This cookbook author turned matcha into a full-time business
We talk to a cookbook author who turned his experience living in Japan into a Shopify store focused on selling the best quality matcha possible.
Eric is the founder and chief evangelist at Breakaway Matcha. He's also an author, ghostwriter, editor, cooking instructor, and private chef. For 16 years, he lived and worked in Japan, where he took deep dives into all things matcha, food, literature, arts, and culture. Eric is the author of three cookbooks: The Breakaway Cook, The Breakaway Japanese Kitchen, and Eric's Kitchen. He lives and works in Marin County, CA.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
11/24/2020
Kurt Elster: Today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are going to talk about a delightful beverage. We’re gonna talk about tea. Not just any tea, matcha. We’re gonna talk to Eric Gower, who is an incredible man with quite the background. He is a delight to talk to, but he’s gonna tell us how and why his specialty matcha company decided that direct to consumer was a way better choice for them than traditional wholesale, how they communicate with their customers in a phenomenal way, how they have amazing educational resources, a full library with an unbelievable amount of info about matcha in it, and how email and storytelling has been their best growth strategy.
Eric, how you doing?
Eric Gower: I’m doing just fine, Kurt. It’s such a pleasure to be here.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I’m glad. So, what’s your store? What’s the name of your brand?
Eric Gower: It is Breakaway Matcha.
Kurt Elster: Breakaway Matcha.
Eric Gower: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And what does Breakaway Matcha sell?
Eric Gower: Breakaway Matcha sells really great matcha. You know, most people think that matcha is matcha, and the way that… You know, in the 1970s, a lot of people thought kind of like wine was wine. You know, you had your Ernest and Julio Gallo in the jug, and the Carlo Rossi, you’re probably… You’re too young to remember those days, but in the same way that wine has really… and coffee is another example. You know, it used to be my mother would put on her pot of Maxwell House coffee and then sometime in the 1980s Starbucks, and Peet’s, and these kind of like more European-style coffees came along, and then the third wave of coffee came along with the Blue Bottles, and the Verves, and all those fancy coffees.
And something very similar has happened with matcha. It started off as a kind of just like this beverage, you threw a lot of milk and sugar in it because the quality tended not to be so good, and it had these associations of health, and so a lot of people kind of wanted it. Some people stopped drinking coffee in an effort to get a little healthier with matcha, but people didn’t really realize that in Japan, it really is this kind of… It can be this epicurean experience, a lot like good wine or good coffee is.
And so, there was nothing on the market like that. First of all, it’s hard to find. It’s hard to find farmers that can actually produce really, really high quality matcha. But I lived in Japan for quite a long time. I was there for nearly 20 years all in and I got to know quite a few of them, and one thing led to another, and I just started drinking tons of the good stuff and turning my friends onto it. I’m also involved in the food world. I’m a cookbook writer and so I had a lot of chef friends, and I started giving them to them and they were like, “Holy crap, this is so good. I just can’t believe how good this is.” And a business was born. I never really meant to start the business in that way. It was really a demand-led thing among my friends.
Kurt Elster: So, you went to Japan, you discovered that you loved matcha, so you’ve got your own interest here, and you wanted to share that experience, so you started sharing it with friends, and they said, “Okay, we like it. How do we get more of it?” And this is what led to a business?
Eric Gower: That’s exactly what happened.
Kurt Elster: And you… Was this before or after… You were in Japan for you said close to 20 years. Now you’re back in California, in Marin, and did you… So, did the business start in Japan or the U.S.?
Eric Gower: It started in the U.S. I had come back from Japan in 2002 and was doing a lot of private chefing, and as I mentioned, I was writing cookbooks, and I had a column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Most people in Japan experienced matcha in a ceremonial context. And as I said, the tea almost plays a secondary role in the ceremony. But for me, it was just this wild kind of drink, like it’s not like other teas. You grind up the entire leaf, so it’s green tea that’s not oxidized. It’s just you pick the green tea leaves, you steam them for six seconds, you dry them in these crazy dryers that look like medieval big hair drying rooms. It’s really trippy. And then you store them. You store those steamed, dried leaves in paper bags that are like 10 kilograms each in freezers in the tea processors in Japan. That’s how they do it.
And so, you put a little hot water in that powdered tea, and you whisk it around, either with a traditional whisk, a funny little bamboo tool that a lot of Japanese use, or as our preference is, an electric whisk, and we… You foam it up into this really, really foamy drink with hot water, and you drink it. So, it’s got a lot of texture and mouth feel. It’s almost like a really thick espresso.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It has like a soft, velvety taste to it, and is this… Like the straight powder is just this brilliant, lovely, it’s like a micro powder it’s ground so fine. It is this just bright, bright green. It is a very attractive color. Yeah. It looks like this must hit… There’s no way you did this without food coloring is the level of green.
Eric Gower: Or passing it through Fukushima. You know what I mean?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s got like a black light glow to it. So, how do I tell… I could buy matcha at the store. I’m guessing it’s not great.
Eric Gower: Yes.
Kurt Elster: I can get matcha at Starbucks. How do I tell the difference between good or bad matcha? Because I think this is where your brand has really excelled, is in being able to communicate the difference and get people hooked on the difference. So, let’s start there. If I’m a consumer, I’m like, “Yeah, I’ve had matcha at Starbucks. I like it.” You’re saying you’ve got the better stuff. What’s the difference? How do I tell? So, we got the bright color, and obviously if I try them side by side I’d say, “Well, one is subjectively better.”
Eric Gower: You know, when a consumer goes into the… Even a fancy market. I mean, Whole Foods is not a fancy market, but fancier than Whole Foods. Imagine that. And you might see a matcha in there. You have no idea what it is. It might say product of Japan, which is a good sign, but you can’t look at the color because it comes in a tin usually. It usually comes in metal. Ours comes in glass. I can tell you why in a minute. But you really don’t know what you’re getting. Can’t look at it, can’t smell it, you can’t taste it, you’re just sort of trusting, maybe usually based on price, whether it’s any good or not.
And you know, it’s a gamble. So, I feel sorry for consumers that way, and then if you go into Starbucks and you say, “Give me a matcha.” This thing is… It’s typically, I don’t know if they still do this, but in the early days they used to just mix the really quite bad quality matcha with powdered sugar and it was this kind of like weird, bright, odd colored drink. And you know, frankly that’s what a lot of the matcha is in the United States. You go into any café and if they’ve got a matcha drink, it’s unlikely they’re paying what they probably should be paying for good matcha, for the sole reason that they’re milking and sugaring it up, you know?
Kurt Elster: The good stuff should either… It should have that foamy, cappuccino-like mouth feel. Different than regular, traditional tea. It’s got… And really, the dead giveaway is that neon color. The stuff at Starbucks is like a darker color.
Eric Gower: Yeah. Army. Army color.
Kurt Elster: Like cheap matcha reminds me of, right, of that real dark color. All right, so you’re in the U.S. You’re selling matcha to friends. At what point does it occur to you like, “This is more than a side hustle.” Or this should be a business, or this should be a formal business, or an online store. What’s the lightbulb moment there?
Eric Gower: Well, it was just the sheer amount of interest, you know? Like I was… I still have a lot of ties to Japan, even though I’ve been back here 18 years, but you know, on my trips there I would visit my guys in Kyoto, and I would stock up. I’d bring a suitcase full back, and that kind of thing, and again, it was not really meant to have any kind of business. It was really a self-fulfilling endeavor, and for my friends, but at one point it just got to be too much. It was just like, “Okay, I need to figure this out.”
And so, you know, I had some meetings with the best growers that I knew. These guys that really, really care. It’s like the truly obsessive ones. And so, they were my teachers, and I absorbed a lot from them, and holy crap, this really is a business, because nobody’s doing it. And they’re not even doing it in Japan, frankly. So, there really is not a very robust market in Japan for this super high grade tea. There’s enough of it, because there’s enough of it, and it sells, but we buy most of it, basically.
Kurt Elster: I want to know, at what point do you launch the website, and then how do you educate people on the difference? So, how did you… You’ve got the website up. It’s BreakawayMatcha.com. It looks great. Really good looking. When did the site go up?
Eric Gower: I incorporated the business in 2010 and spent the next six months getting it ready and figuring out what we were gonna sell. We only started with three products and we went live in the spring of 2011, which was… I mean, talk about timing. The Fukushima nuclear accident happened exactly right around then. And so, literally agricultural products from Japan were radioactive. I mean, I don’t mean that in a literal sense, but among consumers’ perceptions of Japanese agricultural products, they thought that the nuclear accident at Fukushima had permanently tainted all of Japanese agriculture, including rice, miso, all of it.
And that was just… That wasn’t true. It was very contained to around the Sendai area, but yeah, so it was a rocky start in some ways. But I really gained a lot of confidence that we were onto something because we were still growing like crazy, even given that. So, I think it was validated that wow, this is something that people… They really don’t know about, but they want it anyway. And so, it was really our job to educate them on what this is and so I did, like I mentioned in the beginning, it helps to use metaphors that people are familiar with. So, people are familiar with coffee and they’re familiar with wine, and it’s really a short step to understand matcha if you use those metaphors in a similar way.
And there’s no replacement for actually tasting it, because you know, you can read all day about how to swim, but until you get in the water, it’s a very different experience. So, yeah, education has always been a really key part of it, and I’ll just mention one part of our website, we call it the research database. I couldn’t find anywhere on the internet that had collated all of the many, many… turns out there’s more than a thousand studies, medical and clinical studies on some of the health benefits, on the efficacy of matcha in clinical settings. And there’s a lot of research in Japan about this, and there’s quite a bit in the United States, actually.
So, there’s a ton of citations, and it’s just… It’s beautiful. It’s aesthetic. It gives you a chance to kind of pause. And that’s a lot of our messaging, too. And this may be a good chance to segue into… You know, we’ve mentioned that storytelling in the beginning is a big part of what we do, and it really is, because you know, pausing is so important in this world we live in. We are just jangled. Our nerves are jangled. I mean, especially this year with COVID, and our current administration, and everything else, but information is pinging us and assaulting us everywhere we turn. Life is just so different than it was pre-internet and even a couple of years ago. I think it’s different.
And making a cup of daily matcha really does hit a kind of pause button, and this is what I talk about in a lot of my letters. I write letters to our customers every month and I love these letters, and it really helps me figure out why we’re doing this at all, and part of it is this idea of pause. And let’s just take five minutes. Surely we can afford five minutes in our busy day to breathe and to put a pot of water on the kettle and let it boil, sift our matcha into our little cup, and carefully maybe measure the temperature. You never want it more than 175 degrees, else it will scald this delicate matcha. You know, it’s a bad idea to use water hotter than 175 degrees.
And really take your time, and whisk it, and then sit with it for a minute and just don’t do anything. Try not to check your email. Try not to multitask. To me, it’s just a tremendous resetting, and it sets a good start of the day when you do this. And I think that’s a kind of core message that we have, and I think that resonates with a lot of people nowadays.
Kurt Elster: Oh, absolutely. The signal-to-noise ratio in everyone’s 2020 life is pretty horrifying. And like my house is the worst, like 17 Alexa devices yelling at me, and there’s always a screen on within view because of God knows what reason.
Eric Gower: Maybe you should reduce that to like eight or something, Kurt. Come on.
Kurt Elster: I think it is literally nine of them. I used it as a whole house speaker system, but the result is like there’s always one is squawking at me.
Eric Gower: Oh my God. That’s hilarious.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It got a little out of control. It’s okay. Well, all right, when you launched the Breakaway Matcha website, how did you… What was the process to get those first few orders, to start getting traction in the marketplace?
Eric Gower: Well, I believe that… Well, first of all, let me say that we’ve never advertised. We have never advertised at all. So, you know, I think Google and Facebook are some of the quickest ways for small businesses to lose a whole lot of money. Unless you’ve got some kind of venture backing or you’ve just got very deep pockets, understanding the curve to actually use these platforms profitably for small businesses is quite difficult, I would say.
Kurt Elster: I would agree with that.
Eric Gower: Yeah. I think it leads a lot of people astray, so that wasn’t our focus. The focus was communication. I mean, in the beginning there aren’t that many people to communicate with, because you’ve just launched a website, but I wrote a lot of blogs. I think we’re up to 200-some different aspects of matcha on the blog, and when people ordered, part of our thing was that we would handwrite a note on every single order. We still do this to this day, even though it’s untenable, but we do it anyway. It’s one of those things, you know, Reid Hoffman has often said do things that are unscalable, and I totally believe that. I think it’s right. And writing personal notes is completely unscalable, but man does it work, you know?
You treat the customer not like… They’re so used to getting Amazon, and these crappy… These weird plastic pillows that they come in, and it’s just the whole experience is kind of… I don’t want to call it degrading, because there’s a use for that. You don’t really care if you’re buying cat litter on Amazon how it’s packaged, or you don’t need a note from the cat litter people necessarily. But if you’re selling a product like we are, it makes such a difference.
And so, we like to make the unboxing experience nice too. It’s kind of become a cliché at this point, but it really does matter. You know, you get this cool box in the mail, and it just sets the tone for this pausing that we were talking about. It’s like, “Wow. These people really care about what they put in this box and what they say.”
So, we talk to customers, like so somebody orders, they leave a phone number. I’ll call them up, why not? We text people. That’s becoming a bigger part of our business, actually. We’re gonna go full on SMS communication in the next few months. We’ll certainly be there by spring of next year and I think that’s gonna make a big difference for us, as well.
We have pretty high open rates on our emails. It’s something like 60%, which is fairly high.
Kurt Elster: What?!
Eric Gower: I know. It’s kind of crazy.
Kurt Elster: 60?
Eric Gower: Because they’re good. I mean, I don’t want to say… It sounds like I’m boasting, but I’m not. They’re interesting. They’re the opposite of spam. They’re little messages that people seem to resonate with, and people look forward to getting them. I get notes all the time. And you know, but with SMS-
Kurt Elster: How often do you send these emails?
Eric Gower: Huh?
Kurt Elster: How often do you send them?
Eric Gower: Only once a month.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so once a month we send one out. It’s a 60% open rate. And that… So, that owned channel, that email marketing, that has really been like-
Eric Gower: That’s it.
Kurt Elster: Helped drive-
Eric Gower: That is absolutely it.
Kurt Elster: Drive the people signing up for the list, buying, and then also of course the repeat customer rate.
Eric Gower: Everything.
Kurt Elster: 60% open rate. Oh my gosh.
Eric Gower: Yep. But I think with… From all the research I’ve done with SMS, I mean, it’s something whack, like 98% open it. You know?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. 98, 99 is pretty typical.
Eric Gower: Yeah. Which is pretty crazy, so we’re gonna do both. You know, we’re gonna keep doing what’s working, and it gives you a slightly longer form with email, and I’m gonna try to get a little pithy with the text, because you have to be. And we’ve started on this really cool thing called Community. It started off with a bunch of celebrity and rappers who were trying to communicate with their fans directly, versus going through all their layers of people that they have, and so people like Drake and all these other people were using this platform to send out texts, and it really does feel like you’re getting a text from Drake or whoever it is, and we somehow had a connection to the owner of this thing and we got one.
So, we started sending out little texts, as well, and that’s working well. So, we’re gonna continue that, but it’s very non-commercial. You know?
Another thing that I’ll mention, there’s this incredibly cool company out of England called Hiut Jeans. It’s called… I think it’s spelled H-I-U-T. And their emails that they send out and their whole messaging is so artful, I can’t even tell you. I would encourage listeners to go there and study it. We did, and we’re trying to not emulate it, because we have our own way of doing things, but certainly it’s a great example of how to do email marketing correctly. And it turns out that there’s less marketing and more talking, you know what I mean? More listening and more… Less commerce driven, I would say.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I just went on Hiut Denim’s website and they… It’s H-I-U-T. I’ll put it in the show notes. And there’s a banner, a popup banner that comes down, and it’s an opt-in for a PDF that says, “This user manual will help you do your best work ever. A user manual for creativity.”
Eric Gower: Yeah. Who’s gonna say no to that?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Hiut Denim. And it’s like men’s jeans, but they’re talking about creativity. This is very interesting. Yeah, so they do create… It’s not just about like the transaction. It’s more about you, like-
Eric Gower: It’s the story.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, the story and this type of person. So, tell me about that storytelling, because you’ve got… All right, you’ve got the website. When I land on the website, it’s beautiful. It’s consistent. It’s got this take a quiz section, as that’s your main call to action on the hero, and then we’ve got this monthly newsletter with a 60% open rate. You’re doing SMS with Community, which sounds really cool. And you’ve got this resource library.
Okay, so tell me, and this is all just to sell expensive but delicious tea. So, tell me about the storytelling.
Eric Gower: Yeah. I mean, it’s… You know, it’s kind of romantic in some ways, like this is a thousand-year-old fad. Matcha’s been around for a thousand years.
Kurt Elster: A thousand-year-old fad, that might be a cool headline, tagline to use somewhere. I like that.
Eric Gower: It might, actually. It might. And it’s very cool, but in the end, the ceremony thing really is not for audiences outside of Japan, I feel. Other than of course a small minority of people who want to emulate such a thing. And there are, they do exist. There are tea societies all over the world that do this. But you know, for most people they just are… They want the kind of health benefits. They want to make a cup of tea in a reasonable amount of time. They want to look at it, enjoy its beauty, and so that’s where we sort of broke away from the ceremony and made it into a drink that is really a kind of ideal accompaniment to the year 2020 in many ways. You know, the more jangly the world gets, the cooler this product is.
Kurt Elster: No, absolutely. Wait, was this site always on Shopify? Or was it on something else?
Eric Gower: No. We were on BigCommerce in the beginning, and it was… I wouldn’t call it a nightmare, but it was more difficult than it should have been, and so we finally made the move to Shopify and we’re glad we did.
Kurt Elster: Oh, thank God. BigCommerce.
Eric Gower: Yeah.
Sound bite: Ew!
Eric Gower: I know. I know. Is
Eric Gower: Is that a sound effect for BigCommerce?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s anytime someone mentions BigCommerce.
Sound bite: Ew!
Kurt Elster: I’m sure BigCommerce is fine. I just have to give them a hard time.
Eric Gower: They’re fine. I’m sure they’re fine, too. But Shopify’s better.
Kurt Elster: But yeah, so you were like, “All right, I was on BigCommerce, saw Shopify, and then just had to get over to it.” I’m abusing the sound board again. Well, actually let’s talk about the migration. I’m in the process of doing a BigCommerce-Shopify migration right now. I used a migration service for it. It worked extremely well. Cart2Cart, which I think it’s just like shopping-cart-migration.com or something to that effect.
Eric Gower: Yeah, but those guys, I think they’re somewhere in Eastern Europe. I think they’re out of Poland maybe, I want to say.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Their customer support reps had definitely Slavic-sounding names.
Eric Gower: Yes. Exactly. And they’re pretty rough. We used them in the beginning to do the migration. We wound up firing them. They didn’t do a very good job. We had all kinds of data that we needed in certain ways, and they just were not able to deliver, and they were not able to explain why, and they were not… They couldn’t cooperate. They just didn’t do the work, so we couldn’t use them. We wound up using… Then we went through one more who couldn’t do it either, and then we went through a third one that somebody had recommended, like this guy who had done a lot of them. We wound up paying him probably way more than we should have, but at least the work got done and we’re glad we did it.
Kurt Elster: No, absolutely. Yeah, sometimes you just… “Good, fast, cheap. Pick two,” is what you have to balance when dealing with professional services.
Eric Gower: That’s it. That’s exactly it.
Kurt Elster: So, on your site you’ve got this quiz. It says when you land on the homepage, it has a big, beautiful hero image that would totally work as a video of just like matcha being poured in slow-mo and like 20 seconds loop it, but all right, I digress. We’ve got a hero image and it says, “18 grains of matcha. Which one is yours? Take the quiz.” And when I take the quiz, it takes me to a page called quiz. Is this Typeform? It looks like a well-styled Typeform.
Eric Gower: It is Typeform.
Kurt Elster: Cool. And then it says what’s my experience level. I’m gonna say I have some experience. How do you prepare it? Well, I’ve been going with cold just because it’s the easiest, but clearly I’m screwing that up.
Eric Gower: No!
Kurt Elster: Now, the whisk method sounded better. A foaming wand would be cool.
Eric Gower: So, the quiz tries to get at where you are. Do you add milk? Do you like it cold or do you just want to drink it straight up?
Kurt Elster: I didn’t know. Because there’s other… Like, there are vendors that have Shopify-specific quiz solutions that are just really quite extraordinarily, possibly excessively expensive, and yet here you’ve got Typeform, and off-the-shelf solution that works really, really well. Is there some customization here? Are you happy with this thing?
Eric Gower: There is, but not much. I mean, they don’t… You can’t really go nuts with the typography. You can’t really do what you want to do. I mean, it’s limited.
Kurt Elster: It looks like it matches. It’s on brand.
Eric Gower: It kind of us. I don’t know if I agree. I think it’s slightly off brand. It can be. It’s not off off, but it could be so much better. I mean, we want to… It’s something we want to address in the new year as to how to make that better. That’s a big priority for us, actually. But yeah, that thing does generate quite a bit of leads, and people find us via that, and pretty much all organic search is how we get found.
Kurt Elster: Well, you have… I mean, just the tremendous amount of content you do on such… You went very deep on a very narrow topic. Certainly, that has to have tremendous SEO benefit.
Eric Gower: You know, you would think so, and it kind of does. I mean, like if you just do a search for matcha, I think we appear on page two. Everybody that appears on page one is kind of these sellers and there’s a lot of news-oriented stuff on page one, but I would think we’d be better off than we actually are, SEO wise, given the content. And somebody from Google, I ran into somebody at Google at a TED Conference in Vancouver, and he was… You know, Matt Cutts. Do you know who Matt Cutts?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You ran into Matt Cutts?
Eric Gower: I did. I was peeing next to him in the bathroom.
Kurt Elster: Oh my God.
Eric Gower: And I said, “Hey, Matt. Here’s this dilemma I’ve got. We’ve got more content than anybody on this subject. What the hell? Why aren’t we ranking on page one?” He didn’t really have an answer for me. But he did email me later, because I gave him my card, and I said, “Matt, I would just so appreciate it if you could just take a quick look at it.” He did, bless his heart. Very sweet man. And he said, “You know, Google thinks you’re a magazine. You’re not really an eCommerce person. Google thinks you’re a magazine, therefore it’s not really ranking you.” I mean, it is, but not the way you would think it would.
And so, he didn’t have a fix for it. He just said keep writing. In the end, it will bubble up is what he said, once… I don’t know when it will, but I’m hoping it’s right and one day we do get on page one.
Kurt Elster: Well, and keep writing you did. There’s 986 results for this site indexed in Google, so good work. So, what’s the… You know, you’re saying like, “Well, this quiz, it doesn’t quite have the aesthetic we want.” What are some of the other pain points with having this direct-to-consumer eCommerce business for you?
Eric Gower: You know, customer service is kind… I love customer service. I do all of it myself. And that’s kind of… I spend a lot of my time doing it. And I think that’s important for founders to do, like a lot of founders kind of can’t wait to get away from customer service. I never felt that way. I’m starting to feel that way a little bit now, after 10 years of doing this, but it took me a long time to get tired of it. It’s really the best way to get to know your customers. I mean, there is no better way. I mean, do you really want to outsource your customer service to the Philippines? I don’t think so, especially for a product like this.
So, yeah, in the end it comes back to communication, and these are the people buying your thing. Why wouldn’t you want to talk to them? And if you can guide them toward a product that is right for them, there’s something satisfying about that, and it does have a kind of cumulative snowball effect, I would say.
First of all, people are thrilled that I answer the phone and actually talk. They get to talk to a human, which is increasingly rare these days. And second of all, to actually take your time and really treat them like a human and talk to them. Solve their problems for them. To me, that’s a kind of privilege until it gets unsustainable, which it’s starting to do, and when I hire someone to actually take this over for me, they’re gonna have to do it the way I’ve been doing it, and I just need to spend my time doing other things, because there’s a lot of fires in the pit that need my attention, so I am looking for somebody to take this over, but I haven’t found anybody yet. And I’m sure I will, but it’s a big job. It’s like the important job.
And that’s what I would say to a lot of your listeners if they’re merchants listening in. I’m sure there are many. You know, don’t outsource your customer service. This is the heart of the matter. These are the people who are keeping you in business.
Kurt Elster: Wow. That is quite the mindset shift.
Eric Gower: Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: What are some of the… What’s another pain point in this busines?
Eric Gower: Another pain point. You know, just… God, I don’t know. People asking the same questions over and over obviously is a pain point.
Kurt Elster: I think I got a fix for that. So, they go to… Well, let’s say they… Well, I guess there’s not a contact us page, so it’s kind of interesting-
Eric Gower: There is.
Kurt Elster: Under like in the footer it says help, call us, email us, and it’s a telephone link and an email link. If these were like went to a contact page and we lead with the FAQ, maybe we could preempt some of those questions.
Eric Gower: True. I mean, if people actually bother. If they see a link to call, they’re gonna probably click it, you know? But I think it’s helped us, I really do. I think it’s got us to where, or at least was partially responsible for where we are.
Kurt Elster: I think so.
Eric Gower: You know, at one point we probably… more, but that’s a good problem, right? These are the kind of problems you want to have. And we did create a very exhaustive FAQ that every question I could possibly think of was in there, but does anybody read it? Not really, you know? It’s there if some people want to-
Kurt Elster: Well, if there’s like three questions that people ask over and over, my solution is always put those at the top of the contact us page and then you say, “Hey, other questions could be answered immediately, so you’re gonna spell the benefit out for them. You can answer your question immediately with our FAQ, so hopefully they’ve got the top three, then maybe they check the FAQ when they see that these top three are actually helpful, and then maybe the top three is like, “Hey, where’s my stuff?” Or, “Hey, how do I do a return or exchange?” Well, those first two you can get an app like Venntov Order Lookup to handle the order lookup, so like 95% of those go away. And then the other, like returns and exchanges, use an app like Bold Returns Manager, and now you can really streamline that process.
Eric Gower: Well, I’m gonna have Chris, our technical guru, listening to this and copying down exactly what you just said and enabling it, so there you-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, because you’re saying, “Oh, I like doing the customer support. I think it’s valuable.” But the annoyance is going through the same things over and over. Well, okay. Maybe you don’t have to give up customer support, you just need to automate or slow down parts of it.
Eric Gower: Yeah. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Kurt Elster: I think that’s pretty good. Yeah, as long as I’m here for this interview, are there any other app recommendations you need?
Eric Gower: God, I mean… Well, we could talk about apps for a moment if you like. I mean, we’ve been a very big fan of Klaviyo, and that’s been a godsend for us. I mean, it’s worth many, many, many, many times the $250 monthly fee we pay. We’ve been using this app called Route. Have you heard-
Kurt Elster: It’s shipping insurance, right?
Eric Gower: It’s incredible. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: What’s it do? Talk me through it.
Eric Gower: Oh my God, this has solved so many problems for us. So, for a small fee, it’s a percentage of the total. It’s usually about 1%. So, somebody pays $100 for matcha, for about a buck they can get shipping insurance, and Route will take care of all shipping headaches. You just send it to them, and they’ll make the customer whole in whatever way it takes necessary. And it’s actually started with Lloyd’s of London, the great British insurance company.
Yeah, so this app has been great for us, because it will just take care of any problem about a package not arriving, or being late, or whatever it is. It just automatically gets routed to them and it’s worth its weight in gold, I would say.
Kurt Elster: That sounds pretty good, and I’ve heard other people sing Route’s praises.
Eric Gower: Yeah. And it costs us nothing. I mean, the customer pays for it.
Kurt Elster: That’s the magic of it.
Eric Gower: They would rather pay the 98 cents. Oh my God. They would rather pay the 98 cents and have a guaranteed delivery. I mean, it’s great. There’s nothing not to like about it.
Kurt Elster: If they were using Route, or maybe Clyde, and they said, “Wait, we don’t pay anything for it. The customer… It gets passed through to Route.” And I said, “Well, why don’t we just offer that insurance ourselves and then re-ship?” And so, they did it. They just created a product called shipping insurance that people could optionally add to the cart. And it actually was a pretty decent revenue driver.
Eric Gower: I’m sure it was.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That worked pretty well. And then the “insurance” is, “All right, if they can confirm it’s gone,” they just reship the item. Now, the one advantage like with USPS is you can, if an item doesn’t show up, you can call the local Post Office and they take it fairly seriously.
What’s a key takeaway here? What’s like the one thing that now that you’ve really told your story, you’re looking back on it, what’s the one thing that you think is paramount to your success? What’s the cornerstone here, where if you had to go back in time 10 years and give yourself a piece of advice, like hey, here’s the thing to focus on, to stick to, what do you think it is? What do you think has driven your success? This marathon success, where it’s like slow and steady?
Eric Gower: Do things that aren’t scalable, right? Write those notes. Call people. Don’t try to be… I don’t know, Door Dash, like venture funded, acquire customers at any cost, paying ungodly amounts to do all these things. You know, do it the old fashioned way, which is just talk to people who are your customers. I mean, it really is that simple. We’ve been harping on that, but I think that’s been the key, and it’s very underrated, because it’s frankly a lot of work. Nobody really wants to do the amount of work that that takes, but God, to us it’s been very much worthwhile.
And to customers, to delight a customer, there’s nothing better. We just have ridiculous return rates for first time purchasers becoming second time purchasers as a result of this. So, it’s very easy to keep people if you just treat them well, right? I mean, how hard is that to understand?
Kurt Elster: I really like that takeaway. I think that’s fabulous advice. Do things that aren’t scalable, treat people like people, and wash, rinse, repeat and see what happens. Because you’re saying, “Hey, invest in relationships.” And that that relationship with the customer is still a relationship.
Eric Gower: It is. And particularly beginning, I would say. I mean, if you’re full going and you got 200 employees, it’s obviously harder to start over and do that, right? But for anyone contemplating starting a new business, or just getting into Shopify and really trying to figure out how to make this thing work, just make all of the focus on customers. I mean, that’s Amazon’s secret, right? I mean, Bezos has been saying that since day one. It really is true. It’s just like the people who buy your stuff are the ones. Not anything else. That’s it.
Kurt Elster: I like it. All right, that’s fabulous. Let’s leave it there. Eric, where can people go to get your fabulous matcha?
Eric Gower: Well, BreakawayMatcha.com is the only place you can get it. We do have a couple of wholesale things that we do with local outlets and some restaurants and stuff, but God, there are no restaurants anymore. COVID has really slayed the whole wholesale market and I’m so glad that we went direct to consumer. So yeah, that’s really the only place is our website. It’s just BreakawayMatcha.com.
Kurt Elster: And if I can make a recommendation, try the cold brew. It is truly fabulous.
Eric Gower: Right on, man. I have the same recommendation. It’s a good entry point, too. It’s not expensive. It’s one of our least expensive ones. And if that doesn’t get you hooked, I don’t know what will.
Kurt Elster: Eric, thank you so much for being here. It has been a delight.
Eric Gower: Oh, always Kurt. Thank you for having me. It’s been great. Thank you.