The Perspective #2

Welcome to the second edition of The Perspective by Oddit! 

We’re switching things up already! We’ll be sending The Perspective TWICE a month. Get ready for loads of actionable tips for creating brand-first and conversion-optimized customer experiences from the best in DTC.

In this edition 🗞:

• Brand-first breakdown with premium CBD brand Rejuvia

• 5 questions with Anya Co-founder Jane Baecher

• Mike Tyson's new brand...Mike Bites

• A playlist for your morning routes

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Brand-First Breakdown: Rejuvia

Rejuvia is a premium CBD Oral spray helping you sleep better, stress less, and focus more. 

We're diving DEEP into Rejuvia's product page. Let's get started.  

1. It’s great to surface additional products on your PDP, but only if you are going to make shopping easy.

 Suggestions: 

• Make sure each product image feels attached to the button/title below it. We do this by including them on the same background or within a bounding box.

• Add arrows in the middle of the card to easily signify swiping or clicking to see more. Currently the dots beneath the cards are too far down to notice.

• Include reviews and descriptions – the additional details can prompt users to potentially add to cart without using PDP.

• Add a “quick add” option to let users add to cart directly from here!

2. The pop-up floating panel is a great addition, but it takes up too much space for the value it brings.

 Suggestions: 

• Reduce the height (Cut it in half) so it’s not so intrusive when scrolling.

• Make it pop off the page instead of blending in – add a background color that provides more contrast with the overall page so it’s clearly seen.

• Pull in an additional piece of info that helps sell the product ("$90 value" for instance!)

3. Get your users the information they need as soon as possible, and make it crystal clear.

Suggestions: 

• Add a heading above your variant selectors to help guide users.

• Default select the subscribe and save, not one-time purchase and highlight the savings so it pops!

• Give context about what "Subscribe and save" means from a delivery standpoint directly below it.

• Add a “?” that drives a pop-up with the full details (see next section for what we mean here)

• Add a Free Shipping prompt directly below the "Add to Cart"

• The icons are currently not high enough contrast or large enough to be visible. Pull them off the backgrounds to be more clear, enlarge, and put them in a slow, side-scrolling band to add some delight to the page.

• Provide users with specific information about the product to increase trust and eliminate any uncertainty about the products.

4. When it comes to CBD products, don’t leave users hanging – explain the potency difference!

Suggestions: 

• Make sure both options are both visible and easy to read. Currently, the selected option is difficult to read due to low contrast.

• Add a simple prompt to help users select. This prompt would open a simple notification overlay that communicates the difference between the 2 potencies and how to select which is best for them!

5. Real customers help make your brand feel much more approachable 

Suggestions: 

• Remove the “loved and trusted by thousands” completely.

• Replace this section with a cross-section showing real customers, and short, punchy snippets of reviews!

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

Founders Five 🖐

Founder: Jane Baecher is the Co-Founder and CEO at Anya. A postpartum recovery brand helping moms tackle the numerous challenges of having a child. 

Background: Jane began her career at Bloomingdales and Rent The Runway before starting Anya in 2019. 

Named after her own mother, Anya’s goal is to make women's health a priority by providing the information and solutions every mother should have.

Question 1: Jane, you worked for Bloomingdales and Rent the Runway as a buyer to start your career and then transitioned to becoming a founder in 2019 – what advice would you give to those wanting to make a big change, specifically launching their own company? 

Answer: It’s not easy to veer off a promising career path towards something that is unknown. For me, I took steps that made sense to me – one at a time – not necessarily with an end goal in mind or knowing where it would land me.

I left my career in retail because after having my daughter, I just knew that if I were to leave her each day to go to work, I had to be doing something that I was super passionate about – that was making a difference for people (sounds cheesy, but true). I entered a field that I had no experience in professionally, but extensive experience in as a consumer – health and wellness.

I took a few jobs that I never would have envisioned for myself: pilates instructor and nutritional consultant. And it was that move that led me to Anya, because had I not started that work, and validated my own experience as a new mother by seeing so many other new moms around me go through the same thing, I might not have understood the problem and the need so deeply.

And without any credibility, I probably wouldn’t have had the guts to go out and try to solve it myself. So my advice: if you want to make a move, or see a problem that you are determined to solve, start small and take one step towards coming up with a solution, testing it out with a few people. Or moving into an industry that you are passionate about even if it’s not the end goal job you had envisioned. Focus on the steps, not on getting to the end goal.  

Question 2: At Cornell, you studied Fiber science and apparel design management - one would think with your background and experience in fashion your first foray into the e-commerce space would be a fashion startup. Was that ever the plan?

Answer: I was lucky enough to work for the fashion startup Rent the Runway when the company was a startup! I was one of 2 buyers for the company, managing hundreds of brands and like any other startup, with my hands in lots of other roles.

It was wildly exciting to be a part of a company that was disrupting the fashion industry – and enabling women to experience fashion in a way that was never possible before. I loved it and definitely got bit by the startup bug when I was there.  I’ve always liked fashion but honestly have always felt like a bit of an imposter in that world. I grew up on a farm in upstate New York and if you asked anyone I grew up with, they’d tell you that was an unlikely match for me.

On the other hand, I love nutrition and understanding the human body and how it works. When I started studying nutrition and discovered first-hand how directly what I put in my body connects to how I feel, it became a greater passion. And then, when I experienced what a key role it played throughout my pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experience – that was it.

Question 3: With your background in nutrition, you went ahead and developed a regimen for yourself because of the lack of solutions that existed in the US for postpartum.

How long did it take you to research, formulate and then start seeing positive results for yourself? And at what point in the journey did you realize you needed to make the leap and launch Anya?

Answer: All in, it took over 3 years to bring Anya to life. It began with a lot of recipe testing and development in my kitchen, which I then shared with friends, family, and clients in new mom care packages that I was making.  For me, the results were immediate. I felt better, had more energy, could better regulate my milk supply.

It was when I began gifting some of my herbal blends, teas and tonics to other moms in my life in care packages, and seeing the response from them that I knew I wanted more women to experience what I and these few women in my network had.

When thinking about taking the leap, we did two things: collected data and brought in experts. We surveyed 2000 women about their greatest challenges to hone in on the problems to start with, then consulted with a team of nutritionists, herbalists, lactation consultants, and OB-GYNs to help us pull clinical data and build our formulations. All of this helped me to build conviction about the problem we were solving and the credibility of the solutions we were creating.

Question 4: In terms of subscription products, Anya is one of the most unique, specific, and exciting that we’ve worked with in DTC. What advice or learnings would you share with founders on the subscription side of their business? 

Answer: Unique for sure! And not at all simple 😊. It’s an interesting time to be launching a subscription business, there’s ‘subscription fatigue’,  we often hear about how everyone is trying to start a subscription business just because the economics look so good. We launched with a subscription business because it’s what women told us they wanted. We surveyed over 2,000 women using a platform called Qualtrics to inform our business model (my co-founder, Ari is extremely data-oriented).

What a woman goes through in the months after childbirth looks drastically different in month one vs. month 7, and therefore she needs very different things.  We asked women how would they want to experience the solutions we offered? How could we make their lives easier? And the majority of women preferred an evolving subscription – it’s not a typical replenishment-based model, rather product recommendations specifically tailored to a woman’s postpartum stage (i.e. nipple pain at the start of breastfeeding, our scalp serum when hair loss typically begins around month 3, and lactation tea to support supply when women are going back to work in month 3).

They told us – help make my life easier, I don’t want to have to think about it, just send me what I need. We believe that we’ll always offer some form of this subscription, but that said, we are now testing products for individual sale in addition to the subscription. At this stage of our business (5 months in) it’s critical that we get feedback on our products and learn what the ideal experience is for women. That would probably be my advice: to ensure you are a subscription business for the customer (not for the business).

Question 5: Besides Anya - what’s your favorite must-have DTC brand for new or expecting moms? 

Answer: I’m a huge fan of Bobbie (infant formula) – of the product they’ve created and the community they’ve built.

As someone myself who imported European formula to feed my kids when I stopped breastfeeding and thought it was crazy to have to do so, I so admire that they tackled such a complex market dominated by giants that are so heavily regulated – and they’re succeeding.

I also greatly admire the mission behind the company, destigmatizing formula feeding. There is so much stigma and judgment surrounding all aspects of motherhood, the way you feed your baby is another one that needed to change and they’re doing it.

Classifieds 🔎

✅ We’re growing like mad at Oddit and we’re looking for talented digital designers with experience in ecomm/DTC to join our squad. If you’re interested in helping the worlds leading DTC brands dial in their digital brand experience reply to this email! If you know somebody who might be a fit please pass this along!

💰 Sundays for Dogs Raises $10 Million Series A while Mondays for Cats watches in disgust. 

🔵 New brands we discovered this month: This Saves Lives, Sleepy Owl Coffee, Táche, and Haute Hijab 

🤣 A great debate is happening on Twitter: DTC or D2C. Let us know which side you're on in the comments!    

 👂 Did you HEAR? Mike Tyson’s cannabis brand is making ear-shaped weed gummies.

Bonus  

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

This month we’re releasing: Music for morning routes

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. 

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

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  • DTC Pod: "Shaun Brandt, Oddit. Conversion as a service."

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