Featured Listing: Civil Hair

Civil Hair is an online CPG business that is ripe and ready to go. The branding is on point, the product is stellar, and the marketing materials such as youtube testimonials and even audience demographics are well produced and yours for the taking. This is an incredible opportunity for a master of social media targeting, influencer marketing, or FBA ACOS optimization to take the wheel and drive.

Tell us a little about yourself, what’s your business background and what brought you to start Civil Hair? 

In another life I was an SEO consultant. I have a lot of background in building and promoting websites, so this felt like a fun project.

I started Civil Hair because a hair salon owner that I knew was looking for ways to sell more hair products. It’s a high markup item that can generate a lot of good passive income. On top of being a high markup item, it’s also a product that someone is going to buy multiple times. That gives it a huge lifetime customer value if it’s a good product as people don’t just buy it once, they buy it over and over again. This creates a lot of opportunities when it comes to marketing and promoting the product.

From the feedback that we got while developing the brand, everyone loved the product, how it smelled, and well it held. We nailed that portion, so we had a lot of confidence going into this business that it was going to be successful if we could just promote it properly.

This is a white label product – How does that process work?

The supplier handles all of this and it is included in the cost of the products. They apply a two color screen print to the bottle during manufacturing. This process makes it super easy to have a remote business without the need for time consuming sticker application.

You are storing inventory and shipping merchandise yourself. Do you think there would be an opportunity for a new seller to turn this into a drop-shipping service?

They could 100% turn this into a drop shipping business. They would have to make a small adjustment to the products to include SKUs so that a 3PL company was able to accurately pick and pack, but for the most part this could be done with very little effort. The white label manufacturer we use even offers a service to help redesign the packaging to be 3PL compliant. They were very helpful through the whole thing. 

Outside of the ‘refer a friend’ email campaign mentioned in your listing, have you run any other marketing for the site? If so, what has worked? What hasn’t?

We’ve done very little marketing outside of the refer a friend program.

Working directly with independent salons did generate sales but we never pushed it. We researched using Google Shopping ads, Facebook ads, Amazon FBA, and influencer marketing. All of which were very promising. However, since we had spent almost $7k with the refer a friend promotion by the time I realized I needed to re-order products with SKUs so we could take advantage of things like Google Shopping and Amazon FBA, we had run out of money.

I was new to running my own eComm store and this was a very big oversight on my part. One that someone with more experience would have avoided. On top of that, by the time we discovered how important including a SKU was, it was clear that my 50/50 partner was checked out and no longer contributing. With that, I decided it was best to sell. If I could do it all over again, getting products with SKUs and pushing them through Facebook Ads, Influencer marketing, Google Shopping, and Amazon Sponsored listings, Civil Hair would have done really well.

I even did some research into which types of hair products are really popular that I’d LOVE to share with the end buyer. My research showed making a few small adjustments to the types of products and pivoting the selling channels could easily lead to a $200,000 a month business in around 2-3 years conservatively. I really wish I would have been a little smarter and chosen a better partner going in. There’s a TON of opportunity in this space.

I really appreciate your candor in the listing – letting us know that you gave this your best shot, but simply didn’t know all of the ins and outs of the business. What do you think your biggest mistake was and what skills do you think would be best for a new owner to get this company headed towards profit?

At the end of the day, it was my own inexperience that killed this opportunity. I did stupid things like ordering 1,000 metal combs with cool leather sleeves from Alibaba. I thought they would make a great ad on for the product, but in the end, things like that ended up costing around $4k and no one cared about our combs. Plus, they didn’t actually make as good a comb as they did a paper weight!

That said, if I could have been a bit smarter with where I spent my money and a little more focused this business would have been huge! Since I had been successful doing SEO for eCommerce stores in the past, my own hubris led me to believe I could make this work easily. In the end, knowing how to build and brand a website is only half the battle and my lack of knowledge on the operations side and working with a partner that I didn’t need ended up hurting the business.