056: Regal Gentleman’s Liam Jennings with great startup and social media tips, plus lots of Shopify ideas

Liam Jennings is co-founder of Regal Gentleman an online only retailer who sell the very best male grooming products. Launched in late 2014 they’ve had quite the journey already, and now 150% year on year growth (revenue and customers).

Click to Tweet: @eComMasterPlan #Podcast listen to hear how Liam Jennings has successfully groomed his business Regal Gentleman

About the business

• eCommerce Business Structure – Online Only
• Product Range Scale – niche
• On a Shopify platform
• 2 people part-time in the business
• Offer a streamlined range of 90 premium products.
• Based in the UK, sell globally (75% UK business)
• They use Christophe Suant for their photography
• Key widgets in the website:
  • Klaviyo – e-mail marketing
  • Recharge – subscription and recurring billing
  • Swell Rewards – customer rewards
  • Product Reviews by Shopify

Listen to hear how Liam Jennings got started in eCommerce

Most Awesome Thing Right Now

Liam is most excited by Regal Gentleman’s mission – he explains that when he launched the business their focus was purely on sales. Following a bumper Xmas from February – July sales began to dip, they realised it was because their proposition didn’t stand out from the crowd and they weren’t getting repeat purchases. Liam and his partner Josh created a new mission statement to keep them focused on their customers and their business goals – “To help without expectation and make some friends along the way”.

Listen to hear more about developing a unique proposition

On the Radar for the Coming Months

With a team of 2 working part-time in the business Liam admits that the current to do list is pretty long, so he gave us his top few priorities over the next few months.

Firstly to improve the loyalty scheme to continue to improve retention. In the old scheme people were collecting points without realising or understand how to use them. Their new system Swell Rewards is much more effective and better fits the needs of the business.

Liam and Josh will also be looking into personaltion – up-selling and cross-selling the right products to the right customer. They are going to test this out using Limespot.

Regal Gentleman are also going to be creating platform specific content including video for use on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and SnapChat.

Last but by no means least Liam will be looking to work full-time within the business.

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

eCommerce Book Top Tip

Jab Jab Jab Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk and Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

eCommerce Traffic Top Tip

As Regal Gentleman is such a young business they’re still exploring which methods are the most effective for them – they will be exploring this more over the next few months. To date they’ve had great success with Social Media it has driven a lot of traffic to their site with practically no budget.

Tool Top Tip

Liam has found that Hootsuite is a great tool to plan and schedule his social media.

Start Up Top Tip

Liam’s top tips for starting a business is to know when to say no, he learned from his experience that you will get lots of opportunities presented to you and you need to know what is right for you and your business. Liam also appreciates having a partner in the business – saying how nice it is to have someone with you on the journey – and that you shouldn’t be afraid to approach someone to come into the business with you.

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

Zappos

Interview Links

• Regalgentleman.com
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram