Girl Gang Craft Podcast Episode #81 “Her Brand & Co with Jessica Korthuis”

Phoebe Sherman interview with Jessica Korthuis

INTRO
Phoebe Sherman

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Welcome to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast where we dive in deep to all things business, wellness, creativity, and activism for artists and entrepreneurs. We talk with impactful female driven companies and founders for an inside look at the entrepreneurial experience where you'll come away with tangible steps to elevate your business. Are you ready? I'm your host, Phoebe Sherman, founder of Girl Gang Craft artist and designer, and marketing obsessed. We're here to learn together how to expand our revenue, implement new organizational techniques, and cultivate best business practices as we work towards creating a life doing what we love. Let's get started.

Hey creatives. Welcome back. Welcome back to the Girl Gang Craft podcast. Today we have Jessica on the podcast today of Her Brand and Co, a modern marketing educational company for female founders. Jessica is a 40 under 40 honoree, a woman who means business honoree, a woman to watch in 2019 and beyond award recipient, and most recently awarded the woman Preneur Education Business Innovator of the year by the influential Business Woman Awards. Jessica is an alumni of the Wharton School's Executive Education Program on Accelerating Entrepreneurship, and she's a formal advisor to several female founded companies who are using their brands to do good in the world. Jessica is a prominent speaker on marketing and entrepreneurship and has been featured by Entrepreneur Woman, Thrive Global, The Lean Startup Co, I Fund Woman, the Female Founder Collective, the Women's Business Enterprise National Council, and many others. She is a proud mompreneur with a passion for writing and is a fierce advocate for women driving wealth creation. And she is most happy spending time with her husband and daughters. We have a really good conversation about marketing and sort of finding alignment with what works for you, finding alignment with other partners, organizations that can help get the word out about your product or offer. And we've made a page for you where you can sign up for free for her marketing class. There's The hub. We talk about it in the meat of the podcast. Can we say meat? Does that turn that? Does that turn all of you vegetarians and sorry with the substance of the podcast. We talk about it. I'm on click that link in the show notes and on our website so you can check that out and sign up for free for their hub.

Just throwing out there that we have some events coming up. We have Girl Gang Craft Oakland right around the bend that is May 18th at Scottish Right. So check that out. That is free to attend. And we have about 100 vendors there. It's a grand old time. And I'll come back with some details about what that's all about. I mean I also have our Mother's Day gift guide up on the site, so we'll put that in the show notes as well.

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Hello, hello. Hey, creatives. Welcome back to Girl Gang Craft the Podcast. Today we have Jessica from her brand and co on the podcast talk about all things marketing. Welcome Jessica. How's it going?
Jessica
Hi. Thanks so much for having me. It's going well. I'm excited to be here. It's a beautiful day.
Phoebe
it's so nice here too. It's really lovely. So tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit about her brand and co.
Jessica
Yeah sure. So hi everybody. So again really excited to be here. My name is Jessica Korthuis I'm the co-founder and CEO of Her Brand & Co and my co-founder Mari. We run this business together and Her Brand & Co is really the leading educational platform for early stage female entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out all the marketing things. I've worked in marketing for well over 15 years. It has changed a lot since I first started. It is not the same category that it used to be, and marketing is actually the second reason that small businesses fail outside of access to capital. It is a huge problem and our mission is to democratize access to marketing education. There's not a lot of really good, affordable, helpful resources for the type of customer that we love to work with. And that's what we're here to do. And first and foremost, we're educational company. Above all else. We've got programs that are soft I'm sure we'll get into. But that's really our vision and our mission and why we're here.
Phoebe
I love it so what made you start your own business?I assume you were marketing for other companies initially, right?
Jessica
So it's funny what that happened was I was actually working in corporate PR. I was in my young 20s. I had my career fully mapped out. I was raised by a single mom, which I always like to bring that up because it's very relevant to my story. I had never really grown up around entrepreneurship, and at the time when I was kind of coming up, entrepreneurship wasn't the cool, flashy thing that it is now. You didn't see it as often as you see it now. I did the things. I went to college, I got the job, I got the health care, I got the salary, I did all the stuff. And then I was working for a pretty large global fashion company on their PR team, and then they downsized my position. That was my first corporate layoff. I had never experienced it before. I was absolutely devastated. Young 20s, had no backup plan and that happened on a Friday. And then I opened up my first business the following Monday. And then I've been a founder ever since. So I was sort of pushed off the proverbial cliff. But looking back on it, there were so many hints, there were so many signs, there were so many things about me that did not work well in that corporate setting. But because I didn't know any different, I didn't understand that there was another way. And I really found that way through entrepreneurship.
Phoebe
Yeah, incredible. So how did Her brand and co come about then?
Jessica
before her branding co, I was consulting my first business, but I started on that Monday morning was a boutique branding and design agency. This is before everyone you know had an online course about something. And I started really just expanding and trying to create digital offerings. And again, you know, this is like 2016, 2015. So it wasn't done the way that it's done now, and it wasn't as popular. And really, how it happened was I had my agency and I loved working with female based brands, but we were an agency, so we had some pretty high ticket items, and we got to work with brands like Red bull, Girls Who Code, ten X women. And I always wanted to work with female entrepreneurs, but I didn't really have a mechanism to support them through the agency model. So I started consulting and did that for years. And then I started to see that a lot of the women that I like to work with, who we classify them as early stage founders, and what that means is these are typically founders who are doing all the things. I mean, they are fulfilling the service. They're slapping labels on their products, they're building their own websites, they're writing their own copy. They might have an intern or maybe a part time person, but they're doing all the things. I started to notice that she was asking me a lot of the same questions, and at the time, my first baby was born. My first baby, not so baby baby anymore. She's going to be eight this year, but I started to sort of aggregate all the same questions that they had been asking me, and I was like, there has to be a way for me to do this without being away from my brand new baby all the time traveling, it was not sustainable anymore being a new working mom and trying to figure out that identity for myself. So I just started building online courses, truly, and they were very discombobulated. I had no tech. It was like, hey, here's this Dropbox link to like this video on it. It was very MVP, very non sophisticated. And over time that just turned into a really rich library of content. Over the years, I started to attract other marketers, which I did not expect. But I was so happy to see that because other marketers will come to me and they would be like, you know what? I can just market the crap out of someone else's business. But when it comes to my own, I have my own blinders on. So they started to come to, It was a different name at the time, but modern day her branding co, they started to come to her brand & Co and then I saw, you know what like you're doing something really cool with social or you're doing something really specific and niche with copy specifically for email or newsletters. Why don't we bring you in? Then I started to really bring in all these other marketing practitioners into one place, and that had never really been done before. Marketing is a lot like fashion in a way. It's kind of cutthroat. All marketers say that the other one is doing it wrong. Everyone has their own framework that they say is the best. And of course we have our frameworks too. But my co-founder and I just really leaned into one of our core values, which is there really is a room at the top for all of us. And especially since the landscape of marketing has changed drastically in the last 15 years, you used to be able to kind of be a jack of all trades with marketing, you could kind of know a little bit about various things and do well. That's not the case anymore. You really have to be a subject matter expertise in one specific area, which is why marketing is becoming so difficult for an individual founder to do it themselves, because there's just simply too much to do.

Phoebe
They're doing Facebook ads and Google SEO and social media and email marketing.

Jessica
And and sales.
Phoebe
And blogs and sales and trying to figure out tech and funnels. It's impossible. I know it so well.

Jessica
It's impossible. So yeah, that's kind of how we got here and how the platform sort of evolved. And we've tested a bunch of different business models for ourselves over the years. But I think we really stayed true to what we wanted to do, which was be affordable and really democratize access to education. Last year in 2023, we made our platform free, which was pretty radical, and we monetized through different arms of the business. So we've been able to figure out how to make that work. And ever since launching our free platform, we have just gotten thousands of business owners to onboard onto the platform and come to our classes and use our resources, and some of which we partner with other educators, because it's like, of course I know enough about Facebook ads to be dangerous, but you do not want me up in your Facebook business manager. You don't want me running your ads. You want someone who lives and breathes that work every day. Even Mari and I cannot be experts in all the things anymore. And then when I coming into the room now, like, forget it, this has changed so much. And that's really how the platform has evolved and how we've stayed true to our belief system and our values.

Phoebe
So I'm really curious about the free platform, because when we talked before, you were doing paid classes. So last year when we were in conversation. So I would love to hear about that. And yeah, how you're monetizing and keeping your business afloat if you're platform free.
Jessica
Totally. There's a few things every year we do a deep dive into customer discovery. This is something that we've always done since the beginning. It is just a great exercise in staying on pulse with your customers, really asking them what's working, what's not working, and not trying to service your ego, but just really trying to figure out all three on the right track. Are we servicing you the best way that we can? Best way that we know how? Through that customer discovery, we found that our customer in particular, she was like, there is so much education online I'm involved in so many groups. I'm a member of this group, I'm a member of that group This that and the other thing, and it was like there was just this huge fatigue of, now I have to pay for something else. And I don't know if this thing is actually going to help me or not. And we actually tried to sell a membership to the platform and it failed multiple times. What we learned through multiple rounds of customer discovery is that, like any marketing funnel, that there are different behaviors that your customers are willing to do at different stages of their funnel. And our customers absolutely will pay for our services. We have a mastermind, we have an accelerator. We're launching an advisory council this year, and we sell out all of our programs, all the time. So it isn't a matter of like, do our customers have money to pay for things they do? But what we found is that that top of funnel, that trust building stage of the funnel, they are not willing to pay for our membership to be a part of that area of the funnel. I was noodling with Marie about it, and I was like, you know what? We have this amazing asset. Let's roll it out to partners first, which is our initial MVP. So we've got partnerships with a lot of really wonderful brands, very much like Girl Gang Craft that are doing something really special, really unique, have a beautiful, rich community and will reach out to these brands, or they'll reach out to us and we'll say, hey, you do events in community really well, and we do education really well, and we know that all three of those things play really well in sandbox together. We leverage some of our initial communities, like A Good Type is a really wonderful community we're involved in. I don't know if you know the gals over there, but they're like a million strong on Instagram of artists and creators. And Mari and I are both art kids. Actually, we went to school for art and design, working with artists who are like, I can create something really beautiful, but I have no idea how to sell it. That's like a natural partner market fit for us. So what we did is we would go to these community partners. We would say, hey, can we do an open enrollment and make the platform free just for your community? So at first it wasn't free for everyone. We would only allow free access to our community partners. We would do a webinar series with them or some sort of educational programing with them where we could show up live for their audience. We could give a lot of value, we could really help them with some of our education and then provide an open enrollment period where their community members would have access to our platform. So that was the MVP of the free platform, and I wanted to test it before we opened it to see if there was some validity.

Phoebe
Can you tell our audience what MVP means?
Jessica
Of course. So MVP is minimum viable product. This is the minimal thing you can build with the least amount of resources to prove validity. So it's like before you go off and build this whole course and try to sell it. Just see if you can even get people to sign up for the thing before you even makes the thing. You can use it with products and services. The framework works for any kind of business. Our MVP was let's go out and test it with partners because they're already trusted resources. We already have a great relationship with them. They have customers that we need and want to service. Why try to build it ourselves so we can just go through a partner and leverage the relationship we have there. And the first time we did it, we got over 500 tenants on the platform. Within 24 hours, it broke our tech, actually. It broke all of our tech. It broke all of our zaps, all of our back end, because it was just like err- which is every founder's wish that something like that happens. It was terrifying at the time. We sent a really funny email with a really cute GIF that was like, wahwah, you broke our stuff. But it was great. We got really good feedback from them after we did it with one partner, we test it with another, and then another, and then another. And then we found that we could replicate the success with a very specific type of partner, with a very specific type of customer. So that was our MVP. And after we did that, we decided, let's open it up to our customers. Let's open it up to anyone who wants access to the platform. And then that was like stage two.
Phoebe
Fascinating. From a marketing perspective, from a funnel perspective, before we break it down, for maybe other folks who aren't in the service industry, obviously this is very aligned with my work as well and GGC, I'm curious about how you utilized this bottom of funnel to get people to pay for your programs, and how that has worked for you.

Jessica
Yeah. Great question. We talk about leads a lot. We talk about customer journey a lot and a lot of our classes. And the first thing I want to say is, you don't know until you really get started, you really have to make a lot of assumptions on where you think your customers are going to move. Like we made an assumption that our customer would pay for the membership. They weren't they didn't not top funnel. We wouldn’t know that until we launched it. One of the frameworks that I love to teach and one of our accelerators is a lean startup framework called Validated Learning. And this basically is this concept of you have to know ahead of time what you want to measure before you can go out and create an experiment to test if your hypothesis is true. This is like old fashioned scientific method, okay? And one of the covenants of lean startup is everything in anything in your business is a hypothesis until proven otherwise. I find that very freeing and very liberating. It's like, oh, we can play. We don't have to have the right answer, and we're not going to have the answer than the right answer. At first. What we did is last year, 2023, it was really testing and validating what is our top of funnel leadgen that is getting consistent leads into our funnel, because the rest of the funnel isn't going to work if the top funnel is broken, if we don't get the leads, we can't do anything with the leads later to convert them. So that was like step one. How do we unlock the top of the funnel? And we spent a year figuring that out, and we fell on our face many times. And that was the unlock was the free platform. Don't ask me why don't know why. If you would have asked me two years ago if that would have been my hypothesis, that would have not have been it. I would have thought it would be like a lead magnet, or a PDF, or a free webinar or an evergreen, blah blah. Like there's so many other options, but for us and our customer and what she needs, it was the free platform, which we validated through the partnership activations that I had talked about earlier. That was step one. So then it's like, okay, great. Once they're in our funnel and on our email list, how do we get them to take the next step? We've always done monthly masterclasses. It's been a part of our business model since day one. What we do is we invite these founders to come into our classes, and they can drop in as often as they want, however they want. I have founders who will sit in classes for six months before they're ready to go into a formal program, or before they're ready to take the next step.
Phoebe
Those classes are free.
Jessica
They are free, yes. And they're recorded and they're put in the platform. So then what we do is after they attend a live class and again, these are live, like we show up live, we teach them. The big thing here is at the top of the funnel It's all about trust and authority. So if anyone's like, oh my god, you're talking marketing nonsense to me. I do not understand this. This is like Chinese to me. I think the big takeaway is once you get them on your email list, the goal is to not sell them immediately. The goal is to create trust and authority. So how do you do that with your business model is up for discussion. For us, If we are supposed to be educational partners, then we might as well deliver trust and authority through education. So it makes sense for us to do classes that way. From there they come to the classes they tap in when they can. the next stage after that was to do a formal program. So we have a marketing mastermind, which is a four month intensive. It's about $3,000. So it is not inexpensive, but it's not $25,000, which I seen many marketing masterminds are well over the $10,000 mark. So that's why our pricing model is sort of placed in that area. And we offer payment plans. We offer other ways for founders to actually do the financing part of it, but where I have found where we now have opportunity is now we have a gap, we have free, and then we have $3000. We have nothing in the middle. So this is actually what we're working on this year. But what we found is our customers were like, no, no, I will do a marketing program, but I won't do it just for the content. I'll do it. If you tell me what to do, help me do it. Hold my hand. Really hold me accountable and be truly accessible. I don't need a program, but I'm just going to listen to. I can do that on YouTube. I need a program that's going to really help me break down all this marketing complexity, and actually work with someone who I trust to help me hit our goals. Our mastermind, that education was created with that in mind, to really be like, okay, if you're going to spend $3,000 on this mastermind, what is the expectation of ROI on that? Is it lead? Is it sales? Is it partnerships closed? And we talk about that on day one. And we actually have founders do a preliminary program. It takes about three hours. We have them do that as like a prerequisite before they start the mastermind, which is like what's your revenue goal? What are your marketing strategies? We have them do an audit. So like we really have them do some very in the weeds deep work. And that's where marketing gets very hard. It's it's like a founder doing that by themselves. They're just like oh my gosh. Like analysis paralysis. But with the benefit of the group. And then as Mary and I as lead mentors, we're able to really break it down systematically. So that's sort of the next step from free to paid is then going into a program. And then this year. So 2023 was like unlock Top of Funnel. This year. We know our program sell out. We know we have a waitlist for most of them, which is a very great problem to have. But then the next step is there's always some of your programs Mari and I can run. You can't scale revenue. You can have really good healthy road. You can't scale people. So how do we help more founders give them the quality education that we've become known for, but at mass with 100 people, 200 people, 500 people, that is what we're trying to figure out this year. And that is going to be that sort of like mid tier level offer. That's not super exclusive. It's not free. It's like right in the middle and so we have a few things that we're working on for that. But that's where we're moving next.

BREAK

Phoebe
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Phoebe
Oh that's fascinating. I mean, from a personal perspective, it's totally fascinating. This is not what we've intended to talk about on today's episode. But anyways, so this is what happens sometimes. I mean, I just want to say to you, product base, business owners listening, we will hop into some product stuff in a second. And also this stuff can be applicable to your stuff as well. Thinking about again, gathering leads in whatever capacity, having grab and go items, and having a range of prices of products. Anyways, from my perspective, super fascinating because this has also been something that we've been struggling with. We also canceled our membership a year ago, something like that, and it was a fine sized group of people. It fulfilled me like I really like teaching in a small group. I know my members also really enjoyed things our classes would have monthly classes either taught by me or other guest teachers, and people weren't showing up. And I mean, we're just finding the same sort of things that people are wanting classes, but they have access to all these free classes online, YouTube, whatever. They're putting pieces together, right? They have a class from us. I have a class from Jenna Kutcher, from Amy Porterfield, from both their like, sort of mix and matching, and they're not getting that sort of hand-holding or accountability that they need from, let's say, like a $3,000 mastermind or even whatever the pricing is. I think that's really also a challenge for us as well. Figuring out how to get folks in to some of these lower ticket items has been more challenging than some of the higher ticket items. Whereas we have no problem getting vendors for our craft fairs, because folks know that there's going to be an ROI and they're doing it for the experience. And it's been a challenge to just sort of empower folks to invest in their education. And I just think that's all really interesting.

Jessica
You're not the first business who's told me that they've thrown away their membership model, like I have probably over ten businesses that I've talked to who are well known brands have tried to lodge membership model, and it's flopped. That's not to say that memberships don't work for anyone listening. There are memberships that absolutely work, but for some reason, in the service based category specifically for entrepreneurs, memberships are really hard. What we have found is customers want the how. They don't want the what, they want the how. So that's what you're talking about. It's like the accountability, the structure, especially with something like marketing that is so complicated and so overwhelming and takes up so much time and resources and funds, if you don't do it right, it will cripple the business. It will put the business under. So there's a lot of risk if you do it wrong. So that's another big reason why we have found with our customers that she's just like, listen, I just need you to tell me how to do it. Yes, I know I need email, but tell me how to do it, please. Like copy paste that is the real challenge is how do you scale the how. That is what we've been working on. You know, what's funny is we're actually looking at launching a new membership model this year, but it's not membership for content. And that is where I think the difference is going to be. Ask me again in six months. This is my third, I should say stab at this. But a very different customer in a very different time in her business. And we're basically launching a low lift advisory council. So the idea is that a founder can get access to like quarterly office hours. She can also get access to a WhatsApp business line that if she submits her questions like these are like, yes or no– our founder, she's like, I just need to run this by you. I just need to know that am I doing this right? Like, here's where my head's at. Please tell me yes or no. So a lot of times our founders don't need that much critical infrastructure building. They just really need a thought partner, and they need a trusted person that they can go to. That's like, no, no, you're thinking right about that. Or like, I think you should look in this direction. They really want this someone in their corner who really understands our business. So this is the idea for the advisory council is to give founders access to that. So then it's like Mari and I, how do we do that at scale? I do that with 500, 1000 people, 10,000 people. That's why we're leveraging the platform to help us do that. And then also leveraging this idea of like audio messages through WhatsApp. We're not going to build our own tech. That doesn't make any sense. Let's use an asset that already exists. And the way we're running it is you just submit your questions by Friday, and you will be guaranteed to have an answer by the following Tuesday. We might answer it that day, but by the following Tuesday you'll have access to it. And then something else that we're testing out this year is we will always do free education. It will always be part of our business model and a part of our ethos. But what we did last year is we would do one monthly masterclass about a particular topic, and then that same month we would basically do like a working session. So we would give homework, hey, based on what you learn, go off, do this thing and then they would come to the working sessions and we would review in real time their homework. That now is going to be gated the how. So that is our other step at really driving value to this membership, which helps us scale, but it also helps us impact and help so many businesses way more than we can. And then on top of that, we're bringing in other advisors that are not just Mari and I, that they can cash in their office hours with someone who, if they do have a product based brand, which, by the way, 50% of our business on the platform are product based businesses, like a huge percentage of people on the platform have products across all categories and verticals. We have an advisor who's actually our advisor. She built and sold a multi-million dollar VC backed retail startup. She's a perfect person to book an office hour with. If you need help on how to scale products, it's on us to build this advisory council so that you, as a founder, can get access to really specific niche information that you need at certain times.

Phoebe
I love it. thank you for giving the inside scoop of your business. I think it's so fascinating to just no matter what kind of business you have to like, hear how other people are structuring their business, whether whatever. I just think it can be really radical to like, structure your own business completely, not based on anyone else's traditional stuff and like figuring out, yeah, I can have this thing for free. There's no rule against this. And this is behind the payment. But this is how we're scaling. I just think it's really cool. So thank you for sharing with me.
Jessica
Anytime. I'm happy to share. I mean, we have so many learnings. I mean, we share our stuff about our business all the time. We're sharing financial templates and we're all in this together. You know, so many of our businesses, I would say 99.9% of the businesses that end up coming to Her Brand and Co, she just wants to build something that she's proud of. I just want to have time with my family. I don't want to build a tech unicorn. If you do, great, we can help you with that too. But I don't really care about that. I just want to make a good living, and I want to create a business that I'm really proud of and that I love. That is why most founders are entrepreneurs is because.
Phoebe And not work for toxic people.
Jessica Correct.
Phoebe Health instead
Jessica Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Phoebe
Okay. Let's pivot a little bit and let's sort of get to some more basic questions I suppose, since there are a lot of product based businesses listening. I think also quarter one this year has been challenging for folks. I think even quarter three and four last year has been slower. What I've been hearing within my town and around I live in a tourist town, so it's a really interesting petri dish for retail. And yeah, hearing my community struggle through holiday sales even, and definitely struggling quarter one. And I want to say that you're not alone if you're one of those people who are struggling quarter one. And to see that everyone has stuff on sale right now, everyone's on sale. I'm just wondering if you have any sort of advice to optimize your metrics to optimize your conversions right now?

Jessica
well, I've heard that too, from some of the product based brands that are on their platform. Not all, but some. I think that products are so commoditized, everything can be copied. I mean, for the most part, I really think that I mean, this sounds kind of like preachy and sort of superficial, but I see it all the time with the product based brands that are on our platform that are doing well is they are really leaning into their space and their customer, and they're not trying to be everything for everyone. And I find that that is the jumping off point to not being in this place where you're like in this feast or famine mode and Q1 and just like waiting for holiday sales, which is so stressful for product based businesses because like, you can't be a Q4 hero, that's not sustainable. How do you make sure that your business is more than a product? How do you make sure that the business is really representing something more, whether that means you are taking a social stance, or whether that means you have a point of view on something, that's not to say you need to get political or anything like that, but what is your brand really stand for? What does it really mean and represent? And are you willing to draw a line in the sand there and be clear about that and be unwavering about that? One of the brands on our platform, she's like in our eighth mastermind or something. She's just been with us for a while, and she's just grown and grown and grown and grown. She makes these gorgeous kitchen towels made from recycled water bottles, and she has really found that her leaning into the joyfulness of having something pretty in your kitchen. I know it sounds really silly, but that's what matters to her customers. That's what matters to them. They love the patterns, they love the sustainability piece, but it actually isn't the number one driver of sales. That's just like a nice to have. Her really figuring out what are the different levers about her brand story that she needs to pull at different stages of her business has been sort of her journey. And what's interesting is her hero product, which is a towel like a kitchen towel. It's actually shifted from that to these reusable sponges, which I have like a gazillion pairs of. That's the other thing with product based businesses is sometimes there are different products that people are going to want and need during different moments of the season. And if you really understand your customer and what they are looking for, how can you present your brand in a way that transcends the products that you make? So like for Carrie, it is about easing into sustainability. It is about helping someone make one better decision in their kitchen, which is hers is like scrap the paper towels. Get our towels instead. It's also about you don't have to be this like sustainability guru or change your entire lifestyle in order to move closer to sustainability. You can just do one thing in your kitchen. So her really like leaning into that has helped her business grow tremendously, even on off seasons. And that was kind of a long answer. But why people aren't converting at the end of the day, it comes down to so many things. It comes down to is it easy to buy? How many steps are there? Is it clear what the products do? I think that a lot of product based brands, they immediately jump to features. So like it comes in this color, it comes in the size, has a built in bra, blah blah blah blah. It's chip resistant, which is very easy to do when you have a product based business? But what customers really need from you is how does it make my life better? And that story really gets lost big time with product based businesses. Service based businesses don't really have a lot of features to fall back on the way that product based brands do, so they really have to really push on the transformation. Why do I need this course? Why do I need this program or whatever? They have to really, really push on the transformation. Products based brands. Oftentimes will sort of sit comfortable in their features and think that, like the colors will be the seller, the fabric, the whatever, the features of the thing. And that is typically secondary to what is the value of the function of the product. How does it make my life better? Does it solve a pain point for me? What does it actually doing in my daily life to bring value? And then the features are secondary to that.
Phoebe
Can you talk about a hero product?
Jessica
Yeah. So a hero product is something that it's a lot what it sounds like it flies off the shelf. It's the hero of the brand. It's the thing that people want. It's easy to sell. People see it, they like it, they love it. They buy it. You don't have to convince them of why they should buy something else. It becomes the hero of your sales. That's what we mean by hero product. And in the case of Carrie, her first product was this towel, which was not her hero product. It ended up being the sponge just because she put it in market and customers were like, oh my god, I love this one today. It has charcoal in it. So it's deodorizing amazing. It just had all the right things in it that has become her hero product.

Phoebe
What would you say to the folks who are like, well, I make jewelry, what is the pain point it solves?
Jessica
This is such a good point. It brings me back to I don't know if you're familiar with New York Now, but they're one of our educational partners. So they have two big trade tube to big markets a year and last market, we participated as an educational partner. We created curriculum for them for their incubator program, and they had a sister incubator program in fine jewelry. And I hear this a lot. The jewelry companies is like, I just make pretty things. So like what problem I solving? I'm not solving world hunger. I'm not doing anything drastic. When I think that there in lies the task at really understanding your customer, especially with jewelry based brands. So I'm thinking of one of our founders, her name is Shelly and her brand is called by Shelly. So she makes these gorgeous, very light earrings and they're bold. And I want to say they're like laser cut or something. But she has like watermelons and fruits and they have like gold. And they're clearly very bold for a very particular type of customer who likes to wear a really loud, bold statement jewelry. But what's interesting about her stuff is it's literally light as a feather. That's an interesting marketing piece because it's like, no, I'm not solving world hunger here. But the pain point that I'm solving is most big jewelry is heavy and mine is really light. And she has really leaned into that as part of her marketing messaging. And that's really sticking because that is a problem. I think that jewelry business, number one. You actually might have a problem that you've overlooked that to you doesn't seem important, but it actually is. I'm thinking of another founder who we've worked with many times. Her company is called Bom Bom Beads, and she makes these super cute, customizable, stackable bracelets. And she also makes, like, stackable necklaces. And she found that her customers are primarily moms or women with very active lives and children, etc. and she, off of a whim, wanted to make like this magnetic clasp. And that became her hero feature because these moms were like, oh my god, first of all, it's so easy for me to take off. I'm not fumbling with it. But then it's also like the magnetic latch really makes a difference for me and how I wear it. She is solving a problem, and that was something that she didn't even think was really a problem until she started uncovering this from her customer. So number one would be, are you actually solving a problem that you might not realize you are solving? Can you talk to your customers and interview them about what they like about your products? Where do they feel that your products are unique and different? This is where customer discovery comes in. Our customers can tell us a lot of information that we might not know, or that we might overlook because we don't find it valuable or we don't think it's sticky enough, but it is to the customer. That would be number one is if you have customers interview them and get feedback on what is it about your products that they really love and enjoy, and how are they different from the other things on the market? That'll tell you a lot. And then if you're really in a place where you're like, no, no, I really am not solving any problems. I just like to make pretty things. There is a lot of value to that, too. People buy pretty things because it makes them happy, because it makes them feel good. Nobody needs a candle. Not really. We buy a candle because it makes us feel good to have it burning in our house. There's a candle company. Oh gosh, I'm forgetting the name. I met them at New York. Now I think they're a great example. There is soy candle, just like any other soy candle out there. But what they've done is they have taken these really funny, like cultural references from different cities. So the founders are from New York, so they have one candle. I'm going to butcher the name, but I'm pretty sure it's something along the lines of some guy named Joe with a nut cart or something like that. That's the name of their candle. And their candle smells like chestnuts. It's like cinnamony. It smells good. Their candle is just like any other candle that's right down the street. But they're tapping into these really funny cultural references from these cities that they are interested in. And as they grow, they just tap into new cities. Like, I live in Atlanta and they have a candle that represents Atlanta, and it's like every street has peach in it or something like that. It's a peach candle. These are really interesting ways to think about how to differentiate your product based business. When there's a product almost exactly like yours right next to you. Is it through the packaging? I mean, in their case of the candle company, their packaging is super cool. It makes you feel good to get it in the mail. They're not solving any problems. They're not doing anything with sustainability or like recycling their packaging or whatever. It's just a really fun brand. There's a lot of value to that too. But you just have to be very clear in where the brand presents its personality.

Phoebe
I think that's all really helpful. what last sort of advice do you have for entrepreneurs who are overwhelmed and doing it all themselves? any sort of sage, bite size pieces of advice?
Jessica
Yeah, well, don't believe everything you see online. Not everyone is a millionaire. That's number one. Number two is it really is a marathon. It's not a sprint, especially with products. You have cogs and inventory, especially then. And the third would be you don't have to do it all. I really love to teach the solar system analogy. I'll make it short. You can think of marketing and branding and sales as a solar system, and the sun in the system is the brand. It's the ethos. It's all the sticky, juicy, gooey stuff. It's all the emotional stuff. And the planets of the solar system are the channels. Their entire purpose is to pull leads and customers to the sun. That is ultimately the struggle of the founder is to figure out what are the specific planets of your solar system that make the most sense for you. And what I find is that two things happen. Either one, the founders will dump all their eggs in one planet and it's like, no, you can't have a system with one planet in it. That's not the definition of a system. Or they try to do too many planets at the same time, and the whole system comes crashing down to the floor. So what we have found is it's three. Three planets, tops. Tops. and the planets for products that make the most sense are email partnerships and sales and e-com like ecom website. So if it's like I don't know where to focus my time, those are the three stickiest planets. Typically, bviously there's always exceptions to the rule, typically for product based businesses. As business owners, we typically cannot do more than three initiatives well at the same time. So that is why really leveraging that three planet framework is very helpful. And you don't have to do all the things you shouldn't do all the things. Just because you can be dancing on TikTok doesn't mean you should. If that works for you. And that's a planet, great, but you can very easily have a solar system that works really well and not have a million different marketing channels on it.
Phoebe
Yes, it's hard for me to hear sometimes.
Jessica
It's hard for most founders. They really think like they need to do more to have better results in the opposite's actually true, you actually need to do less and squeeze the juice of that lemon so much and optimize that channel so much that it's spinning for you. I mean, you imagine being like a circus performer and like you're spinning this planet or like spinning these plates. You have to keep the current planet spinning while you spin up a new one. This planet over here has to really be self-sustaining and managed and managed well before you can start putting a new planet up there. And that is what founders struggle with, is what are the planets and how do I spin them all at the same time? We start with those three that are typically the stickiest one for product based brands. That's a really good place to start.
Phoebe
And what do you mean by partnerships?
Jessica
Great question. Most founders think of partnerships, they think of influencers, which certainly is a type of partnership. When I think of partnerships and what I've seen be successful with product based brands is really more of a distribution partnership. For example, I have a founder in our mastermind. She creates these beautiful, high end, very expensive, contemporary lockable furniture, and it's locked with a proprietary app that she's designed and created, and she is reaching out to several different groups for partnerships. One of them are like Airbnb hosts who need to lock up their stuff whenever they have guests in their house. Amazing. But they don't want like, something ugly or whatever it is, and they want it to be discreet. So that's like an example of a partnership. We have several really good classes on this actually, on the platform, on partnerships that I teach. But one of the qualifiers of the partnership is that you have to have shared values and you have to have a shared customer. She then reaches out to Airbnb, shared values and shared customer. Maybe it's not Airbnb HQ, but it could be like meetup groups of people who do Airbnbs together or Airbnb San Francisco or whatever it is. That's one example, another example of a partnership for her is like women's sexual wellness. There's lots of things that we might want to lock up, that we don't want our kids or our family to get into. The other ideas like cannabis or distilleries. She's also working with, like Moms Against Gun Violence, who people who want to be responsible gun ownership. So lock them up. That's what I mean by different partnerships, is it's not always a transaction based partnership. And most of the time it isn't actually. I have so many product based brands who are like, if I just get that one influencer, then it'll just make my marketing life so much easier. And the reality is, is that most of these influencers, they have all the power, they take no risk and they have all the power. Whereas in a true partnership like the one I just said, about 40 goods is the name of her company. If anybody wants to look it up, the lockable furniture. Both are invested in helping this customer achieve a results or achieve a transformation, whatever that is. So you can imagine, like on her landing pages for the cannabis partnership, for example, she's going to have stats and information about the danger of children ingesting medicine, which are real and legitimate, and there's animals even getting into things and ingesting substances that they shouldn't. It's really about going back to that storytelling piece I mentioned earlier is like, what? This is so much more than just lockable furniture with a cool app. Those are just features. It's the benefit of what this does to the customer. That is what gets lost, and that is what should be at the center of the solar system. Was that helpful?
Phoebe
Yeah. Can I throw my uterus pin in as an example? Yes. I've been thinking about working with like midwives or nurses or ObGyn friends. I don't know what would that partnership look like? Do you have, I don't know, any ideas for that.
Jessica
Yeah. So you have a uterus pin you want to work with, OBGYNs, doulas, midwives, etc. obviously their shared values. So like yay, check box number one. There's a shared customer check box number one, the other thing which we didn't touch on is I approach partnerships with like a puzzle piece framework. You have a puzzle piece and they have a puzzle piece of your puzzle piece. Is the super cute uterus pin, amazing. What is their puzzle piece? What do they need? and how can you slide your pin in to be a part of that? This is just an example. I mean, I hired tools for both my child's childbirth and they completely changed my life. So I know this space really well actually. My doulas, they will typically create like a new family welcome kit or like a welcome packet if they're doing that. Oh my god, amazing. Can you be included in that? I'm also thinking of working with like, brands and communities. Femtech Focus was their original name. They've changed their name. I think it's Fem Health now. They're a nonprofit. They're a rich, amazing community that's all about spearheading innovation in women's sexual and reproductive health, a partnership with them where they do events, they do all kinds of cool activations for their community. The founder, Dr. Brittany Barretto, actually wears like uterus earrings all the time. I'm thinking of like that is an amazing partnership as well. Outside of doulas or midwives or practices.
Phoebe
And like the ask would be like, they're giving this away, like I'm donating them or I'm selling them at wholesale price or some sort of like kit that they're giving out, or for a party favor or like new moms present situation.
Jessica
All the above. The question is they are just a distribution partner to the end customer. So how do you get the end customer at the end of the day? Is there a I don't know how you do this on a pin, but like maybe on your packaging, is it attached to like a card or something that's like follow blah blah blah or whatever it is, or like get on our email lists for blah blah blah. Like, what is the next step for the end user? The customer? Then for you to sell them something else? Yeah, that is sort of like the next step. Yeah.
Phoebe
Okay. That was helpful. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So where can our listeners find you Jessica.
Jessica
Absolutely. So you can find this on HerBrandandCo.com. Just search her branding career right at the top. You'll find us there. Please, please sign up for the platform. It really is free. We're not going to spam you. Pinky promise. You'll get a welcome email from me and Mari. You can log in. It's super easy. You'll get invitations to our monthly masterclasses. We're going to Italy this year and so that's very exciting. We're expanding on different opportunities to connect with our founders. We don't have to go all the way to Italy though to hang out with us, I promise. But that's just one fun new area of the business that we are exploring. So yeah, just look for us at Her Brand and Co everywhere and you'll find our stuff perfect okay.
Phoebe
Thank you so much Jessica.
Jessica
Thanks for having me.

OUTRO

Phoebe
Thank you so much for listening to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast. Head to Girlgangcraft.com/podcast for shownotes and more. See you next time.