128 - Lessons from Asheville's Ecommerce Brands

Hello, and welcome to the Making It In Asheville podcast. This is your friendly neighborhood podcast where each week we sit down typically with an Asheville based small business owner, entrepreneur, community member, ask them what they are making and how they are making it in Ash. Phil. I'm your host. Tony upertaccio. This is the season finale of an e commerce focused season. And it's been an incredible season. And this episode, we're gonna in case it's your first time here or you missed any, there's been a lot of content over the last quarter. Do an overview of all of the things we've heard, lessons we've learned, guests we've had, so that there's perhaps a meaningful takeaway for the community to use in their own businesses or for you to hear and be perhaps inspired by. So, want to quickly give you context for what we did this season. This season was an e commerce focused season. We sat down with businesses that are doing all sorts of different types of e commerce and retail businesses. We ran this season entirely out of Ernest. So Ernest was our season sponsor this year. If you haven't heard of Ernest, it's an incredible business, incredible location, and they were wonderful to us. So Ernest is you can look it up as Ernest. Readymade Ernest, co warehousing and co working. Ernest is awesome for e commerce businesses, what they do right now, and it's a number of different value props for small businesses. And this is perhaps why they were a perfect sponsor for this season. They have co warehousing space right off of Sweden Creek near the Exit 51 on Route 40, where businesses like the ones that we interview this season can set up shop and operate from a scalable warehouse space. And my wife, who's a guest this season, joined Ernest several months ago at this point, but the quality of life for her has gone through the roof. So she has this hundreds of square foot space that is built to be perfect for product storage and fulfillment. They have multiple loading docks that get constant deliveries from Ups, USPS FedEx in terms of fulfillment and shipping. For Sarah, that her business has experienced meaningful changes in the amount of time that it takes to fulfill orders and in the amount of time it takes to receive orders, 24 hours access to the location, climate controlled spaces, and the ability to grow in it has been wonderful. So Ernest has that part of the business, which is call it modular warehousing, but they also offer a bunch of services like the ability to pack and ship product for you out of your own warehouse space in their space, or the ability to hold your actual inventory in their portion of the warehouse space. 60,000 sqft total in the space. And they'll store it for you, pack it and ship it for you. Absolutely a gift and a godsend for my wife's business and also an incredible sponsor for our season. If you haven't checked out our YouTube channel this season was produced thanks to John Dupree. Exceptionally well. From their space you'll see a portion of their co working side and so tons of desk space, couch space, meeting room space that is just beautiful and gets an incredible amount of natural light. Shouts out to the fine folks at Ernest for sponsoring the season. So that was the background of the season. We found a sponsor that was a perfect fit for the content that we wanted to double click on this season, which is Ecommerce and retail. And we sat down and had incredible conversations with about twelve business owners based in Asheville that are running different types of businesses. And across all of those conversations there are a lot of themes, there are a lot of incredible nuggets that stand out to me and I did my best to try and consolidate all of that into some standout thoughts that I'm taking with me as we move forward from the episode or from the season. And so one that stands out I'm a tools and tech guy and it seems consistently, almost consistently across the board that the tech you use in an e commerce based business really matters. The tech that showed up the most was Shopify. Seems like most people, and this is not news, but most people who are selling physical products run their business from shopify. It is perhaps the most robust out of the box solution with the most capacity to then grow for your standard retailer. There are exceptions to that rule throughout the season, but more often than not, if you are selling physical things, shopify seems to be where most people go. And then there are conversations about these other parts of the business. Depending on the business, you might want memberships, subscriptions, solutions like that out of the box. There are options with Shopify that can do that. You can do it on WordPress. We have some folks in WordPress doing it. All that to say is that technology should, as best possible, support the customer experience that you want to deliver to your customer and support the vision that you have for your business. And whether it's Shopify, WordPress squarespace the type of business that you're in. And you might not be an e commerce business. There are different technologies that seem to do the best out of the box as you launch a business or attempt to grow or evolve your business. So make sure that you're using the right tech to deliver the experience that you want. Speaking of delivering the experience that you want, spent a bunch of time with a bunch of the guests this season talking about the unboxing experience and all of the little details that you can pay attention to as a physical goods seller to heighten the experience that you deliver to your client, to your customer. As a very important point in talking about all of the places that you can add a level of care, attention and detail, beauty and brand building. The exact counterpoint is like how much are you cutting into your profit margin? How much can you invest in these unboxing experiences? And what we saw across the season was that there has been many, I'll say, versions per business on what the unboxing experience looks like. Some have elevated their unboxing experience. The shipping, the receiving, the instagram and TikTok love people opening boxes, YouTube loves people opening boxes and so playing into that and investing in that is valuable is important. We've also seen or heard stories of businesses that have scaled back on their unboxing experience because every single packaging tape that has your logo and fill paper that is eco friendly and recyclable and post consumer and has your logo and all this stuff like all of those add costs. And over time, every cent that you put into packaging is money that comes out of profit margin. And that balancing act between unboxing and profit margin. Big theme throughout the season what that says to me is making sure you know your numbers as any type of business and knowing where you are in your profitability journey is incredibly valuable. And what I would look for are ways to increase value without necessarily increasing internal costs. So like what things can you do that are effectively free or round to free that make the largest impact and prioritize those that could be email marketing welcome series value add. It could be any number of things and I'll leave it up to you to play with that and we could talk about it. Email me DM me but business by business we're looking for ways to increase value without necessarily meaningfully changing our internal cost structure. The other theme throughout the season was all of the many ways that you might consider marketing channels for your business and or launching your business and there were plenty that we talked about. The ones that stand out to me and I'll double underline this is email marketing. I think that without question across the board it was consistent that email marketing seems to be the number one channel for marketing for client facing communications. Whether or not it is the channel that the business spends the most time on, it seems to me some of the folks we had on this season perhaps spend more time doing social media type things or live events like in total time investment. But A number one to drive sales, a number one to drive recurring sales. A number one is email marketing. So we got to think about that especially and including when launching a new product or a new business. The other thing that came up a bunch was this idea of rep groups and so we had a season focus on retail and ecommerce businesses meaningful portion of our guests had some version of wholesale and might be news to the audience. But like rep groups are this kind of distributor level of wholesale and seems to add meaningful value to businesses who participate in wholesale activities. And what I think the transferable there for all businesses, whether or not we're in retail specifically, is who exists that owns the awareness, attention and on a high level distribution channels, who owns distribution to our target audience and how do we create relationships with them that are mutually beneficial so that our businesses grow. And rep groups was a little bit of a surprise to me. Makes sense now, but rep groups were a meaningful portion of some of the conversations we had with ecommerce business owners this year and the last ones are known quantities, whether it's social media and social media strategy. Had an incredible conversation about using live Instagram campaigns like Live Stories to sell product with Solku. We'll talk about that probably when we talk about Solku in a moment. But social media and the many strategies across social media about storytelling, about behind the scenes, about how to think about brand building on social kickstarter to launch businesses showed up a number of times and to launch new products showed up and how to think about using crowdfunding as a business takeaway. There is grow an email list, get excitement before you launch and then have a battle plan to make your first day as powerful as possible so that it's already a done deal and PR can support you knowing that it's going to actually work. Last note was on live events and a number of the guests this year have done a number of different forms of live events. The one that kind of stands out to me was our guest Piranhi who make these incredible tumblers. We'll talk about it when we talk about Piranhi but some of their best successes have been in providing product at low or no profit to large events and then having their product in the hands of artists, musicians. They seem to have gotten a lot of great success and return from that type of live event investments. We've seen a ton of trade show conversations in marketing mix, launching strategies, mixed bag, but it all seems to be how do we get to where our customers are and then once we know who they are, how do we get back to them? So email becomes incredibly important. Last of the themes that I extracted from this season is the idea that storytelling and unique value that founders have as creators are meaningfully, important. And most of the guests this season have stories, have businesses where they're intrinsically connected to the business itself. Not all, but most. And these founders, what stood out was all of them in varying degrees have worked towards taking nonessential work off of their plate. Whether that means hiring developers to help build out custom functionality on websites because they should not be building out custom functionality on their websites. Hiring teams hiring contractors and generally outsourcing non critical work that showed up consistently. And then there was an obvious connection throughout the season that some portion of the guests have leaned on either third party logistics companies, three pls or earnest directly to outsource an important portion of their business, which is either warehousing, product or fulfilling orders. But it's important to a point should the founder be doing it? Are those roles that have to be owned internally? There's a bunch of ways to view it, but I think while it's valuable that founders know the ins and outs of their business and have first person experience with most of the requests that they're going to make of their team or of their vendors, contractors, partners. At a certain point, you have to let go of work so that you can focus on what makes you, as a founder, uniquely valuable to your business and to your team. And almost always that's going to mean you have to let go of things like fulfilling your orders personally have to let go of things like owning social media personally. Always have to let go of just lower value work that most someone skilled could do at 70% of what you do or better. Right? Like the amount of time founders spend in canva making graphics that are okay, versus handing that off to someone who really loves that portion of the work and can thrive in it and can over deliver relative to what you've done. That's a theme that we've seen throughout the season period. What are the unique value propositions, the areas, zones of genius that founders bring to the table? How do they create the environment where that's all that they have to focus on, that's transferable to all of us? And that's the high level of what we heard throughout the season. I want to do quickly, just a speed round. I'm trying to spend less than a minute per episode so that you get a taste of what some of the content is that delivered the context of those themes from the season. The season started at episode 116. I was solo on that episode, set up the season, created context for the season, told you what we were getting into, and told you a little bit about Ernest, our sponsor for the season. Episode 117 was with Jamie Daniels, CEO of Earnest Ready Made Warehouse and Co working, and also the CEO of Brightbell, which is a outsourced call center solution that is all local here in western North Carolina. The two businesses I think, are really interesting. She's a third generation business owner of the Daniels Group, generally heard an incredible story of the pivot from the business as a print business and printing materials into leveraging the coworking space, the warehousing space for co warehousing and co working. And absolutely awesome to just see and hear Jamie's story that's 117 118 was with Devil's Foot. Devil's Foot has done an incredible job of starting in the beverage space here in Asheville. The story stand out to me was like three or more, maybe years in ideation and creation mode before even the first can of ginger beer was attempted to be produced. Absolutely. The commitment from the team, from Jacob and Co was awesome to hear. And so Devil's Foot has been white hot since then. They've done an incredible job of leveraging some grant funding. They have a new space in the Ernest complex, generally called the Mule. Please check out that episode. They announced an exciting new beverage line that we were the first to hear about. Episode 119 was with Elise Van Arnham of Soul Coup. Soul Coup is awesome. Soul Coup has grown so rapidly over the years and done so well in Asheville that they are no longer allowed to participate in the Venture, asheville fastest growing business competitions. Their jersey hangs in the rafters and Solku creates gemstone based necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and products that are very intentional and beautiful. I love their story. I love the amount of pivots it took them to get them where they are, and I love their production model. They hire all local stay at home moms to produce these products, and you get to see their maker's mark on all of the products that they ship out. Check them out. Incredible story of growth, right? Sizing. And now growing again. Episode 120 was with Botanical Bones and Rachel Mayer. And so Rachel is one of the we have several, I would say pandemic babies, so to speak, in the season, and Botanical Bones is one of them. And so Botanical Bones, a organic, healthy, real food pet food product, primarily dog product that has dynamite branding. They use Atlas branding and an incredible execution. Rachel and Co. Have used the kind of in person community building angle to grow their business exceptionally well, working or showing up a good portion of the farmers markets locally. But they've also sold all over the country and done an incredible job of managing demand and attempting to continue to scale. Listen for some good heads up on pros and cons, of using Amazon as a sales channel, and of really heavily investing in unboxing experiences and what that can do to a business. Next, episode 121 was with Digestive Warrior Karen Mullins. Karen has a space in earnest, and it's something to see. Absolutely incredible, the variety of product and the amount of product. Karen's business is like. It's a supplement selling business, as well as a number of services that all dovetail beautifully from her personal story. Very powerful episode where we got to hear Karen's health and wellness journey from, I say sick in bed and nearly dead to a thriving Digestive Warrior. And so she experienced tons of stomach issues, set out on a mission to try and figure out what's going on, and now has built a business around trying to support folks with similar or comparable difficulty and I'd say issues with their digestion. So Digestive Warrior powerful video and episode and story of a founder who really leans into their unique story and unique value proposition as they grow their business. And so next up was episode 122 Sourhouse. And so Sourhouse is another Pandemic baby launched a little later than most. And if you ask Eric of Sourhouse, did they miss the Sourdough baking wave? He says they did. And so Sourhouse is an incredible physical product. It is a house for your sourdough starter that can be climate controlled. It is awesome. The sophistication and elegance of this product really stands out to me. The strategy that they used to launch leveraging Kickstarter and quickly rolling into a beautiful brand experience on a website. The business since the Kickstarter completed at this point time of publishing I believe is still less than a year old. But they've done an incredible job. It's countertop art and high function. I called it the greatest innovation in sourdough baking since the Dutch oven. Check out that episode for some really high level and specific also marketing strategy from Eric and the folks at Sourhouse. Episode 123 was with our dear friend of the Pod, Keely Roberts. And So Ware has been on the podcast at least once before and then also during a Pandemic episodes push where we talked about the pivots and changes in businesses locally, as in the wake of the Coronavirus and the Pandemic and So wears back business has gone through another round, I say another evolution. And So talked a lot in this episode about the power a business has to be the place a client, a customer can outsource. Decision making to Gilly has gone really deep into becoming a refill business. We talk about the pros and cons of that business as a model and what has caused some businesses like it to fail in the past and then what's coming down the pike for where and Gilly? And spoiler alert, they're leaning into white labeled producing their own products as well as subscription type engines inside of their business. Really awesome to have Gilly back on and see how she started as brick and mortar with an emphasis solely on in person sales. And now they've grown and changed in the five years to lean more into ecommerce and online retail. Episode 124 was also an exciting episode with a local business called High Cotton. And so High Cotton, of all of the businesses, seem to have the largest footprint nationally in physical stores and are also leaning into retail in the near and future, near term future and long term future. And so High Cotton primarily does like coasters that are funny and stickers and doormats and physical product like a business that has a very lean team, does meaningful amounts of revenue and is attempting to transition from an almost exclusively wholesale and rep based we talked about rep groups at the top. Wholesale and rep group based business into one where transactions are happening on their website. Talked a little bit about that strategy and what they're thinking about, and I loved it. That business is, I want to say over 20 years old, maybe over 25 years old and its consistency, its ability to weather the storm and continue to grow really exciting and to me gave me a level of calm, it seems to me. And who knows if this is true, it seems to me that a business like high Cotton, of most of them, has perhaps the most distance between who the founder is and what that founder's story is. And a business that fulfills a need and adds value, if only by having people smile as they have drinks or smile when they return to their car or return home and get to see some witty, funny thing. Just very inspiring business for me. Generally High Cotton Episode 124 Next up, episode 125. You go from coasters not proprietary to episode 125. Piranhi Life and Brandejay Pierce, the co founder of Brandejay, is the product designer, is the seemingly like the engine in a lot of ways that gets these products built. And I'm holding my Piranhi tumbler in my hand. The Piranhi tumbler is the lovechild of a red solo cup and a Yeti tumbler. So it's a triple wall insulated tumbler, keeps hot, keeps cold, and the business is a couple years old. They moved to Asheville a couple years ago, not long after launching the business and have been like on a tear. And so you're starting to see these tumblers all over Asheville and just all over generally patented product specific product, really well engineered, like these lids, you pretty much can't close the lid if the tab is closed, like the air pressure is too tight. Just absolutely perfectly engineered. Incredible product and an incredible business. And so hearing Brandig's story of the inception of the idea, the Kickstarter plan, kickstarter success to what they've done to continue to see growth in the business, really compelling and unique. And I expect continued growth and success for them, for sure. Episode 125. Episode 126 was with Runners Box and Laura Jorgensen. Runners Box is in this season was like the subscription focused businesses. And so Runners Box also the runner box, the rider box, and then Laura announced on the podcast also that there was a third business about to launch. And these businesses, you'll see at the time of publishing this, we're still in September 2023, all three of the businesses will have a website refresh and for the third business, a launch in October of 2023. But subscription based business that focuses on supplements and nutrition, primarily products for runners and cyclists that has done exceptionally well. The business is, I think, less than ten years old, but has really become a priority for Laura and the team since I want to say pandemic ish timeline and the growth in those last three years have been absolutely exceptional. Subscription based businesses generally are really exciting to me. You can forecast revenues. You can do a whole bunch of things that are really ideal in terms of business models. And they've done a great job of capturing, continuing to grow their subscriber base, keeping people along for a very real amount of time because the quality of the products that they keep sourcing are so high. This third business called Fuel Goods is now building out this continuity level. So if you love something from one of the boxes, you can now order it from them online. I think that the marriage of these concepts like top funnel capture new audience and make them happy through a subscription model. And then midfunnel bottom funnel, which is you like a thing, we can sell it to you, and then you can subscribe to just that thing showing up monthly, quarterly, or whatever frequency really compelling to me. They also talk about a bit of tech that they've built or developed specifically for themselves to support referral growth. And referrals have shown up in a number of the episodes throughout the season. Really excited to see all of those launches in October 2023. Last up was episode 127 with Sarah Ubertaccio. My darling wife Sarah's, former co host of this podcast. She in the very beginning of the pandemic. We spent a lot of time at home. She got deep into her already powerful passion for pasta making. Put some of the content online, people started saying, where do you get those tools? Said, I need to figure out how to get these tools to people. Three years later yeah, business just turned three at the start of September. 3 years later. She has arguably and perhaps definitely the internet's largest community of homemade pasta making enthusiasts. Her business has grown in a number of different ways. She just moved into earnest to make fulfilling these products, storing these products easier and better. All sorts of exciting opportunities lie in the future, and developments have been made in her business. Episode 127 with Sarah Ubertaccio. I think you'll very much enjoy it. So that was me attempting to go a minute per episode. I loved this season. I loved the idea of doing a thematic season. I liked the quality that we brought to production. If you haven't checked, if you're probably listening on a podcast right now, if you haven't checked out our YouTube channel, please do check it out. We have more podcasts coming towards your ears and eyes for Q Four of 2023. The future is bright here. I am very excited to keep the momentum with the podcast, tell more stories of the community of founders, and admittedly also go back through the archives. Now that the audience level is where it's at. I think that there were incredible stories that we've told in the past. I want to bring them back up. And so if you enjoyed this episode, wherever you're listening, please do the thing on that platform to tell us that you liked it. If you enjoyed this season, reach out to me. If you have ideas for other seasons, ideas for other guests, my email is tony@makingitinashville.com and I look forward to hearing from you. So until next episode, do good, be good, talk soon. And one more time, thank you, Jamie and Ernest, for this incredible season. We were excited to have such a great partner and I think we had a great season. Talk to you soon.