Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Dopple Founder Chao Wang gives us the breakdown of her guerilla marketing strategies that lead to a 10k waitlist on $0 spend

Transcript

Dopple Founder Chao Wang gives us the breakdown of her guerilla marketing strategies that lead to a 10k waitlist on $0 spend · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Chow Wang for Female Startup Club.
• 0:12
  Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm Dune, your host and hype girl. Today we're learning from Chow Wang, the founder of the kids subscription clothing company, Doppel. We chat about her journey in scaling this business by doing things that aren't typically scalable, like building a 10K person waiting list with $0 spend, along with some other really cool gems of info behind the scenes of building this company.
• 0:39
  If you haven't heard of Doppel, it was founded in 2017 by Chow and Janelle Hertz as a membership service reimagining how parents shop for their kids. It was created to make parents' lives easier and a lot more fun by delivering quarterly Doppel drops of custom-curated children's outfits to subscribers. The company, which recently raised $9.8 million in seed funding, uses a machine learning style algorithm to achieve some of the industry's highest keep rates for try-on-at-home models.
• 1:09
  Before we get into it, if you didn't know, we have a killer newsletter that goes out every Monday. It's packed with insights from the show, jobs at female-founded companies, shout-outs to small business owners, and it is well worth your time. You can sign up for free at femalestartupclub.com. Let's get into this episode. This is Ciao for Female Startup Club.
• 1:33
  Ciao, hello, and welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. So nice to be here. Thanks for having me. I've listened to you for a long time. That is so cool. You're blowing my mind, telling me that I'm so excited to have someone who knows the show and has listened into a few episodes so far. Exciting for both of us. Yeah, so great to be here. Excited to talk about Doppel.
• 1:59
  Absolutely. Do you want to start by telling us a little bit about who you are and what Doppel is for those of us who might not be super familiar?
• 2:08
  Yeah, so I'm the CEO and co-founder of Doppel. We are, I'm in New York right now. We're a U.S.-based children's clothing subscription business. We offer the most delightful, wonderful experience for parents shopping for clothes for their children in a subscription format. The B2B side of our business, which you can't see at first glance from our site, is that we work in a new retail model offering a different way for brands to reach their consumers, so children's wear brands.
• 2:38
  That's so cool. I love that you say you're super delightful. When you say that, what do you actually mean? What are you doing to delight people before we jump into it? I feel like all consumer startups, businesses, they want to surprise and delight their customers for sure. I think compare shopping with Doppel, the experience is so wonderful compared to pretty much a lot of other things you need to buy for your kids or things you need to do as a parent, such as
• 3:08
  buying diapers from Amazon, for example. And so what we set out to do wasn't just to make something convenient or to offer great products or great styling, but just every part of that experience from like a text that we send to a confirmation email for it to be a bit of a wink and quite clever and just very fun. So our customers, the one thing that our customers have said over the last three years consistently is that it's like getting a surprise present.
• 3:38
  You don't know what's in it. You know it's going to be really, really good. You always open it with your child. You have an at-home fashion show. It's just like a very delightful experience, and we're super proud of that. And I love talking about it. Oh, my gosh. That is so cool. It's like receiving a present. How nice. Every month. Cool. Yeah.
• 3:58
  Let's go back to 2017. I think I read that's when you launched. But to go back, I guess, a bit before that, what got you thinking about launching this business in the first place? And why were you passionate about, you know, the kids area or the kids space?
• 4:14
  So we actually, my co-founder Janelle and I actually started working on Doppel October. So it's been four years, October 2017. We didn't launch until August 2018. And we didn't spend a single dollar on marketing until 2019.
• 4:30
  What? So from, you know, four years ago until our launch three years ago, we were beta testing and we actually grew a waiting list of over 10,000 parents who are now customers at the time without advertising and without doing kind of the traditional or not so traditional marketing tactics. So technically, I think we're three years old, but we've been working on it for four years.
• 4:55
  And the need, I think, you know, necessity is the mother of all invention. And that applies to Doppel in two ways. One is the actual consumer side, which is that Janelle of our friends was quite young when she was, she had her first child, her daughter, Carmen, and was their pretty classic, like millennial customer where we're used to new retail models, new ways of shopping, whether it's consignment or rental and things.
• 5:22
  We're obviously shopping online. We're used to direct-to-consumer brand. And we're just quite savvy discovering products on Instagram. And so at the time, the children's were a space and still is very disparate. So you have a lot of vertically integrated companies like a Gap, Gap Kids, or J.Crew sells Crew Cuts.
• 5:40
  Target sells Cat and Jack. And then you also have, you know, some really beautiful niche brands like Bonpoint, which we carry, but super luxury, very expensive, not kind of practical for most consumers who need clothes for their kids for every day.
• 5:56
  And so the combination of, you know, the rise of Instagram and seeing what's out there, especially like beautiful European brands that weren't readily available in the U.S. And the idea that, you know, people dress high and low like they do for their kids. We saw a bunch of direct-to-consumer baby food companies pop up all around the same time by founders who didn't know each other or some of them who didn't even have children.
• 6:19
  And it was part of the same trend where people were starting to have kids. They want to treat their kids much like they treat themselves, whether it's how they dress or how they eat organic. They want to feed their kids organic food. And so we saw the need to mix high-low. So mixing a $15 Everlane T-shirt that you might have a couple of in different colors with maybe you'll spend a little bit more on a leather jacket or a hat.
• 6:45
  a bag. And then you need, you know, kind of in between everyday denim. And so that just didn't exist for kids. And, you know, as millennials are starting to have kids, and now Gen Z are starting to have kids, there was a big gap in like how people want to shop for their, you know, now babies and what was available, which was mostly these vertically integrated big brands and very little distribution for smaller brands.
• 7:10
  Wow, that's so super cool. You said something that really piqued my interest that I want to dive into soon, and that is the 10,000 emails that you created without spending any dollars. That's crazy. But I still want to focus on that early kind of time in getting started.
• 7:28
  Okay. So you decided to start a business together. What are the actual early steps? I know you said that you didn't spend any money on marketing, but did you need to buy inventory? Were you kind of like, how did you know what to do and what were you doing in those first few months of getting this brand off the ground?
• 7:45
  So how do you know what to do? So I guess two parts. One is that we were really open to experimenting. So just like I said, there was a bunch of direct-to-consumer baby food products. There were actually a couple of venture-backed companies in the children's workspace.
• 8:01
  So they weren't all subscription. They weren't, you know, we don't really see them as competitors, but it's actually validating that people were like, there's a wide open market here. People want something better. And, you know, millennials are having kids at an older age. They have more disposable income. They have fewer kids. You know, we weren't the first to see that trend. And so we really looked at it and thought about kind of all the things that we could do. We could start a direct to consumer brand actually wasn't quite, you know, trendy to start a retail
• 8:31
  You know, there really weren't any great retail brands that we could think of that were on the level of Revolve or Net-a-Porter that started in those years. This was like the heyday of Away and Outdoor Voices. And there were just another, you know, Casper mattress competitor, direct-to-consumer, any category at the time.
• 8:49
  So we took a look at the space and really spoke to people and really tested out. We thought about doing what if we did, you know, use clothing because kids outgrow clothes. So we kind of looked at every model pretty agnostically to evaluate not just what we wanted to do, but also like what do consumers want? Where was there an opportunity to delight consumers knowing that their, you know, trends were changing how they wanted to shop?
• 9:14
  The other piece in terms of being ready is I don't think I realized at the time how lucky I was. In the last two roles I had before starting Doppel, Janelle, I was working at two other early stage startups that were operationally really complex. I helped fundraise. I was the CEO's right hand I hired. So I felt like I learned a lot on, you know, with some room to make mistakes on someone else's dime, so to speak.
• 9:43
  So that was, I'm immensely grateful for that. And even though that felt very similar to being a founder, it definitely wasn't the same. So, you know, there's a lot that you're not going to feel or learn until you're actually doing it yourself, but had very good...
• 9:58
  training wheels, I think, up to that point. In terms of starting the brand, so our, you know, like I said, the other piece of necessity is the mother of all invention is actually how we procured inventory. So I remember the first time we went to, there's a trade show called Playtime.
• 10:16
  They do it in Paris and New York, Tokyo, and I can't remember, I think Vegas maybe. And we went to the one in Paris because that had all of the boutique brands and the stuff that we really wanted. And it was quite comical how we had to explain slowly that not only did we not have a physical shop in Europe, like a physical brick and mortar shop.
• 10:41
  We were from the U.S. We didn't even have a shop. We didn't even have a website where we showcased that we could just show them on our phone. The like kind of try and at home concept. Just imagine someone who is Spanish, like an older Spanish man who makes the most beautiful shoes that you cannot buy in the U.S. readily that you, you know, at a price point that's comparable to what you might find on Zappos. So like slowly explaining this 150 times. No, I think there were like 500 vendors.
• 11:12
  And so that was pretty humbling and it got us pitching better in terms of understanding the brand. So what we set out to do and what we still do today, our inventory strategy is almost mind-blowing. People almost can't believe that we've been able to do it, which is that we don't own the goods that we sell. It's on consignment for brands. And that is major big brands that are sold at every department store through direct-to-consumer brands that don't even sell through other channels, through boutique brands, and even Instagram native brands.
• 11:42
  They send us the inventory, but this is super capital, you know, capital light strategy. And the reason why we've been able to do it is because when we were pitching, you know, the five, 600 brands that are at that one trade show, we really had to figure out, okay, how are we going to convince people who they just sell wholesale? That's what they're there for. They have beautiful product that we want. And we know the American consumer wants and can't easily get it.
• 12:10
  Yet we don't want to simply like buying wholesale and selling retail is not interesting to us. What we want to do is offer something better. So, you know, necessity being the mother of all invention, we talk to these brands and try to understand, you know, what is a Nordstrom's or Saks not giving you? How can we even convince you to give us product for free?
• 12:30
  that you would normally earmark to sell to, through other channels. And from that, we really understood, you know, revenue is actually only one selling point for the brands that work with us. Obviously, as we grow, that's, you know, for some brands were one of their biggest channels.
• 12:46
  in addition to their own direct-to-consumer. And we drive so much traffic to their site because when people discover a brand and product through Doppel, it has a cachet, hopefully, that it's cool, that we've picked it just for them. They can feel the quality. But for brands, we offer three other major buckets of why you would want to work with us. One is that we offer super rich data that we haven't seen anyone else offer. And that's from...
• 13:14
  off-price retailers, traditional retailers, major e-com retailers, that's actually helpful to the brand. So a typical, you know, a pretty typical situation would be a brand wants to get into nits. You know, they want to get into a new category and they need to figure out pricing. And you would think that there's, you know, trend forecasts and databases and no, a lot of these companies, even though they're quite big, you know, it's a few people on a small team
• 13:40
  figuring out what is the right pricing to launch with. And, you know, the lead times are so long. These are like pretty major decisions that they're pretty much making, you know, without much support from retailers. So what we do is we aggregate data and we have such rich data because of the try on a home model. We know why people keep things, why we have these customers for years and years and years, hopefully. And so we really understand them.
• 14:03
  They provide us far more data than they would ever provide if they were returning something to a retailer because they know they're going to come back. It feeds into an algorithm and human stylists who actually use that information and continue personalizing for that child, for their sibling, for future orders, for Halloween outfits, for if they like organic or don't or love these brands or don't. And so we share that with the brand in an aggregated way.
• 14:33
  you know, they have a lot of doors and major e-com. We didn't know what they offer and what they didn't offer. And so we're like, let's offer something better that's truly useful. So that's one piece. Another piece is that we provide end-to-end fulfillment. So if you're a brand, let's say you have broken size runs from last season.
• 14:48
  some pants didn't sell well because of COVID or it just didn't photograph that well online or the price point, you didn't get the pricing right or whatever. You also have current season that you have a limited window that you want to be selling. You might have some sample stock from when you try to get into shoes and, you know,
• 15:06
  you know, whatever, we make it super easy for you to send us all that inventory. Your goals might be to get, have more data and understand pricing. Your goals might just be purely sales. Your goals might be that you want, you know, your product to be in the hands of influencers and you just, that's not what you do well, or you don't have an agency to do that. So whatever your goals are, or maybe it's just to move currencies and product and you want to drive more traffic to your own brand.
• 15:34
  because you want to do less wholesale and you want to do more direct-to-consumer. Any of those goals, we align and help you with, but make it really easy. So you don't have to package things in a certain way. You don't have to UPC code things in a certain way that kind of what traditional retailers would ask you to do. Send it to our fulfillment center in New Jersey
• 15:52
  And we start getting it into the hands of customers within seven to 10 days. And not just any customers, but customers we know that will love that pair of pants that didn't sell well for you online. We've matched it with the perfect outfit. The sizes match. We know that runs small, and that's why it didn't sell well for you. But we're sending to the customer, factoring that sizing in and have a high degree of certainty of how it will sell.
• 16:16
  That is so interesting. And I love that, like, you're able to offer this thing, which of course, those traditional retailers, maybe they even kind of like try to conceal their data so that they can kind of keep doing better versus like sharing it. But in the beginning, I'm wondering, like, when you were speaking to those five or 600 people in Paris, was it a case of like, fake it till you make it? We're going to tell you we're going to give this data because you wouldn't have had data to start with, right? You would have had to have,
• 16:44
  essentially gone over a period of time and then given them data back. So were they just kind of signing on for the reason of data in the future or was there something else?
• 16:55
  So I think for some people who are a little bit more forward thinking, they thought it was exciting and, you know, were willing to work with us. So we're like, you know, give us a few hundred units. We can start small. There's no risk to you. If it doesn't, you know, if it doesn't sell in X days, we will pay for shipping back to you. You have nothing to lose. We'll send it, you know, just as easy as possible. Yeah.
• 17:18
  Yeah, just kind of definitely fake it till you make it. Once we had a couple of brands on board, it became at least intriguing to other brands. At this trade show, everyone has heard of these brands, which is why you go there and you really get a lay of the land. I'm trying to think what else we did. I think we just hustled. We just hustled, to be honest. And if you're willing to start small, the idea was, okay, let's give us a little bit of inventory. We'll show you what we can do. And at the time, even if we had tons of inventory and every brand said yes,
• 17:48
  we, you know, hadn't raised money. Part of the reason why we had that waiting list was that we couldn't, we, if 10,000 people ordered this week, we couldn't fulfill those orders. And so that's actually why we started the wait list and accidentally built this cache. And then we were able to cherry pick. We're like, what are moms in Wyoming? Like, how did they shop? How much are they going to spend? How did they hear about us? How did they get on the waiting list? So it became this, um,
• 18:14
  you know, accidental experiment that we, you know, did a lot with and with that data and that waiting list. But so definitely difficult, similar to a marketplace, we have to balance supply and demand. And for us, like we're taking their inventory, we want to sell it and we want to have them give us more inventory, more of their merchandise. And so we're hustling on the inventory side and we're hustling on the customer growth side back and forth.
• 18:39
  Okay, let's talk about the 10,000 emails and getting that kind of side of the puzzle sorted. Because at this point, you have the inventory and you have the brands involved, but you have no money to market. And you obviously build this amazing database of 10,000 people to start. So how did you do that?
• 18:58
  So how do we do that? So it's definitely a big chunk of that waitlist initially were just through telling everyone in our network. And that was primarily focused in San Francisco, New York, and LA. That's just where we knew people. I think we initially had a lot of people from, I think this is what like, you know, kind of similar to a SaaS model. So there were some companies, so let's say LinkedIn for women, right? There are lots of moms at LinkedIn. They have a...
• 19:28
  LinkedIn group chat or, you know, bulletin board where they have employee perks or et cetera. And I also think starting in San Francisco, one of the great things about the Bay Area is that there's definitely a pay it forward at it. People will try a new startup, even when it's two people like hustling and they'll try it again in a couple of weeks or a couple of months, even if their first experience wasn't amazing, even though, you know, we were trying to make every experience amazing.
• 19:54
  Whereas I think, you know, New Yorkers are, they'll try anything once, but if it's not amazing, I don't know if they're going to come back as quickly. So it was easier to iterate there. So a lot of these like networks through some of these tech companies definitely helped us build our list. It was kind of a way to build word of mouth. It got to a point, I don't know when it was exactly, but I remember it being like a watershed moment when we realized that just from word of mouth, we had customers in 49 out of 50 states. Yeah.
• 20:22
  West Virginia was the only one. And we were waiting for a customer to find out about us and come in through West Virginia. No ads, no influencer marketing, no paid. I mean, we had some influencers who were, you know, paying customers, but nothing paid. And so, you know, much like there's some categories, if you were looking for a pediatrician,
• 20:44
  You're probably not going to go to Yelp and find the five-star pediatrician nearest to you. You're going to ask another mom. And then maybe you could validate too. But that was quite similar. So when something's cool, I think it spreads like wildfire. And so that's essentially how we built our list. It was being able to drive people to a page for that word of mouth.
• 21:06
  And so just to clarify, though, do you mean you were going, you were going to a friend, someone that you knew who potentially worked at LinkedIn and being like, Hey, I have this thing. Can you tell everyone about it in your company via an email, via a bulletin board, like really like hand to hand combat? Can you please do me a solid and shout about this business to your colleagues? Is that what you mean?
• 21:30
  Yes, except those networks are stronger than, you know, let's say asking your friend who's a lawyer, right? Even the big law firms, they aren't cultivating employee perks and products. You know what I mean? The way that a Facebook or a LinkedIn would be. And were you like offering anything to incentivize these people in your network to spread the word? Or you were just being like, can you please help me and I will owe you one another time?
• 21:59
  We told them that their friends would be bumped to the top of the waitlist, which was true. We did do that. We followed through on that. But you can't bump everyone off a waitlist. Somebody has to be not at the top. And so that was, again, more out of necessity than anything else. And we would let in, we would just pick, you know, a state or a city or a zip code or geography that we weren't familiar with.
• 22:21
  Or even people, and we would, not only were they on the wait list, they hadn't even taken the style quiz. So much like a stitch fix or any other, you know, trunk club, et cetera, the way that customers, new customers provide data is they take a quick style questionnaire.
• 22:37
  And we take that data, our interpretation of it, where we win as a, you know, why we're delightful, why we nail styling is the way that we interpret that data and match that with clothing is unique to us. And that was something we set out to prove. We're like, why do some people have clothing?
• 22:56
  you know, good taste. They're born with good taste and style and other people don't. We think, can we, can we like scale this so that all of our customers have great taste with very little- Systemize and scale.
• 23:09
  Yeah, but truly, like a lot of people say that, but we were, you know, like we actually want this to be so like, aha, that people get it as soon as they open their drop. They're like, holy cow, this is amazing. I can't believe the prices. I can't believe the styling. And therefore, I will share. Like a wow experience all around. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. Yeah.
• 23:27
  Wow, that's amazing. My other question just around this email list of 10,000, obviously we're talking about 2017. Maybe, you know, the landscape has changed since 2017 in terms of people are like bombarded with this, not this kind of thing necessarily, but, you know, joining wait lists and companies doing innovative things. If you were to start this business tomorrow, would you follow that same method or do you think you'd approach it differently to building the wait list?
• 23:58
  Yeah, so when we set up our Klaviyo account, which I know is a sponsor of yours, I remember their team was so small that if I... I think I asked if somebody could please call me. I knew everyone in their office. That's how small their team was. They were like, oh, we'll literally give the phone to someone. So that wasn't even that long ago. So I think attentive and SMS marketing is probably what Klaviyo was at the time. Obviously, MailChimp was around, et cetera. And we weren't like Klaviyo's first customer, but it was in its...
• 24:28
  infancy. So I don't know. I think for sure, SMS is probably the next thing, but even that's pretty saturated. I just figured out the other day that you can separate your iMessage inbox from known and unknown centers. And I looked at how many unknown centers. Granted, I sign up for these because I want to see what other companies are doing. But when I wasn't doing that, I couldn't get back to my friends and family because I had so many marketing texts. So I'm not going to
• 24:57
  I didn't know you could do that either. Someone who's Gen Z told me, I was like, you don't know this. I'm like, no, I don't think anyone. I don't think anyone knows this. I definitely don't know that. Wow. Okay. Right. So SMS marketing, obviously, yeah, I agree with you in that it seems like a lot of people are doing that now and are kind of taking that SMS led approach. Is there anything else that you would think about doing if you were starting tomorrow? Yeah.
• 25:25
  I think people are always going to talk about things that either make them look cool or that they genuinely love, some combination of that, how they go about it, whether it's TikTok or – there's so many more mediums now. But it doesn't change the fact that we're all humans and we love to connect and we love to share –
• 25:45
  If I wasn't doing this, I was like, I would be like a biohacker and just talk about health and wellness. And I don't even care if I have any one listening because I just love talking about that kind of stuff. So I don't know. It's not a, I guess it's not a good answer because I think text is saturated. So what's the next thing? But like being authentic to just, you know, before, before Dopple, I worked at a company called Parsley Health and similar to healthcare people don't like, I would never go to a doctor out of like a search most likely.
• 26:15
  You know, I would ask a friend who lived in that city. If I moved somewhere new, I would ask someone I trust or someone who knows that field or something. So yeah, people always want to share. You just have to figure out like what is the, and test the way. I think being stuck on what has worked last year or three years ago or for a competitor or another product versus setting up some basic tests. One thing we learned really early on is a friend of mine
• 26:44
  Neha, she was setting up a consulting business at the time and she kindly offered to, she's a UX researcher and she offered to do some work for us.
• 26:54
  for free, I think, because we begged her and she was starting out a consulting company. And from her, I realized that she would, you know, I think she spoke with 10 of our customers. Everyone has 10 customers for an hour apiece. And she filmed these and she did it, you know, in a way that would be much better than about, you know, I'm not a UX researcher. And that was enough to find a lot of common threads. You think you would have to do, you know, surveys of hundreds of people to find, no. Like she picked 10 people at random. And at the time,
• 27:22
  we had a couple hundred customers like, you know, and really spoke with them at length and like even similar phrases to how they talk about women from across the country, not just coastal cities, et cetera. And so that led, you know, one thing we learned from that that we still employ is that we call out that we have free shipping. It's a try on a home model. Obviously it's free shipping. What like, also, what do you not get free shipping with nowadays? But she's like, you should call that out. Like that is something that everyone pointed to as like,
• 27:50
  Oh, just easy. The labels in there, like, you know, this like sizing, whatever, you know, I'm not expected to buy everything. Like I totally get what they're doing. They're sending me some things to see what I will say about them. And so we called out free shipping and that, you know, when we did start advertising and when we started putting banner things, you know, free shipping was always like everywhere.
• 28:12
  Yeah. So you don't let your customers talk to you or tell you what they want. And you don't need a huge data set to drive that. And don't worry about what other people are doing. Like when I look on TikTok, I see brands just doing amazing shit that we don't have. Amazing stuff that we don't have time for, quite frankly, to produce that kind of content yet. But that might not. You know what I mean? That might not be exactly the most efficient or thing right for us.
• 28:37
  you need to keep laser focused on what's working for you and kind of just keep, keep your guiding star ahead of you. But what I really love about what you've just said is sometimes it does feel like, you know, you need to be speaking to thousands of people to get this data information and customer feedback when it's like, no, just give yourself a small pool of 10 people and give yourself that goal of like interviewing 10 of your,
• 29:02
  top customers once a quarter, see what's coming up out of that, and then lean into the stuff that's working and kind of either fix or move away from the stuff that's not working and keep iterating over and over and over again. I really do think that that's something that, like,
• 29:18
  It's kind of like small and, you know, something that can easily be overlooked, even though you know that you should be doing it. So for anyone listening, take this as your key to book in some hour long sessions with your customers and record them. Yeah. What is fueling the growth for you now in your like 2021 marketing mix and like what's working really, really well for you?
• 29:43
  So a couple of things we just launched. I was a little stressed earlier before we started because we just launched gifting today and it's the doppel.com slash gifts. No brainer. I mean, from day one, people are, why don't you guys have gifting? So we had a digital gift experience, which was great. So if I were to give you a gift
• 30:02
  And I didn't know if what style you were or what size your child is, or maybe you want to dress them in unisex colors and you don't want pink for a girl. I wouldn't have to worry about it. So it's actually great. We have a lot of like single men who are going, you know, had a friend who had a child and had no idea like how much they should spend or what to do and not to offend people and like whatever. So what the digital experience we had, which we still have today, um,
• 30:28
  relaunched, redesigned, but, uh, you know, I would send you a gift. You would take the quiz and anything that you didn't keep in your drop, you would become a doppel subscriber. And so you get credit towards the next thing. Um, and so it's all, um, you know, I, I look great in terms of giving the gift. I can also give it last minute because it's digital. Um, but that you get, you get a beautiful gift that you have saying what, you know, uh, you can add in the notes, um, for our stylist and you, you tell us exactly what you want.
• 30:56
  That is really cool. I love that. Yeah. And so the new product we offer today, which is a long time coming, is boxed gifts. Now that people are going to baby showers in person, maybe you want to send it to yourself and bring it in person, or you want to send it directly to a friend if you're not traveling, COVID, et cetera.
• 31:15
  And we did something really fun with it. We love, you know, the starter pack memes, like Mrs. Dow Jones and like a lot of accounts have their, you know, when they get it right, it's really funny. So we have mom starter packs or parent starter packs. So you just, if you're not sure which one to pick, you can just look at the meme and you get a sense of, you know, the boho parent who loves Sakara and she's like,
• 31:42
  And all things goop and all things natural and crystals. You can pick that one, pick a price point and gender or unisex and you're off in beautiful packaging. That's more like, you know, what a sophisticated adult would be buying versus it looking kitty. Yeah, the nail pink.
• 32:02
  Yeah, exactly. So this year, what's done really well for us? So launching new products for both our current customers or our current subscribers, we're obsessed with offering other ways for them to shop. So subscriptions are bread and butter. It's where we gather data about our customers and what they individually love. But once we know that, they trust us. They know anything from Doppel is curated, personalized, specific. There's discovery of new brands and products.
• 32:28
  So once we have them in, you know, their first drop experience, we introduce other ways for them to shop. And it's bananas. And so we're trying to think not everyone wants to shop in a subscription or buy exactly quarterly. Our subscription is quarterly. Some people want to buy monthly. Some people...
• 32:45
  just want to buy an outfit because they need something or they want something that's, you know, not a plastic Halloween costume they're going to, you know, toss the next day. And so we're offering other delightful ways to shop. Gifting is obviously available to everyone. We're really thinking about what holiday means from like the doppel lens. So there's toys and books and everything out there that you can get. But what is a like doppel lens for our customers so that
• 33:15
  clothes because clothes are not the number one thing I think kids want to have for the holidays. They want toys and video games. But what is our perspective of that? We relaunched our site, you know, messaging and communication being really clear, like, what is our point of view? You know, as I think I read somewhere that like Saks launched, they offer 60 new children's
• 33:40
  Um, but you know, what is the doppel? It's not just convenience or getting in the mail or free shipping or the curation piece. It's all of it together. But like, what is it that we're going to offer and trying to communicate that clearly, whether it's, um, you know, through our site, when we're sending something to an influencer, like, how do we really get that across? And I think, um.
• 33:59
  Part of that is also, you know, I don't think we do a very good job of like explaining to people like why the styling is so good. And it's actually very data science, machine learning and engineering heavy that you just don't see. And quite frankly, I don't think I've done a really good job explaining it. But that's where we spend a lot of the money that we raise. That's where we spend a lot of our time. The kind of beautiful site thing is a fraction of the work behind it. But the personalization is why we win. Yeah.
• 34:27
  So really focusing on that, whether it's holiday gifts or, you know, Black Friday or there's that. And then I think brand collaborations have always, you know, back when we were at that trade show, nobody knows who Doppel is and we're still quite small, but people know the brands that we carry. And once they know a couple, once they start to know Doppel, they want to know the other brands that we're offering that might be quite small. And so making sure that we have that mix of like,
• 34:54
  you know, indie, interesting. No one's ever heard of this brand, but it's the most beautiful, you know, raw edge hair bow that you've ever seen at an amazing price point that you would have never found yourself. Or even if you did, you don't have the time to research and like, you know, get it from the brand. It's just a lot of work.
• 35:11
  Totally, totally. Congrats on the gift launch for today, by the way. My other thought is, I'm just going to throw this out there. We should totally do a collab with the non-alc wine company when it comes out because all of your moms, I'm sure, would love
• 35:25
  some non-alc wine that is great tasting and premium quality and the best there is. We, we, we have a lot of like, there's like a whole category of mom wine jokes and mom coffee jokes. So it's a whole thing. If you want some content, there's a lot of good stuff out there. That could be, Oh my God. Really fine. Yeah. Are you guys going to do private label and create your own brands? Is that part of the roadmap or will you not go down that pathway? Yeah.
• 35:53
  So it's interesting because no matter how many brands we onboard, I think there's, we carry from newborn to size 14. So, which is roughly, you know, age 14. But there's definitely a sweet spot where we just can't sometimes get enough inventory because it just doesn't exist. So, for example, our team always jokes like,
• 36:12
  somebody should start a company that only makes boys' pants for toddlers, like toddler boys. They're not khakis. Just like interesting, cool, like not khakis and not sweatpants. There's like just like a big hole in the marketplace. Not like we don't know about every brand out there. And so I think private label is something we're tiptoeing in. We want to do it in a really thoughtful way, not just to do it, to do it. There are other companies in the children's first space. It's like that's just the next thing you do as a retailer because it's good for your margins.
• 36:41
  But we really want to offer, like, what's the doppel version of it? Like, do we need to do this? It also adds complexity to our business. In the very beginning, we offered, we tested out selling, like, luxury, you know, baby Dior, but consignment. And...
• 37:00
  And that was such an interesting business. I think the sustainability piece of taking in used clothing from our customers and either reselling it or some kind of way of, you know, partnering with the ThreadUp, et cetera. I think that's super, you know, super exciting. But it adds another adds another business to your business.
• 37:21
  So it's something we're being really thoughtful about it. So we've started. So I think some, you know, I guess TBD 2022, because we're looking at production 2022. But we want to do it really, really carefully, make sure that we offer something really amazing for our customers. It doesn't take away from the brands that we carry. That isn't just slightly better than what is already out there. But maybe we'll start a toddler boys.
• 37:48
  I love the idea of the, you know, the reselling like side of things. We're seeing designers like Gucci come out with the vault with their kind of like vintage pieces that they're bringing back into sell. And I just think like that's going to start popping up more and more. And it makes so much sense for kids, especially when it's like designer kids things. Anyway, last point on that.
• 38:09
  So what is your kind of key piece of advice for entrepreneurs who are innovating on something new coming into 2022?
• 38:19
  The first thing I would say is, you know, trust your gut, trust your intuition. And I think there's a lot written and said about imposter syndrome, et cetera. And like, that's just part of the thing. And you just have to like push past that. I feel if there's anything that I like look back that I regret not doing six months ago or three months ago or a year ago is actually just not going for it because I was afraid or I had to consult someone else or I didn't have enough information or time or what, you know, whatever.
• 38:49
  And so I would say, you know, just like email text marketing, by the time you're onto that thing, there's always the next thing. So just really trust your gut and like push forward, even if it's a small task. So you can kind of do anything in a small, in a small bite size amount without it being so daunting. And then I would say the second thing is probably like tenacity is like 99% of it.
• 39:16
  Like, I don't think I've met a really hungry entrepreneur who I didn't think could succeed. And they might not all succeed, whatever that definition of success is. But it's just putting one foot in front of the other. I tell myself that all the time, whatever the big thing or the hurdle, it's...
• 39:32
  just, you know, I'm tenacious and I am impatient with myself. So those are probably the two, they're like two good qualities. Impatience, maybe not always, but it's like what drives me. So yeah, it's not like, I don't think anyone has it really easy. You saw me like an hour and a half ago. I was like, oh my gosh, like there's so many problems with this thing. Nobody would know if you went and looked and bought a gift. Now you would think that this was, you know, beautiful and,
• 40:01
  Yeah. It's that perseverance. Yeah. Perseverance to just keep going. And I love that idea of like one foot in front of the other. I speak about this on the show all the time. It's like, don't even aim for doing a hundred percent every day. Just aim for 1%. Just be 1% better. Do 1% every day. And like, eventually you'll look back and be like, holy shit, look where I am now. I'm like at the top of the mountain. This is crazy.
• 40:22
  I'm all about it. Okay, we are up to the six quick questions that I ask at the end of every episode and we have a few minutes left so I'm hoping we can squeeze them all in. Question number one is what's your why? Why are you doing what you're doing? I am an entrepreneur at heart. I love building a great company and I'm super, super proud of it. I love the problem solving and I love the people that we work with and just literally building relationships
• 40:51
  building a product and a company out of nothing. Love that. Question number two is what's been the number one marketing moment that's made the business pop?
• 41:02
  So I wish I could say that we had TikTok go viral or there was, you know, one specific milestone and that was the, you know, we had a Dollar Shave Club video and that was like the answer to all our prayers. It actually isn't that similar to what I said earlier about, you know, what I advise other entrepreneurs. We have a lot of things going at once and we put one foot in front of the other. We test things like we're actually not even launching TikTok until later this month.
• 41:30
  But when we do, we don't have the content calendar lined up forever. We have some really good content, some ads that are going to start, and we're just going to get started. And we do that with a lot of different channels. And we do that with things that are really guerrilla tactics. Like there are a lot of mom Facebook groups that are super, super engaged. It doesn't seem super scalable, but it's really effective and it's worth testing. And if you just look at the ROI of the time spent and how engaged these customers are,
• 41:57
  are, it could be worth it. So, so we have, you know, let's say 12 channels going on at the same time, not one of them is that magic bullet. And that's okay. One of them could turn into a magic bullet one, one campaign could turn into a magic bullet, maybe gifting is our magic bullet. But, you know, and because that we're not reliant on one thing. So when there was the iOS app, you know, update, we're not freaking out because we don't have one channel that is the source of all of our growth that we are totally reliant on. So
• 42:26
  I know that's like a good answer, but that's actually, that's actually, you know, the reality. No, I love it. I'd love to know just quickly before I ask you the next question, what do you mean when you're in these Facebook groups, like guerrilla style? Like, what are you actually doing? Like just posting or...
• 42:43
  Yeah, so there are actually, so what started this was that there are Facebook groups called BuySoulTrade, BST, and they were, there are actually groups around one single brand. So like imagine like the adult version would be like Supreme, you know, you love.
• 42:58
  of Supreme and there's like resale value. And there's these Facebook groups where people are like, does anyone have the Supreme skateboard in blue? There's only two made in the world and I really want one. And they're probably posting on Craigslist, et cetera. But this is more of a safe community around a specific interest or brand. And so there are communities around like, you name it, the brand.
• 43:18
  Peloton moms group of the Upper East Side. There's been some that has some notoriety, such as the Upper East Side moms group. I think there was like some press in like a tabloid here called Page Six, tabloid slash great newspaper. So there's a lot of these groups. The point is like each group, it might not be a major growth channel,
• 43:38
  But it could be really worth testing. I remember a while ago I posted, you know, I have building link, which is like a community, you know, bulletin board if you live in a condo building. And the engagement was crazy. Like, you know, and they were quite open to people posts that like, hey, my personal trainer, I want to share a nanny or whatever.
• 43:59
  But if you think about it, how many buildings just in New York City have a building-length bulletin board? If you just did that, that could get you started. So I think, you know, that saying from Y Combinator, it's like do things that don't scale. That's one of those things that doesn't seem to scale. Yet if you think about it, those customers who are super engaged, if they are great word of mouth customers,
• 44:23
  customers for you if they're that engaged online. So we consider all of those. It's like you can truly get your first 1000 customers by doing that hand to hand combat of just like door knocking essentially in little tiny sub communities. I love that. That's so cool and really key. Thanks for sharing. Question number three is where do you hang out to get smarter? What are you reading or listening to or subscribing to that's worth noting?
• 44:49
  So I've listened to your podcast. The only other one that I listened to actually, I like to listen from people who are actually recently have done something as opposed to, I don't know. I think the Bethany Frankel's podcast, whatever you think of her is like quite good because of how she like, I think she just doesn't care like what she asked and she gets pretty good. Interesting, like an interesting variety of people. So some podcasts, um, um,
• 45:15
  I try to read fiction and just be exposed to culture and other things. And that's not a linear way to solve a problem or get an idea, but it just like opens your mind. I don't know. It's kind of having like a shower moment. You know, when you think of your best ideas, like when you're half asleep or you're taking a shower, you're doing something else. Same goes for when you're going to a museum. It just like opens your like literally opens your eyes to something else.
• 45:44
  And I feel like I, you know, answer a million emails, I work on a million projects, talk to a million people. But when you're reading fiction, it's like you're immersed in something totally different than your day to day, at least for me. But, yeah, you know, I'm in New York and there's just like you can, you know, the Steve Jobs thing, you connect the dots after I feel like everything you're exposed to.
• 46:07
  it makes you a better problem solver. It makes you more aware of like other people and how to work with them. So yeah, so I would say consuming culture. And then obviously being around other like smart entrepreneurs, the coworking space right there. I don't know if it's because of COVID, but people are very heads down, not talking to themselves. So the few people I've talked to, they're fascinating. They're doing something really cool. They're super passionate about it. They're just, they're grinding all the time. So maybe I'll talk to more people here.
• 46:34
  Yeah, I'd love that. Get out there and talk to people. Question number four is how do you win the day? What are your AM and PM rituals and habits that keep you feeling happy and successful and motivated?
• 46:46
  So I am a morning person. I try to optimize for when I have the most energy. I also take into consideration my team. I know who's a morning person, who's not a morning person. I kind of know what people like how they like to work. And I try to, within reason, try to like fit fit that in. For me personally, like help like
• 47:05
  health, mind, body health is really important. So I take care of that so that I can be energetic and productive. So I take a gazillion supplements. I try to get 10,000 steps. I have a little checklist that looks like, like a child's app where I just love checking these basic things off. And I'll, you know, I have a bunch of meditation apps. I like, well, I just try to take care of myself because, you know, it's a, it's a marathon, not a sprint.
• 47:34
  Yeah. And that goes for like, you know, talking to a therapist. So I have someone to vent to because a lot of stuff happens and it can be really stressful. So just try and take, take decent care of myself. Yeah. All the things. If you were given a thousand dollars, no strings attached grant money, where would you spend that in the business? Yes. I remember this question. I think we would,
• 48:00
  So with $1,000, we are still trying to figure out how the magic of that wait list happened, to be honest, which is scaling word of mouth authentically. So is it that we put reviews on our page? Is it that we, you know, talk to YouTube influencers to do more unboxing? But how do we really do that? And $1,000 can even, you know, we're...
• 48:25
  We spend more than $1,000 on a lot of channels. $1,000 can do a lot for us because people want to share great – at least our customers want to share great ideas, not just for the monetary incentive. It's not just about refer a customer, get $20. It's the cachet of being like, oh, my gosh, I discovered something that is so cool, so fun.
• 48:45
  Prices are amazing. I wish I knew before. And I'm the cool mom at school with the best dressed kids who people like I want, I naturally want to tell people. And if we can use that thousand dollars to give some kind of cachet that maybe monetary, maybe monetary and something else, first access to things, an insider look kind of how glossy built their community that like, that's probably where we spend it. So I love that so much as well, because it's like,
• 49:12
  Once you figure out those things that make your brand inherently like shareable and gives clout to the buyer within their circle of friends and they become kind of like the trusted source, then you're like onto something major. I love that. Really cool. Last question. Question number six is how do you deal with failure? What's your mindset when things don't go to plan?
• 49:36
  So everything's a learning experience. There's not really failure. You just have to get up the next day and put one foot in front of the other. I think failure is obviously humbling to lean into and, you know,
• 49:51
  I'm so much better for things not working out in the past. And even then, I think when we started Doppel, I thought, not that I thought I learned everything there was to know, for sure not, but I thought like I knew the early stage startup game, but it's a whole different thing when the pressure's all on you and you're not working alongside someone, it's you in the hot seat. So I think, you know, being vulnerable and being open,
• 50:17
  I made a mistake. I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't have done that. In hindsight, I would have done this differently and acknowledging that we're all human. And just, I mean, honestly, acknowledging it to yourself. I think entrepreneurs are just so hard on themselves and being able to sit down, write it down, acknowledge it. So that was just, it's just a thing. Their highs and their lows has been like, has been fine. So it's just part of it.
• 50:42
  part of the journey. Yeah. Ciao. Thank you so much for taking the time to be on Female Startup Club and share your insights and your journey. There is so much gold in this episode. I'm so excited to go back through and take notes, especially when it comes to the kind of guerrilla side of things and your approach and your lens on that. So thank you so much for sharing. This was so awesome. Thanks for having me. Talk to you soon.
• 51:13
  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.
• 51:38
  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.
• 52:00
  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.
• 52:17
  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.
• 52:41
  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.
• 53:04
  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.