You sell more than your product- you sell an experience. On this 149th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Nathaniel Vasquez CEO of Pipsticks.  While stickers may be the product, the real focus is on creating an emotional connection with customers through shared nostalgia.

In this episode, we’ll dive into the secrets behind Pipsticks’ success and how pivoting within a business has been crucial. From testing different customer acquisition strategies to e-commerce platforms, Nathaniel shares valuable insights that can be applied to any subscription-based company. If you want to take your subscription business to the next level, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

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

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

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Selling the Experience with Pipsticks

Andrew Maff and Nathaniel Vasquez

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

Nathaniel Vasquez

Originally from Wisconsin, Nathan Vazquez studied computer science at Yale University. He worked for 15 years as an options trader at Citibank until he was eventually tempted by the idea of being his own boss with work that allowed him the flexibility to spend more time with his family. In 2015, he left his job in finance to join his wife’s sticker subscription company, Pipsticks.  Within a year, Pipsticks had thousands of subscribers in over 50 countries.  As CEO of Pipsticks, Nathan now manages the company’s growing business in the subscription, E-Commerce, wholesale, and licensing markets. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife and four kids.

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We'll keep it late and slow jazz deep into the evenings. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I am your host, as usual, Andrew Maff, and I am joined by Nathan Vasquez, who is the CEO of Pipsticks. Nathan, how you doing, buddy? You ready for a good show? Yeah, I'm doing great. Great. Super, super pumped to be here. Thanks. I am super excited to have you on the show. We weren't even two seconds into chatting, and you've already got this sexy jazz late night voice going this great little setup. This is going to be awesome. We're going to have a good time. Keep it late and slow jazz deep into the I gotta, I don't think I have that kind of voice, so I'm not even going to try. Obviously, really excited to have you on the show. Very interesting industry, very interesting background. So I like to do the usual and kind of let you kick things off, let everyone know about, you know, kind of where you were, how you got started, obviously, a little bit about pipsticks, and we'll take it from there. Okay, yeah, sure. So, you know, originally, my background out of, out of college, was in, was in math and computer science. Yeah, perfect. Perfect perfect story with stickers, right? And I ended up working at Citibank a year or so out of college as an options trader. So I was at the bank for about 15 years between New York and London. Doing you know, electronic trading, electronic market making, had done that for quite a while, 15 years, like I said, and my wife had started a company on the side. She's a graphic designer. She started a company on the side while we were having kids, while she was a stay at home mom. Wanted to keep herself, you know, active and ready to go back back into the workforce as soon as the kids were were old enough, and she started, she started pipsticks. Was still at the bank at the time, but it was a transitional moment. It was, you know, a big company like that has a lot of politics, and an opportunity came for me to sort of raise my hand and take a severance package with a bank. And I had had enough of it after 15 years. So we did that. We stepped away. And I thought, Okay, well, I'll take a few months off, you know, get my get my stuff in order. We were in London, so we had to move back to the States. And then I figured I'd get another, another job in finance, you know, something adjacent to what I've been doing. But my wife had started pipsticks Sort of a year or so ago with a launch less than a year ago, and I, you know, it was new to her, so I decided to help her out, because, you know, I had some time, and it was interesting, and it's all we were talking about at the dinner table anyway. So I got involved. And, you know, we sort of reorged as a S corp, and did some of the the operational and the legal stuff to make it official. And it got to be, you know, January one. And I thought, you know, actually, it looks like there might be some, some opportunity here. Looks like there's some likes here. And I really didn't want to go back, put on a suit and work, you know, not even nine to five, like a seven to seven at a bank anymore. Yeah, so I said I will give myself a one year goal. We'll see what can happen. Because, you know, the bank gave us a nice severance package. We can, we can manage for a year, and we'll, we'll figure it out on our savings. So we did that, you know, we hit our targets. We did again and then again and then again and again. And now I've been the CEO of pipsticks for it's going to be our 10th birthday month in September for the business. So, yeah, 1515, years in electronic options trading, straight into 10 years of running a sticker company. So it's an age old, age old story, right? You've heard it once. You've heard it 1000 times. Yeah, great. This is gonna be another normal podcast with no interesting information. Fantastic, perfect, perfect. So you weren't even, you didn't just study computer science. You studied at Yale, and now you're in stickers. So explain to me what it is you saw in the business that you were like, Oh, I can, you know, kind of leverage some of my background and be able to scale this thing, yeah? So, I mean, you know, my wife, she's the, she's the creative one in the in the partnership, like I said, she's a graphic designer, yeah? And, you know, all my life, I was like, I'll get a job, I'll work hard, I'll make some money. You know, it all made sense. She always wanted to be an entrepreneur, and never. Never really dawned on me, but she would always bring ideas. So she, she'd bring an idea for a business, for a product, and I would like, ah, it doesn't work. Numbers don't make sense. And she, she called me the destroyer of ideas for a long time. And she, she brought an idea for a sticker subscription. You know, we were, we had young kids. The idea was, she was going to source stickers from various other countries, other suppliers, package them together, ship them out to people. You know, it was, it was relatively inexpensive. It was a subscription, you know, it all, it all kind of made sense. This was right when, sort of, you know, Harry's was big and Dollar Shave Club, and, you know, all the subscription boom of, sort of, 10 years ago, and just the numbers, you know, none of them, none of them, were wildly wrong. So we said, we said, give it a shot. And then when I joined her, sort of, you know, nine or 12 months later, after she'd done the backup, we just had a had picked up a big chunk of subscribers in her first three to six months. And, you know, I don't think I realized it then, as much as obviously, I know, and now you know the your initial purchases on Facebook, your initial ads, are far cheaper than, you know, the 10 100 or 1,000th person you get a given month. So maybe it was a little deceptive, but it looked like we were going to be able to keep, keep pulling in subscribers at a pretty, a pretty cheap price. And I could whatever I could. I could play around with spreadsheet, and if things kept going up forever, you know, we were going to make a trillion dollars. So it just seemed like it, it made, it made sense. We've, we've not made a trillion yet, but, you know, it has managed to support, to support us and our kids. Yeah. So I know that it's not a small brand, right, like you're it's a seven figure sticker brand. It's stickers. Like, it's a wildly competitive space. There are stickers everywhere. They're relatively inexpensive from a retail perspective. So like, your your even though your margins might be good, the margin dollars are smaller. So like, tell me a little bit about like, how do you manage that? How do you control that? Like, what has been the go to market approach? How have you kind of scaled it like? It just sounds so complicated. Yeah, it is. It is complicated. It's too complicated. If I could do something again, I would definitely pick something with a higher price point. But you know when, when I look at, I look at stickers, you know, we, obviously, we sell stickers, and we sell a lot more than stickers. Now we sell notebooks and stationary and washi tape and binders, and we've played around with, you know, mugs and various lifestyle products. But it does come back to stickers. That's the core product. But a sticker, the product isn't a sticker, right? A sticker is a medium. So, you know, really, anything can go on a sticker, right? I'm, I don't know if people see a picture of me anywhere, if they're watching the video here, I am way off brand, right? I'm a 40 something year old guy wearing a dull green shirt with like a gray beard, right? And it's trim short right? Now, usually it's scruffy. You know, our audience is 20 to 60 year old women. All our stickers are rainbows and unicorns and puppy stickers, scratch and sniff glittery 80s. We do license deals with Sanrio, with Care Bears, you know, all that sort of stuff. So I would say that the, obviously, the medium is stickers, but our product isn't stickers. Our product is the 80s nostalgia. It's the happiness, it's It's the fun brand and and Mo, my wife, she's the face of the brand. She's the name of the brand. She's the voice of the brand. It all, it all comes it all comes from her, right? So if it's she runs the design team, she manages creative she manages copy. All the emails come from her. You know, in the stuff that we have in the brick and mortar stores, her picture is actually on the back of the of the product. So people feel connected, connected to her. So, you know, we're selling stickers, and I'll tell you right now, they're the best quality stickers you're gonna get. They've got the best foils. They're the best embossed they're the best scratch and stiff, puffy designs. We do that better than anybody else, but what we're selling is the brand, and you know, the fun and the you know, the excitement that comes from mo more so than the sticker itself, even though that is the actual product, yeah, so very good point, right? Like, you're selling basically the nostalgia, the community of it. It's not the actual sticker. Obviously. It doesn't really serve a functionality as much as it serves like anyone would wear a team t shirt or something like that. One of the things I was curious, curious about those, not only are, you know, the small margin, and small dollar size. It's also a very large product line, like, you've got, as you just mentioned, several different types of designs and licenses and stuff that you're working with. How do you focus from a marketing perspective, in like, how you're going after a certain audience, when, obviously, like, you know, there's different there's different categories there that you could be going after? Yeah, sure. So, you know, we have, I think we have 2500 to 3000 SKUs. And the reason, the reason we have that's painted me as well, right? The reason we have so many is because, you know, we started as a as a subscription, and that's been the core of the business until, until pre. Recently, as we've moved more into the wholesale space, and that subscription, we put, you know, there's two or three different varieties, and we'll put 15 or so stickers in each one, and then most of those stickers get launched as their own, independent, you know, one off product. So there's least 50 SKUs, if not more, are being released every single month, right? So that's, that's why the Wow, the SKU count is so high and the variety is so high. You know, in terms of how we market it, you know, a lot of the marketing has to do with people using the product. We don't have one evergreen product that is the same SKU that sells every single time. So we don't have the there's no 8020 rule where 80% of our revenue comes from. You know, 20% of our SKUs, it really is split up and dispersed, you know, all across the product line. We do still have a strong focus in our B to C space on subscriptions. So we still have a number of subscriptions. And once you can get somebody engaged enough in the brand that they'll buy a subscription, you know, that's, that's, that's when you know, you've got a great customer, right? And then we, you know, can remarket to them, and, you know, they'll buy the stickers that they liked in the prior months back. They'll buy them as individuals. You know, we sell sticker keepers, which are kind of a trapper keeper and a baseball card collecting binder, all in one where they can, they can store and save their stickers. You know, really, the marketing is about finding the target audience, finding the people who are like the other people who buy our stuff, getting them in, somehow converting them over into a subscription, and then upselling them on all the cool other bits and pieces that we do that they will like because they like the subscription. And given that everybody knows mo my wife, so personally, they trust her, right? So we send a ton of emails out to everybody once they're on our lists, and a lot of that is content. A lot of it we don't even ask them to buy anything. I mean, maybe there's a link on the bottom of the email so, but they give them content. She shares what's going on with stickers, with things she's doing, with her crafts, with her interests. And then when we do, send out an email that says, hey, and we've got this new this new collaboration with Hello Kitty or with strawberry shortcake, then, because people trust her, and because they know that everything that she produces is high quality and products that they like, then they're eager to jump on and buy, you know, whatever is new and whatever is fresh. Yeah. I mean, obviously, you know, building that kind of personal touch between your wife and the customer base makes a ton of sense, especially if she's, you know, on the forefront of the brand and everything. One of the things I was thinking about you mentioned that it started as a subscription company. When I think stickers, I don't necessarily think subscription. So what was the thought process there and getting that in motion? Sure, so I'll tell you what the thought process was, what the initial idea was, why that was totally wrong, and then where we ended up, even with a subscription anyway, right? So she started, she was a stay at home mom, and somebody had sent her, I think, like a sticker chain mail, kind of like a sticker Ponzi scheme, where, like, hey, you know, if you send me, you send all these stickers to these other people, they're gonna send you stickers back, you know, standard sort of chain mail kind of thing, and your kids are going to get, you know, buckets full of stickers, and everybody's going to be happy. So she did it, you know, and she sent out all the stickers, and, like, you know, one person sent her back an envelope with, like, crappy stickers from the dollar store. And the kids went crazy, and they loved it. So she said, Ah, this is, this is what I have to do. This is the, this is the business. Because what I'm going to do here is I'm going to get this product, and the moms are going to moms are going to get it. It's going to cost them 10 or 15 bucks a month, and they're going to buy themselves an hour worth of time every month just to be by themselves. You know, have a have a coffee while the kids are entertained with the stickers. So she launched it with that idea, and then we found pretty quickly thereafter that our audience was not moms for their kids. It was moms or non moms for themselves. And we launched a non kid. We launched what we called the pro version. And we started, you know, at marketing and working towards packs just purely for adult women. Like I said, kind of 20 to 60 crafting, scrapbooking, Journalers, snail mailers. This is, you know, markets I didn't even know trends and hobbies and communities that I didn't know existed. And, you know, my wife's sensibilities and the things she liked from the 80s are the same things that sort of got these people excited and and by now, you know, two, I would say two thirds of the subscriptions that we sell are the pro subscription, the adult subscription. But of that, of that third that are kids, I guarantee you at least half of them are adults, buying them for themselves anyway. So it we thought it was going to be a way for for moms to buy themselves an hour or two of time once a month, and it would be worthwhile. It's not, turns out, it's people who just like the brand, like the nostalgia, or are into crafting, scrapbooking, journaling. They share in the community. They're on our Facebook groups. They do the unboxing videos, and they, you know, maybe they, they decorate their their letters, and they do traveling postcards with each other, and send these things around and share them as a community. So started out one thing, turned out that was the wrong way, pivoted and brought up a whole, a whole other product line. Yeah. That's an amazing case study for just listening to your customer and kind of adjusting, as you said, what was it that kind of gave it away, where you started to realize, like, wow, that's who we thought our audience was, actually isn't. Yeah. I mean, just, just, just all the customer service responses, the Facebook postings, the social media, just, I mean literally them telling us, hey, people would say, Hey, I'm a, you know, 47 year old woman. And this brings back all this amazing memories I had as a kid. I went to my mom's attic, I found my old sticker book, and they'll send us a picture of their old sticker book and their new sticker book. You know, all these really cool stories of people who are just kind of getting excited about it and sharing it. That's very cool. Tell me about because the one thing that you'd said earlier that's blowing my mind. So you're launching like, 50 some odd new skews every month. So how are you handling this, from an operational standpoint, like that sounds badly like a nightmare. My number one, the number one thing that we've been doing in the last couple of months, last probably year, is trying to, is trying to cut that amount down, right? So we're doing more, more limited editions. So we used to order, you know, a large quantity of also, I mean, it started out as a description, and we started out with curating stickers from from third parties. And then eventually we moved into designing our own, our own stuff. So we have our own full design team, illustrators, graphic designers, the whole thing top to bottom. So all of our work now is all all original. When we did that, we started launching the individual versions of the products that were in the packs. And initially we just kept printing and printing and printing because, you know, we were printing them. They were selling inventory built up. SKU count built up, and in the last year or two, we had too much inventory, right, which is a problem everybody has. So we started, you know, either having limited editions, where we would only print a few when the when the pack was printed, and then we would never reprint, or even extreme limited editions, which are only in the subscription pack. So that 50 to 60 SKUs is down a bit now. It's probably more in 30 ish range. It's still a lot of SKUs, yeah, a lot of spreadsheets, and it's still a lot of a lot of difficulty. So it's hard. It's hard. Good thing. You have a computer science background, right? Although I haven't, I haven't written a lot of code in a very, very long time. So do you miss it? Not really. No, I don't blame it. What? So you mentioned earlier as well. So, you know, you did this. You did the subscription thing. And it was kids, turned out to be the adults. But then you also mentioned that you started going more towards wholesale, at least as of recently. What's what caused that pivot? Yeah. So, I mean, you know, like you said, we did the subscriptions, and then we launched the non subscription products, you know, and then we looked around and we're like, oh, well, we'll try Amazon, you know, maybe we tried a brick and mortar store for a little while. And really the question is just, you know, Facebook dollars and Facebook ads can only get you so far. Where else can we sell the product and who else is interested in buying it? So we just kind of dipped our toe in because we wanted other ways to sell, you know, I think we had had a few people reach out to us with, you know, sort of white label custom orders. So we did, we did some of that. So you do, maybe you do five or 10,000 units of a sticker for another subscription company or a bigger company comes to you and wants you to print for them. And we had a couple of couple of big brands had reached out to us and said, you know, big, big stores, hey, can you sell to us, you know, wholesale? And we said, No, we have no idea what to do, yeah. And after a while, it just became clear that that was another, another channel, you know, and the way I think about it, when I, when I started, when we started pipsticks, we were a subscription company, and we sold subscriptions. And as we moved into non subscriptions, then we started selling other things, other than stickers, binders, higher price point products, it dawned on me that we weren't a subscription company. We were a sticker and stationary company, and one of the ways we sold things was subscriptions. So sold subscriptions, sold non subscriptions. We tried to sell on Amazon. We sold in a brick and mortar. Why don't we sell wholesale as well? So it was really just kind of a natural evolution of the next place that I can sell those stickers to the next person said, you tried Amazon? What happened there? I was stupid multiple times in a row, and I've learned a ton. But the fundamental problem with Amazon for us was twofold. Was one, stickers are really cheap. And I think anybody who's been on Amazon knows a lot of fixed costs, which, you know, obvious in hindsight, but I spent a lot of time, you know, trying to work past that, and that was a failure. And then the second thing problem we had was, you know, Amazon is a marketplace that people don't know your brand. There's very little, very little brand search there. And if somebody's looking for stickers, you know, they probably want the cheapest stickers, right? Like Amazon is really a race to the bottom, and we sell, you know, we sell the cheapest luxury good you're ever gonna find, which means we sell the most expensive sticker. I might have a $7 sticker, right? Or a $5 sticker. That's a lot of money for a sticker, not a lot of money, but it's a lot of money for a sticker. So you put a sticker sheet up on Amazon, that's five bucks, and then right under it is $15 for 4000 stickers. Doesn't matter that ours is significantly better, has the foils, has the design, you know, is not copy infringed. People are going to be like, Oh, I'll buy the 4000 stickers for $15 so that that got in our way. Yeah, we've shut it off since, I do think we do a lot of sticker books, now that's we have to get back to there and find our, you know, 20 to $50 price point items, and figure out which of those can work on Amazon. So it'll be in our future again next year. But, you know, business is triage. It's all about figuring out which things you want to fail in at any given time. And we've decided not to worry about Amazon at least the next year, or other other multi channel approaches, the other, the other online target, etc, Walmart. Yeah. And to your point, I mean, it's all about testing. You mentioned that, you know, Facebook, you can only get it so far. Have you ventured into the Tiktok world yet? Yeah, you know, we haven't. We haven't done too much with Tiktok yet. We're, we're in the middle of some operational changes. We're switching to three PL again. We've brought in a new person to help us with our operations. So So when it comes to sales channels, you know, to Tiktok store, we just don't have the capacity to do it. We've played around with the with advertising on Tiktok a little bit. Never got any traction. Nothing ever works for us, other than Facebook. We've done Pinterest and Tiktok. We've tried everything. Facebook is is 90% and, you know, AdWords takes up the last 10% of our of our ad spend on any given month. Yeah, that's very interesting that it doesn't work for you. This was awesome. I think we had the store, right? I think we had the Tiktok store up and running, and we could direct traffic there. I know Tiktok is supplementing a lot of the ads, supplementing a lot of the sales. I think we could get that to work, but once again, too many other things going on, and that's what we just had to defer. So I would love to be on the Tiktok store and be running ads that direction, but we just don't have the headspace for it right now. Yeah, have you tried the influencer approach? Yeah. I mean, plus and minus. It works. Sometimes it doesn't work. Other times. You know, affiliates are hard, because it's really hard to price them properly. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, and it takes, once again, a ton of manual, individual effort to go, to go make the influencers work, to give them the content that they want to communicate with them. So we've got a, we've got to share a sale program that's out there, and we have some people who are, who are referring links, but it's, once again, not A, not a big part of our marketing efforts right now. Marketing, really for us, is Facebook, top of funnel, some AdWords, top of funnel, as much organic as we can get. And all of that is just cold. And then we take those, those people, and we just drop them into a super aggressive email campaign afterwards with pretty, pretty high, you know, click rates, open rates on our email. We do a we do an okay job at at top of funnel, and I think we do a very good job at the at the email bottom for I mean, considering, you know, you've got meta working for you, you've got the site working for you, getting into wholesale, and you've got the subscription going, but you haven't really gotten Amazon to work or Tiktok yet. Like this, the fact of the size of your business for selling stickers at the price point that they are is wildly impressive. So it's, you know, job well done. It's awesome. I was super excited to have you on the show. I really appreciate it. I would love to give you the opportunity let everyone know they can find out more about you. Of course, more about pipsticks. Yeah. I mean, you can, you can come to www.pipsticks.com anything you want to know about pipsticks Is there. And if anybody wants to reach out to me, as long as it's not a sales pitch you can, you can get me@pipsticks.com I trust you're not going to pitch me on all your crazy stuff, but if anybody has a real question, I'm eager to answer anything and help anybody out that I can good call out. Nathan. Really appreciate you having the show. Everyone else who tuned in, of course. Thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual rate review. Subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. As usual, we appreciate you all joining, and we'll see you all next time.

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