Felix: Today I'm joined by Jeanne and Diana from the Groomsman Suit, the Groomsman Suit makes high quality suits and tuxedos you will own for less than a cost of a rental for the big day and beyond and it was started in 2016 and is based out of Chicago and is a multi million dollar business. Welcome Jeanne, and Diana.
Jeanne: Hi Felix, thanks.
Felix: So the idea behind the business was born from what have you planning a 2013, New Year's Eve wedding. So tell us more about that. Where did the idea behind the business come from?
Jeanne: Sure, this is Jeanne and the idea really came from planning my own wedding. Like most ideas, you go through and experience and realize that it really isn't the best experience and those are the best moments to really create a concept that will work for others as well. So when I got married, my husband and I just decided to do black tie, it was New Year's Eve wedding and I sort of handed that job responsibility off to him with everything else that I was planning. He went to the typical big box store and set all of the nine groomsmen up with rentals. So it wasn't until after the wedding that I realized that each of the guys had spent around $250 for a one time wear, and frankly they didn't really look or fit very well.
So that was sort of the aha moment of really, at first it was like, "What have I done?" I feel so bad that I made them go through that experience and thought maybe I dropped the ball and just didn't do enough research to find out a better option. But after looking into it, I realized there really wasn't a better option and this is the process that most guys go through getting suited up for weddings. So I have an extensive product development, technical design background. Diana has an incredible business background. So we partnered together and decided to try to create a better option for men.
Felix: Got it. So 2013, New Year's Eve wedding, 2016 was one of business launch. So I'm assuming during this time, you were kind of planning this thing out. Tell us more about that, what were you doing during a time where you recognized that there was a problem that you had, that you went through that you recognize other people had and how did that idea as you started kind of gaining traction? When did you as you start putting the kind of pedal to the metal and make this thing a reality?
Jeanne: Oh, great question. So a few months after my wedding, my husband and I lived in Ohio at the time, Columbus, Ohio and while I loved the idea of sort of creating a concept around this, it really seemed a little bit daunting resource wise. So a few months after my wedding, my husband received a promotion with his company, and we moved to New York. So that's really when the resources opened up, and the possibility of developing this concept became a reality. So it took a while to find the right production partner, manufacturer, the materials and really fine tune the product.
What's really interesting is in the suiting industry, a lot of suiting that you find in retail shops even still today are wholesale products. So there are designer brands, there's huge markup along the way and by the time it gets into the store the customer is really purchasing something that's gone through layers of markup and margin increase. So that's really where we realized there was opportunity to provide this direct to consumer option where we could find a supplier that could manufacture a really high quality suit and we could retail it for around the same price as a rental. So it took a lot of time to develop the product and that's really that gap in time between the wedding and the launch. Then it was about partnering with Diana to really build out this business model and find our customers.
Felix: Got it. So you mentioned that your suits are priced at the same price that will cost to rent one. Do you ever get kind of like incredulous responses from your prospective customers like, how can it be this? How can it cost this little for something? How did you overcome that?
Jeanne: That was the that was the number one barrier we had when launching. I think the first thing we always got asked is do you offer refunds for returns? Because I don't really trust that I'm buying a great suit here at under $200 price point. So yes, that was a hurdle we had to overcome, very quickly we decided the best way to overcome that is to really just say, "Hey, we'll ship you a suit or tuxedo for free, try it on, check it out. If you don't love it, you can send it back shipping is on us." So we launched a free trial which was an expensive test to do early on in the stage that we were at, because we were really risking a huge investment in shipping products that we weren't getting pre paid for like you would on a normal retail website.
But we knew that if we got the product into people's hands, they were going to be blown away and they were going to keep it. That's really pretty much the key to our early growth was being able to ship out products quickly to customers that were interested, super low risk on the customer side and then a huge reward on our end of people realizing that we were this great new option.
Felix: Got it. So the free trial which reduced, pretty much really eliminated any risk for your prospective customers. You mentioned earlier, the wording that you use was an expensive test, is this no longer a common objection that you get from your prospective customers that they cannot believe that it is the price it's at?
Diana: I think customers are still super pleasantly surprised by it all. I mean, we look back on it and I think part of the reason why Jean mentioned super expensive as you're starting out and you're building your company, you are not very sophisticated. I mean, we're not doing this anymore but we were literally sending products out without having pre authorized credit card information and all that stuff. But it was a risk that we knew we were willing to take because we believed in the product so much and I think we still have a super high conversion rate on those free trials, it's actually become, they've even become more important now that so many people are planning their weddings from home and COVID has prevented people from going into stores.
Felix: Mm-mm. Make sense, we'll definitely get to that in a second. So with the free trial that you are running, you mentioned that, yeah, you weren't sophisticated, you didn't take a payment in case you needed to charge them or any other just sort of that. What's changed since and how have you kind of refined this process? I think there are probably other listeners out there that have this similar issue where people just need to see it first in order to believe what they're purchasing and a free trial is a great way to do that. So what are some things that you've learned along the way that have helped you improve the conversion rate or maybe the process of doing a free trial?
Diana: Yeah, so we've built out I think part of our success too is offering services to our couples. We like to think that we're more than just our suiting, but that we're a service to anyone planning their wedding attire. So the free trial is one way that we serve people, our customers, and give them a great experience in wedding suit shopping and making it really convenient and affordable. I mean, that's been a whole evolution for what the free trial has looked like from literally sending products out to anyone to now we have sort of a customized checkout that authorizes credit card information to make sure that... I mean we once had, and everybody has these stories when you're building a company but we once had a customer we sent hundreds of dollars worth of product and he had used a gift card that only had like $5 on it.
So it was like, you learn these things as you go. So obviously that process became much more buttoned up and refined, but we also now send free fabric swatches as another sort of point of engagement with customers planning their wedding style. So there's like a whole sort of funnel touch points that we've built to bring people along in their wedding planning process, and then ultimately, the final sort of service that we provide is group coordination.
So typically our customers start out by requesting free fabric swatches then they could transition to seeing a whole suit in person and then they're ready to register their group. We've really identified and sort of streamline this customer journey and built email flows and drips that help kind of bring them along, and just a whole series of communication that is supportive of transitioning them from one stage to another.
Felix: I think the big lesson I'm hearing from you here is that I think what I see sometimes entrepreneurs get stuck on is that they try to optimize like too early. You had mentioned that you were not sophisticated, you just try to solve the problem in front of you, which was that people didn't trust that it could be this price and still a great suit. Was this kind of mentality, this mindset of just trying your best and moving forward and getting something out there instead of trying to plan the perfect free trial, the kind of free trial system that you have set up today. Is it on purpose or was it just a coincidence?
Jeanne: I think it was just out of necessity, you're right. I will say when we started the company it was really daunting to think about competing with other businesses that felt more sophisticated. We would even say, "Well, how is this person doing a free trial and collecting payment information?" We felt like it was really daunting but Shopify is amazing in the fact that, well, for multiple reasons but the App Store, it's incredible, right? So a lot of what we did early on was find really affordable, some free apps that allowed us to sort of piece together what our bigger vision was, and we always thought to ourselves, well, it was kind of a band aid approach. We wanted to offer a sophisticated service but we couldn't afford a really sophisticated and custom platform and so we found our band aids, and we would just do some research about these amazing apps, connect them, play around with them, some worked, some didn't.
But I do a great app for any entrepreneur starting out that maybe is interested in offering a free trial option is the DeferPay app, it was wonderful and allowing us to send a link to our customers that could fill out the payment information, we then securely stored it, sent them out their items, they would then get back to us about whether or not they wanted to keep them, what items they wanted to keep what they wanted to return and then we could go into that app and charge their card on file. That worked really great for the slow free trial requests in the beginning, as that started to become a really big thing for us, that's when we would sort of evolve that process and try to find something else that worked.
At that point you hope, your volume is getting higher, your revenues are higher as well and you start to have a little bit more cash to play with. So that's really our philosophy with almost every service we provide and Shopify allowed us to do that.
Diana: We never really have anything fully fleshed out. Felix, where you think that's where a lot of founders and entrepreneurs get stuck is feeling like it has to be 100% buffed out. We really, I kind of joke with Jeanne, it's like, I've never been so okay with starting out and doing things in a mediocre way because we could have spent all this time building out the perfect free trial system and nobody would have taken advantage of it. We would spend so much time and resources and it's actually been a great philosophy for us as we've continued to build the business and just test things like, it's helped us expand our product categories significantly, because we tested small quantities of accessories to see how popular they were, and when we found out they were popular, then we would figure out how to produce them on a larger scale and everything like that.
Felix: Yeah, I think this idea of just being okay, starting out with it being mediocre is a great lesson. I think that the kind of issue is counter to the ambitious nature of most entrepreneurs where they want everything to be amazing. I'm assuming this is kind of a muscle that you both have worked out over time. So how do you know now when it's good enough to kind of cut it off for now and move on to something else and then maybe come back later to try to improve it? How do you know when it's good enough?
Diana: That's a great question. I think we're always kind of analyzing. I think for us, everything kind of comes back to numbers and profitable and conversion rates. So we are pretty data driven. I think sometimes we're almost as much of a tech company as we are a retail company. So we know what conversion rates are on all sorts of types of engagement. We also know what the ROI is on various efforts, and so we're always quick to turn things off if they're not working. Especially with marketing, we've released them. But then there have been honestly, I think we're still in the phase where a lot of times what we're testing especially from a customer facing perspective, is really interesting to customers and they do absorb it.
I think right now we're facing a very interesting situation where we rolled out virtual appointments in March, and those took off like crazy, and they have become as popular or more popular than our actual physical showroom appointments. That is something that we're still watching very closely and we don't have an answer yet. But like, will that continue to be important or will that be something that we would reduce the time and resources on as people kind of get back to the way they used to shop and they'd like to go into showrooms? We don't know, but yeah, that's kind of how we keep looking at things and analyzing and comparing them to other things that we have, other avenues that we have going on and we're still a pretty small team so we don't have time to continue something that's not bringing in value.
Jeanne: I also think customers will tell you a lot about what you need to be doing better. So that's where we sort of, or if we're missing a product and that's sort of the number one way of testing something is really just listening to the customers. If we feel like there's a gap in customer service, that's where we start to focus or a gap in product if customers are... Customers will ask us for things that we don't have on our website and if we hear that enough, or we see that they're searching for certain keywords that we're not providing a product for that's really where we focus our time and energy because you already know that it's something people want.
Felix: Got it. So brings us all the way back to the beginning. So we mentioned earlier that the business was started in 2016. I think off of the backs of a Kickstarter campaign, tell us more about that. What was the Kickstarter campaign? What were the goals of that campaign?
Jeanne: Yeah, the Kickstarter campaign is pretty simple. We just wanted to sell 50 suits, I think was our goal so the dollar amount was, I think, 7500. We did very minimal marketing. So we put together a video, and then some package deals for people and really, we just wanted to know if people would buy a suit online because at the time, if you think back to 2016, suiting was something scary to buy online still, because sizing and fit is such a thing. Now, you fast forward to today and everybody buys everything online. So it's not as scary but that was the biggest question mark in our minds. Will people buy suiting online when there's millions of stores around the US that sell suits that they can hop into?
So we quickly realized that people do want to buy suiting online because we sold 100 suits in 30 days and exceeded our goal by I think we doubled what our goal was supposed to be. So that was an exciting moment for us.
Felix: Got it. So once that Kickstarter campaign ended and it sounded like the main purpose of it was to validate that people were comfortable buying suits online, especially for a special occasion. What was the next step after that since you had $11,000 pledged from selling those 100 suits? What was the next step?
Diana: So we had to get a website. I mean, we'd already started a website but we had some things that we wanted to kind of buff out and that's when we started our website on Shopify, our store and so it was I think in May when we... The Kickstarter ended in March and was in like, end of April or early May by the time we really launched our full fledged website. It's been crazy. I mean, we've worked really hard but I think we've also gotten lucky in a lot of ways. Jeanne and I have childhood best friends, I was at that wedding that she had, I was actually in that wedding that she had the tuxedo trouble. She neglected to say this, but she was also the one returning everything the day after her own wedding, which was like a real aha moment.
So it was just great timing that we were both in a place in our lives where we could join forces on this and when we launched the full fledged website in May of 2016. I mean, we've really been scrambling to keep up with it. We've grown to be a multi million dollar company in a couple short years and in 2018, we were facing the problem that everybody's like, "Oh, this is a great problem to have." But we were literally selling out of everything we had which was also very stressful. So it's been quite the journey and we now have 10 employees and a fulfillment center and are just continuing to grow and we've evolved the brand to offer not only men suiting, but we also now offer women's which we're really proud about because women are wanting an alternative to a wedding dress or bridesmaids dress. So it's been really fun.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So after that Kickstarter campaign, how did you guys get your first customers?
Jeanne: Well, Diana could probably speak to that more but we it was really grassroots, sharing with our friends and family and then you go to the source of who are the leaders in weddings and those are your wedding planner professionals and photographers and these people that are in constant contact and interaction with engaged couples. So Diana was sitting at the table emailing hundreds of thousands of wedding planners, industry professionals and we just basically said, "Can we send you a suit? Can we send you a suit?" Or swatches, or "Can I hop on a call with you?"
Diana is the most outgoing, bubbly, friendly personality and she really connected with so many of these planners who are still in our network today and refer us to consistent weddings and that was really the driver for the volume of orders and referrals we got early on. Then what happens is, as you outfit these wedding parties, and you provide this really personalized customer service, the guys just love it and they have such a good experience that they share that with their friends, or when they then get married they use us again. So we have this incredible network effect and kind of a viralness, natural viral scenario where we didn't pay for marketing, we just had to treat our customers really well.
Felix: Makes sense.
Diana: Yeah, I think we kind of like looked at each other and we were like, "Well, we have no marketing dollars. So what can we do?" We can email thousands of wedding planners and also we think we made the right decision early on to focus on SEO because again, we have no marketing dollars, what is the gift that keeps on giving? Website traffic, so you can slowly start that ball rolling, gaining strength and important keywords, and we've done a ton of blogging and writing for even other websites to backlink to us. But I think the biggest thing too, was the network effect that you mentioned that we didn't really anticipate.
Felix: Got it. So just to kind of recap that, the network effect that was kicked off by you getting in front of these or rather getting your product in the hands of these couples that are getting married, and their groomsmen and bridesmaids were seeing the great product you're putting out there so obviously would want it for their weddings too or at least would have top of mind when someone and their network was talking about it. But that started first by you kind of just hustling and reaching out to cold emailing sounded like to these wedding planners, as you get those referrals. So what was your approach? I think that this is a really important point. Because sometimes I think the approach when people who are first getting started is that they think they have to win a customer one by one but you found ways to kind of win people that had audiences or not audiences but actual clients that were your kind of ideal clients as well. So how did you approach them when you found a wedding planner that would have been a good fit?
Diana: Yeah. So I mean, we when we looked at like, okay, we know who our audience is, but who are the people that influence that audience? Because we don't have the brand visibility yet and we can't pay to put ads in front of that audience directly, but we can build relationships with influencers of that audience. We can build relationships with that audience directly through wedding expos, through our current customers that we have that refer us to their friends. We can build those relationships within that audience but then there's like a periphery of relationships that we can build on that with the wedding planner industry.
The wedding planning industry has its own sort of virality too around... For wedding planners I think suiting is not a sexy thing to help their couples plan. It's like it's a necessary thing and it's definitely sloppy suiting has the power to ruin wedding photos but it's not like the dress, it's not the venue. So for us we really realized with wedding planners, it's like if we can make the wedding planner feel comfortable with who they're handing the guys over to in the wedding party, who they're giving suiting to make sure that those guys just show up and they look great on the wedding day, we have won with them for a lifetime.
I mean, literally, we have relationships from that first year with great wedding planners that we love that we've never even met face to face but are so happy with how we help their wedding parties look on the day of the wedding that it's just enough for them.
Felix: Make sense. So let's take it back to a couple of things you mentioned too, which was around SEO, I think this is a topic that a lot of entrepreneurs know is beneficial, but it just seems kind of daunting, highly technical, or takes a long time to kind of get that pay off. Did either of you have experience with SEO before you got started?
Diana: No, not a single. We ordered some SEO for dummies and we just like we're learning. I mean, Jean had the fashion background and I had some business background, but as far as web development and tech, that's really we learned as we went along. I think that the key for us there was we really identified, we just started small. We identified 20 keywords that would be great for us, if we started ranking well for them and we doubled down on those in blogging, in what we called our company and our website. I think it was by October, we started showing up on the first page for those few important keywords, groomsmen suits, wedding suits, and then we could like slowly evolve and expand the keywords that we were targeting and then we became more sophisticated and identifying a structure of keywords that certain keywords, were focusing on certain pages and it's just gone from there.
Felix: Got it. So when you mention you found keywords that you wanted to double down on that you thought would be great kind of, high value traffic to bring to your site. For people out there that don't know much about SEO, what's the first step that once you've identified some keywords that will work really well, that will bring the right kind of traffic to your site? How do you tactically create the plan, or what is the plan? Or what are the things you do day to day to make sure that you rank for those keywords?
Diana: Yeah, well, I would say if I could do it over again, because now I know so much more, I think the strategy would be looking... which we did. We looked at competitors, we knew what we wanted to be and who our audience was and how they were searching. So we looked at a whole range of keywords and you really have to find the keywords that A, make the most sense for your brand and B, might not be so hard to start ranking for. So there's like a competitive score that can help you identify. So I think looking for some of those maybe less or competitive words early on to start ranking for.
But then if I could go back and do it, I would have looked at our website and I would have taken all of our pages that we have, all of our sort of collection pages, all of our product pages, all of our you got from our about us page to our contact page and I would have just allocated two keywords to each page that I would have written body copy around that I would have maybe rejiggered the page title to be specific to the alternative text on the photos to the meta description.
Now I know and we have gone back and done this, but if I would have come up with a framework of keywords to target for each page and then made all of those various components on each page align. I think we would have even had more SEO success. But we've done very well. I mean, we're four years in and we're pushing 80,000 to 100,000 visitors a month to our website, which I think we're pretty proud of for not spending much in doing that, and doing a lot of it internally.
Felix: Makes sense. So you mentioned that you did writing for other websites, basically like guest blogging, is it still a strategy that you employ today?
Diana: Yeah, definitely, backlinks are huge, being an expert on your product is huge and the way you do that is by contributing to other platforms when they want to write about wedding suiting, we need to be the person that's giving them information.
Felix: Can you say more about the how, if especially for someone that is just starting out that doesn't have a recognizable brand yet. Back in the day when you are doing this for the first time this guest blogging, first of all, how do you find these websites or these platforms that would be a good fit for getting a back link from?
Diana: Yeah, I mean, very simply, it was with our wedding planners. All the wedding planners that we were reaching out to most of them all have their own websites and they're so interested in adding content to their own personal blog pages and oftentimes what they don't have is men's wedding style guides. So it was very attractive for them to be able to say, "We will write something for your website." Like let us write a little tip about X, Y and Z and obviously we hyperlink the Groomsman Suit in that and so that was like super easy.
I mean, especially for these smaller influencers, sort of like grassroots micro influencer groups, if you will, they love getting content that you'll provide to them. Then as you build more brand recognition, then you can go to the big websites, the big wedding platforms, the big wedding publications and say, you'll be more recognizable and you'll be a bigger brand to be that expert for them on wedding suiting. So I mean, we started small, but I mean, we'd still pitch it to the big brands too and they'd shoot us down in the beginning but we would also offer to send them products and eventually we worked our way into having good relationships with editors and stuff like that.
Felix: Yeah, certainly the name of the game. So just get an understanding of the kind of hustle that's involved in this, how many blogs or guest blogs were you or were you as a team writing.
Diana: It's funny Jeanne's writing a lot of now, hundreds, we've written hundreds. Our blog, we have some blog pages that we've written about what to wear as a wedding guest. That is a blog topic that brings in several thousand visitors to our website a month. People search for that and they want to know as a guest, how they wear. While conversion of that visit isn't super high, it puts our brand in front of our demographic problem, hopefully, we hope a lot of people who haven't gotten married yet that are looking to find something to wear to their friend's wedding, they come across this helpful tip on our website and then they remember us when it's time for their wedding.
Jeanne: I think it's daunting I think for a lot of... It was for myself, like Diana did the vast majority of the writing to start. If you don't think of yourself as a great writer, it can be very intimidating to start writing articles about different topics and posting them on your blog. But, if you just start once a week and decide at the beginning of the week, what the topic is you want to talk about and then it doesn't have to be really long article, it doesn't have to be perfect, it's going back to that when we were talking about not worrying and about perfection, and just understanding that this is part of the process and you'll get better and better at it. It was hard to sort of think of topics at the beginning and now like every day a topic will pop up that we feel like we need to write about just based on a customer question.
So we started I think with two articles a week, maybe once a week, and then it grew and grew and grew. Right now we try to do at least one a week and then we have now reached out to writers of complementary businesses, wedding planners, even fitness experts that maybe want to write a blog for us for backlinks for them. We've even built out an entire program to allow us to advertise sort of these services that we offer of either co-writing a blog or sharing blogs on our website from other people and it's called our insider program. That developed over the years of realizing that we have services outside of our just fulfilling customer orders and coordinating groups, we offer suit loans to wedding planners and photographers that want to do styled shoots and that's a huge part of the industry is just providing products to these people that are just creating beautiful content, and we get to be part of that and half the time people are so thrilled to realize that they don't have to purchase a suit for a one time styled shoot with a model that they've hired.
These are expenses that those professionals deal with and we're alleviating that stress for them. Then also sharing their beautiful photos that they share with us afterwards. So it's kind of a neat way to where we've now managed those relationships in a little bit more formal of a way and get people to sign up on our professional insider program.
Felix: Got it. Now, you mentioned to me, I think before we started recording that you've seen 300% growth year over year, and one of the key tenants or one of the key focuses that you have as a business is to focus on profitability. So things like making sure you can get the marketing you need through SEO without requiring a budget. What do you think has helped you? What are the things you think have helped you maintain profitability as you scale up the business?
Diana: Yeah, I mean, we haven't had to spend a lot of money on marketing. Jeannie and I are pretty frugal. We grew up pretty, in a small town in Michigan. So we've never been accustomed to spending a ton of money on anything and so together we like to do the most we can with less. So the fact that we haven't had to burn a ton of our budget in marketing and to grow this business to get sales is truly the key to our profitability. Let me tell you, being a profitable business these days, especially a young E-commerce company is very rare and it pays off in so many other ways down the road.
I think too as you're starting your business, you really have to be cognizant of what you are spending in marketing and what your return on investment is there because it's a slippery slope and it's really easy to still be like, "The more money I spend, the more sales I'm going to get." But if you are having to spend a ton of money in marketing, just to get sales, then you really have to ask yourself like, "Is this good product market fit? Am I building a business? Did I create something that is truly wanted or am I just spending money to make people want it?"
So I think we got really lucky with that early on and not needing to spend that money. Now we're in the place where we've done a lot of testing, we have some cash, now we're in the place where we are spending more money in marketing but our returns are amazing. Any agency that we work with is always super impressed with the average return we're getting on social ads or paid advertising because we've kind of organically built into that.
Felix: Make sense. Have there been things that you spent money on so far in terms of marketing that just didn't work at the time?
Diana: Yeah, I mean, I think we've tested some various things on social media that have been kind of a hit on us. We're a weird brand because we've tested different agencies that just weren't a great fit for us because we are a weird brand in the sense that we don't do sales, we don't offer discounts to get customers. Because we're sort of a single lifetime purchase., I mean, we do have repeat purchases when people share us with their friends, and then they're in their wedding, and then they need another suit because they're groomsmen. But we don't have the luxury of offering major discounts to get that first sale, and then hoping we'll be profitable on the second or third purchase, and that's tough for a lot of marketing companies and a lot of marketing techniques to wrap their head around. Everybody likes to do like 10% off to join our mailing list and like all this stuff, it's like we can't do that. I think we've learned a lot of things, like who we can and can't work with.
Jeanne: Yeah, it's really easy and for anyone starting out, it's very easy to get caught up in the hype of maybe talking to a marketing expert or an agency and we used to get on calls with different agencies and hear these huge budget numbers and promises of ROI. Those I think are where we feel the biggest disappointment is anytime it sounds a little too good to be true, or you feel like it might be a stretch is when you kind of want to say, oh, go to the tried and true thing, build your business up in little increments, what we've always thought is one profitable sale is better than 500 that are unprofitable because actually then have cash to use to then make another sale and build on that.
So it's like, you just have to really think, am I just trying to throw money at this to feel like it's growing fast enough? Or is this $5 ads investment going to make me 10 and then I can spend that 10 and make 20. So it's that's really where our head has been and social media has been great for us at that because you can sort of have whatever small or large budget you like and grow it intentionally as opposed to just kind of like jumping ahead to these huge ad spends that you feel like you might have to do just to compete, and it's just not necessary.
Felix: Got it. One thing you mentioned to us too, was about how because you're such a kind of customer, mostly word of mouth referral based business where people are seeing your product out there. You've built basically a really customer service based company and focus on you mentioned to us exceeding expectations. Can you say more about that? What are certain ways that you have found successful in terms of exceeding your customers expectations?
Jeanne: Yeah, I think we just every point of contact we've just tried to make really high touch. Early on when Diana and I were talking to every single customer personally through our email accounts or over the phone, we realized that men are really underserved when it comes to going through this experience of getting suited up for weddings. So with very little effort of creating a good experience which just had to do with following up, giving them sizing assistance when they weren't really sure what size to order, fast and free shipping, fast and free exchanges for sizing just being there when a customer reaches out and responding quickly is worth everything.
So we really made it a point to make sure that we responded very quickly to any kind of customer outreach so that they got that instant response and felt like there's a real person behind this company, they're not going to forget about my order. I ordered the wrong size, I feel bad, but now I need somebody to rush me a new one overnight. So we just decided we were going to go above and beyond because every happy customer would lead to more referrals and this natural network effect that we always just have relied on from a marketing perspective.
So really you can start at small by just replying to customers quickly, and then taking every unique scenario and kind of not blanketing your customer service policy. So we've had cases where a customer was on the way to the wedding, probably the night before on the train, with his suit, left and on the train. In those moments you kind of have to decide what you're going to do for that customer. In a lot of cases you would say, "I can overnight it to you for a fee, but you have to purchase a whole new suit and track down that other suit if you want to refund." We just decided how we would want to be treated in that moment and how would that impact this one customer's experience working with us? So those are the moments where we said, "Okay, well overnight you the suit, you'll have it tomorrow and you follow up with the train station and try to track down that suit." That did everything.
Diana: Yeah, it's like a couple of hundred dollars that that costs us but it's like an endless amount of customer love. So as we've realized, like, oh my God, what are customers responding to? Jeanne and I were like, "We're just being nice." But then we realized like, oh, yeah, we've been able to automate some of this not in a fake way but like we've realized customers really love the fact that they do feel like there are people taking care of their guys and they will catch things like their guys forgetting to order a vest or ordering the wrong color. So that peace of mind that we've also been able to give our customers is another level of service that we've been able to build some technology around and that's our wedding group coordination system that couples can set their group up in and literally like let it be and we will send them reminders, we will follow up. There's always a straggler, they don't have to worry about it, we're on it. So it's been pretty fun to evolve how we're supporting our customers.
Felix: Yeah, so speaking of evolving in the way you're supporting your customers, you mentioned earlier that you're now doing these kinds of virtual appointments. Tell us more about that. How does it work?
Diana: When our showrooms were shutting down in March because of COVID, so we have a showroom in Chicago, Philly, and Denver. I will say when we were starting this company out of our New York apartments, Jeanne and I never really thought we would have showrooms. We always wanted this to be an online experience and a great online option. But as we kind of grew and we had good people in different cities, we took the opportunity to put up a very small physical showroom. Anyway, when those were shutting down we knew that we still wanted to connect with our customers, it is truly the part about the business that we love.
I don't know, maybe we were going stir crazy too in our homes in Chicago, but we needed to rebuild that customer connection and so we launched the virtual appointment and just as a way we hoped we didn't know how popular they would be, but we hoped that despite this pandemic people still wanted to plan their weddings and that they knew that eventually large group gatherings would be permitted again. But we also knew that people had more time maybe at home, and they weren't going out as much and they might have a little break during their work day because everybody's working from home.
So we rolled that out and they have just become incredibly popular and it's actually allowed us to expand our range of customers that were able to sort of physically "connect with" see their faces, we've taken appointments with couples from the East Coast to Hawaii. So we've brought the brand into people's homes in a really special way.
Felix: That's awesome. Now, are there certain tools or apps that you've used to set that up or just in general, any other kind of apps that you use to run the business?
Diana: So many apps, Jeanne probably knows best, but currently we use for our bookings and our customer service all is filtered through Zendesk. But Jeanne, you were just talking to a really great new app today.
Jeanne: Yeah, well, I mean, apps have been like our thing for solving problems. But as far as the virtuals are concerned, it's very simple to connect with people as long as you have a calendar, they can book their appointment online and then we just use a Google Hangout link you click in and everybody kind of has their calendar to manage that. So that's been super easy. We do use a ton of apps and Zendesk has been a really, really wonderful customer service tool like Diana mentioned. We love Klaviyo for our email marketing, various-
Diana: [Yotpo].
Jeanne: Yotpo, we love DeferPay as a way to sort of... early on as a way to sort of capture payment outside of the traditional checkout process. Even like little apps to make your shipping slips, when you ship an order, there's apps to kind of like design out your shipping forms, which really, really help from a branding perspective. Collecting sales tax is a real thing and you've kind of set up your sales tax with, we use Avalara to collect our sales tax. So we are big app people and we're always kind of poking in on that Shopify App Store to figure out ways that we can kind of fine tune our processes.
I will say Shopify, when you get to the point where you have a great volume of orders, and you're really looking for that next level support, Shopify Plus is something that we moved on to once we felt like, okay, we're ready for that next stage of development and having that flexibility and Shopify Plus has been so excellent for being giving us the tools to build out some customization options. Because every business is unique and every business will have that unique thing where piecing together a few apps works for a little while, but then you really need to build out something more sophisticated and that's sort of you need to decide when that point happens for your business and that's when sort of Shopify Plus comes in as a great tool.
Felix: Awesome. So the groomsmansuit.com is a website and I'll leave you to this last question. What was the biggest lesson that you've learned as a business recently over the last year, that's had an impact on the direction that you're now taking a business moving forward?
Jeanne: I think our biggest lesson and our biggest suggestion is really that profitability, focus on profitability. We've run into in the last 18 months, we've hit some major moments, relying on a fulfillment center and relying on our physical showrooms for store traffic and you realize you do need to make sure that you are a profitable business to overcome moments of struggle, which are going to happen and it's inevitable that you're going to hit a hiccup. So being that healthy, profitable business from the start has been the key for us to get through those moments and then especially COVID a lot of businesses are struggling. We have struggled through it, but because we run our business so intentionally to keep that profitability on every sale, we have survived COVID, we will survive COVID and will come out stronger for it. So that would be my number one, Diana may want to add something else.
Diana: Yeah, no, I think that's been key. I mean, it's just led to giving us so much leverage in so many different situations. When we say we're profitable, I mean, we're profitable but we're not like millions of dollars profitable but we're in [inaudible] and that is significantly important. I think too, as we've gotten to be a little bit more mature there is no one right way of doing things. I think it's so hard. So I went to MIT Sloan for business school, back then it was like your startup was only as good as how much money you could fundraise and you had to follow this track and it was like a lot of hype and competition too about what stage you were at and all this stuff.
Honestly, none of that matters. You can really carve out your own path as far as like what type of business you're creating, you don't have to do... I mean, there are some common scenarios around how you fundraise, or founders agreements. What you start off with a founder agreement can evolve, it's not totally locked in place. Your business is yours to work on and guide and as you go along, now, I think Jeanne and I are in this place we're like, "Nobody knows our business better than we do." But in the beginning years, it was you would get approached by marketing companies that would try to tell you that they knew your business better than you.
So I love where we're at and sort of like we feel really empowered and we're making the best decisions now possible because we're confident in what we've built, and it's happened over time. But I would say don't let anybody tell you what your business has to be, you figure that out and listen to what the market is telling you and listen to what customers are telling you. Customers will tell you everything you need to know about your business.
Felix: Awesome, thank you. I appreciate those lessons, I think it's a great ride for both of you and it totally makes sense how you've been able to kind of just get started is kind of the key thing and don't be so tied up in trying to make it perfect. So appreciate you both coming on. Thank you so much, Jean and Diana for sharing your story.
Jeanne: Thank you. This is great.
Diana: Yeah, this has been fun. Thanks, Felix.