Woodify

After some conversations we found a company – that was already running several e-commerce companies – who was interested in continuing the product. Conveniently they also had a brand in champagne bottles, which came in useful after the sale ;)

To be frank: We sold the company at half of what we could have sold it for a year earlier, and too smoothen the transition and keep our (minimum) commitment, we turned half the acquisition into an earn-out/profit share based on equal revenue in the next year. Revenue tanked immediately as the product itself became less fashionable that summer. Bittersweet, sold at the last possible moment.

Looking back, the lessons learned building an e-commerce brand proved way more valuable than the net-gain of the exit. 🙃

We where approached by some nice people that wanted to buy Woodify. We, arrogant and young, asked a price that was way to high. Their offer, half of what we wanted was actually really really good, looking back.

Going into the summer season for the 3rd time, we got pretty bored. Running the e-commerce business turned out to be much more than just a website:

• Support
• Running ads and social -every- day
• Supply chain management
• Fulfilment & shipping
• Handling returns
• Updating WordPress Plugins every day

As Woodify was always a side-project, somehow we failed to find passion and joy to really focus this new year. Our sales tanked a bit, and we started looking for an exit.

We opened our first little workshop in India, which allowed us to create virtually any model we'd like. Cool! Time to upgrade the quality (and prices) of our glasses.

Working together with our photographer, who happened to be working some time remotely, we were able to do a supercool shoot + promo video.

We discovered sunglasses don't really sell in winter. That's a bummer, talk about doing deep investments and cashflow...

We did not expect to sell thousands of glasses, and apparently neither did our Chinese supplier. For more than a year, we never had anything in stock, which greatly harmed our brand and possibly limited our sales in great ways.

Almost drowning in sales, we had to keep our newly found customers happy while they (and we) waited on the orders to arrive. Even tough we communicated 30 days delivery, people started mailing after 10 days already, asking when their order would come.

It was our first confrontation with customer service – one of the challenges that taught us a lot over the course of the company. On average, every customers e-mailed us 1.6x for every order. We did not anticipate that, to say the least.

It took less then 4 weeks for us to discover what would be the 'viral' effect of a seasonal product on the first sunny day, being shared all across facebook.

While enjoying the sun ourselves in the old city of Amsterdam, suddenly our phone popped up a new sale every couple of minutes!

In that single day we made almost a thousand sales, which was 100x the previous day.

With literrally zero glasses in stock, that opened up an interesting challenge – one that we happily took one, with now money in the bank to invest in our supply-chain.