"You know you've made it when the thing you sell becomes an emoji."
How a family business selling teddy bears, Plush in a Rush, went from a regional traveling salesperson venture to a nationwide wholesale e-commerce store. Yes, this store is exclusively wholesale, and thriving. Having sold online for nearly 20 years, owner Todd Steinberg has a lot of unexpected and practical advice to share from his experiences.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
2/8/2022
Kurt Elster: This episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are going to hear about a man who sells bears wholesale. Teddy bears, in fact. Not actual bears, thankfully. And Mr. Todd Steinberg joins us to discuss their family business, Plush in a Rush, and how they went from a regional traveling salesperson venture to a nationwide wholesale eCommerce site. Yeah, we are focusing on wholesale with what seems to be an almost exclusively wholesale business.
I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: Todd, Mr. Steinberg, thank you for joining us.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. That’s right. Yeah. Not many wholesalers that I’ve seen on your program or even in the Shopify world. I know people that do both retail and wholesale, but as far as I know I’m the only person I’ve met that just does exclusive wholesale on the Shopify platform.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it’s interesting. Your impression is exactly right. It’s always like, “We go direct to consumer first and then, oh, okay, let’s bolt on a wholesale program for others as this also ran, this add-on.” And often the wholesale programs are spurred by like, “I had this successful business and then I got a few people who reached out.” Maybe a big-box store if I’m really lucky reached out and said, “Hey, we’re interested in carrying this. Do you have a wholesale program?” And then suddenly it’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We totally do.” As you’re Googling it frantically.
But all right, Plush in a Rush. So, I said you sell teddy bears.
Todd Steinberg: That’s right.
Kurt Elster: Did I get that right?
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, teddy bears and other stuffed animals. Not just teddy bears, but 80% of what we do is teddy bears, and the rest is high school mascots, custom printed t-shirts, bandanas, ribbons, that kind of thing to take your plush toys to the next level.
Kurt Elster: And how long have you been doing this?
Todd Steinberg: So, I’ve been in the business since 2003 and then my uncle and dad were doing it since like the early ‘90s.
Kurt Elster: So, they really were… They would go door to door with a sack full of stuffed animals?
Todd Steinberg: Yeah. The way it worked is this. We’re in Texas and Texas has tons and tons of small towns, and so the idea is you drive into a town, maybe it has population 10,000, and you’re armed with what’s called a coach’s directory, and the coach’s directory has how many high schools are in town and the population of the town, but most importantly, the mascot of that high school. And so, there’s a trifecta involved where it's like, “Okay, I want to find the florist in town and walk in with their high school mascot, that I already know in advance, and then sure enough, the gift shop owner is like, “Yeah, we’re selling bulldogs.”” Because as you may know, Texas, it’s basically… What is it? God, country, and football, and really football is more unifying than God because in a small town of 1,000 there might be 20 churches but there’s only one football stadium, so everyone is all about the football team, and everybody wants to get the high school mascot, especially around homecoming.
And if you Google homecoming mums, M-U-M-S, you’ll just see basically this gaudy thing that Texan girls wear around homecoming season, and it’s the school colors, the flowers, the streamers, et cetera, and then usually in the middle is like some stuffed animal or some symbol, and if your high school is the panthers, or the lions, then they’ll plop on a lion or a tiger or something like that, and what my dad and uncle figured out real soon was that people were buying, say a stuffed tiger, and not using the whole tiger. They would cut the head off the tiger and glue the tiger head onto the mum.
Kurt Elster: Oh, no! The poor tiger.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, and so my dad and uncle were like, “Hey, we can just get the tiger heads done overseas,” and it became this big thing because you were able to sell it for next to nothing and the florists and the gift shop guys appreciated that. So, that was sort of their big entrée, was high school mascots, and then from there, they were able to sell teddy bears, and Valentines, that kind of thing.
Kurt Elster: So, this was in the ‘90s. This is where the internet is kicking off, but Amazon only sold books and CDs and it was weird. You’re like, the first time… I remember the first time we ordered. I was probably like 13. Like, “Are we even gonna get this stuff? Is this legal? What is happening here?”
And so, they had this business pre-internet. You brought… It sounds like you took it online in 2003.
Todd Steinberg: That’s right. Yeah, and that was at a time when it was just now coming upon the world that you can buy stuff on the internet, more than just books, and I came on. I was like, “Yeah, let’s build a website.” There was a website for Plush in a Rush, but it was just a one-page thing, and I didn’t know anything about it, and I learned that there was a platform called MonsterCommerce, which is not unlike Shopify or anything else, where you upload your photos, upload the info, and it displays it in a way that’s easy to buy.
And right around that time, as I was finishing up the website, took all the pictures, we went out to Vegas for a buyers show and one of the booths was a booth called Wholesale 411, and it was basically bringing retailers and wholesalers together. It was a search engine for retailers. And so, back then you could buy a top listing for four pennies, right? Four cents, three cents. And they also sent out newsletters. And so, right as the website was launching we got on this thing, so I didn’t have to worry about marketing too much because Wholesale 411 brought in enough traffic to make it worthwhile for the time being, and then I learned about Google ads, and then a company back in the day called Overture, and back then you could buy keywords for pennies, right? And it was a really great way to start getting those first few orders off the web.
Kurt Elster: Oh, and it was so much easier, too, because there was like… You put in the keyword and that was about it. There were operators, like negative keywords, that was it. Broad search, narrow search.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah. Much simpler.
Kurt Elster: You just put it in and there was so many fewer people advertising. It was very different.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, much simpler, and then the good thing about us, like I listen to your show, and the people who sort of made it big in their niche or their genre was because they were the first at something, either they were the first selling something, or they were the first dude on Instagram who was doing this, or what have you. And so, for us, it was organic search, where I tweaked the headers, and the meta keywords, and this, that, and the other, and since like 2004, all of our main keywords have been number one. We’re in the top of the fold. And that’s just been a real boon. We haven’t really had to worry about paying for traffic, whether it be social media, or Google AdWords, or the like.
We’ve tried it all and we just bend our pickaxe on it. We just rely on word of mouth and organic search. You put in wholesale teddy bears, wholesale plush toys, wholesale stuffed animals, bulk toys, you name it, we come up in the top of the results, and we just have our lead generator, and everything else… It’s almost like we have it on autopilot now.
Kurt Elster: Interesting. That’s the dream, as you say. It’s kind of on autopilot. That’s what you want is where you have built a marketing flywheel that just keeps leads coming in, and then you’re not having to worry about return on ad spend. I suppose that’s a… Do you think that’s an advantage to a primarily wholesale business? Is that a different, smaller pool of competition?
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, for sure. So, there’s not many people who are doing what we do. There’s plenty of big importers that aren’t really interested in the customers that we service, so it’s pretty easy to… There’s not a lot of competition and we kill the competition on customer service and having a website that functions well, and that if you buy something, it’ll come in a few days. And we address that in our… We have all the objection busters. One of them is like, “Hey, we know the frustration of trying to find a wholesale plush toy source on the web. Fear not,” and all that. And we show, “Hey, this is what you do, and you can get $25 off your order today if you buy today.”
And then we have all the testimonials and whatnot, and we knew we hit it, taking what I’ve learned here, and Klaviyo conferences, and just customer service in general, I knew we made it when a customer wrote saying, “You guys are the greatest company I’ve ever worked with and I mean that not just plush toys, but anyone.” So, I put their email to see how many orders they bought from us, and she hadn’t even gotten her order yet. It was just the first order that she placed, just based on our flow, our welcome flow, and our new customer flow. She was so excited to get our product.
And I was like, “Okay, we’ve kind of nailed it. Let’s not screw this thing up.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah, on your site you’ve got… There’s a lot of good copy. And on here, this is my favorite section. It’s called, “Here’s How it Works,” in which you just straight up explain to people how an online transaction works. But since it’s wholesale direct, there are questions, like what’s minimum order quantity? What are the requirements? And on here you say, “Hey, here’s how it works. Place an order of at least $150 online or over the phone. It will be confirmed. You can track it once it ships. Simply fluff it and you’re ready to go. And if it doesn’t meet your expectations, 7-day return policy. We’ll refund 100% of your order even if we have to pay to ship them back.”
So, you really spell out for them, even if it seems obvious to you, because you’re working in eCommerce since 2003. It is not necessarily obvious to your customers, so I love that you really very plainly spell out this is the process, and even have the objection buster in there. What happens when this goes wrong? Well, there is no risk to the customer is what you have told us here.
But all right, so you started in 2003. Shopify isn’t founded until 2006. And I see you are on Shopify now. When and how did that happen?
Todd Steinberg: Gosh. You know, it’s funny. We were on MonsterCommerce from 2003 and then I think around 2006, MonsterCommerce said, “Hey, guys. We’re being sold or Network Solutions is buying us, but don’t worry. Nothing will change. Not even the name.” And it’s true, nothing changed, and at first we were like, “Cool, nothing is changing.” But then you’re like, “Hey, nothing’s changing.” And that can be an impediment as the years go on. But you just kind of get comfortable and you think, “Well, I guess this is as good as it’s gonna get. We’ll just continue doing what we do, have our webpage, send out our mailer, send out our postcards and whatnot.”
But then it was just like you kept on hearing about Shopify, and email, and we tried to do retail. We had a website called Just Big Bears and I tried it on Shopify, and we did get plenty of orders, but it cost a lot to get that order because we were brand new, we were spending it all on AdWords and social media. It just didn’t pay for itself. But then I got a taste for Shopify and how it all integrates with different apps, and I was like, “We gotta do that for Plush in a Rush.” And so, spent about six months getting it over to Shopify and all the automations with the different integrations, it just… It was night and day. And looking back now, saying, “Oh my gosh.” If we had to do all that stuff by hand, because you were doing lots of stuff by hand. You had to basically… You took the order, put it into QuickBooks, printed it out in QuickBooks, handed it to the warehouse, then they filled it out, then you took that same order, typed it all into UPS WorldShip, so you were doing data entry twice. Now we do data entry zero times unless it’s over the phone, but even then it’s all automated.
And I was telling our office manager, “Man, if we had to do everything that we do now with the volume we have, we would need a whole host of data entry folks.” So, just the automation alone was great, and the seamlessness. And you know, we talk about autopilot. That’s a blessing and a curse. You do want things to automate, but it’s almost like what they tell you in driver’s ed. Green doesn’t mean go. Green means proceed with caution. So, autopilot is like autopilot, but check it out.
Because someone just yesterday, one of my flows mentioned… It was an, “Answer this two-question poll and we will donate a bear of your choice to charity.” And the headline was, “Let’s donate 2020 bears during 2020.” And the guy was like, “Hey, man. It’s 2022. You may want to update your email.” And I was like, “Oh, you’re right,” so I thanked him.
Kurt Elster: The worst is when no one tells you, like I’ve had automated emails with typos that have landed in hundreds of inboxes before anyone mentioned it to me. And even like you triple check everything, and you try and stay on top of it, and stuff always slips through the cracks. But at the same time, the automation, I’d rather be top of mind. I’d rather be in there. And you’ve got that experience where the guy goes, “Hey, you may want to update this.” And then he can see you’re a real person when you reply right away and go, “Oh, thanks for pointing it out. I’ll fix it right now.”
Todd Steinberg: Oh, yeah. That’s right. He even wrote in there, “I doubt anyone’s actually reading this.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah! They always say that. That’s why no one bothers to mention it is they assume no one reads it. And so, when someone replies to an email, I always try to reply, especially if it’s like, “I know no one reads this.” And then they’re shocked. Oh my gosh, someone actually read this.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah. We actually on the bottom, something we try to do is have that… We did actually, we hired a marketing guru, it was basically a part-time marketing CMO, and he will periodically poll our customers like in a real poll with many questions and all that, and one of the things we discovered was that people didn’t know if we were a mom-and-pop operation or a nationwide company. So, we kind of use that to our advantage, where they don’t know how big we are.
Kurt Elster: Which is the right answer? I always think this is an interesting thing. Because I think there’s advantages to both.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, so we try to make it, “Hey, I’m the owner.” Even though I may not write every single email, I wrote all the flows, but I sign off with the email and I say, “Hey, anytime you want to talk to me, reply back and a real person will answer.” Right? I’m constantly reminding folks that if you call up our 800 number, a real person will pick up. And so, people like that human connection nowadays rather than being told that your phone call may be monitored for training purposes, please stand by, and then the music plays, and then someone picks up. A real person will pick it up every single time. So-
Kurt Elster: And what’s the tech stack for that phone number look like? You have an 800 number. How does it work? Where does it go? What’s it do?
Todd Steinberg: It just rings. We have four phones here and we have an office manager who picks up, and we have someone else in here too who works part time. Right now, she’s in here full time. But we try to over… Attrition, so most people are getting… We actually gauge how many people call in their order versus how many people use the web, and over time, more and more people are just using the web, right? But it’s good to have-
Kurt Elster: Is this specific to wholesale, where they feel more comfortable calling in?
Todd Steinberg: Maybe so, but I think a lot of it has to do with the owners of the flower shops and gift shops, they’ve been doing it for a long time, they just like to call up, maybe see if it’s a legitimate company. I’m not sure exactly why they call up, but it’s just something that we do and will continue to do. I think it’s Zappos who kind of made it a thing, where back before they were sold to Amazon they made phone support a point of marketing, where if you call up phone support, it accounts for a very few of our sales but a lot of our good will. So, we kind of look at that as a way to remind the customers that the people who work here are real and we like working with you, the owner. I think that’s kind of our schtick, too, is that we’re owners working with other owners. We’re not working with a mid-level buyer or something like that.
Usually, the person buying it is also the one putting it in their displays and that kind of thing.
Kurt Elster: So, there’s an advantage to really you are looking to facilitate these personal relationships. And in part because you know it works, but also because you know that is the nature of your customer, like with these smaller flower shops, makes it easier to do this.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, and so sometimes we’ll get… What is the name of the chain? It’s called Edible Arrangements, right?
Kurt Elster: Right.
Todd Steinberg: And they’re franchises, and they have someone… They buy from headquarters, but if headquarters runs out, they’ll buy from us, or they’ll buy secondary stuff from us, and we’ll get requests, “Oh, please be the supplier for Edible Arrangements.” And we’re just like, “Nah.” I don’t want to deal with it, having to call some corporation, having contracts. I’d rather just have tons and tons of smaller customers rather than a few big ones and everybody else is sort of small potatoes. So, that’s the way we kind of run it.
Kurt Elster: To someone who has not been through it, those relationships with working with an enterprise customer, how that is different than working with a small business, I think for someone who’s not had that experience they may go, “Well, this guy’s nuts. Take the money. Go with the bigger fish.” But sometimes it isn’t necessarily worth it, especially when you have something that works and is not optimized for that. There may be a lot of processes and things that have to change to accommodate adding one enterprise customer that wants net 180-day terms and stuff like that.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, exactly, and it’s funny. That net-180, they’ll also say in the contract that if we pay you within 60, we get 5% off or something like that. And you just kind of miss it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They don’t miss a trick.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, and it’s like we actually… There’s a chain called Michaels. I don’t know if you have them up there, but it’s a hobby chain.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Todd Steinberg: And we actually sell to another company who then sells it to Michaels, just so we don’t have to deal with Michaels.
Kurt Elster: That’s funny.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, and Michaels contacted us and they’re like, “Hey, we can go directly with you,” and I’m like, “Yeah, no. Just keep going through that company.” Because they literally have to do things in triplicate and translate stuff into French. It’s just ridiculous what they require.
Kurt Elster: And Michaels tried to do an end run on them, on the supplier, get a lower cost.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah. It’s just like, “Yeah, sorry.”
Kurt Elster: You’re like, “No, I’m good.” That’s great.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, because that’s what I love, and I think that’s something that I admire about the group here is that they all want to make something, make a living from making something or doing something, and nobody wants to work 80, 90 hours a week, continually, for ever more, and you just want to like… It seems like most of the folks here are like they’re family men, family women, they have a life outside of work, and they just want to have a comfortable living where they get to do the thing they love to do and keep at it, and just be happy with it, so I’m very… Love what I do, and I love the fact that we help. The way I put it is that with a teddy bear, it’s like what is the point of a teddy bear? And if you look at kids, if you have kids, a stuffed animal is often their first friend, and they role play with it, they learn from it. It’s like a lot of police officers and fire departments buy from us and a kid may have lost everything, or the kid has to be taken away from the home because of what the parents have done and giving them a teddy bear instantly calms them down.
And I think we forget that. We’re all fully grown. We forget the magic of a teddy bear. And I actually have my very first love, which is an animal from GUND. It’s basically a gnome. It’s a little gnome that’s been loved to death called Gump. I still have him on my wall as a reminder of what it was like to be a kid and having a stuffed animal you love.
Kurt Elster: I think there’s a reason why that old story, The Velveteen Rabbit, has become timeless. And it’s because of… We all have this universal experience. Teddy bears and plush toys in many ways are a cultural touchstone in that way.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, you know you’ve made it when the thing you sell is an emoji, and I think there’s like two or three teddy bear emojis, so it’s pretty easy to sell something-
Kurt Elster: I never thought of it that way. That just became the episode excerpt summary.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, and you know, it’s a classic thing. It’s never gonna go out of style. And it’s not as sexy as selling the next best thing, or the cool weighted blankets or whatever. You’re “just selling teddy bears,” so you just have to make it exciting. You can get bored, just like anything else, so you have to find ways to make it exciting again.
Kurt Elster: And so, we’ve spent 20 minutes extolling the virtues of wholesale. Certainly, it’s not all roses. What are some of the unique challenges that you face as a wholesaler as opposed to being direct-to-consumer retail?
Todd Steinberg: Well, I guess the main thing would be sourcing, and fortunately we’ve had some really great sources over the years, and we’ve built up a reputation to where people will want to come. “Hey, we want to produce your stuff.” And we have a really good source overseas. He’s basically an agent for a conglomerate, and I met him once, we went out to China about eight years ago. I’ve only been to China once, so you don’t have to necessarily go to China and watch your stuff being done. You just have to find someone who understands that you are a legitimate wholesaler distributor and that this isn’t going to be the only time you’re gonna buy from them.
Because what will end up happening is if someone overseas senses that you are just a one off, they’re going to lowball you and do your product doing a lull during their busy season, and they’re gonna send it to you, and if you actually go to reorder, the prices are gonna be higher because it’s now their busy season, or they’ve already… They weren’t expecting you to come back, so they may actually give you something that looks less stellar than the sample you ordered. But fortunately, we’ve taken our licks and now we know exactly how to approach people, and the website sort of speaks for itself. You go on there, you’re like, “Okay, this is a legitimate company. I need to get my A game on if I want to produce bears from these people.”
Kurt Elster: And I think you said our website speaks for itself and we better bring our A game, so they have to impress you, and one of the ways you’ve done that is with a little bit of… with a brag bar at the bottom of the page that says, “See our plush on TV and in the news.” And you’ve got NBC News, Today Show, and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Todd Steinberg: That’s right.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I like that show. My wife raves about it. Loves it. On Amazon Prime. How did you achieve that?
Todd Steinberg: Man, I wish I could say that I have all these connections with Hollywood, but you just… You have it on your website, and for the Today Show and the other one, it was a couple of nonprofits that got on there and they let us know, and that was great, and then we do get calls from prop departments quite often, but it’s usually to decorate a kid’s room, or a carnival, and we’re always like, “What show is this for?” And then it’s like, “Oh, Young Sheldon.” What season, what episode. He’s like, “I’m just the prop guy. It’s number 485642.” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s not very helpful.”
But when the Mrs. Maisel folks called and it was like the VP needed to sign off on it, it was just the yellow bear, we’re like, “Okay, this is gonna be something.” And they had a… It was a big deal because it was gonna be a major plot point and all that, and so we were excited about it, forgot about it, but one of our customers DM’d us saying, “Hey, we saw your bears. We saw the yellow Colorama Bears online on the Mrs. Maisel. And turned it on and it was on three or four episodes, and we were just pleased as punch because of that.
Kurt Elster: Do you get… Did they put it in the credits?
Todd Steinberg: I don’t think so. I don’t know if they need to do that. But it’s funny, I was like… It was too little, too late. I saw the show, those episodes were filmed at a hotel somewhere, a classic hotel, and I called up the hotel to see if they wanted to buy the yellow bears in their gift shop and whatnot, and they’re like, “Yeah, that ship has sailed. We did the whole thing. They’re gone now. They didn’t bother to take their decorations down and we had to do it.” That kind of thing.
Right around Valentine’s Day, we did have two customers. They weren’t wholesale, they were just retailers who wanted to just throw in… buy hundreds of yellow bears for their wife to put in their room to mimic the show, so that was kind of cool.
Kurt Elster: That’s fun.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Let’s see.
Todd Steinberg: But the other challenge with going back to China is… Well, right now, I don’t have to tell anyone there’s supply chain issues and whatnot.
Kurt Elster: You don’t say?
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, and so we just got a container in the day before yesterday, beginning of January, that we ordered like in April, right? And we’re expecting another container to come in that we also ordered in April sometime in January if we’re lucky. And that’s been a problem. A lot of our bestsellers are… Just been out for months, and it’s basically like going to Disney World and it’s like, “Well, where’s Mickey?” Like, “Mickey’s not here.” Well, where’s Goofy? Goofy’s not here. Where’s any… Do you have Cinderella? Nope. And it’s kind of like that.
So, it’s like, “Well, who do you have?” Well, we have… You know, we have Peter Pan’s sister or whatever. We have Wendy.
Kurt Elster: You have just supporting characters?
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, that’s pretty much us. Now it’s enough, like everyone understands, and there’s substitutes and all that. It’s all good. But one of the things we did about six months ago was like, “How about Mexico?” I was seeing ads on Facebook. “Have your stuff be produced by our amigos.” I was like, “Oh, that’s pretty cool. Amigos. I get it.” And so, we’re expecting a test run of about 5,000 bears made in Mexico, and if that goes well, we can order more from them, and instead of it being on a ship, it just gets hitched to a trailer in Mexico City and it just goes right up 35 and arrives in Dallas within a couple of weeks rather than three months.
Kurt Elster: And I would suspect, is it a simpler customs process to go, since you’re all within North America, and we’re driving it as opposed to sending it on a plane or ship?
Todd Steinberg: You would think. Let’s hope for the best. I mean, not only is there a shortage of containers, but also truck drivers, so until Tesla comes up with their automated trucks, we’re still at the mercy. Now, what I heard is I had a friend who said, “You know you can just go into Mexico and literally drive up the truck yourself.” He’s like, “I did that with coffee beans once and it just required a little paperwork, but I did it.” And-
Kurt Elster: Just show up with a U-Haul?
Todd Steinberg: Pretty much. I think the idea is that transportation within Mexico is really cheap and they bring it to the border town, and then from there, it’s just a matter of getting the truck and taking it up yourself, but it can be done. I’m not prepared to do that at the moment. I’m just gonna rely on a shipper. But it’s in the-
Kurt Elster: So, potentially you go, and you may buy a large quantity of teddy bears in Tijuana is what I’m hearing.
Todd Steinberg: Pretty much. Yeah, I think it’s close to Mexico City, but they can do it… It sounded like it was more of a regional player. They weren’t really up and up on all of the consumer protection type stuff. There was a little bit of a learning curve for them. But they seem to be doing it. We got actual production pieces and I’m pretty excited that it can be done. You do have to get a lot more than you normally would from China in order to get the same price point, and you get less variety. So, like normally if you get 5,000 of an item, you can get it in three different colors, whereas here it’s like, “No, you can just get it in one color, 5,000.” So, you have to sort of take that into consideration.
Kurt Elster: Higher minimum order quantities it seems.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah. In order to get the price to where you can sell it more or less for what you were selling it previously.
Kurt Elster: Any other unique challenges? I mean, certainly the supply chain thing is not unique to wholesalers.
Todd Steinberg: I guess it would be finding… We have our organic search but trying to find an audience on Facebook or social media is impossible.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, that B2B on social media, it’s just… It’s not really built for it. It’s a lot tougher.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, and the other thing would be a lot of the cool apps, like there’s so many upsells, and cross-sells. The thing about teddy bears and stuffed animals is that you’re usually buying it for a purpose. You’re not gonna be upsold on, “Oh, add a shiny gold bear for only $10 more,” or whatever. So, that wasn’t a thing for us, the upselling.
We’ve tried to branch out into different products, like I wrote a bunch of children’s books called Stubs and Stilts and then I had stuffed animals to go with them. They were a couple of rescue dogs. And so, I was trying to sell the books at cost so that they would buy the stuffed animals, essentially, and people bought it, but it wasn’t enough to where it became a thing. It was fun to get the books out there, to write them and all that, but it wasn’t the thing that I thought it would be because stuffed animal people aren’t necessarily looking for books. But enough tried out. It was interesting and everyone who got them really liked them, but in order to become a children’s book author, you really have to make that a full-time thing. It can’t just be done on the side.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You’d have to be focusing on that. I guess you can’t casually become a successful author, can you? I’m sure it happens to somebody.
Todd Steinberg: You know, the author of The Martian, the one that became a Matt Damon movie, he was-
Kurt Elster: Andy Weir?
Todd Steinberg: Yeah. His claim to fame, he tried to get his book published through a normal source. Then he’s like, “Well, I’ll just publish it chapter by chapter on a blog.” And then his nerd friends pointed out some scientific problems, and so he corrected them, and then they’re like, “Hey, can you put that onto a PDF for us so we can read it offline?” So, he did that, then like, “Hey, why don’t you sell it on Kindle? Because that way we can read it on our e-reader.” And so, at the time selling your books for a buck was like the lowest it could go. I have no idea what it is now. But he put it on there and it became a bestseller, and then the book publishers and the screenwriter people came to him.
But it was only after he built this audience on his blog, and iterating with his nerd friends, and finally deciding, “Okay, fine. I’ll put it on Amazon for you. Just leave me alone.” And then it blew up.
Kurt Elster: So, whether it’s an international bestseller or teddy bears, the trick really is you’re on your own to find your audience.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, it really is. That’s the hard… Whatever you’re doing, if you’re starting off, expect a two to three-year grind at the very least. It’s like I know people that have gone to Hollywood and they’re like, “I’m just gonna go for two or three years, see what happens,” and that’s just not long enough. You really have to be there for a good 10 years to even figure out if this is the thing for you.
Kurt Elster: That’s good advice for people who are early in their entrepreneurial journey, or starting out, or thinking about it. Do you have other advice for folks starting their eCommerce venture? Wholesale or not.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah. I would say the main thing is you start off, you put something up there that you think might work. Doesn’t have to be perfect. You’re gonna iterate. You’re gonna get better over time. And then the thing that I’ve learned, what I’ve learned, one commonality, like when I went back to my alma mater for the keynote speech where we were trying to pair up with students, we were gonna be their mentors, and the woman speaking said that she got her start by… She was working for a magazine company, and she was told… You know, this was back when Facebook was allowing pages to be done, and she told her boss, “Hey, can I make a Facebook page for our magazine?” And they’re like, “Sure, you can do whatever you want.”
And she was one of the first people to do a Facebook page for a magazine. She got really good at it and then she finally quit, and she started a company helping online media companies monetize their stuff, monetize their assets. And it was because she was there at the beginning of something. And you know, I think it was Popov Leather, you asked them once how did you get your start and he’s like, “Well, we were on Instagram at the beginning.”
Kurt Elster: That was a lot of the interviews I do, is like, “Oh, we were on Instagram in 2015, 2014.” When you have that, unintentionally you’re in the right place at the right time, but at the moment, you may not realize it.
Todd Steinberg: Exactly. And so, the advice I would give is that you may not be the first at TikTok or whatever, but you might… Look at unboxing videos. Someone a long time ago was like, “Hey, what if I just open up packages on YouTube?” And that person is like… That became a thing. You may not be the first on a particular medium, but you might be the first to do a particular something on that medium, so I think if you’re at it long enough, you will be… It’s like they say. The harder you work, the luckier you get. If you keep at it for a while, eventually you will find… Your sixth sense will kick in. Your spider sense will tingle, and you’ll know when it’s time to double down on something.
Kurt Elster: I always think about it as you’ll see results where you spend resources. Whether that’s time, money, that… It’s true of anything. If you think about going to the gym, or going to school, or going to whatever it is where you’re spending your time, money, and focus, it’s where you’re gonna see results and gain skills and experience. And I think you’re right. I don’t think… Sure, there’s people who have overnight success and these viral successes with businesses in general. Not just online businesses. But they’re very rare. It’s like lightning in a bottle. And it’s very… If you even happen to do it, it’s hard to reproduce that success.
And so, I think in most cases it really is like all right, you’re gonna set this at your goal and then you’re gonna grind it out, make mistakes, and figure it out along the way.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah. It’s like even I knew the lead singer of a band called Lake Street Dive and they did a show on Stephen Colbert, and they blew up, and everyone was like, “Oh, an overnight success.” I’m like, “They were far from overnight.” They were grinding it out at clubs for like the better part of 10 years. And then they got the gig on Stephen Colbert.
Kurt Elster: They got the Colbert bump?
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, so I think people don’t see how much time it takes, like if you watch your favorite sitcom, think about all the rehearsal that went into it, all the rewrites, all the time that all the actors had to go to school. There’s thousands upon thousands of hours that go into behind the scenes to producing your favorite content, so the same is gonna be for your eCommerce company, is that… You’ll even see the advice on your Facebook page where I’ve been trying this, it wasn’t working, and people will try to give advice, and you just hope that they’ll keep on keeping on, and then as they gain experience they’ll sort of have the, “Oh, no, this won’t work. This might work,” kind of thing.
You know, it’s like you had someone on who was selling weighted blankets, and now if you try to sell a weighted blanket, the competition is fierce. But at the time, it was like weighted blankets was kind of new-
Kurt Elster: They had to explain it to people.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah. He had to explain it to people. And then you got, what was it, influencers who were able to influence women rather than men, the right influencer at the right time, but that only came because that person who was doing it had a sense, had been doing it for a while, and kind of had an idea, “Okay, this is where we hit. This is how we do it.”
And if you kind of wait, like I know someone who spent a lot of money producing a Kickstarter for a pillow, and I was like, “Yeah…” It was just so late. You saw the video and you’re like, “It seems interesting but there’s so many pillow companies now.” So, that would be the other thing, is like trying to chase the next best thing may not be the best course of action if you’re just starting off. And you may have to pick something else, and I don’t know what that something else is, but I got lucky because it was my dad and uncle’s business and I tried a couple of jobs after college, and it was all right, and then saw an opportunity to come on board, so it worked out for me.
But for everyone else, I can’t exactly tell you what you should be selling or what you shouldn’t be selling.
Kurt Elster: You know, I think it’s good advice from someone who has been there and has the experience. Going into 2022, what challenges do you forecast? Certainly, we’re still dealing with COVID. I can’t believe it. And our supply chain issues are easing but persistent.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, so the challenge for me personally is just to keep on finding ways to refresh your spirit, I guess you could say, and just so you’re still excited about it, because I think you don’t want to get bored with your thing, because when you get bored, you start trying new things, you spend resources on that, and then you’re like, “Oh, that new thing didn’t pan out, so let me go back to that old thing.” But you let that old thing languish. So, the idea is to find a way to keep on making it fresh and new. Freshen up the copy on your flows. Find a new product you can get behind. Do something new this year.
So, I think this year for me-
Kurt Elster: The goal is to avoid burnout but without fiddling. You don’t want to do things just for the sake of like, “Well, this is different and feels interesting.”
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, for sure, so I think this year it might be to automate the warehouse. Like for us, we… Okay, so every Valentine’s, basically January is our busiest month, and pretty much you can count on it from January 1st through the first week of February. We always had 30 to 40 pending orders that we were gonna complete the next day. So, it was always like a day or two lag. But last year, after COVID, COVID we blew up because people were ordering more. Our business increased by like 50% for the past two years in a row now, without having to increase really the amount of staff we have, so we’ve all been working pretty hard to keep up.
So, we went from 30 to 40 pending orders to like 200 pending orders, and I was like, “Okay, let’s just stick through this. It’s an anomaly. We’ll just stick and move.” But it’s happening again, and it may not stop, and it’s just very stressful to have hundreds of orders pending when we’re called Plush in a Rush. Our whole marketing thing is built around one-to-two-day turnaround time and now we’re telling people a week to 10 days. So, we’re gonna find a way to automate the warehouse more to where we can get more orders out faster and more accurately.
And so, that’ll be a fun project that’s not fiddling but we’re not reinventing the wheel, either. And the benefit will be that our back of the house won’t be as stressed trying to fulfill these orders, working late, an hour late, working on Saturdays for a good part of the beginning of the year.
Kurt Elster: And finally, where can people go to learn more about you?
Todd Steinberg: Yeah, so PlushinaRush.com is our website. If you want to learn about flows and all that, you can go there and subscribe. Obviously, you don’t have to buy anything, but it’s something, we do customize our teddy bears with t-shirts and whatnot, so if you send me an email, and I do actually respond to all the emails, and say, “I heard about you on the show. What do you suggest I can do?” I’ll probably work with you. I have a lot of leeway when it comes to the custom t-shirts and stuff. If you wanted to promote your brand, free teddy bear with purchase, be happy to work with any of our peers on the show here.
Kurt Elster: Oh, very kind of you. I will include PlushinaRush.com in the show notes. Todd Steinberg, Plush in a Rush, thank you so much.
Todd Steinberg: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Talk to you guys later.