Malia Mathis & Lance Jeffery of Moderne Monocle, and Jon Aragon of Native Supply, joined EmberTribe's very own founders to discuss their journeys as start-up entrepreneurs and how they've paved the way for building a customer-centric D2C eCommerce brand in their niches.
In this interview:
Josh: This is a series where we're just diving deep behind the scenes with some early-stage founders to uncover those highly practical lessons to help other entrepreneurs in our community. And so, as an agency, as EmberTribe, we're really fortunate to be able to work with a lot of talented founders, people who have years of experience in business.
But also, people who have figured out how to do this as they go. And so, I'm really excited for our guests today and I figured, let's just kick this off. Lance and Malia, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about yourselves and your business.
Lance: Hey Josh. Thanks for having us. Yeah, our business is Moderne Monocle and it was founded by my beautiful wife here, Malia. I'll let her tell us a little about how we came across founding Moderne Monocle. And the little hint is the reading glasses we have on.
Malia: Yes. Like most of us, both of us lost vision in our 40s and neither of us really resonated with the reading glasses. I think for me, mostly the problem was I could never find them. I'd buy them and I have them in all the rooms, and then as soon as I would try to read something, I'll be like, "Where's my glasses?"
Lance: And one day I went to go read a menu and I was like, "Where's my glasses?" I could not find them once again. And I was like, "Maybe if I had just tied it around my neck, I could find them." Like joking to myself. And I looked down and I had a pendant on and I was like, "Hmm."
Full light bulb moment. And so, that was the start of it. And then I had to just do all the recon. I was like, "I have no jewelry making background." But I always liked fashion and art. And so, it just a lot of research and a lot of shut doors and-
Lance: A lot of Shark Tank.
Malia: We watched Shark Tank like every episode.
Josh: Yeah. It's amazing. You guys have really struck the balance between utility and fashion accessory. And the fact that you can market to people with both of those angles is a tremendous asset for your business. John, let's go over to you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your business.
John: Yeah, yeah. Thank you for having me. Yeah. John Aragon, designer, entrepreneur, wear many hats. Yeah. I helped start the company, Native Supply, and everything that we do there with HGA, with my business partner and mentor KB. And on the front end essentially, we're designing clothes. Really, really, really, really cool clothes.
But in so many other ways, from the onset, we wanted to create a vehicle to communicate our convictions and our values. So, as much as it is clothing, which is great and it's stylistic, and we put a lot of attention and detail into it, what we've said historically is just really, it is a vehicle to communicate a message that is really at the core of who we are, what we believe in terms of our relationship with God and how we should relate with the world that is in need.
So yeah, we started a few years ago not knowing that it would grow into what it is today. Though we had the hopes and aspirations that it would. But along the way, I think we quickly found, as we are trying to solve the internal, external and philosophical problems for our fans and customers, that we were making a meaningful impact in people's lives.
We're creating an experience for our customers. We're trying to cultivate a certain type of lifestyle for them. Though our target audience is that, we've gone outside of those faith communities, which is really incredible as well.
Josh: That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Something that both of you have touched on, I'd love for both of you to answer: How do you get customer feedback and how do you go about acting on customer feedback?
John: We have the traditional ways that we are collecting reviews and our CSR team is managing either questions or concerns from our customers, which is really awesome and great. One of the things we started to do a few years ago was pack and ship everything. Our team is making every single piece.
So, as we're shipping the products out, we also ship out a little card that talks about our values, our convictions. And then from season to season, the seasonal collections that we release, we have a particular message behind each of those pieces. And then we ask for their feedback and that's either through a form like the QR code or an email that we get back.
It's not just limited to the quality of the clothing, the messaging that's on the clothing itself, which is really powerful, but just the holistic experience that they've had. So, if you have ideas, send them over. If there's something you would like us to do, let us know.
One of the things that we did that in so many ways was really a response to a moment that I think we were all living this past year during COVID, we retrofitted all of our factories to produce N95 masks. Myself, KB, Nat, others from our team, we have relationships with nonprofits and people in the medical industry and we just had a burden for it.
For us, it really wasn't about making money, profit. We had somewhat of a campaign strategy, but we had the means to do it. We had the machines to do it. We had the team to do it. And we were able to facilitate that for local hospitals here, up in New York, nonprofits here in our city, and in so many ways that was for us coming alongside our customers, where I think for many of us, I'm sure we felt this existential crisis of, I want to help.
I want to contribute meaningfully to this thing. And what we said is, "Hey, if you order one of our custom HGA masks, we're going to make 10 N95 masks." And then as the supply chain of that depleted, we moved towards surgical masks and I think we're doing like 20 per one mask.
We didn't make money off of it, but it was just really a way for us to speak into the moment and respond to what our customers were experiencing and just using our services. Things that we're familiar with, the things that we're able to execute well and for a good cause as well.
TJ Jones: Hey, John, one question I had as a follow up is, I know that your team subscribes to more of a scarcity business model. We can talk more about that later, but how has that played out in some of the user feedback, reviews that you get, maybe tell us a little bit more how the scarcity model impacts maybe how folks are responding and leaving reviews and user generated content and things like that.
John: Yeah. Great question. That was intentional from the onset, what can be...and depending on the industry you're in, inventory's a huge thing, right? We're not just dealing with digital products, but we're dealing with physical items. So, in some respect it is inventory, but we are intentionally trying to create scarcity behind the products to create momentum, to create anticipation for our customers.
That incentivizes people to either spend more or share more. But I think the scarcity model has served us well, because from season to season, we're dropping dozens and dozens of different items.
We have conditioned our audience to know that if I don't buy this now, it may not come back.
Malia: Yes, we get our feedback mostly from reviews. We have a couple of different ways that we get the reviews. We send a follow-up email after they received their purchase, just to see how they like our product, and if there's anything that they would share, anything like that.
We also have a review system on our website, which is an app on Shopify, which is Loox, it's like L-O-O-X, in which they're encouraged to review our product. Also, through our Klaviyo emails that we send out, we encourage reviews.
Lance: And Facebook.
Malia: And Amazon as well. So, we go through all the reviews. It's a small shop we have. I do all the customer service and we read every single review and then sometimes I'll even reach out to the customer and be like, "Hey, can we chat? I'd love to hear more about this."
So, just really trying to keep, like you said, John, keeping our finger on the pulse of our customers and being really thorough with things like reading all the Facebook comments and all the IG comments, and seeing if there's any validity.
It's just cool to connect with these people I don't even know, you know what I mean? So, I like having that one-on-one experience with customers.
Josh: I just want to underscore that point. There's a guy, Paul Graham, who has an essay that's been cited a lot. It's to do the unscalable things. And following up with every customer, it won't scale. But I think a lot of times we're obsessed with scale and we're obsessed with what can be systematized and then you miss out on these opportunities to get great feedback, great qualitative feedback from customers, which is going to set you up for success in the future.