Frequent Flyer Formulates Travel-Friendly Dry Shampoo

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

I'd like to wish everyone a happy Boxing Day. Today's episode is going out on the 26th of December, episode 1090. Now if you are American or otherwise not familiar with Boxing Day, this is a day in which you are entitled to punch any member of your family who has frustrated you this holiday season. You can do so without any consequences. That's why it's called Boxing Day.

Actually now that I'm reading my notes more carefully, I may have exaggerated a bit. There's an alternative definition which says, "Boxing Day was traditionally a day off for servants and the day when they received a Christmas box from the master. The servants would also go home on Boxing Day to give Christmas boxes to their families." Okay, so I guess you got two definitions there, so just choose whichever one suits you best. Now as for today's story, this is Side Hustle School after all, when an on-the-go Canadian gets fed up with traveling hair care, she invents and sells her own formula of dry shampoo. How does it come to be, how does she get it out to the world, and what is the outcome?

All of that is coming up in today's story entitled Frequent Flyer Formulates Travel-Friendly Dry Shampoo. Stay tuned. As a senior account manager for a marketing agency, Laura Armstrong is most often found on a plane or in a hotel. The time, effort, and supplies needed to bring her hair to life on the road was a constant struggle. She turned to dry shampoo, but the traditional aerosols constantly made a mess.

The alternative shake powders were just as frustrating. And they all came in one shade, white. Unable to find any options that met her needs, she set to the task of creating her own dirty-blonde natural dry shampoo, super packable in a small tin with a no-mess applicator brush. Wash, rinse, and dry turned into dip, dab, and go, but little did she know the long-haul journey it would take her on. Her side hustle, aptly named Dirty-Blonde Dry Shampoo, started with a Rover account, where she walked dogs as a means to save up the money she needed, avoiding any debt.

From there, she set up her website on WordPress, paid for social media ads, and invested in enough inventory to make 500 units of dry shampoo. Buying in bulk like that was key to her profit margin. After researching the market of regular aerosol dry shampoos and taking into account the elevated experience she hoped to provide, she set the price at $22 per unit. Laura's first sale was to her sister, but it was far from her last. Soon she was dedicating her weekends to making more product, rising early each morning to ship out packages, and sometimes even doing a second run to the post office late in the afternoon.

To compete at her higher price point, Laura offered a buy-one-get-one free sale for new customers as a small push for them to purchase. It cuts into that profit margin, but achieves the result of a growing customer base. She continues to experiment with different marketing strategies, including doing Dirty-B features on her blog and putting herself out there to request coverage from other outlets. After her experiments, she's found that her audience responds best to the more personal posts. Facebook is where most of her sales occur, and happy customers have been her best source of referrals.

Constantly adjusting to find the right combination of platform and marketing to build sales, Laura noticed that ads were bringing in the leads, but her initial website was confusing, and often lost those interested browsers before they became customers. She switched to Shopify with its simpler checkout process, and her rate of abandoned shopping carts immediately dropped. Looking professional and modern is a priority in Laura's branding. Hiring a photographer to take photos of the products got her off to a good start. From there, she worked overtime to align all of her marketing elements into a well-defined online persona.

Her second product was another natural outgrowth of her own needs. Frustrated with how expensive and damaging hair oil is, Laura again created her own version and added it to her product line. This addition led to the formation of a hair kit, basically a bundle, comes with dry shampoo, that applicator brush, and hair oil to take care of any mane from root to tip. One year in, monthly profits range from $600 to $2,000 depending on the season and on what marketing experiment she's trying that month. For now, Laura continues to build and expand, investing much of those profits into growth.

This side hustle is a main attraction. Alright so here's a question, well first of all congratulations to Laura, it looks like a really fun project. Why does Shopify make for a better customer experience for an e-commerce site like Dirty Blonde? Like I mentioned, she started with WordPress, and then she turned to Shopify. And by the way, just by way of disclosure, both of these companies have been a sponsor for Side Hustle School in the past, so I'm a fan of both WordPress and Shopify.

But the situation here is, WordPress is actually more customizable and can do everything that Shopify can do. But Shopify is more turnkey, so it works out of the box you could say, which is appropriate for Boxing Day, and is purpose built for selling products. So Shopify is all about e-commerce, basically when you go through the tutorial there's all kinds of templates, they make it really easy. And with WordPress it requires more programming, some plugins, custom scripts, etc. So it's therefore more flexible overall, but that kind of thing can be overkill if you don't have programming skills, you just want to focus on selling something.

If you just want to focus on like here is my product, what is the most effective way to communicate about this with clarity so that my customer is not confused, so they know exactly what it's about and why they should purchase, and then how they can purchase in the most easy, optimal, and effective way. So as I mentioned, Shopify is a partner of the show. You can go to shopify.com/sidehustle if you'd like to get a free 21-day trial. If you've already got something else that's working for you, then that's great, no need to change. All right, that's it for today.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes, including links to Dirty Blonde Dry Shampoo, anything else I mentioned in the episode, will be at sidehustleschool.com/1090. That is for episode 1,090. Thank you for listening. I don't think it's a holiday tomorrow, but I will be here nonetheless.

My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.