Felix: Today, I'm joined by Marissa Grootes from STIL. STIL is a company that aims to design organizational products, and inspires women to feel, work and find their best selves. It was started in 2014, and based out of Vancouver, Canada. Welcome, Marissa.
Marissa: Hi.
Felix: The idea behind the business started because you, yourself, were looking for a planner?
Marissa: Yeah. I mean, I've been a so to speak planner girl for a pretty long time. I actually used planners when I was in elementary school, and then all the way through high school. I remember even back then, I would alter my planners to fit my needs and to fit my style, and to make them look a certain way that made me feel good about using them.
So at the time, I had a full time job. I also had a side gig. I was actually doing Stella & Dot. I was a stylist for them, so I was doing these jewelry parties because I was looking for a side gig. And then, I was also going to school for three nights a week in design. So I had basically these three different schedules that I had to organize. It was just a lot going on, so I knew that I needed a good planner to get me through that year.
So I went to Indigo Chapters here in Canada, and got myself a planner. I felt really good about it. I was excited to use it. But then when I actually got into using it, I realized very quickly that it wasn't very functional. And then, also, the aesthetics, itself, wasn't something that I fully identified with. But I thought if it was going to serve the purpose, then I was okay with having something that maybe didn't look as pretty on my desk.
After that, after realizing that the planner that I had purchased, that I had spent $40 on really wasn't very functional, I decided to do a little bit of research into what planners existed out on the market that were maybe a bit of a higher price point, but that had some of the things that I really need in a planner. Which was, most importantly, being able to separate all of my tasks and to do lists from my actual scheduling and time-based activities every day.
What I ended up coming across, at least at the time, this was 2014, I noticed that a ton of planners were targeted towards moms or new moms who were doing activity planning, meal planning, a lot of scheduling for their kids, grocery lists. All things that I necessarily didn't need at the time because I was 24. So I didn't necessarily want those things, and I also ... A lot of the cover designs were floral or they had different colored stripes or it was a lot of polka dot type of things. I just wanted something that was really clean looking, really beautifully designed, and the inside pages were just a nice layout, really good typography. And at the time, I just really couldn't find anything that was like that.
So I set out on this mission, because I was in design school, to just design my own planner for myself. Not necessarily with the intention of starting a business. Just with a basically necessity for something that I needed in my life, that I needed right away to get my shit together.
Felix: So how did you actually design your specific planner? How did you start looking for ideas to make your own planner?
Marissa: Initially, I actually, I spoke to a lot of my friends and my colleagues about different ways that they organize their schedules, because everyone does it in one way or another. Some people use their Google calendar. Other people have different types of organizational apps, like Asana and things like that. I just did a bit of research into what different types of people are using, and what makes them enjoy using these apps, and these other books.
And then, what I ended up realizing, and this was a really big thing for myself, is a lot of the best ways you can organize in your mind, is just by being able to get everything you need to get done on the page. So having a section that is specifically dedicated to your daily to do list. So the things you need to get done that you want to just physically check off, because there's nothing better than the feeling of being able to cross out a task or check it off.
But then also having a separate section entirely for anything that is time based. So being able to put your lunch meetings, your Skype calls, your Zoom calls, whatever, your activities, your yoga, your exercise. And then even something as simple as having dinner plans or meal planning for your dinner, especially if you're working all day and being able to write that all out into a planner, and having it completely separate.
Because then what it allows you to do is look at your schedule for the week and decide, "Here's how many things I can realistically get done in a day." And then, you end up writing that into your task lists, and then not feel like you're constantly underperforming because you're actually getting done the right amount of things, and you feel good about it.
Felix: How did you manage your time from both running this new business you're starting, and having to go to work during the day?
Marissa: I honestly think for me, back when I was running the business and eventually obviously got into selling the planners, I still had my job, I was still doing design work, and all these things. What helped me above all else was knowing my schedule and putting every single thing into my schedule that I was doing in a day, so that I ... That had my hours planned out versus loosely being like, "Okay, well, maybe now I should probably be working on my business." No. I think what really is important is scheduling that time into your planner, so dedicating. If you decide you're going to dedicate three hours a week or four hours a week to your business, schedule that into your planner. Whether that is every night that you're working on your business from 7:00 - 10:00, or Saturday mornings from 8:00 AM until noon, you're working on your business, make sure you're actually putting that physically into your planner. Because not only is it then in your schedule, but it also actually allows you to remember that better, and your mind feels more at ease knowing that you have this on paper.
Felix: So when you are working a day job, which I think a lot of listeners might be out there in that situation where they have a day job, they have something else going on in their life that takes up a big chunk of their time, and they also now need to be focused on building a business, how do you actually choose the tasks, the things you need to do on your to do list that actually move the needle?
Marissa: I think that what we often get confused with is importance and urgency. I think we often focus on urgency more than we focus on importance. So I think it's actually a really good activity to basically look at your tasks and think about, "Okay. Is this important or is it just urgent?" Whereas I feel like usually when we get up, we're like, "Oh, I really just need to get this done. This needs to get out of the way." But is it thinking actively about whether or not this is actually important, I think, is a really defining productive task to do. Because oftentimes, you can just get so overwhelmed with feeling like you have all these crazy things to do. But if you actually look at your tasks, and you start separating yourself from them, and you decide like, "Okay. Maybe today I'm just going to focus on something that's really important that maybe I've been putting off." And then, spend whatever time you have to get that done because you're going to feel so great at the end of the day being like, "Wow. I actually did this, and I didn't put it off any longer."
Felix: Okay. So then once you had your idea, the design of that planner, the ideal planner, how did you go ... What was the process you actually started getting those first prototypes, the first designs actually created?
Marissa: The first planner I ever made was actually handmade because for some strange reason, I decided to get into bookbinding. So I actually, I know how to make books, hardcover books. So I know how to sew the pages together, make a spine, glue it all together and make an entire book.
And so, I actually made a few planner books for some girlfriends of mine for Christmas. So I just thought they would be the perfect gift to give to someone, getting into the new year, and obviously it was something that was handmade and I was really proud of. The feedback I ended up receiving from, I think it was about 10 of them that I ended up making, was that obviously it was an amazing gift, but also like, "Hey, this is really working for me. I've never used a planner this way, and I'm finding myself so much more organized." Like, "Are you going to keep making them, because I'll probably need one next year?"
And then, I guess in my head, I realized, "Oh, maybe there's actually a lot more like women that would need this type of planner in their life." So I decided to basically go out on a limb. I ended up quitting my 9-5 job, basically cold turkey. I just decided to give it up because I wanted to dedicate 100% of my time to running this thing, and making this work, because I also, I think, what a lot of entrepreneurs forget, especially early on, is if you're not spending 100% of your time on your business, you end up not moving as quickly as you would like to, and there's also not that incredible, scary, fire under you to be like, "Wow. I need to make this work, otherwise I can't pay my bills." I think that scariness of feeling like you don't know where your next paycheck is coming from is actually a really great place to be mentally when you're running a business because it allows for innovation and new ideas to come because you're pressured to come up with ways to get creative for making income.
Felix: Got it. Now once you dove into this business, what were the first things you did? How did you actually set the business up?
Marissa: I didn't even have an Instagram account. I had an Etsy Store. That's all I had. I had an Etsy Store. I was handwriting all the shipping labels. Hand-wrapping everything. I ended up getting ... So the Shopify Store I launched in August 2015, I think is what it was. I think it was 2015. So for a while, I was just on Etsy because it was handmade and all of those things.
But between that period of time, I ended up taking all of my savings, I think I had about $30,000 in savings that I had from birthday money, working my summer jobs, and all of those things. Money that I had just saved because my idea as when I was 18, was like, "Oh, I'm going to get a car when I'm in my early 20s. I'm going to buy myself a nice car." But I ended up realizing I don't need a car. So I ended up putting all of that money into my first production run of 1,000 units, 1,000 planners, that I produced overseas, which I think was the craziest and scariest thing that I've ever done.
I think to this day, I think a lot of people in my family, at least, still didn't fully understand what I was doing. But I just felt like I felt like I had an idea and I felt like I had something that I just wanted to explore. I was willing to take the risk of losing it all in order to give it a try.
Felix: Where did you get your first sales from?
Marissa: I did have orders from Etsy. I think I probably sold about 100 units on Etsy in that time, maybe 150. Not a lot. Definitely not 1,000. I wasn't selling thousands of units. But in terms of going and manufacturing overseas, that's what made sense. It made sense to do a larger run of books.
Obviously, I was very naïve to the whole experience, but I think that was actually the amazing part of it because I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I had never done it before, but I learned so much in that process. And when those 1,000 planners arrived, I was so fired up about selling them because I was like, "Oh my God. Now I need to sell these, and guess what? I only have four months to do it because January starts in four months."
That's the other thing about having a dated planner product is people, there's a certain buying period where people buy these planners for their new year because they like to be able to set up their year. They like to be able to have it ahead of time. And then, when January starts, everyone is set and ready to go.
Felix: Tell us about how you found your manufacturer? How did you find the manufacturer to produce these planners for you?
Marissa: I ended up connecting with a friend of mine here in Vancouver, that knew somebody that worked overseas at a printing place. I, myself, when I was in design school, I did a lot of print projects and I had a lot of printing experience through working with printers here locally. So I knew what I wanted in terms of paper, and finishing, and foiling, and I just, I knew all of the lingo. I knew how to create dyes. I knew how to do all of that. So for me, it was just a matter of finding a connection overseas and being able to basically communicate what I wanted.
In the end, I learned a lot in terms of how to communicate correctly with overseas partners, and how to get across what you're trying to do. I think it took three or four samples back and forth for us to be able to come up with a planner that actually worked. Because initially, I had this idea of having this pocket inside the planner every single month. But it ended up making it five inches thick. So I was like, "Oh, this is definitely not going to work."
And so, it was just a matter of trying different things and figuring out what makes sense. And having to go back into design and maybe redesign some layouts to make them fit nicely. That process took a lot longer in the initial stages of my first production run.
I was okay, and decently happy with our first run, but I definitely, I didn't feel 110% ecstatic about it. So I really was excited to get into 2016, to really try and focus on making it better. So every year, it's been more of a focus on just like, "How can we make this better this year?"
And now that we have such a huge platform of women, we go to them directly to get feedback from them. So it's so much different now than it was back then, when I was just making decisions on a whim to be like, "Oh, I feel like this is what I would use. This is what I would use, so let's just go with that," because I didn't really have that huge network of customers to fallback on.
Felix: So now looking back, how accurate were you with your guesses on what kind of planner your ideal customers wanted?
Marissa: I was pretty much dead on, actually. That was the funny part. This was the most hilarious part about this whole thing, is I got these planners. I started selling them in August. I remember the day that I launched my Shopify Store, I got one order and I was panicking. I was like, "Oh, my God. If I sell one planner all month, or in the next four months, what am I going to do?" It was that moment when I was like, "Okay. I need to figure this out."
I really got creative with getting my product out there. This is going to sound funny, but I started my business in the heyday of Instagram. When Instagram was just becoming this thing what now brands were using, and bloggers were using, and people were using to get influencer status. There was no influencers back then. So reaching out to bloggers who all had blogs, who were writing blogs, was a lot easier because a lot of them at the time were looking for content because they didn't have these big brands gifting them things. It was more so a new thing where you would reach out to someone and be like, "Hey, I'll give you free product if you write a blog post." That ended up translating into Instagram, an Instagram post.
So when this whole heyday of Instagram was happening, I was sending out product to these people that were bloggers at the time. Basically, what I did is I strategically would send out two or three a month. And then there was a chance that a customer or somebody would see the same planner on maybe two or three different platforms a few weeks apart.
So maybe they followed blogger X, blogger Y, and blogger Z. Maybe they see it on blogger X and Z's posts. They think, the second or third time that you see something you're like, "Oh, I've seen this before. I think I should get this." That's basically what ended up happening. I set myself up in this way where people just kept seeing it here and there, a couple of weeks apart. It was quite easy for me to just reach out to people that I was following myself whose content that I really cherished myself, and that I enjoyed reading. So it was easy for me to reach out and just say, "I've been following you for a year. I've been reading your posts, and here's what I love about your style, whatever. I feel like you could benefit from using this planner." At the time, it was just so easy to send out a gift.
The other thing that I did was I really wanted to get my planner onto a big retailer shelf. And so, I ended up reaching out multiple times to Chapters Indigo, which is our biggest book seller in Canada. They rejected me I think eight or nine times. And then the 10th time, somebody was like, "Okay. Well, send us a sample, and then we'll see what happens," kind of thing.
And sure enough, a couple weeks later, they ended up placing a ... I think it was around 200 units that they ordered from me, that they sold in three days. During those three days, I sold out of everything on my own store. So before the year ended, the year 2015, I was completely sold out of product, and I had nothing to sell.
Felix: That's amazing that you stayed persistent, and finally got them to work with you. So now, is that something that you still do today, or something that you still recommend other people do today?
Marissa: It's changed so much in the last couple of years. I feel like every year had a new wave of something different that we were doing. Nowadays, like today, we've focused so much more on our customers Instagram, than we do on influencers. We do work with influencers, so to speak, but we don't have contracts with ambassadors, or anything like that, that promote our products for payment, kind of thing. We really just focus on people. We focus on every day women who actually use our product. We reach out to them to be like, "Hey, we'll give you a $250 gift card if you become an ambassador for us because you enjoy the products, and you actually use it every single day. So we want to hear from you because you're an accurate account of what it's like to actually use the product and benefit from it."
Felix: Okay. You think that these smaller, micro influencers have been more effective for you than these bigger influencers in your space?
Marissa: I think that a couple of years ago, I think things were a lot different, and we were definitely focusing more on the bigger influencers. It's what everybody wanted. And then, I think what ended up happening, and I think a lot of people probably resonate with this, is the market just got so saturated. So it was really difficult to figure out, "Okay. Is this person talking about this because they actually really like it, or just because they're getting paid $2,000 to talk about it."
Because I think that being ... The authenticity is a really, really big part. That's the reason why I got into what I'm doing is I want to be able to have an impact on a person's life through my planner. I want that to be an authentic experience. And so, I really appreciate it when people reach out to me and say like, "Hey, I think that I would really benefit from this planner. I think it would be really fun to work together." That, I am absolutely super ecstatic about.
But it just, I think, it becomes hard to discern like, "Okay, is this person talking about this because they're getting paid to talk about it, or are they talking about it because it actually has a big impact on their life?" Because it would be heartbreaking for me to send a product to somebody that is then just going to end up in the trash.
Felix: Yeah. I can see why the authenticity and the trust is not as, I guess, clear when it's a bigger influencer versus a smaller influencer, smaller blog.
Marissa: Yeah. It's also, honestly, quite challenging to reach out to some of those bigger bloggers. It's not to say that I don't respect them, and that I don't agree with what they're doing. I think it's incredible and amazing. I think it's just difficult for a smaller business to get to those people, and to feel like you're on the same level as some of those bigger brands who can pay top dollar for something. You end up just feeling a little bit lost, and feeling a little bit discouraged.
Felix: Do you spend a lot of time educating your customers, your prospective customers on how to use a planner? Is this something that you focus on?
Marissa: I think that we have done ... I mean, over the years, we've updated our website pretty much quite consistently and constantly. We do have videos and ways of using the planners, but I think that they are pretty straightforward. Each planner has its own planner guide in the beginning pages, that you can read about how the planner is intended on being used, and the system that it follows. We have lots of different types of planners now, so each one has its own unique feature point. Because so many women do their planning so differently, so we over the years, had to come up with new solutions for other things that women would want to plan their days with rather than just the one product.
But generally speaking, the people who purchase our product are people who already use planners, and who've already done their research. They already know the competitors. They maybe have used the competitor's planner, and they're looking for something different. Or they've been searching for something different, and now they finally found it. The market that we're in, they understand exactly what they're looking for, and when they see it, they know that it's the right thing.
Felix: What's the main area of focus that you focus on to differentiate yourself from competitors?
Marissa: The number one thing is the aesthetic. I mean, I was born in Switzerland. I grew up in Switzerland. I lived there for 14 years. And so, I was always around very minimalist design and modern looking things. And so, I think that I carry that forward in my design work. And so, from the feedback that I've gotten, that's the number one thing that women like the most is having something that is aesthetically beautiful that can sit on your desk that you can look at, that almost becomes an accessory in your life. You can put it in your purse. You can feel good about pulling it out in a meeting, and taking notes, and things like that. It becomes this symbol of power in your every day that is helping you keep it all together, and do all these things.
Felix: So you credit a lot of your success to word of mouth, and having a beautiful and visual product certainly is critical to that. But do you do anything else to encourage your customers to share your product?
Marissa: I think that what the beautiful thing is, it's happening organically. We include really personalized ... We hand write every person's name on our order. We include really personalized notes to them. We ask them to leave a product review. So all of those things are actually happening organically when the person receives the parcel in the mail. They feel inclined because of the aesthetic to share about it on social media and talk about the different benefits that they're experiencing from having this planner in their life. Obviously, that goes out to all of their friends.
We don't even have to ask to be like, "Hey, do you mind posting this on Instagram?" It ends up happening organically, which is really, really quite beautiful. Obviously in the age of eCommerce, I think that, that is a huge, huge thing. I think having nice packaging, and having something that makes people feel good that they actually want to talk about can be such a huge selling point for your brand. And obviously, such a great social share benefit where you don't even have to ask them to promote it. They will just do it themselves because it's something that they resonate with.
Felix: You shared with us earlier that you worked with a big retailer. How were you able to partner with them? What is the process behind that?
Marissa: Well honestly, I think I was getting really annoying to them. So they were just like, "Screw it. We'll just deal with this." So I think that what ended up being the defining factor is that they requested ... I think they requested three copies that they were going to send to a few different people to review.
The overall, I guess, feedback had been that this is a trend that they've been seeing in the planner community, maybe a bit of a niche of something that they haven't seen before. This was in the age of when Kate Spade was really big, and everyone wanted everything Kate Spade. And so, my planner fit in with that aesthetic. It's not an aesthetic that I identify with anymore. But when I was 24, it made sense. But it just aesthetically fit really well into the lifestyle that, I think, their customer, or at least their female customer was experiencing at the time. And obviously, it ended up working out really well.
They only sold online. We ended up being on their shelves, I think it was two years later, for we did a limited edition series of planners for Indigo two years after that. We were physically on the shelf then. However, I'm going to put a disclaimer here. I do not recommend working with a big retailer like that. It was not a good experience for me. I actually ... It was a really, really incredible learning experience for me. But I do not recommend for small businesses to get involved with companies like that.
Felix: One of the powerful things about working with a big retailer is that exposure to new customers. What were the problems that you encountered, that you faced with working with a big retailer?
Marissa: I mean, I think it can obviously be ... It can give you exposure to new customers. But the thing that was obviously the most difficult is that they took 70%, which at that point, my margin is so small that I'm barely making a profit. I was so small at the time, that obviously I was open to taking anything.
But I think about this now, and I think about, "Wow, I was losing 70% of my margin. What if I had taken all of that money, and put it into Facebook ads instead?" What could've happened then? I could've been driving all this traffic to my own site, and I could've been selling at full margin instead of just giving up that money and hoping for people to reorder.
The other problem that you face with these big retailers is that if they notice that your product is selling really well, they're just going to go and make it themselves, and that's what happened. So they ended up actually taking a lot of my designs and a lot of my work, and basically putting it on anything and everything that they were selling that would go along with my planners.
At the time, I was getting Snapchat messages, and photos of people being like, "Oh, I didn't know that you made this. I didn't know that you made that." None of that was my product.
Felix: Yeah. That must've been super frustrating that you spent all this time designing and creating your product, and then they just copy you like that.
Marissa: Very. Especially if you're small, and you have all these cool ideas. And then, you see this company who's just taking it and ripping you off. There's nothing you can do. I just think about if you're going to leave money on the table, take that money and put it online, and drive all of that traffic to your own site versus relying on this big retail chain to drive your business.
Because the other thing is, is at the drop of a hat they could just say, "We're out. We don't want this anymore." And then, a large part of your business is gone.
Felix: Nowadays when you create new products, what are some ways that you get this feedback from your customers on new product designs, new ideas?
Marissa: We're obviously very active on Instagram. So we do a lot of polls. We send out questionnaires through email. We basically reach out to everyone who purchased the planner last year, and we ask them specifically, "What did you love? What didn't you love? What suggestions do you have, like what can we improve?" People are really actively happy to give that feedback. Certain people write entire essays about certain things that they love, or really, really didn't like.
It's always funny, because the comment at the end is always like, "It's not that I'm not going to buy the planner again. It's just that I really didn't like this part about it. But I'm still going to go and buy it again next year, so I just wanted to give you my feedback." Which is kind of funny, and also obviously amazing.
Felix: Now, I want to talk about marketing and the sales you've been able to generate online. What has been the most successful marketing channel for you?
Marissa: Our most successful thing that we're doing right now is through email capture. What we actually do that I think a lot of people don't do is we give away a free product for email subscription. So when people sign up for our email newsletter with their first order they get a free sticker pack. A lot of other companies do like, "Get 10% off." But there's actually so much more value in giving somebody a $13 value product. That doesn't mean that, that product has to cost you $13. But I think the value of getting a free product with your first order is just something people don't like to pass up.
I also think that as a small business, you don't want to train your customer to expect a discount all the time. I think that, that's a really bad plan of action because then if you come out with something new, they'll just be like, "Oh, I'm just going to wait two weeks because it's just going to be on sale."
So you want to find ways that you can obviously bring sales in without actually doing a sale. And that maybe sounds a little bit funny, but there are so many different ways that you can create a secret sale without actually being like, "Here's 30% off." Because we do that, we do that once a year on obviously the Black Friday, Cyber Monday thing. But throughout the year, we find secret ways of giving people value, of kind of doing a sale without actually being like, "Here's 25% off," kind of thing.
We have an email automation sequence set up that first they get a welcome email. They get sent a blog post about productivity, about how to get productive. That blog post includes one or two of our planners, of just how to crush your to do list, and how to be better with your to do list, and different tips and tricks that you can use to cross more things off. They've got a video that they get. At the third or fourth email, they do get a little discount if they haven't purchased at that point. But we really focus a lot on valuable content, and making sure that people get this, or feel like they want to be a part of this experience of feeling productive, feeling motivated, and feeling like they have their life together.
Felix: You have a very seasonal product where you get most of sales during a certain time of the year. How do you manage a business with a product like that?
Marissa: We've actually been able to over the last two years, we now have extremely consistent revenue throughout the year. There aren't really necessarily any down times anymore.
We do obviously have our big product, our big dated product at the end of the year, but that's the only dated product that we sell now. We have a quarterly planner that renews every three months, that is undated. We also have a six month planner that renews every six months, that's also undated. That has a slightly different layout. We have an 18 month planner. We have an academic planner that starts in September. And people are always ordering these before they actually need them because they want to be able to put in the dates. They want to be able to add their appointments, add their anniversaries, their birthdays, all of those things, so that when they're actually ready to use it, they have it ready to go.
Having a product that has a shelf life is obviously both, it's incredible, but it's also can be really challenging because if you don't sell within a certain timeframe, it starts to devalue and then you have to discount, you're being forced to discount because there's just so much less demand for it.
However, what we've found is with our annual ... Obviously right now we're coming up to 2021 planner. People will pre-order as early as July for the new year. Because of the market that we're in, a lot of our customers are ... They want to be very organized, and they want to make sure that they have their planner for the new year. Also, because we tend to sell out, people from the previous year, feel inclined to pre-order to make sure that they don't miss out this year. So we always do a pre-order period of two months before we actually sell all, send the planners out.
Felix: Now you mentioned to me prior to this call that your most successful and noteworthy marketing strategy so far has been your mystery boxes. Tell us more about these mystery boxes.
Marissa: Our mystery boxes are probably our best selling thing that we do. The way that it works is that basically we come up with a series of items. Maybe that's four to five items that we have in our store that we can collectively pull together to make sure that we still have just enough margin to sell these online without having to be like, "Oh, everything's 30% off."
We just send out an email, and we say, "We have a certain, limited amount of mystery boxes available. You get five items for $55 instead of $90 or $110. And there's only 100 available." And then from my standpoint, what ends up being the alluring thing is like, "Oh, I'm getting all of these items that I'm going to need at some point anyway." Whether that's a pen, or a desk pad, or a notepad, or a journal or a planner. The people who are into organizing and who are into getting their lives together, they're going to want and use these things at some point anyway. And so to them, it just feels so exciting to be like, "Ooh, what am I going to get? What am I going to get in my box?"
We usually add in random little things. We'll put in a hair clip or something else that maybe they wouldn't necessarily expect. There's just so much room to do a fun thing by giving people something where they don't necessarily know what's going to come in the mail. I would say 99% of the time, people are really happy with what they get. But there's always one or two customers that are like, "I hated everything." But they might've not purchased anything in the past, so they might've not necessarily known what they were getting into. But generally speaking, if the customers that are champions for your brand who support you anyway, they just, they love this because they feel like it was personalized for them. They feel like it was curated and put together. It's just something that is really unique that you can do especially as a small business because you're not part of a ...
We're not part of a 3P. We do all of our own packing and shipping because we also do customization. We do monogramming. It's something that you can easily do if you decide like, "Oh, maybe I have this journal that's been sitting, that's not selling on our website. Okay. Well, let's throw it into a mystery box." I think that, that's a really great way to also get rid of old stock that maybe you aren't selling anymore.
Felix: How much again for these mystery boxes?
Marissa: $55 has been the sweet spot.
Felix: You also mentioned Black Friday and Cyber Monday being a critical time for your business, so tell us more about your strategies for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Marissa: I mean for Black Friday, our strategy is a lot different than it would be throughout the year. Our Black Friday planning basically starts in September. I mean, there's probably 20 or 30 or even 40 different emails that are all scheduled out. We really segment all of our lists out. So it's a pretty intricate process.
But for example, if we decide to do one, let's say we do one for Easter. We do an Easter mystery box. Usually what we'll do is we'll email the subscribers a week before. We give them a heads up like, "Hey, mystery boxes are coming. There's only going to be 100 available."
Same thing goes for social media on our Instagram. And then we'll say, "They launch 9:00 AM, PST, Monday." We send out the email. We have the listing up. It exists as a product on the Shopify page. And then, we just sell through them. If we don't sell through them in the day, we continue promoting throughout the week. And then eventually, they're gone.
Felix: You also have something super cool on your website which are these Easter egg hunts. Tell us more about how these Easter egg hunts work.
Marissa: I had this idea when I was driving in traffic two years ago. I guess, was this my third Easter egg hunt? Yeah, it was my third. So it was almost three years ago. I was thinking about we had the mystery boxes, but how can we do this even better, and different in a way that nobody else is doing? Easter was coming up, I decided to do an Easter egg hunt.
What we do is I create these unique mystery boxes that all have different items. Some of them have the same items. We usually do two different-sized eggs. One egg is $98 and the other is $55. And then essentially what we do is, we hide them throughout the website. So people have to go and search for them. We only have one of each egg, so whether you get egg number one, or egg number eight. If you notice that the egg is sold out, that means that somebody else has already grabbed it. That means that you have to continue hunting for an egg that's still available.
We usually launch these at 8:00 AM, and we're sold out by 9:00 AM. It's one of the only things that we do that sells out immediately. But it's also something that we can't do all the time. I think the reason that it works so well is because we only do it the once a year, twice a year, type of thing.
Felix: Now did you build this, the website, in-house? You hire an agency to create the website, to create the online store?
Marissa: Actually, my partner is the designer and we do it together. He's a really good coder. I really benefit from that. Him and I work on that together. We constantly improve it. We just did a bunch of ... We just changed all of our menu, on the weekend. So we're always tweaking and going. It's really, really beneficial that I have somebody that can do the coding work if there's something that I want to change. So we work on it together on the website.
Felix: What about any apps or products or services that you rely on to run your business?
Marissa: Our biggest thing over the last year has been switching to what I was talking about earlier, switching to product for email sign up versus discount for email sign up. We were using a different app last year that allowed you to basically put in your email, and then once you clicked to submit your email, a discount code immediately pops up versus having to send a discount code to the person's email first, where they have to go and check the email.
But what we ended up deciding a couple of weeks ago is to ... We use Klaviyo for our email newsletter software. And Klaviyo now has popups, so we're actually now using a Klaviyo popup that directly connects to our email. It's actually performing really, really well even though somebody has to actually go and check their email to get the code. But that has been the biggest defining thing that we tweaked last year on the website that has made a huge difference.
We use Recharge for our subscription products. We use Stamped for reviews. And then we also use meta fields within the product pages to customize certain things. Add in your Instagram feed, or people sharing your product kind of thing. We're able to add in YouTube videos and things like that. I think those are probably the three biggest ones.
Back in Stock is a really good one too, if you know something is out of stock, people are able to put their email in, and then you can email them once the item is back in stock. And then we use Infinite Options for the monogram feature.
Felix: I like how you have a video playing at the very top of the website. It's really the first thing that you see instead of an image. Why did you decide to video instead of an image?
Marissa: I do. Yeah, because I think it gives the brand an all encompassing look and feel of what it is about. And also, gives people a look into what is the lifestyle of STIL? What is that movement all about? So it's much easier to communicate that over video, than it is just through a static photo.
Felix: So stilclassic.com is the website. It's a store. I'll leave you with this last question, Marissa. What do you think has been the biggest lesson you've learned this past year that you now want to apply moving forward?
Marissa: I think that recently what I've learned is that there are a multitude of things that can happen that are completely out of your control. I think what's important to remember is that you continue to stay on your feet, and reinvent whenever there's a difficult time. And I think that especially when you're going through difficult times there is so much room for innovation.
Felix: Thank you so much for your time, Marissa.
Marissa: Thank you.