#226 - Courtney Klein: Storq - Maternity & Apparel. Going Niche To Win Big

What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Courtney Klein, who's the co founder of Stork. So Courtney, why don't you kick us off, tell us a little bit about the brand that you've built with Stork, the products that you offer, and all about the business that you're building.

Sure. So I am the co founder of Stork, as you mentioned, and we sell maternity, nursing and parenthood apparel and accessories.

Cool. So why don't you kick us off and tell us a little bit more about when you guys started the brand, a little bit of the inspiration behind the brand. What gave you conviction that this was an opportunity that you wanted to pursue?

Yeah, sure. So my background is actually in digital strategy, so I was a partner at a digital design agency in New York and needed to move west. And when I got out here, I thought I would stay in client services, but very quickly realized that it was a great opportunity for me to start doing something completely different. And as part of that strategy, background ethnography was always a big part of my work. And so I also happened to be at that age where a lot of friends and family were starting to have babies to talk about parenthood. And I kept hearing this refrain over and over again from people, which was, there's nothing in this space that speaks to me. And I didn't have any children at the time. Now I have two, but I was kind of going into it blind. And as I started digging and looking at the statistics and the demographics, it was really fascinating.

So more children are being born, and again, if you live in an urban area, this won't surprise you, but more children are being born to women over 30 than ever before in American history. When women give birth later and stay in the workforce longer, they have more money to spend because their incomes are usually higher. And so also they have different needs. When you're having a baby in your thirty s and you're established and you're in the workforce when you're younger, in your 20s, those are totally different needs. So as we started digging into it, I realized there was a real market opportunity to address what we now call millennials, but the millennial parents, and looking at what kind of things they cared about when it came to the clothing that they wore and that the apparel that they used. And now that I have children, I think a lot of this is borne out, which is as soon as you become pregnant, it's like this monumental shift. It's a super exciting time, but it's also a time when your entire identity changes. And what was out there in the market was largely cheap, mass market and kind of assumed that when you became pregnant, you were this sunny, happy, shiny, glowing person.

And that wasn't the narrative that everyone was experiencing. So my partner and I, Grace, we scanned all sorts of moms groups. We recruited ladies to talk to people to talk to who were pregnant and just said, what are your pain points with the clothing that you're wearing? How does this category make you feel? What could be better about this? What are the key items that you're missing from your closet that you wish you had? And that was kind of the very beginning seed of the company was, okay, we're going to start this company that helps pregnant people and parents maintain their identity and style. And so from there, we created these four pieces, which were the capsule collection. And we had this idea that these are the only four things you really need in your closet when you are pregnant. And that was a tank top, a pair of leggings, a skirt and pair of legging tape and a skirt. Oh my gosh, why am I not? And a dress. I'm like, I know why.

Because there's a product change that's happening and I've already moved beyond, which is hilarious. So those four products, that was 2014 when we launched, we still sell those four products. And those four products still make up the bulk of our business today. And so unlike a lot of companies that are seasonal, we really strive to be seasonless. And so we put out into the market like, okay, here are the four things. We're going to get really good at selling these four things. And that's what we did for the first three years of the business was just get really good at selling pregnant people, those four things. And then from there, we expanded the product line once we got good at selling those things.

Yeah. What I really like about how you mentioned coming from a strategy background is a how you invested in the market and said, hey, there's this opportunity that we're seeing that there's a market need for. And then when you actually started to go to market, you didn't go crazy and try to build out the whole closet. You were able to say, if we develop these four products, these are going to deliver the maximum value and solve 80% of the problem that the people who are having this problem have.

Right.

So I think being able to approach it from a macro perspective and then be really decisive in the products that you want to go after is really important when launching because you have limited resources and time exactly, et cetera. Right. So why don't you walk us through a little bit about having made up that decision? You've done the market research, you've started to interview mothers, picking apart their pain points. You decide that you've done the research and said, here are the four products that we believe are going to satisfy a big portion of this market. What are the next steps in taking that to market? What was it like working with your suppliers to come up with the right product? How did you decide those were the ones that you were ready to ship and what type of initial investment did you make to be able to get the business up and running?

Yeah, I mean, I think those four.

Pieces were driven, like you said, from a strategy perspective, but also a limited resources. So we simply didn't have the cash on hand or the expertise. My background, as I said, is in digital strategy. My co founder, she was from the fashion world, but more the editorial fashion world and has like an incredible fashion sense. But she had never been the person responsible for the actual production of garments and neither had I. And so we were both going into it very green and I could fill a giant book of all the things I didn't know about making physical things. And there was definitely some ego that if I had to look back at that, we made a lot of mistakes because we just simply didn't know. So from once we had those four pieces, what we did to kind of shortcut the process because also a lot of vendors didn't want to work with us because the order quantities we were putting in were very small in terms of the lifecycle of manufacturing, which are huge.

A lot of garments are made in the thousands and hundreds of thousands. We were asking for hundreds. And so what we did to kind of shortcut things is we went to a maternity showroom and we found a brand that had a fabric that was similar to what we thought we wanted to use. So again, in doing our research around fabrics, we settled on modal because it's really stretchy, it's pretty versatile, it works in warmer weather, works in cooler weather. And so we went to this maternity showroom and we basically approached one of the brands to do private label for us. So that brand that was already working in a fabric we wanted to work in and already making maternity clothes, we said, hey, any chance you're willing to add some of our stuff into that? And it was an interesting relationship and it did help us fast forward because they kind of already knew the maternity silhouettes and customer and the fitting and it worked out until it didn't, until that became instead of a friendly relationship, it became more of a competitive relationship. But I'd say for the first year, it was something that allowed us to get started up a lot quicker.

And that's likely going to happen when you start working with a partner. Like the first partner that you work with might not necessarily be the same partner that is going to help you go from 10,000 to 10,0000 units. So it's all about what is the first milestone we're trying to get to in terms of production to prove this out. So I have a few questions. When you mentioned showroom, is that a trade show that you go to?

It's like in the garment district. I don't know if you've ever been to the garment district in New York, but in the garment district there are all these sort of specialty retailers and wholesalers and all sorts of different categories. And so we kind of just honestly put into Google like maternity showroom, like, who's selling maternity wholesaler, maternity modal to see if we could just find somebody, anybody to help us bring these initial garments to, you know, they would make them, they'd ship them to me in care. I would take all of the garments in my car, get them screen printed in San Francisco, bring them back to our office in San Francisco, fold them all was definitely the beginning was very manual in terms of what we did. And then compared to now, where we make 90% of our garments overseas and the process is obviously a lot different, managing 100 pieces and taking them to screen print by myself. And I also did fulfillment by myself. I had like a task rabbit that would come help me twice a week to do fulfillment to now we make most everything overseas. We have a three PL in South Dakota that does all our fulfillment.

But that took.

So what was the timeline in that process from initially doing the research of these showrooms to saying, okay, we found the person that's going.

To do it for us, that was probably six months of figuring out these are the garments, okay, this is the fabric. Now let's search and let's see who we can convince to make them. How long is it going to take them to make? How many do we have to order initially? Because we haven't raised any traditional venture capital. So we have had like a friends and family angel round that we use because retail is capital intensive. And so we went out to some people and said, hey, we're starting this business. We need some money just to be able to buy the initial inventory. And so we were definitely now I'm very thankful for it because we've had to create a business that works with revenue and cash flow. And we've been very focused as a result on our customer instead of our investors.

And I don't think that works for every business, but it's definitely worked for ours. And taking that path yeah.

One concept that Ramon and I talk about a lot is building businesses sustainably. Every business kind of has its own trajectory and pace. There's certain businesses where venture is the right model because you're trying to dominate a market. And there's other businesses where there's room for multiple players. It can generate a ton of cash flow and it can be sustainable. And when you build things the right way, a lot of times the growth can just compound on top of that the right way. So I'm really interested to kind of pick into because obviously, if you're entering the apparel space, right, and you're trying to start a business, today venture may not be the best bet. Although what you had mentioned in terms of it being capital intensive, it is true.

Right. So why don't you walk us through generating those first sales? You've said, okay, we're going for this business. We found our supplier. We're generating a couple of units. I love the hack, by the way, of finding a different manufacturer who's already doing something simple. And you say, hey, let's just private label a small run. So you've got your batch, you have it at your apartment. You start getting ready to get some orders out.

Tell us a little bit about the first sales you generated. Did you immediately go to Facebook to try to just run ads and drive your first sales? Were you going into communities? Were you going to friends? Like, where did you go to get your first call? It 100 plus sales.

Yeah. So I'd say that we actually didn't do any paid advertising until three, maybe four years into the business. Not because we were shunning it, but because we honestly just didn't know how to do it. We didn't have the money to hire someone at that point to manage that process. Now, that's run by an agency in conjunction with our marketing director. But so at the very beginning, we called in a lot of favors from friends and family. And so in my background, as I mentioned, I worked with a lot of media companies. So I worked with Conde Nast, I worked with The New York Times, and so, like, had a little bit of a rolodex of people who were in media.

I used to share an office with curbed racked eater and know messaged everyone I knew and just said, hey, I launched this. Know, is there any chance that you would just give me a mention in some capacity? And some people said yes, and some people said no. And then pounding the pavement with moms groups, with anybody we knew who was a parent. Hey, pass this on. Oh, are you pregnant? Like, here, try us out. And it was very manual. But the other kind of flip side to when you're working in the motherhood and maternity space is or the parenthood space, it's a very heavy word of mouth space. So if you please, it's interesting because they say in marketing there are certain categories where if you make a relationship with someone, it's extremely powerful.

And it's like if you make a relationship with a bride, then that's like a relationship that lasts kind of forever. And it's very similar in motherhood. If you can please a parent and give someone a great experience during maternity, then somebody's going to say, hey, I just got pregnant, where do I shop for maternity? And so our first sales were all driven by word of mouth and then kind of like calling in favors, hey, like our Facebook page follow our Instagram. And then very quickly we learned the other piece. And this piece still continues to be one of our top performing channels, which is affiliate and influencer. So this was a time, as I was mentioning, that their chronological feed was still in existence in Instagram. And so we were just sending out freebies to any influencer that we thought might gel with our audience. And it was actually a lot easier and I think a little bit more wild, Wild West.

Back then, it wasn't like you were even necessarily paying people. Now you are. There's just a lot of changes in that industry as well. But we were mailing out free product all the time, hey, wear this, try this, tell us what you think, et cetera, to get those first sales.

So when you were doing that strategy of affiliate and influencer, you also mentioned then that the paid marketing one, it seems like it was put on hold because, hey, this requires probably a different kind of setup that we don't have experience with, but influencer and affiliate is working for us. Let's just double down on this, get us from point A to point B. And then it's not just hiring the ads person, it's implementing the strategy and having someone that can oversee it, that has the experience, which is likely the marketing director. So is that right? Was affiliate and influencer the strategy from zero to one until you evolved paid marketing?

Yeah, I'd say we knew how to email people, we knew how to use Instagram, we knew how to try to promote ourselves. We knew how to create like a share a sale link to try and get people to talk about us because they get some kind all of those things felt very achievable with limited knowledge. Whereas like you're saying, I don't even think we had enough creative from our photo shoots to run advertising that would have necessarily been compelling at that point. And so I think for us, we picked my co founder. She's like an amazing writer and so we're like, all right, we think we can catch people's attention through really fun kind of now. It's interesting as the maternity space has evolved, a lot of it feels very normalized. But when we were first starting doing this, a lot of the ways that we were talking to pregnant people felt like that's kind of, like, interesting. And so we kind of played with copy, and we tried to put ourselves out there as different compared to what the kind of bigger players in the space that were dominating the space.

Because I think one of the things when you become pregnant is it's all about the baby. And people almost start infantilizing you. It's like, oh, are you sure that that's okay for the baby? What we set out to do, and even this does pervade the space now, but there was a lot of like, hey, mama, you got this, mama. I know you haven't been sleeping for two weeks, but we had your back, and it's really patronizing. And so one of the things that we jokingly said at the beginning, and we still stamp pregnant people are people. You're just a person. You just happen to be having a child and or have a baby. You still like the same things.

Yes, you've gone through a transformational experience, but fundamentally, you are you and you like the same things, and your life is still your own. And that felt really different than the way a lot of people were talking to pregnant people.

Yeah. I think what I love about what you guys did is that you decided to go deep instead of wide, right? Because you could still say, hey, influencer and affiliate is working. Let's still try to hack and figure out ads. But you basically were able to see the timeline from a 30,000 foot view and say, we can go much deeper with influencer and affiliate. We can pay attention to little details in the copy that our competitors are too big and too busy. And so that's sort of like the Trojan horse for you guys to make your way into the market and resonate with your audience of those moms. So one thing I think would be valuable for brands that are sort of getting started out is like, what then was your step to hiring your first director of marketing? What did you look for there? Were there any mistakes made when trying to run ads initially? Aka, if you were to go back and have to hire your first director of marketing, how would you do it?

Yeah, I think so. The first thing we did is we started with an agency that kind of managed minimal spend. Like, we still weren't ready to hire that marketing person. I was kind of pinch hitting as our marketer and kind of working with the agency on a small retainer to just kind of do table stakes ads. And I think the interesting thing and something that was hard for me because I'm all about brand, that is the thing I love. That's the thing I feel comfortable with. That's the thing I'm always going to defend. It's like my space.

And working with the agency, in the beginning, they were like, we need to be direct, and we need to say buy stuff. And I was like, oh, that feels too salesy. Like I don't like this. This is bad. And I think if I could go back again in time, I would have been like, just be salesy. You need to sell the things. Like, don't be so precious. We were so precious for so long.

We would only send one email a week for the first five years of the business. Now we send an email every other day because people just need to see you a lot of times and you need to try to sell your things. And I think it's something that we still sometimes are a little too precious about. But I think I would go back and I would say to myself, just listen to this agency and say, buy this now or sale. We didn't do a sale. And even now we're very limited on sales. But I would have done like 10% off for new customers. And at the time we were just like, whoa, this is too much for us.

We're above this, we're better than this. But honestly, we're running a retail business. We need to sell things. And that took longer than it should have, I think, to sink in. And I would definitely take that advice a lot sooner.

Yeah, that's so fascinating, especially when you think about brand versus contact and performance. I think what's so funny, consumers are so overwhelmed today with the amount of stimulus and inputs from across all these different platforms that you're almost sitting at from your seat in the brand, you're like, oh my God, they're going to think this or they're going to think that. And a lot of times, unless it's totally egregious, you're not even registering on their radar.

Right?

It's like, okay, yeah, I got a notification. Okay, just like a milk. I did a million other brands. Exactly. So I think that is a really good tip in terms of for operators and founders who are just starting out. Yes, brand is very important. It's critical. It is the lifeblood that keeps everything together.

But at the end of the day, you need to sell, you need volume, and you need to put yourself out there and give the consumers the right CTAs because you can't assume that they're going to be able to read between the lines, right?

Yeah.

And I think one of the things is I think we've learned now that we have an overarching brand that was very clearly defined, but how that brand expresses itself in different channels, it doesn't have to match one to one like what somebody sees on Facebook. They may never see anything like that on our website. And that's the place you go for the hollowed brand. But in Facebook, you need a different strategy because like you said, people are scrolling by a zillion things and what is going to be clear and actionable. And now we have a lot of data around what works there. And so that's obviously evolved over time. But that is a very different vibe and product than what you might find on our website. On Facebook, we've found that women or pregnant people who are three quarters turned outperform anything else on Facebook.

And so every single image almost that you see or ad from us on Facebook will be a pregnant person turned three quarters so that you can see it's for whatever reason that silhouette performs the best. Now on our website, are you going to see that many three quarter silhouette pregnant? No. Like that would be insane. But on Facebook we know that that's what works. We know that everybody buys black in terms of that's, what drives sales volume. Black does not perform in any of our Facebook ads. So you will see color in every single like there's the brand is just different in different places and that took us a while to kind of internalize and then learn to work with that.

So how did you then scale the affiliate and influencer side when you brought in the director of marketing? How did you hand off the strategy that you had already proven? And then as a leader from a managerial perspective, how did that transition work and what made it work? Is it still something you guys do today, like affiliate?

Yeah, and I think that affiliate and influencer, that's still one of our most productive channels. And if anything, bringing in a director of marketing just made that channel more professional, I guess I should say. We now use a bunch of different tools that help us essentially build our own affiliate program. And we do a bunch of things like every month we send out an affiliate email. We say, hey everybody that we've worked with, this month we're promoting leggings. If you want some leggings, let us know, we're here for you. Don't forget your affiliate code. Oh, also for September we're going to bump it from 10% to 15%.

We have a bunch of things like that in the affiliate world that are more professional. And I think influencer and affiliate are very closely aligned for us. I know they aren't for every company, but for us they're very closely intertwined. But we do things like and I think the influencer just sphere is moving more towards us where instead of doing a one off project with someone, we may find them early in their pregnancy and we'll say, hey, we want to do like four things before you have a baby. And we are engaging people on a longer instead of just like a one off, can we send you a free pair of leggings? It's like the asks are more concrete, the compensation is different. And then we have really deep, lovely relationships with the people that we work there and it's something that has continued to work for us. And I think again, it goes back to the idea of mother or parenthood being so word of mouth focused, that when you work with an influencer around this time in someone's life, I think those recommendations come across pretty strongly. So that does work for us.

And given the Apple privacy changes, which has really impacted our paid and our ability to target and also to just see where that money is going, we have doubled down on affiliate influencer. Email, SMS has been something that we introduced, I think, the beginning of this year and that's been really good for us. So for us, our own channels are all like we're putting a lot more energy into our own channels and the paid channels are becoming secondary. Which I think there was a time when that was flipped and we were just like it was cheap and easy to find people on Paid. And so we were doing a lot of it and now we're exploring podcasts, trying to think of all the kind of other things and I think a lot of brands are given just how the paid landscape has changed, and even the number of people trying to reach the same people you're trying to reach. There didn't used to be so many people fighting for the same keywords and now it's crowded.

So what were some of the instrumental tools for you to scale those systems? Like whether it was internal processes using notion airtables spreadsheets or was it specific platforms that allow you to scale, hey, we need systems to know that every month. Here's what's going to be the offer this month, next month, managing the community. Where does communication happen? What were the instrumental pieces?

Yeah, so we used to use a Google spreadsheet, which I think was fine when it was small, but now we've, we're, we're super Asana heavy company. Asana is like, everything lives in the not. If it's not in the Asana, then I'm not doing it. No one else is doing it either. It's as if it does not exist. So there's a lot in the Asana and then last year we switched to using a tool called Grin grin and it's an influencer management software that has been really great for us because it allows us to keep everybody organized. And one thing that's different about us than other companies is that our people are constantly cycling in and out. So we may have an influencer who we love working with.

They're only going to have one child and we caught them with three months before they're having a baby. So we have that person for three months. We'll keep them in the system and maybe they'll come back, change their mind, but we've got to constantly be cycling in and out and I think that creates a lot of challenges in terms of managing that pool of people and taking people in and taking people out. And we constantly have to be finding new people. And so for us, leveling up to using an actual CRM. For our influencers was important.

Yeah, I think what's really interesting about your specific market that you're going after is that there's almost like an expiration date, so to speak, in terms of when that marketing messaging can speak to a potential buyer. So really being specific and I think that goes to your point. Like when you're running an ad, for example, on social, probably the reason that it performs so well is when you need an ad that immediately tells the potential buyer that, hey, I'm speaking to you through the lens of the three quarter tilt pregnant woman with the belly bump, right, that is going to scream, hey, this is for you. And if you're subtle about it, you're going to miss that window because it's such a short and specific window. And then I think it's also really interesting thinking about on even the influencer side of things and the affiliate side sometimes there's going to be people in groups that you can rely on that are going to be around. For a while and are really always going to be evergreen for you guys, whereas there's going to be others that are like you're saying you're trying to time it again and again and again. You might be like, oh my God, this new influencer is going to have a baby now. Let's get this partnership moving.

And they have, I'm sure, a million different things going on in their life and everything's changing too.

Yeah, this is obviously not the most important thing that's happening in their life.

So one question that I have in the lens of talking about how it's not as easy anymore, of just simply selecting, I'm looking for pregnant women on Facebook and running an ad that way and knowing that how important and impactful your influencer and affiliate channels are. I'm wondering how you guys think about attribution on that side of things, right? Because, yes, there's always going to be the side where we're able to quantify how many promo codes are entered. But I'm guessing that when you're dealing with a longer form engagement, not every purchase, not every conversion, not every word of mouth referral is going to result in an actual attribution in terms of a referral code. So how do you guys think about it? Is it just part of your strategy to expect there might be some breakage on that end and saying that that's an arbitrage opportunity for us? Or what's your approach to attribution and influencer?

Yeah, attribution is obviously challenging for us because it's only become more challenging over the last year because people may see an ad or a Pinterest ad or a Facebook ad and the attribution for that is really challenging as well. And then obviously influencer, they may see something and they may use the influencer's affiliate code or promo code. And that makes it very easy. But we've had a lot of breakage there where we make an affiliate code for an influencer and then it ends up on Honey and then it looks like that influencer is amazing, but then we find out a week later, oh, someone uploaded this code. That is totally irrelevant. We don't actually know how this influencer performs. And so that is something that we struggle with to figure out exactly who's doing what and what's coming from where. Our best influencers, as crazy as it sounds, our best influencers, they have a direct product tie, so we have an influencer that we work with literally every time.

She loves this one product that we sell that is not like one of our top sellers. So it's very strange to see it come up in the top ten. We can link whenever she talks about it with a spike in sales of that product because she's pretty much the only person who repeatedly talks about it. And every time you see it, you're like, oh, did she talk about the button up today? She did, but most of the time it's not that clear. And I think we still struggle to figure out, where did this customer come from? How can we reengage them? It's something that we haven't cracked, I would say, if I was honest.

Yeah. And I don't think it necessarily will ever be cracked totally. And I think that maybe the takeaway here is the fact that because it was a channel that you relied on from the beginning and used to leverage your growth and it was something that has been part of a growing business sort of strategy. And it continues to work because I think the real appeal in terms of influencers, especially ones that are being authentic in terms of sharing your story over the course of many, many engagements, is it just becomes part like people are kind of like we're saying, they're subtly consuming the information. It's like real brand marketing at work as opposed to performance. But then all of a sudden, that person who's been watching this influencer time after time after time, they might be like, oh, wait a minute, I know this person's always been talking about Stork when they were pregnant. Now I'm pregnant and here, this is where I'm going to go shop. So I think in terms of brand marketing, it's a real advantage to be able to lean in on that when other brands might who are strictly performance and metrics driven and will only invest in what they can get pure attribution for.

Maybe it's a way to really stand out.

It's also interesting because I think there's been we obviously have had to start investing more in TikTok and learning that environment versus Instagram and just how our affiliates and our influencers are in TikTok is completely different. It's kind of amazing learning about this with Instagram. I think it used to be like, I love Stork. Stork is amazing. These are the most soft, amazing leggings I've ever had. And it's like one beautiful post. And with TikTok. What we found is most of the people we work with on TikTok, they don't even ever mention us.

They are just creating like ten pieces of content a day and they happen to be wearing our nursing bra in all ten of those pieces. And in every TikTok someone will say like, where'd you get that? Where'd you get that? But it's not like that clear. Like hi, I'm here to tell you about Stork. It's like this off the cuff. It's just in the background and someone is subtly seeing this bra over and over and over again and then they want to know what it is. Because I think that's another interesting thing about this business is we have to catch somebody at the exact right moment and that's really hard. And so this is a double edged sword because we always get new people who find themselves pregnant and find our brand, but then we're always losing people. And so it's a bit of a hamster wheel.

And so thinking about we may have caught someone in some of our media or traditional PR and they may have seen some article and they're like, oh, that's cool, but I'm not having a baby and there's no interest if somebody is not in this life stage. I have a lot of theories about why this is. If someone's not in this life stage, this content truly does not resonate. It's not like other categories where you're dreaming of what your maternity clothes are going to be or what diaper bag you're going to have. Most people aren't in the same way that maybe when you're a teenager you're thinking about your wedding. Most people aren't thinking in that same way and dreaming. They may be dreaming of having a child, but they're probably not dreaming about what maternity clothes they're going to wear and the way that they might write something down when they see it out of context. And so that's a huge challenge for us and something that we're always working to figure out.

It's interesting because we may work with someone, we may be like, this person is not truly our style, but let's give it a go. And for whatever reason, they'll resonate and they will just have a certain percentage of people who happen to be pregnant in their audience. And then there are other people who we love and we think, oh my gosh, they're so stylish, they're amazing. But we get no pickup from the affiliate or the code because they are amazing. But their audience just may not be a match in this terms of this life cycle around having a baby or being postpartum.

And I find that so interesting of the experimentation of people that you think might not be the typical demographic you go after. Because if you then are too targeted with that, there likely is crossover between the audiences of big influencers that target the same exact sort of aesthetic or style or audience or sense of humor. Whereas testing completely different people, you might be tapping into completely different audiences. Like for example, if you know to work with Jake Paul and Logan Paul, like, chances are there's probably a lot of crossover between those. They're now kind of finally going doing their own thing.

Separation.

Yeah, exactly. How do you then view performance measurement on it? Is it a numbers game? Because there's a lot of sort of metrics to measure when it comes to performance here. There's like views on the videos, there's followers on the TikTok account, there's traffic on the website, there's conversions on the actual website. And so what are the initial KPIs you're looking at there? Because some of them can be in Australia or like somewhere you don't ship, et cetera.

I think it's also really interesting because with Instagram you kind of know what you're getting. And I'd say like whereas TikTok, it feels like some person with 20 followers can have a video that reaches a million people and it's like you don't know. And so evaluating that, I feel like a lot of the things that we think about in performance marketing are being able to evaluate somebody's reach or would we work with this person? Oh, they only have 20 followers. It's like now we're like, okay. And I think, yeah, it's really challenging to know who's going to drive. There are people who obviously have a lot of followers across many platforms. You can assume that those people will probably drive something. But I think the way that we're approaching TikTok, which is different than with some of the other people we work with, is like, we just want on TikTok, everybody who is nursing to have a stork nursing bra.

Whether you have 20 followers or you have 20 million followers, we want at least one of the videos where you're nursing your child to be in a stork bra. So we are constantly trying to find and now obviously my TikTok just is all pregnant nursing ladies because that's what TikTok thinks I like. So it's somewhat easy for us to start finding those people, but we still have rigorous brand checks that are on the people we work with. But it's much more relaxed on TikTok because again, you don't know what's going to hit or where that video is going to end up and what's going to end up driving traffic. Like, there's another brand in our space who's done an amazing job on TikTok and basically similarly, they were like, we're just going to flood TikTok, this niche of TikTok nursing moms or pregnant people, we're going to flood that with our product. And then that's a very different approach for us than we would normally take. Like, we would be we want the person to have between this followers this much engagement. And right now, TikTok is very much the Wild West for us, where we just want somebody who finds also themselves stuck in that flow because they're probably pregnant or nursing, they find themselves in that flow to see in the background.

I keep seeing this bra. I keep seeing this bra. We just released it. This is top of mind because we just released a pumping and nursing bra that's somewhat unique. And so we're like, okay, we want every time someone sees someone nursing on TikTok, it's a stork product. Like, how many of these can we send out and how many it's like we're just trying to be in the background of that subtle, like, oh, I keep seeing this product. This must be good, so many people are having it. Which is a very different approach, I think, than we've taken in the more curated land of what I'd say.

Instagram TikTok still very much feels like a little like.

I think there's two really interesting things to unpack there. The first is in terms of the strategy of just being in the content, right? It's almost like modern day product placement. Typically before, back in the day, you'd be running product placements and trying to get your product onto the big screen. And whereas today you're like, I'm focused on organic native product placement, so to speak. And then the other thing that's like a big tailwind in what you're tapping into in TikTok is the fact that it's no longer I specifically need people with a big audience to be able to creating content. It's just I need creators who are creating on TikTok because one could take off and if it does, it's like almost like a venture capital sort of model where the ROI is still going to be just insane. And on TikTok and TikTok, their kind of algorithm, the way it's worked is it's almost like this global talent show where they give everyone the notion that everyone can go viral and you never know when it's going to be. And that kind of leads to people always creating content on the platform because they're like, this could be the TikTok that I create that absolutely blows up and changes my life.

So I think that's very unique. And whereas Instagram, typically you would work for years, years, build your audience, be very specific about here is what I'm showing you. This is how I feel about the brand. Whereas TikTok, it's a little bit more like you're saying off the cuff.

Yeah. And also the other thing about TikTok is, I think because of their algorithm, for better, for worse, you get in these zones and there are these niches that would be hard for us, I think, to discover or just simply aren't as powerful. On Instagram, there's a niche of people who show how much they pump after they pump breast milk. And it's actually wildly popular. And those are the types of people who we want to recruit and talk to because it's an extremely passionate audience. And we feel like there's overlap between this very passionate audience and our brand and that's come to life in TikTok in a way, visually that it's not the same on Instagram.

How do you drive something like that? Do you sort of theme campaigns based on is this a specific theme that you send out to your ambassadors and then say, hey, whoever posts here's your affiliate code or whatever, is it more, hey, do your creative thing? Or is it, here's an exact brief. How do you drive these campaigns?

So we have campaigns and then we have what we call evergreen or affiliation. So it would be like women who love pumping and showing how much they've pumped. That's like a group that has a passion, well, passion group, I forget what exactly we call them. So we may say, okay, this month we're going after that group of passionate people. That's a project that we have a team executing. Then it might be, okay, we're launching a new product. Here's a campaign brief where we're going out. We're like it's much more traditional.

It's like, here's your campaign brief. We need three images, one video. You need to say this about the product. You have to show it from two angles. And then another piece we have is like evergreen. So we have a much bigger product assortment now, but we still sell those four pieces that we started the business with. And we have to keep talking about those things even though it feels like we've been talking about them forever. Because we have so we have a group of we're always trying to find people in this kind of evergreen category to continue to promote those products that are kind of our biggest sellers.

And so it kind of is buckets around. It buckets for us around interests. If we're doing a launch campaign and then this sort of like evergreen, hey, we know it's about to be legging season, let's make sure that we get X number of people wearing and or talking about leggings in the next month. And that is also a difference between our business and other businesses is a lot of businesses, particularly in retail, are driven on newness and we have a little bit of newness every quarter. But we're not a newness driven business. Instead, and again, this probably comes from a product background is like, I believe fundamentally we make the best pair of maternity leggings on the market because we've been making them since 2014. And at this point, we've tried them on hundreds of thousands, if you consider our customers. And that's like a great piece of D to C that we haven't talked about is compared to a store where someone leaves with D to C, we're getting constant feedback through delighted, through sending out surveys, through people writing us saying what they love and what they hate.

We have so much product feedback that we can continue to iterate. And so we have this pair of leggings that at this point, I think is, like I said, the best pair of maternity Leggings. The fabric is basically custom. The Fit has been honed in over years and we have a lot of product like that. But we have to make sure that we talk about that because it's not the sexy shouldn't say easy, but like the sexy hit of like spring collection is here, it's new, buy it. We're like, hi, it's us again. But on the flip side, like we talked about, we have a new audience and that's the thing we have to remember as marketers and sometimes is challenging for our team is like, okay, I know we feel like we've been talking about Leggings for the last eight years because we have. But guess what? The people we're talking about Leggings to, this is our first time interacting with Leggings.

And so we have a lot of email campaigns, influencer campaigns that are like the email campaigns are like drip campaigns where we're just like, these are Leggings, you're going to need a pair. Here's why they're great. And those are just like automatically sending to people when they place their first order around all of our hero products and whatnot.

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. I know we're coming up towards the end here, but I'm uniquely passionate about this because this is what we do at my main business trend. So I deal with all kinds of brands, brands that don't want to give any creative direction at all. And then I deal with brands that are giving word by word creative direction. And it's tough because there are creators that prefer the instructions and not have to then leave the brand unsatisfied and then have the brand more so give revisions after it's actually live or something like that. But I've seen both work. I've then seen creators that are like, let me do my thing. Brain gives no creative direction and boom, it just goes absolutely.

You know, I think before we wrap up here, Blaine, I'll pass it over to you. But I do have one more question on this, which is one thing know been sort of trying to understand more about is why would I become a storic ambassador? What is your why for becoming an ambassador? I think that is one of the most important elements that brands need to get right in their ambassador programs because yes, I understand, I get rev share, but based on tests I've seen, some people aren't even driven by necessarily money. Some are driven by being treated specially or have a special product or early access to products. What is stork's why for joining as an ambassador?

Yeah, I'd say we have a very high touch relationship with everybody that we work with. It's not cookie cutter. There are dedicated people on our team to just interacting with influencers and they're not even executing campaigns. Their job is just to message back and forth. And I think one benefit of being in the maternity and parenthood space is there aren't a lot of cool, hip, jazzy brands. And so a lot of times when people discover, frankly, I think we make really great products and I think those stand on their own. And so when we can get someone one of our products and they try one and they're like, oh, you're actually amazing. I actually would love this and I would use it even if you weren't paying me or even if you hadn't approached me that piece.

And then just keeping in contact, it is just very high touch. And I say that's, like, the why is for a lot of the influencers. Even me, myself, I don't handle that. But I even have influencers that I still DM on Instagram. We've become friends. Parenthood is such a transformational time. Like I said that I think these relationships become really tender and tight on both sides. Yes, we're just a brand.

Yes, we're just selling apparel and accessories. But there is something about connecting with somebody else during that period. And if you can give them a really high touch. I found out that there was a form letter that was being sent on our behalf by our affiliate marketing agency. And I was like, absolutely. No, this is like cookie cutter. And the reason I found out is because one of our ambassadors was like, I got this email. I think you are being spammed.

Like someone is using your name because it didn't feel like everything we do is so high touch. Everything we do is so considered in this space because the way I see it is we're in business together, like, us and these influencers, it's a very symbiotic relationship, and so I never want it. Everybody who works in our marketing, they know that it should always feel like we have their back, whether we have a paid relationship or whether they just have a question about what's the best stroller we'll have that interaction with them, even though it is a business relationship, it's deeper. And I think that's the why for us is they also can feel really good about introducing their customers. I'm sure every brand says this, but I do believe they can feel really good about recommending us. The product does have legs.

Yeah. And the biggest takeaway here, too, is do the things that don't scale. You might be able to buy your way into traffic, into views, into followers, but your competitors that are like super established corporations or something, they cannot buy their way into building that sort of alignment and relationship one on one with each one of those individuals. So I love that.

Yeah. And Courtney. The other thing as we wrap up here, the other thing that really stands out about what you guys are doing is, like you were saying in your marketing messaging, just being able to be so specific with the types of people, those relationships that you're building. And one thing that I was even thinking about is, like, there's so many cool opportunities as you guys continue to grow about even gifting and the sharing, right? Because what you're actually giving is if you're able to provide a great experience for one of your pregnant mothers once they give birth and they're going to have friends that want to do it, them sharing the option of your product with other people is going to be going to help the next person in line. So I think there's so many ways to do this business. And that's what I was going to say. I really liked the idea that there are some businesses that are built on newness and you guys aren't built on newness. You're built on building the best utilitarian sort of product that obviously fits within that cool shape, form, factor, brand, et cetera.

But knowing that your brand is about, we're here to build the best functional product versus we're here to create the most fashionable pregnancy lines, like, those are two totally different they're very different. Totally different. And knowing that is so important because if you thought that if you were all about creating and launching a million different SKUs, it's a totally different sort of business. So I think it is totally knowing what your business is about and staying true to that. Like, clearly you guys have done a great job and we're excited to see you guys keep growing as we wrap up here. Where can our listeners connect with you personally? Are you on LinkedIn, instagram? Twitter?

Where can they? I am all those places, but my own personal profile is a little lacking. I tend to be the lady behind the curtain, but if you want to connect with Stork at S-P-O-R-Q on all the social channels and then Stork sporq.com online. Cool.

Well, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.