Challenge
A Children’s Sock Brand Was About to be Eaten Alive by Sharks! We’ve all heard of honeymoon babies before but have you heard of honeymoon baby socks? Well, now you have! Gabe and Jessica Miller were on their honeymoon when the initial idea for Squid Socks™ was born. The idea was simple, yet genius, and would transform the lives of parents around the world by bringing to market a sock that babies and toddlers could not pull off. Here’s Gabe’s version of the story – “As newlyweds back in 2014, we kicked off our honeymoon with a trip to London. While we were there, we visited my cousin, and he was complaining about his son’s baby socks coming off. After searching online for a solution and coming up empty, w said, ‘let’s see if we can solve this”. The solution to the problem was the now patented dabs of silicone “Squiddy Dots” that line the inside cuff of the socks. Fortune favours the bold and after pouring their life savings and countless late nights into building Squid Socks® Gabe and Jessica got the break of a lifetime. Their application to appear on ABC’s Shark Tank™ had been successful! They were going to have the opportunity to appear on national TV pitching for investment from Kevin O’Leary, Mark Cuban, Lori Greiner and Daymond John, otherwise known as “The Sharks.” When the Farsiight team was introduced to Gabe and Jessica, the Shark Tank airing was imminent and set to occur within a matter of weeks. To say there was a sense of urgency was an understatement. An analysis of the brands current marketing strategy & infrastructure was brief as they were very much at ground zero – a Shopify ecommerce store filled with some kick-ass socks! As a matter of priority, we mapped out the highest impact strategies which we could deploy so that Squid Socks™ was primed to capitalise on the Shark Tank publicity.
Solution
Building an e-commerce digital strategy from the ground up to capitalise on a once in a lifetime opportunity After a deep dive into Squid Socks unit economics and digital marketing infrastructure we identified a number of key opportunities and areas which required immediate attention; The Shopify store was converting under 2% – our Bare Ass Minimum (BAM) is 2.5% The Average Order Value (AOV) was under $40 – we know to successfully scale on Facebook Ads this needs to be over $50 and ideally over $60 There was no full funnel strategy implemented across Facebook Ads & Google Ads There was nothing in the way of automated email marketing setup Implementing our best practice Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) strategies for the home, collection and product pages. There were many reasons for bringing Ryan Joudoin our Head of Social & CRO into the Farsiight team and in this case I’m not talking about his over the top politeness (apparently it’s a Canadian thing?) I’m talking about his pure obsession with ecommerce. Having spent the last 5 years completely immersed in this space Ryan has developed a playbook for Shopify Conversion Rate Optimization. These are out the box optimizations that can be made to any store which in our experience almost always increases conversion rate at every step of the funnel. Now if you’ve made it this far, today is your lucky day as we’ve got some value to give away. If your ecommerce store is doing <$100k per month, here is a link to download a free guide and wireframe which distills Ryan’s best practice CRO recommendations for your home page. Gaining some scale and doing over $100k per month? Click here and fill out your details and we will provide you with a complete CRO review of your entire store for FREE. Noting that Squid Socks website conversion was below our BAM, the first priority was to crank that up to ensure squeezed everything they could out of the Shark Tank opportunity and set themselves up for running paid traffic on Facebook Ads & Google Ads. A three pack of Sock Socks retails for $24 so we know straight away that in order for this brand to truly scale using paid ad channels like Facebook Ads and Google Ads, we needed to solid upsell strategy that would maximise the AOV. The common question we get asked all the time by brand owners when it comes to promotions, sales and offers is “What do you guys think we should do?”. Our answer to this question has always been the same and will never change and that is – that completely depends on your profit margins. I’m not going to break down the unit economics of Squid Socks as that would be giving away the client’s IP but what I can say is that working back from the numbers we landed on a promotion that would achieve what we wanted (increase AOV) and what Gabe and Jessica needed (profit!). A sneak peek into the future…. Just recently we’ve helped the Squids build out an EPIC bundling feature on their Shopify store has allowed us to leverage the same AOV maximising strategy we use in our sales periods as an evergreen strategy. Implement a full-funnel paid acquisition strategy across Facebook Ads, Google Search Ads, Google Display Network, Google Shopping & Youtube Ads. Knowing that we would be operating initially on a restricted advertising budget, our team performed a detailed analysis to understand exactly what channels should be leveraged if at all, at each stage of the funnel. Here are two of the key findings from our analysis; Generic terms like “Kids Socks” and “Baby socks” were highly competitive on Google with high CPC’s – according to our calculations it would likely be unprofitable to bid on these terms on top of funnel. The product had a compelling unique selling proposition and would require a “Show Me Video” creative for Top of Funnel on Facebook. (If you want to know more about what a Show Me Video is and how it increased revenue by 266% for another one of our partners check out this article). Here’s an example of a show me video creative that we’re using for Squiddy right now; Squid Socks Performance Media Strategy Once we had completed the analysis we mapped out the exact marketing mix we were going to deploy across each stage of the funnel which you can see below. For context this is how we breakout the funnel here at Farsiight; TOF – Cold audiences MOF – Engaged with content on platform, page likes/followers, view content, view product page BOF – Add to cart, initiate checkout, insert payment info, previous purchasers
Results
A tentative deal from the sharks, sell-out sales volumes and an ungodly amount of orders to pick and pack for the Squids. I’m not even going to try and humble brag here – we freaking crushed it! Gabe, Jessica and their two amazing children performed incredibly under the pressure of filming on national television and during the segment managed to secure a tentative investment deal with Daymond John. It became obvious very quickly that we were not the only ones who thought these socks were awesome, orders from all over America poured through breaking all sales records for the Squids. Being a humble family e-commerce startup, Gabe and Jessica were pick packing all orders out of their family home. As a result of the influx of orders from Shark Tank and Black Friday the following month their home garage was turned into a production line with family, friends and neighbors all tagging in to help them ship out the overwhelming amount of orders. Here a few stats from the highlight reel; 480% Increase in Ad Spend 5.81 ROAS 16k% Increase in Revenue This all went down back in late 2019, two years later, Farsiight and Squid Socks are still working together and have celebrated many milestones together from new product launches, record months and breaking past the million-dollar revenue mark.
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