686: Claire Built The World's #1 Dachshund Brand From Home - Now Doing $140K/Month

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1:06Welcome to Little Empires, brought to you by the team at Founder. At Founder, our mission is to support the next generation of e-com founders. So while you may know us for interviewing some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, this series is a little different. Little Empires shines a spotlight on the builders inside our own founder community, the entrepreneurs who are in the trenches, taking action, learning, and building their businesses in real time. These aren't overnight success stories. These are real journeys, real lessons, and real founders creating their own little empires one step at a time.

1:39This podcast is proudly produced by the founder team to give our students a platform to share their experiences, wins, challenges, and honest realities of building a business from the ground up. Now, let's dive into today's episode. Welcome to the Founder Little Empires podcast. I'm your host, Leah Finch. Today's guest is Claire Wolfson. She is the co-founder and CEO of Bean Goods, the world's number one Dascham-themed apparel and lifestyle brand. This actually began as a passion project inspired by her beloved Dashand has now grown into a seven-figure business generating around$140 ,000 a month.

2:22She's got a very loyal community as you can imagine of dog lovers around the world and I am very excited to bring Claire's story to our founder community. So Claire welcome to the podcast. Thank you Leah excited to be here. Awesome now I want to hear all about Bean Goods. I know you have like rapidly grown this brand and it's been around for some time as well. So if we can go back to day one before you even started, like tell us a bit about your career and your background. Like, did you have any experience in e-commerce? I actually would say that we haven't really rapidly grown. There were a few years of big time rapid growth, But we've kind of like slowly but surely have been building the brand all the way back from 2011.

3:13It's kind of like when the design and the concept sort of sparked initially. And yeah, my background is in apparel design. I went to school for apparel design in Portland, Oregon. And my husband's background is in graphic design. So it's a really good pair for a apparel and accessories dog brand. But our background before starting Bean Goods, we both went to school for me, apparel design, him, graphic design. But then after that, I had several internships and I only managed to have one corporate design job at a sportswear brand in Portland. and I worked there for full time for about two years and then kind of quickly realized that corporate sort of design life and just living a nine to five type of job just was really, you know, being in fuzzy cubicle walls just wasn't sparking any joy for me.

4:25And my husband, he worked at like Budweiser and then freelancing. He actually worked for a pet brand, coincidentally, designing like some of their toys and a lot of their packaging, that kind of stuff. So that's kind of our background before diving full on into e-commerce and entrepreneur founder life. Okay. And so 2011, tell us about what inspired this brand, obviously out of your own love for your dog, but tell us a bit more about it. Yeah, totally. So I came to the relationship with Chris with Bean, my original dachshund. I got him when I was 20 years old. He was like my first dog of my own.

5:11And I was just so obsessed with this little guy. I didn't grow up with wiener dogs. I just decided that that's the dog that I wanted. And he was just the best, the funniest little dude. Actually, what originally sparked the idea to start a brand like inspired by him and my obsession with wiener dogs was he had a really bad injury that's super common in sausage dogs called IVDD. And they basically become paralyzed by this like disc disease in their backs. And so that was really scary and devastated to just see him like go through this horrific injury and just be so helpless. And so we originally wanted to design something that supported Dachshund's backs, like a special harness to sort of support this very common injury in Dachshund's.

6:17And so we started drawing up the designs for this harness and even, I think, started some conversations with various vets, that kind of thing. And then kind of realized that it just felt like such a huge undertaking and we didn't have our background wasn't in like technical product design or like industrial design. And it felt more in that direction. So we kind of scrapped that idea and just Chris originally designed a really simple like silhouette of a wiener dog. We called it, we actually originally called it Bean Beanies. And we were just putting this little logo on beanies, like little like hat beanies.

7:09And that's how it originally started. And then we eventually changed it to Bean Goods and started putting the logo on just like various products like tote bags and the beanies. Those continued on for actually many years. And then when the brand really started to kind of, we started seeing some much more significant sales was when we introduced our first line of graphic tees. And that was in 2013. And we launched just like a little capsule collection of graphic tees. I want to say like three or five graphic tees. and yeah and that's like kind of when we really kind of started being like okay this is this is a this could be a real thing okay and so I want to lead into this this product right like you sort of played around with the idea of the harness to solve a problem and it developed almost into fan apparel yeah fans of sausage dogs owners of sausage dogs like people who are just incredibly in love with sausage dogs and likely have their own, right?

8:24So can you tell us about what that first version of the product looks like? Would it be the beanies and tote bags and then into the teas? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the problem that we kind of leaned into solving was that we just noticed that they're really like when we started we really were like the OG wiener dog brand there was no other brands out there like us that were so hyper focused on just like this one breed and all the sort of products and merch and and whatnot celebrating wiener dogs and kind of dogs in general was just very cheesy didn't have really any edge to it so we kind of set out to solve that problem and create merch and apparel and accessories that celebrated our obsession with wiener dogs that like we would want to wear ourselves so that's kind of how the first collection came to life.

9:37All right. Thank you. And can you run us through that first order? So minimum order quantities, pricing, timelines, like what did that look like? Yeah. So when we were first doing like that first capsule collection of T-shirts and sweatshirts, we were working with a friend who had a screen print shop. I can't remember so long ago, I can't remember the exact quantities, but I want to say that we were doing just a very small run of 10 to 20 of each size. I think even from the beginning, we were doing small to 3XL. Definitely super small. We weren't working with a manufacturer at that time. It wasn't anything like that.

10:25It was very small runs. and the pricing like what did those batches cost you at the time yeah I want to say not a whole lot like we would we would buy the blanks from you know various wholesalers similar to what we do today and those would range anywhere from like 350 us to like 8 8 50 for like a nicer tea and then you would tack on the screen printing fee, which I want to say would be between like, it depends on how many colors are in the screen print and stuff like that. And we were doing just one to maybe three max colors, but that first run was just like one color prints. So I want to say those were like$1.50 to$2.50, something like that in terms of cost.

11:18I will say that back then we really didn't know what we were doing. I didn't have like any education on pricing margins, like all of that kind of thing. So we were just fully winging it. Starting out small and just testing it out and seeing how you go and just launching straight in. Yep. Totally. Yeah. It's all funny in hindsight, right? Like how much you've learned throughout the journey. Yeah, 100%. I want to learn a bit more about like validation, testing, market research. You developed the brand out of your love for your job being. What did you do in terms of getting feedback from the market?

11:57One of the things is that we since we we started so long ago, we actually started our Instagram in like 2012, which I think is the year that Instagram came out. So we kind of quickly realized that this dachshund subculture was larger than we thought. And we kind of quickly realized that we could really make a go at this and really build a business around our obsession with sausage talks. And our Instagram kind of grew very quickly. So there was a lot of validation there. people just kind of instantly gravitated to our designs and we often got the comments like there's nothing else like this out there oh my god I'm so upset you know like that kind of stuff so that was there was a lot of validation there and yeah we kind of like quickly grew a community as well through that Instagram channel in the very early days.

13:07Yeah. And this is the power of community building in a very specific niche, right? It's like, you know that people following that account are going to be diehard, obsessed fans about sausage dogs, just like you, right? So how did you go about that messaging, the social media posts, the content creation, like actually building that Instagram at the time? How did you go about it? That's a fun one to think about because I actually ran our Instagram solo. It was part of like what I did every day for years. I wish I knew that I could figure out what the exact year, but we didn't get a social media manager until maybe like three years ago.

13:51So I was just like in there forever. Did you have any strategy behind growing the community with your content and your messaging? Like what did it involve? No, there definitely was some strategy in it coming into it without any experience in any background in social media. Social media was like kind of it wasn't brand new because there had been, you know, MySpace and Facebook and stuff like that. But it was brand new to me building a brand with social media that was brand new. So, yeah, I mean, consistency was huge. I don't think I was posting every day, but I was posting, you know, multiple times a week and kind of trying to vary our content so that even back then that it wasn't like all selling.

14:42It was definitely focused on community building as well. And people just kind of instantly connected with the brand because it's such a niche thing. So they felt super connected and like they had found a new home and a new place to make friends of like-minded people who are obsessed with sausage dogs. Yeah, of course. So let's talk about your first major sales channel. Was that through that organic Instagram community building? I would say, yeah, I would say our first major sales channel and like place that we were growing our community. and then we would like direct our customers to our online store.

15:28We also did do email marketing pretty early on. We used MailChimp for years. We went from MailChimp to Klaviyo. So that kind of just shows you that we were with MailChimp for really quite a long time. So yeah, I would say it was like Instagram, email marketing, and obviously our online shop. But we were directing our traffic through email and Instagram. Okay. And so mainly through email and Instagram, do you recall what your sales were like at the time? Because I want to do a bit of a fast forward to how you're tracking down, which is insane. What were your sales like around there using organic Instagram and email marketing?

16:13We had our first six figure year. I want to say like 2013, 2014, like right around that same year that we launched the capsule collection of T-shirts is when we like hit our first six figure for the entire year. And yeah, so that's that's about what the sales were in those beginning. And let's talk about other marketing channels. So you're running MetaRides at the moment. When did you start running ads? We've been running them for a long time, actually. I want to say like 2017, maybe 2018 is when we started running meta ads. And again, knowing absolutely no idea what I was doing. Yeah. And how did you work it out at the time?

17:03So at the time, I kicked it off by I don't even know how. I think I was like advertised by someone of a Facebook ads course. and so I took that but the course actually was for service-based businesses and obviously we're a product-based business so like it did help me with kind of like getting ads manager set up and like the fundamentals of the back end and and all of that but it was it it wasn't ideal because it was for service-based businesses. And so that's kind of where the meta ads journey started. And then I did end up bringing on a very small agency somewhere around those early days of figuring out Facebook ads and worked with them maybe six months at the most.

17:58And then I would go back to doing them DIYing. I've had several conversations with bigger agencies and like run the numbers and stuff and always kind of go back to doing them myself because of margins and it just like not being worth it to like drop into those huge retainer fees, that kind of thing. Yeah. And so there was a bit of that in between of do I pay an agency or do I take it back on myself because I'm just spending too much with an agency and also having that level of control over what you're running as well and where your funds are going. And so a few months ago, you signed up to our founder operators membership.

18:43Very exciting. Tell us a bit about how you signed up and how you were drawn to becoming a part of the membership. So I have always really loved the concept of business coaching and having people who are much more advanced than you like in your corner. And so I have done quite a bit of quite a bit of business coaching, actually, over the years. I've had, I think, three business coaches, but they were more like one on one relationships. And I had wrapped up my last one on one business coach relationship. And so I was on the hunt for a new coaching program. And I think I was advertised about the founder operators program.

19:35And it just sounded amazing. And then I had a one-on-one call with Nathan and everything that he shared with me just seemed like a really good fit. And so that's how that all came to life. Wow. Okay. And so it's been a few months now. What have you been up to? What have you been doing with your ads? Like, tell us about what you've been doing in the membership. Yeah, no, it's been really great. I worked a lot with Nick one-on-one in the account. And what's been really awesome is just having a team, really, of other operators who have absolutely crushed it in their careers and know what works. And they've scaled multiple different brands and et cetera, et cetera.

20:19So just having their eyes on our brand has been so helpful and also validating because a lot of times it's just like, am I doing the right thing? Like, yeah, it's just really nice to have that support. In terms of what we've been up to in the ad account, it's been weekly meetings of just checking in and making small tweaks and testing tons of new creatives. And we got like our first landing page up focusing on like building out specific bundling options, which is something we have never done before. So, yeah, it's been really cool, like very educational, very supportive. Yeah, it's been great.

21:08Yeah, it's so good to hear. And can you tell us a bit about what your sales were like when you started the membership? Like when you first signed up, what were your monthly sales like? And how have they been impacted through the work that you've been doing in the founder operators membership? I feel like our sales have gotten quite a bit more steady. We're averaging around like 140, 150K a month where before joining the program and just like kind of before in general, we would have 80K months and even like 68K months. And it wasn't like a real consistent flow of like 100K plus months. So, yeah, I would say that it's gotten like a bit more consistent.

21:56And then in terms of growth, zooming out a bit, I think we're up maybe about 10 % year to date. And that's kind of like been our growth rate for the past few years. It's been somewhere between 10 and 20%. So we kind of have that like steady growth. Between 2019 and 2022, we had several like explosive years of growth. where it was like those 100%, you know, year growth, or I think we even did the 200 % growth year. But I'm learning more that it's much more sustainable to kind of have this steady upward swing versus like the huge spikes. Yeah, the peaks and troughs. And that's incredible. You said like you had sort of inconsistent 68k a month, 80k a month here and there.

22:53And then you joined the founder operators membership and you're consistently doing about 140 to 150k months. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. Like, what would you say is the most impactful thing that you've taken out of really getting into your ads account, looking at your creatives, working with these coaches? Like, if you reflect on the past few months, right, that is huge. What's been the most thing. Yeah, I would definitely say just like the heavy focus on our meta ads and really sort of like optimizing the account. And additionally, doing a lot more testing and kind of having a guide with that testing has been very impactful.

23:42Also, the creative clinics with Phoenix have been pretty mind-blowing. She's really knows what she's talking about. So that's been, yeah, just like invaluable to have her in our corner as well. And just like spitting out so many helpful ideas of things to try. And before coming into the program, our ads, like I said, we've been doing ads for a really long time, but our ads have been very basic. They've just been And like basically taking our best performing organics, whether it's like a UGC static or UGC real or like our own content that we've made in house and turning those into ads, but not doing any testing with like little graphic overlays and that kind of thing.

24:34And testing like a lot of different styles of statics with graphic overlays. everything before coming into founder operators was like just super basic. So that's been a major change is like just diving into testing a lot of different things, which I think is absolutely necessary. Yeah. And testing and experimenting what works. And also it sounds to me like challenging your perspective on what you might assume will work, right? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, that's a really good point is like just pushing us to do more for sure. Yeah, that's fantastic to hear. Like you've made such incredible progress.

25:14So this is really cool. This is really cool to share with everyone. And so your sales are tracking exceptionally well. So 140 to 150k months consistently. What would you say has been the biggest change for you personally from growing Bean Goods, right? Like it's been some time now, but what would you say has been the biggest change for you financially, mentally, professionally, now that you've grown the brand to this level? Yeah, some of the biggest changes I would say is growing our team. For years and years, it was just Chris and I doing everything. so we got our first intern actually in I think like 2019 so before then from 2011 to 2019 it was just Chris and I doing everything delusionally believing in the brand and finally we got to a point where we were able to start building our team out and that has been amazing and and honestly a huge change for us because we now have about five full-time employees.

26:28Four of them work at our warehouse and then one of them works at, we have a little brick and mortar shop out here in Palm Springs. So I would say the biggest thing has been growing our team and that has enabled us to have a lot more flexibility with our time, with our creativity. And, you know, for instance, Since last summer, we went to Europe for like three weeks and the business keeps running without us there. So that's that's huge. I would say that that is like the best the best change. Yeah, of course. And creating that that system and that structure underneath you so that you can go on these adventures and holidays and things like that.

27:13Exactly. And to wrap up Claire, if the Claire in 2011, if she saw the Claire that is running the business that you are today, what would she think? Yeah, I think she would be she would be impressed for sure. I wish that I could tell the old Claire in 2011 to keep believing that it's all going to work out because it is. And to try to have less anxiety, I guess, just to just to really believe in the brand and believe in the vision and know that it's all going to work out because it is. Yeah, I'd love to hear that. I love to hear that. Thank you so much. This has been so great to learn about the story, right?

28:04Like it has been some time, but you have just grown and grown and learned and always had that belief in the brand and where it's going and what you're building. It's fantastic to see how much you've grown. So thank you so much for joining us, Claire. Thanks for joining the podcast. Thank you, Leah. Appreciate it. Hey, FounderFam. Thank you so much for tuning in today. And if you enjoyed this episode, please take the time to leave us a review and let us know what you think. This podcast is 100 % free. We work so hard to go out and find the most successful entrepreneurs and founders in the world.

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