Ryan Moran advises Ed Alf on growing his batting glove company Spiderz from $60k/month. The problem: too many similar designs diluting inventory and Amazon ranking. The fix: pause new colors for 6-12 months, focus on best-sellers, and use existing email and social audiences to drive sales.
Questions this video answers
About $60,000 per month.
Between 3 and 25 reviews per SKU.
For at least six months, preferably a year.
He says you can double Spiderz in the next six months.
Chapters
All right, this is the part of the show where we look at one of our students businesses. Today we're looking at a submission from Ed Alf. He is one of our tribe members. Hey Ed, good to see you. And Ed runs a business called Spiderz with a Z. They sell batting gloves and custom fielding gloves. A man after my own heart. Good work, Ed. His primary sales channels are his e commerce website, retail independent player reps and Amazon.com and his monthly sales currently are about $60,000 per month. So he's looking to expand. He has a decent Instagram and Facebook following that he could be growing. But today, Ed, I want to look at some obvious low hanging fruit for you because in his submission he said that his biggest problem is keeping sufficient inventory because they're spreading themselves really thin because they're trying to keep their designs fresh and modern and, and they're releasing a lot of new designs which requires inventory purchases, which becomes a bit of a balancing act. We're taking sales, but we wanna release a new sku. So how do we fund that? This would be my recommendation, Ed. I think that you will immediately become more profitable if you go deep instead of wide. When I built ZenActive Sports, it was not until we had several products selling consistently that we even thought about releasing additional colors other than black. All of our yoga mats were one color. And then after we were selling really predictably and we could take money off the table, that's when we said maybe we should do pink or orange or green. What that allowed us to do was to get to the point where we were selling predictably, selling successfully, and then take everything and put it in profit and release the new product. It allowed us to get our reviews really dialed in. So when I pull up your amaz store, I noticed that the SKUs that you have listed only have between 3 and 25 reviews. That's going to be tough to scale. The way that you are really going to get this is if you get Those, you're selling $60,000 a month. Ed, you can get those buyers to come back and review your products because they've already bought an existing product. I would say put a hold on releasing any new products that are duplications of what you already have. Meaning if you've already got good batting gloves, just focus on selling more of that specific design. Aesthetics can be changed later. You can roll out new colors, new designs, new patterns later. Right now, does the product do what it says it's going to do? Does it give the buyer the result that they want? If so, You've got a minimum viable product. Now let's scale that to be a multimillion dollar business. You have enough products to where you could be selling at least 1.5, probably $2 million a year before worrying about adding an additional design, an additional color, an additional anything. Unless it's a completely new product. Right now, I would say you need to double down on your Amazon presence. Get ranking for certain keywords that are going to drive new customers and allow you to get the reviews that you need to be able to stand out in the marketplace. Shelve all new designs and colors for at least six months, preferably a year, and take all that creative capacity into driving more traffic, more conversions and more new types of products that are not deviations from what we already have, meaning they're not variations. So if you wanted to do, I don't know, a T that people hit off of, if that's your market, then add that. Cause that's a completely different set of customers and it's something that your existing customers would come back and buy versus if you just roll out another color.
Are you doubling your market size? Are you giving them a reason to come back and buy again? You're not. You might just hit the person who likes yellow and instead of Blue and that's 5% of the market versus 50% more if you added a completely new product. That's how I think that Spiders is going to grow as a brand. The other piece is you've got a solid Instagram following, a solid Facebook following. Are you driving traffic to the existing products that you have rather than just highlighting new designs? You will grow this business by putting all of your resources that following your email list the reviews behind those products, in this case specifically on Amazon, because you can drive the algorithm, get those reviews, get the conversions up, allow yourself to spend more money to get yourself ranking for those keywords. You are sitting on an easy way to double this company. You can double Spiders in the next six months if you do only that and worry about the rest of the variations later. If you are sitting on a business idea or you have a business that is already off the ground or you're looking to invest in businesses that you know you can impact. We take those types of entrepreneurs and we put them together in our tribe, and that's@freedomfastlane.com tribe. We take people who are successful in business, people who are starting new businesses, as well as investors and audience leaders. We bring in retail partners and people who run traffic and we bake them all together to create new opportunities. Because when people collaborate with a common goal of growing a business, that's when real magic can happen with a new venture. So if that's you, that's over@freedomfastlane.com tribe.
