Commerce Heroes - Episode 1 - John's Crazy Socks

grass hi this is jordan matt and this is commerce heroes i've been in the e-commerce industry my whole career i started building custom e-commerce websites at a very young age and have since worked for atg oracle ebay magento and i can proudly say i've been with shopify for the past five and a half years so needless to say e-commerce has been my life all of my friends are in the industry and even my girlfriend has multiple ecommerce businesses and it wasn't that long ago in the midst of the covet era that i realized you know i probably need a hobby so i tried building model ships some of them came out pretty cool but that gets old after a while my son and i took up rocketry i started flying my drone more frequently until i crashed it into a tree but recently i figured i would give podcasting a try i've been thinking about it for years and i've never followed through and i wasn't sure what i'd want to talk about but as i reflected upon my career the points where i felt the most satisfaction or the most pride was really when i was helping entrepreneurial brands and who do i plan to interview inspirational brands of course so welcome to commerce heroes this is episode one for today's first episode we're going to be speaking with john and mark cronin from john's crazy socks and even if you don't get a chance to listen to all of today's content please take a minute to visit john's crazysocks.com welcome john and mark it's so great to see both of you again we're excited to be here right thank you john thank you so much for taking the time today well it's great fun plus every business owner likes to talk about their business yeah i mean we like to share things with people right i absolutely love your product i'm actually wearing a pair of your socks right now but you're not just a sock company tell us more about your vision what's our mission uh elementary school happiness and and we do that in a couple of very specific ways one of them is to show what people with differing abilities can do right so that's hiring people with different abilities it's sharing content it's doing things like speaking engagements and tours and advocacy work the second is to work with charity organizations to both celebrate causes and raise money for them so giving back is baked into everything we do and the third is we want to make personal connections with our customers so we're always looking for ways to do that i mean the the easiest example every package gets a handwritten thank you note from john and a package of candy now yeah no i i just received the pack i'm wearing my socks right now here we go there we go right yep um but even that you know you keep working and making it better so um we now actually have five different set of inserts that we put in a package depending on the customer that's right so if you're the if this is your first order you get one set of inserts if it's your second order you get another set a different set and so on we have five different ones because we want to keep trying to personalize what we're doing with our customers no that's amazing um so that that all adds up to our version of spreading happiness but the core thing you know if we're going to be an e-commerce store we got to have a great e-commerce store you got a great selection the products have to be good and the service has to be good yeah right but get that and you've had you've had some amazing experiences uh john like addressed the u.n i think george h w bush bush where's your socks do i have everybody biden's wearing your socks now so yeah i mean what is what is your favorite memory probably john from from uh from john do you have a favorite memory i do which one my family said uh i want them our secret loan commands or you like to win steve i came in negative um um i i i i'm saying sorry i'm sorry uh i i i i i keep playing on shirts just camping he gave so we've had a number of elected officials come in and learn about the business so the county executive came in he had a proclamation yeah and he wanted to present it to you and he read it to you yeah and then what do you do and then i um i i have my work colleagues next next to me and i i give certificates to my colleagues and and they're one uh i'm making a difference oh work so hard it's impossible here i i'm so damn i i can't i can't it was a nice moment of uh somebody coming to give something john and he gave it to colleagues but we've had you know this we've testified twice before congress and you know i've spoken at the united nations to sit there on capitol hill next to my son and think that we could do something to stand up for people um that was pretty amazing we've had fun things there was uh one one time uh john was asked to introduce the new york knicks before a game so we go to madison square garden we're hanging out courtside i loved it because i got to meet one of my childhood heroes walt frazier um and at one point one of the announcers a guy named alex broadway came over to john and was giving john advice on how not to be nervous how not to get anxious and i didn't have the heart to tell him john never gets nervous and so there john goes stands at center court they turn all the lights off put the spotlight on him and he introduces the knicks and brings 22 thousand people to their feet screaming that was pretty cool but these these opportunities also become obligations for us yeah right because if we're given that opportunity we have to take advantage of it to advance our mission so i'll give you one other anecdote it was a time we're down in dc we're on capitol hill and a customer from houston calls the office and says i see john and mark are on capitol hill my mother works there and she's a really big fan of john's do you think it would be possible for my mother to meet them and so my you know our colleague said sure here's mark's uh cell phone number just text on the contact information well who was mom nancy pelosi oh wow so we get an audience with nancy pelosi and you know something that it seems sad in our current day i don't care if you're conservative if you're liberal or progressive and we sometimes forget these are people yeah so forget about our politics nancy pelosi is an italian grandmother we go to meet her she takes out pictures of her and george h.w bush and socks she gave him and to show john because he and the former president had become sock buddies they exchanged photos where everybody takes photos and it's all a wonderful moment but we now have an opportunity and that opportunity is okay miss pelosi but now we have to talk about repealing the sub-minimum wage that allows employers to pay people with a disability less than minimum wage there are upwards of 400 000 people being paid five cents an hour in this country that's awesome um so you know you get those opportunities which are really successful but then you have to make use of them yeah well that's an incredible story um how did the journey begin like what you've been in business for four years now four or five years now in december will be our fifth anniversary um so it really started out of a necessity um so cast your mind back to the fall of 2016 and i had been running a business that shut down overnight um i'm 58 years old basically unemployable because i didn't want to work for anybody else so i was starting some new businesses starting some online businesses and where were you i i mean with that i went to hurricane high school and i split my time in wilmington tech program around russian britain so john's in high school but it's his last year in school in the u.s in every state you can if you have a disability you can stay in the public school system until you turn 21. so this is going to be john's last year and like everybody else he was trying to figure out what do i do um what were you looking at i looked at job program at school after that i collect the option he didn't really say anything that he liked and that's you know an unfortunate reality is there aren't a lot of good opportunities for people with different abilities john here he's a natural entrepreneur so you know if he didn't see something he wanted he'd create it and what'd you tell me i said i wasn't i was going into the video with my dad i have a nice other company together come let's go into business together dad okay i've got three sons john is the youngest and this is one i can work with um and then we had to come up with an idea what was your first idea a fun store a fun store no idea what that would be what was your next idea a free truck uh idea from the movie um chef a giant farmer some without a right and that sounded like fun except you know i started thinking i don't want to spend my day in a food truck yeah but ultimately we ran into a problem we can't talk yeah we can't cook but then right before thanksgiving john had his eureka moment i did i want to have crazy socks why socks is fun it's colorful and creative and always literally be me um okay so we went the lean startup route we didn't do a lot of analysis a lot of planning we said let's go and get something up and running and let's go test this um it's one of the many reasons we really like shopify right because that became easy and we could do it there's the two of us john already had the name he had drawings of a website so what day did we open uh we will be on friday august 7 9 to 2016. and what we want to do is test the idea um we were bootstrapping the only marketing we did right when you're bootstrapping you gotta use everything you have so i would take out my cell phone and we'd do videos and who was in the videos i am what were you doing uh i talked about socks right talking about socks we put them out on facebook um but we noticed something people started sharing those videos um so in that first month really two weeks we shipped 462 orders and had about 13 000 in revenue um and we knew yeah make this work they wanted people to wear graves and stuff yeah but we have this force behind it um we had a very interesting conversation wednesday with a gentleman who runs a large promotions business you know put logo on anything and we were talking about him putting us in his catalog and then it came down to it says well like he goes he said now what did he tell us 25 million catalogs a year one of them is aimed for nursing so that you know the customers are hospitals and medical centers that are going to buy buy products and say thank you to their nurses said so he's got like sick nursing stocks already says but if i had your two you know if i had two from you everybody's gonna buy those yeah because they look great but there's this great story behind them and you're giving back he says that's going to make everything else look bad yeah and but that's true if if everything is the same but one has this larger mission and purpose right if two products are created equal and both are high quality and both are fun you're going to choose the product that's got a mission behind it right now it helps you to stand out we we we urge people to consider that social enterprise model right because it answers a lot of questions and one of them is that product differentiation how do you stand out in the marketplace but it also answers i think a larger challenge businesses can no longer only pay attention to their owners to their shareholders you also got to pay attention to your employees and your customers and the community and customers and what we found is customers are increasingly asking but before i give you my money who are you what are you going to do with my money how do you treat your employees how do you relate to the community how do you treat the environment employees are saying i have a choice of where i can work yeah i can do this job but why i want something more you know i want something that gives me more satisfaction and feedback than i just gotta wave i feel like especially in kovanera where there are a lot of folks people were lonely and separated with loved ones there's like there's a there's people want they're willing to pay for belonging they're willing to pay to be a part of something bigger than them they want to they want to have an impact and it's not just about getting a product within 24 hours you can get anything for that right right if you want you can think of where you're going to be in the marketplace if you want to have the cheapest item in the marketplace there will always be a demand for that yeah that is an extremely hard place to be it's always changing commands is always the same there's only something cheaper yeah if you're not if that's not what you're going to be then you've got to have something else yeah so you take a product like socks oh you could be a high-end sock what does that look like you know um and how are you differentiating yourself from that gazillion of the stock companies yeah no what with all the viral like with all of the quick success that you had early on what were the biggest challenges was it like finds an inventory was it scaling infrastructure um there were a couple you know when we talked to folks getting started seemed easy compared to what came later so we were the beneficiaries of some viral experiences and some big media services be careful what you asked for you may get it yeah um the first viral experience overwhelmed us to the point where it almost put us out of business so we opened in december of 16 uh january we get a couple hundred orders because nobody buy you know nobody buys anything in january they spent their money the holidays we grew six fold in february we were starting to gain some traction and then the first weekend in march of 17 was the first viral you can't predict it it was the video put out by the online journal called the mighty they didn't film anything original it's just a slideshow video and last i looked that guy that has over 20 million views wow so we went from doing 50 orders a day to doing over a thousand dollars wow wiped out our inventory we at that time we were renting space we rented this old house that had been converted to office space it was built in 1741 when they say they don't build it like they used to be grateful right undulating floors tilted staircase um we were getting hit it was hilarious we were getting shipments every day and we had no space to put it we were lining boxes up on the sidewalk and we'd put stuff up and it would settle um but what happened is okay now we go get uh we grab a building we get a lease for that size we got a bunch of employees but then it passes and you know if you've seen game of thrones people talk about winter is coming when the sock business summer is coming and it's awful people don't buy socks in the summer right so now it then comes crashing and so part of what we had to figure out is how do you run a seasonal business yeah where you get these huge peaks and deep valleys um and i remember at the end of the year uh we had done very well you know we had good our first year we did 1.7 million we had turned a profit um but i'm looking at my bank account i got no money and i'm talking to my accounts and i'm saying where's the money he says mark let's look in your warehouse there's your money your inventory so you had access inventory we had you you know if you're going to do a million dollars in business or your second year we did five and a half uh because of extraordinary media companies but to do that at any one time you've got to have a million dollars of inventory yeah right um so you know that was difficult and uh getting financing was challenging we had lots of people oh we love what you do we love the story look at your achievement the growth the profit uh we're not going to give you any money um we had other people coming in and what they were interested in doing was buying the brand yeah and so their picks to us was we'll buy the brand we're going to shut you down for you and john will make plenty of money well then you missed the point yeah we were very fortunate uh and it took time to find the right strategic partner but you know so coming back the challenges were handling seasonality and handling rapid growth to be able to support the inventory so coming out of kovid knock on wood we're hearing brands increasingly talk about um you know disruptions to supply chain higher freight rates um you know shipping prices just you know increasing you know dramatically how are you seeing um you know how are those changes impacting your business well i can describe some of the dimensions of it right previously a uh container would have cost about twenty five hundred dollars we're now getting bills for fourteen thousand dollars wow fifteen thousand dollars this is international free yeah um this is one of the many reasons we're grateful for our strategic partners yeah um you know if you start a business if you're a business owner so much you have to know and if you're small you know you've got to keep dating your staff and they got to be smarter than you are um but there's so much to learn you know we're we're grateful that we're working with people who've been doing this decade and it's but it's challenging right um and figuring out you know what what's worthwhile flying in we can slide stuff in because it's light and we can manage that process but there's another challenge not just on the not just on the delivery of goods to us but then shipping to customers so nobody at least within the u.s our experience has been nobody can beat the post office for small packages in fact ups and fedex used the post office the last mile delivery in much of the country well last year it was very difficult for the post office right what was over you know in in a the post office never likes to guarantee anything but we know the timing so within certain reasons you could count on it being overnight or within two days no um then it would take it was becoming more variable and people weren't as willing to trust it so one of the things we saw uh in previous years the post office would announce here's the layer state for shipping first last name and we could watch our sales they would be high and hit that date and then fall off a cliff last year they ended much earlier yeah it was a shorter december because people were so concerned about the post office are you expecting something similar challenges this year i mean i'm not right yeah everyone's back to work but it's nice i am because uh so we're on long island the big paper out here is newsday they had an article today about how local postal deliveries are taking more time so i am concerned about that um i the expectation when we talk to marketing people and other businesses everybody's expecting to have a really big holiday season yeah they're expecting that this is pent up demand and people want are going to want to go and spend um [Music] i am concerned about two things price increases and short price increase is mainly driven by shortages and every day i'm tweeting about it of inventory or of of shipping is across the board right um you know you you read in the summer people can't get chlorine for their pools your car car manufacturers are hurt because there's a shortage of um microchips uh there's a shortage of rubber have you tried to rent a car recently yeah well they sold off on cars during the pandemic right so that's effect that is going to affect people and i think one of the things it's going to do is have an inflationary impact yeah and then couple that with the shipping that we face right we believe we're going to have everything but we don't know um and i think some places are going to be quite short of inventory come the holiday season does that put you in a position where you'll need to adjust pricing or does that come into your margin yeah we i mean one of our challenges is we have a small margin business um we are fortunate we don't have to compete on price and i want to be careful about how i say that yeah we don't have to be the least expensive product um so we have a little bit of leeway yeah we have seen our you know we have the yeah for our direct products we have the freight increase and we're starting to see from our suppliers them raising their prices um you've got the most important ingredient though which is probably brand loyalty i would imagine uh you know people love what you do they love the message you could probably diversify from socks and do very very well is what how do you like what are what's some advice that you have to other entrepreneurs about keeping the good feelings going and ensuring that customers are coming back you have to believe you know we were we were talking to a business group earlier today and and having some of those same conversations and they said well it seems so authentic what you do you have to you got to believe in what you're doing you know you got to i clearly believe in the idea of the social enterprise and i think that's where the business world is going to continue to evolve um but it has to be something which you believe in which um it infuses everything you do right you can't just be well we made some money we write a check right and that's what creates the loyalty and the engagement because you keep pursuing that well people everyone's craving authenticity and their meter is or actually you know way off the charts people can't people smell an authentic message a mile away now you know so so me here's an example one of our charity partners is the special olympics why the special olympics so john competes in the special olympics i've coached and others working with we have a number of social olympic athletes working with us we have people coached in it right yes we donate money to that we help raise money but we do a lot of other things with the special olympics because it just flows from what we do so you know here on a lot of the the state special organizations uh special olympic organizations do pull the plunge fundraisers so every year we do a polar plunge i i shouldn't say we john does up all the fun but yeah but our company's out there and a whole bunch of our colleagues doing john last year right you can't fake that no no that's this is part of the fiber of who we are right um you know another example right we talk about making customers happy and making a personal connection with our customers no one person can think of everything yeah um so here's one you know a lot of times good ideas after the fact seems so obvious one of our happiness packers we're sitting talking and comes and says you know we sell diabetic socks compression stocks for people with diabetes and we're sending them candy a little crazy yeah so now what do we do we have a supply of sugar-free candy and if you order diabetic socks we send you sugar free candy simply because you you want to just keep paying attention and somebody saw that you got to get everybody on board you remember that it's thoughtful it's like it's like you're like you're an individual you're not just someone who's receiving product yeah right the other day uh we saw something posted in uh uh the facebook group that kurt alston organizes yeah and what somebody was doing was experimenting with calling people who abandoned their cars we sort of said hey that's a good idea we'd like to do that um so today met with the two folks that are going to be doing this and we're talking well what do you do what you know we'd like to see if we could help them but we also want to learn information so they're taking off things we'd like to learn but what are we really going to do we're going to call up and see if we can have a conversation yeah how can we help you because we're talking to people yeah and you got to have that you know it's but if i come back as a business i think you have to know your mission you have to know what you're about you know you're it's your simon cynic you know your why you have to know what you're about yes and you got to have your values your when you know what you're about that's your north star so when a pandemic hits you can still navigate and see where you're going yeah and your values help keep you on track and but that can be manifested a lot of different ways right and when you do that if that's what you believe it will keep you keep finding new ways to keep yourself true right so what's our mission happiness so here's an example you've heard the line the customer is always right nonsense the customer can be dead wrong but we're not in the business of being right we're in the business of making that customer happy yeah and our folks that we call them happiness creators that work with our customers they can spend 200 on any customer they can you know they got a lot of tools they can use and the whole thing is we don't time how long they're talking to people is make that customer happy right but that's going to start with what are you about what are you trying to do yeah your values how are you working um and and then you keep carrying that out and you gotta you know so with us it is a high level thing spreading happiness we talk about that all the time we evaluate our decisions based on that no if you don't if you don't know who you are you don't know what you believe you're just kind of aimlessly wandering in the woods right yeah you've got to have a firm mission and a firm grounds and yeah i'm so happy that of john with all the success you've had and um no it's uh yeah it's it's an honor to spend time with both of you so we're we're just a couple of knuckleheads you know and there are plenty of uh you know you it's not all been smooth it's not all been easy at one point in 2019 we were on the verge of going out of business yeah um that was tough and there are numerous things right even the day we opened right what time were we going to open are we going to open our town morning 10 in the morning but what happened well i'm talking about the website crash because our webmaster at the time which would be me screwed up something in the code and crashed the site so we opened at three in the afternoon right um or right from day one we were putting the candy in packages and what candy did we put in i think kittens purses kisses which people love right you'd open the packet you could smell the chocolate everybody loved it it was great until we got the emails from the woman in slaughter saying you may not want to send chocolate to the south because it was melting so what do we put in now any any final words for uh maybe for other entrepreneurs you got advice from people i do follow your heart how you dream work hard if the two of us could manage to do this and we've been very fortunate but if the two of us can do it you can do it too you

Channel: Jordan Knapp

Views: 2,547

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: #onlinemarketing, #ecommercewebsite, #websitedesign, #shoponline, #bhfyp, #ecommercetips, #entrepreneurship, #retail, #motivation, #advertising, #shopify, #onlinestore, #instagood, #shoppingonline, #ecommercestore, #marketplace, #shop

Id: ZltR4ilr3ac

Length: 33min 12sec (1992 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021