- All right, so it's 4:00 AM.
Sorry, I've got to be quiet, my housemates are still asleep.
I just want to show you the results, we are at 1.1 million.
(upbeat techno music)
Hey everyone, Davie here, founder of the Oodie.
Over the past 12 months,
we've done over $200 million on Shopify.
Today I'm gonna give you a behind the scenes,
just do a little bit of a vlog 'cause I think
we're gonna to do a million dollars in sales in one day.
So really special moment, thanks to our amazing customers.
And yeah, I just wanna give you all the tips
that I could possibly can about.
People try to break down why the Oodie is so successful
and I'm just gonna lay it all out there
and hope you get a lot of value from it.
And basically, try to do a bit of a tutorial
on how your brands can achieve this as well.
So let's jump into it.
(upbeat music)
- It's 9:43 AM, we're tracking really well on yesterday's
that's where I'm really confident
we're gonna hit that million.
My kind of first lesson that I wanted to talk about
is something that I don't nearly talk about enough
and it's the most important part about business
or any large business and that's our team.
Our team is incredible.
I probably don't take you behind the scenes enough
and the truth is all you see is me.
The honest thing is that without a team,
we could not do anywhere close to the numbers that we do.
We have teams in marketing, product, finance,
customer service, operations.
You really do need kind of incredible people
in each of those departments
to excel and scale up in your sales.
So when you first set up your product or your brand,
it's basically gonna be you,
you're gonna be the head of department in every single area.
You going to have to learn every single area,
set up the system, set up the processes.
And then it gets to the point where
your time could be better spent
somewhere else in the business.
And that's when you need to make your first hire.
So for me, that was my brother
who was helping me with operations
and customer service, 'cause my specialty is in marketing.
So it's all about opportunity cost,
where could you be spending that time
to better further your business.
Eventually that starts happening at a rapid pace,
and you need to hire individuals for each area,
because people have different skill sets
and different strengths
and your business can grow so big that,
something as small as customer service once was,
is now a full-time job.
My main advice for hiring is, hire for attitude,
especially in the beginning, because, you're going to go
on this kind of really large journey of learning
and people are just gonna need to adapt constantly.
You just wanna hire someone that's super hungry,
believes in that vision, has an orientation
to the kind of the department that you're putting them in
whether it's operations,
they need to be organized and understand kind of
where they need to focus their time in that area.
So one other amazing hiring hack that I have is,
hiring someone that has achieved
what you're trying to achieve.
So, that can be as broad as,
if you're a $10 million e-commerce business,
you wanna hire someone that has taken
a $10 million e-commerce business to a $100 million
in that certain department,
whether be marketing or something like that.
So that's one hack, it's not exactly easy to find,
but you can break it down to even if like
you're looking to hire,
if you're looking to do an international expansion,
you're simply trying to hire someone in your country
that has also managed an international expansion.
That person will have a range of knowledge
from failures that they've done previously,
such as, taxes or setting up the 3PLs,
certain import laws.
It's all of those kinds of things that,
it's just gonna fast track you and avoid a lot of mistakes.
To hire people, there's a couple of good books
like "Who" is a really great book.
Talks about setting up scorecards for your employees.
So you're looking at, what does actually success look like.
Map out their role around that,
and then kind of measure that as well.
But honestly, in the early stages,
you're just gonna be grinding it out with this person
and they're just going to, need to set up systems
and processes and reporting for you.
Our team right now, and the reason why we are so successful
is we have like an amazing OKR system,
which is objectives and key results.
It's commonly used by Google.
That's basically where we all agree as a team,
what the objectives are for the quarter.
And then we set up key results,
the measurable key results to track that,
then result in that objective being achieved.
- My name is Linda
and I am the Social Media and Community Manager at the Oodie
and I also make content.
So one of the key OKR for the quarter
is to reach record revenues.
So this ties back to my role because I assist
the content team and my own personal content.
- Hey, I'm Maddie,
and I am the Creative Content Coordinator at the Oodie,
I'm across a lot of things.
My day-to-day always looks very different.
It can be from liaising with marketing managers to ensure
that our content output is the best it can possibly be,
organizing streamline processes for rapid content output
for all of our Facebook ads.
So one of my company-wide OKR's
is to increase the group revenue for a record quarter.
So one of my key objectives within that is to coordinate
the content team to produce different types of creators
for Facebook ads in order to beat last quarter's targets.
- That's a really amazing part of the Davie group
and the Oodie especially.
We've just hired young, hungry people like,
that really understand the vision
of what we're trying to achieve
and creating beautiful brands.
Touching a bit more about having
key people that are responsible for a department,
obviously with so many brands,
we need an actual brand manager, a marketing manager.
That person kinda lives and breathes the brand
and brings all of the departments in together.
We then use kind of a brand manager
to manage those brand managers.
And then we have each kind of marketing department set up.
We have digital, we have creative,
we have product, we have retention.
All of those kinds of departments
also have a head of department.
So basically, we've got all of these internal resources
that our brand managers can then pull upon.
Every time we've hired someone that's pretty much created
a new capability internally, which is really exciting.
And then we basically just give them free reign
to express their creativity
and improve their results through data.
Everything, we kind of go into it with a hypothesis.
Is this going to work?
What does success look like?
And then we measure it accordingly.
Giving that level of freedom to your team
is just so important and that's part of the reason
why they Oodie has become so successful.
- The Oodie gives me full creative freedom
to do my own trend research,
make videos and edit videos that I think would be viral.
- I have a lot of creative freedom
when it comes to both the actual creative tasks,
as well as the processes that are behind it.
- One of the main reasons that Oodie
can do the numbers that it's doing
is just does that just diversification.
So I see a common mistake with brands
that they launch and find a winning product.
And typically this happens, they find it in the US,
which is a very large market,
and you can build a very large business there,
but they failed to diversify countries early.
The Oodie operates in over five countries now,
and we expanded there really quickly,
which has really provided an amazing competitive advantage.
And I think a lot of brands don't do that
because they're too focused on one market
and they're not planning long-term for the future.
Maybe they're intimidated by expanding internationally,
but the truth is, you should do it quite early
and to really give you momentum as well.
And especially if your product is seasonal,
it's really important to have those other regions
with momentum.
To diversify with countries with your brand,
all you need to do is make sure that you buy
the domains in those countries.
So, .com.au for Australia, .com for the US,
or .co.uk for the UK.
Really making sure that you have those domains,
then you're just gonna duplicate your store.
Change the currencies, set up a three PL in that country,
and just pretty much launch very similar ads
and just duplicate those flows across.
Another great way of diversifying
is actual channel diversification.
So the Oodie operates on all the major digital platforms.
We've got Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, we run native ads,
Google ads, YouTube ads, we do a lot of influence.
So, it's really important from a risk point of view
that you're not completely reliant on one platform,
but it's also very good because just how the platforms work
in terms of efficiency, where the lower amount of ad spent,
the better the returns are going to be.
If you do have that winning product,
and you've kinda pushed Facebook and your landing pages
to the highest degree,
then looking at channel diversification is really important.
The other form of diversification that is super important,
and the reason why the Oodie is so fantastic
is product diversification.
In fact, this is probably the reason
why our group is so successful
compared to a lot of the other kind of house of brands
that are operating is, we really focus on product.
We test thousands of products and the ones that we believe
can provide a lot of value to customers
and happiness to customers
we then yeah obviously launched them.
Product diversification with Oodie,
it's obviously our licensed designs are incredible.
This million dollar day that we're about to do
is really thanks to our licensed products.
Our recent designs are absolutely crushing it at the moment.
We're really excited about that,
but we've got so many other diversified products
which have slowly edged that average sales date,
up and up and up and provided us
a level of diversification amongst our brand.
(upbeat music)
We're here with Rachel Ward,
the genius behind all of our Oodie patterns.
The creative genius.
So, how'd you come up with these designs?
- So we've been working on these particular ranges
for yeah, about six months now.
So yeah, we started off by having a look through the portal,
having a look at what's trending and work out
with our audience, what will really resonate with them.
- So for all the people starting a fashion brand at home,
what is the process for starting a product like this?
- It all starts with the creatives.
So we go through various rounds of mood boards
and we look at trends,
we look at what's happening in the market.
In particular, this is Warner Brothers.
So we have a look at what's in their marketing calendar,
what movies are coming up,
what are the things that would really resonate
with our customer audience.
Then we go through about four or five creative rounds.
So we do different scales of the product.
We go through different style guides,
which takes quite a long time.
So we've been working on this range for about six months,
and then we go through creative approvals.
So again, we do a lot of internal approvals with creative.
As this is Warner Brothers,
we have to do Warner Brothers approvals as well.
Then we start sampling and then it kinda goes from there.
- What's your favorite design?
- Tweety, I love Tweety.
I think there's such a nostalgia with Tweety.
- What are some of the funniest ideas
you've had pitched in the Oodie?
- Oh we've had so many over the years,
our customers really love emailing us
and asking us to create various designs.
One of my favorites was when somebody asks
to have a Nicholas Cage photo on an Oodie, which was great.
Maybe we should actually do that.
- Actually we should do it.
(laughs)
- We are pretty close.
(mumbles)
Let's refresh for everybody.
(suspensive music)
Still got some good hours of trading at 852,000.
Another thing that I really need to stress is,
some basic business principles that have allowed us
to do the sales that we're doing.
The first one is finding a flywheel.
So Jim Collins created this in good to great,
and it really is one of the most powerful concepts
to create focus and understanding
of what makes a great business.
Typically as entrepreneurs, we get very, very distracted.
There's a lot of opportunity in certain areas to grow,
but the kind of key denominator to growing a large business
is finding a flywheel.
Now, what that means is basically finding the process
that makes your business grow.
A flywheel is a big, heavy object that,
as you said, it's very hard to get spinning initially,
and then you're pushing on it and pushing on it
and as it gains momentum,
it's easy to push and it gains a lot of speed.
So that's the kind of metaphor for your business.
So our flywheel is, we release incredible products,
we then scale it through digital advertising
and then we retain through incredible customer service
and also retention based advertising, like email.
It just repeats like that.
That has proved incredibly useful for us
and anything additional onto that
can actually be a distraction.
You need to understand your flywheel for your business.
It may be very similar if you're in e-commerce
and a lot of people will forget that product section
and they'll just focus on their Facebook,
and then that retention and eventually
that's just going to dry up as the product fatigues
and Amazon and eBay sellers enter the market.
So yeah, really making sure that
you understand your flywheel for long-term growth
and just building on that.
You build your teams, you build your capabilities,
you build your reporting all around that flywheel.
The other thing that is a really important business concept
that plays well into that is a Compound Effect.
There's a great book on this.
It was actually the first book I ever read.
It basically talks just about
how small actions over a long period of time add up.
This is especially the case in digital marketing,
where you have so much automation.
So the email flows that you set up day one,
or the website optimization that you've winning tests
on your website, it's just going to keep compounding up.
And then you can just spend more on digital advertising
and it just kind of grows.
So this is kind of the main reason why it takes so long
to do a million dollars in a day
because, you need all of these things compounding up.
You need those good reviews from customers.
You need that word of mouth by reality as well,
which is really important.
You need the trust factors as well.
All of this kind of stuff just compounds
and then you just keep repeating it with your flywheel
and you can do a million dollars as well.
So there's some key things that you can do to start
implementing in your brand to reach
the same success as the Oodie.
It's really important to keep everything
as simple as possible and understand your key inputs.
Throughout the day,
I'm just gonna be refreshing my dashboard for you.
Hopefully we can make the $1 million,
it's gonna be really exciting.
(upbeat music)
All right, so it's 4:00 AM.
Sorry, I've got to be quiet, my housemates are still asleep.
I just want to show you the results at 1.1 million.
So, record day, extremely blessed and thankful
for all of our customers and our team.
So can't wait to see what's next, thanks.