On this 64th episode of The E-Comm Show, our host and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff is with Jodi Benjamin, founder of Life of Colour, an Australian art brand that strongly believes we all have a colorful, inner-creative being bursting to live a more connected life.
Tune in to this episode of The E-Comm Show as Jodi shares her story on how she has successfully built Life of Colours all without the help of Amazon. From understanding her target market to settling down on a niche and expanding her product line, Jodi’s here to share all her secrets to scaling her own brand.
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Andrew Maff and Jodi Benjamin
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Jodi Benjamin
Jodi is the Founder of Life of Colour, an Australian art brand that strongly believes we all have a colorful, inner-creative being bursting to live a more connected life. Life of Colours Chief Colour Officer has been hustling since her teenage years and has had a varied career in TV and Film Production, Fashion Buying, Online Gaming Marketing, and Digital Media across Africa, the Middle East, and now Australia. The burning desire for greater interaction with her young daughters led to her creation of Life of Colour in 2018, which served as an outlet to exit screen time and spend more of her waking hours on fun, mess-free, and take-anywhere art activities. Life of Colour was a Covid-success story, so much so that she co-opted her corporate hubby into the business in 2021 and is now looking at taking her creativity mantra global!
Transcript:
00:03
You know, really I started this business to have more joy and color in my everyday life and found the name of the business before I actually decided exactly what I was going to do.
00:18
Hey everyone, this is Nezar Akeel of Max Pro. Hi, I'm Linda and I'm Paul and we're Love and Pebble.
00:22
Hi this is Lopa Van Der Mersch from RASA
00:24
you're listening to and you're listening and you are listening to The E-Comm Show.
00:34
Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other ecommerce experts where they share their secrets on how they scaled their businesses and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff. Hello,
00:54
everyone. Welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host, as usual, Andrew Maff. And today, I am joined by the amazing, amazing sorry, Jodi Benjamin, founder of life of colors an an amazing art brand outside of Australia, which is going to be great. Jodi, how're you doing? Are you ready for a good show?
01:10
Right? I'm ready. Yeah. Thank you for having me.
01:13
Super excited to have you on the show. Usually, I do like right in the beginning, I do like this whole, like, oh, you know, let's do the stereotypical thing where you can tell me about like, where you started in your background, all that fun stuff, your background, how you started, the business is actually incredibly interesting. So I'm gonna keep doing that. But I thought it'd be nice to give it a little bit more of an intro here. So why don't you tell us about where you got started? And tell us that whole story.
01:35
Okay, well, my background is kind of all over the show. So this isn't the third country I've lived in and multiple industries that I've worked in from film and fashion and, you know, affiliate marketing. And I think that what I do now is just an amalgamation of all the things that I've done, and all my travels and adventures. And, you know, really, I started this business to have more joy and color in my everyday life. And I found the name of the business before I actually decided exactly what I was going to do. So I knew I wanted to sell a product. And I knew I wanted to sell something that I could comfortably and happily sell. Therefore it had to be something in arts and crafts. So not that I'm an artist, but I'm someone who likes to be creative. So I was on a year's maternity leave with my second child, and I had a job that was my first job after I emigrated to Australia. So I'm from South Africa. And then I lived in Tel Aviv for seven years. And then I met an Australian husband and found myself, yeah, you know, a little bit kind of unsure of who I was in this new place. And I had my second child and my years of maternity leave were coming to an end. And I thought I just simply can't go back back to that job. It was soul-destroying and boring and not what I wanted to do, although I had to bring in an income. So I started thinking of what I could do, and as someone I stumbled upon because some of the internet guys heard me about an Amazon sellers course I thought, Okay, I'll do this. And through that, I found a really beautiful product. Learned her which was Watercolor Brush Pens, which I thought was something that I'd never seen before watercolors in a pen with a brush tip. So I thought, well, this is something that I can sell through the Amazon course I found a bit of a community and I learned how to sell on Amazon very quickly realized, Amazon is not for me, and by this time I was back in my job because you know, I had to bring in money. I was doing it on the side I had my job I had my two kids as the baby it was pretty intense. I had I worked four days a week they gave me one day off and I used to just work nights and in my spare time. Yeah, then that's it. So I started selling on Amazon and I slid my job eventually I got a redundancy which is the best thing ever because at that point I thought actually if I spend more time in this I can do it. I got redundancy and then I put all my time and energy and effort into the business and decided no more Amazon abroad or to Australia. Any stock that I had. I sold abroad an Amazon I brought it to Australia and then I just went knocking on doors and said hey guys, you want to buy my product? And I've got a few shops that said okay, sure we'll sell you will sell the product and then got a bit of money in the bank and then other Okay, ready for my next product. And it was my second product that really pushed me ahead because it was acrylic paint pins. So acrylic paint pins, I don't know if you know, but they can draw on any surface and there was a really big trend at that time that it started which was the kindness rocks and painting and rocks or something like that. Have a message at the back and you're gonna hide it in the park. And then people find it and they're put on this Facebook group, each area, or region has a Facebook group and said, I've hidden this rock or fine and people would find it. So I got in these Pain Pens, and I was like the way that I have to get it out there is really to get in these groups. So yeah, that's the way everything kind of changed. I got into these groups. And yeah, the rest is history.
05:29
And you're well over, I believe, at least 50 products now, correct?
05:33
Yes, I think it's about 45 skews. But then I also bundle those up in different ways to make new products. So my whole thing is, how do my products work together? So I'm trying to educate a person that if you have a paint pen, for example, you know, you can lay down a background with your watercolors, you let it dry, then you add a little bit of shading with another one of my paint sticks. And then on top of it, you paint with acrylic paint pins. And so they all work together and anything that I bring out is something that complements what I already have. So besides all the pins, I do watercolor, acrylic, and quash gel pens, all types of pens are now selling the surfaces that you can paint on. So, for example, wood slicers, I have everything in front of me just because I'm at my desk. So like, you know what, I sell the rocks, I sell flat rocks. Now I sell many canvases that come on easels or sell paper. So I wanted to be kind of like a one stop shop for any creative hobbyist art enthusiast or not trying to be the next Windsor and Newton and Fine Arts supplies for professionals. Although a lot of professionals do buy, from me, I'm more catering to hobbyists and enthusiasts. So that's any age from three. Yeah, that's just that's my audience. It
07:06
07:21
said I'm here, Amazon was in the US, and my customer was in the US. And I never knew their names. I didn't know who they were or how to speak to them. And I'm 100% customer-first business. And if I can't speak to or communicate with my customers, then they're not my customer. They're Amazon's customers who are just buying another product and how can I remarket to them? How can I remarket new products, I mean, I didn't know all of that at the time. But what I did know at the time, was that it was very, very difficult to make a profit on Amazon, if I wasn't doing major, major scale. You know, at the time, I just had one product and you know, to get noticed, there were all these tactics that you had to do, like, sell a lot to push your rankings up, you know, so like, you'd sell names, instead of sending it up my price, which is $39. I'd sell them for $15 at some, you know so that I could push up my rankings, then you have to maintain that. But then how do you maintain that it's selling them $15, which was not even breaking even? Then also the advertising costs and Amazon but the main thing is, is that I'm in Australia, and I want to realize I wanted an Australian business, and there was nothing like it here at the time I still don't really have competitors because my products are quite niche. So I just thought, well, you know, I'm in Australia, and I wouldn't be able to see and speak to, my customers because, and that's become I mean, that's become the focus of my businesses, community, and customers. And it's all the C's community customers. Creativity, color content. That's it.
09:06
Hey, yo, nice. I'll tell you your mission statement. What um, so you took this Amazon course you found this product, which obviously started this whole business when you found the product? So always a very interesting question. Was this one of those Amazon courses where they helped you find a product that just had an opportunity? And that was about it? Or did you pick the product because it was more of a passion thing?
09:32
Ya know? So you could search in any category from you know, homewares to gasoline canisters, storage into anything you could basically see, I didn't even look in those categories because I knew that if I'm going to sell a product and pull the brand because from the beginning, I knew I wanted a brand, not just a product because I had a business name, the life of color. So I knew there was a huge there's the amazing brand behind that. So a life of Carla, and um, you know, at the time I had young kids, I had, you know, a three-year-old and baby, and it had kind of reignited my love for arts and crafts, which I loved, you know, pre-marriage kids or busy life. That is I used to do a lot of arts and crafts. And I just knew that that was the category that I wanted to look in. So we use tools like Jungle Scout, and, you know, the tools that they recommended just to see if there's enough interest in the product, not too much competition, it was like a fine balance, you had to kind of find something with enough interest, not too much competition.
10:42
Yeah, it was really interesting. Because, it's not I in fact, you might be the only person I've ever heard that found did the typical like sourcing for a product, and then actually stayed in that product line and expanded it. Because a lot of times when you take these Amazon courses, they're taught by people that show you, you know, there's a category with a product that's got some opportunity. And now here's another category with a different product that's got the opportunity. And all of a sudden, you're selling 500, random things that have nothing to do with each other. You actually found a product that had the opportunity, but then you built a brand around it and expanded the product line to relevant stuff, which is very rarely the case. Usually, it's the other way around. Or it's someone who started with an invention and went that way. Like that's, that's a very interesting story.
11:29
Yeah, so that was what it was, for me. I just, you know, I just had to sell something that I connected with, like I said, I got the name before I got the product. So if I didn't follow the name, life of color, I can't, you know, I can't go and sell. I could have, but no, there are arts, the arts and crafts thing was just, you know, I was growing with it. So I was just intuitively going with where it was taking me. And it was just really expanding in my niche, which is painting bins.
12:07
Yeah. Beautiful. You're one of the reasons I was actually really excited about this conversation. So you emailed me yesterday about something you wanted to chat about, which was your Black Friday stuff. And ironically, that was definitely something I wanted to talk about, too, because you're the first person to be on the show, since Black Friday of this year. So how to go, what do you do, obviously, you had mentioned, like, you had this big blowout sale over a short period of time, like what happened.
12:34
So what happened was, first of all, I'm in Australia, right? And I only sell to Australia and New Zealand. So I'm not this massive us brand that with all this crazy Black Friday hype, I mean, Black Friday has become bigger, but it's, it's not like in the US and on Shopify now that makes such a big deal of Black Friday. Finally, gonna be and, you know, we have had quite a lot of hiccups this year in terms of just, you know, ad spend going up, you know, all our costs going up, and just finding it a lot easier to be profitable than we were before. We also had, you know, some other like channel, we had another really big channel that was lost. And it's been a bit of a tough year. And I just knew that I couldn't do the same thing as last year, like put up a bunch of, you know, send out a bunch of emails and compete with everyone else and put up a bunch of ads on Google and Facebook and, and hope to make a profit, I knew that I needed to use this month to do something huge to catch up on some of that lost profit that you know that from the year. And I was just thinking one day, so my husband who's joined the business, we work together, he was turning 44. And the business in Australia from the day abroad in Australia, not the exact day kind of using the data that was telling for and my husband's birthday is on 1111 and I'm all very into my numbers and everything. So I thought oh, it's an opportunity. fourth birthday for the life of color. Richards 44 1111, the numbers were all talking to me, I was like, let's do a crazy Four Hour Sale, a 40% off, which we never do, you know, small business, you can't really afford what it was in. But you know, you can't do it all the time. But we do have a lot of stock. And I knew that I needed some cash flow back into the business. So yeah, just an only thought of this, we were going to do the regular black Friday campaign, start a week early, do a 30% off or 25% off, and compete with everyone else. But then I just thought of this two weeks before. So we quickly scrambled we work with an ad agency and we were like guys, we're gonna change everything. Let's do this. And we started with an Odd competition. So I've got a Facebook community of about seven and a half 1000 creatives on Facebook. So they always love competition. So, we launched a competition, we called it the color, color, Rush competition, which really doesn't mean anything in color. Open it up to everyone, there were two categories, there was a kid category and an adult category. And I just started to build it up, because people love just getting eyes on the brand, you know, ran some lead gen. Ad just to get more eyes on the brand and into the competition. That's how we started to build it up. And there were hundreds of people 1000s, a few 1000 entries. And then I started to talk about this hype of, you know, this big birthday coming up that it's our fourth birthday, and we're going to be doing something huge. But I didn't say what a few emails were sent out just to create the hype. And also what I did at this stage, which is what I don't always do, is I started to show up all the time because I can get a bit nervous about showing up on Instagram and you know, showing my face like I'm always there people. person and I started to make it very personal, like 1111, which are my numbers, my husband for the businesses for like, there's something huge happening, and I was showing up every single day on all the channels that I could that I have. And yeah, and then that was it. And then I just told everyone set their alarms, because on the 11th of the 11th at 11 o'clock he couldn't do live in because that's a remembrance that was always at 12 o'clock. Set your alarm, there's going to be something huge. And I think I built up a lot of hype. So by the time that email went out, and that first post went out, I just looked at my Shopify and there were like, people in literally set their alarms, they were online with their things, and they caught already waiting to check out by the time the sale started. Let's do I looked at there were like 100 people in the store already. I'm like what that means for the next four hours, we just sat there watching like, I mean, we did more in those four hours than we did the whole of Black Friday last year.
17:21
Yeah, geez. I mean, for less Amazon.
17:25
Yeah, you can't maintain the 40%. But it's fun to know that you can do that. And that there are people watching, you know, the community cares and wants your products, and it helps them at this time of the year to get such a big discount. And you know, it's worked well.
17:42
The fact that you left Amazon, chose to diversify your brand, and build your own brand, then were able to do it successfully. And then you also leveraged creating your own community that you have, like control over, you might be my hero, I can't get anyone to actually listen and do that. And you just, you just went right through and actually did like, it's to me that is the way to grow an E-commerce business because you can't really run ads and you know, doing the traditional approach. Obviously, it works for a lot of people, especially ones that are like loaded with capital. But outside of that, it's all about community building like people want to buy from a person or a brand that has like, you know, a personal feel to it, or at least like something that they can really relate to outside of just peddling product. And you did. Bravo. That was awesome. What's the plan for the remainder of the year? You're doing another one? I won't tell anyone. No, everyone listening.
18:48
Sales are done. We did do a follow-up Black Friday just at a lower discount. No, no more sales. That's it. I don't want people to think that they can always buy things at a discount buy products at a discount. Just they need to pay full price now. But I always give things giving things away. Because you know, because I've got this community, people like to get some that people just like to get free stuff. But it's just I like to show that I'm a brand that gives even though not always giving discounts. At the moment, I'm just doing a free gift with purchase, which is this Christmas stocking that you can color in with our fabric paints. Oh, nice. So I'm doing that until the end of the year. But yeah, we have a few exciting things in the works for next year. But I'm trying to slow down now and I'm ready to take a holiday. Yeah,
19:43
currently, the entire back end of q4. It's like I'm exhausted,
19:47
I'm exhausted. I'm ready to just put my feet up and hope for a few weeks although I never rarely do because I'm actually still running my customer service. Because I mean, I've had people doing it over the years and helping me. But then at some point, my previous person left, I took it over. And then I just got a little bit addicted to it. Because I just thought, how could anyone else actually answer this question? I feel I've got a very, very close connection with my customers, because of the fact that I'm the one speaking to them on the email, and then emailing, saying, where's my package, and this is faulty? They're saying, Look at these beautiful rocks, I'm painting with my grandkids on the weekend, and they're saying, I've got this pen, I'm not quite sure what I can do with it. And, you know, so it's a very personal thing. So I never switch off. So I'll be in Thailand at the pool, on my laptop, speaking to customers, which is fine, because it's not, there's not too much work. And it's just the sense of control that I have of, like, the customers and the messages that are going out they
20:55
Yeah, you mentioned something that again, then I swear, you're you might be my favorite. I completely agree with the aspect of not offering too many discounts. Because in my opinion, it starts to really belittle the brands otherwise, people are just sitting around waiting for the next discount. And I completely agree with that. How often are you? I know, it probably changes year to year based on seasonality and all that fun stuff. But how often are you actually offering any kind of discount on the site?
21:27
So full store discount, we try and do now two big ones a year, we want to do an end-of-financial year sale and a Black Friday, where there's a significant discount on every single item in the store. But we will, throughout the year have, like an offer on certain collections or certain products, just to kind of, you know, gives us something to say in the emails. Like if we put out a blog about a certain bundle, you know, we can offer that 20% off for the next couple of days. Yeah, I do. I am quite aware now that I have a lot more wholesale people buying wholesale, I mean, a lot more shops, small business shops, as well. So I know that it upsets them too if I'm on sale all the time, because at one point, you know when the year started, things were just a little bit tough. And as I mentioned the cash flow was a thing. We probably did a few more sales than we would have liked just to get move things and a couple of my smaller wholesale customers were like, Hey, guys, like come on, you know, like, how can we sell your product for price if you are discount, and I took it with a bit of a pinch of salt because, at the end of the day, it's our business. But at the same time, I want more of these guys buying from me because it's 20% of the business right now. And I want to grow wholesale. So I'm just very aware of the fact that you know, I've got to have a good balance. So yeah, we're trying to do two major ones a year and then smaller, seasonal ones along the way, we'll do something for back to school. I don't know. I always kind of wing it along the way, depending on what's happening
23:14
yet that you so at this point, you've mentioned, you know, email marketing, your blogs, your social media, the Facebook group, and stuff you have so you've obviously got the gamut of the marketing side and your agency that you're working with. What tends to be the channel that brings in the most like, net new customers? Oh, well,
23:34
it used to be Facebook used to be fantastic for us. Like I used to actually run my own Facebook ads in the beginning. And you know, without actually knowing too much. I managed to get like a 678 times row. So this was like three years ago, and it was pretty heydays. Yeah. And now it's just, as everybody probably knows, getting harder and harder and harder. What we trying to do is just rely a little bit less on Facebook and Google, but we need like, we have to have it. We have to have it. We found that the performance max is that on Google and Bing, and there's another one on Facebook, the automated ones. I can't remember the name of the one on Facebook. Those are working the best right now. Actually, ones that you just upload 10 ads 10 campaigns, put a budget let it run. Those are the ones that are now actually running a little bit more of a profit than other campaigns were before so yeah, Google and Facebook. We have we've had quite a lot of great opportunities from the Australian government because they run different voucher schemes at different times so cool. We're gonna know we've got pretty good government Yeah, so for example, during COVID There There's a there's a voucher scheme called Creative Kids. And each kid between the ages of the school going age kid gets $100 a year to have to spend on a creative camp or class or club or something $100 a year. So during COVID, they said, Well, no one can go to classes or anything. So you can use that on a do-it-at-home kit or something. So I applied and got that. And that brought in 1000s hundred, if not hundreds of 1000s 1000s of new customers from our state. So that, you know, that was a great way to bring in new customers
25:41
or the government is listening to this right now. Yeah, that was
25:44
really good. So but that ended. So yeah, we just look for these little pockets of opportunity where we can we're trying to grow the business through wholesale now because just think the more shops we will that we are seeing in the more people actually just come looking for us online, rather than having to pay to acquire that customer each time. Yeah, so yeah, the top of the funnel is still those channels, but working on diversifying, lying on Facebook as much as we used to.
26:17
No one is but beautiful. Jody, thank you so much for being on the show. I don't want to take up too much of your time. I know you're on your Australis your days just getting started. I don't want to eat up your whole day. Thank you so much for being on the show. I'd love to give you an opportunity to let everyone know where they can find out more about you and, of course Lifecolor
26:35
oh, I guess online yeah point website all the socials I'm on pretty much every channel you can be on trying to grow the TIC tock now to Oh, but yeah, I'm on Instagram.
26:48
Beautiful. For everyone listening here in the States life of color. Color has you at it. So don't forget that c o l o u r. But Jody, thank you so much for being on the show. Of course, everyone else has tuned in thank you as well please make sure you rate review, subscribe, and all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you want. Well, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube or head over to ecommshow.com To watch the rest of the episodes. But usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you all next time. Have a good one.
27:18
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