Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the question, you ask the questions, liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.
Speaker 3:Welcome back to another episode of Subscription Box Answers. I hope you're having a great week. On today's episode, I'm delighted to sit down and have a chat with Jessica Prinsabee, who's the founder of All Girl Shave Gold. How are you, Jessica?
Speaker 2:I'm great. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here with you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Thanks very much for coming on. I followed your content for a while on Instagram and stuff and you always put out really, really helpful content for people who are subscription boxes to sit down and have a chat with you. You're the founder of All Girl Shave Club. Do you want to explain what that is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. All Girl Shave Club is a women's shaving subscription service and online boutique. I started the business back in 2016. I was just really looking for a way out of my nine to five. I was working full time, I had two little boys at home and the company that I was working for was actually a company my mom had started. For the past 14 years of my career, I had been helping build her dream and it was awesome, but I really wanted to start building something of my own. I wasn't sure exactly what that was, but I decided to explore different ideas, different possibilities.
Speaker 2:One day, the idea for the business just came to me as I was getting ready to shave. I was going to steal my husband's razor because his always was better and sharper and more premium than mine were. I just hit me it was a download. Hey, maybe this could be something I could build a business around. I don't really love the products that are on the market for women. Maybe I could create a better product. Maybe I could make it feel really fun and beautiful and exciting to receive in the mail. Subscription boxes were a new and up and coming thing. At that time. I just decided to run with the idea. Lucky for me, it all worked out.
Speaker 3:It's great. It's a really good idea. I was looking at your website and you have some really nice copy on it. Smooth as shit, thank you. You can ever give your legs exactly what they want the irritation-free shave that's gentle on sensitive skin. You smooth as a pedal every time. Really good copy.
Speaker 2:Bingo.
Speaker 3:Bingo. That's exactly it. That literally summarizes it. I think people struggle with subscription boxes sometimes getting their message across. But yeah, that's really copy.
Speaker 2:It takes a lot of time too, to really figure out. You want to balance your message between solving the problem but also being really concise and clear. It's hard to find that balance. That was 13, 14 different iterations before we really landed on that.
Speaker 3:People don't really understand that. They think, oh, it's easy to write a headline. It can actually take a lot of effort and a lot of changes to get your message across, but I think you've done a very good job there, thank you. That's exactly what you do. It's interesting. I think it's the same for a lot of people who come into this industry. You wanted to set up your business to leave your 9-5 job. I think that's the goal for a lot of people. How long did it take you to make the leap?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good question, because I'm asked that question a lot too. I think sometimes people think I'll launch this business and I'll be able to leave next month and I'll be good to go. It does take a little bit of time and I don't want people to feel like they are failing or they're not succeeding. If it does take some time, especially working through cash flow and being able to consistently pay yourself and all of that, for me it took about seven to eight months before I was ready to leave my business, my job. What happened was I wasn't quite ready, I wasn't really there, but I had to have unexpected surgery and at that point I was going to be out of work for eight weeks. I took that eight weeks to just really get comfortable with the idea of leaving my job and leaving that security and taking the leap About eight months. But it probably would have been a full year before I made the decision on my own if I hadn't had that happen.
Speaker 3:Fair play. That's something going. Ours was around the same time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Leave. Obviously, the landscape around subscription boxes was quite a bit different back then compared to now. It was the new thing and a lot of hype and excitement around the industry there still is now, but it just was completely different. Did you have any other plans to do any other subscriptions, or was it straight with the razor? How much did the Dollar Shave Club story influence you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. When I actually launched the business, I launched it in a completely different capacity than it is now. It looked very different. It was really like a curated subscription box that had the razor, it had the shave butter and then we also included additional shaving, grooming and body products for women. It was like a whole curated box. I did that because I wanted to differentiate myself from Dollar Shave Club.
Speaker 2:At the time there weren't any other women's shaving subscriptions in the market. I felt like that was my differentiator, that this was a gift experience, like a luxury experience. But over time, over the first few months, I was getting feedback from customers saying, hey, I just want the razor, or I just want the shave butter, or I want to customize my package. I don't want the other products, or I love the other products. There's just a whole bunch of people wanting a whole bunch of different things. I had to evaluate what really was going to be the path forward. I couldn't have 500 different subscription options. We decided to pare it down to our main core products. I stopped doing the curated box and I just put my products as the hero of the store. Those products are now available on subscription so people can customize their own plan.
Speaker 3:Very good. I think a lot of people have a similar story. They call me in and it's a very complicated subscription. I know we had crazy ideas at the start of really complicating what we're doing, but in most cases it's the simpler you can get it, it is for everybody and it's easier to actually sell it too. So if somebody knew coming into this industry and they want to do what you did, they want to set up a subscription box, leave their job and have it provide a full-time income. What's the one piece with the voice that you give to them?
Speaker 2:I would say the biggest thing that you can do to prepare yourself for success, or to set yourself up for success, is to be sure that you are building an audience of people that you can launch to before you actually launch your box. I think sometimes we go into the launch period where it's like we're so excited about customizing our boxes and curating the products and designing all the fun things. Then we get to launch and we're like, oh wait, but who's going to actually buy it? And marketing can be a little bit more intensive than we give it credit for. So if you spend a little bit of time building an audience, building an email list, taking them on the journey, nurturing them throughout the way, when you launch, you'll have a little I call it like my little mini marketing army to help promote and grow your business. I really believe that that was the catalyst for all-girls ShaveClub's success is having that audience and being able to launch to them and then having them help me spread the word throughout the launch 100%.
Speaker 3:people will knew people who sell their businesses. Sometimes they think, oh, if you build it, they will come. It's not the day that you go home, but unfortunately it's rarely like that and you do have to go a bit of audience building. So you've said something very interesting there. You turned them into like your army to promote your box. How did you do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just kind of throughout pre-launch I took them on a journey so they were really giving me their feedback. They were telling me. They were telling me like what box style they liked, what colors they liked, what branding they liked, the different names of different products that they liked. We named our razors different names at the time and they were invested in the experience and so when they were able to buy, then we were able to offer them a referral like an incentive program. I think we paid $5 cash for every referral that they made, but they were excited to promote and share because they felt like they were invested in the product and invested in the business. So that's how we did it. We use referral candy, the referral program app, and it was pretty easy, just super simple.
Speaker 3:Nice referral candy. I remember that from a few years ago. I think we used that really good app. So just looking at your website here, you obviously mentioned that you had other products, and I can see you're selling products like single products on the store, like Shave. Whether is that a big part of your strategy? Do you push people onto that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so generally we lead with the razor. That's the easiest product that people really understand, you know what it is and they decide if they want it or not. We lead with that in our marketing and our advertising. And when they get to the website then we have the ShaveButter as kind of like an upsell in the flow, in the, you know, create your package flow and yes, I would say 85% of our subscribers will take that ShaveButter because it completes the experience and really makes it fun and exciting. And then we find often that once people are on and they have, you know, the razor and the ShaveButter subscription, they'll add more ShaveButter to their order, to their subscription, so they'll get multiple jars each month or you know, kind of customize it that way after they tried it.
Speaker 3:Well, that's some take right, but it goes to show you that if you just have a product that makes a perfect sense with your subscription, people will take it. And what kind of mechanism do you have set up to allow that to happen? Can they log into their account and just do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, definitely. So. We use the recharge app on Shopify and that subscribe flow If they. You know, if the listeners want to check out the website, if they go to allgirlshaveclubcom slash, get started. I believe it is. That subscribe flow is custom built. I had a developer custom design it and it's just pulling in the recharge subscription products and so once they check out, then they can log into their recharge account and they can manage their subscription add, change, remove, change, sense, anything like that.
Speaker 3:Cool. That's really, really interesting. I think in it sounds like you're completely ahead of the game, but I think from like 2023 and 2024 and onwards, you have to be thinking of more products, kind of an ecosystem you can actually offer your subscribers, because obviously we've no control over ad prices, economies, anything like that. But the one thing we do have some kind of control over is selling other products to people. If you can kind of balance that and get people to take more items, give a higher lifetime value, it's not really a worry if your ad costs are going up. Do you find that to be the case in your business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really important to have additional products as an option and, like you said, to support your LTV. But also, like, sometimes it's easier to sell a non-subscription product than it is a subscription product. For those that are maybe a little bit leery of the word subscription or feel, like they might be, you know, in a commitment that they are not sure that they want to have, sometimes it's easier to just lead with a one-time product or a one-time box and then offer that subscription on the back end. We've tried that with success as well. But really I think about subscriptions and I think of it as really a medium, like a sales channel. Essentially, we are still in the business of e-commerce and in selling products, and so having kind of a collection of items that we can offer to our customers is really important as the subscription industry changes.
Speaker 3:You said something very interesting there. So you were selling one-time products on the front end and then upselling to the subscription. If you can get that to work, it makes a big, big difference to your cash flow and payback periods and so forth. Tell me about that. How did you do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So sometimes we do that if we're seeing like high, high, high cost of acquisition, we'll just kind of swap it in and see if that makes a difference. And sometimes it can bring down that cost of acquisition. So we'll just put together we call it a sample pack, so they get the razor kit and the shave butter and it's just a one-time bundle. And you can do the same thing with your subscriptions. If you have leftover inventory or excess boxes, just kind of put together a bundle on the front end and use that in your ads and then nurture through email to the subscription.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's very clever. I really like that strategy, and the good thing about it is sometimes, with one-time products, you can actually manipulate it in a way that you've more margin on them, so you've more money to pay the acquisition, and then, if you upsell them onto the subscription, they could be in profit right away For sure. Yeah, so if you had to give one piece of advice around marketing channels, what do you give to new subscription box owner? What's your most effective marketing channel now, and how has that changed over the last five years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say definitely it's important to learn paid media. I think that's really important. I think a lot of people rely on organic and that can help definitely and amplify your efforts. But it's really important to learn and empower yourself to know how to run your own ads, whether that be Facebook or Instagram or Google or Pinterest, whatever it is. I use the Meta Suite, so Facebook and Instagram ads are like my primary driver of sales and I learned early on that it was really important for me to learn and to be able to have control over, after hiring, several agencies that were very costly and very detrimental to my business. So I would say, definitely learn those ads.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's really, really important. And the funny thing is, for the majority of subscription boxes and direct to consumer businesses, facebook and Instagram still are the main driving source. Like, there's all these other channels Google, tiktok, pinterest and they can work to a degree and they can help supplement your subscribers. But why I always look at it is if you were trolling off Facebook for a lot of businesses you'd be in trouble. Even with these other channels you will be in trouble.
Speaker 3:And the point about the agency yeah, there are so many horror stories and stuff out there about because the barriers to entry to set up an agency are really really low. People can just say I'm running an agency but actually find a good agency is pretty tough and, yeah, you end up burning a lot of money. I think it's important for the business owner to learn some of the stuff the lingo, how to settle bad, what actually works and then maybe at some point in the future, if they find the right agency, it can make sense. But if you're just going with an agency completely blind, it's usually a recipe for trouble.
Speaker 2:I would definitely agree. If you don't even know what they're telling you, if you don't understand the metrics or the language, like you said, then you're just going blind and you don't really know what you don't know. And that was exactly true for me. I didn't know that 0.5 ROAS was really really bad, like you know. I did know, but you know what I mean. Like I didn't really understand what they were saying to me and I was just trusting that they were going to work out. So I do agree, I think learning the basics is really important and then outsourcing it as you grow.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and Langing and batching tips. This is the real reason I wanted to get you on class. I probably learned a little bit from this myself. You're able to run your business in about 10 hours a week. Do you want to elaborate on that? What systems have you set up to do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. It was really important to me to be able to systematize my business. I have two little boys. They're growing very fast. One is almost 13 and the other is 10. They're very active in sports and activities. One of the biggest drivers for me in wanting to leave my 9-5 was so that I could have a flexible schedule that I could work around their lives and be really present and active in their lives. For me, it was just imperative that I schedule my business operations, that I was able to work as efficiently as possible in my business. Really, for me, it's about a few things. One thing is dedicated power hours. I really take control of my schedule before other people take control of it for me. What I mean by that?
Speaker 3:You do you really don Kennedy books as well. I think he calls them time vampires.
Speaker 2:Oh, really, I've never read his books. Oh, tell me more.
Speaker 3:I have some treatment, Time management or something. Yeah, he talks about that Time vampires. But I like that. Take control of your schedule before people take control of it.
Speaker 2:Because they will. Yeah, they will. There are just so many things coming across your plate, especially as a subscription box owner. There's lots of moving parts, moving pieces, lots of shiny objects. If you aren't clear on what it is that you want to work on for that particular week or that particular month, those things are going to easily distract you and pull you in a million directions. Then you're never going to keep working towards or making the progress that you want, towards the goals or the things that are most important. Having those power hours is really important.
Speaker 2:Also, I live by the rule of the big three, Three main priorities, three main areas of focus, either at the daily level, the weekly level, the monthly level or the quarterly level, Really honing in on what those big three things are that are going to make the most difference for me in helping me reach my goals. A lot of times people are like well, how do you really identify that? How do I know which ones to pick? There's three really simple questions that you can ask yourself. The first one is what is my biggest barrier to growth? The second one is what's costing me the most money? The third is what's causing me the most stress? If you ask yourself those three questions, it becomes pretty clear, pretty quickly, what are the areas that I need to be focusing on this week, this month, this quarter.
Speaker 3:That's really, really clever. It's a great way to get away from the busy body work and, on the other hand, especially at the start of post-reboot, you can end up in a lot of busy body work that doesn't actually do anything, like you're literally going nowhere, just going around in circles doing admin work or like if the work doesn't need to be done. But you can make yourself feel like you're very busy but nothing's actually happening. I remember me and one of my co-founders. We worked, I think it was like 90 days in a row and like we were down, we had to go to the office and we were just we were down there all day and it got to the end of it. This is years ago now and we were like what did we actually do in the 90 days? And you've made it tangible to show the subscribers haven't really grown. But yeah, I take it similar approach nowadays too. You have to kind of identify what's actually going to move the needle forward. Just make sure you're doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. And I think the other thing too, the other challenge like I know this was for me especially in the early stages if you're working like as a solo pernuer or someone that has a very small team but you're still very involved in your business, sometimes it can be really overwhelming to know what exactly you should be working on when you sit down to work. Like you have all these ideas and all these things going on and I remember just coming into my office and like opening my laptop and being like okay, where do I even start? Like what are the things that are going to be the most important? And I would just waste so much time, like you said, doing garbage things or just not even getting started at all.
Speaker 2:And so I think it's really important to know, to have a plan, and really I think that also starts with understanding your monthly rhythm and your operational cycle. Like what are the things that have to happen from the first box going out the door to the next box going out the door, those recurring tasks that we're dealing with on a monthly or bi-monthly, whatever frequency. You are mapping those out for the year, for six months at a time, to know at what point in this cycle do we need to be ordering products? At what point do we need to be sending out our email campaigns, all of those things, so that you can have a clear picture of the capacity that you actually have to tackle other projects.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. And the good thing is you actually have a product to help people with this and you've seen this. It's called the subscription box planner. So really, really good product for anybody with a subscription box business. It's going to help keep you organized, help set you up to work towards goals, give you marketing tips and basically make your subscription box life a lot easier. So the 2024 version, I believe, will be out by the time this podcast comes out next week. What made you come up with this idea? Because I know it will help a lot of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it definitely will. It's really like all of the systems that I use to run my business and to work so efficiently in my business packaged up into this one system. The idea really came from my community. I was teaching a pre-launch course for subscription box owners who are getting ready to launch their business and they were getting through the finish line and getting to launch and they were so excited. And then one of the girls was like, well, what am I going to do next? She was so overwhelmed. She was like I know how to launch, but now how do I keep track of everything? How do I keep on top of my life? And so that was really where the idea came from and we did. Becky is my co-founder for the Planner. We actually interviewed hundreds of subscription box owners and asked them what do you need in a tool? What would be helpful for you? So it was created based on the feedback of lots of early stage box owners to really make sure that we created a product that would really serve the market well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because it's a very unique business model. Like, as you said, certain things have to happen every single month for the business to operate properly, and you have them all going out in this planner with great ideas around growth and stuff as well. So what for the planner is this now? Are we in the third year or the second year?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is actually the third version. Yeah, the third year.
Speaker 3:Well, it would be impressive. I definitely recommend anybody listening to check it out. Head over to the website. Where can they grab a copy if they want to check it out?
Speaker 2:Thank you. They can learn more at subscriptionboxplannercom.
Speaker 3:Perfect. Thanks very much for jumping on the podcast. I really, really appreciate it. I'm sure I'll catch up with you again soon in the future. If anybody wants to connect directly with you, where can they go?
Speaker 2:They can find me on Instagram at Jessica underscoreprincipi.
Speaker 3:OK, perfect, anybody that's listening. If you have a question you want answered on the show, just head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free Facebook group and post it there and we'll be back next week at the exact same time. Thanks very much, and chat years next week. And under a standard. They think, oh, it's easy to write a headline. It can actually take a lot of effort and a lot of changes to get your message across, but I think you've done a very good job there, exactly what you do, and it's interesting. I think it's the same for a lot of people who come into this industry. You wanted to set up your business, to leave your mind, to follow your job. I think that's the goal for a lot of people. How long did it take you to make the leap?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good question, because I'm asked that question a lot too. I think sometimes people think I'll launch this business and I'll be able to leave next month and I'll be good to go. And it does take a little bit of time and I don't want people to feel like they are failing or they're not succeeding if it does take some time, especially working through cash flow and being able to consistently pay yourself and all of that. So for me it took about seven to eight months before I was ready to leave my business, my job, and what happened was I wasn't quite ready, like I wasn't really there, but I had to have unexpected surgery and at that point I was going to be out of work for eight weeks and so I took that eight weeks to just really get comfortable with the idea of leaving my job and leaving that security and taking the leap. So about eight months, but it probably would have been a full year before I made the decision on my own if I hadn't had that happen.
Speaker 3:Fair play. That's something going. Ours was around the same time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I believe, and obviously the landscape around subscription boxes was quite a bit different Back then compared to now. It was the new thing, and a lot of hype and excitement around the industry there still is now, but it just was completely different and then so did you have any other plans to do any other subscriptions, or was it straight with the rise? Or how much did the dollar shave club story influence you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. So when I actually launched the business, I launched it in a completely different capacity than it is now. It looked very different. It was really like a curated subscription box that had the razor, it had the shave butter, and then we also included additional shaving, grooming and body products for women. So it was like a whole curated box. And I did that because I wanted to differentiate myself from dollar shave club.
Speaker 2:At the time there weren't any other women's shaving subscriptions in the market and so I felt like that was kind of my differentiator, that this was like a gift experience, like a luxury experience. But over time, over the first few months, I was getting feedback from customers saying, hey, I just want the razor, or I just want the shave butter, or I want to customize my package, I don't want the other products, or I love the other products. There's just a whole bunch of people wanting a whole bunch of different things, and so I kind of had to evaluate what really was going to be the path forward. I couldn't have 500 different subscription options and so we decided to like pare it down to our main core products and I stopped doing the curated box and I just put my products as like the hero of the store, and those products are now available on subscription, so people can customize their own plan.
Speaker 3:Very good, and I think a lot of people have a similar story. They call me in and it's a very complicated subscription. I know we had crazy ideas at the start of really complicating what we're doing, but in most cases, the simpler you can get it, it is for everybody and it's easier to actually sell it too. So sure Somebody knew coming into this industry and they, they want to do what you did. They want to set up a subscription box, leave their job and have it provide a full time income from them. What's the one piece with voice that you give to them?
Speaker 2:I Would say the biggest thing that you can do to prepare yourself for success, or to set yourself up for success, is to be sure that you are building an audience of People that you can launch to before you actually launch your box.
Speaker 2:I think sometimes we go into the like the launch period, where it's like we're so excited about customizing our boxes and curating the products and Designing all the fun things and then we get to launch and we're like, oh wait, but who's gonna actually buy it? And marketing can be a little bit more Intensive than we give it credit for right. And so if we spend a little bit of time, if you spend a little bit of time Building an audience, building an email list, taking them on the journey, nurturing them throughout the way, when you launch, you'll have and little I call it like my little, little mini marketing army To help promote and grow your business, and I really believe that that was the catalyst for all-girls-shave club. Success is having that audience and being able to launch to them and then having them help me spread the word throughout the launch 100% people, well, new people who sell their businesses.
Speaker 3:Sometimes they think, oh, if you build it they will come. Unfortunately it's a rare. You like that and you do have to go bit of audience building. So you've said something very interesting there. You turned them into like your army to promote your box. How, how did you do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just kind of throughout pre-launch I took them on a journey so they were really giving me their feedback. They were telling me, they were telling me like what box style they liked, what colors they liked, what Branding they liked, the different names of different products that they liked. We named our razors different names at the time and you know they were invested in the experience and so when they were able to buy, then we were able to offer them a referral like an incentive program. I think we paid $5 cash for every Referral that they made, but they were excited to promote and share because they felt like they were invested in the product and invested in the business. So that's how we did it. We use referral candy, the referral program app, and it was pretty easy, just super simple.
Speaker 3:Nice referral candy. I remember that from a few years. I think we use that really really good up.
Speaker 1:So,