In this video, I want to share with you my most successful product launch ever.
When I released this product for sale, I was able to bring in an additional $30,000 to
my sales that year and it only kept growing from there.
This year I made about $84,000 selling this product.
If you're curious to learn more, keep watching this video.
Hi!
My name is Mei Pak and I help makers, artists and designers make a consistent income selling
their handmade products online.
My experience teaching you comes from running my own handmade jewelry business for the last
fourteen plus years.
My shop is called Tiny Hands Online, and I sell hand sculpted scented food jewelry made
out of polymer clay.
So, you want to know about my launch.
I want to give you a little bit of some back story.
First and foremost, I personally don't care about launches.
Anytime I release a new product, my launch formula for that is super simple.
I don't make a huge thing about it, because honestly, launches are exhausting and if you
do them too often, it can also exhaust your audience.
And what that means is they can start to tune you out, and you don't want that to happen.
So my launch formula is usually something like, I make twenty pieces of that product,
I tell my email list about it and maybe I offer a small discount and I can usually sell
out of those twenty pieces in one day.
Just because I've got a pretty good, engaged email list.
So, I don't like doing launches, and when I do them, they're super simple.
And to give you some perspective, I make two to three hundred thousand dollars in sales
selling my handmade jewelry online.
I say that to show you that you don't need to do launches or to over complicate things
to make money.
Now, we fast forward to when I launch this product that is the topic of this video today.
At this point in my business, I had already been established for about eight or so years.
And I would say about five of those years were hobby years, I wasn't running my business
very seriously or doing it full time yet.
So I don't want you to think that I like, came out of nowhere, set up my shop yesterday
and next week I was making a few tens of thousands of dollars.
I think a lot of people who talk about their launches, make you feel like that's how it
is, and I just think it's unfair and almost irresponsible that they're giving you false
hope or misinformation about how business works.
It isn't an overnight thing, it isn't even an over month or over year thing.
At least for me, I've always been a slow and steady kind of business.
So I bet you're really curious as to what this product is.
This was my subscription product, the Necklace of the Month Club.
I was actually inspired and motivated to do this because I had become good friends with
Stacey Trock, who used to own Fresh Stitches, an amigurumi pattern business, and SHE used
to run her Kit Club, where every month, for I think it was sixteen dollars, she would
mail you a package of all the supplies you would need and the pattern for making a crocheted
soft toy.
So you would get the yarn, the plastic eyes and anything else you might have needed for
that month's project.
And I remember, every month she would make like eight hundred packages for that.
It was super lucrative.
So I decided after a few months of planning to create my own subscription.
Now, at the time, the reason I figured this was a good idea was because I had already
been in business for a few years, and I knew I had quite a handful of repeat customers.
Remember, I told you about how when I made a new product design, I would tell my email
subscribers about it?
Almost always the same people would be the first to grab that new design.
I kept seeing the same names come up over and over again over the years.
So I knew, my business model had this built in sense of people wanting to collect my products.
You don't just stop at buying one necklace.
You buy eight, twelve, twenty of them.
I have some serious repeat buyers and some really big fans of my work.
So I knew that a subscription would directly feed that desire that I knew a percentage
of my customers had to collect my jewelry.
Now, I want you to know, creating this product wasn't like a one week thing.
It took me months to figure everything out.
There were a lot of decisions I had to make, a lot of thinking about how to structure this
product and a lot of me making my best guesses on what I thought my customers wanted.
And then beyond that there was also a lot of logistical, operational, technical set
up stuff that needed to be done for taking recurring payments and doing shipping.
So once everything was ready, again, my launch formula is super simple.
I told my email list about it.
I posted it on social media and at the time I didn't have nearly as many followers as
I do today. Before I tell you the results of my Launch if you're enjoying this video and your finding it helpful
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Okay, so back to the launch.
In less than a week, I was able to get one hundred people to sign up for my Necklace
of the Month Club.
Personally I think this is a really big feat, because you have to understand, these sales
weren't just one time sales.
They were recurring sales that would happen every month after someone signed up for the
first time.
I priced my club at twenty five dollars plus shipping, so if you do the math, that's twenty
five hundred dollars every month and thirty thousand dollars for the entire year.
That's like the entire annual income for a lot of people.
This product ran for about two years and I was having trouble scaling it up, so I changed
a few things, made the price lower to nineteen ninety nine and I was about to quadruple the
size of the customer base for this.
So currently it makes up almost fifty percent of my sales!
I guess, a few lessons I wanted to share with you about all of this is, for one.
If it doesn't work out the first time, what people automatically assume is that people
didn't like your products or they thought your prices were too high.
That's the first thing people think about when launches don't work or people don't buy.
I know it's easy to think that, but it's usually not the case.
Now, by no means was my launch unsuccessful, but relative to when I changed things up,
it pales in comparison, right?
I had one hundred customers in the first version of my club and four hundred on average, in
my new version of the club.
It wasn't the product that was the problem and what made the difference between one hundred
and four hundred customers.
What I was doing in the first version of the club was making an entirely new product design
for my club members.
These designs weren't available anywhere else, you couldn't find them in my shop.
If you wanted them, you had to be a part of the club.
And it was a little bit of a higher price point.
The trouble with that was I eventually got burned out designing so many new products
and having the pressure of needing to do that every month.
It wasn't sustainable and it wasn't scaleable.
I have production assistants that help me make jewelry, but they don't design new stuff.
Only I do that.
So when I redid the club, I changed it out to being designs that you COULD get in my
shop ala carte, so it wasn't as exclusive as it was before, and in exchange for that,
I did also lower the price.
I could afford to do this because now we were giving out designs that my team could make
and I didn't have to make any new designs.
So you can see how it wasn't really the fault of the product itself, and in some ways you
could argue and say that the club that I changed it to is not as cool as the original version,
right?
When it comes to launches, don't put that pressure on yourself that the outcome needs
to be perfect.
You might have certain goals with your launches, and if you don't meet them, that's totally
okay because part of running a business for the long term is making pivots, making changes
over time, making those improvements based on real feedback you're seeing from your customers.
So when you see other people's launches, don't compare yourself to them, because you don't
know if that's like their tenth launch for that product and they've just got that process
really honed in.
And they've figured out exactly what their customer wants, and they've tested a lot of
different price points and positioning of their product to get to that point.
Don't expect your first launch to be a success right away.
If you do, that's great, more power to you, but if you don't, there is nothing wrong with
that.
Another lesson is to really pay attention to what your customers want.
Now, they won't always tell you what they want, and they may not even know what they
want, because they're not the designers, they're not the ones who know how to make your products,
they don't know what's possible.
When I launched my Necklace of the Month Club, I was giving what I thought my customers wanted,
and that was new designs they had never before seen in my shop.
What I didn't realize until a few years later was I was following the wrong scent.
I mean, it wasn't like my customers didn't want new products, it was just that it was
a much smaller percentage of people who did.
Only one hundred people in my audience cared about totally new designs, because these were
my top fans, right?
They'd been following me for years, they've already got all my other necklaces.
But I wasn't paying attention to all the other people in my audience.
So shifting my Club to the new version and the new format, is in essence more so serving
the majority of my audience and because of that, it was overall a better fit and that's
why it was more succesful than the first version of the club.
This is a mistake I see a lot of people make.
They just make what they want to make, and they don't think for a second about what their
customers want, and that is a huge mistake.
If you don't make any sales, it's very likely it's because you didn't think about what your
customers wanted.
And when you think about it, they're the ones paying you money, so why shouldn't you, right?
Um, another lesson to all of this is, you don't need to overcomplicate things.
I think a lot of us feel the need to complicate things and create all these steps for us,
all these hoops to jump through, so that when we get to the finish line, we feel like we're
worthy of the prize.
I made my life so hard when I first started my Necklace of the Month Club.
I had a hundred club members, which was great, but I was slowly killing my soul inside because
I was forced to be creative, I was forced to make new designs even though I didn't want
to.
The new club is a lot simpler, it's a lot more streamlined and surprise!
It works better than my previous club.
So I hope you learned something from this.
If you're launching a new product or business, I want you to know that it could be really
great.
You could make a lot of money, in my case, I made an entire person's annual income with
selling just one product.
But also keep in mind all the other lessons I shared in this video.
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