Julie Macken from Neve's Bees

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

Julie: You're welcome.

Sam: Can you tell us about Neve's Bees and what inspired you to start making your own skincare products?

Julie: Yeah, absolutely. There was a few things really. We got the Bees because Neve, who's my daughter, when she was nine, we were looking around this house that we're in at the moment and she was a very precocious, bored, nine-year-old. And we went into the house and the chap had a whole pile of honey jars. She said, "Why have you got all that honey?" He said, "Because I keep bees." And she said, "What'd you do with it?" And he said, "I sell it." She said, "How much do you sell it for then?" He said, "Five pounds." And she was going blissfully quiet. And then we got back to the house that we were renting at the time, and she said, "Oh, I've spoken to Granddad Jim," who's my dad, "and he's going to buy me a beehive for my 10th birthday," which he duly did. So that's why we got the bees. And then we'd had them a few years and we were obviously keeping the bees and it was a really enjoyable hobby to keep bees and a good thing to do, I think. And then we were playing around with the honey and the beeswax, you get quite a lot of beeswax, so we started making candles. And then at the same time, Neve and I both suffer from eczema and dry skin and we just couldn't find anything that was good and worked. And I'm a chemist by training and I just didn't like all the stuff that you buy in the high street. So we thought, "You know what? Let's find some old recipes," I like ancient traditional recipes, "and make our own stuff." So that's what we did, and here we are.

Sam: You mentioned your background and I wanted to ask you about that. It's so fascinating how you have this background in chemistry and marketing, and it almost seems like the perfect marriage of skills tp launch a business like this. Can you talk about that?

Julie: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, as a child, I wanted to be a herbal pharmacist, which I think ... I grew up in the middle of nowhere in a tiny little village and was probably a bit of a hippie as a kid. And then went to school, did well at school and, "Right, you'll go to university then." So I thought, "Well, okay." Boots the Chemist, you probably don't have that in the States, but here Boots the Chemist is a big store, pharmacy stores. So I thought, "Oh, okay, well, that's what you have to do then." So I did a chemistry degree and I was quite good at it and quite enjoyed it. And then got on the whole graduate treadmill, went to work for Unilever and GSK as a brand manager. They were wanting to recruit people with a science degree. Yeah, did that and then 20 years into it saw the light and just thought, "Hang on a minute, I'm not sure this is really for me." So then I embarked on a course in herbal medicine. I learned how to make traditional selves and balms and ointments, and how to infuse oils with various herbs and flowers and barks and things like that. Yeah, so everything sort of came together. Yeah, so you're right, it's probably quite a good place to be right now. I like it anyway.

Sam: I was doing some research for this interview, and you mentioned in another interview that retail and fairs made up two thirds of the business's sales and online was almost an afterthought. Then the pandemic happened and you switched to more of an emphasis on eCommerce. Can you tell me about that transition and how sales are now post-pandemic?

Julie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, really good point. I think we kind of fell into selling things. We were initially giving them to friends and family and then we went to a local fair. I'm a beekeeper obviously, and I do quite a lot of work with our beekeeping association, so we sell honey and stuff, and someone said, "Why don't you sell your lip balm?" So we sort of started doing that. Then we entered a Blenheim Palace competition, which we won. Blenheim Palace is a big stately home near us, and the prize was a listing in their gift shop, which is a big gift shop. So we were like, "Oh, right. Now we're in retail then." So we sort of stumbled in it, and we always wanted to sell online because you can just reach such a bigger audience and you can still maintain that direct customer contact. Which, of course, if you sell through a shop, you're relying on their customer service and their merchandise and how they make your products feel and look. Yeah, I suppose in a way, the pandemic sort of did us a favor, ironically, because you're right, absolutely right. You've obviously done your research, Sam. At the time we were, it was about a third, a third, a third, online, markets and shops. Yeah, when the pandemic happened literally two thirds of our business finished overnight. What was it, two years ago, three years ago now. That was it, March the 20th or whatever it was everything shut down here. Gone, pretty much overnight. And we did think about packing the business up because it was like, "Great, what do we do?" But then we thought, "Actually, you know what? Let's turn this on its head and make this an opportunity." At the time we had a website that, it was a fairly basic, quite nice website. It told the story and then you could buy some things on there if you wanted to. We just thought, "You know what? We're going to have to switch the emphasis here to make it a beautiful, fully-functioning eCommerce website." Where actually the first page obviously tells the story and makes you feel the brand, but it's very easy to buy things for yourself and also to send them to other people because we know that our products are often largely used for gifting.Yeah, we completely changed the emphasis of the website. We also then set up a whole mailer pathway. We use MailChimp. Other brilliant products are available and not necessarily happy with MailChimp, so there you go. And we also started doing Google Ads. We also go on Amazon and we do Amazon ads. So there's a whole golly where we're on a steep learning curve and we still are. But now, roll forward three years, I would say probably we still sell quite a lot at Christmas markets and fairs, but apart from Christmas, I would say our sales are now probably 50/50, so 50% online and then 25% retail and in fairs and markets and things. And the trajectory of selling online is definitely going up. And of course, unless you start employing people and want to have the whole fairs, festivals, markets model as your business model, you can only get so far. We do it because it's kind of fun and there's three of us that go to various markets and we go to festivals. Like Glastonbury people will have heard of, Latitude is another one. Things like that, that we do for sort of fun. But there's only so much of that you can do, whereas of course eCommerce, the sky is the limit really.

Sam: There's a few things I want to unpack from what you just said. I was listening to you talking about going to fairs, and you said something that I've never really thought about before, which is you are literally seeing your customers in front of you reacting, maybe the first time that they're seeing new products. And I think that's something that's really lost with online, unless you have some type of online community or something like that. Is that something that you think a lot more eCommerce brands, especially those online, can benefit from, having that face-time with their customers. Whether it's actually calling them or organizing some kind of get-together or something like that?

Julie: Yeah, definitely, I couldn't agree more. My husband likens it to, if you're a band and when you start up, you start up playing in your local pub or, I don't know, village hall or what have you, and you actually see the whites of someone's eyes. And if your music is rubbish, they walk out. Or worse, they throw their beer at you or what have you. And then, okay, then maybe you go into stadium tours and get your products downloaded every second on Spotify or what have you. But I genuinely think that the learnings that you get from watching, listening, feeling your customers interact with your products or your service, doesn't matter really what you're selling, but seeing how people interact with your offering is super, super valuable. And we have developed new products on the back of it. We have killed products on the back of it. We have tweaked products. We've put together bundles of products. Definitely put together marketing packages and communications, because you know why people are buying them. This is a really obvious example but hopefully quite a good example, is that most of our products are bought by women. We can see that through the stats that come through. So probably about two-thirds, maybe even up to three-quarters, are bought by women. But men sometimes buy them, we see them coming to the stalls and buying them. So we thought, "I know, let's make a product for men and we'll make it smell like a man's product." And it didn't really work. We only had one product, and it didn't really work because the women didn't really like it.

Sam: Interesting.

Julie: So what we've done now is we've launched a range for men, but kind of targeted at women. The communications that we use is, "Are you bored about your man borrowing your lip balm, your face balm, your hand cream? We've made one especially for him so that he doesn't have to buy yours anymore." And we would never have known that insight, had we not seen the women buy for the men. "Oh, here, you go, love, you can have this. Don't borrow mine anymore, it annoys me." And it's doing really well. And really, the product is pretty similar. We tweak the flavoring a bit, the smell a bit, and we tweaked the packaging to make it a bit more unisex so that women would buy it for their men, but we would never have known that without putting in the groundwork.

Sam: That's so fascinating, and it's something that comes up when I speak to different eCommerce founders. They're talking about these hidden objections that happen when you're selling to a particular segment, and there's always something that you wouldn't have thought of or you have to see it for yourself or hear it for yourself. I think that's so fascinating.

Julie: Yeah, definitely.

Sam: I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about, I've been on the site and I'm going through your funnel now. And obviously here at Drip, we love marketing automations, and I know you have a couple of different workflows that you're using right now. And this can be as long of a question as you like, but can you tell me about some of the workflows that are working really well for you, and maybe some of the workflows that aren't working so well, or some of the workflows that you would like to implement in the future?

Julie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, really good point. And I like your use of the customer funnel because it's just such an important model that people must ... Yeah, it works. It happens, so use it. Yeah, so we have several automations, which are mailers that go out. We have one when they very first sign up. We have a popup, very standard, you get 10% off if you subscribe to our newsletter. So we get that one. That one works really well and that's how we have managed to grow our database organically successfully over the last few years. We also have one, this is quite an interesting one, I was a little bit like wary of this, but one of the guys that we work with mentioned it. And actually it does work quite well. We have one that goes out after 10 days, it's either eight or 10 days after we've sent it, like, "Hi, hope everything's okay. Please let us know if it's not." And we don't get that much interaction with it, but I do feel it stops anyone going complaining or saying, "My product never arrived," because we send it through our Royal Mail, which is a little bit unreliable at times. So we have definitely seen less our product didn't arrive. The very, very best one, and oh my God, if you take nothing else out of this interview, take this, put a abandoned cart email on. And I was just checking it before this call. It gets 67% opens, which is quite a lot. I think normally our open rate is round about 30%. And we have sold thousands of pounds worth through that automation alone, thousands. Such a no-brainer, that one. Because the phone rings, the dog barks, the child cries or what have you, and you, "Oh no, I must go and sort that out." We also have one that goes out six weeks after, which again is quite a good one. And then one that goes out six months after. And that one, again, I'd say if you were going to have three, definitely have your abandoned cart one, definitely. Have an introductory one where they sign up, get 10% off or 15% off, whatever. I don't like giving away too much for free because it says our products are rubbish, we have to give them away. So I think 10% is a good one. Certainly in the UK that, anyway. And then I think one six months later, or I suppose it depends how quickly your products get used up. Ours is about six month life-cycle. "Hi, we're still here. Here's a discount if you'd like to try one of our new ranges," or what have you. Yeah, those work really well. And not only are they good from a sales point of view, but I think you can use them to enhance your brand. So don't just use the text that is automatically there in some of them, write your own text, make it feel like your brand voice. And if you're really upbeat and cheery, "Hi, hope you're having a great time, guys." Or if you're more serious, "Hi, hope everything's going to plan," or what have you. Yeah, really good opportunity to engage with the customer and sell some stuff.

Sam: I love all this. And you mentioned the popup. I read somewhere that you talked about you had tested 10% versus 15%, and you noticed that there wasn't that big of a difference in the conversion rate so you stayed with 10%, which I love.

Julie: Yeah. Yeah.

Sam: And I wanted to ask, are you running any other experiments for the emails? For instance, this cart abandonment flow, have you considered testing having it from you personally versus from the brand, or HTML versus plain text or anything like that?

Julie: Yeah, that's a really good idea. And the short answer is no, just because of bandwidth and head space. But I definitely think it's worth testing those things. And other things as well and we've looked at this one, is if you've got a mail-away or encouraging somebody to buy a new product or buy a product or give a discount, send it after payday, not before payday. It sounds silly, but that makes a big difference. Sometimes those really quick, sharp little ones ... We had a really hot summer here last year and there was one day where it got up to 40 degrees, it was just crazy. And we have one product, which is a rosewater spritz, which has all sorts of benefits, but one of them is if you're really hot and you just spritz it on your face, it just feels amazing. So we literally prepared it the day before, sent it the next morning, like, "Oh, it's a hot one. Our rose spritz is now free delivery," or something. We didn't even offer a discount. We got so many orders for it, we actually ran out, we had to come buy some more. But just think about what ... They don't have to be all planned and organized and A/B tested or what have you. Some do that, but sometimes just that quick, spontaneous, off-the-cuff can really pay dividends.

Sam: Just riffing on that a little bit, I wanted to ask you about, I know you did this partnership with Plantlife. And when you described it to me, it sounded so well thought-out. And I wanted to ask you personally, for anyone that isn't familiar, what is No Mow May and what were the-

Julie: No Mow May.

Sam: No Mow May, and what were the results of that partnership?

Julie: Okay, so we're literally, the product launched on Monday.

Sam: Wow.

Julie: So a bit early to sell. We have sold some already actually. And the May is this May, so this is the first year that we've really done it. When we set up Neve's Bees, the whole idea was to be more than selling stuff. I've had a corporate career, I've made money, I now want to do something that I actually believe in and feel is a good thing to do. And I have a real passion for the wildflowers and the bees they support. So Neve's Bees is all about bringing back the wildflowers. In the UK we've lost 97% of our wildflower meadows, which is horrible, and the bees need them and the birds need them, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so we said from the outset that we want to give 10% of our profits, it's actually more than that now, to bring back the wildflower meadows. We gave stuff to some local charities, we give away thousands of packs of little wildflower seeds, they're quite cute, for people to use, with their orders. But then, about six months ago, we thought actually this would be a perfect charity for us to partner with. Plantlife is a fairly small UK charity that aims to bring back the wildflower meadows, so it couldn't be more closely aligned. And they have this big initiative called No Mow May, whereby they encourage householders who have a lawn, park, I'm looking out the window, we've got a park out there, park owners, councils that have verges along the sides of rose and stuff, not to mow in May. Because May is the time in the UK when the flowers come out, things like dandelions, daisies, loads of wildflowers, or even weeds that you might call them. But if you chop them down they don't germinate for next year. And all that pollen and nectar that they give to the bees and other pollinators, die. So therefore you've got a whole generation, basically of bees and pollinators that die and can't come back again for another at least six weeks. So the idea is No Mow May. Anyway, we decided that rather than just give them money, we'd see if we could partner with them. Basically what we're doing is we've set up a No Mo May gift set, which is, it's just some products that we had anyway, we've just bundled them together and made them look pretty in a nice little box. We've got it on our website. If you go on our website you'll see it's right there on the front page. We've got a landing page. We're doing Google Ads at the moment. Where we've bought ads on people searching for buying wildflower seeds or buying wildflower magazines or buying bee charity stuff, so hopefully we come up there. They've also got it on their shop, so they're putting it on their Plantlife shop. They're posting it all over their socials. They have a mailer that goes out to we think 90,000, which is lot bigger than our mailer goes out to, encouraging people to buy from their shop. Every time somebody buys a pack, either from their shop or our website, we give them five pounds. So we're still making enough margin to make it worthwhile, I'm not saying we're making a fortune on it, but we very much tick the box for giving our 10%. In fact, it'd be loads more than 10% profits back to charity. But it just makes us feel like we're doing something good, really positive and proactive. We've also, they've given us quotes so we can go to the local newspaper, and maybe even national papers, and get, "Neve's Bees is supporting No Mow May." Hopefully they'll do the same for us. So it feels like a real synergistic partnership where we feel like we're doing something good, they're getting loads of money hopefully, we both get more coverage than we would have, and we are both absolutely aiming for the same thing, to bring back the wildflowers. It just feels like a really synergistic thing. So Sam, invite me back next year and I'll tell you how it's gone. Hopefully I'll be like, "Yay, everyone's heard of No Mow May gift set from Neve's Bees." That's the plan, anyway.

Sam: It all sounds wonderful. And I had this in my notes, because I wanted to not even ask you about this but just highlight how much I appreciate this. You talked a little bit about with orders, I believe, over 12 pounds you include a packet of wildflower seeds.

Julie: Yeah.

Sam: And, to me, I just find that so demonstrative of the brand's values, because we all know that corporate social responsibility is important, and of course it's wonderful when eCommerce brands donate 10 or 20% of their proceeds to a charity. That's great. But the way that you actually involve the buyer, and I heard you talk as well about people who are planting these seeds and then they're taking pictures on social media and they're tagging you.

Julie: Yeah.

Sam: Can you talk more about that? Because I think that's such a powerful way of building loyalty with your customers as well.

Julie: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, and actually, I think the one thing I would say is that it's, you hear people say, "Oh, make sure that you live your vision and you walk your mission," blah, blah, blah. But actually, if you really do have a mission that you believe in, ideas come to you that are that work, and it just sort of feels that everything came together and kind of worked. The little wildflower seeds thing, we started out, we were just going to give some to the charity that we work with and said ... And then we thought, "You know what? We could package these up." So we started packaging them up and we gave them away at a few trade fairs and stuff and people loved them. We thought, "You know what? Why didn't we use this as an initiative?" You're right, we give them away with orders over 12 pounds so it does encourage people maybe to trade up a little bit. Our lip balms are six pounds and we pay free postage. So actually if they buy two, it kind of saves us the postage so it's a little cunning there as well. But then of course people love it, they endorse the brand, they open it up. They're really cute little packs and people go, "Oh, Neve's Bees, flowers. Great, they're saving the flowers." So it helps that. Also, then of course, if people do plant them, which many do, we then say, "Tag us on your Instas," or whatever. And I would say we could probably get more, we should probably push it a bit more, but we definitely, every year we get many, many people, and even somebody ... We've had a few people that have actually captured bees on their flowers that they planted, and they take us a picture of the bee.

Sam: Wow.

Julie: And of course those are absolute gold dust, as far as social media engagement. But then we can like retweet, "Oh look, so-and-so has not only planted flowers, but she has bees and she bought our product. You could have this too." It feels really synergistic. So it's enhancing our brand, the customer loves it, and we're selling more. So it feels like a win-win-win, so yeah.

Sam: I have a related question. I find it so fascinating how you're so clear on where the business is going. You said in one interview you don't want this to be a multi-million dollar business, you want this to be within a certain amount of money that you want to make. You want to keep it within the family. You even talked about how it affects the property that you live in if you make too much. And do you think that's something that more eCommerce brands should be doing? They should be being very clear on, "Okay, this is where we want to go." Because in this interview we talked a lot about conversion rate optimization and making these improvements and so on. And of course that's important, but maybe it's not as important if you're very clear on the type of business that you want to build.

Julie: Yeah. No, that's a really good point, and I keep reminding myself of that actually because ... About six months ago we got asked to send some samples to a big national chain of pharmacies here called Superdrug. Sam probably heard of them, some people would've heard of them, and it's so not what we're trying to do. It's really pile them high, sell it cheap. And we just said, "No, we're not going to send you the samples." Which probably commercially might not have been the right thing to do, but morally it was, and I don't think I would enjoy working with them. I think they would be slave masters. And you know what? This is our business, we can run it how we like. There's a really nice metaphor that probably many people will have heard of, but I'll share it with you quickly. It's about the man fishing. It's not teach a man to fish, it's not that one. A guy is standing on the beach fishing and it's beautiful. He's on a tropical island and the sun is shining and he's having a lovely time catching his fish. Every day he catches a fish and he takes it home and his partner cooks it and they have this lovely fish for tea, and they're so happy and he's got enough time to do everything he wants. And then a businessman comes along and says, "You know what? If you've got two fishes, I could sell one for you." Says, "Oh, all right, I'll buy two fishes." Anyway, roll forwards. He then has a factory and sells loads and loads of fish and is stressed to the nines and is making a fortune. And someone comes to him and says, "Oh, what are you going to do when you retire then?" He says, "Well, I'm going to pack it all in and I'm going to stand on my desert island and catch a fish every day that I'm going to eat for my tea." There is an element of that to this. It's like, I need to keep reminding myself of this, but if you make something so big that you're then employing people and you're managing people and you're dealing with the stress of supermarkets being horrible to you and just like, it gets to the point where, "Why am I doing this?" We'd like to be a bit bigger. We have a level that we want to get to that we know we can still make, using the small team we've got in the small premises that we've got and still have time to have fun. It probably, we forecast to double next year and then double the year after that. That's it, we don't want to get any bigger than that. That's big enough. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong in running a big company and aspiring to earn a million, that's absolutely fine if that's what you want to do. There's nothing wrong with wanting to do that. But I can't bear it when people say, "A successful business is one that turns over six figures in six months," or, "To be successful, you have to take thousands and thousands of pounds worth of investment," and no, you don't. You really don't. So I think it's just, you're right. Work out what it is that you want your business to do and why, and then work towards that, not towards somebody else's agenda.

Sam: I love that. I'm mindful of the time running away here, Judy. One thing I really wanted to ask you just before we start wrapping up is SEO content, it's a big part of any eCommerce brands. But I feel like a lot of eCommerce brands are reluctant to start blogging or to target certain keywords. You told this great story about how you've invested at Ahrefs for one week. You found a couple of keywords that you wanted to go after, you spent a few months writing some blog posts. Can you share that story? I think there's so much value in that.

Julie: Yeah, yeah. Ahrefs, I was calling it AHrefs, Ahrefs, that sounds better. Yeah, so I bought it. Top tip for anybody, I don't know if they still do it, this was probably 18 months ago now. They do a free seven-day trial, which cost here was like 14 pounds or something, which is very little money. You can go on it, search the long-tail keywords that are high-volume or medium-volume and low competition. And oh gosh, I'd say I probably spent a week ... Nerded out for a total week, it was fun. Probably got about 10 or 15 long-tail keywords and have still got some more to write, but they are amazing. At the time I was a trustee of a wildlife charity, so I did a bit of work finding out about ... They had a much bigger, quite a big charity, they had a big website. And I worked out, just looking at Ahrefs, that one of their blog posts, one of their many, many blog posts for this big national charity, was bringing in 27% of all traffic to their website. How bonkers is that? So those writing blogs ... I mean, even now we've written this one blog. Unfortunately, it doesn't bring in that many sales but it brings a lot of traffic, probably brings in 30% of all hits to our website. If we had five of those, our hits on our website would be massive. And if I could write some that were far more on target, I really need to do that. Yeah, definitely. So top tip, go into Ahrefs, find out the best high-volume, low competition, long-tail keywords. They even help you work out what to blog in them. Capture them, and then spend the next six months writing really good blogs. Maybe you could go back and buy another week in a year's time or what have you. Yeah, really good.

Sam: I think there's a good learning, in that it's not always a case of converting traffic into customers either. A lot of eCommerce brands are also converting those first-time visitors into email subscribers, and then using their automations to do the converting on the backend. But I love that story and I can see that we're coming up to the end here, Judy. This has been an enlightening conversation. I've enjoyed learning so much from you about the brand and the values that you demonstrate in your marketing and elsewhere. Where can our listeners go to learn more about Neve's Bees?

Julie: Yeah, fab. Thank you. We have a website, www.nevesbees.co.uk. We're quite active on socials, particularly Insta and Facebook. Again, that's @nevesbees. Yeah, please follow us. And know, if you go on our website, you get a nice little popup and you can subscribe to our newsletter.

Sam: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today, Julie, and all the best in the future with Neve's Bees.

Julie: Thank you so much. I've enjoyed it.