Ashley Reynolds
I think our biggest issues in the beginning were trying to duplicate efforts and duplicate tasks and roles and not really having a clear cut line in the sand of where we both operate best in the business.
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.
00:49 And I'm welcoming to the show today not one, but two amazing guests. They're coming to me from Cloth & Paper.
Ashley and Ryan Reynolds are the co-founders over there and both play an integral part in keeping analog planning at the forefront of the modern consumer.
Ryan, Ashley, welcome to the show.
Ashley Reynolds
Thank you for having us.
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Alright, so quickly for those that are unfamiliar with Cloth & Paper, what are the types of products that you guys are currently selling?
Ashley Reynolds
We currently sell customized planning solutions for the modern paper lover. So think leather binders and we provide you with all the inserts and accouterments to personalize your planning routine or your planning style.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome.
So take me back in time. Where did the idea for this business come from?
Ashley Reynolds Well, all the way back in 2015, I was in this hiatus between having a corporate job and not working at the time. And I've always grown up, I was an entrepreneur from an early age.
Even Ryan and I, our first date was… we went to a car auction together to find a car to flip when we were 17 years old.
So we've been very entrepreneurial from a very young age.
And I really took that high A to really look at what, could I build? What could I create from a product standpoint of something that I really would love?
And then fast forward to now, 8 years later, it's turned into this kind of brand.
Chase Clymer
Awesome.
Walk me through that ideation period of where you were thinking about building this kind of paper inserts, these planners, this type of business.
Did you do any kind of market research or validation back then to see if this was a good idea?
Ashley Reynolds
Like a lot of entrepreneurship starts from a place of need.
So back then when I actually started creating planning supplies, there was nothing on the market that quite fits my aesthetic, my style. And so I was actually on the hun cruising through the aisles of Target, and it was just like all these florally over-the-top neon unicorn planners, and I'm like, I'm in my 30s.
Like, I can't walk into a meeting with a unicorn floral over-the-top planner. And so I actually left Target with nothing, went home and immediately started creating my own planner on Microsoft Word.
And so you wouldn't do that now as a designer. You definitely wouldn't create any kind of graphic in Microsoft Word, but that was the tool that I knew at the time. That's the one that I was most comfortable with.
So I went in there and made my first kind of planner layout, as the community would call it, in Word.
And actually stumbled across a couple of communities online in my planning for my job search. And I stumbled across a planner community online and I started showing people how I was planning, using the inserts that I had created.
And then it really created this interest from the community. And people quickly started asking me, “Well, where did you get that? How can I get that?” And then that's how everything started.
Chase Clymer
You're making this so easy to ask follow-up questions.
So where did you get it? You designed your own thing in a lovely Microsoft Office.
Did you just print it out on your own printer? What would you do?
Ashley Reynolds
I did. I printed it out on my computer. It was like an A5 document size that I had created. If anyone doesn't know, A5 size is just like, it's not the full size sheet of the paper.
So I sat there and cut it out and did the whole thing and punched holes in it and then put it into a binder. And that was the system that I was using.
And so I really learned how to polish it and perfect it.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Ashley Reynolds
And that was actually one of our first inserts that I actually sold. And it stayed on our website for probably the first year, year and a half in business and then quickly learned that I can't really build a business off of Microsoft Word.
Chase Clymer
So that first template you built, you actually turned around and sold that template?
Ashley Reynolds
Yes, I did. Yes, I did.
Chase Clymer
Walk me through how it went from people in the community being interested in what you do to you being like, I think I have a business here. We should sell this stuff.
Ashley Reynolds
It was actually Ryan pushing me there. He started to see that I was getting busier.
He's like, “What do you have going on? You're always online,” and he saw that I was diddling and doing things and printing things out and sending them to people.
And I was telling him about this community that I found online. He's like, “I think you really have something.”
And so I started kind of, you know, maybe I do.
And so I actually kind of said, “Okay, let's look at what we can do here,” He actually like, oh, at that time, we were a single income household. I kind of had to put together a presentation of how I could build this business for him and like how I could grow it.
And I was like, okay, let me focus on doing this and not get a regular job. And we actually betted each other, he betted that, “If you could generate $8,000 of revenue in your first month, then I'll let you keep up with this.”
And that first month, I surpassed $8,000 in revenue. And so we've been doing it ever since.
Ashley Reynolds
That's amazing. I definitely want to get into that first month, but I think we've got a few things along the way.
So you're going to start taking this more seriously. You're going to actually sell these things. And you've obviously got this captive audience that you built along the way.
How did you go about doing your first product launch? What tools did you use? How did you market it? Obviously, you had the community.
But did you get any interest from outside of that? What was that go-to-market strategy?
Ashley Reynolds
My entire focus was the community the whole entire time. Those were the people that were interested. I was also part of the community because I felt like I know how to talk to them the best.
And so all of my initial marketing and everything was done through those community pages, whether it be on Facebook, through my own Instagram that I had created that was geared towards this community.
And that's really how I marketed the product. It was just me using the product out of Odysee, because that was really how I built up the initial interest– it was me actually using the product and showcasing it online.
So my whole marketing strategy, I didn't really know that’s what it was at the time, was just me showing them how I was using those inserts and the planner at that time.
And that's what really kind of built my following and customer base.
Chase Clymer
What about the way you sold the product?
Was it originally a one-time purchase or did you launch as a subscription? Let's dive a little bit deeper there.
Ashley Reynolds
Yeah. So it originally started as a one-time purchase. I didn't know a ton about the recurring sales and lifetime value and all that stuff during that time.
But Ryan quickly helped me get the hang of all of that. And so my first initial product was just a one-time purchase because I didn't really understand how I needed to generate recurring revenue at that time.
So I was doing a lot of things by hand. So printing everything by hand, cutting it out by hand, and then shipping it to them.
So now, of course, I don't do any of that. We've automated a lot of that. But in the beginning, I was definitely doing everything by hand and just focusing on those one-time orders because I wasn't really thinking of the big picture at that time.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And this is back in 2015.
Ashley Reynolds
Yes.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. So you have this first month and it goes great. You surpass both your expectations.
What's happening from there? How does it start to scale? And when does Ryan start to join the picture?
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. I think Ashley ran with it for about a year or so. And building the business... I mean, she did an awesome job building out the site by herself.
So she built out WordPress by herself and really just bootstrapped the entire thing and built it up.
And just to clarify, when she's talking about communities, that was such a core and interesting part of our industry. There's just super supportive tight-knit groups on Facebook or Instagram and that sort of thing.
And we're really able to build the business around that and gain traction. So yeah.
So she was really ramping up. Every day shipping, I would say dozens of orders out of our apartment and I would come out from work and just start to jump right in and help her on that side.
So the subscription side, that was kind of phase two and really started to build up the business from there and layering in the subscription piece of the business.
I'm sorry, I should have answered the question there.
Ashley Reynolds
But the subscription piece actually came from, once we actually started getting this traction, we're like, “Okay, we need to have more than just these one-time products.”
And so we started purchasing from other retailers thinking that that would be a great strategy to grow because we're going to now stock these retailers that people are familiar with and it's just not them relying on the Cloth & Paper product that I was creating at the time.
And so we quickly found out that our customer base didn't want anything to do with the products that they could get from any other online retailer or another brand that they can pick up at Target.
So the subscription box actually came from us having a surplus of those products that we found our customer just wasn't purchasing of those retail brands.
And that's how the idea came from. I just needed to find a quick way to get rid of those products so that I can just focus all in on designing Cloth & Paper products.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
And that subscription box, did that... Using it as a way to liquidate old inventory is a fantastic idea for anyone listening, by the way. Just want to put that out there.
Did that model shift though as you started to run out of those other people's products, is what I'll call them?
Ashley Reynolds
Yeah. We quickly... As soon as we ran out, I think that lasted us maybe three months. Quickly after that, we focused on just our own product. And from then, we just never shifted from that.
And that has contributed a lot to our growth because when you're creating something on your own, your margins are a lot stronger than if you're paying 50% retail to a retailer, then you're having to build from there.
So yeah, it was just a great way to protect our margins, grow our revenue, our bottom line, and continue to grow the business.
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe your first iteration of the subscription… Was that launched on Cratejoy?
Ashley Reynolds
It was. It was launched on Cratejoy. Yeah, we were there for a very long time.
It was just as of late that we've switched platforms and now are on Recharge.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
I want to talk a little bit about launching on a platform like Cratejoy and why you made the choice to switch to something that you had a little bit more control over.
Ashley Reynolds
Ryan's the systems guy. Allahumma.
Ryan Reynolds
You know, I would say we started on Cratejoy because it was easy. And for anyone looking for something easier, a subscription platform that is easy, I would recommend Cratejoy as a standalone product, like, all day long.
But the problem is, subscriptions are like 35 or 40 percent of our business and the rest is Shopify, just a standard e-commerce business.
And so we are constantly bouncing to sell a subscription, we would have to bounce customers off of our Shopify site.
We never found another way to do it other than to have two loyalty programs, two sets of discount codes. Every customer would have two different logins and it was like from that standpoint, it was a complete nightmare.
So that's what fueled the transition to get onto a more robust app, which we ended up choosing Recharge for that.
Ashley Reynolds
And I think Ryan made a great point. Customer experience is just such a big focus of our brand and I feel like a big part of what sets us apart.
And we needed just a fantastic and seamless customer experience. And like Ryan said, we just needed a single sign-on, a single OZ program and not putting extra work on our customer.
And so that's what made us switch. It forced our hands here to switch a little bit.
Chase Clymer
And that was a little more recent. But I do want to talk... Go back in time in just a few years.
You guys had some impressive growth. Now, was this all powered by the community or did you guys start to lean into some more different types of marketing and advertising channels to capitalize on the explosive growth that you were getting there?
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. So for the first 3 years, it was all organic, no paid ads, 100% organic, just essentially word of mouth, really leveraging social media like Instagram has been our bread and butter since day one.
And so yeah, so we ran with that for 3 years, started to play around with bringing in a marketing agency. We tried one agency, tried paid ads on our own.
So we grew it 100% year over year for our first 5 years or so. And then when the Ecom boom happened, through COVID, we were just... At that point, we were growing and just really in a perfect position to grow with that increase in sales.
So many of our customers are like, our industry is really at its core. It's based around a very therapeutic experience of being able to write down, journal, documenting.
And I think so many people were kind of looking for that escape throughout the pandemic. It was just, it was a good fit at that time.
And we've been able to continue on with that growth and maintain it.
Chase Clymer
Now was your marketing mix during that growth phase? Was it pretty traditional like your meta ads, maybe some Google and email and SMS?
Ashley Reynolds
It was only meta ads at that time. We probably... In the past year and a half, two years is when we really started focusing on Google Ads as a part of our growth engine.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, looking back on these amazing eight years, is there anything that comes to mind as maybe a mistake that you made along the way that you might want our listeners to learn from?
Ashley Reynolds
How much time do we have left in this interview? Lots of mistakes. Lots of mistakes.
But we do have a very fail-fast rule. It's just like we are young entrepreneurs and this is what we love and so we like to try whatever we come up with. And if it doesn't work, then we're equipped to pivot.
But I think… Is there anything that comes to your mind?
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, I mean, my go to for anyone that's looking to start their first business or just starting to have some success, maybe in a side hustle or anything like that, is the bookkeeper is number one.
Hire the bookkeeper first. And then every other thing that you're not the best at.
You fall into a few different camps. There's starters and maintainers. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably a starter. There's some people that are both.
But understand, are you a starter or maintainer in my mind?
And then the other thing is our business and I think most businesses are broken into products, operations, and marketing.
And so where do you fit best in one of those three things and start to. hire around what you don't do particularly well, or don't have your knowledge in.
So that's my thought. Bookkeeper number one, no matter what. Don't spend your Sundays like I did for years, trying to figure out quick books and keeping up with that. It's just a terrible waste of time.
And then hire what you're not good at, you know, first and keep doing it.
Ashley Reynolds
And then keeping on that topic of people, I would say.
When you're building a business and it's growing, your first thought is, let me get as many people to help out as possible.
I think it's important to keep a lean business for as long as possible. People don't understand that protecting your margins is such a big part of your company's growth.
Although you want to grow and you start to invest more into people and all of that stuff, staying lean for as long as possible is really, really the key.
And I think that helped us get to where we are as well because we were bootstrapping everything.
It was Ryan and I taking on 80-hour, 90-hour a week because we're like, we want to see this grow. We're going to do as much as we can to really anchor this business and history.
And so I think that's important to just keep in mind, you have to work as hard as possible and sometimes... And then try to stay as lean as possible for as long as possible.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, you guys are co-founders at Cloth & Paper. Can you walk me through how you guys delineated your roles and how has that evolved over the years?
Ashley Reynolds
I think early on, there was a lot of overlap. A lot of times, of course, we want to see the same result and have the same goals that we're both working in the same way towards those same goals.
And so we've gotten to a point now where we have our separate responsibilities.
We attend our separate meetings and then we can kind of come together at the end of the day and say, “Hey, this is what happened in my meeting. Is there anything you want to share from your day?”
I think it's important to really kind of separate tasks and focus on what each other does well and not have too much of the overlap.
I think our biggest issues in the beginning were kind of trying to duplicate efforts and duplicate tasks and roles and not really having a clear cut line in the sand of where we both operate best in the business.
And so now we definitely have that today.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I always find that co-founders... If two people are responsible for one thing, both of the people assume the other person's doing it, and then it doesn't get done.
Ashley Reynolds
Right.
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. Or the opposite. Or you're just on each other's toes all the time. So yeah.
Ashley Reynolds
It was never an issue of something not getting done. It was always like the other person doing it or both doing it and one person wanting it done one way and the other one wanting it done another way.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
But done is better than perfect, right?
Ashley Reynolds
Yes. Agreed.
Chase Clymer
Awesome.
Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?
Ashley Reynolds
I don't know. I feel like we've touched a lot on the people part. The people part is probably the most important part of just business growth overall.
I know I mentioned staying lean for as long as possible. When you actually start hiring people, really focus on just great quality candidates.
I would blow my budget on the perfect candidate just to make sure that I was going to have someone that was really qualified that could push the business forward.
And I think it's important once you get to that point where you can actually invest in people that you truly are investing in people, whether that be their personal or career growth.
Finding the right people for your company and making sure that they fit in your company culture is just so vital.
And once you find out, or if you make a mistake in hiring and find out those people don't fit in your company culture, move on quickly so that you don't sacrifice the culture that you built.
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. And I think on that point of something that the audience can really take away from there is, our big move in 2023 is that we hired, essentially, a business manager or CEO to really help us continue to separate our roles and just unlock that next level of growth and bring in more experience.
So that's what we're really excited about.
And if you add that to the list of must-dos or can't do fast enough, is to hire somebody to just really help you manage your business and bring in skills that you don't have at a C level.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. And I'm looking forward to the growth that you guys are going to have this year.
Now if I'm listening to this, and I'm curious about the products, where should I go?
Ashley Reynolds
You should go to clothandpaper.com to check out all of our product offerings. If you just need help with productivity tools or just want to see how I personally plan, you can check us out at cloth underscore and underscore paper on Instagram and on YouTube.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Ryan and Ashley, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Ryan Reynolds
Thanks for having us.
Ashley Reynolds
Thank you so much for having us, 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.
You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestecommerce.com to get each episode delivered right to your inbox.
If you're enjoying this content, consider leaving a review on iTunes, that really helps us out.
Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.
Until next time!
