Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / 6 Quick Questions with Maddie Voge, Co-founder of Aura Bora (part 2)

Transcript

6 Quick Questions with Maddie Voge, Co-founder of Aura Bora (part 2) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  Welcome back. Here are the six quick questions. Question number one is what's your why? Why are you doing what you're doing? It's a great one. So for me, I spend a lot of my time
• 0:24
  on the creative work around Ouroboros. So whether it be design, social, packaging, branding, copywriting. And my why feels like in the same way that if you were say writing a fantasy story and you get to world build,
• 0:41
  I feel like I'm getting to take this world that's in my mind and put it out into the world in a way that no one else would do. And it feels so special that all of these ideas I've had in my head, these little haikus on the back of each of our cans, they're just this world I've gotten to create. And that feels really special. And I think that would be...
• 1:07
  my why is that I get to take my own like imagination, creativity, and just like, I'm kind of like birthing something into the world that then I get to, you know, when people say they love it, it feels really special. Yeah. It's kind of like an expression of things that it's, it's an expression of you in a way. Yeah. I love that. That's so cool. Are you the designer? Are you actually the one designing these as well? So we work with illustrators. I am a designer, but on these ones, we work with some really cool illustrators too.
• 1:38
  Love that. Amazing. Question number two, I usually ask what is your number one marketing moment, but I'm going to ask you what your second biggest marketing moment is because I feel like number one's kind of obvious. What's been the second marketing moment worth shouting about? Yeah. So last year we tried this for the first time and we're going to do it again this year, but we've been doing this golden ticket campaign where we hide
• 2:04
  golden tickets in five of our e-commerce boxes. And if you find one, you get a year's supply of Ouroboros. So we had five winners last year and it was really, really fun, really exciting. Folks were excited to buy them. But also we got the best videos from our winners who were like, I found it.
• 2:29
  So we're doing it again this year. And that marketing moment has been special on a few fronts. The first one is just that obviously people are excited and we get a higher volume of sales. But more than that, it feels so, so special to get people really excited. And then you have these five winners who a lot of them are loyal, true fans. So that's been a big fun one that feels super on brand for us because it's playful and whimsical and sort of gamified. Yeah.
• 2:59
  Oh, my gosh. I love it on so many levels. You know what it reminds me of? I don't know if you've seen that episode of Modern Family where Phil runs out of his lifetime supply of razors that he won. And it's like he basically is like, oh, my God, it's going to be a bad day because I've run out of these razors. And it's so funny. Oh, my gosh. I haven't seen it, but Modern Family. You should look it up. It's just too funny. That is so cool. I like love that. Those videos must be, I don't know, so special.
• 3:29
  Love it. They are really special. Question number three is what's your go-to business resource in terms of book, podcast, or newsletter? Okay. I'm going to come at it from, again, a creative angle. I get this great twice-per-year magazine called Apartamento.
• 3:51
  And it's international and it's an interiors magazine and it has amazing graphic design and beautiful artists and it features folks who are writers and artists around the world. And so it's not necessarily businessy in quotes, but for me, it's big time inspiration for like brand building colors. What do we want our next cam colors to be like? I use that a lot.
• 4:17
  That is so cool. What did you say the name was? I didn't get it. Apartamento. Apartamento. I'm going to check that out. I've never heard of that before. Thank you. Love something I've never heard of before. Question number four is how do you win the day? What are your AM or PM rituals and habits that keep you feeling happy and motivated and successful?
• 4:36
  is a great one. I want to start by saying I regularly don't win my days. I regularly, you know, go a couple of too many days without showering, et cetera, because there's a lot going on. But here's what it looks like when I do win my day. I wake up early, usually around 630 or seven. Although in the winter, it gets a little hard. I feel that. I like to go on a walk with my
• 5:06
  And I really like to sit at a coffee shop and journal and people watch. And I think for me, it's just really nice to not start my day by thinking about work and opening my computer and kind of getting that anticipation that just comes from like, I've been asleep and now I'm awake and suddenly I have all these things on my mind. So journaling, walking my dog, starting early, having a slow morning is really big for me.
• 5:36
  And then Paul and I have this great time after work where if we're able to end early enough, we'll go on a walk and talk about what we're working on and talk about the day. And that's like a really sweet part of having a co-founder that you also live with is that you can sort of debrief on everything around everything and you know what the other person is talking about.
• 6:02
  That's so true. So true. My husband and I work closely together and I just love it. I really love it. You really know what the other person's like.
• 6:13
  not just goals, but like how they feel about everything and what's important to them on like just such a deep level, obviously because they're your partner, but like on a work front, which I think sometimes you kind of like miss if your partner works in like a completely different industry or something. Yes, that's a great point. Question number five, what is the worst money you've ever spent in the business? I would say –
• 6:39
  early on, we got really excited about having Ouroborra merch. And we wanted to have, you know, T-shirts or hats. And we were looking to source them from more sustainable places. And we'd never done it before. And this wasn't necessarily the biggest loss we've taken on something. But it was a huge time commitment to go looking for the right hat
• 7:09
  to find the right color to decide on the design we wanted for it, to prep like our Shopify site to add it on there and figure out how we were going to ship them out. And we ended up getting this shipment, this was only a few months ago, of what we thought were going to be these cool khaki hats and they were going to have our eyeball logo right on the front and they showed up and they were dark army green.
• 7:34
  with a lavender patch on them. And it could not have been a worse color combination. I didn't even know that it was possible to get this bad. But what about samples? What were the samples? Okay. Yeah, great question. Remember when I said we hadn't really ventured down this avenue before? We just got a photo sample, and it looked khaki, and we were like, amazing. You're like, that's it. So I –
• 8:02
  Yeah, that's the one. And now we have, you know, over a thousand hats that we're like, no one wants to wear this. We can't in good conscience sell these. So that is actually one of our more recent spending failures. Oh my gosh. How much did that cost? How much does merch cost when you're buying a few thousand units? It's about $1,000.
• 8:26
  $3 a hat. So it's not, it's not the end of the world, but, and we'll definitely find a use for them. We definitely will not throw them away, but it always get the sample kids. That is the lesson. Get the sample. Oh my gosh. 100%. This question kind of blends on from the last one. So maybe you won't have a specific answer for this. I might have to mix these questions up in the future, but what's been a major fail or mistake that you can share and how
• 8:57
  early on, we really wanted it to be beautiful. And there are a couple of ways you can build a website and I'm probably gonna get some of these technical terms wrong because I'm not an engineer, but there's a version of it that's called a headless site, which essentially means you're not using a template. And instead you customize the whole thing. And so,
• 9:16
  for the sake of artistry, I decided, let's go that direction. Let's build out the most beautiful custom site you've ever seen. And it's going to have animation and things are going to move and, and it's going to feel different because it is different. There's no template. And that can be done, but it ends up, we didn't know at the time, being very difficult to then have any kind of tracking on your site. So like,
• 9:43
  inserting pixels so that you know when people have arrived and how long they stay or when they dropped off in the funnel. We realized after a huge time commitment and customizing with designers and engineers, this beautiful site,
• 9:59
  that we were going to have to change it over to a template. And that was, I want to say hundreds of hours of time and just like a loss of something that felt like, you know, truly transportive. So that was that was a failure. And that happened, I want to say, about two years ago now. And I would say some days I'm still sad about it.
• 10:23
  Oh, no. Gosh. What's the learning there, though? I feel like that sounds amazing. Like, is it to keep it simple, like not complicate things? I don't know. What is it? Hmm.
• 10:37
  I think the biggest learning was actually learning how to be gracious with myself and be like, I didn't know better then. We'd never done this before. Paul and I say that to each other a lot because we'll look back on things that we now know better than and would never have done it like that and have to remember, oh, at the time that was our best choice. We made that choice with all the facts we had. So I think that's the biggest learning.
• 11:06
  Yeah, that's a good one. Good on you. Hate that for you, but good on you. Thank you. And I will say, I said I'm still sad about it sometimes. Our site is beautiful now. Yeah, your site's amazing. Very special.
• 11:22
  It is very special. Your overall brand and what you've created, I just love it. And I'm so happy that you came on the show and shared all these amazing things with us. I'm so grateful. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks, dude. Thank you for having me.
• 11:42
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 12:06
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 12:29
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that. Thank you.
• 12:46
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 13:10
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 13:33
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show, and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.