Felix: Today I'm joined by Jonas Forth from Moomin. Moomins is the number one official Moomins shop online, providing Moomin fans around the globe with the best out of Moomins starting in 2015, and based in Helsinki, Finland, and earned $1.5 million in sales in 2019. Welcome Jonas.
Jonas: Thank you. Very happy to be here.
Felix: Tell us a little bit more about your involvement. How did you get involved in this, I guess with this brand?
Jonas: Well, back in 2014 I was asked to join a company, which started setting up stores for different kinds of brands. One of them happened to be Moomin. It took off, and this was sort of done as a licensed deal with the Moomin brand back then. When the brand saw it took off, they sort of purchased that part of the company that I had been part of setting up. Then I became part of the Moomin family, and I've been with them ever since.
Felix: Okay, got it. You started off as a ... Basically, an independent company that had a licensing deal with Moomin. You guys were doing a great job with the eCommerce store, and then Moomin came in and decided to buy that piece of the company.
Jonas: Exactly.
Felix: Got it. Okay cool. What's your background? How did you get involved with a company that was basically set up to build stores for different brands?
Jonas: Well, my background is in media originally. I'm a journalist, but I've always been working in between tech and content. This was sort of a perfect mix because we're very much content-driven, and the original setup for not only Moomin, but the other brand source that we ran, was we put content first. Our initial idea was to run the store with very little marketing, like paid marketing, but instead do content marketing. Do content, which engages the fan base, and sort of makes them share it, engage with it, and eventually, perhaps, make a purchase.  We still have the same strategy that we had back in 2014 about putting content front and center.
Felix: Got it. Okay, so when you first started working with Moomin, you mentioned a licensing deal. Can you talk more about that for anyone out there that's interested in starting a business like that where you come in, and there is a brand or almost like a movement, I guess, within that does not have an online presence, and you want to come in and be basically the online presence and online eCommerce store for them. What is involved in setting all of that kind of stuff up?
Jonas: Well, naturally you need a licensed deal, which in many cases means you pay upwards 10, 15% of your turnover to the brand for using it. In our case, we noticed that Moomin, which it's a fairly large brand. It's one of the top 50, 60 brands in the world, I think. We noticed that their website was built with Flash back in 2014. It was already an outdated technology. It had no analytics. The name of the CEO was spelled incorrectly on the site, and we just saw that this could actually become something big. We pursued it, contacted the family that had the rights to the brand, and they said, "Give it a go." We've done so ever since.
Felix: Yeah, I'm sure different brands are different in these cases, but what have you found as something that brands care about when you are approaching them, and you are coming with this expertise, whether it be online marketing, or a tech background, or ability to create content online for their brand? How do you approach them in a way that makes them want to work with you when I'm sure there have been others that have approached them in the past?
Jonas: There have been, yes. I think they found that we had ... The reason, I think, they went with our company was that we put the content front and center, and said that this will become sort of central part of their branding strategy. Initially back in 2014, I don't think that they really understood the importance of a digital presence. During that year, maybe we'll get into it, sort of what happened, but during that year, 2014, they quickly realized how important it was for them to control that channel themselves.
Jonas: For us, it was all about sales then, and although we did a lot of efforts to further the brand, and do content, which sort of furthered the brand, it was so very much about the sales and the Moomin characters, which is the company that owns the right to the Moomin brand. They found that perhaps it would be better to have a better balance between sort of informative content and commercial. Have a play between them, and that was a big part of them then deciding to purchase the store from us.
Felix: Yeah, that's a really good point about how if someone comes in, the commercial or eCommerce business side that is licensing from the brand, might not necessarily have conflicting interests, but might have different number one priorities. You mentioned as a eCommerce business, as a commercial business, your focus is on sales, which makes sense.
Felix: That's the goal for pretty much every business out there, but for the brand, it might have two number one priorities where sales are important, that's the life blood of the company, but then they also want to further the brand, like you said. When those kind of scenarios, how does it usually play out? Obviously, they purchased you guys in this case, or purchased that part of the business, but usually how does it play out if that doesn't happen?
Jonas: Well, I think it differs from brand to brand. Some might have a bigger emphasis on sales, some on doing things which fits the brand better. In our case, we very early on, struck a balance between the two, regardless of sort of them purchasing the company. Then, they're drawn or not. We still had that kind of balance because we saw that that is what fan base for Moomin really wanted. They didn't want that hard core, sort of sales approach.
Felix: It was also in your best interest to focus on building the brand because that was expectation from their fan base. Once you were brought into the Moomin brand, once they bought, again, the commercial piece of the business that you were a part of, what was that transition like?
Jonas: It was very smooth. The team that we had, we were three people, we felt immediately at home with the Moomin family. It's a very small company still. I think we consciously want to keep it that way. We're about 16, 17 people, including the eCommerce side of it. Mainly, we're working with, sort of furthering the brand, and making sure that the brand is used in the right way. Then, of course, trying to engage the fan base.
Jonas: It was very smooth and immediately, since we got more resources, we could do more, and we hired additional people. We've since done much more content. We doubled down on doing content after joining Moomin officially. It's been quite a trip, and the Moomin in general has grown tremendously. I think in the past 12 years it's grown 10-fold. The eCommerce side of that has helped tremendously.
Felix: You say that the company has 60 or 70 people, is that what you said?
Jonas: No, sorry, 16 or 17.
Felix: That's even crazier. It's a global brand, you mentioned, one of the top brands, recognizable brands, in the world, ran by less than 20 people. What kind of advantages do you find that that has for a company that small to have such a big following and big brand?
Jonas: Well, I would say that one of the strongest side that we have, we're extremely agile. I'm not joking, we can come up with an idea on Monday, and by Friday it's like implemented throughout the organization, throughout the bigger organization with our licensees. It's very fast-moving. I think that's ...
Felix: Can you give me examples of something that you guys had done where you make a decision, and then how quickly you've been able to execute on it?
Jonas: Well, I'll mention the campaign that we're running this year. It's called OurSea, and what we're doing is we're ... It's a fundraiser for a foundation and their mission is to clean the Baltic Sea, which is the sea surrounding Finland basically. It's a very polluted sea, and we're collecting money for it. It came about as a brain child of the CEO of Moomin Characters, at a dinner he had with a member of the foundation. It didn't take us more than maybe a month, and then we have 50 people, licensees, large corporations, various partners sitting at the same table, coming up with what it should be.
Jonas: It went live about one and a half years later, as one of the largest fund raising campaigns ever done in Finland. We're well on our way to collecting the money for the cause. Moomin characters owns the rights to everything connected to the Moomins. We have the capability of implementing or deciding what to do on a moment's notice.
Felix: Do you have a lot like I guess partnerships to help execute on this because I can imagine the team that's at the core of it, making these decisions, and kind of managing all of it, but it sounds like it does require, maybe I'm incorrect, but does it require outsourcing or partners to execute on a lot of this?
Jonas: Of course. We have, of course, our excellent partner, Rights and Brands Licensing, which handles the world-wide licensing together with agents around the world, but when it comes to the eCommerce side, we have basically outsourced anything that isn't related to direct communication with the fans, or related to sort of the protection of the brands. We do in-house sort of approvals. We do in-house content, and so forth, but everything related to automated, all those kinds of things, a lot of putting in metadata about the products, things like that, all of that is outsourced.
Felix: Got it. Was this a change that happened during your tenure?
Jonas: No, I'd say that we pretty much implemented ... When we started, when we came to Moomin Characters, it was not really perhaps that digitally savvy, and we started implementing things which would allow us to work in a more agile way, just communicating because we have people in different parts of the world that we work with on a daily basis, so just the basics, starting using Google Calendars and Drive, and Drop Box, and Slack, and all of these, which has come quite in handy during these times since the transition from having people at the office to not having people at the office, working from home. It was basically ... There was no problems attached to this at all.
Felix: Right. Yeah, I'm sure that this global issue has certainly opened a lot of people's eyes to how they can be more ready to compete globally without requiring people to be on-site in the same space. When you are deciding what to outsource, you mentioned again, anything that's not related to direct communications with the fans, the protection with the brand. You guys are very proactive about outsourcing, so can you talk to us about how do you decide what is to be outsourced? What is that decision process like?
Jonas: Well, a rule of thumb for us is that you need to, because the brand is quite specific. Perhaps I'll just briefly share some of the what the brand is based on. The brand is based on a series of books that came out between 1945 and 1970, 1975. Written by an author and illustrator artist, Tove Jansson, a Swedish speaking Finn. The fan base has sort of grown over time since the 40s, and it has a huge following around the world. The turnover, in general for Moomin, goods sold worldwide is in the range of about 800 million, so it is sort of a global brand, and there are really super fans in all parts of the world.
Jonas: In order for us to be able to outsource something, it cannot have a ... Anybody who works with the brand needs to have a deep understanding of what it means, about the stories, and about what Moomin is about. For example, we could outsource our support. We have a number of people attached to our support, handling orders, and answering questions that people might have, but it would be very hard for us to outsource it since anybody who answers emails for us, or requests coming in, needs to have a deep understanding of the brand.
Jonas: We tried to do it, but what we found is we need to have people who basically who have grown up with the stories, who can come in and really talk to us, or who had a close connection to, so that if they have 10 questions during the week, which they need to have a deeper understanding to do that. Outsourcing something like that, the call center, or a support center somewhere, we just couldn't get it to work.
Felix: Got it. Once you do decide that something should be outsourced, how do you roll it out? How do you begin the process of outsourcing?
Jonas: Well, I would say that anything that we roll out needs to have a global approach, or sort of a global scope, so we virtually never do anything locally. If we roll something out, it's something that has to be able to be rolled out in other countries, so it needs to scale, it needs to have ... There needs to be an economic sense in it, so would we rather outsource it? It doesn't make sense from an economic standpoint.
Felix: When you do outsource, are you still also looking for people that completely understand the brand, or does it depend on the function of the role that you're outsourcing for?
Jonas: Well, I mean if it's something like fulfilling orders, it doesn't require specifically that you know the brand, although the ones that we work with now, they did know the brand, and they were thrilled to have us on board as we were their employees. I would say when it comes to like a technical support systems, or anything else where we sort of acquire tools with which we can then do it more effectively, and then we just look at whatever is the best one on the market, and has a global presence.
Felix: Got it. Anything that almost involves like personal communications with the fans, you want to keep in-house, which makes sense. Now, you mentioned that anything that you do roll out needs to be globally deployed. What does that mean? How do you think about how to roll something out when you need to support basically a global brand?
Jonas: Yeah, good question because when we started out, I dabbled in eCommerce. I'd consult companies on it. I'd never run an eCommerce company myself, and when we started, we thought, "Well, we'll go global from day one. How hard can it be?" It turned out that it's very hard from all aspects. If you look at it from like taxation aspect, or just fulfillment aspect, or from a border checking, like a toll, customs point of view, immediately when you go out of your own country, or just outside of your near areas, there's so many other things that come into play.
Jonas: We didn't take that into account back in 2014. We actually didn't start with Shopify. Shopify wasn't that well-known back in 2014. It was sort of just starting out, especially in Europe where we're located. We actually went with a very ... We had a lot of requirements in terms of currencies, and they need to be multi-language, and all kind of things. We chose a technology initially, which didn't scale at all. It was very high maintenance. It required a lot of development work, and it just slowed us down immensely.
Jonas: We tried to scale it from, for example, in Japan because Moomins has got the biggest following in the Nordic countries in Europe, and in Japan. We opened up another store in Japan and it just didn't work. We were just using all our resources, and just updating the site whereas our focus should have been in running the store, and in furthering the brand, making sales. We just decided then in 2014, and also when Moomin bought it that we will transition to a solution, which has much less maintenance, which allows to sort of focus on the business side of it.
Jonas: It was still a gamble back in 2015 to, at least in Europe, to start using something like Shopify because I think in Finland we were probably one of the first, if not the first one to start using it, and it didn't really have a European side to it then. A lot of things were very Canadian or US centric, but it paid off. It was completely the right solutions for us because it allowed us to free up resources, and just focus on building the brand, and building the store.
Felix: Got it. When you think about global deployment, you need to find solutions that will scale, and almost focus on how can we optimize this from the beginning. I think a lot of people that are starting businesses that are listening are not at the global scale. They are certainly not at the movie characters' scale, but when they do start thinking about how can they expand, they have to start thinking about how do we expand without adding in overhead, right?
Felix: You mentioned that when you guys initially tried to expand, there was a lot of maintenance, a lot of almost like manual massaging of your process to make it fit within other countries, other languages, but then once you've been able to rely on technology to handle all those differences, those changes, it sounds like that's when you're freed up to again focus back on the business.
Jonas: Yeah.
Felix: You mentioned a couple times now about how the core driver of the business, down to not just the sales that you guys have been able to generate, but also down to furthering the brand comes down to the content and the content marketing that you do. Tell us more about that. What is the content that you speak of?
Jonas: We're very heavy on text-based content. We still do traditional blog posts, and what we anticipated back in 2014, and the reason why we didn't immediately just put all our money into Facebook and Instagram advertising was that we just thought it was going to be a very crowded space, which we are seeing now, and that the prices would go up, and that people perhaps at some point would have ad fatigue. Using marketing, we see that if you use paid marketing, it's sort of use it once, and in the best case scenario, get a sale, or maybe an email out of it, but if you do content, if you do really good, engaging content, that will pay off today, tomorrow, next year, and in five years.
Jonas: We've actually been fortunate in that sense because we've put so much emphasis on text-based content, and on SEO on it that about 35% of our sales comes through organic search. Another 30% comes through paid, and then about 25% from our newsletters. These are all sort of content-driven in one way or the other. Basically, we said we were going to make two or three written pieces of content every week, which allows us to send a bi-weekly newsletter containing the best parts from the past two weeks, doing competitions, various things just to engage the fan base.
Jonas: We don't have a huge following on social media. It is significant, and of course it helps, but we've never really had that as a focus. We've seen that as sort of a byproduct of just putting content out there.
Felix: Sure. Yeah, I mean definitely not the norm these days to focus more on text-base and on SEO is not as shiny as social media is, so I think you're onto something about not following the crowd, which again, causes the saturation that you're talking about and drives the cost of acquiring new customers up.
Felix: You mentioned that the key to your text-based content strategy is to have engaging content. Can you say more about this? If someone is sitting down, and they're like, "Okay, I want to spend more time, I have a long-term play almost, and focus more on creating content, content marketing, and SEO." How should they start thinking about how to create content so that it is engaging?
Jonas: Well, the very first thing that we did when we put our content plan in place, we read the books, and sort of read everything we could about Moomin, and came up with 10 central values that we could create content around. The values, like universal values like family, and love, and adventure, and joy. We decided that all content that we create must revolve around these themes in one way or the other. In order for us to have sort of a red thread running through the whole thing.
Jonas: The reason why people engage with content is that there's something human, something with which you can sort of feel a connection to, and the reason why people follow say a brand is, apart from having a fear of missing out, but having connection with it, and having a consistent pulse from the brand. That's why it was very important that we commit to doing quite a lot of content, so that people would get a feel of what the brand was because before 2014, before we started creating anything digital or content online, the brand had been defined by various other partners connected to the Moomin brand.
Jonas: We felt that we need to sort of bring it back, and focus it on things which can be found in the original, the works by Tove Jansson. That's the way we thought about it, but as a general rule, in order to have followers, you need to tell them what you're all about, and stay on that narrow path, and stay true to that sort of path instead of being all over the place.
Felix: Yeah, so a couple things to say there. You mentioned staying that narrow path. I think this is a hard thing to do for a lot of people because we start to think, "Okay, if I'm going to go with content marketing strategy, I need to create a lot of content, and focus on quantity a lot of times." I think when you are focused on hitting certain numbers, like five blog posts a week, you start looking for ways to just fill up your content calendar, fill up your blog, and you start diverging from that path. Tell us more about how do you make sure that you are, again, following a narrow path, and being very clear about how you want your brand to be represented, especially in text form?
Jonas: Well, we say no to stuff. We do try to help. A big part of our job is to help the ones who are licensing good, so if I didn't say it already, we have about 750 licensees around the world creating awesome products and services around Moomin games, and theme parks, and different kinds of licensed items. We work with virtually all of them in one way or the other, but if we did everything that was requested, we would have no time to do it all, so we say no to a lot of things. If we can't craft a story around what's really engaging about the new thing ... We have a saying, "A new pen, that's not news, but what is the idea behind the pen? Why would you use this pen over another one if one is branded with Moomin, and one is just a regular pen?" You need to sort of find the deeper story behind the thing that you're writing about.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right.
Jonas: If you see what I mean.
Felix: Yeah, I think you're basically talking about selling the story rather than selling the product on just the face value of the product.
Jonas: Exactly. One example is there might be listeners who have Moomin mugs. It's sort of a phenomenon. It started in 1990s. The oldest company actually in Finland, called Facecups started manufacturing mugs which had illustrations of the Moomins on them. So far, about 100 of them have been created. I think it can partially be compared to collecting Starbucks mugs, or something like that. These are really nice mugs, and what we always say is that we're not selling mugs, we're sort of selling a nicer morning with your children because that's a big part of why people buy the mugs because they're lovely to drink your morning coffee out of. That's the way we try to create some of a deeper story than just say, "Buy a mug."
Felix: There are lots of people talking about the brand, representing the brand because they're selling different products. You mentioned over 750 licensees. How do you make sure that you're the main storyteller, or your story is the one that is kind of cutting through the noise, again, because there's so many other people talking about the brand? How do you make sure that you, I'm not going to say control the conversation, but at least dominate it so that the other licensees or all the other partners that are involved, know where to look for, for direction?
Jonas: That was a big part of creating the site, sort of give us a spine, or give us sort of one place from where to act, from where to communicate. I think actually, we're not controlling the story. I think the fans actually are much more controlling the story because they're the one engaging with it, and telling it, retelling it, in the way that they want, so there's huge amounts of user-generated content being created every day. Much more than what our licensees do, but I think it took about two, three years for us to convince the licensees to work with us on crafting the messaging.
Jonas: It used to be, I said it used to be all over the place, and we wanted to bring it, make a narrow path, sort of bring the focus closer to the original stories, and the values that we set out to craft content around. It's something that we discuss every day. I mean we get story ideas. We have licensees coming in saying, "We want you to push these T-shirts," and if, for example, and if we can't really craft a compelling story around that, we don't see that we perhaps pursue that, as steeply at least, maybe we do it in some other way, but the choice is from day to day. A lot of the licensees really work with us on it, and we work with finding the right audience for them. We do a lot of segmenting, and trying to find the right audience for them, and working together with them on doing that.
Felix: Once you are able to figure out the theme, the story you want to tell, the feeling that you want to convey, when it comes down to the actual putting the pen to paper, who is the one ... How do you make sure that a content is being written? You mentioned that you have this kind of stuff in-house. What's the team like that creates the content?
Jonas: We have four content producers, which work with content in various forms to make videos. They go out and interview people. They rewrite like communiques from companies. It varies a lot, but they're actually old friends and goes really well together, both really amazing people that have been creating content for close to 15, 20 years, and really know their stuff. Of course, they're all Moomin fans themselves as well. Then, we have one person handling the marketing side of Moomin, sort of making sure that the right messages go out in the right channels in the right way.
Jonas: Three, four years back we really put an emphasis on hiring more people on the content side, and we'll probably hire more. When we started out, we would just physically have a background in journalism, and then one other person who was doing content, aside from running the store. Now, we have a much more holistic approach to the whole thing.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Got it. Now, when you are working with writers, can you talk to us about how it's best to work with writers? What kind of input do they need to do their job?
Jonas: Yeah, good question. I think a good writer can craft a story out of anything. We all know the foundation that we need to craft it based on, so the original story isn't ... We can't divert too much from that. Yeah, I don't know. Basically, if you talk to people, if you interview them, or get a bit of background, you can craft a story based virtually just based on that.
Felix: You mentioned too that obviously the goal with the content is for SEO purposes. Any advice there for anyone out there that's starting out with creating content for the first time? What are some best practices on making sure that you're creating content pieces that will actually rank in search engines?
Jonas: Well, at least starting out, what we found, we work with many other brands as well through the writer agency which is our partner. What we find is that a lot of the legacy brands when they come in, they've never virtually done any content at all online. What you need to do is you need to put out something. If there is a site, put some analytics on it, and let it run for three, six months, something like that. Then you start analyzing where are people coming from? What are people interested in, just based on search keywords? Make sure that you start crafting up more content around those keywords, which bring in more people hopefully, and then you'll get more keywords to work with.
Jonas: Fill out all the metadata. Do the nitty gritty work to make sure that Google indexes it correctly, headings and having it well structured. Shopify is quite well-structured just out of the box. The same thing for Word Press or Drupal, or what you're running. This is the eternal question of the Google moves in mysterious ways, so you never really know what's around the corner. Like now, since a lot of things are search-based, or voice search-based, we try to make sure that everything is structured, like technically correctly so that you have headings, and you have paragraphs, and you have all these things so you can index it much more accurately.
Felix: You mentioned that you promote the content through your newsletter?
Jonas: We do, yes. We send it out bi-weekly. It has some great opening rate. It's about 30%. Click through rate is great too. It brings in about 25% of our turnover, so we put a lot of emphasis on getting more emails through Facebook leads, various places on the site, and at offline events, anywhere we can get them, otherwise we basically have to go through Google, or Facebook, or somebody else.
Jonas: Newsletters allows us to have the direct contact with people, and it's in a way ... It's owned media, and we're very big on owned media, and we hope, together with the other brands as well that we're working with, build more and more of our own media so we can start cross-promoting from Moomin to other brands, and from other brands to Moomin and so forth, also through the newsletter. As a general tip, a lot of people I talk with who are starting out, they're like, "Why would I do email? Isn't that dead? All the money is in social media." I'm always like, "No, every email address that you get is gold." I think we have an acquisition cost per email of about 80 cents, and we calculate that we get about annually six Euros per email that we send out.
Felix: Six, seven times the return.
Jonas: Yeah.
Felix: When you are sending out these newsletters, it sounds like you're sending them out to promote content pieces. How do they lead to actual sales?
Jonas: Well, people click through, but we try ... I think every third newsletter we lead with a commercial aspect. The other ones are more like, "Hey, you could win five sweatshirts for your friends and you," or something else. "There's a new theme park just outside of Tokyo." These kind of soft things, which lead people into it. There's always a commercial element in all our newsletters, and we ...
Felix: It's like you're linking it directly to product pages, or you just ...
Jonas: Exactly. Yes.
Felix: Okay.
Jonas: Yes.
Felix: The newsletter's broken up into like a content piece section, updates, but then also specifically to feature, and then drive traffic to like a product page?
Jonas: Exactly. The way it's built up is that we always have on top, we have the main news story from the past week, and then two smaller ones. Then, we have three products, which we feature because we have ... Every year we have about 200 to 300 new products, and so we feature, every week, three new products or the top ones from last week. Then, we also have some cross-promotion to other stories that we run, and then we have a recap of smaller stories that say we saw something really cool on Twitter, or something fun on Instagram, or the New Yorker just wrote a piece on Tove Jansson, so we sort of linked smaller stories as a compilation of different small news articles in one place. We have a certain structure for the emails. People know what to expect, and to click on.
Felix: Got it. You mentioned briefly that you also have used Facebook leads to collect emails for your newsletter. How well has that worked?
Jonas: I would say it's worked really well. I think for us on a weekly basis, I think we get maybe 500, something around that. It's highly cost-effective as I mentioned. The return on investment is like seven times, and since we have an integration, so Facebook has background integrations with various email services. The leads basically go into our service automatically. The good thing is with Facebook leads is that it's able to check who is already subscribed, so it doesn't show the leads to people who are already subscribed to the newsletter list.
Felix: What are the ads for this look like? I've seen Facebook leads before as an option to drive users to sign up for an email list, but what do your ads look like, that's been able to be so effective? What incentivizes people to want to give their email address to join your newsletter?
Jonas: To be honest, I think we've actually run the same one since Facebook enabled it. They're characters in the Moomin story. One is Moomintroll, which is the head character, and his kind of girlfriend, Snork Maiden, and the image that we use, we've used it from the start, is them hugging. I can't quite remember what he said, but I think it says like, "Join us, or Join the Moomin family," or something like that and, "Be the first one to find out about Moomin news, events, and the best offers." Something like that, but we don't have AB, we just have the one message. I think for anybody who's a Moomin fan, that's about it, what they want.
Felix: Right. There's something to be said about the power of building up the brand makes it a lot easier to get these aversions for cheap. I think the investment in that certainly is paying off. You're organic strategy definitely will pay off in your paid strategy causing it to be cheaper, so I think you're certainly seeing that play out here. You said you have a couple of tools that you guys use, Google Drive, and the Google suite of products. You mentioned Slack. Are there any other apps that you use that you recommend other people check out that are on Shopify or off of Shopify?
Jonas: Well, I mentioned one, or several but Printful is one that we use for ... We're not actually using it for Moomin directly on the Moomin store, but we run another store called scandibrand.com which has other brands as well. It's also built on Shopify, and it's connected to Printful. You seldom see something work that seamlessly, and really just deliver. Basically, the store runs itself, so Printful is print-on-demand service, which has manufacturing capabilities in I think Mexico, and the US, and Latvia, here in Europe.
Jonas: It just worked perfectly. It fulfills orders come in, they get fulfilled. The customer gets all the information they need, and it just runs perfectly. I was actually amazed when we set it up how well it plays. We basically don't touch it. We just send traffic to it, and do content for it, and then the orders just come in. Since there's no real inventory risk with it, everything is done print-on-demand. It's just a really good kind of side project for us.
Felix: Awesome.
Jonas: Printful is really ... I've spoken with a number of people there, and they're really, really ... I think the run a really nice service. I have a couple of ones which I could sort of bring up because they helped us tremendously. When we first started out with Shopify, we had a plethora of apps. You can go a little bit crazy with the apps just because there's so much of them, but the problem is what you end up doing is you create silos. Silos for reviews or let's say silos for abandoned cart emails, or silos for any data you collect.
Jonas: We thought at one point, Mailchimp, which is a very good service. It was just we wanted to bring everything together, and we were looking at different alternatives, and we ran across a company called, I think it was called Receiptful initially. Another company which we use. I think we were one of the first companies started using it is a company called, it's now called Campaign Monitor Commerce. It was then called Receiptful or Conversio.
Jonas: What it does is it brings together data from various sources, from search, or from browsing history, or from reviews, or from just purchase history, and it crafts messages which are unique to every customer, or all visitors that come to the site and in one way or the other leave their email. We were struggling earlier with having a lot of different silos, and also running our newsletters sort of separate from the other functions like reviews and stuff. Campaign Monitor Commerce just pulled that all together, and we had really good results with it.
Jonas: Basically, since it just runs in the background and crafts the individual emails for everybody, we just set it up, and make sure that the messages are very in line with the brand, and then just works its magic in the background. There are a lot of alternatives, Collabio, for example, but I think it's just a little bit more cost-effective for us. We've been super happy with that, and couple that with emails, we were somewhat struggling because there's so many emails that you can send out Shopify, we struggled maintaining them, and making them pretty because if you don't know Shopify coding, actually coding the emails can be a little bit daunting.
Jonas: There's an app called OrderlyEmails which it's a huge time saver for us. It's like a plug and play email designer tool, and a great value for money. I think it's like $49 one time fee, and then you just install it. You do all your emails, and that's it. It's been great for us.
Felix: Awesome, so shop.moomin.com is a website. What are some of your big goals for 2020?
Jonas: Well, we have great plans, not only for the eCommerce. What we're doing on the eCommerce side is we're consolidating because we have other stores. I mentioned Japan earlier on. We also have official stores in China, and Korea, and in the UK, and what we're doing now is we're creating a mutual front for all of them, so moving more towards on the commerce so people will have a similar kind of experience, and can engage with all of the official online presences of Moomin in the same way, and having returns to different places. You don't have to send it back to the same place from where you got it if it would be closer to send it to another store closer by.
Jonas: We're in a consolidating phase right now, and sort of working more closely with the other stores. In general, for the Moomin brand, we're of course focusing on our OurSea campaign, but we have big plans. We're expanding greatly in Asia, especially in China, and we hope, so far, I mean the past couple of years we've had a growth rate of about 15, 20% for Moomin characters, and we think that will sort of be our course in the next years as well, regardless of this situation that we have now, but it's sort of a blip, just a small blip in our history.
Felix: Awesome. Thank you again so much for coming on and sharing your experience, Jonas.
Jonas: Thank you. Great being here.