Side Hustle into a 1,000+ monthly subscription service with Jessica Principe from All Girl Shave Club (episode 334)
Jessica Principe is the founder of All Girl Shave Club, a razor subscription service for women. Founded in 2016 they now serve 1,000s of women across North America every month.
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How Shave Club Started
Jessica started her business as a side hustle. As many great ideas do, Jessica’s idea came to her in the shower, while she was shaving.
At the time there was a big gap in the market that needed filling and Jessica felt that a beautiful subscription business would be a great way to deliver.
Jessica really invested in a great pre-launch to validate her product, meet her customers and build her email list.
About the Business
- Near Boston in the Eastern United States
- Sells to the USA and Canada
- Sells razor systems, whipped shaving butter and other related products
- Standout Product: First Shave Kit for young girls
- Running on Shopify now, but started the business on CrateJoy
Jessica’s Favorite Widgets: Recharge for recurring payments, and currently exploring ReBuy that allows for in check out upsells for subscription customers.
The Team
Jessica uses contractors including a VA who handles customer service, and an OBM who handles content creation, email marketing, systems building and other projects.
Jessica also has fulfillment helpers, including her husband, who manages operations on his days off from his Firefighting job.
Choosing Subscriptions
The All Girls Shave Club is mostly subscription, but also sells individual products via their website. Jessica is herself a big fan of subscriptions and wanted to add convenience and delight for her customers.
What she didn’t predict was her customers desire to buy other items via the website. Jessica said that sometimes customers wanted to try things out, but they also wanted to add other items to their existing orders.
Today the business does 85% subscription and 15% single product buys.
Her First Shave Kit
The ‘Her First Shave Kit’ is one of Jessica’s passion products.
She was inspired by her own experience with her own first shave, which was awkward and uncomfortable and wanted to provide a kit that included accessible tips and Levers: Bridge the Gap Between Tactics and Vision tricks for younger girls.
Fighting Churn
One of the strategies that Jessica uses to combat subscription churn is providing delightful surprises in each box.
The subscription is also set up to give special attention to customizing frequency needs.
Jessica says they work hard to ensure they are meeting customers where they are based on lifecycles and not forcing them into commitments that don’t work for them.
Customer Acquisition
Getting customers in the first place is another difficult thing for many subscription based businesses. Jessica credits their robust prelaunch program to launching their business and acting as a mini marketing army.
Another hugely important strategy for getting people on board has been, counterintuitively, making it really easy to leave the service.
Building Excitement
Getting people excited for special occasions and getting them excited before products become available has been a way of amplifying excitement and loyalty among superfan customers.
What’s Next
All Girls Shave Club is launching an affiliate program that her team has put a lot of effort into making fun and educational.
They are taking their affiliate program a step further than many other companies and building strong partnerships to set people up for success.
Jessica’s number one tip for creating a great subscription business? Plan a great pre-launch.
eCommerce Book Top Tip
- Believe IT: How to Go from Underestimated to Unstoppable by Jamie Kern Lima
eCommerce Traffic Top Tip
- FB and Instagram Paid Ads make up a lot of their traffic, but it was a YouTube influencer who really put their business on the map.
Tool Top Tip
Growth Top Tip
- Consistency! Focus on the things that work and double down on those.
Interview Links
Related episodes
- Listen to all our Startup episodes
- Listen to all our Subscription episodes
- Listen to our Affliate Marketing MasterClass on the Keep Optimising Podcast
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