w/ Stacey Keller, Ponyback Hats
Have you heard about the revolutionary Ponyback Hat? Tune in to this episode to hear from its founder, Stacey Keller, about the inspiration behind this innovative fashion accessory and how it went viral on social media. Building a successful business involves more than just having a great product idea – it requires navigating manufacturing and marketing challenges too. Discover how she turned her idea into a viral sensation and built a community-driven brand and why it has become so popular among fashion-savvy consumers.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
3/21/2023
Kurt Elster: Welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Stacey Keller, the mastermind behind Ponyback Hats. From humble beginnings in her home to a successful launch in June 2020, Stacey’s created a brand that prioritizes comfort, flexibility, and style for those with long hair, so I’m excluded on this one. I can still wear them, though.
We’ll dive into the challenges, rewards of starting a small business during the pandemic – it was quite the wild ride, hear about Ponyback’s unique marketing strategies, and discuss what sets these innovative designs apart from other fashion accessories. All today. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And this is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: Stacey, welcome.
Stacey Keller: Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
Kurt Elster: What is a Ponyback Hat? What makes this different from… I don’t know, a bowler hat. A fedora?
Stacey Keller: Well, a Ponyback Hat is a baseball cap that in the back of it has a hidden magnetic seam from the top of the button to the bottom of the band, so it’s a Flexfit, stretch fit hat, but the whole back of it opens and closes with magnets so that you can accommodate your hairstyle. So, right now I’m rocking a high pony and the magnetic seam, it's flexible, so it can actually wrap around your hairstyle, and the benefit of this is that if you have long hair like me, like with an adjustable baseball cap I would have to rearrange my hairstyle to fit that one spot, and often that adjustable cap has Velcro, and this is not comfortable, and it gets caught in your hair, and it’s super annoying.
So, I wanted a fitted hat to fit my hairstyle, so that’s what Ponyback is.
Kurt Elster: So, because you did not invent the idea of a baseball cap with a hole for a ponytail.
Stacey Keller: No.
Kurt Elster: But previous versions of it just weren’t executed nearly to this level of detail.
Stacey Keller: That’s correct. So, when I… I don’t know, it was somewhere when I turned 30 years old and started caring more about my skin, and not burning, and I have three kids by this point, and I’m making them wear hats all of the time. I remember one day my oldest looked up at me and said, “But mommy, you’re not wearing a hat. Why do we have to wear hats? You’re not wearing one.” I’m like, “Yeah.” So, I remember going about my search to find a hat, and at this time these ponytail hats that have this high ponytail hole, the ones you’re referring to, above the adjustable strap, were all over my Facebook page trying to sell me on them, and I just looked at them and I’m like, “Okay, I get how that solves my high pony problem, but I’m kind of like…” I wear my hair down sometimes, and up, and I just felt like that’s not gonna be the cutest look to have this big old opening in the back of your hat. I just want something cleaner.
And I was buying my kids these New Era fitted Flexfit designs and that is such a nice hat, right? I just couldn’t find the equivalent of that for me until I thought like, “Hey, what if there was just an opening in the back of one of those nice hats? Can we do that?”
Kurt Elster: And so, that’s where the idea came from. You went, “Man, why doesn’t it just work like this?” It became… You, having experienced the problem, it became obvious to you, and so you said, “All right, I know this could be better.”
Stacey Keller: 100%. I knew it could be better. So, I went out and I bought a really nice Oakley hat, and I brought it home, and I had the audacity to think, “I can do something about this. I can take out my sewing machine.” I don’t have a whole lot of sewing skills but I do have a sewing machine, so I have a few, and I thought, “Okay, what if I sewed in an overlapping flap?” And then it opened, and that could close up, and that would be great.
So, that was my initial idea, was an overlapping flap, and I got out just whatever fabric I had. I was thinking that yoga pants could work, which was a really terrible idea, and did not work at all, so I had tried sewing in some yoga pant fabric and thinking that it could overlap at the back, but that just was a hot mess. So, I ended up pulling it all out and after I pulled it all out, almost like giving up, like I was kind of like packing up for the day. We’re just gonna toss this in. This isn’t gonna work.
I noticed that the back seam of the hat was just sitting there open, like it almost wanted to close on its own, and I was like, “It just needs a little help.” It just needs a little help. It doesn’t need an overlapping flap. It just needs a little help. So, I’m like, “What is in my house that I could actually use to help hold this thing together?” And as we already mentioned, Velcro is a terrible idea, so I go through all the like Velcro, snaps, buttons. I’m like, “No, that’s your hair. You don’t want that.” And I looked over at my fridge and I was like, “Magnets hold stuff onto stuff. I wonder if magnets could work.”
But obviously, fridge magnets were too big and too bulky, and I didn’t know how I was gonna make that happen. I was like, “Where else? What other magnets do I have in my house?” Just thinking through the options. And I found my kids’ Magformer toys. So, if you’re not familiar with a Magformer, they are these little shapes, and you put them together, and you can build structures, and they have little cylinder magnets inside of them, so thankfully my husband has a bunch of tools, so I broke into them. I harvested these magnets and to my just amazement, these little magnets slid into the back seam allowance on the hat in this little pocket here and once I slid them in equally on either side, and when I just let go, it just closed up. I just was like, “This is it!”
And I remember in that moment thinking, “Oh my gosh.” I slid my messy bun through the top of the hat, and I took a selfie and sent it to my husband, and I was like, “Look, I just came up with my business idea.” He thought it was crazy.
Kurt Elster: How long did it take where you went from the idea to this functional prototype? The moment the magnets get put into this hat, you know like, “All right, now I got something here.”
Stacey Keller: It was that same day. That was one whole afternoon while my kids were napping. That all happened in like a three-hour time period that I literally had a working prototype, but it needed some work because I just had slid the magnets in. They were free floating, like you couldn’t… They weren’t gonna stay where they were. There was a whole bunch of problems with that that I had to later sort out. But it was… So, I had a working prototype, essentially. I went to the lawyer with that. I had conversations, like, “Can this be patented,” with the lawyer as it was.
But we did talk about how just having the magnets wasn’t gonna be enough. There needed to be something else in the back of the hat to make it patentable. And so, over the next eight months after that I continued to iterate on the prototype and I incorporated a flexible tubing so that it could actually wrap around the hair and this tubing would help give it structure, and the tubing would mean that the magnets wouldn’t slide around, and then that actually became what could be patented, and that was the unique benefit of the whole thing was this whole component now that was also in the back of the hat.
So, yeah, that then took about eight months to get that final working prototype, but it was a whole year before I actually filed for patent pending status with my lawyer.
So, we got one afternoon you come up with a proof of concept. Eight months go by to get real deal prototype and then 12 months total you patented the darn thing?
Stacey Keller: Yes.
Kurt Elster: What’s your background? Had you done anything like this before?
Stacey Keller: No, but so I… My university degree was business administration, so commerce, essentially, and then I did a stint in accounting for a couple of years, and then after that I decided that wasn’t for me. I went to teacher’s college. So, I was actually teaching high school business for 10 years prior to coming up with this idea. So, I knew the basics, right? I had been in business school, so you know, if you have an idea, you need to patent it. If you can patent it, that’s the best case scenario. So, I knew all of those things just inherently in my past, so that helped. That helped a bit.
Kurt Elster: So, you have this background in accounting and education, and not just like any. Business education, no less. How do you think that’s influenced your approach to running a business if at all?
Stacey Keller: So, it’s interesting because as I look back on my past, I see all of these components that sort of came together to prepare me for where I am now. So, in terms of accounting, there’s just been so many times where I didn’t need to go to professional or pay someone. I just… I knew inherently the answer. And it’s funny how all these experiences stacked. Even teaching, I feel like it worked on my personality. I mean, I had to hold the attention of teenagers and I feel like I just learned to be really good at that, and be really engaging, which I think also translated into social media for me, and I think we’ll probably get into that, but I became this sort of social media personality for the brand.
And I feel like it just all stacked together and layered upon itself, and so it was really easy. I think my background gave me all of the basics. So, I think a lot of times if you don’t already have that, you’d probably be held back in a certain regard. You’re like, “I don’t know business,” and you just write it off like that’s your limiting belief and you can’t figure it out. I just didn’t have that at all, right? That wasn’t even a factor. For me, it was just, “Okay, I’m just gonna go do this.” But I’ve never done it before, so it’s completely different than just education. It's much harder than that. But I think for me that part of it, like, “Oh, I don’t know something,” was eliminated because I had at least the basic foundation.
Now, when you get into it you realize, “Well, nobody knows anything and everyone’s learning for the first time.” But-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They’re pretty much all winging it.
Stacey Keller: Yeah. We’re just winging it over here. Just because I went to business school doesn’t mean I actually know what I’m doing. And I went to business school like over 10 years ago. So much has changed in terms of how you can build a business now, like social media wasn’t even a thing. I remember in university somebody saying, “Oh, have you seen this thing, Facebook?” I literally learned about it in my university class. That’s how… That was my generation.
So, I wasn’t educated in, “Okay, how do you create a business in the land of social media,” which is a completely new ballgame, let alone… I know we’ll probably get into TikTok, but TikTok created this whole new ecosystem of how you could build a business, as well. So, nobody really knows, but I think that hurdle, if you’re starting a business for the first time and you’re worried about it, I could imagine that, “Oh, I don’t know the basics, or I don’t know what a P&L is,” and that’s gonna potentially hold you back.
So, for me, I think it gave me that extra confidence boost that I probably really needed, and if I didn’t have it, just in terms of my own personality, I’m not sure I would have went through with it.
Kurt Elster: Oh. Yeah, that’s the looking back that always drives me crazy, is like, “If I knew what I know now,” or things were slightly different, or timing changed, would I still achieve the same thing? And I don’t know. I don’t know. And I think it’s important to acknowledge that it’s just like there’s a lot of stuff that’s circumstantial, and random, and maybe the universe making decisions for us.
Stacey Keller: Yes.
Kurt Elster: All right, I want to get… Before we get to launching the brand, building an audience, social media success, and certainly I like that idea that as a high school teacher, that really kind of primed and prepared you for being an influencer. But first you gotta make the product. We need something to sell. Talk to me about the byzantine nightmare that is getting a product mass produced.
Stacey Keller: Even when I was iterating on that prototype, I was like, “Okay. Well, I need to figure out who’s gonna make this for me,” so I was just Googling my brains out about finding anybody who would chat with me about the product. But the problem was before I had it patent pending, I was very hesitant to even tell anybody my idea. I think maybe only my parents knew before it was patent pending that I was even considering this. And so, I was very hesitant to trust anyone, and I think I just… There were a few different manufacturers I found online and they’re like, “Okay. Well, send me your prototype,” but I didn’t… They weren’t referred by anyone. I didn’t know if I could trust them and it was just like a random internet company.
And when you have intellectual property, I feel like you should be careful, and I did let my gut kind of be my guide in that regard. I was like, “I’m not gonna do anything if it doesn’t feel right.” And so, there were times where I would be so close with a manufacturer, having contacted them, and I’m like, “But… how is this gonna work? I don’t wanna just tell you what my whole innovation is.” Because what’s stopping them from being like, “That’s a good idea, now I’m just gonna go patent it myself.”
So, I eventually-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s the danger with manufacturers, right? I remember when Kickstarter was huge, you would see a Kickstarter go viral, well exceed its goal, and before they had ever delivered on the product you could go on Alibaba and find that product as knock offs before they’d even shipped. And so, it’s not paranoia. We’ve seen it happen countless times, right?
Stacey Keller: Yes.
Kurt Elster: So, no, I think you were right to approach it the way you did.
Stacey Keller: So, one connection through my internet Googling, I kept following this snowball, right? I’d email one place. They’d be like, “No, I don’t do this, but hey, go check out this Facebook forum,” and then I’d go to the Facebook forum and I’d type in, “Hey, this is what I’m looking for.” And eventually, I got a guy who had worked at a manufacturer in the past and was like, “Hey, I used to work here. Reach out to them. I’m sure they could help you.” So, now this felt a little bit better, right? Here I’m having someone at least who had worked at a place who’s vouching for them, and it was local to me, in Toronto, Canada, and so I set up a meeting with them and I went, and I made them sign a non-disclosure agreement before I showed them my hat, and this is a big distributor and I didn’t know how they were gonna take this. I was like, “Are they just gonna show me the door because the audacity that she’s asking us for an NDA?”
But I did it anyways and that was my first person that I had connected with who really believed in the idea. So, these people were like, “Yeah, this is a really good idea.” Then there were women actually that I pitched to, so they completely understood, and they started to bring me on, but corporate priorities there kind of like shut it down. Their owner at the time wasn’t into a lot of innovation and they had different… They were launching their own brands. And so, I kind of got shoved down and down until I was like, “Okay, this isn’t happening with them.”
So, I originally was hopeful, and I was encouraged because they were like, “Hey, this is a good idea.” So, I just kept searching, and then a random networking connection was the thing that did it for me, which is madness because of how many hours I spent on Google. It wasn’t even that that helped me get my manufacturer at the end of the day. It was literally a friend told me, “Hey, I know this guy who’s got a patented product. I think you should talk to him.” And randomly on this call, and he's like, “Hey, you know who you should talk to? My mentor, we’re in this incubator program in Buffalo,” which Buffalo is the headquarters of the New Era Cap Company, and he’s like, “You should talk to my mentor because my mentor… I’m pretty sure he was high up at New Era. He might be able to help you out.”
I’m like, “What?” So, I get on this call with his mentor, who yeah, was very influential in the New Era organization, and his buddy, who he golfed with on a regular basis, was a sales guy for one of the leading hat manufacturers globally, and he’s like, “You should meet my buddy. Come down to Buffalo for lunch and we’ll all get together.” And so, I was like, “Okay. This is crazy.” But yeah, it was this random networking connection that got me in with the leading global manufacturer of hats. And luckily their mantra is that they are so pro-innovation, like they have a small number of accounts they want to work with on a year-after-year basis just to build their innovative approach. They’re just… That is who they are.
And the other thing that I just really loved was this company is in China, and this mentor was like, “They have such great integrity.” And so, when I was getting, again, this firsthand account from someone saying that this manufacturer is amazing, and has integrity, and they’re overseas, how could I not feel good about that situation? And by this time, I also did have patent pending, so I felt a little bit more like, “Okay, I at least… I have the legal process in motion but I also do feel good about the relationship.”
Kurt Elster: You know, again, we were saying like maybe there’s some randomness to it, and there’s just some things you cannot predict or prepare for. It goes both good and bad. And in this case, good in that it led you to what sounds like the conceivably best possible manufacturing partner for this product.
Stacey Keller: Yes. The best possible. I wanted to create a high quality hat and I knew the difference maker was gonna be what manufacturer does that for you. What I didn’t know was that there is only like two or three manufacturers globally who can do a stretch fit cap well. And so, I have learned that since, but I would have had no idea, and so yeah, that literally did just kind of fall into my lap, and I was pretty lucky there.
Kurt Elster: So, I think the other issue you have when starting a brand new business, and one that sells a physical good, is a chicken and egg problem. You have to have a product to sell, but you have to have an audience to sell the product to, so help me with the timeline here. When do we start building an audience versus when is the product first available for sale?
Stacey Keller: So, I registered for patent pending June 2019 and immediately after I had that I was like, “I am so excited about this thing. I’m going to tell everyone I know,” so, I’d like carry it around in my purse, and any moment came up where I could bring it into the conversation, I would. And I remember being at this women’s conference just days after it was officially patent pending, and I was on the street, just randomly taking pictures of the hat on the sidewalk, and some women approached me and they were like, “What does the P mean?” So, I got into my whole spiel, and they ended up loving the product and one of them was a photographer. She offered to take pictures. It was this whole thing.
And then they were like, “So, Stacey, how can we find out about you?” And I was like, “Uh, I’ll just set up an Instagram account right now so you can follow along,” and I already had my website. I was directing people to sign up for my email list. But it was a lot of word of mouth in those early days, and that moment I set up an Instagram account and just decided, “Okay, I’m just gonna start sharing about what this is like even just getting started.” I mean, now I can. I don’t feel like I’m held back from hiding the product, so I just started talking about it. And people would share. I mean, when they met me, and they would just share about it, and so slowly my organic social media presence was growing until we got to… It’s now 2020.
Kurt Elster: Uh oh.
Stacey Keller: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: All right, the product gets officially launched in 2020, but you’ve started to… People are aware of it. You’re starting to build the audience. But they can’t buy it, so what’s that social media, that prelaunch media content look like? You’re sharing the problem, the journey, manufacturing? What do I even post, right? It’s like how many times a day can I post about a baseball cap?
Stacey Keller: I know. I mean, I would just… I was also just making personal connections, so I was kind of treating it like my own personal account, so I was just sharing what’s going on in Stacey’s life, and also update for Ponyback. I had a little bit of a photoshoot in fall with some just handsewn prototypes I had made with some friends that I had some photos to post about. One of my friends actually tagged me and this other influencer’s giveaway to… Anyway, so really random, but I gained a ton of followers just from the exposure of being nominated for this other random influencer’s giveaway, and just… I don’t know. I just kept talking about it.
As samples would come in, I’d open up the sample box, I’d show everybody the samples. I just… I was working on it day to day and just shared all the minutiae of literally what was going on. And so, 2020 hit and I was ready to place my first PO. I remember it was like January and my sales account manager with the manufacturer was like, “Something’s going on over there. I’d place your PO really soon. You want to get your PO in now.” And I was like, “Okay.” And yeah, so I ended up placing my PO a little too late, because I think I placed it in February, and by this time COVID’s a full-on thing in China and it’s about to hit us.
But I did get PO in, but it just slowed down the manufacturing process, so I was supposed to have been able to launch by April and that was the goal. April 2020. But with all of COVID, things got pushed off until… I wasn’t gonna get my shipment until July. And even in that there was some delays with ocean freight, et cetera, and so this created issues, but also some opportunities that I wouldn’t have anticipated happening. I remember at the end of March, I was supposed to have a photoshoot all ready, and this was gonna be my main source of photos for my website, for the launch, for everything, and I remember I had to cancel it all, because at this point in March, we are in lockdown.
And then I was thinking, “Okay. Well, what am I gonna do now?” And I went, “Well, I just have me. I have me. So, I guess now I am gonna be not only just the face on social media, but also the main model on my website.” So, I set up my own little studio in my living room. I figured out how to use Photoshop. I had never used it before. I had a nice camera, thank goodness, so I could take my own pictures with the timer, and that’s how I set up my website, and I did all myself through Shopify and had everything ready to go for a preorder launch in June.
And the weeks leading up to that, there was also another opportunity that was created, so a local social media company reached out and they’re like, “Stacey, we don’t have any business right now. Some of our clients just… they’ve had to not be using our services and we just have this extra time. We’d love to help you generate local buzz.” And so, I’m like, “Okay, sure.” So, we started this local follow campaign where they would just help me follow a ton of different people in the local community, and they were very, very well connected in the local community, so they helped me grow my social media following. I think we were around 1,500 people to that 2,000 person mark, and then we decided to run a giveaway, so I had these samples that I was like, “Okay. Well, I’ll give away these samples early, so the winner of the giveaway gets their hat months before everybody else,” because we’re preordering. And that giveaway just exploded. I mean, I had 1,000 followers prior to this. We definitely hit 2,000, 2,500 followers just from this one giveaway. We had 8,000 entries on this giveaway. It just… It kind of went viral in and of itself and then we just tried to get everybody on the email list by offering them a discount on email.
But this first launch, this was a soft launch. I had just purchased the minimum order quantity possible from the manufacturer because at this point, my husband is thinking, “You don’t even know if people are gonna want to buy this hat. How do you even know they will actually spend real money? And this is a high quality hat. Women aren’t used to spending that much money on a ball cap. This is an ask of them, Stacey.” So, he was a bit of a disbeliever, so I was just trying to do everything as scrappy as possible, and on our very first day of that preorder launch we made like $13,000 in sales, and this was just through Instagram.
Kurt Elster: When you did that, you placed your first order for the MOQ, minimum order quantity. How many did you buy initially?
Stacey Keller: So, I bought three sizes. Extra small, small-medium, and medium-large, and that was just from testing my family. Does this hat fit your head? Do you need a bigger one? Do you need a smaller one? And it was kind of like everyone was sort of in this range of extra small to medium-large, or 54 centimeters to 58 centimeters. I’m like, “Okay. Well, that is pretty much everyone, so we’ll go with three sizes and then just two colors.” Black and white. That’s what I launched with.
Kurt Elster: And it worked. You sold out of it?
Stacey Keller: We ended up selling out of black within the month, so the month of preorders was… There was still buzz kind of happening, and I had some friends who were sharing it with some local influencers, so then I’d drop off hats at a local influencer, then eventually… Yeah, by July we had sold out of all the black hats, but we still had white hats left, and at this point… I mean, I’m a high school teacher. I was still teaching part time when I launched this, and it was the end of the summer, and I didn’t want to go back to teaching, but my husband was like, “Well, I mean, you only made like $30,000 in sales this whole summer. That’s not really enough to give up your whole teaching career.” And I’m like, “Okay.”
So, I went back part time in the fall, but again, another opportunity from COVID, school didn’t look the same, so we’d switched to these quadmesters in Canada where I only had to teach from September… My part-time schedule, I only had to teach from September to November, and then I had the end of November to January off, where I did not have to be in the classroom, so that created a bit of an opportunity there, too.
Kurt Elster: Again, a lot of opportunity here, and some of it indirectly created by the pandemic in that you kind of felt forced into you have to become the face of the brand, and you have to master social media, whereas like previously you had someone set up who was gonna at least be helping create content. And then that also turns into a local social media company says, “Hey, let us help.” Maybe your husband saying, “Well, let’s not get crazy and quit your job just yet,” while potentially discouraging, at the same time it’s like it’s nice to have that safety net and walk before you can run.
Stacey Keller: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Well, at that time, what does that social media content look like? What does that character look like? Are you doing face to camera now?
Stacey Keller: Yeah, so now I am just trying to be as scrappy as I possibly can. I am all over my Instagram stories. Now I’m like filming the packing, I’m like… At this point, I’m delivering parcels around my local community, which was much more work than I had thought. We quickly turned off that option on the website. But yeah, I’m just filming all the behind the scenes, and it’s just like… It’s kind of the small business channel with Stacey, and I’m just talking about every single thing that’s happening while I’m trying to take pictures, and cute pictures to post, because that was still the thing to do at that point on Instagram.
But you know, our customers started to create some UGC for me, so that started to ease that up a little bit and was really great. Because they felt so much a part of this sort of mission, right? They’re like, “Oh, we’re helping this hat. We’re helping Stacey for the first time.” So, they were just being really great about sharing too. So, it just became this ecosystem of content that I could use. But yeah, going back to my husband, now I’m giving him a bit of hard time here. He was hopeful, so he did say, “Yeah, we can invest in inventory at this point but I don’t want you to give up your teaching job just yet.”
So, we did fill our basement, so after that initial summer it was like, “Okay, we can invest.” We had sold out of black, so we’re like, “We need more inventory anyway,” so we invested in two additional colors, so now we’re gonna be up to four colors. We kept the same sizes. And we filled our basement. It was like that fall, so by November I had taken all of my children’s mini stick playing area away from them. They were so mad at me. And it was just boxes upon boxes. And at this point, I am now faced with like, “How am I gonna sell all these hats from my basement?” And I have a deadline of March 2021 because I don’t want to go back to teaching next year. I want to focus on this, and I need to convince my husband that this is gonna be a legitimate business.
And I hadn’t still done that. He’s like, “Great. This is a great side hustle. You can still teach part time and sell hats from your basement. That’s cool.” But I wanted to focus on it full time.
Kurt Elster: And what was the watermark where you could both agree on it is safe, I can quit my job?
Stacey Keller: We didn’t really have that agreed upon. In my head, I was just gonna do whatever it took to convince him, so I knew I needed to make something happen. And at the time, I was heavily learning paid ads myself, so I was taking ads courses, and again, I didn’t have a marketing budget, and I didn’t want to spend a lot of our own money, so I’m like, “Hey, I can do a course. I can learn it myself.” So, all this is happening at the same time that I’m hearing TikTok. Everyone’s telling me about TikTok. My best friend was telling me about TikTok. And after my part-time teaching stint was over in November, I’m like, “Okay, here we go. I’m gonna focus on making TikTok content.”
And I started to see it happening for other businesses, as well, like I was catching like, “Wow, that business just went viral and that would be crazy if we could just make this happen on TikTok.” So, I started posting on TikTok one to two times a day in January 2021, and again, my husband thought I was wasting my time with this. I’m making him sound so bad on this podcast right now. He’s been so, so supportive, but anyways, I’m posting several times on TikTok, just doing whatever, like I don’t really know TikTok. I’ve consumed enough by this point to have a feel for what I can do.
And finally, by the end of January, one of my videos gets like 100,000 views on it, and I’m like, “Oh my goodness!” And this actually directly correlates into site traffic and increased sales. When this video happened, it was literally over like a five-day period and I saw the orders coming in, and I’m like, “I’m not going to be able to pack all of these myself next week.” So, at that moment there was just our babysitter, who usually would come over to babysit. I’m like, “Hey, you want another part-time job for Ponyback? You could help me pack orders.” So, she started that next week, and we just after that, we just kept getting like viral video, after viral video, after viral video, after viral video, until we had one hit a million, and then we sold out of all the inventory that was in my basement within only a few months.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: How did it feel?
Stacey Keller: It felt… I mean, at the time, I was having a hard time celebrating that this was such a big win because people were so upset with us because we didn’t have inventory. And at the time, it was height of COVID and supply chain was a hot mess, and I knew I’m not gonna be able to get in this product. What am I gonna do? Because I have a six-month lead time if I want to ocean freight this. It was a stressful time because I wanted to capitalize so badly on all this site traffic we were having, but yet I had no product for these people, so I had to invest in air freighting our next shipment that was coming in, and I begged my manufacturer. I’m like, “Hey, can you just up the quantity like three times what I had originally ordered?” And I just… I did whatever I could to just bring in so much more inventory.
And I also knew I’m not gonna be able to fit all this new inventory in my basement anymore, so luckily a property just super close to us came available for lease. 2,000 square feet. Was just the perfect size. And we moved in there super-fast just before our shipment arrived, like a week before. We got that place ready, and painted, and cleaned, and right when that shipment, we launched our whole restock, and we had an almost six-figure day on our Shopify store when we launched that restock.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Stacey Keller: It was incredible. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: You get another one.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: So, a lot has changed in social media. You’re talking about, “Hey, early on we had success with Instagram,” and you’re posting regularly, and you even said it. You’re like, “Well, then it was all cute pictures.” Really not that long ago. But now, kind of the flavor, the theme, what connects with people on those platforms changes, and what connects with them per platform seems to change. What content worked then that wouldn’t work now? And what content works now?
Stacey Keller: Yeah, so I feel like all of the video content was working then. Even on Instagram, so when we were seeing such great success on TikTok, we were also repurposing our TikToks on Instagram, and several of those also went viral. So, we gained, like in that same spring, when… I think by this time I was nearing like 9,000 followers, and all of a sudden over the two-month span we had several reels go viral as well on Instagram and we made it to like 30,000 followers in like two months. It was crazy. So, we were finding this similar stuff was working with reels, and so I just kept capitalizing on that.
But what actually ended up hitting me wasn’t necessarily social media. It was the pressure of the business now, because now I have a business that looks wildly different than what it did six months ago. So, I’m having to figure out hiring, and how people are gonna help me, because I literally can’t do everything. I was doing everything. Everything for that business prior to February 2021, and now it’s June 2021 and we have this space, and I need more employees, and what ended up getting me, I think, was I just didn’t have the capacity to show up in the same way on social media. I was being torn. You have to be an operator and you have to grow a team, and all of that takes time away from being a social media influencer, and for me I just… I couldn’t keep it up. I was just starting to get drained by the wheel just eating me up so fast.
But since then, I mean TikTok still has done really well for us, but when we hit the offseason, so we’re very seasonal, so March to July is our main selling season, but by August rolling around you know people in Canada, the United States, they’re thinking more about winter, pumpkin spice lattes, not baseball hats and the beach. And so, we see that drop off in sales and I… It was my first offseason heading into that and I didn’t really know what to expect. And the seasonality on the platforms also worked in conjunction with our content, so we were really hot in the spring because as an interest-based platform on reels and TikTok, we were it, right? People are talking about cute outfits and hairstyles for the summer, et cetera, and we had that interest. But as the offseason started to roll around, that content wasn’t performing as well anymore. And so, my sales weren’t keeping up, and I started to get really nervous, like was it just because I went viral and does that just mean that I don’t actually have a business otherwise? I need to start thinking about how am I going to build month-over-month revenue without relying on viral TikTok videos, because this is not a strategy that can sustain.
And then that was when it was like, “Okay, I need more support. I need more agency support.” I started hiring on a few other agencies. We dabbled in paid. But I think it does change when you’re on the platform as operating as kind of like an influencer, a person, and then you become a corporation who’s paying for ads. Your organic reach is interestingly… feels a little bit more inhibited all of a sudden. So, I did learn that too as we moved forward from there.
Kurt Elster: We always say the content hole must be filled, right? As fast as you produce content and fill that void, people eat it up and their attention wanes, and suddenly it’s empty again and you gotta fill it up again. It’s often tough to predict what is going to be successful, what people are really gonna be into, and so you could put all this effort in, and you get… It just falls flat on its face because you had the first second and a half worth of frames didn’t look quite what they needed to be.
And trying to come up with that level of creativity and novelty, video editing, they’re short videos, but it’s still a 16-second video could still represent like several hours to produce. So, to stay on that flywheel as a solopreneur who’s also got other responsibilities, and it’s like the more successful you get at this, the more you gotta put into it. Whoa, suddenly you’re running on that treadmill and you could see where it would be very easy to get burned out. But when you have made yourself the brand, and you own and control everything, okay, now what? What do you do?
And that’s kind of the cost of organic success on those social media platforms, right?
Stacey Keller: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I don’t know that there was a question there.
Stacey Keller: Well, it did… I mean, I can talk about that for a little bit. It did take a toll. So, that fall of 2020 was really hard because I started to see organic reach decline. One thing that was interesting was I could foresee ahead of time that I need to fill out this offseason with a winter product, so luckily I did have a winter beanie in the midst, and what’s interesting about that was when we launched the beanie in November, that was then trending, talking about a winter hat, and it did kind of… It helped. It did help. It just continued to get some traction.
So, the videos that would do really well were then all about the winter product, which was really interesting. So…
Kurt Elster: Well, so… I mean, we learned in the ‘90s with retail was like fast fashion would really get American consumers to spend, because we like novelty, and you need to keep people’s attention. Well, new product, new product, new product is one way to do that. And so, rereleasing the same product, rereleasing variations on the same product, new colors, new styles, that’s one solution. Coming up with new content is another solution. The other one we see, and I think is popular and I love, because you get… It’s a win for everybody. Brand collabs and partnerships. Did you do anything in that space?
Stacey Keller: So, no. We didn’t. And I think that was just a function of I just didn’t have the brain to be able to make those things become a reality. But that is something that I’m thinking about now as we head into the spring. We just actually went for a content creation trip to Santa Monica and… I mean, we met up with a clothing company there called Feet Clothing just to capitalize on the fact that… Well, we don’t want to go and buy all these new outfits for our models, so instead we’re just gonna go to your store and we will use all of your outfits. So, that’s the extent of brand collabs that we’ve currently done, but I could see them being and playing into our future strategy much more.
Yeah. There’s a lot of strategies with pairing up with influencers, and create a specific line with the influencer, and those are all things I think right now I’m looking to explore as we’ve also just hired some more people to help me, so that’s great.
Kurt Elster: That is great. Yeah. Okay, so it sounds like you are heading down this path a little bit and then also dealing with the demands on the time and your burnout as you scale through hiring, and it sounds like it’s not necessarily been full-time. It’s a mix of part-time, contractors, fractional people, whatever you want to call it.
Stacey Keller: Yes, but I did make investments in full-time staff this year, so August 2022 I hired my first full-time employee. We were closing down our warehouse and moving to a fulfillment center, and I thought that this would be a great opportunity to sort of bring on that operations specialist, and like mini-me, like the person who I could just give all the tedious stuff to, to help just maximize my brain capacity. So, I had this girl who was helping me with some YouTube video editing on the side, and I just really thought that she just was the perfect mix of having so many different skills that she could really work in this entrepreneurial environment in which we all do everything really well, so she came on and just helped transition from our warehouse.
She learned all the backend when we were doing it and then when we moved it to the fulfillment center, she was able to have this complete understanding of our business operation from when we were literally sending parcels to the customer, and I feel like that was just so valuable, because now she’s managing that relationship with our fulfillment center, and our customer support team, and she is really being that part of the brain for me.
And then just this February I hired a director of brand and creative because with taking on all of the really true CEO responsibilities now, I just was continuing, and as you talked about creator burnout, like I was just continuing to feel depleted and depleted, and I’m like, “I just need somebody else’s brain.” Even if she’s like, “Stacey, here’s a TikTok idea, now go film it,” at least I didn’t have to have the creativity to come up with the idea in the first place.
And so, she’s been working with me now for a month and I’m already starting to feel just reinvigorated, like I don’t have to have that creative drain going on anymore. There’s somebody helping create and prompt all of that. So, those are my first two full-time hires, which I just felt like made so much sense for me and where I was feeling stretched and the pain, and they just came in and plugged that hole.
Kurt Elster: Those sound really positive and productive. I mean, especially if you’re like, “Well, I know I need to hire. I know I can. And at this point I wonder, can I afford not to?” Then you look at the overlap of available talent and what is the things that are like you need to delegate, you need to get off your plate, that are either really hugely time consuming for you or not adding value in a way you want. It’s hard to get excited about the day-to-day when before you can do the exciting things that reenergize you, that fill that tank back up, you gotta do the eight painful things first.
But there’s always someone out there who, whatever you don’t like to do, that is the thing that absolutely tickles their brain. I mean, just the weird, esoteric things that I delight in that other people are like, “This guy is a spreadsheet weirdo,” right? That kind of thing.
Stacey Keller: Yes. Well, I’ve already seen it too with my director of brand and creative. She is just so into colors, and outfits, and styling, and I would just… My brain would melt anytime we had to have this conversation about what was the model gonna wear. I’m like, “No! I don’t care. Just anything. Black and white.” And she’s like, “No,” and she’s just so into matching the colors with the hats, and just creating that vision, and it’s just been so, so awesome.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, I mean hiring someone to sweat the details on that vision sounds pretty good. Well, one thing I want to know. How do you stay up on industry trends or insights, like whether it’s fashion, apparel, or eCommerce, or marketing, or you’re living it so you’ve got the experience and that keeps you on your toes?
Stacey Keller: Well… I mean, I haven’t explained to you all of the components of my team, so another lucky person I was able to land in the early days was a hat designer, which, they don’t grow on trees, believe it or not. So, when I first found my manufacturer, they were like, “Stacey, you need a tech pack,” and I’m like, “I don’t know what that is.” And I had-
Kurt Elster: Neither do I.
Stacey Keller: … randomly made this connection on LinkedIn. Early days, people were like, “Stacey, you should license this,” and so I was like, “I don’t know,” but I just… I didn’t think that was the right idea. But I had explored it, so I just messaged probably 100 people in product development. If their title was product development at any athletic place or hat brand, I was just messaging them. Anyways, so she was a former product development hat designer at one of the leading hat manufacturers, but she had left and started freelancing, and so we had this call early days and she’s like, “If you ever need a designer, just let me know.” And I was just looking for information from her on how to create a brand at this point, or hats, or just any information I could gather.
And then when the manufacturer asked me, “Oh, you need a tech pack,” I was like, “What?” So, I already had this sort of random LinkedIn connection. She’s been with me since then. So, at first it was just like a tech pack by tech pack basis, but now she’s officially on sort of the team as 10 hours per week for product development and hat design, and so I kind of have her now. She’s consulting on hat colors, and trends that they’re seeing in hats in the future for next year, and do we want to do a bucket hat or not do a bucket hat, so it’s been really great to have her.
Kurt Elster: Well, wait. Hold on. What’s a tech pack?
Stacey Keller: In manufacturing, for your manufacturer, you have to have every single detail explained to the most minute… For instance, we have our logo on the side, right? It’s 1.5 centimeters from the bottom of this band in this way, and it’s 0.5 centimeter from the seam allowance. All of that detail has to be described in the tech pack or on a consistent basis your manufacturer might not make it the same. So, you have to have all of this completely outlined for them.
Sometimes a manufacturer can do this part for you. You’d pay them extra. But in my case, they always left it up to the brand, so I needed to have all of these tiny little decisions, like how many lines on the brim of seams do you want? How many panels? All of the just everything in a document needed to be outlined from. And that takes design skill and experience to even know what they wanted.
Kurt Elster: That tech pack helps define your technical vision, the manufacturing process, to the manufacturer, because you really don’t want to leave things up to the manufacturer’s discretion if you don’t have to. Because they’re gonna go with like, “All right, well what is gonna cut production cost here?” Where it might be an area where you’re like, “No, no. I’m willing to spend the extra penny to work per unit.”
Stacey Keller: 100%. And I even saw some of those things. Sometimes I wouldn’t have identified something, or Melissa and I didn’t say, “Oh, we want this color of underbrim fabric,” or we just missed some small detail, and then all of a sudden I was getting a hat shipment that had a different under color brim fabric and I’m like, “What’s going on here?” “Oh, well, you didn’t tell us what you wanted so we just went ahead with grey. Hope that’s okay.” Oh.
Kurt Elster: Brutal. Yeah. I mean, if you’re saying, “Hey, we need this yesterday,” and you didn’t specify it, they’ll go ahead and make the decision for you has been what we’ve discovered with when some not ideal things showed up. We had a client who sold bags. We’ve had several clients who sold bags. And they had an entire cargo container shows up and all of the zippers are wrong. They’re like, “Oh God. What do we do now?” And of course, that’s like there are people who specialize in that, and then you have to try and get it fixed, and no matter what it’s going to be expensive, time consuming, painful, and at that time it’s like you just need the inventory, so now you can’t even… It’s rough when that stuff, product you’re expecting desperately shows up and it is not what you’d pictured or envisioned. Different from the sample.
It's like it’s amazing how the samples are always really nice. And then product, you’re like, “Wait a second.”
Stacey Keller: Yep.
Kurt Elster: How these manufacturing efforts tend to go. Which is why it fascinates and terrifies me. So, on that note, this is our closing question here. What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs? There are so many, especially in fashion and apparel. They want to start their own small business. What would you say to them?
Stacey Keller: The thing that has stuck with me is if you think your product is perfect, you probably launched it too late, and I’m sure I heard that on some other podcast. Somebody else said that. I didn’t say it. I didn’t come up with that line. But I truly believe in that, so I just… I went to market as fast as I possibly could and out of that I learned a ton of things that we had to rework in the product as I went.
But I’m so glad I did that because the customer has been the biggest guide this whole time. So, that’s the other thing about having this brand be on social media in such a powerful way, that we have this direct connection with the consumer that they’re gonna tell us when… Stacey, the magnets are strong enough. I can’t close up the back around my hair. So, that was the very first problem I had to solve with the original batch. The magnets for lots of people who had sort of my hair thickness or thinner, it was fine. The magnets could do up great. But when it got to somebody who had thicker hair, the magnets weren’t strong enough, so we had to up the strongness on the magnets. That was the very first project that we had.
And then they were telling me, “Stacey, my head’s too big for your hats. I need a bigger size.” Or, “My head’s too small. I need a smaller size.” Okay, well, I’m learning that women just have the widest range possible of head sizes, and as someone who wants to create an inclusive brand, we need more sizes. So, we got to work on building more sizes. Legitimately every single thing that we’ve changed or adapted has come from that customer. We just iterated on again, and again, and again. Like, “Stacey, I don’t like the fabric because it’s making sweat stains.” Well, we gotta come out with a recycled polyester fabric so you can wash it, and you can get rid of those sweat stains.
So, I think that’s the biggest thing, is you don’t have to launch something that is completely perfection. And in a lot of cases, your customers might not even know. The thing that drove me crazy in the early days was that our hat manufacturer had never dealt with magnets before, but now they are using these magnets and they’re not aligning the magnets properly. And so, in my eyes the biggest defect was any squiggle in that back line. I wanted it to look like, “This does not look…” If it’s closed, it looks like a normal fitted hat.
Kurt Elster: That’s what’s so cool about it.
Stacey Keller: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: When you were… In the audio version, maybe you could hear it click shut, but like when that seam closes, it really is 100% not evident that it’s not a real seam.
Stacey Keller: 100%. But would drive me nuts when that seam would look off, and it was because the magnets were not aligned, and in most cases I was being so much more strict on this as a quality defect than my customers were, and so it was interesting because I was so hardened, like, “This was the thing that has to be perfect,” but my customers never once complained. I never once got an email from them saying, “The back of my hat was too squiggly.” The magnets weren’t aligned 100%. That was never, ever the customer service inquiry.
And so, I think that, to me, just proved that here I am trying to be super fanatical about one design aspect, but it didn’t really matter in the same way to them. They didn’t see it the same way because I’m obsessive about my product and they don’t know it as intricately. So, just don’t sweat that your product isn’t its most perfected form, because what’s gonna happen is you’ll launch it and then your customers will tell you where you should be prioritizing and what you should fix first, and what matters most to them. And so, that has been just really powerful along our whole journey and I think we continue just to come out with product after product that’s better, better than the last, and it’s because of the feedback from the customers.
So, that’s my number one piece of advice.
Kurt Elster: Oh, it’s great advice. Where could we go to learn more about you?
Stacey Keller: Well, you can always go to Ponyback on TikTok, or PonybackStyle on Instagram. Those are the places where I show up the most. There’s lots of just Stacey content there. We’re also on YouTube at Ponyback Style, as well, and there’s lots of videos there that go into and explaining the whole journey from startup till here. Yeah, we’ve been trying to showcase it all, so you can find it there.
Kurt Elster: Fabulous. And of course, if I want a Ponyback Hat, I’m going to Ponyback.ca?
Stacey Keller: Yes, but PonybackHats.com is usually where we send all of the people.
Kurt Elster: PonybackHats.com. My mistake. I will include that in the show notes. Stacey, thank you so much.
Stacey Keller: Thank you for having me, Kurt. I’ve been a long-time listener, so it was pretty exciting to be on your podcast today.
Kurt Elster: Oh. Fabulous to have you.
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