This shop owner makes millions telling you what to buy
Today, we're discussing the S-word, and I want to ask you, what about sales makes you cringe?
Hit reply and give me your unfiltered perspective. I'm eager to know how you feel about the topic, good or bad.
This edition of The Hungry is in partnership with Manychat, my favorite tool for quickly getting specialized content and information into the hands of new audience members without being weird about it.
Show your audience what to appreciate, and they’ll buy from you
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Real recognizes real.” It describes how one operator can immediately spot another operator based on their actions.
Finding highly successful, creative individuals to share in the newsletter isn’t always easy. They keep to themselves, not hopping on social media to discuss their annual sales numbers. Whenever I find one and have the pleasure of talking with them, I always ask who else they might know.
That’s what happened with Rubeena of The Gray Muse, and when I asked her who she believed was operating on a similar level to her or better. She quickly rattled off a few names I hadn’t heard, and the one that caught my attention the fastest was Of Aspen, a boutique in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, a small suburb of Philadelphia.
From the outset, you’d think that Of Aspen is just a basic retail shop that sells pens, notebooks, stickers, and a variety of trinkets and gifts, and you aren’t wrong, but it’s how the shop owner shows up on social media and their newsletter that sets them apart.
In July 2019, Caroline Stockman started Of Aspen as an online shop selling personally curated, high-quality pens and notebooks. During the early stages of the pandemic, when people were going nuts for hobbies to keep them busy while they sheltered in place, Stockman posted a video on TikTok that went viral, and her account blew up almost overnight.
As anyone who has gone viral will tell you, it isn’t always a good thing unless you happen to be good and telling the right kind of stories to the right people. With over 600,000 TikTok followers, Stockman’s business has blossomed over the few short years she’s been open, and it’s all because she knows how to intrigue her entice with aspirational product choices.
Of Aspen's CEO, Caroline Stockman on a regular day at work
She routinely gets over 100k views on her “pack and order” series, where she walks through the store warehouse and cherry-picks products based on a recent customer order. Apparently, people love to be voyeurs into other strangers' shopping carts. I’m sure Stockman is happy to oblige because whenever she posts one of those videos, the shop sells several more orders of similar products and others.
Again, Stockman is an artist, but it’s become less important for her to share or sell her art and more essential to help bring joy to other artists by sharing all the goodies she loves.
I call this concept passion adjacent because it allows her to be happy by expressing herself creatively indirectly to what is expected. I’m willing to bet she still makes art in her free time, but knowing that she’s serving the creative community more beneficially is likely more satisfying to her.
How to curate without a viral TikTok account
The planets aligned for Stockman in 2020, and achieving virality on any social platform these days can be difficult, but that doesn’t mean we can’t serve our audience with a curator's approach. I’m not suggesting that everyone open a Shopify account tomorrow (but you could get started for only $3 for the first 90 days—just saying) and start selling random products.
There are other ways to become a respected curator, which require little to no investment. You can curate products but also ideas, people, creative work, or stories.
Curate Stories
The Hungry began as a short list of things I found on the internet that I thought might be interesting. It’s evolved since, but I gained the trust and interest of others like you by sharing links to things they may not have found without me.
I got the idea from Austin Kleon, who got the idea from Tim Ferriss, who probably stole it from someone else. But instead of just sharing those stories in a newsletter, you can take it further and talk about them in your social media posts, one story at a time.
Dave’s Take: Grow your newsletter, and once big enough, open up sponsored posts to help pay for your time spent being the best link curator ever.
Curate Creative Work
This one should be easy for most because we all have creative people we admire. Become your own online gallerist by curating lists of artists and makers. The Jealous Curator has made a career out of this, as has SFGirlByBay, DesignMilk, and BOOOOOOOM.
Dave’s Take: Start an online shop and offer artists a chance to sell their art through you via consignment or print-on-demand. That’s how 20x200 got started (coincidentally, how I found Austin Kleon).
Curate People
There’s an account on Instagram that I love, but I can never remember its name until it hits my feed. The account belongs to a young New Yorker who walks through popular gathering spots and asks people if they're in a band. Once they find someone, they ask them the name of the band, who they listen to, and if they can share their music in the video.
Of course, every person in the videos says yes to the free self-promotion, which will likely get that band a few more followers who might end up as fans who go to shows and buy t-shirts. If the rest of the people watching the video are like me, it brings them tremendous joy to witness this serendipity play out, likely causing binge-scrolling for at least several minutes, if not longer.
Dave’s Take: It doesn’t have to be video. Photos or written forms can be good ways to showcase exciting personalities. Just make sure to pick a category of individuals that makes sense for the audience and makes you happy to continue doing it for a long time.
Curate Ideas
I’ve trained myself to hear or read about something or someone doing interesting things and then figure out how that applies to what I’m doing or sharing online. In fact, I’m doing it right now.
I heard a story about Of Aspen, and I recognized the greatness in their success story, but also how the promotional model of curating goods in short-form video could be a lesson for others to work in different ways.
Dave’s Take: Read a lot! Read way more than you think because cultivating these concepts takes a lot of practice. While reading, consider how good ideas might play out differently for different people. Then, write everything down.
Becoming a curator of products, ideas, or stories is not a short gameplay. This isn’t about finding the right affiliate product and shilling it to your audience (There’s nothing wrong with sharing affiliate links to quality products, but your reputation dies on whether people trust you to share quality goods and services).
The purpose of becoming a notable curator is to build trust and authority. Over time, once you’ve established loyalty from your audience, you can introduce products and services to them, but it must be congruous.
Just like with Caroline Stockman, once you build up that reputation for sharing cool things, the audience will clamor for the chance to support you.
Your work is excellent, but your offer sucks
One of the immutable laws of marketing is to present your buyers with an irresistible offer they'd be foolish to refuse.
For most creatives, the offer they extend to their audience is, "I made a thing. Want to buy it?" It's not a compelling statement, but most artists and creatives only know this approach because they were told someone else would handle the sales if they got good enough at their craft. Someone lied to you.
In sales for any other business sector, understanding how to stack up an offer is essential to staying competitive. It can be a price break, quality improvement, or stacked benefits, and each one comes with a promise to the customer that you must fulfill.
For the next edition of The Hungry, I'm working on a story about how you can build an irresistible offer into your work that makes the purchase decision a no-brainer, and it comes down to three factors:
Attracting more customers
Increasing the average purchase amount
Getting them to buy more often
The answer is simple, not necessarily easy, and as individual as your art. If you ponder it for a minute, you'll know what I'm going to share, but you'll have to wait until next week to find out.
Small Bites
📸 - If you're one of those types with finely crafted Instagram profiles, this news is going to piss you off.
🔧 - One way to deliver an irresistible offer is to use tools that help put that offer into the hands of your audience and help them take immediate action. ManyChat is that tool, and as a customer myself, I attest that it can help you boost engagement and sales. [Partner]
⚰️ - The high art world is in a state of turmoil. For the first time in a very long time, the art market is depreciating, and though that world seems so distant to many of us, it could trickle down to you.
🚫 - You can read that story above and believe the world is collapsing, OR you can do what you can't.
💡 - I'm absolute crap at organizing my thoughts around sharing short-form videos, let alone getting all my video content shot. If you're like me, maybe this short list of tips will help.
🙏 - I want to give a special shout-out to my funny and creative friend, Laura Jane, for giving me some much-needed guidance on a topic I'll share more of next week.
