eCommerce Master Plan

By Chloe ThomasBusiness Entrepreneurship Technology Marketing

eCommerce Master Plan episodes

January 12eCommerce MasterPlan | 577: The Xero Shoes 10x Growth Story with Steven Sashen
Steven Sashen is the co-founder and Chief Barefoot Officer of Xero Shoes. Selling via their international Shopify stores, Amazon, and wholesale. They launched in November 2009 and in 2024 did just under $68 million.

Steven returns to the show to reveal how Xero Shoes jumped to nearly $68M — and the real decisions behind that growth.

Hit PLAY to hear:
How Xero Shoes leapt from $6M to $68M — and why it still feels like a startup
The real reason they moved from WooCommerce to Shopify (and what went wrong )
Why “best practices” are often bad practices — and what Steven tests instead
The surprising truth about wholesale vs. DTC and where real scale actually comes from
How Xero Shoes got NBA + WNBA players training in their footwear
The product philosophy that fuels their growth: make shoes that truly change lives

Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[05:00] “Data-Driven, Opinion-Free Marketing”
[09:07] Platform Choice Doesn’t Drive Conversion
[11:42] “Website Launch: A Workable Rush”
[14:56] “Scaling Footwear Through Retail Doors”
[16:39] Global Privacy Challenges Expand
[21:34] “Life-Changing Shoes Inspire Basketball Innovation”
[23:39] “Impact of Barefoot-Inspired Footwear”
[25:40] Listen to Steven’s Top Tips!

Full episode notes here: https://ecmp.info/577
—
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WEBVTT
00:00.031 –> 00:07.703
[SPEAKER_03]: If your business is not doing these two things, change in Bill’s lives and letting you tell the truth, then you might want to reconsider what you’re doing.
00:07.783 –> 00:10.968
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t do something just to make money.
00:11.108 –> 00:14.573
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t, I’m not arrogant enough to think that your way is not appropriate.
00:15.114 –> 00:22.545
[SPEAKER_03]: But when you can do those two things, it’s like having a superpower, and it’s really, really enjoyable when you have a superpower.
00:24.736 –> 00:27.243
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.
00:27.785 –> 00:31.856
[SPEAKER_00]: Here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
00:32.397 –> 00:37.933
[SPEAKER_00]: Cutting through the hide-off to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond.
00:38.194 –> 00:40.500
[SPEAKER_00]: Here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
00:43.450 –> 00:44.753
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello and welcome.
00:44.773 –> 00:45.775
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s great to have you here.
00:45.835 –> 00:49.583
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
00:49.603 –> 00:52.870
[SPEAKER_01]: In this episode, we’re going inspiring to the max.
00:52.890 –> 01:01.088
[SPEAKER_01]: We are catching up with another one of our past guests since the last time Steven Session from Zero Shoes was on the show, which was.
01:01.068 –> 01:04.512
[SPEAKER_01]: 2018 to eight years ago, they’ve ten X the business.
01:04.552 –> 01:10.219
[SPEAKER_01]: They’ve gone from just under six million dollars a year to 68 million dollars a year and that was in 2004.
01:11.200 –> 01:12.622
[SPEAKER_01]: That’s the latest numbers he was able to give us.
01:12.682 –> 01:14.745
[SPEAKER_01]: I’m sure it went bigger in 2025.
01:15.606 –> 01:21.793
[SPEAKER_01]: Stephen, as you’re about to hear, is a fascinating person, a great to chat to and he’s
01:21.773 –> 01:23.175
[SPEAKER_01]: He’s giving us a couple of rants.
01:23.215 –> 01:26.540
[SPEAKER_01]: He’s giving us a couple of lovely nuggity insights.
01:26.601 –> 01:33.892
[SPEAKER_01]: His top tips are excellent and we’re going to start off with their recent move from WooCommerce to Shopify.
01:33.972 –> 01:37.277
[SPEAKER_01]: Get into some privacy stuff, get into some marketing bits and pieces.
01:38.038 –> 01:41.324
[SPEAKER_01]: There’s just a lot, there’s a lot in this one and it’s really fascinating.
01:41.364 –> 01:43.507
[SPEAKER_01]: So really pleased he was able to come back on the show.
01:43.948 –> 01:46.752
[SPEAKER_01]: Make sure you listen to the end so you don’t miss out on any of it.
01:52.300 –> 01:54.343
[SPEAKER_01]: and now to introduce our special guest.
01:54.523 –> 01:59.129
[SPEAKER_01]: Stephen Sashin is the co-founder and chief barefoot officer of zero shoes.
01:59.550 –> 02:09.824
[SPEAKER_01]: Selling via their international Shopify stores, Amazon and wholesale, they launched in November 2009 and in 2024 did just under 68 million.
02:10.184 –> 02:11.046
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello, Stephen.
02:11.406 –> 02:12.728
[SPEAKER_03]: Am I really a special guest?
02:13.108 –> 02:16.433
[SPEAKER_01]: You are a special guest, all our guests are special guests.
02:16.453 –> 02:18.696
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, if they’re all special, then I’m not special.
02:18.828 –> 02:27.009
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you’re kind of extra special because you’re one of our past guests who’s been gracious enough to come back on and spare us in about an hour of your time.
02:27.390 –> 02:28.793
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I’m thrilled and happy to do it.
02:29.174 –> 02:30.537
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s lovely to have you back.
02:30.718 –> 02:31.981
[SPEAKER_01]: How dare I ask?
02:32.021 –> 02:34.006
[SPEAKER_01]: How have the last eight years being?
02:34.026 –> 02:35.149
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it’s been that long.
02:35.365 –> 02:40.215
[SPEAKER_03]: I barely remember what I had for breakfast two hours ago, so that’s a tricky one for me.
02:40.336 –> 02:51.880
[SPEAKER_03]: It all, it’s frankly all a bit of a blur, I mean eight years ago, we were Jesus, it’s 2025, so we were somewhere around five or six million.
02:52.001 –> 02:52.682
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
02:52.662 –> 02:57.712
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we were tiny back then, and now we’re not tiny, although in my head we’re still a start-up.
02:57.792 –> 03:06.229
[SPEAKER_03]: So, in many ways, they’ve been the same because I’m still the gap between where we are and where I know we can be, seems just as long.
03:07.030 –> 03:11.599
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s just that now we have a lot more people doing a lot more things than me doing a lot fewer things.
03:12.068 –> 03:15.152
[SPEAKER_01]: What’s it been like going through that journey in the business?
03:15.232 –> 03:17.715
[SPEAKER_01]: Clearly your roles changed a fair bit with it.
03:17.735 –> 03:18.697
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, awkward.
03:19.558 –> 03:21.340
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s like going through a puberty, but worse.
03:21.981 –> 03:24.404
[SPEAKER_03]: And we’re still figuring it out, frankly.
03:24.684 –> 03:27.728
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s, we have a private equity partner in a minority position.
03:28.269 –> 03:33.696
[SPEAKER_03]: And so we’ve been juggling that along with just the, what the company is doing on its own.
03:34.217 –> 03:36.660
[SPEAKER_03]: And then of course, in the intervening time, some people got the flu.
03:37.421 –> 03:41.586
[SPEAKER_03]: And there’ve been political things that I hear about.
03:41.566 –> 03:45.810
[SPEAKER_03]: something with the word territory, whatever.
03:46.431 –> 03:51.476
[SPEAKER_03]: Something where we’re suddenly paying a lot of money for the same stuff we were getting for much less money just a few short months ago.
03:51.997 –> 03:58.763
[SPEAKER_03]: So it’s just it, you know, I met some young entrepreneurs and they were complaining about how every day is just the crazy town.
03:59.224 –> 04:02.067
[SPEAKER_03]: And I said, I’ve been doing this 16 years, that never changes.
04:02.928 –> 04:06.291
[SPEAKER_03]: So in many ways, the answer to your question is, say, I’ll say, well,
04:07.688 –> 04:15.538
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s interesting that we feel like there’s so many new problems to deal with at the moment, but actually any year there were new problems to deal with.
04:15.586 –> 04:16.908
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s really always the same.
04:17.028 –> 04:26.942
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I will say it’s interesting that everyone in the company, but especially my wife and I who started this with no experience in footwear, certainly, the amount that we’ve learned is tremendous.
04:27.002 –> 04:31.989
[SPEAKER_03]: So the way we address certain problems, the way we understand certain problems is radically different.
04:32.850 –> 04:39.079
[SPEAKER_03]: But it’s still emotionally and psychically feels like the same thing just day after day, it’s groundhog day.
04:39.059 –> 04:48.215
[SPEAKER_03]: My line is, you know, I hope that we’re smart enough for no someone smart enough ideally someone within the company who knows how to put out the fire that started overnight even there’s nothing changed since yesterday.
04:49.157 –> 04:53.584
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that’s quite a philosophical way of looking at, but quite spot on.
04:53.604 –> 04:57.752
[SPEAKER_01]: I was going to say it’s like, the more you learn, the more aware of other issues you become.
04:57.792 –> 05:00.797
[SPEAKER_01]: There’s a, there’s a kind of joy and naivety, isn’t that?
05:00.828 –> 05:07.865
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, the line that I have is I’ve been an internet marketer since 1992, which means I have a lot of opinions, but it also means I just don’t give a shit what any of them are.
05:07.905 –> 05:09.348
[SPEAKER_03]: All I care about is the data.
05:09.950 –> 05:14.500
[SPEAKER_03]: So I know I know less and less in a weird way.
05:14.561 –> 05:17.267
[SPEAKER_03]: I’m confident about.
05:17.247 –> 05:18.229
[SPEAKER_03]: I’m trying to think of how to say this.
05:18.249 –> 05:19.952
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s not that I’m confident about my opinions.
05:19.992 –> 05:22.016
[SPEAKER_03]: I’m just willing to pursue them.
05:22.076 –> 05:26.143
[SPEAKER_03]: And I know how to do that in the most, the quickest and cheapest way possible.
05:26.604 –> 05:28.708
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t want to spend a lot of money to find out of her wrong.
05:29.569 –> 05:30.932
[SPEAKER_03]: But I have no problem being wrong.
05:31.393 –> 05:32.775
[SPEAKER_03]: I just want to find out quick and cheap.
05:33.211 –> 05:34.854
[SPEAKER_01]: words to live by that, I think.
05:35.596 –> 05:48.221
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, one thing you let slip as we were, as we were preparing for this, and which I had kind of worked out with a little, you know, looking at source code, is last time we chatted you were a WooCommerce store.
05:48.321 –> 05:50.305
[SPEAKER_01]: You’re now a Shopify store.
05:52.029 –> 05:55.135
[SPEAKER_01]: When, when and how did that happen?
05:57.173 –> 05:58.235
[SPEAKER_03]: to pick up the long sign.
05:58.255 –> 05:58.956
[SPEAKER_03]: I did.
06:00.679 –> 06:11.096
[SPEAKER_03]: I’m going to preface this by saying it was not my idea and not my idea for a number of reasons not that let me preface this by saying again I’ve been doing this a long time.
06:11.517 –> 06:20.211
[SPEAKER_03]: I have seen ecommerce platforms come and go many of them and my line is all ecommerce platforms all shop and carts suck differently.
06:20.191 –> 06:26.883
[SPEAKER_03]: So there’s never anything that gives you everything you want, and there are certain things that give you more or less flexibility than others.
06:27.384 –> 06:30.369
[SPEAKER_03]: I’ll tell you why we did it in a moment, but I’ll tell you about my resistance first.
06:31.431 –> 06:33.635
[SPEAKER_03]: One is that I’m just not a fan of closed platforms.
06:34.597 –> 06:39.346
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t like it when other people are telling me based on, quote, best practices, what we should be doing.
06:39.506 –> 06:40.748
[SPEAKER_03]: I have repeatedly.
06:40.728 –> 06:47.397
[SPEAKER_03]: demonstrated with split testing that what people call best practices are not best for us and are often quite the work, the opposite.
06:47.738 –> 07:02.719
[SPEAKER_03]: And remember being at a WooCommerce event a years ago they invited me to go and there was a guy named Pep Lyah who has a company called Conversion XL and he was one of the keynotes and his opening slide was there are no best practices and I literally stood up on my chair and started whistling and clapping.
07:02.699 –> 07:14.013
[SPEAKER_03]: So ironically, the checkout process that I created for our WooCommerce shop way back went a long time ago with something that became a native to Shopify some years later.
07:14.634 –> 07:18.359
[SPEAKER_03]: So that was okay, but then they’ve changed since and I’m not as happy about it.
07:19.039 –> 07:24.486
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t like when I can’t have access to my data at a very fundamental level, especially something’s going wrong.
07:25.067 –> 07:26.749
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t like it if I
07:26.729 –> 07:36.746
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, there’s a bunch of things, but the the biggest one was that there were a number of things that we didn’t win commerce on a daily basis that Shopify didn’t do.
07:36.886 –> 07:41.173
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I started looking at Shopify the day they came out and I looked at it every six months.
07:41.774 –> 07:47.805
[SPEAKER_03]: We had an employee young guy, like in his early 20s, who without telling me was looking at how do we migrate to Shopify.
07:48.225 –> 07:52.753
[SPEAKER_03]: And when I found out, I said, okay, if you can solve these five problems, I’m game.
07:52.733 –> 07:54.736
[SPEAKER_03]: but you can’t because I looked at it last week.
07:54.756 –> 07:58.842
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn’t know you were and if you had just told me I would have, you know, made us say you wouldn’t have wasted your time.
07:59.843 –> 08:02.027
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, things have changed a bit.
08:02.067 –> 08:11.861
[SPEAKER_03]: We’ve been able to code some solutions and frankly, Shopify wanted us very badly so they accelerated some things to fix a few problems that would have had us dead in the water.
08:13.323 –> 08:17.509
[SPEAKER_03]: But I’m still just not happy about what we had to do to get here.
08:17.489 –> 08:24.542
[SPEAKER_03]: There are some advantages because, you know, this is one of the things everybody thinks that Shopify has to cast pajamas, so all the developers are writing code for it.
08:24.963 –> 08:26.345
[SPEAKER_03]: But again, I’ve been around a long time.
08:26.365 –> 08:27.908
[SPEAKER_03]: I’ve seen this game play out.
08:28.369 –> 08:32.376
[SPEAKER_03]: Remember a few years ago when everyone thought you should be on MailChimp.
08:32.575 –> 08:33.377
[SPEAKER_03]: now they’re not.
08:34.138 –> 08:46.565
[SPEAKER_03]: It was not long ago and everyone thought you should be on one shopping cart then Volusion and then I mean these come and go and the more people writing code for something the worse the code tends to get on average because not everyone’s a good code right a cutter.
08:47.427 –> 08:49.631
[SPEAKER_03]: Again there are some things that it does well.
08:50.132 –> 08:52.778
[SPEAKER_03]: Now we had beaten up with commerce
08:52.758 –> 09:08.303
[SPEAKER_03]: Significantly and there’s code in the core of who commerce that we wrote or at least inspired at the very least But some ideas and it was times where there were things in the in the GitHub About who about certain things where there would suddenly be a bunch of people commenting Sasha and tell them they’re wrong and I would like to
09:08.688 –> 09:16.227
[SPEAKER_03]: post from a UI UX experience about why they should do it differently, and Matt Mullenwegg is a customer and I get to talk to him every now and then which is delightful.
09:16.728 –> 09:23.625
[SPEAKER_03]: So it happened because there were people in the company and in the private equity company who thought that
09:24.533 –> 09:27.297
[SPEAKER_03]: it would somehow magically and inherently be better.
09:28.038 –> 09:40.976
[SPEAKER_03]: And there was actually an interesting conversation we have a new chief growth officer and when she was doing a presentation of the board to get her job, someone in the company said, well, I hear when we switch to Shopify, we’ll see a 15% improvement in conversion.
09:41.417 –> 09:44.782
[SPEAKER_03]: And I just kind of mumbled under my breath, the same face that you just made that no one can see.
09:45.182 –> 09:47.185
[SPEAKER_03]: I kind of went platformer to depend on it.
09:47.205 –> 09:52.633
[SPEAKER_03]: And happily this new chief growth officer, she said, conversion has nothing to do with the platform you’re on.
09:52.613 –> 09:54.818
[SPEAKER_03]: it has to do with what you’re doing on the platform.
09:55.640 –> 10:00.632
[SPEAKER_03]: And if somebody sees a 15% lift, their previous site was a dumpster fire and this one obviously isn’t.
10:01.394 –> 10:11.297
[SPEAKER_03]: So I’ve seen in the past where people said, oh, if you switch, you’re going to see an improvements in search engine rankings and conversion and various other things.
10:11.277 –> 10:13.300
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, patently false.
10:13.320 –> 10:17.026
[SPEAKER_03]: If it happens for you, congratulations, but it’s not a given by an estrationally imagination.
10:17.667 –> 10:28.503
[SPEAKER_03]: So there was another one where the private equity company said, if anybody looks at you to buy you, they’re going to want to see you’re on Shopify, to which I said, the kind of people who could buy us are not on Shopify.
10:28.543 –> 10:38.398
[SPEAKER_03]: They have rolled their own, they’re in dot net or something, and getting out of Shopify to them is going to be a bigger nightmare than getting out of woo, where we had full database and root access.
10:38.497 –> 10:50.937
[SPEAKER_03]: So I would say that there was just, well, there’s many other factors, but suffice it to say it was people who didn’t understand WooCommerce didn’t know all the things we could do with it.
10:50.957 –> 10:54.222
[SPEAKER_03]: Look, we could make WooCommerce look and feel exactly like any Shopify site.
10:55.104 –> 10:56.185
[SPEAKER_03]: The commerce cannot be said.
10:56.806 –> 11:04.639
[SPEAKER_03]: And we didn’t have the opportunity to demonstrate that for various internal reasons that have we been able to do that might have been a different world.
11:05.277 –> 11:11.866
[SPEAKER_01]: So, how has it been now your on shop of this business?
11:11.886 –> 11:13.188
[SPEAKER_03]: We’re still in that process.
11:13.449 –> 11:19.697
[SPEAKER_03]: We’re still, I mean, I think that.eusite is launching, you know, as we’re taping this today or tomorrow.
11:20.499 –> 11:23.623
[SPEAKER_03]: There was another thing where there was a launch schedule.
11:23.603 –> 11:24.405
[SPEAKER_03]: Look, I’ll say it this way.
11:24.425 –> 11:42.118
[SPEAKER_03]: These are people who know e-commerce, who are listening, the people who were able to make this decision decided to do this right in the beginning of Q4, which, you know, we’re coming up on Black Friday, Cyber Monday now, and we are crossing our fingers in many ways.
11:42.098 –> 11:57.096
[SPEAKER_03]: So there’s still quite a number of things functionally that we’re working on and a very long list of things we’re working on in UIUX and legally and I mean it’s I would argue that there were people who rushed the process unnecessarily.
11:57.176 –> 12:08.730
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean we could have just waited until we had done serious, serious load testing in UIUX testing and gotten a lot of things fixed and then launched rather than doing it now at a time where
12:08.710 –> 12:18.425
[SPEAKER_03]: We’re scrambling, and frankly, leading up to through Q3, it took all of our growth team off the project and what we’re doing in woo that would have generated additional revenue.
12:19.066 –> 12:25.316
[SPEAKER_03]: So, it’s a work in progress, and of course, like any website with the company’s growing, it will continue to be a work in progress.
12:25.897 –> 12:31.967
[SPEAKER_03]: And I’m waiting to see when we get into that, let’s say more normal cadence and then I’ll have a better answer.
12:32.470 –> 12:36.076
[SPEAKER_01]: And for the benefit of the listeners, we are recording this the first week of November.
12:36.136 –> 12:40.763
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think you probably all agree that that’s a bold time to be prepared.
12:40.963 –> 12:45.871
[SPEAKER_03]: And you say, do you think bold was that on your euphemism of the day calendar?
12:45.891 –> 12:47.433
[SPEAKER_03]: Because you can rip that page out and throw it away.
12:48.435 –> 12:52.261
[SPEAKER_03]: I will say there’s one thing that Shopify is giving us that is super helpful.
12:52.781 –> 12:56.587
[SPEAKER_03]: And it’s something that I, I mean, I talked to the guys at Wu and automatic all the time.
12:56.688 –> 13:00.874
[SPEAKER_03]: And I said, the biggest thing you don’t have that we need is a really good POS system.
13:00.854 –> 13:04.926
[SPEAKER_03]: And that’s something that is, you know, Shopify native practically.
13:05.487 –> 13:10.201
[SPEAKER_03]: So, um, and similarly handling, uh, handling wholesales a little easier.
13:10.622 –> 13:16.078
[SPEAKER_03]: But again, we could have written all that code and made it even more of what we needed than something off the shelf.
13:16.565 –> 13:29.022
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I hope that, I mean, what do you say to I’d say, you don’t really know how a site migration has paid off until 12 months in a relatively, in an averagely complicated business?
13:29.342 –> 13:32.326
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but then you don’t really know because you’re comparing apples and orangutans.
13:32.366 –> 13:35.631
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you can’t, you can split test migration.
13:35.671 –> 13:38.154
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t recommend it, but it is possible.
13:38.855 –> 13:41.138
[SPEAKER_03]: And we have kept the website,
13:41.118 –> 13:48.135
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, on hold, just in case all hell breaks loose, I don’t expect that to happen, but they’re better in worse ways to handle a migration.
13:48.195 –> 13:50.200
[SPEAKER_03]: This was not done as elegantly as it could have been.
13:51.062 –> 13:52.225
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don’t think I’m speaking at a school.
13:52.245 –> 13:53.608
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t think anybody here would disagree.
13:54.213 –> 14:00.741
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I hope that in 12 months, time, six months time, it all becomes business as usual.
14:01.321 –> 14:11.433
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, and again, I would be the first guy to eat crow and say, I was totally wrong that we could have maybe managed it a little differently, but it was the best thing that ever happened to us.
14:11.834 –> 14:15.478
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t care, as long as this is doing what we need for the business, I just don’t care.
14:15.798 –> 14:24.068
[SPEAKER_03]: But I also recognize there are just some fundamental issues or fundamental constraints placed upon us now
14:24.048 –> 14:33.619
[SPEAKER_03]: restrictive, I believe, then what people have predicted because they didn’t know the the inner work is what we had done on Wu as well as I and two other people on the team do.
14:34.493 –> 14:35.194
[SPEAKER_01]: fascinating.
14:35.315 –> 14:37.239
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Steven.
14:37.339 –> 14:38.842
[SPEAKER_01]: I’m going to change to take a little bit.
14:39.864 –> 14:47.540
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned that about on Shopify, it’s somewhat easier to deal with the B2B and the wholesale sales.
14:47.560 –> 14:50.607
[SPEAKER_01]: Because that’s a big part of the zero business, isn’t it?
14:50.687 –> 14:54.595
[SPEAKER_01]: Is the relationships with distributors wholesalers and so forth?
14:54.575 –> 14:55.757
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
14:56.378 –> 14:57.540
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, no, no, no.
14:58.061 –> 15:02.929
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s a small part percentage-wise, but it’s a significant part because in footwear, that’s where the scale happens.
15:03.449 –> 15:11.503
[SPEAKER_03]: So you can do as well as you want to do online direct, but where the scale happens is when some, I mean, there’s a company that we have been talking to for a while.
15:11.843 –> 15:13.746
[SPEAKER_03]: They control, I’ll give you the Lingo.
15:13.766 –> 15:15.269
[SPEAKER_03]: They control 15,000 doors.
15:15.589 –> 15:17.773
[SPEAKER_03]: So stores can have multiple stores, those are doors.
15:18.314 –> 15:20.116
[SPEAKER_03]: So they control 15,000 doors.
15:20.617 –> 15:21.679
[SPEAKER_03]: If they put,
15:21.659 –> 15:27.548
[SPEAKER_03]: three products, just three, and every one of those doors, it’s a hundred million dollar project or whatever number it is.
15:27.588 –> 15:29.251
[SPEAKER_03]: I’m not saying math in the head.
15:29.612 –> 15:38.706
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s a big number, much bigger than what you do by having something viral happen online, and a viral online things are not always sustainable anyway.
15:39.127 –> 15:41.170
[SPEAKER_03]: So retail and in different parts of the world,
15:41.150 –> 15:41.991
[SPEAKER_03]: very different story.
15:42.151 –> 15:59.513
[SPEAKER_03]: Europe is much more retail friendly than the U.S. China has a completely different story when it comes to retail and it’s online but in a way that for most people know a lot of live shopping and key opinion leaders, whole other universe and some of those differences are showing up more and more markedly in other parts of the world.
16:00.034 –> 16:07.123
[SPEAKER_03]: So it is important to have something where we do have a very simple and robust
16:07.103 –> 16:18.727
[SPEAKER_03]: way of addressing those people’s needs and invariably the more you get into wholesale the more you have people who insist that their needs are better than everybody else is even when their company is one tenth or one hundred the size of everybody else’s.
16:19.628 –> 16:26.783
[SPEAKER_01]: So in it’s very much a case of finding the right method for each territory.
16:26.999 –> 16:37.371
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, yeah, it is and in Europe, that place that used to be connected to the, you know, don’t take, don’t, don’t, don’t point that out.
16:37.391 –> 16:39.793
[SPEAKER_01]: You’ll make me depressed.
16:39.813 –> 16:42.136
[SPEAKER_03]: I hear there was some like a tunnel or something.
16:42.156 –> 16:42.737
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t know.
16:42.757 –> 16:43.858
[SPEAKER_03]: I haven’t been there.
16:43.878 –> 16:48.283
[SPEAKER_03]: But, um, we find that even in different countries, there’s different ways you have to manage that.
16:48.323 –> 16:56.432
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, granted, it is nice having a company aka Shopify where they’ve done the heavy lifting about a lot of that, but not all of that.
16:56.412 –> 17:02.101
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, pros and cons, but, yes, every different territory, there’s something you need to deal with.
17:02.462 –> 17:05.467
[SPEAKER_03]: And that’s changing very quickly, especially having to do a privacy.
17:06.048 –> 17:15.062
[SPEAKER_03]: That’s expanding and changing in weird ways, like right now in Texas, there’s a law that is so vague, there’s no way it’ll ever be…
17:15.042 –> 17:29.362
[SPEAKER_03]: challenge or never ever be tried in court and found to be meaningful, where you could be someone who doesn’t live in the state of Texas, but if you’re driving through the state of Texas, and you get a text that you claim is unsolicited, you can sue the company who sent you the text.
17:29.523 –> 17:30.064
[SPEAKER_03]: Right now, that’s
17:30.044 –> 17:31.226
[SPEAKER_03]: the way the law is written.
17:31.446 –> 17:32.507
[SPEAKER_03]: It will be changed.
17:33.008 –> 17:39.738
[SPEAKER_03]: Or you can be a citizen of Texas and be out of Texas and get a text that you think is unsolicited.
17:40.619 –> 17:50.533
[SPEAKER_03]: Or you can have a phone number that used to be in Texas even though you’ve never, I mean it’s like it’s, there’s all the stuff that’s trying to, people are trying to figure out how to
17:50.513 –> 18:04.311
[SPEAKER_03]: handle privacy and then there’s people who are trying to say whoa you’re talking you’re asking people who have been known to opt into something get that thing and complain you just spam them for sending the thing they just asked for.
18:04.872 –> 18:11.841
[SPEAKER_03]: So you’re putting a lot of power in the hands of people who are going to misrepresent reality and anyway it’s it’s a mess.
18:11.901 –> 18:19.491
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the 12 month from now thing you’re fantasy about where I’ll be I’m hoping it’s on an island sipping a drink
18:20.011 –> 18:23.236
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the point about the privacy is fascinating.
18:23.256 –> 18:33.271
[SPEAKER_01]: It makes me think of when the, like, a little while back, when the tech bros were called in front of the, I can’t even if it was the British or the US government.
18:33.552 –> 18:35.254
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that’s the US.
18:35.395 –> 18:38.299
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it probably was the US one to answer questions.
18:38.439 –> 18:43.487
[SPEAKER_01]: And the lack of knowledge that was apparent amongst the lawmakers,
18:43.467 –> 18:44.949
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, can you explain how cookies work?
18:45.029 –> 18:46.070
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s like, a little bit of a, what?
18:47.232 –> 18:47.592
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
18:48.073 –> 18:51.798
[SPEAKER_03]: But you know, this is a fundamental thing that is more pervasive than that.
18:51.838 –> 18:54.401
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, the lawmakers don’t know what they don’t know.
18:54.421 –> 18:56.544
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is the stunning cruiser syndrome.
18:56.564 –> 18:59.027
[SPEAKER_03]: And there’s nothing worse than being confident about your ignorance.
18:59.628 –> 19:05.736
[SPEAKER_03]: But it’s also true about customers and consumers because the privacy stuff is like, I don’t want you know who I am and sending me ads that are targeted to me.
19:05.996 –> 19:07.939
[SPEAKER_03]: No, that’s exactly what you want.
19:07.919 –> 19:09.741
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t need to get another tampon add.
19:09.761 –> 19:12.743
[SPEAKER_03]: I’ve bought all the tampons I’m going to use and I’m not going to tell you what I’m doing with them.
19:13.324 –> 19:26.375
[SPEAKER_03]: So what you’re saying when you say, I don’t want to have people sending me targeted ads, is that you’re somehow so unable to resist an ad that you’re going to go broke by seeing things that you think people think you want.
19:26.896 –> 19:30.900
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s really quite perverse and a little upside down.
19:30.920 –> 19:37.065
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, what they think is that someone is going to get access to that information and do something nefarious.
19:37.045 –> 19:42.635
[SPEAKER_03]: But, which I almost literally can’t imagine, we don’t need to go back to previous wars to imagine that.
19:42.695 –> 19:44.960
[SPEAKER_03]: But I don’t see those things happening.
19:45.280 –> 19:48.446
[SPEAKER_03]: But literally the argument people make is, I don’t want you sending me targeted ads.
19:48.506 –> 19:49.668
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, what?
19:50.390 –> 19:51.692
[SPEAKER_01]: Just what the generic ones.
19:52.453 –> 19:56.100
[SPEAKER_03]: People have been sending you targeted ads on your television for years.
19:56.182 –> 19:58.125
[SPEAKER_01]: and through the post and through.
19:58.145 –> 19:58.426
[SPEAKER_01]: And right.
19:58.526 –> 19:58.786
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
19:58.926 –> 19:59.087
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
19:59.587 –> 19:59.928
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
20:00.008 –> 20:00.168
[SPEAKER_03]: Wait.
20:00.269 –> 20:01.150
[SPEAKER_03]: One of your one of my predictions.
20:01.591 –> 20:01.851
[SPEAKER_01]: Please.
20:02.292 –> 20:06.959
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don’t know if you can do this in the, well, I don’t know where else you can do this other than the US.
20:07.801 –> 20:08.983
[SPEAKER_03]: But you can.
20:09.043 –> 20:12.027
[SPEAKER_03]: They’re a number of companies who provide a service where someone comes to your website.
20:12.048 –> 20:13.670
[SPEAKER_03]: They do not, they do not opt in.
20:13.750 –> 20:15.473
[SPEAKER_03]: They do not give you any information.
20:15.453 –> 20:18.799
[SPEAKER_03]: But you get their IP and you get their MAC address and you know, maybe you get the browser.
20:18.819 –> 20:26.875
[SPEAKER_03]: They’re using and use some third party databases and you can resolve, say, 40% of those to physical addresses and send physical mail to those people.
20:27.536 –> 20:30.682
[SPEAKER_03]: And at the moment, people get those mailings and think, oh, so weird.
20:30.962 –> 20:32.846
[SPEAKER_03]: I’m getting their national advertising campaign.
20:32.886 –> 20:33.788
[SPEAKER_03]: I was just on that website.
20:34.329 –> 20:36.533
[SPEAKER_03]: If they knew what was actually happening,
20:36.867 –> 20:38.731
[SPEAKER_03]: their people will ride in the streets.
20:38.771 –> 20:41.617
[SPEAKER_03]: The people who run two of those companies are people that I know.
20:41.637 –> 20:44.282
[SPEAKER_03]: And I say, I hope you’re running this company with a trailing stop.
20:44.382 –> 20:50.775
[SPEAKER_03]: Like don’t have any debt because when the feces and the fan have a mutual interaction, it will not be good for you.
20:51.413 –> 20:57.465
[SPEAKER_01]: think here in the UK you can do that for B2B data but not for B2C data.
20:57.525 –> 21:02.935
[SPEAKER_01]: There’s quite a lot of, well tell you who’s been on your website so you can call them up and sell to them type stuff.
21:03.135 –> 21:07.684
[SPEAKER_01]: We don’t have the direct mail element of it because we don’t have the consumer legality.
21:07.850 –> 21:15.220
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it’s simply that we all as consumers are various things, not just products, but social media and gunners, what else.
21:15.660 –> 21:24.391
[SPEAKER_03]: We have given away our information to so many people in so many ways that to triangulate and figure out who’s who is just a simple and be irreversible.
21:25.152 –> 21:30.039
[SPEAKER_01]: So Stephen, the last eight years, you’ve more than 10x the business.
21:30.860 –> 21:34.144
[SPEAKER_01]: What’s been the best thing about that journey?
21:34.580 –> 21:52.926
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s the thing that got us started in the beginning is that we hear from people every day saying You’re shoes have changed my life and and changed the lives of people in my family and my friends and and Professional athletes saying the same thing now actually the eight-year market this is perfect way pointing this out eight years ago
21:52.906 –> 22:00.356
[SPEAKER_03]: a professional women’s basketball player reached out to me and said, I’ve been wearing your shoes and sandals off the court and my feet ankles have become indestructible.
22:00.757 –> 22:01.958
[SPEAKER_03]: You should make a basketball shoe.
22:02.659 –> 22:13.294
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it just so happened, we had made a kind of prototype shoe, long story, and we sent it to her and she said, well, I can’t play in this because it doesn’t quite fit me, but I can tell you that I couldn’t spring my ankle in this if you paid me too.
22:13.274 –> 22:34.489
[SPEAKER_03]: and I spent the next six and a half years trying to get that shoe made everyone told me I had my head firmly up my butt and nobody cared it wouldn’t happen but about two years ago we had a bunch of NBA and WNBA players and coaches and managers and trainers say you got to make the shoe and we did and we’ve been in the NBA and WNBA.
22:34.469 –> 22:40.296
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, that proof of that that we can do things that people thought were completely impossible.
22:40.577 –> 22:43.320
[SPEAKER_03]: Both for us as a company and practically, like why would they want to do that?
22:43.380 –> 22:48.467
[SPEAKER_03]: I think we have maybe five or six teams where all the players are training in our shoes.
22:48.948 –> 22:52.993
[SPEAKER_03]: With the coaches and trainers trying to get them strong enough to be able to play in our shoes.
22:53.814 –> 22:59.561
[SPEAKER_03]: So, that was a kind of proof of concept that is one of the few things that I am proud of.
22:59.701 –> 23:02.485
[SPEAKER_03]: And I say a few things just that I don’t pride as not one of my things.
23:02.465 –> 23:09.537
[SPEAKER_03]: but that was a really big deal and it demonstrated something about what we can do as a brand that no one ever believed.
23:09.557 –> 23:12.823
[SPEAKER_03]: But again, the only reason we’re doing this, my wife has the best line.
23:12.843 –> 23:14.446
[SPEAKER_03]: She says, there’s enough shoe companies in the world.
23:14.746 –> 23:18.533
[SPEAKER_03]: You don’t need to shoot another shoe company unless your shoes are changing people’s lives.
23:18.513 –> 23:25.705
[SPEAKER_03]: And what I can tell you is that we’re doing it for people that don’t know just by getting out of the way of the things that cause problems.
23:25.725 –> 23:29.150
[SPEAKER_03]: So our shoes don’t squeeze your toes together, which cuts off circulation in your foot.
23:29.531 –> 23:31.394
[SPEAKER_03]: They don’t elevate your heel that mess with your posture.
23:31.814 –> 23:36.522
[SPEAKER_03]: They aren’t stiff so that you can’t move the bones and joints in your feet, which means they get weaker over time.
23:36.502 –> 23:56.067
[SPEAKER_03]: They aren’t super thick, which means you can’t feel the ground and that means that the nerves in the bottom of your foot of which there are a lot more than anywhere But your fingertips and lips, you know, they need to communicate to your brain and if the brain can’t get that information It makes you prone to fall, trip and fall injury and various other problems It literally shuts down a part of your brain when you don’t give it the information.
23:56.108 –> 24:04.939
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s looking for so we’re just doing the opposite of what shoes I’ve been doing for 50 years now People might know this by the time this podcast comes out Nike
24:04.919 –> 24:11.610
[SPEAKER_03]: Just announced a product that, yeah, yeah, it’s Nike’s version of a barefoot shoe.
24:12.211 –> 24:22.929
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s a big thick foam soul with a bunch of little spherical things in the soul and bet it in it that when you step on them, they protrude from the bottom of the soul.
24:23.249 –> 24:26.334
[SPEAKER_03]: When you step on them, they push up on your foot in a few places.
24:27.817 –> 24:31.703
[SPEAKER_03]: You can do the same thing just by going barefoot.
24:32.206 –> 24:49.017
[SPEAKER_03]: Or you can wear our shoes, which instead of just in those whatever 20 little spots that they have seemingly say they’ve identified that are the most important, which they’re not that you get the same thing with our products, but it takes your whole foot and puts it in the play and so basically.
24:48.997 –> 24:53.544
[SPEAKER_03]: while the big shoe companies have been publicly saying that what we’re doing about natural movement is nonsense.
24:54.145 –> 24:59.894
[SPEAKER_03]: Nike just validated our entire business proposition by doing something that’s supposed to stimulate your foot.
25:00.375 –> 25:02.118
[SPEAKER_03]: Guess who’s been doing it for 16 years?
25:02.478 –> 25:03.260
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, that’s right us.
25:04.061 –> 25:05.784
[SPEAKER_03]: And guess who’s been doing it for both her?
25:06.164 –> 25:10.431
[SPEAKER_03]: I think a couple hundred thousand years every other human being since the beginning of humans.
25:12.706 –> 25:17.553
[SPEAKER_00]: Ecommerce most of the land is supporting by some of the greatest companies in the Ecommerce sector.
25:17.693 –> 25:25.664
[SPEAKER_00]: Here’s a reminder of who they are.
25:25.684 –> 25:27.847
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s time for the top six round.
25:30.831 –> 25:31.672
[SPEAKER_01]: I love this section.
25:31.712 –> 25:36.078
[SPEAKER_01]: I have to ask you these questions whilst I’m my mind boggles at the horrendousness of that Nike show.
25:37.060 –> 25:42.527
[SPEAKER_03]: Steven, are you ready for the top tips?
25:42.625 –> 25:43.106
[SPEAKER_01]: Excellent.
25:43.166 –> 25:44.588
[SPEAKER_01]: Let’s start with the book top tip.
25:44.628 –> 25:51.657
[SPEAKER_01]: Then if everyone listening to this podcast, agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?
25:52.078 –> 25:55.822
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, it won’t make your business better, except that it might well, it might.
25:56.223 –> 25:59.307
[SPEAKER_03]: I’m going to say, in the same tile of his first book, Fooled by Randomness.
25:59.848 –> 26:01.270
[SPEAKER_03]: And the subtitle is the hidden role.
26:01.490 –> 26:02.872
[SPEAKER_03]: I might be butchering it a little.
26:02.892 –> 26:05.275
[SPEAKER_03]: The hidden role of chance and markets and life.
26:05.255 –> 26:18.976
[SPEAKER_03]: And the reason it’s so important is that highlights how much luck is a factor of what you’re doing and when you put, when you balance luck and hard work in the appropriate way ratio, which is mostly luck.
26:18.996 –> 26:23.603
[SPEAKER_03]: And then it gives you a little bit of, you know, humility and perspective that’s helpful.
26:23.863 –> 26:28.490
[SPEAKER_03]: I’m actually going to recommend another because I can’t, whenever someone says give me the top three, I have to do 10.
26:28.611 –> 26:30.233
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you asked one, I’m going to do two.
26:30.213 –> 26:36.163
[SPEAKER_03]: Come on, come on, come on, stumbling on happiness by Daniel Gilbert, which I’ll do the TLDR version.
26:36.924 –> 26:42.614
[SPEAKER_03]: Human beings and I’m going to TLDR cut in half because he talks about both the positive and negative aspect of what I’m going to say.
26:42.634 –> 26:46.100
[SPEAKER_03]: I’m going to focus on the positive one because that’s what entrepreneurs tend to do.
26:46.140 –> 26:54.634
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is we spend the majority of our brain cycles trying to think about what will make us happy in the future, whether that’s a moment from now or a hundred years from now.
26:54.614 –> 26:56.757
[SPEAKER_03]: The problem is we’re really, really bad at it.
26:57.277 –> 26:59.440
[SPEAKER_03]: We’re horrible at predicting what will make us happy in the future.
26:59.841 –> 27:02.944
[SPEAKER_03]: The only thing we’re worse at is remembering how horrible we are at it.
27:03.565 –> 27:06.048
[SPEAKER_03]: And the only thing worse than that is that we think we’re special.
27:06.609 –> 27:09.893
[SPEAKER_03]: And if we find that there’s a million people who got what we think would make us happy.
27:10.374 –> 27:16.942
[SPEAKER_03]: And they are no more happier than they were to begin with, or less happy, or less happy than we are, then we still think, yeah.
27:17.383 –> 27:19.305
[SPEAKER_03]: But if it happened to me,
27:19.285 –> 27:45.259
[SPEAKER_03]: I’m not like those million people, and the reason this is important is that the more you really dive into the thought experiment of recognizing how bad we are, predicting what will make us happy in the future, the less you get swept up in focusing on the hyperoptimistic opportunities and less on the risk of, for example, overextending and doing other things that could put you out of business in lightning speed, back to that luck factor.
27:45.239 –> 27:54.713
[SPEAKER_03]: So entrepreneurs, we fall in love with our babies, usually not our children, just our visit, your product babies, I say this is someone who doesn’t have children, so I’m just making it up.
27:56.215 –> 28:06.991
[SPEAKER_03]: But we fall in love with the imagined future and we don’t pay enough attention to the risks that we are creating for us every moment that we are paying more attention to the imagined future that’s the one that we want.
28:07.351 –> 28:08.513
[SPEAKER_03]: So I recommend that book as well.
28:08.915 –> 28:10.497
[SPEAKER_01]: marvelous recommendations.
28:10.517 –> 28:17.106
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, traffic top tip, which marketing method do you either price above all others or think doesn’t get the press it deserves?
28:18.347 –> 28:27.559
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, word of mouth, obviously, just under half of our orders come from existing customers and out of the remaining like 57% and half of those come from people who met those people.
28:28.140 –> 28:35.209
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you have a product that is changing people’s lives and by the way, if your business is not doing these two things,
28:35.189 –> 28:39.595
[SPEAKER_03]: changing bills lies and letting you tell the truth, then you might want to reconsider what you’re doing.
28:39.635 –> 28:42.860
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t do something just to make money.
28:42.900 –> 28:46.465
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t, I’m not arrogant enough to think that your way is not appropriate.
28:47.006 –> 28:54.096
[SPEAKER_03]: But when you can do those two things, it’s like having a superpower and it’s really, really enjoyable when you have a superpower.
28:54.837 –> 28:58.362
[SPEAKER_03]: So the things that we do to encourage
28:58.342 –> 29:03.388
[SPEAKER_03]: people to spread the word and do it in the right way without being obnoxious to your friends when you have a life changing event.
29:04.049 –> 29:06.812
[SPEAKER_03]: That’s frankly the biggest thing that we do.
29:07.273 –> 29:13.160
[SPEAKER_03]: And then after that, it’s no different than it was when I started internet marketing in 1992 content content content.
29:13.700 –> 29:15.843
[SPEAKER_03]: And there’s just always new ways and new places to put it.
29:15.903 –> 29:27.657
[SPEAKER_03]: And my gosh, I don’t know if you saw this not too long ago, a lot of people were posting and selling courses on doing meta ads, where
29:27.637 –> 29:33.930
[SPEAKER_03]: like we did 25 years ago, what’s old is new again, and frankly, it was never old.
29:33.971 –> 29:42.088
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s just people thought there was something that worked better, and so they stopped doing it, and then people were like, oh, wait, why don’t you try that thing that, you know, there’s old guys that, you know, we don’t think what they do works.
29:42.108 –> 29:42.769
[SPEAKER_03]: But let’s just try it.
29:42.789 –> 29:43.892
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh my God, it works.
29:44.293 –> 29:45.375
[SPEAKER_03]: It always worked.
29:45.355 –> 29:47.939
[SPEAKER_01]: Awesome, an extra bonus tip in there as well.
29:48.460 –> 29:59.295
[SPEAKER_01]: The tall top tip, maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug in, a phone app or just a way of working, is the recall little tool you use that makes you and your team at more efficient from day to day.
29:59.936 –> 30:01.458
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I have an anti tool.
30:01.679 –> 30:04.663
[SPEAKER_03]: I refuse to get on slack.
30:04.863 –> 30:05.544
[SPEAKER_01]: me too.
30:05.564 –> 30:07.929
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t need any more interruptions.
30:08.069 –> 30:09.552
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t need any more multi-tasking.
30:09.572 –> 30:10.413
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s not multi-tasking.
30:10.473 –> 30:12.637
[SPEAKER_03]: I already got enough stuff that I keep in my brain.
30:12.698 –> 30:13.499
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t need any more.
30:14.140 –> 30:19.210
[SPEAKER_03]: So I’m trying to think if there really is a tool that has changed.
30:19.230 –> 30:20.552
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, here’s the tool that has changed my life.
30:21.133 –> 30:25.461
[SPEAKER_03]: I got a really good black check application on my phone just for training.
30:25.581 –> 30:28.086
[SPEAKER_03]: Just to learn basic strategy and how to become a card counter.
30:28.066 –> 30:31.251
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s, as my wife says, it’s better than candy crush.
30:31.451 –> 30:34.155
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s actually something you might be able to make money with at some point.
30:34.175 –> 30:45.513
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think, and I say this all these semi-facetiously, because I decided to learn to play blackjack or try to learn to play jack, blackjack, as an intellectual exercise.
30:46.074 –> 30:53.185
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, to see how you learn these, not these simple but not easy tasks to do this very interesting procedure.
30:53.926 –> 30:56.790
[SPEAKER_03]: And it’s actually changed the way I think about
30:56.770 –> 31:13.090
[SPEAKER_03]: a lot of the way I look at data and not in any, you know, like, oh my god, hundred-native degree way, but I definitely think about risk differently and I definitely think about how to look at information differently because here, this is a weird thing I can say about blackjack that is actually relevant.
31:13.110 –> 31:17.295
[SPEAKER_03]: I would argue to the way people think about tools and advertising.
31:17.976 –> 31:21.580
[SPEAKER_03]: So because every hand of blackjack is effectively random,
31:21.560 –> 31:30.962
[SPEAKER_03]: There’s no difference between you playing for a hundred hours straight or you playing for one at one hour a day for a hundred days, we’re having a hundred people playing one hour at the same time.
31:31.744 –> 31:33.969
[SPEAKER_03]: Mathematically, it’s the exact same thing.
31:34.451 –> 31:35.613
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s a weird thing to think about.
31:36.014 –> 31:39.282
[SPEAKER_03]: But when you think about people who say, focus on one channel,
31:39.262 –> 31:59.953
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, okay, that’s one way of doing it or you can focus on a whole lot of things and find out which are the ones that are popping and you’re going to have some that win and some that lose and then it’s going to average out in on the black check world you’re very small edge turns in way very large amount of money over time in the same way when I think about when people say, you know, well, why don’t you redeploy.
31:59.933 –> 32:08.809
[SPEAKER_03]: The money that’s going to that thing that’s delivering a 3x to the thing that’s delivering the 4x, the answer is because we don’t know if adding that money is going to make the 4x any better or not.
32:08.829 –> 32:16.643
[SPEAKER_03]: Let’s just keep doing these and just build on those until they hit diminishing returns and then try another thing or 5 or 10.
32:16.623 –> 32:22.250
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, I will also argue that I like to say all companies rise to the level of the neuroses of their founders.
32:22.871 –> 32:28.297
[SPEAKER_03]: And as you may have gathered, focus and organization and prioritization, not my thing.
32:28.938 –> 32:29.559
[SPEAKER_03]: I don’t do that.
32:30.180 –> 32:36.808
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s worth that okay for us now, and it’s worth not even better, because we have some people who now can add that to the equation when I can’t.
32:37.168 –> 32:39.551
[SPEAKER_03]: So they’ll say give me the top three, like I said, I’ll give them 10.
32:39.972 –> 32:43.356
[SPEAKER_03]: They figure out which of those three they want to do first and leather instead of repeat.
32:43.994 –> 32:44.516
[SPEAKER_01]: Nice.
32:44.817 –> 32:46.121
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the carbon top tip.
32:46.141 –> 32:48.128
[SPEAKER_01]: Now this is new since the last time you came on.
32:48.650 –> 32:52.603
[SPEAKER_01]: What’s your favourite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store?
32:52.870 –> 33:03.006
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, first let’s be honest, most products, most categories when they talk about what they’re doing to be helpful to the environment is all greenwashing aka bullshit.
33:03.647 –> 33:12.220
[SPEAKER_03]: So there are very few things, especially in footwear where the amount of energy that it takes to process and produce these things is actually producing a net carbon benefit.
33:12.861 –> 33:16.847
[SPEAKER_03]: And even more, the argument the customers will pay for that depends on your customers.
33:17.148 –> 33:20.633
[SPEAKER_03]: Some categories, some colors will most well.
33:20.731 –> 33:21.752
[SPEAKER_03]: they say they will, but they don’t.
33:22.493 –> 33:37.771
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I can say what we’re doing, and this is what we’ve been doing for 16 years, is we looked at what footwear, a lot of footwear ends up in landfill, so there’s two things that we’re doing, soon to be three, or variation of two.
33:38.312 –> 33:40.074
[SPEAKER_03]: The first is that we make our products differently.
33:40.755 –> 33:45.861
[SPEAKER_03]: So in most running shoes, they say you need to replace them every two to 300 miles.
33:45.841 –> 33:56.679
[SPEAKER_03]: Whatever they say, the research shows that by 150 miles, the average running shoe is already deteriorating and causing problems with your gate and with your alignment, which cause a bunch of physical problems.
33:57.340 –> 33:59.725
[SPEAKER_03]: The new super maximal shoes even faster.
33:59.765 –> 34:04.352
[SPEAKER_03]: They’re wearing out, you know, they’re, we’re going to be at an event called the running event in a little while.
34:04.893 –> 34:11.224
[SPEAKER_03]: There will be shoes there because they were there, they were there last year, that are designed to be used for one race and then thrown away.
34:11.204 –> 34:12.065
[SPEAKER_03]: That’s all they can.
34:12.706 –> 34:13.147
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s horrible.
34:13.667 –> 34:19.815
[SPEAKER_03]: So we developed a rubber that we call field true rubber that we back with a 5,000 miles sold warranty.
34:20.496 –> 34:26.964
[SPEAKER_03]: When we developed this rubber and went to the rubber manufacturer, the manufacturer said, but this isn’t how they make rubber for running shoes.
34:27.024 –> 34:31.390
[SPEAKER_03]: We went, yeah, I know that’s why we’re going to do it this way.
34:31.370 –> 34:36.256
[SPEAKER_03]: So we have fewer materials in a minimalist shoe.
34:36.596 –> 34:38.138
[SPEAKER_03]: So that’s using less energy and production.
34:38.859 –> 34:40.381
[SPEAKER_03]: We have fewer layers of things.
34:40.421 –> 34:41.743
[SPEAKER_03]: That’s using less everything.
34:42.383 –> 34:44.626
[SPEAKER_03]: And we make stuff that last longer as much as we can.
34:44.646 –> 34:46.348
[SPEAKER_03]: So that’s our biggest thing that we’re doing.
34:46.949 –> 34:50.794
[SPEAKER_03]: The second biggest thing is that we’ve already had a, especially for kids.
34:50.834 –> 34:55.239
[SPEAKER_03]: We had a bicell trade, Facebook group for parents who bought our kids’ shoes.
34:56.140 –> 34:57.782
[SPEAKER_03]: And we are,
34:57.762 –> 35:06.275
[SPEAKER_03]: building in a, I don’t know what to call it, our scratch and dent or stuff that gets returned for exchange or for whatever reason that’s resellable but not as new.
35:07.076 –> 35:14.408
[SPEAKER_03]: We’re building out a secondary site to be able to offer that to people and we want to just give this shoes as much life as we can.
35:14.929 –> 35:17.893
[SPEAKER_03]: So the biggest thing we’re doing frankly is just keeping stuff out of landfill’s runner.
35:18.454 –> 35:22.200
[SPEAKER_03]: And FYI, we even, this is something that’s really important.
35:22.180 –> 35:30.520
[SPEAKER_03]: We contract with the company that said they had a ingredient they could add to the rubber of our shoes that would make them biodegraded faster in a landfill.
35:31.402 –> 35:32.865
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that was great.
35:33.306 –> 35:34.509
[SPEAKER_03]: And we decided to try it.
35:34.649 –> 35:39.160
[SPEAKER_03]: And at the same time, we did our own independent testing and found out they were lying.
35:39.140 –> 35:52.174
[SPEAKER_03]: So just because someone tells you, if you’re a manufacturer, just because someone tells you do not believe them, the motivation for them to sell you something and give you data that may have worked under certain conditions, but not necessarily normal conditions.
35:53.195 –> 35:56.578
[SPEAKER_03]: So they can make money off everyone’s desire to go green is very high.
35:56.598 –> 35:58.080
[SPEAKER_03]: Greenwashing doesn’t stop with the brand.
35:58.100 –> 35:59.842
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s, I guess, the best way I could put that.
36:00.442 –> 36:05.788
[SPEAKER_01]: Kind of comes back to your point earlier about they’re being no best practice, you know, like there’s things to test.
36:06.072 –> 36:07.615
[SPEAKER_03]: You’ve got to.
36:08.056 –> 36:08.657
[SPEAKER_03]: You have to.
36:10.200 –> 36:16.594
[SPEAKER_03]: Keep in mind, many people wear producing products, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in China or in India or in Bangladesh or in the United States.
36:17.215 –> 36:18.057
[SPEAKER_03]: People are motivated.
36:18.097 –> 36:23.608
[SPEAKER_03]: The manufacturers are motivated to squeeze a few sense out of things that you don’t specifically call out.
36:23.588 –> 36:31.443
[SPEAKER_03]: And so if you don’t say this piece has to weigh this with this density and these materials, you know, they might find a way to do it a little bit differently.
36:31.924 –> 36:37.395
[SPEAKER_03]: And you’re going to get a different product than what you expected with different characteristics and they’ve just made a few extra dollars.
36:37.455 –> 36:41.783
[SPEAKER_03]: So it’s, I mean, I hate to sound whatever I sound like when I say that.
36:41.763 –> 36:52.295
[SPEAKER_03]: like Debbie Downer, but I’ve just lived it too many times and so we are hyper vigilant about not believing a word people say and testing it even with people we’ve worked with for years.
36:52.615 –> 36:54.117
[SPEAKER_03]: The next production run we tested again.
36:54.738 –> 37:01.345
[SPEAKER_03]: We just are very, very cautious because even people who are looking out for our best interests have their own interests as well.
37:02.066 –> 37:04.408
[SPEAKER_01]: So Steven, we have to wrap up very soon.
37:04.448 –> 37:11.196
[SPEAKER_01]: But before we do, could you please let the listeners know whether they can get in contact
37:11.615 –> 37:12.836
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s really simple.
37:13.056 –> 37:16.039
[SPEAKER_03]: If you’re in the UK, zeroshuse.co.uk.
37:16.179 –> 37:22.445
[SPEAKER_03]: If you’re in the EU, zeroshuse.eu, if you are anywhere else, you can start at zeroshuse.com.
37:22.805 –> 37:29.591
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you’re in certain places, you’ll find, find us, we have distributors in various parts of Asia and Australia, New Zealand, in South America.
37:29.931 –> 37:31.673
[SPEAKER_03]: So you’ll bump into us kind of anywhere you go.
37:31.873 –> 37:33.775
[SPEAKER_03]: Kind of hard to miss us if you’re jumping looking online.
37:34.015 –> 37:39.580
[SPEAKER_03]: And just keep in mind, zeroshuse is X-E-R-O-S-U’s.com or.co.eu, or.eu.
37:39.948 –> 37:42.982
[SPEAKER_01]: Steven, thank you so much for coming back on the show.
37:43.063 –> 37:45.836
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s been an absolute treat to get to catch up with you again.
37:45.856 –> 37:47.745
[SPEAKER_01]: So thanks for sharing so much of your knowledge with us.
37:48.287 –> 37:48.568
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
37:48.589 –> 37:49.131
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
37:54.562 –> 37:59.690
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I can’t believe it’s taking me eight years to get Stephen back on the podcast because that was fascinating.
38:00.311 –> 38:10.428
[SPEAKER_01]: And out of interest for you guys listening, those two books, which he gave such thorough recommendations to are the exact same two he recommended eight years ago.
38:10.468 –> 38:17.599
[SPEAKER_01]: So some consistency of recommendation, which I think puts them should put them higher up on all of our to be red lists.
38:17.579 –> 38:20.003
[SPEAKER_01]: lots and lots to unpick from that.
38:20.444 –> 38:29.059
[SPEAKER_01]: I suspect it’s when you might need to listen to a couple of times, but I think the big big things are, you know, how a business changes as you go from 5 million to the 68.
38:29.179 –> 38:35.149
[SPEAKER_01]: I think his focus is he’s outlining in the carbon top tip there about how
38:35.129 –> 38:39.556
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s about making your product, keeping your product out of landfill for as long as possible.
38:39.596 –> 38:41.178
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s a really cool way of thinking about it.
38:41.198 –> 38:50.913
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the bits he was saying around, you know, have a healthy level of skepticism, test, explore, and have that healthy level of skepticism.
38:50.974 –> 38:56.462
[SPEAKER_01]: The big ones for me immediately taking out of that, but I suspect that will evolve over the coming days and weeks.
38:56.442 –> 39:16.155
[SPEAKER_01]: You can get your hands on the notes from this episode including those top tips and links to what we mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterpland.com You can use also use even our director episode short links just put ECMP dot info for such the number of this episode into the URL bar and you’ll be redirected straight to the right page of the site
39:16.135 –> 39:23.605
[SPEAKER_01]: When you get to the website, you can also add yourself to our email list, that way you won’t miss out on any of the other things I share to help you improve your business.
39:24.026 –> 39:28.832
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you liked this episode, then do go and check out our first chat with Stephen.
39:28.872 –> 39:34.920
[SPEAKER_01]: Episode 188, we get into a whole load of very different stuff to what we talked about today.
39:34.900 –> 39:43.848
[SPEAKER_01]: You can also find all our episodes with footwear and other fashion retailers at ECMP.info for such fashion that will take you to the website.
39:44.269 –> 39:48.953
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for tuning into this and every episode that you do of the Ecommerce Master Plan podcast.
39:49.353 –> 39:59.082
[SPEAKER_01]: I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help Ecommerce business owners like you to succeed and thrive with your businesses including progressing along that past a carbon neutral.
39:59.502 –> 40:04.587
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you know someone this show can help please tell them to listen to
40:04.567 –> 40:05.550
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope you have a great week.
40:06.071 –> 40:19.690
[SPEAKER_00]: Don’t forget to keep optimizing.
41 min
January 05eCommerce MasterPlan | 576: The Trust-First Approach Behind Carter Eve Jewelry’s Rapid Rise
Carter Eve is the founder and designer at Carter Eve Jewelry, a brand committed to sustainability and ethical practices creating delicate fine jewelry and distinctive designs. Founded in 2020 they now have annual sales of $1.2M with a 25% year-over-year growth rate. Selling exclusively via their Shopify site.

In this episode, Carter reveals how she scaled her luxury jewelry brand to $1.2M using a made-to-order model, high-touch service, and smart offline pop-ups. A must-listen for anyone selling high-value products online.

Hit PLAY to hear:
How Carter scaled a $1.2M luxury jewelry brand with zero full-time staff.
Why made-to-order products can outperform traditional inventory in eCommerce.
The high-touch customer service strategy that turns buyers into lifelong fans.
How offline pop-ups and events drive massive online sales (and trust!).
Why ethical sourcing is now a must-have for modern jewelry buyers.
The growth tactics that helped Carter hit 25% YoY growth—while still designing every piece.

Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[03:43] Hands-On Jewelry Design Process
[08:39] Ethical Gemstone Sourcing Insights
[12:22] “Future Plans for Outsourcing”
[15:04] “In-Person Events: Essential Connection”
[16:28] Pop-Up Events and Collaborations
[19:45] Listen to Carter’s Top Tips!

Full episode notes here: https://ecmp.info/576
—
Download our ebook… https://ecmp.info/ebook 500 Tips to Increase Your Profits
Get all the links and resources we mention and join our email list at https://ecmp.info
Love the show? Chloe would love your feedback – leave a review here: https://ecmp.info/review or reply to the episode QandA on Spotify.
Interested in being a Sponsor? go here: https://ecmp.info/sponsor
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
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WEBVTT
00:00.031 –> 00:06.661
[SPEAKER_00]: Trust is a huge part of luxury business and doesn’t matter what type of product you’re selling.
00:06.701 –> 00:23.425
[SPEAKER_00]: Trust comes first and that high touch level customer service where you feel like you can text that person if a question arises or you just want to make sure of something and having that person respond right away as almost a friend.
00:23.785 –> 00:29.734
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s through that high touch level customer service and that
00:32.228 –> 00:34.732
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.
00:35.273 –> 00:39.359
[SPEAKER_01]: Here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
00:39.880 –> 00:47.993
[SPEAKER_01]: Cutting through the hive to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond, here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
00:50.943 –> 00:52.225
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello and welcome.
00:52.245 –> 00:53.367
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s great to have you here.
00:53.487 –> 00:57.494
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to another of our inspiring guests.
00:57.995 –> 01:03.465
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess for this episode is here because they applied to be on the show as simple as that.
01:03.885 –> 01:15.786
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you’ve got something you’d love to chat with me about, share with the audience, go to ECMP.info-2apply and maybe you and I will be chatting very soon.
01:15.766 –> 01:32.546
[SPEAKER_02]: In this episode, we’re going into the world of jewelry and we’re going into the world of luxury and we’ll be talking about product sourcing, we’ll be talking about the link between offline and online sales and we’ll talk about what it takes to sell luxury jewelry online.
01:32.586 –> 01:35.109
[SPEAKER_02]: Lots of insight from this guest, she’s fascinating.
01:35.569 –> 01:38.753
[SPEAKER_02]: Make sure you listen to the episode so you don’t miss out on her top tips.
01:44.217 –> 01:46.220
[SPEAKER_02]: And now to introduce our special guest.
01:46.400 –> 01:56.936
[SPEAKER_02]: Carter Eave is the founder and designer at Carter Eave Jewelry, a brand committed to sustainability and ethical practices, creating delicate, fine jewelry and distinctive designs.
01:57.397 –> 02:07.632
[SPEAKER_02]: Founded in 2020, they now have annual sales of $1.2 million with a 25% year-on-year growth rate, selling exclusively via their Shopify site.
02:07.732 –> 02:08.513
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello, Carter.
02:09.074 –> 02:11.237
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, thank you so much for having me.
02:11.386 –> 02:15.366
[SPEAKER_02]: As awesome to have you on, congratulations with what you’ve done with the business so far.
02:15.466 –> 02:17.717
[SPEAKER_02]: How did you end up in e-commerce?
02:18.035 –> 02:25.829
[SPEAKER_00]: So I originally started my business in 2013 after I finished my degree in jewelry and objects.
02:26.770 –> 02:37.790
[SPEAKER_00]: And I started out as a maker designer in a very traditional, very small-scale physical way where Ecommerce was not a part of my business at all.
02:38.451 –> 02:42.017
[SPEAKER_00]: However, over time, I eventually,
02:41.997 –> 03:11.650
[SPEAKER_00]: created my first website in 2016, which was actually a Shopify site, and I have iterated many different times throughout the years, um, constantly improving that website, but it didn’t start generating traffic for me in terms of sales into 2018, 2019, and then in 2020, I decided
03:11.630 –> 03:18.036
[SPEAKER_00]: that I possibly could and we’ve been operating ever since in that capacity through Shopify.
03:18.658 –> 03:22.112
[SPEAKER_02]: How is it felt for you going from
03:22.362 –> 03:32.261
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I’m assuming before you were like the hands on individual customized pieces for people, trade shows, you know, craft events, that kind of thing.
03:32.401 –> 03:40.857
[SPEAKER_02]: And now being in charge of a million pound business, where I’m assuming you don’t make you yourself or not the one creating the jewelry every single day.
03:40.937 –> 03:43.442
[SPEAKER_02]: How’s it felt to go on that journey?
03:43.422 –> 03:47.549
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I design every single piece still to this day.
03:47.749 –> 03:54.199
[SPEAKER_00]: So I am very involved in the design and I oversee all of the manufacturing process.
03:54.560 –> 04:01.231
[SPEAKER_00]: So there’s not a single piece of jewelry that I don’t have my hand in in some way, shape or form.
04:01.271 –> 04:05.818
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is very important to me, although I’m a very busy
04:05.798 –> 04:09.646
[SPEAKER_00]: person because making jewelry is so time-consuming.
04:09.686 –> 04:12.833
[SPEAKER_00]: So I am still involved in that way.
04:13.033 –> 04:16.641
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m not making every single piece every of from start to finish.
04:17.202 –> 04:25.900
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m mostly managing the Shopify site, but a big part of our business through Shopify is all of our products are made to order.
04:25.880 –> 04:38.802
[SPEAKER_00]: So we don’t have an extensive inventory, and that’s done by design, mostly because fine jewelry is extremely expensive to produce, and we have hundreds of skews.
04:39.243 –> 04:50.082
[SPEAKER_00]: So for me to keep all of those skews in stock, in every ring size, in every metal variation, and every gemstone variation, would be insane.
04:50.062 –> 04:52.446
[SPEAKER_02]: be an insane amount of cash, wouldn’t it?
04:52.506 –> 04:54.449
[SPEAKER_02]: Just to have sitting around in the stockroom.
04:55.029 –> 04:55.550
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
04:55.971 –> 04:57.173
[SPEAKER_00]: And you don’t know what’s going to sell.
04:57.233 –> 05:13.858
[SPEAKER_00]: So sometimes people want to customize something or sometimes a particular style will be very popular like size 7, 14-carot, rose gold with moonstone version, but the other variants will not perform as well.
05:14.379 –> 05:18.685
[SPEAKER_00]: And so being made to order not only helps us keep
05:18.665 –> 05:31.611
[SPEAKER_00]: our inventory in a more healthy way, we’re not wasting, we’re not making an excess, but it also allows us to keep that attention to detail and that craftsmanship intact.
05:32.182 –> 05:39.933
[SPEAKER_02]: Especially by its very nature you’re therefore not creating mass market pieces, are you you’re creating the perfect ring for that person?
05:39.973 –> 05:40.814
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
05:41.075 –> 05:41.636
[SPEAKER_02]: Each time.
05:41.996 –> 05:42.917
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, yes.
05:43.018 –> 05:50.308
[SPEAKER_00]: And that’s something that our clients love, knowing that each piece is actually made specifically for them.
05:50.288 –> 05:52.452
[SPEAKER_00]: So, it’s special.
05:52.692 –> 05:57.600
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s very rare in today’s day and age to know that that piece is made for you.
05:57.640 –> 06:07.076
[SPEAKER_00]: And that way, also, if there’s any customization that people want, oh, hey, can you engrave my partners and initials on the inside of that ring?
06:07.256 –> 06:10.822
[SPEAKER_00]: Or can you change the centerstone from a diamond to a Montana Sapphire?
06:10.882 –> 06:12.465
[SPEAKER_00]: We can do that.
06:12.783 –> 06:17.532
[SPEAKER_02]: because you’re gonna create it from scratch anyway, so it doesn’t matter that there’s a difference don’t going in.
06:17.632 –> 06:20.798
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s not, oh shit, we’ve got to take the diamond out.
06:21.178 –> 06:22.140
[SPEAKER_02]: We can’t go up there.
06:22.160 –> 06:25.627
[SPEAKER_02]: You can actually build it around and from the ground up in the right way.
06:26.208 –> 06:29.794
[SPEAKER_02]: So the product is, is all types of jewelry, isn’t it?
06:29.814 –> 06:36.647
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s, it’s rings through to necklaces, and so on, so tell us a bit more about the product if you can.
06:36.830 –> 06:40.553
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so we have a few different offerings in terms of category.
06:40.573 –> 07:00.350
[SPEAKER_00]: We have our everyday fine jewelry pieces, which consists of diamond earrings, studs, you know, a lot of our clients have multiple ear piercings, so we like to create our ear curations with layered diamond hoops and dangling studs and a really just very cool and individual ear stack.
07:00.851 –> 07:05.875
[SPEAKER_00]: We also sell necklaces, meant to be layered and worn every day.
07:05.855 –> 07:14.290
[SPEAKER_00]: every day bracelets, tennis bracelets, emerald bracelets, gemstones, a lot of rings were known for our delicate stacking rings.
07:14.931 –> 07:21.383
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have our everyday luxury, everyday fine jewelry pieces and then we also have our
07:21.363 –> 07:28.154
[SPEAKER_00]: engagement ring in wedding bedline, which I would say 95% of our clients customize those.
07:28.775 –> 07:44.400
[SPEAKER_00]: So what you see on the site is merely a starting point and then most of our clients get in touch whether it’s via email or they book a virtual consultation to modify whether it’s
07:44.380 –> 07:54.270
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we also have a new offering, which is our Couture collection, and that is 18 carrot with lab created diamonds.
07:54.570 –> 08:10.827
[SPEAKER_00]: So it’s a very unique combination of 18 carrot and lab and the reason for that is that it’s so diamond heavy that to do those pieces with natural would also, I mean, the retail price
08:10.807 –> 08:14.053
[SPEAKER_00]: and now they’re more in like the 12,000 to 15,000 dollar range.
08:14.674 –> 08:18.922
[SPEAKER_00]: But those are more statement kind of red carpet style pieces.
08:19.002 –> 08:27.077
[SPEAKER_00]: So that’s a new collection that we’ve been working on for the last year and it’s recently gone live on the site and it’s gotten a lot of positive feedback.
08:27.378 –> 08:28.079
[SPEAKER_02]: Excellent.
08:28.119 –> 08:38.849
[SPEAKER_02]: And you mentioned that you’re using the lab bought diamonds and you’re also sourcing everything in an ethical and conscious way, which is quite new in the jewelry industry, isn’t it?
08:39.470 –> 08:46.717
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, well, it’s something that I’ve always sourced ethically in the sense that I want to know where my stones are coming from.
08:46.737 –> 08:52.002
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve always just taken a lot of interest in, you know, pale blue sapphires, pale purple.
08:52.022 –> 08:54.685
[SPEAKER_00]: I love, I love my pastel sapphires.
08:54.665 –> 09:10.699
[SPEAKER_00]: So they come from Sri Lanka, and so I’ve wanted to know where they come from, so I can look specifically for these stones from Sri Lanka, because those are the prettiest ones that I, you know, that I like, or for example, you know, the rubies that have like a more pinkish tone,
09:10.679 –> 09:14.708
[SPEAKER_00]: they come from Burma, you know, and so their specific Burmese rubies.
09:15.169 –> 09:29.059
[SPEAKER_00]: So I’ve always been interested in the provenance of my gemstones and that they are sourced in an ethical way, but nowadays, it has become something that the consumer really looks for.
09:29.039 –> 09:38.970
[SPEAKER_00]: And I find that a lot of my clients are asking questions now about the sourcing of materials in a way that they had never asked before.
09:39.511 –> 09:47.560
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just something I always, I always said, oh, there, you know, it’s ethically sourced gemstones and fair mind gold and a lot of my clients just, they were like great.
09:48.300 –> 09:55.148
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn’t really care, but now they care and it matters, which is exciting.
09:55.128 –> 10:03.002
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you think they’re coming to you because they know they can get that from you or they’re seeing the jewelry and then they’re checking it’s ethically done before they purchase?
10:03.443 –> 10:05.647
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, they come to me first.
10:05.987 –> 10:17.187
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say they’re drawn to the designs or they’re drawn to the custom service that I provide or they see, you know, a ring that someone else is wearing and oh, who made that and then they find me.
10:17.167 –> 10:21.755
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they find out that it’s ethically sourced and sustainably me too.
10:21.795 –> 10:26.884
[SPEAKER_00]: And that’s just the perfect package at that point.
10:28.226 –> 10:29.548
[SPEAKER_02]: What does your team look like?
10:29.608 –> 10:30.610
[SPEAKER_02]: How many of you are there?
10:30.851 –> 10:31.993
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you opt to?
10:32.814 –> 10:39.225
[SPEAKER_00]: So the full-time team is just me, which is kind of crazy.
10:39.205 –> 10:39.746
[SPEAKER_00]: I know.
10:39.766 –> 10:47.039
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it’s, it’s the wilds, but I have a team of about 10 to 15 independent contractors.
10:47.059 –> 10:59.522
[SPEAKER_00]: So they’re not full-time per se, but they do work a lot on my brand and my business and you know, my manufacturing team, they’re all independent contractors.
11:00.143 –> 11:01.045
[SPEAKER_00]: So
11:01.025 –> 11:07.836
[SPEAKER_00]: they are working on other people’s projects or their own projects or a lot of, you know, my Goldsmith team.
11:08.276 –> 11:10.159
[SPEAKER_00]: They are working for factories.
11:10.760 –> 11:17.751
[SPEAKER_00]: My CAD designer has a full-time job working for a factory and he does all of my 3D CADs in the middle of the night.
11:17.731 –> 11:27.203
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, we’re flexible, I don’t need my staff to be nine to five Monday through Friday, every day.
11:27.223 –> 11:33.070
[SPEAKER_00]: I am very flexible about when people work as long as we are getting the work done.
11:33.110 –> 11:42.422
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Carter of jewelry is really a seven-day a week to cling for our type of organization, which I think is really cool because
11:42.402 –> 11:51.755
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s always somebody there to answer questions as they arise and it’s very important to us to get back to our clients almost immediately.
11:51.855 –> 12:02.791
[SPEAKER_00]: Customer service is super important to me and so a big feedback that we get is, you know, thank you so much for the quick response, you know, you’re very responsive, we really appreciate that so.
12:02.811 –> 12:11.143
[SPEAKER_02]: And you handling the customer service yourself
12:11.950 –> 12:21.403
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you have plans to delegate that to outsource that at some point or for the time being is it just too critical to the brand USP for you?
12:21.839 –> 12:24.423
[SPEAKER_00]: I do have plans to outsource that in the future.
12:24.443 –> 12:39.764
[SPEAKER_00]: I think since we are still a fairly new brand in the sense that people didn’t know us before, we only officially became a brand in 2020, even though this was a project that I had started many years prior.
12:39.804 –> 12:51.340
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that having that interface with me as the designer, the face of the brand,
12:51.320 –> 12:52.662
[SPEAKER_00]: stage of things.
12:53.043 –> 13:04.984
[SPEAKER_00]: I do anticipate a time when I can be a little bit more hands-off in in terms of like the day-to-day operations and handling every single situation that arises.
13:05.104 –> 13:16.264
[SPEAKER_00]: But as of now, I get clients that will text me at 11 p.m. at night and five o’clock in the
13:16.852 –> 13:31.195
[SPEAKER_02]: I suppose that’s kind of critical when you’re selling luxury online, you know, if we think about buying luxury items and I’m sure many of us are going, wow, I’d never buy that product without touching it, seeing it meeting the people first.
13:32.457 –> 13:41.171
[SPEAKER_02]: There is that great a need for trust to be built up and part of the way you build trust is by being responsive isn’t it?
13:41.492 –> 13:42.133
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
13:42.113 –> 13:59.363
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I think trust is a huge part of the luxury business, and it doesn’t matter what type of product you’re selling, trust comes first, and that high touch level customer service, where you feel like you can text that person.
13:59.343 –> 14:22.228
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, if a question arises or you just want to make sure of something and having that person respond right away as almost a friend, because I have all of my clients, they start as clients and then we become friends and you know, they let me know when their babies are born and they come back for, you know, anniversary gifts and it really is a family that we have kind of
14:22.208 –> 14:24.516
[SPEAKER_00]: built through this, which is so special to me.
14:25.038 –> 14:31.881
[SPEAKER_00]: But it’s through that high touch level, customer service, and that concierge type of experience.
14:32.587 –> 14:46.669
[SPEAKER_02]: I always find it fascinating how business is managed to build sufficient trust for someone that they are up for spending luxury amounts of per order and buying luxury items via the online channel.
14:46.729 –> 14:54.662
[SPEAKER_02]: So how do you, obviously, once you’ve got the, the comms going, it’s easy to build the trust because of how you’re handling all the communications.
14:54.642 –> 15:00.869
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you do to get people to take the first step of contacting you or of placing the order?
15:00.909 –> 15:03.372
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you do to build trust in that part of the journey?
15:04.393 –> 15:07.757
[SPEAKER_00]: So I still do a lot of in-person events.
15:08.317 –> 15:20.751
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that is always something that’s going to be important no matter how big our business gets because that is sort of the initial point of contact where people
15:20.731 –> 15:45.743
[SPEAKER_00]: Either they are interfacing with the brand for the first time or they have been following us online for sometimes years and they’ll make a special trip to one of our events because they’ve always wanted to see the very crown ring in person and try it on and they have they come with a list of pieces that they have been looking at and following online but they just wanted to try them on.
15:45.723 –> 16:04.042
[SPEAKER_00]: and sometimes they come with a very specific idea of what piece they want, and then they try a piece that they had never seen before, and they end up either purchasing it on the spot, or they wait for a big event like a birthday and a nursery a holiday, and then they purchase it online through our Shopify site.
16:04.463 –> 16:13.232
[SPEAKER_00]: So I look at in-person events as it’s an omnichannel experience that it all ties together.
16:13.212 –> 16:13.753
[SPEAKER_02]: Got you.
16:13.773 –> 16:25.505
[SPEAKER_02]: And those events, are they you doing your own pop-up somewhere or are they going to big fairs and events and having a table and that sort of thing?
16:25.525 –> 16:28.352
[SPEAKER_02]: What sort of events you’re doing in the face-to-face world?
16:28.400 –> 16:30.464
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I do have a variety of events.
16:30.604 –> 16:36.316
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, in three weeks, we are during a pop-up at Loveshack Fancy in Palm Beach.
16:36.997 –> 16:41.487
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is our second event that we’ve done in collaboration with Loveshack Fancy Palm Beach.
16:41.507 –> 16:44.653
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve also done one at their Melrose store.
16:44.633 –> 17:02.143
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love collaborating with brands that are different than, like, in conversation with my jewelry because it’s just, it makes it really fun, you try on long dresses and jewelry altogether, and it’s just, it’s a whole experience.
17:02.704 –> 17:05.629
[SPEAKER_00]: But I’ve also done events at luxury hotels.
17:05.609 –> 17:13.980
[SPEAKER_00]: Recently, I did a pop-up at the Delamar hotel in West Hartford, Connecticut, which really has nothing to do with jewelry.
17:14.261 –> 17:23.553
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s just a gorgeous hotel, and I think hotels are something that we have a niche with hotels because it’s a luxury experience.
17:23.994 –> 17:27.178
[SPEAKER_00]: So the whole thing is, it’s all about the experience.
17:27.198 –> 17:34.468
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s about going to the spa and relaxing and trying on jewelry, and it’s just this
17:34.448 –> 17:36.631
[SPEAKER_00]: just full immersive experience.
17:36.691 –> 17:39.395
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s relaxing and memorable and special.
17:40.076 –> 17:43.020
[SPEAKER_00]: But we’ve done a few different craft fairs as well.
17:43.040 –> 17:52.253
[SPEAKER_00]: The Renegade craft fair is one that originally I thought, oh, we can just start out doing things like Renegade and eventually we won’t need to be doing that anymore.
17:52.293 –> 18:00.584
[SPEAKER_00]: But we see so much success at those types of craft fairs and even just growing our email list alone.
18:00.624 –> 18:03.949
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s hundreds of people that are
18:03.929 –> 18:14.134
[SPEAKER_00]: walking around and you just you’re able to cast a really wide net and expose a lot of different types of people to the brand that otherwise would never know about us.
18:15.116 –> 18:17.803
[SPEAKER_02]: So what’s got you excited about 2026?
18:18.678 –> 18:21.041
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, a lot of growth.
18:22.363 –> 18:27.952
[SPEAKER_00]: We’re currently in three different luxury retail stores with the plan to expand.
18:28.112 –> 18:30.075
[SPEAKER_00]: So that’s really exciting.
18:30.135 –> 18:36.484
[SPEAKER_00]: And our Couture collection we’re expanding that as well.
18:36.464 –> 18:53.086
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m really hoping that the price of gold comes down just a little bit to allow, to allow the expansion of the luxury couture mine, but I haven’t seen sales slow as a result of the rising price cost of gold.
18:53.146 –> 18:58.793
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s just been a little bit more difficult to produce in a non-made order way.
18:58.773 –> 19:25.033
[SPEAKER_00]: but every year brings growth and success in so many different ways and um we’re yeah we’re just like we’re excited to keep growing and our SEO efforts have really started taking off so I’m looking forward to bringing in even more sales and hopefully growing the team so that I can actually focus a little bit more on the design element again rather than um just
19:27.865 –> 19:32.735
[SPEAKER_01]: E-commerce master plan is supported by some of the greatest companies in the E-commerce sector.
19:32.856 –> 19:43.258
[SPEAKER_01]: Here’s a reminder of who they are.
19:45.533 –> 19:51.201
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, I love this section because me and I’ll list us some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level, Carter.
19:51.301 –> 19:52.543
[SPEAKER_02]: You ready for the top tips?
19:53.264 –> 19:53.525
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
19:54.085 –> 19:55.247
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, the book, top tip.
19:55.347 –> 20:02.698
[SPEAKER_02]: If everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?
20:02.932 –> 20:06.216
[SPEAKER_00]: So never split the difference by Chris Foss.
20:06.777 –> 20:09.320
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s kind of like a Bible to me and our team.
20:09.340 –> 20:13.965
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that it could help any business with any situation.
20:14.005 –> 20:16.508
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s very important to know how to negotiate.
20:17.410 –> 20:18.391
[SPEAKER_00]: That’s my first book.
20:18.431 –> 20:23.457
[SPEAKER_00]: My second recommendation would be secrets of question-based selling by Thomas Freeze.
20:24.118 –> 20:32.668
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, anything you’re selling, whatever type of product, this book is so helpful
20:32.648 –> 20:37.255
[SPEAKER_00]: selling by asking questions rather than pushing a product.
20:37.696 –> 20:44.607
[SPEAKER_00]: So you’re just asking open-ended questions and figuring out what the client is really looking for.
20:44.647 –> 20:51.357
[SPEAKER_00]: And then having an answer to those questions rather than, here’s my product, it’s great, this is why you should buy it.
20:51.658 –> 20:55.163
[SPEAKER_00]: So that’s been those, I love those, both of those books.
20:55.143 –> 20:57.407
[SPEAKER_02]: those two fits so well together.
20:57.447 –> 20:58.709
[SPEAKER_02]: I love those recommendations.
20:58.950 –> 21:04.900
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, traffic top tip, which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn’t get the press it deserves?
21:06.142 –> 21:13.935
[SPEAKER_00]: So, in today’s day and age, where everything is focused on social media marketing, Google has online marketing.
21:13.996 –> 21:17.742
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that there is nothing quite like
21:17.722 –> 21:26.576
[SPEAKER_00]: in-person grassroots doing events to generate leads and generate traffic even though it’s on a smaller scale.
21:26.596 –> 21:35.110
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that as we go forward into the future, people are going to look for that in-person connection more and more.
21:35.130 –> 21:37.975
[SPEAKER_02]: I think you’ll spot on with that.
21:37.955 –> 21:38.857
[SPEAKER_02]: tooltop tip.
21:39.237 –> 21:47.974
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug in a phone app or just a way of working, is there a cool tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?
21:47.994 –> 21:54.546
[SPEAKER_00]: I love Unum, which is an app for social media grid planning.
21:54.526 –> 22:17.682
[SPEAKER_00]: So, basically, for your Instagram grid, you’re able to plan out your next nine to a 12 posts and see exactly how they’re going to look visually before you post them and then you can schedule your posts that way too, but as a visual person and a designer, it is very important to me how my grid looks and I swear by UNOM and I’ve been using it for at least seven years now.
22:18.016 –> 22:19.418
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, and how do we spell it?
22:20.420 –> 22:21.822
[SPEAKER_02]: UN UM.
22:22.604 –> 22:24.747
[SPEAKER_02]: UN UM, that’s simple, everyone.
22:24.868 –> 22:25.188
[SPEAKER_02]: Cool.
22:25.328 –> 22:25.589
[SPEAKER_02]: Great.
22:25.609 –> 22:26.591
[SPEAKER_02]: I hadn’t heard that once.
22:26.691 –> 22:27.372
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m loving that.
22:28.053 –> 22:29.015
[SPEAKER_02]: Carbon top tip.
22:29.135 –> 22:33.342
[SPEAKER_02]: What’s your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store?
22:33.980 –> 22:35.282
[SPEAKER_00]: For us, it’s made to order.
22:35.302 –> 22:53.008
[SPEAKER_00]: So each product is made specifically for the client, which is our way of reducing waste, reducing resources too, because every product that’s made, you’re using electricity, you’re using so many resources.
22:53.689 –> 22:56.072
[SPEAKER_00]: And it’s our way of,
22:56.052 –> 22:58.917
[SPEAKER_00]: participating in what I like to call conscious commerce.
22:59.518 –> 23:02.223
[SPEAKER_00]: So it’s making products with intention.
23:03.184 –> 23:07.372
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that’s that’s just very important to our personal brand.
23:08.013 –> 23:08.694
[SPEAKER_02]: I love that one.
23:08.734 –> 23:17.790
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, there’s no better way to remove waste from the e-commerce retail chain than not making the product until you know someone actually wants to buy it.
23:17.770 –> 23:18.493
[SPEAKER_02]: Revolutionary.
23:19.779 –> 23:20.663
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Carter.
23:20.724 –> 23:27.173
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, before we say goodbye, could you please let listeners know where they can find you and your business on the web and social media?
23:27.676 –> 23:33.342
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, you can find us at carderevejulary.com, which is our e-commerce website.
23:33.783 –> 23:43.273
[SPEAKER_00]: You can also find us on Instagram at carderevejulary, also on TikTok at carderevejulary, and on Facebook at carderevejulary.
23:43.894 –> 23:49.860
[SPEAKER_02]: Congratulations on getting all the handles, because I don’t know if many of business hasn’t, so nice work on that one.
23:50.340 –> 23:53.144
[SPEAKER_02]: And Carter, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
23:53.164 –> 23:57.328
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s been a real pleasure chatting with you, and I wish you all the best for the business in the coming year.
23:57.308 –> 23:59.353
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, thank you so much for having me.
24:05.054 –> 24:14.227
[SPEAKER_02]: I loved Carter’s focus on really delivering the experience and the product that her customer wants.
24:14.387 –> 24:30.910
[SPEAKER_02]: She is a lady who really knows her customer, I guess partly because she’s done so much of that face-to-face activity with them and it’s kind of no surprise those two books she recommended at the end, totally fitting with how she’s gone about learning about her customers and selling to them.
24:30.890 –> 24:37.317
[SPEAKER_02]: So, really fascinated to talk to her there and love her, her approach to sourcing as well.
24:37.777 –> 24:44.464
[SPEAKER_02]: You can get your hands on our notes from this episode including the top tips and links to what we’ve mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterplanned.com.
24:44.885 –> 24:50.271
[SPEAKER_02]: You could also use our director episode short links that’s ECMP.info forward slash the number of the episode.
24:50.771 –> 24:54.535
[SPEAKER_02]: When you get to the website, why not put yourself on our email list as well?
24:54.515 –> 25:06.036
[SPEAKER_02]: If you liked this episode, then make sure you check out Episode 355, where Larissa Lowden, another jewelry designer, shares how she built her jewelry store to over $2 million.
25:06.056 –> 25:13.570
[SPEAKER_02]: You can also find all our jewelry and fashion episodes on the website at ECMP.info for slash fashion.
25:13.550 –> 25:17.676
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for tuning in to this and every episode of the E-commerce Master Plan podcast.
25:18.057 –> 25:27.251
[SPEAKER_02]: I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help E-commerce business owners to succeed and thrive with their businesses, including progressing along the path to net zero.
25:27.672 –> 25:32.980
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you know someone this show can help, please tell them to listen to the E-commerce Master Plan podcast.
25:33.240 –> 25:36.385
[SPEAKER_02]: I hope you have a brilliant week and don’t forget to keep optimizing.
25:39.217 –> 25:42.670
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to the e-commerce Master Plan podcast.
25:43.092 –> 25:48.332
[SPEAKER_01]: Find out more at e-commercemasterplanned.com slash podcast.
26 min
December 29, 2025eCommerce MasterPlan | 575: The Cards2Cash Growth Story: SEO, Payments & Smart Scaling – with Caleb Slater
Caleb Slater is the managing director at Cards2Cash a platform enabling customers to sell unwanted gift cards. Founded in 2022 (when Caleb was just 16) it operates on a custom website, has recently expanded into Ireland, and has already grown to over £500k in annual sales.

In this episode, Caleb reveals how he scaled Cards2Cash with smart SEO, clever payment optimisation, and a huge focus on trust and customer experience. It’s a fast, practical conversation full of insights any eCommerce brand can apply right away.

Hit PLAY to hear:
How a 16-year-old founder built a £500k+ gift card marketplace from scratch.
The SEO strategy that now brings in 99% of Cards2Cash’s customers.
The payment change that saved the business over £20,000 in fees.
Why customer service became Caleb’s secret weapon for growth.
How he’s using AI (the right way) to cut workload without hurting CX.
The big expansion plans taking Cards2Cash across Europe next.

Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[03:37] Building a Website’s Challenges
[07:43] Exceptional Customer Service Priority
[10:48] Gift Card Trading Trends
[15:11] Ensuring Effective AI Support
[17:56] Overcoming Payment Provider Challenges
[19:42] Global Expansion: Ireland to Germany
[20:24] Listen to Caleb’s Top Tips!

Full episode notes here: https://ecmp.info/575
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WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: The main thing for cars to cash has been organic SEO ranking on Google.
00:07.360 –> 00:18.735
[SPEAKER_00]: So, in the first couple of months to up to a year, the ranking on Google wasn’t there, and we didn’t see a major aspect of people coming into the website.
00:19.155 –> 00:27.085
[SPEAKER_00]: However, since focusing on the SEO aspect, we’ve seen a massive jump in sales and a massive jump in customers.
00:29.545 –> 00:32.673
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.
00:32.693 –> 00:37.185
[SPEAKER_01]: It has to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
00:37.205 –> 00:45.327
[SPEAKER_01]: Cutting through the hinder to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond, here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Hello and welcome.
00:49.120 –> 00:50.202
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s great to have you here.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
00:54.048 –> 01:01.520
[SPEAKER_02]: Now it’s not often that we tie an episode’s content to a date or to a time of the year or the month.
01:01.600 –> 01:07.770
[SPEAKER_02]: But we have done this time because when I was looking at and preparing for this interview,
01:07.750 –> 01:23.487
[SPEAKER_02]: I thought I could, we could put this out at a time which is really going to help this person and their business because we’re going to be chatting today to the founder of a business that buys gift cards from people and when do people most want to sell on one to gift cards between Christmas and New Year?
01:23.507 –> 01:28.753
[SPEAKER_02]: So I thought I’d show I guess a bit of extra love by putting it out at the right time of view for him.
01:29.293 –> 01:34.399
[SPEAKER_02]: So for once we’ve actually time allocated our episode.
01:34.379 –> 01:35.823
[SPEAKER_02]: But it’s reciprocating.
01:36.184 –> 01:44.267
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s fascinating enough just to listen to the complexity of his business what he’s doing and how he’s doing it, how he’s incentivizing customers to buy and to sell.
01:44.347 –> 01:49.401
[SPEAKER_02]: He’s got a super duper focused approach to the marketing.
01:49.381 –> 01:57.512
[SPEAKER_02]: He’s had a lot of work on optimizing the text act, so sharing some tips around that, and then some fascinating stuff around AI and payments as well.
01:57.813 –> 01:59.055
[SPEAKER_02]: We pay to log into this one.
01:59.075 –> 02:00.056
[SPEAKER_02]: I think you’re going to enjoy it.
02:00.557 –> 02:07.086
[SPEAKER_02]: Please also listen to the end of the episode because you don’t want to miss out on his top tips and my own take on the episode.
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[SPEAKER_02]: and now to introduce our special guest.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Caleb Slater is the Managing Director at Cards to Cash, a platform enabling customers to sell unwanted gift cards.
02:24.085 –> 02:29.513
[SPEAKER_02]: Founded in 2022 when Caleb was just 16, it operates on a custom website.
02:29.893 –> 02:36.443
[SPEAKER_02]: Has recently expanded into Ireland and has already grown to over £500,000 in annual sales.
02:36.523 –> 02:37.784
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello, Caleb.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, Eclary.
02:38.445 –> 02:39.587
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you very much for having me.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Very cool to have you here.
02:41.038 –> 02:43.124
[SPEAKER_02]: I think your business is fascinating.
02:43.224 –> 02:45.371
[SPEAKER_02]: So I’m very much looking forward to hearing about it.
02:45.872 –> 02:48.581
[SPEAKER_02]: First off, though, how did you get started in e-commerce?
02:48.601 –> 02:51.670
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I’m guessing that this was your first e-commerce operation.
02:52.072 –> 03:05.849
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I’d always been wanting to have like a little bit of a side hustle, say, from a really, really young age I’d had an eBay account that belonged to my mum and I’d buy things from auction and resell them on eBay, so I’d always had that entrepreneurial spirit.
03:06.009 –> 03:20.087
[SPEAKER_00]: However, it got to a stage where I had so much stuff on eBay and I wanted to expand and I’d obviously been able to generate enough revenue and income and that’s where the idea of cast cash came in.
03:20.523 –> 03:37.114
[SPEAKER_02]: I would imagine it’s been a really complicated site to build, because you’ve got validity, you’ve got customers selling customers’ bikes, it’s kind of a marketplace, it’s kind of a verification site, has the tech stack been the hardest part of it for you?
03:37.364 –> 03:41.512
[SPEAKER_00]: I’d say definitely one of the hardest aspects has been the website.
03:42.153 –> 03:53.854
[SPEAKER_00]: I was lucky enough to find a freelancer that I worked with very closely during founding the website and we took a couple of months where I was
03:53.834 –> 03:56.296
[SPEAKER_00]: basically we were we were building it together.
03:56.316 –> 04:04.464
[SPEAKER_00]: I gave him the ideas and he came back with with the final result and yeah there was there was a lot of back and forth.
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[SPEAKER_00]: However, in the end we got version one of the website which went live and yeah the amount of technology that’s involved different systems that you would never thought would have needed to be embedded and finding what
04:22.302 –> 04:26.948
[SPEAKER_00]: everything like that, from the user experience to the experience of me.
04:27.429 –> 04:32.956
[SPEAKER_00]: And when we were building it, I didn’t factor in having a team that would have to navigate the systems.
04:33.697 –> 04:38.323
[SPEAKER_00]: So as we’ve grown things like work for me, obviously, aren’t working for everyone else.
04:38.563 –> 04:40.365
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, it’s been a journey.
04:40.926 –> 04:42.668
[SPEAKER_02]: A bit too customized to Caleb.
04:42.768 –> 04:43.850
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it’s definitely.
04:45.292 –> 04:47.955
[SPEAKER_02]: So what does the team look like now?
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[SPEAKER_00]: So we’ve got a small team, they’re all in the UK, in Northampton, and I’ve been very strong about keeping everything local.
04:57.229 –> 05:14.314
[SPEAKER_00]: So I’ve got an assistant that helps me with all my daily stuff and finances and everything, and then we’ve got a team of that deal with the customer service and operations and everything, helping the customers as the first point of call, and then leading our expansion into other countries.
05:15.357 –> 05:18.120
[SPEAKER_02]: So Caleb, I’m ready to run ahead and ask you harder questions.
05:18.180 –> 05:20.883
[SPEAKER_02]: We haven’t really explained the audience what the actual product is.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So talk to us a bit about the selling and buying process and the product that you’re selling.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, sure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So cardster cash is a gift card market place where people with unwanted gift cards can sell them to cardster cash.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then we list them on our website at a discount and then buyers can purchase them.
05:39.642 –> 05:41.324
[SPEAKER_00]: So it’s a win-win for both sides.
05:41.424 –> 05:44.487
[SPEAKER_00]: If you’ve got an unwanted gift card, you can sell it and get money for it.
05:44.467 –> 05:52.355
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you want to save some money and why you’re shopping online, you can purchase a gift card from us at a discount.
05:52.776 –> 05:55.759
[SPEAKER_00]: And then basically save and get free money.
05:56.620 –> 06:05.149
[SPEAKER_02]: So it’s less of a marketplace, more of a, almost a re-commerce scenario where you’re buying unwanted product from consumers.
06:05.870 –> 06:10.575
[SPEAKER_02]: And then you’re owning the merchandise to then sell it onto other consumers.
06:10.893 –> 06:20.706
[SPEAKER_00]: So to make the marketplace sustainable, we don’t process payment to sellers until a new buyer has purchased it, but everything goes through us.
06:21.007 –> 06:33.804
[SPEAKER_00]: So the seller sells it to us, and then we validate and my team check that it’s a legitimate gift card, it’s got a balance, and it’s been acquired legitimately, and then we list it on the website, and then someone else purchased it.
06:33.824 –> 06:39.972
[SPEAKER_00]: So everything else is controlled by us, and then the process goes through very seamlessly.
06:40.441 –> 06:43.827
[SPEAKER_02]: And do you handle physical gift cards and digital gift cards?
06:43.848 –> 06:46.232
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I imagine that’s a bit of a complexity.
06:46.833 –> 06:50.580
[SPEAKER_00]: So most gift cards can be just a bloated viral portal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The seller will take in it picture off the gift card and then we can validate it from that.
06:56.652 –> 07:03.445
[SPEAKER_00]: And if the buyer needs a barcode to scan or something like that, we will upload the picture.
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[SPEAKER_00]: along with their purchase.
07:05.010 –> 07:07.277
[SPEAKER_00]: So they can click a link and they can access the image.
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[SPEAKER_00]: However, there’s a very few select gift cards that need the physical card in which case we ask the seller to send it to us and then we post it to the buyer.
07:17.583 –> 07:20.227
[SPEAKER_02]: Nice, you’ve eradicated most of the physicality of it.
07:20.608 –> 07:21.470
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, definitely.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Like the commerce dream.
07:24.635 –> 07:26.798
[SPEAKER_02]: No physical product, no post is to deal with.
07:27.299 –> 07:32.288
[SPEAKER_02]: So you said most of your team are involved in the customer service side of things.
07:33.510 –> 07:35.733
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that because that’s more difficult?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Is that because that’s where you see growth coming from, giving good service and therefore the growth comes?
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[SPEAKER_00]: So one of my core aspects of running this company is providing an exceptional level of service because I understand that there might be one or two other platforms out there at the moment doing the same or similar thing.
07:55.381 –> 08:02.237
[SPEAKER_00]: So giving a top tier level of service to our customers is something that’s so important.
08:02.217 –> 08:08.907
[SPEAKER_00]: And it kind of, it ties in line with all of the company values and how the company operates.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I try and get everyone in my team helping with customer service at some point or another.
08:14.715 –> 08:20.884
[SPEAKER_00]: So that say we have a Christmas weekend where it’s mentally busy and there’s so much to deal with.
08:21.025 –> 08:24.750
[SPEAKER_00]: That we haven’t got only one person that can deal with customer service.
08:24.810 –> 08:30.098
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve got an array of people that are able to help and step in at times when it’s needed.
08:30.685 –> 08:31.046
[SPEAKER_02]: got it.
08:31.547 –> 08:36.137
[SPEAKER_02]: And obviously that focus on quality is going to help you grow in the long term.
08:36.197 –> 08:45.859
[SPEAKER_02]: In the short term, I guess you’ve got the double challenge over and above what most e-commerce business has had, which is you’ve got to recreate the sellers as well as the buyers.
08:46.480 –> 08:48.525
[SPEAKER_02]: So how do you go about doing that?
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[SPEAKER_00]: So the main thing for Costa Cache has been organic SEO ranking on Google, so in the first couple of months to up to a year, the ranking on Google wasn’t there and we didn’t see a major aspect of people coming into the website, however, since focusing on the SEO aspect,
09:14.189 –> 09:23.798
[SPEAKER_00]: and really, really tying that in as a foundation that we need to get right, we see a massive jump in sales and a massive jump in customers.
09:24.641 –> 09:28.232
[SPEAKER_02]: And is that that’s still your number one marketing channel?
09:28.499 –> 09:32.725
[SPEAKER_00]: that’s number one followed by email marketing to our existing customers.
09:33.106 –> 09:58.422
[SPEAKER_00]: So our new customers are 99% of the time obtained through SEO and then the other one we do some search engine, adverts and Instagram adverts and things like that during sale periods such as the Apple launch or Amazon Prime Day or Christmas time is when we generally do a small bit of paid advertising,
09:58.790 –> 10:04.287
[SPEAKER_02]: So with that advertising, would that be something like for primed day, want to save even more?
10:04.608 –> 10:07.838
[SPEAKER_02]: Come and get an Amazon voucher for 10% off.
10:08.206 –> 10:26.904
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so we do exactly that and then for example at the most recent Apple launch, we had this really, really cool image that basically looked as if it was the Apple image and we’d put our logo on it and say and it said save 5% on the Apple launch use cards to cash.
10:27.125 –> 10:35.833
[SPEAKER_00]: So basically, we tie it in with our massive marketing stunts on those big events and then every other time
10:35.813 –> 10:41.572
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s the primary mal by this and save this or sell and save and things like that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Nice and do you find there’s a big overlap between your customers and your sellers?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Are they one in the same people?
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[SPEAKER_00]: No, so we find that while there is an overlap, we generally find that there are more sellers wanting to sell unwanted gift cards, which makes sense.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then once we have a buyer that wants to sell it or patches a gift card from us,
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[SPEAKER_00]: We generally find that they are a repeat customer that will stay with Kafka for more than two or three years to be honest.
11:15.587 –> 11:24.383
[SPEAKER_00]: So on average, a buyer will save over £400 with us in a year if they purchase gift cards regularly throughout each month.
11:24.363 –> 11:37.125
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we generally see that once the seller has sold a gift card and they’ve been paid, they might come back once or twice, and that’s what we use our email marketing for to get them back on the site.
11:37.486 –> 11:42.895
[SPEAKER_00]: And we also have an option of a cast-to-cash balance payment so that
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[SPEAKER_02]: If they do want to use our site to purchase, they’ll get a little bit more by selecting to be paid by their cards to cash balance and get that reward of I can swap a gift card for another gift card for example and overall come out better in the deal because I’m exactly saving a bit because you don’t have to part with the cash very clever so we mentioned earlier that you had quite the interesting text act journey are there any particular
12:10.128 –> 12:16.982
[SPEAKER_02]: Changes that you found, you know, without bad mouthing anybody, but any particular optimizations of that text that you found really paid off for you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I would say generally at the start of the journey, we started off with with a very basic sort of understanding and level of the systems.
12:29.425 –> 12:40.523
[SPEAKER_00]: However, as we’ve grown, we’ve implemented fraud controls and fraud systems so that we can be 100% sure, but all of our transactions are legitimate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve also focused on a bank transfer system.
12:44.519 –> 12:51.590
[SPEAKER_00]: So we found the need that our buyers wanted to bank transfer directly instead of using debit and credit cards.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So we implemented an automatic transfer system that will find a bank transfer within a minute of a buyer send the and that’s 247.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So that was another really big step for us.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Wow, that’s a payment method that almost nobody would anticipate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But the tech exists out there if you can find it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we’ve seen a massive, like, a doctor of this method.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we give our buyers a one-percent saving when they use bank transfer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the volumes that we see going through bank transfer, it’s phenomenal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I would have never expected it to be like that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: four a discount already.
13:33.316 –> 13:34.638
[SPEAKER_02]: They’re in discount mindset.
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[SPEAKER_02]: One more percentage point really speaks to them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
13:38.345 –> 13:48.204
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I say they’re purchasing an Amazon gift card that is already only at a three or four percent discount because it’s priced at the demand, an extra percent on that.
13:48.505 –> 13:49.367
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s quite major.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if you’re purchasing a thousand pounds and it’s another 10 of that you’re saving just by sending a transfer.
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[SPEAKER_02]: as simple as that, love that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, cool.
13:58.069 –> 14:05.590
[SPEAKER_02]: And any, any advice to anyone who’s thinking but trying to find some wins in their text act for 2026, where would you look?
14:06.447 –> 14:09.411
[SPEAKER_00]: we are really investing in how AI can assist us.
14:09.891 –> 14:33.282
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I know everyone will be talking about AI and it can do all of this and that but having while it might cost employment and it might cost a rut if it is giving you the equivalent of another member of staff or something like that then you can you can justify it because it’s relieving that workload of here are the simple requests that you see coming in on a daily basis.
14:33.262 –> 14:45.060
[SPEAKER_00]: If you can have an automated response with all of this that’s tailored to the customer then that is really ideal so it’s something that we’re working on and it’s not really yet, but it will be ready soon
14:45.378 –> 14:52.646
[SPEAKER_02]: So there’s a lot of talk at the moment about adding AI and saving time with AI and a lot of people are doing it badly.
14:52.826 –> 14:58.893
[SPEAKER_02]: I read a report the other day that 95% of businesses don’t think they’re gaining anything from their AI work yet.
14:59.293 –> 15:06.061
[SPEAKER_02]: So what’s your key advice for actually embracing AI in a way that delivers?
15:06.121 –> 15:11.487
[SPEAKER_02]: What are the key steps to making sure you’re not just wasting time and having fun playing with a new tool?
15:12.007 –> 15:17.397
[SPEAKER_00]: what I’m going to say is making sure that it works and it does exactly what you want to do.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And some customers they won’t want to speak to AI, they’ll want to be transferred to a human agent and that’s fair enough we are here to support and that links back to the exceptional support level that we provide.
15:29.860 –> 15:36.949
[SPEAKER_00]: So if a customer wants to speak to a support agent instead of going through AI, it will just transfer them straight across.
15:37.109 –> 15:44.038
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the reason why it’s taking us slightly longer is because we want to prepare and we want it to actually work properly.
15:44.078 –> 15:46.361
[SPEAKER_00]: And it’s not going to give you an incorrect answer.
15:46.421 –> 15:50.626
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s not going to give you just something that isn’t going to be useful.
15:51.027 –> 15:53.229
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s going to look at your request and it will answer it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if you don’t like the answer then one of my team will be able to help.
15:57.772 –> 15:58.653
[SPEAKER_02]: nice.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I know that as we’ve been talking it’s it’s quite clear you’re very focused on the percentage points because that’s you know how your business operates is all percentage points off of the cards as they come in and percentage points off of the customers and then the percentage points with the backs.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Is there any other ways in which you’ve improved the percentage points on your transactions that you’re willing to share?
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[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I think there is one major aspect, so about just over a year ago now, I think we switched payment partners from our previous partner to our new one who’s called exactly.com and in doing so we’ve saved over 20,000 pound and payment processing fees, we’ve.
16:40.043 –> 16:55.830
[SPEAKER_00]: streamlined operations we’ve increased up time and it’s I know all of these numbers sound like massive and they are and to us while we’re working on such like small margins because that’s the aspect of a marketplace.
16:56.411 –> 17:01.680
[SPEAKER_00]: Those sorts of savings where at B5%
17:01.660 –> 17:13.610
[SPEAKER_00]: So with that new implementation we’ve saved with our fraud costs, we’ve saved, we’ve got a lower chargeback rate, we’ve got decreased payment issues and things.
17:14.011 –> 17:18.943
[SPEAKER_00]: So that has been a major aspect of changing from one solution to another.
17:19.514 –> 17:37.590
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s interesting because I’ve been around conversations about payment providers and percentage rates and all that kind of stuff for the last 20 years and certainly for the first 15 of those years, the only part of the discussion that anyone was talking about was the transaction fee.
17:37.570 –> 17:42.198
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s all I need one cared about was the transaction fee, the transaction percentage, and that was the entire ballgame.
17:42.619 –> 17:44.002
[SPEAKER_02]: But you’ve listed, I lost track.
17:44.022 –> 17:50.133
[SPEAKER_02]: I think you’re like six or seven other benefits to switching from systems, time saving, accuracy, etc.
17:50.193 –> 17:56.524
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s, it’s, I find it mad that there’s that much you can get from changing a payment provider.
17:56.774 –> 18:00.898
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it’s all about finding the right solution, the works for your business.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And when I started, I was obviously only 16.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And all of the major payment providers say, you have to be 18, so that’s one thing I’ve got over come.
18:11.647 –> 18:17.973
[SPEAKER_00]: And then when I found someone that said they would do it, they looked at the website and they said, oh, you do gift cards, now we’re not gonna do that.
18:17.993 –> 18:20.435
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was another hurdle that I had to overcome.
18:20.575 –> 18:26.781
[SPEAKER_00]: So we had two instant nodes basically.
18:26.761 –> 18:44.854
[SPEAKER_00]: that would say accept me for no trading history, be for no, like basically on my age at 16 and then see of the industry that this website is in was a mammoth hurdle and that’s why I had to settle further company that we used at the beginning.
18:44.834 –> 18:46.877
[SPEAKER_00]: and they were great.
18:47.718 –> 18:49.601
[SPEAKER_00]: They got the solution set up.
18:49.621 –> 18:59.617
[SPEAKER_00]: We got it integrated and while the commercials might not have been viable, it was the only real way that I saw setting up the business possible at that age.
18:59.777 –> 19:01.520
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had to take the hit.
19:01.600 –> 19:05.145
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to be able to if I wanted to do the business, if what I had to do.
19:05.746 –> 19:10.133
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I met my new payment partner at the e-commerce expo.
19:10.113 –> 19:17.468
[SPEAKER_00]: and we got the ball rolling from there basically and obviously the savings have been massive.
19:17.868 –> 19:21.997
[SPEAKER_00]: We are we are able to process much quicker, much easier.
19:22.037 –> 19:26.265
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, it’s it’s been a real big stepals solutions.
19:26.785 –> 19:42.364
[SPEAKER_02]: Congrats on all of that and I think so many of us we have no concept of the fact that age is a factor when you start so young what’s next on the radar for your business k-lovers We go into 2026 what if you got planned a few that you’re willing to share
19:42.732 –> 19:47.300
[SPEAKER_00]: So, obviously, we’ve just launched an island, which is really exciting, that’s growing gradually.
19:47.720 –> 19:54.912
[SPEAKER_00]: However, our next plan, we’re going to be launching in Germany in the next month or so, and then we’re going to be growing from now.
19:54.952 –> 20:04.268
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve got a list of European and worldwide countries basically that we’re going to be launching in to bring Costa Castro to the world.
20:07.150 –> 20:12.000
[SPEAKER_01]: E-commerce most at land is supported by some of the greatest companies in the E-commerce sector.
20:12.141 –> 20:22.543
[SPEAKER_01]: Here’s a reminder of who they are.
20:24.802 –> 20:30.130
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, I love this section because it’s me and I’ll list us some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
20:30.230 –> 20:31.993
[SPEAKER_02]: Caleb, you ready for the top tips?
20:32.654 –> 20:33.656
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, yeah.
20:33.676 –> 20:34.457
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, here we go then.
20:34.477 –> 20:35.579
[SPEAKER_02]: The book top tip.
20:35.659 –> 20:43.030
[SPEAKER_02]: If everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, is there one book you would recommend?
20:43.583 –> 20:47.369
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I would say the lean start-up by Eric Ryos.
20:47.809 –> 20:57.424
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s a brilliant for understanding how to test and how to scale ideas efficiently, without over-complicating things and spending huge amounts of money.
20:58.185 –> 21:00.930
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we can all see that that one must be in your DNA.
21:00.950 –> 21:03.954
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, great recommendation.
21:04.114 –> 21:10.384
[SPEAKER_02]: OK, traffic top tip, which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn’t get the press it deserves?
21:10.887 –> 21:19.261
[SPEAKER_00]: I think as we’ve covered SEO is the major aspect of how we’ve got to where we are and doing that organically is the best way forward.
21:20.022 –> 21:36.068
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it’s I guess for you guys the the trust element is paying off there as well, you know, there’s more consumers have more trust in an organic list and they’re doing a paid listing and with what you’re doing, they’re almost trusting you with their own cash aren’t they so in their mindset if not in reality.
21:36.318 –> 21:41.026
[SPEAKER_00]: and having that trust pilot score of Big Excellent, which is what we pride ourselves on.
21:41.307 –> 21:49.421
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a major aspect because when Google sees the trust pilot score increase, it will see the credibility of your website increase.
21:50.322 –> 21:51.725
[SPEAKER_02]: Nice, okay, tool top tip.
21:51.825 –> 22:00.520
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug in a phone app or just a way of working, is there a cool little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?
22:00.888 –> 22:19.851
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve wide variety of tools, however, the one that I’d say says that’s the most time is talk to you and that’s our live chat help desk ticketing program and it really allows us to be able to communicate and collaborate as a team on how to resolve issues for all of our customers.
22:20.812 –> 22:21.173
[SPEAKER_02]: Nice.
22:21.653 –> 22:23.415
[SPEAKER_02]: Finally, the carbon top tip.
22:23.796 –> 22:27.300
[SPEAKER_02]: What’s your favourite way to reduce the carbon footprint
22:27.854 –> 22:46.504
[SPEAKER_00]: I’d say the remote operations of our business really helps improve our emissions and our carbon footprint basically because by running our support team online and everyone working from home, we cut the travel emissions and energy usage, more staying flexible as we go.
22:47.193 –> 22:47.734
[SPEAKER_02]: Love that.
22:48.255 –> 22:48.976
[SPEAKER_02]: I do that too.
22:50.438 –> 22:57.749
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it’s one of the easiest ones to do and it does make it really builds up the amount of impact it makes and it saves quite a lot of cash as well.
22:58.730 –> 23:02.095
[SPEAKER_02]: Caleb, before we say goodbye, it’s late December.
23:02.716 –> 23:06.061
[SPEAKER_02]: I suspect our audience may be wanting to sell some things to you.
23:06.562 –> 23:10.888
[SPEAKER_02]: So could you please let them know when they can find you and how they can get in contact?
23:11.172 –> 23:12.094
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
23:12.254 –> 23:22.213
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, as we all know, about 50% of people just everyone in the UK basically will have unwanted gift cards from Christmas.
23:22.333 –> 23:23.856
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s a massive statistic.
23:23.896 –> 23:31.290
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you’re looking to sell your gift cards and you want to find the best rate possible, then you can visit us at cards to cash.co.uk
23:31.979 –> 23:32.560
[SPEAKER_02]: excellent.
23:32.780 –> 23:41.976
[SPEAKER_02]: And I hope in this very busy post-Christmas period that you and your team are calm and enjoying it and having lots of happiness.
23:42.096 –> 23:43.999
[SPEAKER_00]: Please bear with us if you email us.
23:45.422 –> 23:48.247
[SPEAKER_02]: Caleb, thank you so much for coming on the Ecommerce Master Plan podcast.
23:48.267 –> 23:52.855
[SPEAKER_02]: I’ve been fascinating learning about your business and thanks for being so generous sharing it all with us.
23:53.295 –> 23:55.339
[SPEAKER_00]: That’s like a thank you very much for having me Chloe.
23:55.359 –> 23:56.080
[SPEAKER_00]: That was brilliant.
24:01.797 –> 24:04.141
[SPEAKER_02]: a fascinating business model.
24:04.882 –> 24:05.623
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it’s one of those.
24:05.683 –> 24:07.125
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m like, why do I think that?
24:07.165 –> 24:08.067
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s it’s so clever.
24:08.227 –> 24:17.521
[SPEAKER_02]: Buy gift cards back from people, sell them at a bit of a discount to customers, everybody wins, hugely automatable, if or rather complex text act.
24:17.621 –> 24:21.207
[SPEAKER_02]: I also loved Caleb’s points around
24:21.187 –> 24:27.613
[SPEAKER_02]: I got up, but his focus so clearly on a couple of marketing channels and getting them absolutely right.
24:27.633 –> 24:36.620
[SPEAKER_02]: So organic social being crucial for trust and traffic, which, you know, if you think about what you do, if you’re trying to get rid of a gift card, it’s what you do.
24:36.720 –> 24:50.012
[SPEAKER_02]: You’d search first and foremost, and I’m sure those that work is starting to pay off in the world of the LLM’s as well, then email marketing to keep the customers buying and to convert the sellers the buyers.
24:49.992 –> 25:05.370
[SPEAKER_02]: And then finally, the super targeted adactivity on days when people are spending lots of money online, or when lots of people are spending lots of money on the same things online to the Apple launches and Amazon Prime Day as well.
25:06.051 –> 25:06.732
[SPEAKER_02]: Very clever.
25:07.212 –> 25:11.277
[SPEAKER_02]: I am fascinated to see what Caleb would achieve in the coming years.
25:11.337 –> 25:12.178
[SPEAKER_02]: I hope you enjoyed that.
25:12.198 –> 25:16.303
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, if you are
25:16.283 –> 25:17.584
[SPEAKER_02]: Why not sell it to Gailab?
25:18.706 –> 25:26.974
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, do you can get your hands on our notes from this episode, including those top tips and links to what we’ve mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterplan.com.
25:26.994 –> 25:37.485
[SPEAKER_02]: You could also use our direct episode short links that’s ECMP.info forward slash the number of this episode, just slot that into the URL bar and you will go straight to the right page of the website.
25:37.866 –> 25:40.709
[SPEAKER_02]: When you get to the website, go on, join email list.
25:40.809 –> 25:41.970
[SPEAKER_02]: You know you want to.
25:41.950 –> 26:04.768
[SPEAKER_02]: If you like this episode, then make sure you check out Episode 4169, so almost exactly two years ago, we released this one, where I’m talking to Bartos Swachek, from G2A, who are another digital marketplace, and really, really, they’re in games, and it’s really fascinating to see
26:04.748 –> 26:10.777
[SPEAKER_02]: The parallels between Caleb’s currently small business and Bartost’s huge business.
26:10.797 –> 26:14.342
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think you’ll really enjoy that one if you’ve enjoyed listening to this one too.
26:15.164 –> 26:22.875
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, you can also hear all our episodes with smaller startups at ECMP.info for such startup.
26:22.855 –> 26:32.127
[SPEAKER_02]: I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help e-commerce business owners just like you to succeed and thrive with your businesses, including progressing along the path to that zero.
26:32.547 –> 26:37.794
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you know someone this show can help, please tell them to listen to the e-commerce master plan podcast.
26:37.814 –> 26:52.693
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope you have a great week and don’t forget to keep optimizing.
27 min
December 22, 2025eCommerce MasterPlan | 574: eCommerce Meets High Street: How Wardrobe at The Cross Wins with Personalization and Trust, with Hilary Large
Hilary Large is the owner at Wardrobe at The Cross, a women’s fashion boutique. Launched in 2023, they sell via their physical high street store, and via their Shopify website and have already built to 100s of orders a week.

In this episode, Hilary shares how she’s blending the best of in-store service with online scale — from personally calling first-time customers to building a brand rooted in trust, experience, and genuine connection.

Hit PLAY to hear:
How Hilary Large built a women’s fashion brand that blends bricks and clicks — and why it works.
The surprising reason she personally calls every first-time online customer (and what it does for retention).
How a small boutique competes with big brands by delivering luxury-level service.
The simple systems that keep her returns low and repeat purchases high.
Why having a physical store still matters — even in a digital-first world.
The one thing Hilary refuses to give up as her business scales (and why it could change yours too).

Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[03:56] eCommerce Marketing Growth Journey
[08:19] “Brand Growth Through Retail Presence”
[12:46] Customer Trust Epiphany
[14:40] “Optimizing eCommerce Customer Support”
[18:56] “Protecting the Business’s Foundation”
[20:14] Listen to Hilary’s Top Tips!

Full episode notes here: https://ecmp.info/574
—
Download our ebook… https://ecmp.info/ebook 500 Tips to Increase Your Profits
Get all the links and resources we mention and join our email list at https://ecmp.info
Love the show? Chloe would love your feedback – leave a review here: https://ecmp.info/review or reply to the episode QandA on Spotify.
Interested in being a Sponsor? go here: https://ecmp.info/sponsor
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
WEBVTT
00:00.031 –> 00:14.246
[SPEAKER_00]: Whenever I get an order that comes in and I see that it’s from a customer name I do not know So I just had one in good example would be a lady in Aberdeen or did this morning a lovely top So I rang her and I just say I just wanted to let you know You’re speaking to the owner.
00:14.306 –> 00:15.967
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s lovely to have your order.
00:16.028 –> 00:19.351
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for that Can I help you with anything to do with sizing?
00:19.611 –> 00:24.216
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I talk to you at all about you know the item you’ve bought just to check you’ve got the right color way
00:24.196 –> 00:34.150
[SPEAKER_00]: She feels that she has had a quasi bespoke experience that would emulate what would happen if she came into my shop.
00:34.170 –> 00:36.553
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.
00:37.114 –> 00:41.180
[SPEAKER_01]: Here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
00:41.721 –> 00:49.832
[SPEAKER_01]: Cutting through the highly to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
00:52.242 –> 00:54.545
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello and welcome, it’s great to have you here.
00:54.585 –> 00:58.730
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen at the one of our inspiring guests.
00:59.010 –> 01:00.853
[SPEAKER_02]: A short intro this time.
01:00.873 –> 01:06.479
[SPEAKER_02]: I just want to say thanks to past guests, Janice Thomas for another great guest introduction.
01:06.840 –> 01:19.195
[SPEAKER_02]: So thank you, Janice, and in this episode, we are talking to a smaller than usual business, but you’ll understand why, as you get into the episode, we’re talking to someone running a women’s fashion boutique.
01:19.175 –> 01:31.908
[SPEAKER_02]: with a bricks store and a clicks store so online and off-lied and she’s going to be sharing how she’s going about building the brand and the customer experience into everything they’re doing across both channels.
01:32.849 –> 01:40.456
[SPEAKER_02]: As is often the case, there are some amazing tips coming up, especially the traffic, a top tip when we get to that section of the interview.
01:40.496 –> 01:44.220
[SPEAKER_02]: So make sure you listen right to the end so you don’t miss out on any of it.
01:49.735 –> 01:51.778
[SPEAKER_02]: And now to introduce our special guest.
01:51.979 –> 01:55.385
[SPEAKER_02]: Hillary Lard is the owner at Wardrobe at the Cross.
01:55.805 –> 01:57.348
[SPEAKER_02]: A woman’s fashion boutique.
01:57.708 –> 02:06.944
[SPEAKER_02]: Launched in 2023, they sell via their physical high street store and via their Shopify website and have already built to hundreds of orders a week.
02:07.044 –> 02:08.166
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello, Hill.
02:08.146 –> 02:09.469
[SPEAKER_02]: Hey there, Clare, how are you?
02:09.770 –> 02:10.291
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m good.
02:10.411 –> 02:26.728
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m really excited to get to talk to you because I think I’m a slight spoiler alert people here, but I always think that the smaller businesses can teach so much to the bigger businesses and I don’t think that’s anywhere more so than in the bricks and clicks.
02:26.708 –> 02:27.229
[SPEAKER_02]: space.
02:27.249 –> 02:30.033
[SPEAKER_02]: So it’s very, very cool to have you on the show.
02:30.093 –> 02:33.157
[SPEAKER_02]: How did you get into this world of e-commerce?
02:33.197 –> 02:36.762
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, what on earth led you to start a bricks and clicks?
02:37.303 –> 02:40.147
[SPEAKER_02]: Women’s fashion boutique in 2020, 23.
02:40.167 –> 02:45.595
[SPEAKER_00]: So I’ve worked in the world of e-common digital since
02:45.575 –> 02:47.838
[SPEAKER_00]: really the inception of e-command digital.
02:47.858 –> 02:51.723
[SPEAKER_00]: So my background is firmly in the women’s fashion space.
02:51.763 –> 02:53.285
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve done a lot of that kind of thing.
02:53.866 –> 02:55.568
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve worked in brick and mortar.
02:55.668 –> 02:59.132
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve worked in businesses where digital was nascent.
02:59.253 –> 03:03.097
[SPEAKER_00]: So started my career with the Kingfisher group on a graduate training scheme.
03:03.158 –> 03:08.224
[SPEAKER_00]: When that group owned B&Q and Superdrog and Woolworths and all of that,
03:08.204 –> 03:33.992
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were right, we’re talking 1999, 2000, right back at the beginning of e-commerce, when websites were a lad, you know, and these were tiny websites strung together with bits of string, but we were just working out how to generate online orders, very interesting times, actually did a lot of picking and packing for superdrogs first ever website, which was hilarious in the bowels of their store in Croydon.
03:33.972 –> 03:54.293
[SPEAKER_00]: then I went from there and I worked at the very group for a really long time and actually that was really important to me and that is a group that is built on the background of direct mail and massive, massive catalog maillings, huge amounts of data, data is the machine in that business.
03:54.273 –> 03:56.056
[SPEAKER_00]: And that taught me so much.
03:56.116 –> 04:02.907
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, I worked there from sort of 2005 through till about 2011, and it felt like a lot longer.
04:02.927 –> 04:13.504
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, growing the website as kind of the internet and digital group, you know, this is before social was an important part of the ecosystem or any part of the ecosystem.
04:14.185 –> 04:18.492
[SPEAKER_00]: This was when email marketing and news letter marketing was just
04:18.472 –> 04:29.577
[SPEAKER_00]: not even really something that we thought about, but it’s hugely important to me to learn about the way those businesses work, what data could mean in an e-commerce business.
04:30.378 –> 04:35.670
[SPEAKER_00]: And then from there, so I would say those were two really important experiences, but from there,
04:35.650 –> 04:56.480
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve done stints as marketing director of a number of different either pure play e-commerce businesses or businesses that have had brick and mortar and e-com and I’ve led marketing teams, but I always knew and I’m 49 for transparency so I’m, and I’m, you know, I always knew that about this point in my life I would do it myself.
04:57.201 –> 05:03.750
[SPEAKER_00]: I got to a point where I thought, you know what
05:04.085 –> 05:06.528
[SPEAKER_00]: But it’s great to do this for yourself.
05:06.908 –> 05:23.447
[SPEAKER_00]: And I am intensely interested in sustainable fashion, intensely interested in women’s wear and how wearing the right armor, and I use that word advisedly, can radically alter the way you feel about yourself and your presentation of self.
05:23.827 –> 05:26.430
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is what we do here.
05:26.410 –> 05:33.437
[SPEAKER_02]: Very cool, so it was kind of like, this wasn’t a moment of realization, so I’m going to open my own fashion boutique.
05:33.577 –> 05:39.062
[SPEAKER_02]: It was something you’ve been planning or having a, having in your vision for decades.
05:39.903 –> 05:52.975
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, back in the day, nobody ever used to talk about vision boards did they, and I’ve never had a vision board, Chloe, I don’t, but I’ve always had something in my head, which said, help you understand women’s fashion.
05:52.955 –> 06:03.344
[SPEAKER_00]: and you also understand e-commerce and customer service and sustainable fashion, although again, that’s a new part of our lexicon or relatively new.
06:03.384 –> 06:06.834
[SPEAKER_00]: Why wouldn’t you do this?
06:06.894 –> 06:08.719
[SPEAKER_00]: This is this is kind of
06:08.699 –> 06:14.490
[SPEAKER_00]: the bringing together of so many different strands of who I am actually as a person.
06:14.610 –> 06:18.157
[SPEAKER_00]: So this place, and I do is my happy place.
06:18.237 –> 06:20.422
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m sat here in the office at the back of my store.
06:20.442 –> 06:24.349
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve got my warehouse on one side and the actual brick and mortar store to the other side.
06:25.071 –> 06:29.219
[SPEAKER_00]: My sense is this is where it was all coming towards and I always knew that that was the case.
06:29.299 –> 06:31.483
[SPEAKER_00]: I always knew there would be one day.
06:31.463 –> 06:36.973
[SPEAKER_00]: When I sat, my husband down and said, right, it’s now, I found the premises, I know where I want to be.
06:37.033 –> 06:38.657
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve got a warehouse.
06:39.117 –> 06:40.320
[SPEAKER_00]: The brands are lined up.
06:40.781 –> 06:41.402
[SPEAKER_00]: Let’s do this.
06:42.223 –> 06:49.557
[SPEAKER_02]: So, why was it always going to be bricks and clicks?
06:50.212 –> 06:55.442
[SPEAKER_00]: I always knew from being a very little girl that I loved shops.
06:55.983 –> 07:00.271
[SPEAKER_00]: As in brick and mortar shops before I come, I loved going to the shops.
07:00.411 –> 07:13.435
[SPEAKER_00]: I loved the experience with my grandmother, my father’s mom, what, by the time she was which was born in 1915, but by the time she was 30, she was the head corsetia and Taylor S at Harvey Nichols in Night’s Bridge.
07:13.415 –> 07:15.457
[SPEAKER_00]: and we both loved shops.
07:15.677 –> 07:42.645
[SPEAKER_00]: It missed a generation, my dad and mom could not be less interested, but I was raised at the knee of a grandma who read Vogue and was deeply interested in women’s fashion in the spoke fashion and she would walk me around herids and harbingicles where she worked and would show me things and I would learn about customer service and beautiful stores and how you could turn a customer from browsing and watching her behavior into someone who you could
07:42.625 –> 07:44.571
[SPEAKER_00]: and that that would convert to purchase.
07:45.233 –> 07:46.677
[SPEAKER_00]: So for me that was important.
07:47.379 –> 07:52.855
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m deeply personal in the way I behave and that is reflected in the store.
07:53.290 –> 08:00.779
[SPEAKER_00]: And then at the other point is, many of the brands I want to stock will only come to me if I have a brick and mortar presence.
08:01.540 –> 08:03.943
[SPEAKER_00]: So I stock tons of Scandinavian brands.
08:04.543 –> 08:13.854
[SPEAKER_00]: The only way to have that business is if you have a brick and mortar store, they are quite understandably, they can have their own B2C websites, they do, actually.
08:14.315 –> 08:17.779
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m happy to say that I rank above them from an SEO
08:17.759 –> 08:24.587
[SPEAKER_00]: because I’ve worked quite a lot on that, but they have their own B2C sites, but they want reach and brand recognition in the UK.
08:25.247 –> 08:31.194
[SPEAKER_00]: So that’s how they get it by being in physical stores here to get their brand footprints known.
08:31.955 –> 08:33.216
[SPEAKER_00]: So that’s the why really.
08:34.137 –> 08:39.082
[SPEAKER_00]: But I absolutely love being shopgirl and I only get to do it rarely now.
08:39.963 –> 08:43.227
[SPEAKER_00]: I try and do it at least for four hours on a Friday.
08:43.207 –> 08:45.210
[SPEAKER_00]: and I love every second of it.
08:45.351 –> 08:55.067
[SPEAKER_00]: I love it and I sort of give myself little goals while I do it of, you know, make sure you get the data, get the email address, make sure, you know, those little, you know, are they following you on all your social channels?
08:55.287 –> 09:00.456
[SPEAKER_00]: Check through it into conversation and I set myself these little goals during the day when I do my little stints.
09:00.908 –> 09:10.783
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, a lot of people starting the business that you’ve started would have taken on kind of like a, I’m going to do it all until we reach a certain point.
09:10.883 –> 09:21.880
[SPEAKER_02]: But it sounds like you’ve already started building quite the team around yourself when you’re taking down, say, at a more intelligent perspective on, you know, the manpower will take to grow the business.
09:21.920 –> 09:23.562
[SPEAKER_02]: So what does your team look like?
09:23.622 –> 09:25.144
[SPEAKER_02]: Who have you got on what are they doing?
09:25.685 –> 09:26.967
[SPEAKER_00]: So I have a great team.
09:27.208 –> 09:28.890
[SPEAKER_00]: They consist of,
09:28.870 –> 09:30.272
[SPEAKER_00]: my very dear friends Sue.
09:30.492 –> 09:34.779
[SPEAKER_00]: So Sue Burn runs the store on a Wednesday Thursday and Saturday.
09:34.819 –> 09:37.684
[SPEAKER_00]: She also does a live with me at least once a week.
09:38.365 –> 09:39.366
[SPEAKER_00]: She’s a trained stylist.
09:39.446 –> 09:41.349
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve known her for 25 years.
09:41.409 –> 09:45.776
[SPEAKER_00]: She’s 10 years older than me and she is better than me.
09:45.856 –> 09:48.420
[SPEAKER_00]: She’s better than any body at customer service.
09:48.540 –> 09:51.705
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve never seen she’s the doyenne of customer service.
09:51.685 –> 10:04.750
[SPEAKER_00]: her customers love her, they come to her, they know her by name, and she is, she comes by, she makes the buying decisions with me because she knows the base just as well as I do, she’s just absolutely the best.
10:04.983 –> 10:09.089
[SPEAKER_00]: recently, we’ve also added Val to our team who is literally there through this door.
10:09.149 –> 10:15.357
[SPEAKER_00]: She may well hear what I’m saying, who so Val used to work for a brick and mortar business called East clothing.
10:15.397 –> 10:25.451
[SPEAKER_00]: You may remember that chain store faltered somewhat, but Val was their visual merchandising manager and is what Val can’t do with a color story.
10:25.671 –> 10:27.193
[SPEAKER_00]: One does not want to do.
10:27.173 –> 10:54.750
[SPEAKER_00]: throw her curveballs all the time because I’ll say to her and she’s just been irritated by me because I’ve just gone these coats rear we need to get these coats out now the weather’s going to change and she’s just looked at me and gone oh hell what what am I going to do with this this isn’t the color way that I’d planned this isn’t the texture or narrative that I want to fix but she’s out there now messing with the mannequins in the window and will do a brilliant job and she has she’s only been with us about eight weeks but she has up to the empty
10:54.916 –> 10:59.341
[SPEAKER_00]: from a looking field point of view to an untold degree.
11:00.082 –> 11:15.860
[SPEAKER_00]: I then have my lovely husband, Graham, who does all my web admin and all of my admin generally, he has other businesses, but because he loves spreadsheets and really dislikes most human beings, he’s very happy to sit in his office and do all that side of things.
11:16.120 –> 11:21.987
[SPEAKER_00]: He’s now very competent on WooCommerce WordPress, which is the old ecosystem.
11:21.967 –> 11:29.826
[SPEAKER_00]: and then I also have my two daughters who are 17 and 14 and they are employees in employees four and five because they appear in my socials.
11:30.849 –> 11:34.919
[SPEAKER_00]: And Katie’s almost that my eldest is almost also trained to do some web admin as well.
11:36.422 –> 11:38.828
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah those those are the team.
11:38.808 –> 11:43.641
[SPEAKER_00]: But I’ve chosen that again because I know that my skills are not best deployed on doing admin.
11:43.721 –> 11:44.523
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m terrible at it.
11:44.744 –> 11:46.649
[SPEAKER_00]: My attention to detail is not good enough.
11:47.471 –> 11:50.960
[SPEAKER_00]: Equally, I shouldn’t be on the shop floor all the time.
11:51.040 –> 11:53.086
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s not a productive use of my time.
11:53.186 –> 11:54.690
[SPEAKER_00]: I should be building the business.
11:55.413 –> 12:03.184
[SPEAKER_02]: So you are in a space in retail and it’s why is sent in commerce, I suppose, and it’s why it is sent.
12:04.246 –> 12:10.435
[SPEAKER_02]: Where many businesses struggling to work out, we know retail needs to be experiential.
12:10.675 –> 12:16.864
[SPEAKER_02]: You’ve talked a lot about the experience already and how much effort you’re putting into the real world experience.
12:16.844 –> 12:19.907
[SPEAKER_02]: But then how do we mirror that in an online space?
12:19.967 –> 12:22.490
[SPEAKER_02]: And so many brands struggle with this.
12:23.290 –> 12:29.497
[SPEAKER_02]: You’re in the lucky situation of starting with both from the very beginning and with huge amounts of experience as well.
12:29.597 –> 12:35.262
[SPEAKER_02]: So have you tried to replicate the experience you get up in store online?
12:36.043 –> 12:40.968
[SPEAKER_02]: Are you seeing the online as a way of converting in store customers to buy more?
12:41.048 –> 12:42.129
[SPEAKER_02]: Are they too different?
12:42.149 –> 12:45.973
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you approach that cohesiveness between the channels?
12:45.953 –> 12:52.300
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had, I had a bit of a, this is where I did have a bit of a, a sort of an epiphany moment.
12:52.761 –> 13:06.036
[SPEAKER_00]: So I’ve been in all the while I’ve had a website right from the beginning and it did, it did okay right from the beginning because I’m sensible and I know kind of about optimizing for search and those kind of things and it was a well-ordered website.
13:06.076 –> 13:10.020
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was always fast and it could convert and all of that, the basics.
13:10.439 –> 13:15.725
[SPEAKER_00]: But I had a bit of a size of a damsely in moment where a customer clearly wanted to order something, and she rang me.
13:16.286 –> 13:19.069
[SPEAKER_00]: This is going back about two years, and she’s maybe year and a half.
13:19.150 –> 13:27.680
[SPEAKER_00]: And she said, hello, you know, an unexplained, you know, I want to make this order of scenes and jeans, but I just wanted to check, are you a real business?
13:27.760 –> 13:38.573
[SPEAKER_00]: Because, you know, you see so many of these businesses, and they end up just being dodgy Chinese businesses and where you’ve got to send things back to China or, you know, that they’re not bonafidey.
13:38.553 –> 13:41.859
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, oh, no, absolutely, you’ll see me on the Instagram.
13:41.899 –> 13:47.590
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m the face of the business and I, you’re speaking to the owner and, you know, and she said, oh, that’s so good to know.
13:47.610 –> 13:48.992
[SPEAKER_00]: She said, I’ll make the order now.
13:50.094 –> 13:52.979
[SPEAKER_00]: And I came away from that and I thought, well, that is interesting.
13:53.741 –> 13:58.249
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s a trust issue here and there’s also a
13:58.229 –> 14:04.136
[SPEAKER_00]: I need to signal that I’m a bona fidey business and that you get a personal experience.
14:04.156 –> 14:06.038
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is what will aid conversion.
14:06.639 –> 14:10.043
[SPEAKER_00]: So I thought to myself, okay, how can I make that happen for every order?
14:10.563 –> 14:12.445
[SPEAKER_00]: Every new customer order, I should say.
14:13.026 –> 14:18.212
[SPEAKER_00]: So now, whenever I get an order that comes in, and I see that it’s from a customer name, I do not know.
14:18.512 –> 14:25.300
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just had one good example would be a lady and she’s up in Aberdeen, ordered this morning, a lovely top.
14:25.280 –> 14:28.843
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I rang her and I said, I’m really sorry to disturb you morning.
14:29.364 –> 14:31.526
[SPEAKER_00]: I always make sure the customer has time to take the call.
14:32.046 –> 14:33.007
[SPEAKER_00]: I explain who I am.
14:33.308 –> 14:36.671
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just say, I just wanted to let you know, you’re speaking to the owner.
14:36.731 –> 14:39.233
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s lovely to have you all to thank you for that.
14:40.054 –> 14:42.236
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I help you with anything to do with sizing?
14:42.637 –> 14:45.139
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I talk to you at all about, you know, the item you’ve bought?
14:45.159 –> 14:46.821
[SPEAKER_00]: Just to check you’ve got the right color way.
14:46.861 –> 14:48.722
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you want it shipped?
14:48.823 –> 14:50.724
[SPEAKER_00]: I see you’ve selected standard shipping.
14:50.784 –> 14:53.447
[SPEAKER_00]: When do you need it?
14:53.427 –> 15:02.492
[SPEAKER_00]: having maybe, I don’t know, seven minute call with that customer, but by the end of that call, what I know is that that customer A is going to be sent the right item.
15:03.299 –> 15:30.471
[SPEAKER_00]: B is not going to have overordered, so perhaps on the original order, she’s put two pairs of jeans in two different sizes, I can confidently advise her and say, I see you’ve ordered both the 38 and the 40 in those jeans, let’s discuss that fit a little bit because I know exactly how those jeans fit and that means that I keep the product and also that I don’t so I can, the availability is maximised for me from any commerce point of view and my returns rate is minimised because I know it’s not going to come back to me.
15:30.451 –> 15:30.992
[SPEAKER_00]: That’s great.
15:31.293 –> 15:39.311
[SPEAKER_00]: But she feels that she has had a quasi bespoke experience that would emulate what would happen if she came into my shop.
15:39.331 –> 15:41.396
[SPEAKER_00]: So what would happen if she came into my shop?
15:41.436 –> 15:42.759
[SPEAKER_00]: She would be greeted in the same way.
15:42.819 –> 15:44.002
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, you’re new here.
15:44.282 –> 15:44.964
[SPEAKER_00]: How can I help?
15:45.726 –> 15:47.650
[SPEAKER_00]: How can I help you with sizing?
15:47.630 –> 15:54.519
[SPEAKER_00]: And that experience I try to emulate on the telephone and if I can’t telephone her, then I will email.
15:54.599 –> 15:59.725
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ll probably always do that anyway unless I think it’s overkill, but it will be a bespoke email.
15:59.926 –> 16:12.642
[SPEAKER_00]: It will be it’s scripted by me with a bit of heavy lifting from AI so I’m using a lot of AI prompts but I always check everything and it will make sure that she feels that she has had the bespoke wardrobe at the cross experience.
16:12.622 –> 16:18.389
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of the signals from my website again, reviews, I’ve got 125 stock Google reviews.
16:19.310 –> 16:25.778
[SPEAKER_00]: If she reads those, they all point to the fact that you will get a phone call, that you will get an at a personalised experience.
16:26.499 –> 16:34.208
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, that is super important to me because that differentiates me and it makes that customer feel like she’s almost been in the shop.
16:34.576 –> 16:42.764
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s a big investment in, you know, found a time to do that, both the email part and the call part.
16:43.304 –> 16:51.772
[SPEAKER_02]: You mentioned that you’ve, you know, you limit it to someone’s first ever purchase with you, they’re not gonna get this on purchase number 10, which makes total sense.
16:52.613 –> 16:58.118
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you, have you yet thought through how you will do this as the business continues to grow?
16:58.719 –> 17:02.963
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, because even now with hundreds of orders a week, that’s quite a lot.
17:02.943 –> 17:06.649
[SPEAKER_00]: but well, it is, although my retention rate is very, very high.
17:07.230 –> 17:17.908
[SPEAKER_00]: So I’m really lucky because because I’ve invested in this first time acquisition piece, my retention rates really good and as you would expect, I’ve got all my flows set up with in Clavio.
17:18.388 –> 17:26.762
[SPEAKER_00]: So any of those things around, you know, I’m doing a really strong, well-conseries, a really strong nurture series, a really strong gone-away series, all of that stuff.
17:27.223 –> 17:28.545
[SPEAKER_00]: So my retention rate is
17:28.525 –> 17:42.045
[SPEAKER_00]: pretty strong, albeit on a small base, but I would say my retention rate is so many of those orders of those hundreds of orders a week, I would say probably 60%, maybe 65% of them exist in customers, so that’s really strong.
17:42.646 –> 17:43.968
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do use meta.
17:44.208 –> 17:54.043
[SPEAKER_00]: I am using meta-appetizing to generate first-time acquisition, and you’re right, as that scales, that’s going to become harder, but I’ve got some ideas for how that I can handle that.
17:54.023 –> 18:02.577
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve got, I already work alongside of VA who supports me with some of this stuff and helps me pull the data together before I make the call, so I’m not scrambling around.
18:03.298 –> 18:07.405
[SPEAKER_00]: And also, being perfectly honest, again, it’s something that my children can support me.
18:07.445 –> 18:09.849
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, my 17 year old is brilliant at it.
18:09.869 –> 18:12.032
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve watched her do it, so I’ll give her four,
18:12.012 –> 18:14.877
[SPEAKER_00]: phone numbers and I’ll say, right, you need to set, put your headphones on.
18:15.357 –> 18:16.880
[SPEAKER_00]: You’ve got calling these four numbers.
18:17.280 –> 18:18.703
[SPEAKER_00]: You’re saying I work for the business.
18:18.843 –> 18:20.886
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m Hilary’s daughter, how can I help?
18:20.946 –> 18:23.190
[SPEAKER_00]: And she knows the stock almost as well as I do.
18:23.711 –> 18:26.796
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, these things will become less replicable as we grow.
18:26.836 –> 18:29.059
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do think it’s important.
18:29.220 –> 18:33.126
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that we got to protect that because that differentiates us.
18:33.494 –> 18:56.903
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it’s that interesting angle of, you know, you often, and I’m sure you’ve heard of it because you’ve got a lot of experience similar to me is that you’ll hear the business who they were doing something great in the early days and they let it drop for efficiency gains and and suffer until someone goes, how do we redo it and you can never redo it as well, can you?
18:56.883 –> 19:04.812
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve seen so many times, Chloe, you’re so right, where I’ve worked in a business, typically I’ve worked in a lot of businesses where they get to sort of, I don’t know, 10, 15 million pound turnover.
19:04.833 –> 19:16.587
[SPEAKER_00]: They take some external investment, external investors say, right, stop doing this, stop doing this, stop doing this, you know, private equity or whatever, because it’s non, it’s either, you know, we can’t attach an ROI to it, we cut, edit it, edit it.
19:16.907 –> 19:20.051
[SPEAKER_00]: So it gets cold, it’s seen as not important.
19:20.431 –> 19:25.337
[SPEAKER_00]: And then suddenly, everybody at the board table and I’ve sat on a few is looking at the
19:25.469 –> 19:34.822
[SPEAKER_00]: What’s happened here and those wonderful things that that owner found did to get it to 10, 12, 15 million turn have gone.
19:35.704 –> 19:37.025
[SPEAKER_00]: And that’s what I have to protect.
19:37.106 –> 19:41.071
[SPEAKER_00]: And look, I don’t know what the future is of this business.
19:41.191 –> 19:44.897
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve got very strong plans, but I want that to be protected at all costs.
19:44.977 –> 19:50.024
[SPEAKER_00]: And I will pay absolutely pay people to do things I think they can do.
19:50.144 –> 19:54.210
[SPEAKER_00]: Whilst I do the things that I know I can do well like those first time calls.
19:56.502 –> 20:01.352
[SPEAKER_01]: E-commerce most Atlanta is supported by some of the greatest companies in the E-commerce sector.
20:01.493 –> 20:11.895
[SPEAKER_01]: Here’s a reminder of who they are.
20:14.153 –> 20:19.763
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, I love this section because it gives me and I’ll list us some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
20:19.823 –> 20:21.806
[SPEAKER_02]: Hell, are you ready for the top tips?
20:22.307 –> 20:23.029
[SPEAKER_02]: I am in D’s.
20:23.590 –> 20:25.353
[SPEAKER_02]: Excellent, start with the book top tip.
20:25.453 –> 20:30.662
[SPEAKER_02]: If everyone listening to this podcast, agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better.
20:31.043 –> 20:33.006
[SPEAKER_02]: Which book would you recommend?
20:33.256 –> 20:36.641
[SPEAKER_00]: I would recommend the brand gap by Martin Umeyer.
20:37.081 –> 20:39.224
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s incredibly short, so you’ll get through it very quickly.
20:40.006 –> 20:40.787
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s not fluffy.
20:41.468 –> 20:48.457
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s not waffly, but it’s really good strategic thinking about what a brand is and how to make yours different.
20:49.018 –> 20:50.420
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s just really good for that.
20:50.480 –> 20:53.705
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s not much about data in it, it’s about brand.
20:53.745 –> 20:57.390
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is what I love, that to me is what makes me tick.
20:57.370 –> 20:59.473
[SPEAKER_02]: Love that, we like a short read.
20:59.954 –> 21:01.215
[SPEAKER_02]: Everybody likes a short read.
21:01.355 –> 21:07.744
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, traffic top tip, which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn’t get the press it deserves?
21:08.525 –> 21:19.260
[SPEAKER_00]: So I’m going to go with, I’ve got a few of this, but I’m just going to go with the press, it doesn’t deserve, because this is a great tip for people with particularly who have this is for bricks and collect businesses.
21:19.240 –> 21:23.888
[SPEAKER_00]: do things in your community that you think will not generate business because they will.
21:24.469 –> 21:30.058
[SPEAKER_00]: So for example, I did a talk last Thursday to the WI in Heswell, which is about three miles away.
21:30.579 –> 21:31.380
[SPEAKER_00]: They’re all my customers.
21:31.420 –> 21:35.107
[SPEAKER_00]: They’re middle class women above the age of 55, classic me customers.
21:35.868 –> 21:37.410
[SPEAKER_00]: They were 90 of them in the room.
21:37.430 –> 21:40.776
[SPEAKER_00]: I did a talk on style personalities and sustainable fashion.
21:41.110 –> 21:53.112
[SPEAKER_00]: all of those women, I took a QR code with me, they all scanned my QR code, I took their data, they’re now all on my base and they’re all having a good old look at the website.
21:53.593 –> 21:55.697
[SPEAKER_00]: So how’s it led to any conversions?
21:55.717 –> 21:58.622
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I gave them all a code obviously to track that business.
21:58.883 –> 22:02.730
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve got about six conversions out of it now, but again,
22:02.710 –> 22:06.894
[SPEAKER_00]: a room full of 90 women who are absolutely bullseye target audience.
22:07.155 –> 22:13.922
[SPEAKER_00]: And you’d never think that would you go and do a WI talk, but believe me, I’ve done seven of them now and they’ve all been really, really worth doing.
22:14.482 –> 22:22.070
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s the good thing about WI talks as well as Nick, once you’ve done well at one, they all tell each other and then you get to go to later them.
22:22.511 –> 22:23.051
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly that.
22:23.372 –> 22:26.715
[SPEAKER_00]: So, literally, they keep telling each other, so I’m booked with another one in about three weeks.
22:26.735 –> 22:32.481
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m a bit, I change it off each time, so I’m not, because some of them
22:32.461 –> 22:38.353
[SPEAKER_00]: So this one will be a bit different again, but I do a lot around style personality, fashionable fashion, they love it.
22:39.035 –> 22:43.363
[SPEAKER_00]: And it’s a great way of collecting data in a soft way.
22:43.403 –> 22:49.997
[SPEAKER_00]: And also generating football brick into the bricks bit of the business, but also generating clicks.
22:49.977 –> 23:00.227
[SPEAKER_02]: love that and it’s so fit so well with all the the the insights you’ve given us to the branding you know the brand and the feel and the vibe of the business too so I love that piece of advice.
23:00.247 –> 23:11.237
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, tool top tip, maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug-in, a phone app or just a way of working, is there a cool little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?
23:11.938 –> 23:13.460
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s really boring.
23:13.480 –> 23:14.300
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m so sorry.
23:14.741 –> 23:16.002
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s WhatsApp.
23:16.117 –> 23:16.958
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s really boring.
23:16.998 –> 23:19.863
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a WhatsApp chat for the team.
23:19.923 –> 23:22.687
[SPEAKER_00]: We call it the wardrobe at the cross crack team.
23:22.747 –> 23:24.029
[SPEAKER_00]: We’re called the crack squad.
23:24.610 –> 23:27.936
[SPEAKER_00]: And Val, Sue, my husband, me and the girls on it.
23:28.136 –> 23:29.498
[SPEAKER_00]: And also one of my temporary staff.
23:29.558 –> 23:30.560
[SPEAKER_00]: Why sound is on it?
23:31.241 –> 23:34.185
[SPEAKER_00]: And it’s just making sure that we’ve covered everything.
23:34.245 –> 23:39.053
[SPEAKER_00]: So if Y sounds done a shift and she hadn’t expected to and she’s been in on a Friday afternoon,
23:39.033 –> 23:48.108
[SPEAKER_00]: She drops it in the WhatsApp to make sure that when Susan on a Saturday morning soon knows that so-and-so has been in and wants so-and-so, and it’s really boring, but it really, really works.
23:48.269 –> 23:50.332
[SPEAKER_00]: And is it auditable?
23:51.534 –> 23:53.277
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you go back and search it very well?
23:53.457 –> 23:58.566
[SPEAKER_00]: No, but it’s great in terms of, because I could use something that’s a bit more techy.
23:58.886 –> 24:02.813
[SPEAKER_00]: I use things myself, like Monday and Asana,
24:02.793 –> 24:05.837
[SPEAKER_00]: but my store team wouldn’t really, that wouldn’t work for them.
24:05.877 –> 24:14.828
[SPEAKER_00]: I don’t think, you know, Val and Wysan, who are lovely, they’re not digitally savvy, not that I expect them to be, why would I want them to learn upon a sauna?
24:15.129 –> 24:17.071
[SPEAKER_00]: We’re actually what’s that’s working for us.
24:17.111 –> 24:20.836
[SPEAKER_00]: So sadly, it’s quite boring, quite pedestrian.
24:21.657 –> 24:23.720
[SPEAKER_02]: But it doesn’t matter if it’s pedestrian if it works.
24:23.840 –> 24:25.442
[SPEAKER_02]: It really is so often,
24:25.422 –> 24:29.406
[SPEAKER_02]: People put in like the most complex tool in the world to solve a simple problem.
24:29.426 –> 24:31.768
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you’re WhatsApp chain is what’s needed.
24:32.529 –> 24:36.152
[SPEAKER_00]: It just works and we can share humor on it.
24:36.292 –> 24:39.795
[SPEAKER_00]: But most of all it’s just like, you know, oh, Sylvia came in.
24:40.116 –> 24:41.136
[SPEAKER_00]: She’s ordered these things.
24:41.217 –> 24:43.318
[SPEAKER_00]: She wants, she doesn’t want to collect them today.
24:43.358 –> 24:45.060
[SPEAKER_00]: She was, but she bought this instead.
24:45.420 –> 24:47.723
[SPEAKER_00]: So, and so I’m going to have left it in your office health.
24:47.743 –> 24:48.423
[SPEAKER_00]: I simple as that.
24:48.483 –> 24:53.708
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I’m literally like, oh, right, that makes sense.
24:53.688 –> 24:57.856
[SPEAKER_02]: What’s your favourite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store?
24:58.577 –> 25:01.844
[SPEAKER_00]: Massively important to me because I sell sustainable brands in sustainable fashion.
25:01.864 –> 25:03.487
[SPEAKER_00]: So we’re always working on this.
25:04.228 –> 25:12.484
[SPEAKER_00]: I am my local plastic waste champion, actually, here in Nested, which is quite sad, quite the claim, but it’s really important to me.
25:12.685 –> 25:12.945
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
25:12.925 –> 25:16.671
[SPEAKER_00]: I make sure that we all bring in reuse and bottles.
25:16.932 –> 25:19.055
[SPEAKER_00]: We don’t throw away single-use plastics at all.
25:19.115 –> 25:22.381
[SPEAKER_00]: That’s just our own behaviour as employees and members of the team.
25:22.841 –> 25:27.349
[SPEAKER_00]: We make sure that we use our own bottles and we fill up from the water there.
25:27.769 –> 25:31.936
[SPEAKER_00]: But also, from a point of view of my e-commerce store, I insist if suppliers don’t do it.
25:32.117 –> 25:39.709
[SPEAKER_00]: I insist they send the garments in recyclable or preferentially compostable packaging.
25:39.689 –> 25:46.109
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve even said I’ll send it to you or I’ll get it to you by hook or by crook, but I don’t want you sending me loads and loads and loads and loads plastic.
25:46.169 –> 25:50.222
[SPEAKER_00]: Now there are two suppliers at the moment who are not bending to my will because they’re too big.
25:50.557 –> 25:54.522
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s very cool, getting them to change, and then maybe they’ll change for everybody.
25:54.562 –> 26:04.875
[SPEAKER_00]: They may or they may not, but actually I think, you know, help, you’ve done your bit there, and you know, and I take, so interestingly, my story is on the cusp of Cheshire and Whirl.
26:05.296 –> 26:11.324
[SPEAKER_00]: Whirl of far better at recycling than Cheshire, there’s our postcode issue, postcode lottery issue.
26:11.724 –> 26:15.349
[SPEAKER_00]: So I take as much of my recycling home with me.
26:15.329 –> 26:19.618
[SPEAKER_00]: because then I can recycle it in a place where I know their facilities for recycling.
26:19.638 –> 26:27.615
[SPEAKER_00]: So my home post code, which is a rural post code, my store is technically chasher, my home is only two and a half miles away, but technically rural.
26:28.136 –> 26:29.218
[SPEAKER_00]: They recycle far better.
26:29.258 –> 26:34.249
[SPEAKER_00]: So I take as much of my recyclable waste actually to my domestic to my own home with me.
26:34.870 –> 26:36.572
[SPEAKER_02]: very cool, loving those tips.
26:36.752 –> 26:42.817
[SPEAKER_02]: So, hell, before we say goodbye, could you please let the listeners know where they can find you and your business on the web and social media?
26:43.298 –> 26:46.941
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yes, I would love for listeners to have a look and share their thoughts.
26:47.421 –> 27:00.213
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I’m on the my website is www.WordrowbackTheCross, which is all one word, spelled CRO, double S at the end, and I’m on a.co.uk URL.
27:01.154 –> 27:02.655
[SPEAKER_00]: And I’m also, you can use that.
27:02.735 –> 27:04.877
[SPEAKER_00]: If you type that as a handle
27:04.857 –> 27:08.463
[SPEAKER_00]: You can get me on TikTok, although that’s a very nice and to count.
27:08.824 –> 27:14.113
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m prolific on Instagram and also Facebook where I’m, I have to be honest, far more comfortable.
27:14.654 –> 27:15.375
[SPEAKER_00]: And also I do it.
27:15.395 –> 27:17.098
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a little YouTube channel as well.
27:17.539 –> 27:21.566
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, rather than they sent to the time building it up to do long form content there.
27:22.107 –> 27:23.569
[SPEAKER_00]: So yes, that’s how you come to me.
27:23.609 –> 27:24.631
[SPEAKER_00]: Or indeed visit the store.
27:24.671 –> 27:29.920
[SPEAKER_00]: If you’re local and you’re around, come and drop me a DM and come and have a look in the brick and mortar.
27:29.900 –> 27:42.828
[SPEAKER_02]: very cool and despite running all this with wardrobe at the cross, you also spend a couple of days a week helping other brands through your consultancy to evolve their digital and e-commerce activities.
27:42.869 –> 27:49.022
[SPEAKER_02]: So if anyone’s interested in getting your help in their business, how do they touch a bit more about it and how do they get in contact with you?
27:49.002 –> 27:50.767
[SPEAKER_00]: So getting contact with me via LinkedIn.
27:50.847 –> 28:00.131
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you look Hillary large, there aren’t many of us on LinkedIn, you’ll find me and I come on to channel dot marketing so that’s CHA and DOWT marketing.
28:00.833 –> 28:04.322
[SPEAKER_00]: If you Google that, you’ll only find a placeholder, so best to find me on LinkedIn.
28:04.723 –> 28:06.066
[SPEAKER_00]: But basically,
28:06.046 –> 28:17.183
[SPEAKER_00]: What I do is I go into businesses, typically SMEs, I don’t do much in the big corporate world anymore, and I offer support where there is perhaps not enough expertise.
28:17.343 –> 28:33.268
[SPEAKER_00]: So at the moment, I’m doing a piece of work for a client who is in the B2B wholesale space, it’s the garment industry, it’s a peril, but it’s about digital transformation of that business, and it’s great fun, and I love working as well with owner managers who have a problem that I can help
28:33.248 –> 28:50.042
[SPEAKER_00]: to solve that gives me all the fields because it makes me think, do you know actually I’ve really come away from that day and I know I’ve got with I’ve moved us forward and that’s a really good thing for me and it keeps my knowledge fresh as well which is which is another benefit.
28:50.022 –> 28:56.572
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it’s always great to go and have go and work on someone else’s activity because you find things you don’t know even when you’re there to help them with stuff.
28:57.273 –> 29:03.322
[SPEAKER_02]: So anyone who wants Hillary’s help go and find Hillary large on LinkedIn and getting contact.
29:04.083 –> 29:06.587
[SPEAKER_02]: Hill, thank you so much for being on the show.
29:06.607 –> 29:12.336
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s been really fascinating seeing how you’re bringing that brilliant customer experience across all your channels.
29:12.376 –> 29:13.558
[SPEAKER_02]: So thanks so much for being here.
29:13.758 –> 29:15.220
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you very much for having me.
29:22.355 –> 29:24.139
[SPEAKER_02]: What an exciting business.
29:24.379 –> 29:25.783
[SPEAKER_02]: Hill is building there.
29:26.644 –> 29:36.225
[SPEAKER_02]: She really knows her customer base and she’s listening to them as she evolves the business to find ways to make them happier, better retained and so on and so forth.
29:36.286 –> 29:37.849
[SPEAKER_02]: I love that tip about
29:37.829 –> 29:40.096
[SPEAKER_02]: getting out and doing talks for the WI.
29:40.216 –> 29:42.743
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, what a great move when that’s your customer base.
29:43.265 –> 29:50.105
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would have thought that was kind of like a physical retail play, but she’s getting the conversions coming through on the website too.
29:50.125 –> 29:50.907
[SPEAKER_02]: So how cool is that?
29:50.947 –> 29:53.053
[SPEAKER_02]: It works on both channels.
29:53.033 –> 30:08.055
[SPEAKER_02]: And the focus on improving that experience for the online customers and trying to replicate some of what they get in the physical store by calling them and emailing them in a personal way, post-first purchase.
30:08.035 –> 30:11.281
[SPEAKER_02]: such a nerve-wracking time for customers.
30:11.801 –> 30:20.537
[SPEAKER_02]: When they put that first purchase in with you, so anything that works to help them feel more confident, more comfortable in that purchase, sounds good by me.
30:20.557 –> 30:24.323
[SPEAKER_02]: And the fact she’s managing to get it to improve her return’s rates, genius.
30:24.303 –> 30:32.035
[SPEAKER_02]: You can get your hands on our notes from this episode, including those top tips and links to what we mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterplanned.com.
30:32.536 –> 30:42.852
[SPEAKER_02]: You can use our direct episode short link to get there too, just put ECMP.info-4sash the number of this episode into the URL bar to go right to the correct page of the site.
30:42.832 –> 30:50.511
[SPEAKER_02]: When you get to the website, don’t forget to add yourself to our email list so you don’t miss out on all the stuff we share to help you improve your business.
30:51.293 –> 30:59.895
[SPEAKER_02]: If you liked this episode, then you can check out all our fashion episodes on the website via ECMP.info forward slash passion.
30:59.875 –> 31:03.882
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for tuning into this and every episode of the Ecommerce Master Plan podcast.
31:04.003 –> 31:14.141
[SPEAKER_02]: I bring you a new episode every week, because I want to inspire and help you to succeed and thrive with your business, including progressing along that all important partner zero.
31:14.602 –> 31:19.531
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you know someone, this show can help, please tell them to listen to the Ecommerce Master Plan podcast.
31:19.932 –> 31:22.677
[SPEAKER_02]: Hope you have a great week and don’t forget to keep optimizing.
31:25.627 –> 31:29.060
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to the e-commerce Master Plan podcast.
31:29.482 –> 31:34.742
[SPEAKER_01]: Find out more at e-commercemasterplanned.com slash podcast.
32 min
December 15, 2025 eCommerce MasterPlan | 573: How Flare Audio Survived Meta Ad Chaos and Still Grew to £5M+
Davies Roberts is co-CEO and co-founder of Flare Audio, the sound technology company who retail headphones, earplugs, and ear tools. Founded in 2010 they now sell globally via their Shopify store, Amazon, and a few retail partners, and are achieving around £5million in sales a year.
Back on the show for the third time, Davies shares the biggest challenges and breakthroughs Flare Audio has faced — from Meta ad chaos to game-changing sound innovation. A fast-paced episode packed with sharp lessons on resilience, product focus, and scaling a standout eCommerce brand.
Hit PLAY to hear:

·       How Flare Audio’s Meta ads collapsed overnight — and the surprising fix that halved their CPA.
·       Why your website wording might be sabotaging your ad performance without you knowing it.
·       The science behind how your ears distort sound… and how Flare turned that into a breakthrough product.
·       What tariff and customs changes REALLY mean for eCommerce brands selling globally in 2025.
·       Why niche audiences can spark growth — but can never be your whole strategy.
·       How an inventor-founder balances deep R&D with fast-moving eCommerce realities.
Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[04:00] Business Challenges and Economic Strain
[07:49] Meta Ads Surge & Strategy Shift
[09:56] “Flare’s Sound Revolution”
[14:02] “Invisible Sound Solution Marketing”
[17:16] “Innovative Sound Solutions Expanding”
[22:39] “Unlocking Music’s True Clarity”
[23:48] “Holographic Audio Revolution”
[29:19] Listen to Davies’ Top Tips!
Full episode notes here: https://ecmp.info/573
—
Download our ebook… https://ecmp.info/ebook 500 Tips to Increase Your Profits
Get all the links and resources we mention and join our email list at https://ecmp.info
Love the show? Chloe would love your feedback – leave a review here: https://ecmp.info/review or reply to the episode QandA on Spotify.
Interested in being a Sponsor? go here: https://ecmp.info/sponsor
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
WEBVTT
00:00.031 –> 00:10.995
[SPEAKER_02]: The key to any business is making something unique, making something have a good value proposition, and making something beneficial to the people you’re selling it to.
00:11.035 –> 00:17.449
[SPEAKER_02]: If you can get to that, you create a business, but if you do it really well, you get a global amazing business.
00:20.095 –> 00:22.599
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.
00:23.240 –> 00:27.206
[SPEAKER_01]: Air to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
00:27.747 –> 00:35.860
[SPEAKER_01]: Cutting through the hinder to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond, here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
00:38.793 –> 00:41.018
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome, it’s great to have you here.
00:41.038 –> 00:44.806
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
00:45.327 –> 00:53.706
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, regular listeners will know that I do love to give a little shout out at the start sometimes to listeners who are kind enough to take the time to post a review of the show.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve got one of those to do today.
00:56.191 –> 00:57.593
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you too.
00:57.613 –> 01:02.760
[SPEAKER_00]: I can’t even attempt ifra123 by Lalala.
01:03.281 –> 01:04.422
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, thank you to you.
01:04.442 –> 01:05.624
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you know who you are.
01:06.445 –> 01:11.952
[SPEAKER_00]: From the UK for leaving us a review on Apple podcast recently a five star review of course.
01:12.413 –> 01:13.795
[SPEAKER_00]: Titled insightful.
01:14.115 –> 01:17.920
[SPEAKER_00]: We always try to be and which says always enjoy listening to close podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It’s great to learn from the masters.
01:19.883 –> 01:27.555
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, we are forever grateful to our guests for being so awesome, and thank you name I can’t pronounce for leaving that lovely review for us.
01:27.655 –> 01:28.697
[SPEAKER_00]: We really appreciate it.
01:29.258 –> 01:39.073
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you listening right now would like a shout out at the start of an episode, then head to ECMP.info.screview to find out how to leave us a review.
01:39.053 –> 01:43.500
[SPEAKER_00]: In this episode we are catching up with another of our past guests.
01:43.520 –> 01:48.007
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, it’s another episode is part of our 10 years celebrations.
01:48.628 –> 02:07.677
[SPEAKER_00]: This guest was last on the show in 2020 which was their second appearance and across those two episodes he shared a ton of advice first on fast growth and then on pivoting to profits and I was very intrigued to see where he is six years on
02:07.657 –> 02:11.744
[SPEAKER_00]: Listers, we will not be disappointed, Davies has bought the goods again.
02:11.784 –> 02:18.856
[SPEAKER_00]: We cover a whole pile of topics from invention and products manufacturing to tariffs.
02:18.916 –> 02:25.648
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, we get into that, meta ads, some crazy stuff on meta ads, and he does the most amazing
02:25.628 –> 02:32.616
[SPEAKER_00]: way of kind of swinging from big strategic thinking to really nitty-gritty clever stuff.
02:33.076 –> 02:37.521
[SPEAKER_00]: So you will love this episode, email me if you don’t, and we can discuss.
02:37.942 –> 02:39.644
[SPEAKER_00]: But I really believe you’ll love this episode.
02:40.144 –> 02:52.598
[SPEAKER_00]: Make sure you listen right to the end because that’s when we take a really random tangent into Tarris, but a really valuable one in the top tips around and there’s some other very
02:57.978 –> 03:00.081
[SPEAKER_00]: and now to introduce our special guest.
03:00.421 –> 03:09.193
[SPEAKER_00]: Davies Roberts is co-CEO and co-founder of Flair Audio, the sound technology company who retail headphones, earplugs and ear tools.
03:09.714 –> 03:19.607
[SPEAKER_00]: Founded in 2010, they now sell globally via their Shopify store, Amazon and a few retail partners, and are achieving around £5 million a year in sales.
03:19.847 –> 03:20.708
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello Davies.
03:21.189 –> 03:22.551
[SPEAKER_02]: Hi Chloe, good to meet you again.
03:23.171 –> 03:24.513
[SPEAKER_00]: Lovely to have you back on the show.
03:24.854 –> 03:27.377
[SPEAKER_00]: How have the last six years been?
03:27.442 –> 03:41.328
[SPEAKER_02]: Ah, a rollercoaster, I think, that most people would agree in Ecomworld, we’ve gone through obviously COVID, which was a challenge for all Ecom businesses, and then the explosive sales that we saw shortly after.
03:41.368 –> 03:48.842
[SPEAKER_02]: Now we’re faced with tariffs and all the things that go along with trying to trade in today’s modern world.
03:49.261 –> 03:58.713
[SPEAKER_00]: It has been like, there’s been enough crazy if you’re selling in one country, but if you’re selling in multiple countries and getting stock from different places, it’s been a whirlwind of a year, hasn’t it?
03:59.353 –> 04:00.235
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, it’s even.
04:00.715 –> 04:10.307
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s nuts, and we’re even even finding today, like, you know, we’ve suddenly been hit with aluminium content that’s in our year protection devices called isolate.
04:10.287 –> 04:23.761
[SPEAKER_02]: And we suddenly got hit with customs, paid for work issues going into the states because of all these new regulations that have been thrown at us in the last literally feels like in the last five minutes, but he’s literally been at a compressed few days this year.
04:24.863 –> 04:25.864
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, it’s a real challenge.
04:25.904 –> 04:27.305
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s a challenge for teams.
04:27.505 –> 04:40.159
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s a challenge for us as leaders and to navigate all that on the backdrop of what are now currently quite hard economic times for a lot of businesses globally, everyone sort of
04:40.139 –> 04:53.608
[SPEAKER_02]: coming out of the craziness of COVID lockdowns and all the explosive stuff from there, and now it’s a case of really trying to find both niches and broader and audiences at the same time so that we can continue to grow businesses.
04:54.061 –> 04:58.625
[SPEAKER_00]: It often feels to be like the world works in a pendulum swing.
04:59.867 –> 05:04.311
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything seems to be a pendulum so I’m going backwards and forwards and you just have to kind of wait for the pendulum to go.
05:05.292 –> 05:14.861
[SPEAKER_00]: And that’s what came to mind when you were saying, you know, we went through the crazy time of COVID and now we’ve almost got the inverse of that swing is what we’re dealing with now economically.
05:15.281 –> 05:15.521
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
05:15.682 –> 05:20.406
[SPEAKER_00]: And it will come back at some point, but the game changes so much each time that pendulum swings does not.
05:20.521 –> 05:28.550
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it does, and also regulation is changing so fast because of the way the AI and businesses are trading.
05:28.570 –> 05:30.232
[SPEAKER_02]: I give you one example, it’s matter.
05:30.433 –> 05:35.899
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, they’ve basically been changing the way that you can market to people.
05:35.999 –> 05:42.867
[SPEAKER_02]: So, for example, the health and wellbeing category, they’ve over the last sort of couple of years.
05:42.847 –> 05:58.182
[SPEAKER_02]: massively restricted, the signals coming from sensitive people, so neurodivergent people, noise sensitive people, people with the HD, autistic people, all the different people that we were marketing to and making a huge difference to people’s lives.
05:58.303 –> 05:59.826
[SPEAKER_02]: We found out that
05:59.806 –> 06:08.399
[SPEAKER_02]: The algorithm changes about just under two years ago, I’d say it’s about a sort of 1819 months ago, we saw a drastic decrease in efficiency.
06:08.960 –> 06:14.930
[SPEAKER_02]: Calls by these algorithms being steered away from targeting sensitive people with sensitive products.
06:15.591 –> 06:18.355
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was a massive change because at the time,
06:18.335 –> 06:19.737
[SPEAKER_02]: We didn’t know what was happening.
06:19.877 –> 06:23.743
[SPEAKER_02]: We just saw our ads losing efficiency day by day.
06:23.763 –> 06:25.425
[SPEAKER_02]: It literally fell off a cliff one day.
06:25.826 –> 06:28.870
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it happens to a lot of businesses when they make algorithm changes.
06:29.431 –> 06:33.256
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we just saw a gradual decrease over quite some time.
06:33.336 –> 06:44.933
[SPEAKER_02]: So whilst I can’t, I don’t know if there was any shadow throttling going on, I do know that it was the policy of meta and other advertisers, not to advertise.
06:44.913 –> 06:50.720
[SPEAKER_02]: sense of products to sensitive people, that’s the sort of load, it’s much more complicated than that, but it gives you the idea.
06:50.800 –> 07:13.047
[SPEAKER_02]: So we didn’t realise this until about about seven or eight months ago, and then when we did become aware, we recognised that we had to remove all wording from our website related to autistic people, people with ADHD, noise sensitivities, even sound sensitive people.
07:13.027 –> 07:16.092
[SPEAKER_02]: We removed all that from our website in 24 hours.
07:16.152 –> 07:33.339
[SPEAKER_02]: We had to literally go sheet dipping on the entire site and remove it from all the product pages, all the reviews, all the adverts where we had video adverts that they were mentioning, that they’ve got autism, all they were mentioning, that they got ADHD.
07:33.700 –> 07:39.709
[SPEAKER_02]: We had to take those videos, edit those bits out, put them back into the ads, put them back into the posts.
07:39.689 –> 07:50.043
[SPEAKER_02]: and then we saw an explosive change to the efficiency, the CPA halved, everything just went nuts again, as that make up, of just a clear cut.
07:50.063 –> 07:59.436
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we all watched it and it got so, it went so crazy that all the spending searched, so all of the different ad campaigns spent almost double.
07:59.416 –> 08:01.899
[SPEAKER_02]: their daily campaign once we’ve made those changes.
08:02.721 –> 08:06.766
[SPEAKER_02]: Because don’t forget that we’re with meta ads as an example.
08:07.147 –> 08:14.878
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s not just your ads that matter and the words what you say that matters, but it’s your landing page that matters and the content of your website that matters.
08:14.978 –> 08:27.415
[SPEAKER_02]: Because if they scan your website to make sure that it’s safe to advertise and I really understand
08:27.614 –> 08:44.593
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, with all the stuff that’s going on in politics and with all the stuff that’s going on with AI, they have to be careful not to allow these algorithms to be as good as they were and as sensitive and laser focus as they were and they need to be more broad.
08:44.573 –> 08:57.548
[SPEAKER_02]: So I get it, but having been through that over the last couple of years, it was hell on earth, and we’re really connected with Meta, and I think their platform is amazing, and where we advertise all our products and it’s incredible.
08:57.709 –> 09:05.738
[SPEAKER_02]: But trying to navigate it as a business, it’s trying to scale on that when you’re selling to another sense to people, is a monumental challenge.
09:06.292 –> 09:17.714
[SPEAKER_00]: It makes so much sense in retrospect because if you’re the more you’re putting into AI, you have to be careful that AI doesn’t disappear off on a tangent that’s embarrassing for everybody.
09:17.934 –> 09:20.760
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and that you wouldn’t, you’d have picked up a few months where I did it.
09:21.281 –> 09:27.793
[SPEAKER_00]: And it never occurred to me that, of course, if you’re doing that, you would deimpact cancelled.
09:28.837 –> 09:38.011
[SPEAKER_00]: edit out negative keyword, things that could be potentially tricky, even with the political situation not going.
09:38.031 –> 09:44.421
[SPEAKER_00]: If you want your AI to be reliable, you cut out the outliers, and anything that could be vaguely dangerous.
09:44.962 –> 09:49.269
[SPEAKER_00]: It kind of makes total sense, but gosh, there was so much changing on meta over that time period.
09:49.289 –> 09:56.059
[SPEAKER_00]: It must have been there was plenty of other things you could blame it on without realising the actual thing.
09:56.157 –> 10:00.802
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is where we have a unique challenge compared to other brands.
10:00.982 –> 10:08.951
[SPEAKER_02]: So back in 2010, we started Flair myself and Naomi because we wanted to improve people’s relationship with sound.
10:09.071 –> 10:20.123
[SPEAKER_02]: I know that sounds just like a cliche kind of comment, but we coming from being a firefighter for nearly 13 years I was in a service industry, I wanted to help people.
10:20.103 –> 10:32.184
[SPEAKER_02]: And I came into the music industry and I realized I recognized quite quickly that there was a significant and serious problem in that sound devices were being treated like acoustic instruments.
10:32.865 –> 10:43.022
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you listen to a violin, it sounds like a violin because sound is resonating through the wooden structure of the violin, giving it the tone of that violin.
10:43.002 –> 10:53.293
[SPEAKER_02]: the same as my voice, sound is resonating around my voice and it vibrates around the different size of my mouth which makes the tone of my voice unique and you can identify it.
10:54.154 –> 10:59.400
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, sound devices were developed on the same resonant acoustic principles.
11:00.280 –> 11:11.052
[SPEAKER_02]: So it means that you were never going to hear sound accurately if you do the same thing with speakers
11:11.032 –> 11:19.545
[SPEAKER_02]: So we started Flair to identify how we removed residents from the devices so that we can truly advance sound quality.
11:20.226 –> 11:25.715
[SPEAKER_02]: We started in that speakers that used in places like Selfages Cinema in London.
11:25.775 –> 11:32.265
[SPEAKER_02]: You can go and see a film there with our Flair Zero loudspeakers, all this Olympic cinema in Barnes.
11:32.926 –> 11:38.355
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, that uses our loudspeakers in three screens, that’s where two screens that are in that cinema.
11:38.335 –> 11:43.544
[SPEAKER_02]: But we then started because we were finding it difficult to commercialize because it’s new physics.
11:44.185 –> 11:48.953
[SPEAKER_02]: So we had to pivot into more of consumer brands and so consumer market.
11:49.574 –> 11:56.226
[SPEAKER_02]: So we developed our first earphone the R2, which was an earphone that produced his sound without resonance using jets.
11:56.206 –> 12:03.734
[SPEAKER_02]: Then we created an Abretecter way before Abretecter’s got cool, so it’s late 2015.
12:03.815 –> 12:04.896
[SPEAKER_02]: We came out with Isolates.
12:04.936 –> 12:13.986
[SPEAKER_02]: We were the first ones to come out with a cool, new looking Abretecter, to use metal to block sound rather than foam or silicon or plastic.
12:14.507 –> 12:22.095
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we started to work on products that were in the air and then back in 2018,
12:22.075 –> 12:32.476
[SPEAKER_02]: I was having different producers and artists come and listen to our loudspeakers and everybody, every one of them had some kind of subjectivity to the sound.
12:32.516 –> 12:39.730
[SPEAKER_02]: So they’d say, oh, you know, can I have a bit of 2K, a bit more 5K and the sort of different changes.
12:39.710 –> 12:43.378
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was like, why have you got subjectivity because we’ve gotten rid of all residents?
12:43.559 –> 12:46.626
[SPEAKER_02]: So it should just be universally amazing.
12:47.267 –> 12:49.472
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I realized there’s a massive problem.
12:49.933 –> 12:53.201
[SPEAKER_02]: A huge fundamental problem with all of us as humans.
12:54.023 –> 12:54.844
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is our ears.
12:55.686 –> 12:58.613
[SPEAKER_02]: Our ears are basically a cluster of shells.
12:58.593 –> 13:03.180
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, how I’ve developed our sound technology is I thought experiment particles.
13:03.520 –> 13:09.649
[SPEAKER_02]: So I imagine a particle, I can then see it move from side to side, which is its vibration, which creates sound.
13:10.070 –> 13:12.413
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I imagine spheres of particles.
13:13.074 –> 13:26.794
[SPEAKER_02]: And I’ve trained all of our R and D team here and all of the people that we’ve got working behind the scenes to create this technology, I’ve created a process to really identify where distortions occur and how we can address them.
13:26.774 –> 13:32.560
[SPEAKER_02]: So when you start to look in the human ear, you realize that all of these shells are massively resonating sound.
13:33.481 –> 13:38.306
[SPEAKER_02]: So what we started to do is develop technologies that remove that resonance.
13:38.326 –> 13:53.963
[SPEAKER_02]: The first one that you’ll probably know about is called karma, and that is a soft silicon insert that you put in your ears with a flat side inside to remove the shell-like resonance and so that sound reflects off a flat surface rather than a cave-like shape.
13:53.943 –> 14:01.556
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s life-changing for quite a lot of people with sort of a 2 million sets and 15% of people find it life-changing.
14:02.277 –> 14:10.611
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s a very, very difficult product to market though because when you put this product in your ears, you hear no audible difference.
14:10.631 –> 14:13.656
[SPEAKER_02]: You just put it in your ears and nothing seems to happen.
14:13.636 –> 14:28.793
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s only when you go into loud environments like on the underground or into a bar, restaurant, school, noisy office, and you wear in karma and then you remove it that you then notice this massive change of distortion.
14:29.533 –> 14:34.539
[SPEAKER_02]: And the reason for that is our brains are constantly processing out the distortions of our ears.
14:35.019 –> 14:42.107
[SPEAKER_02]: So it’s like like with our vision and like with words,
14:42.087 –> 14:50.100
[SPEAKER_02]: So marketing it has been really tough because if we try and say to people, this is an earplug, well it doesn’t block sound.
14:50.541 –> 15:00.518
[SPEAKER_02]: The only way we’re able to market it is to get real life UGC content where people have actually used it and it’s made a difference to their lives.
15:00.498 –> 15:11.497
[SPEAKER_02]: where we then put that into an ad and then we share it and we’ve gained tens of thousands of comments, hundreds of thousands of likes and loves on these post ads.
15:11.517 –> 15:16.186
[SPEAKER_02]: There’s about 30 of them that are constantly bringing in the revenue for us.
15:16.807 –> 15:18.169
[SPEAKER_02]: So you can’t
15:18.318 –> 15:27.196
[SPEAKER_02]: refresh an ad and just create UGC like everyone else does because karma is a tool that you’re using for your ears to reduce stress.
15:27.718 –> 15:36.195
[SPEAKER_02]: It lets still let you hear everything and you’ve really got to hear it from a person who’s using it and to understand how it’s changed in their lives is when you really believe it.
15:36.937 –> 15:38.520
[SPEAKER_02]: So that’s a big challenge for us.
15:38.703 –> 15:48.716
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, with the problem of, you know, the traditional, but the key was that we’re working for you so orders of noise sensitivity, et cetera, a meta.
15:48.736 –> 15:59.811
[SPEAKER_00]: I did wonder if you would have gone down the influence of UGC organic rate in order to still get visibility on the social platforms without relying on the ads.
16:00.432 –> 16:05.418
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, clearly you’ve done it in order to create the ad copy, which is, you know, as we all know, a great move.
16:05.699 –> 16:07.461
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you done it organically as well?
16:07.610 –> 16:22.817
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it’s always in our feed and then we always use those posts in ads because that means our feed gets this social proof as well and it’s how we’ve gotten to the point where, I mean, if we turn all ads off, switch everything off, we’re almost break even.
16:22.797 –> 16:37.258
[SPEAKER_02]: So we’ve already got a business that almost doesn’t need ads, but it’s still represents some monumental challenge because the education behind the product is real world experience, and I just, you just can’t get an influence.
16:37.278 –> 16:39.781
[SPEAKER_02]: So we’re billions of followers to go, hey, this works like this.
16:39.801 –> 16:40.843
[SPEAKER_02]: They just won’t believe it.
16:41.484 –> 16:43.827
[SPEAKER_02]: And it’s, it’s, it’s a real struggle.
16:43.942 –> 17:13.341
[SPEAKER_02]: But with me because I’m the inventor at Flair and I am always looking for the not the lowest hanging fruit, but I’m always looking for an easier path because as the inventor coming out with different technologies, I’ve also recognized that the key to any business is making something unique, making something have a good value proposition and making something beneficial to the people
17:13.321 –> 17:20.129
[SPEAKER_02]: If you can get to that, you create a business, but if you do it really well, you get a grow, you’re global, amazing business.
17:20.169 –> 17:28.279
[SPEAKER_02]: So that that’s really been the focus over the next of the last couple of years is to get to a more broad audience.
17:28.759 –> 17:34.266
[SPEAKER_02]: And we’ve done that through a new product that we’ve got that’s only been out for a while that’s called the definition.
17:34.246 –> 17:44.669
[SPEAKER_02]: Now this is an air device that’s basically it’s an air insert like karma, but you wear it in your ears and it perfects sounds.
17:44.709 –> 17:53.048
[SPEAKER_02]: So you’re able to listen to a concert or a festival and it takes away all of the harsh noises but let’s you hear the detail of the tracks.
17:53.585 –> 17:55.708
[SPEAKER_02]: So that’s what we’ve got out this year.
17:55.908 –> 18:15.397
[SPEAKER_02]: And to get to a more broad audience next year, we’re coming out with collaborations with artists and we’re coming out with different headphones and earphones and sound devices in order to try and step into the more broad market because it’s great making innovative products that are changing the lives of people.
18:15.717 –> 18:21.786
[SPEAKER_02]: But it’s absolutely terrifying trying to stay profitable, trying to stay on point
18:21.766 –> 18:24.389
[SPEAKER_02]: trying to make sure that all our products are meaningful.
18:24.970 –> 18:37.665
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we’re trying to get to that broad audience through product development and through adverts that we’re able to put across to people that are much more main brand advertising.
18:38.346 –> 18:40.930
[SPEAKER_02]: And in order to do that, we’ve got to appeal to the masses.
18:41.450 –> 18:42.171
[SPEAKER_02]: That makes sense.
18:42.337 –> 18:57.041
[SPEAKER_00]: It does make sense, and I think it’s such an astute way of thinking about it, because as you were talking, I was thinking about our earlier conversations, you know, six plus years ago, where the goal of the business had absolutely nothing to do with helping the neurodiverse.
18:57.482 –> 19:07.939
[SPEAKER_00]: It was about sound quality, and then you found this lucrative niche that has, you know, for the lucrative for the soul and lucrative for the bank balance niche, and then
19:07.919 –> 19:18.799
[SPEAKER_00]: with the meta changes you’ve almost kind of like gone back to the original mission of that sound purity and that improving the experience of the musical event.
19:19.460 –> 19:20.883
[SPEAKER_00]: It would be my take on it.
19:20.983 –> 19:21.905
[SPEAKER_00]: I don’t know if that’s right.
19:22.526 –> 19:30.400
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah absolutely and like so following on from the karma launch I did some research and this is this is the shocking bit about.
19:30.380 –> 19:33.144
[SPEAKER_02]: Flair’s mission and why it’s now become so important.
19:33.965 –> 19:40.935
[SPEAKER_02]: In 2018, the WHO published 186 page document called The Noise Regulations.
19:41.956 –> 19:49.727
[SPEAKER_02]: In those regulations, and there’s countless studies, they’ve highlighted that noise is the second biggest killer after air pollution.
19:50.288 –> 19:50.588
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
19:50.809 –> 19:58.800
[SPEAKER_02]: And the attendee being increase in traffic noise is leading to a significant increase
19:59.928 –> 20:08.378
[SPEAKER_02]: The reason that’s happening is because, as we are exposed to noise, within a specific frequency, we release cortisol.
20:09.340 –> 20:16.328
[SPEAKER_02]: A good example is to imagine a distorted guitar sound on a really crappy sounding speaker.
20:17.109 –> 20:21.134
[SPEAKER_02]: It makes you hot, you have a really bad reaction to it.
20:21.895 –> 20:28.483
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, when I first developed Karma back in 2019, when we first announced it, it just
20:28.582 –> 20:47.248
[SPEAKER_02]: I, well, I’ve put it in my ears on the side of the road and then on the Bakerloo London and I was like, oh my god, this is making this horrible screechy underground noise like a recording studio and it was at that point, I was like, there’s something fundamental going on with our ears.
20:47.228 –> 20:54.580
[SPEAKER_02]: Then I found that, that document for the WHO, which anyone can search on Google just type in the WHO noise regulations.
20:55.501 –> 20:58.867
[SPEAKER_02]: But what I’ve recognized is it’s not noise that’s the problem.
20:59.728 –> 21:00.449
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s our ears.
21:01.191 –> 21:13.911
[SPEAKER_02]: Because what our ears are doing with the show-like resonance has happened because of evolution, because way back in, you know, cave times when we were in the wild and we weren’t in a busy,
21:14.060 –> 21:21.717
[SPEAKER_02]: We needed to become stressed against noise, because, almost certainly, if there was a noise behind us, it could be a threat and it could eat us.
21:22.399 –> 21:27.791
[SPEAKER_02]: So that evolutionary trait about releasing cortisol has happened on purpose.
21:28.613 –> 21:30.718
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, what I’ve identified is…
21:30.698 –> 21:35.669
[SPEAKER_02]: There’s a phenomenon known as HRTF or head-related transfer function.
21:36.471 –> 21:47.695
[SPEAKER_02]: And what that describes is the way that the ears, skull, torso and body, sort of all of the spine, all of the different parts of our anatomy, affects the way we hear sound.
21:47.675 –> 22:04.468
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that HLTF is widely known to boost sound by up to 21 decibels at 2.7 kHz on average, now each person’s different, but that’s based on the shape of what is and how we resonate sound.
22:04.685 –> 22:14.764
[SPEAKER_02]: But what I’ve understood is that it’s not boosting, which is what the rest of the world, or the most most acoustic world regard, they just regard it as free boosting.
22:15.466 –> 22:19.774
[SPEAKER_02]: But anybody that knows physics knows there’s no such thing as free energy.
22:19.754 –> 22:24.585
[SPEAKER_02]: because you don’t get boosting from an anatomy for free.
22:25.366 –> 22:27.551
[SPEAKER_02]: You get boosting because of distortion.
22:28.072 –> 22:39.838
[SPEAKER_02]: So what’s happening is higher frequencies and detailed a lot of frequencies are resonating around those peaks, adding a decay to sound at those frequencies.
22:39.818 –> 23:01.708
[SPEAKER_02]: basically it’s acting like an alarm bell inside our ears and it’s that bit really that we’re focused on through either karma, definition, we’ve got immerse and we’re now working on a range of headphones a lot more as well that’s a basically removing this distortion and it’s unmasking and unlocking
23:01.688 –> 23:03.050
[SPEAKER_02]: more detail in music.
23:03.491 –> 23:13.567
[SPEAKER_02]: I will just move to an earphone that we’re currently working on, where we’ve actually got the first time we’ve removed all HRTF distortion.
23:14.488 –> 23:18.955
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is now presenting its own challenge in the
23:18.935 –> 23:34.058
[SPEAKER_02]: you it’s really important what streaming service you use to listen to music because if you listen on tidal or if you listen on Spotify you can hear a load of distortion from the Spotify, you know, compressing this now going on.
23:34.038 –> 23:35.640
[SPEAKER_02]: and then the other problem is recording.
23:36.361 –> 23:43.028
[SPEAKER_02]: You can hear when mics have been placed badly because it just doesn’t sound that great when you’re recording the snare or when you’re recording a guitar.
23:43.528 –> 23:54.721
[SPEAKER_02]: Suddenly all of these tracks are really sort of changing how they present and the really good recordings are coming out as holographic, crazy experiences like Louis Armstrong.
23:54.741 –> 24:00.467
[SPEAKER_02]: You can hear him breathing in the studio as he’s singing and like that was in order before.
24:00.447 –> 24:14.521
[SPEAKER_02]: So when we come to marketing that product, which will be early part of next year once we’ve finished all the R&D work around it, it’s going to be really challenging because it’s a bit like when HD came along.
24:15.082 –> 24:25.392
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you remember 20 years ago, there was this uproar by all of the artists saying, oh, we don’t want HD because we’re worried about what the blemishes coming out on screen.
24:25.372 –> 24:42.556
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we’ve got that same problem with audio now and it’s like there’s all problems that we’re currently trying to work through in how we present and how we do everything because whilst everyone else or a lot of people, a lot of businesses in this world are going down the tortoise route.
24:42.576 –> 24:44.359
[SPEAKER_02]: So the hair route.
24:44.474 –> 25:01.538
[SPEAKER_02]: we are the tortoise and so we’re going slowly and we’re trying to work out exactly what we need to do and what to honestly we need to develop to really make a meaningful difference in the world and really advance sound and that’s really hard when
25:01.518 –> 25:08.093
[SPEAKER_02]: all the businesses around you are going at 500 mile an hour and they’re marketing and using new spins in order to sell stuff.
25:08.113 –> 25:14.667
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that’s quite relevant for your podcast is how you navigate that in terms of business.
25:14.900 –> 25:37.060
[SPEAKER_00]: are the endless challenges and the trying to keep up with the Jones or should we be trying to keep up with the Jones side of things and the distractions and how I find it fast, I always find it fascinating talking to you Davies because you are the inventor of the product be also so involved with the marketing side of it, you know, who we’re targeting the messaging we use in all the rest of it.
25:37.040 –> 25:52.380
[SPEAKER_00]: But going back to that kind of core invention piece, you know, you can’t, I assume you can’t sit down and come up with an idea, the inspiration for these problems has to come from somewhere beer, who report or something else.
25:52.800 –> 26:02.473
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you, I mean, don’t, you don’t know need to share any trade secrets here, but you know, how do you find a time the space for that, that part of the invention process?
26:03.027 –> 26:07.336
[SPEAKER_02]: Well it’s it’s my life it’s this is not a job for me.
26:07.516 –> 26:23.871
[SPEAKER_02]: This is an extension of me and Naomi the company is very much like our child and it’s become a fascination and a total dedication really to try and to understand where distortions are happening because
26:24.290 –> 26:28.819
[SPEAKER_02]: Distortion in the real world can be spotted and fixed by AI or by glasses.
26:28.879 –> 26:32.587
[SPEAKER_02]: If we have blurry vision, we can break glasses to correct it.
26:33.108 –> 26:37.998
[SPEAKER_02]: If we have a missing area on photographs, we can use AI to fill it in.
26:38.539 –> 26:39.902
[SPEAKER_02]: There’s lots of…
26:39.882 –> 26:44.910
[SPEAKER_02]: things you can do in the digital world, but in sound, it’s basically invisible.
26:45.571 –> 26:51.080
[SPEAKER_02]: There, no one can see it, and no one can measure sound quality.
26:51.761 –> 27:06.565
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s absolutely impossible, or the only microphones that you’ve got nowadays can really, they just pick up the intensity of each frequency, and they can show different measurements, measurements in terms of distortion, but they’re all very,
27:06.545 –> 27:13.784
[SPEAKER_02]: are chaotic and they don’t, there’s no measure saying this has got 100% sound quality and this has got 20%.
27:14.105 –> 27:17.955
[SPEAKER_02]: The THD numbers really pretty much meaning this and it’s
27:18.914 –> 27:26.148
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s that challenge and that fascination to understand what’s been going wrong, where the distortions are occurring.
27:26.188 –> 27:36.307
[SPEAKER_02]: And as we’ve gone on this journey over the last, I mean, it’s been, but you know, we actually started this industry as a higher company in 2007.
27:36.387 –> 27:37.108
[SPEAKER_02]: So,
27:37.088 –> 27:53.123
[SPEAKER_02]: it’s been almost 20 years, it’s 18 years, I think this year, and it’s changed so much because what started in Rockham Roll, a gigs, tuning systems, and then realising loudspeakers had a problem developing loudspeakers, realising that
27:53.103 –> 28:08.985
[SPEAKER_02]: earphones had a problem, ear protection had a problem, then our ears have now got this problem, and now having come full circle and realising actually the problems within me, not out there, the problems in my ears and everyone else is, it’s like, oh my god, we’re like starting again.
28:08.965 –> 28:24.510
[SPEAKER_02]: I think if you were to try and describe life, it’s one of Chase, we’re always chasing a happy life, a safer life, a loving life, a life that’s rich, a life that is meaningful, trying to make a difference, it’s that.
28:24.490 –> 28:31.619
[SPEAKER_02]: So I’m trying to chase distortions in order to unlock problems to really make a difference in the world.
28:31.839 –> 28:46.837
[SPEAKER_02]: If I, if I could achieve one thing through this whole journey, it would be to leave a mark and it would be for my inventions to endure past me and in the future when I’ve gone that my inventions really submit a fundamental difference.
28:46.857 –> 28:51.342
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that’s if you, if you’re a genuine inventor, I think that’s what you really want to do.
28:53.735 –> 28:58.607
[SPEAKER_01]: E-commerce most at land is supported by some of the greatest companies in the E-commerce sector.
28:58.728 –> 29:09.094
[SPEAKER_01]: Here’s a reminder of who they are.
29:11.453 –> 29:16.702
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I love this section because me and I’ll list us some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
29:16.762 –> 29:18.445
[SPEAKER_00]: Davies, are you ready for the top tips?
29:19.026 –> 29:19.306
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
29:19.967 –> 29:21.490
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, the book top tip.
29:21.510 –> 29:28.602
[SPEAKER_00]: If everyone listening to this podcast are going to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?
29:29.476 –> 29:43.166
[SPEAKER_02]: I would recommend a processed people, and that is about food, because about seven years ago, I was suffering from massive debilitating anxiety.
29:44.248 –> 29:47.856
[SPEAKER_02]: I went to the doctors, they were scribed anti-cycotics.
29:48.022 –> 29:53.652
[SPEAKER_02]: They didn’t work, and an anti-Sacrotex for an inventor is absolutely terrifying because it numbs your brain.
29:54.353 –> 29:56.617
[SPEAKER_02]: So I went to see a psychologist.
29:56.637 –> 30:13.185
[SPEAKER_02]: She happened to be in nutritionists, and she told me that the food I was eating, so bread and chips and sandwiches, pretty standard stuff, the low fat diet was completely wrong, and that I should eat whole natural foods and quit or sugar.
30:13.165 –> 30:13.966
[SPEAKER_02]: etc etc.
30:14.106 –> 30:19.153
[SPEAKER_02]: I followed her advice to the letter and within 24 hours my anxiety had gone.
30:20.154 –> 30:40.860
[SPEAKER_02]: Then the following week, because I was on that diet for a week, following week I went and ate a domino’s pizza just a day before I was going to go up on stage and I had it was terrifying the amount of anxiety that hit me like a wall that I couldn’t get rid of
30:41.212 –> 30:53.311
[SPEAKER_02]: and that if there’s one thing that I would like to do as well as the invention side, it’s to share more about food and how eating really well, especially if you’re really stressed.
30:53.331 –> 31:06.932
[SPEAKER_02]: Especially if you’re pushing your mind so you’re releasing lots of cortisol and lots of hormones, it’s really important that you minimize the impact of eating process food because the chemicals, the sugar, the carbohydrates,
31:06.912 –> 31:13.341
[SPEAKER_02]: cascade inflammation within your brain and within your body and it just makes your journey so much harder.
31:13.381 –> 31:24.496
[SPEAKER_02]: If it wasn’t for that book and if it wasn’t for the advice given out by some really amazing people out there in terms of health and wellbeing, I think I wouldn’t be sat here today.
31:24.516 –> 31:26.278
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, process people.
31:26.859 –> 31:28.682
[SPEAKER_00]: Fantastic recommendation.
31:28.822 –> 31:29.343
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
31:29.363 –> 31:30.124
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you Davies.
31:30.724 –> 31:36.312
[SPEAKER_00]: The traffic top tip which marketing method you either prize above all others or think
31:36.983 –> 31:47.878
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we only advertise on Meta, and we advertise using UGC content that is created by people who actually bought the products and it’s made a difference in their lives.
31:48.159 –> 31:51.683
[SPEAKER_02]: We reward them if we find content that they’ve created that’s good.
31:52.084 –> 31:56.370
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, it’d be completely wrong of us to just share that and advertise that without paying them.
31:56.470 –> 32:00.556
[SPEAKER_02]: So we do reward them for their content once we’ve discovered the content.
32:00.596 –> 32:06.484
[SPEAKER_02]: But it has to be made before we advertise and it has to be put on on Meta.
32:06.464 –> 32:19.463
[SPEAKER_02]: We’ve tried TikTok, but for us, our products are not really suitable, because it’s not not really viral growing products, they’re more about education, comments and interaction.
32:19.543 –> 32:25.952
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, unfortunately, I’m sticking to the same one, probably I said last time, which is meta in terms of traffic.
32:25.972 –> 32:31.560
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think traffic matters, but the quality of the traffic is
32:31.540 –> 32:36.486
[SPEAKER_02]: and anyone can start a traffic campaign and do it on any kind of platform.
32:36.506 –> 32:41.893
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think if you’re selling something that is on trend, then traffic may well be absolutely your thing.
32:42.013 –> 32:49.183
[SPEAKER_02]: Because if you’re in a broad market with a cool looking piss of a piece of apparel or something like that, then absolutely traffic comes into it.
32:49.263 –> 32:52.587
[SPEAKER_02]: But for us, unfortunately, yeah, it’s gotta be better.
32:52.870 –> 32:54.332
[SPEAKER_00]: I do love your consistency.
32:54.372 –> 32:58.879
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the third time you have recommended Facebook ads in the traffic top tips.
32:58.899 –> 33:00.201
[SPEAKER_00]: So loving it.
33:00.261 –> 33:00.742
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
33:01.443 –> 33:02.785
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, the tool top tip.
33:02.805 –> 33:07.272
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug-in, a phone app or just a way of working.
33:07.352 –> 33:11.959
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there a call little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?
33:12.445 –> 33:29.108
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, well, I don’t use tools because most of my life is spent inventing, but I can mention the tip of the tool that Naomi uses that’s really changed her life and it’s certainly changed the way in which we do business and that’s a camera.
33:29.128 –> 33:31.551
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s been absolutely amazing for
33:31.531 –> 33:48.013
[SPEAKER_02]: sort of getting social content, created and edited, developed and put together, because before that, you were on Adobe Premiere or Photoshop, and it was really clunky and slow.
33:48.593 –> 33:58.146
[SPEAKER_02]: And I see the content that’s coming out, even today, I’ve seen like half a dozen bits of content, just fly out at the team, and it’s like, yeah, it’s candor.
33:58.632 –> 34:14.498
[SPEAKER_00]: It is such a game change when it comes to graphics, I mean, just not needing a whole dictionary in order to use the other programs is a great thing, the carbon top tip, what’s your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store.
34:15.372 –> 34:16.453
[SPEAKER_02]: through innovation.
34:16.813 –> 34:24.200
[SPEAKER_02]: So a lot of our products that you now see on our website are 3D printed using robotic printers inside Flare HQ.
34:24.940 –> 34:44.097
[SPEAKER_02]: That is a very big thing especially for a product derived company because prior to 3D printing, you would have to invest in very expensive, very heavy tooling that is made from solid steel and it’s really like un-environmenty friendly
34:44.077 –> 34:52.854
[SPEAKER_02]: you then can’t change the product and then you have to make batches a huge amounts of plastic in order to make it economically viable.
34:53.395 –> 35:00.469
[SPEAKER_02]: So moving to 3D printing was a very big hidden way of reducing our carbon footprint.
35:00.489 –> 35:06.220
[SPEAKER_02]: The other way which we’re now working on is how we can get our manufacturing and product assembly.
35:06.200 –> 35:16.870
[SPEAKER_02]: down so that we can actually empower people to be able to repair their own products and be able to do things to put their products that they weren’t doing before.
35:16.890 –> 35:17.813
[SPEAKER_02]: And that’s…
35:17.978 –> 35:22.003
[SPEAKER_02]: that’s a very codeworded way of me saying we got something exciting coming.
35:23.925 –> 35:27.730
[SPEAKER_02]: I can’t really, I can’t talk about yet because it’s not out.
35:27.850 –> 35:40.465
[SPEAKER_02]: But getting your carbon footprint down is so much more than just moving to paper packaging or green washing in some fancy way to say you’re buying this many trees.
35:40.986 –> 35:47.614
[SPEAKER_02]: Actually, being really focused on environmental issues and being really
35:47.594 –> 35:53.580
[SPEAKER_02]: focused on how you produce something without creating too much shared to.
35:53.600 –> 35:56.794
[SPEAKER_02]: So minimal energy, minimum stock holding.
35:57.078 –> 36:12.466
[SPEAKER_02]: and minimum impact on the world actually benefits you massively if you’re doing it fundamentally, because it means that you get your costs right down, because you’re now not using the energy, you’re not investing in tooling, you’re not investing in a load of products that’s going to be out of date in six months time.
36:13.127 –> 36:17.635
[SPEAKER_02]: And it’s being able to innovate and pivot through the manufacturing process,
36:17.615 –> 36:22.683
[SPEAKER_02]: that really starts to unlock the whole core of reason of what ECO is about.
36:23.043 –> 36:34.881
[SPEAKER_02]: Because a lot of our definition product, which you see on our website, that’s made as I say, inflare, have in-lotsing, in England, in lots of USR6.
36:34.861 –> 36:40.187
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s made here, and it’s using a printer that uses lasers and resin, so it’s laser-fused.
36:40.968 –> 36:43.290
[SPEAKER_02]: It can be powered off one small solar panel.
36:43.851 –> 36:45.292
[SPEAKER_02]: It is that energy efficient.
36:46.153 –> 36:52.620
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is drastically different to plastic injection molding, which requires high temperature and machine as big as a room.
36:53.381 –> 36:56.264
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s a completely different step.
36:56.364 –> 36:59.788
[SPEAKER_02]: And what we’re now trying to do
36:59.937 –> 37:11.568
[SPEAKER_02]: much more mass consumer and make that much more the way to go because then we can pivot product, we could change products, we can adapt it, we can listen to people and we can make little tweaks to it and we can start to improve things.
37:12.028 –> 37:13.930
[SPEAKER_00]: It just delivers on all fronts, doesn’t it?
37:13.970 –> 37:28.003
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s less waste in building the manufacturing site, there’s less waste in running it, there’s less waste in the product because you’re making what you need not throwing away a load or whatever happens with it and then you’ve got
37:28.473 –> 37:34.241
[SPEAKER_00]: As a business, you’ve got more flexibility in terms of, we don’t have to buy 10,000 units.
37:34.301 –> 37:36.303
[SPEAKER_00]: We can run out for 100.
37:36.323 –> 37:40.208
[SPEAKER_00]: And then if we’re seeing demand spike on something else, we can run off some more of those.
37:40.269 –> 37:45.275
[SPEAKER_00]: And it’s such a benefit in so many ways on the green side of things.
37:45.295 –> 37:48.539
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I think we started off this conversation vaguely mentioning tariffs.
37:48.980 –> 37:52.725
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, if you’re manufacturing in country,
37:52.705 –> 38:00.814
[SPEAKER_00]: then you have got, I mean, raw products may be coming from overseas, but you’re also saving somewhat on their supply chain side of the tariffs, presumably as well.
38:01.374 –> 38:09.884
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that with the tariffs is a really tricky one, because we shipped to 180 sits countries and we were pretty, we were pretty friction free.
38:10.624 –> 38:16.671
[SPEAKER_02]: We had a very good career service and everything was getting out to the states in like two or three days, everything was rosy.
38:16.651 –> 38:22.065
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, unfortunately, these tariffs came in and that big impact for us was the removal of the minimists.
38:22.085 –> 38:28.461
[SPEAKER_02]: So, the minimists is where something gets into the states, you know, it’s 20 quid, that you then don’t have any tariffs on.
38:28.862 –> 38:32.010
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, pretty much every country in the world has got it.
38:31.990 –> 38:34.434
[SPEAKER_02]: an amount of tax-free duty.
38:35.355 –> 38:51.640
[SPEAKER_02]: Because otherwise, if you’ve got something coming into the states at £5, when that comes in, you have to apply the 10% tariff, but then you get the admin fee for the courier, all the processing fees through customs, and you end up with a £5 item, costing it $60-$70.
38:52.321 –> 38:58.791
[SPEAKER_02]: So it meant overnight, it ceased our V2C model in the states.
38:58.771 –> 39:15.466
[SPEAKER_02]: And we very quickly had to locate and source a logistics partner, which we did, and we then had to get pallets and pallets of products out to the stakes as quickly as we could whilst maintaining sales to the US because it is our biggest market.
39:16.126 –> 39:17.187
[SPEAKER_02]: But we managed to do it.
39:17.247 –> 39:19.129
[SPEAKER_02]: We managed to keep in touch with all our customers.
39:19.189 –> 39:22.452
[SPEAKER_02]: We shared what was going on and how we were overcoming it.
39:23.032 –> 39:27.276
[SPEAKER_02]: And now what happens is
39:27.256 –> 39:28.760
[SPEAKER_02]: what your manufacturing goods are.
39:28.800 –> 39:33.111
[SPEAKER_02]: If you’re shipping it in terms of pallets, it means we can now absorb that cost.
39:33.592 –> 39:43.797
[SPEAKER_02]: Whereas before, if we were shipping good from here and the customer was playing that tariff, it was much much more because it was on the retail price that they paid.
39:43.777 –> 39:45.700
[SPEAKER_02]: plus all the admin fees.
39:46.121 –> 40:02.605
[SPEAKER_02]: So you really have got no option, but to engage with a B2B set up with just six partner out there, which we didn’t want to do, because having a logistics partner in another country means you’re now slowed down in terms of innovation.
40:03.086 –> 40:07.793
[SPEAKER_02]: And so a good idea is we came out with isolate, it protects us the new version last Thursday.
40:07.773 –> 40:09.456
[SPEAKER_02]: it exploded in sales.
40:09.716 –> 40:22.980
[SPEAKER_02]: We didn’t quite count for how many we were going to sell because it had been a product before and so we launched the game with a new and refreshed design and our customers went mad and so we shipped a vast quantity out to the states.
40:22.960 –> 40:31.850
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we got hit with this custom’s import issue in terms of, I don’t know, it’s another regulation that we put on aluminium and we couldn’t overcome it.
40:32.490 –> 40:41.360
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we’ve then had to like balance and juggle that and send out small shipments rapidly in the next 24 hours just to make sure we can meet customer demand.
40:42.321 –> 40:46.626
[SPEAKER_02]: But it gives you a good example of trying to keep things simple so that they’re flexible.
40:47.146 –> 40:50.470
[SPEAKER_02]: But then the world changes and that simplicity comes around to bite you.
40:51.142 –> 40:51.984
[SPEAKER_00]: indeed it does.
40:53.126 –> 40:59.500
[SPEAKER_00]: Davies, it has been brilliant chatting to you about all these different things, absolute treat, getting you back on the podcast again.
40:59.520 –> 41:00.663
[SPEAKER_00]: So thank you so much for being here.
41:00.723 –> 41:09.201
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we say goodbye for the listeners who want to try out your products or want to get in contact with you, where can they find your business new on the web and social please?
41:09.620 –> 41:12.404
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, so they can find us at flairordio.com.
41:12.444 –> 41:15.669
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s FL-A-R-E-A-U-D-I-O.
41:16.210 –> 41:23.400
[SPEAKER_02]: You can see us on Instagram as for app-flareordio, on Meta, app-flareordio, and on X as well.
41:23.500 –> 41:24.622
[SPEAKER_02]: I will also on TikTok.
41:25.103 –> 41:28.968
[SPEAKER_02]: We’ve also got some small independent retail partners across the world.
41:29.028 –> 41:33.535
[SPEAKER_02]: If you’re in Australia, you can find us through a reseller called Ear Jobs.
41:33.515 –> 41:36.961
[SPEAKER_02]: But other than that, just search on Google and you’ll find all our products.
41:36.981 –> 41:49.083
[SPEAKER_02]: And the most important I think I say to people is we’re a real company, making real technology, and look at all the reviews in detail on websites and you’ll start to see how our products can help you in your daily life.
41:49.884 –> 41:50.305
[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome.
41:50.485 –> 41:52.048
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for being on the show.
41:52.068 –> 41:53.811
[SPEAKER_00]: David, it’s been great catching up with you again.
41:54.432 –> 41:55.033
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks, Gary.
42:00.650 –> 42:05.318
[SPEAKER_00]: what a fascinating discussion there with Davies.
42:06.059 –> 42:15.696
[SPEAKER_00]: I love how he goes from massive strategic thoughts down to the nitty gritty of how to improve specific things in the business.
42:16.076 –> 42:19.502
[SPEAKER_00]: Great advice in there and insights around.
42:19.482 –> 42:27.689
[SPEAKER_00]: Meterads, around tariffs, around products, development innovations, so much cool stuff in there.
42:27.729 –> 42:30.472
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you’ve enjoyed that episode as much as we did recording it.
42:30.932 –> 42:38.599
[SPEAKER_00]: You get your hands on the notes from this episode, including those top tips and links to what we mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterplan.com.
42:38.619 –> 42:49.489
[SPEAKER_00]: You can also use our direct-to-episode short links just put ECMP dot info forward slash the number of this episode into the URL bar and you’ll
42:49.469 –> 42:52.393
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you’re on the site, why not add yourself to our email list?
42:52.794 –> 42:56.919
[SPEAKER_00]: So you don’t miss out on any of the other things we share to help you improve your business.
42:57.781 –> 43:02.087
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you liked this episode, then make sure you check out our previous chats with Davies.
43:02.647 –> 43:13.823
[SPEAKER_00]: We first caught up in 2018 when he’d recently pivoted to consumer products and had a year of 250% growth, that’s episode 164.
43:13.803 –> 43:21.053
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he came back on the show in 2020 to share how they’d switch from a focus on fast growth to a focus on profitability.
43:21.815 –> 43:27.302
[SPEAKER_00]: That is on episode 250 to have a listen to that one.
43:27.943 –> 43:37.397
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you want to hear from some other bigger businesses that we’ve had on the show then head to ECMP.info forward slash big to find a page of all of them.
43:37.377 –> 43:41.264
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for tuning into this and every episode of the e-commerce master plan podcast.
43:41.324 –> 43:53.986
[SPEAKER_00]: We bring you a new interview every week, even in December, because we want to inspire and help e-commerce business owners like you to succeed and thrive with your businesses, including progressing along the path to net zero.
43:54.006 –> 43:59.816
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you know someone this show can help, please tell them to listen to the e-commerce master plan podcast.
43:59.836 –> 44:02.541
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you have a great week and don’t forget to keep optimizing.
44:05.575 –> 44:09.429
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to the eCommerce MasterBland podcast.
44:09.449 –> 44:14.708
[SPEAKER_01]: Find out more at eCommercemasterpland.com slash podcast.
45 min
December 08, 2025eCommerce MasterPlan | 572: Behind Dorwest’s Success: Trust, Systems, and a Smarter Way to Scale Online
Ben Boughton-White is the Operations Director at Dorwest, experts in herbal pet care since 1948. Selling globally via wholesale, marketplaces, Crufts! and their own Shopify store, they now do over 50,000 order a year, and were recently named Online Business of the Year at the Pet Industry Federation Awards.

Ben shares how Dorwest — a 75-year-old family-run pet care brand — brought its heritage into the digital age. From a smart Shopify migration to building efficient systems and strong partnerships, he reveals how they’ve kept quality, trust, and growth at the heart of their eCommerce success.

Hit PLAY to hear:
How Dorwest turned a 75-year-old pet care brand into a thriving Shopify success story
The smart, slow-and-steady approach that made their Shopify migration truly work
Why documenting every process became their secret weapon for efficiency and growth
The power of choosing partners who actually “get” your brand — and how to find them
Why Dorwest refuses to outsource fulfillment (and how that decision boosts quality)
How a husband-and-wife team keeps communication flowing and the business growing

Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[04:59] “Morning Walks and Business Success”
[09:00] “End-to-End Quality Control”
[10:40] Trusted Partners Shape Our Brand
[13:38] “Focused Loyalty Approach”
[17:25] Evolving Loyalty Rewards Strategy
[20:53] Listen to Ben’s Top Tips!

Full episode notes here: https://ecmp.info/572
—
Download our ebook… https://ecmp.info/ebook 500 Tips to Increase Your Profits
Get all the links and resources we mention and join our email list at https://ecmp.info
Love the show? Chloe would love your feedback – leave a review here: https://ecmp.info/review or reply to the episode QandA on Spotify.
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WEBVTT
00:00.520 –> 00:14.065
[SPEAKER_02]: having someone else who’s as invested in it as you are, that’s I think the key to success of any business, whoever you’re working with, whether that’s your wife, your friend, three big things in the business, and in any relationship is honesty, trust, and communication.
00:14.726 –> 00:17.331
[SPEAKER_02]: If you don’t have one of those, do the two are going to fall down.
00:19.538 –> 00:22.065
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.
00:22.606 –> 00:26.677
[SPEAKER_00]: Here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
00:27.218 –> 00:35.320
[SPEAKER_00]: Cutting through the highly to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond, here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
00:38.287 –> 00:39.569
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello, and welcome.
00:39.589 –> 00:40.770
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s great to have you here.
00:40.810 –> 00:44.755
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
00:44.775 –> 00:51.803
[SPEAKER_01]: In this episode, I get to catch up with the op-stirector of a brilliant e-commerce brand.
00:51.823 –> 00:59.232
[SPEAKER_01]: They’ve got really big in a specific niche and they’ve been doing some really, really clever stuff behind the scenes that he’s going to be taking us through.
00:59.272 –> 01:07.922
[SPEAKER_01]: We’ll be talking about making the most of migration to Shopify and what comes after the migration to Shopify.
01:07.902 –> 01:17.602
[SPEAKER_01]: process optimization, why you may want to keep fulfilment and production in house will be talking about what we’re talking about a little bit of marketing too.
01:18.163 –> 01:20.689
[SPEAKER_01]: And his top tips are absolutely brilliant.
01:20.789 –> 01:24.156
[SPEAKER_01]: So make sure you stick around for those at the end of the episode.
01:29.333 –> 01:31.775
[SPEAKER_01]: And now to introduce our special guest.
01:31.795 –> 01:35.419
[SPEAKER_01]: Ben Boutham White is the Operations Director at Door West.
01:35.819 –> 01:38.301
[SPEAKER_01]: Experts in herbal pet care since 1948.
01:39.543 –> 01:48.291
[SPEAKER_01]: Selling globally via wholesale marketplaces, crafts and their own Shopify store, they now do over 50,000 orders a year.
01:48.411 –> 01:49.052
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello, Ben.
01:49.652 –> 01:51.454
[SPEAKER_02]: Hi, Chloe, and thanks for the introduction.
01:51.794 –> 01:57.940
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, great to have you on the show, such a fascinating business, but how did you get into the world of e-commerce?
01:58.375 –> 02:00.718
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, my background is IT.
02:01.099 –> 02:04.123
[SPEAKER_02]: Traditionally, that’s my first job at the university.
02:04.143 –> 02:04.985
[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn’t my degree.
02:05.686 –> 02:13.537
[SPEAKER_02]: I was completely unrelated about ended up in IT and then kind of family into assistant engineering and then cybersecurity kind of a strange.
02:14.018 –> 02:27.758
[SPEAKER_02]: I was kind of a natural path and then by that point I was married to Joe who is the third generation of the family who started to arrest and use the kind of how the business was going for her and her parents were kind of
02:27.923 –> 02:28.944
[SPEAKER_02]: she needed that support.
02:29.004 –> 02:40.154
[SPEAKER_02]: So I kind of came into the business at that point, felt I had something to offer with my side of my skills really, the kind of technical skills I had, process procedure, that kind of thing from working in much bigger businesses.
02:40.674 –> 02:44.658
[SPEAKER_02]: So kind of made sense for us to give that a go really, and that was 10 years ago.
02:44.778 –> 02:56.108
[SPEAKER_02]: So from there, once I joined door west, I kind of the technical system side of the business in general, and naturally he comes a part of that
02:56.088 –> 02:58.032
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s kind of what I do day to day really.
02:58.052 –> 03:04.043
[SPEAKER_02]: So I look after the systems that we have and kind of as well as the production and dispatch areas of our business as well.
03:04.063 –> 03:09.753
[SPEAKER_02]: So kind of the more technical side of it and woes Joe really looks after the marketing and the customer service aside.
03:09.773 –> 03:14.582
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s where her passion is division for the brand and how we operate as a business.
03:14.642 –> 03:17.527
[SPEAKER_02]: And I make sure that everything runs smoothly.
03:18.148 –> 03:19.851
[SPEAKER_02]: Hopefully in the technical aspects.
03:19.871 –> 03:20.172
[SPEAKER_02]: See
03:20.320 –> 03:24.544
[SPEAKER_01]: So, two massive questions I have to ask after you after that intro.
03:24.925 –> 03:26.687
[SPEAKER_01]: Number one, what was the degree?
03:27.908 –> 03:29.269
[SPEAKER_02]: Marine Environmental Science.
03:29.970 –> 03:36.517
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, that is like I did history and ended up in Ecommerce, but Marine Environmental Science into IT.
03:36.978 –> 03:37.738
[SPEAKER_01]: That’s absolutely great.
03:37.758 –> 03:42.203
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well I should work for the UK Hydrographic Office in some a set.
03:42.263 –> 03:45.987
[SPEAKER_02]: So I went there because I thought that’s what my degree was in.
03:46.027 –> 03:48.690
[SPEAKER_02]: So I got a job as a 10 pin IT.
03:48.670 –> 03:54.180
[SPEAKER_02]: for about a year ended up doing something to do with my degree, hated it lasted three days but back to IT.
03:54.200 –> 03:55.362
[SPEAKER_02]: I loved it.
03:55.402 –> 04:00.251
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it’s just the kind of the hands on nature with a mind-quisition of how things work.
04:00.291 –> 04:01.813
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m quite a mechanically minded as well.
04:01.833 –> 04:09.767
[SPEAKER_02]: So I do love how things work and I remember kind of just being so ingrown to all this technology that was coming into the office and how new systems work.
04:09.808 –> 04:12.332
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s kind of how I am here at Dorwester, really.
04:12.312 –> 04:20.206
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I love making sure that our website works really well, that the ERP behind it works really well, and a really hate inefficiency.
04:20.226 –> 04:28.441
[SPEAKER_02]: So, when I see it in our business, it’s also kind of when I talk to other friends or experience other businesses, I really hate that kind of inefficiency side of things.
04:28.501 –> 04:34.692
[SPEAKER_02]: So, kind of, I think the IT and my kind of systematic brain loves the kind of stimulation that gives me, if you like.
04:34.942 –> 04:59.531
[SPEAKER_01]: that makes so much sense and then the second question I have to ask is, working with your wife and starting working with your wife clearly it’s going well because you’ve stayed there for ten years and any tips for anyone else doing that family business things like I’ve spoken to people who’ve been like yeah we talk about it 24-7 and it’s brilliant and others who go we leave it at the office but what’s your your kind of recipe for success or any tips you can share?
05:00.111 –> 05:01.573
[SPEAKER_02]: We do talk about it
05:02.397 –> 05:10.409
[SPEAKER_02]: in work, hands are outside of work, but also I think having that ability to discuss it out of work means we can leave it alone a lot more easily.
05:10.509 –> 05:12.352
[SPEAKER_02]: So we’ve got four dogs.
05:12.372 –> 05:14.716
[SPEAKER_02]: So every morning, we’re up at 6 o’clock at with the dogs.
05:14.776 –> 05:19.022
[SPEAKER_02]: We have lots of really great conversations at that point in the morning because we’re very, very
05:19.002 –> 05:31.191
[SPEAKER_02]: Things are on your mind over night, they come to in the morning, so that half an adult walking in the morning, and they would she kind of get them off the chest, set the scene for the day, and also having someone else who’s as invested in it as you are.
05:31.231 –> 05:35.982
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s I think the key to success of any business, whoever you’re working with,
05:35.962 –> 05:39.925
[SPEAKER_02]: whether that’s your wife, your friend, just another associated director.
05:39.945 –> 05:41.667
[SPEAKER_02]: You’ve got to have that common goal in mind.
05:41.787 –> 05:45.190
[SPEAKER_02]: So, and also understanding are different strengths.
05:45.350 –> 05:52.256
[SPEAKER_02]: So, like I said, Joe looks after very much to brand vision and the marketing, and I look after the technical side of it.
05:52.717 –> 05:57.020
[SPEAKER_02]: It means we’re not stepping on each other’s toes, but we both work together really well.
05:57.040 –> 06:04.467
[SPEAKER_02]: In communication, you know, I’ll be three big things in the business and in any relationship is honesty, trust, and communication.
06:04.447 –> 06:19.877
[SPEAKER_02]: if you don’t have one of those other two are going to fall down so we push that quite hard in the business I think it’s something that people say a lot but unless you actually do it you went to the benefit of it and we definitely do and I think we can not talk about it as much as we can talk about it.
06:19.917 –> 06:22.742
[SPEAKER_02]: We just come back off for weeks holiday, we didn’t talk about work.
06:22.722 –> 06:33.138
[SPEAKER_02]: really that much, but maybe a little bit, but only because you can relax into things and then just have that little five-minute conversation rather than sitting there spoiling on it and not talking about it.
06:33.819 –> 06:39.467
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it’s not a nine-to-five job anymore, but then the same token is not a nine-to-five job.
06:39.487 –> 06:39.948
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s great.
06:40.068 –> 06:41.090
[SPEAKER_02]: I really love that aspect.
06:41.170 –> 06:49.422
[SPEAKER_02]: It gives me the flexibility or sustainability to do what we need to do as a family and then individuals, but also at the same time have a really successful business.
06:50.178 –> 06:51.200
[SPEAKER_01]: love those tips.
06:51.240 –> 06:52.522
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for that one Ben.
06:52.542 –> 06:54.967
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, let’s let’s deviate back to the business proper.
06:54.987 –> 07:02.902
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I’ve explained the product ludicrously simply as herbal pet care.
07:03.784 –> 07:07.090
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us a bit more about the product that you’re selling, please.
07:07.323 –> 07:20.438
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so, obviously we’re doing with Dol West, we’re from the 1948-based in Poundbury, and Dolchester was actually where it all started in 1948, was a little shed in it, I think, I can’t, one of the roads, not far from where we are now.
07:21.099 –> 07:26.966
[SPEAKER_02]: Our products are natural mainly herbal supplements and plus topical products for dogs.
07:27.546 –> 07:35.035
[SPEAKER_02]: Some cats mainly dogs, they were dog kind of people, so they are tablets, capsules, powders, liquids, oils, bombs,
07:35.015 –> 07:53.648
[SPEAKER_02]: around about 125 skews across 50 product lines, we cover a range of conditions, so kind of joint support, digestive support, calming and behavior, there are biggest, there’s our biggest kind of sector if you like, and then things like shampoo, bombs,
07:53.628 –> 08:14.202
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything I call, along those lines really, so traditionally we’re a very much kind of condition-based, so we’ve previously had revolutionary herbal medicines, we’re now just purely supplements due to the ease of producing supplements, and actually we can make a better call if you product for being a supplement rather than a medicine, which is something that sounds crazy as a whole other discussion.
08:14.300 –> 08:41.117
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it was a small business, I’d say 20 people, and to end we do everything in-house except for manufacturing, so we don’t physically make for the product in-house, but we do all marketing, customer services, technical quality and production and dispatch, so our production unit does assembly from bulk, so we buy our tablets from our manufacturer by the million,
08:41.097 –> 09:06.987
[SPEAKER_02]: and then we assemble those into the sayable unit you’ll find on our website so hundreds, 200, 500 same with powders that comes in in bulk and we package that on site into the sayable unit and by having that hands-on control of all processes from assembly to dispatch we can ensure the quality of that all the way through and I think in any commerce where we’re always approach
09:06.967 –> 09:07.828
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, we’ll take that.
09:07.848 –> 09:11.293
[SPEAKER_02]: We’ll put a price on that for you and we’ll do all that aside of it for you in that.
09:12.114 –> 09:13.456
[SPEAKER_02]: That for us is disingenuous.
09:13.496 –> 09:24.250
[SPEAKER_02]: We wouldn’t want that because we like having that quality from the first person someone might speak to on the phone because there’s a lot of our customers will phone us up to talk about their dogs and they’re talking about their issues.
09:24.791 –> 09:26.233
[SPEAKER_02]: So our customers service him will talk them.
09:26.253 –> 09:27.215
[SPEAKER_02]: They’ll process the order.
09:27.255 –> 09:28.897
[SPEAKER_02]: They’ll go downstairs while dispatched him.
09:29.337 –> 09:30.879
[SPEAKER_02]: They’ll pick it, pack it.
09:31.540 –> 09:34.965
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, put everything in the envelope, put the
09:34.945 –> 09:36.368
[SPEAKER_02]: on the envelope and then send that out.
09:36.388 –> 09:37.971
[SPEAKER_02]: We’ve got to control that from end to end.
09:38.032 –> 09:40.818
[SPEAKER_02]: So that’s very much where our technical quality comes in as well.
09:41.760 –> 09:51.300
[SPEAKER_02]: We can ensure that if there’s any kind lost in post or incorrect products, damage products, we know where we particularly busy, who was working on the specs that day.
09:52.242 –> 09:54.486
[SPEAKER_02]: do we have a different batch of packing material?
09:54.566 –> 10:09.489
[SPEAKER_02]: All those kind of things we can see at end to end and everything, it probably makes a sound a little by like control, fruits, but we just care about the quality of the advice that’s given to our customers, the quality of the marketing that we do and also how we dispatch our products out to our customers.
10:10.171 –> 10:14.217
[SPEAKER_02]: So we do, although I said we do everything else, we’re all selected.
10:14.399 –> 10:16.723
[SPEAKER_02]: things that we do with trusted third parties.
10:17.384 –> 10:40.103
[SPEAKER_02]: As well as wanting to do as much as we can ourselves, we recognise the need for trusted experts, if you like, so things that we can’t do to the quality or the standard we’d want, so things like digital and design, design digital marketing, if you like, say SEO, it’s a dark heart to me, and kind of like any kind of the digital
10:40.083 –> 10:47.173
[SPEAKER_02]: We’re very fortunate to work with a really good design agency who’ve been with us since we did our rebrand over 10 years ago.
10:47.288 –> 10:55.721
[SPEAKER_02]: So we went from being like a cartoon little hand-drawn dog to the pestle and water, logo in three to the kind of the arch logo you’ll find on our products now.
10:55.781 –> 11:01.691
[SPEAKER_02]: We work with a relatively local husband and wife design team who are kind of like our brand guardians with us.
11:02.392 –> 11:05.296
[SPEAKER_02]: So they understand everything about how our brand should look and feel.
11:05.336 –> 11:09.122
[SPEAKER_02]: So when we want to do a new product or a new campaign, we can go to them.
11:09.162 –> 11:12.047
[SPEAKER_02]: And we don’t have to explain as much.
11:12.027 –> 11:15.690
[SPEAKER_02]: because they know it, they wrote our brand guidelines with us, they did all of our color palettes.
11:16.071 –> 11:23.477
[SPEAKER_02]: So we’re at a people like that, and then product experts who kind of vets for product development will work with those to make sure we get the best possible advice.
11:23.918 –> 11:30.523
[SPEAKER_02]: So we manufacture, we use contract manufacturing, who just manufacture our products for us, they’re not white labelled, we don’t white labelled anyone else.
11:31.044 –> 11:33.546
[SPEAKER_02]: And technical partners, so that’s really kind of my side of things.
11:33.586 –> 11:41.393
[SPEAKER_02]: So when we did our Shopify migration product project last year, it was really important to find the right companies,
11:41.643 –> 11:42.985
[SPEAKER_02]: to do that job for us.
11:43.086 –> 11:54.506
[SPEAKER_02]: So, as well as it being the product, so Shopify, it was about finding the right agency and we’ve done a podcast together before about this, you know, Cubics of Heath, we worked with then, we’re so good.
11:54.526 –> 11:56.530
[SPEAKER_02]: They were just the people who just,
11:56.746 –> 12:16.712
[SPEAKER_02]: literally spoke the same way that we did and I understood what they were trying to say so we worked with people like that and we also have a cyber security partner who ensures the kind of the safety and security of our systems and digital security who is like that but again they’re people that I have to be able to talk to and understand what they’re asking of us and they have to understand what we’re asking of them.
12:16.692 –> 12:17.554
[SPEAKER_02]: to be can work together.
12:17.855 –> 12:29.200
[SPEAKER_02]: We really try to select people to work with who are like us, so that means what’s often the people we work with are cooperatively small businesses as well, but I think together it gives us that impact.
12:29.602 –> 12:47.779
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that bit about finding people you can talk to is so critical because back in the day I used to do a lot of website tendering projects and the last one I did was an exclusively Shopify tendering project for an e-commerce business and
12:47.759 –> 12:54.829
[SPEAKER_01]: If the massive difference between those two, which, you know, previously, it was all, but can they create the right check out for us?
12:54.889 –> 12:57.253
[SPEAKER_01]: And do they understand our Zoom requirements?
12:57.273 –> 13:00.898
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, all that kind of kind of techy stuff was how we chose between different people.
13:01.339 –> 13:11.674
[SPEAKER_01]: When it came to the Shopify-tendering process, it was who gets us, who gets the values, who do the people sitting to my right, who are the client, who do they like?
13:11.654 –> 13:15.579
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it’s such a different experience when finding, finding your supplier.
13:15.599 –> 13:18.222
[SPEAKER_01]: So I love the fact you’ve got that up, but question for you.
13:18.262 –> 13:23.308
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned that you’ve recently or 12 months ago, you moved over to Shopify.
13:24.850 –> 13:33.621
[SPEAKER_01]: And before we hit record, do you say do you take, you’re taking, quite, I would take quite an enlightened approach to your migration to Shopify in terms of what happens after it went live.
13:34.001 –> 13:38.607
[SPEAKER_01]: So how have you approached post-live making the most of Shopify?
13:38.924 –> 13:42.271
[SPEAKER_02]: think what we’ve done is we’ve tried to take our time.
13:42.932 –> 13:58.924
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it’s probably the biggest thing I’ve tried to encourage the teams to do and obviously Shopify is and the app store it’s basically it’s full of lots of wonderful things or change your life and I’m sure they would but I’m always kind of very conscious of kind of a requirements creep.
13:58.904 –> 14:15.090
[SPEAKER_02]: kind of just trying to do too much and not doing anything particularly well so one of our kind of next projects for the Shopify site is our loyalty club but now there are 101 or more loyalty based apps and everyone will do amazing things and
14:15.425 –> 14:34.362
[SPEAKER_02]: Our loyalty club is probably one of the oldest things about our business and you know when we did our rebrand, we went back through the archives, it’s very fortunate in my second generation of the business, I’m the first generation of the business, so Joe’s grandfather and her parents kept everything, all the archive material, and there’s letters written by her grandfather and
14:34.342 –> 14:58.307
[SPEAKER_02]: kind of ideas he’d written down like he wanted to write he’s you know he’s I outlined for a loyalty club of ensuring that you know loyal customers after the second order got a 10% off for life and that’s something that we continue to do to we move to Shopify and those all of our old loyalty club customers still get 10% off but we’re now looking to relaunch that in a modern way but we’ve taken our time it was in the original scope
14:58.287 –> 15:02.311
[SPEAKER_02]: but we didn’t feel we could deliver it at the time, the way we wanted to deliver it.
15:02.731 –> 15:04.072
[SPEAKER_02]: So we waited.
15:04.132 –> 15:05.754
[SPEAKER_02]: And the same, we also looked at subscription.
15:06.574 –> 15:07.996
[SPEAKER_02]: Because subscription is massive.
15:08.496 –> 15:12.300
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s very simple to implement from Shopify.
15:13.180 –> 15:23.650
[SPEAKER_02]: But it didn’t feel right for us on our customers because as customers of other sites that you subscription, it frustrates me so much if I can’t tell the public subscription this week, because a communication is so bad.
15:24.551 –> 15:28.294
[SPEAKER_02]: I don’t want that for our customers.
15:28.274 –> 15:36.706
[SPEAKER_02]: we wanted the best possible experience for our customers, we wanted them to be able to order the products they wanted as simply as possible.
15:36.947 –> 15:45.619
[SPEAKER_02]: So whether that’s the website’s performing well, they can pay really easily, they can update their details, the password list, the entry with shop codes.
15:46.140 –> 15:49.425
[SPEAKER_02]: So that’s really how our whole Shopify migration started.
15:49.445 –> 15:51.167
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s like, okay, well that’s what we want first.
15:51.187 –> 15:53.691
[SPEAKER_02]: We want the Shopify experience for our customers,
15:53.671 –> 16:00.777
[SPEAKER_02]: what does it mean, what needs to happen behind it that the customers don’t really care about, and I wouldn’t want them to, or I want them just to have that great experience.
16:00.797 –> 16:16.131
[SPEAKER_02]: So we’ve gone very slowly, we’ve done we’ve added little things along the way that customers probably wouldn’t notice hopefully because we just may dare experience better whether that’s adding the right leaf for it when they buy a new product or it’s given them kind of marketing communications during a promotion period.
16:16.612 –> 16:23.678
[SPEAKER_02]: So we’ve done con really kind of slowly, we’ve kind of replicated what we did previously
16:23.658 –> 16:24.680
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that’s it really.
16:24.720 –> 16:26.744
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that’s kind of my role.
16:26.764 –> 16:33.496
[SPEAKER_02]: I think part of my role is to kind of geek keep that and stop it running away because I’m sure it would run away.
16:33.916 –> 16:35.179
[SPEAKER_02]: But I shop for my partner.
16:35.780 –> 16:37.062
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m very pragmatic as well.
16:37.082 –> 16:41.430
[SPEAKER_02]: They understand what we’re trying to achieve and what we’re trying to experience is trying to give to our customers.
16:41.883 –> 16:44.627
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think it’s such a wise way of approaching it.
16:44.647 –> 16:47.652
[SPEAKER_01]: Cause you mentioned subscription to you mentioned loyalty there.
16:48.253 –> 16:55.565
[SPEAKER_01]: And it’s like, it’s so easy for someone like me or a consultant or whatever’s coming along and get, oh my god, door Western have subscription.
16:55.605 –> 16:57.768
[SPEAKER_01]: You should slap that on the site right away.
16:58.409 –> 17:07.463
[SPEAKER_01]: But as with the loyalty piece, it’s the make or break is in the strategy behind it and the way you implement it.
17:08.245 –> 17:10.388
[SPEAKER_01]: And turning an app on today,
17:10.368 –> 17:21.244
[SPEAKER_01]: He’s neither strategic nor well-implemented as it’s a taking the time to work it out and how you could actually work that out when you’ve just changed your entire systems.
17:21.845 –> 17:25.971
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you don’t have the knowledge to be able to buy well to add another thing and obviously.
17:26.452 –> 17:32.781
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, there’s been a, I think really the kind of the implementation on the switching on
17:32.761 –> 17:41.679
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, less than 10% of the whole project for us is about, you know, respecting the history of our loyal customers, how do we want to reward them moving forward?
17:42.160 –> 17:44.425
[SPEAKER_02]: How do what do we want to do to modernize it?
17:44.465 –> 17:48.333
[SPEAKER_02]: Because just giving 10% of life is fantastic for our loyal customers.
17:48.814 –> 17:54.145
[SPEAKER_02]: But we now have the ability to do more, but what does more look like because of it, you know, whether.
17:54.125 –> 18:01.958
[SPEAKER_02]: You look at every loyalty, but it comes a system out there, because the website is dropping different things.
18:02.058 –> 18:04.402
[SPEAKER_02]: It might be free shipping at a certain level.
18:05.043 –> 18:06.926
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, are we going to introduce like a merch line?
18:06.946 –> 18:11.192
[SPEAKER_02]: Because people go mad for us at crafts when we’re wearing our branded t-shirts and all bubble hats.
18:11.753 –> 18:14.338
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, we could probably sell as many of them as we do our most popular products.
18:14.358 –> 18:16.160
[SPEAKER_02]: So do we, is that something we look at?
18:16.361 –> 18:17.523
[SPEAKER_02]: But how do we deliver that?
18:17.843 –> 18:19.626
[SPEAKER_02]: What has to come behind it?
18:19.606 –> 18:25.916
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it’s not just a matter because I just don’t like it when you have to switch things off because they’re not right and they’re ill-thought out.
18:26.236 –> 18:28.399
[SPEAKER_02]: I really, I don’t enjoy that.
18:28.419 –> 18:29.281
[SPEAKER_02]: And it does have a failure.
18:30.002 –> 18:38.174
[SPEAKER_01]: It is about as far from efficiency as you can get, you know, and you’ve mentioned multiple times that you are hugely focused on efficiency.
18:38.234 –> 18:45.225
[SPEAKER_01]: So are there any key ways you’ve gone about, are you’re particularly pleased with how you’ve built efficiency into the business?
18:46.167 –> 18:53.777
[SPEAKER_02]: Being systemed engineering for the kind of sector I worked in, we were all about the documentation and we’ll kind of come on to this later in my top tips.
18:54.438 –> 19:07.795
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s like we document everything, every process, every way of working, maintenance, task, cleaning, task in our production facility, especially our man of assembly and dispatch has all documented.
19:08.356 –> 19:09.137
[SPEAKER_02]: Because
19:09.117 –> 19:14.683
[SPEAKER_02]: The only way we can ensure quality is to do things the same way over and over again.
19:14.723 –> 19:18.507
[SPEAKER_02]: And if we do things the same way over and over again, we should get the quality.
19:18.527 –> 19:21.931
[SPEAKER_02]: If there’s a quality issue, we can then go and look, is the process wrong?
19:21.951 –> 19:23.152
[SPEAKER_02]: Was the process not followed up?
19:23.172 –> 19:24.273
[SPEAKER_02]: People not train correctly?
19:24.914 –> 19:27.277
[SPEAKER_02]: Is the accessibility of documentation not correct?
19:27.937 –> 19:30.720
[SPEAKER_02]: So that’s kind of one of the ways we’ve done it.
19:30.740 –> 19:33.083
[SPEAKER_02]: And that has meant, you know,
19:33.215 –> 19:55.898
[SPEAKER_02]: in our production and dispatch team, pretty much everyone who works in those areas can do any job because the documentation is there and you can train people that’s training the matrices, there’s, you know, GNP audits on how they do everything, it’s really nice to be able to see and it makes everyone super proud because they get audited by our technical quality manager on a monthly basis and have a follow procedure.
19:55.878 –> 20:03.868
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, and is everything running right, and I think there is a danger when you introduce kind of a program to document everything.
20:03.908 –> 20:04.449
[SPEAKER_02]: People do it.
20:04.789 –> 20:06.952
[SPEAKER_02]: I think you’re doing it because you don’t think they can do the job properly.
20:07.533 –> 20:10.016
[SPEAKER_02]: You’re actually doing it because you want everyone to do it right.
20:10.036 –> 20:15.503
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, we don’t use temporary work because you don’t have any kind of, we’ve got very long-term loyal staff.
20:15.543 –> 20:16.604
[SPEAKER_02]: So that’s great.
20:16.624 –> 20:18.186
[SPEAKER_02]: And you could just go, well, that’s where we’ve always done it.
20:18.727 –> 20:21.130
[SPEAKER_02]: But actually, by having documented, you can go back and review.
20:21.550 –> 20:22.832
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that the right way to do it still?
20:22.992 –> 20:25.395
[SPEAKER_02]: I know, just because that’s the way you’ve always did it.
20:25.375 –> 20:26.496
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn’t mean it’s the right way now.
20:27.017 –> 20:33.664
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you don’t have things doctor-oriented, you can’t really kind of determine whether there is a problem in the system or a problem in a process.
20:36.127 –> 20:40.892
[SPEAKER_00]: Ecommerce Masterplan is supporting by some of the greatest companies in the Ecommerce sector.
20:41.072 –> 20:49.041
[SPEAKER_00]: Here’s a reminder of who they are.
20:49.061 –> 20:51.484
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s time for the top six round.
20:53.692 –> 20:59.042
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I love this section, because it gives me and our listeners some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
20:59.102 –> 21:00.725
[SPEAKER_01]: Ben, are you ready for the top tips?
21:01.286 –> 21:01.867
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, let’s go.
21:02.167 –> 21:03.530
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the book top tip.
21:03.550 –> 21:10.823
[SPEAKER_01]: If everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?
21:11.377 –> 21:13.321
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, I do love to read.
21:13.341 –> 21:16.447
[SPEAKER_02]: I can’t sleep at night without reading and I do try and vary what I read.
21:16.467 –> 21:18.210
[SPEAKER_02]: I don’t read business books before I go to sleep.
21:18.310 –> 21:18.911
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m not that bad.
21:19.693 –> 21:23.400
[SPEAKER_02]: But I do try and kind of get into my cycle of reading business books.
21:23.420 –> 21:31.495
[SPEAKER_02]: So one of my books that really spoke to me, even the title to spoke to me, which may be on a read it, is the 12 week work year.
21:31.475 –> 21:39.404
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think there is a danger when you’re in a position like Joe and I are where the kind of the train set is out is we can do what we want with the business and run it out.
21:39.425 –> 21:41.787
[SPEAKER_02]: We want is to try and do everything.
21:42.468 –> 21:50.157
[SPEAKER_02]: You can’t and when we’ve got a relatively young family so we kind of almost beholden to that five to six weeks cycle of school half-terms.
21:50.898 –> 21:59.068
[SPEAKER_02]: The 12-week work year meant we could bring a bit more focus to what we’re trying to do rather than thinking, oh we’re going to get us done by the end of our financial year.
21:59.048 –> 22:05.077
[SPEAKER_02]: And before you know it, we’ve had our busiest time of year, which is the autumn, which is our the fireworks season for our common product.
22:05.097 –> 22:07.080
[SPEAKER_02]: Then you’ve got black Friday, then you’re going to Christmas.
22:07.881 –> 22:17.435
[SPEAKER_02]: Then we’ve got a crust in the spring, and all of a sudden before you know it, we’ve kind of got the last quarter of our year, and we haven’t achieved what we wanted to do, and it’ll go, we’ll do it next year.
22:17.495 –> 22:19.538
[SPEAKER_02]: But the 12 week work year,
22:19.518 –> 22:25.064
[SPEAKER_02]: The main thing does encourage you to do more simple tasks and project tracking.
22:25.164 –> 22:31.772
[SPEAKER_02]: So, do fewer things in a short run out of time rather than everything over the course of year because you’ll get nothing done or little done.
22:32.853 –> 22:37.899
[SPEAKER_02]: When we did our Shopify migration project, we did that in a relatively short period of time.
22:37.939 –> 22:39.560
[SPEAKER_02]: I don’t know how other people feel about it.
22:39.580 –> 22:40.902
[SPEAKER_02]: We did it in 1990 days.
22:41.643 –> 22:45.407
[SPEAKER_02]: I think from start to finish, which actually,
22:45.387 –> 22:49.073
[SPEAKER_02]: looking back was quite aggressive, but it worked really well.
22:49.133 –> 22:51.196
[SPEAKER_02]: So I’m a big fan of the 12-week work.
22:51.376 –> 22:58.668
[SPEAKER_02]: It kind of helps me keep focus and as you know, running a business with Joe helps us kind of remain at focus between us.
22:59.649 –> 23:05.779
[SPEAKER_02]: And also means that kind of we don’t end up in that position with our staff or we say we’re going to do all these wonderful things and don’t get them done.
23:05.819 –> 23:08.844
[SPEAKER_02]: If we do it on a short time frame, things happen.
23:09.285 –> 23:11.428
[SPEAKER_02]: And you’ve got more
23:11.864 –> 23:16.329
[SPEAKER_01]: It is one of my favorite business books, like top three business books.
23:16.410 –> 23:20.274
[SPEAKER_01]: Listen, I’ve just had to resist the urge to jump out the way.
23:20.294 –> 23:26.001
[SPEAKER_01]: So because we’ve got video on right now, me and Ben, I’ve had to resist the urge to jump out the way and point out it on the bookshelf behind me.
23:26.462 –> 23:29.686
[SPEAKER_01]: And I’m now going to resist the urge to geek out in how you implement it.
23:30.507 –> 23:32.329
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead, I’m going to ask you and keep us on track.
23:32.369 –> 23:38.817
[SPEAKER_01]: And I’m going to ask you the traffic top tip, which is which marketing method do you the prize above all others or think doesn’t get the press it deserves?
23:39.370 –> 23:45.556
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, I wasn’t really sure how to answer this one because I’m not, I’m not a traditionally kind of a market here.
23:45.576 –> 23:51.763
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m not directly involved in marketing, but obviously hopefully from what we’ve already discussed during the standard kind of a very tech-based.
23:51.863 –> 24:07.639
[SPEAKER_02]: So my biggest tip for people is to kind of not be afraid of asking there’s all good questions of your tech providers, because we don’t, you know, hopefully not implementing or designing building, maintaining your own tech stack if you’re buying in products or
24:08.699 –> 24:11.683
[SPEAKER_02]: don’t be afraid to ask those all questions if you don’t understand something.
24:11.723 –> 24:18.473
[SPEAKER_02]: So like when we went to Shopify, that was our single biggest thing that improved our traffic.
24:19.174 –> 24:27.025
[SPEAKER_02]: We were warned by people close to us relatively close to us that we would should expect a 40% drop in traffic first month.
24:27.606 –> 24:31.451
[SPEAKER_02]: And obviously we built that into our budgets to try and put more money into the SEO.
24:31.952 –> 24:35.517
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we saw a 25% increase in traffic first month.
24:35.497 –> 24:42.951
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m not saying everyone’s going to get that, but it just goes to show you that don’t be afraid of doing big things the right way to make a big change.
24:42.991 –> 24:45.677
[SPEAKER_02]: You can’t continue to do the same team expected a different outcome.
24:46.318 –> 24:47.520
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m sure there’s a better way of putting that.
24:47.580 –> 24:52.029
[SPEAKER_02]: But for us, you know, that was our big headline for us.
24:52.069 –> 24:57.960
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was really positive because all of a sudden, we know, I don’t think we necessarily spent any more on SEO,
24:57.940 –> 25:00.824
[SPEAKER_02]: on when we were on Shopify then we did previously.
25:00.864 –> 25:01.885
[SPEAKER_02]: It was just more effective.
25:02.145 –> 25:06.911
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously Google loves to read Shopify that it’s everything’s just written better for it to read.
25:07.372 –> 25:17.485
[SPEAKER_02]: So that’s kind of my traffic top tip is to find the right platform and system for you, because Shopify’s not for everyone, I’m sure, but for us it was just the best thing we could have done.
25:18.190 –> 25:20.936
[SPEAKER_01]: I will take that as a very good traffic top tip.
25:20.956 –> 25:21.798
[SPEAKER_01]: That is acceptable.
25:22.199 –> 25:23.482
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the tool top tip.
25:23.522 –> 25:27.851
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug in, a phone app, or just a way of working.
25:28.232 –> 25:32.622
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there a call little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?
25:33.175 –> 25:37.300
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, I’ve got two here, kind of ones like an efficiency thing.
25:37.320 –> 25:50.117
[SPEAKER_02]: So we use with most companies, I guess we have tried different tools to make us work better as a team, but the more we’ve kind of settled on at the moment, I’m not saying it’s for every Monday.
25:50.177 –> 25:54.402
[SPEAKER_02]: So we use Monday because it’s kind of cross-department.
25:54.563 –> 25:58.828
[SPEAKER_02]: We don’t use it throughout the business because I think the danger of trying to force
25:58.808 –> 26:02.676
[SPEAKER_02]: someone who is in assembly and production to use Monday.
26:02.716 –> 26:03.618
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s not right.
26:03.939 –> 26:08.849
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn’t fit for them, but for marketing and Joe and myself, it’s really good.
26:09.390 –> 26:10.292
[SPEAKER_02]: Really good tool.
26:10.352 –> 26:17.948
[SPEAKER_02]: It kind of goes across everything and we’re doing the marketing for kind of planning, marketing campaigns, product launches,
26:17.928 –> 26:26.424
[SPEAKER_02]: Research projects, you know, even Joe and I have private boards for home stuff where the kids are uniform purchases, school trips.
26:26.925 –> 26:27.827
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s just so useful.
26:27.867 –> 26:33.859
[SPEAKER_02]: And this across everything you can use it on any web browser, but use it at applications on our on our laptop, then it’s on my phone.
26:33.979 –> 26:39.109
[SPEAKER_02]: I try not to have notifications which sound of my phone, but it’s always there if I need to take a note, put something on.
26:39.089 –> 26:45.298
[SPEAKER_02]: And the other one, I really love kind of comes back to what we talked about, our document, everything kind of mantra is scribe.
26:46.019 –> 26:55.474
[SPEAKER_02]: With so many digital systems that we are trying to document ways of how to do things, scribe is just brilliant, it’s just so easy to use.
26:56.055 –> 27:06.210
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know what would have previously been like a 35 page, how to document all of certain becomes like a five minute exercise to do your job, it would document it and you go in
27:06.190 –> 27:10.877
[SPEAKER_02]: how it kind of lays it out and then kind of integrate that into our QMS in the business.
27:10.957 –> 27:12.719
[SPEAKER_02]: So, that has been really good for us.
27:13.560 –> 27:15.603
[SPEAKER_01]: Or is QMS quality management system?
27:15.824 –> 27:16.344
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it is.
27:16.364 –> 27:17.045
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, so, sorry.
27:17.085 –> 27:28.421
[SPEAKER_02]: QMS is where we keep all the SOPs for our standard operating procedures, standard working procedures for our production side, which is now kind of backflowing to the rest of the business.
27:28.702 –> 27:29.142
[SPEAKER_01]: Got you.
27:29.162 –> 27:34.510
[SPEAKER_02]: So, whatever, it would be the fact, for us it’s the fact that a place you go to find out how to do something.
27:34.675 –> 27:38.063
[SPEAKER_01]: Nice, and scribe is spelled SCRIBE?
27:38.364 –> 27:39.146
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s it, yeah.
27:39.166 –> 27:39.446
[SPEAKER_01]: It is.
27:39.627 –> 27:39.847
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
27:40.128 –> 27:42.474
[SPEAKER_01]: On usual, an app that’s actually spelled how it sounds.
27:44.338 –> 27:46.243
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, okay, the carbon top tip.
27:46.283 –> 27:50.473
[SPEAKER_01]: But to your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store.
27:50.572 –> 27:59.912
[SPEAKER_02]: Well for us, obviously all of our products are packed in plastic, which on the face of it doesn’t look great in a world where you’re trying to reduce plastic use.
28:00.674 –> 28:04.562
[SPEAKER_02]: But we are production team and particular production managers very focused on that.
28:04.602 –> 28:11.196
[SPEAKER_02]: So actually we now use plastic, which is partly sugarcane based, so it’s not all version plastic.
28:11.176 –> 28:12.438
[SPEAKER_02]: but that’s not my top tip.
28:12.478 –> 28:20.027
[SPEAKER_02]: My top tip for us of the thing that we’ve done is we reduce the use of plastic and our dispatched apartment by 98%.
28:20.628 –> 28:20.928
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
28:20.948 –> 28:29.419
[SPEAKER_02]: Because there we’ve got to a point, probably about five years ago, where we couldn’t shut the recycling bin on a Tuesday night before it got emptied.
28:29.459 –> 28:30.380
[SPEAKER_02]: And I’m like, well, what’s in here?
28:30.400 –> 28:31.682
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there’s lots of cardboard boxes.
28:32.143 –> 28:35.767
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, and so we’re buying in bubble wrap and we’re throwing away cardboard.
28:36.388 –> 28:39.512
[SPEAKER_02]: So we bought a 2,000 pound
28:39.492 –> 28:44.479
[SPEAKER_02]: cardboard shredder that turns old cardboard boxes into packaging material.
28:45.100 –> 28:48.145
[SPEAKER_02]: So that’s the one we use that for ones that we can’t reuse.
28:49.086 –> 28:51.089
[SPEAKER_02]: Once we can reuse, we do.
28:51.169 –> 28:53.873
[SPEAKER_02]: So we don’t buy in as many cardboard boxes.
28:53.893 –> 28:59.882
[SPEAKER_02]: Now we still have a line of branded cardboard boxes which go to specific customers because that’s not luxury.
28:59.922 –> 29:07.373
[SPEAKER_02]: Now I spoke with, you know, the volume is bored as we’re sending
29:07.353 –> 29:08.676
[SPEAKER_02]: So we don’t buy in boxes for that.
29:08.696 –> 29:11.943
[SPEAKER_02]: And they’re all filled with shredded cardboard.
29:11.963 –> 29:14.829
[SPEAKER_02]: So that, you know, we don’t use bubble bags anymore.
29:14.909 –> 29:16.914
[SPEAKER_02]: We don’t use bubble wrap.
29:16.954 –> 29:18.417
[SPEAKER_02]: We don’t use any kind of bags like that.
29:18.437 –> 29:24.450
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s all wrapped in either box or it’s just like kind of craft paper style.
29:24.430 –> 29:34.799
[SPEAKER_02]: and also alongside that, one of the biggest things that I didn’t think some people understand is that what stops cardboard often being recycled is to take that you put on it to make it stick.
29:35.140 –> 29:39.452
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have water based adhesive on all of our tape
29:39.432 –> 29:40.593
[SPEAKER_02]: now I’m getting really geeky again.
29:40.633 –> 29:55.629
[SPEAKER_02]: All of our tape is on that we use for packaging comes off like an automated machine where you can set the link to you want, whip to a little water bath and activate the CDs if so then that is just craft tape with perfectly recyclable glue on it.
29:56.430 –> 29:56.911
[SPEAKER_02]: Fantastic.
29:56.931 –> 30:00.074
[SPEAKER_02]: So we try and send that stuff that is easily recyclable.
30:00.475 –> 30:03.718
[SPEAKER_02]: And all of our product packaging is household recyclable anyway.
30:04.289 –> 30:14.029
[SPEAKER_01]: What I love about your answer there is the focus on what happens to the materials after they leave the fulfillment center.
30:14.670 –> 30:23.007
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it’s like, yeah, we found this amazing stuff that’s 90% recyclable and we can send it to the customers, but the customers can’t do anything with it.
30:22.987 –> 30:40.219
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they were as, you know, even talking about that tape, it enables more of the cardboard at the consumer end to be recycled and I think cardboard is probably the easiest thing for a consumer to recycle out of all the packaging materials that come through.
30:40.199 –> 30:45.070
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that kind of full life cycle thought you’ve got going on their Ben, right?
30:45.330 –> 30:47.595
[SPEAKER_01]: Before we say goodbyes, we’re very nearly at the end.
30:48.056 –> 30:53.668
[SPEAKER_01]: Could you please let the listeners know whether they can find you and or west on the web and social if they want to get in contact?
30:53.918 –> 30:54.439
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, of course.
30:54.799 –> 30:58.523
[SPEAKER_02]: So our website is nice and easy to find, www.dorbest.com.
30:59.244 –> 31:02.007
[SPEAKER_02]: We also have a trade site as well, which is trade.dorbest.com.
31:02.027 –> 31:05.931
[SPEAKER_02]: If anyone out there is interested to be coming, the stock is to learning more about taking our products.
31:06.312 –> 31:11.397
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m also from Network, so we’re on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, but we are just door west.
31:12.018 –> 31:18.065
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you shop on our website, we’ve got an exclusive code just for the master plan listeners for a 10% off your order.
31:18.425 –> 31:19.306
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is master plan.
31:19.486 –> 31:20.247
[SPEAKER_02]: Nice and easy.
31:20.682 –> 31:22.206
[SPEAKER_01]: Marvers lovely offer.
31:22.267 –> 31:24.754
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you very much Ben and thanks being such an awesome guest.
31:24.874 –> 31:29.387
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s been a pleasure at geeking out on ops with you So thanks so much for sharing so much.
31:29.868 –> 31:30.229
[SPEAKER_02]: No problem.
31:30.249 –> 31:31.553
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you Chloe’s great speed team
31:37.203 –> 32:07.210
[SPEAKER_01]: fascinating to get to just chat ops there with Ben and I think you can really see in the conversation with him how they are, you know, doing great on the growth front and keeping things super efficient but super effective with the focus on giving the customers a great experience, giving them a great product, really ringing true there, particularly liked, obviously I love
32:07.190 –> 32:16.664
[SPEAKER_01]: Just brings so much clarity to life, it really does, and it’s a fascinating read because it’s all based on what sports teams do and stuff, so I obviously thoroughly recommend that one as well.
32:17.485 –> 32:25.958
[SPEAKER_01]: And I like the cardboard top tip, and I say, just saying to Ben about ops, I almost want to go off and find a new career as an ops director rather than a marketing director.
32:25.938 –> 32:31.563
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe it’s just me, but yeah, ops, ops and efficiency, love a bit of ops and efficiency.
32:31.624 –> 32:42.274
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, before I waffle on about that for even longer, you can get your hands on the notes from this episode, including the top tips and links to what we’ve mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterpland.com.
32:42.714 –> 32:55.827
[SPEAKER_01]: You can also use our direct episode short links, just put ECMP dot info forward slash the number of this episode into the URL bar and you’ll be redirected straight to the right page
32:55.807 –> 32:56.308
[SPEAKER_01]: Why not?
32:56.588 –> 32:57.309
[SPEAKER_01]: To go on, do it.
32:57.349 –> 32:58.030
[SPEAKER_01]: Get the newsletter.
32:58.691 –> 33:13.434
[SPEAKER_01]: If you like this episode then check out episode 280 quite a long way back up the feed with Brian Larson from US Business Restorer Pet, which is another pet supplements brand and he’s talking about how he grew that.
33:13.855 –> 33:16.319
[SPEAKER_01]: So that will give you another angle on pet supplements.
33:17.120 –> 33:23.670
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can hear all our episodes with big brands at ECMP.info
33:23.650 –> 33:28.074
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for tuning in to this and every episode that you do of the e-commerce mask plan podcast.
33:28.094 –> 33:29.956
[SPEAKER_01]: We love it to have you out there listening.
33:30.597 –> 33:40.927
[SPEAKER_01]: I bring you a new interview every week so I want to inspire and help e-commerce business owners like you to succeed and thrive with your businesses, including becoming ever closer to carbon neutral.
33:41.307 –> 33:46.192
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you know someone this show can help please tell them to listen to the e-commerce master plan podcast.
33:46.492 –> 33:49.455
[SPEAKER_01]: Hope you have a great week and don’t forget to keep optimising.
33:52.591 –> 33:55.965
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to the e-commerce Master Plan podcast.
33:56.448 –> 34:01.690
[SPEAKER_00]: Find out more at e-commercemasterplanned.com slash podcast.
35 min
December 01, 2025eCommerce MasterPlan | 571: The Power of Focus: How Neve’s Bees Grew by Doing Less, Better – with Julie Macken
Julie Macken is the Deputy Queen Bee of Neve’s Bees a family business turning the produce of their bee hives and local beekeepers into products that are now certified 100% natural. Founded in 2017, they switched focus to eCommerce in 2021. They now sell via their WooCommerce store, wholesale, and a couple of events, and have now reached £100,000 a year and have just sold their 80,000th product.
She shares how focusing on what truly works — and saying no to what doesn’t — helped her turn a local gifting brand into a six-figure sustainable skincare business. Hear how she refined her eCommerce strategy, built a lean but powerful team, and is now leading a mission to make the skincare industry more honest and eco-friendly.
It’s always a treat when a past guest returns, and Julie’s comeback episode is packed with even more insights you can apply immediately to grow smarter and operate more sustainably.
Hit PLAY to hear:
The simple shift that helped Neve’s Bees double down on what really drives sales
Why splitting one brand into two strategies unlocked major eCommerce growth
How Julie turned sustainability into a standout marketing story (not just a value)
The key roles she outsourced — and how it boosted profits and freed up her time
The brand placement mistake that nearly hurt their image — and how they fixed it
Julie’s bold mission to take on the skincare industry’s “ultra-processed” problem

Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[04:32] Skincare Definition: Face vs Body
[06:39] Skin Care eCommerce Revolution
[12:17] “Skincare Website Revamp Focus”
[16:09] Finding Income Through Quick Solutions
[17:27] Small Business Operations Explained
[22:23] “Pure Ingredients, No Water”
[23:13] Skincare Industry Reform Needed
[27:32] Listen to Julie’s Top Tips!

Full episode notes here: https://ecmp.info/571
—
Download our ebook… https://ecmp.info/ebook 500 Tips to Increase Your Profits
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WEBVTT
00:00.571 –> 00:02.275
[SPEAKER_02]: There are so many options out there.
00:02.295 –> 00:11.057
[SPEAKER_02]: You’ve just got to focus on what works, and what you can do, think about the customer touch points and think about consistency and cohesion on those.
00:11.438 –> 00:14.445
[SPEAKER_02]: Collaborate with yourself, make everything cohesive.
00:17.598 –> 00:20.105
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.
00:20.747 –> 00:24.718
[SPEAKER_00]: Air to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
00:25.259 –> 00:33.362
[SPEAKER_00]: Cutting through the hinder to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
00:36.093 –> 00:38.496
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello and welcome, it’s great to have you here.
00:38.536 –> 00:42.481
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
00:42.922 –> 00:46.206
[SPEAKER_01]: In this episode, we’re catching up with one of our past guests.
00:46.587 –> 00:53.917
[SPEAKER_01]: We’ll have quite a few of these episodes coming up over the next couple of months, as a little continuation of our 10-year anniversary celebrations.
00:54.397 –> 01:02.488
[SPEAKER_01]: We haven’t managed to do quite as much on the 10-year celebration front as we wanted, as I have lost a few months of my year.
01:02.468 –> 01:04.630
[SPEAKER_01]: to Perry Menopause symptoms.
01:04.971 –> 01:06.552
[SPEAKER_01]: Not going to go into that right here right now.
01:06.652 –> 01:16.543
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want the blow by blow, it’s in my LinkedIn post and LinkedIn newsletter, but we have managed to do what we planned with the past guest catchups.
01:16.563 –> 01:19.326
[SPEAKER_01]: And we booked quite a lot of those in to record.
01:19.346 –> 01:21.928
[SPEAKER_01]: So we’ll be drippling those out to you over the next couple of months.
01:22.509 –> 01:28.375
[SPEAKER_01]: And we’ve selected them as guests who we thought brought an awful lot to their episodes last time.
01:28.355 –> 01:31.499
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of them are from way back in the early days of the podcast.
01:31.519 –> 01:36.325
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of them are a bit more recently, and who we believe will have plenty to bring you again this time.
01:37.566 –> 01:45.496
[SPEAKER_01]: And I’m really pleased we’ve managed to pull off this part of the 10 year celebrations, because I think it’s probably the idea we had that will make the most impact on you are listeners.
01:45.516 –> 01:48.640
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is obviously the point of all of this is to help you with your businesses.
01:48.900 –> 01:56.269
[SPEAKER_01]: So I’m all right with the fact that we’ve had to get to some of the other ideas, because we’ve managed to deliver on the one that really is going to deliver.
01:56.435 –> 01:58.560
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, back to what we’re talking about today.
01:58.600 –> 02:04.572
[SPEAKER_01]: Back on the show for the first time in four years is the always insightful Julie Macken from Leave’s Bees.
02:05.074 –> 02:11.828
[SPEAKER_01]: She’ll be catching us up on what they’ve been up to over the last four years, sharing insights into pretty,
02:11.808 –> 02:25.917
[SPEAKER_01]: strategy, shaking, insight, they gathered some cool marketing tips and she will also be sharing what’s got her most excited about 2026, which if she pulls it up, it offers going to be phenomenal.
02:25.937 –> 02:31.268
[SPEAKER_01]: And make sure you listen to the end because she’s also sharing some really insightful top tips in that final section as well.
02:37.120 –> 02:52.699
[SPEAKER_01]: And now to introduce our special guest, Julie Macken is the Deputy Queen Bee of Neves Bees, a family business turning the produce of their bee hives and those of local beekeepers into products to now certify 100% natural.
02:53.200 –> 03:01.170
[SPEAKER_01]: Founded in 2017, they switched focus to e-commerce in 2021, and they now sell via their WooCommerce store wholesale, and a
03:01.150 –> 03:09.963
[SPEAKER_01]: a couple of events here and there and they’ve now reached £100,000 a year in sales and have just sold their 80,000th product.
03:10.403 –> 03:11.204
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello, Julie.
03:11.665 –> 03:12.386
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, Chloe.
03:12.927 –> 03:14.709
[SPEAKER_01]: Lovely to have you back on the show.
03:14.850 –> 03:16.973
[SPEAKER_01]: How have the last four years been?
03:17.013 –> 03:20.177
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, it’s quite interesting.
03:20.478 –> 03:21.860
[SPEAKER_02]: I was saying this to you earlier.
03:22.020 –> 03:30.432
[SPEAKER_02]: I listened back to the podcasts that we did for the four years ago and it was really interesting
03:30.749 –> 03:36.458
[SPEAKER_02]: and what changed quite significantly, I should say, and what has stayed the same.
03:36.678 –> 03:42.246
[SPEAKER_02]: And part of the change is the change to our business and what we’ve done.
03:42.286 –> 03:53.483
[SPEAKER_02]: But then part of the change that you don’t notice as it’s happening, it’s like an evolution is what has happened in the world of e-commerce and the world of digital marketing in general.
03:53.851 –> 03:59.378
[SPEAKER_02]: and it was really interesting listening back, some of the things that I was saying, oh my god, this is an amazing thing that we’re doing.
03:59.458 –> 04:01.160
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m like, oh, god, that’s so routine.
04:01.820 –> 04:09.590
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, Ditto, some of the things now that I’m using, that I just think that I’ve been using forever, I clearly haven’t even, we weren’t even using them then.
04:09.670 –> 04:12.233
[SPEAKER_02]: So that’s been quite different.
04:12.974 –> 04:21.664
[SPEAKER_02]: I think one of the changes that we’ve made as a business is we’ve worked out that we’ve almost got two businesses here.
04:22.100 –> 04:24.302
[SPEAKER_02]: So we’re selling skin care and gifts.
04:25.243 –> 04:31.709
[SPEAKER_02]: And I remember going into a new retailer that we just listed in a couple of years ago.
04:31.749 –> 04:37.775
[SPEAKER_02]: And she was saying, well, do you want to be on the skin care shelf or the other shelf?
04:38.136 –> 04:39.397
[SPEAKER_02]: And I’m like, what do you mean?
04:39.597 –> 04:42.460
[SPEAKER_02]: She said, well, skin care is your face.
04:42.860 –> 04:45.242
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m like, why does skin all over my body?
04:45.262 –> 04:47.084
[SPEAKER_02]: She’s no, no, but skin care is your face.
04:47.805 –> 04:49.947
[SPEAKER_02]: I thought this was absolutely bonkers.
04:50.382 –> 04:53.465
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, we went with it and Goli was she right.
04:53.765 –> 05:05.597
[SPEAKER_02]: So the way that the consumers see the market is that skin care is something you put on your face and then other products are things that you put elsewhere.
05:06.498 –> 05:06.938
[SPEAKER_02]: Who knew?
05:06.958 –> 05:19.731
[SPEAKER_02]: So it became very clear once we started to sort of analyze this a bit more that we have a range of products
05:20.116 –> 05:25.000
[SPEAKER_02]: at face-to-face events, I pop-up shops and through retail.
05:25.521 –> 05:27.603
[SPEAKER_02]: And these are things like our gifting products.
05:27.643 –> 05:33.228
[SPEAKER_02]: We have lip balms and hand-sales and little gift sets, little nail and cuticle product.
05:33.368 –> 05:36.411
[SPEAKER_02]: And they’re all kind of 20-quid and less products.
05:37.352 –> 05:42.937
[SPEAKER_02]: But then we have the inverted commerce, now I’m not even putting inverted commerce proper skincare products.
05:43.618 –> 05:48.402
[SPEAKER_02]: I think you have the proper as well, but… And they sell online.
05:48.787 –> 06:02.357
[SPEAKER_02]: I did some analysis a while ago and 70% of our online sales are our facial skin care products, 90% of our retail and pop-up shop sales are gifting products.
06:03.063 –> 06:05.666
[SPEAKER_02]: So we’ve basically got two different businesses.
06:06.267 –> 06:08.209
[SPEAKER_01]: That’s such a dramatic split.
06:08.229 –> 06:14.617
[SPEAKER_01]: I get, you know, you go into the retail store and you’re talking to the retail and you get clarity on the different areas your product could sit in.
06:15.118 –> 06:24.630
[SPEAKER_01]: But then to see it that stalk in your face to face in your online, yeah, like a totally different merchandising strategy for the two different scenarios.
06:24.670 –> 06:31.298
[SPEAKER_02]: Totally different merchandising strategy and totally different communication strategy,
06:31.582 –> 06:38.409
[SPEAKER_02]: I was chatting to Neeve, who’s my daughter, of Neeve Spees, who is now 23, nine, when I’m happy.
06:39.009 –> 06:45.096
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, and she’s very savvy young woman, and she was like, well, duh, that’s obvious.
06:45.736 –> 06:47.758
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, you’re one, you’re going to have to explain that one to me.
06:47.778 –> 06:54.325
[SPEAKER_02]: And she said, well, because there are certain products that people want to read about, take the time reading about, and those are e-commerce products.
06:54.345 –> 06:59.530
[SPEAKER_02]: So, of course, people are going to want to buy their facial skin care online, when they’re happy to buy gifts and stuff.
06:59.864 –> 07:02.167
[SPEAKER_02]: in a shop because you want to read about it.
07:02.187 –> 07:03.649
[SPEAKER_02]: You want to find out about it.
07:04.369 –> 07:06.072
[SPEAKER_02]: So that was a real revolution to me.
07:06.112 –> 07:12.219
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think one of the big changes we’ve made as a business is that we are now competing.
07:12.720 –> 07:18.266
[SPEAKER_02]: We have an e-commerce shop that sells in the £3 billion skin care market.
07:18.807 –> 07:27.998
[SPEAKER_02]: We’re no longer in the sort of I think it’s something like £50 million is the is the lip balm and
07:28.315 –> 07:30.538
[SPEAKER_02]: the £3 billion skin care market.
07:31.299 –> 07:36.605
[SPEAKER_02]: So the nuances in branding are much more significant.
07:36.905 –> 07:46.857
[SPEAKER_02]: The cleverness and the budgets of the competitors are much more highly tuned, much more fine tuned.
07:47.097 –> 07:49.580
[SPEAKER_02]: And there’s a lot of nonsense.
07:49.620 –> 07:51.402
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m a scientist, I’m a chemist by training.
07:52.363 –> 07:53.665
[SPEAKER_02]: There’s a lot of utter
07:55.045 –> 08:24.816
[SPEAKER_02]: If I’m not allowed to wear it right, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
08:25.285 –> 08:49.212
[SPEAKER_01]: So have you got to a point where you’ve worked out the customer and event or a customer retail will buy the gift products and then come and explore the more complicated products later is there that kind of like, in quite funnel stage, they’ll buy the lip balm so they remember who you are and then they’ll come and look at the stuff they had look out on the table but they weren’t ready to buy.
08:49.632 –> 08:52.255
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that’s a really interesting question.
08:52.741 –> 08:54.183
[SPEAKER_02]: some degree that works.
08:54.764 –> 09:11.991
[SPEAKER_02]: Now we’re aware of it, we are really, really careful now about where we sell our products because if you’re selling a product that actually is competing with, you know, the likes of Augustus Bada, who’s literally 400 pounds for 100 grams, very happy to share the ingredients and how people are getting ripped off with them.
09:12.772 –> 09:19.963
[SPEAKER_02]: And then you’re also selling in a
09:20.163 –> 09:30.834
[SPEAKER_02]: you can’t go to, you know, Mrs. Miggins t-shop because that’s not going to be that the brand placement is really, really important product-class post-promotion, right?
09:31.334 –> 09:36.339
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you start realising how important the places in the, in the delightful four piece of marketing.
09:36.880 –> 09:39.122
[SPEAKER_02]: So that’s that’s been quite an interesting one.
09:39.983 –> 09:44.888
[SPEAKER_02]: But we’ve got now being aware of that sort of funnel if you
09:45.425 –> 09:57.355
[SPEAKER_02]: There’s some very obvious things that you can do, such as we obviously give out discount cards when we meet people and they buy something from a festival or a pop-up shop from us.
09:57.955 –> 10:02.419
[SPEAKER_02]: And we’re literally just going back to making some paper leaflets.
10:02.639 –> 10:09.145
[SPEAKER_02]: Get this, I am buying just about to commission some A4, threefold paper leaflets have done those for like 30 years.
10:10.506 –> 10:15.330
[SPEAKER_02]: But it’s just a really nice way of physically giving
10:15.496 –> 10:22.028
[SPEAKER_02]: or they’re just inquiring, you can physically give them, we’ve given them QR codes that don’t click through, giving them a leaflet with why we’re different.
10:22.610 –> 10:25.956
[SPEAKER_02]: Here’s a QR code that you can click to if you want to and here’s a discount code.
10:26.517 –> 10:37.538
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, just being a lot more savvy about actually getting people through, but trying to explain why our products are different, which is quite an interesting one.
10:37.687 –> 10:42.654
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned on the wholesale front that you’re being careful with placement of the skin care range.
10:43.055 –> 10:45.939
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you still letting anybody have the gift products?
10:46.199 –> 10:51.908
[SPEAKER_02]: No, no, we’re not, we don’t know, and that’s partly, and again, I was listening about this.
10:51.928 –> 10:53.250
[SPEAKER_02]: So this happened a while ago now.
10:53.350 –> 10:55.974
[SPEAKER_02]: So I mentioned this at the last podcast that we did.
10:56.034 –> 10:59.479
[SPEAKER_02]: We sold something on a wholesale site that then went to a retailer.
11:00.520 –> 11:04.386
[SPEAKER_02]: We found it on some really dodgy e-based shop
11:04.720 –> 11:10.168
[SPEAKER_02]: rubbishy pictures and there was selling it at like 50p more than the wholesale price that we’d told it to them.
11:10.188 –> 11:12.030
[SPEAKER_02]: So there’s no way they would make anything out of it.
11:12.091 –> 11:14.174
[SPEAKER_02]: But obviously, you know, we give them a decent margin.
11:15.055 –> 11:16.196
[SPEAKER_02]: So that was part of it.
11:16.297 –> 11:18.960
[SPEAKER_02]: But then we realised that, you know, in some settings.
11:19.501 –> 11:22.606
[SPEAKER_02]: So other comments, somebody came up to a sort of pop-up.
11:22.986 –> 11:24.188
[SPEAKER_02]: It was quite a smart pop-up.
11:24.568 –> 11:26.071
[SPEAKER_02]: I was like, oh, I saw this stuff.
11:26.511 –> 11:27.032
[SPEAKER_02]: She said, I’m
11:27.248 –> 11:33.114
[SPEAKER_02]: I just nipped into a little gift shop because I had to go and buy the parking and it was free if I bought something from gift shop.
11:33.134 –> 11:34.455
[SPEAKER_02]: So it’s just a little trinket really.
11:34.495 –> 11:36.497
[SPEAKER_02]: I picked it up and my God, it was amazing.
11:36.517 –> 11:42.562
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m going to buy some more but she bought it because it was a cheap little trinket that was going to pay to the car parking for us.
11:42.582 –> 11:45.445
[SPEAKER_02]: I know that’s not what we’re trying to do here.
11:46.646 –> 11:57.036
[SPEAKER_02]: Worked out well right because it was really good and when she saw it, she bought it again and then she up up sold, you know, she bought some more expensive stuff as
11:57.337 –> 11:58.338
[SPEAKER_02]: and we form, really.
11:59.921 –> 12:00.742
[SPEAKER_02]: There’s an interesting one.
12:00.762 –> 12:01.523
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s a challenging one.
12:02.404 –> 12:11.517
[SPEAKER_01]: So would you get to a point paying site Devils Advocate here where on the website you would remove the gifting items from the site?
12:11.577 –> 12:16.824
[SPEAKER_01]: Or do you think you’ll keep all products in all channels but with different strategy and different channels?
12:17.585 –> 12:26.297
[SPEAKER_02]: I’d love to say we have enough profit to be able to just say we’re not going to sell all the products to all the people, but we don’t have that luxury.
12:26.632 –> 12:33.899
[SPEAKER_02]: However, what we have done and again, this is one of the significant things we have done is we’ve completely redid the website again.
12:34.099 –> 12:40.345
[SPEAKER_02]: We just done it when I spoke to you four years ago and we’re just finishing off doing it again now.
12:40.385 –> 12:43.387
[SPEAKER_02]: And one of the things that we’ve done is it’s a skincare website.
12:43.708 –> 12:54.057
[SPEAKER_02]: There is a section that you don’t see immediately on gifts and we obviously have the skincare gifts as well because people buy self gifts and you know, more luxurious gifts for people as well.
12:54.458 –> 12:59.684
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we have a section for sort of stocking filigifts, which is the, you know, where we have the sort of smaller products.
13:00.105 –> 13:08.995
[SPEAKER_02]: So the emphasis on the website is most definitely skin care products, rather than the sort of smaller gifty products.
13:09.536 –> 13:11.478
[SPEAKER_01]: Which is both as an easy thing to do.
13:11.498 –> 13:19.948
[SPEAKER_01]: Now you understand what the customer journey is and how they’re buying the product and how they’re research products and who’s buying the product as well.
13:20.528 –> 13:23.672
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
13:24.057 –> 13:26.360
[SPEAKER_02]: And it’s really interesting.
13:26.380 –> 13:28.243
[SPEAKER_02]: I’d recommend to anyone that’s been in business a while.
13:28.403 –> 13:37.036
[SPEAKER_02]: Just go back and look at some old plans that you did for the year or some, I don’t know, podcasts that you did for instance, or something like that.
13:37.056 –> 13:38.479
[SPEAKER_02]: And just go and see where you were.
13:38.499 –> 13:46.110
[SPEAKER_02]: And it’s a real insight to see how far you’ve got and then challenge yourself, how, what could I change now?
13:46.150 –> 13:48.614
[SPEAKER_02]: What do I still need to challenge myself on?
13:48.634 –> 13:53.541
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, what, where could our strategy carry on evolving?
13:54.112 –> 13:57.596
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned as well that you’re about to launch a new site.
13:57.736 –> 14:01.360
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you sticking with WooCommerce or have you shifted platform in that?
14:01.681 –> 14:04.123
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we are sticking with WooCommerce.
14:04.143 –> 14:05.986
[SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, we have just launched a new site.
14:06.006 –> 14:09.950
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, it was not a, let’s build a new one and stop and change.
14:10.030 –> 14:11.892
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a, let’s build it as we go along.
14:11.932 –> 14:14.796
[SPEAKER_02]: So it was a refresh, quite a significant refresh.
14:15.456 –> 14:16.778
[SPEAKER_02]: We are with WooCommerce.
14:17.839 –> 14:23.005
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m not sure whether I would still be with WooCommerce.
14:23.356 –> 14:30.885
[SPEAKER_02]: Our web chat was really into WooCommerce and actually he does say it’s more secure and it’s built for a bigger business.
14:31.046 –> 14:31.867
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s his view.
14:32.768 –> 14:43.221
[SPEAKER_02]: I think for the scale we’re at at the moment and if I was going to start or if I was going to be a small business shop if I’d does seem to have the better integrations with other affiliate programs and that’s just my observation.
14:43.241 –> 14:53.093
[SPEAKER_02]: You know whenever we’re taken on by a new affiliate they’re like, oh we can do a shop-flame integration really easily and I’m like, where we come is, oh well that’s a bit more
14:53.815 –> 14:58.041
[SPEAKER_02]: scaling and bigger businesses, but I’m just taking his word on that.
14:58.081 –> 15:03.069
[SPEAKER_01]: As both there is that re-platform is it can be a massive distraction.
15:03.529 –> 15:04.791
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s a huge part of work.
15:04.912 –> 15:10.400
[SPEAKER_01]: So that doesn’t just end when it goes like because everything has to be re-learned, everything has to be re-integrated all the rest of it.
15:10.440 –> 15:22.658
[SPEAKER_01]: So to be able to do it, little by little on the same platform as you’re on without it being a massive project when it’s, I’m assuming the business is still something you’re all doing as a bit of a side project.
15:23.043 –> 15:36.242
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes and no actually so so I would say but so my husband and I now both run it we have four contractors we’re both taking salaries out of it we don’t have any other work outside of this.
15:36.712 –> 15:37.493
[SPEAKER_02]: the kids of Blacktime.
15:37.513 –> 15:38.354
[SPEAKER_02]: We don’t have a mortgage.
15:39.295 –> 15:40.496
[SPEAKER_02]: So the income we need is a bit less.
15:40.516 –> 15:42.178
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, no, we’re definitely taking salary out of it.
15:42.198 –> 15:43.600
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s no longer just a hobby.
15:43.660 –> 15:49.927
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, he had a real rant at me this morning because I was saving some of all the centrals because I like to play with them when he was like, you can’t, this is like, there are a lot of dates.
15:49.967 –> 15:53.131
[SPEAKER_02]: They might get to muddle up in the need to be stocked up like I just want to play with them.
15:53.151 –> 15:53.811
[SPEAKER_02]: You’re not allowed to.
15:54.452 –> 15:58.517
[SPEAKER_02]: So no, it’s definitely, it’s definitely, yeah, it’s probably business.
15:58.597 –> 15:59.678
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s definitely in proper business.
16:00.239 –> 16:04.103
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, which it perhaps wasn’t before and again, I think that’s a bit of an evolution.
16:04.437 –> 16:07.021
[SPEAKER_01]: Have you found you, you think about it differently now?
16:07.061 –> 16:08.182
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s your main focus.
16:09.204 –> 16:17.315
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, possibly, although I was a bit obsessed with it before, but I think one thing that does sharpen the brain a bit is, you know, we have four other mouths to feed.
16:17.816 –> 16:22.483
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, there’s, we’ve got to get the income coming in every month.
16:22.723 –> 16:33.178
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, sometimes you find yourself doing some slightly more tactical things to get, like, yesterday I just put three mailers together because we need to get some more mailers out and I haven’t done that even two weeks.
16:33.530 –> 16:36.794
[SPEAKER_02]: and the lady that normally does them is off poorly for the moment.
16:37.235 –> 16:42.422
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, and then a few weeks ago, we had a whole town of honey, but it normally sells honey.
16:42.842 –> 16:44.264
[SPEAKER_02]: But I thought, you know what?
16:44.825 –> 16:47.128
[SPEAKER_02]: We need, you know, a few hundred quid to pay the bills here.
16:47.148 –> 16:51.354
[SPEAKER_02]: I’ll stick a blog up on honey and we sell it a few hundred quids with the honey.
16:51.374 –> 16:54.939
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, little things like that, you find yourself doing a bit more perhaps.
16:55.099 –> 16:55.960
[SPEAKER_02]: But, um,
16:56.513 –> 16:58.056
[SPEAKER_01]: And what are your contractors doing?
16:58.076 –> 16:59.659
[SPEAKER_01]: What is it you’ve chosen to outsource?
16:59.940 –> 17:04.388
[SPEAKER_02]: So, and again, I’m glad you asked about that, because I think this is a really, really important thing.
17:04.408 –> 17:11.382
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, something bad to what I said before, and one of the things I said is, if you think it’s expensive to get a professional to do something, try getting an amateur to do it.
17:11.402 –> 17:15.410
[SPEAKER_02]: And I, oh my God, I so wholeheartedly believe that.
17:15.771 –> 17:16.412
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I,
17:16.747 –> 17:22.452
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m quite a good market here, but I’m a sort of top-level, that sounds like a big head.
17:22.472 –> 17:23.673
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m a strategic marketer.
17:23.693 –> 17:28.417
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the plans and the big pictures, I’m really not good at the tactical stuff, I get born.
17:29.358 –> 17:31.220
[SPEAKER_02]: And I’m a pretty good chemist and formulator.
17:31.900 –> 17:35.403
[SPEAKER_02]: My husband was an ops director.
17:35.423 –> 17:43.611
[SPEAKER_02]: So he is very good on factory things, and he’s made it, much bigger factory than it really is, a little factory, and he’s really good at regulatory.
17:43.791 –> 17:46.433
[SPEAKER_02]: So we keep that in house,
17:46.885 –> 17:47.686
[SPEAKER_02]: we outsource.
17:48.026 –> 17:50.789
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have a chat that does the all the website stuff.
17:50.850 –> 17:54.974
[SPEAKER_02]: Then we have an also a separate and IT people that just do the security and back up.
17:55.655 –> 17:59.620
[SPEAKER_02]: We have a graphic designer and she’s been with us from day one.
17:59.820 –> 18:04.465
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, we used to pay each other in terms of I did some marketing for her and she did the graphic design for us.
18:04.926 –> 18:16.639
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we have a recently we’ve just taken on a PR lady who does things like journal requests and she writes the blogs and she does mail us for us
18:17.176 –> 18:24.165
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, we need that and she’s so much better and so much quicker than me, you know, there’s an overlap there, but she’s much better at the tactical stuff and
18:24.382 –> 18:25.644
[SPEAKER_02]: She just does it brilliantly.
18:25.884 –> 18:29.028
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, PR is such a different skill set.
18:29.929 –> 18:31.331
[SPEAKER_01]: Such a different skill set.
18:31.912 –> 18:32.913
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, for sure.
18:33.654 –> 18:35.437
[SPEAKER_01]: Not one I have any skill at at all.
18:38.481 –> 18:47.052
[SPEAKER_01]: So last time we caught up in that previous episode, you said you never wanted to grow the business above quarter of a million.
18:47.112 –> 18:50.997
[SPEAKER_01]: Your halfway there at the moment.
18:50.977 –> 18:51.618
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
18:51.638 –> 18:54.922
[SPEAKER_01]: I would some pretty major strategic shifts since we last caught up.
18:55.203 –> 18:56.124
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
18:56.344 –> 19:00.310
[SPEAKER_01]: You now, now you have this different view on the business.
19:00.370 –> 19:04.796
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to go massive or is it still wanting to cap it at that level?
19:05.617 –> 19:09.983
[SPEAKER_02]: I don’t think I want to run a business that’s a million pound business.
19:10.343 –> 19:11.925
[SPEAKER_02]: I just think it would be stressful.
19:12.486 –> 19:20.477
[SPEAKER_02]: It would be lovely if something we’ve created somebody else wanted to come along and
19:21.048 –> 19:21.869
[SPEAKER_02]: driving to do.
19:21.889 –> 19:23.672
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the difficulty is though.
19:23.753 –> 19:33.910
[SPEAKER_02]: So no, I have no ambitions to, I was saying this to before we went on air is that there’s a, a competitive brand that many people will have heard of called wild deodorants.
19:33.930 –> 19:35.373
[SPEAKER_02]: And we make a range of deodorants.
19:35.453 –> 19:41.864
[SPEAKER_02]: And to be honest, their packaging is, is that they have some nice sort of aluminium packaging, which has got pretty patterns on it.
19:42.445 –> 19:43.947
[SPEAKER_02]: I would say our ingredients are better.
19:44.087 –> 19:45.570
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m going to be biased, but I think they are.
19:45.938 –> 19:46.819
[SPEAKER_02]: But it’s a nice product.
19:47.119 –> 19:47.880
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m not lying about it.
19:47.900 –> 19:53.527
[SPEAKER_02]: And they’ve got very good distribution network, but they’ve just sold to you and leave for 252 million quid.
19:54.007 –> 19:58.212
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, if you leave, I came knocking on my door and said I’m gonna give you 252 million quid jilly.
19:58.252 –> 20:00.255
[SPEAKER_02]: I’d go, oh, let me think about that.
20:01.376 –> 20:04.179
[SPEAKER_02]: I think most people would probably take them up on it.
20:04.219 –> 20:12.469
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, that’s not like to happen because we haven’t built the business to be at that level, but I don’t want the stress of running that bigger business.
20:13.040 –> 20:15.123
[SPEAKER_02]: That said, we are still having fun with it.
20:15.243 –> 20:28.520
[SPEAKER_02]: And to be honest, we’ve built the business with all the infrastructure is there such that if suddenly things did take off, then it could be that sort of scale of business.
20:28.640 –> 20:31.103
[SPEAKER_02]: It could certainly scale up to about a million pounds.
20:31.403 –> 20:35.448
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m not sure we’re at the sort of several billion that I’m sure you leave a week while be.
20:36.069 –> 20:39.013
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, so it’s not what we’ve set out to do.
20:39.533 –> 20:46.573
[SPEAKER_02]: But I suppose we’ve been inadvertently set up some processes and practices that could make it be that sort of scale.
20:47.330 –> 20:48.311
[SPEAKER_02]: be careful what you wish for.
20:49.613 –> 20:54.098
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the case when you’re making your own life easy with your systems and your processes.
20:54.118 –> 20:57.662
[SPEAKER_01]: You’re also building it for ready for growth at the same time.
20:57.722 –> 20:59.204
[SPEAKER_02]: So it’s a good point actually.
20:59.244 –> 21:00.385
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that’s a really good point.
21:00.405 –> 21:01.987
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s you come, come hand in hand.
21:02.047 –> 21:12.139
[SPEAKER_01]: So given you’ve now got the platform ready for doing whatever you want with the business in the next few years, what’s got you got you excited looking into
21:12.727 –> 21:17.954
[SPEAKER_02]: So I should explain a little bit about our USP and our formulation.
21:18.334 –> 21:23.000
[SPEAKER_02]: So the skincare industry in the UK alone is worth 3 billion quid.
21:23.020 –> 21:25.043
[SPEAKER_02]: I think globally it’s something like 40 billion.
21:25.083 –> 21:27.146
[SPEAKER_02]: And it’s just bunkers the size of the business.
21:28.167 –> 21:34.736
[SPEAKER_02]: And up until about 100 years ago, all skincare was pure active ingredients, right?
21:34.776 –> 21:40.303
[SPEAKER_02]: So things that would moisturize your skin, things that would help nourish your skin.
21:40.553 –> 21:43.637
[SPEAKER_02]: The manufacturer’s worked out how to add water to skin care.
21:43.898 –> 21:54.513
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, if you’re in manufacturing and you work out how to add water to a process, you’re on to a winner, because water is about half a p-liter and some of the oils we use are about up to 100 pounds a liter.
21:54.794 –> 21:58.078
[SPEAKER_02]: So that’s quite a good margin reduction or margin increase.
21:58.819 –> 22:05.669
[SPEAKER_02]: Problem was, when you add water to skin care, you have to add quite a lot of processing chemicals.
22:06.230 –> 22:09.615
[SPEAKER_02]: And these processing chemicals are not good for your skin.
22:10.186 –> 22:14.230
[SPEAKER_02]: borderline neutral, some are really quite damaging for your skin.
22:15.031 –> 22:20.918
[SPEAKER_02]: And they’re only added because of the water and there’s a lot of more science behind it, but that’s the bottom line of it.
22:21.378 –> 22:38.337
[SPEAKER_02]: So from the outset, I’ve like, I’ve not wanted to put water in the products because I don’t want to put the process in chemicals and so we just use pure moisturizers and pure active ingredients.
22:38.823 –> 22:39.764
[SPEAKER_02]: issue this is.
22:40.124 –> 22:53.759
[SPEAKER_02]: So you can go around boots or super drug or I don’t know, self ridges and harrods and look at the products they have on their shells, anything from a face cream to a body lotion to a hand, cream to a footbook, foot lotion or what have you.
22:53.779 –> 22:59.946
[SPEAKER_02]: 99.9% of the time, the first ingredient will be aqua, which is water.
23:00.627 –> 23:02.349
[SPEAKER_02]: And we’re not just talking about a little bit.
23:02.369 –> 23:05.252
[SPEAKER_02]: We’re talking about up to 90% water.
23:06.153 –> 23:08.155
[SPEAKER_02]: And then
23:08.540 –> 23:23.177
[SPEAKER_02]: are just there for the water and they’re not good for anybody, so I’ve become quite impassioned about this because I just think A people are being gaslighted, lied to, certainly have the wool pulled over their eyes.
23:23.197 –> 23:30.546
[SPEAKER_02]: And when you see these products, it’s oh, made with argon oil for shiny hair or made with oats for Xmaskin.
23:31.027 –> 23:38.175
[SPEAKER_02]: And you actually look at how much they’ve got in and it’s a tiny fraction and the rest of the stuff in there is
23:38.560 –> 23:46.733
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I’m really on a mission to try to change this and I sort of encapsulate it by saying, wouldn’t it be great to do to the skin care industry?
23:47.174 –> 23:50.199
[SPEAKER_02]: What’s been done to the ultra-process food industry?
23:50.700 –> 23:58.272
[SPEAKER_02]: Because the chemicals that are being added are just the same sorts of chemicals and falsifies preservatives, stabilizers, thickeners or that kind of stuff.
23:58.853 –> 24:02.239
[SPEAKER_02]: And they’re not good for your skin, they’re not
24:02.793 –> 24:04.315
[SPEAKER_02]: good when they’re being manufactured.
24:04.335 –> 24:09.363
[SPEAKER_02]: There’s an awful lot of emissions and energy being used in manufacturing them.
24:09.984 –> 24:13.068
[SPEAKER_02]: They’re not good when they get washed off your skin into the water courses.
24:13.950 –> 24:17.255
[SPEAKER_02]: The packaging is associated with making them and shipping them around.
24:17.655 –> 24:22.182
[SPEAKER_02]: The packaging is associated with the products that have got them in that are like four times the size they need to be.
24:22.202 –> 24:24.786
[SPEAKER_02]: And it’s just the whole thing is bonkers.
24:25.467 –> 24:30.775
[SPEAKER_02]: So just on our fairly small scale, we worked out that last year alone,
24:31.126 –> 24:33.308
[SPEAKER_02]: of processing chemicals getting washed into the rivers.
24:33.989 –> 24:35.009
[SPEAKER_02]: Great, I’m happy with that.
24:35.470 –> 25:00.812
[SPEAKER_02]: But imagine if like ourselves were tenfold or another business decided that they were going to change their formulations or consumers suddenly went, I don’t know, I’m going to start looking for stuff without water in it, how much reduction you could make in all these chemicals that are getting shipped into rivers, ship around the world and then they’re not doing anything except enabling the manufacturers to sell water is the
25:01.130 –> 25:02.992
[SPEAKER_02]: What does next year look like?
25:03.212 –> 25:04.973
[SPEAKER_02]: I would love to be able to do something like this.
25:05.013 –> 25:10.298
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would love that the news bees becomes a bit of a vehicle for doing that.
25:10.778 –> 25:13.741
[SPEAKER_02]: Realistically, we’re too small to be able to do that by ourselves.
25:13.761 –> 25:30.816
[SPEAKER_02]: So one of the things I’m really excited about is this could be a big, maybe not e-commerce but certainly digital marketing initiative is that I’ve mentioned to a journalist who’s quite a sort of investigative journalist that we wanted to do to skin care industry,
25:31.117 –> 25:32.098
[SPEAKER_02]: which is food interest.
25:32.118 –> 25:33.340
[SPEAKER_02]: She’s like, oh my god, that’s amazing.
25:33.921 –> 25:35.002
[SPEAKER_02]: She’s had love to do that.
25:35.162 –> 25:39.628
[SPEAKER_02]: So she put together some ideas and I was like, okay, this looks brilliant, but there’s absolutely no way I can afford that.
25:40.188 –> 25:42.051
[SPEAKER_02]: So she said, well, why don’t we get other businesses together?
25:42.111 –> 25:50.782
[SPEAKER_02]: So there’s probably about, I don’t know, six, five or six businesses in the UK who are doing similar sort of formulations to what we’re doing.
25:50.802 –> 25:52.684
[SPEAKER_02]: So water free chemical free.
25:52.704 –> 25:57.310
[SPEAKER_02]: And I’d always looked at them as competitors in the past and then suddenly we’re like,
25:57.560 –> 25:59.202
[SPEAKER_02]: You know what, let’s collaborate.
25:59.222 –> 26:02.326
[SPEAKER_02]: And I’m not talking about, you know, we’re not talking about price fixing or anything like that.
26:02.727 –> 26:16.565
[SPEAKER_02]: But we’re just talking about what if we pulled our resources, pulled our social media, did some intra company links on our websites, started to put press releases out from all of us, pulled the journalists that we know.
26:16.585 –> 26:27.499
[SPEAKER_02]: And suddenly we could actually have be able to make an impact to this massive, massive market that’s owned by,
26:27.682 –> 26:30.125
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, the big boys and the glossy magazines.
26:30.726 –> 26:34.772
[SPEAKER_02]: So that is my kind of, that’s my passion for next year.
26:34.892 –> 26:48.831
[SPEAKER_02]: And obviously there’s an upside from a sales point of view as well because, you know, as well as actually starting to change the industry for environmental reasons and I just don’t think people should be told not to have wrinkles and not to put chemicals on over the skin.
26:50.073 –> 26:56.001
[SPEAKER_02]: But also, you know, obviously there’s a commercial upside for our sand for the other businesses competing, not collaborating as well.
26:56.251 –> 27:15.778
[SPEAKER_00]: That’s what’s getting me really excited next year.
27:18.020 –> 27:23.829
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I love this section because it gives me and I’ll list us some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
27:24.290 –> 27:29.759
[SPEAKER_01]: Over and above your mega PR campaign, which I wish you all the best with that sound super exciting.
27:30.200 –> 27:31.862
[SPEAKER_01]: So Julie, are you ready for the top tips?
27:32.403 –> 27:33.144
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, let’s go for it.
27:33.425 –> 27:34.647
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the book top tip.
27:34.727 –> 27:39.715
[SPEAKER_01]: If everyone listening to this podcast, agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better.
27:40.136 –> 27:41.698
[SPEAKER_01]: Which book would you recommend?
27:42.387 –> 27:49.535
[SPEAKER_02]: OK, and I’m going to give you kind of a similar answer to I gave you last time, which is I didn’t MBA about 20 years ago, and I have not read a business book since.
27:50.836 –> 27:52.057
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think it kind of put me off.
27:52.077 –> 28:01.908
[SPEAKER_02]: I do read a lot of, um, apothecary books and, um, autology books, which, um, I’m not going to start recommending to people, but, but my top tip, and this is something that I now do use.
28:02.569 –> 28:11.398
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, I’ve probably so far behind the curve for the people listening to the program, but go on to chat GPT or Google notes or whatever AI platform you use and just say,
28:11.733 –> 28:17.465
[SPEAKER_02]: Please summarize book XYZ in a thousand words so that I can get the gist of it.
28:17.986 –> 28:19.790
[SPEAKER_02]: And then you can spend 10 minutes.
28:20.090 –> 28:31.935
[SPEAKER_02]: So you could have a Friday and you could read 30 books and get the gist of them all with a little help with your friend tattoo BT it’s it honestly it’s I know that air is revolutionizing everything.
28:32.692 –> 28:35.395
[SPEAKER_02]: But that was, that’s a real easy win for me.
28:35.415 –> 28:36.556
[SPEAKER_01]: I like that.
28:36.716 –> 28:42.683
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that would massively reduce my book buying habit if I start doing that.
28:42.703 –> 28:48.269
[SPEAKER_01]: Because then I could work out, do I actually need to want to read this book or not from the actual summary?
28:48.309 –> 28:48.910
[SPEAKER_01]: Love that one.
28:49.310 –> 28:55.077
[SPEAKER_01]: OK, traffic top tip, which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn’t get the press it deserves?
28:56.138 –> 29:01.804
[SPEAKER_02]: So, and again, I am going to get really old school on this.
29:02.408 –> 29:30.795
[SPEAKER_02]: The thing, and again, we talked about this beforehand, is that there are so many options out there, you’ve just got to focus on what works and what you can do, and it has to go back to old fashion mailers for me, our audience tends to be slightly older, so, you know, they’re more likely to read an email than read a sub stack or, I don’t know, look on YouTube for input or what have you so, um, yeah, I’m going to say Mailchimp, but my caveat is,
29:31.096 –> 29:42.292
[SPEAKER_02]: But actually integrated Mailchimp because I think one of the things that people forget is that it’s so, so important and this is going to sort of lead into my top tip as well.
29:42.893 –> 29:57.154
[SPEAKER_02]: But it’s so important that you’re not Mailchimp isn’t just in isolation, it’s part of the journey and it has to be part of the journey and as well as thinking how as people got on to the mailing list and although there are people.
29:57.640 –> 30:11.529
[SPEAKER_02]: What can you do with them as a consequence of them reading that mail, how can you get them to do something else or find it about more about you in another way or have you so I do think that it’s got to be male chip or other platforms aren’t able.
30:12.271 –> 30:16.780
[SPEAKER_02]: But think it through not it’s not just a one off thing it’s so it’s the whole journey that they’re on.
30:17.283 –> 30:17.924
[SPEAKER_01]: Lovely.
30:18.384 –> 30:19.525
[SPEAKER_01]: A tool-top tip.
30:19.585 –> 30:28.053
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug in a phone-up or just a way of working, is there a call little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?
30:28.534 –> 30:32.557
[SPEAKER_02]: So, this is a way of working and this has been a biggie for us this year.
30:33.118 –> 30:39.384
[SPEAKER_02]: Is think about the customer touch points and think about consistency and cohesion on those.
30:39.784 –> 30:44.809
[SPEAKER_02]: So, one of the things that we did is our website, I mentioned that we’ve updated it,
30:45.110 –> 31:13.311
[SPEAKER_02]: tied it up made it look more polished and made it look more professional, but we also made it sort of have a feel a color feel and the feel is very dark green because we got told by the soil association that we’re so green with dark green just putting that out there and we’ve made a point of now all our maillers have that color way any physical collateral that we do has that way we try and use the same kind of images and we spent quite a lot of money last year getting some
31:13.645 –> 31:15.287
[SPEAKER_02]: again, sell the brand, not sell the product.
31:15.768 –> 31:26.043
[SPEAKER_02]: So now everything that we do, even like when we had a store at Glastonbury and we have a store at Winchester Christmas Market and those even have the same colorways.
31:26.083 –> 31:32.793
[SPEAKER_02]: We’ve painted the store, the same color and we used leaflets and tags and price tags that are all the same color.
31:32.813 –> 31:39.923
[SPEAKER_02]: So that everything, whether the consumer sees us online, whether they see us in reality, whether they pick up a leaflet, whether they have like email,
31:40.190 –> 31:50.262
[SPEAKER_02]: Whether they look on our socials, we try and make everything feel and look the same with the same messages so that then I think you can be far more synergistic.
31:50.482 –> 31:53.806
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, so my top tip is sort of collaborate with yourself.
31:54.346 –> 31:55.448
[SPEAKER_02]: Make everything cohesive.
31:56.068 –> 31:57.791
[SPEAKER_01]: I like that definitely counts.
31:57.951 –> 31:59.472
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the carbon top tip.
31:59.492 –> 32:01.455
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a new one since the last time you’re on.
32:01.855 –> 32:03.337
[SPEAKER_01]: So very interested to hear your answer on this one.
32:03.697 –> 32:07.682
[SPEAKER_01]: What’s your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store?
32:08.033 –> 32:09.594
[SPEAKER_02]: So, two things I’m going to say.
32:09.634 –> 32:13.238
[SPEAKER_02]: Number one, our website chat, Roger, our ITB.
32:13.258 –> 32:18.422
[SPEAKER_02]: He is a specialist in reducing website comfort print.
32:19.103 –> 32:22.986
[SPEAKER_02]: I would be lying if I said everything that he does, but he does all sorts of exciting stuff.
32:23.006 –> 32:24.387
[SPEAKER_02]: And you can find him online, Roger Knight.
32:25.068 –> 32:27.050
[SPEAKER_02]: I think Chloe, you’ve contacted with him.
32:27.450 –> 32:30.673
[SPEAKER_02]: So, he does all sorts of stuff that I would not pretend to know.
32:31.313 –> 32:36.538
[SPEAKER_02]: And for us, built into our products
32:36.738 –> 32:47.949
[SPEAKER_02]: have a fraction of the carbon footprint of our competitive products of other products online, so both from a packaging, from a shipping and from a manufacturing of all the other chemicals.
32:48.550 –> 32:59.501
[SPEAKER_02]: So, say that’s like one thing for us, and we’ve won a number of green awards because of that because of we’re not, you know, putting the water in the chemicals on the extra packaging blah, blah, blah, blah, so sort of intrinsic within our business with that.
32:59.541 –> 33:02.924
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, there’s all sorts of things that clever stuff that Roger does.
33:03.225 –> 33:05.547
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I’d say look on his website
33:06.067 –> 33:07.669
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that’s, that’s very clever.
33:07.689 –> 33:10.792
[SPEAKER_01]: We does love those those tips to Julie.
33:10.812 –> 33:18.381
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much being and now before we say goodbye, could you please let the listeners know where they can find you and your business on the web and social media?
33:19.062 –> 33:23.286
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so website needsbees.co.uk and EV ESbees.
33:23.947 –> 33:35.280
[SPEAKER_02]: Socials at needsbees and we also have a TikTok account from last time and now I don’t
33:35.547 –> 33:37.833
[SPEAKER_01]: And I believe you may have a discount for our listeners.
33:38.475 –> 33:39.377
[SPEAKER_02]: We do, in fact.
33:39.577 –> 33:49.202
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you put master plan in on our website, you will get a 15% voucher across the whole piece, which actually we’re just about to set up a Christmas shop.
33:49.452 –> 33:53.277
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think when this comes out, the Christmas shop should be live.
33:53.317 –> 34:00.226
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you want to come and buy your Christmas gifts, then if you put master plan in, you will get 15% off.
34:00.246 –> 34:01.328
[SPEAKER_01]: Excellent timing.
34:01.968 –> 34:04.452
[SPEAKER_01]: Get those orders in before the delivery deadlines.
34:05.012 –> 34:06.695
[SPEAKER_01]: Julie, thank you so much for being on the show.
34:06.715 –> 34:09.038
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s been lovely to get to catch up with you again.
34:09.138 –> 34:13.063
[SPEAKER_01]: And I am very excited to see what happens with your PR campaign next year.
34:13.364 –> 34:18.647
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, bring us back in four years time, and we’ll see whether we’re at hit the big time or whether we’re still just like, yeah, this is fun.
34:19.993 –> 34:21.720
[SPEAKER_01]: We will do.
34:27.185 –> 34:29.388
[SPEAKER_01]: lovely to catch out with Julia again.
34:29.508 –> 34:39.203
[SPEAKER_01]: For me the two big takeaways from that were first off, really understanding how the customer thinks about the product and how they buy it.
34:39.283 –> 34:51.741
[SPEAKER_01]: Those numbers she shared about, the percentage of customers in the real world face to face by their wholesalers and by their own events, the percentage of them that only buy the
34:51.721 –> 35:03.461
[SPEAKER_01]: and then online, the percentage of orders that are only the skin care products, and just think of themselves as a different type of business, clearly hugely influential in what their strategies will be going forward.
35:03.602 –> 35:06.186
[SPEAKER_01]: So that’s that super fascinating, understanding
35:07.583 –> 35:16.015
[SPEAKER_01]: I’m trying to avoid using the phrase customer journey, but the customer experience, I suppose, of your products and how they think about it, a real demonstration of how powerful that can be.
35:16.796 –> 35:26.649
[SPEAKER_01]: And then secondly, Julie’s point, Julie’s idea about the big old PR campaign and the collaborative nature of that.
35:27.470 –> 35:32.477
[SPEAKER_01]: There’s six, seven companies in the UK all creating
35:32.457 –> 35:35.104
[SPEAKER_01]: non ultra-processed skincare.
35:35.144 –> 35:48.660
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don’t they come together to create the PR campaign, the activity which gets them their idea, this awareness more exposure that will therefore benefit them all because together they’ll be able to achieve more than they can individually.
35:48.640 –> 36:04.084
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, even if it’s some of those simple things she was saying about swapping email messages and various things doing that with your competitors or with brands on a similar mission to you can be hugely hugely powerful so loving that and loads of other cool stuff in there from Julie too.
36:04.064 –> 36:13.322
[SPEAKER_01]: you can get our notes on this episode and there’s full transcripts and a whole lot of other stuff by heading to the ecommercemaster.com website.
36:13.743 –> 36:18.051
[SPEAKER_01]: You can also use the direct-to-episode short link to go straight to the right episode.
36:18.111 –> 36:21.879
[SPEAKER_01]: That’s ECMP dot info for slash the number of this episode.
36:22.761 –> 36:25.566
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you get to the website, you can add yourself to our email list.
36:25.546 –> 36:34.163
[SPEAKER_01]: If you enjoyed hearing from Julie, and you want to hear what our first chat was all about, because we did reference it quite a bit in there, that episode 336.
36:34.624 –> 36:45.346
[SPEAKER_01]: And I read the notes today and Julie listened to it today, and we can both tell you that 90% of what’s in there is still relevant and a good idea.
36:45.366 –> 36:47.250
[SPEAKER_01]: So it’s definitely worth a listen.
36:47.230 –> 36:58.188
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you’re on WooCommerce and want to hear more interviews with WooCommerce people, then ECMP.info towards Ash WooCommerce will take you to the page on the site, but we’ve got all our WooCommerce episodes listed.
36:59.030 –> 37:02.756
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for tuning in to this and every episode of The Ecommerce Master Plan podcast.
37:03.037 –> 37:11.310
[SPEAKER_01]: We bring you a new interview every week to help and inspire you to succeed and thrive with your business, including becoming more carbon neutral.
37:11.350 –> 37:13.474
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you know someone this show can help,
37:13.454 –> 37:17.422
[SPEAKER_01]: Please tell them to listen to the e-commerce master plan podcast.
37:17.802 –> 37:33.032
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you have a great week and don’t forget to keep optimizing.
38 min
November 24, 2025eCommerce MasterPlan | 570: What Would You Do as Head of eCommerce tasked with massively improving operational efficiency? – with Jaime Hill
In this WWYD episode, eCommerce Director Jaime Hill – whose career spans Monsoon, FatFace, Jack Wills, Oak Furnitureland, Hurtigruten, and more – joins host Chloe Thomas to share how she’d approach one of the biggest challenges facing eCommerce leaders today.

Jaime dives into where to start, how to prioritise quick wins vs. long-term impact, and why real efficiency begins with your people, not your processes.

Expect practical ideas, real-world examples, and plenty of inspiration for anyone trying to do more with less.

Hit PLAY to hear:
How Jaime would tackle a “make us more efficient” brief as Head of eCommerce
Why your team (not your tech stack) is the first place to look for efficiency gains
Smart ways to shift ad spend between SEO, paid search, and social without hurting results
How a 2-week payments project boosted conversions in Germany by 35%
The simple cross-team conversations that can save you time, money, and stress
A quick sustainability win: the one website check that can cut your carbon footprint

Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[04:59] Streamlining Operations and Team Efficiency
[06:47] Team Optimization and Process Review
[13:09] Prioritizing Efficiency in Evolving Industries
[14:15] Optimizing Spend and Data Accuracy
[19:58] Improving Processes Through Experimentation
[21:44] Breaking Silos Through Communication
[23:31] Listen to Jaime’s Top Tips!

Full episode notes here: https://ecmp.info/570
—
Download our ebook… https://ecmp.info/ebook 500 Tips to Increase Your Profits
Get all the links and resources we mention and join our email list at https://ecmp.info
Love the show? Chloe would love your feedback – leave a review here: https://ecmp.info/review or reply to the episode QandA on Spotify.
Interested in being a Sponsor? go here: https://ecmp.info/sponsor
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
WEBVTT
00:00.031 –> 00:20.619
[SPEAKER_02]: SEO I think is, it’s not completely undervalued, but I think people don’t always realize it’s important as it is, because if your site is really well optimized, then actually that has an impact on your paid media search, because the better quality your site is, the less you’re going to spend per click to be the top of the rankings.
00:20.879 –> 00:26.747
[SPEAKER_02]: So actually by investing in SEO in the long term is actually going to benefit your other channels anyway.
00:28.347 –> 00:30.874
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.
00:31.495 –> 00:35.486
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
00:36.007 –> 00:44.128
[SPEAKER_00]: Cutting through the hinder to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond, here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
00:47.112 –> 00:49.316
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello and welcome, it’s great to have you here.
00:49.416 –> 00:53.923
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
00:54.404 –> 00:57.289
[SPEAKER_01]: We’re gonna start this episode with a little shout out.
00:57.729 –> 01:00.995
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello to regular listener, Joe Jacks from Jacks.
01:01.476 –> 01:10.871
[SPEAKER_01]: Joe’s been super active, commenting on our LinkedIn content over the last few months and it’s always great to hear your take on things, Joe, so thank you.
01:11.312 –> 01:13.896
[SPEAKER_01]: And most importantly, thank you for listening.
01:13.876 –> 01:30.231
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, in this episode, we are doing another of our new episode format, our WWYDs, the what would you do episodes, where I get some of my favorite people in Ecommerce to come on and share how they would handle a hypothetical situation.
01:30.791 –> 01:41.301
[SPEAKER_01]: This time, I’m chatting to a super experienced Ecommerce director about what would you do as a head of Ecommerce task with massively improving operational efficiency?
01:41.281 –> 01:42.623
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, we’re going there.
01:43.104 –> 01:44.987
[SPEAKER_01]: We are talking about operation efficiency.
01:45.588 –> 01:55.745
[SPEAKER_01]: Jamie is sharing great insight about the areas you need to look into how to make it successful, how to prioritize and there’s quite a lot about people in this one too.
01:56.346 –> 02:02.597
[SPEAKER_01]: Please make sure you listen to the end of the episode because she’s got some brilliant top tips answers as well.
02:08.348 –> 02:28.000
[SPEAKER_01]: And now to introduce our special guest, Jamie Hill is an e-commerce director with a fearsome lineup of past experience, including time in fashion, monsoon, fatface and jackwills, in travel at her to groom to Norway and Avis, and home and garden at Oak Furnitureland, plus many more.
02:28.141 –> 02:29.182
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello, Jamie.
02:29.743 –> 02:31.386
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello, happy Monday.
02:31.602 –> 02:34.087
[SPEAKER_01]: great to have you on the show.
02:34.107 –> 02:45.090
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone with your awesome experience to come and be one of our what would you do guess, but before we get into what would you do, how did you get into the world of Ecommerce?
02:45.110 –> 02:46.894
[SPEAKER_01]: How did you end up in this space?
02:46.874 –> 02:52.140
[SPEAKER_02]: kind of fell into it, started in marketing by accident.
02:52.421 –> 02:54.303
[SPEAKER_02]: I was doing a job straight out of college.
02:54.583 –> 02:56.806
[SPEAKER_02]: They offered me another opportunity, sounded great.
02:56.826 –> 02:59.088
[SPEAKER_02]: So I thought, yeah, I’ll snap that one up.
02:59.109 –> 03:01.892
[SPEAKER_02]: And then as kind of digital grew, I moved into that.
03:01.992 –> 03:07.198
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, yeah, probably the last 10, 15 years into digital marketing and e-commerce.
03:07.258 –> 03:10.502
[SPEAKER_02]: So looking at that sort of whole customer life cycle, really.
03:10.482 –> 03:18.332
[SPEAKER_01]: which is only getting more complicated isn’t it with privacy coming in and more tech complexity it just seems to be getting ever harder.
03:19.308 –> 03:20.089
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes and no.
03:20.109 –> 03:23.834
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the principles are relatively simple.
03:24.455 –> 03:32.486
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you can get some complexity when you chuck in some of the tools, but they are supposed to make your life easier and help you target customers better.
03:33.247 –> 03:37.993
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it’s just a case of getting them set up properly in the first place, so you can use them more effectively.
03:38.153 –> 03:41.518
[SPEAKER_02]: So it’s a bit swings around about, so I think really.
03:42.173 –> 03:50.189
[SPEAKER_01]: I couldn’t agree with you more about getting them set up right in the first place, but let’s not get into that world of random because that could take the whole of the rest of the episode.
03:50.369 –> 04:04.097
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, the what would you do you are tackling today is what would you do as head of e-commerce tasked with massively improving operational efficiency, which I love as a task as a title because
04:04.077 –> 04:09.204
[SPEAKER_01]: I know this is pretty much what everyone’s being charged with at the moment is efficiency efficiency efficiency.
04:09.945 –> 04:11.427
[SPEAKER_01]: So doing more with the less.
04:11.988 –> 04:15.172
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the endless challenge of 2025, I think.
04:15.773 –> 04:24.685
[SPEAKER_01]: So is this for a specific business size for businesses doing specific channels, for specific products or is this kind of like something that would be relevant to anybody listening?
04:24.665 –> 04:27.371
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think it’s relevant for anybody to be honest.
04:27.491 –> 04:43.264
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s not quite a one-size-fits-all because obviously some areas will need more focus than others, but there’s certainly probably three or four areas that I would look at in terms of making these efficiencies and how to to get things running a bit more smoothly, really.
04:43.801 –> 04:58.890
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you’re talking operational efficiency, for some people that they immediately think of the warehouse, for others they think about head office or spreadsheets or something, for you where does operational efficiency say it?
04:58.870 –> 05:04.517
[SPEAKER_02]: So some of it will be looking at warehousing, you know, how does it cross over from Econ into that area?
05:05.078 –> 05:09.663
[SPEAKER_02]: How can you make that process simpler and make sure they have everything they need?
05:10.164 –> 05:14.829
[SPEAKER_02]: But for me, it’s looking at the team, how are they working?
05:15.050 –> 05:20.036
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, is there somebody that’s got a really great skill that’s being undiutilized?
05:20.616 –> 05:22.198
[SPEAKER_02]: It could be optimizing the tech stack.
05:22.258 –> 05:26.143
[SPEAKER_02]: If you’ve got two things doing essentially the same thing that you could get rid of one.
05:26.123 –> 05:35.420
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, it could be, is there an agency you can hand over some of the heavy lifting to without spending more money and free up somebody to do this more strategic stuff?
05:36.482 –> 05:40.249
[SPEAKER_02]: Looking at spend, you know, are we spending properly in the right areas?
05:40.269 –> 05:50.207
[SPEAKER_02]: So you might start to look at multi, you know, the MMM modelling processes as well, you know, are we wasting time doing lengthy processes rather than
05:50.187 –> 06:16.212
[SPEAKER_02]: short cuttings and some areas where necessary without damaging the overall process and how things work so it’s kind of everything within your remit but also how it falls into other areas you know so if a change you could make produces calls to the call center for certain problems can you then free them up to take sales calls or payment calls or whatever yeah it’s
06:16.192 –> 06:21.418
[SPEAKER_02]: it could be a whole gamut of items really to be honest.
06:21.438 –> 06:21.979
[SPEAKER_01]: I love it.
06:22.259 –> 06:28.067
[SPEAKER_01]: Maximum width of definition, which I think is exactly what people are getting tasked with.
06:28.107 –> 06:32.232
[SPEAKER_01]: The bosses aren’t saying can you improve operational efficiency in this tiny part of the business?
06:32.252 –> 06:36.897
[SPEAKER_01]: The bosses inevitably saying, I don’t know where, but we need to be more efficient, go.
06:36.938 –> 06:41.423
[SPEAKER_01]: So assuming the boss said that to you,
06:41.403 –> 06:43.806
[SPEAKER_01]: Where, what would your first steps be?
06:43.866 –> 06:46.810
[SPEAKER_01]: Where would you start working out where to go, what to do?
06:46.870 –> 06:50.475
[SPEAKER_02]: I probably would start actually with the immediate team.
06:51.036 –> 06:53.279
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, what are they spending most of their time on?
06:54.080 –> 06:55.882
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it particular processes?
06:56.343 –> 06:58.405
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you shorten those processes?
06:58.486 –> 06:59.747
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you remove some steps?
07:00.288 –> 07:02.190
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you scrap that process completely?
07:02.230 –> 07:04.153
[SPEAKER_02]: Because sometimes you can.
07:04.133 –> 07:07.863
[SPEAKER_02]: do they have skills and experience in an area that’s being underutilized?
07:08.445 –> 07:15.726
[SPEAKER_02]: Do they have capacity to do more in a certain area and get rid of something that’s just unnecessary?
07:16.588 –> 07:19.476
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, people have always got kind of hidden.
07:19.456 –> 07:25.984
[SPEAKER_02]: skills and experience that you don’t necessarily know about when you join a team because you don’t necessarily see their CV.
07:26.584 –> 07:32.651
[SPEAKER_02]: So that’s one thing I would like to do when I join a new business is sit down with the team and say, okay, what do you currently do?
07:32.711 –> 07:34.593
[SPEAKER_02]: What’s taking up most of your time?
07:35.134 –> 07:36.716
[SPEAKER_02]: What potentially could we get rid of?
07:36.756 –> 07:38.978
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you want to be doing?
07:39.339 –> 07:48.990
[SPEAKER_02]: Because obviously you need to kind of think about future personal development and kind of succession planning, because it’s not always about the CEO succession planning, it’s other
07:48.970 –> 07:57.461
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, and then sort of moving into the processes that they’re spending most of the time on, what are the parts of the company do they touch on?
07:57.982 –> 08:01.446
[SPEAKER_02]: There’s projects and stuff that I’ve worked on that have been completely cross-functional.
08:01.466 –> 08:10.017
[SPEAKER_02]: So, for example, I had to greet and there’s a payment project that I was working on, which covered the website, the cool center, the ships and the hotel.
08:09.997 –> 08:12.141
[SPEAKER_02]: and obviously that’s a multiple countries.
08:12.843 –> 08:20.618
[SPEAKER_02]: So it was looking at the localised payment options, which we could switch on enough by, you know, country, whatever’s needed.
08:21.259 –> 08:26.409
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, make sure that people can actually pay for things that they want to in an efficient manner.
08:26.430 –> 08:28.714
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, so for example, with Germany,
08:28.694 –> 08:32.661
[SPEAKER_02]: we discovered that our authorization rate was absolutely shocking.
08:32.681 –> 08:34.284
[SPEAKER_02]: It was like 50% for cards.
08:35.105 –> 08:38.411
[SPEAKER_02]: So we got a load of information from the call center colleagues.
08:38.471 –> 08:40.574
[SPEAKER_02]: We, you know, look to our ADD and dashboard.
08:41.075 –> 08:44.581
[SPEAKER_02]: And we got recommendations from ADD and look at the partners themselves.
08:44.661 –> 08:45.743
[SPEAKER_02]: In sort of said, okay, right.
08:46.104 –> 08:48.508
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, what happens in Germany is people.
08:48.488 –> 08:53.875
[SPEAKER_02]: typically is by now pay later, or they like to be sent an invoice and then they pay it by bank transfer.
08:54.396 –> 09:00.584
[SPEAKER_02]: So we looked into all the stats, took all the evidence from the call center, which was, that’s what people were asking for.
09:01.325 –> 09:05.370
[SPEAKER_02]: So we did a mini business case, literally within sign-off to live.
09:05.410 –> 09:10.236
[SPEAKER_02]: It was about two weeks and within a week we’d gone from 50 to 85 percent authorization.
09:11.197 –> 09:14.682
[SPEAKER_02]: Now the kind of side benefits to that was
09:14.662 –> 09:19.451
[SPEAKER_02]: the transaction fee for bank transfer is much cheaper.
09:19.471 –> 09:22.696
[SPEAKER_02]: I think for us it was 1% versus 3% for cards.
09:24.079 –> 09:29.869
[SPEAKER_02]: Less cost of the call center because there’s less people calling in so I can’t pay for my cruise.
09:29.849 –> 09:41.103
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, and the monies in our bank much quicker because it’s banked to bank rather than sitting with Adrien for, I think, about, I don’t know, a month, 60 days waiting to be released in case of refunds.
09:41.143 –> 09:50.575
[SPEAKER_02]: So there’s huge commercial impact, as well as customers being happy, you know, but that wasn’t just it with Econ, that was across channels.
09:50.555 –> 10:10.403
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, I mean, you know, processes, obviously spend has got to be huge one, you know, are we wasting spend anywhere, which obviously would look at paid search and paid social straight away, you know, are we wasting money there when we could be improving our SEO, for example, are we paying agencies too much money?
10:10.383 –> 10:20.744
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, I’m not saying scrap them because there are benefits to them, like I touched upon earlier, the tech stack, do we have multiple pieces of technology doing the same thing?
10:20.824 –> 10:28.881
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, you might have merchandising built into your e-commerce platform, but you’re actually using another one.
10:28.861 –> 10:34.750
[SPEAKER_02]: which is the best one, you know, and are you wasting money having two bits of kit doing exactly the same thing?
10:34.791 –> 10:41.501
[SPEAKER_02]: So, yeah, looking at pretty much everything and anything and kind of putting that floorboards and seeing what’s underneath really.
10:42.223 –> 10:49.975
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I love from your art Jamie is that you started with the team and I think so often people think you go straight to the spreadsheets.
10:49.955 –> 11:07.052
[SPEAKER_01]: But actually, the thing about driving operational efficiency, I always think is that it’s both about optimizing what you’re already doing, but also finding out the stuff that you’ve got that you’re not taking advantage of, which the spreadsheets aren’t going to tell you, you know, like, where you’ve got two pieces of text acting the same thing.
11:07.032 –> 11:10.880
[SPEAKER_01]: The data analysis isn’t going to tell you that you need the person who works for the gang.
11:10.940 –> 11:26.813
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you know there’s a whole module on here or you need like all those of us listening who have run Recruitments in the past will know that you hired someone because they did have this really cool thing on their CV and you’ve forgotten about it by the time they start
11:26.793 –> 11:53.610
[SPEAKER_02]: or you just don’t take advantage of it because you don’t have the time and there’s other priorities and then you forget about it like you say but yeah I mean you know I’m not in any way saying that you should get rid of people just for the sake of saving money because actually asking them to do things differently or free up something else and take on something more strategic or something that has bigger impact that they are perfectly capable of doing
11:53.590 –> 12:03.544
[SPEAKER_02]: can actually, you know, outweigh the benefits of getting rid of somebody, you know, because actually they could be working smarter to generate more money rather than use save money because you’ve got rid of a salary.
12:04.125 –> 12:09.173
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn’t always work the way that you necessarily think at first glance.
12:09.233 –> 12:13.759
[SPEAKER_02]: So, and, you know, I’ve been the impact of some of those decisions unfortunately.
12:14.380 –> 12:17.785
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I don’t really want to see other people going through it either.
12:17.805 –> 12:18.366
[SPEAKER_02]: So,
12:18.447 –> 12:20.490
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, please people think more about the team.
12:21.292 –> 12:23.114
[SPEAKER_02]: See what you can do to optimize that first.
12:23.755 –> 12:31.928
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, having been through a few redundancy processes, both as the person, both as being amongst the team who at risk of redundancy.
12:31.948 –> 12:36.135
[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn’t technically on the grad scheme, and yes, this was many years ago, everybody.
12:36.115 –> 12:37.818
[SPEAKER_01]: and then doing it with my own team.
12:38.539 –> 12:49.617
[SPEAKER_01]: There is nothing that kills productivity, motivation, the intangible cost of any of those processes has horrendous anything you can do to avoid them.
12:49.697 –> 13:00.975
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean being deeply involved in it from either side of the coin is not fun, you know, either being one at risk or having to choose who goes at risk is,
13:00.955 –> 13:09.075
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s not a decision that you want to be forced to have to make really, but I guess it’s life at the end of the day, but yeah, if you can avoid it, I’d recommend it.
13:09.713 –> 13:34.050
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think a lot of the things you mentioned of those places you would look in the first instances for where to build the operational efficiency, or I think we can all agree we fail to do this, but we can probably agree with the theory, is that as our industry evolves, especially as the tech spaces evolving a lot at the moment, they are things which we should be checking on a regular basis, but we tend to forget.
13:34.030 –> 13:39.557
[SPEAKER_01]: So you mentioned about diverting money from your ad campaigns into SEO.
13:39.577 –> 13:43.421
[SPEAKER_01]: How often do we actually take that big strategic hold on?
13:43.762 –> 13:47.727
[SPEAKER_01]: Are we flogging a dead horse with, with meta these days?
13:47.947 –> 13:49.589
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it still working to the level it is?
13:49.689 –> 13:53.213
[SPEAKER_01]: Should we shift half the budget into a new ad channel or into SEO?
13:53.293 –> 13:58.840
[SPEAKER_01]: And the same thing with the tech stack with all the mergers and the developments going on at the moment.
13:58.820 –> 13:59.581
[SPEAKER_01]: that review.
13:59.601 –> 14:08.497
[SPEAKER_01]: In an ideal world, we’ve done a much more regular basis, but it does tend to be almost like the big stop sign comes up and I was, oh, maybe we should, maybe we should take a look.
14:08.858 –> 14:14.568
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, why have we got a hundred Google Drive subscriptions going on in the business of ten people?
14:14.768 –> 14:15.850
[SPEAKER_01]: What are we doing?
14:15.830 –> 14:36.927
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think, you know, sometimes looking at the modelling of how spend is working and where you’re spending it, I think can be hugely valuable and it is something that they’ve really started to look at at Monsoon, which was great because, you know, it would give you kind of day by day updates and say, actually, do you know what, this week, we need to be moving more money from
14:36.907 –> 14:42.414
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, maybe money from Meta to Google or vice versa, because actually it’s more effective here this week.
14:42.875 –> 14:49.924
[SPEAKER_02]: But obviously, you need to make sure that those data feeds into the system are accurate and correct, because otherwise it’s a bit of that crap-in crap-out.
14:50.504 –> 14:57.073
[SPEAKER_02]: So with things like AI, if you are putting, like, dirty data in, you’re going to get rubbish out.
14:57.613 –> 15:00.016
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, you need to make sure there’s no bias going on as well.
15:00.076 –> 15:05.243
[SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, in theory, you could
15:05.223 –> 15:08.511
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, I mean, we’ll probably touch on it a bit later.
15:08.551 –> 15:13.664
[SPEAKER_02]: But SEO, I think, is a completely, it’s not completely undervalued.
15:14.004 –> 15:22.405
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think people don’t always realise it’s important as it is, because if your site is really well optimized, ideally it’s
15:22.385 –> 15:35.181
[SPEAKER_02]: really well optimized for accessibility as well, which, you know, all counts and then actually that has an impact on your paid media search because the better quality your site is, and I believe this is still the way it works.
15:35.601 –> 15:39.466
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the less you’re going to spend per click to be the top of the rankings.
15:39.807 –> 15:45.013
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, in your quality scores better and you’ll rank better and all that kind of stuff.
15:45.554 –> 15:51.261
[SPEAKER_02]: So, actually by investing in SEO in the long term is actually going to benefit your other channels anyway.
15:51.241 –> 15:56.009
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, it’s all a bit chicken and egg tonics.
15:56.029 –> 16:08.891
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m not saying everybody just going cut your paid media, it’s been absolutely not, but do should be looking at it regularly and saying actually, are we spending wisely, have we found the right balance between volume and cost?
16:08.911 –> 16:16.624
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes you do have to pay money to spend on
16:16.604 –> 16:20.351
[SPEAKER_02]: because, you know, there’s multiple searches before people narrow things down.
16:20.371 –> 16:28.467
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I went for an insurance company a year ago, and we uncovered that people would do seven separate searches before they would actually take an action.
16:28.568 –> 16:35.862
[SPEAKER_02]: So they might start searching car insurance, or car insurance, Ford Fakers, car insurance, Ford Fakers.
16:35.842 –> 16:56.348
[SPEAKER_02]: over 50 contracts, forward focus over 50 in childhood, you know, they would do multiple searches and then they would actually get on and do a quote or something like that or pick the phone or, you know, they would actually then take an action but, you know, you have to sort of pay for those current trends or they’re the horrible expensive.
16:56.328 –> 17:08.751
[SPEAKER_02]: to filter people down, you know, everybody knows the long-tailed keywords of the cheaper ones and more cost effective in the long run, but you don’t always get the volume through them, so it is a bit of a balancing act.
17:09.102 –> 17:11.024
[SPEAKER_01]: and endless balancing out.
17:11.044 –> 17:20.934
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Jamie, you’ve given us a whole host of different areas to look at to find the right places to drive that efficiency, which of course, the answers will be different for every business.
17:21.014 –> 17:24.978
[SPEAKER_01]: But how do you go about making it happen?
17:25.038 –> 17:36.730
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I think there’s a, I always think when there’s an operational efficiency project on, there’s an expectation of fast changes.
17:36.710 –> 17:43.559
[SPEAKER_01]: or the research, as you’ve outlined, they’re whether it’s looking at the data, or whether it’s talking to the team or something else.
17:44.020 –> 17:52.812
[SPEAKER_01]: And there also has to be some element of sign-off or agreement on, you know, because there are only so many hours in a day, so you have to decide what to prioritize.
17:52.832 –> 17:54.955
[SPEAKER_01]: So how do you go about both?
17:55.306 –> 18:06.750
[SPEAKER_01]: making sure you’re doing the right things, the due diligence, I suppose, part of it, but also making impact fast, which I think are the kind of the two competing aims of an operational efficiency project.
18:06.967 –> 18:13.757
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, obviously subtitles you don’t actually need sign off because sometimes the smallest tweaks can have a huge impact.
18:13.798 –> 18:21.750
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, just cutting out three steps in a process, you know, could save you a couple of hours, remaining you’ve got more time to do other things.
18:21.830 –> 18:25.836
[SPEAKER_02]: So, it’s not always about getting sign off sometimes.
18:25.816 –> 18:55.722
[SPEAKER_02]: you know you can come in and go right okay well I need to overhaul XYZ and you know whoever you’re putting into it might just give you free rain to do that so if you’re lucky sometimes yeah you might need to say look I found this opportunity I’ve been here five minutes if I make this change what does that mean for XYZ you know because you know you making one change in your team might have huge impact in your area but it might really mess things up for somebody
18:55.702 –> 19:03.955
[SPEAKER_02]: generate, you know, 1,000 of more calls in the call center, which, you know, if they can’t cope with it, then you’re in debt with unhappy customers.
19:04.355 –> 19:08.782
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, making a change that makes things live easier for you in your team.
19:09.183 –> 19:13.509
[SPEAKER_02]: Great, but if you’ve made it live, it’s so much more difficult for everybody else.
19:14.090 –> 19:15.212
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s not going to help.
19:15.252 –> 19:16.073
[SPEAKER_02]: So,
19:16.053 –> 19:26.628
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, if you’re new in, very often you wouldn’t need to double check something because you don’t know the rest of the set up and and who else maybe needs to be consulted before you actually put it into place.
19:27.288 –> 19:29.652
[SPEAKER_02]: In terms of, you know, what would you prioritize?
19:30.753 –> 19:40.727
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, it’s a balance of quick wins as opposed to what’s going to deliver the biggest impact because the quick win might deliver the biggest impact, but actually,
19:40.707 –> 19:51.523
[SPEAKER_02]: The biggest impact might be delivered by something that takes a couple of weeks to do, you know, you do need to have enough information and facts to hand before you make those decisions.
19:52.244 –> 19:55.509
[SPEAKER_02]: But then, you know, as I say, a lot of that comes from having conversations.
19:55.589 –> 19:57.892
[SPEAKER_02]: So a lot of it stems down to communication.
19:57.952 –> 20:01.698
[SPEAKER_02]: And the way, I mean, I’ve come across it in several companies.
20:01.738 –> 20:04.342
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s like, well, that’s the way we’ve always done it, right?
20:04.362 –> 20:06.445
[SPEAKER_02]: But that doesn’t mean that’s the best way to do it.
20:06.425 –> 20:07.847
[SPEAKER_02]: I’ve found a quick way to do it.
20:07.927 –> 20:09.089
[SPEAKER_02]: Why can’t we do it?
20:09.189 –> 20:14.396
[SPEAKER_02]: Is there a particular reason as there are a person, a system, another process that’s holding up?
20:14.476 –> 20:25.171
[SPEAKER_02]: Do we need to go and talk to another team who also needs to change their process to smooth out the entire journey, rather than fixing one bit and then breaking something else?
20:25.211 –> 20:29.076
[SPEAKER_02]: Which is a bit like when you’re doing experimentation on the website, CRO.
20:29.617 –> 20:33.883
[SPEAKER_02]: I’ve been lucky enough to work with tools like
20:33.863 –> 20:35.565
[SPEAKER_02]: the impact of the change you’ve made.
20:35.645 –> 20:40.810
[SPEAKER_02]: So yes, it’s fixed the piece that you were looking to fix, but has it impacted somewhere else?
20:40.850 –> 20:47.297
[SPEAKER_02]: So you can either go, okay, right, we need to roll that back temporarily or actually we can fix that really easily.
20:47.317 –> 20:58.668
[SPEAKER_02]: So you can almost sanity check that you haven’t broken anything, but you can’t always do that with just changing a process because, you know, you need to find out how it affects everybody else.
20:59.168 –> 21:02.672
[SPEAKER_02]: Sort of the knock on effect maybe before and
21:03.125 –> 21:21.392
[SPEAKER_01]: I suppose there’s also an angle of having those conversations helps create a less siloed business, a business where there’s more visibility of what’s going on where people are working more closely together, which often is actually a root cause of some operational efficiency.
21:21.432 –> 21:30.145
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, as the web team built this personal, bought this personalisation tool, the marketing team bought this personalisation tool and 80% of what the team tools do is the same thing.
21:30.125 –> 21:34.799
[SPEAKER_01]: And now the IT team are having to build two separate integrations and all the data’s gone wrong.
21:35.300 –> 21:39.733
[SPEAKER_01]: So there’s an element of the process of an operational efficiency project.
21:40.676 –> 21:44.387
[SPEAKER_01]: Can help, I guess, future proof, the business for future efficiency?
21:44.637 –> 22:00.857
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and also it’s building relationships as well, you know, by having these various different conversations with different parts of the business, not only do you get to learn about how they work and information about things you didn’t even know existed or processes they do, but then you also find out their headaches.
22:00.837 –> 22:26.473
[SPEAKER_02]: which you know you can say or do you know what I came across this isn’t in another business I didn’t really get involved in it but this is what they did so actually inadvertently you could be helping them with something else just by passing on a bit of information so yeah I mean everyone says you know communications one of the biggest things that you can do but not everybody does it and yeah silos I think are probably the bait of a lot of people’s lives
22:26.453 –> 22:42.152
[SPEAKER_02]: I think most places are starting to change, certainly in the experience I’ve had in the last few businesses, but it is still a bit of a people just kind of get the heads down and work on what they’re doing, get things done, and then forget to tell people.
22:42.712 –> 22:47.398
[SPEAKER_02]: So like, look at what we’ve done as a team or this is what we’ve done as a department.
22:47.378 –> 22:52.708
[SPEAKER_02]: and people go, oh, great, you know, what we can borrow some of that, or I really like the way you’ve done that.
22:52.768 –> 22:58.218
[SPEAKER_02]: How did you get to that, you know, result, and then they can sort of transfer that learning into their own areas.
22:58.358 –> 23:02.365
[SPEAKER_02]: So, yeah, I just wish people would talk a bit more to be honest.
23:03.668 –> 23:04.670
[SPEAKER_02]: But you really know, nice.
23:05.070 –> 23:11.462
[SPEAKER_02]: And that goes for probably every part of everybody’s lives to be honest if they think there’d be a lot less problems if everybody talks a little bit more.
23:13.687 –> 23:18.632
[SPEAKER_00]: Ecommerce Masterplan is supported by some of the greatest companies in the Ecommerce sector.
23:18.752 –> 23:27.020
[SPEAKER_00]: Here’s a reminder of who they are.
23:27.040 –> 23:28.902
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s time for the top tips round.
23:31.545 –> 23:36.690
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I love this section because it gives me and I’ll list us some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
23:36.730 –> 23:38.452
[SPEAKER_01]: So Jamie are you ready for the top tips?
23:39.052 –> 23:39.913
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh yeah, go on them.
23:40.231 –> 23:41.673
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the book top tip.
23:41.793 –> 23:48.503
[SPEAKER_01]: If everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?
23:48.543 –> 23:53.451
[SPEAKER_01]: And you’ve already waved this at me via the video, so I’m fascinated to know what it is.
23:54.091 –> 24:03.285
[SPEAKER_02]: So it’s probably not what you would actually think, so it’s by Ed Kappel, who is one of the founders of Pixar.
24:03.265 –> 24:21.159
[SPEAKER_02]: and it’s good creativity ink and like I said to you earlier, I don’t write in books, they are pretty sacred but I’ve got little bookmarks and I’ve underlined so much stuff in here, it’s absolutely you know crazy, I mean it is just one sentence, as always how feedback is where did it’s crucial.
24:21.780 –> 24:22.962
[SPEAKER_02]: Super simple.
24:22.942 –> 24:49.793
[SPEAKER_02]: but you know it’s how you phrase it like is it constructive criticism or is it you did this wrong and that’s what broken that rather than next time you do this could you think of a better way to do it because unfortunately it’s you know mess something up for someone else just and you know been able to give that feedback without judgment just you know really the such great stuff in here at like yeah
24:50.262 –> 25:01.441
[SPEAKER_01]: Jamie, before we lose you to the bit, at least there’s you can’t see her right now, but she she is a beaming, flicking through the book, which you can probably hear and she’s put glasses on in order to actually be able to read it.
25:01.862 –> 25:03.745
[SPEAKER_02]: So I’ve got the wrong contact lenses in today.
25:05.027 –> 25:11.578
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think I love that recommendation partly because you’re so passionate about it, but also I love the fact that
25:11.963 –> 25:29.787
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s we’ve been talking about operational efficiency and the book recommendation is creativity in which almost feels like they don’t connect but they’re so interling are yeah they absolutely do because there is a lot of stuff about processes but it’s also the human process of like how you think about things and.
25:29.767 –> 25:31.871
[SPEAKER_02]: and how people become attached to their ideas.
25:31.891 –> 25:38.863
[SPEAKER_02]: So when you try and add to it and make it bigger and better, people get really upset because it doesn’t become their idea.
25:39.384 –> 25:42.289
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, there’s all sorts of really cool stuff in there.
25:42.369 –> 25:52.306
[SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, I haven’t actually finished reading it yet because I’ve gone back and scribbled all over it, but I think most people know and like at least one or two picks are filmed.
25:52.967 –> 25:53.007
[SPEAKER_02]: So
25:52.987 –> 26:20.530
[SPEAKER_02]: if there’s plenty of stories about how they came about some of the stories and how long they worked on certain things and how they fixed what they saw as the problems in it to you know make this actually really cool package at the end of it so yeah it’s not a typical boring business book is quite fun and yeah that there’s tons of stuff in it that you could you could almost open a page and find you know something to make you think differently in there it’s yeah it’s cool
26:20.510 –> 26:21.431
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that.
26:22.112 –> 26:27.178
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the traffic top tip which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn’t get the press?
26:27.299 –> 26:27.979
[SPEAKER_01]: It deserves.
26:28.720 –> 26:30.322
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, we kind of touched on this earlier.
26:30.463 –> 26:39.634
[SPEAKER_02]: I think SEO, although there has been a lot more fake on it in recent years, I think it has such a big impact on other channels inadvertently.
26:39.835 –> 26:46.483
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, if you’re right at the top of the rankings and someone seeing your ad on TV and just feeling lazy and types in your brand name,
26:46.463 –> 26:56.678
[SPEAKER_02]: and you pop up at the top and you’re not squashed to the bottom by five of the competitors and like so before it impacts on other channels like paid search and things as well.
26:56.718 –> 27:01.124
[SPEAKER_02]: So I like to see it as the foundation of all your other marketing efforts.
27:01.224 –> 27:10.037
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you’ve built a great site why not doing the best to get free slash cheap traffic to it without paying for it.
27:10.217 –> 27:14.243
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, I think that’s probably one of the ones I’d pick.
27:14.645 –> 27:16.087
[SPEAKER_01]: definitely agree with you on that.
27:16.247 –> 27:27.143
[SPEAKER_01]: Now the tool top tip, maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug in, a phone app, or just a wave working, is the record a little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day.
27:27.925 –> 27:29.927
[SPEAKER_02]: I would probably choose Trello, actually.
27:29.948 –> 27:36.417
[SPEAKER_02]: I use it in personal projects and stuff as well, but a guy that used to work with
27:36.397 –> 27:40.102
[SPEAKER_02]: he actually linked it in with all our IT tickets and stuff.
27:40.122 –> 27:42.825
[SPEAKER_02]: So he could automatically update things and send it through there.
27:42.925 –> 27:48.212
[SPEAKER_02]: It was absolutely nuts and he linked it up to all the designs for the CRO projects.
27:48.272 –> 27:52.037
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, I’m thinking he linked it up to about four different tools in the end.
27:52.057 –> 27:53.299
[SPEAKER_02]: It was just insane.
27:53.839 –> 27:55.581
[SPEAKER_02]: Georetic, it’s that’s where he linked it to.
27:56.222 –> 27:59.747
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, and it just visually looks quite fun.
27:59.787 –> 28:01.309
[SPEAKER_02]: You can click and drag things around.
28:01.349 –> 28:06.235
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s not exactly difficult to use.
28:06.502 –> 28:09.888
[SPEAKER_01]: excellent recommendation and finally the carbon top tip.
28:09.988 –> 28:14.016
[SPEAKER_01]: What’s your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store?
28:14.737 –> 28:24.375
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m not sure it’s my favorite way but it’s one that probably people don’t think about is checking your hosting company to see whether they use renewable energy.
28:24.355 –> 28:30.363
[SPEAKER_02]: Because obviously, you know, processing power for our website and AI and all that kind of stuff is huge.
28:30.383 –> 28:34.629
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we don’t still don’t really know the impact of all this AI processing power.
28:35.129 –> 28:39.395
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think you’re looking at your hosting company and seeing, you know, who’s that energy supply?
28:39.495 –> 28:40.517
[SPEAKER_02]: Was it renewable energy?
28:41.137 –> 28:44.642
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s a huge rate of kind of cut down on your carbon footprint.
28:45.247 –> 28:46.028
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that one.
28:46.348 –> 28:50.573
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s a once and done as well, you know, as much as you can.
28:50.593 –> 28:51.454
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah.
28:51.635 –> 28:51.815
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
28:52.175 –> 28:55.079
[SPEAKER_02]: Unless you obviously have to change hosting company for whatever reason.
28:55.119 –> 28:58.283
[SPEAKER_02]: But I guess if yours is pretty reliable, then you won’t need to.
28:58.463 –> 29:02.107
[SPEAKER_01]: But even if you do have to change hosting company, you do it once.
29:02.408 –> 29:05.391
[SPEAKER_01]: And you get the carbon benefit every single day.
29:05.812 –> 29:07.474
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s, um, yeah, love that one.
29:07.494 –> 29:08.735
[SPEAKER_01]: Does not get talked about enough.
29:08.755 –> 29:10.157
[SPEAKER_01]: So I’m really glad you brought that one up.
29:10.137 –> 29:21.679
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I came across an event that I went to and they were like, oh yeah, we’ve looked at our hosting company because they were looking at their kind of carbon neutral profile and how did they become sort of moved towards carbon zero.
29:22.080 –> 29:25.406
[SPEAKER_02]: And that was literally one of the things that I said that and it’s really kind of stuck with me.
29:25.787 –> 29:31.858
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s just not anything that you would normally think about because you think about retort from cardboard and
29:31.838 –> 29:45.038
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, waste and, you know, your business energy like is that renewable and all that kind of stuff and you never think about your suppliers as much, so yeah, I think that one could be an interesting thing to think about for people.
29:45.338 –> 29:45.939
[SPEAKER_01]: definitely.
29:45.959 –> 29:53.512
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Jamie, before we say good bye, could you please at the listeners know where they can find you and everything you’re up to on the web and social?
29:54.233 –> 30:01.947
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so the best place to find me is on LinkedIn, so it’s you know, all the slashes.coms and then it’s Jamie, which is J.A.
30:02.247 –> 30:03.850
[SPEAKER_02]: I. M. E. Dashhill.
30:04.611 –> 30:10.401
[SPEAKER_01]: And you are available to help people with operational efficiency, I believe, at the moment and other projects.
30:10.499 –> 30:24.373
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, currently I’m available to help with e-commerce, digital marketing, customer lifecycle, any operational efficiencies, pretty much probably whatever the problem is, I can probably help you with it in some way or another.
30:24.539 –> 30:34.234
[SPEAKER_01]: Awesome, so everyone head to Jamie Hill on LinkedIn and that’s J-A-I-M-E-Hill in LinkedIn, URL, if you want to go that route.
30:35.456 –> 30:40.243
[SPEAKER_01]: Jamie, thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing such great insights with us.
30:40.323 –> 30:41.024
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s been awesome.
30:41.785 –> 30:42.787
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, thanks for inviting me out.
30:42.807 –> 30:43.628
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s been great fun.
30:49.143 –> 30:52.388
[SPEAKER_01]: What great insights from Jamie, they’re really loved talking to about that.
30:52.408 –> 30:59.559
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it’s really fascinating how you think ups and efficiency and you don’t necessarily think it starts with the people.
30:59.659 –> 31:10.115
[SPEAKER_01]: But the theme throughout everything Jamie took us through there was it’s all about the people and their skill sets and their hidden talents and their experience of the job.
31:10.215 –> 31:14.121
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you want to find where the waste is, I bet your people already know.
31:14.101 –> 31:17.645
[SPEAKER_01]: and then building those relationships across team, cross company.
31:17.705 –> 31:20.409
[SPEAKER_01]: So you’ve got that future proved element.
31:20.429 –> 31:23.012
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you want help with that kind of stuff, do you get in contact with Jamie?
31:23.052 –> 31:30.040
[SPEAKER_01]: I know she’s currently looking for permanent or contract roles, or at least she was when we were recording this.
31:30.060 –> 31:35.046
[SPEAKER_01]: She may have been snapped up by now, but either way, getting contact with her if you want help with that kind of thing.
31:35.026 –> 31:42.998
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, to get your hands on the notes on this episode, including the top tips and the links to what we mentioned, then head over to ecommercemasterplanned.com.
31:43.018 –> 31:53.435
[SPEAKER_01]: You can also use our direct episode short links, just put ECMP.info forward slash the number of this episode into the URL bar, and you’ll be redirected straight to the right episode page.
31:53.915 –> 31:55.939
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you get to the website, go on.
31:56.359 –> 31:57.721
[SPEAKER_01]: Add yourself to our email list.
31:57.741 –> 32:00.105
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you want to get our newsletter too.
32:00.085 –> 32:16.605
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, if you like this episode, then make sure you check out Episode 561, which is our very first ever what would you do, which is what would you do if you were to take over an e-commerce business in the 10 to 25 million pound range.
32:16.966 –> 32:19.749
[SPEAKER_01]: Fascinating chat that one, well worth a listen.
32:20.390 –> 32:28.860
[SPEAKER_01]: You can find that and all are what would you do, episodes at ECMP.info-w-w-y-d.
32:28.840 –> 32:33.345
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for tuning in to this and every episode of the e-commerce master plan podcast.
32:33.725 –> 32:44.216
[SPEAKER_01]: I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help e-commerce business owners just like you to succeed and thrive with your businesses, including progressing along the path to net zero.
32:45.097 –> 32:50.964
[SPEAKER_01]: So, if you know someone this show can help please tell them to listen to the e-commerce master plan podcast.
32:51.244 –> 32:54.207
[SPEAKER_01]: However, great week and don’t forget to keep optimizing
32:57.072 –> 33:00.482
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to the e-commerce Master Plan podcast.
33:00.943 –> 33:06.238
[SPEAKER_00]: Find out more at e-commercemasterplanned.com Slash podcast.
34 min
November 17, 2025eCommerce MasterPlan | 569: From Bedroom Startup to £15 Million: The Cheeky Panda Story with Chris Forbes
Chris Forbes is the co-founder at Cheeky Panda, leading the bamboo revolution selling toilet paper, period products, kitchen roll and more. Founded in 2016 they now sell via multiple international Shopify sites, and a plethora of wholesale and marketplace locations. Turnover is now £15,000,000 a year, and did I mention they’re a B Corp?

In this episode, Chris Forbes reveals how The Cheeky Panda turned a bold eco idea into a £15M brand loved by customers and retailers alike. From smart scaling moves to making sustainability fun, Chris shares the mindset and marketing strategies behind their incredible growth.

Hit PLAY to hear:
How The Cheeky Panda grew from a bedroom idea to a £15M sustainable brand
Chris Forbes’ biggest lesson: what to focus on (and what to outsource) when scaling
Why sustainability alone isn’t a USP anymore — and what actually sells now
How a giant panda costume helped them win fans and supermarket deals
The secret behind their omnichannel growth across Shopify, Tesco, and more
What it really takes to turn purpose into profit — and stay ahead of the competition

Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[04:24] “Sustainable Innovation with Purpose”
[07:36] Expanding Bamboo Product Range
[12:01] Supermarkets Prioritizing Sustainable Suppliers
[13:47] Pricing and Quality Drive Success
[16:12] “Cheeky Panda: Fun & Friendly”
[21:14] Channel Strategies: Pros and Challenges
[22:36] Listen to Chris’s Top Tips!

Full episode notes here: https://ecmp.info/569
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WEBVTT
00:00.031 –> 00:11.461
[SPEAKER_02]: Don’t reinvent the wheel non-core things like finance and operations, you know, just use regular systems where you really got to excel as a brand is creating great quality products and making fun and engaging marketing.
00:14.164 –> 00:27.496
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast, air to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business, cutting through the highly to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond.
00:27.516 –> 00:29.818
[SPEAKER_01]: Here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
00:32.600 –> 00:34.103
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome.
00:34.143 –> 00:35.305
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s great to have you here.
00:35.385 –> 00:39.211
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
00:40.333 –> 00:49.389
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I love to start some of our episodes with a little shout out to the listeners who are kind enough to take the time to post a review of the show and I’ve got one of those to do right now.
00:49.970 –> 00:56.481
[SPEAKER_00]: Huge thank you to Lynn Power who left this lovely review on pod chaser for us.
00:56.461 –> 01:21.895
[SPEAKER_00]: a great conversation getting into the nuts and bolts of running an e-commerce business, great advice for anyone interested in e-commerce data-sea business marketing and more, well that’s all of you, so you thankfully tuned into the right place, Lynn, thank you so much for that review, and if you, listening right now, would like a shout out at the start of an episode, then go to ECMP.info forward slash review to find out how to leave us a review.
01:21.875 –> 01:41.453
[SPEAKER_00]: In this episode we are catching up with a phenomenal business, they lead the lights in the world of sustainability, they’ve grown from an idea in a bedroom to a full omnichannel business selling via ludicrously large number of channels and into different countries.
01:41.433 –> 01:55.267
[SPEAKER_00]: doing now £15 million a year in sales and we’re lucky enough to get to talk to one of the co-founders to Chris about how they’ve gone about building that, how they kind of the key tenets that have got them there.
01:55.287 –> 02:00.872
[SPEAKER_00]: He’s also dropping loads of nuggets of clever ideas and things which you can copy as we go through there.
02:00.892 –> 02:02.414
[SPEAKER_00]: So really cool episode.
02:02.734 –> 02:04.476
[SPEAKER_00]: Huge thanks to Chris for coming on the show.
02:04.976 –> 02:09.060
[SPEAKER_00]: Please make sure you listen to the end so you don’t miss out on his top tips which are really good.
02:09.040 –> 02:11.043
[SPEAKER_00]: and you’ll get my own take on this episode as well.
02:11.323 –> 02:22.180
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, there’s a little bit of background chatter from Chris’ team who clearly are very excited to be working with Chris and at the brand, but please forgive us for that.
02:23.041 –> 02:25.885
[SPEAKER_00]: We tried to get rid of as much of it as we cam its a little bit still left in.
02:32.007 –> 02:34.089
[SPEAKER_00]: And now to introduce our special guest.
02:34.569 –> 02:43.737
[SPEAKER_00]: Chris Forbes is the co-founder at Cheeky Panda, leading the Bambi Revolution selling toilet paper, period products, kitchen roll and more.
02:44.218 –> 02:52.945
[SPEAKER_00]: Founded in 2016, they now sell via multiple international Shopify sites and a plethora of wholesale and marketplace locations.
02:53.466 –> 02:59.331
[SPEAKER_00]: Turnover is now £15 million a year, and did I mention that there are B-Corp as well.
02:59.531 –> 03:00.732
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, Chris.
03:00.998 –> 03:02.540
[SPEAKER_02]: Hi, Chloe, I love it to be here.
03:02.580 –> 03:04.363
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for inviting me along this onto the show.
03:04.884 –> 03:06.306
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m awesome to have you here.
03:06.366 –> 03:10.192
[SPEAKER_00]: Big fan of your products, your business, and what you’re doing, so it’s really cool to have you here.
03:10.212 –> 03:13.017
[SPEAKER_00]: But how did you get started in e-commerce?
03:13.057 –> 03:16.342
[SPEAKER_00]: Was Cheeky Pandey your first foray or was it before?
03:16.742 –> 03:21.690
[SPEAKER_02]: So, actually, my first them foray into e-commerce was with a…
03:21.670 –> 03:36.067
[SPEAKER_02]: website called phishingnet.com, which was back in 1996 and we decided to map out the Scottish River System and then sell services like hotels and their accommodation and fishing tackle.
03:36.428 –> 03:42.655
[SPEAKER_02]: So, and that was actually, at one point, the second most visited fishing site in the entire world.
03:42.775 –> 03:44.978
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I
03:44.958 –> 03:46.460
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, unfortunately, it didn’t quite make it.
03:46.480 –> 03:48.824
[SPEAKER_02]: It was in that sort of dot-com boom and bust stage of things.
03:48.884 –> 03:52.510
[SPEAKER_02]: It never actually got any funding, but it just had absolutely loads of traffic.
03:52.530 –> 03:59.961
[SPEAKER_02]: So, um, and yeah, I’ve sort of always kind of been very sort of technically minded and, uh, into e-commerce ever since then.
03:59.981 –> 04:02.545
[SPEAKER_02]: So, yes, it could, could fairly your dears now.
04:02.947 –> 04:03.528
[SPEAKER_00]: very cool.
04:03.548 –> 04:06.612
[SPEAKER_00]: So how come you decided to start cheeky panda?
04:06.632 –> 04:14.162
[SPEAKER_00]: Because almost 10 years ago now, which was kind of at the very beginning of the eco consumer journey.
04:14.743 –> 04:16.065
[SPEAKER_00]: Was that your primary reason?
04:16.145 –> 04:16.966
[SPEAKER_00]: Was the ecology?
04:17.006 –> 04:19.129
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it the green side of it?
04:19.189 –> 04:20.671
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it the financial side of it?
04:20.691 –> 04:23.134
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you just have a desire to make kitchen roll?
04:23.875 –> 04:26.018
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, so, I mean,
04:25.998 –> 04:38.833
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess it was more the is an original idea, so like a lot of ideas because so many people have done so many different ideas, like a lot of ideas are twist of lemon and original theme or like a copy.
04:39.434 –> 04:54.672
[SPEAKER_02]: The fact that this was an original idea of taking the world’s fastest growing plant and making it into tissue which no one had done in Europe before us, that’s what really excited me and you know I lived in the island of Scotland so you know I’ve got a good appreciation
04:54.652 –> 04:57.476
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you think you sort of think, you know, what sort of legacy do you want?
04:57.496 –> 05:08.913
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I was running a business as a head hunting business, which was making slightly rich people richer and as happy as it was for them, you know, this, this definitely had a lot more meaning.
05:08.933 –> 05:16.123
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, I did it mainly for the sustainability angle, but I always thought there was a decent business in it as well.
05:16.644 –> 05:22.633
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you think it would get this big and this successful was that you’re always your plan or have you just kind of seen how it goes?
05:23.238 –> 05:27.463
[SPEAKER_02]: I always believed that the market was right for disruption.
05:27.503 –> 05:32.009
[SPEAKER_02]: We had businesses that have been doing the same thing for fairly years.
05:32.069 –> 05:48.891
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think in any sector where you looked at, like, like, I code that moment or digitization of that, or blackberry, and in the end of the Apple, when you actually have things that are better products, I do believe that the market will shift.
05:48.871 –> 05:59.282
[SPEAKER_02]: but it’s always a question of time and if it’s you that it helps make that shift so lots of risk but I always believed it would become a decent size business and we’re now about 1% of the UK retail tissue market.
06:00.023 –> 06:00.824
[SPEAKER_00]: That’s mad isn’t it?
06:00.844 –> 06:02.926
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s still so much potential.
06:03.727 –> 06:07.691
[SPEAKER_02]: Well we’ve got 1%, but there’s 99% we don’t have so it’s likely.
06:07.751 –> 06:11.655
[SPEAKER_02]: I think even like a couple of more percent is probably we’re not aiming to become the market leader.
06:11.695 –> 06:18.743
[SPEAKER_02]: I don’t think that’s realistic but you know I think the fruit fruit time we could definitely get to 5% to 10% of the market
06:19.280 –> 06:20.183
[SPEAKER_00]: how exciting.
06:20.704 –> 06:26.380
[SPEAKER_00]: Now tell us that let’s go through the nuts and bolts of the business for anyone who’s not hugely familiar with it.
06:27.122 –> 06:31.635
[SPEAKER_00]: What are the products you’re currently selling, what’s your or current ranges?
06:32.037 –> 06:33.920
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have lots of different products.
06:33.940 –> 06:41.470
[SPEAKER_02]: We’ve got some really nice D to C products which would be like the toy that we’re all which is on subscription Great thing about toy that tissue everyone uses it every day.
06:41.531 –> 06:49.542
[SPEAKER_02]: So it’s a high repeat product Facial tissues again highly use kitchen towel We’ve done sanitary products which we launched earlier this year.
06:49.602 –> 06:58.635
[SPEAKER_02]: That’s been really successful and total We’ve got about 35 different skews and yet it’s an nice play and everything’s made out of bamboo and everything is yet disposable
06:59.189 –> 07:02.895
[SPEAKER_00]: And you said the D to C range, so is there a separate B to B range?
07:03.435 –> 07:04.437
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, we do do.
07:05.458 –> 07:19.780
[SPEAKER_02]: We’ve got an only channel business, so we do supply stuff like antiles, system roles, which we’ve sort of more finding like office environments or like stadiums or sort of larger sort of industrial areas like the airports, for example.
07:20.030 –> 07:23.294
[SPEAKER_00]: to go different reformating of the same core product.
07:23.314 –> 07:31.442
[SPEAKER_02]: And then it’s still 100% bamboo instead of maybe 200 sheets on your big rolls you’ve got more like 2,000 sheets.
07:32.203 –> 07:35.547
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no, how did you work at a which point to expand the range?
07:36.448 –> 07:44.957
[SPEAKER_02]: I think a lot of it, particularly in the beginning, a lot of it, we started off with toilet tissue and then we had customers say, and to us, well, can you make special tissue?
07:45.173 –> 07:50.180
[SPEAKER_02]: and we were like, well, you know, it’s going to be good quality to shoot, so it’ll make good quality official tissue.
07:50.641 –> 07:52.804
[SPEAKER_02]: So we are a lot of it within in the early stages.
07:52.824 –> 07:55.968
[SPEAKER_02]: We were sort of led by consumer feedback.
07:56.249 –> 08:02.678
[SPEAKER_02]: And then in some cases we work retailers or we work with other distributors and then they sort of start requesting other types of products.
08:02.698 –> 08:08.346
[SPEAKER_02]: So we just sort of expanded the range based upon do we think there’s a big enough market in it for us.
08:08.326 –> 08:09.428
[SPEAKER_02]: Does it fit with our brand?
08:09.448 –> 08:13.314
[SPEAKER_02]: And if it does, and it’s made it a bamboo, then that’s absolutely something that we’ll consider.
08:13.374 –> 08:19.143
[SPEAKER_02]: Not all ideas made it, we’ve had a couple of field products, and yeah, some super successful ones as well.
08:19.965 –> 08:20.626
[SPEAKER_00]: Very cool.
08:20.866 –> 08:23.650
[SPEAKER_00]: And what’s the team look like these days?
08:23.711 –> 08:26.635
[SPEAKER_00]: Because your team must have grown so much over the years?
08:27.356 –> 08:35.970
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I mean, like we started off from the bedroom, myself and Julie, my wife, you know, she’s a CEO, a majority shareholder of
08:36.153 –> 09:04.337
[SPEAKER_02]: We then did the Facebook thing which was kind of build a team in the house and then she got pregnant so we had to move out the house and then we left and she had offices and eventually we ended up in our current home which has got about very people in the UK and then we’ve got a small team in five people in China which helped to work with our manufacturers and suppliers over there because bamboo grows best in China so that’s where our products come from.
09:04.874 –> 09:08.011
[SPEAKER_00]: And how do you, presumably, you’re outsourcing some things?
09:08.051 –> 09:11.509
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you decide what to outsource and what to keep within the business?
09:12.046 –> 09:13.647
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we’re not aware of our business.
09:14.068 –> 09:15.950
[SPEAKER_02]: We’re not our manufacturing plant business.
09:16.030 –> 09:19.333
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the good thing is just try to stay in your lane.
09:19.373 –> 09:22.475
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that’s good advice is don’t try to go into great.
09:23.096 –> 09:25.318
[SPEAKER_02]: Or certainly, if you go into great, you have to do it at scale.
09:26.439 –> 09:30.042
[SPEAKER_02]: If we built a factory, then we would have spent all the money before.
09:30.623 –> 09:34.226
[SPEAKER_02]: We got to a size where we would be able to use the capacity of the factory.
09:34.286 –> 09:42.053
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think it don’t reinvent the wheel non core things.
09:42.033 –> 09:48.903
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, but where you really got to Excel as a brand is creating great quality products and them making fun engaging marketing.
09:49.624 –> 09:54.531
[SPEAKER_00]: So is that what that’s what the team, the 30 people in had us office a day now all about product and marketing?
09:54.991 –> 10:02.001
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, we are probably about 10 people are sort of sitting in finance, operations and sustainability, and then the rest would be in sort of sales and marketing.
10:02.662 –> 10:04.885
[SPEAKER_00]: And you have a specific sustainability team.
10:05.371 –> 10:13.341
[SPEAKER_02]: We have one individual that’s full-time in that role and then we all chip in as well, you know, part of being a B-corp.
10:13.361 –> 10:23.714
[SPEAKER_00]: I find that fascinating because you would think the further down the B-corp journey you go, the less there would be to do, you know, you can kind of like see when people begin on the sustainability or B-corp journey.
10:23.734 –> 10:30.923
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s like right, we’re going to designate a person to managing this the first time or maybe the second time we go through the process.
10:31.426 –> 10:43.191
[SPEAKER_00]: but the fact that actually to keep on top of it a business who has sustainability in their core from day one, you need that person who owns it, even in year 10.
10:43.323 –> 10:43.904
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
10:43.924 –> 10:46.146
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean sustainability is an evolving journey, right?
10:46.306 –> 10:57.679
[SPEAKER_02]: So just because you’ve done something and you’ve got like a tick box, in terms of like, you know, we recently got Goldicovadas, which we were already proud of, which is used by a lot of the big companies to evaluate how good customers are supplier.
10:58.360 –> 11:04.687
[SPEAKER_02]: So we will always be given sort of like the quest and, you know, like carbon reporting is something that we have to do every sort of tree.
11:04.707 –> 11:07.390
[SPEAKER_02]: So there’s constant workflow
11:07.370 –> 11:35.554
[SPEAKER_02]: things that we need to stay on top of and you know that it needs a full-time dedicated resource to be able to just manage that and in many instances it also takes quite a lot of the other teams time as well because it’s you know operations have to get involved finances to get involved the rest of the way the team has to get involved and you know as part of a core part of the business so we all enjoy it isn’t it we never get any grumbalings or our sustainability you know
11:36.260 –> 11:53.786
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Chris, you mentioned there about how you’re constantly working on the sustainability and how big businesses are more and more asking for these factors and these guarantees and marks and awards, et cetera, before they purchase from you.
11:53.806 –> 11:58.734
[SPEAKER_00]: So, is that one of the things you needed to get in line to be able to get into the big supermarket?
11:58.814 –> 12:00.917
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I know you’ve been doing a lot on that this year.
12:01.218 –> 12:10.157
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so all the big supermarkets are now using eco-virus or similar tools to assess the quality of a supplier.
12:10.458 –> 12:13.364
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, it is important.
12:13.384 –> 12:17.252
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think, you know, as we go forward, and I look back to 2016.
12:17.232 –> 12:18.373
[SPEAKER_02]: There was none of this, right?
12:18.393 –> 12:20.215
[SPEAKER_02]: So there was no framework or anything like that.
12:20.796 –> 12:25.061
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it is becoming, you know, more important, you know, and there’s much from a governance point of view.
12:25.101 –> 12:30.947
[SPEAKER_02]: We, you know, we’ve got one large client that basically uses sustainability, you know, implementing it.
12:31.508 –> 12:42.700
[SPEAKER_02]: As a way to mitigate risk, so that if you have, if you’re doing the right thing and buying the right products, then even if laws change in a particular country, like sort of Sweden changes their laws or Denmark changes their laws,
12:42.680 –> 12:52.088
[SPEAKER_02]: If you’re a company, then you don’t need to change your whole supply chain or a higher and army of consultants and to change everything because you’re already ahead of what that legislation might look like.
12:52.108 –> 12:59.735
[SPEAKER_02]: Where you end up in more troubles, where you’re always firefighting, or the brought on a plastic ban, or no, we need to get rid of all these plastics at an our business.
13:00.536 –> 13:11.185
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you’re kind of sort of forward thinking and sort of thing actually, we can see down the pipe, we don’t want chemicals in our business, we don’t want these plastic
13:11.165 –> 13:15.190
[SPEAKER_02]: you’re less likely to have to spend a lot more money at that time.
13:15.891 –> 13:20.797
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that’s such a clever way of looking at the sustainability activity.
13:20.837 –> 13:30.489
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s not just sitting around waiting for the government to make it, you know, it’s pretty easy to see the writing on the wall of where they’re going to be sending us all as businesses and as consumers.
13:30.930 –> 13:38.539
[SPEAKER_00]: So to be keeping ahead of it makes sense and so I guess for you as a business who’ve been ahead of the curve for so long that must
13:38.519 –> 13:47.432
[SPEAKER_00]: give you a slightly better chance when it comes to some of the big deals and the negotiations that are going on because you can tick those boxes for your customers.
13:47.792 –> 13:57.446
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think at the end of the day, you can tick the boxes and you can have all the right credentials, but essentially it’s all going to come down to the quality of the products in the price.
13:57.867 –> 14:07.260
[SPEAKER_02]: You’ll probably be given about 20% variation away from the mean in terms of what price would be, but as soon as you start to drift outside of that
14:07.240 –> 14:09.002
[SPEAKER_02]: you’re just going to become a very niche product.
14:09.042 –> 14:10.464
[SPEAKER_02]: And listen, don’t get me wrong.
14:10.484 –> 14:17.653
[SPEAKER_02]: There’s lots of categories in business where you can absolutely be a niche product and you can make lots of money and it can be a very, very nice business.
14:18.194 –> 14:22.019
[SPEAKER_02]: But certain categories like tissue, you need to kind of be a mainstream business in order to make it work.
14:22.479 –> 14:30.970
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, you kind of still need to be very conscious, you need to be competitive in your pricing despite having all the credentials and of an upgrade brand.
14:31.422 –> 14:42.937
[SPEAKER_00]: So something I mal a lot myself on, which we’ve discussed a fair few times on this podcast, is whether or not being sustainable is still a USP, which is kind of what we’re drifting into talking about here.
14:42.957 –> 14:45.801
[SPEAKER_00]: So let’s slap up the words, USP.
14:46.662 –> 14:50.707
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think there’s a space for sustainability as a USP anymore?
14:50.747 –> 14:55.033
[SPEAKER_00]: Or do you think you now, as cheeky panda, have a different USP?
14:55.520 –> 15:00.849
[SPEAKER_02]: I would say that it’s less of a USP now, where it might have been five years ago.
15:01.751 –> 15:03.554
[SPEAKER_02]: I think people are expecting sustainability.
15:03.714 –> 15:10.947
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the general 50% of consumers will not buy products are understandable.
15:10.927 –> 15:16.031
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, you a large part of, you know, just basically saying it’s, you’re going to cut that mark out.
15:16.472 –> 15:21.796
[SPEAKER_02]: So then it’s all about, okay, but then how do you take that sort of mainstream consumer and how do you attract it?
15:22.097 –> 15:28.002
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think you then start really coming into, you know, your messaging and the quality of products.
15:28.042 –> 15:34.087
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that’s probably we lean much more into quality and softness and strength of tissue.
15:34.127 –> 15:40.933
[SPEAKER_02]: Then we do, we don’t lead with sustainability anymore.
15:41.369 –> 15:47.979
[SPEAKER_00]: And you mentioned before we got on this call that you’ve just launched in Morrison’s and Tescoes.
15:48.160 –> 15:50.003
[SPEAKER_00]: So huge congratulations for that.
15:50.463 –> 15:57.855
[SPEAKER_00]: But you also mentioned there that messaging is a big part of what you do, trying to get the right message in front of the consumer.
15:57.875 –> 16:01.661
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know you did some slightly zany things to celebrate those launches.
16:02.302 –> 16:03.664
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that,
16:03.644 –> 16:13.016
[SPEAKER_00]: humanizing of the brand that amusement value of the brand is that a key part of the USP as well to help you stand out in the market.
16:13.237 –> 16:15.059
[SPEAKER_02]: Cheeky pandas are family brand.
16:15.479 –> 16:21.207
[SPEAKER_02]: There’s nothing that’s hard enough in the world right now, politics and cost-of-living crisis and stuff like that.
16:21.267 –> 16:24.111
[SPEAKER_02]: You don’t need someone beating you over the head for a stick or a sustainability.
16:25.452 –> 16:26.674
[SPEAKER_02]: You almost wanted it to be fun.
16:26.694 –> 16:33.583
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I was kind of wanting it to be this like a lovable friend where you can sort of say in my house, I’ve got this thing and it feels like cuddly.
16:33.563 –> 16:37.949
[SPEAKER_02]: because it’s a panda, and it’s friendly, and that’s really how we see our brand.
16:37.969 –> 16:46.420
[SPEAKER_02]: And we can have a lot of fun with it, and as you alluded to there on our Instagram, we’ve got a panda with a trolley being chased by the Tesco Supermarket Manager.
16:46.801 –> 17:02.001
[SPEAKER_02]: So that was a little bit hilarious, and I think, you know, if you’ve got like a giant panda, as a mascot, and you know, you’re a brand-collar cheeky panda, you can have a lot of fun with it, and I think bringing a smile to people’s faces is probably one of the best things you can have
17:02.504 –> 17:06.950
[SPEAKER_00]: And so much more interesting than just kind of one of those press release Instagram posts.
17:07.450 –> 17:08.712
[SPEAKER_00]: We’re now available in Tesco.
17:08.932 –> 17:09.292
[SPEAKER_00]: Marvelous.
17:09.333 –> 17:14.459
[SPEAKER_00]: No, give me the panda being chased by the manager with a trolley around the supermarket.
17:14.479 –> 17:17.122
[SPEAKER_00]: That’s what what’s going to stick in the customer’s mind, isn’t it?
17:17.182 –> 17:18.143
[SPEAKER_00]: That’s what we’re going to do.
17:18.164 –> 17:23.450
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it must have been a challenge for our market manager who was in the costume at the time.
17:23.470 –> 17:27.415
[SPEAKER_02]: Prishing a troll, you would be like, I know, but it’s hilarious.
17:28.222 –> 17:30.947
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you flip a coin to see who had to go in the cost?
17:31.147 –> 17:32.550
[SPEAKER_00]: We were all being in that cost, actually.
17:32.570 –> 17:38.380
[SPEAKER_02]: I’ve been in that cost room, you know, as far as Colin has part of the team.
17:39.422 –> 17:41.466
[SPEAKER_00]: So what, what have you got planned?
17:41.746 –> 17:45.673
[SPEAKER_00]: What’s coming up in the business that’s your big focus now?
17:45.991 –> 17:56.029
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, really interesting stats that we have was like in the UK we’ve got about 33% brand awareness and when you get to over 50% you become a household name.
17:56.730 –> 18:03.222
[SPEAKER_02]: So we’re sort of tipping now, so we’ll we’ll hit in the next six to 12 months we’ll become a household name.
18:03.963 –> 18:07.189
[SPEAKER_02]: So I guess like when you start out at a business in your bedroom,
18:07.169 –> 18:37.007
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you always kind of sort of dream of kind of being like a household name and and to sort of see that that’s that’s happening is such an amazing feeling and you know, the fact we sold 86 million toilet rolls last year and five million different products, you know, it just shows the size of the number of people that I’ve actually embraced our products in our range and I think that that’s that’s just so rewarding and to know them out of treasing plastic and carbon that we’ve saved as part of people making those purchases and decisions it’s it’s just exceptionally rewarding.
18:37.696 –> 18:40.983
[SPEAKER_00]: that start of becoming a household name.
18:41.524 –> 18:49.920
[SPEAKER_00]: I had no idea you could actually track that, but that must be, I mean, I think if I was you, I’d have almost like a lie feed up on the wall of the office.
18:50.301 –> 18:51.544
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it’s gonna 34, 35.
18:51.564 –> 18:54.089
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, you have to be honest.
18:54.149 –> 18:58.337
[SPEAKER_02]: We get the data from you guys, because that’s one of the better ways to do it.
18:58.317 –> 19:15.092
[SPEAKER_02]: So, because it does it across the country, so you can sort of see different demographics where we index higher in the southeast and lessen the north, whether we’ve got less distribution, but now that we’re getting distribution further up into north west and south east and into Scotland, then we’ll start to see that tipping.
19:15.132 –> 19:16.673
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you have to pay for it every time.
19:16.733 –> 19:22.338
[SPEAKER_02]: So, it would be a very, very expensive to keep paying for all these uGov service, just to see at which point we tap.
19:22.378 –> 19:25.962
[SPEAKER_02]: I think maybe you sort of like one every six months, isn’t it?
19:26.202 –> 19:26.502
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it
19:26.785 –> 19:33.451
[SPEAKER_00]: And presumably the rate that that percentage increases is exponential.
19:34.292 –> 19:46.202
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m guessing to get from 33 to 50 should be, if you don’t screw something up, whatever, then it should be easier to do that than it was to get from 20 to 33.
19:46.462 –> 19:48.424
[SPEAKER_00]: I haven’t got the message right there.
19:48.444 –> 19:51.427
[SPEAKER_02]: 100% and getting to 10% is probably the hardest thing.
19:52.007 –> 19:54.970
[SPEAKER_02]: And then when you start to get the solution, you start to get one of them.
19:54.950 –> 20:24.231
[SPEAKER_02]: and then when you get distribution then it’s kind of people see it more often and then they sort of reckon isn’t and consumers have to see things free to seven times in order for them to make a purchase so you know all things that we do kind of makes an impact in that whether it’s seeing it in a local store or seeing it online or seeing a Facebook ad or seeing you know an Instagram post or here in someone else talk about it you know these are all things that just build
20:24.211 –> 20:28.459
[SPEAKER_02]: you know that trust in that brand visibility before people can make sort of purchase in this season.
20:28.479 –> 20:44.430
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is the science to it and it does take time and effort and you know some people get very lucky on TikTok and just overnight become a overnight phenomenon but you know for for for for for for most businesses is really have to kind of work work quite hard at it to get to to this point.
20:45.001 –> 20:54.229
[SPEAKER_00]: And as an omnichannel business co-founder, do you care what channel the sale comes from?
20:54.269 –> 21:00.214
[SPEAKER_00]: Or is it about overall consumers reached overall number of products sold?
21:00.295 –> 21:07.501
[SPEAKER_00]: And so long as the channels make financial sense and strategic sense, you’re not too worried where the sale comes from?
21:07.681 –> 21:14.367
[SPEAKER_00]: Or do you prioritize one channel over another when it comes to your own
21:14.684 –> 21:41.805
[SPEAKER_02]: Every channel’s got its pros and cons, so like you know if he just said sort of five years ago D to C was easy is the best channel because cost of acquisition was low, now we’re Google and Metter, you know cost of acquisition is very high and there’s lots of competition and cost of acquisition So yeah, while you own the data and that’s great that you own the data and you’ve got customer stuff and you can upsell and do lots of creative things with your customers It’s become a sort of margin challenge to keep building that top it’s not just you can just add an easy formula
21:41.785 –> 21:42.586
[SPEAKER_02]: in retail.
21:42.606 –> 21:45.470
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s a slightly different game, but it’s more like mass market.
21:46.011 –> 21:52.360
[SPEAKER_02]: So each channel has got an out 60% of people in my category by their toilet tissue from the grocery.
21:52.841 –> 21:58.489
[SPEAKER_02]: So I’m not going to get that 60% to switch to go buy online, though they’ll buy it in the channel that they feel happy is to buy it.
21:59.130 –> 22:03.416
[SPEAKER_02]: So you know, for us it’s all about being in the channel that’s someone’s to buy, having that availability.
22:03.957 –> 22:07.742
[SPEAKER_02]: And if they got their availability then hopefully they choose
22:10.675 –> 22:15.508
[SPEAKER_01]: E-commerce most at land is supported by some of the greatest companies in the E-commerce sector.
22:15.648 –> 22:26.035
[SPEAKER_01]: Here’s a reminder of who they are.
22:28.310 –> 22:33.838
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I love this section because me and our list has some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
22:33.898 –> 22:35.760
[SPEAKER_00]: Chris, are you ready for the top tips?
22:36.301 –> 22:37.162
[SPEAKER_02]: Cool for it.
22:37.202 –> 22:38.364
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, the book top tip.
22:38.524 –> 22:45.694
[SPEAKER_00]: If everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?
22:46.695 –> 22:50.400
[SPEAKER_02]: I would see in the one that I’ve just read, which is predictable revenue.
22:51.522 –> 22:52.984
[SPEAKER_00]: Ooh, what’s that about then?
22:53.504 –> 23:17.655
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s about and don’t say predictable revenue is well in in finance you’ve got like a finance manual and in operations you’ve got an operations manual this is kind of like a sales manual for sales so like we have blind guidelines in marketing and stuff like that but you know having a applying the same philosophy to sales is actually quite a very interesting book
23:18.057 –> 23:18.558
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, nice.
23:18.578 –> 23:24.067
[SPEAKER_00]: And is that a kind of traditional sales, does that go as far as kind of across all the channels for sales?
23:25.389 –> 23:28.634
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s mainly outbound lead development.
23:28.915 –> 23:36.026
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that channel, but maybe in the creative individual that I am, I’ve been able to apply it across inbound in account management as well.
23:36.527 –> 23:40.073
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you don’t want a different philosophy, rolling different parts of the business to you.
23:40.133 –> 23:43.879
[SPEAKER_02]: So to complicated, you know, try to keep it as sweet and simple as possible.
23:44.500 –> 23:46.567
[SPEAKER_00]: like so I will have to check that out myself.
23:47.089 –> 23:53.430
[SPEAKER_00]: A traffic top tip which marketing method do either prize above all others or think doesn’t get the press it deserves.
23:53.765 –> 23:56.048
[SPEAKER_02]: I love affiliate marketing these days.
23:56.429 –> 23:57.550
[SPEAKER_02]: I love audience share.
23:58.732 –> 24:12.973
[SPEAKER_02]: So where we can kind of do, because of the thing, because of the price of meta and Google these days, I think it brands, many hands make like work and if we can plow each other’s fields, then it’s just a lot like our touch to be able to do audience share.
24:12.993 –> 24:19.041
[SPEAKER_02]: So if this brands are listening to this, think we’d be a great match with cheeky bander, then reach out to me.
24:19.782 –> 24:21.004
[SPEAKER_02]: We’re always up for a collab.
24:21.490 –> 24:27.060
[SPEAKER_00]: No, so both kind of traditional affiliate marketing, but also collaborating with other brands serving a similar market.
24:27.440 –> 24:28.182
[SPEAKER_02]: 100%.
24:28.202 –> 24:34.332
[SPEAKER_00]: Nice, one of the most underrated channels in e-commerce, in particular, I think.
24:34.873 –> 24:44.550
[SPEAKER_00]: My journey started off in the world of mail order, where those kind of partnerships and parcel bounce backs and those sorts of collaborations were bread and butter, and then D to C arrived and everybody seems to stop doing it.
24:44.590 –> 24:46.654
[SPEAKER_00]: So I love that you’ve recommended that.
24:46.634 –> 25:07.866
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, it’s made a right old renovation actually, the leaflet drops, they’ve come right back and a lot of people do that in the DTC packs and as well when you sort of see that and you know, if you get like, I’m membered national trust and I’m also English heritage member and I get a little leaflets of people saying, hey, subscribe to my wine or my beauty box.
25:08.302 –> 25:13.396
[SPEAKER_00]: always fascinating as a marketer to see what comes with which magazine, yeah, I’m with you on that.
25:13.997 –> 25:24.505
[SPEAKER_00]: The tooltop tip, maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug-in, a phone app or just a way of working, is there a cool little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day.
25:24.856 –> 25:51.657
[SPEAKER_02]: I would say Monday CRM is our actually Monday.com and then we have the CRM bit but probably Monday’s the thing that if you took out of our business it would really struggle because of the collaboration and running projects multiply across different things and not always having to have meetings about it and you can just get the updates and flow as it is and you know I think if we didn’t have a tool like that we’d almost need to create one so that’s probably our top tool that we use.
25:52.025 –> 26:10.323
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we use a sauna here and I don’t know how anybody can run a business anymore without one of those types of tools be it Monday, BS on a sauna or something else because they are just so I find myself thinking in the structure of a sauna when I’m thinking about a new project.
26:10.704 –> 26:13.426
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m sure it’s the same on Monday.com so I love that recommendation.
26:13.987 –> 26:19.112
[SPEAKER_00]: The carbon top tip, what’s your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store?
26:19.784 –> 26:22.648
[SPEAKER_02]: don’t offset, it’s a cheat as we out, right?
26:23.008 –> 26:32.160
[SPEAKER_02]: Take ownership of your supply chain, try to work with the right partners, ask them tough questions and that’s how you reduce the carbon footprint.
26:32.521 –> 26:35.144
[SPEAKER_02]: I am a believer that there’s no such thing as net zero.
26:35.805 –> 26:42.614
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything that we touch, everything that we are never going to do creates carbon, but I am a believer of think called carbon neutral.
26:43.355 –> 26:48.542
[SPEAKER_02]: And what that means is all the plants and all the ecosystems and the planet that they produce
26:48.522 –> 26:52.568
[SPEAKER_02]: absorb enough carbon, the full, the stuff that we admit that we can be neutral.
26:52.628 –> 27:07.729
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that’s probably the goal we need to stop moving away from these tag lines and we start to need to take more ownership of actually how to get to a neutral place rather than a place where we’re producing more than where the panic and absorb.
27:08.452 –> 27:09.533
[SPEAKER_00]: lovely take on it.
27:09.594 –> 27:10.675
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for that, Chris.
27:10.715 –> 27:16.723
[SPEAKER_00]: Now before we say goodbye, could you please at the list us now when they can find you in your business on the web and social media?
27:17.244 –> 27:37.851
[SPEAKER_02]: So cheekypanda.com and cheekypanda HQ, you’ll see if you go on the earth maybe we’re recording a little bit in advance but when it comes out, hopefully we’ll be a bit of a month back and the the pandemic and chase down the aisle and I’m sure there’ll be lots of our very funny
27:38.253 –> 27:38.635
[SPEAKER_00]: Brilliant.
27:38.735 –> 27:40.583
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much Chris for coming on the show.
27:40.603 –> 27:45.262
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s been a real pleasure chatting with you and thanks for sharing so many nuggets and bits of inspiration for the audience.
27:45.403 –> 27:46.367
[SPEAKER_00]: Really appreciate it.
27:47.050 –> 27:47.512
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks Chloe.
27:47.532 –> 27:48.516
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s been an absolute pleasure.
27:54.368 –> 27:56.652
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, I can’t believe that was less than half an hour.
27:57.153 –> 28:01.982
[SPEAKER_00]: Chris and I covered so many topics in their loads of cool stuff to dig into.
28:02.002 –> 28:12.420
[SPEAKER_00]: The part about staying in your lane and knowing who you are as a business and focusing on that rather than reinventing the wheel in finance or manufacturing or logistics.
28:13.001 –> 28:16.748
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I thought his take on
28:16.728 –> 28:25.601
[SPEAKER_00]: where the sale comes from channel to channel was so interesting and polyrene reflects the size of the business and where they’ve got to in the business now.
28:26.542 –> 28:41.503
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m sure in day one, when they had two channels that he’d have had a more solid idea of where he wanted the orders to come in, but now as they grow and as they’re chasing that household name status, it has clearly evolved
28:41.905 –> 28:45.132
[SPEAKER_00]: We want the product sold and we’re not so worried about the location.
28:45.593 –> 28:50.184
[SPEAKER_00]: Clearly a guy who really understands his target customer and the market is operating in two.
28:50.845 –> 28:58.142
[SPEAKER_00]: You get your hands on our notes from this episode including those top tips and links to what we mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterplanned.com.
28:58.122 –> 29:08.498
[SPEAKER_00]: You can also use our direct episode shortlings, just put ECMP.info forward slash the number of this episode into the URL bar and you’ll be redirected straight to the right page on the site.
29:09.019 –> 29:16.831
[SPEAKER_00]: When you get to the website, you can also add yourself to our email list so you don’t miss out on any of the other things I share to help you improve your business.
29:18.173 –> 29:25.885
[SPEAKER_00]: If you liked this episode, then make sure you check out episode 509 where I’m chatting with
29:25.865 –> 29:32.823
[SPEAKER_00]: X of who gives a crap can you say who gives a crap and cheeky pander in the same podcast episode?
29:33.104 –> 29:42.287
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, yes it appears you can and in that episode episode five oh nine Jenna is taking us through how she built their crazy growth
29:42.267 –> 29:56.530
[SPEAKER_00]: and in on the website even we have a whole page with all our D to C brands that you can improve and find out other big D to C interviews and that’s ECMP.info forward slash DTC.
29:57.131 –> 30:02.079
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for tuning into this and every episode that you do of the Ecommerce Master Plan podcast.
30:02.099 –> 30:09.591
[SPEAKER_00]: I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help Ecommerce business owners to succeed and thrive with their businesses including
30:09.571 –> 30:14.517
[SPEAKER_00]: Let’s edit this on the fly, progressing along the path to carbon neutral.
30:14.638 –> 30:15.739
[SPEAKER_00]: We won’t say zero today.
30:16.159 –> 30:21.887
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you know someone this show can help, please tell them to listen to the e-commerce Master Plan podcast.
30:21.907 –> 30:36.726
[SPEAKER_01]: Hope you have a great week and don’t forget to keep optimizing.
31 min
November 10, 2025eCommerce MasterPlan | 568: Growing a Fashion Brand: Lavender Hill’s Approach to PR, Sustainability, and Profitability with Isobel Ridley
Isobel Ridley is the founder at Lavender Hill, a women’s fashion brand focused on ethically made luxurious staples. Founded in 2013 then now sell exclusively via their Shopify store, turning over around £500,000 a year.

In this episode, Isobel shares how she built a profitable, sustainable fashion brand by focusing on what works—core products, smart use of AI, and old-school PR that still delivers.

Hit PLAY to hear:
How focusing on fewer products made Lavender Hill more profitable
The clever ways Isobel uses AI (including ChatGPT!) to run her store smarter
Why she ditched 3PLs and still fulfills every order in-house
The surprising reason she cut product lines and boosted brand value
How traditional PR still drives sales in a digital-first world
The data-driven mindset behind every major business decision she’s made

Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[04:50] “Sustainability Over Excess Colors”
[07:03] In-House Operations Over 3PL
[10:40] “Shifting PR: Magazines to Influencers”
[14:25] Early Struggles of a Business
[18:05] “Adapting Strategies for Profitability”
[21:17] Listen to Isobel’s Top Tips!

Full episode notes here: https://ecmp.info/568
—
Download our ebook… https://ecmp.info/ebook 500 Tips to Increase Your Profits
Get all the links and resources we mention and join our email list at https://ecmp.info
Love the show? Chloe would love your feedback – leave a review here: https://ecmp.info/review or reply to the episode QandA on Spotify.
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WEBVTT
00:00.551 –> 00:18.558
[SPEAKER_00]: If I was starting over again, I would probably spend three quarters of my marketing budget on PR because it’s all about building a reputation and you need the editors and journalists to give their opinion on your product because it’s all about building that trust.
00:19.118 –> 00:23.540
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s absolutely vital if you want to build a long-term established business.
00:23.600 –> 00:27.081
[SPEAKER_00]: You’ve got to build it through those old media channels.
00:29.966 –> 00:32.350
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.
00:32.891 –> 00:36.977
[SPEAKER_01]: Here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
00:37.498 –> 00:43.006
[SPEAKER_01]: Cutting through the highly to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond.
00:43.286 –> 00:45.290
[SPEAKER_01]: Here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
00:48.640 –> 00:49.681
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello and welcome.
00:49.721 –> 00:50.822
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s great to have you here.
00:50.902 –> 00:54.804
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
00:55.325 –> 00:59.468
[SPEAKER_02]: Our guest for this episode is here because they applied to be on the show.
00:59.488 –> 01:12.156
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you’ve got something you’d love to chat with me about and share with the brilliant audience who tune into this, then just go to ECMP.info4sashguest to apply and maybe we’ll be chatting very soon.
01:12.677 –> 01:15.319
[SPEAKER_02]: Now in this episode we’re exploring
01:16.119 –> 01:30.482
[SPEAKER_02]: a small business in fashion that has a luxury angle that’s done brilliantly with PR over the last decade that’s had some fascinating shifts and changes all based on looking at the data and focusing in on the profitability.
01:30.982 –> 01:41.965
[SPEAKER_02]: My guess will be sharing her take on all of that and how she’s done it all, she will also be sharing how she uses AI in her business and why she hasn’t outsourced her
01:43.625 –> 01:45.507
[SPEAKER_02]: I had a fascinating time chatting with Isabel.
01:45.567 –> 01:50.911
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m sure you’re going to enjoy this one and make sure you listen to the end of the episode so you don’t miss out on her top tips.
01:57.052 –> 01:58.953
[SPEAKER_02]: and now to introduce our special guest.
01:59.513 –> 02:06.677
[SPEAKER_02]: Isabelle Ridley is the founder at Lavender Hill, a women’s fashion brand focused on ethically made luxurious staples.
02:07.257 –> 02:15.261
[SPEAKER_02]: Founded in 2013, they now sell exclusively via their Shopify store, turning over around half a million pounds a year.
02:15.981 –> 02:16.782
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello Isabelle.
02:17.422 –> 02:19.503
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi Chloe, thank you so much for having me.
02:19.683 –> 02:20.864
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m looking forward to our chat.
02:25.712 –> 02:38.635
[SPEAKER_00]: So I set up Lavenda Hill back in 2013, but before that I was working at Burberry in their head offices in London, and I worked in quite a few of their different departments.
02:38.735 –> 02:50.718
[SPEAKER_00]: I worked in their corporate merchandising, sourcing in their showroom in their head office, and then also in their e-commerce department, as well, which is where I gained probably 90% of my knowledge.
02:52.589 –> 02:56.733
[SPEAKER_02]: Also, so that’s why you went high end with your product when you went to launch.
02:57.193 –> 02:58.074
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, absolutely.
02:58.794 –> 03:16.129
[SPEAKER_00]: I always knew I wanted to set up my own business and when I was working at Burberry, I saw a gap in the market for really good quality basics to wear underneath smart jackets and coats because every day when I was working in corporate merchandising, I’d walk up.
03:16.529 –> 03:16.930
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was
03:17.650 –> 03:35.671
[SPEAKER_00]: six floors to the department and I would be really hot and sweaty by the time I got to the right floor and I’d have to take off all of my layers and I just couldn’t find a decent t-shirt to wear or a decent top to wear and a lot of the tops I could find where from Brant
03:38.354 –> 03:41.677
[SPEAKER_00]: which are fine, but they aren’t necessarily that smart.
03:41.737 –> 03:48.264
[SPEAKER_00]: So I started looking into the market and I saw a gap and that’s why I decided to set up Lavenda Health.
03:48.964 –> 03:53.829
[SPEAKER_02]: And so 10 years on, how easy has it been to stick to that?
03:54.309 –> 03:58.874
[SPEAKER_02]: We’re doing the classic basics and not go crazy with a full range.
03:59.837 –> 04:27.854
[SPEAKER_00]: Lavender Hill has got bigger and then it’s got smaller over the years because I’ve tested a lot of different products and but when I really look at the business and what the sales and what are most profitable products are they’re all our classic white navy black t-shirts in three or four of our styles and every time I try and expand I look back at that and I just think no this is the product the just sales and because we’re living in quite an uncertain climate
04:29.276 –> 04:39.959
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s really important just to stay focused on the profitable products that we have, which is why I’m very, very much keeping to selling our call classic t-shirts.
04:40.877 –> 04:50.583
[SPEAKER_02]: it’s so easy to get excited with the latest color, but then 90% of the customer base won’t white, navy, or black, and it’s so easy to get distracted from that, isn’t it?
04:51.123 –> 05:00.029
[SPEAKER_00]: It is, and when I bought out lots of different colors, what I’ve also discovered is, yes, it’s great for on the marketing side, I have that pop, that interest.
05:00.549 –> 05:14.298
[SPEAKER_00]: But actually on the sustainability side, we end up having 10 boxes of hot pink t-shirts, which isn’t very good because you have to sell them to third parties to get rid of them or significantly discount them online.
05:14.418 –> 05:17.400
[SPEAKER_00]: And that brings down the whole brand value.
05:17.520 –> 05:21.283
[SPEAKER_00]: So, for me, I very much want to just stick with the classics.
05:21.363 –> 05:26.146
[SPEAKER_00]: Make sure that we are in stock when customers want to buy the product throughout the year.
05:26.586 –> 05:27.567
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we also sell
05:29.668 –> 05:34.190
[SPEAKER_00]: So, for instance, when it’s cold in the UK, it’s lovely and sunny in Australia.
05:34.290 –> 05:40.792
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we’ve always got to make sure that we are stocked in our linen tops or our lovely silky soft roll net tops.
05:41.712 –> 05:47.595
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, the vast, it’s difficult to stay focused on the core range and to not get excited about the things.
05:47.835 –> 05:50.556
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s actually a lot easier in terms of workload.
05:50.756 –> 05:51.076
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it is.
05:51.236 –> 05:57.078
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m going to definitely over the last two to three years after I’ve really looked into what, what are profitable.
05:57.398 –> 05:58.259
[SPEAKER_00]: products are.
05:58.879 –> 06:05.943
[SPEAKER_00]: And with automation and AI actually now running and online store it’s just so much easier than it used to be.
06:06.304 –> 06:16.030
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to have to hire about six or seven people and now I got a team of three and we’re not overworked because we just have our core product.
06:16.150 –> 06:21.273
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve got everything, we’ll set our whole of our product pages and collection pages all optimized for
06:26.656 –> 06:30.842
[SPEAKER_00]: the workload is a lot less than if we were bringing out some addresses.
06:31.823 –> 06:36.349
[SPEAKER_02]: So what are you and your three team members doing and is there anything you’re out sourcing?
06:37.106 –> 06:43.570
[SPEAKER_00]: We obviously work with lots of different partners as well, but it’s three of us who work within the business full-time.
06:43.990 –> 06:57.217
[SPEAKER_00]: I very much spearhead most things, and then I have a lady who does all of our marketing and social media channels, and then I have a gentleman who does all of our picking and packing and looks after the warehouse.
06:58.327 –> 06:59.148
[SPEAKER_02]: very simple.
06:59.308 –> 07:00.248
[SPEAKER_02]: I like it, I like it.
07:00.288 –> 07:03.531
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you have, you run your own warehouse then.
07:03.951 –> 07:04.691
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, we do.
07:05.252 –> 07:06.152
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we always have.
07:06.593 –> 07:08.994
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve looked at I’m going to 3PL.
07:09.415 –> 07:20.903
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I do the numbers and for the size of the business, it doesn’t work for us because also when I also look at our customer base as well, our customers tend to order three or four different sizes.
07:21.403 –> 07:22.984
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they’ll return
07:25.746 –> 07:51.403
[SPEAKER_00]: can I have it in this colour or actually I’d like to size up in that one and so actually just having one person looking after everything is a lot easier than if it was in a 3PL and they’ve got a team of 50, 60 people and no one really understands or knows the brand it’s a lot more and complicated and then also when you look at their fees the what the 3PL’s I’ve looked at you know there are charges all over the place and
07:51.723 –> 08:17.613
[SPEAKER_00]: when you’re being charged and per box coming in to the warehouse that that’s you know that’s yeah your money’s just going to disappear and I guess if it’s not broke why change it yeah my team’s been with me for at least seven eight years so yeah don’t want to change anything but you are clearly using AI for things so how have you approached bringing that into the business because I know a lot of our listeners are dealing with that conundrum right now
08:18.413 –> 08:18.974
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, of course.
08:18.994 –> 08:35.408
[SPEAKER_00]: So I use it all like in different areas of the business, whether it’s Shopify side to kick, for instance, I went on to that this morning and I was asking it questions about our conversion rate, you know, what is our sales performance looking like this month compared to
08:35.888 –> 08:37.429
[SPEAKER_00]: the last two to three years.
08:37.449 –> 08:40.210
[SPEAKER_00]: I asked it all about our stock flow as well.
08:40.630 –> 09:00.777
[SPEAKER_00]: What do we need to replenish urgently in the next couple of weeks and it bought up the right numbers but I definitely have to say you’ve got a triple check everything because it does make mistakes but I use Shopify sidekick for just end-general admin and list-call work and then also I use chatGPT as well a lot of
09:01.757 –> 09:06.621
[SPEAKER_00]: but a lot of it is very much I ask it to create a marketing plan or something like that.
09:07.081 –> 09:17.268
[SPEAKER_00]: Just to see what it comes up with, just like just for another perspective, I will also pop in a couple of competitors and I will say to them, look, these are our competitors.
09:17.629 –> 09:23.393
[SPEAKER_00]: Please can you tell me what they’re doing, what they’re doing differently, what is there something that we could adopt as what they
09:23.673 –> 09:25.894
[SPEAKER_00]: as well that it could resonate with our customer.
09:26.375 –> 09:30.397
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, sometimes we can look at our email campaigns as well.
09:30.477 –> 09:36.080
[SPEAKER_00]: We can input all the data from our email campaigns and say, can you see any synergies here?
09:36.120 –> 09:37.061
[SPEAKER_00]: What’s going on?
09:37.081 –> 09:39.122
[SPEAKER_00]: So I use it throughout the business.
09:39.967 –> 09:43.671
[SPEAKER_02]: and have you enabled or freed up your team to use it as well?
09:43.731 –> 09:46.934
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you handle the letting go of it?
09:47.575 –> 09:49.717
[SPEAKER_00]: I think everyone should adopt it and learn from it.
09:49.998 –> 09:51.439
[SPEAKER_00]: What is quite scary?
09:51.479 –> 09:54.803
[SPEAKER_00]: What I have found personally is that it’s changing so quickly.
09:55.403 –> 10:04.753
[SPEAKER_00]: So even though I would say I was an early adopter to make the business run more efficiently, even nowadays I just think, oh my gosh, I don’t think I fully understand it.
10:05.194 –> 10:11.000
[SPEAKER_00]: So I definitely recommend everyone to use it as much as possible and just learn from it now.
10:11.420 –> 10:17.927
[SPEAKER_00]: But it’s ever changing and I think if you can get on board with it early, it’s going to help you a lot more.
10:19.132 –> 10:26.475
[SPEAKER_02]: And you’ve completely outside, I suppose, of the world of AI, you do very well with PR.
10:27.175 –> 10:29.816
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you’ve been teaching a lot of great magazines.
10:29.876 –> 10:30.676
[SPEAKER_02]: So, has that?
10:31.477 –> 10:33.617
[SPEAKER_02]: I suppose, now I know you came from Burberry.
10:33.637 –> 10:35.598
[SPEAKER_02]: It makes more sense that PR would be a big part.
10:35.638 –> 10:40.020
[SPEAKER_02]: But has that always been, is it continue to be a big part of your marketing plans?
10:40.740 –> 10:48.564
[SPEAKER_00]: So fun the enough for the first eight years we did, I had a freelance pill later who worked with us full time.
10:48.704 –> 11:02.231
[SPEAKER_00]: But actually in the last two to three years I’ve really rained it back just because I’ve noticed the market has changed quite a lot, we used to focus quite heavily on getting into magazines and newspapers, but less and less people are actually reading them.
11:02.731 –> 11:06.773
[SPEAKER_00]: So we switched our focus slightly more to working with influences.
11:07.253 –> 11:13.477
[SPEAKER_00]: We don’t pay, I’ve never paid an influencer and that’s not a strategy we will adopt any time soon.
11:13.517 –> 11:16.398
[SPEAKER_00]: If someone likes a product, then that’s amazing.
11:16.438 –> 11:24.082
[SPEAKER_00]: Please like, speak about it if they would like to, but we’re never going to be like here’s 5,000 pounds and I would like you to say these things about the product.
11:24.542 –> 11:28.104
[SPEAKER_00]: So for PR, it was very much brand building.
11:28.604 –> 11:34.826
[SPEAKER_00]: But it’s changed in the last few years, actually we haven’t worked with any PR freelancers in the last two to three years.
11:35.246 –> 11:48.590
[SPEAKER_00]: And what we’ve seen is because we built up a reputation and we built up those connections over the first eight years that are a lot of that are quite a few of the journalists still talk about us because our product is still relevant.
11:50.017 –> 11:56.960
[SPEAKER_02]: So bearing in mind that the journalist is still getting in contact with you and you did invest heavily in it for eight years.
11:57.541 –> 12:04.784
[SPEAKER_02]: Given the way the PR landscape is now, if you were starting the business today, would you go deep on PR?
12:05.384 –> 12:07.305
[SPEAKER_02]: Or would you do something else instead?
12:07.325 –> 12:13.168
[SPEAKER_02]: So whatever I’m trying to say I guess is are you dropping the PR because you’ve already built up all that?
12:14.008 –> 12:19.604
[SPEAKER_02]: Brand Awareness and you’ve got everything you could out of it, are you dropping PR because it’s just a bad strategy in 2025.
12:21.757 –> 12:24.498
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I definitely do not think it’s a bad strategy.
12:24.578 –> 12:43.745
[SPEAKER_00]: If I was starting over again, I would 100% I’d probably spend three quarters of my marketing budget on PR because it’s all about building a reputation and you need the editors and journalists to give their opinion on your product because it’s all about building that trust.
12:44.345 –> 12:48.109
[SPEAKER_00]: it’s absolutely vital if you want to build a long-term product.
12:48.169 –> 13:08.427
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean if you want to quick win you can just pay some influences and then put some advertising spend behind the UGC ads and you could probably drive a lot of sales but actually in reality if you would like to build a long-term established business you’ve got to build it through those old media channels.
13:09.146 –> 13:09.787
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it’s interesting.
13:09.967 –> 13:14.192
[SPEAKER_02]: I don’t know how one would actually, I do know how one would test it.
13:14.212 –> 13:15.113
[SPEAKER_02]: What am I talking about?
13:15.573 –> 13:24.083
[SPEAKER_02]: It would be fascinating to do an A-B split test where you remove the brilliant PR logos, you know, Vogue, etc, from your home page.
13:24.703 –> 13:28.688
[SPEAKER_02]: see what that does to the conversion rate and then turn it back on.
13:28.768 –> 13:31.251
[SPEAKER_02]: And which would be a bit of a indicator.
13:31.331 –> 13:40.260
[SPEAKER_02]: But of course then the ecosystem knowledge of the fact you get featured in these magazines would you couldn’t test that quite so well, but I bet I bet it delivers.
13:40.420 –> 13:41.221
[SPEAKER_02]: I bet it delivers.
13:42.142 –> 13:43.563
[SPEAKER_00]: I am pretty sure it does.
13:43.764 –> 13:46.346
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it’s really important to have that.
13:46.726 –> 13:51.450
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s almost like a trust stamp to say, okay, that it is a real company.
13:51.871 –> 13:53.793
[SPEAKER_00]: It has been endorsed by these people.
13:54.373 –> 13:55.434
[SPEAKER_00]: It must be good quality.
13:55.494 –> 13:58.697
[SPEAKER_00]: So I will put my money behind this and buy a product.
13:59.986 –> 14:05.409
[SPEAKER_02]: On that, it must be a good quality, which of course is, you know, we have two issues we buy fashion online.
14:05.569 –> 14:08.871
[SPEAKER_02]: One is, will it fit and one is, is the quality where it should be?
14:09.631 –> 14:12.433
[SPEAKER_02]: Which you can’t really work out unless you actually touch it.
14:13.233 –> 14:25.060
[SPEAKER_02]: Or you get social previously just said, if you ever been tempted to do real world activity, pop-ups, physical store, anything like that, or if you just been, we are online and we are online only.
14:25.900 –> 14:29.844
[SPEAKER_00]: No, so we still actually have a showroom in Central London.
14:29.904 –> 14:31.606
[SPEAKER_00]: I had that for two and a half years.
14:32.106 –> 14:43.397
[SPEAKER_00]: When I first set out as well, back in 2013, I was incredibly naive and I just thought, you know what, I’m going to set up an online store and I’m going to get all of these visitors and they’re just going to buy the product.
14:44.157 –> 14:53.402
[SPEAKER_00]: and I set up the store, I had no visitors and I had no what hardly any sales and the business just was not going to survive.
14:53.963 –> 15:07.110
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had to go out to consumer shows and I would say I probably spent the first six, seven years going to the likes of Burley Horse Trials and Badminton Horse Trials.
15:07.630 –> 15:29.610
[SPEAKER_00]: spirit of Christmas, the country living shows, you know, I went all around the country, I packed, I used to pack up my old polo and put everything in and then go off and set up a stand and sell some t-shirts and that’s actually how, yeah, that’s basically what I did for marketing for the first five, six years and then COVID hit and that completely changed everything.
15:30.150 –> 15:31.431
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone had to go online.
15:32.672 –> 15:40.038
[SPEAKER_00]: and we got a lot of really great press during that time and so we could then focus our energy on being solely online.
15:40.078 –> 15:58.151
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I had the showroom, I stepped the showroom up, it was only very small because we were selling around the world and we would have lots of customers asking about style and fit and I actually just thought, you know, what if we can have a online appointment where we can just have a camera in the showroom and we can show
15:58.671 –> 16:11.015
[SPEAKER_00]: the customer, the items, it would be a lot quicker and easier and then also if people want to come in, that would be a great opportunity for them to actually come and see and feel the items.
16:11.575 –> 16:27.360
[SPEAKER_00]: However, once again, I did the numbers and the staff in costs and after two and a half years, I felt it was more of a vanity project to be able to, for me, just to be able to say yes, I got a showroom in Central London, but actually the numbers weren’t there and when I looked
16:27.960 –> 16:29.342
[SPEAKER_00]: where the business was profitable.
16:29.502 –> 16:32.467
[SPEAKER_00]: It was online and actually it was with a smaller team.
16:32.587 –> 16:39.437
[SPEAKER_00]: So that’s why I decided to go and focus more energy online and targeting customers that way.
16:40.053 –> 16:49.739
[SPEAKER_02]: So it’s super clear to me as about that you have a really great process for going, let’s actually look, is this profitable?
16:49.779 –> 16:51.801
[SPEAKER_02]: Is this not a making the hard decisions?
16:52.641 –> 17:07.491
[SPEAKER_02]: And you said you stopped doing, I was thinking of those shows, you know, burly, et cetera, spring, I’m not spring fair, spirit of Christmas, as being like a caravan of people, traipsing around the country with their stands and their products,
17:08.351 –> 17:10.172
[SPEAKER_02]: You stopped doing that because of COVID.
17:10.692 –> 17:14.134
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you think you’d have stopped if it hadn’t been for COVID?
17:15.175 –> 17:19.957
[SPEAKER_00]: I think probably when you think about the consumer mind shift change.
17:20.577 –> 17:28.762
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this is, you know, it goes too and too because if we didn’t have COVID, I wonder if customers wouldn’t purchase so much online.
17:29.202 –> 17:33.064
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, to I’m talking about perhaps the the older customer,
17:33.904 –> 17:40.406
[SPEAKER_00]: who very much like to go out and see and feel the product and have that shopping experience.
17:40.426 –> 17:43.347
[SPEAKER_00]: But they didn’t have that choice drink over it.
17:43.387 –> 17:46.227
[SPEAKER_00]: So if they wanted a product they had to buy online.
17:47.068 –> 17:48.708
[SPEAKER_00]: So that definitely did help.
17:48.928 –> 17:52.369
[SPEAKER_00]: But we have stopped going to all the shows.
17:52.449 –> 17:55.710
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I do occasionally do shows.
17:56.250 –> 18:17.136
[SPEAKER_00]: but they’re not a key part of our strategy at the moment because also once again looking at costings and actually if it’s profitable by the time you have gone and you’ve paid for the stand, you’ve paid for the electricity, you’ve paid for the staff, you’ve paid for the van, you’ve paid for the people putting everything into place.
18:17.996 –> 18:37.416
[SPEAKER_00]: and then you look at the fall and the conversion and nowadays it’s that the sales steps are a lot longer people come and they view, they want to then go and have a look on the website to see the product and then purchase and that will cost a lot of money up front and it’ll I think it will depend if you’ve got
18:37.936 –> 18:48.201
[SPEAKER_00]: external finance and as well but for me I’ve I’ve grown as business I said to top with 10,000 pounds back in 2030 and I’ve taken no external investment.
18:48.221 –> 18:52.423
[SPEAKER_00]: So if a channel is not working we have to adapt, we have to change.
18:52.963 –> 18:57.464
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m right now when I look at doing all the shows, we don’t make that return quick and off.
18:57.864 –> 19:05.246
[SPEAKER_00]: A long-term strategy, it is still very good to go out to as many as possible, but for a small business and trying to be profitable.
19:05.506 –> 19:12.808
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn’t quite stack up at the moment, but I’m not saying we won’t start going to more and we will stop completely.
19:13.228 –> 19:15.469
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s just not part of the wider strategy.
19:16.389 –> 19:20.590
[SPEAKER_02]: So looking to the future, what’s got you excited on your radar?
19:21.547 –> 19:47.002
[SPEAKER_00]: do you know I feel incredibly privileged with the business I built because we have got the most phenomenal repeat customer rates so actually we have to spend very little on marketing but I think we now at that stage where we can start looking at growth, looking at how we can get in front of the new customers yeah more profitably because I think we’re at a written at a good spot at the moment but I think
19:47.442 –> 19:52.288
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, e-commerce has just changed so much in the last 12 to 18 months.
19:52.368 –> 19:53.349
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s extraordinary.
19:54.150 –> 19:58.655
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve had to build as a completely new website in the last six months.
19:58.835 –> 20:01.679
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything is changing so quickly.
20:01.719 –> 20:02.540
[SPEAKER_00]: The platform’s
20:03.020 –> 20:11.564
[SPEAKER_00]: are changing on a weekly basis and it’s really exciting to see what’s going to happen next in the e-commerce world.
20:11.824 –> 20:22.790
[SPEAKER_00]: I think people will still definitely shop in bricks and mortar as well as online but I just wonder what the online experience is going to be like in future if it’s going to be
20:23.270 –> 20:48.492
[SPEAKER_00]: more virtual, I think I haven’t seen anyone do it really well yet, but I think there’s such an opportunity to have a virtual school online, say you’re walking in, you’re walking into a lavender hill showroom and you can pull out a nighter and you’re a picture of you there and you can put this on, see what it looks like and yeah, a customization as well in personization, I think it’s is ever changing, it’s going to be really exciting to see what really does take off.
20:52.317 –> 20:57.082
[SPEAKER_01]: E-commerce Masterplan is supported by some of the greatest companies in the E-commerce sector.
20:57.222 –> 20:58.624
[SPEAKER_01]: Here’s a reminder of who they are.
21:09.972 –> 21:15.314
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, I love this section because it gets me and I’ll list us some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
21:15.494 –> 21:17.154
[SPEAKER_02]: Isabel are you ready for the top tips?
21:17.695 –> 21:18.475
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, absolutely.
21:18.875 –> 21:20.175
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, the book top tip.
21:20.355 –> 21:27.438
[SPEAKER_02]: If everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?
21:28.458 –> 21:33.303
[SPEAKER_00]: I would recommend a book by Dana Thomas called fashion opolis.
21:33.883 –> 21:43.613
[SPEAKER_00]: It looks into the murky world of the fashion supply chain and it will really make you stop and think about how clothing is made.
21:44.504 –> 21:46.786
[SPEAKER_02]: sounds like a tough read, but a necessary one.
21:47.687 –> 21:54.472
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, the traffic top tip, which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn’t get the press it deserves?
21:55.813 –> 22:06.783
[SPEAKER_00]: For me, it’s definitely organic search, it’s the backbone of our business, you type in quality, or a women’s quality t-shirts we pop up, it’s super important for us.
22:08.083 –> 22:19.430
[SPEAKER_02]: And the tooltop tip, maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug-in, a phone app, or just a way of working, is there a cool little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day.
22:20.816 –> 22:34.345
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I was originally going to recommend automatic discounts and bundling as well just to help increase basket size, but something to make us more efficient is definitely slack.
22:34.746 –> 22:37.968
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s just so quick and easy and an efficient way to communicate.
22:38.731 –> 22:44.852
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think the most recommended tool on this podcast ever as well, the carbon top tip.
22:44.952 –> 22:48.753
[SPEAKER_02]: What’s your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store?
22:49.794 –> 23:06.898
[SPEAKER_00]: For me, I think it’s very much looking at every single practice and process that we have, whether it is making sure that we recycle all of the packaging that we receive in, making sure that all of the packaging we send out is either already recycled and still is recyclable.
23:09.399 –> 23:12.701
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it’s turning over every rock, isn’t it?
23:12.741 –> 23:14.222
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to look at the whole piece.
23:14.282 –> 23:15.523
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s not just a one shift.
23:15.583 –> 23:17.004
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s everything.
23:17.364 –> 23:17.564
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep.
23:18.105 –> 23:25.190
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, it’s about before we say goodbye, could you please let the listeners know where they can find you and your business on the web and social media?
23:25.897 –> 23:26.838
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So if you go to www.lavenderhillclothing.com, you can find our website there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise, if you go on to any of the social media channels and look up at Lavenderhillclothing with it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Brilliant.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for being on the e-commerce boss plan podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for having me.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Loving is about focus on making the profitable decisions and the hard decisions within the business on what she’s going to focus on what her team are going to focus on and where they’re going to spend their time and their money.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I thought that was fascinating and also how she’s bringing AI into the mix is super cool too.
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[SPEAKER_02]: great to hear the actual ins and outs of how someone’s really doing those things.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So an absolute treat to get to chat with Isabel.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You can get your hands on the notes from this episode, including the top tips and links to what we mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterland.com.
24:30.195 –> 24:40.038
[SPEAKER_02]: You could also use our direct episode short link to get to the right page of the website, just put ECMP.info4 such the number of this episode into your RR bar and you’ll be there.
24:40.798 –> 24:43.819
[SPEAKER_02]: When you get to the website, why not add yourself to our email list?
24:43.899 –> 24:44.159
[SPEAKER_02]: Go on.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Go on, do it!
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[SPEAKER_02]: Now, if you like this episode and want to dive into a couple more case that he’s a brand focused on wardrobe basics, we’ve got Episode 434, where I’m chatting with Lindy Benson from Blue Salt to doing something very similar in the USA, or you can go way back into the archive with Episode 49, where Matthew Parvis from Fresh Creek Clean T’s talks about
25:12.862 –> 25:18.265
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you want all our fashion episodes then head to ECMP.info forward slash fashion.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for tuning into this and every episode of the Ecommerce Master Plan podcast.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help Ecommerce business owners just like you to succeed and thrive with your businesses, including progressing along the path to net zero.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So if you know someone this show can help, please tell them to listen to the Ecommerce
25:45.658 –> 25:48.964
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to the e-commerce Master Plan podcast.
25:49.425 –> 25:54.213
[SPEAKER_01]: Find out more at e-commercemasterplanned.com slash podcast.
26 min

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Trying to work out how to acquire more customers? Need to improve customer retention? Or just looking for some reassurance you’re on the right track? That’s what the eCommerce MasterPlan is here for.

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