These Two Sisters Are Building One Of The Fastest Growing Companies In America
We are Hannah and Ariel Redmond, the sisters/co-founders behind Happy Box, an e-commerce gifting platform that allows our customers to build their custom care packages in a few clicks. We also do custom bulk corporate gifting at scale!
Our core product is our website’s build-a-care package feature - it allows you to choose from hundreds of gift combinations to make the perfect care package and even includes a handwritten card with your note! Our current best-selling care packages are built for: birthdays, self-care moments, and corporate gifting. We also have a very busy Q4 as unique holiday care packages are one of our specialties.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
While I (Hannah) was in college, my sister, Ariel got dumped by her boyfriend. I lived states away and wanted to cheer her up by creating a custom care package full of unique and fun stuff - but found it to be a terrible experience. I had to go to seven stores and wait in line for 20 minutes at the post office only to find out I had the wrong label and had to buy shipping tape, which I never used again. At the time I remember thinking that it was CRAZY that you could customize a car online but not a simple care package. That experience always stuck with me and years later I pitched the idea of Happy Box to Ariel - a place where you could build unique, custom care packages in a few clicks and even include a handwritten note for a personal touch.
Luckily, Ariel’s background and career had been in creative direction at advertising agencies for 10+ years, and I had worked as a marketing strategist for 13+ years, so with our combined expertise, we built a business plan, a brand, and a strategy to launch Happy Box.
We started the business filling orders out of my apartment on nights and weekends as a side business from our full-time corporate careers in NYC, and in October 2020 we both finally took the business full-time.
Fast forward to today, we’re #53 on the INC. 5000 list of fastest private growing companies in the U.S.
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.
When we first came up with the idea for a “build a care package” box builder, we started with some curated box themes to see what people wanted. We sent a lot of surveys to friends, family, and customers as well as did a lot of market research to identify our product mix, occasions, and pricing.
At Happy Box, when we build something new on our website, we believe in the lean startup methodology: treat everything as an “MVP” first - a minimum viable product, so we can continuously learn and optimize/improve. We believe in testing and learning and continuously optimizing. As a startup with minimal resources, this is the most efficient way to approach our innovations.
Before we invested in space, people, and operations/systems, we did all parts of the business ourselves - from hand packing and handwriting cards to all administrative work as well. That showed us what was possible from a productivity standpoint as well as what the pain points would be as we grew and scaled.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Before investing in the idea and on our website, we decided to test on Etsy to see if people would be interested in custom care packages. That gave us the flexibility to test lots of things without investing a ton in website development and design. Etsy also provided some organic exposure so we didn’t invest in any marketing.
Once we proved the idea, we invested in some google and social media marketing, just a few dollars per day to see if getting some new customers would help propel the business as we were mostly a word-of-mouth driven business before then.
We bootstrapped and financed the business entirely ourselves. We invested a few thousand dollars each and we got a few business credit cards and did a lot on credit to start. It was scary but we realized we needed to invest to grow! We later applied and received a business line of credit which helped as well. We negotiated great terms thankfully, so it's been a propeller for the growth of our business.
One big lesson we learned is how to balance growth and profitability. It’s really easy to lose sight of maintaining profitability and it is something that all startups have to carefully manage. Once COVID-19 hit, our business exploded as long-distance gifting because super relevant, and we faced so many challenges in that growth. But one of the biggest challenges was (and still is) understanding what growth was REAL ORGANIC growth and what was a COVID GROWTH spike. Like many other e-comm businesses, we had to do our best to figure that out with no playbook.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Our best advice is to listen to your customers. Do surveys and interviews often. Before we make any changes we do rounds of customer interviews. We love being on the phone and on video calls with our customers discussing our website, product mix, and pricing. There is nothing like staying close to your customers to understand the impacts you’re making on them with your updates to your business. Never stop listening to your customers.
Another piece of marketing advice is there is no one-size-fits-all solution. It’s best to hire an expert (or consultant) to help navigate through what will work for your business. If you’re a local business, your marketing strategy is (and should be) completely different than a company like ours, which is a national e-comm business with no real in-person storefront.
For us, ads worked well to propel growth and drive awareness, but now we’re seeing that word-of-mouth advertising and referrals work way better and more efficiently, so we are focusing energy there. I think you do need a good marketing mix regardless of the business you’re in (i.e. invest in awareness, consideration, and retention tactics). It’s also generally cheaper to get your existing customers to buy one more time rather than get a net-new customer, so it's important to not lose sight of creating new offerings/reasons for your existing customers to come back to buy again and to focus on retention.
We also think partnerships are so important - whether that’s partnering on an awareness campaign with another brand with a similar target audience or partnering with an influencer to promote a seasonal product. Because advertising is increasingly expensive, finding OTHER cheaper ways to drive incremental reach and traffic are necessary.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Currently, our focus is growing extensions of our business and expanding our offerings. We have grown immensely in the corporate gifting space and with our partnerships so those two areas are things we will be focusing on. We are also really working on getting in touch with our existing loyal customers to understand what features and offerings they want next: innovation is our passion and we always want to be listening to our customers. We still sell on our website and are currently on and launching on a few other platforms as well.
No entrepreneur knows how to do it ALL, and you’ll need to tackle it all at some point. PERSEVERE and just be confident that you are smart enough to figure it out!
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
I think being an entrepreneur, you must learn how to manage your time effectively. Efficiency is of the utmost importance, as you’re typically spread in 1,000 directions. Us, as the co-founders, it was really important for us to figure out how best to divide and conquer the executive-level work and understand our strengths and weaknesses. We are lucky in that within our partnership we complement each other.
Another thing I think that goes without saying is you have to always remember that perseverance is key. We always say we want to be the last ones standing. We won’t give up on anything we set our mind to, and we will succeed as a result. We may pivot along the way, but we will always push to succeed and meet our goals.
Finally, the ability to pivot is a HUGE necessity in starting a business. We have pivoted in so many ways throughout the years - whether it was pandemic-related, supply chain-related, consumer insight-related, competitor related…when I used to work on big brands, pivoting was near impossible without rounds of approvals up the ladder - but running a startup, you have to EMBRACE change and uncertainty, be NIMBLE and be FLEXIBLE and open to change. It's part of the reason we believe so much in the Lean Startup Methodology.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We are built on Shopify (and a variety of apps on the Shopify ecosystem) and I’d say the main tools we use are Google Analytics to analyze data, as well as Monday.com as our project management tool which keeps track of projects and all progress. This helps our team stay organized and on deadline.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
We are huge fans of business books and podcasts. We love NPR’s How I Built this Podcast, and some favorite books are: The Power of Habit, Shoedog, The Hard thing about Hard Things, and Lean Startup to name a few. There is so much to learn from people who had started amazing companies before!
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
I think our biggest piece of advice is to find a mentor. Find someone who has been through what you’re going through before and meet with them regularly and learns from them. We have a few mentors we meet with monthly and it has been INVALUABLE. Everything we face they have faced - every single challenge we’ve brought to them they have helped us through in some way, even if it's just a full understanding and empathy. Being a startup entrepreneur is hard. You have to constantly prioritize your work, and while the wins are so high and great, the lows feel very low and it’s easy to spiral. Having someone to turn to who UNDERSTANDS and can give you practical, relevant advice is enormously helpful.
The second most important piece of advice is you will NEED to fake a lot of things til you make it. No entrepreneur knows how to do it ALL, and you’ll need to tackle it all at some point. PERSEVERE and just be confident that you are smart enough to figure it out! Of course, hire experts and talk to advisors but you know your business best. Trust your gut and know that most of us didn’t know what we were doing when we started this journey as entrepreneurs!
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We are currently looking for part-time e-commerce fulfillment staff, which is an in-person hand-packing and hand-writing card role in our HQ in North Bergen NJ. If interested please check out the description HERE.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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