Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re relaxing, weighted blanket laying across your lap, feet up, and a beverage in your hand. Today’s newsletter is going to read like a bedtime story taking you through the journey of acquiring Long Wknd, and where it’s gotten to today.
Before we jump into that, a couple of things to share with you:
- This week, we rebranded 1180 Media to Character.
- On Limited Supply, we talked about Utopia Bedding, one of the biggest Amazon sellers.
- Sharma Brands is hiring a Director of Retention (CRM, email, SMS, etc.).
- A new beautiful site was launched by the Sharma Brands team: Simon Pearce.
This weekend I hosted a panel at Anthony Pompliano and Andrew Yeung’s conference, Build Summit. Sharing the stage with Keith Rabois, Nikita Bier, Kat Cole, and many others, I hosted a panel with Moiz (founder of Native), Ryan (founder of Jolie), and Juhi (VP of Performance Marketing at Fabletics). The panel was so amazing, and I’ll share that this week on Twitter.
Ok, I know it’s Sunday and it’s time for an email, so I’ll get right to it…
Let’s go on a Long Wknd
Last year, I bought a brand called Long Wknd. It used to be called Habitat Botanicals, and also something before that. When I bought it, it was Long Wknd, a plastic-free personal care brand, focused on bringing sustainable products to market. Fortunately, the way the deal was structured, I paid virtually nothing for it up front, instead we pay the previous owner 25% of profits each month, but if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have done the deal.
In today’s newsletter, I’m going to break down why I wouldn’t buy it, what I should’ve looked for the first time around, and what we did to innovate on the brand. If you listen to Limited Supply, you’ve heard me talk about some of the operational nightmares… luckily, today, I can say a lot of these issues have been resolved and we’re up and running again.
Check out the beautiful new website: LongWknd.com, and you can also use SHARMA for 20% off your first order.
What I missed in diligence
In short, almost everything. I had a fantastic attorney, Shawn, who helped me with the transaction process. I was recommended to Shawn by Moiz, and I immediately realized why Moiz likes Shawn. Shawn’s entire job was to make sure I was protected, which he did perfectly.
When it came to understanding the health of the business, what I originally was looking at was directly tied to what I’m smart with:
- The Shopify backend
- The customer retention numbers
- The ads manager
- Customer reviews (front-facing)
- The tech stack
I (stupidly) trusted that all these pieces would’ve been equally as good and up to par:
- Product formulation(s)
- Packaging details (ingredients, spelling, oz’s, etc)
- Extra packaging vessels
- Customer experience
- Product efficacy
- Raw ingredients (and the shipping of it)
- Trademarks
- Machinery to produce the product
- The Faire business
If I could re-do it, I would’ve flown my manufacturing partner, Mary Berry, out to the company’s original location, and I would’ve gone with her. We would inspect everything from the weight of the deodorant, which listed 4oz, when it’s actually 3oz, the raw ingredients, many of which were spoiled when they arrived in Texas, and even had her go through the formulations, which didn’t last.
Upon assuming operations of the brand, we saw so many customers have skin irritation issues with the product, complaints about the sizing/oz’s being wrong, and product getting spoiled or not working as promised. So then we had to make a decision… do we keep it going, or do we basically shut it down for 6 months, re-do everything, and then come back online?
The brand was also coming from Canada, so on its way, it got stuck at US Customs for about 3 months, while we had subscribers who expected to get their delivery on time. Because I didn’t realize that Customs could just hold our container, we only agreed with the previous owner to ship out product for the next 2 weeks, assuming the container would reach Austin, but that wasn’t the case. As a result, we lost most subscribers and had a lot of upset customers.
We couldn’t even get to making the new product right away, because the raw ingredients were supposedly on the way… just stuck! However, when the container finally arrived, everything was improperly packed, and many of the ingredients, about $17,000 worth, had to be thrown out. Luckily the previous owner acknowledged and removed that from the price we owe back to them. The other thing I should say is the previous owner meant for none of this to happen, and I still believe they’re great people. This is all on me and all my fault.
Setting up shop in USA
Okay, so now we got the product. We shipped it directly to Cosmos Labs, our manufacturing partner, and while I was so excited to hear the good news, I ended up getting an email from Mary:
“Hey Nik!
I wanted to confirm that we are approved to destroy the materials that are on the “Long Wknd: Material Destruction Log.”
Thanks - and sorry for the bad news.”
Damn it! So many raw ingredients were destroyed in transit due to poor packing and also the container being in the heat for so long. The combination pretty much ruled out being able to salvage it. But the show must go on, so Mary ordered raw ingredients and got to cooking. She’s the Walter White of skincare… if it exists, she can make it.
Initially, we just continued to use the existing formulation. It was something customers loved, right? We also already had the formulation docs, how to make it, the %’s of ingredients, etc. so why not just make it easy and produce that? We did exactly that.
In that process, we realized some of the machinery that was shipped also broke in transit. Boom, another few hundred dollars and 2 weeks lost to replacing a part. Finally, production got started in mid-September. One email from me to Cosmos Labs reads:
“On that, is it possible for us to make sure we don't lose time with production in the mean time? 😊 I just want us to make Black Friday!”
Luckily, they were able to make that happen! Now, we finally got fresh inventory, most of the packaging vessels, but not all, we were able to salvage from the container, fill, and prep on a pallet. We had YRC pick up the pallet and take it to our 3PL, which was one of those heavily funded 3PL networks that rolls up other 3PLs and adds “technology.” I figured, we have our CM (contract manufacturer) in Austin, and our 3PL (3rd Party Logistics Company/warehouse) in Dallas, this is a smart choice to use for us.
This time, I even decided to fly out to Austin, see the facility where we’ll be producing, and then drive to Dallas to see the actual 3PL we will ship out of. It was great; I saw so many brands that we know and love being shipped out of there… must be a right fit! In this tweet, the last photo is me being so excited we will finally get to ship this out to customers properly and (finally) start to grow the business. I was feeling so good that day after seeing the 3PL I even bought a company on MicroAcquire, thinking, “Buying and building IS the way!” I was so dumb.
Randomly, our customer service sees an increase in tickets. Customers are getting the wrong variants of deodorant. They’re getting conditioner when they ordered shampoo. One customer who ordered 2 deodorants for herself on a military base around the world ended up with 200 deodorants instead. How does someone calmly pack 200 deodorants going to an international country and think it’s completely normal? I have no idea.
Then we started to see issues with being able to fulfill wholesale orders through Faire. Orders that were between $400 to $2500 could no longer be fulfilled because of a process issue. With Faire, you have to input the box size at the beginning of the order, but with the 3PL’s process, it wasn’t possible (to this day, I don’t know why), and we ended up not being able to fulfill these orders.
Quickly, I learned this isn’t going to work either. I’m starting to feel like God is telling me to cut this project, and just move onto something else. Until this point, absolutely nothing had gone right. I agreed to buy the company, for what I thought was a great deal, and almost everything since signing the agreement had turned into a nightmare.
On top of that, the person who pitched herself to be a brand manager and got the job for Long Wknd couldn’t understand basic customer acquisition metrics, how to be scrappy, or how to communicate with vendors. The whole thing was a mess, I was burning money from my own savings through the process, and it wasn’t working.
But then I had a thought, which I often have, which was: What would Moiz do? Moiz would tell me to stop complaining, roll my sleeves up, stop trusting other people’s advice, and get things done myself.
The pivot that needed to happen
After a few days of feeling like a failure, I finally made a plan of what had to get done in order to revive the brand. Here’s what was on the list:
- Fire brand manager
- Move up-market to more premium products and ingredients and cater to “richer” customers
- Cut the products that don’t have high sell-through (shampoo, conditioner, lip balm, etc.)
- Reformulate the products we keep (body wash and deodorant)
- Introduce higher price point products (face balm, body oil, etc.)
- Rebrand the visual identity and reposition Long Wknd
- Find a 3PL that actually cares about me and Long Wknd
- Find people to help with operations, content, customer service, etc.
- Get to $5k per day in revenue
Basically, this means I need to:
- Build a brand identity that people are excited to associate with
- Make a product my mom would use
- Find more people who want cleaner beauty products, and sell them Long Wknd
So we finally got to work
I hired the Sharma Brands team to build out the new brand identity of Long Wknd, help me with repositioning, and build me a world-class website. The same team has built and scaled sites for Skinny Confidential, Feastables, Jolie, Simon Pearce, and so many others.
With the brand, my goal was to get to a $75 or $80 AOV and to do that, we needed to appeal to a higher-end consumer. With the branding, we wanted to focus on two personas: people who love to play, watch, or enjoy tennis and Heather Dubrow. If you want Real Housewives of Orange County, you know who Heather is.
In the meantime, Mary flew to New York and set up meetings with different scent houses for us to pick the perfect new scents that align with the branding and positioning of Long Wknd. We landed on three scents to start, naming them all after places that remind us of the perfect long weekend, plus an unscented variant:
- Palm Springs — Spicy, leathery, and musk
- St. Barths — Sweet, fruity, and warm
- Amalfi Coast — Woody, earthy, and sweet
- Staycation — unscented
Using this for scent names, we can also take advantage of the “brand” these places have already built. When you hear Amalfi Coast, you think of moisturizing, blue paradise. When you hear Palm Springs, you think of dry, hot cactus. When we launch a spearmint-like scent and name it Vermont or Vail, you’ll immediately know it’s a cool or crisp scent.
We hired a world-class chemist, the same one who did a ton of work for Olaplex, and had him work with us to create new formulations for our products that would allow for an effective product but also feel premium, rich, moisturizing, and up to part with SEPHORA’s clean beauty standards (see here for more on that). We finally got it right! A world-class formulation AND incredible scents. Now we were cooking!
By this time, the Sharma Brands team finished our new brand guidelines and started on the website. We commissioned the same designers to help us create packaging that felt consistent to the website, and that was kicked off. By this time, I hired someone to help me with the day to day, and she got started by making sure we tested a bunch of vessels to see what was the best fit for us. With her background, I felt confident if I had any idea, we could source anything we needed. One key change we made was downgrading from Shopify Plus to regular Shopify. The Plus wasn’t needed yet, and it wasn’t worth us paying $2k/month for it yet.
The last step… content! We needed to get content for a few reasons:
- Emails
- Website
- Social media
- Ads
- Packaging
I hired the Sharma Brands team again to do this. We did a 2-day shoot in South Carolina and then had 8-10 content creators all create content for us, with different angles or for different reasons of why they use Long Wknd. The content turned out amazing.
The comeback story begins
While everything was in the works to come back to normal, I wanted to create some buzz and do something fun. So, we launched a partnership with Snif, the fragrance brand, to create a buttery croissant-inspired lotion bar. We used their signature scent with our amazing lotion bar formulation, and it sold out in 36 hours.
For the purpose of content, we set up taxi tops and out-of-home posters around New York City, but by the time they went up, we were already sold out!
We ordered all our packaging, and as it arrived in Austin, our product was coming fresh off the line. However, we realized that the way our manufacturer from China packed the boxes, we had some damaged packaging. So we lost another 2-3 weeks due to poor packing.
We got started putting out content to get people anticipating what was to come on Instagram (please follow us!) and put together our tech stack for the brand:
- CMS: Shopify
- Email: Klaviyo
- SMS: Postscript
- Reviews: Okendo
- Post-Purchase Survey: Okendo
- Cart + Upsells: Rebuy
- Customer Service: Gorgias
- Server Side Tracking/CAPI: Black Crow
- Wholesale: Faire
- UGC Collection: Refunnel
- Returns: Loop
We hired Character to run our advertising through whitelisted channels (publishers, influencers, etc), for performance branding purposes. Performance branding is a term I coined that means you build brand equity on the back of your working performance dollars.
Internally, we got our content person ready with organic social post templates made in Figma by the Sharma Brands team, familiar with CapCut (The free version of Final Cut Pro), and we have a kickoff call scheduled with Recharm, to quickly put ads together.
And, here we are today
After this entire journey, today we are finally live with new products, a new website, products that people are starting to become obsessed with, and a few more products in the pipeline that we’ll release in the coming months.
This coming week, we’ll begin hunting for customers (if you want to be one of the first, use code SHARMA for 20% off), and I’ll keep you posted on how we go about that. From the internal brand account, we plan to run with a ton of static creative. The Character team will supplement with publishers and creator content.
If you’re a Twitter subscriber, too, I’ll be sharing the day-to-day progress of Long Wknd with subscribers.
If you think you can possibly help out with Long Wknd’s growth and goal to hit $10k/day, then please reach out to me by replying to this email or on Twitter!
Building something from scratch is never easy… whether it’s a brand, an agency, creating content, or learning anything new. The first 26 reps are going to be so bad you’ll want to quit. The 37th rep will have you thinking you might be able to do something. The 64th rep will finally be good. You just have to stick around and understand that mistakes WILL happen, and absolutely nothing will go according to the perfect plan in your head. To assume that it will mean you’re delusional and afraid of facing the reality of building. I feel like I’m my 32nd rep now, and can’t wait to hit 64 with Long Wknd.
Hope this was an entertaining story where you found a nugget for yourself… now onto some fun stuff!
Vendor of the Week:
Fundrise — The democratized way to invest into pre-IPO companies leading the AI revolution.
#fundriseendorsement #fundrisepartner (I don’t know why we put hashtags in an email either)
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A new fund from Fundrise is focused on the AI revolution. From ChatGPT to autonomous vehicles to disease research, a recent PwC report predicts AI will contribute more than $15 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and Fundrise wants to make sure you don’t get left behind.
With their platform, along with 2 million other people, you can build a portfolio with the top private, pre-IPO companies in the space. The same platform has invested over $7 billion dollars since its launch, and the entire process is easy to follow.
If you’re ready to invest in AI, click here to learn more about Fundrise!
LP of the Week:
This week’s landing page is a great example of how the HOOX team can innovate on a brand or website that has a great product but doesn’t have much design or branding to go along with it. Of course, we strongly prefer that our clients have some level of brand identity, but here’s what happens if you don’t:
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LANDING PAGE!
You’ll see we focused heavily on getting people to understand what the product does for you quickly. Because we don’t have beautiful branding, we are earning your trust by quickly demonstrating how this product can help you.
This is the last week we are running our Black Friday promotion at HOOX, where you can get a free page on us. Click here to buy a page, OR click here to book a 15 min call with us and I’ll share all our best examples of pages with you, walk you through what page we would build you, and why. Worst case scenario, you’ll learn something new on the call!
Don’t let another Black Friday go by, wishing you built your funnel properly.
That's all for this week
Today’s newsletter was fun to write and to reflect on. It makes me even more excited about Long Wknd’s future and what we can do with it. Again, if you think you can help with Long Wknd, please reach out!
In New York, it’s a rainy Sunday here, so I’m going to celebrate by indulging in a delicious 9 hour sleep tonight before the craziness of the week starts back up. I feel like instead of Sunday Scaries, I get so excited for Monday I can have trouble falling asleep on Sunday. Anyone else? No? Ok…
I hope you have an amazing upcoming week. Stay hydrated, especially with the weather changes, get a sweat in, buy yourself something that makes you feel good, and do something nice for someone else.
I’ll see you back here, next Sunday, same time, same place!