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- 50 x $5k Biz Grants ⏰; THE superhack for 15,000 reviews; Play on the same team ⛹️♀️
50 x $5k Biz Grants ⏰; THE superhack for 15,000 reviews; Play on the same team ⛹️♀️
Where women in ecommerce come to get their key insights, tips and tactics.
Hi! I’m Doone, your hype girl in business. This is your weekly source of inspiration & information on all things in the e-commerce and CPG space, read by like-minded Entrepreneurs - that happen to be women - like you. If you find value in this content please like & share above, or forward it to someone in your network. I love it when you do that!
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Industry News You Should Prob Read 🗞
Kellogg's to give staff fertility, menopause and miscarriage leave. Nobel peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai announces her marriage. Women entrepreneurs hold key in India’s economy. Wadhwani Foundation campaign to ignite inspiring conversations between women entrepreneurs. Annual International Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Virtual Summit this Nov 19th. Female-founded US venture firms are on track to raise $7B in 2021.
🔑 Insights From This Week’s Episodes on the Female Startup Club Podcast
Directly from the women building the world’s most exciting businesses in the e-commerce and CPG space.
1. Play on the same team ⛹️♀️
EP235: Learning from Lisa Creaven, one of the Co-founders of Spotlight Oral Care, which she’s built alongside her sister Vanessa Creaven.
The most under-rated rule in business: make sure your manufacturers and partners are really aligned in what you’re trying to achieve.
This relationship is just as important as what you are building with your buyers.
Ultimately, a better relationship = better value for your business. You can motivate them to bend the rules a little bit. Slightly reduced initial orders, more favorable payment terms… 😏
“You’re not going to win every battle, but they need to be on your side”.
There’s a clear chance for a win-win here. It’s also in their benefit to work with smaller brands. Discover where the market is going, and pick up on those skills.
“Huge manufacturing companies want to help smaller brands, because they do all the heavy lifting in terms of changing an industry.”
Keep this in mind when scouting for a manufacturer, or next time you communicate with yours. You’re playing on the same team.
2. THE feedback super hack ⭐
Key moments for your business always come down to one customer. I’m sure you remember the first customer you had. Your first positive customer review.
EP236: Ashleigh Hinde reminded me of this in a conversation that’s so. damn. good. We speak about her innovative eyecare brand WALDO, nifty market research tips & a super hack when it comes to customer feedback.
WALDO boasts around 15,000 online reviews. That’s translates into a whole load of trust. Ashleigh has strategically prioritised her review strategy since day one.
“Getting close to that feedback, getting granular on that feedback, is critical.”
Her super hack? Listen to the kind of language that consumers are using to talk about your product and feed that back into marketing.
🎁 Whilst Waldo is a cheaper product, through analysis of reviews it became clear its quality and convenience that the customers value most above price.
💡 In response, WALDO changed it’s marketing to not be so price-led.
“free delivery” 🔁 “high quality contacts delivered when you need them”
“join our loyalty program” 🔁 “our contacts are proven better for your eyes”
Listen to your customers. Find those pain points. Mirror that feedback. 🪞
FSC Mini-Series from the Founder ❤️
It’s Doone, your Hype Girl. In this new mini-series within the FSC podcast, I’m taking you on the journey while I develop my non-alc wine brand and build it in public. A couple of you got in contact to say you found the resources section last week super useful, so I’ll be carrying on with these alongside the updates.
This week: 4 useful things in 4 minutes for this week ✍️
Tasks, on tasks, on tasks 🤯Task management = something I struggle with a lot. Putting all my thoughts into a well laid out and easy-to-use plan is a real headache. Notion Certified Consultants a great solution for me. I always wanted an epic Notion dock of my own, but the idea to create this and build this out is just beyond me. It’ll sit in a graveyard of half built documents floating around my google drive. 🙄This is where notion consultants enter the group chat. One of my friends was showing me his workflow on Notion and it blew my mind. You connect with them / they interview you about your workflow, and voilà. I’m just starting this process and am already so excited for future organised me!
Legalities ⚖️Not once, but twice I’ve been recommended the small female-owned law firm called Sprout Law. And I want to pass on the favour. It’s a collection of trademark attorneys for women who need to protect their brand. During a free consultation they take a call with you, set out a plan, and you go from there. They quote wildly different from the quotes I’ve been seeing. It’s $59 for a trademark search.
Biz Grants 💰Moving on to money stuff, because we all need more access to capital and money. There is a company in 🇺🇸 called Hello Alice. They have 50 x $5000 biz grants available to US residents. For those of you in the US, the deadline is the 10th of December. So jump on it and get in there. Get that compelling pitch together.
Investment Offer 🇺🇸CLEARCO has an investment offer to DTC businesses operating with at least $10K in monthly revenue for the past 6 months. You go to them, sign up, plug in all of your data, and they come back with an offer.They fund 8x more women founders than traditional VCs, and 30% of their portfolio is made up of women of color. I don’t know exactly what the terms are, but it’s a way to access capital quickly without giving away any part of your business. It’s female-founded too! 💖
Biz Wins & Failz 🎢
Here are a few crackers straight from Hype Club.
We’ve got an ongoing Biz Wins & Fails chat going in HC. This is where we can learn what we can hopefully avoid in our own journeys, and what keeps us feeling like we are not in this alone. A lot of us are seeing a lot of highlights, but tbh there are also so many downs and things that go wrong.
Megan Broderick (Founder of a|dash) shared her close-call fail last week, as she was preparing to fly to Chicago to finally see a production run in person:
“We realised we missed a critical step of adding UPC barcodes to our boxes for them to scan the products on arrival. I hopped onto Amazon to order labels and a thermal printer, and I was able to get all the labels printed just in time for setting off.”
Her manufacturer agreed to put them on the boxes as they build and packaged them. Thank god. Megan wanted to share this lesson for you any of you ladies expanding from DTC to 3PL as you grow: make sure to check in how your partner will need the UPC barcodes to accept the order.
*Our pricing is currently $59 per month, cancel anytime. Come join us in Hype Club if you want to build your network and meet other female founders going through the journey.
What’s on this week? 👀
Let’s see what we have in store for you this week…
TUES: Farah Jesani from One Stripe Chai Co. - hand-crafted chai 💛
THURS: Erin Carpenter from Nude Barre - skin tone underwear & hosiery 💫
SAT: Doone's back - with a solo episode 🍷
Click here to tune in! 🎧
What to Read, What to Listen to 🤔
📚 The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron: a spiritual path to higher creativity, guiding the reader to help loosen up and get in touch with one’s artistic self.
🎧 Masters of Scale, hosted by Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn): in each episode, Reid shows how companies grow from zero to a gazillion.
Job Alert Time! 💼
Check out these cool job listings on our radar:
LA 🌇
SYDNEY 🏄♀️
NYC/REMOTE 🗽
MONTREAL 🇨🇦
Mid-Day Squares, creating the next-gen of food brands, is looking for an Office Manager to be their team rock. You can apply directly on LinkedIn.
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