I’m an ecommerce entrepreneur with 10 years’ experience and I have 3 of my own stores. Today we’ll be focusing on JJ Suspenders’ journey from being in 0 stores in September 2017 to over 150 unique retailers today.
As startups, we all face tough challenges every day. In this article, I’m going to show you how to be successful at trade shows, how you can use email automation to be ten times more efficient, and when you should be cold calling stores.
Okay before we move forward, I really want to touch on a point. I’m a digital marketer, I am not a salesperson. Until this year — I had zero experience in wholesale or sales in general. I’m an introvert and literally the last person you’d expect to be doing sales. I live in Google Analytics, Spreadsheet, and Shopify.
Many entrepreneurs view brick and mortar as the ultimate goal, while others say you should avoid it at all costs. For us, having 100% of our revenue from Amazon and Google, it was the logical next step to diversify our selling channels. If we could get a steady stream of recurring brick-and-mortar orders, we’d be protected against sudden algorithm changes.
At my first trade show, we were beside this woman who was an amazing salesperson. She would approach buyers with no fear of rejection. I remember asking her for help and she told me to approach the next buyer and ask if I could have 5 minutes of his time. I finally mustered up the courage and the buyer basically ran away from me. I learned you have to play to your strengths and be authentic and genuine vs following a certain guideline.
My point is that if I can do it, anyone can. I knew that I needed to approach this problem by playing to my strengths. I’m hoping this article will give you a unique perspective because I don’t view myself as a sales expert.
Okay — so why even bother with brick and mortar? Why’s it important? Well a few months ago, my business partner and I were looking at our channel breakdown and it was a bit scary.
100% of our sales came from Google and Amazon. I really want to drive this in — our whole business was relying on Google and Amazon. I’ve personally had a business completely wiped out overnight when google released an algorithm update, so it’s a really dangerous position to be in. You hear Amazon sellers all the time talking about how the flow of orders suddenly stopped and they were left with hundreds of thousands in stranded inventory.
Trade shows are the most traditional way to build your wholesale business. Here are some tips that I learned as a beginner attending Project NYC and Chicago Collective (the 2 best fashion trade shows in North America).
- Booth size and cost is negotiable. Standard booth size is 10 by 10 but we discovered we could actually get a 5 by 10 booth for half the cost which allowed us to go to twice as many events.
- The location of your booth is insanely important. You want somewhere with cross traffic around an intersection, or near an entrance. You absolutely do not want to be buried in the back corners. We had an incredible show in New York because we were in a featured section around some big names, but we had a terrible Chicago show because we were in a random hallway without neighbors.
- Email attendees before the show. You can email the organizers and ask who’s going, then send them a note with your booth location and offer a free sample if they stop by. Buyers get insanely busy before a show so it helps to let them know you exist.
- Make your booth stand out. It’s insane to me how many people will pay 5-10k and then put zero effort into their booth. For under $1000, you can make your booth look completely unique with some life size canvas photo printouts and unique furniture. For example — we visit Ikea every time we go to a show and buy some furniture, wooden crates, and plants because it looks different than the standard equipment everyone else is using.
- Give something away. One of our neighbors in Vegas had these simple leather bracelets that they would give away to potential buyers. I saw them close a ton of deals that started with offering a free bracelet.
- Mind your body language. It’s funny because it seems the booths who are busy at trade shows tend to attract more people because they’re busy, and the booths that are dead tend to scare off buyers because of an over-eager salesperson. Being analytical, I was testing different approaches and I noticed buyers would often get scared away if I approached too quickly. We’ve all had that experience of being immediately approached by a salesperson. But the opposite is also bad, when you want to ask a question and no one is around. The best balance is being available and friendly if you can tell someone is ready to engage, without being too eager. It’s important not to come on too strong; this is also true if you want to have successful in-store demos for your products.
- Collect business cards and follow up! It surprises me how few people do this for how important it is. I remember our neighbors at our first trade show, when I asked them for some tips. They told me “It’s by far the most important thing to follow up, but we are so bad at it.” And again, I just found it amazing that you would invest thousands of dollars into a trade show, but not take the time for some simple follow ups.
- Track your trade show ROI. Again, a common theme when I would ask my booth neighbors about their trade show experiences was that no one really knew if they were profitable or not. Everyone was just kind of hoping that trade shows were working. Coming from a digital marketing background, this was just crazy to me.
And that’s exactly what we did to get into 150 stores in 6 months. Nothing too complicated but I hope it gave you some insight.
Thank you!
Jackson Cunningham
Founder @ JJ Suspenders
