Today on the Winning with Shopify podcast.
Yeah, Downline chocolate, we are essentially beamed about
chocolate maker. Now what that means is that we
work with farmers from around the world to really source the
highest quality beans and then make the final product, all in
our factories in San Francisco. I mean, you guys must have the
most incredible canteen. Like we have some of the longest
newsletters in the industry where it's like 5 to. 6 pages.
All the information you've just given me is is is all
enlightening as someone who's been eating chocolate since
they're probably about three years old.
Nobody ever, when they're young, thinks of that.
I want to be APM big tech. Everybody does think I want to
work in a Chocolate Factory. So you know, we have this
question in our interview as well, like do you like
chocolate? And because if you don't, really
not going to like. Hello and welcome to another
episode, The Winning was Shopify podcast.
We released 52 episodes a year. So if you've never heard of us,
where have you been? I was just reminiscing with my
guests who will introduce in a moment that I've been running
this podcast for over 5 years. I completely missed our
anniversary last month. If you've been us on that
journey for the entire time and I've never heard from you, I'm
very, very upset. Please send me an e-mail.
I want to hear who you are, what business you work for or run,
what's your favorite episode, how long you've been engaged
for, And thank you so much for being part of that journey.
So first time you're hearing from us, please do subscribe,
leave us a review and if you haven't already, go and follow
us on some of the social channels.
I've been posting quite a lot of various conferences and other
bits and pieces we've been to and it's LED to some really cool
conversations on DM as well. It's also LED some free coffee
and some other bits that have just arrived at my office.
So thank you so much to some of our listeners for being so
generous. I did ask one of our listeners
that sells solid gold Rolexes if they want to send me a gift and
they said no, which is absolutely fine.
I appreciate there is a line with all of these things.
If you haven't already, please go and check out the growth hub.
So go to wwspodcast.com and then click on Growth Hub.
Growth Hub is our free community for all of you guys as Shopify
brands. If you're a tech company, an
agency, you're not allowed in that group.
It's for brands only. We run lots of little round
tables. There's lots of conversation in
that group as well. And a lot of the guests we have
on the show, we add those guys into the Growth Hub as well.
So definitely go and check that out.
And if you're in London in September, come and check out
our meet up at Molly and we might have another sponsor
getting involved as well and some really cool speakers that
I'm going to be announcing soon. You know, without further ado,
I'm delighted to introduce a very special guest from an
amazing business with quite a cool and quite different and
unique story. This is Carol from Dandelion
Chocolate. Carol, welcome to the show.
How are you? Oh, I'm doing quite well.
It's, you know, finally a really sunny day in San Francisco.
So I feel like for the last few weeks it was just we were living
in a completely different country compared to rest of
America. But it's finally the summer has
hit and it's a sunny day, so doing quite well.
As someone from the UK, I'm fully used to all seasons, all
days. It's right now in the UK, it's
about 3°C at night and it's about 32°C in the day.
And that's in the South where it's supposed to be warm.
So it's lovely and cool at night and stupidly hot during the day.
But it's great to have you on the show and lovely to hear
you're in San Francisco as well. I absolutely love San Francisco,
I've been there a couple of times in the last year.
But before we dive in, anyone's going at Dandelion Chocolate?
Sounds nice. Is it dandelion flavoured?
Doesn't sound so nice. Tell us a little bit about the
business. But most importantly, I want to
I'm going to hear a little bit first about your background and
how you actually got involved in the business in the first place.
Yes. So, so you know, I leave the
online business for Dandelion Chocolate and then prior to this
I was leaving product teams at Google and Twitter.
So after leaving Twitter 2.0 I was really kind of thinking
through, you know, what I want to do next.
So I've been always a big foodie and should have really fell in
love with chocolate, had done a lot of research in this space,
like kind of really learning through how chocolate comes
about, especially craft chocolate.
So this is bean to bar and was kind of looking for areas or
like, you know, places to invest in because for me, I really felt
that this could be very similar to like the third wave coffee
movement. So that's How I Met the folks at
Dandelion Chocolate had been their long time consumer of
their product. So you know I met them, really
got along well, decided to spend some time with the team and
learn about the industry and how things are done.
And those three months of experiment now turn into me
being here for almost 2 years. Amazing, amazing.
I love the fact that you've always gone from like big
corporate worlds into like I'm really passionate about this and
now I found somewhere to apply my corporate skills in a less
corporate environment. But I mean, you guys must have
the most incredible canteen. Like please tell me you have
lots of tasting sessions, lots of chocolate in the canteen and
and the team obviously trying the product because if a
customer phones and you say, well, I've not tried it kind of
loses its loses its thing, doesn't it?
So one of my favorite parts of the job is that, you know, I
have we have these amazing, amazing using team of
craftspeople. So like the person who leads
that experiences was an ex pastry chef at French Laundry,
the executive chef who does the pastries.
And then then there is another person in, you know, the
confections team Nick. So my favorite part of the job
is then Lisa, who is our executive pastry chef.
She would send me a ping and say that, hey, I have this treat for
you if you want to try it out. And trust me, no matter how hard
my day has been, that just makes it up for everything.
Oh, amazing, amazing. We've, we've got, we've actually
got someone in our PPC team in my agency just behind this wall
who used to be a pastry chef. The funny thing is he brings in
the lowest volume of baked goods.
And we have someone else in our SEO team, Emily, who if she's
got a face to face client meeting, she always bakes.
And sometimes she was like, Nick, you didn't need to be in
that meeting. I was like, I did, I needed to
do this three hour drive to a client to get some of these
cookies. These are amazing.
And so we've been having a bit of a Bake Off, which is
obviously a very love, well loved global British show,
having a bit of a Bake Off in the spec office, which is always
good fun. Enjoy, but let's get down some
of the nitty gritty then. So you guys are fun business,
amazing product. You are obviously very
passionate about it. I'm sure the rest of the team
are as well. But let's talk about marketing.
Like you can have all this fun passion and all this amazing
energy, but you've got to achieve something at the end of
that. The business got to make profit
and things are going to be growing, moving in the right
direction. So talk about some of your
marketing strategies that have been most effective for driving
traffic and and most importantly, new customers from
the chocolate lovers world. So let me just give you like a
bit of a brief background on downline chocolate before I kind
of really jump into the market because you know, that's what
really sets us sort of apart and different from a lot of other
e-commerce brands if you think about it.
So you know, in downline chocolate, we're essentially
bean to bar chocolate maker. Now what that means is that we
work with farmers from around the world to really source the
highest quality beans and then make the final product all in
our factories in San Francisco. So it's it's kind of really
creating a new category. So, you know, Kraft chocolate
existed in the form of really small local place before this,
but not really operating at this scale and most of the other
industrial chocolate. So if you think about, you know,
any of the big brands, they don't really care about the
quality of the beans for them. It's like they're over roasted
because they need consistency and for something to be called a
chocolate. I believe some of them have even
less than 15% of actual cocoa. For us, we kind of really see it
just as responsibility. It's like, yes, it's operating a
business, but a big part of the goal is also to just educate the
broader world about what real chocolate is, how they can
really, you know, taste the distinct flavors of different
origins. So same way as like coffee or
wine, depending on the terroir, the, the roasting practices, it
can taste very different. So like that's been like one
major goal. And then the second thing that
we are really aspiring for is that we really want to be this
first brand for America that is truly known for its craft and
quality. So like if you think about
American companies, you know, we are known for technology,
innovation, scale, but not so much was craft.
So a big focus of the team has been around like how do we
really build and scale a brand that's truly known for its
craft. So now when you even think about
like our marketing strategies, it's actually sometimes it's
kind of very different. So a big focus for us has been
really building, you know, like outside of having an amazing
product is just the education piece that is actually LED into
self into marketing. So even when it comes to our
newsletters where, you know, we've worked with a few
consultants here and there, they would come and see our stats and
they would just be shocked. Like we have some of the longest
newsletters in the industry where it's like 5 to 6 pages.
Like it's really going deep into the process and but people love
that content We have like, you know, we are in all stats is
like in the top 95 percentile of engagement.
So it's really been about like outside of having just the best
product, the education piece and making people understand that
has been a big part. Amazing.
Yeah, Sorry, just just to jump in on that and I there's,
there's like 20 things I want to pull out.
I won't pull out all 20 because we haven't got 20 hours to go
into all of them. But I, I just in terms of your
branding, for a start, I've had a quick glance at the website
and I say to all my guests, I try not to look at too much.
So I'm kind of hearing and reacting fresh to it while we're
recording. But some of the things you've
mentioned, you mentioned obviously about your brand
positioning and educating people and some of the phrases you've
used several times, which I've never heard in relation to
chocolate, which is why I think your brand is really strong is
bean to bar. I've never I've heard bean to
cup, but bean to cup to me is a coffee machine that you put
beans in the top and coffee comes at the bottom.
But being to bars got like a hang on a minute.
That's like a well known phrase that's slightly different.
That's really smart marketing to take something that's familiar
but make it different. And then the fact that you talk
about crafting chocolate so much as well where like, you know,
Nestle and Mars, like these guys do not talk about crafting
chocolate. I mean you I never knew that
they burn their cocoa beans like you've just said, but it makes
sense now. I've heard that I can't unhear
that. And I'm thinking actually all
the chocolate bars we have in the office have a big tuck shop
for everyone. I feel like I've missed the
trick. I need to change the tuck shop
again because we've got lots of like, you know, Mars bars and
stuff in there. But you guys must have spent so
much time on that brand positioning.
The fact that you're part of the team, although this isn't like a
marketing exercise, you know, this isn't an advert
necessarily, but you're, you're part of the team and you're
using all the same language I would probably expect to see on
the website and hear from the rest of the team.
That's a strong brand position, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, since you
mentioned like you've heard bean to cup, it's kind of very
similar because essentially what bean to cup and everything
started as well was like, hey, can we work with farmers around
who are producing this to really hone in on the quality of the
beans? Like that's how it started in
the coffee world. It's very much similar in like
the Kraft chocolate world as well, because the entire idea is
that, you know, you have all these producers from around the
world and then you kind of source these really create
qualities. So we want the customers to be
able to taste the terroir. So the reason I mentioned about,
you know, like when I was saying bean to bar, the biggest thing
is so if you look at our website and you go to the bar section,
it's if it says 70%, it basically literally means that
it's 70% of the beans and weight and 30% of the beans and sugar.
And now if you pick one bar from the other, it can taste very
different. Like when I have people come to
an Adeline, like my friends would come in and then we have
this entire tasting, they would try these bars and they'd be
like, oh wow, this tastes so different from each other even
though it's the exact same two ingredients.
Yeah, which I think is really, really strong.
And you mentioned about your e-mail newsletter though, so
like even that again, like, like all the information you've just
given me is, is all enlightening as someone who's been eating
chocolate since they were probably about three years old.
And although my mum would say I was more like 10, but I'm sure I
was having chocolate before that.
But it's, it's just educating people on something that's so
normal. But then it becomes so
different. And I've seen it be such an
effective marketing strategy. And then what you say about
e-mail, these huge long emails that people are reading, it's
clearly working, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.
I mean definitely it's working. And you know, since you were
talking, I would say like even when it comes to Mars, Nestle,
like all these brands, I do generally believe that there is
like a place for everything. Like I just call them candies
and not chocolate in my head. And if you think about it, so
yes, there's definitely a place for everything.
But you just like for us, it's like, hey, there is these
companies that exist and you know, like Kraft chocolate today
is a minuscule percentage if you look at like the overall
chocolate as Academy is called today.
But there is definitely a place and no, you know, way for us to
grow. So like, if you educate people,
you can get more people into it. So like, even since you were
mentioning about the content, it's, it's definitely been
working. And we are trying to think of
like now more ways on how to expand it, because a big part of
our positioning has been that we had these stores.
So you know, like you could come into the stores, see the entire
product being made. So like one of Todd who is our
founder, like I the thing that I already connected with him on is
that how just he thought about the entire experience,
experience for walking to a factory.
You see the cocoa beans being roasted.
That aroma is just like, it just kind of, you know, takes you
back to being at home and like your mom making hot chocolate or
like just this. And you see the entire process.
You just develop a different level of association and then
you tell your friends and then how you convert online.
But now our challenge is how do you tell the story when the
growth is happening online and for people who've never visited
the factory? So New Lesters have in some way
been a way for us to kind of build that relationship.
So like when people come in, they kind of understand the
whole story. And then, you know, in the
future, they are actually also build relationship with the
craft people. So for a lot of Dandelion
customers, they would guess, they would know that Lisa is our
executive chef. Nick is the person who runs all
these, you know, the confections department that makes all these
confections and truffles. And there's Stephen who runs
experiences. So it's like really building
that connection with people who are behind the business.
So it just doesn't feel like a faceless product.
I mean, I think it's brilliant. There's a rule we always have in
B2B sales, which is people by people.
So have a name on it, have a face on it.
And people go, oh, I'm, I'm buying so and so's, whatever.
But even if there's like a whole team of people doing stuff
underneath them, it's like their face becomes the thing.
And we, we used to work completely different worlds to
your world, but we used to work with a company based in Wales
who would make commemorative coins.
So it'd be made of real silver. It'd be like it'd be the Queen's
Birthday here in the UK and everyone celebrate the, they'd
really say real silver coin for that birthday.
And I can't remember the guy's name, but they, they started a
blog basically. And it was like alliteration.
So it was like, I think it was like Martin's minutes or
something like that. And it was his blog.
And this guy was just a coin expert.
He was actually one of their customers.
And he always used to e-mail them saying this coin is
fascinating because of this and the material and the design on
it. And it fits really well with
this. He actually reminds me of this
kind of coin. And after a while of like,
replying to him going, great, glad you loved your coin from
someone in the customer service team.
One of the marketing guys heard about this and said, well, we
need to get him on the website. So he said to him every month,
could you write A blog post about what coins are being
released, about any coins found in?
Because yeah, I'm always keeping up to date with all of this
stuff. I'm a massive collector, you
know, great. We'll just write us an article
and send it over. And the articles were enormous.
And at first of all, oh, no, they're too big.
They started using them. But his face like became the
front of like, if he says this is a really cool, like limited
edition print, you know, silver coin, I'll buy it.
And there's a whole following built around him, but through
the brand, it was just really, really powerful.
And so I think the same way you've got Lisa and Nick doing
the doing that, that kind of job.
And I think it's fascinating. But you obviously mentioned the
store and I've got it in my notes that there's been a
transition now to from being an offline store based company 1st
to being an online company 1st. That's a completely different
world. Like talk me through how is that
gone? What changes have been made?
Like, how differently does the team have to now think about
online first versus offline? So this is so this, so the
transition kind of started before I joined.
And then obviously once I joined, like that was a, you
know, online as a part of the business that I'm completely
leaving. But it really all started during
the pandemic because that was a big sort of turn.
You know, we didn't really have a lot of online sales before
that because like I mentioned, for us, a big part of the
experience is that we wanted people to come into this store,
smell the Coke is being roasted and tasted.
And then once the pandemic hit, all the stores closed down and
we really overnight lost all of our revenue and the entire
company basically had to turn into an online web development
team. So like even our HR person
learned how to code and like build a website so.
Yeah. So the company really kind of
transitioned like, you know, during that period.
And then I think one of the key bets that the team took was that
that entire summer they decided they're only going to spend and
on producing chocolate. So like they've truffles bars
and like it was a very small team.
So there was a team that was tasked with building like our
online sort of presence. And then there is a team that
was tossed was like just on production.
And I think during December, when the holiday season hit,
within three weeks, the entire product was sold out.
That's what, like, brilliant. Catapulted.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, well, well done. I mean a lot of businesses
closed down, especially physical like experience based companies,
shops closed down because of the panda or just acquired such
massive debts. Our partners at Saguna have
released a brand new app for Shopify and it's called Shopify
Connect 4 Canva. You can essentially look at all
of your product images from Shopify directly in Canva and
export them straight back. This can save you a lot of time.
If you want to find out a bit more about this or go and find
the app yourself, you can go to saguna.com/canva.
Enjoy. And it's like, it's not, it was
no one's fault. Well, not that we know of.
Let's not go into conspiracies today, but we're going to assume
it's no one's fault. It happened and there's nothing
we, there's nothing we can do to change it.
But actually the way we respond to it is something we can do.
That's exactly what you guys have done.
And I find it amazing that like even your HR team, we're
learning to code and stuff like see you guys must have such a
close knit team that it is clearly a good coach there of
just right. Everyone, this has happened.
How are we going to counter this?
And everyone just wants to bring their bit, do their bit support
and keep it running. And I know it's not one of our
questions. We're supposed to talk about
marketing today, but can we just go on a quick tangent like how
do you build a high performance culture kind of focused team
like that where people want to go over and above so much?
Yeah. So I would say, you know, we
have this question in our interview as well, like do you
like chocolate? And because if you don't, really
not going to like, don't come here.
Which feels obvious, but it's good to ask, isn't it?
Yeah, it is because it's like if you're not into chocolate,
you're really not going to enjoy it, right?
Because a lot of the passion for all of us that are kind of
working here, I think it's it's including our founder.
Like for him, it really started with just being in love with
chocolate. Like he actually tried to grow a
cacao tree in his backyard. Like that kind of initial story.
And then, you know, we are a few years later.
So you know, since you mentioned about like the high performing
culture, I think the number one thing for any sort of company
that I've worked at is just being extremely mission driven.
Like even though it's an overused term, I still, I still
strongly feel like if you have a team that's really aligned
towards like what is it that we are trying to accomplish?
That's really, and you know, with all the people like you,
the other the other fascinating thing that's really worked out
for us is that even as we've grown, some of our best hires
have come through from our community.
So, you know, we put it out in our newsletter when we were
looking for technical people and we just stand out that are there
Chef Foiler chocolate lovers who would be interested in kind of
joining the team And we got like, you know, these two
amazing like early engineers from Stripe.
Who came in and were like, hey, you know, we're kind of have
been a big fan of Dandelion for a while.
Would be interested to kind of explore it.
So you just really get. Yeah.
People get a my friends often joke that I'm kind of living the
kids dream that nobody ever, when they're young, thinks of
that. I want to be APM in Big Tech but
everybody does think I want to work in a Chocolate Factory.
So for me, I'm definitely living living that dream.
But but I feel like I'm going on a tangent here, but it's.
Really useful, yeah. One of the things is definitely
being about being mission driven.
So like having that very shared understanding.
I think the second thing that has just worked out is we have a
very small lean team and it's people don't like and oftentimes
what happens in like big cultures is people think about
this is the team I want to build.
Where As for us, we really kind of focus on this is the guest
experience. We want to provide work
backwards from that and then understand that how can we most
efficiently achieve this. So irrespective of like, you
know, even in our teams, you have we have leadership, we of
course have like people walking through, but everyone's kind of
driven to do the work. So nobody kind of working as
like a middle manager. So for us, I feel like that's
that's just something that I kind of really resonated with me
when I was when I was talking to the founders as well.
And how they want to build a team is that, you know, we want
to have a culture where like, irrespective of where you are,
you can have ideas and you can bring ideas to the table.
So I think that's a very key part of the culture as well.
So like some of our ideas even come from the chocolate
production team. So we do these, you know, like
these exercises where we have a pitch off and anybody in the
company you could be working in fulfillment, but you can come
and pitch picture idea at just in the beginning of the year, we
had somebody from fulfillment who had a great idea which is
going to see the light of the day during this, you know,
December like our holiday season.
So I think it's like mission driven, making sure that
everybody feels extremely hurt. So like ideas, like there are no
bad ideas. People came from all parts of
the business. And then I think the third thing
is really around like having the accountability that all of us
are here for, you know, to for our to provide the best
experience. So we have to do like our part
of the job. Now, I really appreciate you
sharing that because although we're talking about marketing
today, none of that's achievable without the team around you and
the right kind of cultural fit. And actually a spoiler alert for
everybody listening next week, we're talking specifically about
customer service and how AI and stuff fit into that.
And actually, and I've already recorded that one, which I can
tell you what happened, part of the conversation when we were
talking about this was how customer service should actually
drive what marketing do and the messaging they use.
And actually, we can get rid of a lot of customer service by
answering the questions on the website.
Plus we can learn from the things that people ask for in
after sales. Actually, we could offer at
front end. People working in the product
team need to be working with marketing.
And we, I mean, working in an SEOPPC world as I have for
nearly 20 years. And we, we, we've had so many
instances where we talked about the merchandising, buying teams
of brands and say we need more T-shirts, we need more shirts or
we need more of these specific blue shoes.
We need more of these blue shoes.
And they're like, why? And how do you know all of this?
Like we're the product experts like because I've got the Google
search data and people are looking for them.
We're ranking number one and we haven't got enough to sell a
ranking third. And we could rank first if we
had more. I mean, we talked to a baby
company recently about you need to sell more toys.
Like your toy range is so small and you rank so well for toys.
And actually you've got everything up until the baby's
about two or three toys, They're going to be buying toys until
they're in their like, you know, kind of 11/12 at least.
So actually the toys have got way more longevity than all of
your pushchairs, car seats, everything else.
So I think it's really important just that the teams all talk to
one another. You know, if the PR teams doing
something, they don't tell marketing and then product are
suddenly like, well, we can't make enough chocolate to keep up
with the thing you should have told us that was happening.
So I think having that cohesion must be such a important part
bringing it back to marketing to to make the marketing happen and
make it relevant and make it work.
So like you said, you sold out, which is probably fantastic to
do once, wouldn't really want to do it again.
Is that is what one of my clients described that as?
Yep. So you know, it's like 2 things
to it. Since you mentioned about like
like it, I feel like that was something definitely we were
really dealing with initially because especially on the
product teams initially when you sell out, like they start
thinking of that as success and then it's like, hey, you can
sell out a few times, but if you're doing it again, then it's
like there is something wrong, you've got a problem.
Yeah. Yeah.
And then to your point about the guest care team, like that's
definitely been so true for Dandelion.
Like some of our best ideas and growth have actually come in
from our guest care team that just by their share will that's
what started our corporate business.
So we don't have like, you know, we to your point that today with
a lot of these automations and things available, which is also
something that we are really now heavily leaning into, one of the
big things has been that it has actually helped guests carefree
up their time. And they're the ones who are
listening and talking to the customers the most.
And that's how like literally our corporate program started.
And it's like really again, growing similarly to the online
business, you know, the overall business as well.
And it's like if you build a team, which is that self
motivated, it just helps. So like, you know, we have this
thing, we, we don't have strict boundaries.
Like, I think that's been something that I even learned
from being in tech that I had some of the teams on the,
especially on the engineering side, which initially started as
like not being that great teams to becoming the teams that shift
the most amount of features. And a lot of it was just about
increasing accountability and making people feel that they own
the problem. Like it's not just that they're
just, you know, responsible for this part of the business.
They own the problem for the entire business.
And like for them, the success of the business is the success
of their teams. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
I've got two really big questions to ask you, which will
probably take us up to the end of today's episode.
But just before that, I just want to go back to my very first
point about branding the beans cup crafting.
I called, I just called it customer service and you called
it guest care. I love that.
How did you guys come up with that name?
Like, it's such a good, again, it's such a better way of
describing what could sound really dry to a customer.
But I gotta call customer service.
Like, no, I'm going to be cared for because I'm talking to the
guest team. How did that name come about?
So I wish I could take the credit for doing that, but I
that I did not like, you know, Elaine, who's like our she we
call her CXO because wherever there is a problem in the
business, we just throw her at it and that problem, you know,
will get resolved. So, yeah, creative person that
I've met to being somebody who's a great developer, like you feel
if you want to get her website done to running that entire
production team, like she's somebody who's already created
that. And she really started our, you
know, like she hired the set of people for our guest care team.
And for her, this was in her vision.
Like, you know, anybody who's coming in, they're a guest
because you just treat that them differently because customer is
like, it feels like a transaction.
That is what we are trying to do is build a relationship.
Yeah, absolutely love that. Some these framings get
initially it seems like oh does it matter, but they go a long
way. No, I think it's really cool.
And I mean, she sounds like a legend.
Like if you can give me an e-mail, I've got loads of things
you can look out for us. But I think it's just it's just
really nice. And I think just having the
right naming for things like guest care, it makes me feel
more like I'm in a like a really kind of premium, but well
established hotel. And it's the concierge service,
which when I was Jung goes to think, oh, concierge sounds
expensive. But now when I go to concierge,
you realize, actually if you're in the hotel, it's normally
free. And you can say to them, like, I
want to go and see some museums today in the city.
I've never been to the city before.
Where do I go? And they're like, right, well,
let's get a map out. You can go here and go here.
We can. We've got a free car.
We can drop you off at the door. It's raining at the moment,
especially in the UK. And so I think it's having some
of those, you know, having some of those wordings, I think can
make such a big difference to people.
The two questions I want to ask is obviously you've really got
your ear to the ground with marketing and obviously you
know, all the online stuff falls under your remit, so marketing
is really important. Where, where do you see some of
the biggest opportunities right now in?
And I mentioned before we hit record, the world's quite
gloomy. There's a lot of things going on
that can make people very upset. And a lot of business owners I
know are very angry, frustrated. I'm forcing myself not to be
dragged down into that and say, no, it's a good year, some good
things are happening. I'm focusing on those.
What opportunities are you guys exploiting at the moment or
seeing seeing on the horizon? So for us, because it's you
know, in the world like in the world of marketing, paid
acquisition has still been, is actually a very small part of
our business. So, but the opportunity that we
are really seeing is like still on Instagram, Facebook, Meta and
you know, there are very few platforms in the world that can
help you get your message and product in front of the right
customer at that scale. And for us, like a big part of
the brand, like I was mentioning of going now online when you're
entering into completely new markets where people haven't
been to the store as being able to tell that story.
So for us, like really leaning into that video storytelling and
then using these platforms to get the message across, it still
seems to be working. It's really hard to do that for
us because like just online versus retail, right?
Like retail you come and you experience, whereas now you're
telling somebody to imagine that experience.
We're kind of really still leaning into that and like how
do we increase our storytelling? I think the second thing that we
are also doing a lot of experimentation and kind of
being able to build like good data foundations and bringing in
data from like different sources and then thinking about how we
do our targeting. Like that's, that's even though
it sounds small, but then has like a really huge incremental
benefit if your segmentation is done right.
Like I, we just remember like initially when I joined, we
weren't really, you know, focusing a lot in segmentation.
Like I said, it was early part of the business, so it was just,
it was just about getting the content across, not really
thinking through how we are telling the story.
But now with even like having good data foundation and then
being able to do a segmentation has like really catapulted that
growth. The third area for us that's
like seems to be really growing is on the corporate side.
So you know, shifting unsurprisingly is like a really
huge part of our business. And so far corporate has been
like, like I mentioned it was sure will of the guest care team
that that business just started. But we are seeing like there are
some immense opportunities to be able to grow that good, grow
that side as well. Yeah, amazing.
And I appreciate you sharing those.
My my last question was actually going to be on that last point
about corporate. So I'm glad you brought it up.
Obviously corporate. I sometimes describe this to
clients as saying like, imagine your customer is not buying for
themselves. They're buying for 50, a
hundred, 200 people and they're not spending their own money.
So if you think about that compared to the average customer
you're bringing in from Meta ads, Google ads or something
like that or SEO into the site, it's actually a slightly easier
sell in one sense. But also you don't need as many
of them to make a lot more money.
And even things like delivery or doing one delivery, which is
going to cost more than a standard one box of chocolate
going somewhere, it's going to cost more, but not like
proportionally more as sending 100 products out individually.
So I think certainly with the corporate partnerships, how do
you guys approach that? Like I'm sure a lot of brands
listening are like, Oh my gosh, I wish I had, you know, 500
quantity orders coming in every day.
Well, you can, but how did you guys actually start to achieve
that? Like what does the marketing
strategy look like for it? How much do you reach out?
How much do they, you know, the corporates reach into you?
How does? It work.
So we've definitely been a bit fortunate that like I mentioned,
right because I guess care team was the one that actually
started the business for them. It was mostly talking to
customers who were individual, you know they were buying it for
themselves and then they were like, oh, we would kind of want
to share it with their company. So it has been very bound so
far, right, because it's a very lean team, but now they're
really starting to outreach. And now, you know, one of the
things that really worked out for us is like building this
multi gift platform. So essentially providing a place
where you can come in and place bulk orders because that gave us
now an information about like people, it was self-serve.
So people started coming in in Q4 of last year like that was,
you know, suddenly almost 5% of the online revenue, which we had
not initially anticipated. And that's what's clearly kind
of started with is like, OK, now you have these people who are
using this, can they become much bigger clients?
And then telling them about our different offerings that exist.
So we have like, you know, a lot of bespoke customizations.
We invested a lot in our own print shop.
So there are things that we can do.
But now having seen the people who are coming on the multi gift
platform and then converting them into like bigger corporate
guests for us, we going back to like even your growth questions,
right? We also do some very interesting
partnerships and like on partnership side, we look at it
as almost two ways, which has also helped us kind of weave
into like other sort of guest customer segments.
Well, that, that's amazing. And I, I think for many brands
out there, I actually wrote down just an idea for an e-mail
subject line. If you would send an e-mail out
to all your kind of personal customers, everybody is saying
at home, why not something like take us to work, you know, and
say, actually, why don't you use our products, a corporate gift,
like recommend it to the corporate gift buyer at work
because you're helping them out. They're all stressing about it
and actually we've got really cool products and but that's
corporate gifting. How much do you guys also do
then partnerships which can also be incredibly fruitful for for
an e-commerce store? Yeah.
So, so for us, partnerships really fall into kind of two
buckets. So, you know, that is 1, the
partnerships which is more around working with different
chocolate tiers because that's really where it comes from, the
mission that we want to, you know, grow the overall craft
chocolate industry. So, you know, we have this
entire program like I don't know if you've ever seen our advent
calendar. The admin calendar is like a
partnership where we have chocolate tears from around the
country and Canada, like apply to get their chocolates, you
know, treat selected Christmas and then it's paired with like a
celestial theme. So that's like a that's like a
whole new program and it's just, it's so much so that it's almost
called like the Oscars of Kraft chocolate.
So that's a one partnerships, which is more with chocolate
tears. And then the second is more with
brands that we believe they share like similar quality and
craft and the attention to detail.
And you know, like we're we're really trying to combine the
best with the other best brand that we consider in the
industry. So something like fellow, which
is in the coffee world, they make coffee equipment and you
know, we've done a few partnerships with them or with
tea where we did this entire collaboration for Mother's Day
where this we know this person, Jodi, who's like also a great
friend and is somebody who who has like the most amount of
knowledge when it comes to tea. So like really finding other
people in the other craft sort of brands and then being able to
partner. Like one of our another favorite
ones that we did for Valentine's Day was strawberries.
And it really started like chocolate covered strawberries
is a very common thing, common gift, but if we were to pair the
best chocolate with the best strawberries and then like
create like a truly craft product there.
So those are kind of the partnership, the two kinds of
partnerships that we really look at.
And I think, I mean, just think about social media content,
going out to all the strawberry farms, trying all the
strawberries and going, here's our top 10.
So #1 we're going to partner with these guys and do this and
almost like release your top ten.
And we, we, we did a thing years ago when we did something
similar with, with different brands.
And we sort of said to everybody, and, and we are doing
one of these again soon for everybody listening.
And I don't know what the criteria is going to be.
We did some, we did kind of coolest growing and we set some
criteria as to why they were the coolest.
But then we also, we, I don't know if we ever actually
released the video, but I remember recording the team and
I sitting around at a table with lots of cameras and lights up.
And we would sort of bring one up on the three or four iPads in
front of us and look at how cool they were and go through the
criteria to try and then make content out of the the kind of
judging process. So I mean, it sounds really cool
and really smart as well. Because it's cross pollination,
isn't it? So it gives them an opportunity
to e-mail their customers about you as much as you're then
featuring them in there, say you almost get them double exposure
on your e-mail campaigns. People go, I love buying
strawberries from this brand. I always buy that brand in the
supermarket. And they've teamed up with this
really nice corporate craft, you know, bean to bar.
What is that? Let's go and have a look.
And all those all your branding points really start to hammer
home. So yeah, nice, cool.
Well, look, I'm going to draw things to a close there.
We could talk all day, especially about chocolate.
And if anyone's listening to this paro and they're thinking
this sounds amazing, I really want to see this company, I want
to try your products. And how can people get in touch?
What's the website URL? What your social handles?
How can people reach out? Yeah, so I think it's Dandelion
chocolate.com. That's our website.
Our Instagram is Dandelion Chocolate.
If anybody wants to ever reach out to me, it's Parole at
dandelionchocolate.com. Feel free to e-mail.
And, you know, and if you're ever in San Francisco, I highly,
highly recommend everyone to come in for a factory tour
because it's truly fascinating whence you actually see like,
you know, from starting from the fruit to the final, like
chocolate being made. It's, it's a great experience.
So yeah, definitely recommend that if you ever visit San
Francisco, do drop by at the 16th St. factory.
Amazing. Next time I'm in San Francisco,
which will probably be within the year, I will absolutely come
and see you guys. And I'd love to come and have a
cup of tea and chocolate because I always love tea as much as
chocolate. But Carol, thank you so much for
your time. I want to say also a massive
thank you for sharing so many insights.
Brands like you guys don't have to share all of this.
I really appreciate your time. Thank you for your energy.
Thanks for all the stuff you guys are doing.
And yeah, I appreciate you joining us today.
Yeah, Thank you so much, Nick, But I'm really looking forward
to your SF trip. Nice.
Well I'll certainly come and see you guys there when I say I had
bright red Mustang last time. So we'll see What Car I'm
allowed to take this time with with a car seat in it for the
baby. We'll see what I'm allowed.
But anyway, again, a massive thank you to Apparel for
everybody listening at home. Thank you so much for tuning in.
It'll be completely pointless if you guys weren't watching this
and it is slightly pointless if you don't subscribe.
So please do go and subscribe. I'm getting kicked by my
marketing team to plug this home more and more.
Hit that subscribe button. Nearly 90% of you on YouTube are
not subscribe. So please hit that button, leave
us a review, check out our socials as well.
And if you want to get in touch with us, then please do go to
hello@winningwishaw5.com. All right, an e-mail and click
send. Thank you so much for listening
to us today. We're back again next Friday and
we hope you all take care.