When you’re running non-profit organizations, gaining the support of the community supersedes having products aimed to be best-sellers. Stupid Cancer has not only established a brand that people support, but its products’ humor inspires an incredible social media presence. Watch their story now!
In the third episode of Skubana’s E-Commerce Mastery Series where we invite experts of their respected fields to share their best practices for success, our host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz of InspiredInsider.com interviews Kenny Kane, founder of Stupid Cancer and e-commerce branding expert.
Stupid Cancer is a nonprofit organization that addresses and provides community to young adults (ages 15-39) facing or recovering from cancer. While the focus is providing support to those affected, Stupid Cancer has an established e-commerce store to keep the organization thriving.
So how does a nonprofit organization make money with products like apparel and skateboards that people would go elsewhere for? By building a brand that’s awesome with an incredible cause.
In this episode you’ll discover how Stupid Cancer has made a brand that encouraged their organization’s growth:
How they got their start and the inspirational people they were affected by
The utilization of social media to further their brand and how it affected their sales
When supporting a noble cause, how celebrity endorsement boosted Stupid Cancer’s online store
What events and outings they have started in order to spread awareness of their organization
RAW TRANSCRIPT: Kenny Kane of Stupid Cancer
Jeremy: Dr. Jeremy Weisz here. I’m founder of InspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders like the founders of P90X, Baby Einstein, Atari, many more, how they overcome big challenges in life and business. This is part of skubana e-commerce Mastery Series, where top sellers and experts teach you what really works to boost your e-commerce business. Skubana is a software platform to manage your entire e-commerce operation.
Today, we have Kenny Kane. He’s been coding since the age of 13. He began his career as a pharmacy tech at age 15 and Kenny is COO and co-founder of Stupid Cancer and he oversees e-commerce, content creation and much more. He’s helped developed corporate relationships such as Siemens, General Motors, Seattle Genetics and many more. Kenny, thanks for joining me.
Kenny: Thank you for having me.
Jeremy: We have so much good stuff to talk about from a CancerCon to Instaeer to your road trip and also running the e-commerce and going from the demand of out of nothing. And I always like to start with a quick win for people in e-commerce and what things they should be doing or shouldn’t be doing. What is a must for sellers to boost sales? What’s worked with your site?
Kenny: Yeah, so I think, even still engagement probably wins above everything else. It’s one thing to sell something like vacuum cleaners and hope that people just show up. It’s another thing to make vacuum cleaners fun and do something on social media with them.
Jeremy: Right. So, what do you do that works with engagement?
Kenny: For Stupid Cancer, we have had a lot of success with posting people who are at various stages of treatment in Stupid Cancer wear. You know, a lot of our community rocks the bald head look and they look great doing it and those kind of posts just get so much engagement because people, they want to help the person in the picture by giving them props online. So, we see that those pictures will typically go pretty viral.
Jeremy: So, what’s been the most memorable story that you saw posted from Stupid Cancer or that you posted?
Kenny: Sure. So, I actually was telling somebody about this recently. I had a good friend named Lauren Scott who had ultimately passed away at the age of 16 from sarcoma.
Jeremy: I’m sorry to hear that. Jeez.
Kenny: Yeah, she was a beautiful girl. She was, I would say, one of the most active people in our community. People just rallied around her, rallied around her mom. She would put on like the Kurt Cobain glasses and different pictures. She probably hundreds of sunglasses and she just made it rock. She made it look great and I would send her new items to Instagram and take selfies with and we would reshare those pictures and people would just love them, because she was just so adorable. So, for me, that was probably one of the best moments.
Jeremy: I don’t how you don’t get, I don’t know if depressed is the right word, but I mean you, day in and day out, are dealing with such uplifting stories but they’re sad in the same respect. From the people who don’t have a sexy business, like vacuum cleaners or cell phone cases or something, it sounds like you reached out to a raving fan and gave them stuff for them to promote to their Instagram or wherever online. If people are thinking, “Well, I don’t have that great of a story.” Right?
Kenny: One of my favorite case studies of a brand activating the community that they didn’t know were using their products, it was from a book called Brains on Fire and its Fiskars, the scissors with the orange handle, and we’ve had them. Everybody has had a pair of those at some point. So, what Fiskars did is they created a group of women who were crafters and they named them the Fiskateers and they made it this self-electing, self-governing body, where these women would travel around the country going to trade shows and all these different things and it was, I forget how long the term was but they would only be a Fiskateer for so long and then the next batch would be voted in or something like that.
Jeremy: Interesting.
Kenny: But you talk about something from nothing. That was a really interesting story.
Jeremy: Yeah, and engagement, I mean, obviously you do an amazing job creating community, too. What things have worked with creating community?
Kenny: So, when I came on board as employee number two, way back in the day, we had a really small footprint on Facebook. I think we had a couple of thousand and then fast forward about a year, a year and half, we had about 15,000 likes, people. That was kind of around the time when they converted fan pages to like pages and we had a group at University of Texas, Austin that came up with the tag line ‘Like us to give cancer the bird.’ So, one of our slogans is give cancer the bird. People can get behind in it. It just makes sense. It clicks. It’s just edgy enough for the whole family and we put some money into it over the past three years or so, probably about $15,000 which, in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t a lot of money year over year, and we went from 15,000 likes to 303,000 likes.
Jeremy: Wow, that’s amazing.
Kenny: Yeah, and there was a mix of paid and organic. The paid definitely–
Jeremy: Did you start to get traction with the paid, the organic kicks ins?
Kenny: Right, exactly. So, the paid helped get the traction. People were sharing the organics came but, without that advertisement, I don’t know where we would be. We’d probably be still doing pretty well but it was there when we needed it and it just worked.
Jeremy: Yeah, that’s really interesting. If someone asks you, Kenny, “So, now I have all these likes. How do you get them onto your website to convert to sales?” Because, obviously, you have an amazing cause. You don’t want to leave anything on the table because this all goes to, which we’ll talk about the mission of Stupid Cancer and how it came about, but how do you drive those people to your website?
Kenny: I’m still a big believer in email. I think a lot of companies come along and they focus solely on the Instagram or Facebook or Twitter and I’m still a big fan of the inbox. One of the things that I used to do, I pretty much do it every Friday, we do a giveaway. So, I’d create a simple Google form with name, cell phone number, address, email address, and we would let people know that we’re going to pick three lucky winners and there was a thing at the bottom of the form that says by clicking submit, you are opting into our mailing list. You’re ours forever. We promise not to spam you and we were true to our word. We would. We would go to like number randomizer, pick three winners and send them out their product or whatever it was and then they’d come back and comment on the post, “Hey, I got my t-shirt. I got my mug.” But it was a great way to get those anonymous Facebook likes onto our mailing list, which then became lifetime customers.
Jeremy: Yeah, that’s great. I love that. Contests. So, what about things to avoid? What mistakes do you find that you’ve made or you’ve seen other people make?
Kenny: Yeah, to that, once you have a bunch of people, it’s really enticing to start hitting them up repeatedly. So, perhaps velocity of messaging and relevance because, just because you got their email addresses doesn’t mean they necessarily want to hear from you.
Jeremy: Why wouldn’t they want to hear from you? C’mon.
Kenny: Right. They’re drinking out of their Stupid Cancer coffee mug that they won and they don’t want to read my email. We recently migrated from MailChimp to Bronto and part of that was the need to segment a little more intelligently. Stupid Cancer, overall, is a lot of things to a lot of different people. For some people, we’re just a wristband. For some people, we come off as an apparel company which then, luckily, when they dig a little deeper, they see where the money is actually going.
Obviously, we’re the charity, we’re the conference, we’re the road trip, we’re a mobile app. There’s so many different verticals within the organization that, with MailChimp, we had 10 different lists. So, we would have all these people in different places. They’d opt out of one list, still be on the other list, say, “Why am I getting these email?” So, the move to Bronto was really the first time that we had people as a contact where they could self-select what they were interested in. So, giving people the ability to self-select your marketing is critical.
Jeremy: So, talk about that for a second because I think some of the savviest marketers I know are constantly thinking and talking about segmentation. So, what does that self-selecting process look like and how do you implement it?
Kenny: So, one of the biggest things was the preference page. It was actually what I did first when we migrated and we had been segmenting on MailChimp as well. We do a lot of local events at like a bar or restaurant and, if you’re in New York, you don’t want to hear about an event happening in California. So, we would do like 100 mile radius email blast. So, things like that worked really well for us but the move to Bronto or really any, I’ll call it enterprise level email platform, letting people tick the box on what they want to hear is great. It’s a nice offering, then you have to stick to that. You need to only email that group. It’s really easy to–
Jeremy: If it’s relevant, yeah.
Kenny: Right. It’s really easy to say that we want to send everyone the 25% off coupon code this weekend but if they didn’t want to hear about store coupons, you probably don’t want to email them. They’re going to unsubscribe and then, if they were a conference attendee, they’re not going to come to the conference.
Jeremy: You know, I did notice that. It didn’t register in my mind about segmentation but I did notice on your site that you have these circles. So, tell me about those, the different categories that you have there.
Kenny: So, Matthew Zachary, our CEO and founder, he is the marketing champ visually for us and the circles really convey what we like to call the productize nature of the organization. As I mentioned, we have the conference, we have Instapeer, our mobile app, we have the radio show. We allow people to check out our products. We also have the bubbles. Are you talking about the bubbles?
Jeremy: Yeah, like I noticed, how can we help you? And then, I didn’t realize but that’s the segmentations. I need money, I need a lawyer, I can’t work, I need respite, am I fertile, and that’s more like the information segmentation?
Kenny: Right. It’s almost self-driven support. Lot of non-profits will make their websites based on a role. So, for us, it would be I’m a survivor, I’m a care-giver, I’m a healthcare provider. The next level down would be I’m newly diagnosed, I’m in treatment, I’m post-treatment, I’m in and out of treatment, I’m a long time survivor, I’m a long time pediatric survivor. So, we do have a lot of different roles within the organization and, over the years, we’ve tried out really figure out who they are and what different needs they have from content from the conference, content on the radio show and Instapeer, the mobile app, is really the first time that it’s fully democratized where if you are, say, 25 with testicular cancer, you’re going to go in there and you’re going to meet other 25 year olds with testicular cancer. So, you’re cutting right through everything and getting to ultimately what you need.
Jeremy: Yeah, that looked amazing and so how does that coincide with other organizations like Imerman Angels we were talking about early and Jonny Imerman, because I know they do some peer to peer things also.
Kenny: Yeah, I mean there’s really no replacement for what Johnny does. He is matching people up at a custom tailored level. Ours is very much, it’s instant, it’s anonymous and, like any other mobile app that you’re connecting with, you’re going to have the great connections, then you might have the connections that you pass over. I’m sure that happens with his organization as well but his is really a white glove service whereas ours is here now, figure it out. It’s like Uber. You can have an Uber, if you’re not happy, you can rate it a one-star transaction. Ours is very transactional, where his is a little bit offline personal.
Jeremy: Customized.
Kenny: Cultivated, customized. Yeah.
Jeremy: Yeah. And I like your talk about segmentation and relevancy because, oftentimes, I think that we don’t do that enough and you really have identified the different audiences, you can kind of deliver what they are wanting. What mistakes do people make with anything with the actual store, e-commerce store itself?
Kenny: Yeah. We have created a line of products out of thin air. We have the intellectual property for the phrase Stupid Cancer so nobody, literally no one else could do what we’re doing legally. I think some of the issues that we’ve had is perhaps growing a little too quickly with our product offerings and what I mean by that is I did a shirt that says, “I am a survivor,” because, in our community, people scream it from the mountain top. I think maybe the mess up there was the fact that I did it in six different colors and five different sizes of each color so now we had x*x shirts and it’s a matter of when is it going to move?
One of the issues we face too, I’m sitting in the room, we had all of our apparel in a tiny little radio studio and now we have a third party fulfillment company. So, we have less of the walls are closing in, but it’s more about what’s just sitting around in Pennsylvania on the shelves.
Jeremy: Right, and we’ll talk about some of the systems because those are things like they allow you to actually get out and do these road trips. You are not managing inventory and trying to do everything in between. So, I always like to include a fun fact, Kenny, two fun facts about you. One that most people wouldn’t expect, at least I didn’t picture this – that you ride a motorcycle and I did notice on your site, I thought, why do they have a t-shirt with a motorcycle in Stupid Cancer? It seemed random to me but–
Kenny: I’m very selfish.
Jeremy: So, tell me about that.
Kenny: I got the motorcycle when I was 21. My dad, who is the cancer survivor, and, in fact, we’ll get into that as well. Dad and I would always go and look at motorcycles over the summer and I got the bike, he didn’t get the bike. It’s all right, Dad. Since you’re probably watching this, I forgive you. Although, this summer I put the bike in a garage in Brooklyn, my dad’s out in Long Island and he let me know that mowing the lawn wasn’t quite the same because he couldn’t wrap it up with a ride around the block on the motorcycle.
Jeremy: Nice. So, then what made you decide to create that t-shirt then or did you decide that?
Kenny: Yeah. I’ve always been a big fan of Sons of Anarchy. I’m definitely not your typical biker. I used to go up to Starbucks down the block on my motorcycle [inaudible 00:17:23]. And it was a bunch of lawyers and doctors and guys that would play Harley dress up on Sundays, trying to look bad-ass. And the Sons of Anarchy movement, if it is a movement, I don’t know if it’s a movement, just that whole line of apparel is so cool and the charity space, there are a lot of charitable motorcycle riders and that’s always been a pipe dream of mine, to grow out some of our motorcycle runs, rallies, local events. So, it was kind of a multi-pronged approach and it was definitely the path of least resistance to solicit a design for a motorcycle emblem and then print it off on some t-shirts. And actually, my pipe dream happened, where we had a lot of bikers comment, “Hey, I want to start a chapter in my neighborhood.”
Jeremy: Nice. Nice.
Kenny: So, when you do something like that, you have to be prepared for the demand from the crowd.
Jeremy: So, would you say it was a good decision to selfishly create the t-shirt?
Kenny: It was, yeah. I’m a New Yorker, you’re in Chicago, certainly LA is another big city. We forget that there are cross-sections of the country in between these huge cities where, just because I’m walking around the streets of Manhattan, most of the country are riding their motorcycles.
Jeremy: Right. Yeah. So, the other fun fact, which I’m surprised you wanted to share this but we’ll share it anyways, 1.0.
Kenny: Sorry.
Jeremy: 1.0 – what’s 1.0 that you wanted to talk about? You said, “I got a 1.0.”
Kenny: Oh, right. Sorry. It’s been that kind of day. I don’t know what my perception of college was, really. I think I graduated high school in the ’80s, so like a B, and I was always just so curious about tech that everything else kind of fell to the wayside and, back in like the early 2000, late ’90s, we had a bit of tech coming into the classrooms but a lot of it was a lot of it was me at home, after schools, weekends. My mom would yell at me to go play in the yard and I would say, “No, I’m building a website on Bravenet or [inaudible],” or whatever it was.
So, fast forward to time to graduate, I didn’t really put a lot of thought or effort into considering where I wanted to go. So, ultimately, I went to Suffolk Community College out on Long Island, which is actually a great school. People tend to call it the 13th grade but when I went to visit my sister, who was up at Binghamton, at the end of my first year, she was graduating and graduation weekend, I saw how much fun she’d had. Everybody was so sad to leave and it was a new town, a new city and I was like, “I could go here. I could definitely go here.”
So, I applied, I got in. Actually, I applied to school of management and I called, because I was a late application that summer and I called and I said, “Hey, I’m checking on my application for school management.” They said, “Please hold.” Come back in line. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kane, I’m afraid not to tell you didn’t get into School of Management.” I had a 3.0 at the end of my first year and I said, “Well, how about the liberal arts school?” So, the girl was kind of puzzled on the phone, puts me on hold, I guess went to go talk to someone in the admissions office and comes back on the phone, “Mr. Kane, congratulations. You’ve been accepted to Binghamton University.”
So, I went out. I think orientation was two days before school and I remember we had, day one was picking out classes and then day two we were going to sit down at the computer, which was a super old, really crappy registration software and I had decided to repeat a couple of classes that I had taken that I didn’t quite get the grade I wanted, so maybe a C or I think I had a D in micro-economics. So, I was like, “Hey, I’ll take micro again,” and 45 minutes into this hour long registration process, the server goes down. So, everyone loses their schedule. It comes back up about five minutes later, so now we have ten minutes to register and all the classes I had picked out were gone. I was a sophomore at the time, so they were really upper level classes like 400 level, globalization classes.
Jeremy: So, was that 1.0 referring to your GPA or what was it-
Kenny: Yes.
Jeremy: Okay.
Kenny: So, that’s the end of the story. So, I picked out all these classes and I think I had 15 credits that went down to I think 9 and I got straight As in Spanish but it was at 8.00 AM. My roommates, I was tripled in a double. The roommates wouldn’t go to bed so I couldn’t wake up for the class. Everything that could have worked against me worked against me for the semester at Binghamton and I left with a 1.0. I went back to Suffolk for a year and finally I stumbled upon a program that I graduated with at Farmingdale but, yeah.
Jeremy: That’s a painful, painful thing.
Kenny: Yeah. It was a good self-realization though because I had always wondered like all right, if I go away to school, what would it be like and I knew that almost at day one that it was going to be a nightmare.
Jeremy: So, talk to me, Kenny, about the mission of Stupid Cancer. We mentioned Matthew, at the beginning of the interview, Mathew Zachary. How did it get started originally?
Kenny: Matt was diagnosed in ’95 with a brain tumor, [inaudible 00:23:26]. He was also at Binghamton, which was one of our early points of aha. He was classically trained as a piano player and he went to the health services on campus because he started getting headaches and his left hand started getting numb. So, as a piano player, you notice when your hands stop working and nobody was taking him serious that he needed to get further second opinions and what not, thought he had all sorts of different stuff from meningitis to Epstein Barr and finally he had an MRI and they discovered that he had a [inaudible 00:24:08] brain tumor and he went for surgery, radiation, had to reteach himself how to play and walked away from the experience like what the heck just happened to me?
So, 10 years later, there was a document that came out called Closing the Gap and it showed that people, 0-15 and 40+ were surviving cancer much more frequently but this middle section of 15-39 year olds were dying more frequently, didn’t have good outcomes or as good outcomes as the other populations. So, that really led the charge with Matt deciding that he was going to focus on this age group. Earlier on, I would tell people that we were like Facebook for cancer, where you can only be a certain age to benefit from us.
Jeremy: Yeah, because eventually, I want to talk about your journey once you get to Stupid Cancer but you were personally affected and that’s one of the reasons you are so passionate about it.
Kenny: Yeah. So, ten years ago, when I was indecisive about college in May of 2005, my dad came to me one day and said, “Hey, listen I have something to tell you,” and I said, “What’s up?” And he was getting something out of the fridge and he dropped it and kind of hit himself in the crotch and noticed that it wasn’t getting better. It was hurting days later and, luckily, he had access to some neurologists that he worked with at a hospital and they said, “Yeah, this is, something’s here.” So, maybe two or three days later, he was on the operating table, had an orchiectomy and then, that summer, went through chemo. And I actually had to pick him up from his first chemo to come to high school graduation.
So, here I am, cap and gown, best time of my life, had prom the night before. Life was great. We’re getting out of here and I have to look out to the crowd and see my dad looking exhausted and it was just, I feel like Kurt Vonnegut would have had something to say about it, from an irony perspective. That too, I didn’t really know what the future held for him. I didn’t know what the future held for me. I was planning for college and continuing with my life and I didn’t know the degree of care that he would need. So, we kind of went through it together. I was his healthcare proxy. I took him to surgeries. I picked him up from surgery and it’s definitely impactful. I had been in the pharmacy field for a couple of years at that point so I had a basic understanding and appreciation for the significance of the event but you’re never really prepared when something like that happens.
Jeremy: What was the toughest part for you in that time period, seeing your dad?
Kenny: I think for me, and for all care-givers, you’re always wishing that the roles could be reversed. Nobody wants to see a loved one go through something so traumatic and, at times, dehumanizing and there are definitely times when I wished that we just weren’t there at all. But if you’re going to go through it, you might as well go through it with someone.
Jeremy: Okay, I know that you start off, you did your internship there, which was like 90 hours. It grew to like 900 hours or something like that and then you were the second employee that came on. And we were talking before about the co-founder that kind of, they were one company. What were they called, I’m Too Young?
Kenny: Yeah. When Matt started the organization way back when, it was called ‘Steps for Living’ and his goal, the mission was to provide music therapy for people diagnosed with cancer. So, we had this great community of creatives who were impacted by cancer and then the report came out in ’06 that helped him kind of define who was going to be part of this and the name changed in ’07 to I’m Too Young For This Cancer Foundation, also known as I2Y Cancer Foundation.
So, there was kind of two brands working together and it was a great name. It worked. I mean, it hooked me. It conveyed the sentiment. You know, a lot of doctors and health care providers will tell people or just a general feel for it is you’re too young for cancer. You’re in your 20s and 30s.But Stupid Cancer really, it kind of made its way to the top. People started calling Matt and I the guys from Stupid Cancer. People would call us Stupid Cancer. We would have to correct them, “No, we’re I’m Too Young For This.” It was just a lot of–
Jeremy: It just stuck.
Kenny: It was a lot of effort to fight the whole Stupid Cancer change. So, one day we were just like, “All right. That’s it.”
Jeremy: Yeah, and so what were some of the attraction that you saw earlier on when you started implementing the e-commerce, because I know when we were talking, you created demand out of nothing. What did it look like early on?
Kenny: Right. During the I2Y, I’m Too Young For This period, we did have a pretty elementary t-shirt offering on Café Press. Matt had done like this Stupid Cancer kind of block on a shirt and then it had the word testicular with an arrow. So, it’d be like Stupid Testicular Cancer and that was across the board for all cancers and it worked. It was great. I think we would probably get about $400 a month from that, which probably equated to selling 200-300 t-shirts, if we were making a dollar or two off them, which was [inaudible 00:30:18] problem with trying to scale on a website like Café Press. It’s great for one off’s and for personalization but it’s not necessarily going to help your margin.
Jeremy: So, what was next after that?
Kenny: At the same time, we were selling our wristbands through a third party called Loser Kids, which is like a pop punk apparel website and, at the time, one of our board members had a Volusion store and I remember throwing the idea around like what if we just created our own store and brought it in house? And then time out. He was like, “Who’s going to run it?” And I said, “Well, I have 10 minutes here on this part of my day. I’ll do it then.” Prior to the store launch, I think we would do about $5,000 a year in revenue and our first year on Volusion, which was nine months out of the year, we did $25,000.
Jeremy: Nice.
Kenny: So, immediately, there, and back then, like I said, we were probably hovering around 25,000, 30,000 Facebook likes. So, we were still pretty small. So, I think we all took a step back and said, “All right. There’s something here.” And then the next year, we did about $68,000 and then we just closed out last year at $117,000.
Jeremy: Congrats, that’s great.
Kenny: Yeah. So, we’re doubling year over year and kind of as much as we’ve grown with Facebook, we’ve grown in revenue and store size.
Jeremy: So, what are the best sellers? What are you found the best sellers and, in contrast, what did you think were going to be best sellers that did not sell well?
Kenny: So, the average cart size is about $40, which could be a hoodie or it could be two t-shirts or a t-shirt and a 10 pack of wristbands. That’s usually the configuration. Definitely sell a lot of hoodies. I’m lucky to have a woman named Stephanie that helps me do all my apparel. She is a [inaudible 00:32:19] rep out of Florida and she might as well as be a part to full time employee at times, because she helps me manage supply chain and all that good stuff. We wouldn’t be where we are without her but her and I have fun because she is always going to trade shows and always letting me know like, “Hey, we have this new product.” Maybe it’s a beer koozie with a hoodie on it, like these little trashy things.
We do test a little bit of that kind of stuff. We did a pillbox. The pillbox was a hit but then it was discovered that, after a couple of months of use, that the tops would open on the different days. We’ve kind of gone through the ringer with testing some of the knick knacks. Definitely the t-shirts are our bread and butter. We started on a a Guilden 5000 and we’ve since started printing on like a Tulltex 0202, which is a more American Apparel like t-shirt. So, people are buying these shirts. They’re wearing the shirts. People are getting them as gifts and it’s not something you just throw on the shelf because it’s so comfortable.
Jeremy: And I noticed like there’s a skateboard deck that you sell. What is that?
Kenny: Yeah. I guess in a similar way that I did the motorcycle stuff, we wanted to take a step towards active wear and active lifestyle and we did skateboard, we did yoga pants. The thing about skateboards is you don’t want to set them up pre-configured, because everybody does their own thing with wheels, tracks. So, we’re just selling the wood plank. It doesn’t even have grip tape on it but we’ve done a couple of them. Actually, we did a crowdfunding campaign for Instapeer, the mobile app, and that was one of the prizes. So, it started off as an exclusive item, which it’s kind of a novelty item.
Jeremy: It seems inexpensive. Is that an actual wood piece of material?
Kenny: Yeah.
Jeremy: It’s only $30?
Kenny: So, the board typically, I think it’s around $16 cost.
Jeremy: Wow. I would expect it to be way more expensive [inaudible 00:34:35].
Kenny: Yeah. When you start to get into the wheels and the trucks, then you’re looking at close to a $100 cost.
Jeremy: Yeah. So, have you played around with pricing at all? I’m curious about, in general, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked or what you found to be kind of a sweet spot for certain products?
Kenny: I’ve got to think on where to start with that. So, the skateboard, for example, is $30 now. We started at $50. Yeah, we probably moved a couple of units based on the excitement of a new item and then it plateaued. For me, especially before we had the warehouse, we needed to get things in and out. If Matt or even I, if we saw something lingering, I would be like, “Let’s just slash the prices and get it out, fire sale.” We did a $7 t-shirt sale last summer on a Guilden 5000, which I still keep one in the store at the $10 price point. So, they probably cost around $3.50 and the warehouse might get two out of that and then we make $5 on it. But we put them at $7 last year and kind of broke even or a little bit less than break even. We made money on two or three shirts but we moved liked $12,000 worth of inventory over a weekend and we had a celebrity help us promote that and it was just a win. We got all these new people walking around with our shirt on. Going back to the email list, we had all these new customers, so it was worth breaking even for.
Jeremy: Yeah, and one thing I noticed about you, Kenny, and about Stupid Cancer is you are really good at getting the word out, PR, celebrity. What’s your method when you reach out to a celebrity like that?
Kenny: So, this one in particular, Italia Ricci, she is the star of ABC Family’s Chasing Life, and Chasing Life is a show that focuses on someone in their late twenties who is going through it. At the beginning of the show, I think they’re on season three, beginning of the show, she finds out she has it and then the subsequent seasons, she’s going through treatment and navigating life as someone in their twenties. I mean, it’s hard enough being in your twenties and thirties. You throw cancer on it and this show really depicts what happens. And the goal of the show, which I give them a lot of respect for, was to maintain authenticity because a lot of these movies or other cancer-ish kind of stuff, they always go right for the stuff that just guts you. You know, the worst case scenarios and-
Jeremy: Not the common thing but just you know.
Kenny: Right, and the cases where there’s very little hope and then they pull through or sometimes they don’t pull through and Chasing Life, from the beginning, I remember getting an email from, I guess it was the art director saying, “Hey, we’re filming a show for ABC Family. Can we put out some Stupid Cancer signage?” They wanted to do a meet-up, which is one of our programs. So, basically they asked for our logo. They put up a banner on the wall and it’s been in the show quite frequently and the response is great.
Jeremy: That’s awesome.
Kenny: Our community just got, they were really thrilled to see that from such a mainstream company and, after that, they started wearing the shirts, they started instagraming the shirts, the celebrities did as well as the show properties and it’s just been, that kind of stuff doesn’t always happen.
Jeremy: Right, exactly.
Kenny: Especially for little organizations.
Jeremy: Yeah, but you do things that create that like the Road Trip, right?
Kenny: Right.
Jeremy: So, what made you decide to do the Road Trip or what is the Road Trip?
Kenny: In 2011, we had the final New York City OMG Summit. The OMG Summit started in 2008 and it was in partnership with another organization, so we didn’t call it the Stupid Cancer conference and the OMG summit. So, ’08,’09.2010,2011, we were in New York. 2012, we decide we were going to go to the Palms Casino in Vegas. The timing was right. The brand had fully converted to Stupid Cancer. We were poised for greatness and we said, “How do we one up up ourself with Vegas?” And Matt and I were probably at the diner, drunk on bacon, and we said, “Well, let’s do a road trip.”
So, then of course, it’s like, well, who’s going to do the road trip? There’s definitely been moments over the past five and a half years or so, when I’ve said to myself, “I didn’t sign up for this.” The road trip definitely was one of those things like, “All right. I’ll drive a new car.”
Jeremy: It sounds cool at the diner but one you are on the road, it’s probably not as glamorous.
Kenny: Right. So, my now great friend, one of my favorite people, John Stabia [SP] and I, he’s done all our videos for us. He has his own company. We said, “Hey John, what do you think about this idea to go cross-country?” And he is kind of one of those ride or die people, and he is like, “All right. I’m in. I’m in.” So, we plotted the course. We got in touch with Volkswagen and they gave us a 2012 Turbo Beetle, when the Beetle was brand new and they relaunched the body style.
So, it was well-timed. It was a great campaign and the clincher for the road trip, which we had done meet ups in different cities every night. I think we were doing 10 days and now it’s 14 days. When we rolled into Vegas, day one of the conference, we’re in the Pearl Theatre, which is a huge theater, 2500 seats. We pulled the car out on stage for the opening ceremonies and get out of the car and welcome everybody. And people were just completely taken off guard, blown away. Here comes this car, rolling out on stage and it’s the OMG Summit, cancer survivors. It was magical. It was awesome. We did that two more times in Vegas and now it’s in Denver and it’s called CancerCon.
Kenny: I mean, I noticed, obviously we’re talking about a lot of e-commerce but there’s a lot of integrated approaches because you have conferences, you’ve been an app and I know you do some consulting with non-profits. So, when a company comes to you and says, alright Kenny, I need to improve my e-commerce side of things, take pressure off, whether it’s a conference or donations. Where do you start?
Kenny: So, for us, I think even more so than revenue, it was… You know I come from the pharmacy background. I worked in retail pharmacy for years. I just knew that there was an opportunity there and then, when we went from a five grand in revenues to 25 grand, we kind of took a step back and said, “Well, if we do this right, we could potentially offset some of the burden of fundraising and asking people for 5, 10, 2500 dollars and they can get a t-shirt out of it.” So, when people come to me who, depending on what their mission is, what their message is, you know Stupid Cancer is an easy sell. It passes the t-shirt test but if you are any given body part organization, you can come up with a clever slogan and sell it. There’s organizations that support testicular cancer that will have a shirt that says “Love my nuts” or one for the girlfriend that says, “I love his nuts.” And, you know, there’s ways to kind of circumvent actually printing the name of your organization and create something that’s going to move.
Jeremy: Right. Yeah, that’s a good point because someone may say, well, like the scissors example, my business is not sexy or is just is not that emotional. What do I do? And you could come up with like a model or something to put on any product besides just t-shirts or whatever it is. Yeah, that’s a good point and so, what have you seen as far as, obviously, you want to keep growing the e-commerce. What is the next stop? What do you think is going to help?
Kenny: Yeah, all right. Everybody who is watching this has to sign a non-disclosure. So, we also use the tag line called Get Busy Living. One of Matt’s favorite movies is Shawshank Redemption. You hear it in media and in life. Our community has really identified with it and really attribute it to us now almost as much as Stupid Cancer. So, I recently registered the domain GetBusyLiving.clothing, which points to The Get Busy Living brand section of my big commerce store. And the goal there is to create a new line of products that will appeal to everyone. Kind of like a life is good or the flip side of that coin, which is life is shit, which is another great brand.
We’re trying to de-cancerfy everything within the store so that if a friend is coming to buy a t-shirt for their cancer survivor in their life, maybe they’ll be pick up a Get Busy Living yoga pant or something. Another way that I have also considered going with it is gifts for survivors. We talk about things like creams or lifestyle products, things that will just make the journey easier. I’ve toyed around with the idea of doing a subscription, where maybe it would be box one, box two, box three or the August Stupid Cancer kit, where you get something that will brighten your day, if you’re sitting in chemo and somebody hands you this thing, because we certainly have the audience for it.
The hesitation and I guess the consideration is cost of inventory, cost of getting the stuff out, warehousing it and, ultimately, revenue versus the cost of goods sold. We try to fly between the clouds of the burden of purchasing all the stuff and profiting and being able to support the organization because, ultimately, we’re paying for the conference, we’re paying for the mobile app, we’re paying to produce the radio show. So, we need to be able to operate while we grow strategically. We’re not taking out a business loan to invest $300,000 in products because we would not be good stewards of a non-profit.
Jeremy: Yeah. I mean, that kind of brings up to, you bring up, obviously, physical goods. I want to have you talk about what’s the toughest part about running the e-commerce, but I do want to get to, having inventory is also very costly and, obviously, I see the trend. I think it’s really pretty genius as far as the mobile app goes. So, I want to talk about that but first, what’s the toughest part about running the e-commerce?
Kenny: Yeah so, I mean, I mentioned them earlier. We migrated from Volusion to Big Commerce. One of the issues that we had earlier on was the reporting functionality and our book keeper, who was used to doing our business a certain way, had to adapt his practice to now record all these transactions. We had to file for sales tax. There was a lot of up front action items that we had to do but we didn’t necessarily know that were going to have to do them. Once we ironed out the internal process, things like recording inventory, going through our financial audit every year, now we have to account for things that are sitting on the shelf at the end of the year where as it was bank balances previously. And we have to go through and figure out.
Jeremy: Accounting-wise, it’s just a little bit more of a nightmare.
Kenny: It became a little wider, became a little deeper, figuring how cost of goods sold for every item, multiplying the inventory. There’s a lot of granularity to it that, perhaps from a pure profit perspective, up front it was, it wasn’t even break even. It was a lot of time invested to get the store up but you reach a certain point where you do break even and then you hope that the success will continue and that’s kind of where we’re at now.
Kenny: And so is that why Big Commerce, you prefer it, because of reporting or is there other things that you like about it?
Jeremy: Yeah, because I got a random sales call in the fall of 2013 from a sales rep and I was able to go through the product demo myself and ultimately migrate and change the DNS within about 36 hours. It was really no time at all. It was really great to just switch. It’s everything I had hoped for, that I didn’t know that I needed.
Jeremy: So, what other systems/software you use?
Kenny: So, as I mentioned before, we have a warehouse and one of the obstacles now is losing touch with my inventory. So, I used to do all the fulfillment. Staff members would help me but if we sold a lot of red shirts, I would know that the red shirt was trending, whereas now, I don’t see that.
Jeremy: You do it yourself like in an office. You’d be–
Kenny: Correct. So, I’m looking at a radio studio desk. I would be folding t-shirts on the desk and packing and shipping with Ship Station and Endicia and literally filling up a bag for the post office and wheeling it down West Broadway to the Canal Street post office. So, you’re talking about a very manual process. We did a flash sale last summer that yielded about 350 orders and Matt was like, “You’re not filling orders anymore. You need–”
Jeremy: You were going to stand for two days straight.
Kenny: So, I actually, I came in on the Sunday and I started filling the orders and I was like, “Yeah, I think it’s time.” But luckily, I had done an RFP for the warehouse and I recently wrote a blog post about it. It was a matter of location, automation and accommodation. Obviously location, we’re in the North East. It made sense to have our products in the North East. We do typically ship most to California, so that was a consideration of should house stuff out there but, for us, if we need product, next day, USPS first class, it will get here from Pennsylvania in a day.
The automation part of it was a lot of these 3PLs were quoting me, all right, we’ll do a manual export of your orders. We’ll send you back the tracking numbers and then an excel spreadsheet and you can do your thing. And while it sounded better than me filling the orders, I was still saying, “All right, this is going to take a lot of time.” Luckily, I found a warehouse that between their system and Big Commerce, we found a plug in called Drop Stream that, any time an order’s placed, it gets sent over and then around 4.30, they do the end of day close out and it sends all the tracking numbers back to Big Commerce and the customers get their email.
And the accommodation was really, we get t-shirts in bulk in boxes. They’re not folded, they’re not bagged, they’re not barcoded and we needed a warehouse that was going to take them in and, for 15 cents, a shirt-
Jeremy: Get them ready.
Kenny: Right. For 15 cents a shirt, they are willing to fold them.
Jeremy: Wow, you’re like amen.
Kenny: Yeah, exactly. I didn’t know if we were going to have the shirts sent here. We would fold them and send them. Luckily this warehouse, Karol Media, Karol Fulfillment in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, they have been a God-send.
Jeremy: So, Karol Fulfillment, that’s a good resource. Any one’s that you found of the West Coast, that if you were on the West Coast, that you would consider?
Kenny: Yeah, I forget. So, originally, I had been at the [inaudible 00:51:53] West Show in Palm Springs, which if you’re unfamiliar, it’s a giant trade show for online sellers and I was in the exhibit booth and I found a company called Fifth Gear and Fifth Gear is a mega-warehouse and, upon me filling out a questionnaire, they said, “All right. You are a little too small for our typical engagement, but here is 15 other ones.” They sent out my questionnaire to their network and that’s how we got in touch with a couple of the different ones around the country.
Jeremy: So, then what else? Now, you have the plug in that goes with the e-commerce, that goes to Karol Fulfillment. What other systems do you use?
Kenny: So, to mitigate and remedy some of the not seeing the inventory issues, I use a service called the Inventory Planner and it’s Inventory-Planner.com and what that does is, through API, it syncs up with your store, pulls in all your SKUs, your product names, your images, your retail prices, your quantity on hand and then it actually does demand forecasting and it’ll tell you, based on any variable, what’s in stock. So, if I want to see every product that is red, it’ll tell me how many red products I want to see. If I want to be hoodies, if I want how many t-shirts. So, that helps me see what’s actually on the shelf. The inventory software works for them. It’s not quite what I enjoy using. So, having something that kind of bridges the gap between just numbers and also context is really important for me.
Jeremy: And then you use skubana, not to make this a skubana commercial but I want to hear how do use it? What works with that?
Kenny: Yeah. So, we’re actually on board with skubana now and the team over there has taken me through the products and I think that it will help me even more so demystify some of the things related to having inventory off site because, ultimately, you lose the physical touch, you lose the pack and pick. It’s not a detriment but it certainly impacts the way that you run your business and I feel like there’s certainly money being left on the table if I’m not seeing the trending stuff.
Jeremy: Right. You’re not actually shipping it and have your hands on, okay, I know that these red shirts, I’m sending out like 15 of them. I should think about selling more. I mean, obviously, with any new software system, it takes time. What did you like about it? Why did you decide to actually implement it, because you knew there’s always like that onboarding process.
Kenny: Yeah. I’m the kind of person that tests and breaks and test again. I’m pretty confident that this will be able to help me just to operate the store more efficiently because, ultimately, I have a job to do. I’m running a cancer charity. I’m not running an online store. I tell my friends there are some days that are really cancer-y and then there are some days that are more business and online selling, but I’m very hopeful that skubana will help us continue down the path of success.
Jeremy: Yeah, anything else as far as software systems that have been really helpful?
Kenny: I used a platform called Laxity and what Laxity does, it was acquired by Yahoo when Mercer-Myer took over and started buying up all these little startups. It showed me in real time what people were shopping for and I was using it on Volusion and then I used it when I moved over to Big Commerce and it really helped with the 301 redirect process. It wasn’t something that I did on the front end, because I was just trying to get the new store up. So, I think I mentioned that I was in the car when I was going through the Big Commerce migration period, recreating the store, and I was on the way to a three-day conference.
So, what I did is I sat at the conference with my laptop open, looking at Laxity, and I could see when people were hitting page not found. And part of the Volusion migration to Big Commerce was, I took a bunch of old items out that I knew just weren’t going to be coming back. So, if somebody had a page not found for an item I discontinued, I would try to figure out where the best place to send them was. Maybe I’ll send them to this new t-shirt or this other wrist bands. So, that was a really good process to go through.
Jeremy: So, Kenny, what else as far as resources that you think are good that people should check out for e-commerce or companies that you follow, as thought leadership goes?
Kenny: Yeah. I’d be remiss not to mention a private community called the e-commerce Fuel. There is a lot of, I’d say mid-tier merchants who are maybe doing 500,000 to couple of millions and those are the people who are just bootstrapped and really trying to hustle and they’re re sharing real-life problems and coming up with real-life solutions for platforms in general and just online selling in general as well. I read a lot of industry blogs, so Practical e-commerce. I read the Big Commerce blog. I read Shopify blog. It’s really easy to just drown yourself in content. So, the things typically will jump out if you are facing a particular issue.
Jeremy: So, Kenny, one last question. Before I ask it, where can people find out more? What sites should they check out?
Kenny: Sure. So, if you’re looking for cancer support in the 20s and 30s area, definitely check out StupidCancer.org. If you are looking to support someone in their 20s and 30s, you can buy a t-shirt at StupidCancerStore.org and that will help keep us going and make us possible. If you are on a self-hosted platform and you are trying to figure out your next step, check out Big Commerce.
Jeremy: And then you have a couple of conferences and Instapeer.
Kenny: Yeah. So, definitely come to any of our conferences. We have CancerCon, we have coastal conferences. We have OMG West and OMG East. OMG West is new for us this year, so we’re happily expanding our product to offering. We have local meet ups around the country. We have this road trip that somehow continues to roll through the–
Jeremy: So, it’s not over yet?
Kenny: No. Well, we’ve done four of them so far. Next April is planned to be number five and we may–
Jeremy: You say it with such enthusiasm.
Kenny: Yeah.
Jeremy: Once you get there, I’m sure it’s rewarding, you know.
Kenny: Oh and I have no reason to complain. I’ve been to, I think, 39 of the 50 states and I’ve made connections with people. I’ve held hands in prayer when people were facing dire circumstances. I have celebrated and cheers to people getting into remission. It’s miracles and tragedies every single day and the road trip is the one time of the year when, personally, I’m able to see the impact of what Stupid Cancer does and connect with the strength of the people in this community which is, it’s second to none. You walk in Disneyworld and you feel something., whether it’s your inner child kind of coming back to life. When you walk into our conference, you feel a certain energy of–
Jeremy: The warmth?
Kenny: The warmth and people not worrying about the little things in life. It’s just magic. There’s really no other way to put it. So, the fact that we are probably going to have a tour bus next year instead of a car, it’s exciting. It’s exciting but, at the same time, I’m wondering if I have to go to get my CDL now.
Jeremy: So, last question Kenny. People should obviously check out the site, StupidCancer.org. Since this is the skubana e-commerce Mastery Series, my question is, we talked a lot about different e-commerce solutions and things. What best actual tips should we leave people right now to increase their e-commerce business?
Kenny: I would say, if you’re looking to grow, and this is what I did, find the intersection of minimum orders and profit. What I mean by that is if it costs $10 a t-shirt for 47 of them but if you order 48, they go down to $5, order the 48th one but don’t necessarily order up to the next jump without making the next jump. We’ve certainly tested and tried things that have flopped and there are times when I have been very grateful that I didn’t say, “Hey, this is the order and I’m going to order so that the shirts of price of $3, which might translate to tons of shirts.” So, definitely find those minimums. Time is money, so don’t spend time on anything that could be done better through an automated process, whether it’s something like using a ship station versus logging into a platform directly, especially if you are selling in omni-channel. If you can have all your information go to one place so that you are not having all these different tabs open, it’s really efficiency and it’s low cost and, if you do something long enough, you’ll look back and you’ll see a successful trend. You just have to be patient.
Jeremy: So, as far as the e-commerce journey so far, what has been one of your proudest moments?
Kenny: One of the proudest moments. It was definitely in the early days and there’s been subsequent ones but I remember seeing people posting pictures on Instagram and feeling great. I had a slide of Instagram shots that I had just pulled down in one of my talks that I gave recently and you look at the people’s expressions and, whether they have the shirt on and they’re just like pointing to Stupid Cancer, it really gives people permission to reclaim some of their current situation and our grand promise, on some level, is permission to be pissed, permission to own your cancer diagnosis. So, if I see people wearing a shirt that I had a hand in helping to get to them, it’s just awesome and people are jealous of them that they have it and they want them. It’s just great to be a part of it and helping drive the whole movement.
Jeremy: And then you have won Non-profiteer of the Year?
Kenny: I did in 2013.
Jeremy: What is that exactly?
Kenny: So, there is a group called the YNPN, the Young Non-profit Professionals Network. We have a New York City chapter. So, there was an open call for nominations of people doing cool or interesting or unique things and I happened to be nominated and then they decided that I was the worthy victor.
Jeremy: That’s amazing.
Kenny: Yeah. So, I’ve since met some of the other Non-profiteer of the Years and we’re all a little crazy for being in the charity world but everybody is super-motivated, super-driven and I actually sit on the board now of YNPNNYC. So, it’s fun to have a hand in that as well and meet people in different verticals within our non-profit space.
Jeremy: Okay. Thank you so much. It’s been hugely valuable and I want to be the first one to thank you for all your e-commerce knowledge and also for everything you do at Stupid Cancer for everyone. So, thank you.
Kenny: Thank you so much. It was a blast.
Jeremy: Yeah. Thanks again.
Kenny: See you.
Interview Highlights:
“Definitely the t-shirts are our bread and butter. We started on a Guilden 5000 and we’ve since started printing on like a Tulltex 0202, which is a more American Apparel like t-shirt. So, people are buying these shirts. They’re wearing the shirts. People are getting them as gifts and it’s not something you just throw on the shelf because it’s so comfortable.” (00:33:09)
“We made money on two or three shirts but we moved liked $12,000 worth of inventory over a weekend and we had a celebrity help us promote that and it was just a win. We got all these new people walking around with our shirt on. Going back to the email list, we had all these new customers, so it was worth breaking even for.” (00:35:48)
“I would say, if you’re looking to grow, and this is what I did, find the intersection of minimum orders and profit. What I mean by that is if it costs $10 a t-shirt for 47 of them but if you order 48, they go down to $5, order the 48th one but don’t necessarily order up to the next jump without making the next jump. We’ve certainly tested and tried things that have flopped and there are times when I have been very grateful that I didn’t say, “Hey, this is the order and I’m going to order so that the shirts of price of $3, which might translate to tons of shirts.” So, definitely find those minimums. Time is money, so don’t spend time on anything that could be done better through an automated process, whether it’s something like using a ship station versus logging into a platform directly, especially if you are selling in omni-channel. If you can have all your information go to one place so that you are not having all these different tabs open, it’s really efficiency and it’s low cost and, if you do something long enough, you’ll look back and you’ll see a successful trend. You just have to be patient.” (01:01:30)
Conclusion
We hope these real insights from a real seller can help your e-commerce business grow and succeed. Be sure to stay tuned – this will be an ongoing weekly series featuring a variety of e-commerce experts looking to provide you with hard-won knowledge free of charge.
Checkout out our previous E-Commerce Mastery Series episode featuring David Wolfe of Merchandise Mecca as he tells his story of how he started from a basement and grew into a multi-million dollar business.
Work Smart. Sell More.
www.Skubana.com
The post Establishing a Successful E-commerce Brand that Gives Cancer The Bird appeared first on Skubana.