“So one of the reasons we love owning and selling our own products is because we can pick and choose which glasses they’re going to produce. We have a lot of control over the quality of the glasses. And we’re not competing with the exact same product with a hundred other companies.” (Angie)

[Intro clip] Welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast show where we interview founders of fast growing seven and eight figure eCommerce businesses and eCommerce experts. They’ll tell their stories, share how they 2X’d their businesses and inspire you to take action in your own online retail business today. And now, here he is, the man in the mix, Kunle Campbell.

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Kunle: I am excited to introduce today’s guests. They are a husband and wife team that run an ecommerce business called One Click Ventures. One Click Ventures owns and operates 3 eyewear brands. They are based in Indiana, in the United States in the mid-west. The three eyewear brands they own are: Readers.com, felix + iris, and Sunglass Warehouse.
They started their business from their home office back in 2005, so about 10 years ago, and now have a 60+ person strong team. Now, what strikes me about One Click Ventures is that they’re a business that passionately care about two key important people: their Team and their Customers. One Click Ventures has been recognized as one of the best places to work in Indiana for four consecutive years. And their employees as a result not only treat their customers with dignity and empathy, but also customer happiness is intrinsic as a company value

So, if you are an e-tailer that has been in business for 2 to 4 years or even an ecommerce start-up and would like to know what is required to building a long-lasting e-commerce brand that has customer and employee happiness at its heart, then you should listen to this episode, it should really not be missed.

Hi guys. Welcome to the show, Angie and Randy. Could you take 30 seconds or so to introduce yourselves, each of you, please?

Angie: Sure. My name is Angie Stocklin and I’m the cofounder and COO of One Click Ventures. I started out as a school psychologist and now I run operations at One Click. So I use my degrees to an extent but not exactly as I planned. And I cofounded the business with my husband Randy and I’ll let him introduce himself as well.

Randy: Hello, I’m Randy. I’m cofounder and CEO of One Click. I oversee the strategic direction of the business, the management of the senior leadership team. I’m directly responsible for marketing, finance, and technology. My background is in technology where I served in a variety of technology roles for Indianapolis-based technology and consumer companies.

Kunle: Interesting. All right, so Angie is more business operations, being the COO: customer service, order fulfillment, merchandising, and perhaps vendor account management. And Randy, you’re more visionary, you handle strategy, growth, tech, and marketing. Is a kind of like the picture there?

Randy: Yes.

Angie: Yes, exactly.

Kunle: Okay, so there’s good balance there. So roughly how old is the business?

Randy: So we legally formed the business in 2005. We made our first acquisition, our first retail acquisition in 2006 and then by the end of 2008, Angie and I had both committed to the business full-time.

Kunle: Interesting, interesting. And from your website and a few other online resources, I heard you started out from your house, is that correct? In 2005?

Angie: We did. We actually took our home office and made it kind of a headquarters. And we acquired Sunglass Warehouse in early 2006 and it took over our whole top floor. We worked out of our house for two solid years before we got office space. And we kept our full-time jobs as well in an effort to pour every penny that we made back into the business to help grow it.

Kunle: Absolutely. So when did you make your first hire?

Angie: Late 2007.

Kunle: Okay, okay. And you guys are based in Indiana right, in the Midwest of the US. What about staff size now, how many staff, what’s the size of your company at the minute?

Randy: Yeah, we have around 60 team members today.

Kunle: Wow. So in 10-11 years you’ve been able to grow to 60. Okay, let’s talk about One Click Ventures. Could you summarize what One Click Ventures is about, because I have tracked your company back I think it was about two years ago or a year ago, and you didn’t only sell sunglasses, you were into other ventures. Could you just explain the evolution of the business from Sunglasses Warehouse to what it is today, please?

Randy: Sure. We, as you mentioned, we started with SunglassWarehouse.com in 2006 and then we experimented with a variety of different dropship companies between 2006 and 2008. And found that we were most comfortable with e-commerce businesses where we could control the entire customer experience. So we wanted to control the customer service, we wanted to control fulfillment. So from that point forward we focus our acquisition strategy around acquiring companies where we could own the entire customer experience. So that meant building out a customer service team, that meant continuing to build out our fulfillment team. So from there we went into reading glasses and then we went into a variety of accessories companies. So we sold hats, scarves, socks. And from 2008 until 2013, we were able to successfully execute that business model and continue to grow each of those brands as we acquired them and fold them into the portfolio. And then in 2013 we took a step back and said okay, we can continue down this acquisition-driven path or we can double down on the $25 billion eyewear market, which is where we had had the most success with our marketing, with our customer service. We felt like we knew that customer better than any other customer on our brand portfolio. So we made the decision in late 2013 to focus exclusively on eyewear. And in doing so that meant we would divest all of our non-eyewear brands, which that included six brands at the time. Because we built a portfolio up to eight core brands and then from there we would launch this prescription brand, felix + iris, and we would have the team focused on selling and marketing eyewear. And that focus has been really good and we’ve been very happy with that decision.

Kunle: Interesting. Very laser-focused on eyewear. But let’s track back into the acquisitions themselves. So, when you talk about acquisitions, did you buy out businesses or did you venture into markets, acquiring new customers? Could you just expand a bit on the acquisitions and the specific acquisitions you made?

Angie: So we did both actually. Several of the brands we started from scratch and so we saw an opportunity for instance in the scarf space. Scarves were really hot several years ago and we looked at the market and decided that that was an opportunity that we wanted to take advantage of. And it was something that was similar to our eyewear space so we could apply some of the same principles that we know about our customers from eyewear to scarves. And so we bought a domain, we got some inventory, and we started that brand from scratch.

Kunle: Okay.

Angie: There are other brands like Fedoras.com that we acquired from someone I was just looking to get out of the business. So typically we look for businesses that either weren’t growing very well, and had one owner or two owners that did it on the side and were looking to get out. So we saw huge opportunities there to bring that brand in-house and apply it to our marketing team and our specification and really take off from there.

Kunle: Okay, okay. That makes a lot of sense. And then by 2013 you just honed in on glasses in general, sunglasses and reading glasses. Okay, so you have three brands: Readers.com which are pretty much cheap prescription glasses. Felix + iris which are premium prescription personalize, try before you go, Warby Parker, yeah, try before you go glasses. And then Sunglass Warehouse which is cheap sunglasses less than $20. Are you planning on expanding this portfolio more or do you think you pretty much covered the market?

Angie: So we love where we’re standing right now in terms of the eyewear market. One of the things that we’re doing in 2016 is looking at Readers.com and expanding that from just over-the-counter inexpensive reading glasses to a more premium offering. So not the designer space, not the $300 or $400 readers that you would get from your optometrist. But more of the $90 to $100 readers that’s going to last quite a while and it’s going to be your staple reader and it’s going to provide a little more value than just the over-the-counter $20 type. So we’re looking at expanding our markets that way instead of adding brands to the portfolio.

Kunle: And how old is felix + iris, the brand?

Angie: How old?

Kunle: Yes. When was it founded?

Angie: Sure, we just celebrated our one-year anniversary.

Kunle: Wow, okay, okay. So I notice from the domains, like Readers.com and Sunglasses Warehouse, those seem more generic, and then felix + iris seems very much like you know a brand in itself. Was there reason for you naming it felix + iris or…?

Angie: So back in the days of our transactional acquisition approach, we were really focused on getting customers to our site and converting them, which is where we have more functional domains like Readers.com and SunglassesWarehouse.com. But with felix + iris we really set out to build a brand. We spent a lot of time and energy deciding what our brand would stand for. And felix is actually one of the Latin words for ‘happy’ and Iris is for ‘the eye’. And so felix + iris is essentially ‘happy eyes’ and we want our customers to have happy eyes once they shop with us.

Kunle: I like that. Okay, right, good stuff. And you’re 100% bootstrapped, totally?

Randy: Correct.

Kunle: Okay, all right.

Randy: Yeah and the one point on the two other brands, so Readers.com and SunglassWarehouse.com, the plan is to start some brand-building activities around those two brands late this year and end of next year. So we fully intend to build brands around those two more transactional sites today. That’s a big initiative across the entire company right now is to make that happen. But our time and attention up to this point has been focused more on the transactional side but moving forward there’s going to be a nice blend of transactional and brand-building.

Kunle: And how do you intend to execute the brand-building? Will it be pretty much be by social media, video, or both?

Randy: The content marketing will play an important role in our overall strategy. So think about, that’s blog posts, whether that’s videos, infographics. It’s just getting out and putting a firm stake in the ground in the market, so making sure that we’re clearly differentiated and then telling our story. And up to this point we really haven’t done a good job of that but moving forward we’re going to the laser-focused on executing around brand-building for both of those brands.

Kunle: Yes, a very, very good point because prior to our interview I was doing some research on the brand, on your whole brand, the One Click Ventures and I noticed your focus on brand-building. You’re telling your story from your homepage, there was so much to learn about the company and your personality and yeah, it was quite interesting as compared to just you know seeing where there’s corporate. I could actually feel a soul to the company so, yeah, it’s interesting. So I guess that’s going to trickle down to all the brands and the kind of stories you tell on the websites so they’re not just generics and they’re quite memorable I suppose?

Randy: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And we have this dynamic culture, we have amazing people and we haven’t told that story as part of our consumer-facing brands at this point. So that’s a real focal point for us right now.

Kunle: Yeah and there also seems to quite a lot of focus on your team. You alluded to earlier that there are about 60 members of your team. Are they all based in Indiana or are they all over the world?

Randy: No, they’re all based in Indianapolis today.

Kunle: Okay. Because I could see your Twitter page, it’s a quite substantial team size there. Okay. What’s important to have customer service to the company in itself? What percentage… for an e-commerce businesses, if you’ve read Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness, you know customer service was quite intrinsic to the success of Zappos.com. What role does customer service actually play in One Click Ventures and all the brands you manage, being a consumer-facing brand?

Angie: It’s a huge part of what we talk about every day. And we look at customer service as more of a company-wide initiative. So it’s everything from our tech team keeping our websites up and running and loading quickly, to our fulfillment team getting our products out the door correctly and quickly. And obviously our customer happiness team plays a huge part in that. We like to answer the phone really quickly, we have high expectations in terms of quality and customer satisfaction, and but we really have over the last couple of years made it a company-wide initiative to own customer happiness.

Kunle: Okay, good stuff. And I like the term ‘customer happiness’, rather than ‘customer service’. Okay right, let’s talk strategy. How important is owning your brand versus stocking other brands, basically being merchandisers of other brands? And I just wanted to ask if at any point in time you ever stocked other brands and what your experience was like? Because from what I could see, you pretty much own all your brands. Have you ever stocked other brands and what has been the experience like, if yes?

Angie: We have, yes. So when we owned our Fedora website it was all other brands, we didn’t have any private label or our own brand of hats. And it was very interesting I think in terms of advertising and marketing because there were a lot of other companies selling those same brands and we had no control over the quality of the product or the trends that our companies that we were working with were going into. So one of the reasons we love owning and selling our own products is because we can pick and choose which glasses they’re going to produce, we have a lot of control over the quality of the glasses and we’re not competing with the exact same product with a hundred other companies.

Kunle: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Okay and do you think there’s ‘space to play’ for people in the middle, so companies kind of in the middle where they stock other brands and they offer their brands as an alternative. Or do you think that distorts the focus of an e-commerce especially brand?

Angie: Well, our Readers.com brand does sell a few other brands, mainly brands that are a little bit more expensive so in the $80 to $150 range. And those are products that we haven’t necessarily tried to produce ourselves. And so I can see some value in both, but I definitely think it’s harder to compete when you’re competing with the exact same products as everyone else.

Kunle: Interesting. Because price appears to be the core value proposition for Readers.com and Sunglass Warehouse. From a value proposition standpoint do you think you could… well, is that correct? Because that was my observation. Am I kind of on-point or I are there other elements of your value proposition I have missed out on Readers.com and Sunglass Warehouse?

Randy: Yeah, for both of those brands we view our value prop today as being around ‘selection’ and ‘value’. So value’s that price:quality ratio. We’re not the lowest-priced reading glasses and sunglasses brand on the internet but we offer a very compelling price point for the quality that we offer for our customers.

Kunle: Okay, right. I missed the two parts which is selection and quality.

Randy: Selection and value.

Kunle: Selection and value, exactly, at the right quality. Okay, let’s talk acquisition. Do you sell in marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon?

Randy: We sell on Amazon and we’ve dabbled in eBay. We may have some listings on eBay but it would be at a very small scale. But we’ve invested I would say heavily in Amazon over the last 24 months.

Kunle: Okay. And what has been your experience. I read yesterday that Amazon… basically 43% of e-commerce transactional searches, product searches, basically begin on Amazon. So they’re more Amazon in the US, more people start on Amazon for product searches as compared to Google or any other search engine. I think search engine’s about 39%. What’s been your experience with Amazon?

Randy: The experience overall has been positive. I think the challenge with Amazon for certain product segments is that it’s very much price-driven. I would say much more so than in a Google search. So a lot of times people you know start with price and then go to reviews. So for someone like ourselves who we don’t necessarily… we want to make sure that the entire experience is good for our customers, so we’re investing in the overall customer experience and not just focused on how can we offer the lowest price on a pair of sunglasses or readers. Sometimes that doesn’t play as well on the Amazon platform as it does on other platforms.

Kunle: Okay. Okay. And I suppose there’s also the bit of control, there are only so many options Amazon will give you to control the display of your products on their pages. So what about reviews on Amazon? What’s been your experience with regards to acquiring reviews? What kind of feedback have you got from Amazon shoppers with regards to reviews?

Angie: We ship really quickly and we make sure we always ship the right product and so that definitely helps in terms of reviews. For the most part, we get really positive reviews, and on Amazon if you don’t get a positive review it’s really important to follow up with that customer and see what you can make right for them. And obviously you can’t make them change their review but you’re hoping that fixing the problem will change their mind.

Kunle: Okay, okay.

Randy: For us it’s an extension of our overarching philosophy which is do whatever we possibly can to make sure that the customer’s happy. Getting back to your point around the way that customer service is viewed in a company like Zappos or even you didn’t mention this company but Nordstrom is another one of the companies that we talk a lot about internally. So that philosophy exists whether it’s selling through our own websites, whether it’s selling through Amazon; we’re approaching those customer interactions in the exact same manner.

Angie: Yup.

Kunle: Okay, absolutely. Absolutely. So that drives how you operate on Amazon rather than going by Amazon’s terms. Okay, let’s track back to your website, to content marketing and fashion. Fashion is a very visual industry, it’s visual in itself. My question has to do with visual marketing. How important is our visuals to you, especially in the consumer side of retail? What are the important elements? How do you view visual marketing?

Randy: We think it’s very important. And we think it’s so important that we’ve now had a full-time photographer on the team now for over four years or maybe it’s longer than that.

Angie: It’s longer than that, yeah.

Randy: It’s longer than that, so we’ve had a full-time photographer from practically the very beginning. So all of the products that you see on our website, those photographs are taken internally and we write all of our own product descriptions because we think that’s such an important element of the overall customer experience.

Angie: And we also have UI and UX internally to make sure that not only our graphics and our product photos are beautiful, but that the customer has an enjoyable experience navigating through our site and that our design is clean and pleasing to the eye.

Kunle: Okay. And how often do you refresh the design and the experience on your website across the board, given you have a full-time internal team to manage all of this?

Angie: So our experience has been ‘refresh all the time’. We focus heavily on conversion optimization and we have tests running all the time. And usually they’re pretty small tests so a repeat customer isn’t necessarily going to notice the changes, but we’ll do a full refresh of our design and our color palette every couple of years.

Kunle: Okay, okay. I can really see the blend. So there’s a Columbus Day sale and I’m on the homepage of Sunglass Warehouse and I can see a really well-taken photograph of a pair of sunglasses with the horizon scene on the hill or mountain on there and it’s looking towards the 40% off which is quite interesting and there’s a sales promo. I actually follow one of your brands on Instagram and you seem to be doing a great job with regards to the visuals there.

Angie: Thank you.

Kunle: I personally think that visual marketing is quite important in e-commerce, especially in fashion, so yeah, very, very good job.

Randy: One thing that we’re going to do more with Readers and Sunglass Warehouse as we move towards this brand-building phase for those two brands, is work more lifestyle photography into those brands whether it’s on a blog, whether it’s on the site itself, the product-facing site. So that’s something to look out for. We committed to doing that with felix + iris at launch and I’m pretty pleased with how…and the teams pretty pleased with how that turned out, but we want to do more of that with Readers and Sunglass Warehouse.

Kunle: Yeah, talking about lifestyle images, one that really stands out to mind on Instagram is Herschel, the company, the bags and accessories company, they just do a fantastic job of that with regards lifestyle images. Okay.

Randy: What’s the brand again?

Kunle: Herschel. Herschel Supply. I think they’re based in Canada. They’re on Instagram; I’ll share a link to their Instagram on the show notes. They’re just amazing with regards to… they’ve mapped out all their personas, basically, their customer personas. And they just put inspirational aspirational photographs, lifestyle photographs on their Instagram feed. ‘Travel’, just around ‘travel’ especially. And you know those photos – celebrities or fashion websites where they put what they’re packing, you know, what’s-in-my-bag photographs – they do that a lot with regards to like a face, scarf, headphones, your iPhone, and stuff like that. Yeah, I’m just on their page right now, just looking. Quite interesting anyway. It just seems like Instagram… what are your thoughts on Instagram versus Facebook versus Pinterest? Those are like the three major image marketing platforms out there right now. Where do you think retailers, online retailers like yourself would see the most opportunity?

Angie: Currently we use Instagram for more brand awareness and trying to get people engaged. Because it’s easier to get to talk to people on Instagram and Twitter than Facebook. Facebook’s a little bit more difficult, we seem to have a lot of followers but not a lot of engagement, whereas Twitter and Instagram are a little easier I think to do that. So I look at Twitter as more like real-time news and engagement with customers, and Facebook is a little bit more like, ‘Hey, this is what’s new,’ or ‘This is the product that was just released,’ or ‘This is our sale that’s coming up.’ I think there’s a lot of opportunity in all three and we probably haven’t dug quite deep enough yet. And Pinterest is another place where we’re having some success. We’ve just been doing Promoted Pins and that’s been really interesting.

Kunle: Okay. With social, you know I think every social media platform now has a buy button. What do you think the role of search engines are going to play in businesses over the next 3 to 5 years going forward?

Angie: We’ve been battling search engines since we started in 2005, and I don’t mean that in a bad way but it’s always a constant ‘Google is our friend’, or enemy depending on the day. And as much as we try to diversify our portfolio and get customers in other ways, I think that for us search engines have still been a huge part in our success. I don’t look for that to diminish quickly, especially because our audience may not you know go to the social platforms quite as much as the millennials or as fast as the millennials. They’re on there and they’re especially on Facebook but they may not interact with the social media platforms as much as the millennials. So I still see search engines playing a big role in what we do but we’ll definitely take any opportunity that comes our way in terms of diversifying our customer acquisition strategies.

Kunle: Okay.

Randy: We’ve been working extremely hard this year and it’s going to continue to be a focus for us next year in experimenting with other marketing channels. And that includes some traditional media like radio and television and other things, so we don’t have the plan hammered out just yet but we’re certainly going to continue to experiment more than we ever had in the past.

Kunle: Okay, okay. That makes sense. I’m on your website now, on your homepage, you’ve been featured on Today, Wall Street Journal, Travel, InStyle, People, Redbook…you name it. What impact has the press, and you actually have a press contact on there, media (at) OneClickVentures.com, what impact has the press actually played? Has it driven more brand awareness, word of mouth, and more direct brand-name searches to your brand? What’s been your experience?

Randy: I mentioned earlier that we have a Head of PR and Content starting in three weeks and that’s a signal that we believe in the power of PR and content marketing. And we think that those two are joined closely at the hip. But overall PR has been very, very positive for us over the years. You mentioned some of the placements that we received and those placements have resulted in direct traffic, you know revenue that we can clearly tie to those various events, and even when it comes to our employment brand, the One Click employment brand here locally, we’ve had a number of placements and articles written that’s really helped us with recruiting. So we have invested in PR in the past and we will continue to invest in PR in the future.

Kunle: Interesting how PR works both from the backend with acquiring resources and staff, basically, and the front-end which you’re really acquiring customers. Okay, right. Let’s talk about word-of-mouth marketing and customer acquisition. Do you have any experience with word-of-mouth marketing for your brands? Are you encouraging existing customers to spread the word, essentially advising them to tell their friends, or the people about them, your brand? What does word-of-mouth marketing look like for your brand?

Randy: This is an area that’s been getting a lot of discussion internally over the past few months and it’s an area that we’re going to focus on in 2016. Historically we haven’t, other than we think that the most valuable word-of-mouth tool for us is taking excellent care of our customers, taking better care of our customers than any other retailer can possibly do. So that’s our primary focus and we feel like if we’re executing well there and taking good care of our customers, that word-of-mouth to some extent will take care of itself. But the area where we haven’t done a very good job in the past and where we feel like where we can improve is making it easy for customers that have it, have an amazing experience with our brands, to share the experience with their friends and family and you know possibly folks that are following them on Twitter or Facebook or what have you. So we’re going to make it much easier in the future for customers to share their positive experience with our brands and that’s definitely going to be something that we focus on next year.

Kunle: Okay. What lever do you think you’re going to utilize: email or social media or both? To get them to share more?

Randy: That’s still to be determined, but email will certainly play a role. We’ve talked about rolling out some sort of VIP or loyalty program and there may be a reward component as part of that loyalty program. So we still have a lot of work to do, a lot of details to flesh out internally, but we’re really excited about the opportunities that exist because this is an area that we just clearly have not paid close enough attention to over time.

Angie: Anecdotally we hear from our customers that call in or email us that they’ve heard from a friend. But we really need to add that reward component to the word-of-mouth so we can A) help track it and B) reward people for talking about us.

Kunle: Absolutely. Okay, okay. Let’s talk about the eyewear industry. What’s the size of the eyewear industry and what part of the industry are you capturing or targeting with your brand?

Randy: So the eyewear industry as it pertains to frames is $25 billion. At around $20 billion of that is in a prescription space. Around $4 billion of that is in sunglasses space and then around $1 billion of that comes from reading glasses.

Kunle: Okay, okay.

Randy: So it’s a massive…

Kunle: It is, per annum at that. Okay.

Randy: Yeah, and that’s the US market, so it’s a massive market and it gets much larger than that if you start looking at it on an international scale.

Kunle: Okay, and I guess the premium side of each of these segments would take a small proportion, and then there’s a big long tail for other players to engage in the market. What about peak periods in the eyewear industry? Are there any peak periods? Obviously for sunglasses it would be summer but for reading glasses and prescription glasses do you see a steady churn all through the year, or are there peaks and troughs from a demand perspective?

Randy: So with sunglasses we see a small spike around spring break and then we see a larger spike during the summer months, so in the US from June until August. And then like with any retail business there’s certainly more activity around the holiday season.

Kunle: Okay. And then for the prescription and the reading glasses, are they quite similar from a trends perspective, are there any peaks and troughs or is it pretty much steady?

Angie: So we do sell reading sunglasses, but we’ll see a few higher hills in the summer time and around the holiday days for reading glasses but it’s not quite as spiky as Sunglass Warehouse. And then for prescription eyewear, we’ve only been doing it for a year so I don’t know if we know the trends exactly but from what we heard from the industry, it goes a little bit quiet during the holidays and then picks back up in January or so.

Kunle: Okay, speaking of prescription glasses, what are your thoughts on Warby Parker?

Randy: Well just speaking strictly in terms of you know Warby being a competitor I mean we have a ton of respect for the brand that Warby’s built and how they’ve gone about building that brand over the past 5+ years.

Kunle: Because I think they pioneered the try-before-you-buy experience in the prescription glasses sector or segment really and you know there was quite a lot of friction in that space where people tried stuff, returned, there was a high return rate. Given in the UK there is some online prescription glasses companies that have actually adopted their method, because they’re not in the UK at the minute. So my question I suppose is how you tend to scale and grow felix + iris looking at it from a brand perspective? Because it’s quite similar to Warby Parker.

Randy: The area where we feel like we are the most different from Warby Parker is the target audience. So with felix + iris the idea is that the Gen X and baby boomer audience has for the most part when it comes to prescription eyewear have been ignored online and we, talking to our readers and customers over the years and talking to other people on the market, it was clear that there needed to be a brand that really understands that customer and that audience and can service them effectively. And we feel like with felix + iris we can do that and we built our selection and the shopping experience around that customer. So we’re really excited about the customer that we’re servicing and we’re really excited about how were servicing that customer with helping them make sure they find the right fit through accommodation of our Fit Profile or Fit Kit. So while there are some operational things that we’re doing in a similar fashion to Warby, we think about the brand as really being positioned much differently than Warby.

Kunle: So you’re more towards the Gen X consumers?

Randy: Gen X and baby boomers.

Kunle: Okay and the baby boomers . Okay, that make sense. So you really segmented on that part of the market. Do all your brands ship internationally? Because I noticed Sunglass Warehouse does. What’s your take on international e-commerce and cross-border e-commerce?

Angie: So Sunglass Warehouse and Readers.com both ship internationally. We feel like it’s a huge opportunity that we haven’t spent a lot of time exploring. So we worked on making sure that our shipping is inexpensive and we’ve switched international shipping providers a few times to try to get the right fit for our customers. But in terms of marketing and advertising it’s not something that we’ve really invested in heavily. So we feel especially, obviously the English-speaking countries like Canada, Australia, and the UK are really open markets for us and something that we’re considering in 2016. But right now it’s [inaudible 00:41:11] business.

Kunle: What’s been the most interesting source of sale from an international standpoint? Or country?

Angie: So Canada is one of our biggest market, probably because they’re our next-door neighbors. And there’s lots of postal lockers and things scattered up along the border between the United States and Canada, where Canadian customers can use US shipping and ship it for free. Australia is an interesting target because they have really generous tax and duty limits and so we see a lot of volume for Australia as well.

Kunle: Interesting, okay, given the distance of Australia from the US. Okay, let’s talk about retention. How often do your existing customers come to buy prescription or sunglasses from your brand? I guess my question really is do you have a high customer retention rate? And are you tracking the frequency of purchase from your existing customers?

Randy: Yeah, retention is something that we pay close attention to as a team. And we enjoy what we consider a high repeat purchase rate on readers and our repeat purchase rate on sunglasses is isn’t nearly as high and that’s something that we’re working hard to improve to better understand how we can be top of mind when the customers purchase that second or third pair of sunglasses.

Angie: And for prescription eyewear the purchase cycle is about two years, which seems excruciatingly long since we’ve only been in business a year. And so we’re excited to see what our rate is once we hit that two-year mark. But we’ve already enjoyed some repeat purchases and we’re kind of pleasantly surprised by that.

Kunle: That’s quite interesting. Do you do in anything to kind of ‘remind your customers’ that, say their prescriptions are going to… they need to retest, you know, just giving them nudges so to speak via perhaps like email automation to get you top of mind again. So when they are due to change it, they get an email. Is there any automation going on to help out your retention efforts?

Randy: Yeah, great question. So over the past year we’ve talked a lot about 1-to-1 marketing and really driving toward a personalized communication strategy on the email side of the business. So we’ve built out a number of custom automations for our customers and we were leveraging data to make a lot of those recommendations. So we moved from Bronto, which was our ESP for the past four years or so, to ExactTarget or now it’s Salesforce Marketing Cloud at the beginning of the year so we have more resources and functionality at our disposal to get a little more personalized and granular with our email communication.

Kunle: So I guess each customer sits as a contact in your CRM in ExactTarget. If that’s the case then you probably have an order history for every one of your customers, is that kind of like the picture there, or?

Randy: Correct.

Kunle: Okay, all right, that makes sense, that makes a lot of sense. Okay. What about customer lifetime value? I think one of the challenges with calculating customer lifetime value is the time element, you know the devil is in the detail and it’s writing in the word ‘lifetime’, you know. So what about your timespan? What kind of figures do you put or do you use in the calculation of your lifetime value, if you calculate customer lifetime value?

Randy: We look at a number of different slices of LTV. We look at two-year LTV all the way up to five year LTV. But the number that we use most often, the term that we use most often to make marketing decisions is the three-year LTV.

Kunle: Okay, somewhere in the middle, okay. Is there a reason for that? Just down to the fact that’s an average, or?

Randy: With talked to some folks in the industry you know, whether those are operators or investors, and that’s the term that comes up most often so that’s what we’ve settled on internally.

Kunle: Okay, that makes sense; that makes a lot of sense. Right, let’s talk about the company in itself from a culture standpoint. What is it like working for One Click Ventures? What’s a typical day like for a member of staff?

Angie: So, we love the fact that all of our team members are in one building. So we house everything from fulfillment to customer happiness, to marketing, technology, finance, HR, all in one building. We enjoy flexible work hours and a casual dress code. We have ping-pong tables and free breakfast. We essentially want people to feel really comfortable so that they can focus all of their ‘mind-share’ on great ideas and helping the company grow and helping our brands get better. So there’s not a lot of I guess corporate rules that you might see in some larger companies, which I think is pretty typical for smaller startups, especially in the US, I’m not sure what it’s like in the UK.

Kunle: Interesting. Sixty sounds like a good size and yeah, you’ve got a really nice office space, I had a look at your website. In the UK yeah, the bigger it gets, the stiffer becomes. So I guess that applies throughout the world. Yeah, you were recognized one of the best places to work in Indiana for four years consecutively. How did you manage to crack that? And what are your core values and how do your core values actually connect to that accolade?

Randy: Yeah, we are really proud of being named one of the best places to work in Indiana for four consecutive years. What we’re most proud is that that award is based on anonymous team member feedback, so we’re not holding a gun to anyone’s head to tell them what to fill out when those surveys come out. I would say the most important ingredient to becoming a best place to work…and that’s nice for a team to celebrate and to put what we do as a company and perspective but we’re not focused on people and culture here to win awards. We do it because we think it’s the right way to do business. And the way we’ve, the way Angie and I have approached building One Click from the very beginning is to hire super-talented people who are aligned around a common value set. And over time if you’re able to hire, fire, and reward people based on that value set, it’s a pretty simple formula to follow. Unfortunately a lot of companies get off track for any number of reasons but it’s been a pretty simple formula for us and it’s worked well. But it all starts with hiring the right people, and hiring people that are aligned with your values and who are really committed to making the company, in themselves, great.

Angie: We have 10 core values that we live and breathe by, including open and effective communication, act like the owner, think big. We really want to empower people to come in and make great decisions. They can take on responsibility and have ownership over their daily work, but also understand how they’re impacting the greater good of the company.

Kunle: I like your values. When did you start thinking about the core values? When was it important to start to empower your employees with these values? When did you start to say what you are thinking pretty much? At what size did you say, ‘Okay, we need to set this in stone, these values, in stone for our employees’?

Randy: I can’t remember the exact number of team members we had or the exact year but I want to say it was somewhere around 15 people…

Angie: Between 20.

Randy: Yeah, 15 or 20 people where we said you know what, we life these values every day but they’re not documented so as a team we worked together to document the values. It was a total team effort. You know it wasn’t Angie and I holed up in an office somewhere saying, ‘Oh, well what are our values?’ It was, I mean we involved every single person in the company in that process at the time because we felt like it was important to capture the essence of One Click and that wasn’t just with the way that Angie and a I viewed One Click. Now, it just so happened that we were all clearly aligned, you should be, once that exercise finished up. But yeah, I think it was around 15 or 20 people and you can do that at different times. I talked to other entrepreneurs and early-stage company executives asked me about that from time to time, and I don’t think you want to wait too late to do it because if you’re not careful, those culture will be defined for you. But I think as long as you’re thinking about that and taking action on it somewhere between team member number 1 and team member number 50, you’re probably in pretty good shape.

Kunle: Right. Has culture been a constant or hasn’t evolved?

Angie: I think that there are things that are constant and there are things that evolve. You know we have team members that float in an out of the organization and depending on where we are as a business. When we were a little bit younger I think the culture may have been slightly different but the essence has remained the same.

Kunle: Okay, right. Time for the evergreen questions and first question has got to do with how you hire people?

Angie: So we hire people based on our core values. That’s the number one important aspect of hiring people. So we like to joke around office that we don’t have jerks. Because the truth of the matter is we don’t. It’s really important for some positions to hire someone that may be really competitive or driven by numbers but you don’t have to hire a jerk for that position. So if somebody is going to not fit with our core values or not fit with our team, no matter how talented they are, they don’t get hired. But also we like to hire really talented people that are going to add value to the organization. And it’s really important that we don’t hire people that aren’t going to fit in our culture. So small startup means that you’re going to have a lot of responsibility, going to have to learn things on your own, you’re going to have to contribute without being asked sometimes. And someone that’s really prying for a corporate environment where they’re going to get all their tasks handed down to them and they just wait to climb the corporate ladder, I’d say that person doesn’t fit well here. So that’s really important to us too.

Kunle: Okay, okay. All right. What about you three indispensable tools for managing One Click Ventures?

Randy: Do you mean software tools?

Kunle: It could be anything, tools, yes software tools.

Randy: Software tools… Well I would say our email/CRM platform is critical. So Salesforce Marketing Cloud. We use a software tool called TinyPulse. It sends out weekly surveys to our team. That helps us keep a pulse on team member engagement, areas of opportunity across the organization. So that’s a tool that we’ve become pretty fond of over the past two years. What do you think a third tool is? Tiny Pulse and Salesforce Marketing Cloud…

Angie: Domo.

Randy: Domo would be the third. So Domo is a business intelligence platform that has really transformed the way we look at data and the way that we use data internally.

Kunle: Okay, interesting, I’ve not heard of Domo or Tiny Pulse so I’ll definitely check it out. Okay. What’s been your best mistake today? And by that I mean a setback that’s giving you the best or biggest feedback.

Randy: Yeah, I would say that there were a series of Google algorithms updates in 2012 and we had a couple of brands that were caught up in those updates. And that was just a good learning experience for us because we knew with Google search it wasn’t always black and white, there was a lot of grey, so it was a good reminder for our team to A) we needed to diversify our revenue streams, which we have to a certain extent; and B) was like okay well, we understand there’s a lot of grey in how we manage Google Search but we need to make it really black and white internally, and we’ve done that successfully. So that was a really good, there was some really good learnings around those things for the entire team here.

Kunle: Interesting, okay. What one piece of advice can you give to mid-tier e-tailers seeking to grow rapidly?

Angie: I think the one piece of advice is not to get ahead of yourself. So there’s a really fine line between growing and investing in your team for growth, and waiting until you grow and then investing. You have to find that right balance for you. And a lot of that is defined on whether you are or not you’re bootstrapped; whether profit is important or whether you’re just going for top line growth. So understanding what your goals are and then finding that really fine line between investment in your team and your infrastructure, or growing first and then investing. I think you have to find that right balance for you.

Kunle: Okay, fantastic.

Randy: And that’s an excellent point and that’s different for everyone right, because some people may have X amount in institutional funding and then someone like One Click may be taking a more self-funded approach. So everyone has different goals, everyone has different capital needs, but whatever your goals and capital needs are, it’s important to make sure you’re making good decisions in terms of how the team’s built over time.

Kunle: That makes a lot of sense, yeah, being realistic on ground with your situation. Okay great. Final set of questions are: if you could choose a single book or resource that has made the highest impact on how you view building a business and growth, which would it be?

Randy: Wow, there’s so many good… I’m an avid business and leadership book reader so there’s so many good books to draw from here but my favorite big business book, and I’ve read this in the past year, is The Hard Thing About Hard Things. That particular book has been really helpful for me. I wish that book would have been available five years ago because we may have avoided some of the mistakes that we’ve made over the past five years. But yeah, that’s definitely my favorite business book of all time.

Kunle: I have it on my Kindle but I have to admit I haven’t read it yet. Okay, all right. How about you, Angie?

Angie: So I also love The Hard Thing About Hard Things, I think it’s a great book. But one of the books that I really love and I actually sent to people as gifts all the time is Girlboss. It’s the Nasty Gal story and it just really relates to, I mean obviously she’s much bigger than we are but, I related to the way that she bootstrapped her business and worked to night and day to get something off the ground and had a vision that she was able to fulfill, and I just love that book.

Kunle: Gotcha. #Girlboss, okay. We’ll link both books in the show notes. Okay, right. Finally if our audience would like to reach out to you guys, what’s the best way to reach out to both of you, please?

Angie: Well I’m always available over email. It’s Angie (at ) OneClickVentures.com. But I spend a lot of time on Twitter as well and my Twitter handle is Easterday77.

Kunle: Easterday77. I will definitely link that link through. Randy?

Randy: Yeah, I’m pretty easy to find. Randy (at) OneClickVentures.com is my email address. I’m not as active on Twitter as Angie is but I can certainly be reached on Twitter or LinkedIn. Yeah, I’m always happy to connect. And I really enjoyed, I followed the 2X e-commerce now for the past couple weeks and I’ve gotten a tremendous amount of value out of the content.

Kunle: Well thank you. It’s always good to get a good feedback. Please leave us an iTunes review when you have a chance. [laughs] It’s been an absolute pleasure having you both to the show. Wish you best of luck with your new brand felix + iris. And yeah, I was really looking forward to this and it was really well worth it. Okay, thank you so much Angie and Randy.

Angie: Thank you we’ve enjoyed it.

Randy: Yeah, thank you very much.

Kunle: All right, cheers.

So thank you for sticking to the very end of today’s show and hope you found Angie and Randy’s story about One Click Ventures inspiring. To download the show notes and read the full transcript, head over to 2XeCommerce.com about a week from the iTunes publish date. For updates and tips to help grow your store, be sure to sign up to our email alert list over on 2XeCommerce.com. So until the next show 2Xers, do have a fantastic one! See you later.

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