Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / GEMS: Buzzy Launch Strategy with selfmade® founder Stephanie Lee

Transcript

GEMS: Buzzy Launch Strategy with selfmade® founder Stephanie Lee · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:09
  All right. I want to move on to marketing. I want to talk about the launch. How did the launch go? What were you doing to generate that early buzz and awareness? I remember before we started recording, you were saying that you've got some really cool retailers and some really cool stockists. So obviously to get to that point of being interesting to those buyers and those retailers, there must have been some really cool stuff going on. As I imagine, your branding is
• 0:35
  But yeah, we'd love to talk about the launch plan and how you were generating buzz in the beginning. Yes. Complicated question always, I think. When we started, because of the pandemic, we weren't able to raise all the money up front so that I could bring on people. So largely, it was me by myself and a bunch of part-time people. So the way we use traditional digital ads, Facebook, Instagram, all that stuff, and actually did a wait list. We got over 3,000 people on our wait list.
• 1:03
  it's so incredibly important to own your list. If you, on Instagram, your followers, those are not your followers. Those are people on Instagram that are following you. But if you own your mailing list, that is your own property and those are your people. So A, you're not going to be a person.
• 1:19
  Gaining those folks, I think, was really important. Is that public? Can people see? No. But those are the people that you can engage with and that have actually reached out to you and want to follow that. So I think that's really important. They've opted in. They've opted in. As much as, you know, they have the choice to opt out, that's the next part. How do you continue to keep them engaged, I think, is a question that we're continually trying to figure out for our consumer.
• 1:45
  So the next part is we actually used an outside media agency to help us with our ads. And we realized, you know, after paying attention, what that did help us do is understand who's buying. You know, for us, we are largely pointed at young millennials and Gen Z. But what we saw were actually millennials buying stuff. So that was a really interesting data point for us. We also realized we are not getting the return that we want because consumers now just flick past ads
• 2:14
  on their social media. So we didn't stop those ads until probably end of March. And we totally redirected all of our efforts back to affiliate influencers, gifting, and now moving into more of like paid influencers because there's a whole societal thing happening in the US, which is you have to pay brown and black folks. You can no longer take people's work.
• 2:39
  and claim it for free when you're making a profit off of that, which is duh, but at the same time, a very interesting way that the social media influencer world was already working and doing. So for us, once we did that, we're actually able to increase our monthly revenue run rate by three times.
• 2:56
  So again, it's really understanding. Yeah. I mean, we're talking small numbers at this moment because it's like a soft launch. And like we've done product after product rather than like here's a whole suite of products. Right. That was largely because we know we need to educate the consumer on the way that we're doing this very differently.
• 3:12
  What's cool is because we're doing it in a different way and it's also so inherent to how we use product, emotions already are inherent to how we go about our day, that Gen Z gets it off the bat, which is really cool. So from that marketing aspect, we've completely, we may do ads again in the future, but we know that building our community, which you know, because you're doing it, is so critically important. The other thing in terms of retailers and distribution
• 3:40
  We did, I mean, it's painfully expensive to do creative. I saw that you did a rebrand on your website. For us, production, creative, we have all in house.
• 3:51
  We could have easily gone to a creative agency and just say, do this. But so much of this is from the heart and bringing people's vision of how they want to bring emotional wellbeing and mental health to folks is really critical. So finding those wonderful people like our creative, we have co-creative directors. One is from the music label industry,
• 4:12
  And saw how it was just so male run that she was like, screw this shit. I'm going to go do my own thing. And she did a female run, female label. I scooped her up because her eye is incredible. Has she done beauty before? Nope. But she was incredible. Our other co-creative director is a micro-influencer who we actually brought on as talent for our first photo shoot. She loved the brand so much. She was like, how can I help? And I was like, oh, well, we need a lot of help. So come on by.
• 4:41
  And so I think investing in people who really understand and get the heart of this comes through in the creative. And so that creative and the branding, and I think the value proposition we're bringing to the table is what made this attractive so that we actually haven't had to do any outbound retailer searching or anything like that. Folks have come to us. What that does is gives us a choice on who we want to partner with and when we want to partner with.
• 5:07
  So that has been really exciting for us about how we think about expanding our online footprint. How do we talk to people that we want to talk to, which is that Gen Z folks and doing that in a way that doesn't come out of feeling like, oh, my gosh, we have to do X. We have to do Y, because in those moments of like freneticness, like I have to do this to be like that other brand. That's where mistakes happen. Right.
• 5:29
  So keeping the eye on the prize, I think of like how you want to grow this brand or your brand and having that plan stick to your plan. You know what I mean? There's always going to be other things, other brands coming up, you know, down the path that make you like look the other way and, you know, shaking shiny things in front of your face. But I think staying intentional to how you plan that your brand is really, really important. And then figuring out that data in order to pivot, for instance, the digital ads to the influencer piece.
• 6:00
  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.
• 6:25
  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.
• 6:47
  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.