Matthew Kelly launched a spicy margarita product during COVID lockdowns by sending handmade gift boxes to 50 influencers stuck at home. The strategy worked: influencers posted about it, and Shopify sales spiked on day one. Starting with zero budget forced the discipline and creativity that helped the business scale.
We got to launch day and we didn't have any money left. So it was kind of right. How do we launch this product with literally no money? And I think that was kind of where lockdown played in our favor a bit because we could guarantee that everyone was at home. Influencers, we knew kind of the power that they had, but also because of COVID a lot of them were looking for new content just because they couldn't go to bars, they couldn't go out and about. There were no events happening, so it guaranteed everyone was going to be at home. So we literally just packed, packed up. We spent kind of two days and.
If you could have seen us, we literally had a paper shredder. It was so scrappy. But in hindsight, I think it was the best way to do it. Because if you can launch a business with absolutely zero resource and no budget, I mean, you just, I think as the business grows, you learn to operate on just being like stingy with cash, which is ultimately, like, never a bad thing. And I think the way that we launched the business, a lot of brands probably would have pumped like 50k into it, but all we did was reach out to 50 influencers. We handmade some really beautifully curated gift boxes with our spicy margarita in it, some spherical ice cube molds, some pampas, bunches like, all like, it was just too beautiful not to. Instagram essentially hand delivered them all on launch day before we had even like got the website up and running. It's quite a funny story. And then we got the kind of likes of Connor Maynard and Maya Jama and like Grace Beverly, all of those people posting and Shopify, it's like literal, like crack cha cha ching. And that just kept on coming through and it was honestly like Christmas Day.
