We’re now 1-week post the launch of my new business, Unwind Co, and I’ve been keeping a running note of all the lessons and insights I wanted to share with you. 

I’ve tried to consolidate those reflections into my 3 key lessons that you might find valuable in your own business adventure, whether you’re in the early years and just getting started, like Unwind Co, or more established and considering “what’s next” in the evolution of your brand. 

Let’s get into it! 

1. Email marketing is unmatched in return on investment

Long before Unwind Co had a website, I had a landing page to start collecting email addresses. I knew a well-curated and nurtured email list was key to our launch success. I’d set myself a goal of growing that list to 100 people before we launched. And as soon as we hit that target, I promptly extended the goal to 150! 😂 (We managed to hit that stretch goal just minutes before the pre-order email was sent!) 

Well that humble little list of 150 subscribers DELIVERED. 

For context, and before I share the data, Unwind Co is built on a pre-order model. We had a limited number of boxes available, with pre-order exclusively open to email subscribers for the first 24 hours. After those 24 hours, we open the pre-order to everyone else. Being our first launch and not knowing what demand was going to be like, our messaging had clearly communicated that being on the email list was the best way to guarantee yourself a box. 

Ok. The data. 

PRE-LAUNCH

We sent 4 emails to our list in the two weeks prior to pre-order launch to start building hype and communicate everything we needed our audience to know. These 4 emails averaged a 65% open rate. (A “good” email open rate is considered to be anything over 30%, but you can generally expect better stats when you have a small and engaged list.) 

FIRST 24 HOURS

When pre-order opened, we sent 2 emails in that first 24-hour period. The performance of those emails blew me away. We sold 39% of our product from just those two emails alone. You can see more of the performance of that first launch email in the graphic below. 

SINCE LAUNCH

We’ve now sold 50% of our stock, with 78% of all orders coming from our email list. That places our revenue per subscriber at $29. (Typical RPS is $2 – $5, but again, our small and engaged list blew this metric out of the water.)

EMAIL CONVERSION RATE (How many subscribers convert to being customers)

If you Google search “good email conversion rates”, you’ll be told 2-5% is nothing to turn your nose up at. Now we expected much higher than that—again, that very small and targeted list—but what we didn’t expect was just HOW MUCH higher it would be. Our conversion rate was 25%, which means 1 in 4 subscribers on the Unwind Co email list purchased a box. 🙏

2. If you’re trying to grow a significant audience, you really need paid ads. (Or the capacity to be a full-time content creator making 5+ pieces of content each day. #nothanks)

We’d held off on any paid advertising in the lead up to Unwind launch. We wanted to see what we can do organically, first. We managed to hit 250 Instagram followers, which we were thrilled with! 

But here’s the reality. At least half of those followers were already on our email list, and the remaining followers translated to only a handful of orders—which is right in alignment with social media conversion rates being about 3%. We truthfully need an audience at least 6 times that if we’re to receive any noticeable sales volume from social media in the future. #lessonlearned

I did manage to (reluctantly 😂) teach myself to set up an ad campaign in Meta ads in the past week with a budget of $25/day. We’re already starting to see results from that, so I can see it will absolutely be worth our investment over the coming months to continue growing our audience prior to our Summer box launch in November. 

3. Decide where it’s worth investing your money. 

Being a startup, there were SO. MANY. PLACES we could have spent money launching Unwind Co. We could have sunk a tonne of money into the above-mentioned paid ads, we could have paid for influencer marketing, we could have gifted hundreds of boxes and hoped for some social media mentions, we could have dropped $10K on a web developer, and don’t get me started on how much (extra) we could have spent on packaging! 

But Kate and I were aligned from Day 1 on what we knew was important for Unwind. The biggest expenses we committed to were:

• A beautiful, warm, engaging brand experience. We invested in Julia of Luminous Lines for our branding and packaging design, and Leah of Snappy Street Creative for our photography, and they both absolutely NAILED it. The combination of great imagery and a killer branding suite to work with meant we were able to design our own website, which saved us considerably. 
• Quality products that supported other female founders. We could have saved ourselves a lot of money and sourced creative projects from China to go inside the boxes, but the opportunity to support other women in business was something Kate and I were both passionate about. It was also a way for us to ensure our boxes contained high-quality products that you weren’t going to find on the shelves of mainstream department stores, and it gave Unwind Co a point of difference.

I truly believe going “all in” on these above investments, rather than trying to spread our money across multiple possible avenues for potentially mediocre results, was the right choice for us. 

BONUS Lesson: Invest in your networks. They will show up for you when it counts. 

My networks showed up for me last week in ways I never could have imagined. I had friends from my university days 20+ years ago signing themselves up for a subscription. I had connections I’d made through networking in my journalism days 15+ years ago purchase boxes and send me messages of support. And then there were all of the orders from my girlfriends, clients and members of my Accountability Circle network who flooded the order system and social media in the 48 hours following our launch. 

I was emotional as I saw all of the names on the orders come in through Shopify. As I’d tell Jono and the kids how I knew each person, it made me realise how incredibly rich I am in ways I think it’s easy to forget. (I know, that sounds ridiculously cheesy, but forgive me, as I mean every word of it.)

So! Will we be doing another Unwind Box? ABSOLUTELY. 

Kate is already DEEP into research for the products to include in our Summer / Christmas box, which will open for pre-order early November. (We’ll keep you updated). 

I hope you found some value in this big debrief! Would love your feedback / questions / thoughts if there’s anything I’ve missed or anything else you’d love to know.