#10: How An Ecom Business Can Survive & Thrive During The Turmoil Of A Pandemic

I'm joined here today with the CEO of our e-commerce brand company, Kelly Campbell. We're going to be talking about how to survive and thrive during all the chaos and turmoil of a global pandemic.

Before we really dive into some of the things that we're going to share, here’s a quick introduction to Kelly.

I first met Kelly, I want to say, going back almost a decade ago, Kelly was a founding member of our Blueprint Academy, which is an online training group that Steve and I work with where we help people build their online businesses.

From the get-go, Kelly and her partner started building what was a very successful business from scratch with no prior knowledge. We fast forward a few years, and Steve and I were on a parallel track with a couple of brands of our own, and it got to the point where we just said, "Look, you're crushing it. We're crushing it together. We could crush it even more."

So, we combined our resources and our skills and our networks and we combined our companies together. Now today, Kelly is the CEO of that company and really the mastermind in a lot of the growth and success that we've had over the past few years.

Over the past couple of years, just while this pandemic has been raging and causing havoc throughout the world, Kelly has steered the ship for us in getting enormous geographic growth, expanding into different markets, also massive social media growth, reaching people through new ways that we really didn't do before.

We've had massive platform growth as well, so moving away from being sort of a set of brands that were only sold on Amazon to being sold on lots of different marketplaces. Perhaps the biggest one you can say that we've had is going from being just an online group of brands to an online and offline group of brands that now sells in well over 10,000 stores, which to me, growing up in New Zealand, I think we've got like 10,000 shops in the entire country of New Zealand. Having my brand sold in over 10,000 stores around the world is truly amazing.

AIDAN

So, Kelly, it's been amazing just to watch how you at the helm have navigated this, and that's really what I'd like to talk about today, surviving and thriving during this pandemic.

What have been the main challenges that you've faced in this pandemic for the e-commerce business?

KELLY

Well, I think we as humans are very adaptable when we are put under a lot of pressure. I think if it hadn't been for the pandemic, we may not have pushed ourselves to do other things.

We knew that we had to diversify our income, so I think it's not always easy finding those other streams of income like you can go on Google and you can Google stuff and that. But we really had to sit down and think, what do we want to do? Where do we want to be? How are we going to survive?

At the time, the pandemic was only supposed to last a month, and it's now what, two years down the track. 

AIDAN

The funny thing, just to cut you off there for a second, I remember right at the beginning, it was almost like in our television and sort of everyday media, no one was talking about the pandemic, but I remember the factories shutting in China, and I was like, "What's this all about? I'm not really hearing about this much in mainstream media yet." Our factories were closed, and I think that was because things obviously kicked off in China prior to hitting the Western world. But that definitely threw a spanner in the works for the supply chain for a few months. That was probably the first big challenge that I can sort of remember. The supply chain started to get a little bit disrupted.

KELLY

Yeah. The supply chain throughout the whole two years has been a bit of a problem, but we just put things in place to overcome that. I think you've just got to be a bit forward-thinking and think, "Well, if I'm going to need a product by Christmas, for example, instead of ordering in July or August, I'm going to have to order in May or June," because logistically we know that the transport time is going to be that much longer.

I think it makes you a better planner because if not and lots of businesses have fallen down, unfortunately, not just Ecom businesses, but lots of other businesses. I think if you sit down like I can remember we were all brainstorming, "What are we going to do? How are we going to overcome this situation?"

I wouldn't say we're completely over it now, but I can definitely see light at the end of the tunnel finally. 

AIDAN

Yeah. I feel like the world has adapted. We talk about how this whole pandemic has accelerated online sales by, I think, five or six or seven years or even a decade or something. I can't remember the exact number now, but we've seen that.

When I say we, I'm referring to the e-commerce sellers as an industry that has had to adapt and quickly catch up because there's been so much more demand. People have been buying so many things online that they would have previously bought offline.

Obviously with that kind of a change has been teething issues, and some of them have taken the best part of a couple of years to sort of iron out. But I tend to agree with you. I feel like a lot of the hard times are behind us, and I think I'm more bullish and excited about e-commerce than ever before.

Just talking about how COVID affected the landscape though, you mentioned some people going out of business. Would you say there's more competition, less competition, or similar competition now compared to two years ago?

KELLY

Well, I think there are pros and cons because we've re-educated the customer to buy online. So, we've got that. That's been great for us. I think a lot of people have been spending a lot of time at home because of lockdown. They're looking for a way to maybe create another income stream. So, there has been more competition, I think.

But I find now, especially with Amazon, it's more of a level playing field. So you've got serious people coming on Amazon now, so you haven't got the people that want to dabble or don't take it very seriously. And I think Amazon shut down a lot of the black hat type people that were on there previously, so it's far more professional than what it ever was. It's attracting more people that are serious about going into business and creating another income stream or creating their main income stream. So, I think it's different. The whole platform is different to what it was.

But for me personally, I find it better. 

AIDAN

I think it's maturity. I remember years ago, I'm sure you remember this as well. There would be big brands that just would not even want to have anything to do with Amazon. They sort of felt like, "Oh, my God, we don't want to have anyone selling their brands on Amazon." I feel like people that were like that and brands that were like that have just realized that "Hey, look, e-commerce is kind of here to stay, and we can either go with it or just sort of lose our place."

One of the other things that has happened a lot over the past couple of years, we'll talk about this shortly, is it's not just Amazon. Amazon is not the only game in town. That maturity is also spreading throughout the industry, which I think is great because it opens up more opportunities to people that take it seriously.

I think it's always been the case that someone who has taken it seriously has always done better than someone who's just been a hobbyist or someone who's trying to use the dark arts and black cat, do all the naughty things that they really shouldn't be doing, but Amazon has got a lot better at controlling that nowadays, which is good. 

Now, how's it been dealing with manufacturers? I know a lot of people you're dealing with on a daily basis are in China. Has anything changed there in the way? If you think back to, I don't know, three years ago, pre-pandemic compared to now? 

KELLY

One thing China is very good at, that's adapting to change, and they've done that very well. I know a lot of people have got problems with China and stuff, but personally, our experience with our manufacturers have been amazing. They've overcome the challenges that we saw at the beginning when they shut down their facilities, and they didn't even completely shut down. They maybe shut down production lines and stuff so they could socially distance and stuff like that. 

We were always in contact with China on a daily basis about the situation and how it was going to affect it. Actually, didn't affect us at all, but it would have done some companies, but we were extremely lucky. Our manufacturers are not in the part of China that was hit heavily. I think the restrictions imposed on our manufacturers weren't as bad. 

AIDAN

Yeah. I guess it also helps that we don't rely on just one manufacturer, so we don't have all our eggs in that one basket, so to speak. And that's an example of diversifying the manufacturer, to diversify some of the risks from that regard.

At the very start of this episode, you mentioned that one of the things that we've done well to grow has been to diversify the sales channels. Perhaps we could talk about this strategy a little bit more and some of the ways that we have been diversifying from a marketing standpoint, not just the sales channels, but also social media is another good example. 

KELLY

We always knew whilst we were on Amazon that we wanted to get into retail. This kind of pandemic pushed us a little bit more. 

I think there are two parts to retail. You've got your big box stores, you've got your Walmarts, your Targets, CVS stores, that kind of thing, your supermarket chains, but then you've also got your smaller, what we would call mom-and-pop style stores. We initially reached out to the big stores and we're in a few big stores, as you know already, but we also wanted to reach more boutique-style stores.

That's when we went looking for, well, how are we going to do that? We cannot go to trade shows because we're in the middle of a pandemic. How do we reach these little stores? 

We found a few platforms that deal in wholesale only, and it's very much like the Amazon for wholesale, basically, and it works extremely well. I think now we're probably about 12,000 or 13,000 stores, maybe all up with our big box stores and our little stores. 

AIDAN

It's amazing how these little stores that you sort of refer to really do add up when you start focusing on them. Just to put this in perspective for people and give a little bit more context, can you explain how we sell to these little stores? I mean, we're not going up on the door until knocking on the door or anything. How do they find out about us in the first place and then do they just buy one product, or how does that work?

KELLY

Yeah, so it's a platform kind of like Amazon. You list your products, you create a listing, you put your case sizes in and your minimum order quantity. Just like you would with any big box retail store, it all depends on what platform you're on, but normally that you have a commission to pay, and that can be anywhere from 5% to 25%, depending on the platform. You would need to factor that in.

And then you list your product, you get an order placed, your order comes through, depending on what software. We're not using any software at the moment to automatically process those orders, so we process them manually and then you just process the order.

Normally, we have customers that buy $50 worth of product of one of our brands, which is a lower price brand, but we also have customers that buy $1,000 worth of product. For example, we could reach somebody that's just doing maybe home parties and stuff like that that just want a little bit of product. 

This has been such a great marketing exercise for us. We're also in, I think, about 15 subscription boxes. So, we can have somebody come along and say, "Well, I need 1000 of those units." I think our biggest order was 3000 units for a subscription box. Now that's a brilliant marketing exercise for us because we're reaching 3000 people. We've been able to attract a lot of customers to our own website because of the very diverse customers on there. 

AIDAN

To put this another way, it's kind of like there are different platforms out there like Amazon where people can list their products, and then someone who owns a shop, maybe they own a little shop, they can go to that platform and they can say, "Okay, well, I want to buy ten of these so I can put them in my shop," and ten might represent one case. They're buying one case of product. It might cost $50, or maybe they've got a big shop or they've got a few different shops in the city, so they might buy multiple cases, and that's sort of what they're doing. 

Then the products could really be anything. They could be marker pens for coloring in words or something or whiteboard pen, stationery. It could be literally anything. I feel like this is a strategy that is massively underutilized, reaching out to these mom-and-pop stores. There are thousands and thousands of them. Especially when you put them in perspective and say, we got an order for I think you said 3,000 units if you compare that to 3,000 different people coming onto Amazon and buying one product at a time. 

This is the power of when you're selling to retail versus selling to the end consumer. Some of these big stores that Kelly was talking about, I mean, if you think in the United States big stores, the likes of Walmart, CBS, Walgreens, any of these major stores, when they buy products from you, they don't buy one or two products like a consumer. They might buy like 100,000 products or 10,000 products. That brings its own challenges because you have to be able to provide those products.

That's a pretty darn good problem to have because you're getting an influx. That's the real avalanche of orders that you can get when you're selling to a retailer versus selling to a consumer. If someone has already got a brand that they're selling and they're thinking about trying to sell it to a retailer like they want to get it in Target or CVS or whatever, how do they start that? How do they even start that process? 

KELLY

Ideally, what we've done, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend this, but it was an easier path for us, we actually contacted some brokers that do this on a daily basis. That's their main job. The ones that we contacted personally, they've been in business for nearly 30 years now.

They had contacts with places like Target, Walmart, all the big stores. There are also special shows that you can go to where you can reach buyers directly. You can do it that way as well. 

It's just for me, it was understanding the terminology because when they start talking about case sizes and turnover and stuff like that, it was something that I'm not used to. You'd pick it up pretty quickly, so I would say you could do it either way. You could do it by yourself or you could do it using a broker. Depends on what path you want to take. I'd say using a broker would be quicker. 

AIDAN

Yeah. When you're talking about how quick this kind of a thing can unfold for someone who's already got a product with their own brand that they're selling online, how long would it take just to make this a bit more real for people? Is this something they can do in one month or is it going to take them ten months? What's the sort of realistic but optimistic timeline that they could expect there? 

KELLY

We attended a show in June when we started, and we had our first order in August, and that was for like a chain of stores. As a project, for longer. It depends on who you're dealing with. 

But if you're talking about a small chain of stores, then you can get… 

AIDAN

What’s a small chain of stores? How many stores do they have? 

KELLY

If you say 100 stores, I know that's not that small, relatively speaking, when you're comparing to Walmart and the big stalls, but the small chains, you could get an order really quickly, like the next month or so, but the stores I think it's a bit of a longer project. 

AIDAN

What about the differences and just dealing with one of these small stores that might have 100 stores versus a Walmart that's got thousands? How about the retake, the bureaucracy, just the general dealing with them? Are there any obvious differences?

KELLY

Yes, there are obvious differences. The bigger chains tend to require more of your time, for a start. You might have more paperwork to complete. There might be more, I don't want to say regulatory, it's not regulatory, but their packaging requirements might be slightly different. 

We were quite lucky and our packaging was set up because we knew we wanted to go into retail. We already have that in hand. That's actually something to be aware of. If you're looking forward and thinking you may want to be in retail, make sure your packaging is right. Get that right before you approach the retail stores. It just makes things so much quicker. 

But yeah, it's just generally more paperwork. The big stores tend to have more people that you need to deal with. You'll be dealing with accounts payable, warehouse, your buyer, your senior buyer, the VP of marketing, and stuff like that because they want your brand to be a success. There's a lot of people in the middle there… 

AIDAN

They have to justify their day job as well. They better be sending off a dozen emails to get all the bits and pieces in order.

KELLY

Yeah, exactly. 

AIDAN

I guess the other way of looking at it though, is these bigger stores like Walmart and Target and so on, they do have a few more hoops to jump through, but the upside is enormous. One Target with multiple thousands of stores, you might have to have ten or 15 or 20 small franchises or stores for one Target, so what's going to be easier?

I'd rather be everywhere and in all stores. But I think the other thing, I think we said that you could be being sold offline in hundreds of stores in a few months. That was our example. But I would still say to people, "Look, if you're thinking about doing something like this, look at it through a long-term lens." 

Don't look at it through a six-month lens. Think about your brand instead of as a project that you're going to be pursuing for five years. And then a lot of these big obstacles don't seem that big anymore because it's not "Oh, my God, you got to do all these things in one month."

You chipped away, that slow and steady wins the race, and you wake up one day and all of a sudden, you're in 13,000 stores. It's not like there was this bolt of lightning and it just happened. It was slow and steady progress day by day, week by week, month by month. It's that old thing of how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? I think that's the best way to look at it. Yeah.

I am conscious of your time here, but briefly, social media for me has also been one of the big growth areas for us over the past two years. I know that you and your team have done quite a bit of work here. How have you seen social media change in the past before COVID hit the world, and to where we are today?

KELLY

I think because people weren't going into stores, they were spending time at home, more time at home. Social media was, I think their audience figures were double. We just wanted to keep customers engaged. We never take a political stance or anything like that on our social media. We always try and keep it uplifting, and we always like to spread the kindness thing and stuff like that. 

We had done multiple giveaways during the pandemic because it was about people engaging with not only our customers, but maybe future customers or anybody really, wholesale customers are on social media, and we just wanted to keep them engaged and give back a bit.

We put a lot of effort into social media. We worked with magazines, print magazines, digital magazines as well, with giveaways and stuff like that, and it was for a relatively low cost. It was a great exercise. It paid off tenfold for us in terms of growing our audience and our email list, our other social channels. It's good. 

AIDAN

I think also it's a great example of when these things happen, there are really two ways to sort of approach it. You can approach it from curl up into a ball and wait for things to get better, or you can go out there and actively take the initiative and say, "How can we turn this into an opportunity? What can we do here?" I think that's been the real magic that you've been able to pull off over the past couple of years. 

I think there's a big lesson to that for anyone who is considering starting an e-commerce business because you're always going to have these ups and downs, and it could be a trivial thing, like a bad review, or it could be something major and industry-changing, like a pandemic.

You have to have the right people in place and the right culture and the right attitude to adapt when these things happen. You mentioned it right at the start, being able to adapt, being agile, being able to change. And I think the companies that have changed have been the ones that have really thrived. 

We've spoken a little bit about e-commerce in general, but just coming back to wrap up Amazon in 2022, how do you see Amazon as a place for people who are starting to build, maybe building their first online business? What are your thoughts on Amazon? 

KELLY

You can definitely still do it. Anybody can still do it, but it's a different place to where it was ten years ago. If you're going to take it seriously and think about what you're doing, a lot of people, they tend to buy a product from China, a generic product, and throw it up on Amazon and then wonder why they're not a millionaire in six weeks’ time or something. 

AIDAN

That's kind of what it used to be like six or seven years ago. It was like a generic product. And, "Oh, I'm going to make this thing pink instead of all the others in black," and you're making money. But it's just not like that nowadays. 

KELLY

Not like that anymore. 

Amazon is actually turning into a creator's market. So, for all those creators out there, and this goes for wholesale as well. The wholesale love the creators or the makers, as they call them. If you've got an idea about a product or you like making candles or T-shirts or whatever it is at the moment, it's a buyer's market for something like that.

AIDAN

Yeah. Well, this has been really insightful, Kelly, and it's just so amazing seeing what you've done, and hopefully, people listening to the show are excited and inspired by, I think, what's available out there today. 

We've spoken about diversification, selling to retailers, not just selling online. We've spoken a little bit touched on geographic diversification as well. You can sell all over the world. I mean, our brands are sold in dozens of countries around the world now. In fact, I was looking the other day and we've got customers from I think it's like over 100 different countries now. It's amazing how far things can…

KELLY

We’re on every continent now. I'm always quite proud of that fact.

AIDAN

We're not down in Antarctica, are we? Well, we might be used down there, but there are not that many shops. 

I think this is e-commerce. It's here to stay, and it's always the first place, whenever any of my closest friends or family ask me how "Aidan, I see so many opportunities online. What is the one place to go?" I say e-commerce. 

You've got to be a part of e-commerce because this is a wave that is exploding. I sort of feel like we're still even at the start of it, obviously, it's different ten years ago, but there are still so many unpacked areas, like selling to these mom-and-pop shops that you were talking about there selling to retailers, social media. I

t's changing every single day. I found out the other day and I had to laugh because now our products are being sold on TikTok. For the first time ever, I had to get a freaking TikTok account. Sure enough, it worked though. It's another marketplace and social selling is growing enormously.

It's kind of like not if this is going to stick around as well. “What's the next best thing and how can I build my brand to really be able to nail this?” I think also looking back in time, something I'd say to people I touched on this before is you build a really successful e-commerce company sort of like brick by brick, one step at a time. It's like the tortoise and the hare. You can take small slow steps and you will get there because it's very predictable, just don't burn out along the way. I'm personally really excited about it and it certainly helps when you've got people like you at the helm.

Kelly, awesome. Thank you so much for everything you've shared here today. I will be putting a summary of some of the key points and key ideas in the show notes at thegrowthbooth.com. To everyone listening out there, make sure you check out the show notes at thegrowthbooth.com and make sure you tune in for the next episode.