Entrepreneurs who succeeded business with a monthly sales of over 100 million yen as young as 23 years of age look back on the success story

British brand " BrüMate (Blue Mate)" which sells insulated mugs that can enjoy enjoying beer while keeping wine at an appropriate temperature by having a body of a two-layer structure with a heat insulating effect, in January 2016 It was founded by Mr. Dylan Jacob who was 21 years old at the time. After that, the company skillfully conducted marketing using SNS etc., and it has grown into a company that raises a monthly business of 1.1 million dollars (about 125 million yen) in about 2 years since its establishment. Mr. Jacob himself looks back on the way of such a success story.

Growing A Brand to $ 1.1 M / month at 23 Years Old - Starter Story
https://www.starterstory.com/stories/brumate

Product sold by BrüMate is a metallic insulated container with vacuum insulation structure. Although it can not be said that itself is not so rare, BrüMate's products have features that other companies do not have. It is a heat insulation container " HOPSLATOR TRíO " dedicated to beer that a beer can enter as it is, a wineglass-type insulation container " UNCORK'D WINE GLASS " which can keep warm temperature for a longer time, and a wine bottle type The point that we commercialized products such as " WINESULATOR " insulation container. By releasing a thermal insulation container targeting adults, the company has achieved great growth.

Thermal insulation container for beer "Hopslator TRíO" is a type of product that 350 ml can and 500 ml cans as it is in Japan fit within the body of the shoppel directly. Furthermore, it is also possible to drink beer from a can into a container as it is, and it seems that it is named "trio" from three patterns of use.

Uncork'd Wine Glass (left) and Winesulator (right) are both thermal insulation containers made for wine. Not to mention the function, of course, stylish design and coloring seems to be enhancing the appeal of the product.

It was Mr. Jacob who launched such BrüMate. According to the company profile page , Mr. Jacob looked at the fact that there was no product in the world to respond to the needs of adults who want to drink beer and wine at any time, at an optimum temperature, and when they were 21 years old they started business at Indianapolis local is.

BrüMate is planning to release products such as "NOS'R" dedicated to whiskey, heat insulation container "Hopsulator Slim" for 12-ounce capacity slim cans, "Hopsulator Juggernaut" for 24/25 oz cans . The company achieved sales of 250 thousand dollars (about 28 million yen) from November to December 2016, and sales in 2017 reached 2.1 million dollars (about 240 million yen). As of July 2018, there are more than 1,000 retailers in the United States, and monthly sales are over $ 1.1 million (about 125 million yen). In addition, in fiscal 2018 we allocate 35% to 45% of sales to advertising budget, and we are considering annual sales of 20 million dollars (about 2.2 billion yen).

For Mr. Jacob, in fact, Brümate is the third company. The first company is a company that develops and designs products, it is a high school student and started a business. After that, Mr. Jacob, who dropped out of the engineering school, sold the company and established a company that manufactures and sells high end residential glass styles. Even after BrüMate was founded in January 2017, we continued to operate the second company, but we sold it in July 2017.

In developing BrüMate's products, Mr. Jacob paid attention to "that product has an actual market". First, design the first product "Hopslator TRíO", then create samples with 3D modeling. After that, he budgeted 3000 dollars (about 330,000 yen), created 100 product samples, distributed samples at Indianapolis's largest brewery, and got feedback from users.

Posts shared by BrüMate® (@ bru.mate) January 2018 January 5 11:07 PST

Next, Mr. Jacob develops targeted advertisements on Facebook for reservation reception and collection of e-mail addresses. As it gradually became possible to have a business opportunity in "Hopslator TRíO", Mr. Jacob, who saw that there is still room for improvement, further promoted product brushing, made 13 types of prototypes over a year, followed the sale It was.

Mr. Jacob, who completed the Hopsulator, then started to design the "Winesulator" of a wine bottle type storage container. Actually, it seems that Hopsulator was not an original product of BrüMate in a strict sense, and in fact Winesulator became debut fight for BrüMate.

As Winesulator had fewer parts than Hopsulator, the production cost was reduced to about half. From this, Mr. Jacob who judged that the risk is low did not boldly begin actual production without going through the prototype. And when we accepted the reservation using the product image created in Photoshop, it seems that we got about 7000 customers list at the stage of product completion in November 2017.

Posts shared by BrüMate® (@ bru.mate) June 21, 2018 PDT 7:38 PM PDT

At this stage Mr. Jacob seems to have acquired know-how to find a better subcontract manufacturer. There are hundreds of manufacturers in China and similar that can produce similar products and it is not easy to find the best manufacturer among them. However, Mr. Jacob coincidentally discovered that all records of products imported to the United States are publicly managed, and anyone can view it. In addition, by meeting the blog Port Examiner which can browse the data imported by the customs, we succeeded in finding the manufacturer that matched the product of our company.

Mr. Jacob who released the product in this way and won the customer points the following four points to keep in mind for customer management.

◆ 1: Collect e-mail addresses anyway <br> for e-mail, e-mails will keep customers and become an important weapon for new sales. In order to acquire more mail addresses, Mr. Jacob introduced a tool called " Spin-a-Sale " on the site. This allows visitors to get coupons by turning roulettes displayed on the site so that they can register their e-mail addresses when turning roulette. Visitors got a chance to get coupons, and for publishers, Jacob acquired a lot of e-mail addresses by using a mechanism that allows e-mail addresses to be acquired in exchange for issuing coupons.

◆ 2: Utilizing the "Ambassador System" BrüMate succeeded in increasing sales by introducing an ambassador system that can receive $ 20 (about 2200 yen) by answering a questionnaire to its service and providing feedback He said that he did. Although the cost of over 2,000 yen per ambassador is not small, the average purchase amount per customer for the company is over 70 dollars (about 8000 yen), so it seems that we can secure enough return on cost .

◆ 3: Improve conversion rate <br> Conversion rate is the most important index for online shops. The conversion rate in BrüMate is around 4% on average, and it is within the industry as an average class. The company is promoting the brush up of the site by repeating the A / B test for several months, and it is planned to develop a new design site in the summer of 2018. Especially for BrüMate, which has an average purchase price of around $ 70 (about 8000 yen), improvement in this area is very emerging as the conversion rate increase of 0.1% leads to sales of $ 28,000 (about 3.2 million yen) It is said to be important to.

◆ 4: Importance of retargeting
In BrüMate, only 4% of our daily customers have achieved conversions. The important thing here is to guide customers back to the website and lead them to purchase. Jacob said that he is using retargeting to customers by utilizing advertisements such as Facebook, Instagram and Google Adwords.

Also, the large amount of e-mail addresses we have acquired are used for marketing. The company already owns more than 250,000 email addresses, and the sales generated from the mailing list delivered reaches 20% of the total. Although using mail may be taken as a steady sales activity, you should not ignore having a lot of power in actual sales.

By SumAll

Apart from the use of mail, sales development at Amazon is not negligible. As of July 2018, BrüMate's sales at Amazon exceeded $ 40,000 a month (about 4.5 million yen), but it seems that no advertising expenses are being spent on here. The cost to pay for Amazon's marketplace will, of course, occur, but considering the trouble of stocking the products in-house and packing them according to the order, the margin remaining at hand will not change much.

Mr. Jacob also said that he used the cloud funding service "Kickstarter", but the actual campaign ended in a painful failure, and it seems that Jacob's cloud funding was not a good option for Mr. Jacob. Meanwhile, it seems that the strategy of offering products to bloggers and influencers to advertise has been effective, and it is said that it will be $ 250,000 (about 28 million yen) in the period of "Black Friday" which is one of America's largest sales periods ) In terms of sales volume.

As of July 2018, the gross profit ratio before deducting advertising costs in BrüMate is 59% on average. Also, the average traffic per month to the website is between 400,000 and 500,000 accesses per month, the conversion rate is 4% and the return rate is 15%. And Facebook has 280 followers, it seems to be a strong "asset" at the company.

BrüMate - Home
https://www.facebook.com/MyBruMate

For Mr. Jacob who started the business, the most difficult thing was to stick to the attitude of "not accepting external investment". From the moment of the company's establishment Mr. Jacob has always stuck with developing self-funded business, he suffered inseparable loss in "opportunity loss" which can not make the product due to cash flow actually and miss the sales He said that he also has experience. However, from a long-term perspective, this policy seems to have been convincing to Mr. Jacob, and as a result, I am satisfied that I led the business to success.

Finally, as an advice to those who want to start a business, Jacob said, "The only ability to separate entrepreneurs' success and failure is whether they can" pivot ". Faced with problems and headwinds in developing businesses can be said to be a daily routine. However, whether to be able to flexibly change the strategy (pivot) flexibly in response to the situation rather than sticking to his own thoughts at such times is an important factor that determines the success and failure of the business Mr. Jacob is giving advice.

By Carsten Tolkmit