Making Products for Real People and Solving Real Problems with Busy Baby | EP. #177

Is your brand missing the key element of authenticity? On this 177th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Beth Benike, CEO of Busy Baby. One of the biggest factors that contributed to Busy Baby's success is their ability to continuously innovate by leaning into their community of customers.

By featuring real moms, their stories, and even addressing product critiques transparently, Beth had turned her customers into brand advocates. If you're an e-commerce professional who wants to lean into the power of authenticity and real-life experiences in your marketing campaigns... this one is for you.

Watch the full episode below, or visit TheEcommShow.com for more.

If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review, and SUBSCRIBE!

Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  

 Making Products for Real People and Solving Real Problems with Busy Baby

Andrew Maff and Beth Benike

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Beth Benike

Army veteran Beth Fynbo became a mom-inventor after spotting a common parenting challenge during lunch with friends. The Minnesota entrepreneur created the Busy Baby Mat, the first-ever placemat and tether system to keep babies from dropping toys. Featured on Shark Tank, Fynbo now runs her family business with her brother Eric, also an Army veteran, developing an innovative line of interchangeable products that keep baby items within reach and off the floor, at home and on-the-go.

Andrew Maff  00:03

You know, they were just moms, just being real about life, and not trying to be influencers. So we're really just solidly leaning into what's real, like, let's just be real. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. As usual. I'm your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by the amazing BBeth (Fynbo) Benike, who's going to correct me, and I'm looking forward to it. I always like to be really honest. Like we we started a little bit and then we had some technical difficulties. We could start over, and it started off well, and we're back. I'm super excited. Beth, thank you so much for being on the show. Very excited for this, and now that we kind of like got through the little icebreaker in the beginning, that always makes it more fun, right? So you know what? It's a funny story. We'll bring it back. But when I filmed Shark Tank, I did the whole thing where they miked me up, and then I walked out onto the stage, and the doors open up, and then there's the sharks, and they tell you to stand there for 30 seconds, and they're so they can adjust the cameras, the lighting, etc, and then you'll hear, like the voice of God, saying, begin, and that's when you start your pitch. So I'm standing there and I filmed in the first year of the pandemic, so the sharks were all very far apart from each other. So I scan the room with my fake smile, and I scan back, and no one says Begin. And I'm like, What the hell now? I'm awkwardly smiling at nothing. And then they say, both, we're gonna need you to do that over again. Turned out the microphone cord was showing through my shirt, so they needed to just re mic me. But it was the perfect icebreaker that I was able to go out there, see the sharks, feel the, you know, energy of the room, and then, like, go back, take a breath and start over. So, you know, it's the same thing, right here, same thing, hey, we got that. Like, yeah, it's those little like, Hey, we're all people, and nothing is perfect that actually can sometimes really help. And it goes a long way. Yeah, but we're here. We made it same level the sharks right now that, you know, we got our icebreaker out of the way. Now I'm not so nervous to chat. Here we go. So so to correct you, to bring you back to our initial conversation, is, I am, I am finally no longer Beth finbo. I am Beth Beneke. My husband and I were engaged for seven years while I started the business and kept putting money into the business instead of planning our wedding. So now I am Beth Beneke. Congratulations. Thank you. So tell us about the business. How you got started with busy baby. What was the story behind it? Where he at? Let's take it from there. Yeah, the story behind it is I had a baby, and I went out to lunch with some of my girlfriends after maternity leave, and they brought their babies, and the babies were constantly dropping and throwing everything within reach. And so I came up with an idea. Well, first I searched. I searched Amazon. I searched the internet for a product that would not only be a clean surface for baby's food, but also, like keep them entertained and keep their toys off the floor. This was in 2019 or No, 2017 actually. So before COVID, but still, one of my friends was a germaphobe that comes into play later after COVID with you know, we don't want germs getting on our babies things. So I came up with an idea for something that would keep babies toys within reaching off the floor and provide a clean place for their food. I made a prototype, which I didn't know at the time was a prototype, but I made a version for myself, and then another one of my girlfriends who had just had a baby, I made one for her, and after a couple months, she reached out to me, and she's like, Oh my god, I forgot that map thing last night, and it was awful. Like, I didn't realize how useful it was until I didn't have it. You need to make this thing for real. And that's kind of how it started. I was like, Hmm, how would I make this thing for real? It is one of those things where, like, you know, every now and then I lucky enough to obviously, speak to a lot of people in the show, and there's so many times where I come across someone I get to talk to like yourself, where it's a product, where it's like, Duh, like, I'm shocked that something like this didn't already exist. Yeah, there's kind of a scary story I have about that. So I looked online to buy something to do that, and it didn't exist. So I cut and glued some stuff together and made a thing, and then when my friend told me I should make. It for real. I really kind of put my money into it to try and make it for real. I found a product developer and started a process. And I was about $16,000 in to the process when I met a patent attorney who said, Well, what did the patent search show? And I was like, what's the patent search? He's like, Well, it's like, How much money do you have into this? And I was, like, $16,000 he says, Well, if someone else already holds the patent on this product, it doesn't like, I said, I searched everywhere. No one's selling this. Like, there's nothing that I can buy that does what this does. He's like, it doesn't matter if someone has a patent, then they can take everything. And my heart just sunk and and we did a patent search, and we found out that at least four other people had had a very similar idea, but never followed through to finalize any kind of patent. So now we are 15 patents. We're 15 patents deep now, so I took that advice and ran with it, and we're continuing to build out our intellectual property portfolio and and keep babies things off the ground, and we, and we own a lot of the design and utility rights behind all the things we own and create so crazy, so cool. So tell me, tell me about the business. Like, what's you sell online, where online you sell in retail? Like, what's, what's, yeah, we started on our Shopify website. We've been on Shopify Since 2019, great advice I got from someone was to start with that platform, then we got onto Amazon. So for the majority of our life cycle, we've been on Amazon and Shopify. Last year I was able to get into WalMart stores and walmart.com as well as target.com so we've got some presence in those retailers. And then we've tried a lot of other retailers where it's kind of like a drop situation, dropship situation. Beyond which used to be bye, bye, baby Bed Bath, and Beyond is now beyond which is bought by Overstock, blah, blah, blah. We tried doing a drop ship thing with them. They're not really making it work. We've kind of done the same thing through some other organizations as well, but primarily we are our website and Amazon, that makes sense. What's the Is it primarily Amazon or primarily, primarily the website? It was 5050 it was 5050 for a while, and then after Shark Tank, Amazon crept up because, you know, that's where people search and find everything. And then in recent days, it's actually come back to our website, because we have re engineered our our hero products. And so we're out we're out on Amazon. We're mostly out on our website, hopefully getting the new inventory at the end of February. So trying to find a way to make things work until then. Because when you take your hero product and and I mean, we improved, this suction is three to four times stronger on these mats, which is the only negative review we have, is that suction cups, everything, suction cups aren't strong enough. So we we, when we went into Walmart and Target, we had rebranded. So because we're no longer just so here's the old logo where it's got a baby with a place mat and, like some things hanging from it. The original logo was because we were a busy baby mat. That's all we had. Now we have bibs. We have bungees that you can use on your stroller, wagon, car seat, without the mats. We have a whole product line. So we rebranded. So when we went into the retail stores, we redid our molds and rebranded the molds, and since we had to create new molds, we thought, let's take the number one complaint that we see across all platforms and all reviews and fix it. So we increased, improved our suction, and we just got samples and took them out, and it's literally measurably three to four times stronger than the originals. Nice. So we're very excited, also very nervous to have, like, a whole month to six weeks of basically not having our hero product and not having income. Well, yeah, but you know, like, it's, it's very nice to hear you say that you're doing that just because one of the things that I always like preach, even though we're on the marketing side, there's no better marketing than just a quality product. Like, you could have a horrible website with, like, not great creative but if you've got a really good product that people want, they're just gonna buy it anyway. It makes more that much easier. So to constantly be tweaking it and improving it. It's obviously, it's almost guaranteed to obviously give you a return on it. What? What's, what's been the marketing approach? Are you primarily leaning in on like advertising? What? What do I do? It's a great segue, and I'm not entirely sure who your audience is. But as as you were the marketer, I'm gonna put you on the spot. Okay, oh, let's do it. Okay. So you're the marketer putting you on the spot. You got this product mom invented over probably 600,000 happy customers, this mat. The only downfall is that the suction cups aren't the greatest. They don't stick to all surfaces. Babies get too strong. Wrong. So now we've got three to four times stronger suction. How are you marketing the relaunch of this product without being inappropriate, without being inappropriate. What is your tagline? What is your

10:14

inappropriate?

Andrew Maff  10:17

We're better at sucking. I like we suck harder. I think that sounds fun. My wife's gonna be like, what do you do? My wife's gonna be like, your podcast has changed the line of, yeah. We had a an opportunity to work with a marketing agency for free as part of, like, a local startup support organization here in Minnesota, where they would provide some technical assistance. And I said, Well, we have a relaunch, and we need some help with marketing. And I said, it's we're really struggling to come up with something that's not inappropriate. And she came back with some tagline options, and one of them is, we suck harder, so you don't have to. And I was like, No, I don't like what that sounds like. I'm not sure what we're saying, but what we landed on is we are going to lean into our negative reviews. We have created some graphics and some videos of like the negative the one star Amazon review pops up, and then another one pops up. Just doesn't stick to anything, doesn't suck. Suction sucks, and then your your screen is just filled with all the negativeness of how the suction sucks. And then it just says, we heard you, and we did something about it, and and then we show the the scientific showing the parameter that shows, you know, it's three to four times stronger. So that's our plan. We shall see. But it was a tricky, tricky thing getting to that point, I would not suggest it and don't do it. But if you, if you did actually do we, you know, we suck harder now would be, you'd actually get, you'd get a lot of eyeballs, like, I guarantee you, CPMs would be crazy low. It's a great help. Yeah, the way you did it, though, of doing, you know, you spoke and we listen kind of thing that works really well. You could lean in on stuff, of like, if you can get creative, of just like, you know, either, I don't even know how you would do this, like, bigger, stronger babies trying to pick it up. And it's just like, you know, now, now available for strong babies. Or like, babies that love to work out, we got them covered, kind of thing. Or you can have, like, something tied around it that's just hanging from a table so it's not moving. So, like, yeah, there's some ways you could showcase it. But for a tagline, you spoke and we listened, it's probably a little bit smaller, yeah, that's kind of we landed on it. And actually, we're very small team. And our fulfillment gal, she has a grandson who's almost two, and he's kind of a big, bulky, almost two year old, and so I had him tested the other night, and he was like, he couldn't break the suction. So we're gonna do something like that. The other thing I did is I had one of my friends babies in my lap, and we I was shooting a video with the old mat and the new mat, and pulling them both equally. The old mat came off easily, and I'm pulling and pulling, pulling on the new mat, and all of a sudden it snaps loose, and the baby's like, and starts falling. And I was like, I scared you, Max, I scared you. Oh, my God, it's scary. Good suction. Ooh, scary. Good suction. That could be like, if we were closer to, like, a Halloween launch, that might be something. Yeah, you do a strong baby contest and just figure out the strongest baby to actually get the thing off the I just saw a video the other day of some, some woman who's got like, a six month old, like 30 pound baby or something like that. I'd send her free stuff and just be like you see if your baby can get this off the table. Yeah, that might be a trend right now, because I've seen a few of the big baby tick tocks going around. Is that what you guys lean in on like the influencer marketing side. We've, you know, we've tried it multiple different ways, and ultimately, what seems to work the best for us is me being the mom, the mom inventor, the personal story. I run the company with my brother. He's got four kids. I have two. Whenever we bring the kids in our videos, people seem to respond to more of the behind the scenes, family owned products. Oh, yeah. So we've tried influencers. Some of our best influencers actually weren't influencers. They were UGC moms that have since become influencers because, you know, they, you know, they were just moms, just being real about life, and not trying to be influencers. So we're really just solidly leaning into what's real, like, let's just be real. Yeah, the influencer thing's very interesting. We actually, I literally just did some research on some stuff this morning on influencer side. And the thing that we found was interesting, the influencer side can work if you, you know, really lean in on it, and then you got to test 500 different influencers. It's interesting how well just UGC does, like taking, you know, a lot of, we see a lot of brands, they'll get UGC and then they'll just throw it up on their website or on their social or maybe they'll use it for social ads, and then that'll be it. Yeah. But we've started testing, like, having it in emails and having it in landing pages and having, you know, different UGC depending on where they're coming from, so it's a little bit more personalized, and stuff like that's actually worked really well. So like, the concept of you doing the behind the scenes thing is a very, very similar that I could definitely see how that would be working also, and I assume you're leading them all to the website, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even on our website, we have an app that we've integrated for a couple of years now, that is shoppable video. And so you can attach shoppable videos to your homepage your product pages, and the majority of them are just UGC videos and and I feel like every agency we've gone to when I so I run my the meta ads and everything myself, because in the end, as a small brand, no one knows my company better than me. So over the course of the past six years, I've gone between various agencies of various price points and then doing it myself in between. And I ultimately do the best, even though I don't know what the hell I'm doing, because I know my brand and I know my brand and I know my audience. But what I've always been told that the every agency I work with and you maybe preach the same thing is test creatives. Test creatives, more creatives, new creatives. And the creatives that work the very, very best for us are the ones that have been running since 2020 and it's because so I agree with that babies are born every year, so every every month, we're getting a new as long as we're doing our targeting right, we're bringing in new eyeballs every month. So we don't need to create new creative because we're getting new eyeballs every month. Yeah, one of the things I've always kind of like, and from an agency side, I can tell you what the problem is with agencies, but it's also like, I will admit, like, we have to do it as well because of just that's what brands want. Like, if someone's paying an agency to run their meta ads, and an agency turns around and says to them, Hey, you have this piece of creative that's been live for five years and it's doing awesome. We shouldn't touch it. They're gonna go then why am I paying you? So the agency feels like they have to be doing something. So my logic is, usually, once you find something that works, don't touch it, don't fix what's not broken, but take some of the budget to then test some additional creative so don't get rid of stuff. But if you find something that's working, there's no need to change it, and you don't have to constantly be tinkering. You can test new stuff, as opposed to, well, and not even just stuff, but test the new audiences. Test the new whether you're going for awareness or clicks or conversions, you know, use those like, let whatever's working work. But there's a lot that can be done to test other routes. I actually found, and I don't know if this makes sense or not, because I don't know actually what the hell I'm doing in meta, but I created a campaign that's optimized to get video views, and then I created another campaign that re targets people who have viewed my videos for more than 50% of the video and then I have another campaign That retargets the people who actually interacted, engaged with those ads. And then, I mean, it seems to be working so, but I don't want to, I've hired people that don't know as much as you like that just specialize in the meta side. So that's, that's exactly how you should be doing it. So a lot of brands, the biggest problem we always see is like, they're like, Oh, we tested this creative and it's, you know, we're going straight to purchases be like, but there's so much more. So you we like to do exactly what you just mentioned. So you do the the video view side, you retarget them in a 50% test that and see how that does. And then you really just lean on, lean in, on middle of funnel. So the 50% viewers, people that engage with you on social, people that engaged with the ad that you ran, people that visited the website and then just changed the creative for them after, like, a week, so that it's not the same thing over and over again. So it's that, like, you should have a campaign or two that's very top of funnel, but is not focused on purchases because it gets crazy expensive, and then it's just middle of funnel focus most of the time. Yep, at least 100% that's what we see. We're actually liking lead forms too. We've started to see lead forms working pretty well. Of like, you know, if you have that issue where you're constantly running to purchases and it's like the CPA and the ROAs is just not where you need it to be, we've started doing lead forms to actually just gain their obviously, their email, and just stay in front of them. So like for q4 we did it for a couple different brands, where we actually did a campaign in early November for people to sign up to get early access to the Black Friday Cyber Monday sale. We ended up getting more sales from the emails that we had gained prior than we actually did during the actual Black Friday Cyber Monday side. So it's interesting how you can stay focused more middle of funnel and actually still perform pretty well. That's actually one of my to do's that's been a to do for a while, that I still need to get done, is to try, and that's my next thing to figure out, as I going through life, figuring out how to write meta ads, is we need to create. Create a downloadable PDF for how to start self feeding and use our products for starting self feeding. So that could become a lead campaign where type in your email and get this free PDF on how to start baby led weaning, or, you know, something specific to our our demographic, and then retarget those people. I just that's the one area I haven't. You know when you're I think we talked about this in the first take, and maybe it didn't make it yet into this the second take is I didn't do anything remotely close to any of the things I'm doing now. In my previous life, I was in the military. I was an account manager at a health system. I've never done product development, I've never done marketing, I've never done e commerce. I've never done fulfillment in warehousing. We have our own warehouse and fulfillment here. So I'm learning constantly. I mean, we're going on six, seven years of constant learning right now, so it's exhausting, but that is one of the things yet I still want to learn, is the lead generation via some downloadable PDF that we can pull people in that way? Yeah, I always say, like, especially for someone like you that likes to kind of get in there from at least from a marketing perspective, and figure it out and be like, Hey, it works best when I do it. You're probably in a better position to take the time and sit down and build out like an SOP and just hire a freelancer to do it, and just be like, just do exactly what I did. Don't change. Anything different. Feel free of your time, but at least time, but at least you're still controlling it. And I could tell you, as an agency owner, freelancers are cheaper, so you'll save some money. Do you hire to work for you, as in your agency? It seems like that would be a smart thing to do. Yeah. No, we do. We totally do. Yeah. I mean, there are contractors, but it's, you know, you have fluctuating projects, especially q4 it's similar to like you would with a warehouse where you need 5000 people versus 50 normally. Yeah, this was awesome. I appreciate your time. Beth. I don't want to take up too much more of it. I know we kind of swung and missed a little bit in the beginning, and now we've got it and nailed it. And then I could do this all day, because I've got 5000 other ideas for you, but I'm happy to hear them, but yes, I I have more work to do, because running an E commerce business, as probably most your listeners know, is constant changes and updates to the website. One thing I do want to say, and I don't think you guys probably do this, but for the last year and a half, I have been struggling with my conversion rate, and I thought maybe I'm bringing the wrong people to my website with my ads, maybe the layout of the website. You know, I made changes over time, and I screwed it up. Came across a random guy in Fiverr who only works on increasing site speed, and paid him 70 bucks to increase my site speed last Tuesday, and my conversion rate has literally doubled overnight, just from increasing so for finding the right person on Fiverr to increase site speed, I mean, I feel so much relief, because when it comes to running ads, am I bringing like so much? I was beating myself up like I don't know what I'm doing. Maybe I'm just bringing all the wrong people to the website, and that's why conversion is down so much. It literally comes down to microseconds of page loads. So every person has the the attention span of like, less than a goldfish. I think it is now, Oh, for sure, for sure to include myself. So just a tip for all of your clients, anybody with an E commerce site, if you, if you can just optimize site speed with I don't even know what he did. We didn't, literally didn't change anything. He went in and did something that increased the site speed and boom, instant change in conversion rate. So I'll leave you, oh, the the CRO side is, it's like a it is such a pain for me to talk about because, like, we, we do a lot of CRO stuff as much as we can, but I don't think enough brands lean in on it, because, to your point, like, you're spending so much money on advertising, you could be driving it to a website that's not converting. Yeah, the best thing to do get something like a hot jar, or Microsoft clarity, or whichever it is, get heat map, scroll tracking set up, and just watch what they're doing, see, like, where are people going. And then, obviously, once you can get into a B testing, do that. Yeah, we've done that. We did a B testing on different like, page orders, different PDP, you know, cart kind of like, does the does the title, then review, then the cost and color selection versus throwing, you know, just, just the above the fold stuff, all these different things. Literally, the site speed was the biggest contributor to increasing conversion. So, I mean, you have to do both. But the site speed was the easy one, the super easiest one. Beth. This was awesome. Thank you so much for your time. I want to make sure I give you the chance here. Please let everyone know where they can find out more about you and more about busy baby, yeah. Busybaby.com Easy enough. Busy Baby Mat on socials. Busybaby.com on the website. If you see us on a Target or WalMart, please buy us there. We don't make any money off of it, but if we want to stay in the big box and expand there. We need people to buy the stuff there. So isn't e commerce fun, it's all Thank you. Everyone who tuned in, yeah, please make sure you do the usual rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff and whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Good. You.

Narrator  25:02

Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to theecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.