551: From $0 to $30M in 3 Years Selling Fashion | Aimee Smale [VIDEO]

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Back to when it was just me starting the brand. I did my website myself. I did the branding myself. And I was asked, do you need a couple of days? Do you need to hear back from investors? And I was just like, no, it's just me. it is scary and i sit at night and i think what if this doesn't work out what is going to happen all i kept thinking was i don't need anyone else to help me i'm going to speak directly to these people i'm going to sell them this brand the amount young people are spending on these websites like pretty little thing boohoo could be better spent elsewhere and when you're putting yourself up to brands that have been running for a long time how am i competitive what is different about my brand no one's got me amy smell in their brand who you are your biggest advantage no one is you If you was to ask me what I enjoy most about my job, it is being that face of brand to the community.

1:38Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:52First of all, Amy, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. uh so let's talk about the odd muse you started that brand by selling ten dollar pound logos during the pandemic so it's not that long ago and it is a massive brand now see you guys everywhere so take us back to the early days what inspired you to start a fashion brand and what kept you motivated to make it a full-time business i think for me i was working at asos at the time and for me I just graduated university I had gone into like my first ever role um and I'm I was on a I was on women's wear premium department so funnily enough we was with working with a lot of Australian brands and that mid-luxury price point was not a thing in the UK all we had all we had at that time was fast fashion so here in the UK we are very dominated by a pretty little thing boohoo especially towards a younger consumer um or we have your high luxury price points that are completely unattainable and I guess I graduated from uni kind of like I'm not I'm not a pretty little thing girl I don't want to buy fast fashion but I literally have no other option and how fast fashion was in the UK all I kept thinking was the amount young people are spending on these websites could be better spent elsewhere it can't be collected and put into luxury because it is unattainable but we are missing that mid luxury price point and I kind of started odd news as a project on my commute to ASOS so I had come up with this mid luxury brand the idea was investment fashion my target market was young women like me I was I believe I was like 22 at the time and who wanted to implement their spend into one good piece I understood that to get a a woman that's very young 22 years old to spend over a hundred pounds on something it does need to be something that she can wear over and over again and obviously in the pandemic I was never gonna release a brand to sell you an outfit for the weekend it was gonna be the first thing that you can wear when you when you get out and you're still gonna love it um so I kind of started to really believe I was onto something but again it was just a hobby however it really took being home and being in lockdown and just like not being that satisfied in my job anymore to to push me to do it and so I basically started creating 10 pound logos for local businesses at the time in the UK the pandemic was it was a really funny time everyone was starting baking businesses and becoming like but there was everyone was creating like a new job for themselves and a new business there was lots of small businesses around me and for me I was just like I'm gonna I've taught myself Adobe Illustrator I'm gonna make every small business a logo for 10 pound and that literally skyrocketed I remember I would log on at ASOS at like 9am but I'd done like four hours creating logos before work and in the evening I would work all evening creating logos so it was it is to date the most random part of my story but one thing ASOS taught me is if I'm going to launch a business if I'm going to launch an e-commerce business I need capital it's not going to just happen I need I need stock available and I need capital for that and I need to risk a good amount of capital that I just wasn't getting from you know my first ever job at university it's never it's never going to be your first Brad job is never going to be a high paid job.

5:59So yeah, I kind of got to a point where I had the capital, I had the idea. And I think when you're young, and you don't have many responsibilities, such as a house to pay for children, I think that is the best time to try something. Because in my head I diminished all risk I was just like I'll get another job if if this doesn't work out I'm I'm happy to go back to another job and just not live with the fact that you know what if um and I think more younger people should see less risk in just quitting their job and trying something because there's so many other companies and there's so many other jobs that you you can again um so yeah it's just kind of the stars all aligned and I was like I had a very sort of just a moment where I was like I'm just going to try this I really really believed in odd news at that point and I do think that's one of the reasons why we saw a lot of success quite quickly because I sat with the idea for maybe like two years so by the time it went to market I would say it was like a very polished well executed brand and people were surprised that you know a 22 year old just quitting a job at ASOS had you know come out with this brand and we had a mission we had good brand branding we had a great website we had good product and I think people were just captivated from the very beginning.

7:36So you talked about capital would you be able to share how much did you save up to launch and you you know your ultimate muse blazer that was that was what you launched with right yeah so I actually and this is a another interesting part of my story so I actually launched odd news with a six-piece collection but the blazer was what really stuck and the blazer was actually the only thing that sold and that really taught me throughout the whole brand that I only really need one product to to really change the game for this brand um and I've experienced that so many times in my journey so we had you know we started to slow at one point in 2022 um it just got to a point where everyone had had a blazer and and I released a released this pearl dress and it was everything she loved about the blazer it was it was feminine it was it had a good shape to it it was so odd muse if odd muse did a dress and I remember in that quarter alone we grossed like 1.5 million just off that dress and we became a dress brand and that was again one product and so I actually launched odd muse with six pieces the blazer sold very very well and in total the capital invested was 12 000 pounds and that was mainly just on stock I did my website myself I did the branding myself I did all the socials myself um I really saved in every area possible to be able to buy that stock and so yeah it was 12 000 pounds I put in and I kind of even to this day like that is quite a lot of for a young person to risk but I think where I was working in a buying team at ASOS I was so exposed to numbers and I was so exposed to the reality that if you do want to build a big business it does take that sacrifice and that sacrifice is putting capital in there and risking it and not really knowing um what's going to happen all all I knew was that I very much believed in this blazer I remember the six piece collection my minimum quantity order with the factories was 50 um pieces each style and with the blazer I ordered 100 I I doubled that order because I was like there's something about this blazer that I think people are really really going to love and that's exactly what happened we ended up selling out going into a huge pre-order and it just really really paved the way for literally the last four years yeah it's crazy so um i want to talk about lorna lux but before i do talk me through like the manufacturing and the creation process so you said you ordered uh you know double the moq for the blazer but you had five other pieces so a collection um how did you go about finding your supplier choosing you know the materials all these different things because this gets people caught up quite a lot yeah a hundred percent and honestly i would have started my brand a lot sooner if i had more visibility on literally the manufacturing and the supplier side it is the hardest it is the hardest it is the hardest thing to find the information about once you get connected with someone and start having conversations like I always say my supplier at the very beginning was almost my mentor I told myself that I just needed to ask the questions and I just needed I just needed to speak to someone and have silly questions about fabrics and components like zippers and buttons and my sketches were very sort of like amateur at the time.

11:35But I learned very quickly that I wanted to manufacture in China because just where I was working, I was working on the premium women's wear department. It was with a lot of mid-luxury Australian brands that I wanted to associate myself with. And a lot of my job was importing that stock into the UK for ASOS. So I had full visibility on. Are you hesitating to take the next step in your e-commerce journey? Founder Plus has you covered. With proven frameworks tailored to your business needs for fast results, a supportive community of over 30 ,000 like-minded entrepreneurs and weekly live mentorship sessions, Founder Plus is your key to success.

12:15Try Founder Plus today for just$1 for seven days and start building your dream business with confidence. You can visit founder.com forward slash start dollar trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial. Them all being from China and exactly where they are in China, because I think made in China is a complete minefield. China is the biggest country for manufacturing and there are all levels of manufacturing happening in China. So brands like Shein create in China, but also luxury brands create in China. So it's very important that you know where to go in China. So I had full visibility on that and I really credit ASOS for just really showing me the sort of like back end of where all these products are coming from.

13:03And so from that, I just started to Google manufacturers in China. and and I had honestly I had about 50 conversations with 50 different suppliers a lot of it was a simple just like vibe check and the other part of it was what are your minimum quantity orders if anyone come back to me and said you know a lot of the time when it's like a fast fashion brand they'll come a fast fashion manufacturer they'll come back and say their minimums are a thousand pieces or two thousand pieces I knew that anything over 50 I wouldn't be able to do and so that was that was narrowing a lot of it down what are your minimum quantity orders what is your lead time whether or not they're willing to work with a small brand a lot of manufacturers a lot of manufacturers do want to work with reputable brands that are going to send the orders in so it's also finding someone that's going to want to work with you at the in the beginning and me and my manufacturer pretty much landed on each other we're the exact same age we started our business at the exact same time she needed a client I needed a manufacturer and we kind of took a chance on one another and we have grown so much together we've just opened like and we've just opened a like exclusive odd news factory that is only odd news and I always say my manufacturing story is very unique um and even this year we we have tried to one thing one thing that you they'll always say is like an e-commerce brand when you're importing stock and when you're especially in fashion there is an element of supplier risk so really you should have a few suppliers under your belt because if one supplier goes down one day or for what for whatever reason you have other people that you can get your stock from and in the process of finding another supplier this year it has been one of the most horrible experiences of my life of the last four years so I think suppliers and having conversations is the most important step and making sure who else they're manufacturing for and how like how confidential they are with your designs and what's upcoming for your business it's very important in fashion because if you do it right there's going to be a lot of people coming for your designs and wanting to copy them and wanting to know what your next step is and so I think it is it is the one thing that you should be the most meticulous about and going back to my first point that simple vibe check with a supplier is very important you need them to be your friend and you need to work well with them and you need to you know know that they're going to be loyal to you and but unfortunately there's no quick answer it is figuring out where you want to manufacture in the world googling to the 100th page and having conversation after conversation and narrowing it down as to who you want to work with there's no good supplier that's just going to land on your lap and how did you know the one that you chose was the right one what was it um well immediately we started i started sampling with a few so the one i went with was first and foremost the best quality in what i was seeing in what i was sending over it was also in at the beginning the way in which i would communicate what i wanted was it was very vague like now we've very sort of got our tech packs we've got our measurements we've got our fabric references but at the beginning I was very I didn't know what I wanted I wanted to create a blazer I was trying to source this like I kept saying to her I need a high quality fabric I didn't know what I was asking for um and she really worked the best with me and I think when you're starting out you need you need a supplier that doesn't want the order and doesn't want that they they want to help you so I think just the patience she had with me the quality that was coming through and a big thing was the minimum quantity orders I needed someone that was going to accept 50 and 50 is very low and I don't think you can get that anywhere now I think everywhere is 100 minimum quantity order on clothing now so at that time that was quite rare and that was something for me to consider because yeah I didn't know what was going to sell I needed I needed that the lowest quantity order I could find yeah yeah look that's really really helpful for people because I know people get so caught up and they also get caught up with this idea that perhaps you need to raise money from outside outside you know not not you know be able to pull your own personal I mean I and I think they also get caught up on needing the capital before they start so that was one thing I was very much like I need I need the money to start I need all the money there and then I'll start and but then I can't remember who said it to me but then I basically just started sampling before I even had the money for the brand so I was paying a hundred dollars for a sample I didn't have that money for the end order but I kind of knew that I would you know keep working and get there so it kind of like married up like when I said I had that capital ready all of a sudden I also had all my samples ready like at that point I'd spent like just under a thousand pounds creating samples and finalizing samples so I think if you if you really want to take it seriously and you really want to do it but you don't have the money just yet you only have a small amount I would still a hundred percent start sampling a hundred percent and things like sketching your ideas supplier conversations and all stuff like that that should be done before you even have the money anyway so whenever anyone asks me like what's the best bit of advice I always say it's so boring I always say like just start because I spent so much time just like I haven't got the money so there's no point in starting um when in actual fact it wasn't till I actually had that realization that I can start sampling and I can start conversations and I don't have the money but that doesn't matter right now that you know that really changed the game for me and I was learning a lot and I was you know spending little bits of money it isn't until the last point that you actually need that money that the stock's finished that you pay for it and so I always say to people just start yeah I think that's great advice and and how long did it take you from starting to have conversations to go yep this is what I'm going to go after to actually launch your built-in website i assume on shopify right yeah um so i would say i mean i was sketching odd news for years before but i would say i started i started sampling in i would say i started sampling in april and i launched in september but the idea the sketches the name odd muse the logo all stuff like that was done years prior because it was my passion project on the way to work um but yeah sampling sampling took me a good like six months and even now from sort of concept of creation with the collection it is around it is around eight months and six to eight months yeah okay awesome that's a great timeline for people to get a gauge so so you launched you had one product that sold out pretty quickly and you had an influencer Lorna Lux who organically promoted your blazer which was really it really helped talk us through how this collab came about and what lessons you learned from that experience so the way in which Lorna discovered the blazer was there was quite a lot of noise early on because pretty little thing had ripped off the blazer and at the time I'd only had I only had like 500 followers um and someone messaged me like you should put this on Twitter um and I was like I'll try anything like I'm just like they've they've copied me I've got 500 followers like I'm this is I quit my job um so I put it on Twitter and it started to get really really viral like lots of retweets people were replying saying I bought this blazer we got a few sales from it um and then a couple days later Lorna Lux had posted on her story that she just purchased this blazer it's coming tomorrow she's going to wear it in Paris and immediately I think we had about I think we had about 80 units left on site and they just sold out within five minutes um and I had loads of people asking me when are you restocking when are you restocking and this was like a real pivotal moment in odd muses history and in its lifespan one of the reasons why we're still self-funded today um i ordered 700 units from my supplier i manually i didn't even know what a mailing list was at this point i manually collected emails in an instagram response box i counted them i said two four six eight all the way down I left it 24 hours counting it all the way down and I had around 800 people on there so I ordered 700 blazers from my supplier I did not have the money in my bank to pay for it and I said to my boyfriend I need to sell these blazers now if I want to pay for this stock and also I know people's patients I know if I don't sell it to them now I'm never going to sell it to them so I launched a pre-order for all 700 blazers and that day we grossed like 60 ,000 pounds um which was maybe like three weeks into odd news or four weeks into odd news it was very very soon I remember just sitting on my stairs at home like with my iPad just looking up my mum and dad like I've just made£60 ,000 and it was just wild and it really just scoped the brand like we have continued to do pre-orders to this day and it has it has really funded it has really funded like the growth like this year we see it with we've scaled to£24 million in sales and we've never taken outside investment because we just have this relationship with our customer where she just wants it and and we'll always launch with immediate stock so we'll never put something on pre-order that we know our customer doesn't want and isn't sold out it's always like she's missed out and she has to pre-order now um but yeah pre-order is you know I credit it so much.

24:16I would not have been able to scale without that original pre-order. I would never have got them blazes in. And each time we've just scaled it. Yeah, look, I think it's a really great insight. It seems so simple, but it's just a really powerful way to also gauge market demand, right? That is another reason why we do it as well. Like I don't want to order lots of stock and be left with it. I'd rather just know, okay, everyone wanted that time. We'll go a bit bigger on the second order. That is like one of our like pledges to just being a more sustainable brand. We're not left with waste. So, yeah.

25:00Yeah. And look, that's basically, you know, how Kickstarter or Indiegogo works, right? Like people put up a crazy product and it's usually some sort of crazy, wacky invention. and if people want it they'll pay for it and they'll wait three four five even sometimes even a couple years one thing that helped me i think that really like launched our pre-order was everyone was in lockdown anyway so what does it matter if the blazer you're buying is going to come in four weeks it kind of just like lined up like that everyone was at home everyone was on phones they was I was on my Instagram stories every single day like I cannot believe this I was sharing my story I've quit my job my blaze has gone viral everyone wanted to support it it become what everyone was watching in lockdown and a lot of people told me why would you start a business in lockdown but for me I was just like everyone's on their phone and I'm going to speak directly to them I don't need anyone else to help me I'm going to speak directly to these people and I'm going to sell them not this blazer, I'm going to sell them this brand and why I'm doing this.

26:12And also it goes back to that piece, I was never trying to sell something that you was just going to wear for the weekend. It was always going to be something that was going to be so loved in your wardrobe and pulled out again and again. And that's still the reason why we sell that same blazer to this day four years later. Nothing on our site dates. It's not a seasonality thing. we are a slow fashion brand and we are a seasoners brand and so yeah I've kind of lost my train of thought a little bit but yeah that was that was how we sort of originally first spoke to our customers yeah and I think it's really clever so talk me through the copycats piece right so So pretty little things, they copied you.

26:59Most people, that would really get to them, right? Because copying is a massive problem. So like, you know, I started an e-commerce brand on the side of my girlfriend. And it, you know, we really popularized the concept of like a time-marked water bottle. Like, you know, they said when you should drink. Like we were one of the first to come out with it. the brand was called healthish absolutely took off million dollar business did really really well and uh now it's everywhere so many copycats on amazon i see it in our local stores i think with products it's so hard like especially i don't know what it's sort of like in australia but here like with products that everything gets copied for like tiktok shop and everything gets ripped off but i think with clothing you're and if you are a mid-luxury brand the one thing fast fashion can never do is replicate quality because they don't put they don't put spend into quality control they don't put spend into good quality fabrics they don't put spend into product development so yes pretty little thing copied me but my god it was an awful version and whenever people copy us it's always an awful version because we do stand on quality um so yeah that's with fashion that is the one thing we always have they're never going to touch our quality um and also what i'm learning as we you know i don't let it bother me at all anymore it's just an expect it's expected now whenever we release release a collection fast fashion brands are going to release their version of but it doesn't bother me because the quality factor but also my customer no longer shop separate little thing because that was our mission all them years ago and we have so many customers that can vouch for us changing their spending habits and changing their shopping behaviors to a more slower side of fashion and to becoming someone that rewears their products and when they're buying they're thinking of how many times they can wear cost per wear um so I don't see us competing with fast fashion at all and we're changing the behaviors of people that do shop fast fashion we're part of that like lifespan um so yeah I don't know it bothered me too much we kind of expect it and we do a TikTok every now and again when it happens and we have fun with it to be totally honest and I think that's what you do obviously me four years ago with 500 followers it was very frustrating but I still see it as an opportunity to let people know where the original blazer is from and so yeah I don't know it bothered me too much yeah and because you had such fast incredible growth so you you effectively did you know close to a hundred thousand us dollars in sales in your first month in business that's a pretty pretty incredible feat what were some of the biggest challenges in scaling so quickly and then obviously things really took off from there so i think at the very beginning we've had so many that the last four years have been insane and they've had their own challenges but when i think back to when it was like just me starting the brand the main challenges was facilitating the growth so having the customer service behind it having the ability to get the orders out get the returns in and offer a good service I think that has really taken us a long time to perfect and we've perfected it this year and we've seen how much more we can scale so I think just the stress of that and also I've always put my face all over the brand I am the face of the brand so when the customer service isn't there the first person they're blaming and and coming to is me or coming for should I say um so I think you know putting myself at the face of the brand at the time where the brand wasn't equipped to get orders out quick enough and offer emails with a good response time now our email response time is like four hours worldwide before it would take me like we'd sometimes we would have automatic responses basically giving us like five days to get back to your email which is not acceptable and so that was that was the challenge the challenge of being a 22 year old girl that did not know that this business was going to go like that has been quite a common theme for the last four years um but yeah I'd say the main part when we was first scaling was just being able to offer you know having the sales of a big business but not being able to offer the service yeah yeah and what about your designs like you you keep putting out new timeless pieces can you walk us through that creative process and and how you keep up with so you because you have to keep we don't have to but but new is good right and when you've got a growing hot sexy brand there's a lot of talk around it you want to keep kind of building that momentum so talk us through that process I think one of the one of the moments really that changed the game for odd news was when we introduced more regular launches and that doesn't necessarily need to be like a big collection every single month some months it's just like one style obviously fast fashion new in pages are like thousands of options new new each week we needed to find that sweet spot mainly from a point of having a bit more conversation on social and so we introduced sort of more products but still in the grand scheme of things it's still like only 50 products a year but it's kind of like staggering them so the creative process behind that really just goes back to our customer so we don't necessarily look at trend reports we're very much with odd muse we're very much inspired by odd muse and that has created a really strong brand identity so when you look at all our products lined up you can tell it's odd muse and whenever you see a dress out in public like when we were shooting in new york recently we were shooting a new collection and a girl come up to me like oh my god your dress is odd muse it was not a release dress no one had ever seen it before but the product we design has such a strong identity to odd muse so we keep it very aligned with what we're doing and what our customer loves not necessarily who's been seen wearing what what what's gone down the runway what's trending for spring summer 25 and and I think that's that's made us sort of that strong ground that we are today yeah and one thing that you keep going back to is the customer and you've built this amazing brand incredible product and you've grown so fast i i think there's an unfair advantage you used to work at asos as a buyer that's one of your unfair advantages but you also have built this incredible brand of trust and loyalty and you know putting as you even refer to as her putting her first talk me through that like it's your first business how did you work that out because i think that's something that sometimes people often mistake and it takes a long time to understand?

34:38I think for me, I went into Obmuse with no real knowledge in marketing. I didn't really have that much knowledge in buying. It was my first job, like coming out of university. I was there for just over a year. And I feel like I started the brand with my customers. I feel like we was all in lockdown. and they you know I'm so grateful to them um and everything we do is for her and we always speak about her in the office um and yeah I think that is just like me injecting my personality into the brand because I am just so grateful for everyone who has enjoyed odd news at any level for the last four years whether you've not bought anything and you have just enjoyed watching our content and you've engaged with our TikToks and I think that really shows in what we do I think people feel that energy from us we're not a salesy brand we just want to have fun with whoever loves the brand and I think people really really engage with that it's you know nothing we do is salesy we're just I always speak about how I didn't get into this to have a growing business and and I think that translates well to our customer and I think that's built a really amazing community and obviously I'm I'm all over the content it's a very founder-led brand so people have like a story to support and I know for a fact like I remember brands I was aspiring to be like I didn't know at the time I didn't know anything about who was running this brand and now whenever I'm shopping I always want to know who owns this brand who am I supporting um so I think it was I think it just become a bit of a movement and this brand is for our customers we we now do bridal we do graduation we you know we want to be part of her every day like whether that's her special day whether that's just her new job um so yeah our customer is really special to us and I feel like you can feel that from every angle of the content we share yeah and I think I think I think that that's that's some of the magic right that that's why this brand is growing no one likes to be sold no one likes to be sold and that is that is the key marketing thing that I would say don't sell if you want to sell don't sell because no one wants to be told our our marketing strategy is you know we do all these things it is it has got an intention to drive people to the website of course but I do not ever want anything on social media that says shop now or any any call to action like that I just want you to enjoy odd music social media like it's my own social media um and in turn that drives a lot of traffic to site in turn that means our paid social ads perform quite well it has a greater good we don't put pressure on sales and so yeah my you know my best advice to selling would be don't sell yeah i um when you said that what comes back to me was i once heard someone say people don't like to be sold to but they love to buy yes a hundred percent yeah and i think you really you've really kind of nailed that um so talk to me about influencer marketing so beyond you know you guys don't you don't sell um but you have a lot of creators that you work with how do you approach influencer partnerships what would you suggest for smaller brands considering this our influencer pool is very very unique the way in which we've always worked with influencers so when i started the brand like lorna taught me this very very quickly so Lorna so organically bought that blazer and posted about it and that is why we saw such amazing sales from it so from the get-go I told myself I am going to continue creating amazing product that influencers want to buy and if they don't want to buy it they will accept gifting and I just know how much the word ad diminishes credibility I always from maybe like an integrity point of view it was my product it was my baby I wanted to know people loved it and they wasn't ever going to be paid to say that so originally really up until this year all our influencer partnerships have either been gifted or they've bought it themselves and people would always ask me how do you get such good influencers and I would always say product product is the most important thing I don't want I'll they genuinely want to and people would whenever we'd send to people we would never ever put pressure on them wearing it we always wanted them to just wear it whenever they wanted to not just upload a photo of the bag or upload a photo in the mirror because we've pressured them to do that.

40:00So for the first three years of Odd Muse, we was working with influencers on a completely organic basis. Now this year, we have introduced a commission platform, which I think all brands should do. I think it's fair for the influencers, but I think it also protects the brand. So a lot of influencer partnerships in the UK, when it is a branded ad, you may have to spend quite a lot of money up front on that ad you don't know what you're going to get out of it and you also have the ad that the word ad that is going to diminish whether people want to convert whereas platforms like like to know it we've got another platform called shop my um they will pay the influencer based on what they sell so if an influencer links our product she's worn our dress she links it and she sells 10 dresses she will get paid for them 10 dresses and I think that has been amazing that has in that has introduced so much extra incremental revenue into Obmuse this year so we generate a lot of sales through like platforms like like to know it and shop my um but what I love about it most is I can advise any brand on any level to get on a platform like that because you're you're only spending if it's sold and it's you know it's it's the same as meta ads and paid social ads that has been a real development in influencer marketing that you know we've welcomed with open arms because I think now that's coming as a very fair bridge to the gap between okay I can pay this influencer but how do I know what I'm going to get because so many layers of marketing are immeasurable.

41:54And I'm a data girl. I think people love like data. If you're growing a brand, you need data. So commission platforms for influencer marketing is the go-to and always creating a good product that they want to wear, of course. Yeah, yeah. And so you're still sending the product out for free, right? In some cases, yeah. if not so shop my a lot of the we've really tried we're really going for the us at the moment so shop my is a platform where a lot of us influencers can come on once they're approved they can make their selects to of on odd news and it will get sent to them so it is mainly on a gifted basis yeah yeah yeah got you and because one of the things for smaller brands or early stage brands wanting to get into influencer marketing i often hear and i'm sure you do well i tried it it didn't work or you know i've sent them something and they don't post and and i think there's a there's one thing that people don't talk about is the content forget the value exchange of just like like make trying to make money or trying to you know sell more product but the content is really a big big part of that exchange right it's hard to create content yeah we um we have like a bit of like an influencer pyramid of like what but like three pointers as to why we would want to work with an influencer one of them a hundred percent is that she's a macro influencer that everyone in the office loves and we just want her and we just really want her in odd news the second part of it is there's a big pool of micro influencers that sit under 40 ,000 followers that create the best content that we work with on a regular basis because of the content they create and how good they make the product look.

43:44Sometimes it doesn't always have to be like this person has 300 ,000 followers, we're just going to send them. We always base it on, you know, is this person fit for the brand and is their content good so that is a huge huge factor for us and I've always done that from the very beginning I've always wanted to work with micro influencers because you are going to get a lot more content out of them and I think it's just sort of like nice that that piece of just like a growing brand and a growing influencer working together that there's something quite nice around that so yeah we we we often work with with micro influencers probably more so yeah and i think another thing is as well is people look at it like i you know you i don't especially in the early days i don't think you should ever consider paying influencers i'm a big fan of of gifting product and making that part of your budget so don't spend money on paid ads right don't try and get that going build an organic presence build a small grassroots community and gift product and take that away from your marketing budget so you're effectively looking at the cost of this day our biggest uh the thing that drives the most sessions the site every single day is odd music social media organically still to this day yeah yeah there you go so i think that is what you said it's the most important thing and it's it's the reason why when we do a pop-up shop we have queues outside and It's the reason why we have such strong love around the brand because we've never relied on an influencer.

45:23We've never relied on paid ads. It's always been like them two things. If they bring revenue in, it's a bonus and it's amazing. And we have amazing people in the office that take care of that. But the main strategy always is the organic connection between us and the customer. yeah and so just on that what advice would you give to earlier brands smaller brands people that are moving into this space starting an e-com brand that want to start driving traffic to their store don't want to spend money on ads how do you build a strong organic presence because you you did that pretty quickly off the gate what advice would you give what experiences can you share I always said from the very beginning that I was gonna try and be as appealing to a customer to and to an influencer as well I always said that I wasn't going to chase influencers I was always going to create a brand that influencers would chase and I think that's what had me so laser focused on the brand I didn't I didn't I wasn't looking on Instagram for who who was going to grow the brand and who was going to wear our muse I was so laser focused on that Instagram feed and I still to this day think Instagram is where you build the most community I think TikTok can be super loud and it's got it's got such this virality piece but it hasn't got that loyalty piece that Instagram has and so I would say Instagram is like my you know favorite place to communicate to our customers and TikTok is where we have just like a bit of fun and it builds of the community and a lot of people then go on to follow us on Instagram.

47:09But I think it seriously is in having a good product and having a good story, communicating that story in, you know, the least polished way possible. So a lot of what my founder content at the moment is just me sitting here. It's just the five minutes I have in the day. It's not too polished. It is just a real honest conversation every single day that I'm having with our customer. And I would say also one big thing is never post to go viral. Never post because it's a trend or because you think this is going to go viral. Always post to talk to your customer. Always post to talk to them people, whether there's 100 people there or a million people there.

48:00never ever worry about the virality of that video because you're only going to create disappointment every time it doesn't go viral so you might as well stick and build a community and speak to the same people every single time and hope to bring in more of them people every single time and I think that's one thing you can see in my own content on my personal socials and also of muses content we're never really looking for a new customer and and jumping on trends anymore we're always just speaking to our customer directly and I think going viral now has become like a bit of an addiction and it becomes a bit lost and whereas we kind of would prefer to perfect our style and talk to our current customer and our current follower yeah and one thing i've noticed as well is you are very intentional about that founder-led content and building your own personal brand like even on your company pages it's like buy amy smart like so i'm curious when did you make that conscious decision that i'm also going to show Amy and everything that's happening behind this brand and who is behind it and really separating the two but they are still one in the same.

49:28I think to be totally honest when I was when I was starting the brand and I was thinking about the brands that maybe my customer was shopping at already and who I was kind of going up against I asked myself what do they what do I have that they don't and when you're putting yourself up to brands that have been running for a long time you know you're with that question for a long time how am I competitive what is different about my brand and I kind of landed on me I'm different my story no one's got me Amy Smell in their brand and then I looked deeper and I was sort of like well none of them even you know have their founder face fronting and so for me it was kind of like a marketing advantage I always say to people you are your biggest advantage no one is you no one can even when I do my TikToks now I talk about my day because no one's no one's to point blank had the day I've had so it was more so as a 22 year old thinking I had a competitive edge putting myself out there and also it's kind of all I had I'd spent all my money on my stock all I had was to very candidly tell people my story in the hope that they would find it interesting and when I was looking at those other brands all I wanted was someone to tell me how they found their supplier and how they launched their brand and silly little things um so I kind of wanted to be that person that I didn't have when I was starting the brand and and that's how I kind of fell into founder content and even as silly as when we was doing our first shoot I didn't have any mod I didn't have any money to pay the models so my friend took the pictures of me um so it's all very sort of part of it was intentional but part of it was down to budget and to this day I just really enjoy it like if you you was to ask me what I enjoy most about my job it is you know being that face of brand to the community yeah and I'm curious as well for people starting out just coming back to the social piece and content and all of that stuff how much time would you be spending like on content versus then you've got customer support like you've got in the you're working on the next drop or product like how do you work out how to allocate your time in the early days I think at the beginning I remember I used to do one content day a month so I used to do one shoot a month of the product but pretty much every day I was finding five to ten minutes in my every day to just candidly tell Instagram stories and TikTok what I was doing and what I was working on and I think that's the beauty of where we are now TikToks like that reach a lot of people 10 years ago there was no way you could upload a video of you just sitting there in your working clothes and just talking and it could reach you know if it goes viral it can have the same reach as like a you know a huge ad and like a huge celebrity endorsement if a video like TikTok has given you that ability to do that and social media too um so I think now's the best time like when would that have ever been a thing um so yeah I would always find five to ten minutes of my day to really candidly speak to people um and yeah would do that one content day a month for actual product because I think you do need to have you in order to you know really make a product desirable yeah you do need to have that refined content but to make a brand desirable you do need to have that candid content founder talking but you do need that desirable product content so I would always have them too but yeah I would do a day a month and just five to ten minutes in my day for all the candid stuff yeah that's awesome that's really helpful because i think for early founders early stage brands it's quite overwhelming and some for some people it's just like oh i don't want to create content can't be bothered i don't naturally lean into it perhaps you know you it's hard it's for somebody it's not easy it's just sometimes it is literally just going on TikTok and saying, I don't know.

54:10I don't know what I'm doing. I don't want to be in this content. I never set out to do this. I'm just, here are my intentions. I'm just trying to grow a brand here. I have so many moments like that on TikTok where I'm like, guys, I don't know what I'm doing today. I don't know why I am the founder of this big business. I don't know what I'm doing. Sometimes it's that content that works the most. and so yeah don't be afraid of things you don't want to try and things you're scared of because people find that even more relatable yeah you strike me someone that is quite fearless Amy have you always been that way I wouldn't say I'm fearless but I can I would say I'm quite impulsive and I'm just a dreamer like I really just thought odd muse would work and I really had it in my head and it would just keep me up at night, like how good this idea was.

55:04So, yeah, I wouldn't say fearless because there's definitely this side that I'm showing a little bit more this year where I panic and I'm scared. But I think the difference in that is I don't let the fear stop me. I'm scared, but I do it anyway. What are you scared of? Like what are you sharing that you're scared of or that you're afraid of? I mean, loads of different things. So as of recent, you know, when you're self-funded and New York pop-up, a crazy investment. When I was going through it with production, I was asked, do you need a couple of days? Do you need to hear back from investors? And I was just like, no, it's just me.

55:52Like this is, it's just me that approved. um so I think whenever you're taking big steps to grow your brand a lot of stuff like that you know it is scary and I sit at night and I think what if this doesn't work out it's not you know it's all self-funded it's literally my own money what is this what is going to happen um but we do it anyway and we've done it anyway the 700 blazers I ordered that I didn't know that was going to sell but I definitely couldn't pay my suppliers for. I had a couple of sleepless nights where I thought, what if no one buys these and what if I had to pay all that money?

56:30I have so many moments like that, but we do it anyway. Yeah, I love that. You talked about international expansion. Would you be open to sharing? What does it cost to set up a New York pop-up? You said it was a lot of money. What's a lot of money? I mean, our New York pop-up was around a£300 ,000 investment. Yeah, wow. Just for the pop-up? $300 ,000. Well, we're there for three months. And with the New York pop-up, I really wanted to showcase who the brand is now. Because we opened a tiny store in London last year. We've signed a five-year lease. It's tiny. In an ideal world, it would be a lot bigger.

57:14We've grown so much since then. And so when we went to New York, I was kind of like, we need to go big. We need to show ourselves that we are this luxury brand that a mid luxury brand that can compete with key players. So we went quite hard with the New York pop up. But also one thing I would say is we needed help from a production company. None of us was based in New York. We had to lean into a lot more labor than we would have in London. and but I mean it's been open for 12 days 13 days and we hit$200 ,000 in sales today. Yeah wow already. Yes and opening weekend was just shy of$100 ,000 and but even that just we we never expect you know we wanted it to be this big marketing piece because I mean if you look at the content from that week of opening I was doing tours every single day we've done this today progress over here globe the intention was to have this big moment in new york and break new york but take all our followers with us we've nearly got a million followers on instagram and it has grown the brand overall and i saw that even when we opened our london store whatever we're doing in real life it has a domino effect on the website so i knew new York would globally grow the brand and our orders have upped every single day the amount of people coming on site every single day because what we did in New York was amazing and our customer wants to see that and it continues that conversation on social media um but the fact it's been so you know going so well in store is just amazing and you know is a testament to you know how much people love odd muse we had queues around the block for odd muse in new york which was just wild to me yeah that's amazing and um we have to work towards wrapping up but i'm curious why did you decide to set up retail stores and not just stick to direct to consumer you're self-funded you know you've got a great brand great community for our community she's our customer i keep calling her she but she has grown our brand so much why would we not put spend into her being able to experience the brand in real life when we every time we've done a pop-up or open a store we have queues of people who are so excited and that's really why we do it and that's really why we push it to the next level each time because of our customer love it and last question we have to work towards wrapping up and it's late for you so thank you so what's next for odd muse any upcoming products partnerships exciting projects that you want to share i think next year for odd muse we are really trying to become more of a lifestyle brand so we're very confident that she gets every dress for any occasion from odd muse but we want her in odd muse every single day we want her to smell odd muse we want her to wear odd muse to work we want her to to wear odd muse to bed we've done pajamas this year so we really want to just be in every area of our customers life so that's a big thing for us next year like product and our categories are a big thing next year and also just building on that international expansion piece we get orders from all over the world we have uh we have we have amazing sales in australia and we have amazing sales in the u.s so keeping that new york store hopefully and you know seeing where else in the world we can pop up yeah love it well look amy thank you so much for taking the time uh this has been incredible interview you've shared so much been so open so candid and it's going to help a lot of founders in our community so thank you thank you thank you so much for taking the time hey guys if you love this episode you've got to check out my interview with davy fogerty on how he finds trends in undercapitalized markets and turns them into multi-million dollar businesses i'm generally looking for trends globally we find trends that haven't been kind of capitalized in certain markets or in certain marketing channels and then we also obviously add our flair to it.

1:01:42You need to differentiate your product.