The Search-Driven Fashion Strategy That Helped Spirithoods Scale

Speaker A: If you want to be a great designer, if you want to develop products that are going to move the needle both with your existing customer and your new customer base, the smartest way that we have found is to design within the framework of using SEO to develop and to name and to create.

Speaker B: It's the E Commerce M 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. 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 he 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 um.infoguest to apply and uh, maybe we'll be chatting very soon. In this episode we're chatting to the co founder of a fascinating business from the US the product's fascinating, the seasonality is quite fascinating and he is going to be sharing with us his approach to product development which is completely entwined with SEO. We'll also be having a bit of a rant about the challenges of tariffs and quite a lot of other bits in here. Super inspiring episode, um, with lots of takeaways from this one. I think you're going to really love it. And um, make sure you stick around for the top tips because he was telling some fascinating business stories during that section too.

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Speaker B: And now to introduce, uh, our special guest, Lateef Hamilton is the creative CEO at uh, SpiritHoods who sell animal inspired apparel and give 10% back to endangered animals. Founded in 2009, they now sell via their Shopify store and wholesale and sell over $4 million of fashion a year. Hello, Latif.

Speaker A: Hi Chloe, how are you?

Speaker B: I'm good. Thank you so much for being on the show. How did you get into the world of E Commerce?

Speaker A: Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show and yeah, I think, uh, that's a great question. Actually. After I graduated university, I launched a company with a senior partner who was really skilled in sales. And it was in the residential and commercial remodeling space and not in E commerce. And it was really service based and we had a lot of success. And I was quite young, I was in my 20s and I was telling people that were in their 40s and 50s what to do in terms of construction work. And uh, there was some gaps there and some challenges. And I realized that I was kind of. I had learned everything I needed to in that industry or in that business and I was ready to move on. And so I had spent a couple months trying to figure out what other business. I mean, I've kind of been an entrepreneur since the beginning. So I was researching businesses and one day, um, I'm doing that with my brother and one of our friends comes over and he tells us this story about this hat he was wearing. And my brother and him used to make these hats for Burning man. These wonky faux fur, animal inspired hats that were just like silly and ridiculous. And he had worn it out at night and then the next day and just had the craziest time. People. It was a product that stopping power is basically what he was trying to tell us. And we just decided, yeah, uh, let's do it, let's figure this out. And we did.

Speaker B: Spirithoods was the first time of doing E Commerce.

Speaker A: Yes. Yeah.

Speaker B: Wow. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. And that was 2009 and I had. Yeah. So I exited the other company and actually my friends called me and I was on vacation because every year in December, January, construction slow. And so I was on a, you know, a black sand beach doing stuff with some m. Turtles. I'm big, big fan of animals. And so that's also part of our, of our, of our line. We give 10% back, 10% of net profits back to endangered animals. And um, anyways, yeah, they Called me and they were saying, hey, we've got to go to this trade show. It was called Magic and Project at the time. And we got accepted also, we need $20,000. And I was like, okay, let's slow down for a second. But they were so convincing on the phone. They emailed me and I had go. I had to go to a pay ph and call them from a payphone in like the middle of nowhere on one random street on a beach town. And um, they convinced me to come home. So I left my beautiful island, my beach time in. I think I was in Guatemala. And uh, I came home and we went to a trade show and we had wild success actually. And we still didn't have an e commerce store at that point. We had just had 10 product SKUs, uh, 10 designs basically. And we had gone to a trade show and booked $40,000 worth of orders. And so we were like, okay, well before we only do wholesale, let's also launch e comm so that there's not a conflict between the two. Because there was at the time people would either do wholesale or they would do e comm. And doing both sometimes ruffled feathers. So yeah, we ended up launching our e commerce store at that point.

Speaker B: Very sensible reason to go E commerce at that time because. Yeah, nothing. It was a very strange time where a wholesale customer would get so frustrated and annoyed if you launched an E commerce site, but if you'd had one already, they didn't care. It was so strange.

Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. Uh, yep, yep, you're absolutely right. I think a lot of people don't. Unless you were around at that time. You know, people don't realize that it was kind of. It would really, it would bother people.

Speaker B: Really did. It really did. So. So let's come up to date then. You're based in the U.S. do you purely sell to the U.S. wholesale and retail or are you.

Speaker A: Well, thanks to our current administration, uh, we do just sell to the US because the tariffs are absolutely bonkers.

Speaker B: It's a lot to keep track of, isn't it?

Speaker A: It's crazy.

Speaker B: Manage.

Speaker A: I mean, it's crazy. We, we'll see what's going on as of now that the Supreme Court overturned it. But you know, our tariffs on one of our biggest. You know, we do a lot of faux fur coats and it's at 67.5%. Is a tariff just to get the material already? Yeah, no, no, to get the landed items. Get the landed products. Ye. That doesn't count. The supply chain disruptions from all that where all of the costs leading up to uh, our finished goods have been increased as well. So it's really been kind of a disaster from our standpoint. So we'll see what happens going forward. Um, but we used to sell all over Europe. We used to sell, um, London, France, uh, in the uk, France, um, we had Germany, Australia, Canada. We sold to quite a few countries. And now that's really off the table until something tidies up, until something changes. Yeah, fingers crossed. That's what we're hoping it.

Speaker B: But uh, sensible to get out of the game until it settles down. Because it could take over, couldn't it? Just trying to keep track of every change.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it's. I think the keeping track is not terribly difficult. I think the bigger issue, I mean, of course keeping track of what the hell the administration is going to do next is a pain. I think it's nonsensical to create so much, uh, disruptive sort of, you know, uh, we need to be grounded. We need to have a plan. I don't know why we're not doing a two year plan. Two year. I mean, at minimum, you know, for transitioning tariffs, there needs to be a timeline. People need to be prepared to adjust. I mean, as a business person, I think everyone understands that I'm moving my warehouse and it's taking me four months to plan all of that and do it. So I mean, come on, there's some sensible actions that we can take to support changes. I'm not opposed to changes, but we need to do it in a supportive way. I think businesses in the United States particularly are hurting. I have a lot of different businesses that I'm, um, friends with, different people I'm friends with that own businesses. And I think we're having to reshape and prepare for some of the impending storms that we are seeing on the horizon, myself included. I'm downsizing, I'm switching my warehouse is. I'm optimizing, I'm optimizing my inventory, streamlining things and preparing for what I think is a little bit of a difficult, turbulent, continued turbulent time. And in fashion in particular, I don't know if you've been paying attention to fashion, but Forever 21 went bankrupt. Um, Saks Fifth, the holding company for Saks Fifth Global went bankrupt. I mean, fashion has been a wild ride right now. So.

Speaker B: Yeah, and here in the. Well, not technically in the uk, but in the us uh, not the us the eu. Come on, Chloe, remember your countries in the, in the eu, we're about to have the ESPR legislation coming in, which is the whole tracking from end. I'm gonna explain it really badly. Everybody listen to the episode with responsibility where we explain this much better. But um, it's, it basically means as the manufacturer of the fashion item, you are now responsible for its end of life. So what happens to it after sale? Does it end up in landfill? Does it end up being resold, reused, etc. What happens, how much waste is there in your supply chain? All that kind of fashion waste and burning of overstock and all that kind of stuff is about to be not good.

Speaker A: Right? The burning of overstock in luxury items is wild to me. I mean, what a disaster. What a terrible thing to do. I mean, I understand people's desire to keep limited supply, but I mean, you don't have to do it that way. You can re release, you can keep it, re release it two years later, you can keep it, rerelease it later. Like, I don't know. There is a lot of waste in fashion. It is one of my qualms for sure. I mean fashion is a challenging world.

Speaker B: It's insane. The waste in fashion. We had, um, a lady on the podcast, Dr. Christina, uh, I've forgotten your full name, sorry. Who runs a business called the R Collective, who are all about recycling fashion products. And for one big high end fashion luxury brand, they recycled some of their fabric for them. But because it was a fabric that could be closely, they felt could be closely tied to their brand, they had to rip the fabric down into fibers and then reweave it into new thread before turning it into a different fabric to then repurpose it into some, some clothing.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Wow. Perfectly unused, usable rolls of, um, cloth shredded, turned into new. It's just, I mean it's better than it going into landfill, but it's still madness.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean and the thing is, the thing is, is that if somebody wants to replicate or knock off a fabric, they're going to do it, you know, so it's not like they can't do it, you know. So I think, you know, I have my, I have a lot of thoughts on, on how, you know, some of those things can go. I do think one of the biggest harms to, to the ocean environment is microplastic pollution. And I think people don't realize that, you know, that's a concern for us as well. But our, you know, I can explain how we differ a little bit, but microplastic is um, largely coming from, you know, your polyester clothing that gets Washed in the washing machine. And there's a wonderful woman who just developed a washing machine filter. And we also used to sell the guppy bags where you can throw your clothes in there. Our clothes, you don't really wash. Um, there's, there's a few lines that we have that wash, but most of them are, are dry cleaned and they, they really are. You know, there's not a lot of ocean exposure with our products. Um, but yeah, I mean, there's, there's a lot we could go on a whole tangent about.

Speaker B: I'm gonna pull us back for that because you mentioned the product and we haven't really explained what the product is. And I think probably for most of our conversation, people are going to need to know. So let's see. Please explain your product range as it currently is.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, the best thing is just to check it out. Spirithoods.com When I try to explain it, it's a little tricky. But we are, we're a bit of a, uh, you know, our focus as a core pillar is self expression and we do everything from, you know, animal prints to neutral colorways. You know, our brand centers around animal inspiration. That's why we give back to the animal kingdom. Um, but we also do, you know, neon tiger prints. And, um, we have extremely, you know, the highest quality faux fur in the world in some of our coats. We have long tail draggers, we have crop coats. You, um, name it. That's, that's one of our core businesses is the faux fur coat world. We used to do a lot of home goods, but post Covid people just. The competition ramped up and we ended up closing our home goods line because it was just really expensive. Plus now you have the tariffs. It just really doesn't. It's, it's not a place we can compete in and the market's kind of saturated. But we do have house robes, luxury house robes. Um, they're really, really fun. A lot of our stuff that has hoods also has ears. So again, drawing back to the animals, it's very kitschy, it's very playful. We don't take ourselves too seriously. You know, we just, we have fun. You know what I mean?

Speaker B: For me, looking at your products, I'm like, right, that has Glastonbury, Coachella, Iron man written all over it. Is the, uh, festival outfit, is that your key market or is there other elements?

Speaker A: Not really, actually. So we started in the festival world and we expanded out and what ended up happening is we started partitioning our season between festival Season and sort of nightlife. And so, you know, we also happen to have a lot of exposure in the music scene. So, you know, like, Doja Cat bought a product we didn't even know until she wore it on social media. That kind of stuff happens all the time. We also can get products out to, you know, artists. But, um, a lot of times we've been in photo shoots and we've just. We've been on a lot of various celebrities. And I think that's just. There's a natural affinity to the product because it is, you know, especially music artists are already kind of loud in their attire, and we just help them facilitate that, that, uh, branded experience for themselves. And so what ended up happening is we divide our season into festival season. And really, we don't call it necessarily festival season, but we call it off season on season. And actually our off season is festival season. And so we still luckily drive a lot of revenue during the spring, summer months. And, uh, we do that with a variety of products. Now, we ended up saying, okay, what do we do to navigate the heat when we do a lot of faux fur? I mean, we started with headwear. We started with what is called the spirit hood. And that was our first piece. It got sucked up into pop culture back in 2010. Um, and then that was what catapulted us into being like, wow, we're doing millions of dollars. We've got to figure out how to do this properly. We started getting knockoffs, uh, which tanked our revenue. We had to really invest in. I'm sure there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are, Listen, just that have been through that, where you got, what is it, Beginner's luck? You know, like, that's really there. There's a part of that going on. We really had no idea what we were doing. And it, you know, I've spent the last decade and a half, uh, understanding and reevaluating every aspect of business, and it's constantly changing. So, um, but we expanded out. We started doing, you know, bodysuits, full bodysuits, uh, which. Which does really well during spring, summer in particular. Uh, you know, our house robes are designed for fall winter. Our coats, uh, the bright colored coats are designed for spring, summer. The more muted coats or fall colorways are brought in for fall. And so we've kind of partitioned some of these things out. We do have more holiday styles, and we do have more nightlife styles or cold weather styles. And then we have our spring, summer, you know, our spring summer apparel.

Speaker B: It's so fascinating to hear you talk about the different seasons and the stars coming in, because I think at first glance, someone would look at the site and go, oh, they just create crazy colored coats, you know, in the nicest possible way. But there's. It's really clear. You really understand your customer base and the rhythms of the business and know what to drop when in order to drive the sales.

Speaker A: Yeah, if you look at the site now, it's gonna look wild and more young. And you look at the site in fall, winter, it's gonna look a little bit. We don't really do contemporary. We do have some contemporary pieces, and we start to build those in. Not everything we do is kitschy. We have a black, you know, collared coat. You know, we have lots of things that are like that. Um, we'll push more of that forward during fall, winter. And interestingly enough, one of our biggest competitor. That leaves us as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, faux, uh, fur coat special specialty E Comm. Stores in the United States now, because our. Our biggest competitor just went out of business, which just tells you the difficulty in the industry right now. Um, they were twice our size. And so there's also. We're able to kind of. Now we see that sort of gap in the market, and we're sort of. We've got, uh, made to order items that are more in the contemporary world so that we don't have to stock items that not everyone is going to love in terms of our customer base. And, you know, so there's just some strategy components that we've been able to modify to really pay attention to what the market is dictating and how do we serve it?

Speaker B: How do you go about keeping your finger on the pulse of what's going on? Um, what the customers are going to want and what they're going to want next.

Speaker A: Yeah. You know, the struggle between an artist and a creative. Right. And for me, an artist is designing without constraints, and a creative is designing within a box. And so I think I have a lot of difficulty sometimes paying attention to trends, you know, and so the way that I navigate that now is very specific. And what I do is I use SEO.

Speaker B: Really? So you're not watching the, you know, the fashion weeks or something like that for what's coming online. You're on the SEO front.

Speaker A: I certainly watch it. I'm a color snob, so I do like to see what's going on in the world of color. But I feel like as a brand, we're a cross between fashion and Entertainment, almost. Right. We're an entertaining product to wear. When you wear the garment, it's got a tremendous amount of stopping power. So that bleeds into people coming up and talking to you. That creates brand ambassadors, naturally, because you're talking about where you got the product, et cetera. Um, so we kind of stand. I use it with a grain of salt, I guess. I look at the trend data and I use it with a grain of salt. What I'm more focused on is the integration between my marketing and my product development and marketing specifically being our SEO. Right. And now geo. But really what we're talking about is SEO, because when you look at the trends on what is being searched and you look at where the demand is, and you look at where your brand's SEO power is, you know, your authority score, what, how, how relevant you are to Google in a particular industry determines how much power you have to drive organic traffic. And, um, we have a reasonable amount of power, obviously, because I took this approach many years ago. Um, and I look at, you know, what if I want to design a colorway, I do look at trends, but I'm also going to look at, uh, upcoming trends. You know, what is the color of the year? Sure. But more importantly to me is actually what are people looking for? If people are looking for a yellow faux fur coat, and, you know, we already know that we do bright colored coats, that color will probably fly with at least a certain percentage of our audience, maybe not everybody, it's a very specific color. But I'm going to focus on dropping a couple of yellow coats if that's what's trending and there's not a ton of people supplying that demand. And especially given our competition right now, there's limitations for people out there. So why not capitalize on that and build out organic traffic to the color yellow, Yellow faux fur coats, you know, um, and et cetera. So we design, I really design differently. Right. We design within the scope of what is being searched. If it's crop coats, if it's long tail draggers, if it's the tail draggers, what colorways, what are the. If we're thinking about men, what are the top colorways for men? What are they searching for and how long have they been searching for that? You know, how, you know, and if the traffic is relevant enough, there's enough searches and the demand is not, you know, you know, if you demand varies. Right. If it's a black coat, you know, you're getting 100,000 searches a week for that or a month. At minimum, um, we may not be able to just make a black coat, but we can make a black faux fur coat coat. Right. Or a men's black faux fur coat. And in that narrowing, um, down, we can have our wins, our successes, and start climbing the ladder of organic traffic. And that really moves the needle for us in terms of how we think about Net new customer acquisition. Because if they're searching for it on Google, they're also searching for it on social media. And you can also kind of gleam some of that from social media as well, but it's much easier on Google as the base.

Speaker B: So you're looking at the Google search trends, Google SEO data, et cetera, and then that's informing what products you put into design, into production, et cetera. But at the same time as you're doing that product creation part, you're also working on the marketing of that. So getting the SEO foundations in place.

Speaker A: Yep, yep. So that would be naming conventions, that would be metadata. What are we targeting? Absolutely. That would be our Google Merchant Center. Bing Merchant center, you know. Yes, absolutely.

Speaker B: Did you. I mean, properly techy question here, but do you put the product live on the website before it's ready to sell? So you've got that page? No, we do not. Is the background stuff ready and then bang when it's correct?

Speaker A: Yeah. And the reason for that is actually related to. Not is related to our existing customers. We have a much greater. I mean, we. Okay, that's not entirely accurate. I'm sorry. We do have a Coming soon page. We do have a Coming soon, but it's not like we're putting the Coming soon page out months before. And that just has to do with the fact that though we might know it's being developed or designed, or we might have a prototype six months prior, um, we have to shoot everything. So we can't, you know, it becomes a, um, it becomes, you know, you've got to fit it into your operations, you know, but it's and it's also just. I want to point out that it's also identifying when trends are happening. So, for example, Burning man is a really big season for us. Festival season in general is okay, but Burning man is really, is really. The pre. Burning man season is pretty big for us and it starts mid July. So what do we do? We launch products beginning of July. We run our sale mid July. Right. Targeted towards, you know, the festival season. But because you're not really. You're not allowed to use the term Burning man in your marketing, and we respect the rules. Of Burning man because we have such a huge audience there. And, and we. My, I myself have been to Burning man several times. So, um, we respect the rules of the game. A lot of people do not when it comes to marketing, but I like to identify the trends when we want to drop stuff based on seasonality. So, for example, when is October? You know, we've tried a few different things. When we don't follow the trends and we're dropping product lines or running sales, that's kind of a problem. So, for example, October is a really great season for us. September is oddly a terrible month for us. I cannot figure out exactly why. I mean, we have some theories internally, but it goes July, August, fantastic for us. September, just not great. It goes back to like a June month for us. You know, June's not a great month for us either. It's kind of the height of summer, so to speak. June and September for us, not great. And then October starts booming. Right. And so the timing for when we launch Halloween inspired products and Halloween content is really relevant. You can see when other people do it and they are all over the place. Some brands do it in the middle of September, some brands do it in, you know, middle of October. Right. So the timing of that, as you're watching the trend lines ramp up in historical years, you can see where the, where the line comes further and further back. Black Friday Cyber Monday, for example, Great exam. Great, great case study. Right. The seasonality for Black Friday Cyber Monday is weeks before Thanksgiving. It's. We, it's. It's. We actually run a birthday sale because our birthday happens to be November 10th. And part of the reason my brother launched that initially was like he was saying, look at these trend. You know, he's like, look at these trend lines. We've got to figure out how to capture dollars earlier. And I think it can be a trap. And you need to be careful. We're talking two things here. One is sales and one is product development. I'd like to probably focus on product development because there's so many strategies when it comes to sales. But my point is just to illustrate, when you're looking at trends, you can identify real easily when this volume of search is starting to go up. And we have correlated that. That is exactly when we need to be releasing products. So we don't release products at random. We've done a variety of releasing schedules, but we don't do it at random. We do it based on what we're seeing in search. And whenever we deviate from that, it doesn't help us, it doesn't help us to launch something earlier than that, if that makes sense. Earlier than when the trend line is forming.

Speaker B: That makes sense. So that's why, um, I think many people will be listening, going, he said Burning man was good and they launched the sale ready for Burning Man. But it's because, you know, there's appetite for purchasing, so that's a good time to launch sale.

Speaker A: There's tremendous appetite. And in that, in that regard, we will be competing for everyone that is, that is out there trying to capture dollars. So, you know, there's a point where you really, if you, if you, you know, we don't like to discount heavily. So I'll say that first of all, maybe it's a 20% off, you know, of certain, you know, maybe it's a range, a spread. Um, we're certainly not doing 50% off. We're not a discount brand like that. Um, so, yeah, but I think tactically, and we don't discount brand new products. So if we release, uh, a line July 5th, you know what I mean, just in time for that season, none of those are going to be on sale. So there's strategy, there's a variety of strategy going on.

Speaker B: You mentioned that you'd like to talk more about product development because there's more we need to know. So what's a couple of other things we need to know on that product development side of things?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think we covered some of the, some of the gritty parts which are, you know, the main thing that I think people don't realize is how when you tie your product development to your SEO specifically, you reap tremendous benefits. And uh, you know, SEO is sort of foundational to me. You know, there's ads which in my opinion are, are supportive. The cost of ads continues to go up. I would wager that the cost of SEO is not really going up that much. I mean, it's a, it's very similar strategies. You do have Generative Engine Optim now, but I'm still using the same people to work through that. It's not like I've got a, I mean, granted, I have my own consultancy that is a blend of both Spirithood's team and my consultancy. So, um, there's people that work on both ends. But generally speaking, ads are ever more costly. Right. And SEO is a great way to drive your foundational traffic. So when you're designing within that framework, when you're creating, we used to name our products. Naming conventions are really important. We used to Name our products something like a gray wolf. You know, coat, let's just say, right, if we want to be recognized in Google, that has nothing to do with a faux fur coat. Google's not going to go, oh, let's rank these people for faux fur coat. Sure, there are small tactics and strategies that you can do, but when it really comes down to it, you want a thorough line from your creative marketing. Which gray wolf? You know, we're all animal inspired, so we still keep the gray wolf in the title, but it's at the end and at the beginning is gray faux fur coat. Right. Because that's what's being searched for. And so. Or, uh, it's gray hooded faux fur coat. Or so these concepts are just, are, they're, they're sort of the devil's in the details. Right? And I think SEO traditionally is kind of like that. It's not a far stretch to create your names based on what people are searching for. I mean, and it's right down to Google won't say this, you won't get this information. Because we do a lot of SEO for a variety of brands and obviously spirit hoods has been the bulk of our, our growth and understanding around SEO and geo. It's down to little things like women's plural. Women type correctly. They're better grammatically. So they will type women's faux fur coat. Women with a plural, an apostrophe S. Right. So what do we do? We actually, all of our women's faux fur coats, they have the word women's with an apostrophe. Men's do not. So there's more search volume for women's with an apostrophe than there is women's without. There's more search volume for mens without an apostrophe than there is with. Because men tend to not use apostrophe. They're just lazy. They're just M E n s. Right. So we actually name right down to the, to the details like that. And that has served us pretty well. And um, you won't find that Google says that that's the reality, but in our experience directly we find it. It's down to very specific details. Now the point isn't to get bogged down with details. The point is just to start somewhere. Right? And I think if you want to be a great designer, if you want to develop products that are going to move the needle both with your existing customer and your new customer base, the smartest way that we have found is to design within the framework of Using SEO um to develop and to name and to create

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Speaker B: It's time for the top tips round. Okay, I love this section because it gives me and our listeners some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level. Lateef, are you ready for the top tips?

Speaker A: Yes. Let's do. Let's go.

Speaker B: Let's do it. 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: You know, I think I'm going to go with a, uh, stretch here, but it's probably going to be Martha backs the way of integrity. And the reason for that is because we've had a very, uh, strong mentality around integrity as a brand. And I remember we had a quick story. If we have time, I can tell you this quick story. So the reason I think integrity is so powerful when it comes to branding is because we know the adage that one person is happy, they'll tell three or four people about it. If one person is mad, they'll tell 7 million people. They will scorch the earth. Um, we had, we had launched a Black Friday sale and, you know, let's call it Bodysuits. Basically, one of our product categories like bodysuits was under discounted. We didn't have enough of a discount on it. We weren't paying attention. It was too low and they were not moving. And it had been five days into the sale and so we needed to bring that discount up so we could clear out some of the inventory. So we, we had a quick meeting and you know, for us it was pretty easy uh, to decide this but a lot of brands will, will, they will raise the discount amount up to wherever they need it. So if it was 10% off, now it's 25% off and they will just not tell anybody. Right. Because in your email segmentation, generally you're segmenting, you know, anyone who's purchased in the last two weeks is not going to be notified. Um, so generally it's hard for people to find out. We didn't do that. We said let's, let's. Because it's hard to manually discount everything for those people. Email them, let them know what's going on. It's a whole process. Right. And people don't like to do it. It, we did it. We refunded uh, people the money, the difference and we let them know that we did that. And the response was really eye opening for me. We had already sort of had this integrity model and what I found was we just created a whole bunch of, of brand new brand ambassadors. They were so thrilled. They were comparing us to other brands like, you know, Zara would never do this or whatever brands. I don't, I don't, I can't claim that Zara wouldn't do that. But they were listing out these brands. Our existing customers were saying, this is why we love Spirithood so much. This is why we're obsessed with you guys. Um, we don't have to worry when we purchase. And that really was eye opening. It really made me want to buckle down even more in how we are able to be a brand with integrity and transparency. So I recommend the Way of Integrity because it is a lifestyle. It is challenging too in the beginning to really be in integrity with yourself and the world around you. But you can do it and I think it's really beneficial to your business.

Speaker B: Great story and a, uh, fascinating book. I don't think I've come across it, so I shall have to go and check it out myself. Now the traffic. Top tip. Which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn't get the press it deserves?

Speaker A: I'm going to go back to SEO, the basics on SEO. I think there's a lot there that people need to explore and get into and it's really not that Difficult to build it out, especially if you've got an existing brand, you've got a domain that's very valuable. Build it out, be the leader, be the content king. I mean, traffic, you know, if you want good quality traffic. Another example is we did tertiary content for spirit hoods, right? We do all types of content around spirit animals because our brand is called Spirit Hoods. The spirit is in the title we do. We give, we have a lot of animal inspiration. We started pumping out blog content and we even have a spirit animal quiz. What is your spirit animal? Right? And we drive hundreds of over a hundred thousand people to our website every month. And some of that traffic, a significant amount of that traffic actually is actually just content related. That has nothing to do with purchases. And the reason we did that was because that was a path to, again, going and saying, what can we own in the space that drives a lot of traffic, that will give us relevancy to Google and elevate everything else that we do purely by proxy by the fact that you, uh, know, our faux fur coat and our authority score goes up because we're commanding so much traffic. We've dominated a space, so we've been dominating the spirit animal space space as a tertiary strategy and also because we're animal centric. So our, our audience already loves to know, uh, about animals, about little, you know, little hints and details of what happens when you see an eagle on your walk or what. Like it ties into the brand. And also it's a very powerful operational tool and we've discovered that through again, SEO. What can we own in the content space that, you know, evolves the brand further and drives more traffic? So I'm gonna go with SEO. Sorry.

Speaker B: I feel like it's good, it's good

Speaker A: with all these stories.

Speaker B: I don't know, I would have been surprised if you hadn't gone with SEO after all we were talking about earlier.

Speaker A: So I love that tip.

Speaker B: It's great. Uh, okay, the tool, top tip. Maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plugin, a phone app, or just a way of working. Is there a cool little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?

Speaker A: I would say a lot. Again, when we. I'm gonna, I'm gonna with SEM Rush, which is an SEO tool. That's an easy one. It's very inexpensive and it will help you understand the inner workings of if you're not already paying attention. You cannot just rely on agencies for these things. I mean, I take it from somebody who used to do that, um, and it was, it didn't work, you know, so if you're not seeing results that, you know, it could be because, you know, you can't lead something you don't understand. You cannot lead something you don't understand. So you've got to get familiar with it, at least at a foundational level. And then in terms of other tools, you know, we use Asana, you know, we, I also think just don't spend money when you don't need to. You know, we don't. We just use Google Meet, for example, and it's like, it works great, you know, So I think use tools that are, that are inexpensive because it adds up. Just like your subscription on your phone when you go and you check it and you're like, oh my God, I have like 12 subscriptions. The same thing adds up as a company. So with as much as you can go with, go with the stuff that's. That you're already paying for or that already works.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's advice to live by. Use what you're already paying for, people.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: Okay, the carbon top tip. What's your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an E commerce store?

Speaker A: I think you want to be mindful from the beginning what the direction of. If you're concerned about the environment, you want to be mindful from the beginning about what you're doing. And if you're already knee deep in it, then how do you alter that? For us, spirit hoods is made from acrylic. Right. Our faux fur is made from acrylic. We have been working with our factory, who has been dumping in millions of dollars in research to try to figure out if we can do. The last project was a rayon blend, so a natural fiber faux fur. So we're on the cusp of that, that when the economy stabilizes, we'll have more people concerned about sustainability and that will drive and push our ability to spend money and create more sustainable items. But for now, it's kind of on pause because the economy's on, on fire, I think quite, quite globally, I would say. Um, but you know, that said, I think every brand needs to have a benefit to humanity that is outside just of what they do. So for us, it's giving 10% of net profits back to endangered animals. So I think if you have something in the core, it can be 1%, it can be 2%. It doesn't. It makes people feel better and it makes you as an owner feel better. Right. You're doing something good and you're Participating outside of the general business model. When you do that, I mean, we get to have conversations with nonprofits that are amazing. So it makes us feel, um, connected to humanity as the whole. And then there's things like our packaging. We pay attention to our packaging. We try to use recycled. Some of our plastics we've brought in are biodegradable. Um, so we're constantly sort of playing in that space, trying to find something that's cost effective and works. So I think just constantly keeping that as a forefront of, uh, your business model. Not every year you can afford to dive into it because it can be expensive to be more sustainable. But certainly keeping it as an annual discussion is wise.

Speaker B: Nice. Okay, Latif, before we say goodbye, could you please let the listeners know where they can find you and spirithoods on the web and social media?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, everything is pretty much at Spirithoods for Spirithoods. If you're curious about, uh, writing, I also write a substack. It's just Substackatif Hamilton.

Speaker B: And so, wait, and you mentioned briefly that you work with other businesses and I know you help a lot of them with some really tricky E commerce problems. So could you please also tell the audience a bit about that?

Speaker A: Yeah. So I have a consultancy called the Growth Operative. And my team is team members that have been working for Spirit Hoods and have usually 20 plus years of experience in the industry. For example, my production manager, um, global Production. So the Growth Operative is a consultancy for E. Com businesses. And our main agenda is to educate and train and teach people. We're not trying to gatekeep information from you. We actually want you to be able to take over these things in yourself and understand some of the tools and tactics and tricks that we've used to cut costs and improve, you know, optimize, you know, even your creative processes, your operations, marketing. Like we talked about the SEO, how profound and powerful that can be. There's a lot of nuance, uh, in that world and we can help brands do that. And we do help brands often do that, depending on what it is that they're looking for. So that's the Growth Operative, uh, just the Growth operative dot com. It's where you can find us there.

Speaker B: Brilliant. Thank you. Well, hopefully a few people will. I'm sure a few people will be in contact with you via that and we'll all be going and checking out the Spirit Hoods range as well. Um, Latif, thank you so much for being on the show. It's been a real treat catching up with you and uh, finding out more about your business and your approach to things. So thank you so much for being here.

Speaker A: Thank you for having me. It was great to chat.

Speaker B: What a fascinating chat. I love, um, Lateef's approach to that product development and seeing it so intrinsic with the SEO. And it's not just about what the audience think they want, it's about what's coming down the line as well. So super fascinating, um, to do all that. Loads of stuff to take out of that. Um, I am probably gonna have to listen to this one again myself to make sure I got all the bits and pieces and maybe, maybe we'll get Lateef on again in the future. Cause I suspect he's got lots more to run through with us. So, um, if you like that idea, reach out, let me know. 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 can also use our direct episode short link that's ecmp.info episode number to get to the right page straight away. When you get to the website, go on. Add yourself to our email list so you don't miss out on any of the things we share to help you improve your business. And if you liked this episode, then why not check out episode 402? That's 4 022, where I'm chatting to another brand who produce fashion inspired by animals, then donates to animal charities. It's Bearkind socks. In episode 402, founder Lucy is explaining how they grew their wholesale business to 400 accounts. And if you want more on fashion, then head to the website@ecmp.info fashion for all our fashion episodes. 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 like you to succeed and thrive with your businesses, including encouraging businesses and consumers to make more sustainable buying decisions. So if you know someone this show can help. Please tell them to listen to the E Commerce Master Plan podcast. I hope you have a great week and don't forget to keep optimizing. Thank you for listening to the E Commerce Master Plan podcast. Find out more@e commercemasterplan.com podcast.

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