In an ecommerce world that’s seemingly dominated by Amazon, Eric Bandholz has simply moved his firm’s merchandise away from that market. The corporate, Beardbrand, is now centered on promoting by way of its web site and different channels. Income has enormously elevated.
I lately spoke with Bandholz about Amazon, Beardbrand, and the significance of an organization imaginative and prescient. What follows is the audio recording of our whole dialog and a transcript of it, edited for readability and size.
Sensible Ecommerce: Inform us about Beardbrand.
Eric Bandholz: The Beardbrand story goes again to after I was a monetary advisor. I regarded a sure approach, dressed a sure approach, and behaved a sure approach. I at all times felt like I used to be placing on a shell or a ruse of being somebody who I wasn’t. So I finished working as a monetary advisor, and I made a decision to develop my beard.
I spotted there was a neighborhood of people like me. I known as them city beardsmen. Beardbrand was going to be the group that united city beardsmen and offered the instruments they wanted to really feel assured.
Through the years, Beardbrand has advanced. It began in 2012 as a weblog and a YouTube channel and a Tumblr web page. Then we introduced within the ecommerce component in 2013. We try this by manufacturing and designing our personal males’s grooming merchandise — on your beard, your hair, your pores and skin, something that you may think about a dude would want to enhance his look, and his fashion. Hopefully, that can enable him to spend money on his household and this profession and his neighborhood and, finally, make the world a greater place.
Beardbrand is solely bootstrapped. We now have no exterior traders. We develop from the earnings of the enterprise.
PEC: Why not promote your merchandise on Amazon?
Bandholz: Again in 2013, 2014, we made our first try at promoting on Amazon. We offered a bit. But it surely made up not more than 10 p.c of our enterprise on the time. The factor that I hated — as a philosophically-driven individual — is the way in which that Amazon communicates with its resellers.
I’d obtain emails from Amazon that threatened to terminate our account. They very aggressive after we had been coping with rising pains.
We ended up working with a reseller whose whole enterprise was promoting on Amazon. We handled that reseller like every of our different wholesalers.
We did that for a few years. We had been in a position to collect information on what our merchandise had been doing on Amazon. They generated a good quantity of income — round 12 to 13 p.c. However we offered a wholesale value.
So January of 2018, we determined to go all in with Amazon. However we couldn’t discover the precise individual to affix our staff to fill that function. January changed into February, which changed into March. Then, at our March quarterly technique session, after not hiring the individual to run our Amazon channel, we began to have a look at the information of what was occurring with our enterprise.
Once I began digging into the numbers, our non-Amazon income in January was 36 p.c larger year-over-year. That’s after we determined not to promote our merchandise on Amazon. It was a crystal clear resolution.
PEC: You wrote in a weblog publish that you simply couldn’t ship the expertise that you simply needed on Amazon. What had been you referring to there?
Bandholz: If you wish to be good at Amazon, it’s a must to perceive Amazon. It’s by no means been a core competency of ours. We’ve by no means been a data-driven advertising and marketing firm that manipulates the pricing of our merchandise, begging and bribing for critiques. We’ve by no means accomplished any of that stuff. So [to excel at Amazon], we must make investments a variety of assets — money and time — to have the ability to study and develop.
We’re engaged on Fb campaigns and electronic mail advertising and marketing techniques and YouTube movies and weblog articles. All of those have an effect on income. So we didn’t flip off Amazon and mechanically achieved a 36 p.c enhance. There are lots of elements that go into that.
PEC: Is {that a} 36 p.c enhance in your web site, Beardbrand.com?
Bandholz: Sure. It was 36 p.c in January, 41 p.c in February, 80 p.c in March, and 86 p.c in April.
I think that lots of people who had been shopping for our merchandise on Amazon have realized we’re not there. They now go on to Beardbrand.com.
PEC: How do you generate site visitors to your website?
Bandholz: My thoughts is at all times turning to how we are able to generate an viewers over the long run — what sort of advertising and marketing methods are sustainable. For us that meant investing in our YouTube channel, producing a variety of academic and leisure movies to assist our viewers.
Final yr, we had about 250,000 subscribers to our YouTube channel. We’ve added one other 400,000 subscribers since then. So our YouTube channel is as much as 650,000 subscribers. We’re producing about 6 or 7 million views monthly.
PEC: Do you do produce the video in-house?
Bandholz: Sure. We now have a full-time video editor. We even have an individual that wears a number of hats — half influencer, half face of the model. He movies a bunch of our movies. Then we’ve a social media coordinator, who helps to speak our movies.
PEC: You moved away from Amazon, however you continue to have wholesale channels. How a lot of Beardbrand’s gross sales come from wholesale versus direct-to-consumer?
Bandholz: We’re now in all Goal shops. It dramatically shifted our income streams. It’s now a couple of 50-50 break up between direct-to-consumer gross sales and wholesale, by way of retailers corresponding to Goal.
PEC: You’re a former contributor to Sensible Ecommerce. How do you advise retailers who really feel trapped by promoting on Amazon?
Bandholz: If you wish to be away from the thumb of Amazon, design and develop your individual merchandise. Much more, construct a model and a imaginative and prescient and a mission that’s larger than the merchandise themselves. Make the world a greater place. Empower your viewers. As soon as you work that out, the shoppers will comply with. They are going to be part of that mission.
