They say that laughter is the best medicine. For Colin McIntosh, it’s also been a pretty good business strategy. After a couple of fits and starts in business, Colin found himself with no job but quite a few domain names in his possession, all of which were pun-based. So he cycled through what he owned and formed a plan to build a company in a disruptable industry where he could make a splash and earn some market share. 

What he landed on was Sheets & Giggles, a direct to consumer bedsheets company with a social good component that became the most successful bedsheets company to launch on the crowd-funding site, Indiegogo. Since then, Sheets & Giggles has grown to millions of dollars in sales. 

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Colin gives the behind-the-scenes story of building Sheets & Giggles, including how he worked backward to build an email list that led to an unprecedented 45% conversion rate. Plus, Colin dives into the pros and cons of selling on Amazon, and gives an exclusive preview of some of the ad copy he’s working on to bring more humor to the Sheets & Giggles campaigns across channels.   

Main Takeaways:

• Going Backward: In order to meet your goals, it’s sometimes useful to work backward. Define what it is that you want to achieve and then reverse engineer the steps you need to take to get there. 
• Navigating the Amazon Waters: DTC founders agree that Amazon is simultaneously the best and worst partner you can have. There are pros and cons to working on the platform, including massive discoverability but also deep cuts into profit margin. It’s important to weigh all the pros and cons of selling on the platform and find the strategy that works best for your brand and that leaves you with more of the pros than the cons. 
• Laughing With You, Not At You: Selling with humor is an effective strategy if you can actually get potential customers to engage. Consumers are reading less and less, so if you are going to use humorous copy, it needs to really resonate, grab the attention of the customer, and get them to keep going along the customer journey. It’s easy to be funny just for the sake of being funny, but you have to remember that the ultimate goal is to sell the product, so there needs to be a call to action.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Hey everyone, this is Stephanie Postles, Co-Founder of mission.org, and your host of Up Next In Commerce. Welcome back. Our guest today is Colin McIntosh, the Founder and CEO of Sheets & Giggles. Colin, how's it going?

Colin:

Pretty good. Thanks so much for having me today.

Stephanie:

Yeah, thanks for coming on. I was very nervous about messing that name up. I'm sure you get that a lot.

Colin:

MacIntosh, McIntosh. Yeah, [crosstalk 00:00:28]-

Stephanie:

Oh, I meant your company name.

Colin:

Oh, Sheets & Giggles. Yeah. No, of course. Yeah, sorry. I feel like I've gotten so used to it now, I don't even register it anymore. But yeah, you can call it S&G for short, so that way you're not laughing every time.

Stephanie:

There you go. I like it. So, before the show started, we were going a little bit through your background, which I think people would like to hear before we get into Sheets & Giggles. So, I'd love for you to kind of start there. How did you come to founding Sheets & Giggles, and what came before that?

Colin:

Well, a lot came before. It depends on how far back you want to go. I graduated from Emory University's business school back in 2012, and I started my career at the world's largest hedge fund in Connecticut, a place called Bridgewater Associates. And, the founder there, a guy named Ray Dalio, is pretty famous nowadays. And, I got fired in about five months, which was great being 22 and losing your first job in a strange state that you don't know anybody in. And then-

Stephanie:

What happened?

Colin:

Well, I was terrible at my job. So, [crosstalk 00:01:33]-

Stephanie:

Five months is not enough time. How did they even know?

Colin:

No, Bridgewater is usually... They're famous for two months or two years.

Stephanie:

Okay.

Colin:

And so, I kind of had a weird little in between stay, where after two months we were all pretty sure it wasn't going to work out, but they were like, "Ah, this should work out," and they didn't want to really pull the plug. And then, eventually I remember, they were arguing in front of me one day about... I'll never forget this. They were re-interviewing me for a different role inside of the company, and... That's how they do it. You lose your "box," and then they try to find you a new box before they totally get rid of you, because they think you're a culture fit.

Stephanie:

Yep.

Colin:

And so, they were arguing in front of me. I'll never forget, these two guys, the two managers. One said, "You know, I think Colin is a six for this role," and the other manager says, "Well, I think he's more like a seven, and I think we should hire him into it." And, they're arguing six, seven, six, seven out of 10. And then, the arbiter goes, "Look, guys. He can't get hired into the role if he's not a seven. If he's a six, we can't give him the offer." And then they agree, "Okay, he's a six-and-a-half, and we'll need to have another meeting on it." And, I just remember I raised my hand and I go, "Guys, let me do this. Today's going to be my last day at Bridgewater." I just couldn't deal with that type of [crosstalk 00:02:50]-

Stephanie:

Yeah, rating you.

Colin:

It was crazy. Yeah. And so, that was my first job experience. And, from there I became a recruiter, a third-party agency, recruiting for banks, and hedge funds, and startups. That's where I got into technology, and startups, and software. Taught myself a lot about software development and software engineering, and ended up hiring a bunch of different engineers at a bunch of different companies. And, I ended up hiring myself at one of my clients in Seattle, in a really interesting B2B software space called Application Virtualization, which was really hot in 2014; it's still pretty hot.

Colin:

And I ended up moving up to Seattle. And then, about a year and a half later, I got an opportunity at a company that I helped co-found with some friends called Revel R, which was a wearable tech product that got into Techstars, which is for those listening, a really famous worldwide accelerator for startups. They give you a $100,000 for 6% of your company, and put you in a room with nine other companies for three months, and give you all the training, resources, connections, and mentorship that you could possibly need.

Colin:

And so I dropped everything I was doing in Seattle, drove 19 hours down to Denver on a week's notice, and became a Coloradan about five years ago. And, that company... I ended up working there for about two-and-a-half years. We all got laid off at 1:00 PM on a Sunday, as startups unfortunately go. And, it was really sad. We had raised millions of dollars, and we're in Target, and Brookstone, and HSN, QVC Deals, T-Mobile stores. But, that product, unfortunately, didn't have all the legs that we thought it did. And, three weeks after I got laid off xI incorporated Sheets & Giggles, and now it's been three years since that date. And, it is now the longest I'd ever worked anywhere in my career.

Stephanie:

That's great. So, what is Sheets & Giggles, and how did you have the idea to start it?

Colin:

Well, for anyone who hasn't heard of us, it's okay; although, I will hold it against you.

Stephanie:

Very rude.

Colin:

Very rude. We sell bedsheets that are sustainable, and they're made out of a material called Lyocell, which is made from eucalyptus trees. And so, if you Google or Amazon eucalyptus sheets, we're generally the first results. Lyocell sheets is another query we rank high for. And what our sheets do is, they actually save up to 96% of the water that cotton sheets use, which is about 96%... sorry, 1,000 gallon reduction. And then, they also save in energy, they use no pesticides, no insecticides; whereas, cotton can use 16-24% of the world's insecticides just by itself, as a crop.

Colin:

They also biodegrade faster than cotton, they're hypoallergenic, they're zero-static, and they're naturally softer and more cooling. So, if you're a hot sleeper, they're the best possible material. The eucalyptus Lyocell is for hot sleepers. And s