Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Part 5. How to find a manufacturer

Transcript

Part 5. How to find a manufacturer · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  Hey everyone, it's Dune here, your host and hype girl. In this mini episode, I'm going to step you through how we found our manufacturer. And I can tell you now it's a short and sweet episode, but I would love to get your thoughts on this format and whether you're happy for short and sweet or whether you would prefer a monthly deep dive into a bunch of things all at once. So let
• 0:30
  on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, all the places. Let's get stuck into this episode. This is me for Female Startup Club. Hey guys, Dune here, your host and hype girl. Full disclosure, it is 10 p.m. I am having a wine. Sweetie is asleep beside me and she's all cute and cozy and snoring and
• 0:57
  And in this episode, I'm going to try my best to step you through how we found our manufacturer. And there's no secret sauce here. It's literally back to that list and cold outreach to everyone and everyone and following the breadcrumbs. And before we do that, you know how proud I am of Hype Club. So let me hit you with some stories and some updates from the community this week.
• 1:28
  This week we had a really cool win for one of the entrepreneurs in the network, Laura Rubin. She has a wellness company called Nurture that empowers people to heal through herbs and natural products.
• 1:43
  So this past weekend, she was telling us that she held her first market to start getting feedback from customers. And even though she said it was kind of slow traffic, she was able to make her profit back on the day and have a bunch of eye opening conversations.
• 2:02
  And so when I asked her what she learned or what insights she picked up, she told me that the overall vibe was that people really love the taste of her teas and like the overall branding aesthetic. And why that's really interesting to note is that she was literally just in the process of engaging a designer to do a full rebrand refresh. Yeah.
• 2:25
  And now she's realized maybe that actually it's not totally needed after all, which obviously means a bunch of cash saved that she can spend elsewhere, i.e. marketing. But my point of all of this and my point to bring it up is you really have to just get out there and talk to your target users before you start iterating and changing based on your own personal opinion.
• 2:51
  I mean, we hear it all the time on the show and we've also heard the pitfalls that entrepreneurs can have with making choices and changing without having first spoken to the people who actually matter, your customers.
• 3:05
  Another key insight that she unlocked is that people don't consider tea so much as part of their wellness regimen. They actually view it as a beverage, which, I mean, so do I. I actually never thought of it as part of my wellness kind of routine. I really just saw it as a beverage. So...
• 3:27
  She's realized that it seems super obvious, like now in hindsight, but definitely it requires that added education to demonstrate how important tea is when it comes to your self-care ritual. So loved hearing this, Arielle, from Laura, and so grateful that she shared with us that really cool business win. I don't have any epic fails for you tonight, but maybe next week.
• 3:55
  What else? What else? So tonight we also hosted our first workshop with our resident business and marketing coach, Kelsey. And she's talking us through all things relating to marketing and how to really build out a badass plan and marketing playbook to hit your specific goals and targets. And what I love about Kelsey is that she doesn't approach this as a one size fits all approach and just giving you kind of like...
• 4:24
  the stock standard, here's what you should be doing with your marketing. Through her series, we're actually digging into what works for each individual entrepreneur's journey, working out how to identify your key drivers and goals, and what you should be focusing on.
• 4:40
  Aside from that, next week we have Kim hosting a really cool masterclass on building community. She joins us coming from five years' experience of building community at Glossier, and she's now the head of community of Geneva app. So I'm super excited for this, and I think it's going to be a really, really good one.
• 5:01
  But that's all my updates on the Hype Club. As you know, everything is recorded and designed specifically for e-commerce entrepreneurs. So if you like some of what I'm talking about, or you're in the process of building your own e-commerce CPG brand, you should absolutely come and join us. We will welcome you with open arms.
• 5:21
  That aside, I just want to say we're still on the lookout for a US-based TikTok creator. And so if that's your jam or you know someone who would be great for this role, please do slide into my DMs. I would love, love, love, love to chat. Okay, so let's get to the good stuff. Finding our manufacturer.
• 5:42
  As you can bet, it all starts with another list and it's actually really straightforward. It just requires time, research and persistence. And that's literally the recipe for success in today's mini episode.
• 5:59
  We actually started by working our way through Google, searching for the kinds of services we needed, i.e. dealkalization is a really obvious one for us. And the first phase of this is where it was actually a bit trickier because essentially I didn't know what to search for on Google and we didn't yet know what we were actually looking for. So we needed to do all this kind of
• 6:25
  pre-research to figure out like what these keywords were and
• 6:31
  And basically, once you find those golden keywords, then everything actually just unlocks. And it's super easy to find the kind of businesses that service what you need. So once we found what we actually needed to be searching for to get the results that we wanted to see, the research became a lot easier and a lot faster to build out what I would call like a mini database with all the stuff you would imagine, i.e. name, company, email, status, et cetera.
• 7:00
  We basically then spent some time making that list in Excel and set about reaching out with a really simple cold email saying we'd started a non-alcoholic wine company and we were looking to learn more and chat to people in the team, you know, all the kind of basic stuff. And if you think we got crickets back, you would absolutely be correct. We got no replies, not even one, literally nada, zero, zero.
• 7:29
  So, you know, it's a little bit disheartening. And I bet anyone listening who has gone through this process will know that for all the no's, eventually you get one yes. And that one yes is amazing.
• 7:45
  But before we get to the yes, while this was all happening, we also hired, and I'm going to tell you this just so you know that there are also other avenues you can pursue. This specific part didn't work for us, but it has before in the past. So we also hired a researcher who had worked with before, and we gave her the same sorts of tasks that we were doing, but to see if she could find different avenues or different kind of areas of the internet or
• 8:13
  you know, a different path basically to figuring out certain companies and the kinds of companies we were looking for. And in the past, this approach actually worked really well for us. And we got amazing like research and, and kind of pathways back, but for this specific time, it was a little trickier, I guess, and nothing worthwhile came back, but I still think it's important to note because it's one of those things where you can just find a really good researcher online. Um,
• 8:39
  even from places like Upwork and things like that. I think we actually got recommended her from someone else, but we've used her for a few different research projects. And basically it's, it's always been great in the past. So yeah,
• 8:53
  Something definitely to keep in mind when you're going through that journey. But anyway, so we're back at the point where we've got no replies. We have built out this mini database of the companies that we'd love to work with and, you know, literally zero. But that is all part of the journey. So we had to keep persevering and we switched our efforts mostly to LinkedIn.
• 9:15
  And I actually love LinkedIn so much because you can search for a company, get onto the company page, go through and connect with every single person that lists that they work at that company. See who accepts your connection request and then message them from there.
• 9:33
  And that was the approach that actually worked for us. We eventually connected with someone in a totally different region, got on the phone with them, and then they connected us to the team that we actually needed to speak to in Europe, like on our side of the world. And then from there, it was good to go and...
• 9:53
  those dots were connected quite easily. So really, I think it's a matter of following the breadcrumbs around the internet and essentially stalking people until someone opens your message and takes it further. Obviously...
• 10:09
  I've made this sound really simple in a quick recap. And when I hear it coming out of my mouth, it just does sound so easy. And in fact, the actions themselves are so easy. But of course, this happened over a few weeks or a few months in the very beginning. And it's kind of frustrating and disheartening when no one replies to you and you don't think you're actually getting anywhere. You're just shooting in the dark.
• 10:35
  But of course, at some point, if you keep trying and you keep trying and you keep trying and you try different ways and different avenues, you will get there. So just know that if you've been through that or you are going through that, you're not alone. You've just got to stick with it. Keep reaching out. Keep connecting.
• 10:53
  And eventually you'll get someone replying. What I haven't said here is that when we were doing this, it was pre-engaging our business partner. So he actually, if we had have engaged him first,
• 11:11
  it would have been a lot faster. But because we were alone at that point, I guess it was a lot slower because we didn't have any insights or industry connections. So I guess that's the other thing is like, you should absolutely leverage any connections in your network. Ask friends or friends or colleagues of friends or whatever to see if anyone knows anyone that might be able to help connect the dots. Because obviously that's also a great way and probably a faster approach to doing it.
• 11:39
  But definitely I would say that having our business partner involved when he did come into the picture, that's kind of around the same time we'd already connected with the team and having him part of the conversation from day one.
• 11:56
  I truly don't know if we would have been able to get to this point. And I mean like from the point of being connected and having an early conversation to getting to now where we're actually working together. I don't know if we would have been able to get to this point in these conversations and like, yeah,
• 12:13
  in the journey with our manufacturer without him as a very clear hook. And it really shows me the power of having a key strategic partner who can do the things or connect the dots that you can't slash don't have. And it's not to say that it's not possible without, because I'm so sure it is possible without. We see it in every entrepreneur's
• 12:36
  episode on the show, everything is possible. But I'm just really seeing firsthand what it does to have a great strategic partner. And I'm really all for it. So even if you're not in a position where you can add a strategic partner, maybe think about assembling strategic mentors or strategic advisors who are really able to, you know,
• 12:59
  open some doors, have industry contacts, have industry connections, all that kind of thing. But anyway, we're on manufacturing. I feel like sometimes I go a little bit off topic. Again, this was a really quick episode, but that's how we found our manufacturing partner,
• 13:15
  From there, we basically contracted them to start working for us on samples immediately. So we, at this point, had done our own kind of wine tastings. We'd benchmarked what we wanted the product to be. We had looked at everything on the market and...
• 13:32
  We basically delivered them a brief, a very clear brief with our business partner, who is a master sommelier. We paid an invoice and we started then working on finding the best wine producers to sell us their base wines to start the process.
• 13:50
  who would also allow us to de-alkalize their wine and then reformulate it. So that's a whole other thing, getting people on board to do this thing you want to do, which is totally against what they're doing previously. We definitely didn't choose the easy route with this project, but I feel like we're slowly getting there. And, you know, we're at this stage now where we've done multiple rounds of samples and
• 14:19
  It's getting really exciting. It's just becoming really real. In the next month, we are actually going to our manufacturer to finalize the samples, and then we will have our first batch of product, which just blows my mind. I think it's one of those things that's kind of weird. Like it kind of feels like it's all happened really fast, but if you actually think about it from January till now, it's been eight months.
• 14:47
  So it's kind of a while, right? And this is just to get samples. This isn't to actually produce a batch. So...
• 14:56
  Anyway, I hope you like these quick mini episodes. I'm still deciding whether I should do them short and sweet weekly or keep them a bit juicier, make them a bit longer and do them monthly. I would love to know what you think. I'd really love some feedback. I feel like I'm totally shooting in the dark with these episodes. And yeah, I would love to know what you think and feel free to slide into my DMs.
• 15:23
  And as always, if you want to leave me a review, I will love you forever and be eternally grateful. Thank you so, so much to every single one of you who has told entrepreneurs in your life about the show, who has shouted about us on social media, who has left us the kindest and loveliest reviews ever. And thank you just for listening. I feel so happy every day that I get to create
• 15:53
  It's literally all because of you. And I know I say this all the time, but it's just so, so true. It's to everyone in this moment listening to this. It's just incredible. Thank you so much. So that's all for now. See you next time. Bye.
• 16:26
  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.
• 16:50
  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.
• 17:13
  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.