Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re sitting back, relaxed, feet up, and you have a beverage in your hand. It’s cold and rainy, so I got Kolkata Chai delivered (it’s for the vibe). Today’s newsletter will be a deep dive into a business I admire, but before we get right into it, I have a couple of things for you.
I need 3 readers with a marketing budget of over $500k next year to fill out this 2024 Marketing Trends Survey. If you’re one of those who filled it out, reply that you did, and I’ll send you an Amazon gift card as a thank you! I’m actively turning that into an insights deck that I will share here. Fill it out!
Sharma Brands is actively hiring for two roles:
- Paid Media Director — this role will lead a team of media buyers and work with our clients to achieve their KPIs. If you’re a seasoned media buyer/growth strategist, this could be a good fit for you.
- Graphic Designer — this role will sit on our creative team but interface internally with the CRM/retention team at Sharma Brands. If you understand graphic design and emails, this is a role for you.
This past week, we aired the final episode of Limited Supply for 2023. Season 6, episode 6, with Cody Plofker, the CMO of Jones Road Beauty. We dove right into Black Friday 2023. Everything he did right, everything he should’ve been better about, what he will plan for in anticipation of Black Friday 2024, and more. We recorded it in person, in NYC, so the vibes are high in the podcast. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen!
Well, that’s all I have… let’s get into today’s newsletter.
A few weeks ago, I wanted to write an email for a friend who had an idea to launch a brand and what factors to focus on around building a smart business. Things like frequency, AOV, shipping costs, acquisition costs, etc, are basically lessons I’ve learned from the best brands. Instead, I think it would be better to talk about what business I admire, why, how they do it, and what to learn from them. Today’s newsletter is the first version of that!
When I think about the perfect DTC business, I often think about the brand Jolie Skin, which is known for its filtered showerhead. Have you ever wondered why your sink water (maybe even the water you drink) has chemicals and metals in it? All those toxins mess with your brain’s chemistry, skin layers, and the oils in your hair. Jolie’s founder, Ryan Babenzien, realized he could bring a shower head to the market that talks about clean water positioned as a beauty and wellness tool. After all, if you shower with clean water, not only will you look and feel better, but your skincare products will also work 10x better.
Before Jolie officially launched, Ryan created the Jolie Water report. The goal of the water report was to make people aware of the problem. The setup to any great ad, is the problem, before the solution. The Water Report was so genius because in an effort for lead gen, it gave an incredible amount of perceived value to the consumer, and it was really just knowledge. It’s not easy to replicate — so many companies have tried to re-create the Jolie water report, but it doesn’t have the same weight of value going to the consumer.
Now that I’ve set the stage, today I’m going to break down a few things about Jolie that I think everyone should know and learn from. I think they’re a perfect business — they check all the boxes for me.
- Clear product innovation and marketing/sales innovation
- It’s a high AOV product ($148-165) that is lightweight and easy to ship
- It includes a subscription — quarterly refills for new shower filters
- Their entire business revolves around ONE hero product with only 4 different options for colors/finishes — it’s not a logistical nightmare with dozens or hundreds of SKUs
- It has a massive TAM — anyone with a shower could be interested in this product
- It’s a really unique wedge into the $150B/year skin and hair care industry
- It’s a product that is connected to something people use every day — their shower
And the value proposition is so blindingly obvious that, as a consumer, it’s hard to say no when you see it.
We filter the water we drink. Why don’t we filter the water we shower with every day?
Most people probably know Ryan as the founder of the DTC footwear brand GREATS. He started that company in 2014 and sold it to Steve Madden in 2019. While at GREATS, Ryan learned the ins and outs of how to sell online and became a master of brand building, marketing, and DTC. He’s been a friend for years and someone I really respect and admire in the space.
Now, he’s taking what he’s learned and applying it to an entirely new industry in an even bigger way. I personally think that Jolie will be a billion-dollar brand that my great-grandchildren will still buy from, decades from today.
In today’s email, I want to focus less on their product innovation and more on a few of their unique marketing and general business practices that have helped them scale. It’s not an exhaustive list of everything they did, just a few things I liked that others could learn from.
Alright, let’s dive in.
The Jolie Water Report.
The first innovative thing I wanted to (re) highlight is the Jolie water report.
If you haven’t taken this already, you definitely should.
It’s an interactive report where you enter your name, email, and zip code, and Jolie will tell you what’s in your water. Your information runs through the EPA’s API, goes into Klaviyo, organizes a profile, and then sends you an email with your local water report.
For example, here in NYC, my water has:
- 892.3 times the haloacetic acids (HAA9)
- 80.3 times the amount of chloroform
- And 254 times the amount of total trihalomethanes (TTHMs)
- Other contaminants that you will see in the report.
Do I know exactly what that means? Not really. But I know that it’s not good. And it doesn’t make me trust that any of this is being remotely regulated, either!
When you see these numbers, you have a strong feeling that something’s not right.
To me, this is the perfect marketing initiative because:
- It’s a great lead magnet to capture information.
- It shows a consumer their problem in 10 seconds or less and elegantly offers them a 1 click solution to solve it: buying a Jolie.
- It’s personalized, i.e., they pull the water data for your exact zip code for each report.
- It’s a conversation starter that drives word of mouth. When I saw my report, I told my parents and a few friends. They immediately wanted to get their own.
When sending traffic to this lander, they were getting emails at an 80% conversion rate.
It was a home-run marketing initiative for them and only took a few days to execute. The idea behind it is the Krabby Patty Secret Formula. They’ve been running it since launch, and it still converts.
Some other thoughts on why this is great:
- People want to see for themselves — there’s no convincing required for someone to want to get a report
- People feel they’re getting value out of it
- It’s short, simple, demonstrates authority and a level of education about the problem, from the brand
- Most things in life don’t have easy solutions or “hacks” to fix them, but when you see this, your quick fix is just ordering a Jolie
- It gives the ability to talk about something in content, other than just the features of a shower head
Jolie’s Approach To Content
This is really the big one and I think something that more brands should explore.
In 2022, Jolie generated ~5,000 pieces of content from creators all over the US. In 2023, they generated nearly 10,000 pieces of content, so far, which has helped them achieve 5X growth Y/oY.
The truth is most brands think that to scale, they need to invest heavily in paid ads. They make a few dozen creative variants in-house and spend the rest of their budget promoting these ads.
Ryan and his team took a very different approach. He invested heavily in organic content via product seeding to large and small creators at scale.
1,000 shower heads going out, for free, to people who will hopefully create content, but have no expectation to do so. These are influencers that you follow, home designers, makeup artists, comedians, etc. It’s anyone with influence within a circle… they get one. It might sound reckless, but it’s genius. They’re getting content from it, and people are talking about it/posting it on their own.
Jolie’s product page on their website includes this content. Their emails include this content. Their ads are this content. The entire marketing funnel is built on customer content, not studio-shot ads. It’s allowed them to also build an army of ambassadors. If you post about Jolie, you’re royalty to their social media lead.
This doesn’t even take into account all the sales that come in, due to the nature of people posting the product organically. Instead of the traditional COGs + creative + ad spend, their CAC can be as low as the raw cost of one unit + shipping. It’s a genius strategy, and more people should do it. But you have to do it at a high volume, or it doesn’t work.
How did they implement this strategy?
The other important thing to know here is that when Ryan’s team thought about seeding product, they focused on creators who made great content, more than creators who had large followings.
They literally DM’d 10’s of thousands of creators across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc and were messaging hundreds of accounts per week.
From my understanding, there isn’t a great way to automate this and it was a ton of manual work.
They do create content with larger influencers but many of the folks that they reached out to were accounts with between 10-50K followers.
Here’s why:
These creators were excited to have the opportunity. They love making UGC and wanted to try Jolie. Many of these creators were thrilled to do a review or create a post in exchange for a product as a partner. They didn’t charge exorbitant rates (if any), and their content actually converted.
A few lessons on this:
- People like people. Ryan knows that humans influence each other. A micro-influencer with 10K followers can impact their community more directly than a cold ad to the same audience. A simple recommendation from someone you know and trust goes a very long way.
- Good storytelling and content always wins. Ryan would rather have a quality piece of content from someone who cares about the product that is distributed to a smaller audience than a bad piece of content pushed out to a large following.
- Stacking insights and amplifying creativity. Ryan’s team has one opinion about the content that might work to grow Jolie’s brand. When you seed a product to 1000 or 5000 other creators, you get 1000 or 5000 more creative opinions on what might work. The more content that is generated, the more insights that you get as a brand about what ultimately works, which you can then use in your own ads and content going forward.
- Engineering serendipity and virality. With enough shots on goal, you are bound to get a few winners. Ryan said on a podcast that he remembers a small creator that they sent a product to who created a post that generated 10-15M views, generating a bunch of sales.
It’s these kinds of outlier events that make this strategy even more compelling. Instead of generating one sale, you just generated 500 sales from a single post. This reduced your CAC down to pennies for those sales and also created tons of valuable brand awareness and word of mouth.
They also used the top organic posts from these creators to run ads, and often whitelisted content from the top-performing creator’s accounts to drive even more scale.
Untraditional OOH Advertising
The last thing I wanted to go through is Jolie’s approach to untraditional OOH. I think Ryan has a unique view that the best offline marketing can also dramatically amplify online marketing and more brands should do untraditional OOH.
Part one of untraditional OOH is Ryan’s events.
In the early days of Jolie, he hosted a bunch of events throughout NYC. One that I’ve heard him talk about before was a wine and oyster dinner. He selected oysters because they are like the ocean’s natural water filter.
He wanted to demonstrate this as a simple tie-in with Jolie so that it was on brand.
When attendees arrived, they saw two water tanks, both filled with dirty water from New York’s east river. On one side of the tank, there were 16 oysters, and on the other side there were none.
By the end of the 2 hour event, attendees could see just how many contaminants had been filtered out of the water by the oysters. It clearly demonstrated to attendees why filtering their water matters. They also took video of that event that was later amplified online.
The next piece is how he approaches signs.
Traditional OOH is like a standard billboard that you see on the highway from every brand.
What Ryan does instead is wrap large box trucks that drive around cities which share thought provoking stats about how dirty your water is. They have a few in NYC that have gone viral online as well.
They wrap the trucks with messages like, “Did you know that your shower water is dirtier than this truck?” as the truck appears to be covered in mud. This stuff gets people’s attention immediately and makes them want to pull out their phone and research the brand.
They also do more lo-fi sidewalk stickers and posters throughout cities in strategic places with similar messages like “Did you know that your shower water is dirtier than that martini?” or, “Did you know that your shower water is dirtier than that bench or subway handle that you are about to touch?”
I feel like Jolie always has some of the most creative angles to get people’s attention and get them talking about the brand. More companies should be doing this, even if it’s harder to gauge the direct response ROI.
Here’s The Kicker
Oh, and here’s the kicker and I wanted to save the best part for last. Jolie has scaled to mid-8 figures with a full-time team of just 3 people. 2 co-founders and one employee. They use external vendors for everything else.
They have partners and vendors for their site, landing pages, ads, OOH, photography, logistics, product development, supply chain, etc. They have been able to do all of this as a hyper-lean team.
To me, this is truly the future of DTC. Mini-SWAT teams with a ridiculously talented core staff and everything else is outsourced. If you run your business this way, you can grow like crazy without the headaches and complications of managing a large team.
It’s truly a feat, and I don’t know many (if any?) other brands that have achieved this scale with such a small core team. My hats off to them, and if you haven’t already, go buy a Jolie!
Okay, that’s it for this week. Now, onto some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
Black Crow — Their new product, Predictive Offer, makes you an additional 40% in welcome flow email revenue.
What happens when most people go to your brand’s site? They get hit with an email pop-up, and then they close it. You spent $3 to get that person to your site, and then they left without giving you any information. The problem with the pop-up is that it’s not correctly timed… it lands when you get there, maybe 15 seconds later, or a 50% scroll down the page.
Black Crow realized the timing of asking for the email is what needs to be precise to get more out of the pop-up, so they thought, “We can do that.” You’ve heard me talk about Black Crow’s other products before; all their products are built on top of their ability to build individual AI models for brands based on their website’s traffic behavior, purchase behavior, etc. Black Crow can assign a score of shopping intent to users (i.e., how likely are they to purchase), or in this case, know precisely when to serve someone a second email pop-up and have the highest chance to collect their email.
Predictive Offer has yielded brands ~40% more revenue from their welcome flows. If you previously made $100,000 per month with your welcome flow, you’ll likely make around $140,000 with no extra work, other than adding the Black Crow to your site. On the site, you’ll see a ~15% increase new email and phone number signups.
The AI tech that Black Crow has is incredible. Sakara, P&G, Liquid IV, Mejuri, Cadence, and more are all customers. If you’re running a Shopify or Shopify Plus store and looking to increase your new customer revenue, I recommend booking a demo of Black Crow’s Predictive Offer. I saw the demo last week and plan to onboard 2 brands this coming week to use it.
If you have a brand that does over $2M/year in revenue, Black Crow will give you a $100 Amazon gift card as a thank-you for joining them. Sign up for a demo on this link, and claim your $100!
LP of the Week:
This week’s landing page of the week is from a software company, Tydo, and I think the page turned out so beautiful.
Their goal is to drive booked calls, and the page does a great job explaining the product, what the brand gets out of it, social proof, and an easy-to-use widget for booking. The HOOX team dia a great job with it!
If you’re ready to start testing landing pages, book a call with my team at HOOX. We will strategize, wireframe, write copy, design, develop and deploy the landing page. Then once you get it, you can use it as a template and A/B test it. If you purchase a page before the end of the year, HOOX will create a second version of a hero image and a shop section, for free, essentially giving you a second landing page to test, for free. Book your call on this link!
That's all for this week
As we get closer to the holidays, I hope you’re staying warm, staying on high alert with your immunity, and getting a ton of sleep to make the most out of each day.
It’s Sunday night, so I pray you get those 9 hours of sleep tonight, and have an amazing week. We’re basically 1 week away from Christmas and we owe it to ourselves to finish the year out strong!
Have an amazing week, and I’ll see you next Sunday.