How Popov leather grew from a basement to a $1M business with 12 full-time employees.
Ryan Popoff founded a leather goods company after learning leather working as a creative outlet. Bootstrapped and run solo in 2013, Ryan is now leading a team of 12 full-time craftspeople in a 1,400 sq. ft. workshop in British Columbia.
Popov Leather makes handmade leather goods like wallets, belts, watch straps, notebook covers, and more. They're made to order, reasonably priced, and have turned thousands of customers into devoted fans.
In this episode, you'll learn:
Popov Leather is the quintessential rural small town success story. A hobby turns into a micro business following spousal encouragement which then turns into a thriving fast-growth business. Six years after its first sale, Popov Leather today YOR revenue growth as more than 90% of their production is shipped to satisfied international customers.
Kurt Elster: Hello and welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster, recording from beautiful, gray Ethercycle HQ, atop Skokie, Illinois’ Westfield Old Orchard Mall, in the professional building, and I love gear. Certainly, I engage in my share of rampant consumerism, and when I buy stuff, I don’t want to buy garbage. I want to buy stuff for life. In fact, there’s a subreddit for this called Buy It For Life, I believe, and I’m lucky to have, in Buy It For Life, had more than one client who has made products so wonderful, so durable, that they get shared in Reddit’s Buy It For Life subreddit. And recently, I started working with a merchant who falls into that space, and for whatever reason, often it’s leather goods, or men’s goods in general, and so we did a customer development survey for this group, and we asked people a series of open-ended questions to learn about what they’re getting out of this brand.
And we’re like, “Why did you buy? What kind of person… Why did you buy? What did you get out of it? What kind of person do you think would buy this product?” And over and over, the same things kept coming up. They said people who appreciate handmade, quality leather goods, people who want something durable, that will last a long time, and people who just want a good darn men’s wallet. Well, so today we’re talking to Popov Leather, Ryan Popoff of Popov Leather, and he started handmaking leather goods in his basement, the basement of a rental suite, not terribly long ago, and now has a million-dollar business with 12 full-time employees, operating out of a proper 1,400 square foot workshop. Man, that is the size of my last condo that we lived in. With two kids, no less. That was tight.
Ryan, thank you for joining us. How you doing?
Ryan Popoff: Hey, Kurt. Thanks for having me.
Kurt Elster: My pleasure. So, did I get that intro right? Is there anything I screwed up in there?
Ryan Popoff: No, you nailed it.
Kurt Elster: Okay, good. So, tell me in your own words, what is Popov Leather?
Ryan Popoff: So, Popov Leather, like you mentioned, we make handmade leather goods, and essentially anything you can hold in your hand, or wear around your waist, like a belt, or a bag, we kind of offer. We take a lot of pride in making things that are, like you said, handmade, and a lot of attention to detail. Everything’s made in house here, and you know, we try to put the emphasis on quality and handmade, so whatever we can tackle, or what our customers are asking us for, that’s essentially what we do.
Kurt Elster: When you put it that way, it sounds very simple. “Well, we make…” Essentially, you had a skill. You liked leather goods. You started making leather goods, and you just make stuff that’s good quality and people want. That doesn’t sound too complicated or crazy.
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, and I guess Kurt, it kind of started with my own needs. When I started the business, or started doing leatherwork, it was because I wanted a wallet that wasn’t offered on the market, and that kind of… You know, that’s kind of how a lot of entrepreneurs start. They create a product that isn’t on the market. So, for me it was a wallet that didn’t have any branding. It was very minimalistic. And that’s kind of how we carry things forward, so all our products don’t have any branding.
Kurt Elster: Whoa, you’re right. I did not catch that before.
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, so we don’t really emphasize that. We kind of let the product speak for itself, and so we built the business on word of mouth, so a lot of people will ask folks, “Where’d you get your wallet?” And then they’ll say, “Hey, you know, I got it from these guys.” We rely on that. We don’t… For me, having a wallet with brands and stuff on it, I don’t want to walk around with advertising, so that’s just kind of how we built our products, and that’s what got me started.
Kurt Elster: Well, you make it sound easy, but that’s the common entrepreneurial story, is someone says, “Hey, I need a product that fills X niche.” And you said, “Listen, I want something without branding on it, but I don’t want junk. I want a nice leather wallet without… that’s not plastered with a logo.” I just bought a new wallet. Previously, I had a Coach monogram wallet. That is nothing but branding. The entire pattern is a logo, right?
Ryan Popoff: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So you said, “Listen, I need this,” and nothing that fit the bill existed, so you said, “Why not me?” Did you have leathermaking experience, or was this the thing that kicked it off, where you’re like, “All right, I want to start in leather goods?”
Ryan Popoff: No. I mean, I had a little bit of background in sculpture, so that was kind of my specialty in art school, and then I graduated, and started working a day job, and at night, during my downtimes, I needed to fill my creative… I don’t know, desire, or pursuit, or whatever, with something.
Kurt Elster: For sure.
Ryan Popoff: And you know, leatherwork came up as kind of an interesting way to do that. I had no experience in it, and I just kind of taught myself. Watched a bunch of YouTube videos. Interacted on leatherworking forums with other folks, and just got really into it. I don’t know, just almost to the point of obsession, and I just… I really had to make that wallet that I really wanted, and I don’t know, that’s just kind of what started it and drove me.
Kurt Elster: I love that leatherworking was your creative outlet. I totally get that. I think a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people need that creative outlet, where they can make something and share it with the world. It’s that joy of achievement, that you’ve made a thing and put it out into the world. And for me, it’s photos and videos. I think it’s a creative endeavor, I like that a lot, so I totally get it, and it’s so much more fun when it’s a physical thing that you can make, like leather goods.
And when your business is your passion, it makes life easier. So, you were saying? Go ahead.
Ryan Popoff: Oh, yeah, sorry Kurt, I was just gonna say there’s no better validation or pat on the back than having someone give you money for something that you made. So for me, having that wallet and selling it, that’s what really kind of kickstarted the rest of the business, just having those first few initial sales, and being like, “Wow, maybe I’m onto something here.”
Kurt Elster: So, when you made the first one for yourself, how did you go from there to selling the first one, to selling the first ten?
Ryan Popoff: So for me, it was kind of finding a way to keep the hobby going, so after I developed that one wallet, Jill was like, “Hey, you should maybe throw that up on Etsy,” and I had no ecommerce experience or anything like that, so I was a little hesitant. And of course, putting anything online, there’s always a huge risk of failure and feeling bad about yourself, so I just did it anyways. We threw it up, and in a couple of days someone bought it, so we used that money to put towards better tools, and better material, and eventually people kept buying that same wallet, and we kind of expanded our lineup into book covers, different types of wallets.
And along the way, you kind of learn the tricks of… I won’t say tricks, but sort of the search engine optimization techniques on Etsy, and that kind of snowballed into us having a business on Shopify, because a lot of the strategies that you learn on Etsy are very transferrable. So, it’s not just understanding how to come up in search, but it’s also standing out, so product photography, product copy, pricing, that sort of thing, so all sort of the basic elements.
Kurt Elster: So, you started with Etsy. It’s wonderful when you’re initially starting out to validate your idea with a marketplace, because you don’t have to worry nearly as much about building the audience. They’re providing that for you. There’s a lot of the marketing gets done by the marketplace, and a lot of the infrastructure. How long were you on Etsy, and what made you… before you said, “Okay, let’s start building our own brand?”
Ryan Popoff: So, what worried me a little bit about Etsy is having sort of all your eggs in one basket, and not owning that basket, so there was a point where we were making enough money to quit our day jobs, and it was kind of at that point where we were like, “Well, if we stay on Etsy and they decide to change something radically, we have no say or control over it.” So, for example, they charge for advertising on their platform, they charge for transaction fees, that sort of thing, and you know, they could decide to raise those, or just do some radical things, which have happened in the past, so we decided to jump ship and move to Shopify, and sort of establish our brand further on Shopify. So, instead of directing traffic to our Etsy page, we started just sending folks to our Shopify page.
And because we had built up sort of a following on Etsy, it wasn’t too hard to transition, so when I talk to folks who are starting out with the handmade space, for the reason you mentioned, having the marketplace already there, I always say, “You know, start on Etsy. Learn how to do all the stuff that makes you pop out in search, and get people buying your things, and sort of validate your products, and then move over to another platform.” We’re still on Etsy, but it’s just a fraction of what we’re doing on our Shopify store right now.
Kurt Elster: And for someone who’s on Etsy, who’s got it as maybe they’re initially trying to validate their brand, their product, or they’re just trying to add an additional sales channel to their existing online presence, what would you… What are two of those top tips that people need for success on Etsy? Because I have so little experience here beyond it seems like a really cheap place to buy gifts. I’ve gotten the best gifts for my wife from Etsy.
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, and that’s kind of unfortunate, because they don’t really police a lot of the listings on Etsy, so you’re competing with people who are simply just reselling products brought in overseas, but there are still people who go on there looking for high-quality goods, or handmade products, so if I were to give advice to anyone who wanted to jump into Etsy and start selling there, I would first learn about the search engine optimization side of things. So, you know, how do tags affect your product listing, how do you word your titles, they all play into each other, and there’s a lot of advice online that you can look for, and it’s fairly simple.
But you know, focus on that, then focus on your product photography. So, it’s one thing coming up in the search results. It’s another thing to be sort of an attractive click, or to stand out from everyone else. When we first started on Etsy, we were doing the white background thing. On Amazon, every product needs a white background, and that’s… We jumped in thinking that that was the way to go, but when folks were looking for leather wallets, of course we look like every other listing, so then I started using a burlap sack as a background, so a nice, textured background, and then all of a sudden we started getting more sales. And then all of a sudden I started seeing everyone else use textured backgrounds.
Kurt Elster: Oh, geez.
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, it’s really funny. Up until two years ago, I was using a wood plank background, and then I started seeing a lot of our competitors do that, and so this year we switched to a different textured background, and I’ll be really curious to see if anyone else uses the same sort of strategy, so it’s a very specific type of material.
But yeah, it’s one thing to show up in search, but it’s another thing to actually get people to click on your listing, and then once you have them looking at your product, then you have to think about, “Okay, how do I sell it? Is my price appropriate?” There’s a lot of things that you can test on Etsy, and because, like you said, there’s a marketplace already there, or folks already there, you don’t have to worry about the cost-per-click advertising kind of thing. And another really cool thing about, or I think that’s cool about Etsy, is they give new product listings and new sellers a leg up, so if you’re a brand-new seller on Etsy and you get a product listed, they will give you a boost in search engine, in search engine rankings, just to give you a shot and see if people click on it.
So, if you can dial in your product photography, and get the SEO stuff figured out, you have a good shot of testing your product fairly easily.
Kurt Elster: When you say dial in product photography, what do you mean by that? Where would I start with that? Because I think that’s where a lot of people fall flat on their face initially, is like you don’t know if the product was the problem, the pitch, you, or just the photos.
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, so that was a huge struggle for me, and I still struggle with it, so I do all the photography for Popov Leather, and one of the biggest ways that’s helped me was actually just doing Instagram every day. So for me, shooting Instagram has taught me how to compose photos, what people like seeing in photos. I learned how to use my camera every day, and eventually you kind of upgrade your equipment to kind of suit your needs.
At first, I was shooting on a DSLR, and just kind of doing rudimentary sort of edits in Lightroom and stuff like that. Now, it’s fairly sophisticated, but I kind of just learned all that by doing Instagram every day. You eventually use a tool enough, you start to get fairly savvy with it. So, if I were to give anyone advice on product photography, I would say start with Instagram, because you can build a following on Instagram as you do it, and then you can use all that media that you’ve created on your website, and in your product listings, so you kind of have a twofold approach, and we use a lot of that content over and over again, like in our emails and things like that.
Yeah. I don’t know. For us, Instagram was just instrumental in learning the product photography stuff. And for me, like I said, standing out. If you can make your product stand out, try to do that as much as possible, because if you’re selling on Etsy, like if you’re selling on a marketplace, you just have to look different. You have to stand out from-
Kurt Elster: Okay. I like this idea, so we need professional photos, but more importantly, we need something different than what everybody else is doing. So, your initial move was, “Hey, I have a background,” and just by virtue of it not being product on white, that immediately helped it stand out, and it helped set a tone and a feel for the product, as well.
Ryan Popoff: Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay, and I’ve known, because Instagram knows, Facebook knows I’m interested in photography, lately I’ve been getting ads for like a pack of just background, backdrop tiles for doing product photos, which I thought was kind of clever. And to your point about different backgrounds. I don’t know. I just look for stuff around my house. It’s like, “All right, I’ve got this ceramic tile floor. I’ve got this marble countertop. I’ve got this beat up wood floor over here.”
I just look for those different backgrounds, because it really changes the photo.
Ryan Popoff: Totally.
Kurt Elster: So, what’s your, out of curiosity, and I know the best camera is the one you have on you, but what’s your current gear look like now? What are you shooting with most often?
Ryan Popoff: So, I have a full frame D750, a Nikon.
Kurt Elster: Cool.
Ryan Popoff: And I use a Sigma Art Series lens-
Kurt Elster: Nice.
Ryan Popoff: … for sort of our day-to-day in the workshop kind of photos.
Kurt Elster: What focal range?
Ryan Popoff: You know what? I couldn’t tell you. That’s me being an amateur photographer. I have no idea. I just know it’s the Art Series lens.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, those are nice.
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, and for product photography, I have a macro lens that I use.
Kurt Elster: That would be my biggest recommendation for people, is get… Whatever camera you’re comfortable with. It could be Micro four thirds, a full frame like your D750, or my 62, but grab a macro lens for product photography. It will make your life dramatically easier, and really make photos look better. And there are some cheap options, like I have a Canon 50 millimeter macro that I bought used on eBay for a couple hundred bucks. And that really dramatically improves things.
Ryan Popoff: Absolutely. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Do you do anything with lighting?
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, so I have a diffused, just camera… What’s it called? It’s just a diffused light. One of the big challenges with selling leather goods or any sort of tangible good on the internet, at least for me, is knowing how it’ll feel, or sort of the texture. So, one of the things with leather is the tactile feel, right, so we get a lot of comments about that. So for me, having decent lighting, where you can sort of catch the grains, and a macro lens that can really emphasize that was key.
Yeah, I struggled a lot with lighting in the early days. It took a really long time to figure that out.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, I’ve got… Looking at your photos, they’ve got… It’s like a really soft, off-access light, that the end result is the leather looks genuinely supple in appearance, like it has… You can tell that it’s soft. Yeah, certainly leather could be shiny, and you get a lot of glare. I appreciate being able to take a great photo of leather goods.
So, on the topic of photography, you mentioned Instagram several times. Is Instagram your favorite social media channel?
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, I would say so, but not necessarily for bringing folks to our website. That’s kind of a weird thing for me to say. YouTube is probably our best channel for getting the word out there, and it’s not through our efforts, it’s through sort of the micro influencers that we work with. Instagram has been valuable for me, like I said, just for learning photography, and for getting content for our various marketing initiatives, like email and so on.
I would say out of the ones that we produce content for, Instagram, yeah, I would say is my favorite, and then YouTube is probably my second.
Kurt Elster: So, you mentioned influencers with YouTube. How do you get access to influencers? What do you look for? Because from what I’ve seen is this goes one of two ways. You either get ripped off, or you get nothing out of it, and you’ve given your stuff to a random person, you have paid them, they did the work, and it just didn’t convert to anything. Or it’s tremendously successful, it drives a ton of traffic for 48, 72 hours.
Ryan Popoff: Yep. So, when I say YouTube’s my favorite, it’s because it’s not ephemeral like Instagram. So, on Instagram, when you deal with an influencer, sorry, they have your product for a little while, and then there’s either a burst of traffic, or nothing, or whatever, but then it disappears, because people seldom go through your feed or… And then, even worse, Google doesn’t pick it up, so there’s no… If someone searches for whatever your product us, Instagram’s never gonna appear on search engine listings.
So, for us, I mean we’ve worked with all sorts of influencers in the past, and what’s really worked well is the folks on YouTube, who aren’t super popular. I mean, I’m not gonna say super popular, but people who have 2,000 to 20,000 subscribers, that sort of thing.
Kurt Elster: Well, that’s me. I’m right in… I’m at like 2,300, I think.
Ryan Popoff: Oh, sweet. Okay, so maybe you could do a video for us. So, we look at specific niches, so we have a variety of leather goods. Right now, we’re looking at the everyday carry community, so it’s very simple for us to run a search on YouTube looking for everyday carry, and then kind of filtering out the folks who, like I said, between 2 to 20,000, and then we look for the people who have the business contacts in their profile, and we go, “Hey.” Simple, two-sentence email. We think that our product might resonate really well with your audience. Can we just send you something? No obligation to do a review, we’re just genuinely curious about what you think of it.
And like, I’m telling the truth, just check it out. If you’re happy, chances are you’ll probably do a review and be stoked that we sent you something, and that’s 90% of the times that we send something out, they’ll do it. And we kind of just repeat this process over and over again with different… with folks in that range. And I really like it, because they are people who are really engaged with their audience. They’re showing that they’re working hard to grow their channel. At the same time, they’re not looking to be paid or to be shills, you know? You talk to people who are 500,000 followers, they have marketing managers, they have people who are like, “Okay, I’ll do this, but it’ll be $5,000 for a video,” or something like that.
So for us, we’re able to scale the approach with micro influencers, by essentially the cost of an email and sending out a free product, and it’s worked really well. So, I think we’re… On average right now, we’re getting about 100 YouTube videos a month, and we’ve been doing it since April, so if you go on YouTube right now and you look up Popov Leather, you’ll see all the awesome folks we’ve been working with.
Kurt Elster: And when we did that customer survey for you, and we asked, “Hey, how’d you hear about us?” Word of mouth by far is the largest category, but there were a lot that were like, “Yeah, YouTube,” or like, “This community.” Like, “This forum, this subreddit, this specific YouTube channel.” It was cool to see. I mean, it really was the power of you make something great, and then enable people to talk about it, and the craziest thing is there’s no branding on the product and people are still out there recommending it.
If anything, they may be more comfortable recommending it with that it has this low… You have this very low key approach to branding.
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, it’s worked really well.
Kurt Elster: And on the topic of branding, your last name is Popoff, P-O-P-O-F-F. The leather brand is Popov Leather, P-O-P-O-V. This has driven me nuts ever since I noticed it. What’s going on there?
Ryan Popoff: So, yeah, that was essentially… When we first started Popov Leather, I thought about this for a really long time. So, Popoff is a very common Doukhobor last name, and Doukhobors are Russians who emigrated from Russia, but it’s not a really well-known last name, so I kind of thought, “Well, if our customers are coming from the States, and they’re buying Popoff Leather, what does that mean? That’s more of a verb, right? And that just kind of sounds silly.” So, I changed the last couple letters to Popov, with an O-V, and essentially it means the same thing. It’s the same last name, so it’s the same surname, just spelled differently, and it’s more of a name.
When you look at the brand, it’s a name. It’s not a verb. So, it’s a very silly but simple sort of twist on the name there, and that’s why we did it.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I mean, having grown up in Chicago, where there are literally more Polish people in Chicago than in Warsaw, and a lot of Ukrainians, and Russians, grew up with those guys. This makes way more sense now than previously. Okay.
So, going back to your journey, because you’ve given us a lot of great insights overall here, but going back to your journey, you started working out of a basement, and it was just you, of course, and your wife, who is really supportive, and that is tremendously valuable and in many cases necessary. But now, you’ve got this much bigger business with 12 full-time employees, and a big, proper workshop that looks really cool. How did you get there? How did you know, “Man, we gotta move. We gotta rent a proper space, and we gotta hire our first person?”
Ryan Popoff: I think there’s a crossroads that every entrepreneur or every craftsperson comes to, and it’s the decision, do I want to stay as a hobby, and be comfortable, or do I want to really drive this and make a difference, and put my mark on something? So, we took that road. I was like, “Let’s grow this. Let’s just see where this takes us.”
So, we were fortunate in that Jill’s folks, they live in Nelson, they helped us build a home here, and the bottom floor was gonna be a workshop, so just dedicated to a workshop, and we had our first child shortly after we moved into the home, and it was at that point where Jill was my better half, and now her days are taken up with Thomas, and I was kind of left on my own, in a bit of a panicky situation, so I asked one of my friends. I said, “Hey, do you want to come work with me part-time?” And that part-time turned into full-time, and then once you get over that hump of being scared about employing someone, being responsible for a paycheck, you start to realize that you could get a lot more done in your day if you had more help around the workshop.
And you know, in those early days, I focused really hard on making sure that the person who we hired could do just as good as a job as I could making a wallet, and that was kind of my focus, and that freed me up to start really working on the website, really working on our marketing initiatives, and essentially that’s kind of taken me out of the workshop, so now I’m just focused on building the business.
We outgrew our workshop in our house within a year. We had, I don’t know, six employees here. We were just tripping over each other, and then we moved into the workshop, and at this rate, we’re adding two to three employees a year right now. We just hired a production manager. It’s crazy. It’s really crazy. We just instituted a Kanban system, so now instead of getting an order and making an order to suit, we can actually pull the pieces off a shelf, and have stuff out within five business days. We’re looking to have stuff out within one business day pretty soon.
We’re gonna be the Amazon of handmade leather goods in the next six months. We’ll see, but-
Kurt Elster: Hopefully. With any luck.
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, it’s been a crazy ride, but what’s been really important for me, and I think what’s really helped us sustain our growth, and helped us scale, is customer service and our commitment to quality. So, even with getting stuff out the door within five business days, we still have a really rigorous quality assurance method, so like everyone has a really keen attention to detail, and along each step, it’s super important for me, because like I mentioned, word of mouth is what grew us, and word of mouth is what’s gonna keep growing us. And if we compromise on quality, or if we compromise on how we treat our customers, that’s just… It’s gonna tank us.
So, you know, like I said, I like to let our work speak for itself, and how we treat our customers is paramount to that.
Kurt Elster: And absolutely, that has come through. I mean, if you look through the reviews, one word comes up over and over. Quality, quality, quality. I mean, just unreal how into this product and the brand people are. The sad part is it’s because you just lived up to your promise. You said, “Hey, we have a lifetime and satisfaction guarantee. We handmake quality goods in our workshop. That’s what people get when they buy, and the prices are very reasonable, and I’ve told you this privately. It’s like I think you should raise your prices. I really do. For the quality, for what people are getting, I think this stuff should cost more. So that’s a… Certainly, I would take that as the highest compliment I can give, is when I tell someone, “You gotta charge more!”
Ryan Popoff: Thanks.
Kurt Elster: When did you start this? I don’t think I asked.
Ryan Popoff: So, it was six years ago. 2013. Yeah. We were living in Victoria, in the basement suite, so that’s kind of when we started.
Kurt Elster: If you had to go back and tell yourself one thing, because our time portal only opens for 15 seconds, and then it closes. You can only tell yourself six years ago one thing. What is it? What’s one thing you would do differently, or tell yourself?
Ryan Popoff: Kurt, I get asked that often, and my answer is always nothing, because without having those failures, you would never have successes. Because you don’t learn from constant success, right? You learn from falling down and picking yourself up, so a lot of that was what got me here today, so I don’t think I would change anything.
Kurt Elster: I think that that’s wise, and I think it’s sage advice, because you’re right. If you look at yourself ten years ago, and you’re not a better person because of all the mistakes you made in that time, well then, you’re probably just not getting better and you’re a crappy person, right? You have to… Those mistakes, those failures, those things that, “Man, I wish I could go back and change that.” Well, they’re what… That’s what made you who you are now. That’s what got you here.
Certainly there are things, “I wish I could do that differently,” but I think you gotta look at it and go, “Oh.” You have to think about those failures, instead of failures, go, “Thank you for that opportunity, universe, that taught me I don’t want to do that again.”
Ryan Popoff: Totally. Yeah. 100%.
Kurt Elster: So, looking down the line, what’s next? What are the things that… What’s on the horizon? What are you struggling with? What do you want to do differently? Tell us where this is going.
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, so for me, my biggest struggle is stepping into the CEO role, pulling myself away from the ground level of the workshop. I find it impossible. I always have to have my hands in everything, but there are other things that… I need to learn how to delegate, so these are just personal things that I’m working on.
In terms of the business, though, we just hired someone to help us full-time with product development, so we’re looking at releasing a new product maybe once per month.
Kurt Elster: Whoa!
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, it’s insane, but this person has been with us for three years, and she really understands the business, and she really understands what makes a good product, so really excited about it. And we’re thinking about maybe creating a private community of folks who can help us test these products before they launch, so having-
Kurt Elster: Oh my gosh. Do it.
Ryan Popoff: Yeah. Yeah, so I’m really excited about that. And like I mentioned, we have a production manager now, so he’s streamlining our production and our… We’re looking at more efficient ways of shipping, so these are all things that are kind of 2019, and then beyond that, I’m not sure what’s gonna happen, but we’re just gonna keep growing, hopefully, and be a… I think one of my biggest points of pride is being a local employer, so being able to move back to my hometown and employing a lot of people who are really stoked to be leatherworkers, so-
Kurt Elster: That is cool.
Ryan Popoff: Just continue to do that. Thanks, man.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, I think those are excellent goals and plans. For the community, it’s gonna be a VIP group of customers, and what would that look like? Would it be like, “All right, we took our 1,000 best customers and invited them.” Do you do it off lifetime value in Klaviyo, or number of purchases? And then invite those people to like a private Facebook group?
Ryan Popoff: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Yeah. We have a number of people, like I think our repeat purchase rate is somewhere like 30 to 40%, so anyone who’s made more than three purchases in the last couple years, I would probably just personally send them an email, be like, “Hey, are you interested in this?” And we actually have a thread on our website where people can suggest new products, so I might just reach out to those folks, as well, and be like, “Hey, you should come here and see what we’re working on.”
Kurt Elster: Very cool. We didn’t talk general tips. If I’m listening to this, and I’m thinking, “Oh, man. I handmake goods. I could sell those online.” Give me one or two tips for someone who wants to start selling handmade products online.
Ryan Popoff: Sure, so I can just say how I did it. I started on Etsy. Again, you have a marketplace that’s there, that can sort of validate your product, and if you’re looking at being really serious, it’s gonna teach you a lot about search engine optimization. It’s gonna teach you a lot about pricing. You’re gonna be able to see your competitors, what they’re doing, and what’s working for them.
And then the other really big thing that maybe I touched a little bit on is customer service, so if anyone ever has a problem with your product, use it as a learning example. Don’t take it personally, and wow the customer. So for us, if anyone ever has a problem with a wallet, my general response is keep it, let’s make you a new one, let’s make it better. Give it to a friend, and I’m gonna make you happy no matter what. I don’t care how annoying you are, and we’ve got our best customers just by putting up with nonsense that most people wouldn’t put up with. So, just do that. Do all that.
Kurt Elster: Just do everything I did.
Ryan Popoff: Just do it. Yeah, and sorry Kurt, the other thing is just do it. Don’t sit around thinking about your perfect logo, don’t sit around thinking about what the perfect this, that, and the other is, just go out and do it. Just exactly what I said. Do it. Don’t be a wantrepreneur, I guess is the phrase.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Wantrepreneur. I think to your point, you’re right. One of the things that stops people is perfectionism as procrastination. You’re like, “Well, I just can’t launch my site, because this isn’t perfect yet.”
Ryan Popoff: Can I give you a funny anecdote on that?
Kurt Elster: Please do.
Ryan Popoff: On that, so for our logo, when I first started, this is the epitome of just doing it. I took a piece of scrap paper that I still have hanging up in my office, and I just wrote Popov Leather with a Sharpie. Took a picture of it with my cellphone, and that’s been my logo for the last six years. That’s it.
Kurt Elster: I assumed it was something fancy done in Illustrator.
Ryan Popoff: No, man.
Kurt Elster: Nope, just Sharpie.
Ryan Popoff: Yep.
Kurt Elster: That’s great. I love it. And clearly, you’ve got a million dollar business. The Sharpie logo is in no way stopping you.
Ryan Popoff: No, man.
Kurt Elster: That’s cool. If people want to get your fine leather goods, and I have your Apple Watch strap, where should they go?
Ryan Popoff: To our website, Popov Leather, P-O-P-O-Vleather.com.
Kurt Elster: Beautiful, and I will link to that in the show notes.
Ryan Popoff: Awesome.
Kurt Elster: Ryan, this has been excellent. Thank you very much for joining me.
Ryan Popoff: Thanks, Kurt. Thanks for having me.