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- Exit this way ↗️; No Money > Stupid Money 🤑; Golden Tips to finding your manufacturer
Exit this way ↗️; No Money > Stupid Money 🤑; Golden Tips to finding your manufacturer
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!
And lmk your answer to my very last question at the end of the email. I’m curious!
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A Quick Recap on Industry News 🗞
The first 100% Recyclable Ice Cream Carton. Splashup was announced as Xccelerate21 winner. Uncork Capital hires Susan Liu as newest partner. Organizations and governments uniting against period poverty. Maven Clinic announces $110M Series D round: company's valuation at $1.05B. Serena Leith becomes TikTok ANZ Marketing Director. Stop hustling on holiday. MLB hires former Marriott, Disney exec to lead marketing. This Sanzo x Marvel collab by Jacqueline Wang is fire.
🔑 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. Exit This Way ↗️
EP199: Sacred Serve Founder Kailey Donewald is super open about starting the business as a call to sell the company. I’m so here for that. Too often women don’t talk about this. I’m with her on changing this stigma (& chat abt this a little in the intro episode for the FSC miniseries 👀).
“I am in this to make a lot of money, for myself and for working so hard. This is a great product, and it’s going to go far.” Yas girl!
What has this pre-sight meant for the way of business at Sacred Serve? 🤔
Knowing she wanted to exit at some point, Kailey has been taking her time before taking any capital - being aware of what she wanted to do with that and being capital efficient
The company and business model has an inherent focus on profitability with a growth mindset: their margins are very strong
Kailey openly thinks about the type of exit she wants to have, and explores various avenues oppose to just assuming her “only option is a $100M sell to Unilever”
TIPS from an advisor: you need to have that concrete number in your head that you want to walk away with. And without that specific number, you’re not going to get there.
2. No Money > Stupid Money 🤑
EP200: In our two-hundredth (!!) episode, Allison dives into the origins of her super inspirational startup story. That excuse you were telling yourself not to get started? Forget it. It’s always possible.
“It’s the full-on grind of startup life, but it doesn’t faze you. When you have that gut feeling, and you know you’re doing something right, just go.”
The Founders’ No.1 tip: do not be blind-sighted by stupid money.
“We didn’t want to take on stupid money. There were people interested, but they weren’t going to bring anything strategic to the table with it.”
When you take on investment from people that just have money and don’t have any value besides that, it’s not a great partnership. As often mentioned on the show, investor relationships are almost like a marriage or partnership. So you want to be really careful with that.
FSC Mini-Series 🍷 from the Founder
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. I will be sharing what’s happening in real-time, including the mistakes we learn along the way.
Part 5: How to find a manufacturer 🏭
In this short and sweet episode, I step you through how we found our manufacturer. No secret sauce here, a lot of time, research, persistence, and maybe a couple of golden tips. I’ll take you through our initial process:
Googling 🔎
Start googling, and do pre-research to figure out what you’re googling. Initially, we didn’t know what to search for, what we were actually looking for. Find those keywords. When you find these, everything just unlocks. And it’s super easy to find what you need.
Building 🏗️
We spent some time making that list in excel and building a mini database of potential partners.
Reaching 📨
We set about reaching out with a simple cold email of what we were doing. If you think we got crickets back… You are absolutely correct. We got no replies. Not even one. Nada. Zero. It’s a little bit disheartening.
“Everyone that has gone through this process knows that through all these no’s you eventually get one yes. And then that one yes is amazing.”
Three Golden Tips 🌟
LinkedIn 🔗
Things changed for us when we started combing through LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. It’s genius. See who accepts your connection request, message them from there. This approach worked for us. We eventually connected with someone from a totally different region, got on the phone with them, and they connected us to the team that we actually needed to speak to in Europe. From there it was good to go! Those dots were connected quite easily.
“It’s a matter of following those breadcrumbs around the internet, and essentially stalking people until someone opens your message and takes it further.”
Outsource Research 🕵️♀️
Whilst this didn’t work for us, I’d recommend hiring a researcher and giving them the same sorts of tasks that you are doing, but seeing if you found something different. In the past, this approach worked really well for us. It’s something to keep in mind as you’re going through this journey.
Team Up 🤗
You should absolutely leverage any connection in your network. Ask friends of friends. Colleagues of friends. To see if anyone knows anyone who might be able to help connect the dots. This is a much faster approach to doing it.
There is a lot of power in having a key strategic partner to connect those dots that you can’t or don’t have. Everything is possible, but it does help a lot to have a great strategic partner. Think about assembling strategic mentors. Strategic advisors. People to open doors and have industry contacts.
🎧 Tune in next Saturday for the next part of the journey!
Biz Wins & Failz 🎢
Here’s a few crackers straight from Hype Club.
We’ve got an ongoing Biz Wins & Fails chat going in HC. But tbh… This is where we can learn and 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 there are also so many downs and things that go wrong.
Laura Rubin from Nurture shared a win this week:
She attended her first market to start getting feedback from customers. It was slow traffic, she was able to make her profit back on the day and have a bunch of eye-opening conversations. People really loved the taste and overall branding aesthetic.
However, she was about the have a total rebrand. Is that really needed now? She’s considered saving on that cash to invest elsewhere in the biz.
The learning: it’s so important to get out there and talk to your target users before you start iterating and changing based on your own opinion. You’ll be surprised, and you might even save a few pennies here and there.
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What’s on this week? 👀
Let’s see what we have in store for you this week…
TUES: Remi from Freck Beauty - the original freckle ✨
THURS: Charlotte Chen Pienaar from Everyday Humans - humans against average SPF 🌞
SAT: Kristin Olszewski from Nomadica - making wine a stress-free experience 🍷
Click here to tune in! 🎧
What to Read, What to Listen to 🤔
📚 The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm: exploring the ways in which the extraordinary emotion of love can alter the whole course of your life.
🎧 This American Life, with Ira Glass: the super popular weekly American public radio programme & poddy, on all sorts of topics.
Job Alert Time! 💼
Check out these cool job listings on our radar:
NYC 🗽
The Conversationalist, the online Gen Z community, is seeking a Head of Operations to manage their day-day. Check out the listing.
Hero Cosmetics, the brand helping everyone feel good in their skin, is looking for a creative Digital Marketing Manager. Apply here.
LA 🌇
Remote 🌎
PS:
Tell me something… What would you do with $1000 no strings attached grant money? Just hit reply. 👋
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