From 1795 to Shopify: Building a £12M eCommerce Toy Brand, with Joe Jaques

Speaker A: If your cash flow is breaking, you really need to get to exactly why. If your CAC is skyrocketing, you need to understand exactly why. And the only way you can find that is by spending the time to go in the data. Just having a point of truth across all the platforms is absolutely critical. It's the E Commerce Master Plan podcast here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e commerce business, cutting through the hype to bring you inspiration and advice from the e commerce sector and beyond. Here's your host, Chloe Thomas.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome. It's great to have you here. Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests. Our guest for this episode is here because they applied to be on the show. So if you've got something you'd love to chat with me about and share with the audience, just go to ECMP. That's short for e commerce master plan, ecmp.info guest to apply and, uh, maybe we'll be chatting very, very soon. In this episode, I am chatting with Joe from Jacks of London. We're talking about how he's kind of pivoted his very old family business into the world of children's toys. We'll also be talking about the interesting time they had post Covid and how they survived that. We will be talking about how he keeps everything in house, right from the team in China through to the pick pack and dispatch here in the UK and a whole host of other topics. There's some great marketing stuff around Facebook, ads and influencers. If you listen right to the end of those top tips and 4, 4 tips in the book top tip as well. So I know you're gonna really enjoy this one. I thoroughly enjoyed recording it with Joe. So huge thanks to Joe for applying and to listening as well. Um, and hello, Jo, if you are able to listen to your own voice and you're listening back to that, to this one, it's a pleasure to have you tuning in. Okay, everyone, here we go. Make sure you listen to the end because you do not want to miss out on Joe's top tips.

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Speaker A: entradas e interiores personalizadas. Ademas Aurora centa Dolores enuncit de dos de vault de veinte Vultures Max porcientos ecenta inue dolares ll pro des Try to lista de materiales escrita y recotizacion en minutos agilisa tus projektos mi entra siguesta.

Speaker B: And now to introduce our special guest. Joe Jakes is the CEO, uh, at, uh, Jakes of London. Inventors of croquet, ping pong and chess as we know them and championing play as the foundation of Learning. Founded in 1794. Five, yes, over 200 years ago, Joe is the eighth generation toy maker to lead this family business, winning multiple awards in recent years. Now selling via their Shopify site and Amazon, they are on track for £12 million this year. Hello, Joe.

Speaker A: Hello, Chloe. Thank you very much for having me on the show. As you know, I'm a massive fan of this show, so I'm truly humbled to be here.

Speaker B: Always a treat to get to interview one of our own listeners. So, um, thank you, Jo, so much for applying to be on here and, um, very cool to have, um, Jake's on the show as well.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: Having been a croquet player at uni in a very amateur sense, um, this is very cool. But rather than us go off and talk about the history of croquet, ping pong and chess, which I must admit I did have to go and look up after writing the intro.

Speaker A: It sounds a bit unbelievable, doesn't it, that one family's invented ping pong, redesigned the Staunton chess set, invented happy, uh, family, Snap, Ludo, Snakes and ladders, tiddlywinks. You know, Lewis Carroll is my great, great uncle. Uh, it's a quite an unusual, unusual family to now sit here talking about selling things online. But we find ourselves here today.

Speaker B: But we are here. So how did you end up in the world of e commerce?

Speaker A: So I joined the family business in about 2001. Um, was a salesman on the road, selling here, there and everywhere. And gradually over from that period up to about 2010, gradually, all of the customers that we were selling well to and were selling well were selling online. So I sat there and said, look, this is completely pointless. We might as well learn to do this ourselves. Started selling ourselves on Amazon initially in about 2014 and just in the, in the days of Amazon hacking and ranking and knowing how to do it all, sort of started doing that. Was really, really happy that we suddenly became the first, second and third best selling backgammon set. But really cut our teeth when I got into data and effectively, uh, discovered how much bigger the toy market was, had a daughter in 2012 and pivoted the whole business really to start reselling toys. You know, we used to sell toys years ago and started selling them again about. And really now we're a toy company, but we've very recently become a toy company again. And, um, that was all kind of my vision and creation.

Speaker B: Wow. So you. So you went from literally out on the road.

Speaker A: Yeah. Driving around stockists with an A to Z map. Yeah. And learning the Internet and clearly becoming

Speaker B: somewhat obsessed with it.

Speaker A: Complete. I'm completely obsessed. I'm a complete data geek. I, um, love numbers and I love, I love the money and I love the fun and the winning of it all. And I love. Obviously we're a family of creatives and have been for hundreds of years, so understanding how we can dream up products and then sell products and understand the size and scale of the market for those products is highly, highly addictive, as we all know.

Speaker B: Oh, isn't it just. Well, let's cover off the basics of the business for those who aren't in the know. Um, where in the world are you and where are you selling to?

Speaker A: Uh, we're based in Edenbridge in Kent and we sell just to the uk. We have sold all across the world in the past, but my belief is sort of master or market first. And if you're trying to build a brand where people know and can buy again, you know, particularly with acquisition costs being what they are, uh, you need to sell to the same person multiple times and you've got a much better chance of doing that in better concentration, in my opinion.

Speaker B: I'm pretty sure. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but the size of the markets you play in in the uk, that's huge.

Speaker A: It's absolutely huge. It's like three and a half billion.

Speaker B: There's plenty of scope there, isn't there?

Speaker A: There's loads. There's absolutely loads. And I kind of think people get obsessed with being in global business when you don't need to be.

Speaker B: Life's a lot simpler.

Speaker A: It really is. Yeah. Particularly nowadays.

Speaker B: So tell us a bit about that product. We mentioned a couple of things, but what's the core focus and what else are you doing these days on the product front?

Speaker A: So the core focus with the products is people talk a lot about purpose in business and why you're doing what you do and what's the problem that you're trying to fix. We've always been a educational play company. We were making sort of Lotto, uh, games 200 years ago about how learn about the history and the different parts of history. So now everything we do is about educational play and really the focus is on sub 5 year olds and how much the brain develops by the age of three and how incredibly important it is to do the right activities with children at that age. And really then, you know, we include learning cards with all our uh, wooden toys just to help sleep deprived parents have prompts to help get the most out of all of our toys. And we're the only people that are doing that really well. You know, loads of people make wooden toys but no one does it with a clear clarity of purpose that we do.

Speaker B: As I mentioned, I used to play croquet at uni, so I think of jacks as big old croquet sets and you know, kind of posh sporting paraphernalia and obviously you've got this huge um, history in backgammon, chess, etc. It seems, it seems slightly odd but then completely obvious when you talk about it that you've now branched into the under fives as a core, as the core market.

Speaker A: Market, absolutely. And we used to do children's things and it's not like we haven't done toys but. And we are still the biggest domino's seller in the uk. We're still the biggest chess set seller in the uk. So you know we do own those markets and we still very much at games but really play is at the heart of everything we do rather than games. So the importance of playing, interaction, how you play with the toy is the same as you know, everything is for our entertainment. But if you can make your entertainment part of learning then I think that's a really important thing.

Speaker B: And that's when it makes so much sense actually. Ah, this is just all different ways of different age people, people getting to play.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: And what does the team look like? You know, what are you doing in house? What are you outsourcing?

Speaker A: We do everything in house. So we do have an advisor on our account, on our meta account only. But everything we do our self taught Google Ads and then we've learned it across the team meta, uh, all our Amazon account, all our Amazon listings and in fact we've what they, what they now call in the world, vertically integrated. So we've got our own warehouse in China which I set up 15 years ago. So we do all of the product sourcing, all of the product designing ourselves. We quality control, wrap, pack and QC everything ourselves. So the reason our quality is so high is because all the deliveries come into our warehouse in China. We wrap, pack and actually make sure everything's totally perfect before it, before it leaves there. So we're really, really, really end to, uh, end and we do everything ourselves, you know, so it's quite, it's quite the operation. But about at peak 100 people, but including China, but normally sort of 40 to 60.

Speaker B: And are they, uh, mostly you've got the team in China doing the initial pick and pack and then you've got it coming into your own warehouse in the UK for fulfillment.

Speaker A: Into our own warehouse in the uk. And actually, obviously all our Amazon orders are fulfilled by them. But yeah, everything here and all our containers come here and, you know, we ship about a container a week there or thereabouts.

Speaker B: And how do you break down the head office team between the different functions?

Speaker A: Uh, head of finance, um, a smallish team looking after Amazon and then a bigger team looking after social product design, customer service, email. There's about 10 people in the office here, but fundamentally, all bar one or all bar two dedicated to marketing.

Speaker B: Got you.

Speaker A: And sales.

Speaker B: So, so many things I could ask you about your business. It's really, you know, the background is fascinating. What you're selling today is fascinating. I suppose one of them is the. One of the obvious places to go is the price point range you have in the business. I'm, uh, just looking at the chess sets. You've got a 15 pound travels chess set, roughly speaking, to beautiful chess sets that are over £5,000. Yeah, that for most e commerce business, that'd be something. We advise against that, that diversity of

Speaker A: price point Y and I'm not sure I'd advise to do it either, to be totally honest with you. Um, we obviously are very high end, very collectible, very limited production. We are the original designer of the Staunton chess set. So we do sell these collector sets. But make no mistake, the bulk of the business is in consumer goods effectively and, you know, sub pound hundred price points. That is, that is really 95% of our turnover.

Speaker B: So a very different mindset or prioritisation of marketing activity, et cetera, across those different ranges.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And everything you do, you know, my objective is to get into people's houses and have as many repeat users as possible on a daily basis. Our repeat customer rate is 30 to 40% every single day. So for a non consumable, non deteriorating good and in fact something that we pride ourselves on lasting for a long time, we're trying to sell people other things. So for me it's all about portfolio expansion.

Speaker B: Got you. And then that at that sub 100 pound price point. And then the, the larger ones are the specialist collectors market. Yeah.

Speaker A: And it's a very small part of our business, to be honest, something that we love and we take great care of. But in terms of getting, you know, right driving about 12 million, it's very much, it's not, it's not driven by that.

Speaker B: And then you, you know, we occasionally get people running. We are working at family businesses on the show and you know, to have 200 odd years of history to deal with, I mean, it seems, you know, from our conversation thus far, clearly it doesn't leave you scared to innovate, scared to change the business and to adapt it. But do you feel, do you feel the weight of it?

Speaker A: You do, but I think, I mean I inherited a business that had debts of nearly a million pounds and a million pounds turnover. You know, we had a 400 grand overdraft when I joined, um, how we were ever allowed that in 2005 and we know what happened shortly after that. But the business was, the world was a very different place. And yeah, I think um, you, you become confident in your own test, don't you? You know, a lot of what we do is 1% better every day and you evolve and I think the business has had to evolve over that period. You know, we used to make false teeth out of hippopotamus teeth. So that was a hell of a, that was a very odd thing to do. So we, we have had to evolve and I think, um, I think a lot of it, it's really good because it keeps you really true to, you know, you, you won't make a bad product. You know, you really put the effort in everything that comes to market. You really want to put yourself behind. But I don't think that makes me particularly exclusive because I'm eighth generation. I think a lot of people that run their businesses put their whole life behind it anyway, so, so I think it's just part of the honesty by which you sort of operate.

Speaker B: From how you talk about it, it feels a little like, you know, how uh, when people are talking about the values and the focus in their business, as we've talked about a Fair bit already in this chat. You know, you get the feeling that sometimes that stake is really firmly rooted in the ground. You know, it's not going to wobble very much because it's really firmly there. Which can be down to, like, force of conviction. Or in your case, it can be down to we've got 200 years of history under the soil and that will keep us on track. You know, we can see the clever stuff, the hippopotamus teeth, etc. But that gives you that really solid DNA to grow on.

Speaker A: Yeah, it does, I think. But also you, you become more familiar. You know, I've been here 25 years now. I think you get so much more familiar with the entity within which you exist that you, it becomes an extension of you. And you're so proud of everything you're doing that it just, that just becomes your absolute dying passion. I'm not so fussed about the turnover and bits and pieces. I want to make amazing products. And I think, you know, as my father once said to me, never want to earn, uh, money, always want success. And if you have success, the money comes for free. And I think chase success.

Speaker B: Yes. Wise man, your father. Yeah, yeah, he was, um, so changing tax slightly before we hit the record button. You mentioned you'd had an interesting journey since 2020.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I think, um, I'll try and do a really potted history. So. So we introduced toys in 2018. We were doing 3 million a year. We went to 5 million in 2019. We then hit 17 million in 2020. But for my own optimism, um, stupidity, what had actually happened is January 2020, I went to China, launched 93 new toys, got really excited, launched them at the same time as Covid, and obviously sold out of everything. And it was completely amazing. I thought, there we go. Finally, after all these years, I cracked it, went and borrowed money off in various different places to continue fueling that growth and obviously came unstuck, Actually continued to hold some okay turnover numbers after that, but really were weighed down by all your cash is going on debt. We were advised to go for a raise, went and worked with one of the big financial institutions as an advisor. Um, they were actually quite helpful and we had people like BGF desperate to invest in us, but literally that was in about 2021, 22. But as we were going through that process, obviously the world started collapsing and every door that was begging us to come in just suddenly started slamming in our face. And I thought, oh, dear, here we go. Um, got too much debt. The only way through it was to put the business through a CVA company, voluntary administration. Wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Being totally honest with you, it was the most miserable thing I've ever done. Um, does have you question life a lot. Um, but yeah, you, you also get through these things. At that point, my business partner left the business as well. Just. It was all a bit tough and. Yeah, and now we're here and I'm running the business on my own for the last two and a half, three years, um, which I've never enjoyed it any more than I am now, which is totally epic. And I'm finally doing all the new exciting products that I wanted to do in 2021, 2022. I kind of got all the inheritance from my father in that journey, plowed it all into the business to rescue it, you know, stuck it all on red and now have got it through the other side. And the business is now trading nicely, growing and profitable. But it's been, uh, a been an interesting journey.

Speaker B: Looking back, would you have done the same things you did?

Speaker A: We made some mistakes of trusting people within the business, of not really getting as close to the finances as I could. I followed the commercial finance much more so than the daily sort of cash flow bits and pieces. So I was all about margin and bits and pieces and following detail and yeah, I'd like to have done it differently, but I think, uh, I was not. The $64 million question, what would you change in the past with all the things I got wrong? I keep doing all the things I got right, so I definitely could have done those things. I'd love to know. I'd love to have had a proper education and know now. Know what I do now, even 10 years ago would be amazing.

Speaker B: Yes. Business is like that, isn't it? I'm sure an MBA is a good thing, but. But I doubt it teaches you how to run a small dynamic business particularly well, if that makes sense. A lot of that side of things.

Speaker A: Resilience. Resilience is the number one thing and I think it comes up time and again and I think that's the number one thing.

Speaker B: But I suspect given how the economy is at the moment and the continuing post Covid fallen rise challenges that businesses are still dealing with a little bit. For anyone who's thinking about doing, um, the voluntary, what is it?

Speaker A: The CVA company, Voluntary Administration.

Speaker B: That's the one. I always get the letters wrong when I try, as everyone just heard. I always get the letters.

Speaker A: I had to practice saying it before I came on the podcast because I forget it too.

Speaker B: For anyone planning on doing one of those or thinking about doing one of those, what advice would you give them before, during or after?

Speaker A: It's very hard, very, very, very emotional. But I think a bit like a lot of these things, whether it's a cva, whether, whatever it may be, they are huge hurdles that you have to think. Um, I was very lucky. I, I bought on board an advisor, a chairman, as we went into the raise and he stuck with me through the CBA process. Still sticks with me now. And just having someone as a bit of a rock to, you know, when you've got a sack, your cfo, having someone there to say, right, you got to go and do it now. Joe, I was like, right, okay, you know, he was the ex CEO of Selfridges, so he's been through some big things in himself. So the, that having that CEO, um, of Selfridges and advisor just really helped be a stable. So talk to people. You know, most of these things have been done by Ford, by somebody else. So you know, talk to people.

Speaker B: Having taken a business through something similar, uh, uh, and various redundancies and stuff I've had to run in the past. And it's like when you're the person in charge of the business, it becomes really difficult because you. There's so much you can't tell the team legally at certain points, which is. I found the hardest thing of all was not being able to tell people. So to have someone who's a key advisor who knows everything, who you can talk to and understands it. Family and friends are great, but someone who actually is aware.

Speaker A: Yeah. And ah, good people always want to help good people. So you know, if you're, if you're able to deal with it and be honest with yourself and honest with somebody else, then you will get an honest to helpful reply. And I think that part of the, the hardest part is actually facing these scenarios and being truthful to yourself. But there we go.

Speaker B: Look, I want to ask you about something slightly more positive, if even more challenging before, before we head towards the top tips, which is Joe, you mentioned that you're doing everything in house and that the Google Ads and the Facebook ads are super important to the business. And we've gone through a very challenging time with running Google Ads and Facebook ads, Facebook ads in particular, where I know a lot of people are now deliberating whether agency is best creative in house, somebody else running the accounts or outsourcing everything or keeping everything in house. How have you navigated that massive shift in how the Facebook ads, how we have to use Facebook ads to deliver the result.

Speaker A: I think m measuring, um, obsession in detail and measuring. I mean, lots of people are talking about it being a huge shift. I just always view these things as part of evolution and I think, you know, when you've been doing it for a while, it is just always hard work. It's about finding honest data and I think that's the hardest part. We now use triple wow, which we'll come on to in a minute. But just having a point of truth across all the platforms is absolutely critical. A bit like everything, you know, if your cash flow is breaking, you really need to get to exactly why. If your CAC is skyrocketing, you need to understand exactly why. And the only way you can find that is by spending the time to go on the data. And we're lucky enough nowadays we've got so many different ways of extrapolating data and dropping data into AI that you can start to ask challenging data. I mean, one of my favorite things to do is I ask, you know, either Claude or ChatGPT, this is what I want to know and I'll ramble into it. Tell me what the best prompt is and what data do you need from Moby to kind of understand this. And I will get prompts from one AI to feed into Moby for Triple wow and then pull all that data back in so I can really understand the data as well as to what's what. So that sort of, um, data analyst that I, world class data analyst, we've always wanted does exist. But you've just got to get used to asking more proactive questions and getting more and more data.

Speaker B: It's interesting, isn't it? I think I used to say like about 10 years ago that one of my roles as an advisor to people was to tell them what to Google. You know, it's like I've got this problem, all right, this is the keyword you need to Google. Then you'll find the potential suppliers and the potential solutions. Because if you don't know that area of ego ecommerce, you don't know what the words people use for it are. But listening to you talk about that, it's like actually now, now AI gives us the right keywords to use.

Speaker A: It does dictate and ramble into it and it will work out what you're trying to do. It deciphers mass amounts of information, be that your own ramblings, what your own problem is, what it may be, or all the data and all the answers. I did a huge piece all about TAM and the totally tributable market that I could do for domino's and chess and I wanted to know exactly it uh, by month how much of the UK market I had for domino's and chess by and I went through, went through all the keyword search volume just for an Amazon misses, went through all the keyword search volume, went through all the different conversion rates, went through everybody's rankings, dumped it all in and got to a pretty good point of exactly how much of the market we are for each of those things. That's all data that exists, but it isn't pulled together in a place yet. But by having multi stage questions into an AI I can get all that data, ask the right questions of the data and then let it process it literally overnight. I had to do it, but it, but it got to it and then

Speaker B: of course you can decide how much more should we push those products on Amazon?

Speaker A: Absolutely correct. Where's the opportunity?

Speaker B: Are we at 90% or are we at 10%?

Speaker A: That's it. So for example, I run two Mexican trained Domino sets on Amazon. One in a tin box, one in a wooden box. Our theory is if one's out of stock, the other one sells. It was very apparent running the data that that's not what happens at all. So it's absolutely critical that you run them both. And that's why, because it couldn't a shift in sales volume of that particular item when the other one was out of stock. Now I couldn't really get to that in a way quickly in the way that it did.

Speaker B: Yeah, very complicated spreadsheet and some manual looking at things and two days later you're not entirely sure, but exactly that.

Speaker A: Whereas you can get some pretty good understanding now with AI and data analysis

Speaker B: and uh, on the creative side of Facebook ads. How are you, you, you tackling that? Have you got, you know, video studio set up, are using AI for it? How are you and the team creating the creative? You need to feed it?

Speaker A: Yes. So all the creative is done in house. We do it, you know, or we do, we've got some lights and a bits and pieces and we do some of the ASMR kind of stuff piece to camera and bits and pieces. I do like a fake podcast, adverts for founder videos and stuff like that. Um, but yeah, we do it all in house. Um, the hardest part at the moment now is all this Persona shifting that we're working on, which I'm sure you're going to cover in due course but looking at changing one variable whilst not having duplicate content. So, um, having a different angle of a very similar video but making sure that it comes across in a different way. But I think a lot of that, you know, people go, oh, the Persona and the this and the that and what the advertise and isn't working. Hang on, isn't this just, just what we used to call the type of customer in the olden days? Um, so really I look at like who's going to buy about Gamma set and why? Who's going to buy a wooden toy tractor and why? And you kind of answer all these questions anyway. So I think there's a lot of emperor's new clothes in how we dress up and talk about different things. E Commerce Master plan is supported by some of the greatest companies in the E commerce sector. Here's a reminder of who they are. Agilisa tus proyectos mi entra sigues con loves

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Speaker A: It's time for the Top Tips round.

Speaker B: I love this section because it gives me and our listeners some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level. Joe, are you ready for the top tip?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Okay, the book Top Tip. If everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?

Speaker A: So I've got three books which I'll whiz through super quick. Uh, Poor Charlie's Almanac, which is the book. It's all the pieces of work and advice that Charlie Munger did, which Charlie Munger was Warren Buffett's right hand man. And it's the whole logic about how he approaches everything. They simplified every piece of investing they ever did. He said that the danger with intelligence is that everybody gets something, knows something and goes really deep. So before you run into it, the logic is you need to keep under before you start any opinion, you need to keep understanding everything from the broadest possible perspective. So they went took every view and every bit of knowledge. So I think teaching you to think broadly and not nailed down too much. Um, I love Black Box Thinking by Matthew side, who's a fantastic bloke. Um, it's, it's all about the power of diverse thinking and having a diverse team as possible so that you will challenge each other and you know, Mr. Average doesn't exist. So, so break that up a bit. And I love, um, Malcolm Gladwell, Tipping Point, who I'm pretty sure people have spoken about before on this podcast. I think I just like it for the emotional reason that there might be a tipping point out there where it all becomes a bit easier. But I think, um, it's the logic that it does build and momentum builds and I think that's the key thing when you're doing lots of social media influencing or whatever it may be that it does take a tipping point to get to. And I'm going to be crazy if I may and add a watch. Top tip. Please do. My favorite thing that I've watched in many, many years is a program called the Thinking Game, which is a documentary about Demis Asabis, who's the now the CEO of Google DeepMind, about how he went about solving the protein folding problem and how they did alpha fold to solve that, they did AlphaGo to beat the world champion at go. And just the way that somebody with a great mind thinks and progresses and you know, he's now arguably one of the most influential people in the world, but just the humbleness and the way he thinks about things is absolutely beautiful.

Speaker B: Oh, I love that cheeky extra tip. Brilliant. Lots of great advice there. Join. Uh, definitely expecting good things from you, from the rest of the top tips. Pressure's on traffic. Top tip. Which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn't get the press it deserves?

Speaker A: For us, I always think it's your pop up because we spend a lot of time worrying about how much traffic we get and where it comes in. And you know, our uh, uh, pop up now converts at about 7%. So 7% of the people that rock up at our site, 10,000, you know, 10,000 people. The difference between 3% and 7% is quite a huge amount of, of people. And if you're putting those people in and bringing them into a conversation with you and just making that conversation last a little bit longer than the time they're on the site, I think that's a hugely valuable thing that um, we've got our pop up spot on our flows we're still working on to get as good as I want them to be.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, uh, the Email pop up is a. Or email capture Pop up is an underappreciated tool. So I love that you've flagged that one. The tooltop tip. Maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plugin, a phone app, or just a way of working. Is there a cool little tool tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?

Speaker A: Um, my three again, are lifetimely, I love, because it's just an easy way of tracking margin, not, not perfect margin, but you can follow your daily performance nice and easily across the business. Lifetimely, uh, Triple Whale, I've already mentioned, I think, has been an absolute godsend and, and understanding and using that as it should be. I hated it for the first three months, nearly canceled my subscription. When I went to go and cancel Bits and Pieces, they said, maybe you're not using it right, Joe. So I dug deep and I couldn't do without it now. And we also use Upfluence, which is a really handy tool for putting all of your product seeding influences all together. Um, we now do hundreds of product seeds a month and that's a really good thing. And it's, it's not about paying huge influences, tens of thousands of pounds. It's about getting people that really love your products to really talk about them. Honestly, if you've got a really good product, people will want to talk about it. You know, we're not in beauty where we're, we're forcing people to talk about a miracle face cream. We're making really beautiful, lovely toys and we want people to film their children playing with really beautiful, lovely toys. It's not a big ask. So, yeah, uplift is awesome.

Speaker B: Lots of people, I think, fail to make as much impact as they should with the influencer, uh, strategy. You said you're sending out to, what is it, 500 odd people a time with this. Is it a case of kind of go big with the micro influencers is where you found the sweet spot.

Speaker A: That's where I've gone. I know we've done influence, we've done product influence of stuff seeding for absolutely ages. But I've always kind of done it and then backed out and then done it and backed out. And then you see it on a cost line, you hate it. And, and what we did now was actually dive in and actually do it properly. And then I tracked a graph of impressions and a graph of product seeds and then I tracked branded search term volume both across, mainly across Amazon because you can kind of see where people then start searching your brand and then got the two graphs and then look for a graph correlation with AI and generally saw that within a week of the product seed dump going out, you could see that there was a branded search term, um, boom on Amazon. So then I could start to have some comfort actually that is working over here.

Speaker B: Yeah. And that's, it's so hard to track. But if you can see those correlations and you can see the impact going and the product sales, then it's, you

Speaker A: know, know if you're struggling to track something it's always like, hey AI, this is what I'm trying to do. Is there any way at all, any creative ideas or as anybody else that had this problem before and um, penny to a pound someone has and you can come up with an idea. That was actually one of my ideas of graph correlation. But, but you know, AIs can help too.

Speaker B: And then the carbon, top tip, what's your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an E commerce store?

Speaker A: There's an old saying which is buy cheap, buy twice. And I think a lot of carbon can get wasted in resending out things that are broken. So buy nice things and make sure it's considered. And when you do, you know, when you're lucky enough to get a sale, for heaven's sake, make sure that that product arrives and somebody wants to keep it because it's not junk. And also if there is any problems, you know, damaged in transit, whatever it may be, work out some sort of resolution, have a human conversation with a customer, try and work a way of it not having to go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. You know, automation can very much be the enemy in carbon footprints, especially when

Speaker B: it comes to returns. Yeah, very much so. Um, Joe, before we say goodbye, could you please let the listeners know where they can find you and your business on the web and social media.

Speaker A: Yes, we are Jake's of London. J A Q U E S um, so you can find, Google that and you'll find us and on LinkedIn if anybody wants, if you know. In all seriousness, Joe Jakes. J O E J A Q U E S um, uh, uh, yeah, drop, drop me a message on LinkedIn. I'm super happy to help anyone and anything positive like all the stuff I've spoken about or if anybody's going through a bit of a tough time and balancing and working their way through a dip, um, I'm happy to be here for that person to talk to about something because I know how blooming hard it is and I've done it now and got through the other side. So do reach out. I'm always happy to help anybody at whichever side of that seesaw you may be currently sitting on. Um, after the storms come, the sun shines. So keep pedaling everybody.

Speaker B: Ah. Uh, so such wise words. Joe, thank you so much for coming on the E Commerce Master Plan podcast. It's been a real treat getting to chat with you, so thank you for being here.

Speaker A: My absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker B: Fascinating to chat to Joe there. I can't believe quite how many topics we got through in the course of that chat. Um, I think the, uh, biggest which resonated the most with me was the clarity of who they are and what they're doing. You know, the doubling down on the play part of the story. Which reminds me of, I don't know if it's an urban myth or reality, but where Nintendo were originally a playing card manufacturer and then decided that their USP was not being a playing card manufacturer, it was being a creator of games and therefore they evolved into what they are today. And the way Jo's pivoting, Jake's, or not so much pivoting, but taking it back to an element of its roots really feels very similar to that story to me and is, you know, clearly working well for them. Fascinating stuff on the marketing front with the influencers and the ads approach there and, um, lots of other bits and pieces in there. I suspect several of you will be listening to this one again. You can get your hands on our notes from this episode, including those top tips and links to what we mentioned, by heading over to ecommercemasterplan.com you could also use the direct episode short link. Just put ecmp.info the number of this episode into the URL bar and you'll go straight to the right page when you get to the website. You can also add yourself to our email list so you don't miss out on any of the other things we share to help you improve your business. And if you like this episode, then why not check out Recent episode number 588 where we're covering m vaguely similar topics, but with someone with a very, very similar mindset to business to Joe. So I think you'll really like that episode as well. If you haven't caught it yet, that's 588. Just a couple before this one. And if you want more on Shopify sellers, then head to ecmp.info shopify for all our interviews with people on the Shopify platform. Thank you for tuning into this and every episode of the Ecommerce Master Plan Podcast. I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help e commerce business owners to succeed and thrive with their businesses, including progressing along the path to Net zero. So if you know someone this show can help. Please tell them to listen to the Ecommerce Master Plan Podcast. I hope you have a great week and don't forget to keep optimizing.

Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the E Commerce Master Plan Podcast. Find out more@ecommercemasterplan.com podcast.

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