Our Custom Sticker Business Grew 35% To $2M+ Per Year
This is a follow up story for Sticker it. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 3 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hi, my name is David Rubie-Todd and I run Sticker it. We’re an e-commerce & manufacturing business that creates the finest custom stickers & labels.
Here’s an example of the work we create for brands all over the world:
You can read our original starter story, written back in 2022 here.
We’ve come a long way since 2022, investing over $750k in our manufacturing facility. We’re also focusing a lot on marginal gains & automating fulfillment - more on that later.
Today we are at revenues of $200K/month, up ~30% since our last interview.
We kept it simple, doing more of the things that work, such as good content and good backlinks, and less of the stuff that doesn’t work. Simple but effective over the long term.
More recently, we’ve launched magnets & buttons that have been a real success!
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
2023 started off as a great year, and we were over 35% up for the first 7 months of the year. Then August hit, and growth bombed! It was even the first time in our history that we’d had a YOY decline month! Luckily that didn’t last long.
We have a few hypotheses as to the reasons. Generally, in our industry 2023 has been a hard year with many companies going bust.
We also changed from a custom site to a Shopify site in May/June, which meant a lot of URLs changed. This had a huge impact on Organic traffic, as shown in the image. The arrow shows when the new site went live.
We did this because the cost of maintaining our custom site was so high, and Shopify does a great job in so many areas we wanted to piggyback on all of their work.
So we took a short-term hit, but as you can see, the numbers are now back to record highs for Organic traffic.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
The biggest challenges have been around how to handle an impact on growth due to the organic traffic decline shown above.
Deeply understanding the numbers, such as free cash flow, is critical to managing a business when profitability & growth get squeezed.
We always plan for troubled periods by having cash reserves to help us through these times. We’re a high-overhead business, so cash management is critical.
To help overcome the issue of slowing growth, we doubled down on the marketing channels that worked for us, really focusing on SEO. We kept it simple, doing more of the things that work, such as good content and good backlinks, and less of the stuff that doesn’t work. Simple but effective over the long term.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
The biggest lesson has been to get as many marketing channels working as possible. But not to the detriment of performance on any single channel.
Our core focus for years has been SEO and it’s been the main driver of our growth. In the last ~6 months we’ve added paid search to this.
We’ve started slowly and have taken a methodical approach so we can keep on improving.
It’s still early days but showing good signs.
We currently spend about $3,000/week on ads with a positive ROAS and plan to scale this as much as we can throughout 2024.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
A core focus for us in 2024 & beyond is to automate as much fulfillment as possible.
We manufacture everything in-house, so it’s a big part of what we do. However, we see ourselves as a technology company first.
A few years ago, we created our custom-built fulfillment system. Because everything is custom, there is a lot to do post-order compared to a pick-and-pack business.
We’ve decided to take this system we’ve created and spin it out as a separate business called Glide.
We’re investing a lot in this platform that will help Sticker it & many other businesses that are in the mass-personalization industry to fulfill orders more efficiently than ever.
We expect Glide to have a huge impact on our efficiency. For example, we’re semi-automating the design process, which we expect to reduce errors by 75% and speed up the time to send customer proofs by over 60%, so it’s almost instant.
Alongside Glide, we’re developing hardware to help automate manufacturing processes. It’s still early days, so no images yet, but I’ll share some in our update next year!
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
The Russel Brunson trilogy has easily been the best thing I’ve read recently.
I admire him, his work, and his approach so much, and feel almost all entrepreneurs can learn from his work
I would highly recommend getting his books and working through what he suggests!
I’m on a journey to understand storytelling and how it can be incredibly powerful in marketing to take customers on a journey to a mindset where they can make the buying decisions themselves.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
I’ll build on my last answer here.
Russel Brunson took me on a journey to understand storytelling and how it can be incredibly powerful in marketing to take customers on a journey to a mindset where they can make the buying decisions themselves.
I’m a very logical person who likes facts & figures, but that’s only one part of selling (and not the first).
I would urge you to get his books and devour them. Work through everything all in detail. Don’t stop until you’ve iterated many funnels. It’s helped me and my business and I hope it does the same for you.
Where can we go to learn more?
The best place to see what we’re up to is on our website.
We’re not as active on social media as we should be, however, you can see our work on Instagram.
It’s something we want to invest in. I like to have a channel working before committing so once we’re happy with our paid search we’ll move on to our social channels.
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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