From 0 To $140M Selling Boutique Clothing - The Story Of PinkLily With Tori Gerbig

14 15 16 we grew you know 4 to 12 million we kind of stayed at 12 million for a year or two just because we kept outgrowing our space and we it was just my husband and I it was our money you know so like welcome to the my wife quarter job podcast today I have Tori gerbig on the show and Tori and I were recently featured on the Ashley Banfield show where we shared some tips on how to start an online business and Tori is the founder of pinklily.com which is a nine figure business that sells clothing and boutique fashion now pink Lily hit the multi-million dollar Mark and it's grown to a business of over 200 employees and what I actually admire more is that she is a mother of three and she works with her husband just like I do with my wife and our business and in this episode we're going to find out exactly how she did it and without welcome to show Tori how you doing Hi how are you thank you so much for having me on today yeah you know Tori so I actually teach a class on e-commerce and what I always tell people is that clothing is actually one of the hardest types of products to sell online so I'm just very curious how you got started it was by Act ing accent um I went to school for marketing and sales not um come 2012 we were just really struggling and could not make ends meet so we started selling items on eBay and Etsy and started out with very random products I'm talking like golf clubs um USB hard drives random stuff and um it did pretty well we sold items on eBay and Etsy for about a year a year and a half and then fast forward to 2013 I was pregnant with my son looking over my benefits my maternity leave options and freaking out about having unpaid maternity leave so that was something that made me so nervous so once my son was born we really were like look we've got to pick up this online selling just to supplement our income so I invested a little bit of money I think maybe just a couple hundred dollars and some little girl Boutique clothing and some adult boutique clothing and started a Facebook group at that time um the Facebook group was primarily just local people from my town but it grew pretty quickly and it grew from you know a couple hundred girls to over 10 000 women by the by the time I started back to after my maternity leave so I I always started selling clothing on there I didn't really sell clothing on eBay or Etsy it was just mostly through the Facebook group so I was showing the items I was PayPal invoicing them I was shipping the items all of this at night time after I worked my full-time job and after I got my son to bed um so I really didn't sleep much at all in 2013 like that last quarter and at the end of about November my husband's like we cannot continue doing it it's so manual we have to start a website like this is too manual you PayPal invoicing people you going to stamps.com creating the labels and it's just too much so we are going to start a website we're going to take the money that we've made the profits from selling on online so far and we're gonna just start this website so December 31st January 1st of 2014 and we kicked off pinkvilla.com it was really a right out of the box horrible website like it wasn't good at all so so slow site speed everything we had no prior experience but it was like just him and and I who did it and we were like okay our goal for the year is fifty thousand dollars in Revenue that will help pay off our credit card debt and some of our student loans I'll still work my full-time job he'll work his full-time job it's just a side hustle and by month two we had already hit the 50 000 and then by six months in we hit a million dollars in Revenue so we I walked away from my job in April of 2014. it was terrifying everybody was like no you can't quit your your job with benefits um just for an online site and then my husband walked away from his job in July that same year and then rounding out in December that year we hit four million dollars in revenue and had seven full-time employees so all from like just this starting in our house and by the end of year one having you know a team of seven and hitting four million in Revenue very quickly um in the first seven months we actually still were in our house too so we were packaging the orders up to the very like first million dollars of sales all on my dining room table Tori what's funny is your story is almost exactly like mine we started on eBay we were just selling some handkerchiefs and they were running it all over my house and then my wife she she didn't like her job and when we had our kid we were like okay we want to stay at home with the kids and we ran everything out of the house and our goal was actually fifty thousand dollars our first year also hit it really quickly and then my wife was like okay we got to start a website because I was making the rounds at this post office carrying like a car full of boxes and they all knew me and they actually hated me I'd occupy the line for like a long time right but it's funny let's take it back to the beginning I'm very curious so what did you Source those first clothes for uh for Etsy and eBay and that Facebook group yeah so we um I worked with some vendors out of LA to get some products and mostly um for eBay I think one of the biggest things we had that sold in 2013 were bubble necklaces so a lot of jewelry really did well on eBay same with Etsy um so Etsy I also monogrammed on the side like two I was like well I'm gonna buy a monogram machine we do that too yeah so so very time consuming I realized that was not the best use of my time I sold that monogram machine um so yeah it was just kind of like scarves and jewelry mostly and I sourced them from you know places uh La China or duet fashion okay yeah yeah yeah cool and then these were not with your brand on them though right these were just already made okay yes already the sale uh TurnKey products yeah so how does one grow a Facebook group so quickly actually so you mentioned in the beginning it was just Kentucky folks right how did you attract other people so I think at the time of course the timing was great for Facebook and um it was you know back before the it shifted where now it's more paid placement it was very organic back then so it was easy but I also have a social media um degree or I have a marketing degree so social media was always something that I loved and I learned it as quickly as I can when a new platform comes out so Facebook was something that I knew very well and I knew certain strategies of how to grow it you know build it as a community you know do fun giveaways get women excited about the product do the live videos or the the photos you know and and kind of just go off what works well if you see that this photo is getting a lot of response continue to do photos similar to that style and and just kind of like taking it it was very Scrappy too and I think that people loved it it wasn't like this put together beautiful photos literally like an iPhone photo of me in my house wearing the product and I think women just could relate to that a little easier than just that you know your typical models that you see on Victoria Secret or places like that type sites so we're people just finding your group through word of mouth or were you advertising it's just Word of Mouth it was a group so it wasn't you couldn't do paid ads for a group at the time um so it was really just like by having people add more people to the group so can you kind of walk me through like how often were you posting and how did you build a community so I would post several times a day I think that's the strategy too with uh any good social media platform is to make sure you're consistent with your posting um but building the community I was always on there so even while I was working my full-time job I was answering girls questions and they felt like they could ask me hey how would you style this or what would you recommend size I go with and really to like give them that personal shopping experience almost from the very beginning and um to also like allow them to to tell me what they wanted to buy and what they were looking for for us to carry and such so really to listen to them and always put them first and really help to elevate it and that's kind of been behind um the brand since the very beginning as we always put the customers first and foremost so were you going live in your group or was live available back then probably not right live wasn't available back when it very first started but it quickly became available so yeah we we've been doing live since the beginning of live creation so is that Facebook group still around are you still active in the group or so that group no um I closed it down after we started pink Lily and then we started a pink Lily group right after and our Pink Floyd group has I think 120 000 women in in that private group nice so our sales I imagine since you have a website now you don't do sales directly into the group but is that a way to like showcase new products and get feedback so we do it um we show products but um we also definitely get feedback on like what are you wanting for us to buy for fall or you know what kind of styles would you like us to carry um and really giving them more of that um that inside behind the scenes feel but also the biggest thing that does so well in our group is we allow all of our customers to post their own photos so all of them are actually running the group for us by posting content because they're excited to share what the dress looks like on them or their outfit and then all these women are supportive on them saying Oh you look great and how does this fit and they're answering questions and their Community they're communicating together on this group and and it works really well that way for us cool so are the moderators of the group just super fans of your brand for the most part we actually have most of them are workers here and then yes anyone is allowed to post in the group we approve it we approve it here internally right nice okay so you go from this Facebook group it gets out of hand because you're manually invoicing everyone you start this site it looks bad it's slow how do you get your first sales on your site is it just driving through the group to the site yeah so at that time right after we launched the Facebook or the website we launched a Facebook page and that's where primarily most of the sales would came through in year one was all through Facebook so I did not have any knowledge of Google ads I have no knowledge of anything else Instagram really wasn't big yet um Pinterest probably some too actually we did go viral on Pinterest a few times our first year so Pinterest and Facebook were those key drivers um the Facebook page I did start doing paid ads on there by the end of January 2014 um but again I kind of taught myself all of that with not having background knowledge on any like paid placement paid social right right so but to go from you say you hit 4 million in that first year you said yeah okay so how does one go from just a couple hundred thousand to to four million is that is that ads or is it just the size of your group like how do you grow exponentially like that so quickly so I do think ads was a little bit of it but I think we were very lucky on our timing too and to have things go viral on Facebook and on Pinterest that year so we had one photo of a cardigan that had over 700 000 repins on it like after it launched and we sold all 300 in a day and that was just luck of the nature you know it's really hard now to go viral and so I do try to explain that because eight years ago social media and today's social media of course but you can you still can go to tick tock and go viral there still are opportunities um so we just you know had those few moments and then we kind of played off of it from there you know we did spend a little bit of money in ads and I don't know the exact amount but it was very little and it wasn't um it was really just curating that community on the Facebook group and being very consistent with social media so most I would say year one and two most of the sales were organic sales okay and then in terms of product sourcing uh did you have like a steady Factory at that point were you still just kind of sourcing stuff from the Fashion District and whatnot so yeah no years one through three all came from La fashion to start it was not we did not have any factories we still don't have our own Factory we do work with manufacturers Now versus um you know paying as much wholesale um we still work both ways but yeah we um I would go to Fashion District up until you know 2016 even I think 2017 we it all came from there so when you go to the Fashion District you can say hey I want you to sew my label on there right and make adjustments yes correct yeah it's been a while since I've been there I mean we we did shop there also the minimum order requirements are generally lower they're also right depending on who you find yeah and but we like to appoint quickly about 2016 2017 that we were needing three to four hundred per style that we carry so we hit them very easily yes the order requirements are very low but the more you buy the more willing to work on pricing with you yeah I mean one of the challenges of clothing also is the sizing and the return rate how do you how'd you deal with that early on so sizing will still always be the biggest issue and we're still trying to figure out the best way to overcome that one of some of the couple recent changes in the last two years have been um having several different size models on the site and then also doing videos that explain how the item fits so this sizing will always be the number one issue because it's very hard to know your size when you're shopping online um but we definitely have implemented new strategies the last two years by having several size models and then also to do videos on the site that try to explain the fit so if they should size up or size down or stick with their true size um in a size chart in the beginning I will say it was probably the number one reason of returns was this just didn't fit me so and it's always going to be a battle with clothing online but and there's hopefully even in the near future more things that come out on helping women to admin to to really understand what size that they should buy before purchasing how much money did you start with uh and did you invest into pink Lily when it launched so when we launched the site we had been selling on eBay and Etsy for about um in that Facebook group for about six months and I think we had about ten thousand dollars in our bank account just saved aside from all of the the profits to reinvest so we started very little like a couple hundred dollars for eBay and we'd always reinvest the money and put a hundred percent of the profits back into the account to to grow the inventory so when we started pinkfully.com we had about 10 000 we I think spent 500 on the website and then the remainder all went to um inventory to launch so we had you know a small selection of clothing to you know I think 20 to 30 Styles when we launched wow okay so 10 grand for 23 styles that means it's not that many units of each no at the very beginning I would get like one pack like maybe six units per Style and so it was basically up to you to to understand and know what was going to sell right or did you just buy that many styles to see what would sell and then focus on your winners what was your strategy oh I didn't really have a strategy I kind of just would buy what I personally would wear and what I thought would sell well and then go off Trend so it back in the day in 2014 like Chevron was huge so okay I sold a Chevron Maxi it did really well it sold out so fast so then I would turn around and used all of the profits to buy five more Chevron Maxis so I kind of played off what was selling well to to turn around and buy more product in that same area scope to see if it continued to do well and when did you start introducing models for your clothes I mean that costs money right immediately so immediately okay yeah when we launched we launched with models and we did some flat lace but typically the clothing for us sold better on a Model yeah so where did you find the talent and uh was that a huge investment on your part to hire these models for photo shoots no um we found the talent we have a college here in town and um we found the talent just by I actually looked on Instagram and I was like I want to DM a few girls see if they're interested I did all the photography in the beginning for about the first eight months too um it took most of my time doing every single job but then we hired a full-time photographer I think by August of our first year and we've had now we have I think three full-time photographers we have like seven models that are here most days and um yeah it is an expense but for us it it's necessary it was always worth it that's amazing so you bootstrap with ten thousand dollars that's amazing for clothing yeah yeah um what does your husband do okay it says I'm a husband and wife team also and yeah yeah she's kind of like the face of the company because I I can't talk about handkerchiefs or you know that sort of thing what is what is his role so his role is he is the president of the company he oversees all of the operations side the HR side and the finance so he has a degree in finance and his MBA so that's his specialty um but he also did Logistics at his previous uh corporate world so he has a lot more operation knowledge than I do so we kind of split I'm over product over customer service I'm over marketing case of the brand he's on the back half of it on the operation side and the HR all the the harder stuff but um it's it's all hard but it's stuff that it's just like people don't always understand like the back end of a business yeah no that totally makes sense actually in the beginning when my wife and I work together uh closely we kind of overlapped in our roles and we just kept clashing and fighting and it wasn't until we separated everything out uh and things are good now but it took a while for us to get there yeah we don't overlap very much at all there's really not a lot since I'm on the the product development and marketing set he has not much to do other than money that's about it that's really the only like okay here's your marketing budget for the month and I'm like no we need more and he's like no you can't go over this amount so that's about the only thing that we really have a lot of like uh conversations on but we have dominion planning and forecasters now so he's out of that and budget you know a finance team that sets the budget so he's he just oversees them now it's not him setting the budget right right yeah so you're growing really fast and I I know that when you grow fast it's extremely uncomfortable you it seemed like you were switching out warehouses like every year or less um walk me through that time if you will um things were growing fast what were the first things that you're implementing in terms of infrastructure during that growth period yeah so our first Warehouse what we thought was a warehouse we moved into in July of 2014. it was 1500 square feet so we're like oh yeah this is huge at least it's out of our house and we quickly realized it was way too small and um by the November of 2014 we found a 3 000 square foot warehouse and we moved the week before Black Friday um so we did have uh we had a one-year lease on the first one but we were like you know what it makes sense just to go ahead and move we need more space to grow otherwise we're going to be stuck at this smaller amount so we moved in by 2015 we were like we still need more than 3 000 square feet so my husband and I bought this the land right up the road it was two acres and started uh building our current Warehouse facility so we bought it in 2015 we built 25 000 square foot warehouse and completed that in 2016. we added on an additional 25 000 square feet by 2018 and then by 2019 we're like we have to have another Warehouse so we bought or we rent some lease on one right up the road that's 160 000 square feet so last year 2020 Black Friday we were actually operating out of both and trying to like makeshift up there just for more room um but we currently are operating out of both warehouses your your offices are in Kentucky right correct yeah Bowling Green Kentucky okay good in California that would have been like 100 million dollars oh my goodness yeah wow no I gather Kentucky not much here that's amazing um so when you are scaling also uh so the where how many skus are we talking about when you moved into that first 1500 Warehouse like what was all the room for was it just inventory were you carrying inventory or was stuff made on demand it was a lot of inventory for girls to work at that time we were hiring people to come in and package orders so they're not doing it on my dining room table so we had like packaging stations and we also had all the inventory stored there too oh wow okay so you don't use a third-party Logistics firm or anything you're still fulfilling all of your orders yeah we we do not do three PLS we do um all of it fulfillment too wow okay so that can you just walk me through what your facility looks like is there like conveyor belts like amazon.com where where boxes come down and you have these automated stations or so they [Music] went two million dollars to put in we're not doing that um so we do have um some really cool things but we don't have conveyor belts um we have like our inbound you know they have they receive the boxes they put the way the boxes we have overflow we have really high racking um so we you know we have those little things that they go up on the whatever they're called and then [Music] um we have about we have a day shift and a night shift so we are operating seven days a week out um pretty much I think 20 20 something hour their 10 hour shift so 20 hours a day the warehouse is open and um I think that the the SKU count currently is about 13 000 excuse me wow okay can you walk me through just like the calculations and going 3pl versus owning your own Warehouse so I they're still doing a lot of deep diving into that and it's not out of the question in the future the hard part is with 3pl's it works very well if you have less cues the more excuse you have especially being more of a fast fashion brand it's a lot harder for them so for us it makes I think in the long run makes sense to keep our fulfillment um but three PLS you know they work very well when you have a limited SKU you know if you're only selling 10 20 30 products and you're always replenishing those makes sense but yeah if you're changing out files every season it doesn't really make that much sense yet so actually yeah walk me through that side of the business so once something goes out of season are you stuck with the inventory or what do you do with the inventory when it goes out of style yeah so one thing that especially with our brand is we're not too trendy in that we do that on that that reason if there's a trend that hits the the market now but in two months it could be gone like that doesn't really resonate very well with me because I don't want to invest in something that I'm going to just toss out of my closet two months from now you know so like our pieces are more stable that can last for years versus it being so trendy we do occasionally have some trends that we want to test out um but again if you go to our site it's really a little bit for um we offer so much for everyone but it's not super super trendy it's just good classic Styles but there is that case where we do have inventory that you're sitting on and the trend goes out say tie-dye 2020 was huge and then we didn't sell it all the way through tie-dye and then the the trend quickly died so at that point we work really hard on you know what kind of sales do we need to put it in what kind of liquidation process do we need we have once a year typically we do it in person uh Warehouse sale where people can come shop items very discounted and then clearance as well so we do have a clearance section on the site sales section and those are typically for styles that are um you know maybe they're 20 or less left in stock or they're just out of season and we are not carrying them in the future so we just want to discount them to get them out the door when did you start designing your own clothes are you a designer clothing designer I am not a designer I have ideas but I am not like an actual designer so um we started working with our vendors in LA and then some in China and Korea back and I think about 2018 on our own ideas and so from there it's transitioned very quickly with manufacturing our own items and we're currently actually hiring for a full-time designer but um I'm not one myself so what I mean you're the brains though right I mean you know what's trendy so walk me through like how do you design without being a designer so I'll look for Concepts I see things that do well within again it goes back to the very beginning like what sells well on the site what are people loving and keep continually playing off that if there is something that they love let's innovate it let's make it you know newer for next year but let's keep the same concept of it you know if there's an animal print maxi dress that every single time we restock it sells out let's let's take that and let's come up with three more animal print designs let's work on that so I I see things that I like and I put them together in my head or on a horrible Photoshop like here's the idea for the the swimsuit but I cannot draw at all and I do not know AutoCAD at all so yeah yeah I do work with our graphic designer here in still draw Prince and and you know I do oversee a lot of that with her um but we also we um we know our customer pretty well so it's like we know what they love and we continue just to play off what they want and so if you're working with like a designer I imagine it takes multiple iterations before like the stitching and this I mean there's only so much I can do from a picture right exactly yes okay and there's a lot of different fit samples and a lot of like Proto samples that it takes two or three rounds okay well wow this just sounds I mean running a clothing business just sounds so much more complicated it is very complicated looking back I'm like maybe I should have started something else but it's okay I love that because I wear clothes every day and so yes everybody else so it is a necessity um and the way of the world is you know turning to shopping online which is great for the future but yeah it is it is very complicated of those 13 000 skus how many would you say kind of turnover in a given year we need to do it four to five turns a year on our complete inventory but in terms of like the styles that kind of go obsolete or that you you're taken down um you mentioned you had Staples and then you had new styles of those 13 000 how many of those are just kind of Staples that that just lasted the test of time so for our Staples we still don't always keep them in stock we do let them run out and then restock them at the season that they are appropriate for there's some Staples like body suits if they're long sleeves we may not have them in stock in May and June so we used to let them sell out at times and so I would say 90 of our business turns and it's not a state level would be maybe getting it to maybe 40 60 one day but yeah most of our stuff is it it turns amazing okay so okay so where we left off was you're at four million dollars how do you go from four to a hundred I mean so what were the primary drivers for growing you know past you know nine figures yeah so for 14 15 16 we grew you know four to 12 million we kind of stayed at 12 million for a year or two just because we kept outgrowing our space and we it was just my husband and I it was our money you know so like we reinvested all the profits but we didn't like it put additional in to continue to scale fail and so by 2016 we started working outside of just Facebook and Instagram we started doing more paid ads influencers we introduced those influencer Partnerships I think in 2018 which really helped Elevate and in 2019 we teamed up with a minority investor company and they really helped Elevate you know and scale we started building out our teams and with director level because at the time it was still my husband and I doing most of the work so they invested in um you know director level positions and really um those positions helped us Elevate even faster you know our director of Ecom our warehouse director our marketing director and such so um by you know getting a little bit of expertise on board by 2019 that really helped us go from you know 30 million to 100 million within two years was that just all online or was that dude are you in retail outlets we have one retail store here in our town and it is under a million a year so it's very small since we are just a college town it's not like a big city um so it is it's a very small amount of Revenue okay so it's it's all online sales that you scaled and it was it sounds like it was scaled through mostly just paid advertising Facebook Instagram I would imagine yeah paid advertising and yeah pretty much what's uh are you guys on Tick Tock we are yes how's that how's that going for you guys so um Tick Tock is it's great to for like Legion but it's not great for building the community so we are consistent on there and I think we have about 150 000 followers um we were one of the first Brands to jump on there quickly because anytime a platform uh arises I'm very quick to like make sure that our Brand's on there and hat people are know about us and see us um but people don't respond to Brands as well on tick tock so we're still trying to learn to navigate that but yeah we do have 150 000 followers we just try to get them over to Instagram or get them to our email list you know we've run some Tick Tock ads that you know they go to it and it signs them up for our email newsletter that's a key driver to get them to actually shop yeah speaking among my colleagues it seems like people will find you on Tick Tock but you have to drive them to either your own site get their email or Instagram to actually complete the sale exactly yes it is a good for Lead Gym but not really for conversion yeah are you guys on YouTube also or is it just yeah we have a YouTube we really pushed it last year um until it just bandwidth we couldn't um keep up with keep making the videos every single week it was really more behind the scenes on the brand side though than uh like product which people love they love seeing you know the behind the scenes of the brand yeah what is your philosophy of you personally being in the post are you still in a lot of the posts that you're in other Tick Tock or or Instagram so tick tock not really um or Instagram I mean they'll repost photos that I get and share and stuff but um for sure YouTube behind the brand more so and like behind the scenes stuff but I'm not like the model you know we do they do have Tick Tock models and and photographers and such that and I honestly just don't have the time to go to all these photo shoots and do that part of it too yeah no I was I was just wondering so that transition probably took place once you cross like eight figures I would imagine right you could hire a whole bunch more people to handle everything right yeah we I did a lot of the live videos for the first few years and people really did um enjoy you know seeing the CEO do the videos and I would love to do more of those live videos on Facebook but it's just it right now I'll leave it to the marketing team to do it yeah so I want to switch gears a little bit and I want to I know you're a mom and you have three kids right so how does one job I know we have some problems doing this how does one juggle three kids with running such a large business um with help for sure um so my we have a uh our two or older ones are in school but then my two-year-old she has a babysitter that comes during the day so we come into work while she is at home with her babysitter um if we ever have to travel she'll stay the night too she's great um but my husband is really good too like we we both are great parents versus it just being like the mom's role or the dad's role so um we tag team a lot and if I have to work late he'll go home at four and let our babysitter go and like he'll cook dinner and such so um it is a lot at times and we're so much at work and then you can't get your work done and you have to do it but I try really hard to you know four to eight o'clock as kids time we play we do math we do that and then if I have to finish working I'll do that after I get the kids to bed to to complete the emails for the day yeah so your kids are younger than mine mine are um teenage years now and I feel like I'm a full-time driver starting at one o'clock on uh I can't even imagine uh so so I I my work hours I work from about seven until about noon or one o'clock and then the whole afternoon is just devoted to me being like a glorified Uber driver like I go to all their practices I coach and that sort of thing uh can you walk me through your typical day actually I'm very curious yeah so in the morning it is wake up get the kids ready for uh school do my daughter's hair and they're on the they just started riding the bus like two weeks ago they're super excited about it because we moved into our district so they could ride the bus I don't know why they They begged to ride the bus I was like I hated the bus when I was a kid I did too actually and they ride the bus and they like it so I'll get them out the door my husband does too and then um we play with our two-year-old for just a little bit before her babysitter gets there and then I will come into work I'm still working on we just recently moved I'm still working on getting my home office so I can actually work at home some um but it looks nice just a mile away so it's not hard to get here um so come in and I'm typically here every day from eight to four or eight to five depending on the day and then go home we have right now this is a crazy season we've got soccer we've got cheerleading and baseball so every single night there is an activity for a kid to get to Yes um and so spring especially it's a little harder but that nights are usually either driving one of them and staying at a practice or staying home with the other two kids and feeding them dinner cooking them all that stuff it's nuts so um for so from you said nine to four you're at work um what what are your primary duties at work right now I am over so many things so I basically oversee all the products so I'm over the buying team but we just recently hired a director of merchandising so she's still learning the ropes um I have to work on with them and demand planning to ensure we're hitting the numbers that we need to hit on the sell-through percentages on our inventory coming in I also oversee the marketing team so I work with them directly the marketing director on just strategies and overall implementation for marketing also oversee the customer service team to ensure the the csat scores are going up and you know everything that all customers are satisfied and then from there if there's other ever other issues that arise or just things like today I'm this afternoon going over to the warehouse just to see new new things that we're doing and I'm dealing with some issues with new contracts for our ambassadors and influencers Etc so hands in a lot of different things at all times Tori that that made me tired just hearing you say all that stuff actually yeah I do at night time I'm like okay you probably sleep very well I do yes yes okay so I want to kind of shift this last part of the interview towards people like so as I mentioned before I run a class and and oftentimes people want to sell apparel so I want I want your advice here so whenever someone asks me to to celebrate whether they should sell apparel I usually say no because I think it's just gonna be extremely difficult but you clearly pulled it off on a bootstrap budget what advice would you give people who actually want to go the apparel route I would say at this time and age eight years post when I started total different world obviously now with clothing and you know even things like Amazon fashion was not a thing when I started so um I would say the only way for it to be successful at this point in time would Define a gap in the market of something not being sold so that's going to be like if there is an idea that you have you know I've seen great Brands pop up like fiori you know they sell um really good Lounge wear and such and they are huge brain that just popped up you know a few years ago but they had that Gap in the market and there wasn't great loungewear and everybody who's staying home and they wanted that stuff so um to really look to see what that Gap is and um you know I agree on Trends changing way too fast I think if you go that route you may not be successful I would think it's going to be much more successful if you have classic styles that work for people long term and also even going into the the route that you know we're trying to go in the future is just having a sustainable clothing line that can be something huge you know if you wanted to start out that right now have you guys had problems with knockoffs uh yes absolutely so we always have issues with that and even as far as graphic tees and graphic designs you know that we do on our ours that our graphic designer hand draws then we see it all over Etsy a month later so um yes we we always have issues with that what would you say like a good starting budget would be for someone new who wants to go into apparel do you think it's possible to bootstrap it just like you guys did today yeah absolutely yeah okay I think I'm always in favor of walking before you run sure you know that so and where would you start in terms of marketing would you start with influencers would you start on social what would you do if you start all over again right now I would do both I would start you know definitely with uh influencers and you know Tick Tock and Instagram social media I think that there's still a lot of life left in some of those uh platforms and there's also new platforms always starting up so um a lot of women have or a lot of Boutique owners that I know have great success with both of those especially Tick Tock right now yeah yeah take some dance lessons throw up some tickets yeah we're gonna do great uh what's your influencer strategy what do you find so we work with a variety of influencers and we really we ensure that we're getting a good Roi on them though so I mean it does um take a lot of like after the fact here's what they are posting here's what this what's sold here's what their coupon code brought in for us to be able to rebook them you do have to bring in a certain Roi but our strategy it's really um it's ever changing because the influencer world is always where do you find them do you look on Instagram primarily yeah so we were Instagram Tick Tock YouTube we work with all influencers on all those platforms so do you give them like a trial like you mentioned Roi but it's really hard to figure out whether someone's going to be Roi positive right so most influencers don't do a trial it's just you know they're so what I meant by that is do you cast your net wide and then and figure out who's who works and then just focus on those things okay I think if you're starting out now that's exactly what I would do do you focus on the smaller or are you guys looking at bigger people or uh so for us it's a it's a really good mix the ones that really drive the conversion and the sales are the bigger girls um but it's very hard to book larger girls and it's also very expensive to book larger girls so I think if you take the money and split it um amongst smaller ones you're going to get a whole lot more new audiences and in the long run it can be better for just that top of funnel marketing so uh what do you negotiate as like the deliverables I mean obviously you're not sometimes one post isn't enough right so what is your typical like minimum book for them to post for you um usually it is just one post a story session too I mean there's definitely some that we do like okay two posts a month and two story sessions but um a lot of them like to have a variety of things that they cover on their their platforms and they don't want to just be like only showing one brand all the time interesting are you looking for Roi positivity with influencers or do you I would imagine your repeat customer rates pretty pretty good right because you have a closer we have about a 74 retention rate okay that's amazing yeah that's amazing it's very above average yeah that's amazing so that means you can probably afford to lose money on these influencers right just again yeah we don't though we we make sure that we do not lose money on any of our our um Investments so we do a make sure that we have a positive Roi okay so if you're brand new would you just recommend going after the small guys were you do you do you actually just give away product for the small people and in return for in the past yes the world has changed so much that very little influencers do it for free product these days everyone considers this themselves an influencer I know it's changed drastically in the last even two to three years The Way of the World in 2018 with influencer world is drastically different than it is in 2022. yeah okay so that sounds like a good overview so you could probably bootstrap with like 10 grand if you were doing it all over today focus on social maybe Tick Tock the free organic methods yeah and find some influencers find out hopefully try to just give away the product in return for some mentions yeah especially social create a community yeah I think the community is a really big factor I think that that's just the way of the future with online selling overall and you know people want to feel like they're my husband's in this bourbon group community and he spends a lot of money in there and he's like I love it I'm addicted to it and I feel like people actually do get addicted to these groups and that they want to check it every day and then they're like oh well let me buy that and you know they get excited and they want to fill a part of a community you know people are spending less and less real time together so they want to have an alternative and that's a community on social media is Facebook still the best place for communities or have you branched out elsewhere I think a Facebook group is probably still the number one still number one if you want to see more amazing interviews with successful entrepreneurs then check out this next interview right here I think you'll enjoy it and you'll definitely be inspired

Channel: MyWifeQuitHerJob Ecommerce Channel

Views: 48,965

Keywords: ecommerce, shopify, selling clothing online, selling clothing on shopify, ecommerce business, ecommerce website, how to start an ecommerce business, ecommerce marketing, pink lily, tori gerbig interview, shopify store

Id: 0LbMRoyJBeY

Length: 42min 5sec (2525 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022