A Brilliant $20,000,000/Month Shopify Niche Store transcript

It's quite unbelievable how in e-commerce there are bootstrap brands that are going toe-to-toe with some of the big giants such as E.L.F. Cosmetics. In today's video, I'm talking about a brand called Smooch, a Shopify store that is in the beauty niche. And if you don't know about them, today's going to be a treat. But even if you do know about them, today is going to be a treat because we're going to be exploring their bestselling products, their ads, and their overall strategy to scaling to $20 million a month plus.

Now, you can see from their traffic distribution, they're driving about 4.7 million monthly visitors to their store right now, and they're growing at over 100%. Most of that traffic is from the US, but a lot of it is also from the United Kingdom. So, we're going to dive into all that stuff. And if you don't know who I am, my name is Ari, and I like making these videos because they're a good opportunity for me to do some deep research into some of these hyperscaling brands.

And that research is helping me hypers scale my brand, which is also growing at a really fast pace. We're doing about 500K a month right now. And prior to this brand, I was running an agency and community called the Chemi where we're spending $10 million a year. And we have the highest meta agency partner status on here. I'm really excited about this community, but that's besides the point. This is Smooch's bestselling product right here.

It's a colorchanging foundation, which sounds really simple when you think about it, and you may be wondering, how can you scale such a simple product to these levels? And the answer is through marketing and offers. So, for example, right here you can see their two bottle offer gets you a free smooch blender, a free mystery gift, and free shipping for only an extra $10. So, this is literally what you'd call a no-brainer offer.

I mean, who wouldn't want to take this if they're already interested in buying one bottle, they might as well buy two and spend the extra money to get all those benefits. Now, they are running this on a subscription. So, this is a subscription offer. It's a lot more expensive when you buy it outside of a subscription. Then they have some scarcity right under that and a money back guarantee to kind of handle that objection and maybe the fear that some people may have when buying things online.

Then they go straight into testimonials and more benefits. I mean, this is all so beautifully branded. In my opinion, this is probably one of the best branded stores on Shopify right now. I'm not even kidding because it perfectly blends direct response, offer creation, scarcity, product design, and branding, right? It just does it all so so well. Now, here's an interesting thing about them, though. I actually did a video on them, and I've been keeping an eye on them for a very long time back when this was their main winning product, which is a peel off lip stain.

Now, the lip stain trend is absolutely booming. There's 165,000 people searching for this every single month. But, as you see, it has sort of plateaued even though it's continuously growing, right? This is a great product category to be in, but it has plateaued. But, as I mentioned, these guys do everything right. So, they're continuously innovating and they've been able to hop on new product categories, even adding peptide serums to their product stack and collagen lifting masks, which we've also covered on the channel before.

So, that's another major key to their hypers scale. It's just continuous product innovation and subscription building, right? So, that's the beauty of it. Not only are they able to acquire subscribers for all these products, but also continuously hop on new product waves and innovating with their branding, product formulas, etc. Right. And now let's hop into the other engine that's driving a lot of this growth, right?

Which is their meta ads, right? So, as I mentioned, I'm a huge meta ads fan. You can see right here, they have 1,900 active ads at once. So, right now, they're running 1,900 active ads. That doesn't include ads that are inactive, right? Ads that they've tested in the past that they've turned off. These are all their current active ads, which is crazy. And one strategy that I want to highlight here, which is incredibly powerful and something that all of you can do as well.

It's something I'm doing for my brand is advertising through different pages. Right? So, we're going to look at some of these ads specifically, especially some of these high performing ones. All of these right here are their most highest impression ads, which is awesome. Those tend to be the ones that perform the best. Now, here's the thing, though. If you're only good at marketing, that can only take you so far. One of the great things that these guys do is they continuously innovate.

They continuously improve their product. They're continuously trying to improve the customer experience. And one of the easiest ways that you can improve your customer experience is to improve your shipping. One of the best companies that can help you do this for e-commerce is called Ship Velocity. This is one of my good friends company and I appreciate them sponsoring this video. I'm super happy to help them grow. They provide an incredible service for ecom brands.

Unlike a lot of 3PL's out there that basically rinse you any way they can. They offer no storage fees, no software fees, nothing like that. And my friend Tanner comes from an e-commerce background. He's one of the owners and now he's helping brands scale pretty much fulltime with one to three day shipping. On average, they're usually saving brands at least 30% on their fulfillment costs, which is pretty unbelievable, right?

I mean, that can increase your margins by 30% pretty much, which is insane. Not to mention the downstream effects of just having better shipping and being closer to your fulfillment partner. pretty much every brand that works with them grows extremely fast. And again, because they're so close to the ecom trenches, they provide all the resources you need, they're going to be there with you in the trenches helping you scale, which is amazing to me.

That's a huge deal cuz ultimately, you want to be a partner with your 3PL. And so, being able to have such a close, tight-knit relationship is extremely valuable. So, if you are an ecom brand and you're looking to improve your fulfillment and customer experience, then book a call with them below. They'll get you a quote and they'll help you out at the very least. Even if you're not the right partner, they're going to send you off with a ton of value regardless.

Thanks again to Ship Velocity. Check them out below. And what you can see here though is they're running from several pages. So they're running from Korean beauty tips. They're running from Cosmetic Times. And then of course their main brand page. But here's what's super cool, right? So let's take a look at some of these Cosmetic Times ads just so you can see exactly what I'm talking about. So here's one of their top ads, right, that they're running from this specific page.

And one interesting thing here that you can see is they're going after this solutionawaware market. So they're saying after decades of settling for close enough shades, there's finally a better way. This innovative foundation actually adapts to your unique skin tone. No more guessing, no more mismatches. So that's a really brilliant way to market your product, right? Especially in a crowded market. Obviously, beauty is one of the most crowded markets out there.

It's one of the biggest markets on Shopify. So it's really smart to address that, right? address the elephant in the room, the fact that there are so many choices out there, but choices that have pretty much failed for people and then positioning your product as the solution, right? The thing that actually will work. Oh my goodness, this is taking forever to load. But this is also what's interesting about this video.

It's only 8 seconds long, right? So, they're running all kinds of ads. They're running these bottom offunnel ads that are sort of quick and to the point, very Tik Tok style. That's all it is, right? I mean, it's just showcasing the product and it's talking about the crazy price, right? So, it just kind of makes you want to go shop right now. These are really great bottom of the funnel ads and definitely an ad style that you need to incorporate into your campaigns.

But if we scroll further to the top, these are their highest impression ads. Of course, there's another bottom of ad here, Prime Day sale. That's a really, really easy ad that you can replicate for your brand. just having like a sale ad that's running and capturing the bottom of the funnel, people that have visited the site, but maybe they need an extra incentive to convert. But here's the big key. You can't just have these kind of ads.

If you only ran these ads, you're not going to get good results or at the very least, you're not going to be able to scale, right? Because you're only targeting people that already know about your product. This right here is the major key that is scaling these guys up to the moon. They are brilliant at targeting the top of funnel, right? So take a look at this hook. So it's saying at 63 and by the way this is a five minute long ad.

So they're running five minute long ads and 8second long ads. Let's take a look super quick at some of it. We're not going to watch this whole thing. We may not be able to watch any of it actually because this is superus. [music] I was [music] reaching for toilet paper when I heard his voice behind me. Michelle. My stomach [music] dropped. I hadn't seen Peter in four years. Not since he handed me divorce papers after [music] 31 years of marriage.

I turned around and watched his face. >> So, you see, so far, right, we have no idea what this is about. Like, I mean, [music] >> so far this video is not about the product at all, right? This is kind of introducing the story that people can get hooked by, right? especially older women that maybe fear that this could happen to them. So, a big key to scaling is being able to capture someone's attention and bring them into a story where you can tie your product into it.

So, that's what they do towards the end and then they actually lead you into an advertorial page which is from Cosmetic Times, one of their pages and this basically just educates people, right? They're providing value and then they lead people to the main landing page which we already covered, right? So those top offunnel ads do an amazing job at capturing someone's attention that has never heard of this brand that has maybe never even considered buying something like this and then convincing them through this funnel, right?

This very congruent and persuasive funnel into then buying this product. Really smart, right? And then you pair those two together, the top of funnel and the bottom of the funnel, and you scale to the moon. Now, another thing that's interesting about them is just the amount of diversity that they have at the ad level, right? You can see they have all sorts of ads as we mentioned. They have these bottom of the funnel ads.

They have these top offunnel stories. They're driving ads from a variety of different pages and they're driving traffic to a variety of different funnels as well. So, they also have this preander that you can see right here. And everything they do is just so beautiful and congruent. But that's kind of a major key these days. It's not just the creative diversity. That's something a lot of people talk about, but it's also the funnel diversity. having different funnels that you can put people through to have a more customized customer journey, right?

It's incredible how fast you can grow when you do these kinds of things. And obviously, it's not easy. These guys are worldclass at it, but it's super inspiring, especially with this growth rate. I mean, this is just unbelievable, especially when you consider the size of their business, right? Growing at 139% at this scale is simply unbelievable. I look forward to getting to those levels myself. And hopefully you enjoyed this.

Follow me for more. Peace.