What I Learned Growing My iPhone Case Business from Zero to Seven Figures in One Year

Most online entrepreneurs overlook the HUGE opportunity with traditional commerce. If you learn to leverage it, your business can make a much bigger impact and change the industry for the better.

In this article, Matthew Bertulli — author of Anything, Anywhere and founder of Pela Case — will share what he learned growing his iPhone case company.

Where Old School and New Retailers are Both Wrong

The vast majority of mid-size and larger retailers are not willing to throw away the old way of doing things. So they’re just going out of business.

The companies that started in the last decade — the digital-born retailers — find their narrowly-defined customer really well. But they fall down when it comes to adapting and using some of the old ways of doing things.

A digital-born brand is terrified of wholesaling.

They see it as what the other guys did and that’s why they’re failing, and that’s not true.

A manufacturer from the ‘90s has no problem at all wrapping their head around shipping pallets of product out to a Walmart or a Target, but they’re scared of shipping a single thing to a customer.

Today’s young, hungry entrepreneurs are building great brands, and they’re super comfortable selling to individual customers. But when a retailer wants to buy 5,000 units of their product, they think it’s a part of the old guard.

Wholesale is super valuable to a modern day, digital-born brand.

Timing is Everything

Start thinking less about all of the noise. There are a million things that we can all Google and find to do to grow our business.

Figuring out what to do is not the problem now. That knowledge is free.

The real challenge is — when do you do these things?

It’s less about what and more about when.

The order in which you actually do those things is really important.

If you’re not very savvy with inventory management, you should not be selling your product on Amazon marketplace. That is a nightmare of an ecosystem to navigate. It is more about operations and logistics than it is about the brand.

Play to your strengths.

For a million-dollar business that’s grown all on their own, moving to Amazon may not be the next logical step. That might be three or four jumps away.

Stop and think. Should you be doing that now, or should it be done later?

Strong Platforms are Leverage

Pelacase.com is an iPhone case brand. The branding and positioning play: It is also a biodegradable compostable iPhone case. When you’re done with your case, you can actually just throw it in a backyard compost.

That’s the customer.

Then, in twelve months we grew from zero to a seven-figure brand almost entirely on one channel — Facebook.

Our Facebook presence, Instagram presence, and fan base are why we’re even in the door with big retailers.

People get way too comfortable in that one channel, though, and they never create more leverage elsewhere.

They’ve only got one leg to stand on.

Amazon is a channel you don’t own and a customer you don’t own. It’s Amazon’s customer. When somebody else comes along and kicks Amazon-only retailers, they fall over and the business is done.

Build real businesses and real brands. That’s way more fun, and you sleep better at night.

Leverage your first channel and move on when you are comfortable.

Think About Wholesale Strategically

Pelacase is pursuing wholesale now and talking to telecom companies. Anybody with retail principle thinks of Apple, Radio Shack, or somebody who sells phone cases.

“Go after the retailers because the retailers have customers.”

Retailers are also going to compete with you online.

If we can get a Bell or a Sprint or a Verizon to buy and sell to their customers through their distribution chain, there is no channel conflict. More leverage.

Get into wholesale without creating the channel conflict headache that most brands encounter.

Startup Tech Should be Simple

Shopify has pretty good Amazon integration, Zen Desk consolidates everything for customer support.

Digital stuff is no different than physical stuff. It just weighs you down.

Pelacase startup software cost $200 a month. Basically, a Shopify store and nothing else.

About $30 or $40 a day can test Facebook ads to find the campaigns that work, then start to scale them up bit by bit. Don’t go from $20 right to hundreds of dollars a day.

Test campaigns for about a week to see if they work.

If you’re getting the return on ad spend, start to scale them up until they don’t work, then we bring them back down.

That channel just requires a lot of testing. That’s it.

Make Your Own System

Every tool that we use in our system is an adapted version of whatever the hell we read.

Our version works for us. It’s not verbatim somebody else’s.

Anything, Anywhere was designed around the approach that we take and the questions that we ask to figure out whether to do something first or second or third or fourth. And the answers vary for everybody.

Some advice: Stop looking at your analytics every day.

Instead, build a list of seven metrics that you look at weekly. Use them to make forward-looking planning decisions — not reactive.

We all jump from fire to fire because most of us look at our business way too closely. It probably hurts us more than we think.

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Matthew Bertulli is an entrepreneur and author of Anything, Anywhere, a close look at the strategies he uses to build successful brands quickly. Find him on MattBertulli.com.

This post was excerpted from his interview on the Author Hour podcast.