Company

When Alex Ikonn and his wife Mimi realized how hard it was to find good hair extensions, they knew they had stumbled on a business opportunity. 

They took their problem and solved it by creating Luxy Hair - an extremely successful online store selling hair extensions for women.

And the coolest part? Their business is powered almost exclusively by tutorial-style YouTube videos.  

Their YouTube channel was created in 2010 and since then has amassed 1,474,246 subscribers and 173,657,125 total video views.

In other words, Luxy Hair is the perfect example of an audience enabled business that relies on a loyal community of fans instead of other channels like SEO and paid advertising. 

I caught up with Alex to find out how they took their site from idea to million dollar business. 

Today, I’m happy to announce that Shopify has raised $100 million in Series C funding. I am excited to welcome OMERS Ventures and Insight Venture Partners to our team, along with Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Georgian Partners and Felicis Ventures. These are some of the most prestigious venture capital firms in the world, and I’m honoured to have them join us in our mission to make commerce better.

It’s hard to believe that Shopify has come this far. It feels like yesterday that my co-founders and I were working out of a coffee shop trying to find the best way to sell snowboards online. Our options were either wildly expensive or painfully complicated, so we built our own. It didn’t take long to realize we should stop selling snowboards and start selling the software we created to build the store. That was the best decision of my life.

Today, Shopify has over 300 employees and powers over 80,000 online stores in 100 different countries. By the end of the year, our merchants will have sold well over $1.5 billion in products in 2013 alone. And although we’re the fastest growing ecommerce platform in the world, this is just the beginning.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with your mailing list is to send the same email to everyone, all the time. To address this problem, you can create emails based on specific criteria using segmentation. In this post, we’ll look at different ways to segment your email list in order to increase engagement and conversions.

Have you heard of Crossfit? It's a strength and conditioning system that was started in 2000 and has become extremely popular in the fitness community.

It's also a movement a lot of smart entrepreneurs are building businesses around. 

One such person is Peter Keller, an entrepreneur from Texas and owner of FringeSport, a Crossfit and home gym equipment supplier.

Peter and I connected on Reddit over at /r/entrepreneur after the Beardbrand case study we published generated a lot of discussion over there. 

He introduced himself and shared his story (as well as some pretty incredible sales numbers for such a young company).

I got Peter to take us behind of the scenes of his extremely successful ecommerce business and show us how he achieved such phenomenal growth so fast. 

What do you get when you combine premium-quality, stylish sneakers at prices much lower than the competition? The answer is GREATS Brand - a new direct to consumer ecommerce shoe company that's aiming to disrupt the shoe industry by become the Warby Parker of footwear. 

Since launching in August, GREATS is off to a smashing start garnering attention from major media outlets like Forbes and men's fashion websites like GQ. 

The company is the brainchild of Ryan Babenzien and Jon Buscemi, two shoe industry veterans who saw an opportunity to create a new sneaker brand powered by ecommerce. 

We caught up with Ryan to find out more about how they've been so successful in such a short period of time.

Eric Bandholz has one serious beard.

And he's not alone. 

Just look around any major urban center these days and you'll see more beards and mustaches than ever before.

In fact, beards, mustaches, barber shops and male grooming in general are all undergoing a major renaissance right now. Especially with Movember in full swing.

Being a member of the beard community (and blogging about it), Eric was aware of this demand and realized he and his peers we're being underserved both from a content and product standpoint.

So he decided to create Beardbrand. 

Since launching the site this past January, Beardbrand has built a loyal community, has been featured in the New York Times and is off to a racing start. 

I was lucky enough to catch up with Eric and ask him some questions about how he's achieved his amazing success in such a short period of time. 

Whether you’re selling t-shirts or homemade jewelry, by now you've probably heard that you need to be marketing your business with content.

That's because creating valuable free content creates trust, builds your brand, keeps people informed, gives you something to share on social media and helps you rank in search engines.

More importantly, content marketing helps you attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers.

But how many companies are actually walking the walk? And more importantly, how can ecommerce companies like yours create content that breeds fans and followers?

Well, let’s look at how other online stores are managing to sashay down the content runway in style:

Imagine walking into a kitchen being used as a studio by a self-taught fashion designer who’s keen on transforming the look of women’s leggings from being hardly noticeable, to being the centre of attention.

Well that’s exactly what happened to Cameron Parker, a manager at an advertising agency, the day he met Black Milk Clothing founder James Lillis.

That was a few years ago, the early days of Black Milk Clothing, a stand out brand from Australia that today is a wildly successful company with a cult-like following any company would be jealous of. 

Since then, Parker has taken over the marketing reins for Black Milk to help take the business from kitchen table to global sensation. 

Started in 2009, the company began when Lillis sold his first legging for $10.  Today Black Milk Clothing is a multi-million dollar company that’s grown to 150 people and distributes its products globally.

And the best part? They’ve been able to do all that with a $0 marketing and advertising budget.  

I sat down with Cameron who heads up all the marketing and operations duties for the company to find out the company’s trade secrets. 

Parker travels the world for an annual tour in which the company facilitates meetups for its fan base so they can talk and rave about Black Milk Clothing in person.

In this interview, he breaks down the tactics that have worked for them, and what emerging ecommerce companies can do differently to gain the necessary traction to be successful.  

What do you get when you combine hi-tech performance fabrics with mens fashion? 

The answer is Mizzen+Main. 

Mizzen+Main is a fast growing men's apparel company that's on a mission to get rid of pit stains with their performance dress shirts. 

The company was started by co-founders Kevin Lavelle, Web Smith and Steven DeWitt who all came from different backgrounds but all bring something different to the table. Mizzen+Main has been featured in Fast Company and Forbes and has garnered key partnerships with NFL players and ESPN. 

We caught up with Kevin to find out how they came up with the idea, how they run their company and what advice they can offer to entrepreneurs looking to start an ecommerce business. 

You’re losing money. We haven’t even met, yet I know this because the data supports it; that each and every day you’re losing potential orders on your website.

Noah Dentzel of NOMAD has run two crowdfunding campaigns in two years on two different platforms. His first campaign, on Kickstarter, reached 322% of his funding goal. His second, on Indiegogo, reached even higher.

In the perpetual struggle of battling the bear that is Amazon.com, small online shops find success with a) a unique product, and b) a memorable customer experience.