Felix: Today, I'm joined by Colin Chik CEO from BluMaan. BluMaan is a range of men's hair products created with input from the BluMaan community and was started in 2014 and based out of Vancouver. Welcome Colin.
Colin: Thank you, Felix. It's great to be here. 
Felix: Yeah. Excited to have you on. So we mentioned the intro that the product is heavily powered by the community. So talk to us more about this. How is a community involved in the brand and the product?
Colin: Well the brand was actually created by the community. So in 2014, our founder, Joe decided that he really wants to make a hair product. So he posted a video on YouTube asking people what they wanted in a hair product, such as  the finish and what the market really lacked. And from there, they started formulating a new product. Our BluMaan Original Meraki. The community really pushed our product a lot. We did testing with the communities.  So we sent out samples throughout the whole year, trying to get people's opinion. What made it good, what's bad about it. And even when the company first started, a lot of the community members took volunteer positions, like our customer service, our product development, our marketing team were all built with the community members. So that's what makes us kind of unique compared to a lot of brands because we're built by the community directly. 
Felix: Yeah. That's amazing. So let's talk about that. Because I think that this is obviously probably your most valuable asset having this community. So if anyone else out there that wants to follow the same path, it sounds like you got to start off by building this community. So talk to us about how that was first established, before the brand, the price was ever conceived or even thought of, we started with the community. So let's talk about that. How did that begin? 
Colin: So the community was really built on Joe's following. Joe is a YouTuber for those who don't know. When we built the community, he was about 250,000 followers on YouTube. And his vision was that, he wants to connect with every one of his followers on YouTube in a more personal level. So he literally responds to every message that gets sent to him on YouTube. And he talks to them a lot. And one day he decided, let's make a community together on Facebook. So he created a group and he really marketed on his channel to push people into this group. And his philosophy was he wants to make a group where people can share hair tips, hairstyle, product reviews, and just bring his fans into more community talking like aspect.
Felix: And that makes sense. If you're a YouTuber or even like a podcaster like me, you're spending a lot of times kind of talking to people or they hear your voice, but you don't hear from them. And they definitely don't hear from each other. So I Could see the power or the desire, the benefit of having a community. So you mentioned that this community actually lives in Facebook, in a Facebook group. He drove the new members into the group from his YouTube channel. Can you speak about what are ways to engage a community to get them active? How do you actually get things rolling? Once people would come in, I think that a lot of fear, or a lot of hesitation, like you have about running or starting community is like, okay, everyone's here and know how do I... it's like you're hosting a party. Right? How do you ensure your guests are having fun? How do you do that? 
Colin: So one of the things that our founders did was, they actually was really into the community. So they talk a lot in the community, post some of the personal stuff that's happening with their life, responded to people's posts, their questions. And ultimately they created another separate group. We call it the VIP is of BluMaan's community. So these are moderators. So we got volunteer moderators that really love the group, and really help push more discussions within the group. Even today we have about 20 moderators that constantly do posts, respond to people and really become really helpful leaders in that group. And I think that's really important in getting the community started and building that activeness within the community. 
Felix: It's a separate group that is your VIP, like the biggest fans of Joe in this case. Is that like a separate Facebook group? How do they collaborate or congregate? 
Colin: It's just a little moderator group. It's just a separate channel to just talk about posts that they don't like, or people that are being disrespectful, or they discuss new ideas, or new giveaways within the group. So we let those moderators take control. A lot of the things like, what kind of giveaways, what kind of promotions stuff like that within their group. 
Felix: That makes sense. So, based on what you have seen in the years of this group running, what works to continually grow this group, outside of Joe driving this, I think almost two million subscribers now to the group. Are there other ways to... you mentioned giveaways, and what are some other ways that maybe people that don't have two million, I guess following what are some ways that they can grow their group more organically or ways that they can do without driving traffic from another source? 
Colin: Having really meaningful discussions, basically. Not necessarily just about like men's grooming, but on our group, if you go to our group, if you ever do go to our group, there's people to talks about their daily life, like one of our community members at one point posted pictures of his newborn baby and how much he loves his life as wife, more personal or more empathetical discussions are in the group. And that's the stuff I really want to promote a lot. And those attract a lot of new users we feel.
Felix: I've heard Facebook specifically call out that they are trying to promote more of this meaningful discussion, meaningful conversation that you're talking about. I'm sure that if your post something meaningful, you don't have a lot more comments, likes and shares. So obviously Facebook likes that. So they're going to push that up and certainly will recommend your group more often. So I think that, that's important. Now as someone that is overseeing the group, maybe it's a group for your brand or a group for your community in this case. Are there ways for you to encourage this meaningful discussion? 
Colin: That's a really hard question to answer. I think the way that we treat our moderators really helps get them excited about our group. Like we treat them like if there are team members are employees of BluMaan every single day, and we really give them all the special treatments such as like, let them try out our new products and stuff and show them the results of what's happening with our group. Like when new people join, how people left and the happiness level of the group really motivates them in participating. 
Felix: So it starts off at the top where you are treating the moderators, the people that are seen as leaders of the group in a way that gets them excited. It gets them excited about the brand, gets them excited about the community, makes them happy. And that somehow trickles down to the members of the group, and encourage them to open up and have these kinds of conversations. 
Colin: Yes, definitely. And you know what, they're really happy. Some of our moderators has been with us for over four years, and they're still very active and still messaged me every single week saying like, all the new changes that they're proposing, and new ideas that they have, and how much more people are actually joining the group every single day.
Felix: Now, when it comes to things like giveaways, how does that work? Is that something that you guys often use in the group to encourage engagement or to encourage more people to join the group? 
Colin: We did do quite often. I think, every quarter we do one giveaway and these giveaways are done by the moderator, and our marketing team in house. So they communicate with each other and then they basically come up with an idea and we've try to work with other sponsors, like other brands, so do a collab giveaway or whatnot. And yeah, it's been pretty successful in that area.
Felix: How does it work? You're giving away a bundle of products, how does that drive your marketing by giving away products? 
Colin: Well usually when we do a collab giveaway, so we work with other brands. They give out our products to their fans as well. So we kind of cross promote our community with their customers, our community really likes it because they get to experience new brands or new giveaways. The decision for the type of products and everything that are on our giveaway, can range from... we've actually given out airplane tickets or a vacation package before, dinner with Joe, we try to make things exciting and different each time, it's never going to be the same, never going to be like just BluMaan products.
Felix: So the idea behind a collaboration giveaway is that the brands that you collaborate with will also share this giveaway, and then expose the BluMaan products to their audience?
Colin: Yes. And we usually work with brands that are different from BluMaan, while the audience is somewhat similar, if that makes sense.
Felix: Right. So they're competitors, but these are people that would buy your product and the brand you collaborate with.
Colin: Yes with the right demographic.
Felix: Okay. That makes sense. Okay. So let's talk about, so you build the business community either by driving traffic from an existing source, have some kind of following already, or by cultivating more meaningful discussions or running giveaways to get more people into the group, to get other brands to promote your brand or promote your community so different ways to get people into this group. Now, how big was the group at the time that you guys started asking the group, the community if they were interested a line of products?
Colin: The line of products actually came before the community was built actually, we decided we wanted to product on the YouTube channel. And then we created the community to do the discussion, what we needed in the product. So it came before.
Felix: Okay. So basically the community and the product almost grew hand in hand together. Wasn't like there was a [crosstalk 00:11:39] Do you remember how big that group was before there was meaningful discussion around the product? Because someone might be, again, want to say, to take the same approach of building community, almost building like a panel of people, to bounce ideas off of, how many people do I need before I can actually switch gears and start asking them about prize? You remember how big the group was before it made sense to start asking them these kinds of questions about products?
Colin: Unfortunately, I didn't join BluMaan team until after that.
Felix: Okay. That's just fine. So at this point, how big is this community?
Colin: When we started doing most meaningful discussions aboout the product. I believe it was about 10,000 users.
Felix: 10,000 users. And It's bigger than that today?
Colin: Today we've hit about 50,000 group members.
Felix: Amazing. Okay. So let's talk about the kind of questions you should ask your community. And if anyone, again, out there that wants to bounce ideas, wants to release a product or maybe start a brand new company with a community on Facebook that they've cultivated. How does it even begin? How do you introduce the idea to the community to begin with?
Colin: It's first identify the problem? So identify what's missing on the marketplace, and the product that you want to try to introduce. For Joe he realized there's a very big disconnect in high quality, natural product in the hair space, and especially direct to consumer online. So that's where his approach came from. And from there he just asked, Hey guys what are the products that you guys like as benchmarks? And from there, like you asked, what are the advantages of that product? And what do you dislike of each of the competitors products? And you take all the good stuff and we move all the bad stuff and basically try to make your ideal product and then find a lab or chemists to make samples to create that product. 
Felix: Okay. Definitely talk about the creation of product for a second, but you broke it down to basically a simple math problem of adding stuff that they like, moving stuff they don't like. And I think is just as straight forward as that, you just got put in the work after you realize the formula. Now you mentioned before this or before you decide to ask them about the particular products and brands that they like versus dislike. You mentioned that you had to first define the problem, can you just talk about this. You mentioned that there was a lack of direct to consumer brands to solve a specific problem. What was the actual specific problem that you guys have recognized before asking them more about the products that they're buying in this space? 
Colin: So for this space, a very high hold product that gives a really matte finish, and it's still healthy for the hair. Because one of the biggest thing for men is like, we need our hair to be very healthy, to have that beautiful shine or beautiful look. So that was the biggest thing for us was the whole matte finish, and the natural ingredients in the product. 
Felix: And was this like a hypothesis that you and the team had going into this, or did you discover this as you were asking them what they liked and didn't like?
Colin: This was actually... it was a theory from Joe and Ben. Joe he's a YouTuber, but he's really focused on hair product reviews. So he's always been reviewing products and he loves hair products, so that's where it came from. 
Felix: Okay. So they already had an idea behind it, and they wanted to then ask people about the specifically what hair products they like and dislike. Do you remember some of the, or do you know some of the answers that we're getting back about what they liked and didn't like that went into the creation of your product line?
Colin: So one of the big things that people really didn't like of a hair product was, it was really hard to get on people's hair. When you wash it, shampoo a lot of products were made out of oils, or wax that didn't wash up properly. And it created a lot of tugging. And then when you create a lot of tug on your hair, you kind of lose your hair even faster, especially for men, right? And in men, hair loss has been a big issue. So that being said, people wanted ingredients in the hair product that promoted hair growth to prolong their hair. And the hold is very important. A lot of notice that like you put your hair product in the morning by noon, it starts flopping. That's another issue that we noticed. Those are the three main, biggest problems that we notice. 
Felix: Got it. Now, when you aren't asking a community or asking potential customers these kinds of questions, how do you actually prioritize their desires, their wants into actually figuring out that this is a feature that we want to add into our product, versus something that is going to be deep prioritize and maybe something you guys look at in a future. How do you decide what you should actually add now today in the product you go to market with versus something in the future? 
Colin: For us, I think we do more of a pole. We actually do a lot of surveys and stuff on our community to determine what are the main features that they're looking for. And basically want to look for something that's more like 70 or 80% of the people that did do the survey, that wanted a special feature. And that would be the feature that we try to aim for. 
Felix: Okay. So you first start off with almost an open ended discussion about the things they like about certain brands, certain products in the space, things that don't like. And then based off of that, do you like kind of rank them based on frequency of a similar type of comment. And then from that you create a poll. Is that the approach? 
Colin: Yes. We actually do this for the actual product lines too. So we would say like for hair products, different types of hair products, like clay, there's pace, there's Pomade and there's hair oil, et cetera. So we actually do a poll for everything that we do.
Felix: Now, is there ever been like a competing desires where people might want a certain feature, but by adding that feature, it will produce adverse effects for something that they definitely don't want. Basically conflicting I guess once?
Colin: Conflicting features, yes, there is actually a high hold products tend to have more tugging.
Felix: That makes sense.
Colin: It's not as smooth to apply usually. And a lot of times what we have to do is we just have to work around it. We have to compromise between the two features, and make the perfect balance with our community. So that's where we do a lot of testing back and forth testing between our community, like where we make a product. Sometimes it takes up to a year of testing with our community until people are satisfied with the balance.
Felix: Got it. Okay. So let's move on to that phase of actually creating prototypes and then developing a final version. So you guys got these feature or basically the features of the product. And then you moved on to finding like some kind of a manufacturer or some kind of chemists. What's the next step for product like yours. Once you have an idea of the results that you want to achieve with a product?
Colin: Sorry, can you repeat the question again?
Felix: Sure. So basically once you know, what kind of results you want to get for your customers, based on what kind of benefits that they want, and things that they don't want. How do you take that and turn it into a actual product? like that very first, maybe first prototype of who you're working with? How do you work with them? 
Colin: So one of the things that most people don't realize is Google is full of resources. You can literally Google anything. So when we first started, we literally Googled a manufacturer that we want to work with. And Google came off a lot of good results and you basically have to email every manufacturer, talk to them, see how much it costs to do your R&D for your prototype and just work with your manufacturers, tell them exactly your situation. Don't lie about how big your company is. Just be very honest and honesty really helps in the situation. It gives you a lot of perks with these manufacturers, because a lot of manufacturers really love working with small companies or startups, right. 
Felix: And why is that? Because you have a minimum order quantity when you work with manufacturers, but you're saying that they like working with startups. What are they looking for in a startup that makes a startup attractive to a manufacturer? 
Colin: Because the thing with startup is they can become a really big company really fast and there'll be more dedicated using that manufacturer over a long period of time. And a lot of CEO's from these manufacturers love helping young entrepreneurs. It's just a thing that they really love helping them and these people succeed. And some of these CEOs, from our manufacturers are kind of mentors and it tells us like really insider stuff about our industry that we would not have be able to Google.
Felix: Yeah. I guess this raises a good question, which is what are some of the under-utilized benefits of a manufacturer that people don't take advantage of. And a lot of times people think that, okay, I ordered these things, they give it to me and that's it. But you're talking about using them as a mentor. What other things have you discovered that manufacturer has been able to do to be helpful for your business, that you think other entrepreneurs might be under utilizing? 
Colin: Okay. So if you've built a really good relationship with a manufacturer, they will sometimes tell you about like trade secrets, like what are the upcoming products that other people are manufacturing or the trends that they see. For example, they'll tell us how makeup is now starting to become a trend, prior to it being in the consumer market yet, ingredients that are becoming more popular and new ingredients. How other similar competitors that we're at the space that we're in, how they're doing the marketing, even approximate quantities of orders that they're even doing, and strategies of their supply chain or manufacturing and even their terms and everything like that. Like payment terms, they will even help us with.
Felix: [crosstalk 00:22:55] obviously, because if you succeed, then they're going to-
Colin: They'll succeed. 
Felix: They'll succeed. That makes sense. What about some lessons learned? What are some early mistakes that you guys might've made that you want to warn other entrepreneurs from making when they're working with the manufacturer?
Colin: There's a lot, always prototype and always do a first batch sample, prototype and your first batch might not always match. We had situations where it didn't match and we had to redo the whole first run, like for our Meraki, our first one was really off from the prototype. So don't just assume everything's going to be exactly like the prototype. Right?
Felix: Right. So there's no big jump you're saying between getting the prototype and that production run. Because a prototype looks good. Doesn't mean that at scale, the production run will also be as good as the prototype.
Colin: Yes, exactly. Especially for our cosmetic industry. When they do the lab sample or the prototype sample they did in a lab. Right? But when it comes to their full batch manufacturing, these machines and a large, just imagine big containers balling of your products or filling your products, even as a site change in temperature or slight change in the percentage of the ingredients may affect the product significantly.
Felix: Right. So in order to see what the product looks like in, or how we'll perform is to get a bad sample and not to reference the prototype, a bad sample is the closer you get to the product that would get to the customer itself. So let's talk about the prototypes, what was the very first one like?
Colin: The very first one I believe they did about 50 prototypes, 50 iterations, on average at BluMaan we do easily sometimes past the 50 Mark. One of our products took over two years to prototype. It happens all the time.
Felix: Now when something takes two years of what makes you guys keep on thinking that it's a product that's worth investing more time resources into? 
Colin: Well, for us, it was we believe that that product would be a really good add on. And it's something that we really needed. We are also a lot demand from our community, demand from our customers, and we just wanted to make it perfect. There's a lot of companies that does make products and they don't really care about the full quality of the product as much, but for us, we wanted to make it perfect every single time before we launched our product. And that's why our product development cycle is significantly longer than the average company. 
Felix: Okay. So when you get that prototype, that first iteration, or 10th or 20th, what do you do with it? How do you actually figure out if it's good enough or if it needs a certain tweak? 
Colin: So all this is based on feedback from people. So when we first create a prototype for a new product, we actually give it to our team to try. So we have log guys working in our office and they will try it out, and they'll with Joe and then write down their feedback, the feedback is sent back to our product development team. And that is sent back to the lab exactly what we were missing or whatever you would like to see more. And we constantly do this until our team on a majority basis like the product. Okay. And once that is done, we then send it out for mass testing. So we send it out to our community team that test our products on a regular basis and they come back with feedback. And if it does not good, we go back to the drawing board and we formulated again or tweak it until we get it where, the team and the community are happy with it.  And then we'd do another test after, in-person test. So we usually host at my small little event at a barbershop or whatnot, and we invite our followers, a couple of more dedicated followers to come in and actually try the new product beforehand and see how they like it. If any part of this testing phase people are not fully satisfied, they would really go back and retweak again. And sometimes, sort of some formulas, you can't really tweak it all the way to perfection. In which case we will have to totally reformulate it again and start from step one again. 
Felix: Because I'm surprised that if the team thinks is good, it's not enough for you guys to just go and run with it. What are some examples of things that you have discovered that the team's like, this is perfect. This is right to go, then you release into the community or test with the community, and then they notice certain things. And what are some examples? 
Colin: One of the things with hair products is every men have different types of hair, so there's fine hair, there's course hair, there's Caucasian hair, Asian hair. And people have curly hairs, right? So different hair requires different type of product, unfortunately, different requirements mostly on the hold side, for fine hair the hold is very different from our coarse hair basically. And because our office is... we don't have like a broad variety of hair types. So that's why there's going to be a difference between the community and our office team. 
Felix: I wonder if that goes into a factor when you guys interview and hire people to see if they have hair that is not been represented yet.
Colin: No that's not apart of hiring. 
Felix: I'm sure that's not legal either. 
Colin: No I don't think so. But that's a cool idea though.
Felix: Yeah. I mean, I'm sure if someone comes along with a that kind of fill your quota of a hair types, I'm sure that helps it a little bit. Okay so you mentioned that internal with the team first and see what they like goes out to the external community where it has a kind of broader sample size. And then you mentioned that you do an in person kind of trials. What is the benefit of doing this in person, because it seems it's going to go back to basically a smaller subset then the Y community. So what's the point of doing in person trials? 
Colin: So it goes back to the type of hair as well. People in the community and people in our office, there's going to be some type of a demographic that's missed, right? So we want to put those people into the in-person from just random picking people from the community. And also it gives a little incentive for people in the community that when you're a part of this group, you might be chosen to do an in-person. And it's a huge bonus, you get to meet Joe. You get to try new product, and you get free products to going there.
Felix: You're mostly trying to target specific hair types that you weren't happy with in terms of the getting the back... if you weren't getting enough responses from people with curly hair, you might try to run a in-person trial to bring in more people with curly hair and see what their feedback is. 
Colin: Yes. And it's really nice to see them in person because we can see how they use the product. Right. When we see how they use their products, we can create content for that as well.
Felix: Right. You can create …
Colin: Tutorials.
Felix: Okay yeah tutorial to cater towards the way they use it. What are some examples of how differently people use your products? 
Colin: So not many people realize that there's such thing as a pre styler and does a post styler. So a pre styler is when you use a product, when your hair is slightly damp and then your blow dryer to activate it, to create that better hold more volume especially for a finer hairs. And then there's post styler when you use the product after your pre styler, so your final product that you use. And those two products may not be the same.  You may be using the BluMaan Original for pre styler and use BluMaan Cavalier Clay as a post styler. So that's one of the different ways of using our products, and these can be mixed around. So some people might not like our Original as a pre styler, but they're like our Monarch for our pre styler. And there's always that mix and match. That's one of the things that are very different for different people with different hair types.
Felix: Got it. Okay. So now once you've gone through this prototyping phase and you have finally arrived at a product out 50 iterations, or however many you guys are happy with something that can go into production. You mentioned first start with a small batch run. How small are we talking about? And is this something that's common to ask a manufacturer to do?
Colin: Yes, of course you can always ask. You always should be asking minimum order quantities. However, like I said, if you have a really good relationship with that manufacturer, they'll actually do even that smaller batch than that.
Felix: Does it help to explain why you want a smaller batches to see what this looks like in production?
Colin: Definitely so the batch number doesn't necessarily mean that they do a separate, smaller batch for it. It's just, they do maybe a couple of hour run, small batches might still be at over a thousand units, by the way, it's fairly two boxes or a dozen. Right?
Felix: Okay. So once you get back this a thousand units, what do you do with those?
Colin: We basically try to send it to influencers. For marketing wise, we was sent to influencers. We would give it out to our community leaders. We'll give it to our office people to try it out. Our product developer would heavily test the product, make sure that's really consistent in all units. We sent it to our founders and just do vigorous testing to make sure that same as the prototype that was given to us.
Felix: Got it. Okay. So once you've done that and the prototype matches the small batch size, you guys are ready to do a full on production run. What's the marketing plan, or how do you guys launch a new product or a new product line to the community?
Colin: So one of the first things that we really wanted to improve in our operations side is how much units we going to actually create. And that is like more towards the number side of things. How much money are we willing to invest? How much can we even afford to invest and still have money for the marketing side, especially for a startup with very limited resources. This is a really crucial part of launching a product we can overproduce and we shouldn't under produce, right? And once the budget is created, we give to a marketing team and a marketing team works with a budget. We also give the product to our sales team, our B2B distribution team, and they determine how much products that they actually need. And we actually... how we allocate the products. So we'll say, okay B2B gets 30% of all our products that new launch, feed direct to consumer gets the remaining. Then from there, we actually have a playbook that we have for launching new products in BluMaan, and they follow the playbook while adding in a new something new to it. Something that they want to test out during a launch. 
Felix: Interesting. Okay. Can you give us a high level what that playbook looks like for anyone out there that just has no idea how to launch a product?
Colin: Basically how to create hype for a product, being mysterious kind of create that buzz for the new product, how to get people's attention for the product. And they say which marketing channels we're targeting, how we're going to target it and most cost effective way of targeting these channels.
Felix: Now you mentioned you decide which marketing channels to target. How do you guys make the decision here, how does the entrepreneur decide how to spend, which marketing channel they should spend their time and money?
Colin: In my opinion for new entrepreneurs, you want to look at your competitors, what they're doing. Usually with they're spending a lot of on paid ads, or they spend a lot of money on like influencers. There's a reason for that, right? There's a reason why they're doing that. It's usually because the ROI does make sense for them. Right. Usually I would say, just follow what they're doing, but doing a smaller scale. So if they're targeting large influencers, for example, you always target micro influencers, right? Because micro-influencers cost less usually doing it for free compared to large influencers. So it's easier to just follow what people in your industry are doing and not make that mistake. And then when you do have that extra money, they can try different channels that your competitors are not trying. 
Felix: Got it. Okay. So you're basically looking for what the competitors are spending a ton of money on, but then obviously take the same approach, but at a scale that your budget can support. Right. Okay. That makes sense. And you mentioned targeting on these channels. What do you mean by that? 
Colin: So there's different channels out there right now, even new channels, such as like a TikTok for example, that's a really new social media channel. When we say targeted, like find a way that we can fit our product into that channel without being too heavily salesy, be more subtle, and just get our product in front of people. So people know about it rather than to just sell it.
Felix: Okay. So basically try to create content that's native and organic for them, that channel. And just speaking of TikTok. Is there a lot of effort you put in here? I think that's obviously a channel that a lot of people are interested in, but don't know exactly how to market on... Can you give us any pointers when it comes to TikTok.
Colin: TikTok It's so new right now, it's undetermined even for us, we've been doing little experiments here and there, but we haven't really come to any conclusion yet. It's still to new. 
Felix: Right. Okay. What about another channel that may more established that you guys definitely try to hit on? Like, is it Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, what's the next kind of a channel that you guys almost always want to spend Lots of effort and resources on? 
Colin: Influencers has always been our biggest market for us. It's actually different types of influencers. So when we first started, we focused more on the men's style and fashion and men hair, and we're slowly moving away from that more to lifestyle, like athletics, kids even. So those are different channels. Instagram that you can try to target, or untouched markets basically. 
Felix: Okay. So you're moving from influencers that are specifically using a products that maybe people would almost even expect to see kind of sponsorships and product reviews into a less related channel. What's the thinking behind that? Like why move away from kind of almost like it's more the low hanging fruit of these influencers? 
Colin: Well, one of the thinking behind it was that these type of influencers especially in our market, fashion influencers. They tend to be over saturated, they market a lot of different products like skincare, multiple different hair products. And it doesn't seem less authentic a lot of times, if you see an influencer marketing three or four different hair products, you really trust in that influencer in their hair products selection, it's kind of hard to do. So, so what we realize is markets that, or channels of types of influencers that don't haven't ever marketed hair product before seem to be a better fit and a better return on investment. 
Felix: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Now once you decide, okay, I want to focus more on lifestyle influencers, how do you decide what kind of influencers are going to be a good match? Especially once you're moving away from the more direct kind of hair products, men's grooming influencers into little more uncharted territories. How do you try to make sure that they will still be a good fit for the brand? 
Colin: So to find the right influencer, we are too much at brainstorms and look at, these are the influencers that are coming through our door and they determined like, Hey, does this person have good hair, does this person have high engagement? Like, are the followers very dedicated to them? What's the response rate when you do a post, and how saturated they are in their paid ads. Right? So even if they never done a hair product before, if they've done a lot of like promotions, that's also really not the best sign for us. It wants someone who doesn't really do much promotions, maybe just support one or two brands kind of thing. And that's what we look for. 
Felix: Just to kind of avoid that almost like ad blindness that people might develop from seeing the same influencer, constantly advertising products, constantly advertising the same type of products. You try to find a influencer that's not doing much advertising at all. You're saying?
Colin: Basically. Which is really hard. 
Felix: Definitely. That's why you said that you're trying to focus on the, micro-influencers the ones that may not be so big that they are constant getting these deals.
Colin: Yeah. Micro-influencers are really good in ROI. In general, they tend to have much higher engagement. They cost a lot less than a major influencer and they really put more effort because they're still small. So they really to put that effort in and making their content better. 
Felix: Now, when you identify a micro influencer or influencer at all that you want to work with, how do you get in touch with them? And what's the pitch that seems to work? Like what does it influence micro influencer or influencer care about that gets him to say yes?
Colin: I think one of the biggest thing is that do they feel comfortable and that does it really represent them when they represent this brand, right. Does this brand fit their lifestyle or fit them? And I think that's the most important part of getting influencers to take on this brand as an ambassador or to promote it. 
Felix: So let's talk a little about the website. So is that all done in house? You guys hired agency for that? How was that built? 
Colin: The first literation of the website on Shopify, we actually didn't do Shopify to be started. We actually did on Google commerce in the beginning and that was done in house. Then we switched to Shopify and it's been amazing. Shopify is amazing.
Felix: so did you guys have a customized theme or how did you guys build the Shopify site? 
Colin: We started with a theme first and then we customized a theme. And later on we hired a Shopify, a web design firm to help us make the next one. So the credit theme was made by an agency, it was a lot more costly, but it had a really good return.
Felix: So you basically redesigned to say at least once, what was the intention, what was the goal of the redesign? What are some things that you guys wanted to fix essentially the next version? 
Colin: So one of the things that, that has been a early on problem for us was identifying our brand. So a lot of our marketing materials was too scattered because it was made by, a lot of times we've made by volunteers, right? Because the volunteers did our marketing for us a lot of times, and it was really inconsistent. So our website design didn't really match our branding. So first literation we try to make it closer to our branding, and make everything consistent of font and et cetera. And on the last revision, the third revision, we really focus just on the branding. And that really helped on the conversion rate. 
Felix: Can you say more about that? When, when, when you talk about branding, if someone out there has a site already and they want to make improvements to it, you mentioned the branding has made a huge difference. What did you like tactically change or what did you actually change on the website to improve the branding on the website? 
Colin: So one of the things is making sure that all our photos or our assets on our website match the type of people type of demographic we're targeting, having high quality images, having those men with nice hair, hairstyle that could be created with BluMaan products, making all our images consistent as well, like each product shot it must be very consistent to the next one. A lot of people don't really do that. Font, the font colors, the color of the website should match the packaging of your product. That's another thing that we didn't do really well in the beginning and the messaging as well, the copywriting must match our actual product, and what the message that we try to communicate to our customers.
Felix: Got it. So it sounds like one thing is to invest in the photography, lots of images of people, you represent the lifestyle that you want the brand to represent. And then also, I think one of the thing that you mentioned that now a lot of would do is that you kind of want some consistency between the photos to, like was actually all done in like one photo shoot, one session rather than randomly pulled together. You found that makes a big difference. 
Colin: That made a huge difference. 
Felix: And you mentioned also massive packaging of the website, the colors, and maybe the fonts to the actual... the website rather to the packaging, colors and fonts. I think that's also something that it gets sometimes we overlook to, which is interesting it. okay. So now when you guys are running this website, are there any tools or apps that you use either on your site itself and the backend or in what comes to marketing that you guys really rely on? 
Colin: There's definitely a lot, actually Shopify has a lot of great plugins. One of the first plugins we have for install with us, we call No Fraud, credit card fraud. That saved us thousands of dollars a year. We used Privy the popup, product reviews, plugin, recharge, the your current bill payments. We have some SEO plugins, and even an inventory planner as well. Yeah. So there's a lot actually that we use.
Felix: And we talk about the popup on the site. What is the popup? Is it to collect email address? What's the attention of the popup? 
Colin: The public intention was to get subscribers to our email list, to give them offers, launches, updates, and really just collect the info as well as giving them like coupon as well. 
Felix: What is the incentive, what was worked for you guys to get someone to subscribe to the email list?
Colin: I believe one of the best thing was actually understanding our customers at that area. Our popups actually asked like, what type of hair you have, and we try to recommend, when they get their first email recommend what type of product that would fit best for the hair. 
Felix: Oh, interesting. So you're not like... a lot of sites have a pop up and they'll say things like you can get 10% off, but you guys are asking them a question first is what kind of type of hair do they have. And then you use that to segment the emails so that the product recommendations are more specific to them.
Colin: Yes. And that's one of the biggest thing is like, what product works for your hair, right. And even in our customer service, we get that question asked a lot, like what is the best hair product for me and it's not always necessarily going to be a BluMaan product. And we allow our customer service even promote other products or even a competitors products, as long as it works for our customers. 
Felix: That's interesting that's probably like the most valuable field that you have in your database is like the type of a hair that they have, because it allows you to give them a solution to a problem. So directly now, when you are... what tool do you use for emailing what's the software that you guys use to power all of this?
Colin: Email software, I think we use Retention Science. Have you heard of that?
Felix: No I have not heard.
Colin: It's an AI based email marketing software.
Felix: Very cool. It sounds like a very useful for personalization. That makes sense. Awesome. So I appreciate you coming on Colin. So I leave you this last question, which is what needs to happen this year in 2020 for you to consider the year a success?
Colin: For 2020. I believe that one of the biggest goals for BluMaan this year is to reach more customers, help more people change their hairstyle, change their hair game, and really built that confidence of these people.
Felix: Awesome, so BluMaan is B L U M A A N dot com. Thank you again so much for your time Colin. I appreciate you coming and sharing all your experience.
Colin: Thank you. Thank you for having me.