Lessons from Scaling a Mega Boutique | NanaMacs

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 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 Nanomax 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 they 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 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 mainstream 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 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 and 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 messages 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 as well. And I'm so excited about our guests Jeremy and Susie Shute. 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 in 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 Nanimax started there was very few boutiques doing what you guys do on the market. And I always love to hear where the idea come from and how did it get started and how the two of you got together on this idea.

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 going to do. I'm always like a planner and I never just cold turkey quit a job. I had three boys to support too, so that was freaking me out. And so he asked me, we had had this long conversation and I have 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 leg work 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. Um, 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 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 of 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 6 to 6, 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 out. 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, so we've got something here.

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 for 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, 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 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 we weren't driving any traffic. And so, I don't know, it was. 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.

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.