How To Start An Ecommerce Business (and Make $7,500/month)

wouldn't it be great if you could start your own razor company alex scott and hunter of the portland razor company have done just that working out of the garage they've already amassed six figures and have huge success today we're gonna find out exactly how they did that in today's episode of uplift we're going to be talking with hunter who's a business partner with the portland razer company and he's been with them since 2014 and since 2014 he's helped him expand into a barber shop retail space and even professional education that's the bare minimum i think if you're going to run an ecommerce business from home so when it comes to advertising how much do you guys spend on that zero nothing the best way to grow traffic to your website and generate revenue bandsaw you need a drill press grinder's a big one you want to get a nice kiln they've already crossed the hundred thousand dollar mark they've been featured in gq up rocks and even portland business journal so today we're going to find out how they got all their popularity off of these right here that email list is a gold mine that's how we keep our click-through rate really high we're converting into more sales right now 100 of our sales are on our website hunter what is that secret to e-commerce people who land on our website spend money so it's definitely working for you guys it's definitely working so on today's episode hunt is going to tell you how you can start your own e-commerce business from home and hopefully be as successful as him and alex and scott now let's go meet him [Music] so hunter can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved with the portland razor company sure so i was the first employee at portland razor company very quickly became a business partner saw the potential in it and wanted to get involved i was a hobbyist knife maker before but really had no business ownership experience before this it was a new challenge and uh here we are it seems to be working out okay nice and we we are here is it possible you can show us the operation and yeah get inside look definitely come on back alrighty we started out in a garage in 2014 little 12 by 12 space we expanded into bigger and bigger shops march of 2020 hit we decided to bring it back home and uh i don't know if we'll ever leave it's kind of nice so in the beginning uh what were your startup costs like for you know your barber space the manufacturing that you do here and even you know the retail space for you guys sure so making straight razors is the same tools as making custom knives out of your garage and those tools are really accessible you can get that set up for under a thousand dollars to start with building out a barbershop is a little more expensive for us we did most of the work ourselves and it only cost us forty thousand dollars okay yeah that's a significant amount of money but it's working for you guys so far so good got you perfect so you guys have an ecommerce business what is the most profitable product you guys have on your website and maybe why do you think that is yeah there's a reason so because we're making product ourselves whatever we make from that we're just paying ourselves wow so for for product that we manufacture profit margins like 80 or 90 percent now you got to factor your time in there right right then there's the other products that we carry the lifestyle products around the razors which is kind of the sexy thing the high dollar thing that people are really drawn to those products because we choose to work with other local small makers we're making 50 percent on those if we sell it at full msrp right and that's good so profit margins retail space that you guys previously had e-commerce strictly that you guys do now better worse i'm never going back to retail okay not that there isn't a place for it but the profit margins with e-commerce and the lifestyle that it affords are just way way better really i love that i can work from home there's less overhead as far as you know retail space that's expensive especially in a city like portland um labor paying for retail employees is expensive right and that's going to be true no matter what business you have but being able to do this from home in a space that i already occupy i'm already paying for and monetizing it that way that's the way to go for you guys specifically what type of equipment do you use to get the job done and then for that equipment what type of budget do you need for somebody starting from zero right you need a product to sell for us that means making it but your budget is whatever the cost is of acquiring that product to sell okay so for us tools is the big one you got to be able to cut the outline of the blade that you're making so bandsaw later on we move to water jetting which is a thing that we outsource you need a drill press each of these is going to be like 100 bucks okay grinder's a big one having a quality one's worth it spend about 500 on that one over there with the interchangeable tool arms abrasives is your big consumable those are relatively cheap but you're going to spend a couple couple bucks there and the last big thing for knife makers is heat treatment it's kind of the most important step in making something sharp it's also kind of invisible but you want to get a nice kiln that's going to be around a thousand dollars i would say it's around three thousand dollars for tooling and materials to start making product after that you need to put it on a website so you got to get photos can you do that yourself can you not if you have a smartphone that'll do the trick right you need a website it's a couple hundred bucks but you've got it for the whole year i'd say you could have a solid knife making e-commerce business from home for under five thousand dollars for sure got you not too bad we've got a hack and a tip coming up for you later on specifically for e-commerce so make sure you guys stay tuned it's coming up on later in the video [Music] what is your revenue like on a monthly basis and with yet revenue you're bringing in is that all strictly from your guys website and social media or do you sell your products you know elsewhere sure so right now 100 of our sales are on our website we sell direct to consumer we're averaging 7 500 bucks a month okay it's slowing for us during the summer we've got the holiday season coming up so we're ramping up production we're expecting a big bump in sales for that gotcha this is the first year that we haven't been back ordered we're only selling stuff that's in stock interesting part two of that is you know we closed down our brick and mortar we are interested in selling more at other retailers so there's places like portland um made here pdx is the name of a local retail brand that has stocked our products in the past okay we're looking at getting back in there um we sell at a couple barbershops too and you know what now that you mentioned that i'm interested and curious are you guys at all thinking about in the future being in more of like the department store type of environment or do you prefer it to kind of be you know maybe small local businesses here and there and just strictly e-commerce yeah big department stores isn't on our radar yet okay i think that's in the universe of possibility for us we would have to make some big changes to our production process to make that happen gotcha so with you guys being an e-commerce business uh what are some of the costs and what exactly are the programs or software you guys use for you know your email marketing or even your blogging that you guys do occasionally sure so the the main one is the website right ecommerce plan for a squarespace website is around 300 bucks that integrates really nicely with mailchimp which we use to manage all of our email contacts and for sending out those email campaigns that subscription's around 30 bucks and then you got to get products to people right right when they finally hit that button they buy something you got to ship it to them you'll save yourself a lot of time and money by paying for something like ship station you get commercial rates on shipping it's one click to print the order and automatically send all of your shipping and tracking notifications to customers interesting saved us a ton of time we use those every day that's that's the bare minimum i think if you're going to have run a run an e-commerce business from home all right guys we're actually here at hunter's home and with an e-commerce business he's able to do a lot of his work from here so he's going to show us his workspace and how he makes his money with the portland razer company so let's check it out welcome home all right so uh come on back we've got our pandemic garden over here okay our hobbies and then work the nice thing about this is i can manage the whole company from my smartphone really but also you know from this laptop plugged into everything okay main thing is the website i can make all of my edits check orders inventory discount codes i can even do a lot of my marketing from here as far as email campaigns gotcha and it's all in one place when an order comes in it populates automatically to the other software that i use which is the order fulfillment and that is the main job that you see here i have my inventory which is managed also through the website software so it's all the same got you order comes in i pull it from inventory so let's say someone wants to try wet shaving they want to get into a traditional shave soap and a brush okay so i've got our shave soap here and a synthetic bristle shaving brush there it is really common opening order um i set that aside free small flat rate usps box there we go shipping priority this is really big like simplify as much as you can when you have a bunch of products that are small especially but varying weights and sizes it's not worth it even for me to put the thing on the scale to weigh it to do different uh like first class rates right yeah we're nickel and diming ourselves at that point okay charge nine bucks use the small flat rate box and it's the only thing you have to keep in stock got you seal that up when i click print it buys the label updates the order in in our master list so it sends all the automated email notifications to that customer your order has been fulfilled here's your tracking number look for an update or check your porch you can personalize those as much as you want which is also nice and just like you're able to do all that in this one space here didn't even break a sweat really yeah it took me longer to explain it than it takes me to fill the order right so in 2019 you guys had the barber space you guys were very physical as far as you know being out there what was money like then compared to now where you guys are strictly in ecommerce business now yeah 2019 we did a little bit over a hundred thousand dollars that year we i think was 110 120 000 okay in 2020 after shutting down all brick and mortar operations we still did a hundred thousand dollars in e-commerce sales only so that information right there was all we needed to know to know that e-commerce was the future for us that's where we're going to go overhead's a lot lower with e-commerce we reinvested a lot of time and energy into our blog and into growing our email list owning those contacts when all of your fans are on instagram you don't own your fan base instagram does right so making sure that you're driving high quality traffic to your website and owning those those viewers is how you succeed in e-commerce in your opinion what's the best way to increase traffic for your e-commerce site what's been working for you guys you know maybe something you've seen that doesn't work and you know you guys don't do that anymore because you know you've got the formula now sure the best way to grow traffic to your website and generate revenue is to have quality content what do i mean by that okay quality over quantity every time write stuff that's actually helpful to people what that looks like for us is being an authority on our subject straight razors and wet shaving manufacturing even writing about that in a way that is fun and interesting and using our own voice yeah right and writing stuff that is helpful to people right for your guys channel it's people who are interested in starting their own e-commerce business how do you keep people on your channel give them actionable advice yeah right so whatever your business is about do that better than anybody and then share that information freely nice it's gonna drive a lot of traffic to your website not just for your product but for people who are interested in trying the same stuff okay and then even if they start doing a similar thing it's going to be different it's going to be there so it's not really stealing anything from you that's right yeah and anything that they make that references you just drives more quality content back to your website makes sense rising sees raise all ships in this case right so there's there's nothing to be lost by sharing everything got you so email lists blogs you know how does that work for you guys how is it benefiting you you know is it benefiting you guys at all or yeah we really took charge of our fan base and and owning our clients by sharing really really high quality information on our blog and really building out that resource as a place people can go for all things straight razors and wet shaving right that converted into a lot of e-newsletter signups that email list is a gold mine but you can't abuse it right yeah you can't do all that work earning all that trust just to turn it around and spam people with useless information all the time you'll lose them right away so you gotta win those emails and then baby them a little bit right you gotta feed it right right give it more of that good information this is an industry standard i can give you click rates on e-newsletters for manufacturing businesses peaks at about eight percent and we're consistently over ten percent so sending an email like an email out at least ten percent of those people are clicking through to our website and interacting with our content and we know from our website analytics that around two percent of people who land on our website spend money so it's definitely working for you guys it's definitely working so you mentioned the email list how do you guys grow that and continue to you know keep it going even in you know 2021 where you guys have been so successful the last couple years it sounds like that's something you guys want to keep going you know how do you do that yeah there are some industry standards like pop-up windows and stuff that we try to stay away from but it's like very in your face feel spammy we want to we care about those high quality subscriptions not just the like volume of subscriptions right that's how we keep our click-through rate really high we're converting into more sales gotcha so we do maintain visibility for that sign up form it's in the footer on every page of our website so as someone scrolling through and they're reading stuff that they like they get to the bottom do you want to see more do you want to know what's happening put your email list subscribe got you anybody who places an order is automatically subscribed oh okay so that's a way to grow it easily as well gotcha the other way and i guess this isn't an exception it's it's kind of how you acquire clients from other businesses and other brands that align with yours is by doing collab projects okay so for us we have soaps with craftsman soap company that we worked on we used to make razors for lyle's barber shop projects like that resulted in a lot of cross-pollination in our client bases that was really cool nice very cool so one thing that i thought was really cool is you guys have got a lot of attention from some big publications i mean you guys have been featured in gq oregon business journal how do those things even happen and how can other e-commerce businesses you know try to get some attention like that so that they can you know benefit from it yeah i i think really that comes down to kind of two things one we had a really polished website pixel perfect design good branding consistent fonts little things like that matter right and that really gave the impression that we were much bigger than we were right it communicated how serious we are about what we're doing on the flip side of that we were really engaged in social media instagram was where we lived for the most part very visual product very visual platform and there we got to be a lot more authentic and immediate and interact with our customers um in that immediate sense and i think that made us very shareable it also endeared us to them it we earned their trust through that because we were very transparent about what we were doing who we are and i think that honesty translates well and that's the thing that kind of creates those opportunities is making those connections [Music] so when it comes to advertising you know marketing how much do you guys spend on that zero nothing no dollar spent on ads but we've done a lot of gorilla marketing okay right we went to some trade shows we do a lot with content creators in kind of parallel industries so we worked with some barbers did some collab products there interesting so that's not no effort right but it had a huge return for us okay co-branded products are things that work well for their fans it works well for our fans you reach new people grows your email newsletter your email list all things that are really important for us right other than that it's really just word of mouth again it's you know endearing yourself to those customers making them want to become advocates for you got you and would you say that's changed at all over the years or no it's pretty much been consistent you guys using you know the social media and website and not really paying for advertising yeah i'd say the tone has changed and the makeup of our audience has changed over time uh but we've been doing kind of the same thing from day one the platforms have changed okay we moved from instagram and focused more on our website we work with some small youtube channels that has worked really well for us that's true and uh kind of like you guys reaching out for us like these are the opportunities that have helped us grow the most [Music] when it comes to having business partners you have alex and scott you've been working with them since 2014 what are some of the pros and cons of having business partners in it not just being you but uh sort of a team you guys have with the three of you yeah purely like brass tax numbers it distributes risk right okay so whether it's capital time investment you're distributing that among more people so that if something goes wrong you can absorb that risk and either keep going or pivot and do something else so that's a big one because our business partners were all really involved in the business from the beginning we also benefited from having that entire talent pool we have a pixel perfect designer in alex we have a product engineer with a good background in that in out in a in scott nice and then for me it was a lot of the in-person customer service that side okay so uh and writing i've done most of the writing for the website so you benefit from having all of those various skills and experience and what was nice for us was we had enough skill overlap in that we could all work on the product okay but we had a really broad range and different personalities where we could kind of fill in the gaps for each other gotchu and that was really advantageous for us as well so when it comes to your guys you know pretty much daily operation and you know what adds to your success do you guys outsource anything for your e-commerce business or everything's in-house for the most part all of our stuff is in-house and that's mainly because we have that talent in our ownership okay so you know alex is the that pixel perfect designer again all the marketing works on emails those are things that even now as we're starting to scale i would be more willing to pay a specialist okay and outsource that work but so far it's been working all of you guys kind of pulling your talents and gifts together to where you didn't really have to do that exactly and is that what an area that you would say has helped save you guys some money because you know you don't have to go and pay someone else to do what you can do yourself for the most part absolutely you you definitely pay less in terms of a lump sum or contract but again we were fortunate that we were able to pay ourselves a livable wage from the beginning right and so we were paying for that okay it's like is that wages or is that profit right it depends on how you look at it got you okay yep that makes sense all right guys you've made it the moment you've all been waiting for it is now that time for the blitz question segment of our up flip episode hunter are you ready i'm ready all right we've got five questions for you you only got a few seconds to answer i'm gonna get into them i'll do my best he said he's ready i'm ready let's get into it first question first thing in the morning what do you need to get your day started so much coffee so much coffee okay coffee got you uh second question hobby that you do you know on the weekends when you're not working you know what you go to motorcycles okay get out into the woods get on the highway get out the toolbox nice favorite restaurant or place to eat in portland you know maybe when you get done working or on the weekend you know what's your favorite place to eat at kim jong grillin okay got you and what is one of your pet peeves you know something you just hate you can't stand either in business or even just at home hypocrisy fakeness yeah now tell me what is so far you've been with the business since 2014 what was like your guilty pleasure by the thing that you bought when you made some extra money and you were like you know what i'm gonna buy this for me this is you know i'm gonna treat myself um probably my motorcycle okay okay yeah i i wasn't a rider before that was only in the last couple of years and it was because the business was at a certain point was like okay you can you can start to have you could splurge outside of this [Music] so you've been with the portland razor company since 2014 business-wise are there any mistakes that you wish didn't happen and if so how could other business owners kind of avoid those you know in the future with their businesses yeah first thing that comes to mind is definitely just being able to absorb more instability and adversity you know the last year and a half really comes to mind um and i think we did okay but better is always better right the next part of that is definitely trusting experts and letting people be good at what they're good at right we we like to know how to do everything involved in our business but it's okay to let people be good at what they're good at and listen to those people exactly kind of know your strengths and yeah yeah like we're razor makers we don't also have to be lawyers you know there's people you could hire for that right yeah the last part of that is kind of on the opposite end which is read the fine print right we bought insurance policies that weren't right for us we signed a predatory lease agreement that we're still stuck in so that would be my my biggest piece of business advice gotcha all right guys it is now that time we talked about it earlier it's time for the hack it's time for the trick the tip that you guys can use and implement to your potential business or your current business that you have already especially in the e-commerce field so hunter is going to give us that right now hunter what is that secret to e-commerce the secret is there is no secret that's it you have to earn people's trust gotcha you have to instill confidence we're an e-commerce business and so that online presence is everything the key to that is a good website and good content that means good web design good images good writing right hid those fundamentals yeah if you have that the rest will flow wow you can figure that out yep gotta start with that though yeah that's it that's the hack the tip the trick you heard him say it himself the secret is there's no secret just do what the man says hey guys you've made it to the end of the video make sure you like it make sure you subscribe to our channel and make sure you hit the bell icon so you get the notifications for every drop we have for upflip and here's a side note hunter actually watches the video so if you have a question for him or even a comment leave it in the comments below hunter's gonna be looking at him he'll be able to answer you give you any advice maybe even say what's up and as always thank you for watching this video i'm justice rogers for upflip

2021-07-22 18:35

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