Lucy Jeffrey from Bare Kind

Sam: Lucy, welcome to Beyond the Inbox. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

Lucy: No problem. Hi.

Sam: Can you tell us about the inspiration behind Bare Kind and how it came to be?

Lucy: Yeah, a hundred percent.

I founded the brand Bare Kind about five years ago now. I was working for a bank at the time and doing a job that was okay, but it wasn’t really lighting any fires underneath me.

I wanted to do something that would have more of an impact on the world. When you work for a bank, you tend to be quite a small cog in a massive machine, so I really wanted to do something else and leave a legacy in the world.

That’s where Bare Kind came from.

The product we sell today is actually completely different from what we started selling. We started by selling reusable straws.

At the time, there was a mass trend around reducing single-use plastics and using things like reusable stainless-steel straws.

I jumped on that trend and started experimenting with different products, such as reusable tote bags and T-shirts.

It wasn’t until maybe a year and a bit later that I landed on the hero product I eventually quit my job to sell more of, which is our bamboo socks.

Ten percent of the profits are donated to help the animal featured on the sock.

We have this really cool product, but behind the scenes, there’s an amazing ethical reason for it. We support animal conservation and have lots of charity partners around the world.

Quite a few are based in the UK, which is where I am, but we also have partners in many other countries.

It has just grown from there.

In 2020, I quit my job, so I’ve been doing it full-time for about two years. I have a small team behind me, and we’re a sock business now. That’s a hundred percent of what we do at the moment.

Sam: What was it like making that leap from safe, full-time employment to the unpredictability of entrepreneurship?

Lucy: It was really exciting.

I was lucky because I spoke to my partner about it. I was living with my boyfriend—and still am—and he was very supportive.

He had his full-time job at the same bank where I worked, and he said, “I’ve got this. You need to take this moment to experiment. If you don’t do it now, when will you?”

That was two years ago, and he has recently quit to join me.

Sam: Wow.

Lucy: I know. Now it feels a little scarier because both of our incomes are fully dependent on the business, so it needs to work.

I was very lucky to have his support.

It was exciting, and I haven’t looked back, to be honest. It was the best decision I’ve ever made.

Even if the business crashes and burns in the next week—which hopefully it won’t—I still think it was the right decision for me.

You can always go back to a nine-to-five job. I’ve been there and done that. I have experience and could always go back to it if I had to.

But I’m glad I grabbed life and went for it.

Sam: Let’s talk more about the business.

You mentioned Bare Kind sells socks, and apparel and accessories is obviously a very competitive market.

What makes Bare Kind different from other apparel and accessory brands?

Lucy: It’s our USP—the charity donation—and we find that it really resonates with people.

We use it a lot in our marketing. We literally pin everything on it because it’s the sole reason we exist.

We double down on that niche. We’re very focused on the animals and the charities we support, and we notice that’s why customers buy from us.

We see it in our reviews. Customers say they love the charity donation.

What’s interesting is that the reason they come back is that they then realize it’s actually a very good product.

The charity angle has the potential to feel like a bit of a gimmick: “Great, you donate to charity.”

But because the product itself is very good quality—which was always really important to me—we get customers who believe in the cause but also genuinely like and use the product.

That’s what makes us different.

It’s not the reason I did it, but it has become a really good marketing tool.

The purpose of the brand is to channel more money into animal conservation, but because of that, it’s almost a win-win.

It works well from a marketing perspective because we have that USP.

Sam: Is it sometimes difficult to navigate the balance between focusing on conservation and operating a business?

How do you find that balance, especially in your marketing?

Lucy: Overall, people are really understanding and supportive because we donate 10 percent of profits.

Most of the time, in our email marketing and whenever customers engage with us organically, they say, “I really love what you do. What a great idea. I’m happy to support it.”

Interestingly, Facebook ads are the one place where we occasionally see someone say, “Why only 10 percent? I’m not spending that much on socks. I might as well donate directly to the charity.”

The funniest comments are the people who say, “How much are your top CEOs being paid if you’re only donating 10 percent?”

And I’m like, “Really not much. I’m not being paid much.”

I think they assume we’re a massive company using the charity aspect as a small benefit to help us sell.

But it’s actually the reason we exist.

When people know us, understand the brand, and see what we do, they get it.

If someone only sees us briefly on Facebook, that’s where we sometimes get those comments. It’s still only a minority.

As soon as we reply and explain that we’re a small company, that we have salaries and bills to pay, and that we need to function and grow as a business while donating, people generally understand.

There’s a minority who don’t fully understand the model.

But that also tells me I’m glad we’re in this niche because the concept of being a business while also donating to charity isn’t completely established yet.

It shows me we’re early adopters.

Sam: Absolutely.

I want to go back to something you mentioned because I had a question about it.

I don’t think I’ve seen many brands with as many five-star reviews as Bare Kind.

Why do you think you’re driving so many reviews, and what are you doing to encourage more reviews in the long term?

Lucy: There are a few key things.

First, make sure you have a review automation in place.

Whatever email or review software you use for your website, make sure those automations are set up.

Our customers are automatically asked for a review, and they’re automatically reminded, so from a logistical perspective, that helps.

In terms of what we’re actually doing, I think it’s a testament to the product.

People want to support us because we support charities and animals, and that’s something they care about. I think that makes them more willing to leave a review.

The second thing is the quality of the product and everything we’ve built around it. We want customers to be five-star happy with us.

The third thing—which we see frequently in our Trustpilot reviews and the reviews on our website—is our customer service.

Customer service is really important to what we do.

It used to be only me. Now it’s mainly my sister helping, so we tag-team it.

At Christmas, it gets very busy, but we respond to customers on the same day. We are on it all the time.

It’s not necessarily scalable or sustainable because it’s going to become a bottleneck, but at the moment, we’re managing to deliver five-out-of-five customer service.

I think customers expect that these days.

Sam: Do you think that will be difficult as you scale?

Customer service is so close to home with you and your sister doing it. How do you think you’ll navigate that challenge?

Lucy: I don’t know. I’m scared to let it go.

To be fair, it was a jump for me to hand it over to my sister.

It was one of the last things I was still doing that I probably shouldn’t have been doing as the founder.

But I trust my sister, and she’s very good at it.

There will come a point where she either moves on or runs out of time. This isn’t her full-time job. She has another job and does this on the side in her spare time.

Eventually, I’m going to have to outsource it or hire someone. There are a few different models.

Whatever I do, I’ll have to keep it as close as possible to our brand messaging and tone of voice.

I’ll need to manage it tightly until I have another person on board.

Whether they’re actually on the team or outsourced, I need to be very close to them as a person.

I can’t just give it to some random person without fully understanding their values.

It might be more expensive to do it that way, but I think it’s much better for our brand in the long term.

Sam: I think it’s something a lot of founders struggle with.

I was speaking to a founder recently who hired one of his customers to handle customer service.

He said he practically had to beg her to do it because she was such a strong advocate for the brand. He knew she was the person who had to lead customer service, and he managed to hire her.

It’s a pretty interesting story.

Lucy: Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.

I have a few customers who might be good. I don’t know, but that’s really interesting.

Sam: I want to dive into your current marketing strategy.

I have so many questions, but I want to start broadly: how are you reaching your target audience today?

Lucy: I’d say through all the usual channels.

We have Facebook ads, which historically have done very well for us but have become harder and more expensive. I know a lot of brands are seeing that.

We have Google Ads and email marketing as well. We’ve done a lot of work to grow our subscriber base.

Something slightly different that many brands might not have tried is that we ran radio ads at the end of last year.

It was a massive awareness campaign that reached millions of people across the UK during Christmas, which is our peak time as a sock company.

We saw great revenue off the back of that.

But it also came during a very expensive period.

When we went back and looked at our profit for 2022, we had doubled revenue compared with the previous year, but our profit hadn’t increased much.

We had postal strikes, so shipping costs increased by around three times. We also became VAT registered, so 20 percent goes immediately.

Advertising became more expensive too.

Radio was expensive, but every other channel was becoming more expensive as well. We really felt the pinch.

We’ve dabbled in lots of different channels.

The only one we don’t do at all—or don’t do very well—is TikTok.

We’ve tried it now and then and experimented with organic content, but it’s a time issue.

Sometimes you have to focus on what you have time to do.

We’re a small team, so maybe one day we’ll do it and realize we wish we’d started sooner.

For now, we just have to prioritize what’s on our plate.

Sam: It’s interesting that you mentioned radio.

How do you measure the success of something like that? Are you sending listeners to a specific URL?

Lucy: It’s very difficult because you have limited time.

The maximum ad length is around 30 seconds, so you can’t spend the ad saying, “www dot this.”

It’s more like, “Search Bare Kind bamboo socks.”

A lot of people come through Google, and we have to mop up that traffic.

The other challenge is that Bare Kind is spelled B-A-R-E, but people assume it’s B-E-A-R, so we have to account for that traffic as well.

Historically, radio has been very difficult to attribute.

However, we could see a massive uplift from the moment the ads went live.

We also have a post-checkout survey that asks customers where they found us, and more than 50 percent were saying they found us on the radio.

We have to trust that the data is telling us what happened.

Even with Facebook and Google, attribution is difficult these days, so we have to use the data we have.

Sam: Very true.

I’m sitting here wondering whether people will come back next year because they had such a good experience the first time.

They might return a year later and technically still have originated from radio, but they’re also an existing customer.

That creates another layer to the attribution.

Lucy: Exactly, and we rely on that.

Because we’re such a good gifting product, as long as customers enter our funnel at some point, we have email marketing that can bring them back the following year.

They also tend to order more from us.

They might say, “I’m going to get socks for everyone,” and buy socks for the whole family.

Our average order size at Christmas is much higher than normal, which works really well for us.

We haven’t discussed whether we’ll do radio ads again this year, but hopefully, we’ll also have lots of returning customers.

Sam: I want to talk about the customer lifecycle.

When someone lands on the website for the first time, what journey do they go through?

Are they buying immediately, entering their email address, or going through a welcome flow?

Lucy: We do have a welcome flow and offer 10 percent off the first order.

Quite a lot of people go through that.

Because we have a relatively low-cost product—a pair of socks costs less than £10—it’s probably easier to convert someone immediately than it is with a higher-value product.

We see people convert fairly quickly, sometimes straight from a Facebook ad, even though Facebook ads cost us quite a bit.

Other people go through the flows where we explain more about our charity impact.

We’ve recently released our charity-impact report.

Because we have so many five-star reviews, the social proof is there, and we tend to convert people quickly.

An interesting insight is that we use software that shows us where customers are clicking and looking on the screen.

Many of our customers love shopping from the “All Collections” page.

It’s literally one page showing all the socks, and they click through every single one.

Our product is technically one type of product with many different designs, so customers want to make sure they’ve seen everything available.

That might be relevant for other apparel businesses too.

Overall, we’re fortunate that customers can convert fairly quickly.

At Christmas, everything changes.

Q4 is like a different company. People convert more, the average order value increases, and the conversion rate increases. It’s nuts.

We really are a Q4 business.

Sam: What happens after someone makes a purchase?

Are they receiving a post-purchase flow and then perhaps a repeat-purchase flow later?

Lucy: Once someone becomes a customer, we have several repeat-purchase flows.

Someone on the team set these up.

We have flows from two orders all the way up to eight orders and above. There’s a limit somewhere because we haven’t had enough people order beyond a certain number.

After each order, they’ll get an email celebrating it.

At four orders, for example, it might say, “You are amazing,” with otters clapping or something like that.

We focus heavily on the animals.

We do have customers who order from us many times, and those emails go out to them.

We also have the standard flows: first-time customer, abandoned checkout, and so on.

Then we have a monthly newsletter as well.

Sam: You mentioned Christmas.

Are there any other seasonal holidays that drive significant sales, such as Father’s Day or Mother’s Day?

Lucy: We’ve just had Mother’s Day, and it isn’t really a big campaign for us.

We mention it, but it doesn’t seem to take off.

Father’s Day is a bigger one.

People associate socks with dads. It’s such a classic dad gift.

We go hard on Facebook ads and make sure the imagery features the typical sock designs that sell well in men’s sizes.

Father’s Day is pretty big, but nothing compares with Christmas.

Sam: You have a newsletter and send seasonal campaigns.

How do you plan your email campaigns across the quarter and the year?

Lucy: We have a content calendar.

We have someone who looks after our email marketing and website.

We have someone who handles social media, charity, paid-ad content, and design.

Separately, we have someone looking after the wholesale side of the business because we also have B2B email marketing.

We have both B2C and B2B.

Each person owns their area and comes in with ideas for the next few months.

They might say, “This is what I want to do for Father’s Day.”

Then we come together as a team and review it.

We might say, “You’ve planned this email for B2C. Let’s replicate it for B2B. Do we also have an Instagram post?”

We make sure everything is aligned.

It’s useful for collaboration and helps us ensure that, once we’ve created a piece of work, we’re getting as much value from it as possible and using the assets everywhere rather than doubling up on work.

We have a content calendar. It’s nothing fancy—just an Excel spreadsheet—but it works for us.

Sam: You mentioned something when we last spoke that I wanted to explore further.

You said people are nostalgic about animals from their home country and that this influences their buying decisions.

How do you use that insight in your flows?

Lucy: It’s an assumption I’ve made based on what I see people saying and what we see in the sales data.

We’re currently very UK focused. Most of our ads are aimed at the UK.

The socks that do particularly well feature animals such as hedgehogs, badgers, and bumblebees.

Orangutans, tigers, and other animals also sell well, but we really notice the strength of UK animals.

I launched the hedgehog socks in May 2021, and they’re still one of our best sellers.

We’ve assumed people are particularly supportive of and attached to UK animals.

You can also see it in broader trends. Bees are everywhere as a motif—on cushions, throws, and homeware.

We follow those trends.

In our flows, we focus on the relevant animal group.

If someone has bought bee socks, we might target them with hedgehog socks or show them the UK woodland collection.

We also target customers at particular times of year.

There’s a World Bee Day and a National Hedgehog Day, so we use those animal-specific days as a reason to reach out.

If someone has bought hedgehog socks, we might email before Hedgehog Day and say, “It’s Hedgehog Day on Friday. Make sure you wear your hedgehog socks.”

We might then target them with ads for badgers and foxes.

The insight also influences our product decisions because I’m looking at introducing more UK wildlife based on the data.

Sam: I wanted to ask about that too.

How are you thinking about product-line extension?

Do you test which animal is more likely to sell, and how do you make those decisions using your data?

Lucy: I think it’s getting harder for us.

When we first started, I launched patterned turtle socks, and people liked them, so I introduced four more animals.

Since then, I’ve mostly added socks based on what I think could be the next good seller.

At one point, the decisions were as simple as, “We don’t have orange socks, so let’s make orange socks,” or, “We don’t have tigers or gorillas, and those are well-known endangered animals, so we need them in the range.”

Now we have a decent range—around 40 different animals.

We’re trying to make decisions based on data and seasonality.

I’m trying to work out which colors will be best for which season.

It has become complex.

As I said earlier, I came from banking. I don’t have a background in merchandising or fashion, so this has become quite a challenge for me.

The good news is that we haven’t really had a flop with any of the socks.

We can generally introduce a sock, see how it performs, and test from there.

Our minimum order quantity is a thousand pairs.

We bring them out, try to sell them, and are now reaching the point where we review whether we have any unproductive products that should be pushed into the backlog.

We’ve never had to do that before. We used to restock everything.

Now that the range is so large, we need to be more strategic about what we bring out and what we put on the back burner.

I don’t have all the answers.

Other brands have full merchandising departments doing this. It’s a full-time job.

It’s something I’m trying to work through at the moment.

Sam: Where do you see the company going in the next couple of years?

I spoke to a founder recently who said she was happy making a certain amount each year because she wanted to keep the business small and within the family.

Do you wrestle with the conflict between wanting to grow the company very large and wanting to keep it small?

Lucy: I want to go global.

I have big ambitions for it.

The whole point of the company is to make as much money as possible to support animal conservation.

Climate change isn’t slowing down, so I want to support these charities in the way I can, which is by running the business and selling as many socks as possible.

I want to sell in more countries, work with more retailers, and make the company as big as we can.

There are so many more socks I want to bring out and more charities I want to support.

We might diversify into different products in the future.

Right now, we’re a sock company, and we’re seeing a lot of growth and opportunity in that area, so we’re sticking with it.

But I think the model could work with other products too.

I like the feel of an independent company. I don’t want a huge team.

But I can see us getting to the point where we bring in a more experienced CEO, while I remain the founder and focus on the things I’m best at.

We’d still try to keep the team cozy.

I really do want to scale the company.

I believe in the project and think it has the potential to do this.

We just have to battle through everything happening with rising shipping and marketing costs and hold on at the moment.

Sam: Which marketing channel are you going to double down on in 2023?

Lucy: We’re doubling down on wholesale as an entire channel.

We don’t have a huge spend in wholesale marketing, but our main marketing channel for wholesale is email.

We’ve moved further into that and are really doubling down because we did our profit analysis for last year and found that DTC is so expensive.

There are Facebook ads, VAT, and shipping.

With wholesale, retailers pay the VAT. They tend to pay shipping, and even if we pay it, the cost is split across hundreds of units rather than two or three pairs of socks.

Our marketing costs are very low.

It’s also effectively free marketing because every shop that stocks us puts the brand in front of customers we might not otherwise have reached.

Don’t get me wrong—we’re still a DTC brand and very Christmas focused.

But from Q1 to Q3, we’re going heavily into wholesale.

It gives us consistent cash flow and revenue.

When DTC is difficult and getting expensive, we have retailers coming back and helping keep the company alive during the quieter DTC periods.

Sam: One channel I hear many founders talking about is community, and that extends beyond social media.

We’ve talked about email and paid marketing.

What does community mean to Bare Kind, and how do you plan to leverage it in the future?

Lucy: We’re going down a slightly different route with this.

My partner and I have just started our own podcast, and we’re adding it to the Bare Kind YouTube channel.

Again, it’s doubling down on the wholesale niche.

My YouTube channel has become a community of brands like mine following along as we grow our wholesale channels.

I share how we’re doing wholesale.

We’re on a marketplace called Faire, which is a massive wholesale marketplace—almost like Amazon for wholesale brands.

We’ve found a niche where we release YouTube videos explaining how we’ve achieved success on that channel.

We’ve also just launched a podcast.

The podcast is about what it’s actually like to run a business, how things are going, what our strategies are, and what the numbers look like.

We’re being transparent about how we’re growing the business.

We’re currently trying to grow from six figures to seven figures over the next couple of years.

That’s a massive leap and will be really difficult, but I think it will be good for people to see how we actually do it.

I learn from other people, and it can be hard to find people willing to talk openly about these things.

I’m hoping to build a community there.

Sam: Firstly, congratulations. That’s amazing.

It makes me happy to hear that because I spoke to a founder recently who started building a personal brand.

He writes on social media every day and shares everything he has learned from growing seven- and eight-figure businesses.

I believe it always comes back to the brand because people buy into people, not brands.

I’m sure you’re going to build a community where people are on the journey with you, and Bare Kind will be part of that as well.

Major props to you and your partner for starting it. I’ll be sure to check it out after this recording.

Lucy, I want to start wrapping up.

I had a ton of questions and wasn’t able to get through all of them.

Where can our listeners learn more about Bare Kind and stay up to date with the brand’s latest developments?

Lucy: Follow me on LinkedIn—Lucy Jeffrey on LinkedIn.

I share a lot of these insights there, and that’s where this community of founders willing to share is coming from.

The website is barekind.co.uk, and we’re also Bare Kind on Instagram.

There’s lots of lovely animal content on there if that’s something you’re interested in.

We’re Bare Kind on YouTube as well.

The podcast is called Candid Founders, so you can go to candidfounders.com.

But really, follow me on LinkedIn because that’s where I share everything that’s going on.

Come and check it out and give us a listen. I’d love to hear from you.

It is very new. We literally launched episode one yesterday, so we’re completely fresh to it.

Sam: Congratulations.

We’ll put the links in the show notes.

Thank you again, Lucy, for taking the time to join us, and all the best in the future with Bare Kind.

Lucy: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.