Ecommerce Playbook: Numbers, Struggles & Growth

This week's episode centers on how an "agency guy" hires agencies. In that process, host Andrew Faris shares the one thing he looks for (above everything else) when hiring.

This week’s episode comes to you from on the ground at our shipping fulfillment center in North Carolina. And after being around the actual products that we are using, packing, and shipping — host, Andrew Faris reflects on the realities of gross margin in business and how he’s thinking about that differently.

Last week you learned about our side of the story: the sale of FC Goods.

This week: we're bringing on the buyers, featuring Eric Weisser(CEO, Weisser Distributing)and Mike Childers(President, Weisser Distributing).

Pop the champagne and drop the beat …

We just sold our first brand. And, yes, the math in that outlandish headline is right: a 15,500% increase from our initial investment.

In early 2018, 4x400 — Common Thread Collective’s ecommerce holding company — acquired 80% of FC Goods. The price? $5,000. In Oct. of 2020, we sold it for $1.2M. Minus the founder’s 20% and less broker’s fees, that nets out to $780k. From $5k to $780k: 15,500% ROI.

Of course, that clickbaity calculation is far from the whole story.

That’s why this is a special episode of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast with guests Taylor Holiday and Aaron Orendoff … to reveal everything. All the numbers. The entire journey. Every struggle. Every loss. Every win.

At the end of the episode, Taylor and I share 10 takeaways — the biggest and most-tactical lessons we learned.

Best of all, I’ve summarized them all with examples and illustrations in this article to make the takeaways easier to take away: https://bit.ly/36HjDGf

One of the hardest things about running an ecommerce business is that the future is unpredictable. Or in the words of host, Andrew Faris: "the only certainty is uncertainty". Here's what to do about that.

We did not see this coming… but we stumbled into a giant Facebook ads win for one of our 4x400 brands. It was our biggest win in months, and it was pure luck.

On today’s episode, we’ll give you the exact numbers and the exact process put in place that unlocked this high-performing creative campaign, so that you can get lucky too.

Show notes:

Full Length UGC Ad: https://www.facebook.com/115977923900/posts/10159209765208901

1x1 Cutdown Version: https://www.facebook.com/115977923900/posts/10159278228173901

Influencer Marketing that actually works? We've never done anything like it, but as we take the next steps to grow our brand 31 Bits, influencer marketing will play a key role.

Cody Wittick, the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Kynship, joins us on this episode as we lay out the influencer strategy.

You can reach out to Kynship by emailing [email protected] or reaching out to Cody on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Cody_Wittick

Unleashing Vision by Common Thread Collective

This week, we're talking about the biggest problem we have to solve right now in our business and the steps we're taking to fix the top of the funnel.

We've had this problem before, and this time around, we'll need some more magic.

We won't delay, Black Friday & Cyber Monday went below average for the six brands we operate this year...

Here's why, plus five takeaways we learned.