A niche market requires niche messaging, but where do you start? The key is market research. On this 164th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Jimmy Zollo, Co-Founder of Joe & Bella. Joe & Bella is an adaptive apparel brand that makes dressing faster, safer, easier, and more dignified for adults living with physical and cognitive changes. By leveraging his market research background Jimmy has been able to take Joe & Bella from an idea to a thriving business.
In this episode, Jimmy shares the importance of understanding your target audience in a niche market- more importantly, differentiating between the buyer and end user. With their target audience in mind, Joe & Bella have been able to create targeted messaging that resonates with this specific demographic. For businesses trying to understand how market research can help you develop products that truly solve problems- this episode is a must..
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Andrew Maff and Jimmy Zollo
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Jimmy Zollo
Jimmy Zollo is the CoFounder of Joe & Bella, an adaptive apparel brand that makes dressing faster, safer, easier and more dignified for adults living with physical and cognitive changes. After graduating from Indiana University, Jimmy joined the team at GrubHub, where he helped to drive initial growth while developing their industry-leading restaurant network. In 2017, Jimmy co-founded Collaborata, a consumer insights first that developed innovative large-scale projects focused on generational cohorts, working with brands like NBA, Disney, Ford and AARP.
00:03
Why do they need these types of clothing? What physical or aid related changes are they living with? Who would most benefit from these clothes? And how can we best find those individuals make clear what the solutions are that we have,
01:06
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 Jimmy Zollo, who is the co founder over at Joe & Bella. Jimmy. How you doing, buddy? You ready for a good show? I'm ready. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah, super excited to have you on the show. Very interesting product line. Definitely have not had someone like yourself on the show before, so that always makes it very fun. I'm sure, as you know, I always kind of like doing the standard and just letting you take the stage for a second. Give us a little bit of insight into, you know, your background, where you started, obviously, how you got moving with Joe and Bella, and we'll take it from we'll take it from there. Yeah,
01:43
absolutely. So I started in Chicago at GrubHub. I was one of the first salespeople at GrubHub. So I was traveling the country, launching new markets, trying to convince restaurants to allow their food to be ordered online. And I think looking back at that now, it's pretty funny to think how hard that actually was at the time, these online ordering just wasn't a thing for restaurants when we we had started back then, but stuck with GrubHub for a while. After that, I launched my first business, which was in marketing research. We were working with some really great companies, from the NBA to Reebok to Disney, but AARP actually ended up being our most important client, and we were running an annual project with them looking at the future of Aging and Longevity and caregiving in the US. And it became a passion project. We were essentially going across the country and pounding our fists on the table and saying, not enough is being done in this country to prepare for massive age demographic shifts, which is 10,000 Americans are turning 65 every single day, two thirds of whom have a disability, and by 2033, they're gonna be more Americans over the age of 70 than below 18, for the first time in this country. So we just need to do more. And that eventually led me down the path to launching Joe and Bella. Interesting.
02:57
So one thing I'm curious about before we get into Joe and Bella, you went from sales at GrubHub trying to get restaurants to sign up to a market and research company. How did you what? How did that happen? Where was that background? How was that?
03:12
Excuse me, so, I just happened to come from a family of entrepreneurs, and I joined GrubHub early on with the goal of eventually starting my own company. And I had seen Matt Maloney, the founder of GrubHub, speak, and went up to him afterwards, was like, Hey, can I come work for you? And I started, I think, a week later with GrubHub. And he knew at the time that, hey, my goal is to learn enough here to feel comfortable, comfortable and confident to launch something. And I had a pad at my desk where I would constantly scribble down business ideas, product ideas, a lot of ideas that just didn't ever materialize but, but this idea for my first company in marketing research came to us a bit organically. My father actually had a background in marketing research, and we ran that company together. So that was how I felt comfortable enough to do a little bit in that space.
04:14
Nice, I mean, jumping into market research and landing clients like, you know, the NBA, Nike, obviously, AARP is impressive out the gate, and then obviously, kind of flash forward a little bit. So the AARP alignment to Joe and Bella makes more sense than the GrubHub to market research. So explain Joe and Bella and the product line around that? Yeah. So
04:39
we make what's known as adaptive apparel. So adaptive apparel is clothing that's altered in any way to make dressing faster, safer, easier and more dignified. So you could think about something like shoes with Velcro instead of laces as technically being adaptive, but it allows kids or older adults to put on shoes and you. Tighten them themselves without the need of assistance. So that's technically adaptive, but for Joe and Bella, we are making adaptive apparel specifically for older adults living with physical and or cognitive age related changes, so things like Parkinson's adults living with progressed dementia or something as common as arthritis and changes in dexterity. And so a solution for us is something as simple as a men's button down shirt, which happens to be our best selling product. When you see it, if you see someone wearing one of our shirts, you will have no idea there's anything unique or adaptive about it at first, which is the idea. But what we've done is we actually hide magnets behind the buttons themselves, so the buttons are just for show, and the magnets allow for an individual who maybe they just had a stroke, maybe they had broken arm, maybe they just have arthritis, can put on a button down with one hand and about a second flat. And it's a really cool thing to see. And we have a lot of additional special features to the shirt and the design of it to make it specifically a better solution for older adults. It's
06:00
a, it's an incredibly interesting product line, obviously, because it's very differentiated. But even when I was, like, digging into it and making sure, obviously, I came prepared today, I was like, Wow, this looks exactly like, like I was specifically actually looking at the button down. I was like, this looks like a button down. I don't understand why it's considered adaptive. And then, like, I was like, Oh, wow, that's actually genius. And also kind of, like, I think I want one so like that makes a ton of sense. So the one of the things I was curious about that I know I wanted to kind of touch on today with you, is the complication of marketing a product line like that, right? Because I would, and obviously you're going to know better. So correct me. I'm wrong here, but my assumption is retail theoretically could do pretty well, because that age group is still used to being able to go into stores, then on an on an E commerce basis. I know you're also available on like marketplaces, in your own website and stuff like that, which we'll touch on, but that's where it always becomes interesting. Of is your messaging directed at the consumer, or is it actually directed at a customer, where it's kind of like you're actually targeting the children of the older people and effectively trying to incentivize them to purchase? Like, what's the approach around all that? Right? It's
07:15
been a unique challenge, because when we launched, we had our assumptions as to who would be the individual actually making the purchase of apparel, as opposed to the individual wearing it. But we didn't know for sure, so we did a lot of AB testing upfront, a lot of user research up front, a lot of post purchase surveys. And what we found is, to date, about 70% of the purchases made on Joe and Bella are made by either the daughter, the daughter in law, or the female spouse of the individual wearing the clothes that delta that 30% there's some people that are purchasing for themselves. There are occasionally husbands purchasing for wives, and then we actually have parents that are purchasing for children. So even though our clothes are designed for older adults, we find that because our solutions have been designed universally someone who's 1819, 2021, years old, still can have great benefit from from them, depending on what needs they might have. So from a branding and marketing perspective, it's it's been tough, but we are, we are making sure to now speak specifically to the caregiver in the family, for the most part, directly on our site. The other challenges with our products, if you just see an image of them, you don't, as you mentioned, you might not understand what makes it special. So finding out, how do we communicate the value of our products, the simplicity of our products, the simplicity of that solution in as few words as possible, and as quick of a GIF as possible, and quick of a diagram as possible has taken a lot of time to get right, and it's also further informed our product development strategy as we go forward, because we want products that, hey, if we have a two second gift, can this product be really clear to the consumer? If the answer is no, we kind of don't want to go down that product development road right
08:59
now. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine the content creation is is very challenging to make sure it's showcased. Quick and easy. How you can do that? I definitely want to make sure I give credit where credit is due, because I've had so many people on this show, eight, nine figure sellers that you ask them, like, you know, who are you targeting? And they're like, oh, it's like, oh, it's like, typically people like 18 to 44 and like, that's my answer. You clearly showed your market research background by knowing that it's like the daughter in law. Like, how you how are you getting that information? Or do you have, like, a kind of a post purchase survey, or something like that, providing you that insight? Yeah, that's
09:38
exactly right. So we use a lot of post purchase surveys. Obviously, without you're never gonna get full opt in and full completion rates on those post purchase surveys, but we now have enough of those that we're able to look at our audience and sort of map it out at a broader scale. So we find that incredibly. Important for us, and we also are now going down the road of trying to understand, all right, if you are the daughter of the daughter in law, and you're caring for your loved one, why do they need these types of clothing? What? What physical or age related changes are they living with? So that's sort of that, that next step for us, where we're really trying to understand who would most benefit from these clothes, and how can we best find those individuals? Make clear what the solutions are that we have?
10:25
Yeah, and so obviously, for those users, or those those customers, that's also based on you know where they're shopping. So in terms of your availability, obviously, of your own website, I know you're available on Amazon. Are there any other sales channels that you're currently available. We
10:43
have a few other niche distribution partners. So an example would be a brand called spin life, which is one of the larger brands in the US for wheelchair users. And they traditionally have sold things like ramps and wheelchairs themselves and anything that would go along with a wheelchair. But now they also offer Joan Bella's adaptive apparel, so it's really specific, nicely aligned to the type of individuals that we are trying to help. There's another company called the right stuff and parent giving. Both are websites for families that are caring for an aging loved ones for So those sort of niche marketplaces make for natural partners for what we're trying to build, yeah,
11:21
what about from a marketing channel perspective? Because I did some poking around before to see, like, Okay, what do you guys have in motion? And I was like, okay, like, kind of light, social, light, social ads, here and there. But what marketing channels have been kind of the primary drivers? Yeah,
11:38
you're exactly right. So we do a little bit out of social right now. It's primarily organic social as well as retargeting. We don't actually do any top of funnel paid social right now, we ran a test in q1 that just didn't work. And I think it didn't work because at that point, we had a few different dynamics at play where, I think, number one, our creative just isn't, wasn't evolved to the point that it is now. And the second is, our customer list was too small that if we wanted to make a look alike audience and meta, we just didn't have enough to go on and and, and I think that really limited our ability to have success there. So I think at some point we'll go back to meta, but we're having success on other channels, so we don't necessarily have the need to go back there. What's working best for us is Google in Google in a few different ways, both from an organic perspective of what we know is a lot of folks don't know that adaptive apparel exists. They want to know to go to Google and type in adaptive apparel, but they do know that they've got a loved one with a very specific need, and so we're targeting long tail keywords of, hey, I need help for my grandmother, who just moved into a memory care community and she needs new clothes. Like, how do we win that type of search? And there are a lot of those that are long tail that we're going after pretty aggressively. So year to date, about 55% of our revenue has been driven organically, directly in Sumer, thanks to what we're able to accomplish on Google from a search perspective, as well as what we're able to accomplish from organic social we do a little bit of paid on Google, both through Google Shopping and Google p max. I think shopping for us has been the more stable of the 2p. Max will have a great week, or here or there, then a down week, then an up week is just it's the nature of Google, p max, but that those have primarily been our paid channels today.
13:25
Yeah, it's interesting, because to your point, like, I would expect there be there. There needs to be some additional level of education because it's such a differentiated product line. So I would think that social would do really well. So I find it odd that it didn't work for you when you tried it in q1 but to your point, like creative, you could have the world's best product, but if your creative is not aligned, it's not going to do much for you. Have you, I don't know well enough if this was, if this would actually work or not. But have you delved into the influencer side at all? I know that there are a good amount of influencers that are older, but I think their audiences tend to be younger, and it's kind of an interesting spot. Have you tried that? So yeah, we
14:05
have, and we're starting to try more because we think that's a space that should really work for us, for folks that are speaking to caregivers, that are speaking to families, that are speaking to older adults, and have natural audience already in place, so we've had a few influencers, primarily on Instagram, that have worked pretty well for us. There's a group called the adaptive equipment corner that that reviews adaptive equipment and products related to that space. There's a really amazing daughter mother team, where the mother has dementia, and they've been sort of chronicling that age related journey, and that's been a fantastic partner. The biggest one that we've had. We actually partnered with Seth Rogen and his wife, Lauren Rogan. So they have a foundation, yeah, they have a foundation called Hilarity for Charity, which is fantastic. They do grants for families taking care of loved ones with Alzheimer's. They just. US also do some Alzheimer's research, and they do education for younger adults when it comes to brain health. So fantastic. Foundation and Seth actually helped design a version of our men's button down, which is very much in his style. It's we call it the vacation shirt because it's bright orange and floral and just sort of ridiculous. $10 for each one that we sell goes back to their foundation. So that sort of partner has been fantastic, and something that we want to grow on meaningfully into the new year. Yeah,
15:31
I could see that being a big aspect of it, too. What about on the Amazon side? I know on Amazon, you know, most brands, it's like a great revenue driver, not the world's best profit, tough to educate. So I would think for a product line like yours, it might be kind of challenging. What's what's your experience like on that channel, so far,
15:48
we've been having success on Amazon. I would agree with everything that you said, where, hey, the margins aren't necessarily gonna be as strong as they are. From the D to C perspective, there's challenges when it comes to education, because you can only use seven images, and the type of video content that you can put up there is really strict. It you can only use four bullet points in your description. So it just leads to challenges. And of course, the biggest challenge, I think, is the main image that we use in the scroll. It can never be a GIF, and it can't use copy, so we can't really call out that something's adaptive or something that's special about it. So if you're just scrolling shirts on Amazon, you'll just see a button down. So we've got to be creative when it comes to how we title the products, the type of images that we use, so that we're really succinct and clear that some this is a special and different type of shirt right off the jump. Interestingly, we've had some success when it comes to PPC on Amazon, because there are folks that are proactively look, looking for our solution, similar to Google, that we're able to capture that, which has then helped increase our Amazon SEO and so what we've seen to date is our PPC conversions, roughly 80% of them are going to be for individuals over the age of 65 but when it comes to our SEO related conversions, or organic conversions, to Amazon, over 50% of those sales are by individuals below the age of 40, which is a really interesting dynamic at Play that we're trying to better understand. But I think at the end of the day, what we've seen is, hey, if people just would be fine not buttoning their shirts and would rather use magnets like, why not? It's just a simpler Yeah, that's
17:33
what I said, Yeah, as long as the shirt looks good, why
17:36
why not wear it? So we're excited by that dynamic, and I think that will give us some testing grounds for the brand as we go forward, and how we want to potentially reposition things on our own website, or maybe even have his sub brands later, later on down the road. Yeah,
17:52
how do you focus on, kind of the repeat purchase side? Because I you know, to your point, I'm sure Amazon's the top revenue driver. Not a lot of control you've got there in terms of communication with the customer, but I would also imagine that, especially since you mentioned your customer is primarily like the daughter, daughter in law, the spouse, that there's probably a pretty significant amount of repurchases, at least over a pretty decent amount of time. So how are you kind of controlling that and measuring that? Yeah, yeah, there are a few different
18:21
things. The first one is we have automated flows and campaign flows. We use clavio, like so many others do, to be really smart about how we follow up with individuals when we follow up, what sort of additional product solutions we might be offering. So if we know someone had purchased a pair of our adaptive pants, that maybe our adaptive socks are a really great solution to go along with that. Or if they've had a pair of our adaptive pants for a certain period of time, it's probably time for a refresh, because most of our pants are intended to be worn with an incontinence brief so there's just sort of a limited life cycle for that sort of product, because you're going to want that clean and fresh on a daily basis. One of the challenges for us up until about three weeks ago for a button downs, it actually only came in three colors, so a high percentage of individuals that have purchased our button downs for the first time already had all three colors in their closet. We finally have some more options available, which is we're excited to see play out over the next few weeks and into the holidays, as to what that repeat purchase rate can look like for men who already have three colors and now they got three new options to to choose from, and hopefully add on in. We offer referral bonuses. We we offer occasional discounts. We absolutely trying to incentivize that that repeat, but we're still we're still learning and and one of the challenges for what our audience is and is, is a lot of the time, individuals who get our products are late stage in their life, the the number one, three reason why a product. His return on Joe and Bella is actually because the individual passed away before the product arrived. So, so, so there's just inherent amongst our audience, is that a certain segment will not have a high repeat because of what where they have in their life journey. And that's something that we've got to be aware of and but that's, that's who we're here to help. And that's, that's, it's a challenge as a business, because we will never have like the LTV of a Lulu Lemon, that that's okay. I think we need to frame it in a different lens, and that, hey, we think about LTV when it comes to our memory care community partners or our assisted living community partners or our home care agencies that we partner with, as opposed to just the end user of the product.
20:45
Yeah, do you is all of the different adaptive clothing options? Like, are those all patented? Or are these? So you don't have to be too specific in case things listen,
20:59
patent. We have a few patents. One of them is for our care zips pants. So it's the only pant on the market that can use a three zipper system. So what that means it has two zippers down the side and a third on the instant by the crotch, which allows the pants to fully open up. So it was designed specifically for incontinence briefs, so an incontinence brief can be changed without the wearers pants coming all the way off. It turns out it's also great solutions for access to catheters or colonoscopy bags or hand held urinals for individuals who are using wheelchairs. So that is a patent that we're really proud of. We also would say we don't have patents, but we have IP around really clever designs around existing patents on the market. Without getting too much further into that, we were able to figure out some really clever workarounds to existing patents as well. Yeah,
21:50
because I was I was thinking too, like for my parents, like, I know there's a handful of elements where they are very brand loyal, and I could see how licensing that technology to some of those brands that would be open to doing it, it would be very interesting to them to be able to carry that consumer into a later stage in their life with that same functionality. So I do, I find that kind of interesting too, is that, what is the plan with the business like, what's next? We think
22:18
about who we're trying to help it's the boomer generation. Now who's who's aging up into this, this 70 plus age demographic, and Boomers are the most loyal generation in American history. It's the generation of Nike. At the end of the day, they compare. The interesting thing is, the cost to acquire a boomer is higher than the cost to acquire any other generation in the US, Gen Z being the lowest cost to acquire, however, Gen Z is the least loyal group. They are most likely to switch brands on a whim, and so the LTV of the boomer is that much more impactful if you're able to get them loyal to your brand. So we're absolutely opening up to open the licensing opportunities. We're in a couple conversations right now with some really amazing legacy brands, and we'll see where those go. But also has to be the right fit, because the end of the day, our goal is, hey, how can we help as many people as possible to dress with less pain, with us risk of injury, to feel more dignified, and we want to make sure we're doing that with partners who are not just looking at the bottom line, but are looking out to be able to grow as we possibly can.
23:31
Beautiful Jimmy, thank you so much for being on the show. Super insightful and to a very interesting product line. Really appreciate it. I would love to give the opportunity here let everyone know they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about you, and, of course, more about Joe and
23:44
Bella. Thank you. Yeah, you can check us out. Joeandbella.com you can see us on Twitter or X excuse me, on Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok. All are @HelloJoeandBella, but yeah, please check us out.
23:57
Beautiful Jimmy. Thank you for being on the show. Everyone who tuned in, obviously, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff, whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecomshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, we'll see you all next time. Have a go.
24:16
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