$150 million in sales in three years is crazy, says Ben, a cofounder of True Classic, the fastest-growing and most profitable DTC startup. They started with $3000 in the capital.
Over the last few newsletters, I have highlighted how they captured significant demand generation so fast. Readers can integrate, challenge, compare or question their strategy and execution to gain higher ROIs tomorrow.
True Classic launched as a side project. It did $26k and 651 orders in the first month.
Now more than two million orders with over 150 million in revenue, 40+ employees, selling 30k+ shirts a day, donating 15k+ shirts a month, and profitable all the way.
What’s their secret sauce?
743 things, but there are three pillars: True Classics identify the following
1. Execute at warp speed.
The founders, Matthew, Nick and Ryan, are fearless executors with a high-risk tolerance.
They test every growth initiative under the sun. They pull the trigger, learn from the data and either ride the lift or cut and run.
2. Care MORE about your customers and employees.
Care more than your competitors about the potential customers you’re serving. The companies that provide the most value will always win. Care more about how the product works. It is how to build community and trust faster.
Employees– build a team of the best you can afford.
Give them autonomy and flexibility, and don’t micromanage -let them be the experts you hired them to be. Inspire them, motivate, encourage them, and give them incentives and clear goals that they can work towards achieving. If you do all that, they’ll have no reason to leave.
3. Creativity is massively underrated.
Almost all businesses are turning into commodity businesses. To win now, you must paint with different colours than everyone else to stand out and differentiate your business.
Invest more time and money on creativity and how to differentiate your business better. Do better than your competitors.
True Classic – we create humorous ads (9.6 million views) for paid media because it adds value to people’s life when you can brighten their day and make them smile, even for a moment. People remember. Creativity plays into everything within the business.
More nuggets of wisdom from True Classic
True Classic seek human-to-human authentic connections online with people. They build relatability into all their communications with their audience. No other t-shirt brand talks about its products as we do, says True Classic.
- Ben says that unique creativity and content are True Classics’ superpowers. That’s one of the biggest strengths of our co-founder Ryan as he is just a creative genius and a huge reason why we were able to grow so fast and get momentum.
Debt provider: Wayflyer is their debt provider of choice. ( Wayflyer provides e-commerce stores with affordable unsecured loans to allow them to fund advertising and inventory in advance of selling items. It also offers detailed analytics to help clients to improve their sales performance.) The actual Classic director’s idea – was to raise debt rather than equity. They believe that if they run their business responsibly – they could scale faster and be more profitable in the medium to long term.
Premium valuation: Ben believes they have a gem of a company. He says, “It’s an unbelievable trajectory that hasn’t been seen in the D2C market before. The power –
if you operate profitably, you are at nobody’s mercy – you call all the shots.
Product Market fit: Bens’s view is that testing is super complicated because many people believe they’re being data-driven by looking at some numbers, but most need help understanding what they’re looking at. ‘At True Classic, what we do is have very different targets for very different tactics because we calibrate
them against this idea of incrementality’, says Ben
Videos: True Classic has millions of views with 30-second and two-minute commercials.
- YouTube is a more challenging channel to crack than TickTok,
- The creative bar is a lot higher on YouTube,
- Most brands are not that good at creativity and therefore cannot get lift off,
If your content is excellent, you get much interest and sometimes even convert better with longer-form content. Success is your brand story (strategic narrative) that allows you to scale content that matters. To succeed, start by
- genuinely thinking outside the box,
- be different (differentiate from your competitors)
- be resourceful,
- deeply understand the value of customer engagement over an extended period.
Customer Surveys: True Classic wants to know when customers first heard about their business. Surveys are calibrated on a day-to-day basis;to gain insights into
- A deeper understanding of their customers,
- Who are they?
- What do they want?
- What do they feel?
- What do they want to feel?
- What are their problems?
- How do you communicate best with them?
In their five physical retail stores, over 65% of potential customers are buying offline (and declining). They use in-store cameras to understand what people are
- picking up,
- how often something’s getting touched,
- picked up versus put back on a Shelf
- versus taken to a fitting room,
In-store surveys
- Ask them how they first heard about us: True Classic want to understand if someone started in physical retail and purchased online.
True Classic Strategy Tips
- Blue Ocean strategy– ensure your market has a large Total Addressable Market,
- Steer clear of niches; it’s less scalable. Where privacy and regulations are everywhere today – it is too cost prohibitive to find and grow niche brands -that must advertise more effectively on Meta to grow.
- Product is the absolute foundation of growth – have the best products,
- Be very good at – marketing, website, landing pages and email and SMS |Mobile phone capture,
- AI stay close to this because it may change the game completely.
- Strive to have the best customer service in the World. We at True Classic take it seriously.
Regards
David
