Customer Acquisition Through Content Creation
Éva Goicochea, Founder and CEO of Maude, discusses repositioning sexual wellness, community building, and strategies for going into retail
Let’s be real, sex makes people uncomfortable. But it shouldn’t! And that’s one of the driving principles behind Maude, a modern sexual wellness brand that is disrupting a taboo industry and making sexual health more a part of overall health and wellness.
Éva Goicochea is the woman behind the brand, which all started with an idea to disrupt a static industry and a blog called “The Maudern” that was starting to gain some traction.
“We had the blog and… the idea was can you build a world around the product?” Goicochea said. “Because we knew we weren’t going to have many products — we didn’t want to be an over-sorted brand. And people were reading [the blog] — they just kept consuming it and then we started to get feedback, and then that turned into seeing what was working and what wasn’t….We get more traffic on The Maudern than we do on the product side of the site to be quite honest with you. That’s probably because we produce so much content, but it’s been great. I think it really positions the brand in the right way, and we’re showing content that we want to see in the world.”
The success of the blog as a community and press engine helped fuel Goicochea to bring the business further along, get products to market, and really start making a splash.
“I threw up this website in 2015 for Maude even though we weren’t anywhere close to being ready to go to market,” Goicochea said. “We started getting inquiries about press, so I knew then that it was a topic people were going to want to talk about. Cut to 2017, we actually had a real landing page, and we got our first piece of press and we used basically our renderings of our products — but that was an important piece in getting Maude off the ground because the brand awareness happened so far in advance of launching that by the time it got there, we had built-in community. We had captured those emails, and people were excited and ready. I think that that’s a really interesting approach for people to take.”
But Goicochea didn’t want to rush anything to the market. Instead, she and her team took a methodical, empathetic approach to create products that fit within the brand and the community they had already built.
“We don’t just take products to market quickly,” she said. “We definitely work with our customer. We survey them and ask them questions and look at feedback, and then we also look at really what’s happening in the market. Are there products that we can make in a better way? Are there problems we should be solving with our brand? It’s this collaborative process with the team to look in this 360 view and say what’s really happening, and should Maude even be making it?”
Ultimately, Maude has gone to market with a number of products that customers love, and Goicochea also has expanded into the retail space as well. But that journey hasn’t been without its hiccups, including having to outbid retail partners on search terms for her own products.
To hear more about that and where Maude is headed next, tune in to Up Next in Commerce.
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