Brandkenstein Lab Report to $100k #3: We made a couple of sales! [Aug 2024] 🧪

Yo! Welcome to the Lab! 👋

Here, la me will whip out the proverbial microscope to share the DTC brand’s spend, results, strategy, and next steps.

The premise of Lab Reports are simple: I’ll recap the results of the previous month and share my hypotheses and plans for the next month.

In this report I’ll share:

• The source of our first few sales.

• The marketing & branding initiatives we’re working on.

• Our next steps for building the brand and driving sales.

We finally launched the flagship product 🥳

Launching the flagship product—a special type of all-in-one beauty “kit”—took way longer than expected. 

I wanted to launch around Feb-April. 

But our landing page and ads went live in the first week of August 2024. And we’ve also uploaded our catalgue on TikTok (at a discounted rate to build momentum on the platform). 

There were a bunch of things that went “wrong” with the launch process: 

• Building the landing page on Shopify app PageFly was a struggle!
  
  It took some fiddling to ensure the page was responsive across all devices (and even then it’s not the best on desktop, but we’re optimizing for mobile anyway.)

• Our product model bailed on us. A friend of a friend agreed to be the model for the brand/flagship product.
  
  We were supposed to shoot a video with her showcasing the product and her feedback, but she bailed last-minute. So we rolled with the punches and continued with a more product-focused ad (without a human face involved). 

• Printing issues. The flagship product involves custom designs that need to be mass-printed.
  
  Our printer started messing up a bunch of these as we prepared influencer boxes! 

• TikTok violations for delivery. Honestly struggling to wrap my head around the platform and how you’re supposed to mark an order as fulfilled or shipped.

  
  Keep getting violation warnings for this. This is not good considering that TikTok is our ONLY source of sales so far. 

Ongoing: 

• Launched a Google ads that’s focused on the flagship product at the start of August.

• We ran a TikTok ad for a week to test the waters too.

• During this last week, I’ve set up an ad group for our white-labeled products that runs to the catalog page. 

• I’m also using TikTok Affiliate Centre to find and send products to potential influencers.

“The numbers, Mason Hassan” 👎

27 Jul - 27 August: 

Sales: 4 sales - £17.00 in revenue.

TikTok has been our only source of sales so far despite running ads to the Shopify Store. 

These sales are for our white-labeled product which isn’t that unique and retails for £3-6 on our TikTok shop, and £9.99 on our Shopify Store. 

The products are available elsewhere on Amazon and via other players in this space.

But our branding is different and we tell a story with each SKU. 

Our flagship product, on the other hand, hasn’t had a single sale. 

I’m quite worried about this because it’s had 400+ visits from paid search costing £193, & 0 conversions. Makes me wonder:

• Is our product a dud or do we just need time for the market to respond? 

• Do I need to drive demand with aggressive influencer marketing? 

• I’ve been thinking about launching ads on FB/Meta, but I’m holding off because we’re spending a lot right now without any ROI. My think is that if there’s a solid need for the product, it should sell with ads…

Not sure how to read the data and respond appropriately.  

Traffic: 462 users

• Paid search: 286 

• Direct: 114

• Organic search: 55

Ads running: 

As a content/SEO guy, I’m new to ads and enjoy the process of planning and running them. 

Currently, I have one conversion-focused Search Campaign with two Ad groups: 

1. Ad group to the landing page for our flagship product (been running for a few weeks and is the main source of traffic). 

   • Clicks: 332

   • Impressions: 24,451

   • CTR: 1.36%

   • CPC: £0.58

   • Cost: £193.12

   • Conversions: 0

2. Ad group to our catalogue of white label products (launched this week) within the same campaign. 

   • Not worth sharing data because it launched 3 days ago. 

I’m having conversion tracking issues with Shopify. Working on correcting it. Let’s see how that goes

Finding the whole paid ads thing daunting but fun. If any of you reading can help me out here I’m all ears.

Speaking of ads…

TikTok’s CPC works out 100% cheaper

We recorded a product ad and ran a TikTok promo that leads to the TikTok product listing: 

• CPC: 0.19 GBP

• Impressions: 12,016

• Clicks: 307

• CTR: 2.55%

• Total cost: 58.17 GBP

• Conversions: 0

Compared to Google Ads, that’s roughly a 100% difference in total CPC. Although, while I write this I realize the comparison is unfair as the TikTok ad creative is a polished video ad, and the Google Ads are search only. 

A better comparison for TikTok would be YT/Meta video ads. 

Brand growth:

• 170 followers on TikTok. Roughly 100+ from last month

We know producing content is going to be key for organic growth and exposure, but it’s been difficult for my wife to find the time with my daughter at home. 

My daughter will be back to school next week, which means we can focus on producing more content on TikTok and growing our following. 

To be honest, we’ve both been a bit down considering the poor sales performance of our flagship product and all the time that went into it, but the trickle of sales from TikTok has given us some hope lol.

If I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have gone with a custom all-in-one kit to launch the brand. Instead, I would try to pick one part of the kit to refine and improve first.

And that’s a wrap!

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