Retales: E-Commerce Growth Stories
Welcome to "Retales: Ecommerce Growth Stories," a podcast series that brings you the unique and captivating stories of ecommerce retailers from every corner of the globe.
Each episode delves deep into the journey of different ecommerce entrepreneurs — from scrappy startups to established multinational chains — shedding light on the strategies they deploy to ride economic waves and seize new opportunities.
We feature candid conversations not only with these trailblasing entrepreneurs but also with the venture capitalists who back them, creating a comprehensive picture of the ecommerce landscape.
The entrepreneurs share their stories of innovation, growth, and resilience, while the investors give their insights into what makes an ecommerce business stand out and attract funding.
Every discussion covers topics critical to every ecommerce retailer's success — scaling operations, enhancing customer experience, optimising logistics, leveraging social media, and navigating market fluctuations.
Our guests share their experiences, insights, hard-learned lessons, and personal tactics for achieving success.
Whether you're an ecommerce veteran or just starting your journey, "Retales: Ecommerce Growth Stories" is your passport to understanding the dynamics of ecommerce, transforming modern day challenges into engines for growth.
Join us and draw inspiration, knowledge, and practical strategies from those who have journeyed before you in the exhilarating world of ecommerce.
Retales: E-Commerce Growth Stories
The Changing Face of Apparel: Embracing Minimalism and Sustainability
Join us on an enlightening journey with Andrew Gibbs-Dabney, founder and CEO of LIVSN is a premium outdoor sustainable apparel brand.
With an intriguing path towards minimalism, Andrew shares how scaling back can open up a world of possibilities and introduces us to his brand's ethos of owning less but achieving more with our possessions. His perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic reveals how people's change in lifestyle has led to an increased demand for versatile and durable clothing.
Delve into the world of technology that fuels LIVSN, as Andrew sheds light on the various platforms they harness - Shopify, MailChimp, Meta, and Brightpearl. Learn how these tools influence business operations, shape future plans, and mitigate challenges, including supply chain disruptions and increased freight costs, borne out of the pandemic. This conversation promises to leave you with a deeper understanding of how technology can be leveraged for business growth, even in challenging times.
Lastly, Andrew emphasizes the significance of building emotional bonds and establishing a strong brand. He believes that in the world of business, especially in the apparel industry, sustainability is not just about eco-friendly practices, but also about emotional sustainability through a hard-hitting brand story. Listen in to grasp these invaluable entrepreneurial insights in the latest episode of the podcast.
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Hello, I'm Caroline and welcome to the Lightning 50 E-commerce growth hacking podcast. Today I've got Andrew Gibbs-Dabney. He's the founder and CEO of Lives and Designs. But before we get into the conversation, a quick message from our sponsor. We have an exciting sponsor today PeopleFox, the warehouse management system helping ambitious E-commerce businesses scale.
Speaker 2:If you have a growth mindset, like lounge underwear in the style or O-Poly, you know how important it is to have industry leading fulfillment and customer experience. Peoplefox offers proven increases in accuracy and transparency across your warehouse. Lightning fast pick and pack methods based on industry best practice and a proven track record, partnering with some of the most successful brands of the E-commerce era All with simple setup and user training. Exactly what you need to take control of your warehouse and wow your customers With established integrations into Shopify, bright Pearl, inventory Planner and more. Just search PeopleFox and chat to their WMS experts today. And now onto the podcast. Lives and Designs is a sustainable apparel brand that was founded in 2018 with a mission to simplify our belongings. Andrew, I'm really looking forward to hearing a little bit more. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?
Speaker 1:Thank you, happy to be here. I'm doing really well.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Yeah, no, I'm great. Thank you, I'm great. So tell me a little bit about Lives and Designs and how you started the business.
Speaker 1:For sure, lives and was really born out of this long term effort that I was going through personally to minimize the things that I own really boil down to a wardrobe and a collection of things that were really additive to my life and quality and things that I was really happy to take care of. I had this realization along the way that the more things you have, the more responsibilities you have, right, and most of us lead a busy life and I have kids now and I didn't even have kids at the time. But I wanted to simplify these things and really honor the things that I owned and value them. So it's not minimalism, it's more. It's almost like a weird form of maximalism, but not quantity more over quality. And so with all of that came this realization that, you know, without their lifestyle, I had just a proliferation of gear and things and stuff. I've come from a parallel industry background, so I had tons of clothes and Lives and is this idea that we want to make very versatile, very high quality and very durable things so that you can own less of those things and do more with them.
Speaker 1:That's been our mission since the beginning. It's very sustainability focused, the idea being that just less stuff is better for the environment, right, like there's a lot of things you can do to be more sustainable, but the biggest thing we all can do is just do more with what we have, and so we are out to be that brand for people that have made that choice, that they want to have this more simplified, more diverse wardrobe, and then you want to go do all the things outside, but they want to wear those same things to their business meetings and work every day at the same time.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. So you started the business about five years ago. What was the turning point to living this lifestyle? What was it that made you really interested in deciding to launch a business like this?
Speaker 1:It's more real than narrative.
Speaker 1:At this point. I had come out of a career in outdoor apparel and was briefly intact and was very disillusioned with that industry and wanted to be back in the outdoor industry, back outside, building things for people that were interested in pursuing an outdoor lifestyle and had a point of view on apparel and the space that really wasn't being met. So really blending more of like a kind of higher end boutique style details of products with outdoor functionality and that wasn't really happening very much at the time and fit was kind of terrible and pants and lots of things that I was interested in making, and so that the previous experience met with opportunity and free time and a really a point of view and an idea on sustainability that I didn't see being said, and so all of it really congealed into lives and the name means a lot too. That was a big reason to get going was finally finding something, finding a name that motivated me to build a brand and a story that lives and comes from the Swedish word it's frowds, poorly, lives in Utah, which means one who lives life fully, and that really crystallized it right. You have this person who's out there to really live a really meaningful experience filled life.
Speaker 1:What are they wearing? And that's what we're making.
Speaker 2:I see, and obviously everyone coming off the back of COVID as well probably came out wanting to spend more time outside after being so used to being having their daily walk and all that kind of thing, but also wanting to live life a bit more fully, and that's been something that you've seen reflected in sales. Like a lot of our guests, finding the pandemic has impacted them in very different ways.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I mean, the pandemic was hard on lots of people and I won't say there's really much good that came from it, except that people did get outside. And for us as a small business, we'd started in 2018, but really didn't make any revenue until 2019. And in 2020, we've made a big kind of commitment to inventory. You had to do it right at the beginning of the pandemic, right at lockdown. It was very uncertain and we had to make this choice of look, if we don't buy for fall, we're not going to be here. If we're going to buy, we have a fighting chance and luckily, everybody went outside in 2020. And so we were at a really good spot. We had inventory of an outdoor product in stock and ready to sell at the height of people going outside, a lot of people for the first time looking for this kind of versatile wardrobe that could do it all.
Speaker 1:And so 2020 was a big year for us as far as revenue, and we're still pretty small. Like I said, like 2019 was our first revenue. For the most part, we were at like 100 and like 140,000. In 2020, we went to 275. And skip ahead to 2021, we actually went to over a million. We could talk about that, but half of it was in one big Kickstarter. So yeah, in long story short, people's changing ideas around what it meant to get outside was very helpful for us and, really, like our brand, had a message and still does. It's very relevant to people that have discovered the outdoors and people that have not about it. You know, had that as part of their life experience for a long time.
Speaker 2:And talk to me a little bit how that reflected into your growth rate numbers. So I've got down here that you've been doubling revenue year on year. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting. So I said like it was like 140 to 275 to a little over a million, so it's obviously more than doubling, but not. And then the next year was about 1.2. So the interesting thing is we've been doubling but you have to kind of remove crowdfunding from the mix to really see the real, true business, because we've done four kickstarvers and the last two each were over. The third one was 515,000. And the one we just wrapped up was 455. So like those are really big revenue numbers but that you can have to separate them from regular DTC and wholesale commerce, and so our core business DTC commerce and wholesale has been doubling every single year and those kickstarters just kind of come in and jumpstart whichever year we're in there. It like adds this big kind of cherry on top, but it makes our revenue look a little more lumpy than if you just looked at the traditional line of business.
Speaker 2:And when you're looking at the traditional line of business, are you pretty happy at the minute. How's what's the focus? Is it growth or profit for the next year?
Speaker 1:We're in a spot that I think probably a lot of early brands are in, where we still need to grow to hit the economies of scale to really make everything work. But we're also looking heavily at how fast we can get to profitability and what numbers we need to pull to get there, and so we have to grow some more. We can't just say we're fine, we're going to preserve cash and stay where we are, because we're just not there yet, but we're not that far from profitability either. So we're probably 12 to 18 months away, and so we are starting to assess which levers to pull, dial back a little bit of growth, be a little bit more conservative and keep it to our core selection and what can convert to get to profitability while also still needing to grow.
Speaker 2:Exciting times and talking of levers what are, do you think have been, the most important levers for growth? So what have you kind of been pulling that's really helped you get out there and get in front of customers.
Speaker 1:It's been kind of more old school and, I guess, fundamentals than anything else on how we've grown, because we've really focused on the product, making the best product we can for a customer that really needs it and a brand that means something to people. Right these things at a very high level that you can kind of paint over with good marketing, but you can't do it for very long. You need to have the core fundamentals right to grow. So I won't say that we've ever really done amazingly at any particular growth hack. We've done pretty okay at things like, you know, actual meta and social media marketing and we've done pretty good at press. We've done a lot of coverage.
Speaker 1:We've done pretty good at these Kickstarter drive, but there are brands out there that have done way better at every one of those things than we have in our way, our way, more efficient edit, and so we focus a lot of our time on is the product good and does the brand mean something? And I feel like that kind of puts a little bit of a gold dust on everything else you do, because at least you've got something relevant that people really want and that's what we hope for, you know, and that's we hope we can scale that, and it's not just early adopters that are kind of telling this is great, we want to go out into the broader world and be successful at scale. So we could talk a little bit more specifically about some of the actual strategies, and I'm happy to. I just wanted to kind of hit that like no, yeah, I wouldn't consider us growth hackers. We're more interested in just building really good stuff.
Speaker 2:The thing is, though, you're talking about growing this product and growing this brand, and I definitely want to hear about these strategies, but you know your area of line of retail is quite populated. You know people are getting into health and fitness, they're getting into sustainable ability and being outside, and all these things come hand in hand and, like you know, I can imagine some of your competitors in my head at the moment. So how do you go about creating that brand and getting those eyeballs on you?
Speaker 1:So from a high level, I think that we really try to focus on an honest conversation of sustainability. Sustainability is obviously like a very big buzzword now it's a browser or saying they do it. They are in the outdoors is not necessarily a place where that's differentiating, right. But instead of really focusing as much on the fact that we use organic cotton or a cycle polyester which we do we focus much more on this idea of buying for life and keeping things in service longer. So we have a repair program that allows people to send their products in and get a repair and we really celebrate that. You know, once you boil down to the very bottom of like the whole logical stream of sustainability, it really like once again boils down to buying good things that last a long time and keeping them a long time and so like it takes a while for that to break through.
Speaker 1:You're a small brand and you say like we're very high quality and everybody's like, yes, sure you are Right, but you say it long enough and you deliver on it long enough. Where I think it starts to break through, you know, while maybe slower than some kind of very catchy like clickbaity sort of claim, I think it's much more sticky. It's much more true because it's true and the people that kind of come into our family tend to be pretty big fans at that point. So, like our net promoter score, you know, is very high, most of our customers will tell their friends to try it out. For I, like, that's been probably more the key to our success than anything.
Speaker 1:It's just delighting our customers and having them want to tell people about it and want to vouch for us and want to, you know, create content for us and want to help. And that is probably very tied to the crowdfunding world. We came from right, so we launched on Kickstarter. We've done four of them. We've also raised equity on crowdfunding through WeFunders. We've raised some like 400 plus of our customers are now owners in the company. And so we've done and once again, not even as effectively as I think we could. I think we've done a pretty good job of bringing people that are fans and making them into super fans and supporters and evangelical people that want to tell people about Lipson.
Speaker 2:I can see how that's ended up being really beneficial for you, but what was the decision to go down the Kickstarter route as opposed to like traditional methods of funding at the beginning?
Speaker 1:Well, I didn't want to do it the slow kind of organic way For apparel.
Speaker 1:It's very hard to create full-adjusted cut-and-sew like your specific designs.
Speaker 1:At the beginning you typically have to start with like off-the-shelf blank t-shirts and some graphic design and really move through that, and I didn't want to be a part of that somewhat wasteful cycle of like just kind of producing the same thing with your name on it.
Speaker 1:So Kickstarter was a very efficient way and still is to get a lot of people together all at once to help fund the true production of real products, and so we had really that or the other option would be to, like I said, like the kind of organic group of t-shirts, or to raise a bunch of money up front and go to like the wholesale market right, go to retailers and try to build up a bunch of POs and all of those things are incredibly hard. But at least Kickstarter you can do that efficiently. You can kind of have one time, a 30-day window to say what you're doing is clearly as possible, to show the world what you're making and see if it works, and then, if it does, then you get to go to those retailers and to people and kind of use that as a problem, and so Kickstarter was just a lot of these things wrapped up into one very efficient vehicle for launching a brand.
Speaker 2:Which sounds like it's been really helpful for you. What other kind of technology platforms have you been either dabbling with or implementing at scale at the moment?
Speaker 1:So I mean we're probably like a lot of brands that listen to this. We our website is on Shopify, where there never really was another choice to me. I'd come from knowing that platform for a long time before and wanted to start there. We went for MailChimp at the beginning, we migrated to Clamio for email marketing kind of, as we've scaled and needed some more robust tools. We advertise almost 100% on Meta, a little bit on Google.
Speaker 1:We look at performance using a tool called Lifetimely Deliveries, kind of a daily P&L and how your ads are doing and what your row as is, which is helpful. These loop returns for customer interaction so they can return things on loop. We use a ERP called Bright Pearl. That is kind of the single source of truth for all of our business. It holds our wholesale orders and our DTC orders and it kind of funnels them to our warehouse. So we use the third party logistics warehouse that is tied in through Bright Pearl to Shopify and all the other sales channels and stuff like that. So there's more little things here and there on the website like apps and plugins and things, but those are the biggest pieces.
Speaker 2:And how have you found implementing those? Have you got a technology head on your shoulders, or has it been mentioned that you worked in tech before? So how have you found onboarding most of those platforms? Has it been pick a mix and take them off the shelf, or has it been a bit more tricky?
Speaker 1:Well, some are really easy. I like to add plugins for Shopify and stuff are just always really easy Copy and paste some code. And no, I'm not a technical person, I don't code, I don't, I don't. You know, I understand it from a high level point of view and using it. The hardest lift would have been the ERP system. It's just anybody that's done that. It's enterprise resource planning. I think it was in support, but it's just this big behemoth of an enterprise software that you had to format all your data and all your channels and all your codes and everything. So, and that took months and I had the help. So I actually hired someone with the direct aim of launching that project and then managing our operations from there on out, and they did a lot of help and a lot of work.
Speaker 2:And now it's all implemented. What's the one kind of platform out of that list that you couldn't live without now and couldn't run your business without?
Speaker 1:That would definitely be Shopify. I mean, like if we had. I know there's other e-commerce platforms out there. I've used some of them but, like at this point, we're so ingrained in that that we're just hoping that Shopify never has any financial issues.
Speaker 2:Never have downtime on Shopify, basically absolutely not.
Speaker 1:I noticed I didn't really come to think of this until I looked up to the data that Shopify is actually still not profitable. Right, they're still running operating laws every year and with the current landscape of kind of venture financing and interest rates and stuff, I'm like oh shit, sorry, if Shopify has an issue, I don't know what, like the whole world's e-commerce is going to just like bank.
Speaker 2:So definitely, definitely not. Are you tired of being buried in excess inventory? Then you need inventory planner, the number one demand planning software for e-commerce businesses. Inventory planner gives you real time insights to identify slow moving products, make informed decisions about your inventory and free up cash flow. Right now, listeners of the Lightning 50 podcast can get a free 14 day trial of this incredible tool by heading to inventory-plannercom. Inventory planner never knowingly over by again. So talk to me talking of like the future and crystal ball gazing, and hopefully not quite as gloomy as what you've just suggested. But what about technologies in the future? Is there anything that's kind of caught your eye that you'd like to implement? Or maybe, if you had another round of funding, what's the kind of thing that you would love to get in?
Speaker 1:So I think there's a lot of opportunity at least for us to streamline the customer experience, so from the buying to tracking their order, to even doing their returns and exchanges and then filtering that all in. What I'm really excited about is launching a resale platform. We're looking at some different providers to do resale. So, like I said, our brand is all about long lasting things that can serve the purpose for a long time. What that means is we get a lot of returns back of products that are very usable still. They may have been worn or washed or whatever they didn't fit.
Speaker 1:Then we take those back because they want to make customers happy, but then again there's no other life form, so we want to have a chance to put those out into the world online. And then also we'd like to have the ability for our customers to have kind of a peer to peer marketplace where they can sell to each other, because if we have a Facebook group with about 1000 people in it that do that in real time, they'll say I've got a couple pairs of pants that you know I'm either too small or I grew, or they grew, or whatever People were buying them. So we see this like happening organically. We'd like to facilitate that in a big way. And then it also helps from sustainability is that someone can come and buy something from us that's already been made and worn. That's a great win-win. We get that transaction and that product stays in the world. You know, we're never going to burn things like fashion brands, we're never going to just throw it away. So I'd like to see you somewhere to get that to people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was listening to another podcast the other day about all the investigations that have been done with clothes being sent to other parts of the world and just ending up in landfill and fast fashion, and this is just so heartbreaking when you think about it. That's the thing I suppose is getting your customers, or potential customers, to stop and think about it. And then coming to you but then staying with you and this whole resale platform would be such an incredible idea. Have you seen any of the brands do something similar or would that be really groundbreaking?
Speaker 1:It wouldn't be groundbreaking? I don't think, because Pat Agouti has been doing it for a long time, so that's a lot of the things that we do aspirationally are really based on a roadmap they set out from a sustainability point of view years ago and then, over the last, we started the whole brand in 2018 with this idea, this thesis of long lasting things that do the job well for variety of purposes. But the industry the outdoor industry in particular has come really around to us over the last few years, so most of the top brands have launched some sort of resale platform over the last year In our repair program, while it was ahead of its time, when we've launched it, it is now almost part of the course, which is great. I'm not upset about this. We're not trying to go out and say that we're innovators or all these things in technology or we're doing everything differently. We're just trying to say what we're doing is the right thing based on what we assess, and so I'm happy when other brands make the same decision.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's kind of, I suppose, making a pathway for you. You know you're on the same lines as these big brands and you're all committing to making the world a better place at them in it, I suppose.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's the nice thing is like all the stuff is good and so the more companies that come in and do these things I'm very happy for. And it's not like you know, apparel is not like the tech industry. You don't need to capture 25 plus percent of the market to make a really great brand Like there's plenty of room for everybody.
Speaker 1:People buy clothing, plenty of brands, it's just lengthy. We'd like to see less people buying so much clothing, but the reality is that, like it's happening every day, all the time, there's a lot of people in the world, so there's plenty of room for us and everybody else.
Speaker 2:So talk to me a little bit about some of the challenges that you've come across over the last five years, and how have you overcome them. What's been the biggest moment where you've been like, oh, this is going to be really hard, I don't know how I'm going to get?
Speaker 1:through this. I mean, covid was obviously the biggest COVID and supply chain interruptions related to it were obviously have been the biggest challenge for us, and I think it's been true for a lot of consumer goods brands. You know, like I alluded to earlier, our biggest inventory purchase and really the first time we ever did it not through crowdfunding was the PO was do around when blocked out happened, and so that was a huge moment of uncertainty. Right Like, we have some money, we need it for inventory, but if we spend it on inventory we don't have it anymore. Right Like, there's all these choices to make and so we made it and it was good. But that whole next, really up until pretty recently, the supply chain has just been wrecked. So most of our clothing is actually all of our clothing is made in Vietnam. In Vietnam had very strict COVID lockdown restrictions and so our factory at any given time would be okay, we're shut down, fall on we don't know, two weeks, maybe three weeks, or when they were up it was one or two lines out of 20 and actually in production and they had rotating schedules so that they can, you know, keep production going, and so it was always this kind of push, pull of? Where are we in line? Can we get product? Products made? And we were able to.
Speaker 1:And then once it got to the point where it was ready to leave freight and transit was just wrecked. Containers were in the right spot, things weren't moving, ports were closed, they couldn't get stuff through, so we had to pay. During the height of the pandemic we had to actually fulfill our that kickstarter. That went about $500,000. And we had to elect to air freight everything because of timelines. We just couldn't. We couldn't wait and air freight at that point was about 10 times more than it should be and air freight is usually expensive anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so like our margins took a huge hit. You know we had to get product here and so that was hard and it definitely hit us on the bottom line. Through those years that we've been able to make it through and thankfully things are pretty much back to normal when it comes to freight at least. So the cost increases we got throughout that time More sticky, they're lingering but we're hopeful they come back down at some point. We've had to raise prices to accommodate. We hope to actually lower prices at some point if we can.
Speaker 2:You must have had to make a lot of decisions very quickly at that point and for the future of the business and your livelihoods as well. So were there any mistakes that you made along the way and anything that you learned from any potential mistakes?
Speaker 1:Definitely I mean hopefully, and it seems like nothing was fatal, but we've definitely made. We've made choices on products that were a little bit too fast, choices on inventory buying that were either too aggressive or not aggressive enough. You know, just one thing that, specifically, our ERP pride pool helped us do is the demand planner aspect of the software, which allows us to actually kind of get some real good predictive ordering going so that we order more efficiently. And I'd say, like are the things that are the biggest risk for us because we're so small and so much of our budget goes into our inventory is ordering wrong? Yeah, we definitely ordered wrong. So, like those things have been painful but yeah, I said, not fatal yet.
Speaker 2:And I'm sure it's not just you won't be the only apparel brand that will be listing that as a potential mistake. It's quite difficult to be planning all of this so far, as far in advance as well, and so, talking of looking into the future again, what kind of opportunities are there for you to grab at the moment?
Speaker 1:It's a challenging environment right now. A lot of brands are struggling but we're still growing, and I think that's something to do with being new, but I also think it's something to do with what we're saying and the messaging we're putting out. And I think that messaging like we see so much runway ahead and so much opportunity and really owning this idea of very durable, versatile products last a long time and making that our cornerstone and what that does is it helps us break through the noise. I think. I think that, like I said, it takes a little longer, but it's more honest and I think that it's sticky in our repeat customer rates, really high. So we're diving a mile deep into that messaging and then with that, that puts the pressure on us to make sure that we follow that up in reality. So we're really diving into QC with our factories, making sure our fit, everything's perfect.
Speaker 1:All of our new product development is focused around high levels of stability, transparency and durability and all these things, and I love that. I think it's why I'm in this, it's why I started it, and the more we own that as a brand and push that messaging forward, the more it dictates our actions as a company to follow it up, and that's the kind of things I want to be doing. I don't want to be trying to figure out how to make things cheaper, right, I want to figure out how to make things better and then command the price point. That liars that, and so that's where we're excited to move forward to.
Speaker 2:We're getting towards the end of our time together, but I'd love to get two or three tips that you can share with our audience for e-commerce growth and scale. So have a think about that, but while you do, I need to hear about your is it your? Bags? Your big, hairy, audacious goals. Tell me a little bit about those, what that means I've heard it a couple of times, but some of our audience might be new to them. Is that something you live your life by? How did it come about and how do you use it in the business?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a B-Aggs, it's a kind of old school business. It's big, hairy, audacious goals and they're useful, right Like. The point is that they're big goals, that they're potentially just out of reach, but the guide to action so, like you know, ours is, or one of them, is that we want for every product we make, for three other products to not have to get made Like right, that means that we need to make things last three times as longer and bring a customer that's going to really act that way, right and behave that way. And another one is that we want to be a household name in the next really five to ten years, like we want we want to live in, to be as recognizable in someone's conversation as Levi's or Patagonia, and so what that does is it says, okay, well, we're building this. How are we building it? Are we building it to be kind of this small little regional player? No, we're building it to be national, which means that we need to have a match. I think it gets back to messaging more than anything.
Speaker 1:The difference to me between, like a very successful brand, let's say, is DTC focused and is going to get to, you know, five, 10, $15 million and be really happy there, and one that has the potential to go to $100 million to do it, you know, to billion dollar brand is the, why it's the, it's the, it's the emotional connection between that brand and their customers and the real reason for being. You will hit a limitation, and we we may as well. Right, maybe we're wrong, but I think that what we're saying is valid, I think that what we're making is good and I think that we have something to say on the national and international scale, and so we're going to operate that way Within reason. We can't do all the same things, we don't have the resources, but we can at least, like, prepare ourselves for that, and that's the function of a BHAG. Right, like? You just want to like, keep your North Star, for you want to be heading so that the small decisions line up to equal that big result.
Speaker 2:Fantastic tips there, so let's go back to those e-commerce growth and scale tips. What would you like to share with our audience as the key takeaways? Or somebody that's maybe a couple of years behind you? What advice would you give them?
Speaker 1:I think the biggest thing would start with. Fundamentals is like are you building a product that is differentiated and it's going to get people excited? Right, it's a lot harder to go and say that I built this, you know, kind of off the shelf product that's similar to 1000 others, and convince people that it's that it's special. It's a little bit easier if you believe that you've made something worthwhile and so it's not like a you shouldn't not do it because you can't write but like it's just a. I think it makes things easier and that's not a hack, right. It's just like a, something to think about when you go in.
Speaker 1:I think Kickstarter is somewhat of a hack and I think that's been a crucial thing for us. To crowdfunding is like if you think you've got that product, go out and test it, use Kickstarter, use crowdfunding to go out there and build it up and prove that, because if one you have it and you prove it, then you've got, you know, potentially hundreds of thousands of people that are immediately going to be your biggest supporters. Right, and I think that's been a big part of our success is these Kickstarter people and crowdfunding people? They're not there usually for the product Everybody pretty much expects are not going to get it or it's going to be a letdown. So they're waiting to be in print, right? They're waiting for you to just do this, dad, like the bare minimum, like deliver on time and deliver a product that you said he would. And if you do that and you actually go beyond that, then you've got the most engaged customer group that wants to tell everybody about it.
Speaker 2:That's. That's such a good point. I never really thought about that from a crowdfunding, but that, yeah, those are two very great tips and, andrew, thank you so much. That was a really interesting interview. Thank you so much for your time and telling us your story.
Speaker 1:No problem, it was fun. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Furniture box, natural baby shower and beyond retail are just a few of the ambitious retailers who have integrated people Vox warehouse management system to take their e-commerce tech stack to the next level With lightning fast pick and pack workflows, easy user training and a 360 degree transparency into your warehouse operation. Anyone who has used people Vox will tell you that the platform is a genuine game changer. Not only does people Vox enhance your customer experience by tightening inventory control and cutting out packing mistakes, it also boosts your efficiency and unlocks growth for your business. So if you're ready to transfer your business, head over to people Voxcom today, so to our audience out there. Thank you all, as always, for listening.
Speaker 2:We learn quite a lot there about building an emotional connection with customers and a strong brand, of course, and potentially using platforms like Kickstarter to really really kickstart your brand and also, importantly, like maybe working together and looking elsewhere at sometimes, your competitors, what they're doing from a sustainability point, because at the end of the day, the race there is only to get to a better place in the planet.
Speaker 2:So make sure you head over to the usual podcast platforms to listen to previous episodes of the Lightning 50 podcast and don't forget that retailers like furniture, box, natural baby shower and beyond retail are just a few of the ambitious retailers who have integrated people Vox warehouse management system to take their e-commerce stack to the next level With Lightning, fast pick and pack workflows, easy user training and a 360 degree transparency in your warehouse operation. Anyone who has used people Vox will tell you that the platform is a genuine game changer. Not only does using people Vox enhance your customer experience by tightening inventory control and cutting out packing mistakes, it also boosts your efficiency and unlocks growth for your business. So if you're ready to transform your business, head over to people Voxcom today, and that's all we have time for. Until next time, goodbye.