Tony MIIA: Hello, and welcome to the Making It In Asheville podcast. This is your neighborhood podcast, where each week we sit down with an Asheville based entrepreneur, small business owner, community member. We ask them what they are making and how they are making it in Asheville. And this season is a cool season. We're focused solely on e commerce and retail businesses here in Asheville. And this week we have back on the Pod for at least the second, potentially third, definitely third time friend of the Pod, Gilly Roberts. From where? Gilly, if you could just take a moment and describe where as it exists today and introduce yourself, if you could.
Gillie: Yeah. Thanks, Tony. My name is Gilly Roberts and where is a we say zero waste living shop or sustainable living shop or sometimes I say something different every time I talk about it, but we have narrowed in on a tagline of late and it is low waist, high standards, if that helps.
Tony MIIA: Yeah, okay. That's wrong.
Gillie: And so, yeah, we do in store. Our brick and mortar has a big refill component, but as does our ecommerce, and we're kind of growing that in a way that is new from either of our previous conversations about it. So did I cover all the bases? I think I talked about it without talking about it.
Tony MIIA: Yeah, and it's great to have you back. So, without going into the origin story, but when did you found where 2018 opened the doors. 2018 opened the door. 2019, you were episode guest number two on the Pod.
Gillie: Guest number two?
Tony MIIA: Maybe it was episode four, I think it was.
Gillie: No, it was not. First guest.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. John Hoppel airbnb.
Gillie: Got it.
Tony MIIA: First guest. So you were our first, like definitely brick and mortar, definitely retail store. The business was relatively new then.
Gillie: We opened in middle of July of 2018.
Tony MIIA: Right. So it was like a year. Maybe you had just about had a year because we arrived in May and we would have had you on right away. So you were coming up on a year. Next time we have you on is probably right at the start of the pandemic. I kind of blacked that period out, so don't exactly remember the milestones along the way, but outside in, a lot of changes appear to have taken place. I remember in the first conversation, there was perhaps at the time, no ecommerce capacity on the website. Minimal. We first opened minimal at most.
Gillie: I actually kind of rebelled against it.
Tony MIIA: Yeah.
Gillie: I was opposed to it for a while.
Tony MIIA: Opposed to it. And so what I'm excited about having you on the podcast for today is there have been a number of changes and it does appear that ecommerce, while it may not be more than 51% of the business today, and I don't know yet, it seems like it's headed in that direction. You're in a new location in West Asheville. There's a new tagline this is a new tagline. There's a new tagline, new branding. So from 2018 to we're now mid 2023. You've been at this five years. Five years for a minute. So I would love to get a sense of what is going on today. We're going to call this a little bit of a teaser, then we'll go back to the beginning, and then we'll come back to today. So what does today look some if you're not watching on YouTube, here's a great opportunity, great episode to watch on YouTube if you want to see what we're talking about. Otherwise, we brought some products. What is happening? How do we create a low waste, high standards e commerce and retail business here in uh, for us, the e.
Gillie: Commerce and the brick and mortar retail are inextricably linked. There's so much information behind a brand that deals in minimizing waste and changing people's kind of daily habits in any way, even if it's convincing them to buy a different product than the one they've been getting at the grocery store that you have to have so much information available to people that even if we only sold brick and mortar, our online presence would be super important. However, we also sell ecommerce. It's about 20% of our business at this point. And we are trying to figure out how to make as much of the refill experience not just feasible for people to purchase, but as sustainable as coming in the store to refill things on your own. And that's our current challenge.
Tony MIIA: And if I'm not mistaken, some of that looks like a delivery service that might be coming online that's locally based. Locally.
Gillie: I'm talking about Ecommerce from anywhere in the country.
Tony MIIA: Okay.
Gillie: But yes, that's also technically part of Ecommerce.
Tony MIIA: Interesting. And so at 20% of the business. But if we're going to forecast into the future, looks like it's going to be a growing percentage. And one of the things that I've always loved about your business is how much you do put into educating consumers like myself and my wife, who kind of ask you, hey, what should we do? What is the right call? Or don't ask and just look at what's available on your website.
Gillie: Easier when people ask, because then we know what information we need to give them, otherwise we risk inundating them with too much. Because the reality of selling products because of how they're made means you can talk about them forever, right? Not only how they're made, but how they're used and then how they're disposed of. We literally could talk about products forever, and people would very quickly become overwhelmed. So it's great when people ask questions. It makes our job easier.
Tony MIIA: Interesting. And one of my kind of core beliefs on selling things is that people buy stories. They're either buying the story of the product, the story of their experience buying the product, the story that they believe that they get to tell once it's in their possession and people are looking at it on their countertop, whatever it is you're ending up. You're buying a story. You're not typically buying products or transacting solely for what the thing is the widget. And if you are in a business of selling just the widget, then you're probably not selling at where.
Gillie: No, you're certainly not. And the only world in which I could picture an alternative to that is like in those kind of Dystopian movies where people walk through a grocery store but everything's labeled with white and it's black text, and you just pick the one option of everything. Maybe that's what everyone's trying to sell is like communism, but that's a different conversation.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. So that is the extreme or the other extreme is just filter for cheapest. Right? So it's either you have a single choice because that's what comes down from the mothership, or filter for cheapest. And then the story is no longer it's just a matter of efficiency.
Gillie: And in that case, why produce anything but the cheapest? So then you're probably down to one again.
Tony MIIA: You're down to down to one, and then what will rise from the ash is a counterculture alternative. And then all of a sudden, you tell the stories. You get to start telling stories again. And then all of a sudden you get to be, we've got a plot here, we got something. And you get to exactly what you said, though, is choose based on whatever values you might have. And your values at least communicated by your new motto, is low waste and high standards. And I love that for you. I think it's a really strong motto and way to communicate the filters you use.
Gillie: Yeah. And what makes us different? I mean, there's a lot of stores selling products like ours have existed long before they were branded as low waste stores or zero waste shops or refill shops. I grew up going to natural food stores with my mom as a kid, and many of these products already existed, but they weren't being marketed to the general public. They were only being marketed to people who cared about one specific set of values. And usually it was health, human health. And so when you take those products and you look at, how do I deliver this to an audience that cares about the environment, that also cares about what it looks like, but that also cares about how it works, how well it works, and cares about human health and cares about how it was made and how it got there. You start talking about checking a lot of boxes, but it also means like, you're speaking to a much wider audience. So you have to adapt everything about the way you talk about that product to encompass all of those values. And that becomes both very difficult in some regards, difficult in the sense of, like, we're just pulling some of these values into the mainstream. And so you're trying to find ways that don't water down the meaning of these terms in ways that they're already getting watered down, like sustainability. What does that even mean anymore? I have a degree in it. I can talk about what it means all day long, but it doesn't necessarily mean I'm talking about the same thing that every brand on the Internet is talking about when they say whether a product is sustainable or not. The easy part is that you get to follow more conventional marketing guidelines. And so there's a little bit more of a framework to emulate than there is in a setting where you're not in old school, grungy, hippie, health food store settings that these products used to be found in. I feel like there wasn't necessarily a need for a framework, so maybe that doesn't change whether it's harder or easier.
Tony MIIA: And how much of this have you learned in the last five years? Or did you feel like you were aware of in 2018? B right. Like, so part of some of part of me assumes that there's been some learning curve yeah. Where you're like, oh, I was slamming my head against the wall for a while, and I now realize that there is this slightly more standard playbook, even with air quote, sustainable products. Or there's some things like, oh, I got to throw the playbook out and rewrite it because we're in this space that really hasn't had whatever kind of voice you've built.
Gillie: I'd say the first portion of that, the pulling these products that I already knew existed into the more popular realm and those kinds of challenges, I think I had a pretty good grasp on, because that was kind of the plan from the beginning.
Tony MIIA: Right?
Gillie: I knew the products existed. How do I get them in front of people who don't know they exist yet? That was always the goal, the adopting more conventional marketing strategies for less conventional products. I think I came to that more recently.
Tony MIIA: Interesting.
Gillie: I think I was trying to rewrite a book that didn't need to be.
Tony MIIA: Rewritten before the last honestly year or so.
Gillie: Yeah.
Tony MIIA: So maybe we'll take a second and assume that people haven't been following along since 2019. What did V one or V 0.1 of where look like? And if we can boil it down to a couple, what several kind of milestones or inflection points have most affected your trajectory? Right. So seems to me global goes without saying pandemic affected something in the trajectory. What happened before 2020 that might have modified how you were thinking about the world? Thinking about two to three major milestones from concept 0.1 or version 1.0.
Gillie: So when we were opened, it was a downtown tourist district boutique selling clothing and decor, and a lot of the functional daily use items that we carry. Not as broad a range as we carry now, but we were just doing a lot with a small budget and in a relatively small amount of space. We're in a smaller space now, but for considering that we were trying to cover what department stores do sure. In one boutique, for what it's worth.
Tony MIIA: The new space maybe feels bigger because it's taller.
Gillie: It is a lot taller.
Tony MIIA: It's a lot taller.
Gillie: We went from like, probably not even code tall ceilings to twelve foot ceilings.
Tony MIIA: So it does when you walk in, you're like, OOH, there's more space, it's.
Gillie: Just not on the ground. Yeah. And we do utilize the vertical space as much as possible for storage. Obviously no one can reach it.
Tony MIIA: And for what it's worth, where are you now?
Gillie: Now we've moved as of a year ago, we moved to West Asheville, which is for folks unfamiliar with Asheville, I call it the Locals downtown. It is another neighborhood of Asheville that is more residential than downtown. Currently less pedestrian, but still pretty heavily pedestrian by nature of being more residential. More residential. But we can walk to a grocery store now. And we're surrounded by coffee shops and sandwich shops and the kinds of places that make the ease of being in a space for 9 hours a day, five days a week more pleasant than being surrounded by kind of like boutiques and high end restaurants and things like that, which are not bad things to exist. They're just when that's your work environment, you're like, okay, what place am I going to overspend on lunch today? Or if I forgot my lunch, or things like that. It's a very different lifestyle. So in addition to it being a business move, it's also like a higher quality of life for everyone who works at ware in the new space. Even though at the time when we moved, none of us lived in West Nashville, we all lived downtown and we were still happier.
Tony MIIA: Yeah, that's a great note. Again, it circles back to the thread. So we're in West Asheville now. That's a big change. You were in downtown, you had a little bit of everything in 2018.
Gillie: Yes.
Tony MIIA: And now it's more.
Gillie: But what happened is, when we shut down for the Pandemic, we closed the store and we renovated it. And I had always wanted a refill component to the store. I didn't think Asheville was ready for it, and I didn't have the budget and or understanding of the processes around it when we first opened. So I don't know what I was waiting for, but I was waiting for something. And then we shut down for the Pandemic and I was like, this is what I was waiting for. clearanced. All the clothing clearanced, a lot of the decor and non functional pieces.
Tony MIIA: There were beautiful rugs as an example.
Gillie: There were rugs? Yeah, there were poofs. There were a lot more, like, there's art, things like that, and launched a very small version of literally just refillable versions of the products we already carried. We already carried some companies like Fillery out of Durham who had refill built into their business model. We just weren't accessing that yet. And so we just immediately that was our starting or, like, jumping off point, was just adding the refill options for the products we already carried and sold.
Tony MIIA: A lot of great, and we grew from there.
Gillie: And that was probably like, five things at the time.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. And you mentioned that you thought Asheville might not be ready for refill. How were you making your assumptions? And then what parts of whatever test you ran proved that there was more capacity than maybe you thought it was.
Gillie: Super anecdotal based primarily on the fact that the cities where I knew it was happening already were big. The Las and the New York's of the world and all over the UK at the time. But that wasn't our culture market our culture. So I was not just wasn't sure if we had the volume for it, and I wasn't sure if Ware had the volume, like the foot traffic volume for it. If we could start something that would immediately be successful and risk because there actually is a shelf life to soap and things like that. And I was like, what if we buy all this product in these bags and it just sits here and people are like, I'd rather get a new bottle. But we started getting questions about it, and the company we were selling is called Fillery. And people are like, well, does it can I refill it? And I'm like that's a good question. You can. Just not here. And so I realized I was sending folks to Fillory to have, like, mail order subscription plans. And I was like, this is getting silly. We sell this product, we should sell all of every version of this product. We should kind of continue on our mission in this way.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. Love it. Okay, so if I'm hearing maybe three major changes from the 2019 or so version of where it's a you're in a new spot, b you've simplified the breadth of offering and then increased the depth in the areas that you're paying attention to. And then it's pretty in on refill by way of or as an underline on the concept of we're going to focus on minimal waste.
Gillie: Yeah.
Tony MIIA: And so perhaps refill is the answer to this question, but what concepts by way of minimal waste have evolved for the business? Maybe none from when you started.
Gillie: Um, it was always such a big part of the mission. It was that it's more that just by nature of adding the refill station, we expanded our capacity to support people in that effort.
Tony MIIA: Perfect. And then the other half of the motto today is High Standards. How have the standards evolved over the last five years, if at all? And we know you've mentioned some of the many boxes that one might attempt to check off when looking at just sustainability. But I know that that's not the only set of boxes that you're paying attention to. So what do the standards look like?
Gillie: The standards on the sustainability side? The standards look like we're paying living wages. We're partnering with businesses that pay living wages regardless of where they're located. Living and thriving, ideally wages. They look like packaging materials and responsibility and packing materials. They look like supply chain production and functions all along the supply chain. They look like the location of the company. If we can find the same product closer to home, we will swap it out. Same product being of equal quality and function and checking all the other boxes and just happens to be close to home, which is not always, but we can often get closer than the easiest thing that we found. It looks like ingredients that are applicable to more people and minimize damage and waste wherever possible. So we almost always source vegan products. That is the case for two reasons. One, if we have an alternative that doesn't require large scale agriculture, why not? But also it broadens our market, right? So now we're serving anyone who wants this product. Not just folks who don't care about don't care about, but you know what I mean? Not just folks who aren't shopping with vegan values in mind. Sure. And that's just like all on the sustainability side, and I'm sure I'm missing some. We try to go small brands, small companies, whenever possible. I do consider that an economic portion of a sustainability consideration because small businesses are by nature of the way that they keep money local and the way that they tend to have smaller environmental impacts. They are sustainability considerations. The economics of an enterprise is a sustainability consideration. And then we look at things like what does it look like in your home? And do you want to look at that product every day? Which is a big dropping off point for a lot of these brands.
Tony MIIA: We lose a lot. You might have done well, might have done well, might have done well. And then what's it look like?
Gillie: The vast majority of we hit the point where we just made a form on our website for people to for vendors to apply because all we have to do is type in their URL and know that the branding doesn't work, so they're not going to be in the shop regardless of how many other boxes they check. And that is something that I think I've had some gentle and not so gentle pushback on from brands and other people saying, how can you say sustainability is the ultimate concern when you're so concerned about the superficial side of it as well? And my response is I actually don't care why someone buys a product from where. And I've said this on this podcast before. I don't care why someone buys a product from where. If they buy it because it looks nice, or if they buy it because it works well, or if they buy it because it's sustainably made, or if they buy it because it's vegan, if they buy it because they can refill it. We've added another box to that list of reasons that people would buy this product. And so by making it beautiful, in addition to functional and sustainable and all of the other things, we pull other people into this conversation that otherwise wouldn't be in it. And that's part of our mission, is that education piece. And so by nature of it being an aesthetic that more people buy into and the dominant aesthetic culture of the United States right now, it means, genuinely, we just have a bigger reach or more power to our reach anyway.
Tony MIIA: Sure. It's almost perhaps the inverse of the if it can be vegan, why wouldn't we have it be vegan?
Gillie: If it can be beautiful?
Tony MIIA: If it can be beautiful, why wouldn't we choose the beautiful option? It's just one fewer way to have someone opt out and say, exactly, oh, well, I'll get the other.
Gillie: Yeah.
Tony MIIA: Because the other thing is, at least I know it'll look good on the counter.
Gillie: Yeah. But if someone's buying it just because it's cute and popular, also great, they're not only giving money to a business that is doing good things with it. So I think hopefully they use it and they like it, and they buy it again and they've swapped something out in their life that was maybe more wasteful before. Who knows?
Tony MIIA: Hello. Are you watching on YouTube, listening on your favorite podcast player? If you're not on YouTube, perhaps consider it because behind us, you would notice that we are in an absolutely beautiful space, and that space is our seasoned sponsor, ernest Readymade Warehousing. And so if you're not familiar with Ernest, it is fantastic. I am joined here by my wife Sarah Ubertaccio, founder of QB Cucina and one of Ernest newest clients.
Sarah QB Cucina: Yeah, excited to be back on the podcast.
Tony MIIA: Great to have you back. Episode 110 if you haven't listened before, but what we want to talk about today is why you chose Ernest and what makes Ernest stand out, let's say, compared to finding a new office space in town to fulfill from as a very high level. Ernest is a 30,000 square foot facility on Sweden Creek, just south of Asheville. Huge facility, beautiful facility. Why did you choose to go with Ernest instead of any other place in Asheville?
Sarah QB Cucina: Yeah, well, I have a small growing business ecommerce. We sell pasta tools and Italian kitchenware, and we currently outgrew the space that we were in and really needed a different kind of space. And so I love Ernest. I love the fact that as we grow, Ernest can scale with us, so they have different sized co warehousing spaces. So if we grow bigger, we can just quickly move over to a different space within the same building. Which is a really huge time saver. I also really love that they have daily, sometimes multiple times a day pickups from Ups, FedEx, and USPS, so we don't have to worry about packages getting lost or stolen and our team doesn't have to drop them off at the post office. And it just saves us all a bunch of time and headache. And also they have temperature controlled rooms, which for a business like us, one of our products is pasta flour. It's really sensitive to temperature. This is really, really important for us to make sure that our products are secure and not getting damaged while they're being stored in our warehouse. And I love all the other amenities. I love they have a photography studio so we can quickly photograph our products. They have a full break room. They have coworking space that we're able to use for our meetings with team members and other people that may come to see us. And then just the sense of community being around other small businesses is something that we currently don't have. And I'm really, really looking forward to connecting with others here.
Tony MIIA: I love that. Ernestready.com, if you've not visited that before or you can check out Makingitanashville.com Ernest. And we have a bunch of information about the partnership we've built for this season, as well as some perhaps special discounts and incentives. If you happen to be an ecommerce business or the right fit for Ernest, you should definitely check out Makingintasheville.com Ernest. Ernest and back to the episode that makes sense to me. Awesome. So I think we're then in present day. So what are perhaps as we're thinking about ecommerce and as we're thinking about trying to grow that portion of your business, a couple of thoughts are coming to mind, or questions at the very least. What have you experienced in this transition to go from 0% of the business to 20% as perhaps the major oh, we hadn't accounted for that right, because you have a beautiful and I've always had a beautifully merchandised retail experience. What are parts of taking the business and making it more digital and ecommerce focused? What things have shown up as oof or biggest moments, biggest inflection points?
Gillie: So when we first opened, where we were using a different point of sale system, that was a big part of it. We were using lightspeed. And Lightspeed, for those unfamiliar, is a competitor to Shopify. However, where Lightspeed started in e commerce and adopted brick and mortar point of sale systems into their they acquired a business for that. Or maybe they just developed that internally. I'm actually not sure. For Shopify, Lightspeed started as a brick and mortar point of sale and acquired kind of the European version of Shopify in order to add e commerce to their capabilities. And it was terrible. And I don't know what it's at now, but for all of the things that Lightspeed did in the brick and mortar space, for inventory management, et cetera, that shopify still doesn't even compare to and reporting and things like that. It was so clunky on the e commerce side. It was like pulling teeth. And I tried to get like I had a friend help design a web page for it, and she had to learn an entire new language, coding language for it. And even then, she was like, I can't do any of the things I'd like to do to make this attractive. She was like, I can't even take money from you for this. This is too difficult to work with. Everything seemed like a hurdle with that, and it just was so difficult. And that was after I had overcome my initial thought of, maybe I'll add ecommerce someday, but I want to prove that where as a brick and mortar store is a viable business concept outside of ecommerce. And that was just kind of honestly, I couldn't tell you why that was. Now it's kind of a stubborn sticking.
Tony MIIA: Point, would you say ego, probably sort of pride.
Gillie: Yeah, I'm sure it was. I think I just had this idea of the way I had worked in downtown boutiques when I was younger. I just had this idea of traffic flow or foot traffic and business functionings that didn't end up being reality for me, but I couldn't really define them, I don't think, right now. Okay, but it felt like I needed to prove this first heard, and then so we actually were making the move to Shopify. Prior to March 2020, we had started the subscription for Shopify, but we're still operating on lightspeed. And we closed our doors on March 16. And within about, I think it was 48 hours, I had our entire catalog live on Shopify because as a store that sold soap during a pandemic, we were an essential business. And as a business that was able to operate, people didn't come into the store by any means. We shipped everything at that time, but we were able to fulfill orders, and I was running the business single handedly at this point. And so I was in the store every day packing up soap and shipping it out, and I was just getting a crash course in shopify. And so I think all that time during yeah, I honestly haven't probably credited kind of pandemic time business owner brain and kind of what those horizons looked like and what we were all considering to the real reason that I've embraced ecommerce in the way I have. But I would say again, that much like the marketing approach, I don't think I fully embraced kind of more conventional marketing concepts for wear. Until the last year, it's been a piecemeal acceptance heard.
Tony MIIA: So you're on shopify now? On shopify, the SKU total has skyrocketed ballooned just grown?
Gillie: Yeah, by nature of having a lot of smaller things, although it's bigger, I think it's just grown steadily. When you're selling apparel, you. Have like sizes and colors and things and that's messy.
Tony MIIA: Sure. Okay. Yeah. When thinking about, let's just say give you a couple of months. Q Four 2020 to we're about to be Q Four 2023. I imagine your experience with shopify has evolved.
Gillie: Yeah, I mean, we pretty quickly were utilizing a lot of its capabilities that were relevant to this business and have since added clavio and a number of apps to do lots of different things from like subscriptions that's new. And part of me embracing conventional business practices and trying to think what other things? Like back in stock notifications. We have all kinds of apps on our website now that just weren't part of the picture. When? Three years ago. Not even close. So many apps.
Tony MIIA: Don't mind me if I double click. Right. So Fabio, is an email infrastructure primarily CRM add on is the right way to say it. Or just email. How would you think about it?
Gillie: Email marketing.
Tony MIIA: Email marketing. Email marketing could mean a lot of different things.
Gillie: They do SMS as well. We just don't use that.
Tony MIIA: You do SMS. They do, they do. I was going to say I have not been texted by where that I'm aware of.
Gillie: Maybe here's another sticky hold on. I'm going to try not to do that.
Tony MIIA: For as long as I know marketers will break text messaging. I'm confident in it. In the near term, it is the highest open rates of any possible, if.
Gillie: Only to delete it.
Tony MIIA: If only to delete it. If only to no longer have the notification.
Gillie: Exactly.
Tony MIIA: Message. But what an opportunity. Because you can be sure that an email is delivered, let's say, and you can get an open you can get.
Gillie: A false open on an email.
Tony MIIA: You can't false. Exactly. There's no current way that I'm aware of.
Gillie: You also can't get a confirmed open confirmation on a text.
Tony MIIA: Correct. Unless they have that set up, which is a weird thing. You'd have to be like sending it from an Imessage account, right, or WhatsApp? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's click into email marketing, if you don't mind. Education. Education is my guess for how you.
Gillie: Think about email marketing content.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. How are you thinking about emails today? Are there any specific email techniques, concepts, things that have shown up over the last three years that stand out to you?
Gillie: We hired someone in the pandemic, like store was open to the world. I'm trying to pinpoint what time, what year this might be. Would have been either late 2020 or early 2021 when we hired someone that I was like, oh, I'm just going to let this person run our marketing. I'm not going to do any more of it. And at no fault of her own, realized that was not something that worked. And then she ended up not sticking around for very long because she went to a marketing agency. But in the meantime, she got us onto clavio and immediately set up a bunch of flows that we have. For the most part, the content of those flows has changed, but those flows have remained important to welcome series. And since currently we're working on following up on product purchases with care instructions and kind of unintuitive use ideas and things like that because a lot of our products are multipurpose. We sell a dish block, but it also works really well for cleaning rugs, like spot cleaning rugs and things like that. So things like that, that you don't always get the opportunity to, like I said, pack all that information into every touch point.
Tony MIIA: Sure.
Gillie: Whether it's the website, even if you put a ton of text in your product listing or the conversation you have in the store because people only have so much bandwidth. And so just finding ways to get people more information about products we carry is yeah, you're right. Education. Education, I love it. And that looks like a lot of different things, but flows are a big one. We're currently parsing out our email list. We realized that. So Clevio gives you open rates and things like that, but they also give you sales attributed to this email rates, which, in a world of brick and mortar is kind of a messy business because if that person was coming into the store anyway that day and their phone happened to automatically open it. And they spend money. Doesn't matter what they buy. Even if you didn't market it to them via that email, that's going to go to that. It's going to get attributed to that.
Tony MIIA: Interesting.
Gillie: And so we have to take that with a grain of salt. But what we've done recently that I think has helped with clarity and I say recently, like, this will be the second time where today, tomorrow morning will be the second time an email goes out. Where we've done this is we send the exact same email, unless it makes sense to change some of the words to non locals and to locals, to people we've deemed locals on our email list, whether because we know for sure and we've tagged them as that in the store or they've spent money in store. X number of times in the past year. So either they're local or they're here a lot.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. Which welcome.
Gillie: Yeah.
Tony MIIA: Same.
Gillie: Yeah.
Tony MIIA: Cool. And with the purpose of giving yourself more clarity on the effectiveness, overall understanding.
Gillie: If we're going to grow in the ecom environment, how much of our marketing is actually affecting people's online purchasing that is not staying in this area.
Tony MIIA: Awesome. By way of list building, which is there are two primary ways someone buys a thing, someone opts in to hear from you. What does the opt in experience look like on where today is there a call to action for something other than.
Gillie: Yeah, we do a 10%.
Tony MIIA: Okay.
Gillie: And that gets used. We had nothing for a very long time because I was of the mind that and would maintain that, but that our margins are just not what conventional retail is. And can we afford to give everybody 10%? I think the reality is can we afford to not do it once if that's going to promote an initial purchase? Because the benchmark for customer retention so like a repeat customer, it's like 35, I think is the industry standard and we're in the mid to high 60s.
Tony MIIA: Sick.
Gillie: So we just have to get that first sale.
Tony MIIA: Yeah.
Gillie: And our issue is like having a bigger audience and making that first sale. Our issue is actually just not after that. We don't have to stress about that.
Tony MIIA: Luckily, I believe that that's true. I see you and this is not a perfect parallel, but I see you as like some version of Huckberry or some version of, like I forget what the thing is. Where you get clothes sent every month or quarter look, box, whatever it is, where it's like in a world where I am faced with a million decisions all the time, I would love to just outsource it to wear. Love to outsource it to wear. And so in a lot of ways, I can imagine that once, for whatever reason someone chooses to purchase with you, you are in a position to become the expert, the resource, the sounding board, whatever it is, for decision making on products that live in a home.
Gillie: Well, another thing I learned sorry, let's.
Tony MIIA: Finish where you're going with no. What that would mean is based on that assumption that you'd have a high repeat customer list and probably average order values that go up over time, perhaps, or unless refills are just like small but continuous, I'd imagine that people go, oh, no. Yeah, we just keep going back to where when we need to make a choice like this.
Gillie: Yeah. And I think related to that is something I learned fairly recently or realized fairly recently that maybe I learned gradually in the past couple of years, more than ever before, is, I think, in apparel retail and more aesthetically driven retail, or primarily aesthetically like home decor and apparel and things like that. The person doing the buying is often especially a small shop like this where it's one person doing most of the things. They are their own target market, they're their own avatar. And I realized fairly recently that I've never been mine because our boxes are so broad that we have to check our ideal customer. It's like three can't be willing to do all the things that I'm willing to do to get that information. Otherwise they don't need me. Yeah, they don't need where if they don't mind spending their entire life doing research before they buy anything.
Tony MIIA: Yeah, there aren't many of those people.
Gillie: And there aren't many of those people, which is great, but it also changes the paradigm for me when I'm thinking about do I want this thing? Or do I not? Because it's actually not just whether or not I want this thing. There are people out there who are not as far along as I am in their let's use the kind of GZ terminology, sustainability, journey. And what about those people? I still want to draw those people in because I want them closer to where we are, but they're not there yet. So how do I shop for them?
Tony MIIA: This is so interesting. And I don't normally do this on the podcast. Where my mind is going is like a parallel business called Gilly's List where all of the places that you'vetted that would work, but there's a place in Raleigh would work, but there's a place in Charlote Woodwork, but there's a place in Greenville that can provide the thing. Like, I can imagine two sided customer base where people want to outsource their brain to you to make local decisions for them in my friends in Oakland. Right. So, like, where in Oakland should I go? Let's check Gilly's list for Oakland businesses. Right. And so it's like maybe where in the perfectly sustainable future isn't fulfilling against the orders from Oakland.
Gillie: Sure.
Tony MIIA: But there's a two sided marketplace where the businesses might be paying you and the customers. While this doesn't seem like it would be a customer paying process, like opt in and get connected to the resources that you spend so much time accruing. This is very interesting. But the point is, yes, you do not seem to be your perfect avatar. But I'm imagining in my mind, like a Venn diagram, multiple concentric circles that aren't perfectly centered. Somebody cares, really? Like, aesthetic first and then sustainability or like aesthetic first and then what is my wife currently thinking about? Like hormone disrupting?
Gillie: Endocrine disrupting?
Tony MIIA: Endocrine disrupting.
Gillie: Ingredients.
Tony MIIA: Ingredients. So it's like those are very similar people, but maybe not the same person.
Gillie: Yeah, absolutely.
Tony MIIA: So it's like sustainability isn't exactly hormone disruptors.
Gillie: And they're still probably not shopping at that health food store that I found the product in in 1996.
Tony MIIA: And they're going to Google stuff and they want their mobile first and it needs to have a good look and it needs to make sense. And they'll transact after a good ad that they see twice. But what business in that space is going to run ads to get in front of them? Interesting. Okay. You are not your perfect customer avatar. And I think that's a really interesting.
Gillie: Insight and I think it's not very novel concept for a lot of industries, but I think in very small retail it is.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. Because you're effectively like for Sarah QB cucina she's her customer, right.
Gillie: She's importing the things she yeah, yeah.
Tony MIIA: And I get and like, there is still some version of like, let me outsource decision making to you, Sarah, but.
Gillie: It'S let me outsource importing to you exactly decision making as well. People are vetting for sure through sarah. But also, they just don't have access to those products.
Tony MIIA: Right.
Gillie: In my case, people have access to these. Just it's just a lot of work to figure out which one to buy.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. And I opt out of that work often.
Gillie: I'm here for you, pal.
Tony MIIA: For that, I'm so grateful. We interrupt this episode with a horror story, an e commerce horror story that my wife Sarah Upertachio, experienced. But I'm going to preface, she's not alone. You might be an e commerce store owner. You might have a friend who's an e commerce store owner. And this story is universal, though.
Gillie: Specific.
Tony MIIA: Sarah, please take it away.
Sarah QB Cucina: Yeah, well, I own a small business called QB Kuchina, and we sell Italian pasta tools and kitchenware. And in our previous space, where we were fulfilling from one day, my employee was packaging up a bunch of packages to ship via Ups, and Ups did not pick up from this location. And so she was going to package them up and take them out to the car and drive them to Ups. Well, it was raining a lot that.
Tony MIIA: Day, as it tends to here in Asheville.
Sarah QB Cucina: Yes, as it tends to here in Asheville. And on her way, taking the dolly out to her car, some packages flew off. The dolly were soaking wet. She was soaking wet. And then she had to repackage them, like, go back up to the office and repackage them because they were ruined and couldn't be shipped out.
Tony MIIA: And A, I'm so sorry to hear that story. That's a heartbreaker. Now you don't have to worry about that happening anymore because you work at Ernest Readymade Warehouse and they have daily pickups and deliveries from FedEx, Ups, and USPS.
Sarah QB Cucina: Yes. It's like suddenly we have a valet and concierge at our fingertips, which is amazing. They have daily pickups from all the major shipping carriers, and they have a huge loading dock, so we can receive our shipments very easily, 24 hours of the day, every day of the week, which is amazing.
Tony MIIA: To learn more about Ernest Readymade Warehouse, visit makingintashville.com Forward slash Ernest E-R-N-E-S-T. We have all sorts of information about this season, about our sponsor, Ernest Readymade, and offer a very special incentive for those of you who are small business owners in Asheville who could benefit from this facility. Back to the episode. Amazing. Okay, so that was email marketing.
Gillie: No SMS.
Tony MIIA: Let's take that no SMS for now. Let's take that out.
Gillie: We'll talk in a year.
Tony MIIA: You've also mentioned, and I'm thinking ecommerce first. So there's a couple of concepts. One is you've gone pretty hard in social media, or at least on again, off again relationship with some powerful social content. I see you as a voice for the people, of the people, especially local, like saying some hard truths on social media. How has that evolved over the last couple of years? And specifically with respect to attempting to drive sales in store or on Ecommerce.
Gillie: That ebb and flow that you've sensed is just me burning out and realizing I, at my core, hate social media. It was very late to the Instagram.
Tony MIIA: But at your best are like very sharp teeth, toothed, and I want to say a killer, but it's not the right word. But you're good.
Gillie: Thank you.
Tony MIIA: When you're on, it's as good as it gets.
Gillie: The thing I care about that is relevant to that is words. I think it's because I'm a strong writer and that I'm comfortable saying. And when I can convert that to I'm actually not even a very strong speaker. Because if you weren't driving the trajectory of this conversation, we'd still be talking about either the first thing or some weird tangent of the first thing that we spoke about. Because I just have a really hard time with storytelling when it is live and verbal. But the nature of social media usually allows me to do some hybridized version of either having written myself a draft of it or knowing I only have 30 seconds. That helps give me 30 minutes to an hour, and we're in trouble and I need you. But the 32nd time limits and things like that. But what is that driven by? That's what you asked. I'm trying to channel my inner tone right now.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. Have you seen in the Klavio type example, have you seen ticks in sales after compelling social posts?
Gillie: Yes. However, yeah, I mean, we see big difference in our website traffic after we do something that goes that gets any level of popularity on the Internet, regardless of what channel of the Internet it's on. And that by nature of mathematics, typically ends in sales. You get in front of more people, get fewer people further along the sales funnel, you get more sales. So yes, but I can't always point to where they came from.
Tony MIIA: Sure.
Gillie: Sometimes I can and then sometimes I can't.
Tony MIIA: So social is part of it. Is it overly strategic, underlying strategic, reaction based?
Gillie: Our email marketing is far more strategic than our social media heard. Our social media often just echoes what's happening in our emails or something that's temporarily interesting in the store or relevant just to locals. And I need to get it out on a one off, like, hey, we have this one thing left, or hey, we're out of this one thing. FYI to the people who are in here regularly, those people tend to be people who also follow us pretty closely on the Internet, on Instagram specifically, so that kind of thing. But I used to be a lot more strategic or want more strategy around social media, and a number of things have happened. My personal Facebook account has been I still haven't figured this out, I still haven't fixed it, but I've spent many, many cumulative hours attempting has been flagged internally by Facebook as high risk for something or other. So it cannot be attached to a Meta business account.
Tony MIIA: Brutal.
Gillie: Which means we can't do any marketing from Meta. I can boost posts, I can't run an ad, Facebook or Instagram, which is really messy and really ties your hands if you want to do true digital marketing strategy in that way. So we're pretty limited in that regard. However, it has forced me to be more interested in email marketing and that has had, honestly, a quicker return. I think I'm getting close to revisiting the meta issue, but every time, it's like a new the level of overwhelm that I find myself in once I start going down that rabbit hole. Because every time, I have to like, if you've ever connected a Meta business account to a retail store, it is like there are seven layers to hell, but there are probably 15 layers to this endeavor. And Dante couldn't.
Tony MIIA: Yeah, and that's so brutal because if you're being reductionist, there are three things to pay attention to when it comes to marketing as a business owner. Maybe four. Four? One is in person stuff human beings together. The other, excuse me, email. We've talked about that to some extent. And the other two is Facebook. Google. Facebook. Google, right. Like that's it. Those are the four things to pay attention to. And you are now I mean, there's a stool there. You have a great in person, you have a strong email list and the potential and Facebook and Google are connected.
Gillie: Yeah, they're not deeply they're not as connected as Facebook and Instagram, sure. But there is a strong overlap.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. Those circles are closer together than the other two and that is brutal. Okay, empathy. If anybody's hearing this yeah, let's crowdsource connections to Facebook. The next thoughts I'm thinking about. So we had a little bit of email marketing, a little bit of social, which feels perhaps light. I know in the past you've done a ton on educating brands to attempt to sell into businesses like yours. You mentioned lightly a form seemingly by way you can quickly discern whether or not these potential brands fit with wear. What's your relationship as standards have increased? What is your relationship with dealing with brands? Inbound or outbound?
Gillie: Inbound. Meaning people reach out to bring them. Oh, they're reaching out to us, we're reaching out to them. I think the whole landscape of retailer vendor that's kind of what you'd call this roles in a scenario, retailer vendor relationships is markedly different in a world that in the current world of Fair, which is you're probably familiar with Fair but for those who aren't, I don't know how you would have missed at this point if you're an ecom. Yeah, but they have more or less or taken a massive chunk out of the need to go to in person trade shows for physical merchandise.
Tony MIIA: For sure. And we actually talked about it a couple of episodes back with botanical bones who uses fair to do some wholesaling cool.
Gillie: Yeah, fair was very small. It was called something different when wear first opened and I don't remember what. And the very funny thing is it's.
Tony MIIA: Called what I was going to say foul.
Gillie: No, I can't remember what it was. It was very different, but it was fair is what I almost called ware because it means to make in French the way they spell it with e on the end. And it's also kind of a play on words with a craft fair.
Tony MIIA: Yeah, craft fair event, which is what.
Gillie: They'Re going for too.
Tony MIIA: Correct.
Gillie: Really glad I didn't do that. Yeah, I sent what I thought was a joking. I had a really good relationship when that branding changed with my rep at Fair. And I was like, I don't even remember his name. Call him Colin. I was like, OOH, Colin, y'all are lucky that I didn't go with fair. I'd be coming for you now. And they're so massive that's not even funny. They'd have me on a silver platter.
Tony MIIA: So they do seem to have taken a huge portion of the I mean.
Gillie: To the point okay. Oh, yeah. Where I was going with that is the way they control the relationships between brand, between vendors and retailers is wild because I as a retailer, no longer have to reach out to a company and communicate with a person at all. I can online shop for wholesale product like I would online shop for clothing. And they get an order and they're like, oh, I guess we're in a new store now.
Tony MIIA: Yeah.
Gillie: And for that very reason, a lot of vendors are starting to pull out. I don't know about a lot, but vendors are we're starting to get communication from vendors who are pulling out of Fair because they want more control over where they're showing up.
Tony MIIA: Sure.
Gillie: And that's valid beyond zip code exclusivity. They want a better idea of how their brand pairs with how it's going.
Tony MIIA: To be merchandise, how it's going to.
Gillie: Be merchandise pairs with the store. And that's obviously not an issue we've ever come across. We are pretty careful about those things. But I can see how businesses who have maybe a less clear idea of who their audience is might, in the process of trying to figure that out, be more experimental than a brand wants to be on the receiving end of sure.
Tony MIIA: And then on the inverse of that is as a vendor, to use your language, on the vendor side, it does seem like the convenience has a price. Right. And there is a meaningful portion of top line that is taken.
Gillie: There is. If they find you through Fair, I.
Tony MIIA: Think it's 30% something crazy like that. Yeah. If you wanted to win the favor of a brand, you say, hey, I'm selling the Fair, sending you an email, send me your link exactly. And I'll save you 10%.
Gillie: A lot of brands are putting it on their website now. So we'll try to go to their website and find it.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. That's wild.
Gillie: It's rare that I actually find a brand because of Fair. Got it to be totally fair, mostly because I know it's pretty small. The refill zero waste product space is very small, and wear is also pretty small, but not the smallest in this arena. And so it's pretty uncommon that someone who's gotten we get reached out to a lot of times, or I've already found them, they're on my radar. If I'm not on theirs before Fair is even in the picture, or before I realize they're on Fair.
Tony MIIA: Heard one of the questions, and I can imagine this being something I want to over preface it. No jinxing available here, right? So we're not jinxing anything. But I remember at some point there was perhaps a post that you made about refill businesses going under in the last several years. And so there was some like they it showed up more in my world from zero to multiple. And then I did get a sense that some had shut down. Do you have any guesses as to what missed for the ones that are no longer with us and what lessons can be learned?
Gillie: I cannot understate the importance or the significance of margins in a sustainable business model. When you start paying more for labor ingredients, packaging time in all kinds of forms, shapes, forms, and fashions smaller scales, all the ways that things get more expensive, which, as soon as you start talking about sustainability, almost every input does. The ability to charge enough to sustain a business on that product, whether it's direct consumer or wholesale or retail, is so important. And I think it's something that has a morality attached to it in the sustainability world. Like, people want to prove that their margins are small as if that makes them ethically superior, morally superior. And what it means is that they don't have a cushion when economic downturn is around. And I'm not saying where is different. I think I've been very firm about our margin, and it's meant that there's brands we haven't carried because they've wanted more control over the retail price and they're only open to bringing down or able to bring down the wholesale price so much. So the margin was well below something we could afford. And I've passed on brands because of that, largely because I can't pay for our physical store and the maintenance of that and the salaries at a living wage in Asheville and the R D of testing out of new products. I can't cover all the things that make wear what it is if we don't have a sufficient margin. And I don't think that that is something that many businesses in this very niche, part of this already pretty small industry have put the emphasis on that would allow them to get through the last three years particularly. But the reason I think that is hitting everyone now is because all of the different we had government support of different kinds for a while and then we had people couldn't travel and so they were spending money on things or they couldn't go to concerts, so they're spending money on things. And that affected how much money retailers were seeing across industry expectations. And then now small retailers are seeing across the board. It's not just refill. Shops are seeing a downturn in sales traffic. And that hits those who have the smallest margins, the hardest. They have the least insulation from those experiences.
Tony MIIA: That makes a lot of sense to me. If there was a target to, I guess, squirrel away, what do you try to target?
Gillie: We try to target the industry standard, which is 100% markup heard.
Tony MIIA: Yeah, there's not a lot of not a lot of room. Not a lot of room, no. Especially when you're trying to do stuff right. And so that leads me to a new segment, new concept segment. Yeah, these things have made the cut. If you're not watching on YouTube, we will do our best to describe some of the products here, just if you could maybe pick one or two and talk me through it. This looks like mints. How about we talk about the things that looks like a jar of mints?
Gillie: It does look like a jar of mints. It is a jar of toothpaste tablets, which are a liquid free and therefore tube and kind of liquid adjacent, packaging free alternative to toothpaste.
Tony MIIA: So pop one of those in and be chew it. Chew it.
Gillie: By chewing it, you create the paste and you just brush your teeth like normal. But it's in a little glass jar and there's a month serving. Assuming a responsible person brushes their teeth twice a day, you get one month use out of one jar. And then in front of that, we've got the commercially compostable pouch that you could sign up for a subscription to refill that if you purchase this at home, wherever in the country you are, you can wear specifically save 10%, get this package in the mail once a month.
Tony MIIA: It fills that jar perfectly fun, commercially compostable.
Gillie: And that's kind of what a lot of this is. We've got a jar of laundry powder here, and behind it we've got a high number post consumer recycled paper bag full of the exact same amount of laundry powder. So you can initially buy this glass jar of laundry powder, or you can start with the bag. If you've got your own container at home, whatever works. And you can sign yourself up for a subscription or not. But we're trying to figure out ways as often as possible. We're trying to make the refill experience available to folks who don't live near refill shops, which in many, in most cases, both for cost and sustainability purposes, means eliminating or minimizing liquids.
Tony MIIA: It seems. To me, part of that is weight. Shipping.
Gillie: Shipping is expensive and it's expensive in part because it takes more gas to ship something that's heavier than to move something that's heavier than something that's lighter. And so you pay more to ship liquids. And, oh, by the way, if a product that is liquid versus its non liquid equivalent, the difference is water, but then it's the emulsifiers to make sure the water and the non water stay bound. Then it's stabilizers and things to help keep it shelf stable and those preservatives and things like that, you end up with a lot of ingredients that are not necessary to the function of that product.
Tony MIIA: As soon as you add water, Interesting. And also by net result would also mean, my guess, volume increases the volume. And those are the two shipping.
Gillie: Exactly.
Tony MIIA: Equation.
Gillie: Absolutely.
Tony MIIA: Base and weight.
Gillie: Yeah. So here we're looking at shower streams don't ever really come as a liquid, so that's not relevant. But toothpaste and a bar of shampoo and a powdered laundry detergent and we've got these little concentrated pods of cleaning fluid. For this case. It's all purpose cleaner. And so you pop that into this 16 ounce bottle, it has to be mixed with 16oz of water and you shake it vigorously and you've got your All Purpose cleaner, but you've purchased something that can get to you in the mail with a regular stamp.
Tony MIIA: Yeah, post stamp.
Gillie: So we're trying to figure out ways of making refill sustainability minimal waste. And most of this packaging is curbside recyclable. Yeah, not the compostable bag, but we can figure that out with folks who would rather have that.
Tony MIIA: Sure. And how are you attempting to solve for the subscriptionability? Subscription renewing because it seems like to me one of the best things in business would be being able to forecast future revenue. So that's the question that all businesses are trying to solve for is like, what does the future hold? Most don't have an answer. Software businesses are the closest to knowing because they can say, well, on average, 2% of our customers churn, 10% of our customers churn and on average they stick around 18 months, 24 months, 36 months. We now can see into the future with some version of truth. How are you thinking about building a subscription engine in the business?
Gillie: I think it answers that question part. Right. Like if you know that 15 people are going to buy this All Purpose Cleaner for their subscriptions next month, next time you restock, that's at least 15 that you know you have to buy. And then the ones that we're going to go out the door in a more organic fashion. And so it helps, it informs purchasing, it informs cash flow expectations and revenue predictions. And there's almost no better way to support a small business. I know a lot of people look towards business cards, sorry, gift cards, when people talk about supporting small businesses and crunch times. We've had a lot of conversations around gift cards, I think, and the larger small business kind of Internet conversations over the last few years. But one step better than that is not as opposed to giving a business a chunk of money for which you're going to make good on at some undetermined time, which in some cases makes a ton of sense, like a gift. It's a responsible way to give a gift. However, if you're doing it to support a small business, an alternative is either buying a thing so they're not holding on to something that could disappear from their hands later, or a subscription, which means that they know you're coming back every month. They know that they don't have to sell to you, they don't have to stress about that one sale, that one sale is taken care of. Even if you knew you were going to make that sale, now they know you're going to make that sale. And so it's a really great way from a small business perspective, if you're looking to support them, that's one way to do it. Outside of that, just from like a regular business operations and financial projections and it's really wonderful if it takes off. We have not gone super hard on marketing at this point, mostly because I was unsure about there's a lot of software you have to figure out to make it smooth. I'm not sure we're 100% there yet, but there's a lot of things that need ironing out. But some of those things can only get ironed out once people are subscribed. And as we grow, we'll figure it out.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. Wow. Two thoughts. And they're probably just me being creative and or silly. Sure. Do you have anything to do with or have you considered at all types of cadences? So seems to me that the toothbrush monthly makes sense. It's like that is the capacity. How do you attempt to communicate, hey, this is a pound of dishwashing detergent or laundry detergent. That'll be about a month. Do you want to start at a month? Do you want to start every two months? Do you want to increase?
Gillie: We can't really for things like laundry detergent where people could have eight people in their household, they could be one person in their household. That's not a thing we can determine. So we have a lot of different cadences available to people cool on their own, built, that kind of figure it out. But for things like toothpaste tablets, where we know that is one serving for one person for one month, they're on month increments. You can buy multiple and have them delivered every other month or whatever. But same with the toothbrush heads. We know how long hygienically you're supposed to keep a toothbrush head. Those are on. And these are like sonicare plastic free alternatives like Sonicare heads specifically. And so we know how long those are supposed to last from a hygiene standpoint. So things like that. Some things have very firm, sometimes not perfect.
Tony MIIA: So that was going to be the inverse. So it's like communicating how much they should buy and then the other is once they get a sense of how much they should buy, it's like how frequently should they buy it. Right, so it's like buying we have a family of two. We can buy one of these every 15 days and ship it every 15 days. Or we can buy two six yeah. And be ready for we're one quarter of the year. We're getting shipments every quarter.
Gillie: Yeah, we've left that up to the discretion of the buyer.
Tony MIIA: But they have the ability to say, don't send it every month, send it every two months.
Gillie: Yeah. They have the ability to go in and say skip this month, specifically.
Tony MIIA: Great clarity. So is it built on the assumption that there's going to be a monthly reorder and they go in and skip months?
Gillie: We have built different structures for different timelines, and then we apply those products to those timelines. So we've got monthly ones and certain products apply to those. We've got bimonthly and quarterly things that you would just realistically not ever buy that often. And we read certain products applied to those. And that would be separate subscriptions. Because you can't have multiple timelines on the same subscription. That's just the nature of that app. I don't know if different apps are different, but Fascinating Shopify has just added a subscription feature internally, so we're going to take a look at that and see if that makes sense. Currently we use loop. I'm neutral on loop right now.
Tony MIIA: Heard last line of questions. Not true. Second to last line of straight last. I'll say deep, perhaps line of questions. Is there anything else that you're really paying attention to headed into Q four? 2023 and next year it seems like you've communicated ecommerce is going to be prioritized refills, pushed harder perhaps and further. What else are we thinking about?
Gillie: A wholesale line? I wasn't sure if I was going.
Tony MIIA: To say that.
Gillie: It'S what I've wanted to do since I opened wear. The whole point of me opening Wear was because I wanted to be in product development.
Tony MIIA: What fun. What fun. Oh, what fun it is to interesting. Okay, so is there even loose approximations on timeline on what that looks like?
Gillie: No, at this point it is either. There are different lines in the funding pond at the moment. If one of those were to take, it would be an ASAP scenario that we would get things going and would take maybe two months from point of inception or investment.
Tony MIIA: Yeah.
Gillie: If none of those happen, it's a 2024 thing.
Tony MIIA: Do you want to talk about funding things on a podcast with Tony? Like now? Yeah. What are we thinking? Have you ever done any kind of I know there was initial friends family that we talked about in the first podcast.
Gillie: Since then, it's all been debt, debt.
Tony MIIA: Okay.
Gillie: The occasional additional buy in of equity from friends and family. But aside from that okay, so what.
Tony MIIA: Are you looking at now?
Gillie: I actually don't know that I can talk about. Okay. But it would be a friends and family type investment from someone who's unsure if that money is going to be available to them in that way.
Tony MIIA: Interesting.
Gillie: So that's how that would happen if.
Tony MIIA: Someone was like, I absolutely loved this story, I love her. How do I get in touch? I want to buy a chunk of voice. Are you open to funding or are you specific on these people that you already know as the funding pool?
Gillie: I would talk to somebody.
Tony MIIA: Cool.
Gillie: The cold emails I've gotten have clearly.
Tony MIIA: Been like, yeah, hello, I come from very wealthy family.
Gillie: Or like, yeah, we know about investment. What do you know about investment? Let us invest. The family business is an investment banking firm, so buy. Which does not mean I have access to endless capital because FINRA but in the SEC. But it means that I do at least know what a red flag is.
Tony MIIA: Sure. That's so funny. Yeah. Send us your actually, I want you.
Gillie: To reach out to Tony and Tony.
Tony MIIA: Will reach out to me if please do.
Gillie: Oh, how funny that would be.
Tony MIIA: I could see the email coming in. I would love to be a fly on the wall. Very fascinated.
Gillie: Well, yes, and the alternative is organically paying for it from revenue. And that would be starting a lot smaller. That would be starting a lot smaller.
Tony MIIA: And now it seems to me and I don't want to make any big assumptions, but it seems to me the house brand has always been like the profit center in most retailers. And there are some interesting numbers that I've seen or heard over the years about whatever would be like the ingles version of the thing. Everything else is like loss leaders. If anyone buys the ingles version, it's.
Gillie: Covered six of them.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. They've made all their money. So it seems to me that you might have five years worth of data around which products you should start with.
Gillie: Yeah. And that's how we would start. And that's the idea, is we know what moves well in this context. And so even folks who I think I've started looking at it recently as a way of franchising without franchising.
Tony MIIA: Interesting.
Gillie: So it's like having a store within a store. If people know that these items sell well at wear and they can buy into them all they've now got, it's a way for them to not have to do the research either.
Tony MIIA: Outsource it to Gillieslist.
Gillie: Yeah, exactly.
Tony MIIA: Co uk.com. Yeah. Interesting. And then last question, and this is not last question before the last questions, terms of loose check size, if there were one. What makes this a I'll start and we can have it theoretically for holiday 2023. If someone you said it was about magic wand, it happened today.
Gillie: Magic wand had happened today.
Tony MIIA: Would be tens of thousands.
Gillie: Yeah. About 75 to do it the way I want to do it. We could probably do it for 50. Yeah, I think I could do it for 50, but I'd like to do it at 75 based on the things that I wouldn't make it smoother later on.
Tony MIIA: Okay. Make your emails out to Tony at making it in Asheville. If you have reason to believe that you are that investor or series of investors, making It in Asheville is starting. We're going to do a roll up vehicle. Very standard. Very standard.
Gillie: This is the most professional.
Tony MIIA: I love it. Yeah. Cool. So the last actual last line of questions is if people fell in love with the story, fell in love with you, how would they find you on the internet to connect?
Gillie: Aside from Tinder?
Tony MIIA: There you go. Keep swiping.
Gillie: Actually, keep swiping. If you find me, tell me, because that's a problem.
Tony MIIA: Yeah. Your image and like someone's getting a lot of catfishing.
Gillie: You and we need to talk. They can find me at they can find where at howdy@whereavl.com they can find the website is whereavl.com I did that backwards. AVL. Like Asheville's airport code. We are on Instagram at where AVL? I think it's probably pretty similar for Facebook and TikTok.
Tony MIIA: And we'll have links to all of those things, mostly on the internet. Yeah.
Gillie: Or you can find us in West Asheville at seven nine seven Haywood Road, suite 101. Asheville scale on two days. Come see us.
Tony MIIA: Perfect. That was podcast. Thank you so much for being here.