Hi Maddie, and welcome along to the podcast.  So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and and the brand to, to our audience. Hi. Yes, in case anyone forgets, I have my goodbye ear t-shirt on today. But my name is Maddie.

I have been with good Goodbye gear for coming up on three years now,  I head up all of our organic social, our public relations initiatives, our influencer campaigns.

 Goodbye Gear is the leading online marketplace for baby and kid gear resale. So we basically will resell everything except for clothing at this time.

So, strollers, bassinet, sound machines. We even do car seats and use press pumps.  In select cities we will come to families' homes and actually pick up all the gear for them since parents are so busy and then bring them back to our facilities where we have a team of what we call wing moms and they will.

Quality, check the items, make sure that they are not broken, that they're not recalled. Make sure they clean them up, make sure stroller tires are fully filled, and then if they pass our inspection process, we will photograph the items listed on our online marketplace and even suggest pricing based on our algorithm 

 And then we also have a really wide variety of open box gear, which helps a lot of these big box retailers kind of manage their returns and excess inventory instead of them throwing them away.

Wow, love this. I mean, the problems that you solve are, are manyfold, right? 

But also the big one,  is the problem of like, parents don't have time to take photos and, you know, organize the selling of their items. 

Yes. So since founding Goodbye gear in 2016, we've saved over 270,000 items from landfills, and we've helped, I believe over 50,000 parents sell their gear instead of throwing it away. And we have made a pledge to save over a million pieces of gear by 2025. So that's the initiative we're really working toward as we grow our business.

Yeah. Amazing. So in terms of like digging into your organic marketing strategy, so you look after specifically organic social, SEO, o influencers, email and pr, what have been the biggest wins in terms of those various channels that you'd wanna highlight to our listeners? 

 When I joined, we were, I think about. 8,000 followers on Instagram and now we are just under the 50,000 mark. We should be hitting that this week. So you know, that's over a hundred percent year over year growth since my two and a half years at the business. , and that's just through really creating a social media strategy that.

Has a really thoughtful posting cadence. So posting not too much where parents get fatigued and unfollow us, posting at the right times when parents are online and you know, not at 3:00 PM during school pickup, that's probably not the best time to post about a sale we're having. And then working with a lot of really fantastic influencers to help grow that online social media presence has been huge too.

So one of our biggest wins has been, Testing influencers and seeing which ones really drive a lot of traffic to site and interest. And our absolute favorite to work with is her name's Kelly and her Instagram handle is the car mom. And we've actually signed on to like an annual and monthly car partnership with her just because she has drove driven such incredible growth not only to our site but our social followings.

She is, She'll increase organic social metrics over a thousand times, month over month. 

So what do you think has been the like, why has she been so successful as an influencer for you guys, and how would you kind of advise other brands to replicate that success you've seen with her?

 It's definitely some trial and error. Influencer marketing is a little scary because part of it is just passing over the money, having them post and see if their audience. Likes the content or not, but there's a lot of safeguards you can put in place, making sure you're signing on with an influencer that will resonate with your brand.

So there's a lot of free and pay to play platforms you can use to really look at influencers, analytics when you're vetting them. And the most important things to look at are. Their demographics. So what city are their followers in? Or cities, for example. If I want to work with someone to promote our selling services in New York, I wanna look at their demographics and really make sure that the majority of their followers are in New York.

 So demographics are really big. And then on Instagram in particular, what I found is, You should always be testing your influencer on Instagram stories. First and foremost, instead of spending thousands of dollars on an Instagram reel or an Infeed post or images to use, really start with stories because of that direct link sticker they can add.

So you can give them a U T M link and have them put it in their story, and that way you can directly track how many conversions they're sending to site. Otherwise, influencer marketing's really hard to. Actually measure any sort of roi. You can look at engagement, you can look at how many followers you got, but how many of those are actually converting to purchasing something on your site is a little harder to find.

So what I'll do is with a new influencer, I'll have them just put up a three side story series, give them a Bitly link that I can track on the back end. If there's two influencers and one drives, 50 clicks to site and one sends a thousand people to site, you know, then the one with a thousand is the one to do a repeat campaign with and then you can start spending more and doing a larger collaboration with them.

And we just saw that the car mom really drove a lot of traffic, and I think it's a few things. I think we caught her at a really unique time where she started growing really quickly. So every time. We do a repeat collab with her. She has so many new followers that they're still meeting goodbye gear for the first time.

So her audience isn't fatigued by having her post for us like once a month. Whereas other influencers, once they post once paying them to post again, followers like, yeah, yeah, we've already seen this. So her growth is in turn really helping our growth and I think just the industry vertical lines up really well.

So she for anyone who's not familiar, she's great, you should go follow her, but she is like in a big family of car dealerships and she started this whole social account to teach women and parents and moms in particular how to, you know, Get the best financing on a car, which car fits three car seats across which car seats fit in certain vehicles.

So she kind of already was speaking to our same audience, so they really trusted her already with her car recommendations. So then her recommending other gear just made a lot of sense. So she was a perfect matchup for us. Amazing. Cool. So what platforms are you using for, you mentioned you use a couple of platforms to look at, like their, you know, where their followers are located and, and all of their key data.

Which ones would you recommend? Yeah, my absolute favorite is called Clear and it actually was purchased by the PR platform, Meltwater recently. So it's nice because we could actually bundle it and get a really great deal and they will actually calculate like, Sentiment are most of the comments on these influencers post positive, negative, neutral?

It directly tracks when you do have them post with a certain hashtag that you link to the campaign in clear on the backend. It will pull all the metrics for you. So you don't need to go digging or ask the influencer how many clicks they got or how many views. Their technology is really fantastic.

So that's the one I've used for the last few years and the one I'm most familiar with. I've used a few others. Grin is a really great one. It's a little more pricey. And I've also used Aspire iq, but I can't speak to their current capabilities since the technology's changing so quickly these days.

Have you guys had any moments in your, like in, in the three years you've been working with the brand where it like felt like. Everything was just going wrong. 

And, and how did you, how did you solve it? Yeah, so it's interesting. I actually came in right in the midst of what you're describing. So I joined the team in December, 2020. So Kind of the latter half of the first year of Covid and the few members of the team who were around right when Covid hit in March of that year say that was always the moment where I'm sure a lot of brands and founders can relate to this, where everything was really uncertain.

You were sending people home. To work remotely. The economy was all over the place. People are saving their money. They're not using their disposable income. So they were really holding their breath and what they found, and then what I kind of came into as part of a new strategy was. That good goodbye gear is actually very much recession proof and very much covid proof because families are going to keep having kids.

People are not gonna stop having kids and they still need gear for their kids, even if they have less money to spend or they can't leave their house. So after kind of. Being uncertain of how Covid would impact goodbye gear and they really hunkered down.

It actually really made the business boom because parents are then looking for discounted gear. So they're searching more like, how do I find a cheaper stroller? We pop up in that search engine of, oh, you actually can buy an $1,400 stroller with us for. Literally a fraction of the price. And then one of the big pivots they made that then I kind of took on as part of my responsibilities too, is like events and in person marketing they used to always allow parents to come to their facilities in those locations I mentioned and shop in person.

And when Covid hit, that was the end of that. And then they really Shifted to curbside pickup. And that's something that we really still lean into today. And now we'll do quarterly in-person shopping events that I will manage and run. And they're really fun events and we do a lot of extra deals and discounts and local families just have a heyday coming in and testing gear and seeing what we have.

But it really shifted our whole process, our marketing messaging of, you know, go online, select our inventory. If you're local, you can come do curbside pickup if you're national. Now we ship it to nationwide. So Covid actually really pushed good by gear into like the next iteration of the business.

So what about now, now that we are in. Are we in a recession? Are we not? We don't really know, but people have less spending power. That is one thing for sure. Has that impacted you guys positively, negatively, neutrally?

Where are you sitting now with that kind of situation? Yeah, in terms of our. Customer base, it hasn't impacted us negatively. We're still continuing to see people shop with us. We're still really trying to make sure we're getting parents the best deals possible on gear. But that's a whole different ballgame when it.

Came to fundraising just because a lot of investors are really, you know, holding onto their money right now.  But getting a lot of investor feedback during this time really caused us to like, push ourselves to the next level and make sure that our company was going to really succeed and do well.

Like a few examples of that are Just making sure that we are owning more of the baby and kid gear, like market share. So we took a whole 12 months to create a pri proprietary process for inspecting gently used car seats for resale. And we're the only brand to be doing that, and we have to be really, really diligent with that to make sure that you know, we're going through.

A process that makes parents feel comfortable to buy a used car seat with us. That's been quality checked by experts. So that was a really big win. And now we car seats are 30% of the baby and kid gear market. So now we can add that whole 30% to our online marketplace and therefore increase offering to parents, therefore increase our revenue.

So things like that, we're trying to really. Push ourselves during these kind of uncertain times to position us in a really good spot. I love that though, cuz often what is more difficult to execute becomes like a moat that protects your business. So you guys obviously solve a massive, massive problem there. That's awesome. Yeah. Okay. So you recently did get investment. How did you go about this and what advice would you have for merchants looking for investment at the moment?

Yes. 

So again, the car seats was a really big example. And what I can see and what I heard from our c o and our C O C E O was really just being persistent and really listening and not taking any. Feedback negatively and really spinning it into a positive. And you know, that's the best insight you can get is an investor telling you why they're not going to invest.

Okay. Yeah. Then that's what you take and change it. So then it's something that's intriguing to future investors. So that's really the strategy that our marketing team was kind of like running with. I'm trying to think of a few other, like tangible examples that I can share. Publicly. But we also, I guess another good one is our VP of business development worked really hard to bring in more like big box retailers and more partners to bring in more high quality inventory.

So again, that's not the seller inventory we're getting from parents, but everything else that you see listed as open box on our site, And the more brands that we can solve that sustainability pinpoint with is a positive for those brands, but it's also bringing in more revenue streaming to our business and giving parents even more high quality care to shop.

So that was another thing we pushed and we actually doubled the amount of partners we had in our pipeline just in Q1 of 2023 alone. So that was another really big change that moved the needle when it came to investment. Yeah. Amazing. What's the biggest challenge you're facing in marketing right now, and how are you tackling it?

Yeah, this is a really interesting challenge that I didn't really think about when I was joining Goodbye gear. But it's a fun challenge. I've really enjoyed it and it's, I. Changing every day, but it's always a challenge. And that's just doing e-commerce for a resale brand. Previously I did all the same types of work I've done, but for a hair color company and we had tens of thousands of skews of a purple hair color.

We had a lot of like, you know, you could just sell, sell, sell purple hair color all day long here. We might have one up a baby stroller and it might be sold tomorrow. Mm-hmm. So what product am I marketing when I'm linking out on an Instagram story or when we do an email roundup? How do we ensure if someone doesn't open their email till tomorrow, every single product in that email, we don't wanna send them to a dead page of that item already being sold out.

 So whether that's you know, sending someone to our U R L search query for upper babies and they can scan all the upper babies that we currently have on site, as opposed to sending them to a P D P.

But then, you know, that's two clicks. As opposed to sending them directly to where they can click at Decart. 

We wanna do everything in anything. So we're like, Ooh, this collab seems fun, or this influencer seems like, you know, we love their brand, we want to do something with them. And our leadership team does a really good job of grounding us and saying, you know, here are a few business objectives. Is this.

Work going to move the needle? Yes or no? We're a very small team and just making sure we're working smarter and not harder is a daily challenge. . Do you guys have any particular framework you follow for that? Like OKRs or rocks or are you following an organizational framework?

Yes, we do quarterly OKRs and it's really great because it comes all the way from Kristen at the very top level,

and then those are informed from Kristen to then our chief revenue Officer to our VP of marketing, and then the rest of our team. So what has been changing tack a little bit, what has been your kind of, I guess you could call it a growth hack or what has been a sort of surprising tactic that people might not have tried that has been really successful in growing your.

Growing your customer base.   The other thing I would really suggest,  is really making sure your business has a TikTok strategy and.

Sometimes it can seem daunting, or sometimes I feel like brands shy away from TikTok. They're like, eh, this is more for cust like consumers or individual use, or, you know, it's for funny things. It's for trends. Like, I don't know how my brand would fit into this. The great thing about TikTok is that the algorithms really self-sustaining, so you don't need any super complicated TikTok posting calendar.

Strategy, like I am a team of one over here. I am posting on Instagram, Instagram stories, Facebook, Pinterest, like Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok. I don't have time to go crazy here. And to be honest with you, which I shouldn't say out loud is last week I didn't have time to post a single TikTok video to go by year's account, and our sessions to cite from TikTok still increased week over week, whereas Instagram didn't have a strong growth, even though I was posting there every day because the videos are really self-sustaining.

A video I posted in December is continuing to get views and likes and clicks to our site on a daily basis. Because the more it is viewed, the more it is growing. Unlike a reel that kind of comes and goes when you post it on Instagram. So that's kind of my hack to any e-commerce brand is just find a few inspo videos you like.

You can try to recreate them. You can take some old product videos you have, piece them together. I'm not a video editor by any means. And sometimes the simplest. Things that you'll cut together where you don't think they're very high quality will just blow up. And the algorithm really Prioritizes new accounts.

So the first few months is actually where you'll see the most traction, and within the first three weeks, we gained over 10,000 followers. So the growth is really quick and I kind of like tell people like, be kind of dumb to not be on there. It's all, it's doing the work for you once you get it set up.

So that would be my. Other growth hack. That's so impressive to have got that level of growth so quickly. What do you, what was, what did you do in those early, you know, I mean you mentioned like repurposing content, et cetera, but there were, were there any particular content types or any insights you can share with our listeners as to why you had that fast growth?

Definitely I definitely benefit from also being a personal TikTok scroller, so if you're me too already. Yeah. Just knowing what the current trends are and using the most trending songs is a really great way to get a lot of views really quickly and all of the relevant hashtags. You can even Google like.

Top TikTok hashtags. If you just hop into the TikTok, or sorry, the hashtag tag tab in TikTok, it's a tongue twister. You'll see the most recent ones pop up there. So definitely using those and then like you can go crazy with posting. I think the first week I posted three times a day and. You know, two of them took off, but two of 'em had over a million views.

The other ones had 30 views. I don't care about those. You know, like the other ones are doing the work. So I definitely tested a few different content buckets and have found that How to fold certain strollers does really well. So like the upper baby hashtag is really big. So like how to fold up a baby stroller.

That's a really big one. Comparison videos are big, like you know, the Chico key Fit 30 car seat versus the 35. What's the difference? You know, and we've done. Elaborate video shoots where we bring in a professional video videographer, and we'll do it on a nice white background. And then sometimes we'll also pull them out of the warehouse and I'll just be standing in the middle of our, you know, warehouse and just point to the two and say, here's the difference so that I'm gonna pop 'em back on the shelf.

And. To be honest, those are the ones that usually do better. So you don't need a ton of resources. And I would just say test, test, test post away. And then that's how you'll get learnings to see what your audience is really resonating with based on what types of products you're promoting. Yeah, so get your phone out and start filming is really, yeah.

The message which I need to get back contract with this week. Yeah. And it sounds like as well, from what you're saying, like people are definitely using TikTok as a search engine. Yes. As well as like having stuff served up to them, it's, it sounds like people are seeking out the kind of content you're creating.

Yeah. We actually originally had a YouTube strategy. And basically that translated over to TikTok with a few tweaks. So I look at them pretty similarly and we will always post on both channels, just making sure the aspect ratio is correct, of course. But again, 10,000 followers on TikTok in a month.

I think in the three years that goodbye a year, we've gotten a few hundred followers on YouTube. Like the growth potential is just huge on that channel, so it's definitely worth exploring. Yeah. And are you guys running TikTok advertising as well? Yes. We actually just had a call about that this morning.

 I will suggest our top performing organic videos to our VP of marketing who then manages our budget and will put spend behind certain videos and then that will keep the momentum going even further.

The videos that are doing well organically are the ones that do well unpaid, and that's not always the case on Instagram.

Sometimes you want something a little more polished for Instagram or something that looks a little bit more like an ad whereas, you know, the more. Nitty gritty things are in more like organic, do, better on organic. But TikTok it's a little bit easier because there is more that one-to-one ratio.

So you don't have to put a ton of brain power behind it and create a bunch of different content. You can utilize the same content for paid and unpaid. Awesome. That's definitely what I, what we advise and have been seeing in the agency as well. That's great. The more native looking, the content and you know, having that ability to test it first, right.

And see whether it's engaging to people is a really smart strategy for sure. Okay, cool. So What advice do you have for, for E-com startups? I mean, you've seen the growth from, you know, a very early stage to now more of an established brand. 

Yeah, I would definitely suggest, and what I've seen across multiple startups I've worked for is creating a foundation that can be really fluid, kind of like we've said, like the like, Underlying message that we keep bringing up is the economy keeps changing. Things are pretty unpredictable. And you also don't really know what your audience is actually going to like and what they want and what they need.

When Kristen first founded Goodbye Gear, they didn't do the local pickup services, and every parent was saying that's all they wanted. So she said, all right, let's add it in. Let's find a way to do it. And just being really flexible and listening to what. Your audience actually wants and not what you think they want because you might have this amazing idea and you might found the company for one reason, but as long as you can kind of let your ego go and make changes along the way and be willing to be flexible and pivot and really adapt, I think has always been the best method for the startups that I've seen that grow successfully.

But with that said, It's also really important to kind of have your brand messaging in place, your mission, your founders story, and make sure that's not changing every month. Or, you know, if your audience says they want something different, don't be like, oh yeah, nevermind. Now we do that and we don't do anything of what we said before.

You know, there's has to be some balance there. But the goodbye gear that I joined three years ago, Is not the good by gear that exists today. And it's not The Good By Gear that was founded in 2016. The foundation is still there. But it is growing alongside with parents as they grow their families and the environment and the economy changes.

And just making sure that we can always keep up. Makes sense. Yeah. I haven't asked you about seo o do you have any interesting strategies or tactics that are working well in SEO in your space at the moment? Yes. So SEO is definitely a. One of those channels where slow and steady progress pays off, it's, it definitely takes a little more patience.

Whereas organic social, you post a video and you're like, yay, you got a ton of views today. And the best way that we really grew our SEO strategy over the last year was looking at our editorial blog and really optimizing it and doing a lot of keyword research to see where those opportunities are. And for example, one of the big seasonal pieces of gear are wagons, and those are big in the late spring to summer for beach time and picnics.

And then in the fall for Halloween, so making sure, now we're getting our blog up. That includes the best wagons for Halloween, so that has time to rank and optimize. By the time Halloween rolls around and parents are searching for the best wagons. Our blog post is right up there at the top. So my biggest like strategy with SEO is to play the long game, not the short game.

And you'll see very slow and steady growth and then once you kind of hit that growth, it will be off and running. When I was pulling this week's report or organic search traffic has finally on par with our organic, or sorry, with our direct traffic, which is huge. When we first started you know, our organic.

Search sessions were an eighth of what our direct traffic was. And now that we can pull people through both of those search engines, just because we really took time to optimize all the content on our blog was definitely a huge win and a strategy I suggest every company does not overlook. I feel like the blog can be in the background a lot but it is in the background working really hard for you if you do it right.

Yeah. So are you, your strategy there is like long form kind of educational pieces about, about the products that you sell or comparing them and detailed information? So we really lean on. Tips and tricks. I was actually just breaking out one of our blogs and it was like the top eight beach tips and packing essentials. So it makes sure that, you know, we're not being overly promotional or overly salesy because then people are just gonna leave people like being sold due without knowing they're being sold due.

So we'll be completely honest in our content and especially our blogs and saying, This might not be the best time for this exact brand or piece of gear. But here's another option for you. And that way we're really tying in a lot of suggestions that are actually authentic. Yeah, that's great. Great tip.

Okay. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we sign off? I think the biggest thing is just kind of going back to good goodbye gear as a whole and. You know, there's a lot of startups out there, there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there, and sometimes an idea feels like a great idea, but it feels really like a massive undertaking to turn it into something successful.

 But I was taking a look at some of our stats before chatting with you and. Since our founding in 2016 and then really when they started hiring an actual team in 2018, Goodway Gear has averaged almost 190% year over year growth.

And Wow, that's just like, what I want to underscore is that is not an accident. Like you can't just kind of sit back and be like, this is a good idea. We're gonna let parents shop our products. Like no, everything we've talked about today really has a purpose and a place and contributes to that growth.

Awesome. Where can we follow you? Like both you and also the brand itself?

Yes. So goodbye gear is goodbye gear across all of our social handles. It's good g o o d, buy as in purchase, b u y gear. And that is for Instagram. Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn is where we're the most active. So that's where I really suggest following Facebook kind of. Is the same as Instagram, just on Facebook.

So those are the primary channels. And then my own content, you can find me Maddie McClain on LinkedIn. M a d d y m c l e a n. And I actually just got married two weeks ago, so I updated my Instagram handle. So now it's Mattie m Glazer, g l a s e r. And. If anyone, feel free to follow me. Send me a DM, connect on LinkedIn.

Amazing. Thank you so much. And thank you for being so open with all the tips you've shared. I'm sure a lot of brands are gonna benefit from these. Awesome. Yeah, it was so exciting. I love sharing the wealth. 📍