Lori Harder's brand hit $1M in sales within a year, sparked when influencer Melissa Wood Tepperberg mentioned the product live. The real driver was heavy product gifting to customers and potential promoters with no strings attached, paired with direct outreach to every early Shopify customer.
In under a year of launching the business, we did our first million. When we launched, I mean, it's a new business, so barely anyone's purchasing. Nish and I were just sitting there in bed and our Shopify starts to go off and we were like, where are all these sales coming from? There's an influencer, Melissa Wood Tepperberg. She ended up talking about us on a live and that's kind of how the brand started to grow. And did she ever tell you how she found the brand or was it just— I gifted. You gifted? Yes. I was gifting so heavily, Lori, and I think that that's something that I advise to all brands. I was gifting it to anyone and everyone with the premise being, look, I just think this product is going to make your life better. There is no pressure to post nothing. Just try it. I was gifting to customers, you know, I would be like, does your best friend want to try it? Or if it was someone's birthday, I mean, when you're starting out, the great thing is that you have the ability to do the things that you can't do when you've scaled because you are in Shopify, you are talking to every customer. And so we took full advantage of that.
