#120 Sarah Vezina: How Octopied Mind Grow Their Sales 3X Each Year
Hey Budai Nation!
Welcome to The Ecom Show, your go-to weekly podcast series for inspiring e-commerce success stories. This week's episode is about Sarah Vezina, the co-founder of the Canadian apparel brand Octopied Mind.
Sarah Vezina got the idea of starting Octopied Mind while working at Shopify. Octopied Mind is a gender-inclusive, ethical apparel brand that creates hand-drawn designs in small batches. In this episode, Sarah shares the story of how this fastly growing apparel brand has managed to grow its sales revenue by 3X each year.
Tune in to this episode to learn more about:
✅ Sarah's Journey From Shopify To Octopied Mind
✅ The Secret Behind Octopied Mind's Steady Growth
✅ Sarah's #1 Advice For Entrepreneurs
Sarah's Journey From Shopify To Octopied Mind
Sarah dived straight into the world of e-commerce by landing a job at Shopify. She worked at Shopify for a little over a year, and during that time, she had the chance to speak with hundreds of business owners daily. This motivated her to research and start her own entrepreneurial journey.
Shopify has an extremely nurturing culture that's perfect for growing entrepreneurs. While Sarah worked at Shopify, she had access to a free website, an extensive resource library to learn, and an allowance of $500 each year to pursue her entrepreneurial journey. She used these resources to start Octopied Mind, and within a year itself, she was able to pursue her vision full time.
Sarah co-founded Octopied Mind with her best friend, Jill Davis. Their apparel brand focuses on creating meaningful conversations around mental health through hand-drawn art on apparel. Their vision has been to create a community built on acceptance and radical self-responsibility, which they've been able to successfully achieve and grow since their inception in 2018.
The Secret Behind Octopied Mind's Steady Growth
Octopied Mind started as a homegrown venture started by two best friends. Sarah and Jill would create hand-drawn art on preloved clothing items for each other and wear them to parties and other events. They noticed a lot of positive comments and decided to test selling these graphic shirts in small batches to friends and family. Their word-of-mouth marketing spread like wildfire, and this motivated them to go all in and launch their e-commerce store through Shopify.
Octopied Mind is now celebrating four years. They've grown their sales revenue by 3x yearly and are now available in multiple countries. Sarah attributes most of this success to their Facebook ad marketing. Facebook marketing has helped them target customers in different parts of the world and helped them discover new markets.
They also have an extremely high returning customer rate of 30%, which they've been able to maintain by creating a community around their brand. Octopied Mind has several automated email marketing flows that they set up using Klaviyo; these flows alone help them generate $30,000 revenue each month. Apart from this, they've also successfully created a community through their general brand ethos.
At its core, Octopied Mind is creating a space for individuals to speak about mental health and positivity through their gender-fluid clothing line. Their commitment to providing fair wages to their workers, ethically producing their shirts in small batches, and attention to detail regarding quality, size, and fit is what's helped them resonate with their customers. In addition, Sarah and Jill actively share their journey with their community through social media.
Sarah's #1 Advice For Entrepreneurs
Sarah's number one advice for entrepreneurs just starting is to focus on building a website and getting it up and running.
"Don't wait for the perfect website to go live. You can always make changes to keep improving your website once you go live, but it takes time to build a mailing list and get subscribers. Even a simple website is a great start because it allows you to start collecting data."
Her #1 advice for existing business owners is to spend more time working on your business rather than in your business.
"If you're spending too many hours in your business, you need to find somebody and delegate that to them. The faster you delegate, the faster you can just get back to working on your business, and that's where you see growth. That's where you see sales."
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Ecom Show.
Follow Daniel Budai:
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
You Might Like
