1Mby1M Deal Radar 2017: The BroBasket, Camarillo, CA

The BroBasket is an e-commerce site that offers customizable alcohol themed gifts baskets geared towards men. It caters to the undeserved niche of unique gift baskets filled with things guys love, including their favorite beer, spirits, and/or wine. Launched in December of 2014, The BroBasket has grown from fulfilling a handful of orders per month to over 1,000 on a typical month.  >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like this is also a key open problem around which more innovative solutions are in order and where innovators and entrepreneurs could come up with more innovative solutions.

Kevin Eichelberger: Absolutely. Mobile payments issue is a big opportunity. Mobile user experience is a big opportunity. I think there is a larger underlying shift in retail that will open up even greater opportunities for new ideas, new solutions, and new entrants in the marketplace in terms of a better way to engage with customers. That’s certainly something I could speak further about during the course of the conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s turn it around into something very specific. If you were starting a company today focused on this problem, what kinds of things are in your mind about ways to solve the problem besides the mobile wallet issue? Are there other things that you can do that would be interesting?

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Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: By the end of 2014, what was your level of e-commerce business?

Eyal Levy: Because we grew the business through other options, the percentage of the online business remained within the 15% to 20% range. Domestically, it grew. It went up to 25%.

Sramana Mitra: I have one question which I can’t help asking. This is one of the reasons why so many e-commerce brands have done so well. It’s because of not having to invest capital in opening stores, which as you state, is very capital-intensive and hard to finance in the growth phase.

How does the revenue that you generate through e-commerce compare with the revenue that you generate through these capital-intensive stores. Can you build this brand largely through e-commerce and not through all this retail expansion? >>>

Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Why Japan?

Eyal Levy: Through the years and since 2012, people would see our brand if they came to the US and tried it or they’d just read articles online. Some approached us to see if they can start the brand in their own country. With most of them, it just wasn’t the right fit because we really believe in the model that we created, which is the synergy with the brick-and-mortar and online. Some of those leads wanted just online or just stores and didn’t want to have the entire model.

The first person who we really believed could do it was a person from Japan. He read about Yogibo and approached me. He ordered and paid $800 to ship one and wrote me an email that it’s the best purchase he’s ever made. We met a few weeks later in Asia. There was great chemistry. Three months after, we signed the >>>

Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Now we’re talking 2010. What is the split in the business? How much are you selling through retail? How much are you selling online?

Eyal Levy: Back then, the online business was about 20%.

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2011?

Eyal Levy: We saw that the model of the store worked. In October of 2010, we opened the second store.

Sramana Mitra: Where was that? >>>

Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a product that you are doing under your own brand?

Eyal Levy: For the first line, we had to develop the product ourselves. We had to develop a different inner fabric to make it more durable and to comply with the regulations here. It’s our own brand. I started the brand. We started eight years ago with a core line of bean bags, but we have now expanded it to a whole lifestyle line, which includes a lot of comfort accessories and home décor products. Now we’re expanding into fashion accessories.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning. In 2009, what did you launch the company with? I’m assuming you bootstrapped the company since you had just gone through the exit of your family business. >>>

Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 1)

We’ve been covering new niche brands that have successfully been built either purely with e-commerce or with an online-offline combination. Yogibo is a bean bags company that has scaled nicely in its niche.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Eyal Levy: I was born and raised in one of the suburbs of Tel Aviv. I was raised in a family of entrepreneurs. My father was an entrepreneur. He founded a plastic company. My maternal grandfather was also an entrepreneur. He had a toy factory. Since I was ten years old, I was helping out. I would spend half of the summer vacation >>>

Bootstrapping an Online Mattress Brand to $168 Million: Ricky Joshi and Ron Rudzin, Co-Founders of Saatva Mattress (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: One of the results of this increased competition is that Google keyword pricing goes up significantly.

Ricky Joshi: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: You’re a high-ticket item, so I suppose you have lots of headroom to spend on customer acquisition. Still, everybody in that space does have that kind of headroom, so the bidding war must be tremendous.

Ricky Joshi: It comes back to building the business and being an early mover. Because we were early, we were able to test and learn what worked. We were >>>