Getting Creative with Marketing a Lifestyle — Not the Product

0:00Trying to identify what is different that you could do that would stand out. Even if it feels a little bit unexpected, a little bit weird, a little bit strange, I kind of think you need to do that today in order to really not blend into everything else that's in a category. Hello and welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm Shuang Esther Shan. You might have heard this saying in marketing, don't market the product, market the lifestyle. Our guest today has certainly built a product and marketing strategy around a lifestyle, namely hosting and entertaining in your home.

0:40Elise Borkin is the co-founder of Rocco, a company that makes smart mini fridges that are designed to be displayed. Elise also helped to market some of the most iconic direct-to-consumer products, including Casper mattresses, Billy razors, and Our Place pants. She's here today to talk about all things around creating a lifestyle around a product. Elise, thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me. Very excited to chat about all things Rocco. You've got to tell us, did the idea for the product come first, or did you envision this lifestyle for Rocco first? Well, the origin story is a little bit of a funny one.

1:22It actually came from my co-founder, Sam. He was at Away leading supply chain and product development before starting Rocco. And his work had taken him to fridge factories because apparently there are manufacturing similarities between suitcases and fridges. They're both big hollow pieces of metal. And while he was at these fridge factories, I know, I was shocked. While he was at these fridge factories, all of the factory managers had told him that there wasn't a lot of innovation within the wine fridge space. There were basically huge appliance brands swapping a handle, changing a logo, and not really doing much else for decades.

1:55And he is a big wine drinker and wanted a wine fridge for his apartment, but he rents in New York City. He wasn't going to renovate his kitchen, and he wasn't going to put a big soulless box of metal in his living room because wine fridges were really designed to be built into cabinetry. And so he started working with an industrial designer in Italy to really rethink it from the ground up as a piece of furniture. But he knew that he wanted to create a different kind of appliance brand because appliance brands really haven't had a brand. When you think about how they present themselves, how they market themselves, it's really kind of like a utility product.

2:27It's something that they kind of show in a print ad with just an apple in the middle of like a fridge that's opened up. It's not really meant to kind of, I think, speak to the next generation of homeowners. And it feels, you know, quite a bit dated. So when I met him, because I am a brand marketer, and so we were introduced just through people in the startup community, I loved the idea, but there was just one problem. I actually hadn't drank alcohol in many, many years. And so together, we kind of thought about how can we actually make this from a wine fridge, which conceptually is a bit dated.

3:01Nobody just drinks wine anymore, to an all-in-one drinks fridge, you know, so that we can kind of appeal to people with all different sorts of drinking preferences. I'm the type of person that I don't really always keep wine in my house. I do sometimes for guests, but I have a huge seltzer collection. So that's kind of how we combined both of our experiences to create the branded product. And so much of having a piece like a Rocco is entertaining, having guests over, having this piece that acts as furniture, which is very different from the traditional thinking of a fridge. How did you and Sam validate this idea and make sure that this is something that had a big enough market that you can actually convince people to think about fridges in this way?

3:51Totally. So a lot of Americans actually have a second fridge already. It's just in an inconvenient location. So potentially the garage, for example. And, you know, no longer do we kind of have an extra old white fridge lying around that we want to keep in our garage. and honestly a garage is like a pretty inconvenient location especially in the winter you leave your house just to get a drink and then if you don't have a garage fridge or even if you do you likely have a bar cart in your living room where you kind of have your home your own at-home bar set up and so we combined those two things essentially and created one product that solves the problem for both so we knew that people already had something in their home that was similar we were just kind of upgrading it for them.

4:34Yeah. Or like a fridge in your basement to keep like popsicles or ice cream that you're hoarding. So what kind of lifestyle or imagery did you want to illustrate for the consumer when they're thinking about a Rocco fridge? Yeah. So we just came out of the pandemic. We spent, you know, many years kind of holed up in our homes by ourselves. And now that the pandemic's over, we are really spending more time out of the home with our friends and family, but we really wanted to actually re-inspire people to use their homes to have friends and family over and I like to say put the living back in the living room.

5:13And so the Rocco fridge really is supposed to be kind of the center of your celebrations in your home and be something that people can kind of use to help themselves to a drink. You no longer have to go to the kitchen to get somebody a drink. You're fully stocked. So if you have a ton of friends over and they want to stay late, you definitely have enough room in your Rocco fridge to be able to have enough drinks for the whole night. And it really kind of becomes this nice way for people to feel like they're ready to host no matter what their home looks and feels like. You know, I'm always like, oh, well, I haven't renovated my bathroom yet.

5:44And like, or it's a little bit messy in my kitchen. I don't have time to clean up and I'm self-conscious about, you know, how my home looks when I invite my friends over. But now with this, I kind of just feel like, oh, I'm definitely ready to host. People are going to come over. They're going to love this. They're going to love having a drink out of my fridge. And I think also, you know, one thing that we try and do is inspire people to have more mini celebrations. I think we're all kind of used to having bridal showers and weddings and, you know, baby showers. But all of those celebrations are kind of more traditional milestones and celebrations that take place outside of the home.

6:18and with a Rocco fridge I feel like you could really you know have an excuse for having people often more over and having more celebrations in your home and so whether you're celebrating selling a painting or starting a new job or even a breakup I want people to just you know have a reason to celebrate and to take that time for themselves to to really like have you know a nice moment. Yeah, love mini celebrations. And I think this is truly a shift in a marketing philosophy as well. You're very much illustrating and marketing a lifestyle versus a product first approach. How can founders think about their marketing strategy in this way in general?

7:03Yeah, I think it's a mindset of thinking a little bit less about the features and the value props and the tech specs of a product and really thinking about how the product fits into somebody's life and what it brings them. And also just what the product means by being on the market. So, you know, for example, when I was at Billy, the women's razor brand before Rocco, Billy was the first women's razor brand to really actually show women shaving body hair. And before that, razor brands for a hundred years had never actually shown the thing that they were removing. and it kind of had body shamed women into feeling like they had to shave, like they should be embarrassed if they have hair.

7:43And Billie was really the first brand to show and celebrate the fact that women have hair and it should be a choice as to whether or not you shave it. And so I think there's different ways you can go about it. You can kind of see the difference between the way Billie did that versus Rocco does that. But it's really about thinking about a message that's a bit bigger than your product and how you can have a stance beyond just the thing that you're selling and what it functionally does. And it really reminds me of the iconic Apple ads or the comparison of like, instead of talking about gigabytes of storage, it's like thousands of songs in your pockets, which is just so easy to convey the advantage to a customer as well.

8:23Totally. And I think for us too at Rocco, it's kind of, you know, on even smaller scale to your point about that analogy. It's about thinking about everything that you can now do and store in your fridge now that you have some extra space. And I think people do get a lot of joy from drinks. And I don't even mean just alcoholic drinks. It's like I wake up and I love looking forward to my iced coffee in the morning. And now I have my La Cologne cans. And, you know, in the middle of the day when I'm kind of stressed and haven't had a break in a minute, me going and taking a cold drink out of my fridge and having, you know, something sweet in the middle of the day, like a United Soda, and it's a blueberry flavor and it's, you know, kind of just unexpected and fun, brings me a little bit of joy and just gives me a nice break.

9:07And same thing when I go for a drink in my fridge at 5 p.m. to kind of end the day and I have a little bit of like a mocktail. So I think it's kind of about thinking what emotion or what the drink kind of does for me versus thinking just like, okay, you can fit eight cans on the shelf and 12 bottles on the shelf. And here's the different kind of combinations you could do. It's a little bit more about what the drinks actually mean and what they can bring to your life. I just I think I had an imagery of people putting in skincare in the fridge and some sparkling water and they're having their friends over and they could put like a sheet mask while having a drink.

9:43So yeah, I love the the potential of like the moments that you can have. So yes, I love that. And then Rocco only launched November 2023. So you haven't even reached a year yet, but there's been so many milestones. And I think that's a testament to the pre-launch. What was your pre-launch process like? Yeah, I think, you know, from the very beginning of thinking about the brand and the product, we started to think about how we wanted to bring it to life and keep it fresh and make sure that we were, you know, speaking to different important moments throughout the year where we would be relevant.

10:21And so, you know, we launched in November and even by dry January, we were starting the first month of shipping complimentary drinks with the fridge that we kind of helped you stock your fridge and discover new drinks that you might like. And so for Dry January, we did a sampler pack where we sent about five different kinds of drinks that came with your fridge and inspired people to celebrate Dry January. And then we kind of continued doing that with different drink partners through today. And that's something we'll keep doing just so that we are, you know, not only the place where you store your drinks, but also discover new drinks that you might like.

10:55And so we partner with drink brands on their launch day. And if you get a Rocco fridge, you also get this new drink. or maybe it's, you know, a very popular drink that already exists like a seltzer, but we're helping you discover a new brand, a new flavor. And so we kind of, you know, had started talking to drink brands way before we launched and just kind of started to set up those partnerships. And the biggest one was what we just launched in July, which was a partnership with the Wolfer Estate. And they're in the Hamptons. And we kind of knew that we felt like the fridge would be a good fit for people who have New York City apartments and they're going out to the Hamptons for the summer of Hamptons Homes, where they like to host a lot.

11:32And so we came out with a pink fridge with them to celebrate their 10th anniversary of summer in a bottle, which is one of the most iconic rosés out in the Hamptons. And so, yeah, we actually had started that partnership even before we launched. So fun. And I think not only is it getting you and the team be creative, have these different fridges and also partnerships, I think it's also something sometimes founders might be intimidated to think about because they think, I need to launch my brand, have a presence before I can reach out to other brands for partnerships. But this is actually something you thought about pre-launch.

12:08What are some other things that founders should think about before launching that sometimes they might think, oh, I need to wait and establish myself before doing that? That's a great question. I actually have the mindset that I think sometimes founders should do less before they launch. Because, you know, for example, I've advised brands that do these huge photo and video shoots before they launch, and they invest sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars into them, but they don't yet know what the customer is going to respond to and what message or what imagery is going to work best. Like, for example, even we had a shoot before we launched, of course, it wasn't hundreds of thousands of dollars.

12:49But we found that the The imagery of the fridge with a shelf pulled open where you can kind of see both the outside and the inside at the same time is one of our top performing assets, especially if there's a person in there grabbing a drink because then somebody can imagine themselves in that image. We only got like basically half an image of that at our launch shoot. And so I've been working on getting more content to actually show the interior and the exterior of the fridge at the same time since we've launched. And that's something that I definitely never would have been able to predict, I don't think, before launching.

13:19So I'm really glad that I didn't overinvest in content production before launch. And I was able to kind of put a bunch of different things out into the world, test a lot, and then from there actually like double down on what I knew worked. Yeah, similar to that aspect of discovering that certain images work better compared to others, you can only learn those things when you launch. You also took a similar approach to branding where you also iterated and experimented as the company was building and growing. Talk to us about that. Yeah, so I took a little bit of a non-traditional approach when it came to the branding exercise.

13:57A lot of people spend months and months building this brand book, building out 100 pages of reference imagery and how exactly you should use the colors and the fonts. And for me, I really wanted to see the branding in the places where I was going to use it versus seeing it just on pages in a deck, which I feel like sometimes can feel very devoid of the use case and oftentimes doesn't actually work once you put it into action. I was very lucky to work with designers who are incredible and who actually, you know, would have never designed branding that didn't know how to work in a specific channel.

14:34But it was nice for us to be able to actually spend a lot more time on something like the website design versus the brand book, which we never actually made and don't have to this day. We kind of moved very quickly from logo, here's a mood board, here are the colors, and then immediately started designing into the website. And that was really helpful because it allowed us to figure out exactly which colors we wanted to move forward with based on the imagery that we were putting into the website and what complemented it most. And it kind of allowed us to figure out the different design elements that worked best in the channels that we were designing for.

15:09So my advice to new founders is always to, you know, obviously establish the very essential brand elements that you need, but to actually skip the brand book, go through the actual execution process of designing everything you need to get to launch packaging site ads, your, you know, first few social posts, and then maybe go back and actually make that brand book if you need it. versus really taking so much time to establish a design structure that ultimately may need to change anyway as you start designing for different placements. And so you'll have to go back and edit the brand book anyway.

15:47It is definitely very interesting. And of course, like the process of building a business is constantly iterating and very excited to chat more about that in the realm of marketing. I'm chatting with Elise Borkin, the co-founder of Rocco. I would just like to take a moment to thank you, our listeners, for tuning into the show. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to Shopify Masters and let us know some thoughts and feedback in a review. We love reading them and incorporating them into the show. Thank you so much. So you talk about the fact that having the imagery that customers or someone is using the fridge and showing the inside and outside was something that was very impactful in your content and your advertising.

16:38What are some other markers of success or learnings that you've gotten as you're testing your marketing efforts? There's a few things. So one is we launched with two neutral colors and one pop of color. And it's been really fun to see customers and potential customers write in with all of their different color requests. And I'm glad that we actually launched again with kind of a limited assortment, just three colors. There are lots of brands that launch with way more colors than we did, but we kind of chose to be a little bit more intentional with that strategy so that we could actually get all of that feedback from customers and then create our roadmap from there.

17:16So that's one thing that's been just really fun. And I wish I could say we had, you know, a few colors that really came to the top of that list, but people have wild imaginations and we've gotten everything from turquoise to burgundy to a royal blue. So even within each color that exists, getting just the request for every different shade is really fun. Other things that we've learned, kind of similar to what I mentioned, people really love seeing the inside of the fridge and how it works and what they can keep in it. And they kind of, you know, imagine their own drink collection inside. So they'll often write into us and be like, how could I keep champagne bottles in here?

17:58Does champagne fit? How could I potentially keep water bottles? I actually want to use this at my small business where I have a Pilates studio and I just want to give out water. And so we've kind of, you know, are working through with different creators, different combinations of drinks in the fridge and being able to kind of have a fridge that showcases everything that people might want to store inside. So we're kind of learning people's drink preferences and what they want to use it for and really changing our imagery to represent that. It's very cool because you're getting this community of feedback that you otherwise wouldn't if you haven't launched and have the ability to iterate.

18:39I guess on the more analytical side, have you been looking at certain metrics to see certain strategies have done well as you're kind of honing in on the more technical side of digital marketing? For sure. So we have, we currently track a few different metrics very closely. One is click-through rate, one is conversion rate, and also hook rate for videos that we launch through our ads. And so click-through rate and hook rate kind of give me an indication for what pulls people into the brand and the product. And then conversion rate is obviously what we're tracking to figure out if somebody actually wants to follow through in that decision.

19:17And from a click-through rate and a hook rate perspective, we're really looking at kind of broader brand and product messaging. And for us, it's a fridge, it's an appliance, it's$1 ,500, it's a considered purchase. So our funnel is a lot longer than if you were buying lip gloss, which kind of gives us an interesting opportunity to really put different messages in front of people along the way and really show them the entire brand, which I actually love. I think it makes it a lot more interesting. But from a click-through rate and a hook rate perspective, we are starting a bit broader than maybe your average lower price point product.

19:56And so we're thinking about messages around hosting and party tricks and cocktail recipes and at-home bar tips and the way that the fridge kind of fits into your living room and elevates your decor and your aesthetic and how it can kind of shape your living room space. And then, of course, as we get to the website, we are still talking about features and capacity and everything that somebody would need to know before they actually click buy. But, you know, I have kind of seen that for Rocco, at least leading with messages that are a little bit more lifestyle centric or emotive or, you know, our solution to certain problems you might experience in your home are the things that work best versus like kind of dialing in on exactly what the product is, exactly what it stores, exactly how it works.

20:48And I imagine you probably discover so many different use cases, or I guess just like different profiles of customers that you didn't think about before? Has there been a use case you were surprised by and then you end up incorporating that into the next content or the next iteration of ads? I've actually been shocked by how many businesses are buying this for their space. I definitely had imagined it more of an at-home product. But I think people want to create warm environments and places where people want to spend time, kind of like, you know, the mentality somebody has when they're furnishing their living room.

21:28That's how people are thinking about furnishing their businesses. And so we're getting a lot of people who are buying this for Airbnbs, small hotels, gyms, spas, anywhere where somebody might want to hang out for a little bit after they're, you know, doing the activity that they came to the business for. even boutiques. We have a lot of small retail shops that are buying it because they want guests to feel more comfortable in their space, spend more time there, have a drink, take a seat, try something on. So that's actually been the most surprising to me and something that we're definitely thinking more about as we continue to grow our customer base.

22:04Yeah, I can even see a use case for co-working spaces where people would gather around the fridge. So how else are you embracing, I guess, like this B2B channel to kind of reach out to different smaller business owners to get Roccos into their store or their space? Yeah, we haven't had to do so much yet. I think a lot of people are still discovering us, which has been huge. But one thing that we did do this summer is we launched a program called Rocco on the Road, where we put a Rocco fridge in different small businesses in New York City, so that people could really come and experience the fridge and also so businesses could see what it would be like to have a fridge in their space and also so that we could get content of the fridge in their space to actually show what it looks like in store to be able to have for businesses because, you know, we would get people writing into us and saying like, I would love this in my spa or I would love this in my, you know, dermatologist's office.

23:02Do you have any pictures of it so I could just see what it looks like in a space like mine? And now we're kind of building up that content library to be able to have those examples for people who write it and are curious about putting it in their businesses. That's so cool because I think it's such a natural way to market and get people to experience it without the need of buying one. And then the businesses also get to experience Rocco. So a Rocco fridge can be used by anyone, but when you're experimenting with marketing, have you seen any differences amongst the generations? It's been appealing to everybody, which is a win because I think that we are kind of, you know, representing the brand the way we had envisioned it.

23:43And the homes that we, you know, choose to photograph the fridge in are a bit more, you know, stylish or have a, you know, very specific aesthetic in like kind of the mid-century postmodern era. But I've been surprised at how many people have put this in their home, even if their aesthetic doesn't match what we're showcasing on our site. So we kind of designed the fridge to really be very seamless and blend into any home. And once we put it in homes that have a specific style, like a mid-century or post-modern style, it definitely like picks up on that. But if you put it in like an ultra-modern home or a very retro home, it fits in there too, which was the goal.

24:18And so I'm glad that we're having people who have all different personal tastes be able to put this in their space and feel like it fits in. And yeah, I think we've just been surprised at it. And we got one order a few days ago from a group of roommates in Williamsburg who just ran out of space. And they have a lot of drinks. And they like to have people over on Friday nights. And so they got a fridge. And then we had somebody in Arizona get three fridges. And their home looks like it could probably be its own zip code. So it really is kind of spanning the gamut for use. And then, of course, like your experience within the direct-to-consumer world is so expansive.

25:00You worked with the iconic Casper brand in the early days and also at Billy. How are you viewing the evolution of direct-to-consumer and what are some things that you're bringing from those experiences to Rocco? So when I was at Casper, there was a mattress startup launching every week. I'm not even exaggerating. And Casper really had to figure out how to differentiate in the sea of sameness that was three layers of foam. And we did a lot to build the brand and to tell the story that Casper really wanted to help you sleep, whether it was through their mattress or through something else. And what through something else meant was a hotline that we made that you could call in the middle of the night if you couldn't sleep and get rid of bedtime story.

25:44And we just ran the cheapest possible commercials you could ever run. They were like 3 a.m. commercials. It was a stock video of like a fish jumping out of the ocean. And it just had like the 1-800 number and said, can't sleep, call. And it really was kind of a more guerrilla approach to trying to help people sleep in the way that we knew that they needed and what they were probably doing at the time when they couldn't sleep, you know, watching TV aimlessly. We also had a chatbot that you could talk to between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. Otherwise, it would tell you that it was too busy working.