🤯 What happens if your revenue drops 75% overnight?

Hair Craft Co is a premium men’s hair care brand helping millennial men look great.

In 2020, Co-Founder Leo Carrillo III left his job to work on Hair Craft Co full time. He'd worked on it as a side hustle for a few years at that point.

But one month after committing full time, the world shut down with the pandemic.

Sales dropped to 25% of what it used to be.

The brand was 100% reliant on Amazon to capture demand for their hair products.

But with no one was going out, socializing, or continuing a normal routine, no one was searching for or purchasing hair products.

Leo was forced to create a demand generation platform--a stand alone brand outside of Amazon.

They worked with Instagram influencers, professional athletes, and building Facebook into a profitable channel.

They tested creative -- from expensive photo shoots to simple user generated content.

Today, sales off of Amazon now account for 30% of sales. This includes email, SMS, and advertising on facebook and instagram.

Leo shares his experiences in great detail, and how he has bounced back to have a surge in sales, unlocking growth from new channels, and preparing for new product launches.

The Takeaway: Focus on building a brand is a strategic investment that helps generate demand (as opposed to relying on Amazon, which limits brand development and only serves to capture demand). This can help weather the unexpected downturns and fluctuations that are beyond one's control.

So your StitchFix shopping experience will be completely different from mine, and everyone else's.

This is the future of ecommerce

In this Fast Company piece, more details on how it works and what the vision is:

"Today, the company launches a new platform called Freestyle that creates a customized store for every shopper. It’s designed to mimic the discovery process of a traditional department store, where brands and styles are showcased together, rather than a typical e-commerce site, where you have to search for exactly what you want. This new approach to shopping has the potential to grow Stitch Fix’s business beyond its subscription model—and also transform the way we shop online.

'Our ambition is to build you your own personal store,' CEO Elizabeth Spaulding says. 'It’s designed to facilitate discovery, but we’re showing you things that we know will fit you and match your own personal style.'"

✍️ Why We Buy

Copywriter Joe Cunningham listed out the reasons that people buy, from Bob Bly's "Copywriters Handbook".

Here are the first 10 reasons why we buy:

To be liked
To be appreciated
To be right
To feel important
To make money
To save money
To save time
To make work easier
To be secure
To be attractive

But here's the trick: after you know why people buy, you need to think about what comes next.....

Which is why you want to use "so that" afterwards.

For example, to use the first reason from the list, "You want to be liked [so that] you can have personal fulfillment."

Or a brand like Athletic Greens--people buy their drink mix to save time so that they can spend it with loved ones.