Boredwalk Update: How We Increased Sales 85% Through Paid Social Media Marketing [$3.5M ARR]
This is a follow up story for Boredwalk. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 4 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
We are Matt Snow and Meredith Erin, and we’re the co-founders of Boredwalk, a digitally native lifestyle brand specializing in selling our art on functional consumer products ranging from apparel to accessories to books and more.
To date apparel items — particularly t-shirts, tank tops, and hoodies — have been our primary revenue drivers, but our hero product in 2021 has been our Grievance Journal, a hardcover writing journal full of funny prompts and de-motivational quotes to help people vent in a safe space about the stuff that drives them crazy.
Boredwalk currently has an ARR of ≈ 3.5M. One of the most common things we hear from customers and fans about us is that they have never felt so “seen” by a brand.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
It’s been about one year since we were originally profiled on Starter Story. In that time we have settled into our new, larger facility, our team has grown by around 50%, and our sales volume has grown by ≈ 85%.
A big driver of that growth has been increased paid social spending coupled with several successful product launches. However, paid social is a very volatile and unpredictable acquisition channel, so we have focused heavily on diversifying by adding SMS, growing our email list and affiliate program, and leveraging our very engaged fanbase to launch successful flash sales as a stopgap while we teach ourselves new marketing tactics and hire more people to build out our marketing department (which to date has just been the two of us).
Facebook has, of course, been very volatile as a paid acquisition source. It seems as though every year some major calamity adversely impacts the efficacy of the ad platform in Q2.
In 2019 it was the big Facebook/Instagram outage that took both platforms offline for the bulk of the day. It took Facebook months thereafter to concede that yes, outages of this nature DO negatively impact ad performance (which it did for us for roughly three months).
Then in 2020, it was the COVID-19 pandemic that brought commerce to a standstill in mid-March. Thankfully we didn’t lose our heads and stop advertising completely. We took preventative measures that allowed us to continue operating and take advantage of the favorable environment in the ad auction, as there was very little competition from late March through mid-July of 2020, so our ad costs were reduced dramatically and ad spend was very efficient. We also used this opportunity to increase our email cadence to 3x per week, focusing the new email on entertaining and uplifting content to distract our subscribers from the anxiety of the pandemic and the boredom of being trapped at home.
In 2021, it was the Apple iOS 14.6 update that adversely impacted a lot of small and medium-sized businesses like Boredwalk. Q2 was rough, but we made it through and are back in a growth phase.
As far as actionable insights for Starter Story readers, the key takeaways we’d like to share are:
- Content is king/queen. Written, visual, experiential. If you don’t have compelling, interesting things to say or show people that are relevant to their experiences, you’re gonna have a bad time.
- Paid social: this is all about getting out of the learning phase and optimizing as fast as possible. The Apple iOS 14.6 update blew up the digital marketing landscape, and what works now is not what worked even 2 months ago, let alone 12. Have excellent creativity, consolidate spending into fewer campaigns and ad sets to get out of the learning phase faster, and couple these actions with releasing new products fairly frequently that solve a problem for as broad an audience as possible.
Thankfully our CPMs have remained fairly stable over the last year, whereas some of our colleagues are seeing theirs skyrocket. We believe this is largely due to our sticky organic social content, which gets a lot of engagement and helps keep our CPMs low since high organic engagement signals to the algorithm that we feature compelling content and rewards us with lower ad costs.
However, getting out of the learning phase faster means starting new ads at higher budgets and letting them run for longer to allow the algorithm to hit the 50 conversions/week threshold recommended for optimization. This is tricky, though, because, with the data loss resulting from iOS 14.6, an ad set may have significantly more conversions than Facebook is aware of.
Tracking individual ads with distinct UTM parameters helps get closer to the truth, but in our experience, ROAS calculated off UTM data pulled into our eComm platform (Shopify) is still off by anywhere from 10-30%. You don’t want to go by what FB shows, but you also want to avoid turning off a profitable ad just because FB’s reporting indicates poor performance. Leverage every bit of first-party data you can to make more informed decisions about ad performance.
You can’t just spend your way out of problems. Being a founder means being a problem solver.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
Trust your gut, but verify with data. After some bad hires in 2020, we started using an objective testing tool to act as a sanity check for our gut assumptions. There are a lot of tools out there that provide this kind of assessment; we use Criteria Corp’s testing batteries, but the point is to not JUST rely on your instincts.
The same goes for ad performance. iOS 14.6 threw a wrecking ball into things earlier this summer, but it’s been survivable. We’ve had to adjust our thinking as far as what constitutes “good” (read: profitable) ROAS, as well as not relying on native reporting on the ad platforms. This can be annoying — right now I’m pulling UTM data from Shopify into Google Sheets via Supermetrics and calculating ROAS based on that, which is a much truer representation of how our paid social ads are doing compared to what Facebook Ads Manager and Google Analytics is showing.
We also look at MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio) to make sure the % of gross revenue going to paid acquisition is staying within our desired profitability range. It’s important to look at both micro AND macro marketing performance now to get at whether your efforts are working or not.
Other than the staffing headaches that I think most companies have been grappling with — including those of us that pay a little higher than most — the supply chain issues that cropped up in 2020 as a result of the pandemic worsened throughout the fall and winter and have continued throughout 2021. As soon as one category is back in stock, another one disappears. Even with projections and over-ordering, it has been a real challenge to stay ahead of these outages. All we can do is try our best to roll with these external pitfalls as they appear.
Finally, if your budget allows, surround yourself with people as smart or smarter than you — being the smartest person in the room all the time is exhausting, and also has a tendency to create “blind spots” that can lead to counterproductive decision making if you don’t have the right leadership team to challenge your assumptions and bring a fresh perspective to your organization.
We spent 8 months searching for our Ops Director, and we’re so happy we didn’t settle for the first couple of people we interviewed. Our patience has been rewarded. Now we just need to find similarly smart people to head up our nascent marketing department and continue filling our operational departments (Production, CS, and Shipping) with engaged self-starters that buy into and are excited by the company vision. No pressure!
Other tips:
- Drink less, exercise more (I know, I know — boooo!)
- Get off the internet for some dedicated period each day and each week to preserve your sanity. It will still be there later/tomorrow ready to make you miserable all over again!
- Surround yourself with people as smart or smarter than you are to help guide your organization to the next level. Don’t let personal pride be the reason your growth stagnates.
- At the very least, learn the BASICS of EVERY part of your organization — even the stuff you find difficult or boring — so that you can intelligently assess candidates and performance and cut down on mistakes as far as vetting and hiring, both in-house employees and outsourced contractors.
- Be skeptical of marketing agencies that promise the sun, moon, and stars. Most of them are full of it.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
We are planning to expand our marketing efforts to non-US territories/regions this fall. The complexities of a post-Brexit and post-GDPR world have made it very difficult for small businesses in the US (that aren’t primarily relying on Amazon or Etsy for sales, at least) to ship overseas while remaining compliant, so we had to temporarily cease shipping outside of the US and Canada, but our Ops Director is working on navigating all of that stuff.
We are also hoping to do more advertising on YouTube, continue growing our affiliate and influencer marketing programs, and generally try to become less reliant on paid acquisition via Facebook and Instagram.
Surround yourself with people as smart or smarter than you are to help guide your organization to the next level. Don’t let personal pride be the reason your growth stagnates.
We are actively building out our in-house marketing team as I write this, and are currently hiring a Director of Marketing, a Head of Partnerships, and a Digital Media Buyer. Getting these roles filled will free Meredith and me up to focus on our superpower, which is product design and development. Being able to focus on that fully is exciting to both of us.
We want to continue releasing new books — more journals and publications with more of a long-form narrative thread — and expand into other product categories to meet customers where they’re at. Not everyone is into graphic tees and hoodies, but a lot of those people still like our art. So we’re trying to expand the brand’s appeal for those folks who might be really into candles, puzzles, socks, etc.
Long-term we plan to scale aggressively over the next few years; ideally with an eye on an eventual exit and retirement, but it depends on how quickly we can hit the post-tax/fee numbers we’re after while also making sure we streamline things as much as possible to turn the company into a very turnkey operation that will be viewed as a valuable investment/asset in the PE space. A lot of stuff has to break right, including market conditions that we will have very little control over, but that’s the dream.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
I recommend getting involved with a community of other founders, either online or in-person via local networking events. The only way to get better at running your business is to surround yourself with other smart, talented people who are going through (or have gone through) many of the same challenges you face daily. We are members of eCommerceFuel.com (ECF), but there are others out there — Dynamite Circle, EO (Entrepreneurs Organization), the Brand Growth Experts’ Coalition, etc.
For more of a digital marketing focus, there’s also the Foxwell Digital Founders Membership. Everything we know about digital media buying we learned from Andrew Foxwell and the other smart folks he hangs out with.
I will say, though, that pretty much any vetted, private community like the ones mentioned above is going to come with a membership price, but if you immerse yourself in these communities and contribute, you can easily 10X your investment of time and money within a matter of months.
Boredwalk would not be where it is now were it not for ECF and the wider world of smart entrepreneurs it has introduced us to over the last five years. In our experience, you get what you pay for, so there is a fairly low ceiling in terms of what can be gleaned from free/cheap courses and communities.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Yes! As of this writing, we are looking to hire up to five people for the following roles:
• Head of Operations: We are seeking an experienced e-commerce professional who will be responsible for the management of day-to-day operations, including oversight of production, shipping and fulfillment, customer service, inventory management, and vendor management.
We don’t expect the Head of Operations to do all of this themselves — we already have a great staff in place to execute — but we do expect the ideal candidate for this position to oversee these departments and tackle strategic issues that arise with alacrity, vigor, and a keen problem-solving mind and be willing and able to learn the inner workings of each of them and approach all operational processes with a desire to improve efficiency and accuracy as we continue to scale.
The Head of Operations will serve as the right hand to the brand founders, and be responsible for overseeing all business functions that don't fall under the marketing and product development teams' purview.
This is a full-time on-site role in our Santa Fe Springs, California office, with a competitive salary and full benefits.
Hours: Full Time (40 hours per week), flexible hours Location: Hybrid on-site/remote. Will need to live in the Los Angeles area.
• Digital Media Buyer: We are seeking an experienced e-commerce professional who will be responsible for driving our organization's media buying program. This role entails driving the vision and execution for profitable customer retention and acquisition across paid channels including Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
Hours: Full Time (40 hours per week), flexible hours Location: Hybrid on-site/remote. Will need to live in the Los Angeles area.
For detailed descriptions of each position, as well as information regarding compensation and benefits and application instructions, please visit the page.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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