Hello Hello Hello 👋
Welcome to the very first edition of Closer to Customers. We are so glad to have you all here.
If you were too excited to subscribe to this newsletter, here is what it is going to be about:
Stories.
Yes, stories.
We mean not any stories but stories of how your favorite DTC e-commerce brands became a success by cracking the code of getting closer to their customers.
In this fortnight’s edition, we will be covering how the ever-manly and funny Dr. Squatch gets closer to its customers!
Jack Haldrup, the founder of Dr. Squatch, faced a condition called Psoriasis, a skin disease marked by red, itchy, scaly patches. The typical soaps available in the market aggravated this skin edition. To avoid it, Jack used to go to the farmer’s market to get natural, handmade soaps for himself.
Until it hit him - Couldn’t there be more people like me who need a natural soap?
And folks, this is how Dr. Squatch was born!
2017 - Inflection Point
💡 Raindrop changed the website, social ads, product images, and also Dr. Squatch’s email communications. And then they dropped a video.
120 million views
100,000 shares
And more than $100,000,000 in sales
That’s 100. Ducking. Million!
Post 2017 - Journey to Scale
You thought we were going to share any other meme than Dr. Squatch? 😄
Well, they focused on four pillars:
Let’s break them down further.
Dr. Squatch catered to a market that was not addressed before. Heck, we would even go so far as to say that the market didn’t even exist.
Bigger soap players like P&G, and Unilever majorly focused on women for marketing their soaps. They knew that women were usually the demographic that made the decision of buying soaps for the household. So why do they even target men?
Dr. Squatch grabbed this opportunity and built their marketing campaigns around men and explained why they can’t use the same soap that their Mama bought for them.
💡 Lesson for the DTC founder: The gold is in the niche.
Once Dr. Squatch had boiled down on their target audience, they deep dived into their needs and desires.
What was something that these men were not doing right?
How can they be better men?
💡 Dr. Squatch had to ensure that they bring the true, real men out of their cocoons.
This led them to position their product as a soap for the manly chops-his-own-firewood male, who wants natural soaps but doesn’t want to smell like lavender and patchouli.
And they didn’t stop there. They communicated this message across all their marketing communications.
Website? Check
Emails? There
Socials? Hell yeah
Ads? Ofcourse!
Their about us page for instance is a perfect example of storytelling. They are not just connecting with their audience but also building a community of men who are sick of using flowery soaps and want to smell like men.
And they have spread this message across their homepage and product descriptions as well.
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that ads have been the most important channel for Dr. Squatch. Ever since its inception, Dr. Squatch has always focused on ads.
But since their partnership with Raindrop, they have become the master of video ads.
💡 Their video ads are a perfect marriage of entertainment and education.
And dare I say, they start with great hooks. How often do you come across a video that starts with “Your soap is shit!”
And it's not just the hook. Even the language they use in their videos resonates closely with their target audience and is picked up from their day-to-day communications.
This is relatability done right!
Once they were able to crack their video ads, they also repurposed them in many ways across socials which added to it getting more viral. They also managed to get a slot in Superbowl in 2021, which captured more attention and raked in more sales, and also made them more memorable.
Dr. Squatch had cracked the secret of making effective and viral video ads, but virality doesn’t last unless repurposed and redistributed.
Ever since its success with video ads, Dr. Squatch has been repurposing its narrative and building the same messaging with the same personality across all its socials.
They didn't fiddle a lot with their videos and mostly used the same people, playing the same characters, in usually the same setup. This helped them build on the familiarity they had first developed with their audience.
💡 They also created an extension of their personality by creating memes around their videos or around their soap and made their audience come back to them to not just buy but also to get entertained.
Don’t trust us? They have got a following of more than 720 thousand people across Instagram and Twitter.
Dr. Squatch has been successfully creating a halo effect around their brand using humor. Their brand personality of being manly, but funny is continuously attracting their audience towards them.
The liking towards their ads and content is also driving their audience to purchase their product.
💡 One of the top two or three things is I bought it because I loved the video that I saw on YouTube or Facebook, which is a funny reason to buy a product if you really think about it.
- A happy Dr. Squatch customer
The humor they use in their videos and social media is making them appear more human which is further helping them connect with their customers. The positive emotions associated with the brand are helping them get more buyers and fans that keep coming back to them.
Dr. Squatch is a great example for social media managers to prove the point that engagement drives sales 😀
In an interview with Shopify, Jack Haldrup shared his two recommendations for new e-commerce entrepreneurs:
And folks, that’s how Dr. Squatch got closer to their customers and became a 9-figure brand.
What was your key learning from Dr. Squatch? Share it on LinkedIn or Twitter and tag us to get an exclusive invite to our community of e-commerce founders and marketers.
We recently did an AMA with Jamie Roller, Sr. Marketplace Manager, Growth Channels at Dr. Squatch. Jamie had some golden nuggets to share about growing a DTC brand.
The AMA was exclusively shared in our DTC drive community. To ensure you don’t miss more such AMAs, join the community right now by hitting the button below.
That’s all for today folks.
I hope you’ll enjoyed reading the very first edition of Closer to Customers. If you’ll got any feedback or suggestions regarding the newsletter, please share them with us by replying to this email.
And also let us know what challenges you are facing in getting closer to your customers.
Let those replies come!
Until next time,
Adios! 🤝
