🐕 How to launch a sock brand (with no audience)

Once she could confirm that demand existed, she was confident that she could make a business out of it, at least enough to hit her goal of $50k in sales.

She decided that a partnership was the best way to quickly validate the product idea: find a group of people (who are not family or friends) who buy the product because they saw it and wanted it. Not because they were doing a favor.

This is her main caveat, before people get too caught up in the idea, they need to verify that there will be a market for the product.

Susan talks about her partnership process in great detail in our convo, starting at the 25:20 mark

Here is her process:
Simplify the product offering: She only started with one product — a sock for dachshunds.
Identify a partner with an owned audience – Susan identified an ecommerce brand that focuses on Doxies, called American Doxie.
Make a generous agreement – The offer has to be appealing to both the partner, and the partner’s audience. In this case, Susan offered a free pair of socks if they bought three pair. The deal she made with the owner of American Doxie was she would give him the first 100 orders for free (this was the cost that she incurred herself). One unit of socks costs $8. Each order cost her $10 to fulfill, and for her to cover the first 100 orders, it cost her $1000 to expose to the perfect audience.
Run the promotion – With incentives aligned, the partner promoted the dachshund socks to his audience — who loved dachshunds. In the end, she sold $7,700 in sales. But more importantly, she validated demand for her product.
Build your list – Part of her partnership agreement was that Susan would get the emails generated during the giveaway. This was the foundation of building her audience for Sock Doggo.

For the $1,000 investment, Susan was able to accelerate the launch of her brand when she didn’t have an existing audience.

Takeaway: Find a partner with an audience that you wish to target, and make a mutually beneficial offer to get in front of that audience.

Susan wrote a lot about her launch giveaway, with more details and numbers into her launch to in this post on The Social Sales Girls here.

🎁 Five traps to avoid: The long game of DTC and e-commerce

eCommerce sales penetration hit 35% in 2020. This is more than double the 16% of the previous year.

And this is not a trend that will fade as we move past the pandemic, according to McKinsey.

The main takeaway from this piece: be mindful in the strategy that you set now, as the impact of these decisions can have lasting impacts.

This applies to decisions on technology, unit economics and pricing, and more. An interesting piece here (though definitely skews to the challenges of the biggest DTC brands in the world).