it. And I’m pretty sure it was probably in the like thousand dollar range. Okay. Out of those customers. So we had again, we seem to see like a 30 like open rates were extremely high. So our open rates for those emails were in the like 50 % range, which was actually phenomenal, especially from like

23:30
typically on Facebook, you’re not getting extremely high quality leads. Yeah. And it’s not even something like now when we ran campaigns like that, like we don’t get anything close to that. So I’m not sure if that was just like the period in time or sure or what. Can I ask you a question about the wine product real quick? So you actually have to pour the wine into the container. Yeah. So it comes with a little silicone funnel and you pour the wine inside. so is it just like a thermos then essentially just market it differently? Okay.

23:58
It’s shaped like a wine bottle. It holds a full bottle of wine perfectly. You know, it serves its purpose. It’s like… 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

24:25
and provide 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. Now, first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Counsel 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,

24:54
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. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s EMERGECOUNSCL.com. Now back to the show.

25:16
Sorry, I interrupted you. So you did the same process, but you got more leads. sounds like 7x more leads for this launch. And then what? Yeah, so same thing. I ordered 7,000 units, seven different colors for the Wine Slater. So we did all the… We tried to do a spectrum. So was like aqua, so blue, pink, yellow, green, black, white, and I don’t remember what the other color was.

25:45
Same exact process. you know, I, this time actually, you know, I had to invest into 7,000 units, which was a bit more of an undertaking, but like the response to the product was actually significantly better than the hops later was. Um, I think part of that was just the fact that one, we invested a little more into marketing and two, uh, we were targeting a much broader audience, but once that product came in, uh, so that came in November 26th, 2016, and that product sold out in two weeks.

26:13
So we did $270,000 in sales in that two week period. Sold completely out before Christmas. All those products arrived to everyone’s stores before Christmas. And that sort of ended our first year and closed us out at around $300,000 in sales for the year. So that was just based on Facebook leads that you generated in that email list that you had, right? No, the leads, like we had probably a 50 % open rate. And I would say out of that, you know, maybe 1500 to 2000 people actually purchased.

26:43
or at least 1500 to like 2000 units. over that two week period, a lot of that we were running Facebook ads and stuff. again, like I don’t remember what our return on ad spend was, but I know it was very high. And yeah, so over like a two week period, you know, between the email list and the Facebook ads that we were running, we sold out. Could I ask you why you decided to do so many colors on that first run? So funny, it ties back into V2 design.

27:11
Um, so whole concept behind VG design was actually, uh, I had like walked into a granite tile showroom or a granite showroom and spent like four hours picking out granite from my kitchen. And then I walked into a tile showroom to pick out a backsplash and for glass style, were like four color options. Um, and there, just thought there was a disconnect. So like our whole thing in VG design was like, we had the largest color selection for glass tiles. So like a little bit of something for everyone’s taste. And so I sort of applied that same concept to drinkware.

27:40
All the drinkware at the time really came in like solid colors or just stainless steel. And so I thought like bringing color into this and like allowing people to personalize and like using as a conversation piece or like match it, you know, to their outfits or like having it be really like a fashion accessory instead of just a product for their wine would make it a little more powerful. And so it’s just something I wanted to test because with the Hoffs later, we only did stainless steel and black for that first version. Okay.

28:07
with this product since we were targeting women, I just thought as an opportunity to like get a little more funky with the colors. And that actually worked really well. And you know, I now we have, you know, 30 plus different colors for the majority of our products. Dang. So you didn’t find that like one color dominated all the sales and then you had problems getting rid of some of the other colors? No, because we didn’t do like different shades of the same color, right? Like, that was sort of what I was talking about, like with the color spectrum. It was like picking like one green, one blue, one pink. Got it. Okay.

28:36
I’m trying to pick something that fit in each category and like was most popular. So for like blue, did like a Tiffany blue, like Aqua for pink, we did like a neon pink, you know, for, for orange, did like a coral color cause like world’s popular. So, you know, I looked at like Pantone color trends and what’s popular and use that to basically figure out like which color I wanted to select for, each part of the spectrum. And that worked really well because you know,

29:03
Again, like everyone has different buying preferences. So when you have, you know, thousands of people looking at a product, like not everyone’s gonna want to have the same exact thing. Okay. Yeah. All right. So it’s the start of 2017 and it sounds like you have two products at this point, right? Yep. Was it just more of the same to get to that first 2.1 million? Yeah. So we had a product that allowed you to bring wine into glass free zones, but there was nothing to drink it up. So February, 2017, we launched our Uncork series, which was our insulated wine tumbler.

29:34
So now we’re able to create like an insulated wine tumbler set where you could get two wine glasses and the wine slater sort of as a set. And that was like one of our most successful basebook campaigns for like all of 2017. Is this all digital marketing at this point to get sales? Yeah. I mean, we had some retailers, like we had a become a dealer button on the website where people could apply, but we probably have like 50 retailers in 2017 if that.

30:00
And we weren’t actively looking for any, yeah, it was all direct to consumer. All right, did you use anything outside of Facebook? Were you using Google, shopping? We didn’t start using Google till the end of 2017. Okay. So I was actually running all of our Facebook ads until October 2017. I did, again, did not know a lot about Facebook ads. I just knew how to run very basic campaigns. And I started to see, as I was trying to scale our budget, it just wasn’t performing.

30:30
nearly as as I wanted to and we’re starting to see diminishing returns. And so that was when I sort of brought on our first hire, which was Mitmar. Can you comment on why you hired someone versus maybe just getting an agency first off? I talked with agencies. So I talked with Talk Media at the time. They were just a little too expensive. had a minimum commitment and we weren’t in their spend level at that time. then I think their minimum fee was like 10 grand or something.

31:00
So it was like fairly expensive for me. And I also just didn’t really like, you know, I had other friends who had started companies and like they had heard negative things about agencies. So I wanted to have someone like working on our account day to day and not just like sort of touching it, you know, for an hour or whatever. And so I ended up just hiring a contractor. So I used up work and, you know, sort of interviewed probably 10, 15 different people that had.

31:26
good reviews and done a fair amount of work. So like over $100,000 earned and had them do like an audit of our account and put together like a of a roster of like things that they would do differently if they were to come on and then sort of pick the best person for that. Is this a full time hire then or just a contractor in the beginning? Just the contractor and a contract at that time. Okay. And then he basically scaled what you were doing.

31:51
Yeah, so we had done a million dollars in sales from January to October and then from October to December we did another million. So he was able to come on and like pretty much revamp what we were doing and get not only better results than what I was doing, you know, at scale he was able to condense what I had done in 10 months into three. Okay. And we’re getting better results. so

32:16
We didn’t start you asked about Google and other so we didn’t start advertising on Google like shopping network and Snapchat and like all other places that we advertise till 2018. Okay. You sound like a smart guy that you could figure out Facebook ads. I’m just kind of curious what they what your consultant did that you weren’t doing that allow you to scale so quickly. So for me it was like look like audiences and segmenting. It just wasn’t something that I was fantastic at. And so he was like really good at sort of analyzing the data that we had and creating

32:45
I was just kind of beating the same audience over and over and over. And so, you know, our, um, like frequency rate was going up and, know, I’ve tried and create other audiences, they wouldn’t work as well. So it always go back to like what was working. And, um, you know, he was able to like successfully create lookalike audiences where we were able to target new people with similar interests. We’re again, like we’re bringing down the frequency that they’re seeing these ads and we’re getting significantly better results by doing that. So.

33:14
I’m not 100 % sure. I would say a lot of it was just attributed to campaign structure and audience structure. Okay. Well, because I know since I run all my own ads also, it’s a pain in the ass to kind of rotate creatives. I was just wondering, since you’re running this other company, perhaps you might not have had just the time to give it your all in terms of Facebook ads. That’s kind what I was getting at. I was wondering if that was the case. Yeah. I mean, probably a little bit of everything.

33:41
You know like our the creators we were using weren’t fantastic The copy was written by me like I’m sure there’s a lot of factors that played into like why it did significantly better after I brought Him on. Okay. Were you still were you starting to run your Facebook ads directly to your products at this point? Or were you still trying to get leads? No, so we only did leads for the initial two. Okay, you would actually stock inventory. We were running acquisition campaigns

34:09
Okay. I’m able to actually directly to like collection pages. Okay. Hey, I just want to make fun of Austin Bronner here because I saw in one of your other interviews that you said the Spindle Wind pop-up increased your signups by 4x. Was it? Yeah, I wrote about that on a blog post and I got a 2x increase and thing but then everyone started making fun of me because I for you, you got 4x right in terms of the number of leads that you were getting versus the old form, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

34:39
There you go, Bronner, Spend-A-Win pop-up for the win. Okay, sorry, sorry to say that. Do you know who Austin is by any chance? We still use our own version of that today. We have different versions. Like we use a text signup form and then we also have, we just do know, but we did our own custom Spend-A-Win version and it still performs extremely well to this day. Yeah, I wrote my own also actually. Yeah, it performs better than the ones that you can get off the shelf. Okay, sorry, I just wanted to, I thought I’d bring that up just in case people

35:09
still doubt the power of the spin to win. All right. Okay, so you hit 2.1 million in 2017. And then all of sudden you like 10x the following year. What happened? Yeah, so a couple things. I in 2017, I sold my house, I also sold my other business. So I was able to like, so towards the end of that year, I was able to fully invest in roommate. So all the money went in towards investing in inventory for Q4.

35:36
And then a lot of the money that we made in Q4 was reinvested back in inventory for Q1 of 2018. like going into spring and summer, we had pretty solid on an inventory to be able to sustain growth. Cause in 2017, like for a lot of the year we would run pre-orders. So, you know, I would literally drive people to the website, they would pay for the product and then, you know, it’d say like 90 day lead time or whatever. And then we’d get the product created and then I would air ship it in instead of shipping it by sea. So we get it quicker and then we would ship out.

36:05
product and do that in batches. Because again, like I didn’t have the money to really invest in like 1000s and 1000s of units to just talk about that real quick, actually, because I run an ecommerce business and cash flow is always a problem. Right? So you bootstrap this you still own 100 % of this, right? So yeah, we actually just closed an equity deal last Friday. Last Friday, but hitting 36 was all on your own bootstrap, right? Yeah. Okay. How do you get the money to fund the inventory?

36:35
Well, so again, like I had sold my first business, I had rolled that into my second in the house on the house itself. Once it was finished, I was able to pull a line of credit on the house. Okay. I able to leverage that and use that for the business. And then, you know, you’re only allowed to finance 70 % of the house value. And the house wasn’t appraising as high as what I actually sold it for. like, there was just a lot of leftover money that was in that house that

37:03
that I can really touch. when I sold that, you know, I had access to like a significantly larger amount of capital. But yeah, I mean, it was something, you know, I was using this line of credit, but you got to remember like thousands and thousands of units, you know, trying to invest the money into having that on hand, plus having like production deposits on future orders. So you’re not like, you know, running out of stock and placing an order and then waiting 90 days for it to come in, like trying to balance all of that was really difficult. So pre-orders was sort of my answer to that. It allowed me to, you

37:33
pre-sell the product and we didn’t even do it at a discount. But again, these are products that didn’t exist and they came in unique colors and like people wanted them. So they’re willing to wait and we would get maybe 10 % of the customers that didn’t read and you know, didn’t know it was a pre-order or whatever. And we’d either refund them or like explain and a lot of times they were okay with it. But I use that really all throughout 2017 to help grow. I didn’t have to, cause at the same time I was also investing money in like molds and things like that too. So.

38:01
You’re trying to balance all that was difficult, but pre-orders was sort of the answer because it allowed me to pre-sell the product. You get the product in after 90 days, ship it out, and then repeat the process over and over again and sort of roll the money back into the company. But 2018 was the changing point because not only did I sell my other business, my house, we also got our bank line of credit because we had had our two-year anniversary. So after like two years of business, we were able to get a formal $250,000 line of credit from the bank.

38:29
And so it was an unsecured line of credit. It wasn’t collateralized against inventory or anything. I was through SBA. And that was a few month process. I started working on that beginning like January 2018. think end of February, we probably closed that. So like right in time for spring, we were able to place some pretty large orders on top of, you know, the orders we had already placed from the money we had made from Q4 2017. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, again, like

38:57
I had brought on the guy that I was using for Facebook ads at the end of 2017. We had started seeing really good results with scaling, you know, the financial aspect of like having a lot more money to put in the inventory. think all those things combined are what allowed us to grow so quickly in 2018. And then on top of that, we added in, you know, Google and Google Shopping Network and Snapchat and Pinterest and Bing and Influencer Marketing, like a ton of different channels throughout the year.

39:24
So we’re just reaching customers in a different way and really finding out and figuring out what works for us and what didn’t. Okay. So outside of Facebook, what are those other channels have worked the best for you? So Google works extremely well. Snapchat works very well for us. Influencer marketing works really well for us. Pinterest is okay, but it’s not super scalable. Snapchat even then we weren’t really able to scale it for a long time. It took a year and a half working with our team in beta programs and whatnot.

39:53
their tracking just wasn’t great back then. like, trying to actually track results from their platform was like nearly impossible. So we would spend a little bit of money here and there, but you know, we can fully invest into it because without knowing where we’re getting out of it, like that would have just been like, it didn’t make sense to do. I think Google would be I guess you’re probably talking about shopping then. Or Yeah. Okay.

40:20
I would imagine that the keywords for your thing would be just really expensive. Maybe you can pull it off, but are you using Display Network at all? Yeah, we are. And out of those, which one is working for the best for you in terms of Google land? Between Facebook, Google, and everything else, we spend $2.5 million a month. Our marketing team is 13 people now. I honestly don’t know. I don’t really have my hands in that. Okay. I’m just curious if you knew. Yeah.

40:48
What would you say I mean, man, the fact that you bootstrap this from the ground up means that you were you probably have working knowledge of all aspects of your business at some point in time. So what would you say were your biggest struggles early on? Yeah, so biggest struggles were definitely fulfillment. You know, with the pre order method, it wasn’t super difficult. So I had a shared warehouse. So VT Design, I stored a tile there, when the product would come in, I’d have it delivered to that warehouse. And then I I’d have

41:17
10, 15 friends come help me package these orders over a couple of day period and get them out the door. But it wasn’t until like we got our first facility and started hiring employees for day to day fulfillment that I really understood just how difficult getting products out the door was on time and how much of a distraction it was for me. Because like I, what I really enjoyed in the business was the product development innovation aspect and like.

41:44
there’s none of that in in order fulfillment. And so it was a huge time stock for me. I spent a lot of my time doing this and I didn’t enjoy it at all. No sort of where like shit monk came into play. So like we use a three PL even to this day, which allowed us to completely free up the fulfillment side of things and you know, really focused on what we’re good at. then the second cheaper going with three PL just kind of when you run all the numbers in terms of headcount and mindshare. I definitely did. Yeah, I did at the time even now.

42:13
at the current scale we’re at, it’s iffy. But if you’re under 20, $30 million in sales, definitely for a variety of reasons, like you obviously have the pick fees and warehousing fees and things like that. Typically, the warehousing fees are just passed on, so it’s going to be pretty similar to what you’re paying in your own warehouse. So really, your additional costs are going to be the initial pick fee and then additional pick fees on top of that. If you look at the shipping rates that you get as, let’s say, a company that’s shipping

42:42
200 packages out the day, 200 packages out the door a day versus like a fulfillment center that’s shipping, let’s say 30,000. The rates that they get offset the pick fees. So, you know, I know like our average cost to ship a product was over $10 because our products are really heavy. Like our average package is almost three pounds. Okay. So really heavy, really expensive to ship. And that dropped by over 40 % when we moved over to a fulfillment center, which completely covered.

43:11
Plus, um, you know the initial pick fee and additional pick use for those orders Nice. So there was also a forcing function right because when you sold that tile business presumably the warehouse went with it or um No, because so we ran fulfillment ourselves for seven eight months Okay, so the tile business went I had gotten a new warehouse and which was just for roommate and then we actually upgraded that warehouse three times in a year period so we went from

43:38
3500 square foot warehouse, like 7,000 to 20,000. And same thing, like it was really in that 20,000 square foot warehouse that, and this is beginning of 2018, that we were just seeing major growing pains. Like we had just moved in there, got everything set up. And I remember we got like four cargo containers then, and we were putting it all up on racks and stuff. And it took up like, I don’t know, a third of the warehouse. And we pulled out of that in like three weeks.

44:07
Oh man, crazy. And I was like, oh my gosh, like what a complete waste of time. Like we just set up this new warehouse and like it’s not even going to be big enough for this next order we’re going to have to place. And I had met Dan who owns Shipmong through Forbes 30 under 30. And you know, pretty early in 2018, I started getting, so I think we gave them maybe 30 % of our daily volume upfront. Just to sort of test the relationship. Yeah. We’re like a two or three month period. ended up moving 100 % of that over.

44:37
And then yeah, warehouse, you know, ended up buying out the, think we stopped, we stood out for a year and then the subway serve, um, sort of bailed on that place. And then I just bought out the contract early. Are you guys on Amazon? Yeah. Yeah. So we’re using a FBA. Yeah. So we did the vendor relationship with them for a while. Hated it. Went back to FBA, but yeah, we’ve been on Amazon since late 2018. Okay.

45:06
So in terms of the way product gets in there, do you just have Shipmunk ship over whatever products are as needed to kind of top it off on Amazon? Yeah, exactly. We warehouse all of our stuff in one place. you know, big retailer orders ship out from Shipmunk, direct consumer orders ship out from Shipmunk, FBA shipments are pick packed and fulfilled by Shipmunk. So they, if we if we send five cargo containers to ship or to FBA, then

45:34
They’re the ones like labeling all the cartons and palatizing it, setting up the pickup and whatnot. Okay. And then you’re in a bunch of retail stores. Can you kind of comment on your efforts there? Like is the retail segment more than the e-commerce segment? Nope. So in 2018 we were diversifying our marketing channels. But outside of that, I really wanted to diversify our actual sales channels and create like a true omnichannel brand. I’ve seen too many companies, you know, I talked about like Facebook ad costs.

46:03
So from like 2016 to 18, the amount that like the cost per click and you know, everything else went up across the board was just ridiculous, especially for us. And I just didn’t see it as being sustainable if we were running 100 % of our sales and 100 % reliant through just digital marketing. And so I wanted to create a brand that, know, I had, again, a hypothesis that there were like three different types of customers. There was the…

46:31
brand loyalist, which wants to shop direct with you and they’re on your email list and text list and like they want to be on the know and limited product releases and all that stuff. And then you have your Amazon customer who like they see an ad or someone talk about the product or whatever. And the first thing they do is just go to Amazon because they want like unbiased reviews in Amazon Prime. And then you have the sort of older, more reserved customer who would much rather like see and touch and feel the product in person before making a purchase. And so that’s been in the three categories. It was direct to consumer, Amazon and retail.

47:01
And we really only had direct to consumer. So throughout 2018, we started ramping up our Amazon efforts. We started working with retailers, you know, and moving into 2019 retail was a really, really big focus for us. So this year, wholesale will probably be roughly 30 % of our business. Okay. Another 25 % of that is Amazon and then the rest is direct to consumer. So.

47:29
roughly half of what we do is direct to consumer and the rest is made up by other channels. you know, if we see a downturn in retail, like it’s not really going to affect the overall business and you know, if the cost for advertising goes up and like we have to pull back a little bit on spend for the month on direct to consumer, then like wholesale and Amazon usually make up the difference. So we’ve created this really cool ecosystem where, um, you know, there’s ebbs and flows, but you know, typically our months always end up very well. Um, just because, you know, we do have such a diversified way of

47:58
of reaching customers and selling to them. So I think I saw in another interview that you’re trying to grow this to a nine figure company. What’s it going to take to get there for you? what’s on the road We’re going to be there this year. So we’re at almost $70 million in sales for the year. Wow, nice. Q4 is our biggest quarter. So we typically do 30 to 40%, if not more, of what we do in Q4. So we’ll be over $100 million of revenue this year.

48:26
But a lot of that is attributed to wholesale. So wholesale last year we did 3 million. This year it’s going to be 20 to 25 million. We brought on 115 sales reps across the US. We got into some pretty major retailers that were in Dick’s Sporting Goods and Cabela’s and Bass Pro and Nordstrom and Palmetto Moon and Total Wine and Spirits. We’re in almost 5,000 retailers now. And that’s a big component of it.

48:55
We’ve had a lot of new product releases and our teams continue to grow and we’ve gotten a lot more scrappy. Yeah, it’s a combination of a lot of things, but we’ll be there this year. Let me ask you this question. If you were to do it all over again, would you still go with the digital marketing route followed by retail or would you have gone the other way around? No, absolutely. I would do it the exact same way. Okay. What we’ve seen with retail and why retail is so successful for us is because of direct-to-consumer.

49:24
Think about this, okay, you walk into a store and you see a product for the first time, like you’ve never heard about it, you’ve never seen someone talk about it, you’ve never seen an ad for it. You’re probably just gonna walk by it, right? Like, it’s not gonna stand out to you, because it’s not familiar. With direct-to-consumer, there are, I mean, think about, you know, we reach millions and millions and millions of people every single week, so we’re not getting millions of orders every week, right? So like, people are seeing.

49:51
the brand and seeing the product. But again, they might fit into that category of like people that want to shop direct or like touch and feel the product first before buying it or whatever. And so they walk into a store now and they see roommate and like they’re familiar with the brand. Like, you know, our displays that we have are like designed to stand out and catch your eye. And so we’ve just seen like massive adoption and sell through and a lot of the retailers are seeing something that like they’ve never even seen before.

50:18
just because of that relationship we’ve already built with the consumer before going into retail. Whereas if you do it in the reverse, like you’re really relying on the retailer to like tell your story and you know, they’re not going to do a good job of that. Oh, exactly. Like they can’t tell it the way you can. So if, if you can do that yourself and then just basically use them as a vessel for selling the product, then it’s a, it’s a symbiotic relationship because now they, it’s hands off. Like all they have to do is literally just put it on their shelves.

50:45
And we don’t have to worry about them like telling the brand story wrong or like not positioning the products right or whatever it is because the customer already knows what it is. Like, and now they can touch, feel and buy the product in person. So that’s been something that I think was extremely beneficial. And one of the reasons why wholesale like not only has been so successful, but has been able to scale so quickly. And I think if we did it in reverse, it would not have been that way. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Hey Dylan, if anyone has any questions about your company or

51:13
want to buy your products, where can they find you guys? Yeah, so my Instagram is at Dylan d y l a n dot Jacob. If you have any questions, just drop me a DM. I answer DMs all the time. And if you want learn about the product, you can go to roommate.com. So BRU m a t e.com. And then our Instagram is BRU dot m a t. Awesome, Dylan. Thanks a lot for coming on show, man. Really appreciate it. Cool. Thanks, Steve.

51:41
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now I love insane growth stories like Dylan’s when all the pieces just magically come into place. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 346. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon 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 KLABIYO.

52:09
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-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now, if I talk about how I use these tools in my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

52:38
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.

00:29
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, and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, who’s also a sponsor of the show.

00:58
Businesses are always the most successful when they own their own data, customer relationships, and their growth. And that’s why more than 50,000 e-commerce brands like Living Proof, Solo Stove, and Nomad trust Klaviyo to deliver their ideal customer experience. Now having used Klaviyo for many years now, I can wholeheartedly say that Klaviyo is the best email automation platform in the world for e-commerce, and you’ll get everything you need to build strong relationships that keep your customers coming back. Now with advertising getting harder and more expensive,

01:26
it’s time to take back control of the customer experience with email and SMS. So if you’re ready to drive future sales and hire a customer lifetime value with a marketing platform built for your long-term growth, get a free trial at claviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.com slash my wife. Now onto the show. Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast, where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle.

01:52
so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chu.

02:02
Welcome to the My Wife, Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m super excited to have Jamie Kern Lima on the show. Now Jamie is the co-founder of It Cosmetics and she is the first female CEO of a L’Oreal branded brand in the company’s history. And in 2016, Jamie sold It Cosmetics to L’Oreal for $1.2 billion in cash and has been included on the Forbes list of America’s richest self-made women. So what’s funny about this interview today is because I’m not into makeup, I had actually not heard of Jamie.

02:31
until my friend Andrea Deckard met her personally at Turks and Caicos and highly recommended that I have her on the show. And then I casually mentioned that I was having Jamie on the show today and then my wife started going nuts. So before this interview even has been recorded, I have seemingly earned some brownie points with my wife, which I will save for a rainy day. So clearly Jamie has already inspired a bunch of people. And today we’re going to delve deeply into her story and how she did it and without welcome the show, Jamie.

02:59
How are doing today? Oh my goodness. Thank you for having me and thank you. Say hello to your wife for me too. It’s exciting. It’s great to be here. What’s funny about this is it’s rare that I do this, but I’m not young anymore. You know, I’m in my 40s. So I actually tried a little bit of concealer just for kicks and the stuff made my skin flawless. Oh, unfortunately for me, I can’t wear this stuff as a guy. Otherwise I totally would.

03:25
We have a lot of guys that wear it. We have a lot of guys that are yeah, we do. Yeah. So it’s, it’s for everyone, for everyone. I love that your wife got excited. Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah. It’s such an honor. I know I shared this with you before we started, but I’m inspired by, by you sharing your story and hers too. So thanks for all you’re doing. Cause we’re all in this entrepreneurial journey together. We are definitely. And sometimes it can be a lonely journey.

03:53
So with that out of the way, Jamie, can you tell the audience about why you started It Cosmetics for people who may not have heard your story? Absolutely, yeah. You know, it’s so funny for anyone in your community who kind of fell into entrepreneurship or thought they were gonna do one thing and had a dream and were on that path their whole life. And then all of sudden, you know, in my case, it was really a setback, something that was a setback happening to me that ended up being a setup.

04:23
for launching IT Cosmetics. So I thought I was gonna be a journalist my whole career. Like I love other people’s stories and I really just wanna interview you right now, Steve. Ask a billion questions. So I mean, since the time I was a little girl, I thought, oh, I’m gonna grow up and share other people’s stories. That was my dream job. And so I was working as a TV news anchor and…

04:48
and thought I was in my dream job and I started getting a skin condition called rosacea. And for me, it came in the form of like bright red cheeks that like if you imagine touching your cheeks right now and then feeling like sandpaper with red bumps everywhere. And what started happening is I was anchoring the news and I live in my earpiece from the producer. I would hear, you know, there’s something on your face. There’s something on your face. Could you wipe it off? Could you wipe it off? And I knew there was nothing I could wipe off. I knew it was that.

05:16
the makeup was starting to break up and the redness was coming through. So I saw dermatologists, I started trying every makeup I could find out there and I had no interest, even no thoughts of ever, you know, going into the beauty industry. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t have any connections and almost no money. And the more I tried to find products that worked, I couldn’t find anything that worked. And I went through a season of

05:43
of self-doubt, honestly, where I started worrying, I going to lose my job? I going to lose viewers? in the process of this kind of season that I really felt was a setback, got this, like all of a sudden, I guess a lot of entrepreneurs out there have this kind of aha moment where I realized, oh my gosh, okay, if I can’t find anything out there that works for me, there must be like so many other people out there that maybe…

06:11
have the same challenges. Maybe they have different skin issues and nothing works for them too. And if I could actually create something that works, it could help a lot of people. And so I had that moment. And then also one more thing that happened is I had this moment as well where I was like, why is it there’s millions of makeup brands out there, but like, I can’t find anything to work. And I also realized Steve that, you know,

06:39
all of the ads I’d seen my whole life on television or in magazines, I realized, oh, wow, I’ve never seen anybody modeling makeup products that actually has skin like I do and has problems with their skin, challenges with their skin. They all have kind of flawless Photoshopped skin. And I realized kind of a bigger mission, if you will, where I was like, okay, well,

07:03
you know, from the time I was a little girl seeing those ads, I always aspired to look that way, but they also kind of always made me feel like I wasn’t enough. And so I had this kind of double thing happen where I was like, okay, if I could figure out how to make a product that works, and if I create a company where we use real women, all different, you know, ages and shapes and sizes and skin tones and skin challenges as models,

07:30
maybe I can help shift culture inside the beauty industry around inclusivity and around the definition of beauty at the same time. So was this big thing happening yet, like so many people in your community may be listening right now who have gone through this experience. I didn’t know how hard it was going to be to be an entrepreneur. I thought, if I pour all my savings into making a product that actually works, if I can get to that point where a product works,

07:59
Like it’s just gonna sell, right? And yeah, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And long story short, I wrote the business plan with my husband on our honeymoon flight to South Africa, which is probably the least romantic thing you could do on a honeymoon flight. We got back, quit our jobs and just dove all in from our living room. And what I didn’t know was from the moment we dove all in,

08:25
It would be three years before we could afford to pay ourselves and it would be three years. Like, I love so much the show that you do and how you go, like these types of questions too, because why I wrote the book Believe It in so many ways is because like when you Google my story, you just see like, Denny’s Waitress, you know, builds billion dollar empire. it makes it seem like it’s easy and it makes it seem like a message just got lucky or.

08:54
But it’s like at the end of the day, my journey that I think a lot of other entrepreneurs and human beings can connect to is really a journey of going from not believing in myself to believing and dealing with constant rejection. The first three years of our business, we heard hundreds and hundreds of no’s and I had to figure out like, well, how do I listen to my gut and my knowing or do I listen to what the experts are telling me to change about what I’m doing?

09:22
It’s really a journey of learning to believe in myself and trust myself. And I know it’s the journey of so many other people out there, which is why I wrote the book. So what I love about your story is that you’re actually a husband and wife team. And likewise, I started my e-commerce brand with my wife as well. And what’s also funny is, I’ve obviously read your book, is that I actually use an alter ego to manage support and to actually be on the wedding forums. My person was named Christina Lang and she was a very bubbly bride to be. Wow.

09:51
So, And do you still, is Christina Lang still hustling She is no longer working for the company. No, she moved on, but I understand you did something similar, right? With your support Yeah. I mean, I didn’t intend to, but it was so, I think that, you know, when you’re an entrepreneur and you can’t afford to hire anyone else, it is, you have to just get scrappy, right? And figure out how to do, I mean, I Googled everything, right? And

10:19
but we literally couldn’t afford to hire people that knew what they were doing. And so in the early years, yeah, I mean, oh my goodness. So two things that stand out that maybe help everyone in the community going through this, because we don’t see these things on social media. We see like everyone’s highlight reel and it just looks good. But the real stories, I think help us feel less alone and more enough in what we’re doing. And yeah, mean, two stories that stand out are,

10:46
our one, Marie, right? So, I love that you said that you did this too. I think that’s amazing. So, I was like, oh my gosh, how do I get press for our company? We couldn’t afford to advertise. so, Marie is my middle name. so, Marie at it, cosmetics.com got her own email address. Marie would head customer service and then Marie would pitch all the press. So, like, you know, she would have

11:14
If this were fast forward 10 years, Marie would have emailed you and the whole like my wife Twitter job podcast community saying, Steve, great news. Our founder, Jeannie Kern-Liem is available for an interview. like Marie emailed, good morning America. mean, she would pitch PR to everybody and Marie got no response a lot and also got rejected a lot. But it was like, kind of got to do what you got to do. And I’ll never forget.

11:43
crazy that now this business that we started in our living room this year became the largest luxury makeup company in the country. Why that’s so crazy and why is because for so many years, all of the retailers that we’re so blessed to have partnerships with today all said no for years and that it’s not the right fit, it’s not going to sell well in their stores, and that we needed to change what we were doing and how we were doing it.

12:12
And so I just, you know, somebody in your community might just need to hear this today because when we get rejection, it’s hard to not let it, like confuse it with, maybe my gut is wrong or maybe my, you know, knowing is wrong. And then we start second guessing ourselves and it starts like manifesting into self doubt and it’s hard. But anyways, real quick, the other story that stands out too is,

12:38
So we couldn’t afford to hire a web developer. And so my husband went and bought that big yellow book called HTML for Dummies. literally, and by the way, so all these retailers were saying, no, right? was sending our product because we finally, we poured all of our money into this product and I sent it to all the department stores, to all the beauty retailers, to QVC, which is the 24 hour live television channel, sent it everywhere. All my favorite places to shop and they all

13:07
said no. And so I was like, okay, if we can go direct to consumer, if we get our website up and it’s like, you know, this is going to be huge because the product works and I just believed it. And so he bought the big yellow book, HTML for Dummies and, and built the whole first website and the morning it went live, I felt like it was like, you know, gonna be one of the best days of my life. The way little kids are on

13:34
you know, mornings of holidays, like Christmas morning, right? And I was so excited because I just knew it was going to be huge. And the morning the website went live, there were no orders. And then the next day, no orders. And the next day, no orders. That’s exactly what happened with our website, too. Did it really? Yes, in the beginning. For two weeks, I want to say. Oh, OK. So tell me if this happened to you, too, because maybe you guys are way more classy than I was. I…

14:02
A couple days in, I said to my husband, I said, it’s broken. You didn’t do it right. I said, there’s no way a product this good isn’t getting any sales. You must not have built the site right. It’s broken. And then a couple weeks later, still no orders. And then the day our very first order came in, I was cheering, running around the office, AKA our living room, screaming, your first order, our first order. I knew it. knew it. I’m so excited.

14:31
And he says, he says to me, that was me. He goes, I placed the order to prove to you the site is not broken. And I was like, oh, and it was like, you know, those early days. And so, so for you guys, was a few weeks in. We had the same story. I was the one doubting that the website was working. So I placed the first order and then my wife saw it and said, oh my God, we got our first order. I was like, no, it was just me.

14:55
Sorry. have never, wow. Okay. You’re the very first person I met that has the same story. I love this, right? Because so many people are going through this right now and not seeing, you know, I think when we don’t get that, when things don’t go like we hope they’d go, it’s, hard. It’s hard to keep going. If we don’t have all the tools in place with mindset and with mission and with all of those things, right? It’s so easy to let, I mean, in my case, lack of

15:25
success around me and no proof that my idea was gonna work and also just experts saying no. you know, this stuff comes in so many different forms for people, right? Sometimes it’s our own friends and family that love us and means so well, but they’re the ones that are like, are you sure you should have quit your job or are you sure you’re qualified? Yeah, did you? Yeah. So Jamie, know,

15:54
the audience of this podcast, they’re all small business owners or aspiring business owners. And one of the questions that I got to ask you actually was, how does one even start a makeup company? Let’s say I want to start a cream or concealer for myself. Like how do you even make that? Yeah. So I didn’t know anybody, right? In the beauty industry. And I didn’t know the answer to that question when I started. Literally didn’t know.

16:20
The big blessing of course is Google and reading everything about how things are made. In my case, I never formulated anything in my kitchen, although you certainly can. There’s a lot of entrepreneurs that put together beautiful products inside their home and they formulate them. And I didn’t do that and I don’t have a chemistry background. And so what I did instead was Googled a lot and learned that through reading tons of stuff that’s out there,

16:49
and then starting to go to trade shows, I learned that most cosmetic companies manufacture either in their own facilities they own, but almost all of them also use these third party manufacturing facilities that have tons of chemists and tons of formulators. A lot of them are FDA approved. And so a lot of the big companies use these manufacturers. And so I started doing my homework on who are they and

17:16
you know, and trying to understand the whole process. And what I learned quickly, Steve, was that in the beauty world, who you manufacture with is like the most closely guarded secret. And so, you know, people protect their formulas, they protect who they manufacture with. And so I ended up having to get really scrappy.

17:41
And what I did was I went into all the department stores and kind of just, and I knew most all the brands in existence. Cause I had been, you know, seeing them as a consumer my whole life, but I made a list of every brand that sold inside department store. By the way, this is, I don’t even know if this is embarrassing. I’m going to share it with you though. Cause again, maybe someone out there needs to hear it, but um,

18:02
I made a list of every company, every brand that sold inside the department stores and same with all the brands that sold inside like the Sephora, all the beauty retailers. And I sat in my living room and I cold called every single company and whoever I could get on the phone, I would ask like, oh, I’m looking for a really great manufacturer. Is there anyone you recommend? And most of the people hung up on me. You know I mean? Yeah, of course.

18:30
And I got a hold of one really kind woman who probably should have never shared this. She worked for a smaller makeup company that was sold inside Sephora. Totally not a competitor to what I did either, but she was lovely. And she’s like, oh, here, you know, here’s our favorite one. And she gave me the name of their manufacturer in New York city. And I thanked her and called him up and that he became our very first. I mean, now we have dozens and dozens of manufacturers we work with, but that’s how I got my very first one.

18:58
went out and did a meeting and it was really, think sheer grace because, listen, I was willing to get hung up on hundreds of times, but finally was able to get through to someone and ends up he makes products for a lot of the largest brands in the country. And so they have, you know, all the unsexy stuff I had to learn about, which is like FDA regulatory compliance and clinical, you know, clinical safety testing and all that stuff.

19:26
It was really sheer grace that they ended up being certified and compliant in all those areas. so they made our very first products. How do you make a formulation though, when you don’t have a background in chemistry? Yeah, so, you know, there’s a lot of different ways to do it. The way that we did it is we really leveraged all the chemists that were part of the manufacturer. And we assembled an advisory board as well. And then, you you just have to work with someone who’s patient, because in my case,

19:56
It was hundreds of iterations of our concealer, for example, back and forth before it actually worked for me. So it wasn’t like I could take something out there on the market and say, oh, make it like this, because there wasn’t anything out there that worked for me. And so when we started getting formulation samples, I mean, it was hundreds of iterations. And after launching our concealer and it being the first really big product that had a high repeat purchase rate,

20:24
One of the things that I did right and I did, oh my gosh, I did so many things wrong and I share all of those in the book too. But one of the things that I did right was I kept that, I kept my blinders on when we finally got into retail stores. What happens is they want new all the time. So they’re like, can you have something new for this season, new for this quarter? This is a big trend. Can you make something new for this? Cause everyone’s trying to get short-term money. And you know, we stuck to the whole.

20:52
If it doesn’t work better than anything out there, I don’t want to launch it. And I remember it took us seven years before we launched our first moisturizer. And that was something that, you know, all the stores were asking for, you know, for us to create from day one, but it wasn’t right. And so in that case, I probably drove teams of chemists crazy, but it was like, listen, I have really sensitive skin. And if I can’t wear it, like you can’t fake authenticity. So I can’t go out there and sell something.

21:20
but that doesn’t work for me. And we kept that discipline in terms of saying no to short-term sales because the product wasn’t right yet and really focused on. So in the case of the moisture, I was like seven years before we launched our very first one. So that was so many iterations to get it right. unlike a lot of other companies in the beauty space where they make their money off of what’s trending at the moment,

21:48
and they have constant pressure to launch new innovations nonstop. We took a different approach, which is let’s really get products that are like hero products that are part of your daily life and that women love because that’s where the repeat purchase rates. I’ve always seen business as like anyone can get a sale once and that’s just a sale. But when you have customers that love something so much that they buy it a second time,

22:17
that’s a brand. Right. And I wanted to build a brand. you know, and, and when you do that, I think that’s when you get, you know, avid avid fans that spread the word to you because, know, so many people out there are just looking for us to add value and make their lives better. And, and for the products that and services we create to do what they say. And when they actually do, then people do spread the word. And in the early years, that’s how we stayed alive because we

22:45
couldn’t afford advertising. So was really we kept the lights on because the very few people that started buying the product would post their own befores afters online and started spreading the word organically. And that’s really what kept us alive before we had the big retailers saying yes to us. What’s a realistic startup cost to launch a single product? I mean, why was this company willing to work with you in the beginning when you had nothing?

23:12
Well, we talking like tens of thousands of dollars or no, they actually did my very first samples for free. Really? And yeah, they made my very first samples for free. And you know, I think in their case, they work with enough huge brands and maybe they just went with their gut. I don’t know why, but they made the very first samples for free. And you know, it doesn’t cost much to make it. I mean, they have their formulators time maybe, you I

23:38
poured my heart out in the meeting and told them my big vision for this huge shifting culture in the beauty industry and all this kind of stuff. Maybe they just had a gut feeling and I’m not sure, but there’s definitely manufacturers out there that will do it for free. You just have to be careful. What I mean by that is, and by the way, we started with under $100,000 all in. I have some stories I can share if you want me to about some of the process of getting investors and how that happened and how it didn’t happen.

24:08
All of that. And I share a lot of those in my book, Believe It Too, for the first time. Because I think when we go through that process of looking for money or of hoping people invest, or even if should we bring on investors, you know what I mean? I think that whole journey is so complex and so layered. you know, we- In terms of that first product, was there like a large minimum order quantity? Like the samples were free, but how much did you actually have to buy upfront? Do you remember?

24:37
Oh gosh, let me think back. It wasn’t very high. Yeah, there’s the, but to your point, there’s a lot of contract manufacturers where they, do have minimums for sure. There’s a lot of them that don’t. And I think if you can find one that doesn’t, it’s great. Um, we were only selling two to three orders a day on our website. So if I, if I think back, I feel like the highest MOQ minimum order quantity was probably a thousand units at that place, which is not very high.

25:01
and but you’re right. But you know what I would say to you, Steve, by the way, no one’s ever gone this granular. So let’s go there. I love it. Right. This is the good stuff because like the stuff I wish I had known earlier on, right. The stuff that saves us nights, crying ourselves asleep in terms of I have so many stories of rejection in this book and how I handled it and like, had I done it differently, it would have changed everything. And anyways, but also just we save ourselves time and money. feel like when we share these stories at a granular level. So I love

25:31
You’re the only person in the whole press tour for the book who has asked me anything like this. But yeah, and so what I want to say to that is, you know, there’s the MOQs and minimum order quantities and there’s the, you know, formulation and how much do samples cost and all that. What I would say for me, and this happened, I think through sheer grace also, I just, didn’t know what I didn’t know at the time. And I was very blessed to get a ethical manufacturing partner from day one.

26:00
because that’s not always the case. And I definitely met some down the road that weren’t ethical for sure, because we’ve worked with probably hundreds at this point. But what I would say to every person out there in their business right now, whether it’s a product business or a service business or anything else, is the importance of knowing where you want to go one day. So I knew I eventually wanted to change. I would write in my journal.

26:28
I help billions with a B of women live better lives. I’ve never shared that before, by the way, but anyways, I would write that every single day and I knew where I wanted to go. And so I knew in order to do that and to scale at the pace I had imagined, by the way, this is during the years of getting no, hearing no from everyone. I would still- These are the best years actually for the people listening. And I would still write things like that down that seemed absurd, right? I helped billions of women live better lives. Like I would write those things down.

26:58
And meanwhile, I’m sitting there hoping to have a $1 hot dog from Costco that night because from the stand outside Costco, I don’t know if you’ve ever had one, they’re really good. But we were scrappy, right? And we were hearing no and no after no after no. So one thing happened in terms of contract manufacturing that was really sheer grace. But now when I look back, knowing where you’re going one day. So I knew in order to help billions of women,

27:28
with a B that, OK, we have to scale really big. And in order to do that fast enough, it likely means we’ll either go public as a brand one day or we’ll be acquired by someone who has hundreds of, has people on the ground in hundreds of countries and can really help spread our message quicker than we can do on our own. So I knew that was going to be the end goal one day. What I didn’t know was in order to ever often even just bring on investors, let alone go public.

27:56
or be acquired, there are so many things you have to have buttoned up like crystal clear, I is dotted, T is crossed in order to actually have something of value that they’re gonna pay a lot of money for. And part of that stems from the very beginning of even how you’re setting up your own IP, intellectual property and your own formulations. And one thing that happened by sheer grace,

28:25
But what I would say to maybe someone in your community needs this little tip right now is that, you know, we owned all of our formulas. And when we worked with our very first manufacturer, even when we had no money and we had no success yet, we were able to have ownership of the formula. It just was something intuitively I felt like we needed. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I didn’t yet know how critical that would be.

28:51
And I also didn’t know that there’s something called like in our case and in manufacturing process of a batch recipe. So it’s not just what’s your formula in terms of what are the ingredients and quantitative, but also how is it actually made almost like the way you make a cake, like turn the oven to 325 degrees, add the egg first, mix it for five minutes, whatever that is. The batch recipe for every formula, those two things I didn’t realize how

29:19
critical those would be to own. And what happens is if you don’t get these things in place early on, when you get really successful, manufacturers don’t want to give them to you because they don’t ever want to risk you leaving and making your stuff somewhere else. Right. So you’ve got to get all these things in place early on. And, you know, if anyone in your community knows for sure they want to take on investors or they want to sell their business one day.

29:45
these kind of, know, learn whatever you need to do to make that happen. All the things, right? Listen to this show, meet people that have done, have exited their companies and learn everything you’re going to need to do to make it happen one day. And then back all that up to right now and start getting those things in place. Because I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs that are so excited about the creative side of their business, which that’s the fun part, right? And they’re so excited about

30:15
the product or about what’s selling right now or about revenue or this or that, all those things that matter. And they forget these like unsexy foundational things that if you don’t get in place, you’ll never be able likely never likely never be able to to sell your business or to get what what you should for it. know, we had this play out in real life, you know, after we finally

30:40
finally got yeses from manufacturers and from QV, I mean, from retailers and from QVC. And we were growing and growing and growing. And eight years into our business, we sold 100 % of it to L’Oreal, but we went through the whole process and there was, and I did meetings for three years with them, which I talk about in the book and how it all happened and how it almost didn’t and everything else. But there was a moment where the night before the deal is supposed to happen.

31:08
There was one product out of 400 that we couldn’t find ownership, proof of ownership for. And it was the worst night ever. Our lawyers didn’t know if the deal was going to go through and I knew we owned it. So I knew, and I knew that our manufacturer knew that we owned it and I could not find the document and writing anywhere. And it was a really rough night. And thank God I literally prayed all night and the next and cried. And the next morning,

31:38
they sent it to us in writing and we were able, everything was able to proceed. Uh, but I just, you know, it just, reminds me of like the things that we don’t even think about cause a, they’re not fun. Who wants to deal with this stuff? Right. It’s like getting it all together early on is so important to set you up for, you know, success in the future.

32:01
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.

32:29
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.

32:59
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.com. Now back to the show.

33:09
Jamie, if you can look back really far, do you remember how you made your first sale? So before QVC, it seems like QVC is what really launched your product, but back before QVC, how are you getting your sales and even just staying afloat? Yeah, mean, everything was really came down to our website and it was really just two to three orders a day. And it was real people that started spreading the word and posting their own befores and afters. I definitely had friends and family both.

33:36
who knew we weren’t in these retail stores, but they would go into the retail stores, ask to talk to the manager and say, have you heard of IT Cosmetics? And they’re like, it what? Like, oh, can you please do a written request to corporate to carry IT Cosmetics? Like my friends and family would hustle. And I did all the time. I would call stores. Do you carry IT Cosmetics? Can I talk to the manager? I mean, you do what you got to do. But at the end of the day, was, was, you know, grassroots, real people that

34:06
that would try the product and spread their word. It was all really through our website. It was word of mouth basically. It was word of mouth. then we didn’t plan for it to be QVC first, but that happening and the way it happened, single greatest life and business lesson I’ve ever learned in terms of the power of authenticity and the power of trusting your gut over experts advice when they conflict.

34:33
I believe your gut is always more powerful than anyone else’s advice. I think that so many of us let self-doubt and all the things take over to the point where we don’t even hear our own gut or our own knowing anymore. Anybody in that position, I talk about so much of that in the book. But QVC ended up being direct to consumer and was in live and was one of the biggest blessings I could have ever hoped for.

35:01
And it’s essentially became live advertising for us into a hundred million homes. after, you know, every time we would go on QVC, a lot of people would see us on television, but want to actually try the product in person. So that built up demand for actual retail stores to carry our product. And, and then the rest is history after that. It was a long journey. How does one get on QVC and do you actually recommend QVC for most e-commerce brands if you are able to get on the show? Oh, yes.

35:30
I would say do everything to get on QVC. I sent my product there for three years and heard no for three years, dozens of times. I would find anybody I could on LinkedIn who worked at QVC or Sephora or Ulta or department stores and send everyone the product. And it was no for three years. When we finally got a yes from QVC, it changed everything.

35:56
And, I had always heard from other entrepreneurs that you can sell, you know, more on QVC in an hour than you can all year in department stores. As a beauty company, I’d always heard that. And then to see the power of it happening right before my eyes was the craziest journey. You know, Steve, as you know, I, you know, after three years of sending our products to them and hearing, no, no, no, you’re not the right fit.

36:22
It’s a long story that I share in the book on how, but we finally got a yes and got one shot to go live. And here’s the thing, Steve, is like, were, know, as I shared, we were selling only two to three orders a day on our website. And when I learned we got one shot to go live for 10 minutes with our product, it was, we had to hit their sales goal. We had to have over 6,000, we had to sell over 6,000 units of our concealer. And we’re only selling two to three a day on our website.

36:50
but that is large volumes. In the beauty space, it’s consignment. So if it doesn’t sell, you have to take it back. And so our one shot that we got, you should never take a purchase order you can’t afford to lose ever. But at this point, we were three years in and we didn’t know how we were gonna stay alive as a company. And so we said yes to it. And it was this moment where literally everything was on the line.

37:15
We applied for SBA loan. first 22 banks said no, and it was bank number 23 that gave us an SBA loan to cover just the inventory cost of that purchase order. And it was one of the most wild moments in my life because I knew the future of the company surviving basically came down to the 10 minutes and so much pressure. And I flew out there a week before.

37:43
are airing and I sat in this rental car in the parking lot all alone staring at the front door, like praying, crying, feeling like, because we had outside experts had said, here’s what you need to do to have success. Use models with perfect skin, all the stuff that was not why I created the company. And I just had this vision. What if I go on QVC and take my makeup off and show my bright red rosacea, show real women and.

38:08
And I wanted to stand for my values and my beliefs. And we all know what our values and beliefs are. But we often all face situations where someone wants to challenge those or where we’re challenging them ourselves and going, okay, am I gonna stand for what I believe in when it feels like everything’s on the line? And I just had this moment in that rental car where I just imagined like who that woman was watching on the other end.

38:34
it came down to the idea and the belief I have. And now I’ve learned it over and over that you can’t fake authenticity. And I wanted to, you know, I remember thinking of like a woman, like I kept imagining a single mom folding laundry who had forgotten that she mattered and was too busy to remember that she’s beautiful. And I rather have, I remember this moment in the car where I realized like, if she’s going to turn on the television and see me and give me two seconds of her precious time, like,

39:03
I’d rather have her look up on the screen and see me showing my rosacea and showing real women that look like her. Even if she buys nothing, I’d rather have her for that moment feel like she’s seen and like she matters than like go on TV, show flawless skin, you know, like everyone’s done for years. And even if I sold more product, it mean I was standing for nothing. And so, yeah, it came down to a 10 minute window. And Steve, I remember the clock.

39:32
started at 10 minutes and it was like 9.59, 9.58. And I learned, oh my gosh, I learned right before the show that you’re not guaranteed the 10 minutes. If for some reason it wasn’t selling well, they can cut your time live. And it was so much pressure. But I remember the moment my bare face went up on national TV and I showed all different women of every age and shape and size and skin tone and skin challenge. there was like one minute left in the show and the host was.

40:01
Like, oh, the deep shade is almost gone. The tan shade, there’s a few hundred left. And then I remember that the moment, it was down to the 10 minute mark and the big sold out sign came up across the screen. And I started crying on national television and my husband came running through the double doors and I was like, real women have spoken. And he’s like, we’re not going bankrupt. And that one airing turned into five that year and a hundred the next year. And then we did over 250 live shows a year and still do right now. And so we built the biggest

40:31
Beauty Brand and QVC’s history, is at this moment right now. And again, I only share that because it was three years of them saying no, and you’re not the right fit. so, you know, anyone in your community who’s an entrepreneur right now who keeps hearing no, or you’re not the right fit, it’s like, no one can tell you you’re not the right fit. So Jamie, I recently read your book, which I recommend everyone pick up. I’m not sure if it’s going to be, it’s released in February, right?

40:57
Yeah, yeah, it comes out the week of February 22nd. Yeah, I’m so excited. You know what I love? Like I’m interviewing you right now and you actually write exactly like how you talk. So it’s completely authentic, the book. You know what? I wanted to write every word myself. So I said no to a book deal for like five years. So I’m like, you know what? If I’m to do it, you can’t fake authenticity. And I just feel like we’re all this together, which is why I’m grateful for your show too, because it’s like when we share these real stories, it’s

41:25
It’s, you know, it’s, think it has a huge impact on all of our journeys of learning to believe in ourself and trust ourself and, and, and know we’re enough and that we’re not alone and become the person we’re born to be. have two final questions. If we have time, these are quick ones. One is you wrote that balance is a lie. And, and I completely agree. Uh, you have to make some sacrifices in order to be successful.

41:51
And I wanted to ask you if there’s any regrets because you put so much into your work working 20 hour days is that I’m sure some of the things were sacrificed, right? So if you were to do everything all over again, would you have continued on this path? Yeah, I don’t believe that I need, cause I worked a hundred hour weeks for close to 10 years and I don’t think I needed to have done that to have the same outcome. And I wish I had learned to believe

42:21
that my success was possible sooner. And I did learn to believe it. And then I made better decisions, but it was interesting that after three years of hearing no, and you’re not the right fit, and you’re not enough, when we finally started getting yeses, and then Steve, I remember like we finally started getting sales traction, and all of a sudden, all the retailers wanted us, and then all of a sudden we were doing really well. It was almost as if I felt like I had to strike while the iron’s hot, like, oh my gosh.

42:48
What if it all comes crashing down at any moment, right? So many of us, have these moments of success and then we think like, can I believe it? And which is a kind of a form of imposter syndrome in a way. And, you know, we started having the kind of success I’ve never seen in my life. I was not raised around that success when I was working as a Denny’s waitress, saving my tip money to buy a Mac lipstick or Lancome eyeliner. And to start,

43:16
passing those brands in size. These are kind of things where I was just like, oh my gosh, is this real? And so I drove myself so hard and I also became addicted to work. And so did my husband. And we had this realization, right? Because busyness or work addiction is like any other addiction. It separates you from you. And it’s almost numbing to the point where you don’t even feel the day anymore.

43:44
And when we realized this was happening, it was a big part of why we decided, okay, you know what? Let’s partner with another company like L’Oreal instead of going public, because if we went public, we’d still be running it ourselves and it would still all be on us. And I got to the point and I talk a lot about this in the book on how do you learn to trust yourself? Right. And I realized I need to trust myself to not trust myself that I’m not going to keep working a hundred hour weeks. And so.

44:14
We made better decisions and in that. And so when I look back, I don’t believe that working hundred hour weeks is why in any part we created a billion dollar company. I think I could have worked 40 hours or 50 hours or whatever it might be. Would it have happened a little bit slower? Maybe, but maybe not. And I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more. So those would be the big things. Okay. Do you have time for one more? Do you have to go? Yeah. Okay.

44:43
I’m supposed to be on another, you know that I, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s why I’m asking. Final question. There’s an excerpt in the book that I’m going to read out loud and I wanted to understand exactly what you meant. There’s one line and this one for some reason when I read it, struck me. said, without intending to, he also instilled to me deep, that deep belief that women are stronger than men, that men hold women back and that women need to be super women to do it all on their own. And I personally, I have two very strong business partners who are both women.

45:12
And I’m terrified now that if they read your book, they’re going to realize that I’m the main thing holding them back. So I’m just kind of curious what you meant by that line. Yeah. So that line is talking about part of my childhood, right? And what I went through. And in this book, I talk a lot about how some of the things that happened to us shape our beliefs and how we’re kind of all in this journey in a lot of ways of almost

45:38
re-figuring out what the right thing is to believe. you know, I talk about being raised with a dad who was an alcoholic and a mom who was superwoman and who kind of did it all. And I talk about the realization that, you know, growing up, I never wanted to get married and I wasn’t sure why. And I realized why, that I had this belief that women are superwomen and that men hold women back.

46:04
All those things. And I talk about the journey of learning to overcome that and of learning to trust my own gut that when my husband proposed, I didn’t want him to propose. I told him not to, but when he did, even though my head told me, Oh, no, no, no. Like, you know, when I checked in with my gut and my internal knowing, I had such peace about it that I said yes. And I continue to unfold a lot of these beliefs in my life. also

46:32
you know, because of how I was raised, I always thought, oh, I’m a lone wolf. I’m independent. Like, I don’t need to depend on anyone else. Like, right, for anyone in your audience right now listening that maybe thinks like, you know, oh, independence is a badge of honor and I’m a lone wolf and I got this. That was me my whole life. I, again, based on the stuff I saw growing up, and then I had this…

46:57
wild journey where I, and I share so much of this book I’ve never shared before, but while building this business, I was, we were also trying to start a family and for 10 years went through IVF, went through everything you can go through and couldn’t carry a pregnancy full term and eventually ended up looking into adoption and surrogacy and, through that process of having our daughter wonder who’s now two.

47:23
I actually needed to depend on another woman in that journey. And it ended up becoming one of the best experiences in my life. And I learned, oh, life isn’t meant to do alone. And oh, being a lone wolf or independent isn’t a badge of honor. In my case, it actually was just a deep seated fear of me not being worthy of other people showing up for. And I learned that.

47:51
And it helped me shift my perspective on not wanting to do it all myself and being afraid to count on other people. So yeah, life’s a journey, right? Yeah. So Jamie, I want to be respectful of your time. If you’ve enjoyed, if you’re listening to this and you’ve enjoyed this conversation, the book is full of very personal stories, things that I would never put down in writing myself. Some of the stories you told in the book that were really interesting.

48:19
So I encourage everyone to go pick up the book. Jamie, you are true to your word. You’re so authentic. Your writing is just like talking to you. And I had a great time talking to you today. Oh, I had such a great time. Steve, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

48:38
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now Jamie is super inspiring and down to earth and I really enjoyed reading her book. So if you need a dose of inspiration, then be sure to check out Believe It on Amazon. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoderjob.com slash episode 343. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

49:06
So head on over to mywifecoupterjob.com slash KLAVIOIO. Once again, that’s mywifecoupterjob.com slash KLAVIOIO. 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-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div.

49:35
Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog. 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.