How To Create Engaging Content For Your Boutique Business

You can leave your phones on only if it's Reba McIntyre or Lizzo. And we can dance when you get a phone call. Well, good morning, you guys. Kind of like church. I see lots of us are sitting in the back this morning. Everyone have a good night in Vegas last night? Yes. Time change always messes with me. I feel like when I'm here, this is such an old home week. I was still like coming to these shows. How many of you guys, you are veterans.

You've been to this show before.

Why don't you guys stand up? I don't want you to fall asleep this morning. So let's just get a workout in. Okay, Good. We've got next. How many of you here? This is your very first time to this show. Why don't you guys stand up? Put you on the spot. Wow, that's a really good mess, you guys.

Welcome.

How many of you guys this morning are mutual members? Why don't you guys stand up? Boutique cup members. I usually need like a whoop whoop. If you're a boutique. Perfect. And the rest of you, we won't.

Make you stand up.

You know who you are. But soon you'll be boutique members as well. Right? Let's do this because this is one of my favorite parts of this show. I know we have some veterans in the room in this show and I always will tell this story forever as I have the opportunity to be on the stage. The reason I first came to this show was a dear friend of mine, T.J. reed, who was like the patron saint of the wind show when it came to bringing boutique owners together. And she invited me here something like six or seven years ago to kind of shadow her as she met with her store owners here. And there's always a table in the back that is all of TJ's. TJ's original community. So you guys have to stand up. I love that. How many of you here? Let's start our under five, let's say under one year in business. You're new. Stand up. I mean, we're still doing our workout. Newbies welcome. Under five years in business or one to five years in business.

Awesome.

You crossed the hurdle. Five to ten years in business. 10 to 15 years in business. Wonderful. 15 to 20 years in business. Still some 20 plus years in business. The reason I illustrate that in large part, I think what you guys at this table are such a great example of is they're the first examples of community over competition. This is really where I learned this month is from you guys you guys do such a good job of always supporting each other and working together. And I think as a result of that, look at how many of you have been in business for over 20 years. 30 years, 40 years. I think that's a good example for the rest of us. And why we're here today is because we do live in this model of community over competition. And a rising tide lifts all ships. And the more we can share with one another, the stronger all of us can be. And clearly there's more than enough to go around, right? I don't know. Some of you were with us at the off price show yesterday. Why don't you guys stand up? A couple of you came on our tours yesterday.

Awesome.

So the neat part about seeing the off price show and then coming to the wind show and then going to Magic and Project, isn't it amazing when you walk around these shows to see how different and diverse these fashion brands are and how diverse our stores are? Isn't that neat? I think it's easy for us to get so pigeonholed, pulled into thinking what our definition of fashion is and who our customer is. But when you come to market, you see just how many opportunities to serve others there are out there. You know, I tell this story microphone that I grew up in North Dakota, clearly not a huge fashion vendor. There's a Monte Carlo.

You betcha.

Down there by synagogue. Yeah, no, yeah. Our accent was coming out really thick over here, so it's gonna flip. I'm sorry, but I felt like North Dakota wasn't a fashion mecca at that time. I felt like fashion was New York or fashion was la. And I felt like, gosh, what about the rest of us in the middle of the country, right? Where's our fashion? And I think what's so cool about boutiques today is we're fashion on main streets in Podunk, Oklahoma, Indiana, North Dakota, it doesn't matter where you're at, but everyone is obsessed with opportunity to feel beautiful, right? And to feel served. The things that Amazon will never be able to do for our culture. So such an opportunity that we have and such an opportunity we have to work together in this industry and again, to just diversify what we're offering for a product mix at all of these shows. So I just commend you guys for being here for this this morning.

A couple quick introductions this morning before.

I get started, I've got to first start with our boutique, Humpty. I always love it when you guys have an opportunity to just meet our entire team because they're my favorite people in the whole world. Let's start. I know some of them are in the outside. Is Ed in here? Ed's right here videoing. Ed O'Vera, our director of wholesale, of course down here. Beth Leah is our director of operations. She's in the back, out in the hallway. She's going to be dancing for you later.

You're welcome.

Meredith Palmetlo is our style intern. She's here taking pictures. And Sarah Burks, if you guys are in retail, boot cancer. Burks flies in this afternoon and her daughter's had a couple basketball games, so she'll be with us later. But we also wouldn't be here if it weren't for a couple of sponsors that help make these events possible for us. So I want to start first by introducing our friends at Sezzle. How many of you guys are familiar with Sezzle? A couple of you. So let's start. John, Luke, why don't you come on up here and introduce Cecilia. And if you guys have any special questions, this is the guy to ask. Yeah, sure. I mean, you're tall, but.

Welcome everybody. Thanks for having me. If you're wondering about the strange accent, originally from Germany, not quite North Dakota, but I did marry a farmer's daughter, N.D. so that should be brownie points, right? Do we have slides or just.

I have.

No, no slides.

That's okay.

Drop the top.

All right. So Sezzle, I've been with them about for six months, which makes me want a veteran since the company has doubled in size since then and this whole space, which we typically refer to as buy now, pay later, is just completely blowing up. In essence, we allow shoppers to split purchases in to interest free installments. And one of the main reasons why Sezzle has been so successful is really our, our partnership with Boutique Hub. I think our co founders met Ashley one and a half years ago. Is that about right?

Yeah.

At Magic.

At Magic, yeah. And since then, so many Boutique Hub members have joined Sezzle because they see Valerie in offering the service to their customers. And that has really helped Sezzle gain traction early on, get off the ground and become a larger company. So thank you to Ashley and her team. We threw some sets up here. These are actually slightly outdated already. We now have roughly 1 million active shoppers. We grew 470% year over year last year. And the large majority of our 10,000 plus merchants are smaller and medium sized companies like yours and really many boutiques. That's really our brand and pattern. Funny how this works. You just have to Press the button. Okay, so in essence, this is how Sezzle works. Let's say you buy a jacket for $100. You as the consumer in this case, you would pay $25 to sezzle at checkout. Then Sezzle pays the merchant right away in full. And the consumer pays Sezzle back over time every two weeks. Now the payment is due, so four payments, 0% interest to the consumer. We pay the merchant right away up front. They have the money the next business day. And if the consumer doesn't pay Saso, the merchant still keeps the money. We assume all risk of fraud and chargebacks, etc. We make our money by charging merchants a small fee per transaction. That's slightly higher than what you would pay in credit card processing or PayPal, for example. There's no interest ever to the consumer. There's no impact on their credit score. And even if the consumer were never to pay us back, we wouldn't send them to collection agencies. So that's just our loss. We want to design the most consumer friendly product that's out there. Here's an example. Jessica Simpson uses us. So in this case, this pair of boots provide $419 or four payments of 29 and change with Sezzle. And simply by having this little widget up here. It's maybe a little hard to see in the back down here. That's the Sezzle widget. Simply by having that on the product page you see much higher cart insertion rates, higher conversion rates and lower cart abandonment, which of course is a big issue if you have an online routine. So a couple of the benefits to the shopper. It's pretty obvious it's a way to budget over time. That's not a credit card without fees, no interest. It's super easy to use, kind of like PayPal, but a little bit more fun if you ask me. Merchants love it because they see a pretty significant increase in average order values. People who use Sezo, they tend to spend more money, higher conversions and guaranteed upfront payments on average. We tell folks merchants that they can expect a 20% increase in average order values with Cecil. So these are larger basket sizes. Cecil shoppers come back more frequently for more. So that's why we reference the 10% and the 13%. That's what we call our take rate. So once CESS installed on a website, we typically process 13% of all checkouts just for a frame of reference. Discover credit card, which has been around for 30 some years, their taker is 5%. So our 13 ever is released as my last Slide. For any boutique hub members that are interested in joining Sezzle, there's a special discount where the small transaction fee that I mentioned earlier is reduced automatically. If you're a BOTCA member, you can reach out to them or us if you're interested in anymore. And I believe we're taking some questions. Is there any. Right.

Yeah, you can keep that mic. If anyone has any quick Sezzle questions. Yes, back here. Does it work with Comet?

Sold. Yes. Comments? Sold. We're big fans of Comet. Sold. Other some comments. Old folks here. Yeah, they're a great partner of ours. We love them and works well together.

So at checkout if they're checking out on condom.

Sold.

It will give them that option if it's. If we offer it. Is that how it works?

Yeah.

Okay.

As soon as they add products to their part.

So if you just look at it, it's not going to show until they.

Add a cart for nine. Okay.

Awesome. Did you have a question?

I was just going to ask like.

For a customer that like getting products all the time, once they access this and they check out and they do this, how do they pay their for payments before they're able to use that again to buy more products?

Great question. No. So we give consumers pretty much a credit limit for our first time Sezzle user. We quickly assess their ability to pay us back and based on their credit profile there's no impact. Right. But we look at the credit profile, we give them a certain, you know, credit limit, let's say $500 for first time. And if their first purchase with Cesar was less than that, they could keep making several purchases. Yes.

Hi, is Sizzle available to be used in stores?

And also a second question.

I am with a company of different company I won't name however do you have at do does Sizzle give the company as well as the consumer access? Just like if you're a 1, 800.

Number that we can call direct.

Yeah, we actually have an even better number. We have a 651 number which is local Minneapolis. So our entire shopper and merchant support teams, two dedicated teams are based in Minneapolis. So if you have any issues you can actually just call Minneapolis and the local person that speaks better English than I do about the in store question. Also another great question, great question. We're currently piloting with Target and they have asked us to develop an in store point of sale solution for them. It's pretty much ready but we're going to first roll it out with Target soon and after that it will become available for everybody.

Another question.

What's the average age of the person that's ordering?

Great question. So the average age, currently I would say about 2/3 of Sezzle shoppers are under the age of 35. 2/3. So 1/3 about 35. And our current consumers also skew lower on the credit score and income spectrum. So roughly half of Sezzle users earn less than $50,000 a year. And almost 15% of our shoppers don't have a credit history at all.

Okay, you have another question?

Yeah, I'm just, I'm really new at this. So the way you're explaining it is.

You'Re saying.

A boutique owner, their product owned there.

Yes. So let's say you have an online store on Shopify. Most of our merchants are on Shopify, but we have integrations with all major e commerce platforms. So that's your store on Shopify. There's a section that's called Alternative Payment methods. And there it's as easy as selecting Sezzle from a drop down menu. As soon as you click the button, Sezzle will be on your site. And then if a shopper puts something in their cart, they go to the checkout page. They will see all payment methods. For example, pay with credit card, pay with PayPal, or pay with Sezzle. It would look at futures the same way as PayPal, for example. Okay, so this is a payment method.

Not a way to get goods, correct?

Yes, we only facilitate the payment.

One more question.

What do you do about returns?

Yeah, so we just lean on the merchant. We just follow whatever the merchant's return policy is. Does that answer the question?

All right, if you guys have any more. One last question. And then if you guys. And then if anyone else has questions, Jeanlin will be here all morning. And you're going to be at our cocktail party tomorrow.

Actually, can I quickly point out my two colleagues, Lauren Anderson and Josh. Maybe you can quickly stand up. So Lauren and Josh will be here all day and all day tomorrow? I'll be here just today. Perfect.

One last question.

So what are the fees?

Yeah, so our typical fee if somebody just goes to sensor.com is merchant and signs up, our fee is 6%. That includes the roughly 3% you would pay for credit card or PayPal processing. So on average, you know, 3 ish percent higher. But for boutique up members, I believe it's 5.5%. And if the merchant wants to sign a contract with us for a year, then it goes down to 5%. But that's optional. They don't have to sign a Contract with us and immediate payouts. Yes, thank you.

The interesting thing is, like you said, the increase in average order values, I think we've seen that a lot across our members, you know, that have reported higher average order values, really in sizzle. And the other thing I thought was really interesting, and I haven't even got to talk to you about this yet, but I was meeting with a Brazilian company the other day and I was looking at their site and they had, you know, up to 10 payments and like all of these other solutions, this is something that's been around the world, rest of the world, for quite a long time. That is relatively new in the United States, which we usually think of ourselves as the leaders in the United States, but really we're kind of behind the eight ball on this.

Yeah, it's a good point. Our founders, they didn't invent this product. It has been around for, for quite a while. There's much more penetration in South America, also in Australia, even in Europe. So we're roughly five years behind in this trend, I would say. About your, your AOB comment, we did two case studies with boutique members that use Sezzle. I don't know if they are well known boutiques, Prep Obsessed and Deep South Pouch, they're pretty large 7 digit in revenues and I think Prep obsessed has a 55% AOV lift with sezzle, so larger baskets, 55%. And what was the other one? Deep South, I think in the 30% range. So both really good numbers.

Awesome.

Perfect.

Well, guys, can you please help me and say thank you to the team? All right, let's bring the team from Comet. Sold up. They're also here this morning.

Swag for you.

And they can come answer a couple of questions.

Quick.

One thing, our team, because we're in Wisconsin, or several of our team in Wisconsin, we came over to Minneapolis to tour the Sesil headquarters, which kind of.

Looks like Google headquarters. So it's not going to swing all these things.

But the stat that I thought was so interesting was that of the millennial population, they fear credit card debt more often than death. Is that shocking to anybody? It's shocking to me. And so we've asked people that are members of our team, hey, do you.

Have a credit card?

And most often the answer is no. They rely on debit cards because they survived what happened in 2000, 2008, 2009. They saw their families in distress, and so now they're looking for alternative payment solutions. Really fascinating stuff. Carolyn.

Good morning. We're here with Common Soul.

I'm Carolyn, I'm Sierra.

And we are here to tell you about the best social commerce platform that's.

Out there right now. Eat the mic. We can hear you better. Can you hear me? Yes.

Can you hear me better now? So we are a real time interactive social commerce platform. What that means is that you can sell online, but specifically in Facebook and on Instagram. And so instead of sending somebody over to a website to go check out, you're able to capture their attention right there on social media and get them to check out much faster. So you're getting money a lot quicker. And we do that in several different ways, all different types of content. And how many in here already are already using Common Soul?

You can scream for that.

We have a lot of people in the family, it looks like in the front, and we have a big crew back here. So we're excited to see that. So welcome back.

So we do two things at Comments Sold.

The first one we're going to talk.

To you about is that we make shopping simple and fun for your customer. So we offer comment selling. If any of you guys are not familiar with what that is, you've probably.

Seen it happen on Facebook.

You may just not have registered that was what was going on. So if you've ever been in a boutique group or a page and you've seen somebody post a picture of an item and say, comment sold. And your size and the color and you know, then I'm going to send you an invoice, right, That's a lot of work. And we'll talk about how we automate that process later and make it easy for you. But that's what comment selling is. So we do that on Facebook and on Instagram. So you're able to monetize both platforms and then live selling. So how many of you guys in here do Facebook live sales? Oh, there's so many. If you're not, this is an absolutely amazing way to engage your shoppers. So we are the number one way to host live sales because not only are you able to stream live to your Facebook page and your Facebook group and your mobile app, if you have one with us, but we also, you're able to see everything coming in at any in real time on one dashboard.

So you can interact with your customers.

No matter where they're shopping from, which is just amazing. And then on top of that, it's going to take care of all of those inventory issues for you. If you're live selling without Comments Sold, I'm really sorry because I can't Imagine going live and then having to figure out who commented on something first. I don't know if any of you guys have ever had that problem before. Comments sold. But it's terrible and really time consuming and fights can break out.

It's a whole thing.

We also make shopping again, so we have gamification features so that we really engage your customers. There's a countdown right on their invoice and checkout screen so that you can hurry them along so their cart expires at cart expiration, so that they feel that sense of urgency. And then seamless online shopping. So I can put something on my cart on Facebook and then I can go to Instagram and add something else. I can go to the website, I can go to the app, and all of it's going to show up in one cart when I go to check out. So there's no trying to check out with your item on Facebook. Then you bought something on Instagram and now you get a totally separate invoice. All that combines for your shopper. So this is a little bit more about streaming live. I kind of gave you the overview, but we also have the live overlay. Have any of you guys seen the little bubble above people's head when they go live? That has the cute little picture and it gives people instructions. So 85% of social media users use video content with the sound off. Because we're all either like, doing it at work or hiding from our kids in the bathroom. And we don't want them to know that we're in there or our husband is watching football. We don't want to listen to two things at once. Right. And so we offer HD video. But that overlay features means that you.

Your customers know exactly how to shop.

Whether they're sound or not. And that is an absolute game changer. And then again, viewing all incoming comments, tracking your inventory in real time, and then you can actually schedule your live sales in advance and forecast your revenue.

So if your goal is to make.

$6,000 on your live sale and you only have $3,000 worth of inventory that you're selling, you're obviously not going to make $6,000 on your live sale. Right? So you can forecast that in the future. And then Carol is going to talk about the other thing that we kill, which is we automate your workload and make your life simple.

Yeah, Save your sanity and get your time back. Get your life back. With all of the automation that we have inside the platform. Invoicing is the core. That's how we started that's our baby. Sending the invoice immediately after they comment sold. We do that, we send that invoice for you. We're automatically asking them to pay you. You're not having to go and manually send an invoice or do any of that. That's going to give you a lot of time back. Marketing automation is built into the platform as well. We have a lot of features that specifically like coupon codes. We have something called secondary offer which if they're checking out we're teasing them with more content trying to get them a second thing in their cartoon. We have emails that automatically go out on the system. So one of the most favorited ones are probably like when.

Yeah the wind.

Back email is really good and then also when the first time customer is coming through. So if you've got somebody.

If you've.

Got somebody that's coming to your website and it's the first time they've ever visited and they didn't actually check out, you're going to send them an email automatically through the system and it'll give them a 40% off discount code to go ahead and complete that close because it's really hard to get them that very first time. Just give them a little taste and then get them to come back and do more. All of those. We've got five different types of marketing email automations that are already built into the system that you don't even have to worry about. It's just a quick toggle on button and we do all will have you thinking and sending for you. Inventory management, there's a lot of opportunity there. When specifically when you're looking at the reporting you can see who your best brands are, you can see what are the best sizes, you can see all of the different types of the return is another big one. So you're getting all of that information in one dashboard on the back end which so yes we do make it simple and fun but on that back end we're also automating and trying to make your business operations smart and so you're making intelligent decisions there. So that's us.

Awesome. We've got time for two quick questions and then we've got content.

Could you explain forecasting and how that helps with forecasting and is another platform that will pull your inventory from also website. Yeah. So we are an all in one system so you can upload your inventory into ours and you don't actually need any other system if you already have one like Shopify or something. We also sync very simply with Them with a one click button so we can pull that inventory in. If you're working with Shopify, it's a, a sync that's in real time. So if you sell on one platform and then somebody goes and checks out on your website, the inventory is going to update in real time. So there's no over sale worry there. And your other question was on lifestyle forecasting. Yeah, that one's a big one. Specifically if you're into goal setting and planning and maybe you want to set your week up right. And so on Sunday you go in and you schedule out these, these posts are going to drip out on one day, these are going to go another day. You're able to see how much money you could make. So once you got it all scheduled out, then you can focus on and you know that we've got all of the actual automation taken care of, you can focus more on how you're actually going to sell that to your customer, how you're going to make that connection. You can make it a much more personalized shopping experience because you're focused on what really matters, which is connecting with them, which is nice to.

Have an important tool to have on a daily basis. Whether you have comments, sold or not. Acronyms, just running that forecast. So many times I work with boutiques and they don't even know what is my inventory on hand and then what is my turn rate. So what can I forecast in per sale, per category. So that was a lot of where the boutique boss planner came from too. And we just want to encourage people to really dig into those numbers. So I'd like you guys have that automated one last question, then we'll get going. Yep.

Cost.

And also does it matter on Facebook if you have a page, is it.

Required VIP group or age or cost.

And then future VIP group?

Yeah, so that's a great question. As far as cost, we have a couple of different cost levels and our sales team is actually in the back. So when we're done with this, if you guys have questions, they can talk to you about your business and which plan would be best for you. But really if you think about it, even with whatever the cost would be for your business, you're basically hiring 10 employees that work around the clock that are already trained and you do nothing. So it's worth every cent. Right. And then as far as the page versus the group, it works well with both. So we don't tell you that you need to do one or the other. You can absolutely run multiple things and it all works seamlessly so if you have a page, you can run your page that way. If you have a group, you can run your group that way. If you have both, run them both that way. So we make it easy for you.

To do all of that.

Any good discount as a boutique hub. Yeah, exactly.

The boutique hub, we're bffs is boutique hub. We love the education that you're getting here and because of that, we do give you a discount on ours. So make sure when you do sign up with us, you scream loud and.

Clear, I'm a petite cloudy.

You'll get it. Where our starter plan is $29 a month and 5% transaction fees. And then our boutique plan, which most of everybody is on for you. The boutique hub price is $99 for percent transaction fees. So thanks for having us.

Awesome.

Thank you guys. I love that lots of things that they talked about as tools we're going to talk about in, in my talk this morning. Just automation and how do you set that up and what type of coffee should be included in your automation. We're going to go through all of that in just a minute. One last introduction though, you guys, and we're going to get started. And that is the team at Fashion Go. Nuri, you want to come on up here? Thank you guys for helping make this possible.

Good morning, everyone.

Wow, this is honestly so crazy. We love Boutique Hub and love being sponsors here. And honestly, every time when we come back, the room gets bigger and bigger.

So you guys are going to have.

To excuse me because I'm not a professional like Ashley, but thank you so.

Much for having us. For those of you who are not.

Really familiar with Fashion Go, we are.

An online wholesale platform. Connect you guys to over 1,000 wholesale vendors now.

So they list their products on there.

And you guys can shop from the.

Country of your home or boutique business.

So if you guys have any questions, let us know. We're going to be here. I actually didn't bring a planner with us or a notebook. Christine, you can hold it up. This is our customized planner. That is a gift to you guys. It's in the back, so if you haven't grabbed it already, please grab one. And this is actually a special, special announcement just for the Bouti club members.

And all of you guys.

We are launching a rewards program.

Awesome.

Yeah. So this is going to be where.

You guys can save towards your next.

Purchases with the vendors you love.

We actually didn't even release the YouTube video or marketing yet, so look out for that. That's going out today.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

We're going to be partnering with Magic. So we're going to be having our booth. It's going to be called online booth number 74319. 74319.

We're going to be partying there.

We're going to have the opening night ceremony with Nelly.

So, yeah, please come by and.

Perfect. Thank you so much.

Any quick questions for them? Awesome. Thank you.

Appreciate it. All right, you guys. All right, we're good.

All right, guys, so here's how I want to roll from here on out. I love really easygoing, go with the flow, Answer your questions as we go. Workshop style talks, if that's good with you guys. So if I'm talking about something or sharing a thought idea. If you guys have questions, I encourage you raise your hand as we go. I don't want you to have to sit and wait to the end. I want to make this interactive and get you guys as much value as I possibly can this morning. And if you prefer to wait until after and ask me a personal question or talk to our team, we can definitely do that too. I know we have all different types of businesses in the room, from new to very experienced to online to brick and mortar and not so much online. So I'm going to try to tailor this to all of you, but again, ask your specific questions as we go. So what I really want to hit on today is there's so much changing in social media and marketing strategy and business strategy in 2020. And I just did a podcast about this here last week about 20 trends that we see coming in 2020. And I really wanted to narrow this down today to four main strategies that I really want you guys to hone in on in the coming year that I really think are the ones that will move the needle forward for you in the coming year. And I want to start with this first one, which seems as basic as it possibly can be. But, you guys, I underestimate how many boutiques don't do this. How many boutiques don't always exactly know their customer or they think they knew their customer, but really their customer has changed. You know, going back to this whole North Dakota reference, it was for the longest time, time that we were so behind in North Dakota when it came to trends, right? We would rely on a fashion magazine or seeing somebody that we thought was stylish on the street that was wearing something really cool. And today, with Instagram and social media influencers and just how fast content travels today. Trends are so fast, right? So our customer changes and it can't be our customer relying on us to see what's coming at market projected six months out. She's a lot of times ahead of us on that. So for us to really know our customer, it's knowing our customer on a whole new level today and understanding where is she getting her information from so that I can make sure I provide faster information, faster trend information, and serve her needs in the most significant way possible. Something that we do in our Retail Boot Camp program. How many Retail Boot Camp students are in the room? I know there's a couple of you. Lots of you, actually. So you guys just survived module one, last week's help Boot Camp, and something that we do there that I think is one of the most powerful tools is a customer survey. Raise your hand if you've done a customer survey anytime recently. How about you? Maybe it's just the Boot camp that says it right. So I'm going to give you guys this strategy because I think it's so important. We use a tool called Typeform. It's a website. There's a free version, there's a paid version. But we do Typeform because.