How sewing machine makers are building a US$44bn industry with tribes.

Hello and welcome. My name is Jim James and I'm your host today on Speak PR. On this podcast, I'd like to help you to unlock the value in your business with free and effective communications tools and ideas. Now, I've been doing this by sharing my experience as an entrepreneur and also as a PR agency owner for over 25 years. I've served over 500 clients, large and small. And now on this podcast this evening, I'd like to talk to you about sewing machines and the sewing together of a tribe. Now, as you might have heard in an earlier podcast, I have been tasked by my daughter Amity to get a sewing machine for school, and I did what I think most consumers will do. And the reason I share this is because from a PR point of view If we're running our own business, it's always important to think about the overall customer journey as they look for solving a need and look for the solutions, shortlist the solutions, and then zero into actually making a purchase. But after that, what do we do to help that purchase settle in to be used and be a valued part of the purchasing process? So we had a look online. I say we, I had a look online. And of course, the first thing that we all do, regardless of business-to-business or consumer, is we go to a search engine. Now I use Ecosia, which plants trees every time I search, but we're also using Bing or Google, of course, or in China, Baidu. So the first place, of course, is from a PR point of view, what content do we have online in order to— for the search engines to be indexing us? Of course, there's the, the large number of banner ads for different sewing machine companies, plus websites showing sewing machine content that are ad-based. There are a number of specialist titles in this particular niche, so there is SewMag, .co.uk, which has its own app. There is The Spruce, bestreviews.com, Sewing Machine Expert. So there are, you know, about a dozen websites professing to give me the top 10, top 5, best of 2020 reviews. So I read through a few of those, and then I looked also because some of the learning sites like Udemy have their own courses on everything from macrame to sewing to home stitching and so on. So I had a quick look there to see which sewing machines are being used by the teachers and which ones are being recommended. Now, some sites then, or some companies, have their own websites as well. So singer.com has its own. Janome has its own, uh, own branded website. And so there are a number of brands, about 15 main sewing machine brands, largely from Asia. And these are mainly coming from Japan, South Korea, and China. I then went across to look for the YouTube videos to see, you know, what what help I can get from the world's largest search engine for video. And of course, then what one can do is see the, the number of videos made by what one might call the whole influencer community, because the influencer is not posting on the search engine for a long-form text. That's being done by the review websites that are living off content with advertising. But the influencers are in abundance when it comes to going to YouTube. So I had a look and I found that there are a number of influencers, quite unlikely to be honest. I found videos, for example, on Abby's Den. And Abby's Den, there's a video filmed 2 years ago called Inserting the Front-Loading Bobbin Case. Pretty exciting, but 324,000 people have viewed that that short video made in someone's kitchen by all accounts. So there's also a young person called Black Diamond, and she appears to be a an Australian Asian teen. But her videos on basic how in fact. It's called Learn How to Sew, has 2.6 million views on a 26-minute video. No microphone, no lighting, no nothing, but she has 64,000 subscribers to a sewing tutorial. Interestingly enough, as I looked at her video, I was shared up a, uh, served up a Gillette advert in advance. Now I guess Whether that's tied to me, I suppose, rather than the average person looking for sewing machines. But nonetheless, on a customer journey, I'm going to buy a sewing machine now, I've gone and looked at the review sites and shortlisted some, and then I have gone to YouTube and watched to see which ones are the most favorited by these influencers. And I can then start to see as well The machines in action. Some machines, people complained slightly of jamming. Some complained of the, the lighting fixtures and so on. So I'm already getting a really good idea of how my machine is going to fit into my life and work for my, for my daughters and my wife. So having then shortlisted, I then made a list of 2 or 3 brands, including the, the John Lewis brand, when I was able to then go and find the next level of detail, which was the online brochures. So different websites and different products did better and worse, and some of them, of course, then precluded me being interested because the, the literature wasn't in English, for example. It wasn't easy to find. It wasn't well annotated, the infographics were poor. And I liked the one from, uh, this company, uh, from John Lewis Partnership, um, because it was all very clear and the warranty details were stated out clearly. So on my customer journey, uh, I was getting reassured that I've seen this product actually being used at length by a number of different influencers. And I've also now been able to download the brochures to see of the more technical detail, things like the forward and reverse, the number of stitches— this one has 14, by the way— the ability to do pockets, and so on. In other words, my checklist of comparison items has been defined as I've gone through this sort of 1.5-hour process. So I've ended up looking and liking this Janome product, but it's white-labeled by John Lewis and Partners. And that's important to me because actually the John Lewis website and app is very clean and simple to use, doesn't offer me multiple options when I've made a decision, and takes me to the shopping basket in a very nice way. But I couldn't help but having a peek at the founders of the Janome product. Now, if you haven't heard, the Janome is a brand leader, and they've sold some 2 million sewing machines in the UK and over 60 million sewing machines worldwide. So for those of us that just thought sewing was sort of an idle hobby, Sean Seki, who's the president of Janome in North America, says that they have a mission to produce machines which inspire creativity and innovation. Yet are made to provide you with reliability and durability that you deserve. So he says, he goes on to saying, the better your tools, the more inventive, artistic, and pleasurable your sewing experience will be. So they've really understood the importance of the sewing machine not as a machine but as part of our lifestyle, our home lifestyle. Now this is, I think, really, really important for all of us who are managing public relations and, and selling services and products. It's not about the, the product, it's about how it's integrating into the life and the experience. Now, sewing machines, funnily enough, the next choice that I had to make was which ones were available, because during COVID sewing machines have taken off in terms of taken off out of the stores, not with jets or anything on them. So the sewing machine market is projected to grow by 17 billion dollars. Okay, it's projected a growth of some $3.9 billion. Now this seems pretty amazing, but by 2025 it is due to be a $44 billion industry. This is sewing machines, and there are some 15 brands that dominate the business. It goes to show that COVID has actually been good for some businesses, and there are some businesses that may be a little bit unexpected. And until I had a chat to Mr. Pickles this week about buying a sewing machine, I would have never have thought of sewing machines as being a business opportunity for me or for anybody else that I'm surrounded by. So going back to this idea of scale and this purchasing process that someone like me would go through, in this case for a consumer product, But it starts with search, it moves off to reviews, then it goes into video for influencers, then it comes to shortlisting the merchant, and then it comes to the product specification. And what we're finding in venues and platforms like YouTube are people like Black Diamond, as she calls herself, are influencers, they are young people who are taking the product or being given the product, using it, and experiencing absolutely massive amplification on their content, much more than the brand themselves could do. If the— some of the brand videos in fact are getting 5,000, 10,000 views, and it'll be down to credibility because Ironically enough, the amateurish approach and the lack of high production values or sophisticated scenery means that it's much more, uh, in keeping with the lifestyle and the environment of the people that are going to be buying it and using it. So there's an authenticity in the influencer work that makes it well more powerful than a well-polished advert. And that's why when we're thinking about promoting our products or our services, engaging those people who are influencers, who are actually from the community that we're going to be selling to, is really a key part of the public relations activity. Now, what we're really talking about actually on another level is how companies like Janome are not selling products, they are building tribes. So this is the Seth Godin concept of building tribes. You know, now what I realize, of course, is that there's a whole tribe, men and women, uh, involved in sewing of various kinds and various levels, plus the industrial sewing, of course, which makes up part of that 40 billion. But this whole idea of what tribe are we part of, and can we either lead a tribe or can we be part of an existing tribe. Now, one way of joining into a tribal group is, for example, sponsorship or product placement, in the same way that KitchenAid has done on The Great British Bake Off, or Amazon. So when Channel 4 purchased the rights to The Great British Bake Off, which is this really an institution now, and my daughters and I and my wife love to watch that as well, But it's in 9th series and, um, you know, has now got an estimated, uh, £5 million worth of sponsorship from Amazon. And Amazon want to showcase their Echo speaker and the capabilities of their Alexa voice service. So prior to Amazon, uh, Dr. Ecker and Tate& Lyle had been sponsors. And interestingly enough, Tate& Lyle, they believe that, uh, the, the two of them probably paid about £4 million a pair in sterling to sponsor this. So what did they get from it? Well, of course, they were in this amazing series that really reached out to young bakers. Uh, in the 18 to 25 category, The Great British Bake Off became a top-rated show. Now, uh, the people at Tate& Lyle said that the early results from their sponsorship by promoting their golden syrup was that they were having sales year on year against the same period of twofold in web traffic by people looking for recipes and tips. So in other words, the sponsorship of The Great British Bake Off by Tate& Lyle doubled the interest in their products for baking. Such is the power of product placement and sponsorship. So when we're looking at building our opportunities for marketing, for public relations, we talk about press relations of course, but in our Speak PR program where we talk about storification, personalization, engagement, amplification and knowing. Under the engagement, we talk about creating great content, but sometimes, as we've seen with the sewing, the tribe will make the content for us. The tribe motivated by a love for the product, a love and a passion for the tribe, but also from a commercial point of view by starting to get sponsorship. I mentioned, for example, the, the Black Diamond was preceded by 2 adverts and indeed one also in the middle. So there's a reward for the tribe to be helping to amplify the content that they're making, and there's also opportunities to sponsor by product placement or by cash or both. And it doesn't have to be a huge Great British Bake Off, but it could be a local event, it can be a school event, it could be a running, uh, a running team locally or a sports team. Or anything really that helps to get the brand into the community and to be seen to be part of the tribe. So public relations is about content and about influencers, but also public relations is creating the, the information throughout the passage of the, of the consumer as they pass down the path from wanting to find out, becoming knowledgeable, becoming interested, and then taking decisions to make a purchase. And when we build our digital footprint and our digital path out in the ethernet, but also on our own and on these other platforms, we need to story and think about the story of the people buying our product But also help them along the way to create a narrative which is consistent and compelling. In our case, we bought the sewing machine, the JL-110, and we plugged it in, and then of course we went back and watched those YouTube videos again to figure out just how to load that front bobbin. So if you need any help with loading front bobbins onto your sewing machine, you can either check out YouTube or you can drop me a line. So the point is that the internet and public relations work together to help us as entrepreneurs to guide and to lead and to fulfill the information requirements that our consumers or our partners or our staff have along their entire journey. So with that, I say thank you very much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. And if you have enjoyed this, I do welcome you to our website, to eastwestpr.com, to register for our newsletter. You'll also see our Speak PR podcast. If you like it, also please do me a favor and rate it. That would be great. In the meantime, I wish you great health, a profitable business, and keep sowing and communicating.