The Secret to Growth? Building Community First with Ashley Alderson

Today I'm sitting down with Ashley Alderson, the founder of The Boutique Hub. Ashley has built one of the most supportive and powerful communities for boutique owners, and in this episode we're talking all about the magic that happens when you focus on connection first. From building relationships that last to creating a space where your customers feel like they truly belong, this conversation is packed with inspiration for anyone looking to grow their business through community. Grab your earbuds. Let's listen.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Welcome back to the Launch Your Box podcast. Today I have a very special guest with me. Today I have Ashley Alderson here from the Boutique Hub, and just a little kind of spoiler, I have been a member of the Boutique Hub for more than 5 years now. Yeah, and, um, I'm not a traditional boutique as many of them are, but I have a boutique feel, and a lot of stuff applies to me as I sell graphic tees and gifts and things like that. And so it is an honor and a pleasure to have Ashley with me today. Ashley, thank you for being here. Why don't you give a little introduction for anybody that may not know you and kind of what you do?

Yeah, well, Sarah, I'm so glad to be here, and thank you for being a longtime member of the Hub. Thank you for trusting us with your business. Um, it's, it's amazing that our paths are finally crossing in this way, so I'm glad that we get to share today. But behind the scenes, a little bit about the Boutique Hub. We first started it back in 2013. I know our paths are very similar, and we knew that there was a need for a place for retailers of all types, shapes, sizes, to come together and have a sense of community where they could learn from one another. Previously, our industry was very siloed, and it was hard to get information, so community was really the first thing that we did. And then we knew that we had a need for expert education. And I'm a big believer, it's not what you know, it's who you know. So I'll teach you as much as I can, but I love to surround myself by people way smarter than I am in all kinds of areas of life and business. And so education and community really collided back in 2013 when we first started to build the Boutique Hub. And now today we serve retailers again of all shapes and sizes across 50 states and 7 countries. We serve about 100,000 small businesses of all types. And we just love pouring into businesses because I know you agree with this. When you change a small business owner's business, you change their life and you change the trajectory of their family and you change the trajectory of the community around them. So small business is such a ripple effect. I just believe so deeply in all of it.

Yeah, it's, it's so important. Like to you, it's hard to measure the impact that someone like you and I have on small businesses. Like I know what my business has done to change my life and same for you, I'm sure. One of the things that really attracted me drew me to the Boutique Hub was the community. I'm a big, big proponent of community over competition, not keeping all the things. And so I think that building a loyal community really helps people buy and buy again. So that's where I want to start here today because my audience are subscription box owners.

Yeah.

And what they don't realize is that they're going to be building a community sometimes. And so let's talk about what customer loyalty actually looks like as far as what you see in the boutique business?

Yeah. Well, I think I could write a book on this topic, as could you. But I think that community, like you said, community over competition is something that we have talked about from the very beginning before it was a buzzword and before it was cool. And it really does mean that a rising tide lifts all ships. And in order to really live community over competition, sometimes that means you have to get a little bit uncomfortable. And be very real and authentic when maybe you don't want to. So there's, there's, you know, some easy ways to do it. There's some more challenging ways to do it. But I think a couple of things when it comes to building community definitely ring true for all types of businesses. People want to do business with people, right? They don't want to do business with companies. There's all kinds of companies out there. There's websites, there's big corporations, but people feel most connected and want to spend money with businesses that they can relate to. And so if I was going to break it down into a formula and get like real tactical, if you guys wanted to take notes, I look at content and community building to go hand in hand. So if you want to build a sense of community, it has to go hand in hand with the content you're creating on a daily basis. And I have kind of this 4-part formula that I look at called the VAVA method. VAVA? VAVA. Do you remember Vavoom hairspray?

Yes.

Okay. I'm the youngest of 6 and there's 5 girls in my family. So they used to, like in the '80s, when I was little, I had like the big bangs, like my sister's in high school at the time had and Vavoom hairspray. It stunk so bad. It was so sticky. So the VAVA method for me is like a tribute to Vavoom, but it's V-A-V-A. And what it stands for is this. And this is, again, this is like everything I post in terms of our community has to kind of meet these 4 standards. So the first is, is it viral? And when I say viral, it doesn't mean like, oh, so many people are going to share this, but it just means would someone care enough about this to actually comment on it, click on it, like it, do anything? Like, is there any credibility in the share. So it has to be, in order to be viral, it has to be something that's really relatable. And it's something that people can, don't know how to say, or they aren't brave enough to say.

Okay.

So viral, I think is the first thing. Like, will anyone even care? Does anyone want to click on this or not? The second is A, is authentic. So is this real? Does this feel like a real person is saying this? I'm going to tell you so many times throughout my journey, I've had to be so authentic. In the good times, in the bad. I've had to take a stance on things and say, listen, this is what I believe in. And I had to act as a magnet. And sometimes magnets attract and sometimes magnets repel. But I think the more you can do that, the stickier your community becomes because you're all in this together. And I'm not telling you, you have to take this huge like political and religious stand on things, but people definitely know how I feel about a lot of things in the world. And that's okay. We can agree to disagree on things, but at least we're going to be completely honest with with one another. So be authentic. Then the next V is value. So is what I'm doing providing value to somebody else? Am I making someone's life easier, better, simpler? Am I saving them time, money, effort? How is this content just making someone's day a little bit better? And then finally, the last A is aspirational. So everybody, you know, it's our human nature, right? We're all striving for more love, more status, more relationship equity, more financial gain. So is the content that I'm posting aspirational in the sense it's making me feel like I'm getting better than what I'm at today?

Okay.

So here's this like stance of who I think I am. Does this somehow make me better? Does this product make me better? Or is it kind of like, oh, I just like, I grabbed this at Walmart, you know? And that doesn't really give me the sense of like, oh, I'm becoming a better person or I'm going up a level in status or however I see myself in the world. So is it aspirational content? So all that content, again, VAVA, if I can think about everything I'm posting in my community, am I building everything in that direction? It makes our community so much easier to build.

Now, when you talk about these 4 things, how do we relate that to our product-based business?

So all of those things, when I think about product-based business, it's like Gary Vee, jab, jab, jab, right hook, right? If we just right hook people all day, like buy this, buy this, buy this. They would be so turned off. They would walk away because 3% of our customers are actually ready to buy right now. 7% would if we convinced them to, but 90% of our customer base is just there. Yeah. They're really ready to buy.

Yeah.

So we've got a jab, right? And jab to me is all the soft sell content and right hook is the sales content. So if I kind of looked at everything as a whole, I've got about two-thirds soft sell content that I'm sharing and a third right hook content. That I'm sharing. So if I was going to go through the VAVA method, the VAVA method, I mean, a lot of it is just relational content, two-thirds of it, right? If it's viral, right? It's probably like an engagement post or something that's going to get people talking. But if it's value, it could be either a soft sell or it could be providing value on the subscription box I'm selling, the new launch that I'm promoting. Like this is how I would wear this thing and it would make my life better. Aspirational, you know, it could be lifestyle content or it could be here's the new collection I launched and here's how That's gonna make my life easier, better, more stylish, my home more attractive, whatever it is. So I think all of those things, VAVA, can be looked at both as a soft sell and as a hard sell. Yeah.

I think a lot of subscription box owners feel like they might be bothering people when they show up and ask you to buy their subscription box over and over and over again. How do you coach through, how do you coach your boutique owners through that mindset of actually selling?

Well, I think first of all, I think this is a fundamental problem in society today. And I think it goes back to the cartoons we watch as a kid. Because when you go back to the cartoons you watch as a kid, how is the salesperson positioned?

It's negative, right? It's the villain, right?

The villain. They're the sleazy car salesman. They're just trying to get you. Cartoons today are promoting capitalism and sales as a negative event. When in reality, I think sales is a noble process because you're counseling people through a process that they're either unfamiliar with or unprepared for, and you're helping make their life better as a result of that. And my husband and I have talked a lot about this. He used to, before he came to work at The Boutique Hub, he was in high-level sales for a chemistry company where the sales process was like a 2 or 3-year window. So it was like you were constantly selling, selling, selling to finally get to the close of the deal 3 years later. So when I think about sales and subscription boxes or apparel launches or home and gift, whatever it is, you're trying to help someone's life be a little bit better. And I think you have to be really attached to the outcome of what's my purpose? How am I making people's lives better? How am I making people's day a little bit brighter? What is the change I want to see in the world? When you're attached to that, it's easy to show up day after day after day because it's not about just trying to sell something. You're trying to achieve a different outcome for your customer base because you're so committed to them over the long haul.

Right. I love that because it's about building this community that then is going to buy from you, not the other way around. You don't start with sales first. You start with serving the audience first in a way that they want to come hang out with you while you're live. They want to come see what new collection you put together. They want to feel like they're part of the process with you. And selling feels much easier when you can do that. Right.

It's all servant leadership. When we serve people, when we lead from behind by truly helping people with what they need, then the leadership piece is easy. Then the sales piece is easy when you lead with the right intention.

How do we build loyalty with our buyers? Because, you know, we can run ads, we can do promotions, we can get that one buyer in, but how do we keep them coming back for more and more?

Oh man, loyalty I think is such a huge thing. And I, I mentioned this at the beginning, but I believe that people want to do business with people.

Yeah.

And so loyalty, I think, comes back to how did I create an emotional reaction with my customer? Like, did they just buy this product and then life kind of went on? Or did they buy this product and they had an emotional reaction to doing business with me? So what was it in my marketing? What was it in my follow-up sequence post-purchase? What was it in the handwritten note that I left them? What was it in my authentic content this week that made them feel like, oh, Sarah's my person. Like, she just gets me. I just feel good when I'm in her space. I feel good. I feel like she hand-chose these things for me. You know, it's how do I just drive that emotional reaction? To me, that's loyalty. But it's also, I think, this idea of value too, right? Like, we're not dumb when it comes to being, you know, price aware of I'm spending, you know, this amount of money and I'm getting this in return. So I think it's an emotional reaction and community, but then I think it's I Received value for what I spent money on. And value and price are funny things. They go hand in hand. So the idea of like whatever I'm going to sell this subscription box for, right? The idea of the value of this box has to have so much pleasure attached to it that it outweighs the pain of the hard-earned money I'm letting go when I spend it. Right. And so everything we do in marketing is how do I increase the idea of value so much that no matter how high the price is, it outweighs the pain of that price. And so I often say inside the Boutique Hub, cheap ain't loyal, right? Like, if I just—

cheap ain't loyal, y'all. It's true. Don't undercut your prices because they're looking for the next best deal, right?

Yes. And let them go find it on this, you know, corners of the internet with the sleuths of the internet. Like, go on and go to Walmart while you're at it, and that's fine. Cheap ain't loyal. If you want something more that has value attached to it, like, that's what we're striving for. In my opinion. And that's where customer retention comes from too.

It's creating that experience, right? It's not buying the thing, it's creating the experience. Whether that's the outfit I bought from the boutique or it's the subscription box that's landing on my door every month, it's creating that experience because at the end of the day, they can get the stuff anywhere. How do we make them feel when they open a package from us? Right?

Absolutely.

One of the biggest, I want to say contention points, with my members is I really encourage them to be the face of their brand. I think it's one of our small business superpowers that we have. And I always say, being me is free. And so it's one of those marketing tactics that we get to use. Talk to me about how you feel about showing up as the face of your brand.

I totally agree with you on this one. I think it's critical. And if I look across like the thousands of retailers I've worked with over the years, if I had to put the, you know, 20 top small businesses in a room together, they would all have that in common, hands down, all of them. And maybe it's not, you know, there's also burnout, right? So I can understand you don't want to go live every single day and, and you don't want to be doing all the things. But I think it's understanding where does the shift happen in your life of being an entrepreneur versus a CEO? So that you have the time available you need to become the face of your business in the most important ways. But that doesn't mean you can do all the other things. Like you have to have help and support to do the other things to make your business sustainable so that you can show up in full energy as the face of your business. And again, it doesn't have to be all the time every day, but people have to know without a doubt that it's you and it's your brand and this is your taste because people want to do business with people.

Yeah. And I don't think it's necessarily that you have to be the only face of your brand.

Yeah.

Who works with you? Who's fulfilling these orders with you? Who's helping you with putting the collections together? Like, I think your staff can help you also be the face of the brand. Like, I love it when my girls are like, we're going to do pictures today. You don't, we don't need you. And I'm like, yes, they don't need me. I don't have to be the model today. Thank you. And they get just as many likes and comments. And over time, people have gotten to know them too, as well as me. And so it relieves some of the pressure of me. So I think don't be afraid to introduce new people into your brand as also the face of the brand. They're the one fulfilling your orders and they— my people love it and they're always commenting on my socials like, your team is so awesome. Yes, they are. Yes, they are.

Yes. I feel the exact same way. Like our team, like if you come to the Boutique Hub, you don't just know me. You know, Jeff and Sarah and Dane and everybody else on our team because they all have such an important role to play. And I mean, it might come down to even your USPS driver, your UPS guy, Mark. You know, he's on your team too. So keep him involved in your marketing because people just, they want the human connection. They do.

Okay. So you've worked with thousands of boutique owners.

Yeah.

Can you give me, you gave me the VAVA strategy. Can you give me a couple more strategies that you feel like really move the needle when it comes to gaining customers and/or keeping customers?

Oh my gosh. Okay, well, let me, let me look at it like this. I think that business as a whole, I think this is relatable to subscription boxes just as much as it is to boutiques. Let me just talk about business as a whole and what do each business owner need in order to like really maintain a growable, sustainable, long-term healthy business. And I call it the 6 layers of business.

Okay.

And so it's more than just retaining customers, but it's really about the overall health of the business. So if I was going to go in any business owner that we work with inside of Retail Bootcamp, which is kind of like our college for retailers, we start at the ground level and we continue to work our way up through these 6 layers. Because I think anytime you're an entrepreneur and you start a business, I think we can all relate to sometimes we like build the plane as we fly it. We're kind of like figuring it out as we go. Nobody starts with a perfect business plan. Nobody starts with all the numbers figured out. We just don't know what we don't know. And so it's important that we come back and rebuild our business from the ground up. And so that's where these 6 layers come from. So if I was going to start at the very floor level, I also like to call these the 6 layers of lasagna. Maybe that's more relatable. This is like the, I don't know, is this the meat layer and then the cottage cheese and then some noodles?

I can totally visualize that, 100%. Lasagna, 6 layers of lasagna. We can remember it that way. I love this, Ashley. The 6 layers.

Layers of lasagna.

Yeah.

And everyone wants the crunchy cheese layer on top, right? Like we're all trying to get there. But if we spend all of our time in the crunchy cheese layer, you miss out on everything else that makes lasagna lasagna. So we've got to go to the beginning. So the first meat layer is your operations and foundation level. So this is really that CEO versus entrepreneur mindset. This is your operations plan. I call it your bus rule. What happens if you get hit by a bus tomorrow? How? You got anything written down? Hope so. Where's the keys at? I don't know.

Probably need a few more things written down when you put it like that.

There's a couple backstops we should have in place. So operations and then your brand, those are the 3 pieces I think of your foundation. So your brand, like I love Donald Miller and StoryBrand, like really knowing who is it that I serve, who's the villain we're trying to defeat and how can I Be the wise guide to help my hero achieve success. So that's a foundational layer. Then we get into products and profitability. So here comes your cottage cheese. Nobody likes cottage cheese.

I love cottage cheese. I do.

Well, there's a few people. So great.

Awesome.

So everyone, you have to have the cottage cheese layer because this is like, this is what am I selling? What am I selling it for? How much inventory do I need? How's my cash flow? And most, I'm going to say women in business, are terribly guilty of putting their head in the sand and not knowing this layer. And if I could just be so bold as to place blame for this problem, and I'm just going to go back to like, sorry if you're a high school math teacher, but somewhere along the line, a lot of women in business that I've worked with have had an issue in math in school. And they developed a belief about themselves from some school episode that told them that they weren't good at math. And now it's this like thing that they repeat, "I'm not good at numbers. I'm not good at numbers." So they put their head in the sand and they never address the most critical part of their business. And it's the cottage cheese. It's the products and profitability piece. So we've got to go back and shift our thinking to, "I'm good at money. I'm good at dollars." When you stop thinking about numbers and math and let go of that limiting belief you had since high school and start thinking about, "I like money. I want to make some," then everything kind of shifts. For us. So that's layer number 2. Layer number 3, we're back to— is this noodles, meat? I don't know, depends on how you make lasagna. This is your team. You have to have a support system, whether you're a solopreneur and you're just relying on contractors or an attorney or a friend who's a mentor, but you got to surround yourself by the right people. So that's layer 3. Layer 4 is sales strategy. So this might be optimizing your website, optimizing live sales, optimizing the merchandising in your store, but where's my conversion point? Where do I want people to come to buy this thing. So your sales page for your subscription box, that's layer 4. It's critical. It's another layer of meat, right? Layer 5 is content strategy. This is not just, oh, I showed up and I posted on Instagram. I showed up, I posted on Facebook, but no, what's the plan? How much traffic do I need in what period of time? At what like average order value or dollar amount? At what conversion rate? And that's going to give me this traffic number that I'm seeking every day. So every time I go to Facebook, Instagram, or I run ads, I know it's because I need this much traffic. So that's layer 5. And then finally, layer 6, we get to the crunchy cheese on top. And this is, again, this is where everyone wants to spend their time.

But I'm dying to know what crunchy cheese is.

What do you think it is? What do you think most people want to spend their time doing?

I don't know.

Social media.

I would tell you my audience would put that last.

Really?

Okay. Well, they don't want to do social media.

Okay. I see a lot of people spending a lot of time there and it's not effective.

Okay.

Unless they have all the other pieces in place. Social media is the crunchy cheese layer. It can be great. It can drive the sales. It can build your community, right? It can get you the traffic you need, but it doesn't work unless all the other pieces are—

You've got to have the foundation. You can't just have crunchy cheese in the bottom of a pan, right?

No, it'd be weird.

It wouldn't be lasagna. Yes, it'd be, it'd be like those cauliflower pizzas they keep trying to give us, right?

Right. With no toppings.

No toppings. I think that's so important because people, they get really focused on one of those layers, right? So I'm hyperfocused on this layer. I'm hyperfocused on this layer. And what happens when we do that? We see action taken from that layer, but all the other layers get thrown by the wayside. And so we've got to have a steady balance of every part of our business and not ignore. That's what I see a lot. We ignore a part of our business. My people, they want to ignore social media because they don't like it, right? And social media is a huge part of our business. It's the crunchy cheese. But we have to know our numbers because we have to know the time we're spending on social media is actually affecting our traffic. It's actually converting people into our subscription box. And so we have to know all of those layers and we have to, we have to have a balance of understanding all those layers and a time to focus on all those layers. Or we have to hire someone to focus on that. We have to hire someone to make sure our website is optimized. We have to hire someone to run our numbers and give us the high-level detail of that. We've got to have eyes on all those things to really have a strong, effective business.

Yeah. It takes all of the pieces. And I think it's easy as an entrepreneur, especially in the day of the doom scroll, right? Where we're just all over the internet. It's easy to see what other people are doing and then go back and go, oh, that's what I should do to be successful. And so pretty soon we're just chasing our tail and we're chasing what we think other people are working on rather than just going back to, no, this is the proven method. Because Sarah, I don't know how many people ask you this, but if I had a dollar for every time someone said, What's the secret?

Like, what?

Right, what should I do? And I'm like, nope, it's, it's these 6 things and you've got to attack all of them and there's no one secret.

I, I would tell them the secret is being consistent. Yeah, consistent with this and you got to be consistent with this and you got to be consistent. It's not one thing, right? It's the consistency over time with all the things you need to do in your business.

Yep.

When you think about the future of retail and online communities, tell me what excites you most about where we're headed, where marketing is headed, where loyalty is headed.

You know, I was just watching this Gary Vee TikTok yesterday, and Gary Vee was talking about, you know, I mentioned the doom scroll, and he was talking about how we've been just so lost in the doom scroll for so long that now, like, the next layer of marketing is, you know, there's a places that you go to where you have to like check your phone in at the front desk and you don't get it until you leave.

Yeah.

Like people are paying to have an experience where they are forced to be away from their phone so they can have human connection. Yes. And so I think we're moving away from like, we've been in this isolation culture for the last several years where we're just at home on our phones. And now people are realizing this isn't healthy. I need to be outside. I need to be in nature. I need to be with people. And so My translation for small businesses is it's really important to figure out how to create experiences. And even with e-commerce businesses, there's ways to create experiences, whether it's, you know, meetups or Zoom connections or whatever, like the real human connection is that doesn't involve just selling or just fake. Like, I'm just going to show you my highlight reel. Like people just crave real relationships. So if we can work that in, I think that's key.

I saw one of my mastermind members, they have a HighLevel t-shirt subscription, and they were doing a member, a subscriber bingo night on Zoom, and they sent them digital bingo cards and they had prizes from their shop. And I thought, what a fun way for all these people to, one, to connect with each other and to connect with these ladies. And so it is about experiences and how can we do that? How can we create that with our subscription boxes? How can we create that in our community? Because we've been in this bubble for a long time and we're starting to come out of it, right?

Yeah. It just goes back to what you asked at the very beginning. Community is everything. Yeah. You can't— like, I just think that's a foundation. Everybody has to have it, and it's a future of where we're going. If you have community, you have something really, really worthwhile, right? Yeah.

And in the, in the grand scheme of things, and this is what I tell my students too, like building a community is so much cheaper than acquiring customers over and over and over again.

Yeah.

So if we can build a solid community with the VAVA method, with understanding our business, with understanding why people are repeat buying, we're ahead of the game 100%. Every time.

Absolutely.

Ashley, this was so good. I just want to thank you for showing up and dropping some knowledge on us today. Tell my audience where they can find you.

Yeah, please come visit us at theboutiquehub.com or on any social media, The Boutique Hub. We also have an amazing planner, day planner for business owners called The Retail Planner. Check that out. Or if you just want to see life of a CEO at The Boutique Hub, it's AJ Alderson on Instagram.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Yes, back next week for another great episode.