Imagine this: it’s Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year and you’re a brand with customers on your website pushing the buy button, but instead of moving them down the funnel, you stop them and interrupt the buying process to ask them, “How are you feeling right now?” 

Seems like a crazy thing to do right? Especially in a world that is dominated by closing sales and doing everything possible to get a consumer to hit buy. You’re literally pausing a conversion, making a customer examine his or her activity and second guess making a purchase. Nevertheless, that was the strategy Bearaby put into practice this past holiday season and the results might just surprise you. 

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Kathrin Hamm, the Founder and CEO of Bearaby, tells us that that mindfulness experiment, while risky and not advised by her industry peers, paid off in big ways. Bearaby was able to gain insights into consumer behavior and gather data that helped predict whether or not a customer was likely to return a product or not. And, most importantly, Bearaby was able to build more trust with customers and foster a more authentic relationship centered around mental health and the customer’s well-being, which in today’s world goes a long way toward creating a loyal base of customers. Kathrin also explains why adding more mindfulness and behavioral queues into the customer journey could have a positive impact on return rates, overall customer satisfaction, and your NPS score.

Main Takeaways:

• Do You Need This?: So many brands are trying to optimize for sales and push people through the funnel, but what if you took a step back? At Bearaby, by introducing mindfulness into the buying process and asking people how they feel throughout the process of a sale, the company was able to build trust with its customers, understand the behavior of people who returned products, and increased the overall net promoter score of the brand. 
• Making it Work: As a small, independent, DTC business, being agile and having the ability to accelerate a product are assets. But when you expand and begin to take on retail partnerships, your internal processes need to adjust. Rather than thinking a month of two ahead, you need to fit into a production timeline that is already planned two years in advance. To do that, it’s critical to have the right backend operations in order to analyze data and manage inventory so you can meet the needs of your partners. 
• Stop Selling, Start Connecting: Most brands see social media and SMS messaging as tools to sell products and get information to customers about deals or products. But what if you used those platforms to be a resource to your customers and offered them help in ways unrelated to your products? Bearaby took this road when establishing itself on social media and found that sparking natural conversations led to more curiosity about the brand overall, and subsequently led to sales with truly engaged customers.

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:

Hello everyone and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, Co-Founder and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Kathrin Hamm, the CEO and founder of Bearaby. Kathrin, welcome.

Kathrin:

Thanks so much for having me.

Stephanie:

Tell me a bit about Bearaby. I was looking at your website, I saw how amazing your weighted blankets look. They're knitted, they're awesome. I have a couple other weighted blankets, but they are nowhere near that, so tell me a little bit about the company and how you thought about creating it.

Kathrin:

The idea of creating Bearaby was really when I had sleep problems myself. I used to work for the World Bank as an economist, and I was just traveling a lot. I just had moved from Washington to the Middle East, and then from the Middle East to India, all within two years. I was traveling a lot and I was never a good sleeper, but this constant travel and jet lag really put me over the top. So I was just looking for a natural sleep solution. I tried many different things and at some point I came across this really simple concept of a heavy blanket that's supposed to be 10% of your body weight, that you put on top of you in an equal way, and it's supposed to help you calm, relax and sleep better.

Kathrin:

The concept itself is not new. Weighted blankets have been around for more than 60 years, especially for children that have sensory disorders. I ordered one of these blankets into India, and I tried it on a Saturday afternoon, and I napped for four hours. Which never happened to me before, and I was just sold on the idea. I'm like, "Okay, that's it. I can move on with my life, I just get this blanket and things will be good." The next night I woke up again and with the weighted blanket, but I was sweating and it was really hot.

Kathrin:

I think that's when I realized that all these weighted blankets are made with these artificial filling materials, so usually you find 20 pounds of plastic beads in it. Obviously it makes you hot, like an oven, but it's also really not good for the environment. At that point, I was really just searching for a product myself, and I realized there's nothing out there. Even though the product has been around for such a long time, somehow no one had really innovated on the concept. That's where the idea started to make something different and use innovation and design and at the same time try to come up with a product that's addressing these needs while being sustainable at the same time.

Stephanie:

That's awesome. So this was back in 2018 when you launched your company and you still had your day job and you launched it on Kickstarter, right?

Kathrin:

Yes.

Stephanie:

Tell me a little bit about that thought process. What was in your head when you were like, "Okay, I have a full-time job, I'm in India, and I'm going to go on Kickstarter."

Kathrin:

I think I'm naturally a risk-averse person. I know other entrepreneurs are like, I had my idea and I knew I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and I just went for it. I went the other way. I'm like, "Let's try it as a little side hustle and see it more of a project at the beginning." So I really mapped out in a business plan, so what do I need to have first? How do I think about the product? How do I think about the IP? And at some point you come to the funding, and when you do the numbers you realize that it actually takes a lot of money to launch a product or a brand, and you don't know in the early stages if people even will like it.

Kathrin:

It's when I realized that I think crowdsourcing is a good way to fail really fast or get feedback really fast. So we put together a short video, with the initial idea, and within a month, we had more than quarter million dollars already on the Kickstarter campaign. And the feedback I got from people is that this is just a product that more people are looking for, and I think that gave me then the next confidence boost to say, "Well, it might be not only a project, but this might be a real business idea that I can start exploring."

Stephanie:

That's very cool. So, what did it look like after you had that money in your Kickstarter account, and you're like, "Okay, this is real." What did it look like after that?

Kathrin:

Well, the money didn't last really long. So I actually emptied out my whole retirement funds. After I had had left my job. I think at that site, I really believed in the product and I knew I was onto something that I wanted to bring to the market. So the next step was the manufacturing. At that point, I had a prototype that I actually had developed together with my mom who's a really avid knitter. And we came up with the idea that instead of using any plastic or glass beads to make a product heavy, it's like a knitted rug. And if you use layers upon layers of fabric, you actually also get to a heavy blanket that comes up to 20 pounds.

Kathrin:

There was a small piece of a blanket. And then I went around and I just had a list of different manufacturers. I think I had a list of around 40, and I just picked up the phone and were talking to people. "This is my idea. Is it something that you could help me produce? Could you help me make this?" And I think one of the issues was that most people didn't know why do you even want to make a heavy blanket? We've been working in the industry since 30 years to make a light product, a light blanket. So I think that was an issue. Then I also obviously didn't have any credibility in the space where there's like, "Okay, even if we're trying to make this, how many units would you take?"

Kathrin:

And I'm like, "Maybe 100." An