A Risk-Averse Entrepreneur Re-invents Women's Intimates
Marnie Consky is the Founder, CEO, and Chief Anti-Chafing Champion of Thigh Society (US), a niche undergarment brand offering moisture-wicking, breathable, and discreet boxer brief underwear for women. Thigh Society prevents inner thigh chafing while providing modesty coverage and is on a body-positive mission to normalize this common skin issue while helping women love their thighs at any size.
Key Takeaways:
Marnie grew Thigh Society to a six-figure business while working a demanding full-time job before deciding to focus exclusively on building the business in late 2016, and has grown it to 7 figures since. Before becoming a full-time entrepreneur, Marnie worked for organizations in Toronto, Canada including Accenture, the Ontario Ministry of Government Services, and the Rotman School of Management (MBA school) in a variety of strategic talent management roles.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
Marnie Consky 11/3/2020
Kurt Elster: So, Julie, Mrs. Elster.
Julie Elster: Hi.
Kurt Elster: Hello. On this episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, I’d like to talk about your favorite underwear.
Julie Elster: Okay.
Kurt Elster: Tell me who, what brand is it… You bought some lifechanging underwear like two, three years ago?
Julie Elster: Are you talking about Thigh Society?
Kurt Elster: Thigh Society.
Julie Elster: Okay.
Kurt Elster: It’s such a great name.
Julie Elster: Yes.
Kurt Elster: It’s like… You know, I always use the example dog lawyer, where it’s like if you hear someone say, “I’m a dog lawyer,” you gotta know more. Thigh Society, I’m like, “What is that?” So, what is that?
Julie Elster: Well, it is fantastic underwear that I believe I found postpartum. I think it was after we had our daughter and I had gained some weight, and so there was an issue in the warmer months where I’d feel like my thighs were always touching when I would wear dresses, or like comfortable, loose-fitting clothes, because I was postpartum, and it was super uncomfortable. And I don’t even know how I came across Thigh Society, but it’s like it’s underwear, but it goes a little bit longer and covers your thighs, but it’s not like spanks, or like a spandexy-type thing that sucks everything in. It’s super breathable and comfortable and then I didn’t have issues with rubbing together or chafing, and so I found it was great postpartum, and because I’m always going to Disney World in Orlando where it’s always incredibly hot and humid.
Kurt Elster: It’s roughly 140 degrees and 200% humidity.
Julie Elster: Yes. Every day. Always. And you’re walking around outside constantly. So, I found those to be just like a total game changer for when I was walking around the parks for 10 hours at a time, because so much walking, and even at my thinnest, I just naturally have big thighs. So, I found these to be a total game changer, life changer.
Kurt Elster: And did you end up ordering more pairs or you just bought one pair?
Julie Elster: I don’t know how many I have. I have several.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so there were multiple orders placed.
Julie Elster: I do have several. Yeah. Yes.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And what got you to place the multiple orders? Was it like… So, initially it was a Facebook or Instagram ad.
Julie Elster: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: You checked it out, you bought them.
Julie Elster: Yes.
Kurt Elster: On the first go or did you research it?
Julie Elster: My guess, I don’t remember because this was a while ago, but typically what I do if I’m gonna buy something from an ad, I will scroll through the comments and then see what people say.
Kurt Elster: Oh, don’t read the comments.
Julie Elster: Okay, but if people… If it’s universally people being like, “These are great.” Then I’m like, “All right, now I’m gonna do a little Google research and see if I can find other people who…” Maybe negative comments haven’t been deleted on Facebook, to make sure that it’s a good product. So, that’s most likely what I did, and ended up ordering a pair, and then when they were great, I ordered more.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And I’m very familiar with this because you were so excited about these, I heard many times. You’re like, “Oh, I love these underwear.”
Julie Elster: It’s really hard to be a postpartum woman in hot months when you’re trying to lose weight, but also wear loose fitting, and I had a C-section, so loose fitting, comfortable clothes were what I needed to be wearing at all times, and so these ended up being lifesaving for me.
Kurt Elster: All right, and joining us so that we can learn more about this lifechanging underwear is Marnie Consky, the founder, CEO, and chief anti-chafing champion of Thigh Society, a niche undergarment brand offering moisture wicking, breathable, and discreet boxer brief underwear for women. And the problem Thigh Society solves is it prevents inner thigh chafing will providing modesty coverage, and the entire brand is on a body positive mission to normalize this entirely common skin issue while helping women love their thighs at any size. That’s a great tagline. I love it.
Marnie, thank you for joining us.
Marnie Consky: Hi. I’m so happy to be here. I mean, that introduction from Julie, I mean… She’s hired. Julie, you’re hired.
Kurt Elster: What’s funny about it was I was very familiar with Thigh Society because of her experience, and then we connected, and I did conversion rate optimization work for you and then connected you with one of my colleagues.
Marnie Consky: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s a small world.
Marnie Consky: It’s a small world and it’s honestly a full circle moment and really such an honor to be a guest on your podcast, since it was around this time last year that I first discovered The Unofficial Podcast, and to think that I’m a guest right now is just super cool, so happy to be here.
Kurt Elster: When… How long has this thing been going on? When did you start Thigh Society?
Marnie Consky: A long time. So, I started Thigh Society in 2009 officially with a website, but the concept and ideation took a whole year before that, from July 2008. And I like to joke, by the way, that I was one of Shopify’s very first stores. I think actually Kelly, our web developer, checked and we’re one of the first thousand stores on the Shopify platform.
Kurt Elster: Whoa!
Marnie Consky: Yes. Which is-
Kurt Elster: Wait, I wonder how she figured that out.
Marnie Consky: I think… I don’t know. That was like… That’s above my pay grade.
Kurt Elster: I gotta ask her.
Marnie Consky: Yeah. You can ask her. And so yeah, I started… The idea for these anti-chafing slip shorts was really born out of a need for a product for women that didn’t exist, and I was… I never identified as a plus size woman, but my thighs touched. Julie mentioned this a little bit in her intro. My thighs have always touched and whether my size has been a size 6 or a size 12, regardless, anytime there’s warm weather out and I’m walking bare legs with a dress, my thighs get sweaty, and they rub together, and a rash ensues. And so, it was honestly the first hot day of summer, in June of 2008, and I was wearing a dress to work, and on my lunch break taking a walk, and my thighs started to rub together, and I thought, “Shoot. I remember this problem.” We get like three months of summer here in Toronto, pretty much the rest of the year is winter. Pretty similar to Chicago I would imagine.
Kurt Elster: I was gonna say I’m familiar.
Marnie Consky: Yeah, so you have a short-term memory, right? When it comes to summer you’re like, “Oh yeah, I remember this season.” And I remember running to a drug store and grabbing whatever I could find, at the time it was baby powder, and just sort of slathering it on my thighs so that I could walk back with dry thighs. And I really thought, “You know, there has to be a better way. There’s gotta be a product on the market that’s not shapewear, that’s not tight, like a long leg boxer brief for women.” The same way men get all kinds of leg lengths, right? Like for boxer briefs, you can go into any store and pretty much have a selection between short, mid, long, ultra long, you name it. But for women, the only choice really was like shapewear for long leg coverage or cutting leggings and wearing bike shorts, like from Under Armour or what not.
And so, essentially I made it my mission over the course of the summer to try to find a pair of shorts that met my laundry list of requirements. You know, light weight, breathable, seamless, super comfortable, because most women who are wearing this type of garment don’t really want to be wearing a base layer. They want to be able to have the freedom of bare legs. So, the most you can make this garment invisible and forgettable once it’s on is really… That’s a sign of a great product, and I wasn’t able to find anything over the course of that summer, so I really spent the time pounding the pavement, visiting local boutiques, visiting department stores, looking online. I can’t remember if Amazon was… Well, Amazon wasn’t as big as it is now in 2008, but I certainly spent a lot of time scouring the internet looking for this product that I was hoping to not have to create, quite frankly.
I was really a reluctant entrepreneur, especially in the sense of taking on an apparel or an intimates company. I had grown up in Montreal, where back in the day that was a real hub for garment manufacturing, and so I had a lot of friends whose families were in that business, and just remember hearing that there was all kinds of things that just didn’t necessarily appeal to me or seemed like they were a bigger headache than they were worth. And so, I was a little scared off from the idea of making clothing of any kind, so I was really hoping during the course of that summer that I would find a product that would meet my needs and then I could just move on my merry way.
But that didn’t happen, and as I got deeper in this couple of months of research, I realized that there was probably… I probably had a good opportunity to give this a good go.
Kurt Elster: So, all right, 11 years ago… Wow, that feels like a long time, doesn’t it?
Marnie Consky: It really does.
Kurt Elster: It’s amazing how common this initial story is, where you have a pain or problem in your own life, you say, “There’s gotta be a solution for this.” You go looking through the solutions, find none of them are particularly good or just flat out don’t meet your criteria, and you go, “Well, somebody’s gotta make something better. Why not me?” And then you attempt to do it. So, once you had that why not me moment, what’s the next step?
Because manufacturing something scares the shit out of me, right?
Marnie Consky: Me too.
Kurt Elster: There’s a big difference…
Marnie Consky: It still does.
Kurt Elster: You’ve done it! So, like trying to get a physical good made is a scary proposition. Where do you even begin?
Marnie Consky: Yeah. So, I… When I decided to quit my job to focus on this full time, I don’t know that I knew that it would be a temporary… First of all, I didn’t know that I would be back in the workforce so quickly after, but I also decided that I would take this time to learn all I could about the industry. I set aside at the time $8,000. It was under $10,000. I ended up spending $8,000 to get… As a goal, to go from developing the product, producing the product, and launching a website. And decided that that was money that I could live without if this didn’t end up working out.
And so, I really did commit at the beginning to say, “This is one of those things that if I don’t take the jump, if I don’t try this, the worst case scenario is I’m out $8,000.” And I had saved up for that. It’s not an insignificant amount of money, but I was okay if I never saw that money again, and so it was important to me that I had allocated that money, that I wasn’t worried about needing to borrow money at the time, and I am a very risk-averse person by nature and a risk-averse entrepreneur. I think my risk profile is changing as the years go by, but especially when it came to manufacturing and the idea of committing to-
Kurt Elster: More?
Marnie Consky: Yeah. Like an order-
Kurt Elster: You said it’s changing. More or less risk now?
Marnie Consky: Oh. I think I’m less risk averse now. You kind of have to be.
Kurt Elster: And you weren’t particularly risk averse then.
Marnie Consky: Oh, sorry. No, I was very risk averse then and I’m less risk averse now, but still more risk averse than I can observe from some other entrepreneurs.
Kurt Elster: I relate. I see other people make crazy investments and in my head I’m just like, “You’re gambling. That’s gambling. Oh my God, don’t do that!”
Marnie Consky: Yes. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: And then, you know, they end up like with obscene sums of wealth and I’m like, “All right. Well, maybe I was wrong.”
Marnie Consky: Same. Yeah. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Right? Risk reward. Okay. I interrupted.
Marnie Consky: Exactly, and I’m sure we’ll touch upon some of that in this chat. So, I had committed this money and I thought, “Okay, I’ve committed the time,” because I had quit my full-time job, and essentially what I did was I started doing some research in terms of what local organizations existed for any sort of fashion entrepreneurs, even though I never have and still don’t consider myself in the business of fashion. We make a real, foundational undergarment in the intimates category, but of course we have to sort of… We position ourselves as fashion, even though our niche is within intimates.
And so, I had found actually a local organization that was a not for profit that had a lot of online resources, some free and some very low cost guides that you could download to learn about how to build a fashion business, how to scope out sewers, and pattern makers, and a list of local domestic factories and things like that. And then I went online, and I bought a couple of books on… I remember my first book was The Beginner’s Guide to Seamless Manufacturing. So, I read that book, and I got my highlighter out, and I was taking notes, and I really took this on like a class project in terms of just trying to gather as much information as I could from the manufacturing side. I also spoke to a lot of people, so that was the freedom of not working during that time, is that I could have a lot of meetings during the day, whether on the phone with people who weren’t based in Toronto, or even after hours when some people were available.
So, I spent a few months having a lot of conversations, and I also at the same time kept trying to do some online surveys spread through my group of friends and their group of friends, about asking women what type of undergarment they would want this to be. You know, sharing my idea of creating this undergarment and trying to sort of crowdsource feedback in terms of if you could wave your magic wand, what would be the key features that this undergarment would need to have? And I also did that online in some chat forums and things like that.
Kurt Elster: That’s… I want to highlight that. It’s such a critical and important step and like strategy and tactic. The strategy is before you make anything, talk to your potential customers, and try and validate your idea with them and see what info you can… It can send you down quite the rabbit hole that you didn’t expect.
And I heard if you could wave a magic wand. As soon as I hear that question, I know market research is being done and I am happy to help, because you just want to know how I think and what I think about X. Oh, I have opinions, man. But that’s that critical question, is if you could wave a magic wand, and saying like, “All right, ignore the current situations, ignore the current solutions. You’ve got this… We’ve agitated this pain or problem by describing it to you. If you relate to it, what’s the ideal solution? And so, finding if multiple people agree with you on your solution or come up with an even better idea, that’s a million dollar question.
All right, continue.
Marnie Consky: Yeah. Totally. Totally. And it still remains a key part of our processes today when we’re thinking about new product development. We do customer surveys, we post surveys through Instagram stories and things like that, even just quick one offs, so definitely our customers are always a source of ideas and feedback. So, I was collecting all of this feedback. I was really trying to be a sponge, soaking up everything I could about manufacturing. I was reading online about eCommerce and I didn’t… I don’t think I even understood at the time what a payment processor was versus a website, like I had to come to understand what is WordPress?
And this was back in the day, of course, when Shopify didn’t have those downloadable templates that you could now make a full-blown website out of in a couple of hours. I knew I would be in a position where I had to hire a web designer to build that website, that WordPress site for me, and a graphic designer to do all of the design, et cetera. But I also was researching domestic manufacturing, so at the time, being a startup, knowing I was very risk averse, knowing I really had no plans of taking out a loan to start this business, that I really wanted to be self-funded from the beginning, domestic manufacturing was my only option, because once you start going overseas you’re facing really large minimum order quantities, and I also really wanted to stay domestic as long as I could, and it’s also… It was much easier to find somewhere local, because you could just sort of pop into the factory and see how things were going.
And lucky for me I had a wonderful network, and in my network was an acquaintance who was very well connected to domestic manufacturing in Canada for a large apparel company, and so he was able to facilitate some introductions in addition to that list I had acquired from that local organization, and met with a couple of factories, and I was interviewing them as much as they were interviewing me. Especially when you’re coming in really small, you have a small budget, you’re really looking to find out what their minimum order quantity is and you’re hoping it’s affordable, because especially when you’re doing apparel and intimates, I knew from the get go that I didn’t want to do a one-size-fits-all undergarment, because as a consumer, I had tired other shorts that were one size fits all, but really those undergarments are often one size fits none or one size fits one, because they’re meant to fit one body type and one size.
And so, I knew going into the production process that I need affordable minimums so that I could start with at least four sizes, from a small to an XL or a 2XL. And so, I worked over those coming months, those months between I would say July and December to learn, absorb, survey, and ultimately come up with a prototype with my factory that was delivered to me on… I think it was Christmas Eve, so I had this working prototype finally of this idea that I wanted to create in my hands, which was super cool, made with fabric that I had also found a local fabric supplier, so that’s another thing. At the time, thinking back to 2008, I didn’t have the money to buy bolts and bolts and bolts of fabric, whether from an overseas or domestic supplier. So, I really had to find local suppliers, or at least North American suppliers, where I could buy smaller volumes of fabric that I could then ship to the factory to knit.
Things are very different now. Actually, we’ve moved to a completely different production process. We now actually make our own fabric.
Kurt Elster: Whoa!
Marnie Consky: Yeah. Pretty cool.
Kurt Elster: That’s cool.
Marnie Consky: And there’s a lot less waste through the new process that we use, and I think our products overall are much better fitting because of the nature of the yarn process that we use. But at the time, that was really my only option as a small business.
So, everything came together. Christmas Eve I got my first sample. From there, I ordered a lot of other samples in other sizes, because obviously I didn’t want to just be the only test model, and subsequently sent out samples of this product to a lot of friends and acquaintances to try, and then they… I asked them to send it out to their friends and acquaintances who lived in warmer U.S. states, because January in Toronto is not an ideal weather climate to be testing anti-chafing shorts, especially testing the moisture wicking properties. Yeah, you wouldn’t. I mean, you could wear them as an extra layer of warmth.
Kurt Elster: You have to go hang out in a sauna.
Marnie Consky: Yeah, pretty much. So yeah, we went through that testing process, got feedback, iterated on it over the coming months, and then at the same time I was working with my web developer to come up with a website. I was learning and picking up a little bit of WordPress, HTML at the time. Really, like I said, this was… That six month period was really-
Kurt Elster: It’s a superpower.
Marnie Consky: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: If you can figure out… If you can know just a little bit, just enough HTML and CSS to be dangerous, that really makes life easier.
Marnie Consky: It really does. It really does. And I think I… I don’t know. I think I geek out on that stuff. I think in a past life I may have been a developer. But we’ll see. And so-
Kurt Elster: It sounds like you geek out on a few things, like just being a little bit geeky about eCommerce, web design and development, manufacturing processes, and even I hear material science made its way in there now. That’s exciting stuff!
Marnie Consky: It really is. I could totally nerd out on that for a whole podcast, but I’m sure your listeners have different things they want to hear. Yeah, and I think curiosity for any entrepreneur is so important, right?
Kurt Elster: Yes!
Marnie Consky: It’s like you have to be curious, especially in those early days. For me as a solopreneur, and I was a solopreneur for the first five years, I mean that’s the frustrating part ongoing I think, too, about being entrepreneurs. You know, you often need to find the expertise. You don’t need to be an expert in everything, but you need to be curious enough to learn enough to be dangerous potentially or learn enough to know who you need to hire or who you need to bring on. And so-
Kurt Elster: Well, and it helps you when you’re doing the hiring, it’ll make you more comfortable that it also helps you talk the talk. Like I in no way expect my clients to know web development, but if they understand even like 1% of what’s in Paul Reda’s head, my gosh, that makes it dramatically easier. For me, it’d have to be more like 10%, because I’m not operating at his level.
Marnie Consky: No, for sure. For sure. And I still employ this tactic, and I did it a lot at the beginning, which is when I was speaking with my manufacturer and others in the apparel industry, I would often say, “Can you explain this to me like I’m 10 years old? I need you to please boil this down to the basics.” Or, “Explain it to me like you would explain it to your grandmother.” Because oftentimes we get so caught up in our respective industries with acronyms and industry speak, and it’s really… It’s tough as an outsider to figure that out.
Kurt Elster: Well, and those buzz words exist in part to exclude outsiders. So, if you’re trying to teach something to someone, you want to avoid buzzwords, and acronyms, and abbreviations, and all that stuff, and just try and like if you truly understand it, you can teach them the simplified version. When you say like, “Teach it to me like I’m your grandma or I’m 10.” That’s what an executive summary is. The assumption is the executive does not need to know the details, right? So, that’s a skill in itself.
Marnie Consky: Yes. Totally. I think it’s a skill we could all use. It’s a great lesson for life.
Kurt Elster: You decided to do it. You committed to I’m gonna try this for six months. You did tons of customer research. You’re risk averse entrepreneur, which I appreciate all these things, and you decided you’re gonna bootstrap it through your network… Which, all right, unfair advantage. You want to look at your network and see who can help you with whatever you’re doing, and maybe they know someone who knows someone who can help you. That’s why you want to explore those avenues. And you’ve got… All right, so now you’ve got your prototype manufactured in your hands Christmas Eve. Where do we go from there? How do we get our initial sales?
You’re building the site. This is early days. This is before things… The tools were starting to be democratized, but they’re not where they were now.
Marnie Consky: Yes. And so, a large chunk of that $8,000 investment went to my web developer and designer. I think it was about $5,000 went to my web dev and my designer to come up with a logo, and we did a photo shoot as well, to get some product photos, and the remaining $3,000 was roughly for the production, for the first round of production. And so, what I did leading up to the launch in July was I had gathered a few samples from the manufacturer, and I again went online and looked up what we would now call influencers. Then they were more known as bloggers. And so, I was able to come up… I’m very methodical and very organized.
I’d say one thing, maybe what makes up for some of my risk aversion is that I feel like I can control things if I’m more organized about going about them, and so I had my spreadsheets, and my lists, and I was very methodical about coming up with a list of however many bloggers that I could that I thought would be amenable to trying the product, and I was very confident that they would love the product, and then they would write about it and share with their readers, and then that would potentially generate more sales.
And that’s really fundamentally how I started. I went out with this approach of let’s get some free PR, and let’s hope that people love this and start coming to the website. I was very deliberate about making this an online business as opposed to focusing on wholesale, but at the time I did feel that from a proof of concept perspective, I really wanted to have some… I wanted to have some wholesale accounts so that it could validate the business. So, if someone was shopping online, I think the internet and online shopping’s come a long way since then, but I did have this concern in 2009 that if people happened to find my website and were shopping on there, would I have more credibility as a brand if I could demonstrate that I was also sold in retail stores?
Like, “Okay, this company’s not a fly by night. They’re legit. They’re sold in stores. I’ll give this a go.”
Kurt Elster: So, you wanted like as a form of social proof, you wanted logos or availability in retail stores.
Marnie Consky: Correct. Yeah. Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: I think that’s a good strategy. For sure, I think that adds… Like you’re not gonna see that and go, “Well, these guys aren’t legit.” Definitely not hurting.
Marnie Consky: Right. No, for sure, and I mean in hindsight, I think I would still approach it the same way, and as the years went on with wholesale, I really didn’t approach new wholesale accounts as time went on, and this was a very deliberate decision on my part for a number of reasons. Mainly because I was a solopreneur, and I was… I felt really there was only so much that I could do, and I wasn’t a sales rep. But I do remember in early days, like 2009, as soon as I had product, I was making phone calls to different stores that I again had sourced, come up with my spreadsheets, here are all the boutiques I’d like to sell to in Toronto that are specialty lingerie and bra shops. Same thing for other cities. And I remember being the most nervous having those conversations, because I didn’t know anything about like sales or this whole industry, but I’d call and say, “You know, I have this product. Would you like to carry it in your stores?” And ended up locking in about a dozen wholesale accounts.
Kurt Elster: Wow.
Marnie Consky: Yeah. One or two were consignment and I quickly learned that that was not something I wanted to do, and so with smaller minimum order quantities. I think I let some of my early companies start with something ridiculously low, like six pairs, like what’s six pairs at a wholesale price? It’s affordable.
Kurt Elster: Well, you’re risk averse and so are they.
Marnie Consky: Right.
Kurt Elster: So, say like… Obviously a store’s always gonna say yes to the consignment. The problem is like they have no… Because in my teens and twenties, I worked countless retail jobs, so very familiar. When the stuff’s on consignment, you just don’t have… There’s no fire lit under you to move the stuff, so it’s like, “Ah, we got that. Just stick it wherever it’ll fit.” And it just ends up on a pegboard somewhere. I’m thinking back to like my bike shop days. I’m assuming that these fine boutiques don’t use peg boards.
Marnie Consky: No.
Kurt Elster: But like versus the stuff where it’s like, “All right, we got it, and we paid for it, but they’ll replace it with next year’s model at the end of the year.” But like that stuff somehow magically, that always took priority over the consignment stuff, right? Because that represented cash that they owed.
Marnie Consky: Totally.
Kurt Elster: All right. Little retail perspective there.
Marnie Consky: Oh yeah. So, I made a real decision early on that wholesale was not an avenue I was going to pursue. I was happy with the initial boutiques that I had lined up who were only in Canada, because I didn’t want to deal with the extra hassle of customs and duties of shipping over the border to the U.S. And so, that’s sort of been my approach. Over time, I think it’s just sort of it’s been validated. I think it’s difficult as an eCommerce business to be everything to everyone, and when you want to be able to offer promotions and deals to your customers online, if you have a huge wholesale presence, you have to remember that those wholesalers are gonna be asking for similar promotions, because how can they be expected to compete?
Kurt Elster: 100%.
Marnie Consky: And so really, from an early on in the business, it was also a function of just me being just me. I thought, “You know, I’m just gonna leave this sort of where it is and let it grow organically.” If I get demand from a whole bunch of Canadian wholesalers, I’ll evaluate those, each one individually on a case-by-case basis, but I won’t make it my mission to pursue. And that’s really been my strategy ever since, and even now when we onboard a few new boutiques here and there, I’m very transparent about how we operate online, because I don’t want them being surprised and coming back later saying, “I can’t believe you’re doing this promotion and you’re not giving us this deal.”
I operate with full transparency.
Kurt Elster: I think that absolutely that’s the best way to handle it. You’re like, “Look, this is the score. Take it or leave it.” No one can be surprised when you have those clear expectations. As part of your agreement with them, are they allowed to sell online?
Marnie Consky: Yes, they are. Yep.
Kurt Elster: And can they… Do you have MAP? Minimum advertised price policy?
Marnie Consky: Nope.
Kurt Elster: Can they sell on marketplaces? Can they sell on Amazon, eBay, Etsy?
Marnie Consky: You know, we don’t have anything formal that prevents them from doing that, but the size of these retailers are quite small. They’re not like the Nordstroms of the world.
Kurt Elster: So, even if they did, you’re like, “Whatever. Go for it.”
Marnie Consky: Yeah. I’m kind of like you know what, they’re women-owned business too, and I’m just… If it ever got to the point where they were undercutting me to a volume that was concerning, obviously we would be addressing that, but it’s never gotten to that point. And they have t heir local customers, their local following. Especially with COVID, a lot of them had to shut down, so those that had been set up online were still able to target their customers, and I want them to have that, right? I want them to be able to stay in business.
Kurt Elster: I think for me what’s interesting about that is knowing you and knowing how organized you are, and how process-driven you are, there are some things in your business that still, even for you, there’s a laissez faire attitude to it where it’s like, “All right, not everything is worth the full management effort of my type A personality.”
Marnie Consky: Correct.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Marnie Consky: How much do I owe you for that therapy session?
Kurt Elster: I do a solid 15% of my work on the phone is business therapy with clients, for sure.
Marnie Consky: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: No, I just… I relate to a lot of your journey and a lot of what you’ve said, and so like even that aspect, I recognize it because it takes one to know one, right? There’s a lot of stuff where I’m like, “This is how this is done.” And there’s other stuff where I’m like, “Why do I even care?”
Marnie Consky: Yeah. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: And you have to decide and know what those things are and you kind of figure it out over time.
Marnie Consky: Exactly, and over time you get better at that, and letting go, and delegation, and all of that good stuff, which I guess that’s a good segue into how I went from solopreneur to not solopreneur, but-
Kurt Elster: Well, what I want to know, I still don’t have a good grasp on early… Like how did you get those initial sales? How did this business start growing? And how did you know… When did you go, “All right, time to leave full-time employment again and go full-time entrepreneur.”
Marnie Consky: Yes. So, the timeline for that was I launched in July 2009, and I quit my full-time job in August of 2016. So, just about four years ago. So, there was seven years of deliberation.
Kurt Elster: Wow.
Marnie Consky: Between should I do this full time or not. And I would say, so how did I grow the business in those early days and what led to my decision? Honestly, if I think back, it was really just a lot of word of mouth and it was a lot of those early press hits. There was a couple in particular that I got from some bloggers that were picked up by Buzzfeed and-
Kurt Elster: Wow.
Marnie Consky: Yeah, and that was huge in early days. And so, that led to a lot of traffic, and the business was really small in those early years. I was really running it still like a hobby. I still… I don’t think I was really still convinced that this could be a big business, and I was enjoying it because it was scratching the itch to learn. I was becoming more adept at some of those WordPress, in some of that coding, and marketing, and a little bit deeper in manufacturing, and it was sort of scratching this itch to learn, where I felt I hadn’t necessarily been learning that much in my career for previous years, and I had a job that I was really enjoying. I was working as a career coach for MBA students. And I thought-
Kurt Elster: Oh, that sounds fun.
Marnie Consky: It was. It was really fulfilling. And here I was applying I guess practical knowledge from saying, “Hey, these are…” A lot of my students were career switchers, entering into their MBA because they wanted to do something different, and so really being able to coach them and steer them down the path of how to make that switch. At the same time, essentially doing the same thing in my own life in tandem.
And so, as the years went on and the sales kept climbing, and again, it was… I really think it was a lot through word of mouth. I wish I could sit here and say we were an early adopter and figured out that Facebook ads was where it’s at, but I only came to Facebook ads in 2016, after I quit my full-time job. You know, we were just even dipping our toes in social media. We had a very bare bones presence on Facebook at the time.
And so, sales were growing very, very steadily and slowly by me reaching out to other influencers or bloggers and continuing to slowly build that business. You know, I had one product, too. This was not a mega corporation at the time. So, I was really treating this as a side hobby, and then ultimately what ended up happening is I think some press turned into more press. You know, the Huffington Post covered us, and Bustle, and Refinery29, and that was leading to more sales, and around the same time you started to see a bit more media activity around chub rub and chafing. Some of these bigger media outlets started covering those topics in the springtime, and so naturally because we had been around using keywords since 2009, Thigh Society was showing up number one in organic search just by happenstance.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Marnie Consky: Yeah, so that… I think a lot of that is… We weren’t doing any Google ads. We only started doing Google ads two or three years ago. So, it was really growing organically, and it got to the point where like I said, it was just… It was time. I felt like the business did have opportunity to grow. I don’t think I realized I was really contributing to inventing a new product category at the time. Because I was so risk averse, I really needed the numbers to prove it. And our sales had grown year over year. That $8,000 investment was long recovered. And I just felt like, “You know what? If not now, when?”
And you know, I was turning 40, so maybe there was some midlife crisis happening there, but I believed in myself as far as my skillset. I’ve had like nine careers throughout my life in MBA career coaching, in consulting, and HR strategy, and I felt that if this fell through, if I couldn’t really… If I quit my job and couldn’t get this thing off the ground to become a full-time job, then I could always find something else. I really had the confidence in myself that I was hirable. And so, at the time I considered it to be a really low-risk decision, and so… And that was 2016. And I’ve never looked back.
Kurt Elster: Well, congratulations. Clearly, the correct choice. But it’s you started 11 years ago, and you’ve been full time for four years.
Marnie Consky: Yes.
Kurt Elster: When you started, Instagram wasn’t even a thing. So, kind of a thinking out loud question. Let’s say you just said, “You know what? I’m done with Thigh Society.” You just blow that thing up today and you’ve got a brand new idea you’re way more excited about. Also, fashion and apparel. What… You’re gonna invent another category. You’re like, “One’s not enough. I want another one.” What do you do differently? What do you think that launch plan looks like in 2020?
Marnie Consky: That’s a good question. I don’t know that I would do that much differently. I mean, obviously now I know a lot more about eCommerce, and marketing, and manufacturing, and so the runway time that I gave myself treating this as a very casual hobby for those few years in the beginning, those… That time period would be condensed immensely, because I could… I have a lot more knowledge under my belt as far as that goes.
So, I would have condensed that period of time. I would talk to more people sooner who were more in a position to help me, rather than some of these conversations that ended up just being very educational. I would probably seek out people who I could partner with, even, to accelerate it. To sort of bridge that gap in my knowledge with them.
But I don’t know that I would do that much differently. I could tell you for sure I wouldn’t start another apparel or intimates business.
Kurt Elster: Oh no? Why not?
Marnie Consky: The inventory. A product-based business is so tough for anyone making products, but the inventory required, and I would say this is… It is philosophically aligned with how I want to run the business, so I’m not bitter about it in any way, but when you’re talking about apparel, in Thigh Society’s case, I wanted to create a garment for every woman. I wanted a woman who was a size zero, all the way up to a 6XL and above, to be able to have an option to have a comfortable fitting underwear without any shame around it. Because we’ve maintained from the beginning that thigh chafing has nothing to do with size, nothing to do with weight. Really it has to do with skin sensitivity and friction under the right circumstances.
So, basically I knew from the get go that I would have inventory challenges that I’d have to work through. I needed to decide on colors. When we first launched, we only had two colors because if you think about it, you’re gonna launch two colors in three sizes, so you do the math. It just keeps adding up in terms of how many SKUs you need to have. And so, with manufacturing and apparel, being a brand that we want to make sure we can accommodate all these sizes, the inventory… As the inventory… As our sizes got bigger and as we developed new products, our inventory investment increased. And so, you’re left holding a lot of inventory. We do a lot of forecasting around what can we sell, what sizes are selling, then you introduce colors, and you have certain minimums for colors, so you have to offer those across all the sizes. So, it’s just… I think it’s a lot of, again, my risk-averse nature speaking in terms of I don’t like the idea of carrying a lot of inventory over time and I want to constantly iterate and develop and launch new products, but you… I always am tempering that with, “Okay, so how much? What’s my turnover? How quickly can I sell this inventory through?” And then replenish, and then launch new products.
So, yeah, I don’t… I mean, I don’t think I’d go into apparel. I still wouldn’t be averse to a product-based company, but I don’t think I would do another apparel business.
Kurt Elster: Right. I absolutely see that perspective, just in that… In eCommerce, you get into this hamster wheel of I have to sell this inventory to get the cash to buy more inventory, to get… It just keeps going like that. And you’re right, as soon as you’re in apparel and it’s like, “All right, well, it comes in three sizes. Five sizes. Six sizes.” Oh my gosh. “Oh, it comes in three colors.” All right, well now every product requires 18 lines, each with their own minimum order quantity. Or 18 SKUs.
Marnie Consky: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Each with its own minimum order quantity. Oh my gosh, now I’m purchasing a lot of inventory, tracking it, and housing it. That’s maddening. How… Since you learned, you didn’t know any of this when you started, and you are very wise now, what advice do you have around inventory forecasting for someone who’s new to it? What do you wish you knew 10 years ago?
Marnie Consky: Oh my gosh. I’m still learning, and I’ve now been able to outsource a lot of that forecasting to my CFO, who also plays a double role as COO. And I think I’ve given this advice to entrepreneurs starting up a product-based business now, and it was the same advice I gave to myself and that I followed when I first started, which is start small. I would say start with one product and be really good at it. Even if it means that you have to wait a year before you introduce a new product that you’re dying to introduce, that you think your customer base would want. Because if you get stuck with a huge order for multiple products that you can’t… You find out one of those is dead in the water and you can’t sell it, then what?
And so, I think there’s… Especially in my early years, when I was speaking with a lot of people who had experience in wholesale and retail and apparel, one of their initial pieces of advice to me was, “You’re not gonna succeed. You only have one product. You have one short. How are you gonna make a business out of that?” Right? And I said, “Okay. I hear you. But I really want to make the best anti-chafing slip short out there, and I want to establish a solid base. I want to be able to get feedback from my customer base about how we can improve and then I want to get their feedback on what else they want to see from this product line.” And I don’t think there was a single person I spoke to who had experience in this industry that agreed with me.
It was either expand your product line immediately with different styles of shorts or add a tank top. People like to buy in sets. Or how are you gonna sell it to wholesale? They’re gonna have trouble selling just the shorts. And I struggled at first, but I was able to block that out and just go with my gut, which was… and again, probably risk aversion speaking of, “You know what? No. I’m gonna stay with this one product and I’m going to know the ins and outs of manufacturing this product. I’m gonna hear what my customers are giving me in terms of feedback. I’m going to really perfect the marketing, and the language, and the branding around this product. And I’m gonna get so good at it that then I’m gonna take the leap and start expanding the product line.”
And I still give that advice to this day. It’s not for everybody. Some people luck out and want to grow really super fast, and you can’t necessarily do that with one product. But I think there’s still… We don’t hear enough about that option, in terms of you don’t have to come with a huge product line. You can be very deliberate and methodical in how you launch your brand. And so, just from a cost perspective, cost savings perspective, try to start small. Start small and grow. And who knows? That product can be your flagship and you can build around that.
So, I still am in that camp of stay small. If it makes sense. But I think you can build a business around one product, and I think I’m living proof of that.
Kurt Elster: I think that’s fabulous advice. I really do. So, we’re… I could keep going. I mean, we can keep going for another 30 to 60 minutes, easily.
Marnie Consky: I know.
Kurt Elster: But I have to wrap it up. One of… All right, a few questions.
Marnie Consky: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Common one that people struggle with is like how do I know when to hire? And who do I hire first? What was your experience there and maybe your advice around that?
Marnie Consky: Yeah. So, I think you had another guest on recently who said… He was from the Bombtech Golf. Sully. I think it was Sully who said-
Kurt Elster: Sully. Tyler Sully Sullivan from Bombtech.
Marnie Consky: That’s right. And that podcast really resonated with me, because we have a similar way of thinking, which is you know, as a solopreneur when you’re starting out, you want to know a little bit about everything in your business, or a lot about everything in your business, because usually when you’re early on you can’t afford to hire the experts to do it. But over time, I think it’s important to sort of recognize that you need to know enough to be dangerous, or you need to know enough to hire the right people who can come in and take over for you. And so, in my case, I started… The first person I hired was in 2014, was part time, and actually I should just back it up a second.
Thigh Society is built entirely with freelance contractors and agency partners, so I am the only full-time employee in the business, and I think again, going back to that low-risk profile, as well as cost, and I think some of my consulting background played a role here, where when I realized it was time to bring some people on, I wanted to hire experts. So, I wanted to hire someone who could parachute in and start the work that they were really good at from day one, rather than have to sort of figure things out on the go. I also was having trouble or knew I would have trouble finding a generalist for a one product business at the time. It would be too expensive for me to hire someone who was amazing at eCommerce, and marketing, and shipping, fulfillment, operations, all in one go, because I was still a relatively small business.
And probably most importantly is I think I realized that I had so many responsibilities as a CEO that I felt that I needed to keep my finger on the pulse of the business, that the human aspect of managing employees, just I felt like I wouldn’t be able to give it my all. In terms of developing a team, and finding out what people’s career goals were, I just didn’t have the confidence that I could do both of those roles really well. And so, I chose to focus on the CEO role and then bring in outsiders and freelancers to help me. And so, the first person I brought on was someone who at the time was just finishing a master’s degree in social media and PR, and so she would give a couple of hours a week curating articles online that had to do with topics related to our brand, or topics that would resonate with our customers, like a lot of articles around body positivity, and body confidence, and things like that.
And then I also had engaged the work of a product designer, because around 2014 I was thinking through how we could make improvements to the product, and so I needed somebody with that deep expertise who was a freelancer herself, working for multiple clients at the time, because my factory didn’t have that expertise in house. And obviously, I had also brought on a web designer. I didn’t mention that, but that was one of my early hires, so obviously another freelancer who had built that initial WordPress site.
And then obviously as the business was growing, I was picking and packing and shipping all of the inventory out of my home office, and that became unsustainable, and so I at first was very worried that it would be unaffordable to find a local 3PL, and this was back in 2015. I think there’s so many more options now for 3PLs, but that was a pretty easy decision, right? Because I knew that I just needed someone to take those hours away from my day, who could pick, pack, and ship my orders, and I also knew that they could negotiate better rates with the Postal Service, so I could offer in turn more affordable shipping to my customers and whatnot, so that was a no brainer.
And then, I’d say one of my… My most key hire was my CFO/COO in 2016, and this was the year that I quit. We were introduced through some mutual contacts and I would say she was really my therapist, my business therapist for the first… From January 2016, all the way right through till August, till I left my full-time job, where I think everybody could use a mentor and someone who they can bounce ideas off of and share concerns, and fears, because being an entrepreneur can be really lonely. And you know, you don’t even need to find a mentor who is in your industry. In my case, my COO happened to have had experience as a general manager, and she had some manufacturing experience, and she had dabbled a little bit in intimates, as well, so it was a really great fit, but once we started talking, the relationship evolved from that of a business mentor to that of can we formalize this into a few hours a week? Or a few days a week that you can give me to start working on some of that inventory forecasting, working with our suppliers, and then the whole just finance element in terms of planning, and budgeting, and things like that.
So, she was really key, and she’s also still with me today. And then I also realized around this time, and I’m sorry, I’m going on for a long time. I’ll try to speed it up here. I had not even touched Facebook ads until December of 2016. And I had heard that there was some opportunity there, and I think that would be an understatement now knowing that we know the heyday of Facebook ads was probably in 2015, 2016, but I realized we had to start spending some money on marketing, that giving these shorts out to influencers online wasn’t necessarily going to just keep growing the business, and that organic traffic I mentioned wouldn’t be able to keep pace with the growth that we wanted.
And so, I brought on an ad agency who was expert specifically in Facebook ads, and Instagram ads, and Google ads, and so he was pretty self-sufficient with his team, parachuting in like I said, getting our assets together, learning the brand, and being able to go out and we allocated some budget to that. And then brought on… I was doing email marketing until this point all by myself, realizing okay, I’m hearing that email marketing is really important. Do I have enough expertise that I feel like I can grow our subscriber list? And what’s a flow? Oh, a welcome flow, when someone subscribes. Okay, I get that. That makes sense. Yeah, I’m seeing that from my other emails from other companies that I’m shopping from online, so what am I waiting for? You know?
And then I brought on an agency that specialized in email. And then… So, those early years, I’d say later years, but early years relative to the last four that I’ve been doing this full time were really when I started to assemble the team as the need arose, right? Thinking that I could only take some of this so far, so I knew enough about email marketing, I was absorbing all the podcasts I could, but even then I just… It was a question of time, and for me to become a true expert in email marketing, as an example, I would need to devote hours upon hours to learning that craft, and I just didn’t have it, you know? So, it was time to outsource that, and so that’s how I’ve approached essentially growing the team.
And case in point, our two most recent freelance hires have been someone to do PR, because I again was still curating lists, setting up Google alerts every time chub rub or anti-chafing showed up at a Google alert, I would try to add that person to my spreadsheet and target them for the next summer, or send them a note, or a DM, and it’s just… That is unsustainable and not a very good use of my time. And even when-
Kurt Elster: Actually, that’s a really good strategy tip right there is set Google search alerts for these keywords that are directly related to you and then add those people to… Okay, they’re writing about this topic, we can reach out to them.
Marnie Consky: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Smart.
Marnie Consky: Thanks, and I still do. I mean, I obsessively curate all the articles about thigh chafing, and articles that we’re not mentioned in, and I find I refer to those quite a bit, and I’ve now passed them off to other teams that are managing that. And then our most recent hire is actually your Nick Disabato, part of your network.
Kurt Elster: Oh, good deal. I love him.
Marnie Consky: Yeah, he’s amazing, because we thought… You know, I’m hearing more about all this stuff around CRO. You had done some work for us back in December. We’re getting to the point where our growth could really benefit from someone’s eyes on that, and I’m really excited about that moving forward, because as much as I want to become an expert in all aspects of my business, it’s a bit of that type A in me, and that curiosity, it’s just not practical and there’s not enough hours in the day to do it. So, it is… I speak to and I mentor a lot of entrepreneurs who are constantly deciding who to bring on first, and a lot of times, it’s funny that a lot of entrepreneurs are doing their own Facebook ads, and I’m always surprised at that, because I did… When I initially brought on the Facebook agency we’re working with now, I thought naively that hey, this seems like a cool thing. Maybe he can train me, and I’ll do it.
And so, I actually spent a month, I hired him to train me on how to do the ads, but it is a world unto itself, and it’s your craft if you’re doing Facebook ads and Instagram ads. I mean, to keep on top of all the best practices and things like that, again, it’s just… It’s too hard. So, my attitude is let me bring in the experts who can parachute right in and do this, and if I ever want to learn from them some tidbits here and there, I do often… I ask my questions. Explain it to me like I’m 10 years old. But I feel like I know enough to run the business with the knowledge I have and trust the experts to take that on.
And thankfully as the business has grown, we’ve been able to afford to hire those freelancers.
Kurt Elster: No, absolutely. All right, lightning question. One book recommendation.
Marnie Consky: Oh my goodness. Let me think about this. So, you know what? It’s an oldie but it’s a goodie, and it really influenced a lot of how I run business from the customer service side, and it’s the Zappos Book, and I’m trying to… I think it’s called Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh. So, it’s really an old book. Yes, I know, it’s back in the heyday of Zappos, but the approach to customer service that Tony had really set the foundation, the tone for how we approach customer service with Thigh Society. Being an underwear garment, an underwear company, and one that doesn’t really take returns, we want to make sure our customers have the best possible experience. And I think in this day and age, I think a lot of customers when they shop online are often primed for a bad customer experience, especially if there’s a problem with the merchandise. And I know myself, I’m super picky about customer service. Whether it’s in restaurants, or online shopping, whatever it may be, I notice good service, and I wanted to be able to replicate that in my business.
And so, it’s an old book, but it’s really fascinating in terms of how that business was built on a foundation of customer service with some really very unconventional techniques. And then for fun, I always Shoe Dog, the Philip Roth biography, but… Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Oh, of course. That was classic. If one were to want to purchase your underwear, where would they go?
Marnie Consky: They would go to thighsociety.com, and if they are in Canada, they would be re-routed to our Canadian site, but ThighSociety.com. That’s where to go.
Kurt Elster: Wonderful, and if someone wanted to learn more about you, what can they do?
Marnie Consky: They could send me a note. Send me a note through any of our channels on our website and my team will happily forward that on. I guess I have a bit of a low profile on social media, but they can check out my LinkedIn profile.
Kurt Elster: It’s for the best.
Marnie Consky: Yeah, I think so. It’s too hard. I don’t have time to keep up with social. But yeah, they can learn more about me from my LinkedIn profile and connect with me there, as well.
Kurt Elster: Wonderful. Marnie, this has been educational, inspirational, thank you so much.
Marnie Consky: Thank you so much. It’s been fun.