The Perspective #1

Welcome to the first edition of The Perspective by Oddit! 

Once a month we’ll send out actionable tips for creating brand-first and conversion-optimized customer experiences from the best in DTC.

In this months edition 🗞:

• A brand-first breakdown with Covey skincare

• The founder of the first DTC paper company circa 1993

• Why baboons are in need of a marketing director

• A Playlist for your best creative moments 

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Brand-First Breakdown: Covey Skincare

Covey believes that healthy skin shouldn’t require a 12-step routine – it’s why they created essential-only products that support your skin and work together in harmony. Let’s get started.

1. Desktop Navigation: The key to an effective navigation, as with any part of your site, is maintaining a clear design hierarchy.

Desktop Navigation Suggestions: 

• If ‘shop’ (or any navigation item) is going to have a dropdown, make sure users know what to expect by showing a chevron or ‘+’. 

• Unless your blog is critical to communicating your product’s value, move it inside the mobile menu and footer. It’s not important enough to draw attention away from your primary actions.

• If you have less than 5 products, remove search completely. It’s unnecessary and adds clutter to the nav for no reason.

• Add a primary shop action styled differently than the rest of the navigation. We suggest “Shop the Routine” in this case!

2. Mobile Menu: Utilize the white space in your mobile menu & build a design hierarchy of primary vs. secondary information to better guide users towards key actions.

Mobile Menu Suggestions: 

• Create a more distinct hierarchy of information. This can be as simple as showing primary pages larger, secondary pages smaller. 

• If you want to give clear access to each product, you can also load the ‘shop’ dropdown already open and make them visually compelling.

• Pull in a customer review – if new users use your menu to discover, this can be a great trust builder!

• Add an easily accessible blanket/primary action at the bottom.

3. Homepage: Keeping product cards/cross-sections simple and easy to scan is critical to driving users to the PDP.

Homepage Suggestions: 

• Make sure headings grab people. We suggest styling the “steps” differently than other headings and giving each its own color. 

• Try reformatting your image layout to take up less vertical space while still surfacing the same visuals (cause they’re great).

• Save the paragraph text for product pages – simplify this to the single most compelling selling feature of each product.

• Make sure your action is full width at the button of the product card, and use the extra canvas to show the step, and the price.

• Add a secondary action to each card to shop the full routine.

4. Product Page: This is the most critical part of your conversion journey – make every pixel count.

Product Page Suggestions: 

• Obtaining new customers is all about trust – make sure reviews are the first piece of content they see (if you don’t have many reviews, surface total customers!)

• Give your text ample room to breathe. Currently, the margins on left and right are much too wide on mobile, and they are forcing this section to be longer than it needs to be, and line lengths to be short.

• Pull the single most compelling statement about the product up into this section.

• Remove price from top – it’s stated on each of the variants already (one-time vs subscribe).

• Collapse subscription details into a simple popup or accordion.

• Update your quantity selector to be full-width.

• Reiterate the final price on the add to cart button so users aren’t forced to look back and forth.

• Clearly call out the savings associated with subscribing on the variant selector

• Simplify your secondary action below your add to cart.

• Pull your icons up the page – they clearly communicate the product benefits well.

If you enjoyed these tips, reply to this email and let us know. We love feedback :) 

P.S - Nik Sharma sent Covey over to us and Co-Founder Emily DiDonato is a big fan:

"SO incredibly helpful and valuable. The Oddit team allowed us to take a step back and re-think about our customer journey. The mockups and recommendations made perfect sense to our team, and helped our conversion rate without sacrificing the brand aesthetic we’ve worked so hard to establish. I’d highly recommend Oddit to any DTC company that’s conscious of their conversion rate, but isn’t willing to sacrifice their brand."

Founders Five 🖐

Founder: Warren Struhl, Founder and Partner at Myphoto.com and GOAT foods. 

Background: Warren’s been in the DTC space long before it was cool. In 1989, he started the first DTC paper business called PaperDirect. 

Today he and his sons Adam and Jonathan lead the team at My Photo and GOAT foods which includes brands like Pretzels.com and Licorice.com

Question 1: Warren, looking at your LinkedIn it’s obvious you’re a serial entrepreneur. You’ve built and sold businesses in paper, popcorn, pretzels, plaques, tennis memberships, digital photo products, just to name a few. 

They sound so different, how the hell did you make all of these successful? 

Answer: Can I confess?? They were not all successes. That would be like a baseball player never striking out! 

But...out of all my 30 plus startups and venture investments, I am batting about 500. I think the reason my percentage is high is that I have reasonably solid intuition about what humans want and what they will pay for. 

And, I am always looking at business opportunities that seem to be not obvious to others. 

Question 2: With all of these successes you must have had at least one enormous failure (spare us the ‘failures is where you learn the most speech’, we know..) with that said, do you have one, and what’s one main reason it ended up in the dumpster? 

Answer: The enormous failure I have had that I think about was called Genesis Direct. 

I started it in 1995 and it was a "catalog industry consolidation" play that acquired 22 print catalog companies in 22 months and combined them into one infrastructure to gain economies of scale and most important transition them all into eCommerce companies. 

It failed as I was a too early for people to adopt to buying online and ran out of money. We started close to when Amazon started but Bezos was a way better fundraiser than me and was able to convince investors it was ok to lose money for 14 years!

Question 3: There’s a racket club listed as one of your endeavors, you got some game or what? How many years have you been playing? 

And is this where any of your business ideas started, partnerships formed, deals closed etc? 

Answer: Been playing tennis since I was 10. Love the sport. I am sort of good for a newly minted 60-year-old! 

I bought it with my best buddy Kenny as we couldn't find enough indoor court time to play together in New Jersey. So...we had to buy one. It actually was a great deal! 

Besides the fact we played when we wanted, we made it very profitable and sold it at a huge gain. Yes, there were at least two deals that I can recall that were started at the Tenafly Racquet Club. One worked and one didn't. 

Question 4: What’s your favorite DTC brand right now that you have no involvement with, and why? 

Answer: Love UNTUCKit and Legends Brand. 

Ninety percent of my daily wardrobe is purchased from them! Just so easy to buy and more importantly they know how to merchandise and at the end of the day, it's all about the merchandise.

Question 5. You started a paper business in the 80’s, exited in the 90’s which was credited as “the company that invented specialty paper for laser and inkjet printers”. 

Rumor also has it that the “David Wallace” character in The Office was based on you, and a side-by-side photo only validates this further – any truth to this? 

Answer: That question is offensive to me. I am so much better looking than David.

Classifieds 🔎

🚀 Baboon To The Moon is hiring a director of marketing. When applying, please include one Baboon fact on your resume. 

💰 Blueland raises $20M and plans to expand to Canada because they heard Oddit is based in Edmonton 

🔵 New brands we discovered this month:  Apollo Scrubs, Dental Pod, Lucky Paws, Leaf, and Buffy. 

🤯 Build a website by scanning notes from your notebook using Paper Website. Ya may need an Oddit report after you're done though. ;) 

💤 Eight Sleep is hiring an International Marketing Manager. Daily naptime is strictly enforced (non-nappers are still welcome to apply) 

Bonus  

We've been putting together killer playlists for various working moods. 

This month we’re releasing: Music for creative moments

Give it a listen! (Only available on Spotify for now. Sorry, Apple peeps 😅)

Want your own brand-first breakdown? 🚨

Check out the solo, essential and premium reports!

We’ll boost your DTC brand guaranteed. If you don’t find any value you’ll get all your $$ back. No questions asked. 

Share The Perspective 👀

If you enjoyed this content, share it with a friend! 

The Perspective is written by Shaun Brandt, Taylor Davies, and Thomas Schreiber

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