How Blenders Eyewear Built A 7 Figure Brand
Chase Fisher & Blake Jensen are the founders of San Diego based Blenders Eyewear, a rapidly growing seven figure ecommerce brand. Blenders makes most of their revenue through influencer marketing, by working with Instagram influencers they meet through local meet ups. How do they do it? Here is a quick breakdown on how their influencer outreach process works.
Q: For a new ecommerce store would you say that Instagram is the best platform to go to build a following and then see if your product interests the public?
Yes, absolutely. Instagram is for sure the number one platform that most people hear about us most. It’s the first touch point that most of our customers see or hear about us and stuff like that. If we were to do it over again, we would definitely start Instagram first and do Facebook advertising as well. Instagram is such an important tool for us because it’s a visual learning platform. Our product is very cool and it’s very photogenic and we have a lot of cool different things that we do with the brand. A lot of that really transpires well visually, so that’s why Instagram is great for it. I mean, any brand is great for Instagram. If you sell a product, it’s definitely the way to go.
Q: Blenders Eyewear is known for networking with photographers that you’d find on Instagram, getting them glasses and then taking photos for you for your Instagram feed, can you explain how this works?
For sure. We would find them through just using the platform, Instagram itself. A lot of these photographers will actually host meet and greets where the top Instagrammers go and they shoot photos and they all have a little day out. We would show up and just meet new photographers and bring a box of sunglasses. Just say,
“Hey guys, I’m Chase. I’ve got a sunglass company. I would love to give you guys awesome pairs to photograph. If you guys would be so kind, send them to my email and I would love to share them and post about them on Instagram too.”
The photographers were going out shooting portfolios already. We didn’t really have to pay for too much content when we started, which was really cool. In exchange, we were able to help build their portfolio, post about them on Instagram and really develop relationships from that point on that we still use today. We’ve helped build a lot of photographers’ Instagram accounts.
Q: How long have you guys been doing these collaborations for? Now that you are an established brand is this strategy still something that you still do today?
We’re still doing it today. It’s cool because we get to meet a lot of new people and it just expanded us. Not only expanded our network, but it just expanded our horizon of just that there’s a lot of cool people that you can meet through Instagram and Instagram’s not a creepy platform by any means. It’s completely normal. Yeah, it’s been awesome.
