Coffee, Chaos, & Cashflow
☕️ Coffee, Chaos & Cashflow 🎙️
Fueling your business journey with real talk, laughs, and a dash of caffeine! Join Eric Griffin, Aram Street, & Yemi Ogunbase as they share wins, missteps, and candid advice on turning chaos into cashflow. Real stories, real lessons—entrepreneurship, unfiltered. 🎧
Coffee, Chaos, & Cashflow
#8 Ecommerce
Learn about Eric and Yemi's experience in the e-commerce industry. Eric's shift from web agency owner to successful e-commerce entrepreneur highlights his adaptability, from learning dropshipping via YouTube to building a branded business model with recurring sales, overcoming challenges like Google marketplace updates along the way. Yemi brings expertise in crafting compelling narratives for the food and beverage e-commerce sector, emphasizing brand identity rooted in culture, meaning, and mission. This episode shares lessons on transitioning from generic stores to niche brands that connect emotionally with consumers, the importance of trusting suppliers, and the advantages of direct manufacturer collaboration, offering strategies for customer retention and resilient business growth.
We're back, guys. So, guys, let me. Something good has happened this week.
Speaker 2:What? What happened this week? Tell me something that has happened. Good, not good. My hometown washed away this past weekend.
Speaker 1:Oh no.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a rough week. It looks pretty bad.
Speaker 3:Yeah With weather after the hurricane, it's been a doozy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not very good. Can't get back home. All the roads are closed and everything, because the roads are washed away.
Speaker 3:Wow, yeah, I guess if you were to look at a good thing there as tragic as this is, like just the it's it's really cool to see how people come together and really, really sacrifice to help in that kind of situation, when there's like there's no gain and you know, trying to round up helicopters to go fly people in and help them, like you're not going to get anything from that. But you realize the need for that and it's. It's awesome when people come together and see that need, fill it and act very, very, very swiftly and so that's been awesome.
Speaker 1:And, as terrible as it as as the events were, the unity, just that we're all coming together to help, you know, our fellow Americans, fellow human beings, like it's just, especially, you know, know, with the season that we're in right now, with it being political season, and you know, everyone hates everyone because you, you know, you don't think this person's vile or you like this person, um, it's nice. Just like you know what you're a human being, this crappy thing happened to you and we're gonna find somebody to help you. You know, yeah, and that's the, you know. Know, I always try to find the silver linings and things, so that's that, all right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're going to chat about some e-commerce today, right, yeah, yeah, so I'm going to E commerce.
Speaker 2:This is cool.
Speaker 3:You guys both have some experience here on this front and that is an area I have not touched at all, so it'll be kind of cool. Eric, we'll start with you. You've got very successful experience in the e-commerce front, so give us a run through of that and you know just some high level, like what happened? How quickly did it develop? Give us some just timeline stuff that we can get a feel for what you were doing, what the product was and how they came together for you.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, it was born. The whole e-commerce thing for me was born out of I had shut down my. I was in the process of shutting down my uh web agency because I didn't see a direction there in the future. And I I had I had just gotten my biggest client ever, um, which basically I didn't have to do any work, and so I was like, okay, I have one year to learn a new skill, to learn something that I can take, and and and, because I don't see this web agency uh, working out, it's not going. I, I can, because you have website builders and all that. So I was like, um, I have one year. And so I was turning around, I was looking everywhere at the same time as that was happening, my uh dance studio that my wife and I was running. We were closing that down because we kind of got kicked out of the town a very, very small town, but um, so anyway, uh, but yeah, so what I did was I just it's like I have one year, I have to get something started. I don't know how long it's going to take, and I need to learn a whole new, a whole new thing that I've never learned before. I already knew. I already knew how to build websites, you know, because I the website agency, so I already knew a lot about web design and all of that as far as experience goes. But I had never sold anything online and so I was like, okay, well, I bought.
Speaker 2:I found a YouTuber, like an 18-year-old, who was doing these YouTube videos and dropshipping these random products and always claimed that he was making these crazy amounts per week and he was selling this course. Which course is used to? I don't know if it still is, but back then you know really great deal. Everyone was doing a course, but I was like, okay, if this guy it was six, it was nine hundred dollars, if this guy is real, then I should be able to copy exactly what he does and it should turn out the same way, because that's logic, you know. And so that's what I did.
Speaker 2:Um little did I know that I was actually scamming people at the beginning, until I, until I realized, wait, this isn't right, and I changed. I changed it up. Maybe not scamming might be the wrong word, but it was like it was scamming in my mind, like value, wise, um, and so, and yeah, all together, it took me about six months of building that store in terms of actually making it. Now it's a reoccurring brand and I moved away from dropshipping and we we branded the whole thing and was actually and was making steps to change some things, and we were going to move out of China to Vietnam to manufacture there with our own manufacturing facility and everything. And then Google did this. They updated their marketplace, shut down millions of people's stores, restricted their accounts millions of people's accounts that were legitimate accounts and it took them forever to get them back up and running. And by the time they got them back up and running, we were already out of, we were done and didn't have any more momentum left. So that's the very short version.
Speaker 3:Good stuff.
Speaker 2:Lots of stuff done back there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, we'll get into some nitty-gritty here in a minute. Uh, let's talk to you real quick, yemi. So your experience has been on the copyright, uh, copywriting for food and beverage, specifically in e-commerce. Give me kind of a similar like, give me a run on that. What was, what was the deal there, what were you doing and how did that come about?
Speaker 1:well, it was a. It was a food and beverage company that manufactured uh, you know they did functional foods, and basically the whole idea behind that were foods that added to your life um, not just food you just consume for this, you know, junk food or anything like that. It was things that helped you perform better. Well, we're shown to possibly have helped you perform better, because we're not trying to get in trouble with the FDA Working there, you know they. You know it was a W2 position, so I came on as a. The role was direct response copywriter, which they created specifically, and I was the first person that hired for the role, and I was working directly with the director of e-commerce for the brand, as well as the retention manager for the brand, and the whole goal was to create campaigns to increase sales.
Speaker 1:They had a massive email list. They weren't leveraging at all. Massive text list. They weren't really leveraging at all. It was just kind of like they had some name recognition. They were kind of the first in their space, so it just kind of that's just kind of how it worked for them. They didn't know what they, what they, what they didn't know. So it was, it was a good time. Um, got a lot of free products, which was awesome. It's always the benefit of that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so with all of that data of you know text, that data of you know text, all these numbers and emails are sitting there, was it? I mean, I don't know, but it sounds to me like that's a goldmine waiting to happen if they're not utilizing it and it's just available. Was it easy to convert? Like, were you building campaigns? To kind of just come in and be like, hey, all this has been sitting there, we haven't utilized it. So that's the first thing we're going to do is just try to convert as much of this you know open in here. We haven't utilized it. So that's the first thing we're going to do is just try to convert as much of this you know open stuff as we have. What did that look like for you Were you was that?
Speaker 1:your first line of approach? Were you doing other things or how'd you tackle that? So, you know, being my, my focus being email copywriting, one of the things I did was I analyzed their, you know, went through their entire database and everything figured out. You know, I through their entire database and everything figured out. You know, I really started isolating people who hadn't opened an email for over a year. You know, don't want to email them. The company was paying for them, and so basically it was a list of 500,000 by the time I was done. It was like 350,000, you know just, we sunsetted those, set them aside and everything. Well, the month after I did that, you know, I only wrote one email campaign, just a quick four day flash sale, just to kind of test the market, and we more than doubled the email revenue from the previous month Just in that alone, just cleaning that up. And then, like you said, it was just this gold mine they were sitting on, didn't know how to properly leverage, and so that was the first month there.
Speaker 3:That's a good way to start. You love a good metric growth right out of the gate. So, eric, I'm guessing this is probably a pretty popular question you get when it comes to e-commerce how did you choose and how did you go about selling it?
Speaker 2:Well, the first product that I did it was actually recommended to me by the mentor that I bought the course from Going back to the beginning with the headphones. They weren't the headphones that I ended with, but it was headphones. It was these super cheap, very awful, terrible quality headphones but and I did successfully sell those but then I changed them later on to way better better than at the time, better than Apple's AirPods. So I would say, in that respect, you want to make sure that the quality of whatever the product is going back to the last episode that we were talking about Teams you want to make sure the quality of your product is good. Yeah, you don't want to like.
Speaker 2:You're not helping people by selling junk, you're taking advantage of them if you're doing that and you're not going to succeed in your life if you're just going around selling junk.
Speaker 2:All the time back when I got started, there were people just throwing up like just black and white store pages that any normal, any like person would be, any millennial would look at and be like, no, that's that looks like a spam, but people are. We're still getting taken advantage of because 70 percent of traffic is on your mobile phone. So, as long as it somewhat looks like it's fits on your phone, then you're never visiting these stores on your computer, and if you did, then you probably would have figured it out a lot easier, and so so, yeah, back at back. Then it was basically you know, you pop up a store, you run it for a couple months on a banger ad and then you don't do anything, you shut the store down. You do the same thing whatever's trending at the time, and at the time when I started mine, waterproof headphones was able to sustain and keep riding it until other factors played, which were not necessarily in my control, in terms of getting somebody running off with $25,000 and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:So yeah, you know I've heard you mention brand. You know starting a real brand a couple of times versus just having a store. I know the difference. Aaron knows the difference, but no, what would you say is the difference between you know what makes someone starting a brand versus hey, I'm just starting this to get a few bucks for whatever. You know what makes someone starting a brand versus hey, I'm just starting this to get a few bucks for whatever. You know, extra money kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, a brand is a brand, has culture, it has heart, it has meaning, it has a mission behind it. You know it has. It's focused on one singular thing, whereas a store is like a Walmart. It's just. You know you're not really trying to do anything, you're just trying to make a buck and you're just putting a bunch of products in.
Speaker 2:Honestly, you're going to fail because a brand is so much easier and people relate to it emotionally and people buy with their emotions and people relate to brands a lot easier than going and just looking at a store where they have a bunch of products that are not even. They don't even relate to each other and have nothing to do with each other, and yet you're trying to sell it. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make sense to go out and try to start a walmart. It makes sense to go out and start a water bottle company that is focused on, like I don't know, green trees or something like that. That makes more sense than then, you know. Going back to the quantity, the whole quantity thing, it's we're not, we're not there, we're not in those days anymore. We're, we're in singular brands, um, hyper focused, very niche focused and really trying to dig out our tiny little corner of of you know culture and stuff around that. I think that's really cool honestly.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that makes sense I I always love hindsight questions, just because you know we all have the benefit of hindsight after we've done something. What's something that each one of you would like? If you were to relive your experience in e-commerce in both of your respective roles, what would you do differently? Like you can say what for certain, like this would have gone better if I hadn't done this and I had done this.
Speaker 2:Lots of I could do lots of hindsight the way dropshipping worked, and it still kind of works that way now. But you basically got in contact with what's called a supplier and all. A supplier is in China or they're in other places too, but all that person is it's boots on the ground. That has the connections to the local manufacturing factories and they have like a deal that they're on the ground there and they can purchase a bulk shipment from them and then they ship it out to your customers, whereas if I was to go directly to the manufacturer, they would ship me a bulk crate of all the things and then I would have to figure out how to ship it out. So that's the only big difference in the supplier supplier and you're always paying a little bit more per unit, usually to the supplier, for that benefit. And the way that this worked is there was no contracts, there was no like accountability, there was no like anything. It was just a trust system. Um, so I, if I pay you money, you want my, you want me to come back and use you again, and so this supplier was used to dealing with probably 5K a week, something like that worth of shipment, and obviously never seen big money before, and so I was ripping up my store.
Speaker 2:I had rented up to $25,000 a product a week. I had just reached that. I already sent him $15,000. And I sent him $10,000 the week before that. Now I sent him $25,000 via wire. It's a trust system. What did he do with it? He ran with it and he basically unloaded everything that he had and sent it back to my customers. So my customers got smartwatches Wow, random headphones that weren't even the real ones A bunch of this random electronic stuff, like a bunch of this random electronic stuff, and and so that, yeah, in hindsight, what I would have done is I would have worked directly with the manufacturer way sooner and started that Cause. That's what I ended up doing after I recovered from that.
Speaker 3:So, but what are you, Amy?
Speaker 1:What I would do differently is when I was, when I was brought on on board with the company, they told me basically, we just want you to write. You know, write, analyze campaigns. You know, work with, you know, your manager. She was the retention manager, she was responsible for, you know, once we got a customer in the door for keeping them longer term, work with her to put together these campaigns to ensure that we have repeat buyers. You know the goal was to get them on a monthly subscription for these particular products. Well, within three weeks of joining the team, my manager's boss left. He left.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, in the team, my manager's boss left, he left, oh wow.
Speaker 1:And then, a week and a half later, even though she could do the job and had previously done the job, they didn't promote her, so she left oh, wow so my two biggest advocates.
Speaker 1:I didn't realize how much junk they shielded me from until they were gone. All of a sudden it was like, hey, I mean, you've got to attend this meeting. Hey, let me attend this meeting. Like hey, um, you know, brand doesn't like this copy, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this, that and the other, and I'm like look the results. Say this like I know you hate it, but we've had a like an almost 500 increase in email revenue in the last two months. Like, what are we here for? Are we here for? Like, does it got to be pretty? Are we making money? What are we doing, you know?
Speaker 1:and I just I realized that I didn't play the corporate game well enough at the time, um, very, I don't know, looking back I might have been a little bit of, a little bit abrasive, just because it was it was. It was the frustration of not being not doing what I was brought there to do and then having people who, you know they don't have any ownership in it, like my metrics metrics for for for work are tied to these results. Yeah, you know, and I get that. You know selling in every email is bad. But you know, yes, we sell out in every email. It's elegantly done. But we're not here to have pretty emails, we're here to move products. You know, moving product keeps salaries going, that kind of thing. And I just I didn't play the game very well and I realized that W2 is not always for me.
Speaker 3:So Wrapping up here. I got a couple of quick lightning round questions for you guys, Some random ones just to get you thinking. So you guys can answer this whatever order you want. What is your favorite store to shop at? All foods okay, nice and easy barnes and noble.
Speaker 2:Whoa, that's relaxing. Okay, that's relaxing. They have it pretty good over there.
Speaker 3:That's true, like books just Just like to be in there, yeah.
Speaker 1:Do they?
Speaker 3:They still have Barnes and Nobles right, Like those.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's one in Hamburg, and then they open one.
Speaker 3:Oh, that one's still in Hamburg, oh gosh. And they open one in the mall, really In the Fayette Mall. Oh my gosh, did they're coming back? They are coming back. Got to bring it back. We cannot. Not only are they not giving away their company, new stores, doggone it. Yes, that's good stuff. Well, guys, this has been fun, been an enjoyable session, and until next time. Until next time.
Speaker 2:Until next time, woo-hoo.
