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Designing & Launching A New Home Decor Brand & Product

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

Damage Inc.

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Hey guys,

I’m starting this thread to document my new adventure. My sister and I are partnering up to create and launch a new product. It’s an idea that we came up with together, basically a new twist on a very old item. There are a few people putting out somewhat similar products, but from what I can see nobody is really developing it into a solid stand alone line or executing it well and taking it all the way. Our version will definitely be differentiated from the others I’ve seen. If it works out we’ll also be marketing it as a gift and making nicely packaged gift sets geared towards bridal parties, groomsmen, and that sort of thing.

We’re starting with 4 versions of the product. The immediate plan to test the product/market is to make a small sample batch of them (about 5 of each design), get them up on Amazon (not using FBA until we validate), and begin driving traffic through facebook and maybe adwords. If it’s viable we’ll look into creating our own site and additional methods of driving traffic.

Right now we’re in the stage of gathering materials to produce the sample batch. It might be about another week until we have everything in hand, and then there will be some trial and error in the production. I’m hoping to have this moving quickly and we'd love to be selling for the holiday season.

Comments and questions are welcome, thanks for reading.
 
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Damage Inc.

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It took longer than expected (and we're going to miss the holiday selling season) but we now have all materials in hand to make the first sample batch of products. The last supplier I was dealing with was kindof blowing me off for a little while when I was asking about bulk discounts and bulk shipping rates on the items. I figured maybe they pegged me as a tire kicker or something so I offered to pay for one item upfront and then take a new invoice afterwards with the difference and the discounts, and that seemed to work out for everybody. I ended up with shipping discounts but no bulk order discounts, I'll revisit that in the future if this pans out and my orders get larger.

The modified timeline is now to have the first 3 products created, tested, and finalized by mid December and then up for sale with ads running right around the end of December to first week of January.
 

Damage Inc.

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After some time researching, testing, creative problem solving, and producing and we came out with 4 final products that we are very happy with. Quality is great and I think our target price is justifiable. The production time and material costs are right where we expected and everything seems to be scale-able. We staged some nice pictures with background props that fit into our theme and they came out looking pretty good. I bought our UPC codes for Amazon and we're now working on the fb page/ads and amazon listings. Being that this is a general decor / gift item I'm not 100% sure how to best target the fb ads. I'm thinking women, 18-55, history of purchasing online (p.s. does anybody know where fb gets this stat from?), who like stores that would carry items in the same genre (like Bed Bath and Beyond). I'll play around with the audience insights tool as well and see if I come across any other ideas. I think the product could do well on Amazon without paid ads too if we can rank, but from reading the other progress threads on here it seems like initial validating is easiest with paid traffic.
 

Damage Inc.

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Alright as of last night I have a $40/day test ad set running for one of the products. Just one ad for the one product that's up on Amazon at the moment. There's room for improvement everywhere (Amazon listing could use more info, more and better pictures, copy could be improved, etc. But I think it should be decent enough to at least gauge interest and start testing. It spent $6 overnight when I was only targetting women who liked a couple stores and the engagement wasn't great (I know the sample size is tiny but the ratios just seemed off). So I've expanded the reach to include men and I've added more specific interests related to the item to the targetting. I'll let fb tell me who's engaging and clicking and then adjust down from there - or change it completely if I'm way off. We'll be working more on improving what we have tonight and perhaps get one more item up for testing.
 
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Damage Inc.

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After a mostly unsuccessful $30 spend on the first ad campaign we shut it down in order to make improvements and try something different. The stats are below, and not very good. No purchases, only a few click throughs, and low relevance.

ad%20set%201%20stats_zps6fxembhb.png

ad%20set%201%20stats%202_zpsg8koh3vn.png


I'm open to any help interpreting that data if anybody has any opinions.


We made the following improvements over that ad and are now testing 2 new campaigns:

- Better photographs on the ad and the Amazon listing
- Better copy and title improvements on the ad and Amazon listing
- Using the actual ad creater tool rather than a standard boosted post (looks so much better with the ad formatting)
- Lowered the price with a limited time sale offer and better call to action
- Changed up the targetting

Hope this set turns out better than the first.
 
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Damage Inc.

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The new ad was definitely better received than the first, but still no purchases. Data below, we killed this one after spending about $50.

2nd%20ad%20stats_zpsi7pf7eyo.png


We got some page likes out of it, over 100 likes on the ad, and 23 clicks to Amazon - but no buyers. We're going to regroup on the advertising strategy and the price point of the product. We're not ranking at all for the good search terms on Amazon so I don't see us getting much organic traffic there. I threw these up on ebay just for the hell of it so I'll see what happens there (on ebay so far we're on the first page for most of the good search terms). If anybody has any input on our ad stats feel free to share.
 

Dan44

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I come back every couple days to check this thread. I wanna see that first sale and where it came from. Keep us posted!
 

Damage Inc.

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Thanks @Dan44. We do have good news, we got our first sale!

1st%20sale%20v2_zpswdxn7an2.png


The sale actually came organically from eBay. It's a different product than the one we did the fb ads for and have on Amazon. I also lowered the price for eBay as part of the price testing, so for the time being I think we'll go with this (at least for eBay). I think we mis-judged which of our items would be the most popular / easiest to sell. This one that sold also has the most views, so it seems to be the front runner. Our next step is to get this product on Amazon as well and maybe test an ad set for it.

In other news, unfortunately I'm getting kicked out of my warehouse with 1 months notice for my primary auto parts business, so now I'm scrambling trying to find a new space in less than a month and dealing with the fact that I'm most likely going to have to pay higher rent, move all of my inventory, etc. Just trying to stay positive and keep going forward.
 
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Dan44

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Thats great to hear! There is nothing like the first sale, well at least it was that way for me.
 

DrkSide

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For the Amazon listing: You would be much better served getting some reviews and then running PPC from within Amazon. If you run outside ads to your Amazon listing it can hurt your conversion rate which will in turn hurt your rankings.

Focusing on ranking because it will give you the quickest benefit.

Note: You don't have to get reviews to rank or have sales but it does help tremendously to show social proof to potential buyers that people are buying your item.
 

Damage Inc.

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For the Amazon listing: You would be much better served getting some reviews and then running PPC from within Amazon. If you run outside ads to your Amazon listing it can hurt your conversion rate which will in turn hurt your rankings.

Focusing on ranking because it will give you the quickest benefit.

Note: You don't have to get reviews to rank or have sales but it does help tremendously to show social proof to potential buyers that people are buying your item.

Ok thanks that's good advice. I was running facebook ads rather than PPC within Amazon (which I wanted to try but I'm set up as an individual seller right now and can't). Right now I'm using my personal eBay and Amazon accounts because I didn't want to go through making a bunch of new accounts for the business before validating the idea. So any effort that I put into getting reviews and ranking right now will ultimately be lost when/if I make actual business accounts. I was operating under the "make sales first then structure" type of mentality but do you think there's better value in setting up the business accounts to add legitimacy and get some progress in ranking?
 
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DrkSide

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So any effort that I put into getting reviews and ranking right now will ultimately be lost when/if I make actual business accounts.

Seller reviews won't transfer to a new account but the product reviews will stay with the product no matter the seller. Product reviews is what you want.

I was operating under the "make sales first then structure" type of mentality but do you think there's better value in setting up the business accounts to add legitimacy and get some progress in ranking?

Honestly, the pro account on Amazon is $40 and if you sell 40 items or more you are better off with the Pro. If you don't plan on selling 40 or more items a month you are in the wrong game (judging by the price point on the ebay item).

Note: Do some research before you create a second Amazon account. Just to be aware of the possible issues.
 

Damage Inc.

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2nd%20amp%203rd%20sales_zpsmyknbzd0.png


We made two more sales today, this time on Amazon. I was a little surprised that these sold being that we aren't really ranking yet for the main simplest searches that I would think people are using (and we haven't done any advertising since what I posted here earlier). Our Amazon price point is about $2 higher than eBay due to the fees and the "upscale" nature of Amazon, and I guess that's alright. Out of curiosity, are you guys selling at a higher price on Amazon than on your own website or other cheaper channels? Or just one price across the board and you eat the extra expenses depending on how it sells?

We're pretty excited. I know it's a slow start but getting the 3 sales within 3 days without active advertising, great ranking, or any reviews seems like enough validation for me to take this to the next step and create and pay for the business accounts, try some more advertising, put effort into eliciting reviews, etc.


EDIT 12/19/15: I just temporarily inactivated all of our listings to prevent issues with last minute holiday shoppers who probably wouldn't get their items on time if ordered after today. We'll use the down time to create our new seller accounts, learn about Amazon PPC advertising, add some facebook content, and prep a new fb ad for after the holidays.
 
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Damage Inc.

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Read Fastlane!
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Update & December 2015 Recap


Update

Since the last update we sold two more products on eBay. We also had to re-ship one of the previous items we sold due to shipping damage. We’ve only gotten feedback from our first customer so far. I specifically asked if they were impressed with the quality, and whether or not they would buy it again or recommend it to friends and family. They said they liked the product and would recommend it, which was great to hear.

I also opened an Amazon business account so that we can transition away from my personal account, but I couldn’t complete the process since I haven’t filed our registration of fictitious name with the state yet. So that’s on the to-do list, and in the mean time we’ll keep selling how we were. I wanted to wait until we had our official account to upgrade to pro seller and start running PPC but since that might be a few weeks away we might jump the gun. Also on the to-do list is getting our items up on Etsy. My sister said that if she was looking for this product that’s the first place she would check, so maybe we have some potential customers over there.

Overall it’s been an exciting and successful month - going from idea to product to validating with 5 organic sales.


December 2015 Recap

- Launched our first 4 products
- First sale on 12/16/15
- 5 items sold total
- $102.92 in revenue
 
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