I’ll apologize now to those who follow me on Instagram for the incessant stories asking you to check out the Champ Canvas site over this past month. The nuanced storytelling aspect of it all may have fallen by the wayside, and I more or less force fed a few cartoon hoodies into your eyeballs.
What I was attempting to do was a little ecommerce experiment.
I wanted to test the hypothesis that with a little distribution and a (hopefully) ad-savvy approach, taking the time to establish a “brand” first while selling apparel wasn’t necessary. Maybe a few cool designs, limited time to buy, and some internet tricks could seal the deal.
The idea was simple. Take three California icons, push the stories of some of their most iconic images to the forefront, and sell some products reflecting that for a limited time only.
For a few reasons, this did not work.
First, though, I want to set the stage for all the moving parts. There were a few steps and variables involved. It breaks down like this:
Set up shop and site.
Leverage multimedia between this Substack, my podcast, and my personal channels.
Partner with a media company for custom content.
Run paid search and social.
SEO and Blog.
Let’s run through how it went.
Setting Up Shop
Shopify is a gem. This process was all rather intuitive: Follow a few steps and the site is set up pretty quickly. For product, I used a print-on-demand fulfillment center to keep overhead to an absolute minimum. In my case, Printful. Then, load up a few designs that I had made involving cartoons of popular sports images and port them over.
For narrative’s sake, I chose three California athletes to give me a connective thread, which will play into my messaging and ad targeting strategy here in a sec.
Leveraging Multimedia
I’ll admit that “leverage” is used loosely here. As some of you may know, I also record a podcast called On The Side where I chat with people doing interesting things, chasing their passions, or building cool shit in their spare time. I wanted to provide a platform for my friend, who I partnered with on custom content (more soon) to talk about his media accounts, and the brand he was building. The result was a great conversation which you can listen to here. The idea was to use this as a precursor to get people familiar with the page just a few days before Champ Canvas content started to come from that account.
Then, originally, the goal was to send this recap out a few days sooner than I actually am, to serve a few points. One, be a “build in public” moment where I held myself accountable on sales, learnings, and other things like that. Two, be one last catalyst for readers to hit the site and possibly maybe buy a hoodie. Oh well. The personal channels part involved the spamming of Instagram stories mentioned in the opening paragraph.
So, I had audio, read, scroll, and custom content for the month.
Custom Content
Since I didn’t have an established brand, and no audience, I looked for distribution outside of paid media and owned channels. Luckily, my buddy Brendan has been hammering away for almost two years with killer sports and culture content through his brand Sideline Views, which made for the perfect partner. If you don’t already, follow his suite of accounts, do it.
So, we rolled out one design a week, coupled with the image backstory and a giveaway, and we had distribution. He was a gem to work with and the content was great, so if anyone else is looking to tap into the sports market a bit, you know where to go.
Paid Search & Social
Listen, I know. I’m out here buying ads way too early in the life cycle of this whole thing like an idiot—but remember—this idea isn’t really a business or a brand at all. I really wanted to lead with the designs, and hope that the stories made their way through as well. Also, I’ve seen the reports about the effectiveness of Facebook Ads dwindling, but what do you want me to do, make TikToks? I refuse. (For now)
Anyway, an excuse to reacquaint myself with Facebook Ad Manager and Google Adwords wasn’t the worst idea. I geo-targeted everything to California, A/B tested some images, and saw some early success. Unfortunately, performance dropped drastically halfway through the campaign and even with some tinkering and updates I wasn’t able to salvage anything in terms of performance. I just ran out of people who fit the bill and ended up serving the same people a few too many ads, a few too many times.
SEO & Blogs
This was completely new to me. I’ve listened to my fair share of Neil Patel YouTube videos and read a ton of Sam Parr’s copy emails to get familiar, but applying SEO tips and tricks to my site and product descriptions still wasn’t smooth for me. Luckily, my roommate is a pro so I got some assistance in setting this up.
On the blog side of things, it was a fun excuse to walk down memory lane and relive these sports moments, which is what it was all about anyway. I learned a new trick, too, that involved linking the product at the end of the blog, and the blog at the end of the product description, which apparently (if I had real traffic) would help run up my page rank and improve the legitimacy of my site in Google’s all-knowing eyes.
It was a worthwhile experiment, but I didn’t sell enough hoodies to recoup the total ad spend for the month. I received a few pieces of feedback throughout the process that I’m pondering, and I’m not sure if I’ll keep the site open year-round, how to cycle the designs in and out, or how to fully alter my approach in a way that might be more effective.
I’ll be nestled deep in the corner couch at Nook for a few weekends to figure it out, though. If you have any suggestions, please join me one of these weekends or let me know in the comments if you aren’t in NYC—I need all the ideas I can get.