#51 The Least Boring Weekly Newsletter

January 05, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes

Good Morning readers!🌞

Have you started working on your 2022 new year resolutions? 💪

All the news about H&M opening a metaverse store is not true.

 “We’d like to confirm that H&M is not opening a store in Metaverse at this time,” the spokesperson said. They also added, “We are also not collaborating with CEEK.” ( The excitement was short-lived!)☹️ 

Ceek shared its clarification through a tweet

Almund's newsletter will let you in on all kinds of tips for D2C brands and much much more. 

Alright, so let's get right to it! 

This newsletter is going to dive into :

🌏  Shopify partnered with GigLabs to enable NFT trading.

👌The Right Launch Time Helps Avoid Any Wreck

🙎 BRAND of the week - Liquid death

👩🏻‍💼 Plenty of jobs awaiting you!

So, scroll down already to THE VERY END & read up on what's yet to come your way!

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WHAT’S COOKING, HUH?

With its recent announcement to allow NFT trading and minting, Shopify has entered the NFT cosmos.

Shopify has joined with GigLabs, a company that provides solutions for operating Non-Fungible Tokens, to give an outstanding experience for its users.😋

Shopify merchants can create and sell their own NFTS(Can't wait for the outburst of creativity.) 

Their programme will first be available in beta and only to merchants in the United States. To sell on Shopify, merchants must also have a strong social media presence. ( it's time to up our social media game💪) 

The technology, which is currently in beta, allows merchants to establish NFTS utilizing popular networks such as Ethereum, Polygon, Near, and Flow.

This also means that the payments can be accepted using credit cards, Shopify payments, Shop Pay, or cryptocurrencies.

GigLabs announced the launch of the GigLabs NFT app for Shopify + users as a result of the agreement. The Flow blockchain will be used to facilitate the sale and minting of Non Fungible Tokens. 

Flow blockchain was chosen because of its environmentally friendly design (Anything environmental friendly, will do right?) and proof-of-stake consensus method.

Other Shopify products and apps, such as email marketing and membership, will be available through this platform as well. (wohhoo) 👨‍🎤

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The Right Launch Time Helps Avoid Any Wreck

New Year, new product? You definitely deserve a round of applause!

If you are ready to launch your new product or service, first of all, congratulations. We know getting here isn’t a walk in the park for anyone. But now that you are here, it’s time to hit that launch button.

But the million-dollar question is - when? 

This product is your baby. You’ve worked long and hard into making this dream a reality; surely sacrificed a lot of sleep, peace of mind, and tears into building this from scratch. Of course, you wouldn’t want to screw up the launch process. That’s where the hundreds of ‘ifs’, ‘buts’, and ‘maybe’s’ come in. 

Let us help you walk past this mess before you go spiraling into the planning process. With the following few tips in mind, you would be able to set up a launch campaign helping you bear successful results right from the start!

❓ Are You Actually Ready?

Before we get into finding an appropriate date & time for your launch, pause for a moment to think if your product is actually ready for the launch. 

Is your service or product bug-free?

Is it completely functional? 

Have you optimized it to suit your users’ needs?

Releasing a sub-par product is only going to harm your brand image and possibly set you back. Don’t let the shine of a brand new launch usher you into taking a hasty and wrong decision. 

👩‍💻 Study Your User Pool

Not every day is the same; a launch on Friday evenings can give you better results than one on a Tuesday morning. So, research more about your target audience to find when (day of the week and time frame) they are most active on which platform. You can schedule your launch based on this information!

❗ Take Into Account Important Dates

When studying consumer characteristics, you might discover how your users behave during certain religious holidays or during holiday seasons. Do they travel back home for the holidays & miss out on most news and updates? Do they stay away from their mobiles during this time to rekindle with family and friends? You might want to time your launch right before or after this period then.

🧾 Evaluate One Last Time

Although product or service testing is a part of the development process, one last time won’t hurt. Perhaps, you could hire a product analyst or consultant to test and evaluate your product to give you one last green signal. It’s always better to be safe than sorry. 

🗣️Create Some Buzz Before The Launch

Planning for a launch doesn’t just involve the launch and what comes after; it also involves the activities before the D-day. 

Build up the anticipation around the new product or service you’re offering. Get your customers excited about it early to guarantee success. Keeping them intrigued is a great way to reel customers in. Use teaser videos on social media, hint at it through interactive stories and posts, and use long-form content to emphasize the need for the product/service.

😤 Be Ready For Post-Launch Traffic

The last thing you want is to have your website crash due to the overwhelming amount of traffic during launch. If everything goes well, your business infrastructure should be able to handle the jump in sales. 

Prepare beforehand & test if your payment gateway is glitch-free, the landing page is optimized, all links are live and working, the customer support team is ready to help users, and the distribution system is functional. 

📑 Hire A Dedicated Marketing Team 

Having a good product isn’t sufficient anymore. You need to communicate well with your audience to hook their attention to your offering. So, hire a marketing expert or a team of professionals before the launch for them to form a launch plan/campaign effectively. 

🗓️ Keep Your Schedule Free

Lastly, don’t forget that you are the boss. You cannot be busy focusing on an important meeting with a stakeholder while your product is launching. Your product launch time should adhere to your schedule. Schedule the launch when you have nothing else going on so that you can devote all your energy, time, and attention to the launch.

We get it, launches can be difficult especially in the D2C marketspace. With the margin of so many things to go wrong, you can remain assured that a little bit of planning, pre-launch sweating, and infrastructure organization will bring you great results. 

So fellow entrepreneur, are you ready to launch your ship?

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BRAND OF THE WEEK is…

LIQUID DEATH

Liquid Death, a water brand that debuted in 2018 with a lighthearted video to prove the concept, has become deadly serious about its expansion plans. 

The L.A.-based company, which sells "kill your thirst"(Oh, I love the name) canned mountain water from the Alps, has just received $75 million💲  in Series C funding headed by the startup studio Science, which helped develop the company and now has a "strong minority" stake. 

Liquid Death is currently offered in over 29,000 locations across the United States, including Whole Foods, Target, Safeway, and 7-Eleven stores, and revenue topped $45 million last year, up from $3 million the year before when the company sold its first can.🤯🤯

Mike Cessario, co-founder and CEO of Liquid Death, has long linked the company's success to its grimly humorous wording, as well as its packaging, noting that metal is more recyclable than plastic. (Yay🥳) 

Cessario says the company's strategy hasn't changed now that it has additional goods to promote, and that the focus is still on developing a brand "that's about making healthy beverages as entertaining as, if not more fun than, junk food and alcohol companies." Because its clientele is younger and more male, and because "young kids and most men have a sweeter pallet,"

Liquid Death recently passed an important metric that Amazon uses to determine when to start selling a product wholesale, which means Liquid Death is no longer charged for every case of water it sells through Amazon but is instead selling water directly to the e-commerce giant, which then sells the water to its customers at a reduced price — which has sent sales soaring.

“I don’t know what other water brands spend, but we’re not going to have Coca-Cola 🍻 or Pepsi-like budgets to spend. We don’t have $300 million to throw at something, so every piece of marketing that we make has to be interesting or entertaining so that people organically spread it.” 

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In need of a  job? We’ve got plenty awaiting you!

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CHOOSE SUCCESS below and have a great week! ‘Get that D2C business runnin’.