When
2018 – 2021
What
Brand design, website development, content, e-commerce, marketing and advertising, fulfilment to build an experiment to build a brand and conquer the world of street fashion.
Wow
An e-commerce business from scratch, including social media presence, community and marketing funnels. Generated €3K monthly recurring revenue in 6 months.
Background
In 2018, my good friend Edwin returned from a holiday in Thailand and brought back some T-shirts he picked up at a little streetwear shop in Bangkok. It would be the start of a awesome e-commerce adventure for the both of us.
Building an e-commerce empire
After some market research and brainstorming we decided to dive in. We ordered our first batch of T-shirts at Oldskull in Bangkok and rebranded them. We called it Oldskull Amsterdam: The finest streetwear from the far east brought to the metropolitan area’s of Europe. Starting right in the most sexy city in the world: Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Bless your style
I created an identity to match the name. Turns out, you can just use the Saint Andrew’s Crosses from the City of Amsterdam in your own brand if you like. So we did ;-).
Setting up the platform
It took me a couple of weeks to set up a an e-commerce platform with WordPress and Woocommerce. I hooked up Facebook, Instagram and Mailchimp to generate and capture leads. After setting up a lean digital marketing campaign with some self-learning multivariate ads in search and on socials, we were good to go.
First revenue
After some testing and finding the right way to actually ship the shirts while keeping a reasonable margin, orders rolling in were fulfilled without much effort.
Design is never done
This was a great start, but we had a long way to go before becoming viable. At this point we we’re spending all our profits on advertisements so the big optimisation was coming.
We found quickly that our own website was in desperate need of some polishing. We analysed errors, segmented incoming traffic, decreased bounces, retargeted empty carts and optimised the overall UX and UI.
Next up, building a social audience. We managed to connect some influencers to our shirts. Not big ones, because we didn’t pay for them. They just loved the shirts so they were willing to promote us for some free gear. I also connected the shop to our Facebook page to bring in some extra traffic. Our monthly newsletter was also hitting a fair amount of subscribers, and we started pushing discounts and offers, which helped us clear overstock shirts and this obviously contributed nicely to our total revenue numbers.
Experimenting with advertising
We found that search ads had a big impact on our sales. So after a couple of months we were able to calculate a formula to balance our ad spend. We mainly used smart self learning multivariate ads that did the optimising for us.
Skyrocketing sales numbers
In one summer weekend, we had a barbeque at my place to celebrate our success. That weekend, suddenly, our sales skyrocketed 20x! Unfortunately, after some investigation, it turned out that we had the comma misplaced in the daily max. ad spend…
While not intentional, the proof was in the pudding. Ads just work when you’re selling stuff online. All you need is to do is strike the right balance.
Running the business vs Changing the business
After 10-12 months, our business was running smoothly. Besides from an occasional hiccup in stock shortage or a lost package in transit, we were playing the e-commerce game quite nicely. Orders kept coming in, profits were made. Until… supply shortages hit us. Our competitor from Germany, who we identified in our market research, was snatching shirts from under our nose. Not good.
We tried to partner at first, but they weren’t inclined. We tried other sources to get our supplies. That helped, but was not a sustainable solution. We needed a plan.
The pivot
Our thinking was simple. What if we would create our own shirt designs and build out the brand with that. So we did. We partnered with Revenant Customs, a specialist in custom motorcycles and first minute Oldskull fan to set up our first series of themed Oldskull Amsterdam t-shirts next to our regular offer.
I created some designs, we had them specially screen printed. That drove up the cost, but made it more exclusive. This allowed us to ask a higher price and even make some more margin. They turned out to become an eclectic mix of eastern and western culture, which was a surprisingly nice fit with our brand.
We did a photoshoot and voila. It worked!
Well.. for a while that is. Our partnership with Revenant Customs didn’t work out well for various reasons.
We needed a new plan.
Manufacturing our own gear on demand
Maybe, we could get away with just using our own brand on our products. And since we didn’t want to manage supply shortages anymore, we tried manufacturing on demand.
Introducing Oldskull Amsterdam accessories
With our iconic Amsterdam style brandmark, I designed a series of products that could be manufactured on demand. We hooked into events like Kingsday in the Netherlands in our marketing campaigns to generate attention.
The end
Unfortunately, our manufacturing on demand idea didn’t bring us the success we hoped for. In the end we sold just a few caps, flip-flops and phone cases. We needed a new plan again. But our supply from Bangkok was completely dried up. Our German friends bought the exclusive rights for Oldskull in Europe and shifted into a gear we couldn’t compete with. They licensed all designs from Thailand and started manufacturing themselves on large scale.
We decided to call it quits. On to the next adventure!
