“Understand your customer like a friend.” This episode of the Retail X Series podcast is an in-depth conversation about fundraising and building a business with Elana Reinholtz, Founder & CEO of Bird + Stone, a cause-based jewelry company. Elana talks about her building her brand, how she built it starting with an Etsy shop and how she stays in touch with her customers. She also shares resources and tools that have helped her along the way.

Topics:
- Getting initial insights from early sales and testing in a scrappy way
- Finding ways to understand your early customers at launch and beyond
- Running partnerships with complementary brands as an acquisition strategy
- Paid advertising: what worked and what didn’t in the early days
- Building and launching products based on early customer insights
- Thinking through PR and press including DIY versus using agencies
- Figuring out how and which influencers could work for your brand
- Measuring metrics like CAC and LTV

Resources Elana Mentions:
- Women Entrepreneurship NYC and the WE Fund (offers debt financing)
- Dojo Mojo – CRM software system
- Shogun – Tool for landing pages, works with Shopify
- Hotjar – Heatmapping tool 
- Facebook Insights – Tool for paid Facebook insights

Music by Eino Toivanen, kongano.com
 
Edited by Deven Shah

Learn more at Retail X Series and follow @retailxseries on Twitter and Instagram.
To submit a pitch or to find out more about Sapna Shah, check out Red Giraffe Advisors.