Jacob Pazos, Hanna Zameni, and Scott Shin are the trio behind Revival Jewelry, makers of pendants that project images once a light shines through its gemstones. On this episode of Shopify Masters, we chat with Jacob Pazos and Scott Shin on their product development process, tips for crowdsourcing feedback, and ways to reach their target audience.
Show Notes
- Store: Revival Jewelry
- Social Profiles: Facebook, Instagram
- Recommendations: Product Personalizer (Shopify app), Stamped.io (Shopify app), Fera.ai
Creating your niche: applying a modern twist to a traditional product
Felix: Tell us about your product and why you wanted to create a modern alternative to the traditional locket.
Scott: There’s a real lack of modern lockets, and that's how we market our product as a modern locket. A lot of times, you'll find lockets are old fashioned and dated. Really, this thought came about when I wanted to have a personalized piece of jewelry for my mom when my father passed away, and this was maybe three or four years ago. She’s more of a hip mom, I'll put it. She's not going to wear an old fashioned locket, and so I had the idea of making a locket that she would wear. This came about when my sister came to me with an invention she had for a small gem, and it almost looked like a stone you would find in any jewelry. We got together and said, "Hey, why don't we make some jewelry out of this?" She thought let's try making some rings, but in my mind, I just wanted to make the one pendant for my mom.
Felix: So your sister came to you with an invention. This is something that she invented, or did she find this invention? What's the story behind that?
Scott: She and my uncle came up with the idea. I wouldn't say they came up with the prototype, they came with a lens prototype. But when she got together with me, we figured out maybe we can turn this into jewelry piece sets that someone would wear. Around that time is when I talked to Jacob. We were friends and I knew he grew up as a jewelry designer, and so it was perfect to have him involved. He can tell you about what his first thoughts were and how we ended up getting together.
Jacob: I thought it was a great idea as Scott said. I come from a jewelry background, grew up around it, and started doing jewelry design at 13. I was very familiar with an array of different things of what people like, what they don't like, and lockets were always that thing where I knew sentimentality was a huge indicator as to what people connect within their jewelry. Lockets have that sentimentality but are very low in terms of style, and they're very antiquated, so it was always an older audience. When Scott showed me the concept, I immediately was intrigued because I thought, "Wow, this is not compromising style at all. If anything, we can now put this into any context." My jewelry design light bulb just went off. Rings, charms, pendants, whatever you can imagine, it can go into and have the same level of sentimentality that people want to have in their jewelry and that connection with it, bring even a newer level of personalization that people can have in connection to their jewelry but also not compromise the style at all. So, I was in love with it immediately.
Felix: Can you describe a bit about what you're bringing to the market, as in, what is the modern alternative?
Scott: I would survey friends, my mom, and sister, about what kind of jewelry they liked to wear. They often shop at places like Pandora, so they're all about what's currently trending in jewelry. Those are the pieces that I thought maybe we can make and put a special image inside of it. That was before we thought we could take this to market and sell it and mass produce it. But we just wanted to see, hey, can we come up with a piece, a prototype that my mom or my sister would like? I threw some ideas at Jacob, and I don't think they were very good. Really Jacob is the designer here. He threw a few sketches back at me and not only did we survey our family, but we took it to friends as well. When we hit that right, got the right response from friends saying, "Oh, I would wear that," I think that's when we decided all right, this is what we need to start making.
Felix: When designing the product, what did you start with and what kind of changes did you make along the way that made it to the final product?
Scott: We started with a piece called the Halo. That was the very first piece we came up with before we decided to start marketing it. The name behind it shares the sentiment of an angel overlooking a loved one, right? We have a halo with stones around it that encompasses a picture, and once we were able to put it together and get comfortable with the nuances of how to make it seamlessly because I knew nothing about making jewelry or producing jewelry. Jacob was the expert on that, so I did a lot of learning from him.
Jacob: We started with the Halo. It was a very simple design. We were just throwing it out there to gauge reactions, so there was nothing really special to it. It was just this design that we thought was simple, likeable. It started, the concept was really taking off. at the time the design, people were like, "Okay, I could kind of take it or leave it, but I love the concept behind it," so that's when we regathered and said, "Okay, let's actually now step out a little further and try to come up with some better designs." What we did was we thought through the process of how can we create something that's hitting different price points for our customers, because I come from a fine jewelry background, so it's very different from what we're doing here in terms of price per unit. I thought let's create something that people can buy at $75-$80, all the way up to $200-$250. We ended up coming up with four designs. One very simple, just octagon without stones so that it was very light, not a lot of metal, didn't cost a lot, so we could offer that to people at a lower price. The Halo was the next product, and I redesigned it and made it look a little sleeker, nicer. We added a little more weight to it. Women were saying it felt very dainty, the first model. We would have things also where we would just take this to women and show them and just get their feedback and say, "Hey, here it is," and literally had parties at one time to just show them the product and get their feedback.
Scott: That's where we thought we could turn this into a business. Because the reaction we were getting from people, immediately they were like, "Man, can you make one for me?I love this." And these are people who wouldn't normally wear a locket or anything like that, but some of them would look at the jewelry and say, "I love this piece," not even knowing that it has an image in it and say, "I want it."
Identifying the marketing strategy to suit your business
Felix: How long did it take to get to the point where you both were like, "Wow, this is actually a product that we should start to try to sell online."
Scott: We were both working at our jobs. I have a background in the semiconductor industry and I was working full-time before I decided to move into this. We were sitting there and saying, "Look, we have a product here, but there are a lot of different ways we could go about marketing this, right?"
Jacob: If we're putting it on a timeline, that started 2017. I remember you, Scott, came and initially had the idea with his sister. And so Scott had handed me some designs, early 2017, started making them for him. I was at one point like, "Hey, I'm not a fan of these designs really, but I think we can do better." We kind of collaborated, that's where we did the Halo. And then we showed friends and family those designs that weren't that great.
Scott: We finally decided that we were going to go direct-to-consumer as the route to spread the message and really market these things. We tossed around the idea of the jewelry party, and also selling wholesale to jewellers. But the issue is the party would have been great because it's a product that you have to demonstrate for people to get, so it's not just going to sell itself. But direct-to-consumer online provides you with a website that educates the customer, right? We have that opportunity to do that, and I thought that would be a great way to launch this, even though I'm not sure if Jacob at the time was too keen on it or maybe a few others thought you can't really sell this online. But I thought, look, it's the perfect platform because your website can have all the information showing them what it does. Not to digress too much, but that's our strategy to marketing this is that 100% of our sales is online, and we use Facebook mostly to generate traffic- and Facebook paid ads. For us, I was trying to educate myself on how to do this because I wasn't well-versed in Facebook marketing and all that. As I was learning about how to market this on Facebook, you'd go online, do your research and people would talk about building your funnel strategy, right? But to me, we take more of a send traffic to our website strategy, and really we're sending them through the funnel on our website itself. Our conversion happens faster than the average product. Of course, it just varies on what you're trying to sell online, so if you're selling services that have a longer sales cycle or big-ticket items, obviously you'd probably want to have a multi-tier approach first on Facebook itself or through sending different touchpoints online. But for us, once we get people to our website, it's pretty simple and pretty straightforward on how to order, what it does, and so we thought that was the best approach for taking this to market was direct-to-consumer online.
Felix: How did you identify that price point, $70 - $200, as the target market for your product?
Jacob: The background I come from, it was a lot of custom design, it was higher-priced items, so I knew that those would be few and far between. It would have taken a lot more to gather sales if we were talking about a product that’s real gold and sell it for $7,500 a unit. It's a lot of having to educate a customer and having to bring them along that funnel just of education alone. To me, it didn't seem like that was the way to go at all, and Scott knew that as well. We talked about this as a more mass-market type of item. It's things that when we got the responses, sentimentality played into that a lot of the different reasons people would put these photos in, from in memoriam photos to their pets. We realized this is more mass-market than higher-end stuff, so let's create designs and be cognizant of that when we're designing things so we can produce things that are that lower price point so that we can spread it farther for people and make it more available.
Felix: Are you guys also in the gifting market? Are there a lot of buyers that are buying it as gifts?
Scott: Yes. I see a huge percentage of our customers dropshipping it to their friends, as gifts for family members, for special occasions like birthdays, graduations. But that's about half of our sales are in that and half our customers buy it for themselves.
Felix: How does that affect the way that you market the product either in your ads or when people land on your site? Do you try to encourage people to buy as a gift?
Scott: One of our main ads, it does show that it's the perfect gift item. So we do have some of that messaging. This is a great gift, but we only recently started making card inserts for our customers because they've been requesting that a lot. Usually, we're talking to our customers after they purchase the product. We're always learning from our customers, in fact, that's been from the very beginning. We crowdsource our designs. If you look at our website now, I think we have eight signature designs, and we're continuing to build more designs based on what customers want. We're constantly getting feedback from our customers on how to approach the whole gifting side of things as well because I think we along the way provided gift boxes that are nicer. All of our jewelry comes in nicer Revival Jewelry boxes now. Because they were always asking for jewelry boxes. Now, I was surprised to learn that it's not a common practice for a lot of jewelers when you order jewelry online to send you a jewelry box with your item. When you order stuff, a lot of times it just comes plain packaged. We were very surprised. So, we decided to provide nice packaging when we send you an item as well.
Felix: You started a jewelry business selling customized pieces. Can you explain the technology and the process that goes on when someone goes to your site and they upload a photo? What happens at that point?
Scott: You go to our site. All the instructions are right there on our page, so it's pretty simple. Once you find a jewelry piece that you like, you click through to that piece, and then there's a button that asks you to upload a photo. This is an important piece of how we market this. A good portion of our sales are mobile because people keep all their photos now on their phones, right? If you're going to our website from your mobile device, it's really simple to upload a photo that you have already there. We have a little tool that we use, it's a Shopify partner app that helped us build that solution. You upload your image, then there are tools for cropping, rotating, and adjusting the image the way you want it. It'll come to you how you crop it, so it's pretty straightforward.
Felix: So you worked with a Shopify partner to create the technology for this?
Scott: Well, no. It's an app we use. That’s the beauty of Shopify is that anything you need, there's an out of the box solution these days. We were wary about building a website because we thought, "Look, everything has to be custom-built, all the stuff we want." But as it turns out, Shopify has a lot of out of the box solutions for whatever you could think of, and so we use a lot of that.
Felix: What was the app that you use for this?
Scott: The one we use is Product Personalizer, but there are a few others. But this one works well for us because we didn't have a whole lot of SKUs to start.
Felix: How is the actual Jewelry made?
Jacob: There are two parts to our production - processing and production fulfillment. The processing, we keep as a trade secret because we do have a utility patent pending on the lens itself. Getting the photo in, we have our own in-house lab where we do that. But as far as putting the pieces together, we have a 3D printer here. We print molds on all of our prototypes and then of course we send it out, we have some relationships with people who cast the jewelry. We use mostly silver, 925 sterling silver, but we also use gold. We stuck with silver and rose gold because silver is the one timeless metal that people use for jewelry, and rose gold is a current trend but that's always been in and out as far as jewelry trends go. Now if we do get requests for custom pieces to cast in different metals, we'll do that for people, but we do everything in-house. It's difficult to use third-party logistics for us because it's a customized, personalized piece, and so we fulfill everything here.
How to use crowdsourcing to optimize your product
Felix: You mentioned a lot of the products on your site are crowdsourced, how do you crowdsource the jewelry?
Jacob: Mostly through social media. We have a social media person, she will put out polls. Any time we have a new design, in fact, we're working right now on some charm bracelets and charms that she'll be putting out on our Instagram page and will send polls out. Also our email list is about 8,000, and these are people who are very actively involved and we'll go to them to ask what they like. We'll have maybe three variations of a design and then ask them, "All right, do you like design one, two, or three?" That sort of thing.
Felix: Are they physical products, or just mockups at the crowdsourcing stage?
Jacob: Since I do CAD design with jewelry, it's pretty easy. We'll think up an initial concept and our team will sit internally and say, "Hey, what do we want to do?" So far, it's been pendants only, and so for the pendants, it was “let's create these.” We knew we wanted different price points, so I drew up some things and then we crafted it internally and then said, "Okay, this is good enough to send out. Let's post it up." I got renderings where it looks pretty realistic, the metals look real, the diamonds or CZs look real. It's all computer imaging, but we just throw it up there on social media and would have the votes and everything like that and people would comment, "Oh, I like this," or, "I don't like this about this piece." One simple thing was from the Halo that we first had to the Halo we have now, it's very similar, but the common response was something as simple as the stone should be a little bigger. Making them 25% bigger changed the whole look and design of the piece, and it became a much better seller than it was before when it was just slightly smaller. Paying attention to details like that with customers is important. In our Facebook ads, we get comments of, "Oh, I would love to see blah blah blah." And we get this amazing feedback from customers via email, Facebook, whatever, who say, "Hey, do you think you'll ever come out with fill in the blank?" We definitely take notes of that. When we see something commonly popping up, charms for instance was one of them, that's when we go back to our internal team and say, "Hey, what do we think about releasing charms?" That's where we were at, and so I'm in the process right now of creating charm bracelets and charms for our customers, and that's going to be going out soon for their review.
Felix: How often do you test these designs out?
Jacob: At first, it was not very often. Maybe once a quarter we would revisit our designs. That was because we were just getting focused on launching and getting the product to a point where we felt comfortable with it. We made little pivots where we had only silver and then okay, now let's make all the pieces in silver and in rose gold, and then made little additions like that. Now we're looking to release things that customers really want and men's jewelry is things we hear a lot and charms are things we hear, so we're trying to take that a bit more frequently where we revisit what customers want. We're not trying to kill ourselves with the amount of SKUs we're wanting to release, obviously. We're trying to go about it as a systematic approach, but listening to our customers very carefully and trying to make sure we're pumping out things that they really like and enjoy.
Scott: Our signature line is just going to be there, we imagine for a long time, but we're always trying to add on to the signature designs by following different trends that are seasonal. We have about 19 SKUs, if you include chains.
Felix: You mentioned that one improvement that you've made from listening to your customers was around the packaging and the jewelry boxes. Tell us about how this happened.
Scott: We were hearing that a lot of people were gifting this., In fact, some people were asking us if they could pay for a box. So we realized we could raise the price, and we actually did. Our initial pieces, we made the mistake of designing them as necklaces that you couldn't move the chains from. That's one of the immediate feedback we got from our customers is that "Hey, we want pendants with removable chains." When we made that change, we realized hey, it's costing us more to do that but we can also pass that cost on because it's reasonable. People will pay for that. As we did that, we also factored in the cost of having nice boxes. It wasn't like we suddenly doubled the price. We thought we were going to get some backlash or people telling us, "Why did you raise the price?" We didn't, people accepted it, and that's great.
Felix: Did designing the jewelry box go through multiple iterations as well?
Scott: We previewed the different boxes that were available and we designed one and stuck with it. We've gotten good feedback on it, so we haven't really found the need to change the design., But of course, it's possible we could come up with a different box for different occasions and events. That might be an idea, but right now we just have one standard box that ships with our pendants. Now, we do have l these paper maché type boxes that we send when you buy one of our non-pendant items. We have what we call our Pillar and we have a little piece that looks like a camera. We don't ship those in jewelry boxes, they don't come with chains. But sometimes we'll put them in a box for the customer if they do order a chain with it, but it's all mentioned on our website so they know what they're getting.
Identifying your target audience and using Facebook ads to drive them to your website
Felix: You mentioned you had to learn paid ads from scratch. Can you discuss how you learned and your Facebook ads strategy to generate traffic?
Scott: I definitely encourage people just starting out to tackle it on their own and learn as much as possible. Early on I tried a couple people who were with agencies and said, "Hey look, we can help you guys out." But I learned that they weren't producing any better results than we were. A lot of the conventional wisdom out there is this funnel strategy approach, but for us, we know who our customers are. Just start with targeting who your customers are and build your audiences around those interests. We did that for the entire first year, and once we had around 750 to 1,000 customers, we started using custom lookalike audiences on Facebook. If people aren't familiar with that Facebook works better when you have more data, so the more data you feed it, the better it works. But around the time when we had 750 to 1,000 customers is when that started taking off. If you're starting a business, you should know who your customers are, right? Once we figured that out, we could target different interests. One of our biggest groups is pet owners. They buy our products a lot, so we would try to find pet lover audiences.
Felix: How do specific target audiences change your ad copy and the way you create your ads?
Scott: We could probably be doing better, but as far as the return on ad spend we're getting, we haven't seen the need to create too many ads. We have two ads, tell you the truth, and there's one that's been running for a whole year and a half now. Ever since we started marketing in March of last year on Facebook. That’s been running ever since and it's been working well. Around the holiday season, the fourth quarter, we were seeing 11 to 22x. Right now, we're closer to 5x, without having to change anything. We only have two basic video ads out there.
Felix: You mentioned that your main goal with these ads is to get them to your website. Are you driving them to your product page ?
Scott: In the first year, we did spend a lot of money on buying cold traffic and targeting the top of the funnel. But once we started getting conversions, we switched to having purchase conversions, and ever since we've just been doing that and it's been working pretty well and it's still pretty popular.
Felix: So once you have enough customers, you're able to switch over to a lookalike audience and set the conversion event to purchase?
Scott: Yeah. And honestly, it worked so much better than we expected. We entered into some problems in Q4 when we hit Black Friday and we were so overwhelmed, we hired seasonal help. We were trying to scale production as fast as we could. We actually had to throttle the Facebook ads at that time because we were biting off more than we could chew. So, it was a learning experience.
Felix: How quickly does the conversion happen once they see your ad, click on the ad to go to your product page?
Scott: Lately, it's been shorter in the past as I review the analytics on Facebook, I'd say about a third of our conversions were within a one week period, and then a third were within the 28 days. Here's the problem is that resets once you go beyond the 28 days because Facebook only tracks for that long, right? We suspect that it mostly takes up to a week. Right now, as soon as we run a new ad, we start to see conversions immediately because I think these are probably warmer leads.
Felix: Yeah. What do you do to help that conversion? If they land on your site and it usually takes a week to buy.
Scott: Honestly we let the Facebook algorithm figure that out for us. In some ways, I'm puzzled as to how someone comes to our website, and on the same day, we're getting a lot more customers that will convert within the 24 hour period I've noticed. These are people who Facebook has already found and they were ready. We've had customers say, "You know, I don't know how Facebook figured it out, but they showed me your ad and they realized this is something I wanted and I didn't even know you existed." It’s kind of funny how that works because in most cases, it does take a few days for people to think of what photo they want to upload, but we have a lot of customers that already had their picture ready and they just didn't know we existed.
Felix: Have you made any changes to the product page or the website to improve conversions?
Scott: Yes. Initially, in our first month, we struggled a bit to get orders, and we learned that it's because we had to educate the customer on how to order as well as exactly how the product worked. We put that all on our website and we do use a tool. It’s an app called Fera.ai. It's been helpful for us in terms of tracking the pathway the customer goes to once they come to our website. The main page pretty much has everything you need to make a decision right there. It tells you who we are, what we do, and then how to order. If you spend maybe 10 minutes on the front page, that's enough time for you to make a decision, because this is really an impulse buy a lot of times. But in many cases, it's because life events occur and they're always happening, right? Someone's always having a baby or there's always someone graduating. Unfortunately, we also cater to people who have lost loved ones, right? They want a meaningful piece to buy for themselves or to comfort a loved one. I don't think we ever dry up the list of potential customers.
Educate and impress your customer: the key to conversions
Felix: What are some tactics you use to impress your customers and gain their retention ?
Scott: We always say we want to constantly impress the customer, delight the customer. Any time they contact us, if there's a problem they have with our product, we try to get to the core of what the problem is rather than simply issuing a refund right away. But we have a very flex refund policy, and surprisingly, we have a low rate of return on our product. We have less than 5% rate of return, which is uncommon in e-commerce. Once people have the product, it's just so personal. They also love our product. But we try to delight the customer by going above and beyond, so any time someone contacts us, they request almost anything within reason, we do for them. We constantly get customers asking us to overnight them a product, and we'll do that whenever we can even though it may cost us 20 bucks to do. Or we'll add an extra little gift for people because they want to add something more. -
Jacob: Just last week we had two separate customers who asked us to write notes for people, and so we went out and got some cards. One was a birthday and we asked them, "What would you like us to say?" And they typed up a whole message. We wrote one for a graduation. "We're not going to be able to be there because obviously the COVID stuff going on right now," but just things like that. We really try to put ourselves in the customer's shoes and go, "Hey, these are people. They're more than just customers, and so how can we treat them like that?" We try to go above and beyond as much as possible.
Scott: We also always like to ask customers to share their stories behind their photos as well, because these are meaningful things to them. Just to have a listening ear, because one of our goals with Revival is to create a community for people as well so that they'll have a place where they can share their stories. We're really wanting to focus on that these days, so we're building a social media strategy for that. In the first year, we let social media fall to the wayside because we were just so busy managing the business. Thank God we found someone to do our social media right before all the shelter in place orders went through here in California. Right now, we'd love to hire people but it's hard to go out there. We do want to grow, social media is so important to us. We’re trying to do that but part of that is building more of a community presence where people can share their stories of the pictures they have in their pieces. That’s one way we delight the customer and also build customer retention. Then we have customers that have bought every single piece. In fact, some customers have bought three or four and they'll put the same picture and give it to all their grandkids or buy it for their aunt. So, it's interesting that someone would buy the same piece four or five times, and buy every single piece we have.
Felix: Speaking of COVID-19, the pandemic, the lockdown, how has your business been affected and what are some ways that you've been able to navigate these times?
Scott: Well, it's stretched our lead times, but we're fortunate because we're not using third-party logistics, which I think most 3PL warehouses are up and running anyway, but for us, we have our own warehouse. We're spread thin these days because of that, but orders haven't been affected. We thought initially should we scale back our Facebook ads because we did see a drop for a couple of days, this was mid-March, when we first were starting to hear the news. But within a few days, we started seeing orders continue to come in, and we had to think of ways to continue operating. Luckily, you can keep your warehouse operations going, and that's all we really have. We're able to social distance because we only have three people - we use a lot of contractors for different things, but we only have three full-timers right now.
Felix: The first full year, you did $265,000 in sales, let's talk about that. Where were these first customers coming from for you to be able to crack a six-figure mark?
Scott: We thought we would first go to friends and family to sell this product, but all of our initial sales came from Facebook. In the first month, we only did $1,000. In fact, the first half, we didn't do a whole lot. We did 60% of our sales in Q4. I think you'll usually see that with new businesses. The beginning is slow to grow and it kind of snowballs. In fact, we're still seeing that right now. Except for March, we continue to see month over month growth. But it was all Facebook. We do get a certain percentage of organic and non-paid shares and Google searches and whatnot, but a vast majority comes from Facebook for us.
Felix: Is there a lot of education around your product? How do you make sure that you're able to educate your customers that this is a modern take on the traditional locket?
Scott: Our initial ad shows exactly how it works. There's a video, we used a model. It's a friend of ours, she shows you exactly how it works. The first time you come in touch with our brand, you see what it is. Now, once you get to our website and you know that you can upload your picture and order the piece, even when you receive it, once you open the box, we have a card insert with instructions on exactly how to view your picture. In fact, our customers helped us learn that we can do a lot of different things with our piece, and later on, we started educating them more on how to do that, like we'll tell people, "Hey, you can actually view your photo using your cell phone." Jacob was the one who discovered that, but we also had customers that quickly discovered that. You can also project your images using a cell phone, flashlight apps. That's something initially we didn't even think of, so our customers have been discovering those things. But in any case, we are constantly educating the customer from our first ad they see to when you get on our website to even when you receive the product, we have another card insert with instructions on it. I don't think there's ever any step of the way you're not going to know how to use it. Now, we do still get people who open the box, throw the card away, and they're like, "All right, I'm having trouble seeing the image," because some people look at it backward initially because they look at the front gem and don't realize oh, you can actually look straight into the gem. Because it looks like an actual gem that would go on jewelry. But in fact, that's the lens piece that you look in to find the picture.
Felix: So, what has changed from your strategy, or what are you guys doing to go from low six figures to cracking a million?
Scott: Now the interesting thing is when you scale your Facebook ads, we've learned that when you scale from spending $100 a day to $1,000 a day, you're supposed to see a diminishing return. But even up to $1,000 in some cases, we've seen return on ad spend accelerate. We haven't reached the mark where it started decelerating yet. We know January and February tend to be slower, except we did have Valentine's and so we had a little spike there. But we wanted to focus on scaling our production and expanding our operations. We started doing that, we were buying more equipment and things of that nature, but we put that on hold right now because of the whole COVID restrictions. But we plan to move out of our space that we currently have this summer, as long as everything goes as scheduled so that we can bring more people in. Because right now, we're confident that we figured out how to scale our Facebook and as well as expanding other marketing - honestly the best return we've found so far has been on Facebook, but as long as we have everything scaled on the production side of things, we should be able to hit that number. Last year most of our sales were in Q4, 60%. A good portion of that was simply Black Friday through the end of the year. So, we want to be ready for Q4 this year by being able to have enough people and equipment ready to scale production.
Felix: What kind of apps, tools, or services do you use to run the business?
Scott: Early on we used, and we still do, Stamped.io for reviews because that really helped us with conversions initially to build social proof that way on our website. We also use Product Personalizer. Those are our favorite ones. A tool called Fera.ai as well because we needed a solution for social proof that people bought our product, so you'll see a little pop-up. Initially, we weren't sure we wanted to do that because we thought it would annoy people, but it actually helps convert, so we continue to use that. Other than that, those are the ones we rely on. We do use Omnisend to communicate with our email list, and we need to definitely be more active with that because every time we do send out emails that have the highest conversion rate, even better than Facebook actually.
Felix: What do you think is important for you to focus on over this coming year to make another leap in growth?
Scott: We want to expand our marketing presence too. We've been testing the waters with some trade shows and building a presence and doing more PR sort of activities. We've never really tried influencer marketing, but we want to do that. But the most important thing for me is building the whole community aspect of our business so that we continue to build on our customer loyalty. We have big plans for that, for sure.
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