Project Repat’s Nathan Rothstein on how a focus on email sign ups led to $4million sales in 2015 (episode 043)

28th March by Ellie

Nathan Rothstein is one of the founders of Project Repat. It’s an American business which turns your favourite old t-shirts into quilts. You might be thinking oh, ok, so they have to convince someone to trust them with their favourite t-shirt interesting. And yes it is, and we’ll chat about that later, but what makes it even more interesting is that they’ve served over 55,000 customers and in 2015 did $4 million in sales.

Click to Tweet: @eCommasterplan #podcast – Project Repat’s, Nathan Rothstein explains how they have email marketing all sewn up.

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About the business

eCommerce Business Structure – Online Only
Product Range Scale – niche
On a Shopify platform
2.5 people in the business – 60 people in their 2 production providers
Based in the US, sell mainly in the US and Canada but can sell globally
Key widgets in the website:
- Klaviyo – for email marketing
- Tag Board – for social media
- Referral Candy – for customer referrals

Listen to hear how Nathan Rothstein got started in eCommerce

Most Awesome Thing Right Now

The most awesome thing for Project Repat at the moment is the speed at which the business has grown. The team never considered that the business would take off so quickly. During 2015 they were virtually living in their office space, struggling to drive traffic to their website. Their numbers for 2016 are 3 times that of the same period last year.

On the Radar for the Coming Months

The Project Repat team are always looking at ways to create more efficient production systems – so this will continue to remain a priority over the next few weeks. They are also looking at ways to use Facebook, email marketing and brand partnerships to continue their business growth.

Listen to hear how effective email marketing has been for Project Repat.

4 Tips for Building Trust With Potential Customers

Nathan shared some great tips for building trust with potential clients:

Follow up your email sign up with a welcome sequence that really explains who you are and what you are about.
Make sure that your website has a great explanation of your product, your process and your business.
Encourage your customers to leave testimonials and share on social media.
Incentivise referrals.

You can hear about all this on the podcast, for free – right now…

eCommerce Book Top Tip

Contagious by Jonah Berger

eCommerce Traffic Top Tip

Nathan recommends Facebook advertising for his top traffic tip – he is impressed by the improved web platform and the wide variety of adverts that are now available. Test which work for you and then invest in them.

Tool Top Tip

The Project Repat team use Slack the team messaging app – they find it’s great to manage a lot of people working in different places – important for them as they do not have a central office.

Start Up Top Tip

Nathan advises start ups to try and get customer validation as quickly as possible – create the product and see if people will buy it rather than asking them if they will buy it.

If your business didn’t exist, which eCommerce Business Would you like to be Running?

If Nathan wasn’t working in Project Repat he would like to revisit a previous project – a marketplace to fund education by shopping local – he would make it work.