We talked a little about launch day and how we prepared for it in Issue #7. But since then, a whole month has passed! We thought it might be fun to reflect on the launch and see what we’ve learned. First of all, I had zero expectations for how many socks we’d sell. Part of me thought we’d sell out on day one. At the time, we had more than 80,000 subscribers to What’s In Store and a steady 45–50% open rate. Freddie and Co. had 4,000 subscribers. Selling 1200 pairs of socks seemed totally doable. Plus, my co-workers thought we were crazy:
Recapping Launch Day for Freddie and Co.
Remembering our launch, one month later.
But the other part of me thought we’d sell 50 pairs and my team would be really disappointed.
We had a handful of orders roll in during our soft launch, which helped us spot a few problems. My personal email was attached to our PayPal account (yikes), for instance, and we discovered some tax-related issues that took a bit of Googling to solve.
Grand opening day arrived, and I turned into a “refreshing” machine. I relentlessly refreshed Shopify, social media, all my inboxes, over and over and over. It felt like orders were pouring in, but really it was just a few at a time. I posted real-time updates in the company chatroom.
[May-24 10:06 AM] Meg: first order bought FOUR pears!!
…
[May-24 10:28 AM] Meg: 60 pears sold!
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[May-24 10:48 AM] Meg: 3 international orders so far — netherlands, switzerland, canada!
…
[May-24 12:17 PM] Melissa: @meg we just broke 100 units sold. 1100 to go.
[May-24 12:22 PM] Austin: ? X 100
[May-24 12:25 PM] Mark: amazing!
[May-24 12:25 PM] Kyle: Great news!
…
[May-24 1:28 PM] Meg: this just in!
[May-24 1:28 PM] Meg: my dad just bought some socks
By day’s end, we’d sold 217 “pears” of socks — 18% of our inventory! We’d wanted the socks to last a good 8 weeks before we introduced the next collection, so this seemed like a great start. But in hindsight, it’s clear that launch day numbers do not extend past launch day.
As I’m typing this, we’ve sold 366 “pears,” which leaves 834 to sell in the two weeks before we switch to our next product.
Meanwhile, our Freddie and Co. email did really well. With just shy of 4,000 subscribers and a 77% open rate, we generated almost $2,000 from a single campaign!
I texted my friend Alexis who’s a technical advisor on Mailchimp’s support team: “Wow, email marketing works!”
Her reply: “Comforting, huh? lol”
