The organic beard products retailer is using the sales and momentum from a Wix commercial contest to increase operations and advertising.

What was once a side project that consisted of little more than a beard oil stand at a local farmers market is now a full-fledged e-commerce business.

Owner Alfredo Palmer launched Age of Beard LLC in June 2015. The retailer sells organic beard oil, beard balm, mustache wax and beard-care tools such as combs. To start, Palmer sold to his friends, family and at his local farmers markets in Miami. After positive feedback and incremental sales, Palmer began selling online.

Palmer launched the brand’s e-commerce site in 2015 on website builder Wix.com because it was easy to setup; he launched AgeofBeard.com in a few weeks.

Wix also allowed Palmer to customize certain elements of the site, he says. For instance, while Palmer didn’t want to have to stick to a web template, he also didn’t want to hardcode any features. The Wix templates are flexible without requiring coding, he says. That’s allowed him to develop a shopping category page, such as its beard soap page, that features a paragraph describing the product’s ingredients and how it’s made, before listing the various products. A paragraph before products on a shopping page was not within any templates he found on other e-commerce platforms and would have require a custom build, which would cost extra money.

“What really sets you up for success is a good first impression; to be as informative as possible,” Palmer says. “Online you go to a website, and the websites are pushing you to buy, buy, buy. But you don’t have to buy, buy, buy. You can stop and read and find out about a product before you spend a penny.”

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Cost also was a bonus of going with Wix, as the platform does not charge more as sales increase, which is a type of typical pricing structure of e-commerce platforms. Palmer says he pays a few hundred dollars annually.

This was especially key when Age of Beard won a Wix-sponsored contest with a prize of a Shaquille O’Neal-starred commercial.

In the first six months of 2015, sales were “very low,” Palmer says, estimating a few hundred dollars a month. Throughout 2016, sales slowly increased but it wasn’t until the commercial launched in December 2016 that traffic and sales to AgeofBeard.com began to soar, Palmer says.

“To go from a couple hundred bucks, to a couple thousand to $20,000, things get real serious,” Palmer says. “It changed the whole pace of the company.”

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To prepare, Wix helped Palmer “freshen up its website” such as improved navigation, and optimized it so it could handle a glut of traffic.

“I was lucky if I get a couple thousand people to visit my website in a month. I had 75,000 visits in one month,” says Palmer regarding the commercial’s launch.

While Palmer invested in inventory, it was hard to estimate how much he should produce. Typically, the retailer has a 3-5% conversion rate. Palmer knew a lot of people would check out his website when the commercial aired, but wouldn’t necessarily be interested in purchasing. Still, even with the elevated traffic, AgeofBeard.com had an 8-10% conversion rate.

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Palmer had his friends and family help him to keep up with the surge of orders that came in every minute, Palmer says. Sales in 2016 were a 600% increase over 2015, and sales in 2017 were a 300% increase over 2016, Palmer says, without revealing exact figures. Part of the retailer’s sales growth also is via selling on online marketplaces. Age of Beard has sold its products on Etsy Inc. (No. 22 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 500) since early 2016, Amazon (No. 1) since 2017 and it plans to sell on Walmart.com’s marketplace soon.

With more sales and cash, Palmer moved storage into a warehouse from his apartment. He also changed the product’s packaging to stand out on marketplaces. His oil now is in a black bottle compared with its previous amber glass bottle, which is much like other beard oils on the market. Age of Beard also updated its beard oil formula so men can use it on both their beard and head hair.

With the influx of traffic, 10,000 consumers signed up to receive emails from AgeofBeard.com, which the retailer is now using for remarketing. This is a huge increase from the roughly 20 subscribers it had pre-Shaq commercial. Palmer hired a head of marketing to make a plan to remarket to these shoppers. Every week, the retailer sends an email about a new blog piece.

Now, more than a year later, Palmer is still trying to ride the wave of momentum from the commercial. Palmer is attempting to resurface the commercial as much as possible via paid YouTube ads to continue to drive interest and traffic to its site. Its goal is to generate $150,000 per month.

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