Boring is good, the basic execution of focusing on the things that work for you is important. Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host Chase Clymer, and I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results. I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business. Let's get on with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today I'm bringing to the show an amazing gentleman. I've got Sergio Take, the founder and CEO of Dossier. They're a perfume house for the next generation. Sergio, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat. So quickly, can you give us a little bit more details about Dossier, the types of products that you guys are bringing to market? What do you guys sell online? Yeah. The general idea of Dossier is that we try to make great perfumes available for 99%. When we started the company, when we started thinking about the perfume industry, it just didn't make a lot of sense to us, at least to me. It didn't make sense that to smell nice, to go out on a date, to buy a nice perfume, you had to fork out 150 bucks plus. So, we just thought there's got to be a better way of doing this. So, what we did is that we initially reproduced famous sense, and we made manufacturing of France with the best ingredients, and obviously the great craftsmanship that comes from France in the southern part of France called this Village for Grass. And the general idea, again, is that instead of selling them for crazy amount of money, we sell them at a much more affordable price so that everybody can enjoy smelling nice and enjoy these great sense. That's amazing. Well, now, you kind of alluded to the problem that you were looking to solve. Like, can you take me back in time? Where'd the idea for this business/product come from? What was going on? I've been in the e-commerce space for a while now, and especially in beauty, and I've always been fascinated about how we can give back more to customers. It just didn't make sense to me that some of these great products in beauty had such high margins. And when we started looking at the perfume industry in particular, it made even less sense. And just to give you a quick stat that I like mentioning, when you go to Sephora and you buy a bottle that costs $150, $200 plus, the cost of making the liquid inside the bottle of the actual perfume is less than two bucks. And we just felt this, there's got to be a better way of making these great perfumes with high quality greens available for more people. So that's how the idea started, and we launched with our impressions collection, which are perfumes that are inspired by luxury sense. And that's really what drove the company off the ground initially. And then after that, we launched our original selection, which is our own creations, and we're particularly proud of. Actually, one of our perfumes recently won a lower best in beauty award, so we're super proud of that. That's amazing. But that's the idea is that these two collections live within the Darcy world, but the north star of the company is, and it will always be, great ingredients, high craftsmanship, but at an affordable price for everybody, and not just the lucky few. That's amazing. Can you talk to me about how long did it take to go from this idea get stuck in your head to you've got a sample product in your hand? So I had a roadmap in my head because this was not my first company. And the blueprint is pretty much always the same. Once you have that idea is, okay, how can I make this product? So you start talking to a bunch of supplies in the perfume world, you start talking to people who will give you bottles, pumps, et cetera. And you know that in the beginning, you're probably getting it screwed on price and you just don't do industry that well. But the idea is just talking to as many people as many supplies as possible to put that first product together. So that was the initial challenge. The initial challenge is that we once started off with 20 different perfumes. So 20 different skews, which means a very low production in each two because we didn't want to launch with thousands of bottles. So the blueprint is the same, the challenges are different, but it's always about going out and finding, talking to people in the industry, finding all the pieces of raw materials you need to start assembling this, or you can buy finished goods. We didn't want to do that. We want to build our own products. That was important to us and definitely the most challenging piece for us was finding the right perfumer to work with. There's a lot of perfumes out there. It's still a pretty opaque and hard to access world. So that was the biggest initial hurdle that we had to cross is finding the right people to work with, especially on the perfumer side. Absolutely. And you mentioned that you launched with 20 skews, knowing what you know now, is that still the way that you'd want to do it, or would you maybe give caution to some startups that don't have your experience? So in general, first of all, it's a good question. The way I think about this is you need to spend the least amount of money possible to launch with first-vitamin product. That's something I've always been very focused on. You don't need fancy branding. You just need a product. Is anybody going to buy my stuff? And once you validate that, then you can start scaling. For us, I think it was important to have a wide offering, because I don't think we've got a lesson that we need to learn if we just offer, for example, sweet perfumes. Maybe for the reasons those are not right perfumes, and we would have given up. So we needed that breadth, but the focus was always, how can we get this done for as cheaply as possible so we can test and learn. It's always been a big thing for us is we test products, sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. We move on. But I feel that, especially with the background I had, I felt comfortable launching those 20 SKUs. But what you need to ask yourself is how many products do I realistically need to get proof of concept? And for us, we thought it was 20. In many industries and in many other cases, it will be significantly less than that. And you don't need to spend a ton of money on different products to learn whether this is viable or not. Absolutely. And I think, though, to the credit of the brand you were building, I think the brand itself was part in part the product. You're trying to bring choices and variety and value to the customer, and you couldn't do that with like a low amount of SKUs. That's exactly it. And what we're noticing is that when people buy on our website, they don't buy just one perfume. They don't buy two or three perfumes. What we found out is that people are not interested in dossier for the value per se. The value is a means to an end. And what I mean by that is when people buy dossier, they want to experience great perfumes, but they just don't want to experience one. They want to have a wardrobe of perfumes. They want a perfume to go for work, won't perfume to go out with friends. And it's kind of hard to do that when the nice stuff costs $150 plus. So what the value that we provided, what it did is that it unlocked that whole experience and discovery process. And to your point, it would have been hard to do that with just two or three parts. Absolutely. And so you alluded to this, but I want to ask one more follow up and then we'll kind of move on with the journey. But you mentioned that you spoke with anyone that would pick up the phone and you were looking to find partners to help you build out this first kind of product line. How many people do you think you talked to before you found a manufacturer that would allow you to order in the quantities that didn't break the bank? For most listeners that haven't built a product, there's this thing called minimum quantity orders. I forget what the? MLQ. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. So let's talk a bit about that. I mean, we reached out to hundreds of supplies, hundreds. So I'm not, I'm not, this is not enough of making up. It was well over the 100 block. You need to cast a wide net and you know, when, when I talk to people who start companies and tell me, yeah, you know, I reached out to three suppliers, no, that is not enough because you will be amazed at the depth, well, especially in the beauty industry, I guess, but in any industry, you'll be amazed at the depth that this ecosystem has. So you need to talk to hundreds of suppliers for the different room materials that you need, just to make sure that you will get the right product. And what often is going to happen is after bad, I don't know, 70% will answer to you. Well, if you start with 10, you, you, you, you're fully started with three. So that's not going to work out. So you, you just need to put as many chances on your side as possible because to your point, some suppliers will go, well, some suppliers will tell us, oh, you're not doing a hundred thousand bottles. Sorry, we're not talking to you. So it's difficult to find the right small supplier to work with that's going to provide, first of all, good quality because if you don't have a good product, you're going nowhere. So you need to have a good product, but also who's willing to work with you in those small quantities. So I always say this cast as wide as a net, as humanly possible, reach out to as many people and as many companies you can find. Do the research spend hours and hours on, on, on Google? And that's a good way to start because otherwise you're just not putting enough transit on your side. Absolutely. And I ask these questions because I sometimes, I know what the answer is going to be, but I know that there's someone out there that needs to hear it again. So I appreciate the answer. We all do. Oh, yeah. We all do. We always forget, you know, this is a common thing that you're going to see me talk about is back to basics, execution is boring, there's, there's nothing sexy about being entrepreneur. It's about making sure they get all the steps right. And step number one, just like we talked about is making sure that you find the right supplies. There's only one secret to that, which shows many people as possible. That's amazing. Unless you have like a special access that you know about specifically, which most people don't. Hey Shopify store owners, have you ever wondered if your store is leaving money on the table? Imagine increasing sales without spending more money on ads. Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not. I'd like to introduce you to store tester. Store tester is a done for you conversion rate optimization service for Shopify merchants. 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Intelligence empowers you to find the perfect price point for your products and optimize your shipping strategy, but there's more. Boost your average order value with customized campaign offers and discover if your customers prefer free shipping or a lower list price. With over $100 million in incremental profit generated, they have over 1.5 billion transactions ran through their software. They have over 400 million shoppers that have gone through their test. Intelligence is not a tool. It's a game changer for your business. Are you ready to transform your Shopify store's profitability? Book a demo today at intelligence.io, empower your brand to reach new heights. Again, that's intelligence giving superpowers to your customer acquisition, retention and overall profitability. Well, let's talk about the next step, which I feel a lot of our listeners are always they get stuck at. They have a great product, you had a great product. How did you get it in front of customers? What was that go-to-market strategy? How did you get new eyes on this thing? Just like I mentioned, I'm a firm believer that execution is boring. Just to take a step back, there's a whole romantic aspect of entrepreneurship where people say failure is great. To some extent, it's true. If you fail because people didn't like your product, that's fine. You learn something very quickly and you move on to the next thing. If you failed because you didn't execute properly and you had a good product but you didn't execute, there's no excuse for that. That's something that you need to get right. Going back to your question, boring is good. Basic execution, focusing on the things that work for you is important. For us, it was social media advertising, Google advertising, influencer marketing. We tried a bunch of other things and ultimately, again, going back to the concept of this new shiny object syndrome, we realized that just focusing on these basic things and doing them extremely well was very important for us. We put a huge emphasis on influencer marketing and especially on the video side of things. The reason for that is we sell a product that requires some explanation. You can't just show a picture of the perfume and people are going to get the concept. You need people to talk excitedly about the product and tell them, "Oh my God, this smells amazing." It smells just like a little bus on top 33, whatever. We put a lot of emphasis on that and that helped awareness and also that response. That was important to us. Ultimately, it was just that basic execution. I always like to say that we started selling perfume the hard way, which is online. That's not an easy thing to do. That execution, especially on the influencer marketing side, where other people talked about a product, was particularly important. Then related to that is just making sure that we offer an experience on a website that is adapted to the model world. Super simple returns. You understand what we sell very clearly in our operations collection. We will say citrus ginger inspired by blood chanel. It's very straightforward and a couple of cleasening by making that experience simple. You know what? If you don't like the perfume, try it on, open the bottle, spray as much as you want. If you don't like it, send it back to us. We will refund you no questions asked. Really trying to make that experience as simple as possible combined with the discovery process of social media advertising and influencer marketing. I think that was those were the keys. I'm not saying anything, it's about having good product and then doing the basic things right. I think that's really important when you start off. Absolutely. I'm going to ask you to again clarify something to the listeners that need to hear this stuff again. This happens all the time at the agency. People will come in and they want to do a shotgun approach. They want to do 13 different things at once. They haven't maximized the channels that are already working. So again, can you talk about how you try to everything and then you focus on the three that we're working and you just kept doubling down on it? Yeah. This is more specifically to social media advertising. We tried Snapchat, we tried Pinterest, we tried a bunch of smaller platforms. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it's always the same stuff that works well. When you talk more broadly about channels, that was a particular focus for us. We really did not want to do anything else than online for the first couple of years because to your point. When you try to do too many things, you're going to fail. One, you're absolutely correct. We first need to optimize and maximize the opportunity within online and we still have some room to grow. But now we've started diversifying out with the company's five years old, we've grown quite a bit. So now we're starting to diversify our channels, but you are absolutely correct. Just focus on the basics, focus on one thing at a time. I'm repeating myself here, but I'm a firm believer in this is basic execution wins. Do focus on the one, two things that work really well for you, maximize that. Then when you feel like you're getting tapped out, then you start moving on. You can always try them at things. That's not the issue. You shouldn't be completely blind to it, but just make sure that you keep the efforts focused on what's really important for the business and what allows you to grow up initially. And it's all entrepreneurs or builders and they get the shiny objects syndrome and there's always something new and fun to play with. But if everything's important, then nothing's important and you're going to spend in circles if that's kind of your approach to it. So I always like to make sure we highlight that here. Now, this is a pivot, I guess. Could you tell me about maybe one of the lows at dossier and how you guys got through it? So the background of the company is we didn't raise a lot of money, first of all, because we didn't really need it, second of all, because I believe you can launch, you need some money to launch a brand and beauty, but you don't need dozens of millions of bucks. You can get to a good viable product without breaking the bank. So that's the background of the company. I always say 80% of my job as CEO is to make sure there's enough money on the bank. And one of the low moments is when I screw up at that. So at some point, we're going to fund raising process, that fund raising process, as usual, and everybody should know this and rather than the hard way, takes way longer than you anticipate. And at some point, we had literally 20 bucks on the bank account. So this is not a number I'm making up, it was 20.33, if I remember, very exactly. So that was the moment, that was tough because that meant we had to have difficult conversations out suppliers. Thank God they still trust us, they saw the growth. Obviously, this cash crunch happened right before Black Friday, where any e-commerce this cash producing is going to be a bit depleted because they just need to invest in an inventory. So that meant just making sure the employees got paid, if that was number one rule, the most important thing for me is that they didn't feel stressed out about that cash position. But yeah, that was, those was, I don't get stressed out easily, but those moments gave me some sleepless nights, which does not happen a lot. So your number one job is to make sure there's enough money on the bank accounts. And as a CEO, and just learn that money goes out the door much, much, much faster than you can possibly anticipate. And again, I'm not saying anything new here, I'm sure a lot of people in the podcast say the same thing. But once you actually go through it, you realize, holy shit, I'm sorry, I'm not sure if I can swear. Yes, you can. But the thing, money goes out the door much, much faster than you can possibly anticipate. So be cognizant of that, always give yourself enough time to do the next fundraise if you need one. Absolutely. I hear it's, I think just in sales in general, it's always like the money comes slower and it's not as much as you think and it, you know, it's harder to get than you think. And everything is more expensive than you think. Oh, yeah. Especially these days in 2024, but that's a conversation for a different day. Now, before I let you go, is there anything, any advice that you have that you think might resonate with our audience? Yeah, a couple. So number one, what helped me in my career, the number one thing that really used to be worked for back before and that transition job entrepreneurship was not necessarily easy. But I think what made it considerably easier is that I had a great friend who became my mentor and who was really in the e-commerce space and just having that mentorship come somebody who knows what he or she is talking about is going to save you so much time. I think that's, that's really, if you can find somebody in this space that can help you, go for it. I cannot say enough good things about that mentorship program. Number two, I call this know what you're getting yourself into and I'm not talking necessarily about the entrepreneurship lifestyle or what you're going to quote, I'm talking more about how you start the company, how you fund the company. Is it self-funded or is it VC money? There's no good or bad route. It all depends on what you want and what you think is best for you. There's pros and cons to both, but just make sure you know what you're getting yourself into because the routes are very different and have very, very different implications. Just a good example, if you're probably self-funded, you probably chances are you're going to grow slower. That's fine. It's not a big deal and that's, that's, that's your choice. If you're going down the VC route, chances are you are probably going to grow faster, but that company is not yours anymore. Again, that's okay, but just make sure that you know these things and what you are getting into it. Especially once you start signing these controls, decide these big life changes, the devil's in the detail. Make sure you, you really understand the contract you're signing even on something simple, like a convertible note. There's a lot of little details that can trip you up. I cannot, this is boring, but I cannot emphasize this enough. Know, read that contract well, get advice and know what you're getting yourself into. Number three, I'm a big believer in focusing on the basics and in this case it's focusing relentlessly on unique economics. The math is pretty simple. You sell stuff, that stuff has a margin and how much dollars do I need to make by selling this stuff to cover my fixed costs? The formula on that point of view is extremely, extremely simple. We have this concept called contribution margin one, two, three. So we look at contribution margin up the cogs, contribution margin after cogs plus shipping or fulfillment costs and then contribution margin after cogs fulfillment costs and then a cack. So you need, I look at these numbers daily, several times a day even, it's a little bit unhealthy, but you need to focus on these numbers relentlessly because you need to know them inside out and understand, okay, I'm making stuff up. I'm making whatever it is, 30 bucks in order. Great. Okay, my fixed cost is 100. Therefore I need to sell at least four products, at least four orders. The math is simple, but you need to focus on that. Speaking of simple math, and by the way, interrupt me if I'm going on a tangent here. No, no, no, no. This is super fun and I'm already in my head like, we're going to have Sergio back, we're just going to talk about this formula for 30 minutes. And then number two is different formula, but your revenue, e-commerce is not difficult. You're not putting in that in the moon. The revenue is really sessions, times conversion rate, times LV. And if you want to write, you want to write lifetime, you got times repeat. The formula is extremely simple. So you only have a couple of levels you can work on to increase your business. More sessions, better conversion rate, better EOV edits. I wrote a whole e-book about that formula. Yeah. Oh, really? Oh, awesome. That's awesome. I'm glad we agree. But once you go in the details of those specific, what can I do to increase my sessions? Of course, there's a bunch of options you can do, but always remember, it's simple. Focus on these simple things. What can I do on each part of this equation to grow my business? So that's another thing. And then I mentioned to you failure, failure takes a cue because failure, because you didn't execute properly, it's not acceptable. I'm a fan of belief that there's no charm or glory in that. And then fifth point is, and I'm going to close with this, and now we've talked about several times that I really believe it, boring is good. Focus on the boring stuff. The basic stuff is really what's going to get you 80% there. Focus relatively on that, and you'll do just great. Either you do just great, or second best option is fail very quickly, which is actually not great, but it's actually way better than failing slowly, which I think is the worst possible outcome. That was a rant, but I hope it helped. Oh, no, it absolutely did, Sergio, and I can't thank you enough. So the last question, I guess, for you is, like, one, if people are curious and excited about the product, where should they go? And then two, if they want to get ahold of you, talk to you about something, what should they do? Yep. So for the product, dossier.co is where we sell our products in the US. We launched in Mexico. We launched in Canada, too. We launched in Australia, in the UK, a student to be in continental Europe, too. But in the US, dossier.co, and then if you have a Walmart next to you, which pretty much everywhere it does, you can go to any super center, or not super center, and you will find out perfumes. So we're in prison in all the Walmart stores. And if you want to reach out to me, either my email, Sergio, at dossier.co, or to LinkedIn, whatever makes it, whatever's easy for you. And I'll reply. Awesome. Sergio, thank you so much for coming on the show today. The pleasure was all mine. Thank you for having me. We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own businesses. You can find all the links to the show notes. You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestycomers.co to get each episode delivered right into your inbox. If you're enjoying this content, consider leaving a review on iTunes that really helps us out. Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help you get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to electriceye at electriceye.io/connect. Until next time.
On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Sergio Tache. Sergio is the Founder & CEO of Dossier, a perfume house for the next generation.
We talk about the power of boring but effective execution, finding the right suppliers, validating concepts without overspending, and so much more!
