Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / From print studio to $10m selling notebooks & pyjamas with Printfresh’s Amy Voloshin (part 1)

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From print studio to $10m selling notebooks & pyjamas with Printfresh’s Amy Voloshin (part 1) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Amy Voloshan for Female Startup Club.
• 0:12
  Welcome back to the show. It's Dune here, your host and hype girl. Today on the show, we're learning from Amy Volotion, the founder of Printfresh. A longtime lover of patterns and textiles, Amy founded Printfresh with her husband in 2016 as a way to combine a few of her greatest passions, quality fabrics, bold prints, and sustainable practices.
• 0:38
  What started as a tiny operation of Amy packing and shipping orders out of her house has since grown into a nationally recognized and loved sleepwear and lifestyle brand. In this episode, we cover her major pivot from print studio to notebooks and pajamas, how to get started with retail stockists, and bootstrapping her brand to $10 million in revenue in 2021.
• 1:03
  And in case you missed me talking about this last week, we've just launched our 1-800 Hype Girl hotline number powered by Norby. And it is so much fun. Oh my gosh. It's something I've been dreaming about starting since the very beginning of Female Startup Club to bring a little more sparkle to the week. The way it works is you sign up to receive texts from us, and then every Monday you receive a dose of motivation and good vibes directly to your inbox.
• 1:32
  Whether you're a student, whether you're working the nine to five, or you're an entrepreneur, it's literally for everyone. And it's totally free. So sign up by clicking the link in the show notes or head over to our Instagram bio and pop your number in to get going. I am so hyped for this. I've received so many nice comments since we launched it last week. So jump in there. But now let's get into this episode. This is Amy for Female Startup Club.
• 2:01
  Amy, hi. Welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. I'm so excited to dig in to your journey today of how you've built your brand. But for anyone who doesn't know you yet, could you give us a little bit of an introduction to who you are, what your business is, and the ethos behind it?
• 2:21
  Yeah, of course. So we are a size inclusive sleepwear brand. And we originally started as a textile design studio and kind of have evolved over the last 15 years or so. And we make all sorts of printed pajamas. We even moved into home decor now.
• 2:42
  That is so cool. Is it your one of your prints on the wall behind you that I can see? Yes, it is. Our figura pattern, which is one of my personal favorites. Oh, my gosh. I absolutely love it. And your dress as well. Let's go back to your life, I guess, all the way back to starting the studio. I think I read that was circa 2006 to kind of get the vibe of what was going on, what was leading you to starting the studio. Yeah.
• 3:12
  Yeah, so I had originally studied textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design. And so I always knew that I loved pattern and fashion. And I moved on to work at Urban Outfitters and worked in design there for free people, urban and anthropology. So I got a really good background in all of those different things working kind of in a more corporate environment. And...
• 3:35
  Then I wanted to do something on my own, something entrepreneurial. And that's when I started the textile design studio. And so it started very small. It was just me sitting in a room by myself creating designs. And then it really evolved to something totally different with a large team and working with some of the top fashion companies in the U.S.,
• 4:01
  Wow. What I love about this is you've obviously gone through different iterations and different variations of what this business looked like. It started as a print studio and you were working with different clients all over the place. And then you've kind of merged into what we know Printfresh as today, which is a sleepwear company, home decor, clothing, all that kind of thing.
• 4:23
  I'd love to kind of get into the nitty gritty of what decided or what was the deciding factor for you to switch from the studio into creating a line of pajamas? Yeah, I think that, you know, like there was just so much like that changed in the world over like the last 15 years. And we were originally like B2B, so we were only working really behind the scenes.
• 4:46
  working with those fashion companies and we would go into their design offices and work with them there. But I felt like as things like social media started to happen and Instagram became like a thing, we started to see that there was so much interest in what we were doing and our paintings and our process. And that was kind of the catalyst to start to think about, like, could this be something that we could really switch to being more of a DTC business?
• 5:15
  And so like, did you have to do anything to prove out the concept? Had you been speaking to people and they were asking you for pajamas? Like, how did you know that that was the direction to take?
• 5:26
  Yeah, we would see in Instagram comments, people would be like, where can I get this? And, you know, it was kind of a convoluted process to try to direct them to like where they could purchase our designs. And so it started with a ton of testing. I mean, it took us years to kind of sort things out, figure out things that we could affordably start a test into. We were self-funded and didn't really have a, you know, an experience in like doing a direct-to-consumer product. Yeah.
• 5:55
  There was a lot of fumbling around to kind of figure things out. But we started small and started with stationary because it seemed like something that was easy to dip our toes into and apply our products and like our patterns to it. So we just started with a couple of notebooks and it kind of evolved from there. Wow. And so when you say like a couple of notebooks, you know, starting small, what were the MOQs that you were kind of working with at that time when you were testing and learning?
• 6:24
  Yeah, testing that out was hard because some people don't want to do anything that's less than a thousand. For me, I kept on thinking, how am I ever going to sell a thousand notebooks? But, you know, we didn't even really have an e-commerce website or anything like that. And so we were lucky to finally, after a ton of research, find somebody that was willing to do a couple hundred. And we just had to narrow down to a few designs to begin with.
• 6:52
  And how much did you need to invest to kind of get your website up and running, those few hundred orders of units and kind of get yourself ready to launch the 2.0 version of Printfresh?
• 7:06
  Yeah, I would say in the beginning, we just did everything ourselves that we could. We, you know, luckily decided to use Shopify. And so it's very user-friendly. And a few of the people on the team had some experience in, you know, in doing some things online or managing blogs and things like that. So we kind of cobbled together the web design initially on our own. And we just kind of had to figure things out with how to get the products on there.
• 7:35
  start to pursue like a wholesale side of the business. So selling to boutiques and like small lifestyle, like sorts of stores. Oh my gosh. And how were you finding like, you know, getting stocked in those retailers? What was the process for you to find new retailers and get yourself in there?
• 7:54
  Initially, it really just came down to going to local stores and connections, the places I had shopped before, thinking maybe, well, if I like shopping at their store, maybe they'll like what I have to offer. And so it was just kind of like going door to door a little bit and seeing if somebody was willing to test out our products. And then we kind of set a big goal for ourselves and signed up for Wifi.
• 8:19
  what at the time was called the National Stationery Show in New York. And so that was like really where we started to see interest in the brand. And then after doing that, we had 30 stores that wanted to carry our things. Oh, my God. Wow. 30 stores. That's a lot. Yeah, it was. I mean, I think it was like it was really amazing to see so much interest and being able to gauge whether we had kind of stumbled across something that could work for us and something to pivot our business into.
• 8:51
  When you get like 30 stores kind of all at once wanting to work with you, obviously that requires a lot of working capital to place the orders, to help kind of market and, you know, the supporting things to keep those products selling off the shelves. How were you kind of funding the business at that point? And what was your kind of vision for the funding piece? Yeah.
• 9:13
  Yeah, it was a little bit, I would say, like confusing to figure out like exactly how we were funding it because we were essentially still like working our day jobs in our studio business where we were selling to fashion companies. So we're doing it concurrently. So we kind of just saw it as like a way to kind of do some research and development into like what maybe the business could turn into. Yeah.
• 9:37
  So it was definitely challenging to kind of figure out how much to invest in product. And then being able to manage inventory planning, I think, continues to still be probably one of my biggest challenges with guessing what's going to be the hot product, how much of it do we need, and figuring out all the fulfillment and logistics of that was really challenging.
• 10:03
  Yeah. And I bet also the jump from notebooks to clothing, which obviously has different sizes and fabrics and, you know, fit and all that kind of stuff. What was that journey like and how did that go for you?
• 10:19
  Yeah, so it was kind of a very interesting process with how we got from notebooks to pajamas. But we had this one pattern, the Bagheera pattern that's behind me right now. And we just loved the way that it looked, but it just didn't quite look right on a notebook. And we kind of said to ourselves, like, what if we try this on a pajama? And I went to India and worked in a factory there, and we just loved the way it looked.
• 10:48
  And that was kind of like our aha moment for that product. And then we knew that we could really translate our patterns so much more effectively onto that sort of category with sleepwear. And luckily, I had some experience from working at Urban Outfitters in fashion design. So I was familiar with the technical side of things.
• 11:07
  And I really love fashion design. So I had a lot to figure out there, especially since we have so many sizes. We do extra, extra small to 6X. We do petites. We do tall. So there's a lot of technical expertise that was needed there. And how did it go when you launched? Like, how were you getting the word out that you were now like launching a pajama line and kind of expanding the category range?
• 11:36
  Yeah. So by that point, we had gotten picked up by a sales rep group. So she found us originally at that first trade show. And then we eventually ended up doing business together. So she's really been helping us with all of our sales nationwide. And that's like really been amazing to have that support.
• 11:54
  And so we took the pajama line to the New York gift show, and we pretty much sold out of our first initial order that we had placed just through the boutiques that came to that show. So that kind of made us realize, wow, we have to get going with this. We have to invest more and get more inventory to be able to even start to think about putting those online.
• 12:22
  So it sounds like at this point in time, it was very much a wholesale kind of play and working with retailers versus D2C. How were you kind of making that transition to D2C and building your direct relationship with customers? Yeah, I would say that the pandemic pretty much did it for us. I think that initially we thought that our business would be mostly wholesale with a little bit of e-commerce.
• 12:48
  And when the pandemic began and all the small boutiques that we were working with were forced to close, we just were sitting in our studio. There were just a couple of us that were still like working together and everyone else was working at home. And we were just sitting there and all the packages were.
• 13:07
  started to get returned to like all of the orders that had been placed and they were just piling up around us. And that's when we really thought we have to figure out something like how, you know, because we didn't know how long things were going to last that way. And so that's when we really started to realize we needed to focus our energy on e-commerce and figure out digital advertising.
• 13:30
  And so how did you do that? How did you figure it all out and kind of switch from going to essentially to zero to building your kind of, you know, huge trajectory that you're on now? Yeah, I think that some of it was just honestly like very good luck. And I used to organize this artists like flea market sort of thing. And in December, like of, I guess, Augusta,
• 13:57
  2018, a guy came up to me and he was like, Hey, do you sell things online? And I was like, yeah, a little bit. Anyways, I was super busy. He passed me his card and I didn't really think anything of it until later. Um,
• 14:10
  And I realized he did digital advertising. I didn't totally understand what that meant, but we ended up reaching out to him and he had a very small firm, like doing digital advertising and kind of like really was the person that helped us get set up and gave us really great guidance. Like when we first began, because it was something, I don't have a marketing background. I was running a business to business situation like where I didn't really have a need to have those skills.
• 14:39
  So it was kind of very lucky that we met him at the right time and had somebody that could really show us the way. Was he like the first kind of, even though he was external, was he like the first hire to do with, you know, the 2.0 version of Printfresh? Or did you have a team, you know, fully functioning at this point? And he was more like the first marketing hire? Yeah.
• 15:02
  Yeah, we had somebody helping us with social media internally. So doing Instagram, things like that. But yeah, that was the first real marketing hire. And then quickly we realized that we needed to also then work with an outside vendor to help us with email marketing because that was such a huge opportunity in terms of retention. So pretty quickly we realized that we needed to focus all of our efforts on digital marketing and advertising.
• 15:32
  Oh my gosh. Wow. So did you then kind of keep the retail side of things when it started to open back up or you were just like, okay, let's put that to the side now and a hundred percent focus on D2C? So we do both because I love working with the boutiques and they just have such lovely shops and it's so cute to see the stuff out in like in real life. So we continued our relationships with that, but I would say it's about 10% of our business now and the rest is
• 16:02
  I read that you did something like $10 million in revenue last year for 2021. If you were to summarize kind of like the last two years of going from essentially to zero to that point, what are the key milestones besides the hiring the guy to do marketing and hiring the agency to do email marketing? What are the key milestones that get you to $10 million in revenue? Ooh, I think.
• 16:30
  That's a tough one. I think that it was just, I mean, I don't even know if I can look back on it because it was such a whirlwind in terms of like very like clear steps. I think that between my business partner and I dividing our roles and responsibilities really helped and really focusing on a key product, like something that is like excellent quality and,
• 16:53
  and making sure that it's like photographed well, like that really like started to be like the major focus for us. And I think getting the imagery right, really focusing on high quality images, like really helped us like progress very quickly. And I think if we hadn't done that, I think it would have been much slower to grow, especially given that we're e-commerce. Yeah.
• 17:17
  For your kind of niche in the industry that you're in, do you have to do a lot of new drops and new collections to expand through newness? Or are your prints kind of like, these are the classics, we have the same prints over the long term kind of thing?
• 17:33
  I think that's something that we've been trying to figure out. I think that in terms of advertising and marketing, it definitely helps to have an evergreen product, like something that always sells and you can just keep doing in different colors or something. I think that that has really helped us to have a couple patterns that we can really lean into.
• 17:55
  And then we kind of supplement that with newness and like what we're very excited about or just adding some fun and new things in there, especially for customers that keep coming back. We always want to have something to surprise them with. Totally, totally. How do you approach like partnerships or influencer kind of partnerships?
• 18:17
  Yeah, I think that working with influencers is amazing. I think that in the beginning of my business, it was really challenging to figure out how to make it work. But these days, that's been just such a big part of showing our products out there and showing it in such a variety of ways. So now we have a team member who focuses on.
• 18:41
  specifically on influencer partnerships and figuring out like cool ways to work with them to show new product and do different advertising campaigns. I think that it's just these days brands have to really figure that out. And every brand, I think, has to do it a little bit differently depending on their product category. But it's been so important to us.
• 19:04
  When you say like at the beginning, it took you a while to like figure things out, like how to make it work. What was the kind of problem and how were you solving that for anyone else who's listening who might just be in the early stages of building a brand and kind of wanting to go to influencer marketing, but not sure how to kind of roll it out? I'd love to hear what your kind of experience was with that.
• 19:25
  Yeah, I think that it was just it was such a new concept to me because I just never had really heard of that. I didn't realize that I was being advertised to in that way, like every day. I think it was just something I wasn't like totally aware of.
• 19:40
  And then some of my friends started to like explain it to me that they work in marketing. And it was just so eye-opening to me to realize, okay, you have to give away your product. You have to, you know, like figure out, you know, like are there any parameters like that you don't want your product like used in a strange way or something. Like figuring out like how you want to work with them, how much you would like to pay them, or is it strictly gifting? There's so many different ways to navigate it and figure out
• 20:09
  what you might want to do with them in terms of advertising, video, photography. But I think that our influencers have turned into some of our greatest advisors and always have so many interesting ideas and feedback for us. So I think it's just something that takes a long time to build and there's certain influencers
• 20:31
  that really make fantastic partners. And other people, it might not click for their audience. And so I think it's just navigating it and sticking with it and seeing who really is your best sort of partner. Yeah, it's really that long-term approach. And you might do something once, it might not work, but you should still try again and again and again until you find those ones that really do work and you can see the results. Yeah, exactly.
• 20:59
  When you were saying earlier that you had the studio kind of on the go day to day, and then you were launching the notebooks and you had kind of both on the go, was there a point when you stopped doing the studio altogether or is that still kicking along in the background? Yeah, we pretty much stopped with doing that. That was pretty much like really like the pandemic really stopped that business. A lot of the major retailers,
• 21:27
  said, Hey, you know, like we can't afford to pay for our invoices and it just, and they do, nobody was taking in-person appointments, which was always how that business worked. And most people were working remotely. So it just, it dried up instantly, which was just really upsetting and shocking because, you know, we had been doing that business for over 10 years at that point and to see it disappear overnight was really heartbreaking.
• 21:55
  Do you think that in hindsight, it actually helped propel your business now forward because you kind of had to focus and triple down on what was working? It definitely did. It was incredibly stressful because also my business partner is also my spouse. So both of us were really in that together under such an incredibly stressful time in the world.
• 22:21
  And, but luckily he's a great partner to me. And we were just able to totally just put all of our energy into making this work. But it was definitely not easy.
• 22:35
  Yeah, I bet. Gosh, when you look back at the challenges that you faced in the beginning and trying to sort everything out of how to start this label and what you're facing now, what are the challenges post the COVID world and the COVID era are you facing as a brand in the fashion and apparel space? Yeah.
• 22:56
  I think that just figuring out, especially in the sleeper category, is this a category that lasts? I think that there was so much interest in sleep and lounge wear. And I think for those of us that have
• 23:10
  products that were really popular during that time. I think it's just kind of like the unknown of like how to evolve our product categories as the world changes and like becomes more comfortable. So some of the things that we've been layering in are things like bedding, wallpaper,
• 23:26
  in dresses because we're trying to kind of expand a little bit out of the home and give our customers like those beautiful patterns that they come to us for but in dresses instead so it'll be like a combination I love having all of the categories absolutely wallpaper is just so much fun as a product
• 23:47
  Yeah, we are so excited about it. I'm actually moving homes this week, tomorrow. And I've been so excited about which room I'm going to put our wallpapers in. And it just, I think it just makes a home so cozy and comfortable. Uh-huh. I 100% agree. What is your key piece of advice for founders who are in that early stage building in the fashion and apparel space?
• 24:17
  There's, I mean, there's just so many things that I can say for advice. I think that I would urge anyone who's doing fashion to strongly consider size inclusion into the product line. I think that it's such a great opportunity and I just think it makes your brand so much more accessible to others. Did you have size inclusion from day one or was that something you added in after it was like a requested from your community?
• 24:47
  It was really important to me from day one. So for our wholesale launch, we only went up to Excel
• 24:54
  But it was more of like a proof of concept to test that out, make sure that the fit was correct. But our intention was immediately after that to then start adding in additional sizes. So we went to 2X, and then we went to 4X, and then we went to 6X. So we kind of had to course that out so that we could make sure that the fit was correct because we needed to get a lot of feedback to make sure that we had it worked out.
• 25:18
  Yeah. I feel like that would just be... Navigating different sizes is already complicated, but then navigating so many different SKUs across so many different products just seems like such a big challenge. Yeah. It's been incredibly important for the inventory planning to be able to figure out how many of each of those sizes we need to be able to get more of an even sell-through. But it took a little bit of time and
• 25:47
  reviewing like how we were doing with each size to figure out the popularity for each one. But now we kind of have like a better formula in place for when we're placing our lives. But it definitely took some experimentation at first. Yeah, gosh, I can't even wrap my head around that. Goodness me.
• 26:07
  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.
• 26:32
  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.
• 26:54
  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.
• 27:10
  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.
• 27:35
  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.
• 27:57
  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.