#312: Lessons from Scaling a Mega Boutique

Hey guys. Welcome to the podcast. This week I have a bit of a backstory about this week's guest because it's super humbling and it reminds us that we all start somewhere in business. You guys, when we very first started the boutique Hub, I remember having to cold call on the phone, literally boutique owners, trying to talk to them about this idea, this thing that I was building that I wondered if it would be useful for them and just want to get their input and invite them to the platform. And, and I'll never forget one of the very first phone calls I made was this awesome boutique in Idaho that was growing rapidly. It was one of the very first, you know, bigger boutiques that was blowing up online. And I get this gentleman on the phone and he starts asking me very technical questions about my strategy around SEO and SEM and these programs that I was using and all this. And I remember quickly thinking, like, this guy's really smart. He, he is probably out of my league. I'm just trying to build this like, resource for boutique owners. But man, maybe he should come and teach inside of this thing. And I always laugh from that conversation. On the very first time I met Jeremy Shute and watching he and Susie continue to build Nana Max Boutique into what it is today. Now getting to know them on a personal level and having this interview with them today. And in case you haven't heard yet, they're coming to join us at the 2021 Boutique Summit for an in depth, real talk, no holds bar what it's really like. Fireside Chat. And through all of this, I have come to really appreciate their very unique story. It's not unlike many of the big boutiques that you know, in terms of how they got started and grew from nothing and had to just continue to invest everything they had to. Now being in a place where they've been recognized by Inc. Magazine a number of times, they have a number of employees, a 40,000 square foot warehouse, They've got all these things going on, right? But what I appreciate about them, and especially this will show today and at the Boutique Summit, is that they're willing to share the details. They're willing to talk about the game and what they've learned in playing the game and encourage everyone because everyone in this industry is so different. There's live selling superstars, there's e commerce superstars, there's brick and mortar superstars, and there's room at the table for everyone. So, guys, I'm so excited for this interview and the opportunity for you guys to meet Jeremy And Susie, I know you'll be inspired and you'll learn a ton. Again, this is the intro. If you're going to be joining us at the Boutique Summit, there's even more to come. But for now, enjoy this week's episode. Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works from Main Street Fashion to Fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat. Hey guys, this week I'm back to share another awesome review that you guys left for the show. These are so, so sweet. You guys are so kind in what you are saying when you subscribe and leave a review to the show. This one comes from Shop the West Boutique and she said, I just started my boutique in January. I, like a lot of new boutique owners, wanted the business to grow overnight. As in right now. I hear that a lot. And while that didn't happen, what did happen was I grew to having my first quarter in business at 15,000. The boutique world can seem so overwhelming at times and this podcast helped me numerous ways that I didn't even know were possible. It has opened my eyes to a lot of issues I could potentially encounter and come up with some pre solutions. I highly recommend this podcast to any and all boutique owners. You'll hear from guests of all stages of boutique life. Thanks to the Boutique Hub. Keep up the great work. Hey Shop the West Boutique. Thank you so much for your review. You guys. If you're listening and you find this helpful or inspiring or motivating whatever it is, please subscribe and leave a review. And don't forget to message me on Instagram because your words mean the world to me. If you have a question or you want to share what you were doing after or during listening to the podcast, I'm all about it and I love a good video chat back and forth. So my personal Instagram is AJ Alderson or message us at the Boutique Hub anytime on the gram. Guys, thanks so much for listening this week and for every week. I appreciate you. Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast this week and if you are listening in audio we also have video happening on YouTube this week week as well. And I'm so excited about our guests Jeremy and Susie. Shoot, you guys have been, I would say pioneers of this industry, if I could use that word. And it has been such an amazing journey to watch unfold for you guys building Nanomax and just the continued growth and scale. And I feel so lucky to have gotten to know you guys on a much more personal level in the last year and hear your story and see, like, you are like truly the right and left brain side of business, like, come together, two in one. And I think that's so cool. So we're gonna just dissect all of that today. You guys good with that?

Absolutely.

Oh, man.

Well, we always gotta start with the beginning story, right? I feel like when Nanomax started, there was very few boutiques doing what you guys do on the market. And I always love to hear where'd the idea come from? And how did it get started? And how the two of you got.

Together on this idea beginning. So I quit my job for multiple reasons. It just was something that was not working out. And Jeremy was like begging me to quit because I was 100, miserable. And so he said, you know, just quit. But I wanted to know what I was gonna do. I'm always like a planner and I never just pulled turkey, quit a job. I had three boys to support. Support too, so that was freaking me out. And so he asked me. We had had this long conversation and I had been talking about it for months. I wanted to have my own clothing website. I pitched it to a friend of mine. He said, that's stupid. Don't do it. My parents thought I was nuts, but I still wanted to do it. And Jeremy was the only person that really just said, yeah, I will build your website. Let's do it. And I said, well, what am I? What job am I going to have? And he said, you're going to have that job. And I was like, what? I'm supposed to be working. And he's like, that is working. Just, you know, trust me. And so I started to kind of, while I was with my other job, I started to obviously do some of the legwork to figure out how I was going to make this work. Jeremy was planning on keeping his job, you know, for an indefinite amount of time until this thing got off the ground. If this thing got off the ground. And the name Nanimax came from my grandparents. It's a name that I wanted eight years prior to me even starting my company now. And somebody took the name. I don't know who, but I was upset because the website was already taken and I couldn't have it and I really wanted it. And that's when I was doing another business. And so I picked another name and I didn't use it. And it was a God thing because if I would have used it for that company, I. No, I didn't want to use it for that. So I'm glad that, you know, things worked out the way they did. But the website came free. Whoever it was just never got the company off the ground. And the company name came from my grandparents, my grandmother, Nana, my grandfather, Mac. Their Last name was McCarthy. He was the oldest, McCarthy, so everybody called him Big Mac. I wasn't going to use Big Mac in my company name for obviously reasons. Obviously probably a few trademark. But he had his name before the hamburger came along. So, yeah, I started Nanomax, you know, with Jeremy, him still working. You know, he still had a full schedule at work, but he would, you know, come home and go to sleep because he worked through the night. So he worked.

Was it 6am, 6pm to 6am six.

To six, which was a crazy schedule.

And then another 40 minutes to drive home.

Yeah.

So I get home about 6:45, maybe 7am I would sleep, sleep, get up noon.

Shit. Help me with the things that I broke and then go back to work. Yeah. How.

Tell me about traction at that time. I mean, first of all, I don't know how you do it with very little sleep. But, I mean, obviously things started to roll. How did you start to find that initial traction? And how did you realize all of a sudden, oh, we've got something.

Here's my first initial failure. Because I love. I love to talk about my failures because I feel like people think that, you know, I started this business and it just went like this. And then here we are and, you know, no, no, no. So I bought all these clothes that I loved and they were like my jam, my taste and everything. Nobody liked them, nobody bought them. I was out there taking my own photos and I thought everybody would love this. The only person that bought some stuff for me was my sister. She was my first customer and that's it. Nobody wanted my stuff. And so I got really upset about it. Right. Obvious reasons. I'm sure a lot of people have gone down this road where they just implement their taste and it's not what whoever's looking at your website at the time, which was like this many people just didn't like it. And so I had to shift. I had to start doing research and figuring out what was trending. You know, what are people buying? What are other boutiques selling and the, you know, the ones that I knew of when I started out, I knew one modern vintage boutique, you know, God bless them. They were the only ones that I could see that was out there that was doing anything similar to what I wanted to do. Otherwise, I couldn't find anybody else. There was mint julep kind of came along later, and then I started to find, you know, more and more that were, like, what I wanted to be. But, I mean, they. From what I could see and from what I had researched, is that they were up here and I was down here. I was this. This little fish, you know, in this pond. And when we launched the website, you know, you get all excited. You're like, yeah, my website's launched. And then you're like, nobody's coming to my website. Nobody even knows who you are, because you're just out there in the virtual world of, you know, the Internet and you. We weren't driving any traffic. And so, I don't know, it was just. It was a whole thing. But then I had to get on the train of buying stuff that, you know, was actually starting to trend, which Chevron dresses and bubble necklaces. Bless us. I remember all the days that's. That's what helped us grow. And it wasn't even that I just started putting them on my website and people started buying them. Nope. They still didn't know who we were. So ebay was something that I had done on and off for years and knew how to list product and knew how to get it out there and knew kind of what I, you know, titles to put in and stuff, to sort of get people turned on to product. And so I started selling that stuff on ebay. And then we would put in cards in our packages to follow our website. And so we used ebay as a vessel to drive traffic to our website, you know, and we were hoping that they would just start shopping through our website because, you know, ebay charges all these fees, and you don't want to pay all those fees. Yeah, But I even had, like, that little PayPal, you know, like, cha Ching thing that comes on. It's like a bell, and it makes a money sound. Sound like a slot machine. And so every time money would come in and do that little cha Ching, and that kind of motivated me. And, you know, it was started out with really small sales, and then as people kept buying stuff on ebay, you know, I kept pushing the traffic to the website. Then we got our Facebook going, and then our Facebook page started to pick up more people than I thought would ever get picked up. I Mean, we just threw our stuff out there, spent minimal amounts of money. And back then, Facebook was playing nice to businesses. Not so much anymore. But back when they were playing nice, you know, everything was basically organic. And so the organic reach started to get out there. And that's kind of, you know, what started getting us rolling to the point where Jeremy, in a year, could quit his job, and that's what he did.

Yeah, Jeremy, tell me about that. Tell me about that transition of you were helping ship all the Chevron and bubble necklaces, which I really think you need to go back in your customer list and find my name, because I'm pretty sure that's where all my bubble necklaces came from, was Manamax.

And all the Chevron. We had a big commerce website back then, so, yeah.

Everything Susie said was spot on. And I have. I look at it from a different perspective. When we first started that, the website, we were literally. How do you put it? If a tree falls in the forest, do you hear it fall? That's what we felt like. We felt like we took our. Our website and threw it out there, and nobody heard of it at all. Nobody knew that Nanomax existed. There was no SEO in place because we just launched it February 2013. We're sitting here. It's like crickets. It's like nothing is happening. So it did take a little bit of humbling for us to. Take what we were doing, set it aside, and then follow some trends and move forward. And the Chevron and the bubble necklaces were that trend. And as it started to happen, the economic side of. Of me just kicked in. I was like, no, you need to buy more. Buy more. Buy more, buy more. And she's like, I don't want. They don't sell. I'm like, don't worry about it. Buy more. And I had to force her to buy more product. And as we did back then, I mean, we were buying. How many packs do you think we.

Were buying back then? Well, from some companies, like, Double Zero was a. Like one of my. Adrian. Whoever knows Adrian out there, he's the best guy ever. He's not with high five anymore. But I have known him for pretty much as long as working out of my house. Yeah. And I would call him and go, whatever Chevron stuff you have shipped to me now. And these dresses that I kept restocking and restocking, probably over 500 of just that one style. We just kept bringing in, it, kept. Kept selling out, kept bringing in, kept selling out. And then every single season that had changed I just kept following the trends, you know, and then straight into fall, you couldn't get enough boot socks and leg warmers. And I found second step, as many boot socks and leg warmers. And I just pushed that and drove that. And, you know, not rated boots were huge. They did really well for us, almost straight out of the gates. And so it was just like you started to pick up on the fact of, okay, this sells, buy more. If this sells, buy more, you know, and then you can sprinkle in, like, your other things, you know, that you're not sure about. The stuff that we were sure about, we just went hard on, you know, we just said, buy it all. As much money as we had, which wasn't a lot. You know, we just kept dumping the money back into the company. And that's kind of of how it started to do this. And we started out in this little. Was it a 100 square foot office? It was tiny.

It wasn't even that. It was literally a small.

Like a corner in the house.

Yeah.

And then we moved down into the basement, which was a lot of space. I tried to perfect my own studio down there. And that was a joke. I spent a lot of money on Amazon. L. It's, you know, for the studio. I. I hired a photographer to come help me and all of that. And I. Jeremy, built like this thing that came out of the ceiling that we would attach the backdrops to, you know, and I had like the fake wood background on the whatever rolled up piece of printed. What was it, like plastic or. I don't know.

It was like a canvas backdrop.

I mean, you just. You did what you could to make your photos look good. And some of them just were a total bust. I see them in my Facebook memories sometimes, and then I just share them with everybody that works for me, and they all just laugh and go, wow, those are really bad. And I'm like, yep, they are.

I remember all your hay bail.

The hay bail were my jam. It was in the. Yeah, it was in. Literally in the back of our neighborhood. And then I didn't even know it was illegal to shoot on railroad tracks, but I did that a whole lot. So I broke the law multiple times. But the photos were great. And then I learned how to, like, blow out the background because I talked to a guy at Best Buy and he gave me all the equipment and, yeah, those were all my shots. I was shooting with a Canon, you know, just doing what I could do to make my photos look good. And, you know, it was. I'm sure Everybody goes through this, too, where you're trying to legitimize your business and not look like, you know, you're working out of the basement of your home, you know, And I always had that, like, fake it till you make it type mentality. And so, you know, somebody would call and want to talk to the manager, and I'd be like, yeah, hang out for a second, you know, and then I get back on and just, like, change the tone of my voice and be like, yeah, we are. That's great. Like, I had multiple people when really I didn't.

So, yeah, tell me about that transition. Like, I want to ask you this personal question. So just having, you know, gotten to know you a little bit better. The two of you weren't initially married when you started the business, and then you got married, and now this has grown. And not only were you figuring out being married, but you're figuring out Jeremy leaving his career and the two of you defining what your roles were going to be. And I know there's a lot of people in our industry today that are walking in the middle of that walk.

Walk.

And Eric and I have had to walk in the middle of that walk. Tell me, how did you do that without hurting the relationship? How did you keep the relationship first?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, because friends are a part.

Of it, but you want my version or you want Susie's version?

Jeremy, let's hear your version first.

I had to swallow a little bit of pride at the beginning and realize that Susie didn't want the business in both of our names to begin with. We were still dating. We were young in our relationship. We had just come out of some relationships where our significant others had cheated on us. So we were very skeptical of relationships, but we found some commonality in our lives outside of business. And then the business side of it sparked a whole new piece to our relationship. We drove each other. We leaned on each other for every aspect of the business going forward. And with Susie not being comfortable with me being an owner of the company, I took and just swallowed my pride and moved forward, was determined to make it work, determined to be in this together as a team. Even at the beginning, I never looked like it, like an outsider. I never thought of it as being an outsider to the business. I thought of it as our business. I thought of it as much as I can. She's the boss. I've always told everybody that she's the boss. Everybody always asks, well, what do you do? My job is to make sure that she can buy the product she wants and dress her little Barbie dolls the way she wants. And then everything else was. My job was to make sure that she could buy and style the way that she wanted to. So it just, it worked out really well. I didn't get to just quit my job after a year. Susie wanted to be absolute certain that the business would be able to support us. Because when we. When she quit her job, I took on not just my expenses, but also expenses to help raise the three boys and, you know, Susie off of my individual income. And back then I wasn't doing too bad. I was making like $50,000 a year, which is good money for this area. A decade ago was. So yeah, about 2013, about 2014, which was good money. So we cut out a lot of extra expenses. We were very frugal and we used Susie's income taxes that she had saved.

And really that earned income credit comes in handy when you're broken. You know what, the fact that we.

Did a lot of it ourselves saved us a lot of money. I do, you know, wish that, you know, it was. We had a little bit more to invest into it at the beginning because it would have taken off a lot faster.

Yeah. We didn't have a large sum of capital and you know. Yeah. So Jeremy's. He, listen, I have a unicorn for a husband. I'm just gonna throw that out there.

I'm just red headed. It's okay.

He is literally like the most supportive person in my life. And he has been that way since day one.

Oh, thanks.

And he just didn't argue with really anything. We just so. And I know this sounds like very whatever eye rolls, but we don't fight that much. We have our. We have like a blowout probably maybe once a month and it's over something stupid usually. And it's just I'm always in probably the one to blame for it.

But no, honey, it's not. Is totally me.

No. Because he's just very go with the flow kind of guy. But he is, he just. He's very go with the flow. I'm more challenging. But also, when we started out this company, we kind of just knew what our places were. It wasn't that we had to jockey for position over anything. You know, I didn't want to deal with the stuff that he wanted to deal with. And he didn't, you know, for the most part, want to give input on buying. Sometimes he does. And he gets really mad at me because he's like, this is cute. And we're at market and I'M like, yeah, it's cute. And then I just put it back, and he looks at me and goes, you don't like that? I've learned.

I'm like, I've been educated.

Let me do my.

I know way too much about certain dresses and. No, that's a Dolman. It's a shirt. It's a Dolman. What do you mean, it's a Dolman? It's a shirt. It's a Dolman.

Yeah.

What's this? That's a skirt.

But it's stuff that he doesn't need to know. It's fine. But that's kind of how we work together. Well, is that, you know, we just stay in our corners. You know, we have separate offices. I. We never once have tried to put ourselves in an office together. The only time we were in the office together was when we were in our house, and that was too small. And so even at our old warehouse, we were opposite ends of the offices. Like, he was way down there, and I was way down here. I couldn't even yell at him because we were so far apart. Now we're closer together. But I'm also never in my office, so I'm never around. And when I want to, like, annoy him, I just sit in my son's desk, who's in Jeremy's office, and then I bug him there. But also, another thing that we did that we probably left out in this conversation is we started a storefront very shortly after we started online. And most people do storefront and then go online. They go backwards, or we went backwards. So they do it, like, pretty much the way that everybody else does it. We did it in reverse. And then at one point in time, I thought, storefront is so much easier to run. You don't have to have shipping going on. Like, there's so many less parts and pieces left to mess up. And for anybody that sells online and knows how many processes can literally just jack up your whole flow and your company, and then you're apologizing to a hundred customers. But we did close up the storefront because the online blew up.

But not before.

Not before what?

Before you were like, I want to close the problem.

Yeah, I wanted to close the dot com down, too. So that was.

And just keep the storefronts, because that's.

When Facebook's algorithm changed. And I started to get really mad that nothing was working. I was like, nothing is working. And now people have stopped shopping. And, like, our flow just kind of went like this. And then. Yeah, he was the One telling me we just have to keep. We need to figure out a better way to sell product. We need to get ourselves out there easier, you know, and maybe look outside of Facebook. And I'm like, but there's nothing else. Because back then there really wasn't anything else. Yeah, but. And then we brought on Christina, who had, like, a wealth of background that we just kept. She always, like, kept these secrets.

We hired her for one thing first.

I hired her to make a logo, and somehow she ended up being our sister wife and, like, our top dog in this company. So. But she had all these, like, hidden talents and secrets about social media.

And, you know, she's also a digital artist.

Oh, by the way, I can code. I can freehand draw. Oh, and by the way, I can shoot products.

Tell you, I went to school for marketing. Yeah, no, you didn't.

What else can you do? Yeah, so, I mean. Yeah.

So you guys.

We had a lot of.

You guys have been through a lot.

Of ups and down. How did you.

And it's. You're not done.

Yeah.

There will always be another one. There's always going to be another algorithm.

Over a hundred. I bet there's been over a hundred different road bumps. Every single Facebook algorithm change has been a road bump. Literally everyone. You'll see it instantly. And a lot of new owners don't understand that, but we've had to overcome from completely free, organic, no restrictions to restriction. Okay. How do you navigate that restriction to a new one to a new algorithm? Okay, well, this algorithm coincides with the first three, and you have to put all three together. So if you skip that step and didn't have to go back and do that one, you didn't know about it. And you'd be sol. Every single step of the way. We had to figure out a way to, you know, we were around before groups were around, literally. There is so much that has changed, not just with Facebook, but through the Internet, through the web, different e commerce platforms, different fulfillment platforms. We've watched every wms out there that has come on board from Ship Hero, brightpearl, orderhive, Warehouse os, you name it. We've seen. I've demoed every single one of them out there. I've asked them questions and found holes in every single one of them to just. Most recently, we fixed the overselling complication with sezzle. Now they don't have overselling complications. I literally brought them in, showed them how it works, told them what they need to change on the back end with Shopify, and boom, here we are no more overselling with sezzle across the board. And I made them fix it. I was like, you're going to fix it or I'm going to leave, I'm going to have somebody else fix theirs. I go, somebody's fixing it. And just there's a lot of that out there and having a little bit of technical analysis and skill set has definitely helped.

So. Really?

Yeah.

Thank God for that.

I just spit out a lot of stuff.

I apologize.

It's all an evolution. It's all an evolution. And I'm laughing as I'm hearing you say this because well, I was telling you guys this when we had dinner together that I remember when we started the Boutique Hub and I was like cold calling people like would you ever get on the Boutique Hub? And I somehow got Jeremy on the phone and you like probably talked seven layers over my head about what technical crap I did not know about at the time. And I was just like this guy just schooled me like I'm embarrassed. Does Nana Max ever want to come.

Come on the Boutique Hub?

They probably think I'm an idiot. But now here we are. So thanks for overlooking that back then Jeremy, but I, I think about like all that evolution and all those calls you've been on and how you've dug into that. As people are listening to this today, what is your advice to them as they're like facing a new road bump, a new algorithm, having to figure it out and they're still trying to scale at the same time. Like if you could break down how you attack those persons problems and dig in to find solutions like what advice would you give them?

9Pm to midnight is a great time to research without getting distracted and then send all that stuff to yourself for the very next morning. So it's at the top of your inbox. I did a lot of research outside of the Google search, a lot of Internet research, but a ton of reverse engineering of other systems, platforms, competitors. I did a lot of keyword searches for whatever system I'm working on. I'd search for their competitors, I would read reviews and see where people went. And I'm still to this day constantly finding new systems, new platforms. Like right now there's four other live selling platforms besides ComEd sold out there that people probably don't even know about, that I know about. There's one that's come over from China that is becoming very popular. There's one specifically just for shoes. They're just a lot of people don't know about them yet because they're not mainstream. And it's very hard in this day and age to get information out. So you really have to dig deep, understand how to navigate the Internet. I swear, I've been to the end of the Internet and back about four times, so I understand how to search the web for particular keywords, analyze it, and then I love to reverse engineer every system. And I will get very technical on my questions during a demo to the point where they're like, you've exceeded my knowledge. You know more than I do currently about my own software. So I'm going to hand you off to somebody else. I'm like, okay, who is this person? And sometimes I'm talking to their CTO of the software company companies, because they can't answer the questions I have with integrations with the coding and how it works. And I scare them sometimes. But it's very important for anybody out there to do your research when you're not distracted. You have to really dig into it, write down your notes, demo it, think outside the box, think two steps ahead. Think, think three steps ahead. And Susie will tell you, you have to put me in a box.

You also have to keep reinventing yourself and your brand. And for the people that think that Nanomax has just made it, we're just here and everything's great. No, you have to keep reinventing your brand, including me and my brands, because it can be as small of a change to change your sales as a time that you launch product, a time that you go live. And for those of you that don't go live, go live because you will make more money. It doesn't matter if you don't want to go live yourself as the owner. I am somebody that has never actually gone live. I've done group lives or I've done like a couple live with somebody who's kind of the lead lifey person where I've gotten on on a Saturday just for fun. But I've never actually been the face of the person who goes live every day. And the reason for that is that first of all, I'm an introvert. I don't like to go live. And for people that know me, they know like when they're doing TikTok videos and stuff, they know I'm not going to be the volunteer to do the dances. I'm not gonna like. No, we. They know Susie doesn't do that. My employees know me and they're like, nope, don't go to her. And it's just because it's. That's my Personality, but also I'm super busy and I figure if I'm going live, I'm not helping grow this company and I'm not doing the other stuff that I'm required to do to keep this, you know, company moving forward. And if people need to understand something else about this industry, it's that it's very fluid. When you hire people on, make sure that you tell them, listen, this company is fast paced and it's very fluid. You have to be able to bend and change. And if you want a 9 to 5 job Monday through Friday, this is not the industry to be in. It is retail. Even though you're not a storefront, potentially you could be, but if you're not, you're just totally online. You're missing out on opportunities of not going live on a Saturday. You're missing opportunities on not going live on a Sunday. And you might get pushback from your employees and find the ones that won't give you pushback. The hardest part about this business is being able to have to shift and like, make your employees realize that we're shifting again. And they're like, man, I just got stuck in this schedule that I really love and now you want me to move and go live at a different time. And we're like, yeah, that's what we need you to do. So if you don't want to go live, find somebody who will work for you that does. There's a lot of people willing to do contract work out there. You don't have to hire them on as a 40 hour employee. Because then you think, you think, well, what the heck was my life you were gonna do in the off time that they're not going, like, don't worry about it. Just have them come in. You need to find an extrovert who is a social butterfly who loves to talk to people and who loves to talk in general. Because there's a lot of people like that where like you have an employee that works for you and they never get anything done because they talk a lot. They're probably supposed to be on camera.

Put them on, on camera.

You need to stick them on camera. And that's how I figured out who should be on a live feed and who should be behind the camera. You have different personalities in your company, but those people are just important, just as important in helping your company grow and getting you to where you need to be. And you're gonna have pushback. So if you guys think that I don't have pushback, I have pushback. Everybody has Pushback, Pushback. You're just gonna get that? Yeah.

It's all the idea of strength based leadership. Right. But that comes from you too. And if I think about like, what does it take to scale a business? It's everyone has to understand where the strengths are across the board and play into them and then do what you do best and hire the rest. Like constantly finding those people that can support you along the way. If you were gonna start a business now, if you were gonna like be a brand new boutique owner today, knowing what you know now about this industry, where would you start and how would you scale it in today's life, I.

Would have one product, only one product, one SKU shoots and I one pair. I would source it all to a 3PL so I don't have to worry about any of the logistics Done.

Not what she's looking for. Cell phones. How would I start? I think it's doing a lot of research first. I think a lot of people jump into it really fast. And then I see it a lot of this like, Well, I put $600 into Facebook ads and it went absolutely nowhere. And Now I'm out $600 and nobody's bought anything. And then you go, you know, what do you do now? And I think it's a step back and do research, research all of the companies. So this is what I did when I started Nanomax. I researched what was out there and who was doing what I was doing. And not, you know, I didn't look at Macy's. I looked at other boutiques, you know, that were already kind of doing what I thought the path I should follow. Modern vintage boutique. I studied them very hard and you know, I continued to watch the new ones that came along. Now there's thousands to follow. So I think starting out and looking at who do you. Who is your model company that you want to be and you focus on those ones. So say you like this girl and you like her personality and she's totally killing it, you know, she's killing it, you know, she's doing well. And that's your business model and that's where you want to go. Then go that direction and start following and sort of not copying what they do, but sort of following their business model and how they do what they do. Because there's a lot of different boutiques online that do a lot of different things that we don't do. But then there's other ones, you know, that do similar to what we do. And then there's boutiques out there that don't go live at all.

And you have to.

I don't have that magical unicorn answer for the ones that don't have to go live at all.

You have to know your demographics.

Yeah.

If you don't know your analytical demographics, target market, and what they're willing to do and what they're doing, not only that, but what they're doing on your website or on your social media, where are you? Where can you capitalize? Where can you provide a little bit of effort and get that roa from that effort and then move on to the next? You have to understand your demographic. You have to understand your website. If you don't understand those, you have to teach yourself those particular things. Learn how to read your analytics, understand what a bounce rate is, what a four or four pages. You have to understand, is the way your website laid out actually causing your bounce rate and your lack of conversion. Are your colors off? Is your header way too big? And you know what's above the fold? If you don't understand those things I've just said, you need to understand the basics of your website. So if I was to tell people to start somewhere, research it, learn how to do it yourself, and then figure out, okay, I need to hire somebody that has those skill sets. If you don't know what you need, you don't know who to hire. And Susie and I tell this all the time to people just starting out. What would you do if you had to do it all over again? Because you just asked that question. We would hire the professionals earlier than we had. We tried to do a lot of it ourselves. And we want. As we. As we started out, there was other boutiques starting out about the same time, and we did this, and they would start to just grow rapidly. And we were very conservative. Very conservative, very conservative. We reinvested our money. We did a lot of the stuff ourselves. And then we. We grew, but we never had any big, major setbacks. We just continued to steadily grow. We're like. If it was like a turtle on a hare race, we would have been the turtles, basically. But. But you know what? We're still growing and the hairs are doing this, and we're just steadily on our increase still.

I also think that, you know, being a hub member, I think is really important, especially when you're just starting out. So I'm. I wish we had the hub. You didn't have the hub.

I called you about it, but I didn't know as much as you did at that point.

Come on.

If we knew, if we know now what we knew back then or back then. If we knew that all that information and there was a. It would be a completely different industry. Every single major department store would be out of business by now. And right now, it's only about 70% of them are out of business because of us smaller boutiques. So hats off to all you ladies out there that are just crushing it, giving the department stores a run for their money.

But I also think there's an important part of, you know, starting out in that personal connection. There's a lot of TikToks out there that I see just blowing up because people are allowing them to see, like, they're out of the home business and seeing, you know, how little they are. But also they put a personal touch in their packages and stuff like that. And we used to do those things, too. So when you're starting out, you know, if I were to build my company all over again or build another one similar to, you know, what we're doing, I would be on TikTok probably more right now. Like, TikTok isn't a major thing for us, I think, because we're too big. And the sense that people feel like there's a disconnect, like we're not personal anymore, because, you know, I have multiple models doing multiple things and, you know, and they're trying to focus on, okay, well, who's this girl and who's that girl? Where if it was just me starting out, I would be on TikTok, showing them how I package my product, the quality of stuff that I'm selling, and put it on a more personal level. So I think when you're starting out, you have to be very open and let people kind of see your behind the scenes and stuff like that. I think that people can resonate because the reason why they want to give you money and buy your stuff is because they realize you're this, you know, know, person out of your home. You're a small business, and they can relate to that. And then there are people that want to do what you're doing on top of that. So you're going to get double that traffic coming in and that, you know, personal experience. Whereas, you know, we have to shift and we have to move differently once you hit, like, a certain level, you know, you just do. And people will be more critical of your business when you're bigger. They will have higher expectations when you're bigger and when you're smaller. I miss those days where, like, you can get away with a lot more. You could get away with like screwed up orders and delayed shipping times and all that. And now like, no, you don't get those get out of jail free cards anymore. Those are gone. But, you know, that's the beauty of starting out is that you kind of have a lot more flexibility and ways to roam and take advantage of that. But I also think I started out with $5,000. I think you need more money than that now. I think just because of, you know, you're going to have to run ads at some point down that road. Probably the earlier the better. But make sure that your website and everything is looking good, looking clean and ready to go before you sign. Start out because you're also going to be judged on that side. So if somebody sees an ad and they feel like your ads aren't legit, because there's a lot of Chinese manufacturers out there that are trying to steal photos and scam people. So if everything looks very discombobulated and not cohesive, that's where people's trust levels start to kind of do this and go, I don't know if I should buy. Is this a Chinese knockoff company? You know, they're trying to figure out the expectation is much higher.

Yeah, those talks are over the hub.

So before you get a website going and you can even sell product without having a website, I know there's a lot of people that do that too. But if you decide to go the route, you know that we went and you want a website and all of that, make sure that it's put together, cohesive. Shopify is like very easy to use. BigCommerce was more challenging. We even started out with Magento and that was a nightmare. We ditched that after like a month. Too many technical things I don't understand. But Shopify has so many plugins and then they have really good layouts and stuff like that. So I recommend Shopify if you're going to do a website, you know, and go the Nanomax route. But there's a lot of people out there where they don't, you know, their comments sold only and that's totally fine. And they're killing it and making money going in that direction. Yeah, yeah.

Talk to me about. So I asked you if you were new and you started again, what would you do? We have a lot of people in the boutique up community that are like at that scale level, let's just say they're at like 40 to 80,000amonth and they're like, they're at this peak and they're like I just want to push it over the edge. But talking about that stage, you know, maybe you're in that smaller office space space, smaller warehouse space, and you're needing to grow. You're probably needing to build some systems. You definitely need more team. What advice would you give to that bracket of retailers that are listening?

Be careful what you wish for, because more money, more problems. No, I. I'm. If I can be honest in that, like, I'm gonna be honest, it's hard. Once you hit a certain level, it's like you. You know the hamster that runs in the wheel, and you see like the funny video where he just can't run fast enough, and then he just starts swirling around and then he gets spit out. That's kind of how you feel when you scale and you get a lot bigger. And, you know, but for those of you that. And I am joking, but I'm not joking, it is. It's a beast. You know, when you move into a bigger warehouse, your cost go way up. You have have to build more racking systems. You have to hire more employees to get your shipping out, to get your inventory coming in, you know, and all of that unpacked. And, you know, when you. If you're at that point, I would say get to where you were absolutely busting at the seams in that warehouse. Can you go higher? Can you build higher? Can you maximize the whole space as we. Thick as you can?

Yeah. We redesigned every warehouse we've been in multiple times, and we built it to fit what we were doing, and we built it for growth, and then we built it for a second growth, and then we went up, and once we did all those things, we realized, okay, we have to move to a bigger facility. Your. The processes that you have in place are key. Your processes will be, if your warehouse is not organized, binned correctly in a manner that they only have to walk up and down a row once, not twice, but once. When you're doing a pick list, if the way that your shipping station is set up, all those things take time. Time is money. And if they're busy doing that, they can't be doing something else. They can't help out in another department. So if you can, when you're just to that point where you're like, oh, I just. You can't figure out how to grow a little bit more, but you have these fixed expenses. Figure out how to simplify, streamline, and improve your processes, and you'll find that your expenses will go down, your quality of service will go up, your customers will be happier. The faster you can get them the product, the better you are. But also look at cost savings. If you're not getting free labels and you're still paying for your 4x6 labels, you haven't figured out the game. If you are sourcing your poly bags from Amazon, you still haven't figured out the game. If there's all these different things you, you can completely improve upon that are going to help you. And all it takes is a small little catalyst to push you up over that next level. If you can change the way that your warehouse is laid out and binned, you can actually put more product into that warehouse. If you find that, you start turning that inventory over faster where you're not sitting on 3, 3,000, 10,000 orders that you have to ship out. If you can get that stuff out the door faster, you can actually fit more in. The efficiencies are important and I've always been doing this. Negotiate with your Shipper, with your UPS, FedEx, USPS have them bid against each other every four to six months. You need to be renegotiating. If you're not, you're losing money.

And I think a lot of people think, oh, it's only 10 more cents for this poly bag and it's only 25 more cents for this. All of that on a larger scale matters in a very large way. Anything that cuts into your margins is, you know, money out the door. And when you start scaling and you start growing and you get over a million dollars a month, that money matters a lot because it feels like stuff is just flying out the door and like, money's flying out the door. And it's, it's. When I say it's a beast, it is, because shipping out, you know, 7,000 packages a week or more is like a lot of money going out the door. And shipping charge for shipping, we do free shipping. And I'm going to tell you guys, charge for shipping, do it sooner than later. Because right now, if we went in reverse and tried to charge for shipping, now our customers are going to lose their minds. And that's been one thing that I wish and regret we would have done from like start to finish and just kept that. Because if you've always had that, you're never going to get pushed back for it. And I know people think, oh, I want you to be like Amazon Prime. Well, none of us are going to be like Amazon prime and none of us are going to get those shipping rates. And so it's just not going to happen. And shipping just keeps going up and up and up. And it's been cutting into, you know, our margins a lot lately. Shipping has gone crazy. And, you know, I've even stopped buying felt hats that. Because we had to put them in a box, otherwise they get smashed. And that was like $15 to ship out a hat. And Jeremy was like, stop buying hats.

So anytime, anything, we buy shoes, hats. I'm looking at dimensional weight. I'm like, dimensional weight. Oh, gosh. Six zones, eight zones. That's a big portion of our population is on the east coast. We're shipping the full eight zones. That's going to cost me 16 bucks. I know. Not because of weight, because of dimensional weight. Because it's going to fit in this box. Give me a 16, 14, 8. No, thank you. Stop buying that product.

And I would say 90% of our inventory is in boxes. Even if it comes in on a hanger, hanger, whatever, those plastic hangers. Sometimes we'll just bag it and take it and do that. But racking systems take up a lot of space. And so you need to move into another warehouse, but everything you have is racked. Go to boxes because you will find more space. But, you know, basically all I'm saying is, you know, they want to move into bigger warehouses. And I get that. If you have maximized everything and you just can't, like, when somebody comes in the door and you're tripping over stuff, that's when you need to move. And that's kind of everywhere. Where we've gone, that is where things have gotten for us. So the last warehouse that we were in, before this one, you got in the door and you tripped over. There was pallets of boxes, and there were boxes right in front of your face when you walked in the door. When you get to the point where your employees can't move and they don't want to be there because they're claustrophobic.

If you have to move something to get something, you're wasting time and money. And that's when you.

To upgrade. But don't move into a space that's too big. Like, you know, okay, I might, you know, we might fill this up in two years. Then don't buy that warehouse. Buy something six months in our case. I mean, we filled up our warehouse already, but we'll also have the ability to go a little bit higher and to do, you know, what we need to do in order to survive and be, you know, not have to blow out the back wall, because that's our whole Warehouse is custom built. For those of you that don't know that we. This is our first custom built warehouse and so we allowed for the back to be knocked out if we have to grow even bigger than what we are. And so when you are building, having that option is really nice because then you're not paying for the whole space to be built all at once. You have an opportunity to kind of like save some money and then blow out the back wall at a later time. So that's what we've done. Yeah.

So can I put you on the spot? For those of you that are listening on audio today, it's audio, but if you're watching on YouTube, I. I get to see you guys. Can you like, just like turn the camera? Can we get like a little sneak peek of your warehouse space?

Okay.

Okay. All right, so there's going to be a little reflection. Everybody in the windows. So I apologize, but let me.

We're in our conference room. Awesome.

Awesome. So that's the back wall you can blow out if you have to.

Yes, perfect. That's helpful.

I think that's inspiring for people to see and just like kind of get an idea of layout. Right. And how. How high those boxes are, your bins are. So this is something I know we. We've already been at this podcast here for quite a while. This is a longer episode, but I feel like it's so worth it. Like your story and what you would do again, like all the technical pieces. But I want to just, you know, kind of mention this to everyone today. This is an invitation to keep the conversation going with the three of us, because today we're so excited to announce that you guys are going to be joining us at the boutique Summit this year. And this is like our one on one. This will be our one on one conversation. But we have like a 201 that's coming.

There's some, there's some. We've talked about some good information and I think at the summit you'll definitely want to be there for that one because that one's going to be a lot of fun.

Yes.

I feel like we're ready for kind of a no holds bar conversation about, okay, let's really talk about growth, let's talk about team, let's talk about processes, let's talk about warehouses, let's talk about money and investing money and your end game and all the details that no one really talks about.

I'm so excited to have this conversation. I think, you know, it's important too that people understand like, yeah, I make jokes and stuff, but I'm also, anybody that knows me knows I'm a realist. And when people ask me questions, I'm very honest with them. And I don't want people to be misled by how hard we've had to work to where we are today. That it's, you know, it's a lot of sacrificing and it's exciting. It's, it's an amazing company. I love this business, I love this industry. I absolutely love fashion. But it's also, there are some hard parts in, you know, to running a business and scaling this big. And I think, you know, I couldn't wait to get there and I couldn't wait to get that big and, you know, I couldn't wait to knock out and achieve these goals and, you know, and it was exciting and everything and all of that. But then you get to the point where you're like, oh, I, this is so big. And I don't know how to maneuver myself as easy as I used to. Like the days where we were smaller, it was easier. And as you grow, it does get harder, you know, because you have to trust people more. There's a huge level of trust with your employees to manage departments because when you've just grown in scale, you can't be there and you can't work with every individual person anymore. You have to hire on a management team and they have to, you know, run with it. So, yeah, there's a lot to unpack.

Get yourself a unicorn. Get yourself a red headed unicorn. That is going to be the title of this podcast. Well, you guys, I just want to thank you so much for this candid conversation and just sharing your story and the realness of it. You know, there's an abundance of TikToks and Instagram post posts and stories out there of how wonderful, you know, owning a boutique and growing a boutique or scaling a business can be, but it often overshadows the real nature of what really happens behind it. So I'm, I'm just thankful that we get to have this conversation both today and at the Boutique Summit. And if you guys are listening and you're excited and you want to hear more, I've got all the details linked up in the show notes, but you'll get a chance to meet Jeremy and Susie in person, which I think will be a lot of fun. So you guys, thank you for all of this and I can't wait to continue the conversation.

Thank you.

Hey, I'm so thankful that you guys are listening to this podcast. I am so grateful for our guests this week and all the strategy that we are in the middle of uncovering. But I want to also invite you to one more opportunity to continue to find strategy and grow your business. And that's at the 2021 Boutique Summit. You guys, the Boutique Summit is back in person person. It is the largest gathering of boutique owners for a business conference in the world and it's going to be taking place live on August 1st and 2nd in Atlanta right before the Atlanta Apparel Market so you can hit the trade show as well. And we have a full day of digital workshops taking place on August 17. There are in person tickets but there's also digital tickets. So if you weren't able to join us or grab a ticket for an in person experience experience, grab the digital ticket so you can catch all of our keynote speakers live online and take place in our digital workshop day on August 17th. I can't wait to see you there. Hey guys, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope that you loved it. Don't forget to hit subscribe and leave a rating and review down below for a chance to be one of our featured listeners each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and how to access complete show notes and bonus downloads from our guests, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.

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