Happy Sunday, y’all! (I’m flying back from Texas, bear with me) I hope you had a productive and recharging weekend and are ready for today’s Sunday newsletter. Our last Limited Supply episode inspires it with Ty Haney, the founder of Outdoor Voices, and seeing what she was talking about IRL on running trails in Austin. So I hope you’ve got a beverage in your hand (I’ve got a bottle of water with Waterboy on my flight), your feet are elevated and locked, and you’re ready to dive in.
Before we dive into this, it would be helpful to get the context of the episode where Ty briefly explains community. You can listen to that episode on Apple or Spotify. My goal is that in the next 4 minutes, it takes to read the newsletter, it inspires 1 or 2 ideas for activating this for your brand or company. Ty also gave us all the insight into how trying to execute a retail strategy, eCommerce strategy, and a community strategy at the same time didn’t pan out and why. It was a fangirl moment for me to do this with Ty, so thank you for listening!
Ty scaled Outdoor Voices to 10s of millions in revenue ($40M/yr before departing in 2020) while building one of the most authentic and engaged communities I’ve seen in DTC apparel.
Outdoor Voices is a beloved activewear and lifestyle apparel brand for those who don't know. They had a meteoric rise from 2014-2020, quickly expanded into retail, opened 12+ stores, and still had roughly 70% of their sales via DTC. They essentially created the trend of using matte fabrics (instead of spandex or polyester blends) for activewear. They were extremely early to introduce what’s now recognized as the “standard DTC color pallet” by offering their items in color tones like moss green, charcoal gray, mocha brown, strawberry red, and more.
In our 82-minute conversation on Limited Supply, Ty put a masterclass on building community. Here are some of my favorite takeaways that can be helpful to your business or brand this year.
Activate IRL & Amplify on Social
In the early days of growing Outdoor Voices, Ty had the valuable insight to try to “Activate IRL & Amplify on Social.”
Over the years, Outdoor Voices has hosted hundreds of low-cost, often weekly, in-person events to cultivate community and introduce new potential customers to their brand. Ty and the team would host everything from weekly dog walks to pick-up basketball games to an ongoing running club. Because her brand’s mission was to build your “uniform for everyday activity,” Ty wanted to think outside of the box and create events and programming that “freed fitness from elite performance” (which is the opposite of what companies like Nike or Under Armor are trying to do.)
She chose event types that felt authentic and valuable to her ideal end consumer. Someone who enjoys staying active while not trying to compete in every physical activity that they do. These initial IRL events created a chain reaction of both word of mouth and organic UGC content for the OV brand. Soon, community members were organically posting about the events each week and excitedly telling their friends. Ty even mentioned that new customers would routinely visit their first 800 sqft, Austin Texas store, asking employees about last week’s basketball game score. Now that’s some world-class attribution if you ask me.
This simple IRL and UGC strategy unlocked massive growth for Outdoor Voices. It was a playbook they replicated in every major city they expanded to over the years. These IRL events (which inevitably created UGC posts on social) helped them create a passionate physical community in places like New York, LA, SF, Boston, Nashville, Washington DC, Chicago, Denver, and more
The Importance of Having a Home Base For Your Brand
Despite being digitally native, Ty and the Outdoor voices team thought it was particularly important to have an IRL home base for their brand. Many events they hosted in each city centered around their storefronts, giving customers and new community members a unique way to experience their brand. Despite 70% of their total revenue coming from DTC, Ty remembers that the LTV of someone who shopped in a physical store was roughly ~4X higher than a traditional e-commerce customer who simply clicked on an ad and bought the product online.
Awesome Collaborations and Partnerships
Another way Ty could unlock new growth through the community was to create extremely unique partnerships and activations with aligned brands. She told Moiz and me that her favorite day running Outdoor Voices was her 1600-person “dog jog” in Austin. She brought in over 1000 community members and dozens of excited dog influencers and partnered with aligned brands like Bark Box and Chewy to host an iconic brand event. Ty likes to call these activations “Major Moments,” where you spend big to create an unforgettable experience for your community. She recalls that they often spent 20-40K on these events. Check out this tweet from 2017.
The Importance of Slow and Steady Growth
The last thing I wanted to touch on in this newsletter is the importance of slow and steady growth. Ty and the team had issues as they tried to manage the intense pressure of scaling a hypergrowth brand. Ty candidly shares some lessons from raising 50M+ and scaling to 10s of millions of yearly rev.
Most importantly, it made me realize that we all need to do a better job normalizing that growing a business is hard!
There’s this notion that the best brands in the world are all “rainbows and butterflies” and that they have everything figured out all the time.
That’s not always the case. Every brand on earth has issues they must deal with daily. For all my founders and operators, you know that incredible marketing, growth, ops, people management, logistics, customer service, etc., are hard!
But… that’s also the fun part!
If you want to be an entrepreneur or even an executive at a fast-growing brand, you have to fall in love with solving problems and fighting those fires. It’s simply part of the game.
Anyway, I was very grateful that Ty shared her story with Moiz and I and gave us the uncut truth and not a “PR’d version” of what it’s like to face challenges as a growing brand.
She delivered a ton of real value, which is important for many to hear.
So what does this mean for a brand that’s just getting off the ground? Well, the one thing that always smacks me in the face is, “Slow and steady wins the race.” Anyone can set up a Shopify account and launch a brand. Anyone can find a design partner like Ty did and create something they want to sell online. But, very few brands can build a world around their products and a community that continues to grow on its own. Ty did that. It increases the “word of mouth” channel — it gives consumers a way to integrate, live within, and talk about the brand without being a salesperson to someone else.
The more someone talks about OV’s events, their running club, or how they met someone great from a dog party, the more FOMO the brand builds, which ultimately leads to more engagement and revenue.
I think it’s extremely important to focus on who your customers are, what else they want to do, and how can I (as the brand) do more to support what my customers want more of, and then do it. It’s not scalable by any means. Community marketing won’t give you a $30 CPM where you can insert $200 and see 6k+ people, but similar to SEO, the compounding effects are huge and have a big payoff.
I’m curious… how do you think about community and, tactically, how to build that for your brand?
Okay, that’s all for this week. Now onto the fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
Northbeam — The ultimate attribution tool for brands doing over $5M in annual revenue
When you start running paid media on 1 or 2 channels, attribution can be pretty straightforward. For the most part, you can see what channels are driving new customers in, and with the low spending, you’re likely focused on a few creatives. However, as you grow the number of creatives, you’re spending against, and even the channels you spend on, not using a proper attribution tool can be the equivalent of flying blind.
When I ran performance marketing at Hint, we spent 7-figures a month on paid channels ranging from Meta and Pinterest to TV, influencers, podcasts, and direct mail. Without a tool like Northbeam, we relied mainly on vanity URLs and coupon codes for attribution. It gives somewhat of a picture but not the whole picture. If Northbeam existed back then, we could’ve been more precise with what channels, creative, and offers we ran.
The magic behind Northbeam is the platform refines its data because of 3 main components:
- The native machine learning built into Northbeam; their platform sees billions of dollars in ad spend.
- The Northbeam Pixel — this sits on your site and tracks every incoming UTM parameter and identifier to understand where the click came from and where that user went.
- The URL identifiers — these attach to the end of your ad URLs and allow NB to understand exactly which headline or video variation drove the click and other actions on your site.
Most brands you know and love that are scaling their DTC channel will likely use Northbeam already. It’s a very accurate single source of truth to give you better insight into how to spend efficiently.
If you want more accurate reporting and feedback on your ad spend, I recommend walking through a demo of the Northbeam backend. If you outsource running ads to an agency, using Northbeam will keep them honest too!
LP of the Week:
This week’s landing page of the week is for a supplement brand called Sweetkick.
Their product is a gut-health powder that gives you energy. Supplements are a tough category to win new customers in, and on top of that, a powder is even tougher. So using a landing page that focuses on the science, the benefits, the social proof, and even video reviews work in their favor.
Click here to check out the landing page!
And if you’re ready to start acquiring customers with a higher conversion rate, then I highly recommend booking a call with HOOX to discuss how landing pages would benefit your business!
That's all for this week
I hope you found 1 or 2 nuggets in this email that you can apply to your business. We’re back to a 5-day workweek, post-holidays. Are we even ready for a full week?! Jk, you will because you’re going to get 9 hours of sleep tonight. Our next long weekend isn’t until February 20th!
Stay hydrated this week. Go for a long walk in the morning. Sleep an extra hour each night. Try some cotton candy grapes from Trader Joe’s. I’ll see you next Sunday!