After raising $164,775 on Kickstarter, this husband & wife team is disrupting carbon fiber manufacturing.
After raising $164,775 on Kickstarter, this husband & wife team is disrupting carbon fiber manufacturing.
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Gabriel Mountjoy is a graduate of the Cal Poly Mechanical Engineering Department in San Luis Obispo, CA. He and his wife, Ann Mountjoy, founded Common Fibers in 2013 after invention of a carbon fiber hinge. For the past six years they have developed composite products for the automotive, aerospace, medical, construction, and consumer goods industries. With two patents, they are building a passionate team that will continue to disrupt the composites industry and change how manufacturing is currently done.
Kurt Elster: Hello, and welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster, recording from Ethercycle HQ in Skokie, Illinois, above Westfield Old Orchard Mall. And today, we are talking with one of the most niche store merchants I have ever encountered, and near and dear to my heart, they used one of our apps, our most successful app, Crowdfunder. And they run a site that is entirely group buys, from what I can tell, and they use Crowdfunder to do the group buys. Crowdfunder, it’s like a Kickstarter widget. Looks like Kickstarter on your product page.
And the niche is, it’s super niche, it’s manufacturing carbon fiber products for the automotive space. So, if you are a car guy, or you’ve got this one trim panel in your car that always breaks that you hate, that you’re like… It’s held on with Scotch tape and you say to yourself, “Man, I wish that was better. I wish this was carbon fiber,” which is the coolest thing. We love carbon fiber. Then a site exists where you can literally… I feel like you can submit that idea and then people run a group buy, but we’re going to get the whole story here, because it has interesting origins and just in the five minutes of pre-show interview I was like, “Oh, this is a good one. I gotta know more here.”
So, joining me today is Mr. Gabriel Mountjoy. He is a graduate of Cal Poly mechanical engineering in California, has a passion for creating new products and innovating the manufacturing process. Me talk pretty. And here we have they started Common Fibers in 2013 after inventing the carbon fiber live hinge. For six years, they’ve developed composite products for automotive, aerospace, medical, and consumer goods. They’ve got two patents, congratulations, and are building a passionate team to continue to disrupt the composites industry.
Mr. Mountjoy, my first question is for people who don’t know, what is carbon fiber and why do we get so excited about it?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Thanks, Kurt. Thanks for having me on the show, first off, and yeah, carbon fiber for those who do not know what it is, it kind of is… If you don’t know what it is, it’s a black plastic that’s really expensive. That’s what we describe it as, and we sell wallets as one of our products, and if you don’t know what carbon fiber is, you really think you’re just buying an expensive plastic wallet. So, it’s really important to educate people as to what it is, and traditionally, carbon fiber has been used in the aerospace industry, and then more and more in the automotive, and now it’s developing into almost every industry you can think of. But it is a very tough and durable material. It’s built from carbon fiber, which is a strand. It’s actually just carbon, the element carbon, and then it’s actually put into a resin matrix, so pretty much you’re mixing a very strong strand with a very strong plastic that can take any shape you want.
So, it’s a versatile product that you can form into lots of different things, and it’s kind of becoming the new titanium, that everyone wants this in their product.
Kurt Elster: And what’s interesting about carbon fiber is the carbon fiber we think us has this very distinct look. When you see it, it looks like plastic that is woven. It has this… Because it’s a fabric, right?
Gabriel Mountjoy: That’s correct.
Kurt Elster: And then you set an epoxy resin over it that’s clear, so you can see through and see this woven fabric underneath it. And the end result is this incredibly strong, versatile fiber, that also has a lot of unusual properties, and that depending how you lay it, it can either transmit heat, or resist heat, and you can make it flex in different ways, but most importantly, it is way stronger than it has any right to be at its weight. So, it’s like it would be equivalent to a plastic panel of the same weight, like if you had two sheets, a sheet of carbon fiber, a sheet of plastic, they’ll generally be similar weights, but the carbon fiber will be significantly stronger.
Gabriel Mountjoy: That’s correct. Much more comparable to metal.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, and I’m basing this on I’m a SRAM certified bicycle mechanic, sir.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Okay. Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: Years ago I worked in a bike shop as a bike mechanic, and that was part of my background in my twenties, and I also… Before this, I worked as an auto parts drop shipper in the aftermarket auto parts space, and going to SEMA this year, so I’ll be at SEMA, where there’s just wall to wall carbon fiber as far as you can see.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yes there is.
Kurt Elster: If you’re in those spaces, you’re already familiar with it. I’m trying to convey the excitement and the joy of carbon fiber to people. Lance Armstrong’s bikes are all going to be carbon fiber, and it’s one of those things where you can like pick the bike up with one finger, because it’s all carbon fiber. And supercars, many of them are made, the body panel is all carbon fiber, the tub, the chassis could be all carbon fiber. All right, that’s enough of my ode, my love to carbon fiber. Sorry.
Gabriel Mountjoy: I appreciate it. No, the stuff we make, we’re making mascot heads now out of carbon fiber, just to make them lighter. Like you said, lots of car parts, but medical equipment. I’ve got harp cases. You name it, everyone wants something made out of carbon fiber these days.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it’s really, it’s do you want something to be light and strong? Use carbon fiber. That’s the appeal of it, and then as a bonus, hey, it also has this very cool look.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yep. Exactly. And of course, price is getting better, as well. Actually, over the last 10 years I think price has gone from about $100 a pound for carbon fiber to $10 a pound for carbon fiber, so it is drastically reducing in price as it becomes more popular.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so let’s go back to the beginning. This is a husband-wife team, this commonfibers.com website.
Gabriel Mountjoy: That’s correct. Yeah, the-
Kurt Elster: And how did you get started?
Gabriel Mountjoy: So, we got started, we met at college, Cal Poly, both doing engineering degrees, and both passionate about cars and composites to begin with, and so we were actually building carbon fiber race cars. Little different than your standard race car. These are little pods that we would race for efficiency, so actually it was about a 2,000 mile per gallon car that we were building.
Kurt Elster: Whoa!
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah, so it’s for the Shell Eco-marathon that they put on each year, and so we raced against 100 different schools around North America, and Cal Poly happened to be one of the better teams, and that’s why I went to that school, actually, because I was interested in automotive efficiency. Initially thinking I liked engines and wanted to make them more efficient, but as I started working in the industry, in that field, I kind of realized that composites were the way that we were gonna increase efficiency faster. Just make your car lighter.
So, we spent four years in college building these cars, and it was actually one day we were making a drive from Seattle, where Anne’s from, back down to college, and were coming up with a list of ideas, and came up with a bunch of products that needed a hinge, and so we invented, kind of came up with the idea for a carbon fiber hinge. Did a bunch of research on it, took us another two years to figure out how to do it, but eventually, by the end of our schooling, we invented a live carbon fiber hinge, so pretty much directly built into the carbon fiber itself. We were able to make it soft and foldable, like a hinge, and then rigid and strong everywhere else, and filed some patents for that, and did some little competitions in college and got a little bit of seed money, and we were off to the races.
Kurt Elster: So, starting in college, you had a very successful career here. You guys were building literal race cars out of carbon fiber. You got a patent on something that had never been done before that had tons of applications in this space, and then got money for it. The important part. What then?
Gabriel Mountjoy: So, won those little competitions, and six years ago, and it still is today, Kickstarter was really taking off, and so we decided let’s go ahead and do a crowdfunding campaign and see if we can make something out of this. And so, we came up with just a very tangible use for a carbon fiber hinge, being that of a carbon fiber wallet, and wallets once again were popular on Kickstarter, so we spent eight months building up that campaign, making sure we did it right, and had a goal for $20,000, but blew past that. Ended up raising $160,000 over that month, and really was enough to kickstart the business. We had 3,000 orders for wallets and needed to get going.
Kurt Elster: Whoa. And I just found the project on Kickstarter. I love that these pages stay up, so I’ll link to that in the show notes. Common Fibers, a real carbon fiber wallet, and is RFID blocking if you’re concerned about such things. You had a $20,000 goal. You raised $165,000. You sold over 2,500 of these things.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yep. Crazy.
Kurt Elster: Did you panic? Where you had that… I suspect this happens, is not uncommon with Kickstarter folks, where you’re like, “Uh oh, I think I just became a victim of my own success.”
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah, there was slight moments of panic. Truthfully, from the beginning, our goal, we set $20,000, but our goal, we wanted to hit $100,000. And so, we were sort of preparing ourselves for that, definitely going above and beyond that was surprising. And then of course having to deliver on 3,000 wallets instead of $20,000 worth of wallets, which would have been just a couple hundred wallets, changed the scale pretty significantly. I had to really get us into a whole different level of production.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s been six years, but what do you think was the driving force that helped that Kickstarter campaign succeed? Because I’ve heard people say running a Kickstarter campaign is way more difficult than people realize, and it’s a full-time job while it’s going on.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah. I think what’s more important than that is that it’s a full-time job for the six months leading up to it if you want to do it right. And that there is a ton of work, legwork behind it. Of course, getting the video going, getting the infographics, making your proof of concepts, but then there’s all the work of reaching out to bloggers, and there’s advertising involved, and different marketing, in order to get the snowball effect started when you launch your campaign.
If anyone’s trying to do a Kickstarter campaign, the thing I can recommend the most is spending a couple months doing the research, finding every blog that’s relevant, reaching out, trying to make connections, and setting a schedule of when our Kickstarter goes live on this date, we’re hoping you’ll be interested in posting about it. And having all that ready to go before you start.
Kurt Elster: If you were to create a standard operating procedure, where you said, “This is how you run a successful Kickstarter campaign in 5 to 10 steps,” so you said it’s six months in advance, so it’s get the idea, produce an amazing video, but start that blogger and PR outreach, build those relationships way early on, which is interesting you say that, because I asked Ben Parr, currently a co-founder of Octane AI, but formerly the editor of Mashable, I believe. And he said people were nuts. He said he’d have people camp outside his house to try and pitch products to him.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Wow.
Kurt Elster: Or stories. Yeah. And I said, “All right, so clearly you’ve gotten nonstop pitches, good and bad, what’s the secret?” He said, “Build a real relationship.” Like before you ever pitch them, weeks, months in advance, just try and have a relationship with them.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Those are the stories that get picked up. So, you’re gonna reach out to people in your space early on, try and build those relationship. What am I missing?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah, you build those relationships. You build hype around it, so if you are able to release teasers, having social media network. Actually, your own just personal network is extremely important, Kickstarter. That was one of the things we did was there was four of us who were working on this Kickstarter campaign, and we went all through our own personal contacts, sorted them all, friends, family, influencers, people who also have networks, organizing those and creating the content for all your friends and family to share, as well. Because you’ll be surprised at the contacts you already have and their interest to share with what you’re doing, as well. It might actually be easier than reaching out to an unknown blogger.
Kurt Elster: And I call these unfair advantages, so you have an existing network and you’d be surprised at the connections that people have. What were some… Give me an example. What was one that surprised you?
Gabriel Mountjoy: You know, certain friends that after high school, hadn’t made much high school with them, and you reach back out to them and it turns out they’re running on a business, or they’re somewhat of an influencer on Instagram, and these people who have good followings, or run a podcast, or a blog. Once again, you didn’t realize they did until you reached back out and find out they maybe have 20,000 people who listen to what they have to say.
Kurt Elster: That’s a good point, because I… You’re right, like on my personal Facebook, I’m not like, “Hey, here’s the new podcast!” It’s so niche that I don’t want to just spam my family and friends with the latest eCommerce story, so I’m sure there are people I’m friends with from college still on Facebook that have no idea, right? Yeah. Okay, so I could actually see how that would happen.
I’ve heard that the video is the critical, make or break component that’s the cornerstone of a Kickstarter campaign. What do you think makes a good versus bad crowdfunding video?
Gabriel Mountjoy: I would completely agree with that. So, that was another sort of connection actually, in terms of for ourselves, was reaching out once again to someone in high school I knew who liked doing video production work. Turned out he was now working for a video production company and he pitched us to his boss, the boss liked it, and we came up with an agreement in terms of, “Hey, you’ll produce a top quality video for us, and in exchange, we’ll provide a percentage of earnings.”
Kurt Elster: Wow.
Gabriel Mountjoy: In exchange. So, we ended up with a very high quality production company. They do actually most of the filming I think for the AFC fights, and so coming up with a deal like that, finding an interested video production company that’s willing to take a gamble, because they can pay off well if you can succeed, and of course if you have a good product and they believe in you, they might take that risk. But it is absolutely critical to have a good video, and the production quality shows. A whole lot of it comes down to audio, actually, is super important. I think that’s lacking in a lot of videos.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Right? And of course, that was something, if we’d filmed this video ourselves, we wouldn’t have had the audio equipment that we had access to when they filmed for us. So, I think that’s critical. And then of course just the pace of the video and the length of it, that we have a pretty short attention span these days, and so making sure you grab people in those first 30 seconds, there’s not too much just sort of talking to the camera, but more showing people what you’re doing gets people more excited.
Kurt Elster: I would agree with all of that, and to figure that out, I had to read this year the book How To Shoot Video That Doesn’t Suck. You know, I’m getting more and more involved in video production for this business, for my wife’s business, advising clients on it, and this book, How To Shoot Video That Doesn’t Suck, said every single thing you just said and more, so it was a great primer on like, “All right, here’s why your video blows, and here’s why other videos don’t.” Yeah, it’s like you want these four-second cuts, and there’s a whole chapter in there about how… Hey, bad audio will destroy your video. Good audio will make it. So, I’ll link to that in the show notes for folks.
Because at this point, your iPhone, I say iPhone, but any smartphone has an incredible camera, and you can edit right on the phone. The tools have democratized. It really is about editing it. I have people that are like, “Hey, Kurt. What are you shooting with? How do you edit? Your stories look so great.” And I’m like, “Well, my iPhone and this app called Videoshop. This $4 app.” Because the tools are not what make or break it. It’s what you do with it.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: So, you had the successful Kickstarter campaign. You got a website going with the same brand, CommonFibers.com, and that is where you then began selling these wallets. At what point did you start the website?
Gabriel Mountjoy: So, we started the website, actually we had it going before Kickstarter even started. Another one of those things to prepare for is the second Kickstarter ends, making sure you got somewhere to send people to. So, we started a very basic, I think it was a WordPress site I built to start, and then quickly transitioned away from that after we got going and realized we needed to be selling product on there, more than just showing what we’re doing, and got into Shopify. But yeah, started that pretty early, and just needed a place to push people after the Kickstarter campaign was done.
Kurt Elster: So, you started the website then, and for people who aren’t familiar, when you’re selling on Kickstarter, you are not allowed to sell anywhere else, so the common thing we’ll do is like in preparation, we’ll set up a Shopify store, it’ll largely mirror the content from the Kickstarter site, but instead of… Either you don’t list the product or will change the add to cart button to one that says, “Back us on Kickstarter,” and then links to Kickstarter.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And then as soon as that Kickstarter campaign ends, then you make the product available at the full price or a preorder price on your Shopify store, right?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah, so we started taking preorders the second the Kickstarter ended, which is super common, because someone’s gonna miss it and be a day late to the party, and want to continue to back that project, because it still has that media hype going for it.
Kurt Elster: And once the campaign ends, and you’ve got your Shopify store up, and you’re accepting orders there, yeah, there’s the scramble to fulfill these orders, which I’m sure causes some heartburn and sleepless nights. Other than that, how did you keep the success going? How do you transition from successful Kickstarter to continued success on Shopify?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Sure. Yeah. Kickstarter itself has great SEO, and everyone’s going to Kickstarter, but your new website you’ve started now has 10 daily visitors, and it doesn’t get that much press, so first is the transition from pushing people from Kickstarter to your site, which Kickstarter now makes their landing page after you finish your Kickstarter, they make a good transition of pushing people that direction. But then for us, a big part of it was building or social media network, and so through Kickstarter and past Kickstarter, we did a lot of work with influencers. Primarily in the automotive space. That’s how we grew our Instagram to 20,000+ followers, was finding automotive influencers who were interested in a carbon fiber wallet and either trading for posts for the most part, getting them a wallet and making them an ambassador for our brand was really the best way we found to push continued traffic and keep people knowing about our products.
Kurt Elster: The way I envision that process looking, because this sounds like a really great way to do it, especially in this space, in the automotive space. So, you knew, like when I was trying to explain the joy of carbon fiber, I’m talking about how you have… If you’re in the automotive space, if you’re a car guy, if you’re into aftermarket parts, you’re absolutely into carbon fiber as this space age, cool material. So, it almost becomes like a lifestyle good in the auto parts space, motorcycle parts, and probably airplane people, as well, who are fanatical, and I’m guessing you could start expanding this to other niches. Probably watch guys are gonna be into it, as well, as an accessory. And finally, people into cycling I would guess, as well.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Sure. Yeah. And another one is tactical. You’d be surprised how the tactical gear guys.
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah, the Tacticool guys. I fall into like 80% of these categories, too. At the risk of being a bro, that happens.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yep. That’ll do it.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so you don’t have… You’ve got some audience, but not a ton of audience, and wallet is too broad a category. That’s just like men’s lifestyle, men’s apparel, and accessories. So, you look at these niches, where it’s less common, and you’re pitching it as a lifestyle accessory to those niches. You find influencers in that space. What kind of followings were you looking for when you reached out to these influencers?
Gabriel Mountjoy: We would go out to the large end, right? The Cars Without Limits that have 2 million followers, or multiple millions of followers, and you’d reach out to the people with 100,000 followers, or just the… and those are more the accounts that are just posting car pictures every day. And then there’s more the influencers, who might be a race car driver himself, who has 20,000 followers, but they’re 20,000 followers very dedicated to what he’s doing. And so, kind of any range there, but the big ones were great for a big blast. When you’re reaching out to 20 or 2 million followers, you getting 20,000 people all of a sudden heading, checking out your Instagram, and then going to your webpage, so we’re able to watch traffic on a post like that, was significant, and it really built our following.
Kurt Elster: And they really did this? For just a free wallet? Or did you do like an affiliate program, like you could give them a coupon code, and an app like Refersion will then credit them automatically for each sale?
Gabriel Mountjoy: So, we now do Refersion ourselves, but back when we first started this, for the most part we were trading a wallet, occasionally we’d come up with like, “Hey, for $20 a post, we’ll get you a wallet and then $20 a post. We’ll pay you $100 and we’ll get five posts.” And kind of just coming up with these trades that were fair to them. I know the market’s become a lot more saturated since we started doing that, that now there’s a whole lot more advertising going on on Instagram, so it’s harder, and instead of the $20, now the person says it’s $100 per post, and it only stays up for two hours, so-
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah. Negotiations have changed significantly.
Kurt Elster: So, they delete it?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah, they’ll put it up for just a set number of time. You can pay for six hours, or 24 hours, or permanent posting. The reality is most of the follow, and all the likes and comments, everything happen within the first couple hours, so sometimes it’s not worth keeping it around.
Kurt Elster: Give me a ballpark budget range here for someone who’s entirely new to this. What am I… If I’m approaching, if I start approaching these influencers, just ballpark, what would I expect to pay?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Sure. I think you could still get some great posts around the $50 per post range. If someone’s trying to say $100-plus, I wouldn’t go there. But if you’re able to trade product and get posts for around $50 on one of those a million follower profiles, it’ll pay off, and it pays off pretty well. Depends of course on the product and what you’re trying to advertise, but I think that’s… The $20 to $50 range is ideal.
Kurt Elster: And when you reach out to them, do you use a marketplace? A press person? Or just DM them?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah, mostly just DM them. Some of these larger accounts have an email address to reach out to them if you’re interested in media inquiries, but for the most part, just DMs.
Kurt Elster: Okay, and this is something you still use today?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah, it’s something we did a lot of, tapered off, and we’re actually picking back up now as we’re growing our other brands that we’ve started after Common Fibers.
Kurt Elster: Okay, and that, I did the whole intro about your carbon fiber group buy site, and then got derailed by 20 minutes of holy crap, these carbon fiber wallets are awesome, which I’ve linked to it in the show notes, it’s commonfibers.com. They’re really beautiful wallets if you’re looking for a nice wallet as a gift, and do you have a… I notice you mentioned in the notes you’ve got a coupon code for this. Let’s plug that now, before we move on to the group buy site.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah, absolutely.
Kurt Elster: The code is Ethercycle. That’s the name of my agency. And the discount is 30%.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yep, that is correct. Yeah, Ethercycle.
Kurt Elster: Very… I appreciate it. And 30% is quite the discount. I believe I will be using it, and I’ll tell you right now, this is a tip that we developed when working with Jake Starr from Recycled Firefighter, who is best known for selling wallets made out of recycled firehose. I’m not the only person who has this question about, “Well, what’s the difference? Which one’s right for me?” And so, what we do in Klaviyo for him, and I recommend anyone who has multiple similar products, is write a buyer’s guide, and that buyer’s guide, like he already had it. It was just a blog post they had. So, I repurposed it and I set up a browse abandonment flow, but it was filtered. You had to view this wallet’s collection, and Klaviyo has that a single filter, to be like, “All right, if they view any product in X collection.” Makes it real easy.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Nice.
Kurt Elster: So, you view any product of that collection, couple hours later, boom, and you don’t make a purchase, couple hours later you get an email entitled, “Which wallet’s right for me?” And then in it, it’s just that blog post that’s describing the wallets, and we add links to it. That, when we ran it, within two hours of the first emails starting to go out, it made four sales. It’s like, “Oh my gosh. It absolutely works.” There is your easy, easy win for doing this interview with me.
Gabriel Mountjoy: That’s great. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s kind of educating the buyer. It’s very important.
Kurt Elster: And you’ve expanded beyond wallets now. You got a lot of stuff. How do you decide? As you’re adding inventory, how do you decide what products you’re gonna produce?
Gabriel Mountjoy: There’s a mix of ways. I mean, we listen to what our customers want, what they’re reaching out requesting. Within our business, we kind of have a policy of if an employee has an idea, suggest it, and if it’s something that we can make and sell, then we’ll kick them back a percent of profits. And so, we go to a lot of shows, a lot of car shows, and so we’re talking to the customer and figuring out what do people want. And then of course, we’re also pushing ourselves into what can we make, what else can we do with a carbon fiber hinge, or what other thing could we make out of carbon fiber that’s kind of wacky and different or might be a different application for it.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s like a lot of it, because you are the manufacturer, you could make this stuff yourself, it’s partly what consumers suggest, but it’s also a little bit of play. It’s hey, can we do this? And if we can, let’s try and see what happens.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yep. Exactly. Yeah, that is definitely a benefit of ourselves being the actual manufacturer, which is definitely rare these days in that yeah, our facility, we can prototype and make just about anything, and so, if we have an idea for it, I got a sewing machine. I can sew the wallet, I can make the carbon part, we can assemble it all together and try it out.
Kurt Elster: That’s very cool. Okay, so I’ve spent so much time talking about these wallets, and your story, because it was all valuable. In addition to this, you have another site, as well, called CF Group Buy. Carbon Fiber Group Buy.com. Tell me about that. What is that?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah, so to make sense, to make that transition from wallets to how do we now build in cars, from the beginning that was our goal. We were building cars through college. We were carbon fiber car nerds. And so, we never wanted to start a fashion company by any means, so the wallets were great, funded what we have going today, and we started advertising and sort of just by word of mouth taking on more and more projects relating to carbon fiber. So, one of the first things we actually did was help build a chassis for an autonomous vehicle startup company.
Kurt Elster: Cool.
Gabriel Mountjoy: And then just kind of the products just kept rolling in. Like I mentioned, we’ve built a mascot head for Oklahoma State University. If you watch any of their football games, Pistol Pete’s wearing… His head is made of carbon fiber. And so, all these projects started rolling in, and so I’d say kind of for the first three years of our business, we sold wallets. And over the last three years, we’ve now developed into becoming much more of a manufacturer of automotive, aerospace, medical devices, other assorted equipment. And so, over the last year now, as we’ve been doing more car parts and are building that Instagram community, so many people are reaching out to us constantly saying like, “Hey, I really want this car part for my car made out of carbon fiber.”
You know, it’s an older car, it doesn’t have a bunch of aftermarket parts for it. Definitely no carbon fiber. And so, we talk to the person and quote them out, but carbon fiber, the expensive part of it is making the mold or the form to actually make it, and so on a front lip for a car, you’re gonna spend $2,000 just to make the mold, and then maybe $500 to make the part. So, you got an individual who’s looking at $2,500 just to make one front lip car part that for the most part you can buy online for $500 or so. And so, it’s really hard for an individual to take that bite and spend all that money, so what we’ve started doing was we talk to customers and okay, maybe they have the cash to fund that, but they want to make that money back, so then they start organizing a group buy of the part. They reach out to forums and find people that have that same car and want that same part, and then they put together a group buy.
But it’s kind of sloppy, and they’re exchanging money via PayPal, and then they’re waiting on us, it’s kind of like a telephone game. So, what we found was we could organize this all in one place, and so instead of that person having to pay that $2,500 up front, we could put together a group buy and sort of crowdfund it. A lot of the people we talk to, they are active in their car clubs, and know the forums to post to, so for them, it’s not too difficult to get 5 to 10 people interested in the same part.
Kurt Elster: I love this, because you’re tapping into a part of an existing community, and in this case, like automotive culture. The internet grew up with car forums, and 12 years ago when I was in auto parts, working for an auto parts drop shipping company, that was a huge part of our marketing was sponsoring these car forums and then being active in them, and then listening to what people wanted, and then we’d sell those as kits, and we’d do group buys. We’d be like, “Hey, we can…” And literally, we’d work out a deal with the distributor, the manufacturer, and be like, “Hey, what’s a minimum to get this price break?” And then we’d pass that on to the customer.
So, that is like part and parcel to internet car culture, these group buys.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: It also works for, “Hey, we’ve got this…” Someone on the forum will be like, “Listen, I had this pain or problem in my car,” it’s that typical entrepreneur story. “And so, I’m an engineer, and in my part time I developed this product, and hey, we can get it manufactured if I can get 20 people to commit for X dollars.” And it’s like a passion thing. And it lets really niche cars, where it really wouldn’t make sense normally for people to jump into it, for a manufacturer to jump into it, because there’s not a big enough market for them to be able to develop these things. Like they only make a few thousand manual Jaguar F-Types a year. I have one. I love it. But I hated the shifter. There was no short throw. Sure enough, the forum, other people had the same problem. Somebody found a guy in Europe who manufactured short throw shifters, and they said, “Hey, would you do it?” And he said, “Yeah, here’s the minimum number of pieces I need, and send me the shifter, and we’ll do it.”
I’ve got one of a handful of these short throw shifters on my car. I love it! You knew that this was part of that car culture and leveraged that idea. When I asked you, “Hey, how’d you figure out what lifestyle products to make?” You said, “Well, we listened to our customers.” Here, you did it again, where people were saying, “I need X product. I want X product.” You know, “I want a carbon fiber lip for my 25-year-old Acura NSX.” Well, all right, but somebody’s gotta foot the bill. And you figured out a way based on your past experience to do it. So, the benefits there to that group buy process is you can make these super niche products and it’s accessible to everybody, because they’re essentially… You’re dividing out that initial expense of replicating the product in carbon fiber, right?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yep. That’s exactly it. And it goes actually back to the original name of our business, Common Fibers. Our goal from the beginning has been to make carbon fiber more common. And so, part of this group buy process still continues to push our mission that it can be accessible to anyone, that there are a couple hurdles to get over in terms of cost, but if you split it up by 5, 10 people, it’s actually not too bad.
Kurt Elster: So, with CFGroupBuy.com, how long have you been doing this?
Gabriel Mountjoy: So, CF Group Buy has only been up now for… It’s about four months, I believe. And we’ve kind of been pushing it out and sort of beta testing. Once again, testing out of a couple of them, making sure that everything runs smoothly. Once again, listening to our customers and having them suggest products to begin with, and we’re just about to actually start a push to get this out onto all the forums, and start pushing them on Instagram to the influencers that we talked about earlier. So, we’re just getting ready to actually really push this live.
Kurt Elster: And so, this was based on just people reaching out and going, “Hey, I see you make carbon fiber. Can you make X part?” And you were able to turn around and say, “Yes, but…” Yes, but either you gotta foot the bill up front, or hey, we’ll help you run a group buy campaign for this.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yep. And we get those inquiries almost every day, and so it was taking up a lot of our time trying to manage them and educate the customer, so it was like how can we do this in a more streamlined fashion?
Kurt Elster: And walk me through the process.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Of the group buy itself?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah, so the way it works, ideally if you’re an individual who wants a part, let’s say it’s a spoiler for your car and it’s not made, you can reach out on the site and there is a suggest button, so you go through there and you suggest the product, and you say, “I want this for this car.” And we’re gonna take that contact form, pretty much comes in as a request, and we’re gonna look at it. And the first thing we’re gonna say is, “Is this even manufacturable?” And make sure it’s something we can make. If it is, and we think it’s a product that, once again, truthfully, we’ll post anything that is manufacturable and let the community decide if it’s gonna be worth making.
But the way we do it is we post it with no price initially and gauge interest, and if we get five people who chime in saying they are interested in that part and they’d like to see a price, we then spend the time to quote out what it actually will take to make that part, and so on a spoiler, is it a two-part mold? How complex is it? What’s it actually going to take? And we’ll quote it out and say… At that point we decide, “Okay, is this going to be a batch of 10 parts? Is it a batch of 20 parts? How many do we need to make to make this make sense?” And split up that tooling cost by enough people such that the price of the part is reasonable. You don’t want to still spend $2,000 on a spoiler if we have to still make 10 of them because it’s such an expensive part to make, so we want to split it up over enough people.
So, we do the math after we get five people interested and go ahead and repost it now as a live campaign and proceed until we reach the goal number. And once we hit that goal, we go ahead and say it is live, and as people are… People are actually putting in deposits for the parts, so we’re getting about 50% payment up front, holding that, and then when we hit the number, we go live. Of course, if it’s a product, does not make it to its goal, we would refund the money, although we also look at them case by case. If we reach 7 out of 10, we’ll still look at it and say, “You know what, 7 is still worth it. We’ll go ahead and make this part for these 7 people, because they’re dedicated, interested, and for the most part it’s worth it for us to make it.”
Kurt Elster: So, looking at the site, first one I click on is an Acura NSX Gen 1 Front Lip. So, nice little carbon fiber piece that just goes across the front of my very expensive Japanese supercar, and I have a local client who has one of these. I got to road in it, and after that I was like, “I need to buy a mid-engine car at some point in my life. It’s so cool. Once you try it, you’re like, “Oh, this is what the fuss is about.”
Gabriel Mountjoy: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so this is a very unusual car, just in general, because of the age, the expense. I mean, this thing used… I think the guy paid like 70 grand for it. And so, not a ton of aftermarket for it, so hyper-niche, and someone says, “Look, I want to make a carbon fiber front lip for it.” And you say, “Listen, we could do it. We just need 10 of them to be made.” Right now, I’m looking. As the time of the recording, there’s six people have committed, so this is not crazy. As niche as this is, you only need 10 people to make a purchase to make this happen. So, someone in the community or forum reached out to you, you said, “Yeah, we could do it,” and then do you do any promotion? Is up to them to promote it?
Gabriel Mountjoy: It’s primarily up to them. They are the expert in that community, but then we’re working on building out our own social following for this business unit and building our own connections to forums and influencers so that we can push it out, but who knows of our followers, how many of them own an NSX? It’s probably not a ton. So, our marketing efforts are definitely less than theirs. For the most part, it relies on them to push it out through their network.
Kurt Elster: And so, the full price is 500 plus shipping, so I make a 50% deposit, so when I make the purchase right now, today, I pay 250 bucks. You then sit on that money, and let’s say you need 10. Let’s say you get to nine. You go, “All right, fine. We’ll still do it.” Let’s say it stops at five, or at stops at six, and one person wants their money back, then you just refund their payments?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yep. Yeah, you refund the deposits. We kind of set a time limit on each of them. It’s not necessarily something that we have as a hard deadline on it, but for us it’s if this doesn’t gain another committed person in another month, then we’re gonna cut it off. This is an example of one that I know is doing well. I think we got four of those orders within this last week, and we just were at the NSXPO last week or two weeks ago.
Kurt Elster: It’s called the NSXPO? That’s great.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yep. Exactly. And so, we talked to a lot of people with this car, and so we know there’s a handful more coming on this one, so in that case, we did a bit of networking to get this one going, as well.
Kurt Elster: And let’s say it does get funded, so you know this one’s gonna sell. How do you collect the remaining payment?
Gabriel Mountjoy: We’re actually using just directly through Shopify, where we’re able to send them an invoice for the remainder. Plus, we’ll calculate the shipping cost at that time, as well. And so, it’s pretty streamlined of just kind of duplicating the order and invoicing for the correct… the remainder. And sending the invoice for them to pay.
Kurt Elster: Okay, and part of the reasons for my question around the payment process with deposit, and what happens if they don’t pay, and then how do you do the remainder, this is for people using… Because this whole thing is powered on my app, Crowdfunder. Right?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yep. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And the reason I ask is because that’s one of the more common questions we get from people who have not yet run a campaign, is, “Well, what happens if it doesn’t get funded all the way?” Well, you could choose to make it or not, or you could just… You could give them the money back. “Well, how do we do deposits?” Well, you accept the money and sit on it. It really… People struggle to wrap their heads around this stuff.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yep.
Kurt Elster: Just because it’s unusual in the eCommerce space.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah. It adds a layer of complexity, but I think it works pretty smooth.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I think the other issues, like in the case of Kickstarter, Kickstarter’s the one who sits on the money. You don’t see it unless it gets funded, so they’re coming… If you’re coming from that model, you’re like, “Wait, I’m getting the money, but it hasn’t finished yet?” Yes. Don’t blow it, please.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah, exactly.
Kurt Elster: Put that in a savings account and forget about it until the campaign’s over.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Well, it’s cool that the… We used the example of the NSX. When that campaign is over, would you then make that a product that’s just available on a website? Or would it be something where you’d say, “Well, all right, we could do it again, and we’ve got the molds, but this time it’s just a group order of five.” And you rerun the group order once a year? What is the future plans here?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah. Our intention is to re-put up a finished group buy. Like you said, we have the molds now. We’re gonna keep the pricing the same, but we’re gonna go ahead and put it back up, and yeah, maybe it’ll be a smaller, but we’ll do it another… Next time we reach five units, we’ll go ahead and make another batch. We do have some customers who are helping fund one of these group buys, so they say, “I want to put in $1,000 towards that mold, such that I can make sure this happens.” But then they say, “But I want this to be a limited batch of 10. I only want 10 of these ever to be made, and I want serial number one,” and wants it to be super limited. People love that in the car community, and so there are projects where we’ve agreed to a customer who’s helped fund it, that we won’t put it back up again.
Kurt Elster: So, the examples we used were very niche, but potentially you could have someone with a newer car, say a Kia Stinger, right? And they go, “Hey, it’s a brand new car, no one’s manufacturing carbon fiber hoods yet. I want a carbon fiber hood.” So, you sell these things, it’s $1,000, but that could be a huge market a year from now, so in that instance, would there be potential? Would you take the same approach, where it’s like limited, we just keep rerunning it? Or would you say, “Hey, maybe we should just start selling some of this in a store?
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah. It definitely is something we’ve considered. Do we transition a finished product in here potentially to a store, or add a new category that’s continually ongoing parts? For us, the efficiency in manufacturing, it really does make sense to make carbon fiber parts in batches of 10. Below that, it just becomes more expensive. So, if we were to look at it and see the demand say, “Okay, I know in the next six months, I’m going to sell 20 of these hoods or 20 of these engine covers,” without needing to have people prepay for it, then sure. I’d go ahead and just make those 20 and start selling them. And I imagine our business model will transition that way as more of these become successfully funded. Then we want to hold inventory.
But right now, it’s means for a really lean manufacturing approach, that we’re not sitting on inventory and there’s not a lot of cash out of our pockets to get going.
Kurt Elster: It’s such a great way to approach this, because you are the factory, and you’re giving people access to essentially coproduce product development with you. Where they’re going to market… Show up with the idea, you’re gonna say, “Hey, listen, we’ll do the manufacturing design and development, which is technical and difficult and expensive, and you’re gonna market this thing and make it happen. And by the way, it’s gonna be you and nine friends.” So, it makes it very accessible.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah. That’s what we’re going for.
Kurt Elster: I think the potential here, as soon as you get a few bigger group buys going, like more visible ones, more visibility on it, the first time you get like a Subaru, or one of those, or a Mustang, those cars that are very common to see modified. I think this thing could really take off.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah, that’s what we’re hoping for. Like I said, we heard the need from our customers and saw that people were organizing these group buys on Instagram, and Facebook, and emails, and they were just sloppy. So, hoping this will be a nice place to keep everything organized and people can trust that when you put your money into something, you’re gonna get out a good, high quality product.
Kurt Elster: Oh, absolutely. If you had to go back in time… You’ve been doing this since 2013. You gotta go back and tell yourself six years ago, “Here is the one thing you need to differently in the future.” You’ve got the time portal window only opens for 30 seconds. What do you tell yourself?
Gabriel Mountjoy: What to do differently. I think the hardest part in business are the people. Employees, and the relationships you create, and so I think a good piece of advice for myself from the future, as well as to anyone else, is just being very careful with everyone you work with, and making sure that those are the right people that you want to be working with, and sort of vetting and testing. Whether it comes to an employee, or business partner, or a relationship with a vendor, that the relationships you form in business are the most important thing. And so, really making sure that you’re on top of them from the beginning. That’s what’s gonna make or break your business or your relationships.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely. I could not… I knew my network, the people I surround myself with were important. But it took me 10 years to figure out how absolutely vital and important it really is. Do you have a litmus test you use to say like, “This relationship, thumbs up, thumbs down?”
Gabriel Mountjoy: I’d say it’s still a bit more of the gut feel approach, and making sure that you set a line in terms of morals and business ethics, that if you’re not… The person’s not too greedy and just actually interested in being mutually beneficial for both parties, I think is the biggest part that I always keep an eye out for.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely. You want everyone to get equal and fair compensation in an ideal world, and you want to have the same shared passion and goals. And you as the business owner should be seeking to be moral, and ethical, and legal in everything you do. And so, you want people that are on the same page, and I don’t think that’s a ridiculous thing to want. And then finally, ultimately, I only want… I want to work with nice people. I want to work with people whom I like and who like me, and so if you can check all those boxes, I think things work out pretty nicely.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Absolutely. Just in hiring, for employee side of things, it’s yeah, it’s great if someone’s technically skilled with whatever it is you’re looking for, but what’s more important is that they’re a nice person, realistically. A lot of things can be trained, but making sure you’re a good person from the beginning is probably the most important.
Kurt Elster: It goes a long way.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, tell me finally, where can people go to learn more about you?
Gabriel Mountjoy: You’ve already dropped this a couple times, but CommonFibers.com of course is gonna get you to our original site, where you’re gonna see all of our products, and that is gonna get you links to our other websites, including CF Group Buy. We have a DIY blog called CarbonFiber.life, where you can sort of read on projects and we can hopefully teach you how to make your own carbon fiber products. And then you can also take a look at our past projects, including the mascot heads and different cars we’ve built for SEMA through Composite Fundamentals, which is another one of our websites. But it all kind of branches out from CommonFibers.com.
Kurt Elster: Very good. Thank you, Gabriel. This has been insightful, exciting, novel. I enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing your story.
Gabriel Mountjoy: Thank you, Kurt. Really had a great time talking with you, as well.