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Honest Ecommerce podcast episode - 252 | The Right Attitude, Resilience, and Grit For A Startup | with Mackie Swan
Nov 20, 20232 min read

252 | The Right Attitude, Resilience, and Grit For A Startup | with Mackie Swan

Mackie is the CEO of WOO More Play, a direct-to-consumer sexual wellness brand with a focus on natural, organic ingredients and female-forward products to spark a better intimate life.

WOO More Play's purpose is to empower women to have better sex, by delivering high-quality intimacy products that put her first.

Have the best sex of your life with WOO More Play: woomoreplay.com

In This Conversation We Discuss:

  • [00:47] Intro
  • [02:01] Gaining passion and purpose for your work
  • [03:12] Solving personal problems by exploring opportunities
  • [04:34] Successful products come from a personal need
  • [05:15] Building the brand with its first product
  • [06:29] Leveraging Ecom to communicate with the audience
  • [06:44] Facing the technicalities and issues as a startup
  • [07:17] Maintaining optimism when starting a business
  • [07:52] Where professionalism and passion meets
  • [09:24] Navigating growth channels to find out what works
  • [10:16] Starting a podcast to engage with the audience
  • [11:14] The power of word-of-mouth in driving sales
  • [11:42] Episode sponsors
  • [16:49] Additional complexity in the “vice industry”
  • [17:55] Dealing with shadow banning in the space
  • [18:41] The underlying stigma on women and sex
  • [19:34] The challenge of acquiring payment processors
  • [21:19] Obedience and resilience over ever-changing rules
  • [22:11] Challenges present opportunities to de-stigmatize
  • [22:50] Business is about things you believe is for good
  • [23:32] Building community & loyalty for recommendations
  • [24:15] How earned media do wonders for a business
  • [25:14] Consider context in every product innovation
  • [27:27] The secret to business success is: keep going
  • [28:10] Where to check out WOO More Play

Resources:

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Transcript

Mackie Swan  

What is the product that you're making, when and where, and what is the context that you expect your customers to use that product. And understanding those differences is really big. 

Chase Clymer  

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. 

And today, I'm welcoming the show Mackie Swan. She is the CEO of WOO More Play, a sexual wellness company specializing in organic, body-safe products for women. 

Mackie, welcome to the show.

Mackie Swan  

Thank you so much. It's great to be here. 

Chase Clymer  

Oh, I'm excited to chat. 

Finally, It's been a while. We've been postponing this too much but we're gonna get it done today. 

Tell me the story. How did you end up in this space, first of all? 

Mackie Swan  

Totally. I love talking about this because I feel like sexual wellness is a category. It's finally a cool place to be. That was not always the case. And it certainly wasn't the case when I got into the industry. 

Started out my career in more traditional advertising and PR. Really loved it. Was on the agency side. Wanted to do that forever. 

And pretty early on after coming out of undergrad, I started volunteering for a nonprofit that was hired by fraternities and sororities to do different risk management education. 

So they were sending facilitators out to talk about healthy alcohol consumption, bystander intervention, a whole bunch of things. 

I happened to get assigned to the workshop on sexuality and relationships. So I'm from Eugene, Oregon, if you're not familiar with the Pacific Northwest, it's very progressive. I had a lot of sex ed growing up. That was never a shameful topic in my family or in my community. 

So when I'm a 20-something traveling around to different college campuses to speak to young sorority women about their sex lives, you can imagine how shocking that experience was for me. 

And I learned super quickly that not every young woman had the same skills and comfort level navigating their sexuality that I did.

And it really kind of triggered me, like, this is a big problem. At this point that was eight years ago now,  I think. 

Really big problem that I was seeing all these bright talented young women just have no language and no ability to navigate a really important part of their adult relationships. 

So that's when I kind of realized that I wanted to do it professionally. Had a great opportunity to work for another startup in the space, a brand that was really kind of at the forefront of bringing a focus on women and a focus on organic products to the sexual wellness space. 

Did some brand work there, served as a salesperson there for many years, had a lot of success in that role and really just solidified for me that it's an exciting time to work in sexual wellness and we still have a lot of work left to do. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. Now let's pivot to what was going on with WOO More Play during this time.

Mackie Swan  

Yeah, yeah. So, WOO More Play was started by three co-founders, a woman named Lauryn Bosstick, her husband Michael, and their best friend Westin

They had the idea back in 2016. Lauryn had kind of been venting to Michael and their friend about how every time, you know, she and Michael were intimate, she was experiencing really uncomfortable UTIs afterward. 

It didn't seem to matter if she was using a product she brought from the store. If she wasn't using any product, she was like...we have this great experience, and then I'm dealing with it afterwards with this like pain and discomfort. 

So somebody brought it up, it changes depending on who you talk to. I hear it's Westin who brought it up like, “Oh, I've heard organic coconut oil is really great as a lubricant. Just go to Whole Foods, get a jar of coconut oil, see what happens.” 

She did that. A lot of people know for a variety of reasons, coconut oil is antimicrobial, antibacterial, and really promotes healthy bodies in a lot of ways. 

She gets a jar of coconut oil, doesn't have discomfort, doesn't have a UTI. She's like, “Holy sh*t, this is brilliant.” 

At the time, she was in the early days of her blog called The Skinny Confidential, posts about it on her blog, blew up. 

And that's when they realized there's a real opportunity here for us to create an intimacy brand that not only checks the clean and organic boxes, but also speaks to women and isn't just a shitty lube from the gas station or the drugstore that men have been buying for way too long.

Chase Clymer  

I just want to point out here that most successful products come from a personal need and exploring the options that are out there, finding something that solves that problem for themselves. 

And then it's so powerful and just interesting to me that she posts about it on this blog and just immediately gets market validation like, holy crap, there's something here. 

Mackie Swan  

Before they even had a product, right? That's I think the beautiful and serendipitous thing is she's validating it with her market without doing that intentionally. 

It's just seeing, I think, the way that that blew up was the inspiration behind the brand. So it's definitely a fun history there. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. 

So what did they do next? How much do you know of this origin story? How did they go from this idea that there's this market here for this product, this is a need that a lot of women have. 

Did they immediately try to start making samples? Did they do some more testing? What was the next step that they took?

Mackie Swan  

So I tease them all the time because they had this big meeting, right? And Westin was the CEO of WOO More Play before they brought me on. So he's my right hand. He's very much day to day in the business with me still. 

And he has this meeting with Lauryn and Michael. They're like, okay, we're going to do this. We're going to build a brand. They are all three entrepreneurs by nature who have done multiple businesses and are very much kind of the stereotypical serial entrepreneurs.

And Westin tells me that when they had this big, kind of come-to-Jesus meeting that we're going to do this business together, they gave themselves a goal of getting the product on the market within 3 months. 

Which is... Anybody who has created a consumer brand from scratch knows that that's just absurd, especially if it's your first product. 

Chase Clymer  

Oh, yeah.. 

Mackie Swan  

So 3 months is the goal. It took them 2 years. 

So our first product actually launched in January of 2018. It is our hero’s cue today. It's our organic coconut love oil.

Had a great response, had a lot of success on Ecom, had a lot of success continuing to build out through Lauryn's community of like-minded women. 

And over the last five years now, we've just continued to innovate with everything that a woman might need to feel comfortable with her intimate experience. 

Chase Clymer  

Now with that flagship product, did you guys have to deal with FDA regulations?

Mackie Swan  

Yes and no. So I can't say too much about it. I will say that personal lubricants are class 2 medical devices by the FDA. 

We are working with the FDA now on that specific product. So that's a long process. 

Chase Clymer  

The reason I ask is because it's such a bright and opportunistic attitude like, “Oh, this can't be that hard.” 

Mackie Swan  

Yeah. Like any good founder story. It's like, “No, this is going to be super easy. There's no regulatory stuff.” 

Chase Clymer  

I think that's what is the advantage of a founder in a new... Maybe not even just in a new category, just like… the optimism and not knowing how hard something is. 

Because if you knew how long it would actually take to get there, some people, they might not have that...

Mackie Swan  

You wouldn't do it. Yeah. You wouldn't do it. 

I think ignorance is bliss when it comes to running a startup in so many ways where they just have no-fear attitude because you don't know what you're getting into and you're just curious and you're going to try it. 

I think if most founders knew what they were getting into, I'm not sure they would do it, frankly. 

Chase Clymer  

All right. So now, how did you enter the picture?

Mackie Swan  

Yeah, so like I said, I had been at another startup in the space, and have been really passionate about the sexual wellness category for many, many years, originally through volunteering. 

And I met the team at WOO a little over two years ago now. So they had launched in 2018, and around the middle of 2021 I had been introduced to them through mutual friends. 

They had done a really good job getting quite a bit of momentum online. They were at the, you know, multi million dollar run rate mark, had this Ecom success, but as you said, they were starting to brush up against, I think, some of those pain points of a scaling business, whether it's regulatory and the FDA or becoming an omni-channel brand and dealing with retail distribution, just some of those things that you wouldn't really know if you hadn't done it before. 

And started to realize it was time to bring somebody in who had been in the space, had the relationships, understood the category. 

And it was just really kind of a moment of serendipity. It was the right place at the right time. 2021 coming out of the dark times of COVID and the pandemic, and some changes that had happened in my personal life. 

It was just... It was a really good time to go after the new adventure. And I was really impressed with what they were doing and the mission of the brand. 

And it was just a really good fit, I think, on both sides. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. And I want to dive into the complexities of what you inherited and what you're doing at the brand. But I know my audience would be mad if I just glossed over that they went from an idea to having a $2 million run rate, right? 

Like what did they actually do there? Do you know what helped them break the product and find those customers online during that time? 

Mackie Swan  

Yeah. So I think at the time, it was much easier to navigate some of the growth channels that can be quite painful today. So whether that's paying to get in front of audiences on Facebook and Instagram and some of those places was big for them.

One of our co-founders, Michael Bosstick, also runs a company called Dear Media. He is the co-founder and CEO of that. It's a podcast network with some really successful shows that speak to women across the country. 

So plugging in the brand message into the distribution vehicle that is the podcast network was another really big way to grow the audience and do some testing and learning to figure out what worked. 

Chase Clymer  

Oh yeah. That's fantastic. I think you're the first guest that I've interviewed that one of their main growth channels was podcast advertising. 

Mackie Swan  

Yeah. It's been huge for us. And it's funny because in the same way that they started WOO, like I said, they’re serial entrepreneurs, Michael and Lauryn had started their own podcast and weren't finding a good fit for a network. 

And they thought, “Why don't we just create one?” It was the time when influencers were becoming more business people and they saw an opportunity there. 

So the beauty is that they were on the side of talent and took those pain points to create a network that was going to be a really great experience for talent. 

In the same way, Lauryn had these pain points with her own intimate life and took that to create a really good product that would help a lot of women. 

Chase Clymer  

Now, can we talk about why they went all in on podcasts first? What a traditional brand might do is just dump it all into Facebook or Meta now. 

Mackie Swan   

Well, I don't think they went all in on podcasts per se. I think it was just like an inside opportunity to do some testing and audiences that would often be not feasible for a stage startup. 

The other one that we haven't talked about that's huge for WOO today and has been from the beginning is word-of-mouth. It's our number three top lead source at the brand even today when new customers find us. 

That's the top three cited reason, that friends or family recommended it, which, when you think about the fact that we work in sex, right, and most people are embarrassed to talk about that openly. That to me, I think is really, really huge in terms of speaking to the experience that people have with our products and with our brands. 

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Chase Clymer  

What I was trying to get at with my previous conversation, which goes along with what you just said is people are scared to talk about sex. 

It's considered a vice product by the industry. That's a really weird term to say. 

But what are some of the issues with having a company that operates in this kind of vice product space? What do you run into? 

Because I know there are a lot of entrepreneurs out there that... It's basically all the fun stuff. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, firearms. You can't really, there are issues with those specific types–not rock and roll–but everything else I said.

Can you talk about that a bit? 

Mackie Swan   

Oh my gosh. So much. There's so much to say here. It's so challenging. I often think, what a life it would be if we were building a food brand. 

No disrespect to food founders. That's also a hard space. But when I think about acquisition or venture capital or certain retail stakeholders, I'm like, “Wow, there is so much additional complexity because we sell sex.” 

So those are the three big ones. Acquisition is such a pain. I mean, the traditional channels like Meta, like TikTok, we are shadow banned, we have to use a number of accounts. 

I can't even tell you how many times our Facebook ads account has been shut down, just completely deactivated. 

You know, I'll try to be PC about this, but I will say that you'll see a press release from Meta saying, oh, we've changed our policies. And, you know, we're being more accommodating for brands that focus on women's sexual wellness.

I as a brand owner have not seen the effects of those changes when it comes to actually getting my ads approved. It's still very much an issue for us. 

And so the acquisition and kind of the UI UX that goes with that can be a little bit clunky. 

We work around it. We're still successful in acquiring customers in those spaces, but it's more challenging than it needs to be. 

It's definitely a thing when it comes to raising outside capital. So not only are there venture funds that, maybe, have a mandate that prohibits them from investing in what they would describe as a vice category. 

But the reality is, even if I'm pitching an individual angel investor, if I'm talking to somebody about, you know, imagine the persona of a more stereotypical investor, he's probably a man, he's probably older. 

And I'm getting on a video call and saying, “Hey, women aren't enjoying sex, women don't know how to orgasm, women don't have products that make them feel good in the bedroom with their husbands.” He might take offense to that. 

So even outside of the actual legality or policy issues, I think there's this undercurrent of stigma and personal discomfort that people have with the space that impacts how I run my business and how I bring certain people into the community that is WOO More Play.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. 

And I know we spoke about this one on the pre-call: payment processors. 

Mackie Swan   

Yes. This is a fun one. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely.

Mackie Swan   

So we can't use Shopify payments. They don't work with sex companies. They won't work with us. We did very early on for a short period of time before they shut us down. 

I think when you and I met a few months ago, I was right in the middle of a weeks-long fight that I was having with PayPal who had tens of thousands of dollars in our account. 

And I just woke up one day and they said, “Hey, your account's been deactivated. It's a policy violation.”

We've been using PayPal for five years. We had not changed our assortment in a meaningful way. We hadn't changed our marketing in a meaningful way. 

We just got caught by the PayPal bots that decided, “Hey, this is a policy issue,” and now suddenly I don't have access to tens of thousands of dollars of liquidity. 

So it's things like that where it's never quite predictable how it's gonna show up, but it's a bit of a game of whack-a-mole where I and my team spend time fighting fires that we wouldn't have to face, I think, if we weren't in this quote, vice industry. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. 

And I feel that most conversations I have with aspiring entrepreneurs pre-building a website, honestly, from the agency side of stuff, if they're in one of these vice categories, the first question I ask them is, do you have a payment processor figured out? 

And they're like, “We're just going to use Shop Pay,” and I have to be the bearer of bad news and really explain to them like, you can't. 

And even beyond that, getting approved by these alternative payment processors is a kind of jumping through hoops in and of itself. It's not that easy. 

Mackie Swan   

It's not that easy. 

And the other thing, I mean, just coming off this example that I shared with PayPal, even if you're by the book and you're following their policy and they say they're accepting you, that doesn't mean that you're not going to have issues with it down the road. 

So I think it's really cool that your clients have access to your brain and you can call that out because it's so much better to get ahead of it. 

But it's also fluid, right? Like the rules are constantly changing and what's okay today might not be okay tomorrow. So I think you just have to have that attitude of like resilience and grit and we're going to figure this the f*ck out no matter what happens, because it is going to keep happening in one way or another. 

Chase Clymer  

Yeah. I like how you said it's fluid. It's like, yeah, it is legal. CBD is legal, but you're not going to find a standard payment processor that will accept your payments. 

Mackie Swan   

Correct. 

Chase Clymer  

And so you have to understand the nuances of this industry. And that’s an unfortunate truth of it. 

Mackie Swan   

It's an unfortunate truth and at the same time I think that's what makes it so beautiful. It's like, okay, there's a reason that, I think, we have been so successful in this space is like we've tackled those problems head on.

And the fact that it is inherently more challenging, I think represents just more opportunity, not only for WOO More Play, but also for the sexual wellness industry in general. 

Like we, if there's still such a stigma that payment processors aren't gonna work with my company, then I have more work to do, right? 

That means we have a lot more work to do to de-stigmatize this space. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely.

And unfortunately, we spent the last couple of minutes talking about the pain points of building a vice category in the sexual wellness industry. 

But no, let's flip the script. What's the best thing about working in this industry? 

Mackie Swan   

I love it. I am never bored. We literally just talk about sex all day, whether it's products or meeting with my marketing team to talk about our content strategy. 

We just launched a podcast I'm super excited about on the network with a fantastic woman named Carter Cruise who comes from the adult film space. 

So just for me getting to show up to work every day and ask myself and ask my team, how can we help women have better sex? Like, what a dream. 

I couldn't imagine a more fun job or just a more fun business to be in. So it's a good time. It's a good time and we're never bored. 

Chase Clymer  

That's fantastic. 

And so we talked about some of the challenges of advertising in this space. How did you guys overcome those? What's your playbook look like these days? 

Mackie Swan   

So I think the biggest thing for us overcoming those issues is just not being too reliant on it. 

I think the silver lining of having those challenges is that it does force us to run a healthier and more sustainable business. 

I am not putting all of my marketing budget into acquiring customers online that are maybe going to come buy from me once and then never come back because they weren't the best customer for me. 

So we spend a lot more time building our community, thinking about loyalty once people get to us, thinking about, “Okay, how can we have a really direct relationship with our customers and give them such a good experience that they are going to be inclined to talk to their friends and family about it?” 

The other thing that's huge for us that just is such a mystery to me in many ways is earned media.

We don't have a publicist. I've never paid a publicist at WOO. We don't have a PR agency on retainer

Editors are writing about us. So people often find us through GQ or Cosmopolitan or some of those publications that are doing really cool work in sex and relationships and are talking about our products. 

The only reason I can think of is that we do just make really f*cking good products. And so I think when editors discover our brand, they tend to keep talking about it. 

Chase Clymer  

That's fantastic. And that just does wonders for your guys' SEO. 

Mackie Swan   

Oh, it's huge. It is huge. Which is funny because I can't remember if I mentioned this to you when we first met, but our internal SEO efforts are highly neglected. 

So getting that extra bump, I think, from the outside coverage is really valuable. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. 

Now looking back on your tenure at WOOlmore Play, does anything stand out to you as maybe a mistake you guys made along the way that you want to be like, hey, maybe don't do this to our listeners?

Mackie Swan   

So many. I mean, running a startup, you're just constantly making mistakes and learning from them, right? 

Okay, so one that comes to mind is like a product or innovation mistake. So one of the products in our assortment when I joined WOO was a massage candle. So it's like a really beautiful candle. You melt the wax down, you can use it for an intimate massage.

It had this phrase on the side that said, Eat me out for once. And our customers just thought it was hilarious. We're always talking about how women need to prioritize their own pleasure. 

So it was a really funny, really giftable item that our audience loved. So going off of the success of that candle, we're like, “Okay, people obviously find the humor in our kind of like crass language and the way that we're just being so in your face talking about sex. So how could we iterate off of that with other products?”

We'd been working on a bundle. We knew there was going to be a tote bag involved. We're like, let's put a funny saying on the side of the tote bag. 

We're whiteboarding. I won't send you the list of phrases because some of them were just a little crazy. 

But one of the phrases was My sex toys are in here. So we released this tote bag. It says My sex toys are in here. It's in our cute branding. We thought it was so funny. We sold it in a bundle. 

People not only weren't really buying that bag, but they weren't using it. 

And we kind of had that light bulb moment after the fact of like, okay, putting a silly sexual saying on a candle that stays in your house that you only bring out in front of your partner before you guys have sex is very different than putting something like that on the side of a bag that we're expecting people to bring home their groceries in. 

So I think understanding like, what is the product that you're making? When and where and what is the context that you expect your customers to use that product? And understanding those differences is really big. 

And so that was a good learning for us of like, okay, we can't just always be crazy just for the sake of being crazy. We have to be strategic about it so that it's done in a way that's really going to resonate with our community. 

Chase Clymer  

Oh, absolutely. 

Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?

Mackie Swan   

I guess just keep going. I think that I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs or people who want to become entrepreneurs and start their own brand, and there's often this sentiment of like, what's the secret or what is the magic bullet or the secret sauce for getting this off the ground? There is none. Like you just have to start and you just have to keep going. 

And you don't know what you don't know, none of us do. And so if you find a space that you are really passionate about, and you think that you have a unique view on it, just start and see what happens. 

And I think a lot of the time, if you're in it for the right reasons, you'll just surprise yourself at how much you learn along the way. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. Now, if I'm listening to this podcast, I'm curious about the products. Where should I go? 

Mackie Swan   

WOOmoreplay.com. We have amazing lubricants. We have toys. We have feminine care items.

And it's not just for women. Couples buy our products a lot. A lot of guys come to stock up for their female partners as well. 

Yeah. And I hope that everybody loves it.

Chase Clymer  

Awesome. Mackie, thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Mackie Swan   

Cool. Thank you so much, Chase. 

Chase Clymer  

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

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