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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...

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What Dogs of Instagram Can Teach You About Marketing

The user-generated feed of dog photos has become a hashtag and, in a way, an online movement. The couple behind ‘Dogs of Instagram’ started it as a pet project and now have four million followers and a very successful ecommerce business.

The founders used a formula they don’t teach in business school:

1. Start an Instagram account about something you love

2. Lovingly build a community around that shared passion and watch the numbers grow

3. Translate that community into a growing media & a retail business beloved by customers

Oh, and along the way, find the love of your life. This is the story of Dogs of Instagram, an immensely popular Instagram account, and Lucy & Co, the business that grew out of it.

When husband-and-wife duo Ahmed El Shourbagy and Ashley Paguyo El Shourbagy met in July 2011, Ahmed had been posting photos to his new Instagram account, @dogsofinstagram, for a week and a half. Ahmed had an interest in social media and an itch to do...

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The $600 Million Dollar Story

Four years ago Peter Rahal was making protein bars in his parents’ kitchen in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. On October 6th, 2017 Peter sold his company RXBar for $600 million to Kellogg Co. He didn’t have a cooking background, he was self funded, and he had zero retail experience. How on earth did this happen then? $0 to $600 million in under four years…that’s impossible right? Nope. It just happened. This is a brief look at his story.

I was walking out of a meeting with Target when Pete first texted me back in 2013. He was looking for a bit of help and guidance on starting his new protein bar brand. He wanted to pick my brain and explore how to get into brick and mortar retail and how he could generate brand awareness marketing online. At that time, I was exiting one of my first companies a sports watch brand that I started with a couple friends here in San Diego back in 2010. We used social media to build the brand and gain traction. Fast forward 18 months...

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Instagram Is Now Shoppable For Shopify Stores

Shopify recently announced a new feature allowing shopping on Instagram accounts of U.S. merchants. A group of Shopify test stores (apply here) will be able to sell products right from their Instagram posts. Currently, 60% of Shopify’s 500,000 merchants sell in two or more channels. With the addition of Instagram, business owners will be able to maximize their channels in time for the busy holiday shopping season. Once selected to participate, merchants can choose to connect to Facebook’s product catalog in Instagram without any additional effort.

Shopify stores who use Instagram shoppable posts will also have access to analytics from the photo-sharing service, including how many people viewed product information or clicked through to its product page. Clickable links aren’t allowed in post captions, so shoppable tags are the quickest way for e-commerce retailers to get Instagram users into their stores. Before Instagram launched its shoppable posts feature,...

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