Don’t Flush The Fundamentals
How Omigo was built on lessons learned from an ecommerce expert, and why never forgetting the small things is the biggest lesson of all
The best way to learn something is by doing, which is a lesson that Thomas Lotrecchiano’s father taught him early on in his career. Thomas and his father started Omigo together in 2018 as an alternate route to Thomas going to school for an MBA, and in the years since, that lesson keeps cropping up.
Omigo is a DTC bidet company, and like many industry disruptors, its biggest challenge is educating the consumer base and converting skeptics into loyal customers. In order to do that, Lotrecchiano says they had to do one simple thing.
“Listening to our customers at the beginning was more about why they decided to try the product, what they like about it, and what they were skeptical about, and then taking that feedback and putting it back into our messaging,” he says.
Customer feedback is critical to any business and provides insights into how you can better sell to your target audience and gives you an idea of what you can improve upon. And in certain instances, customer feedback can be used as content in and of itself. UGC is big in the ecommerce world, and Omigo has employed the UGC strategy too. But Omigo does things just a bit differently.
“UGC isn’t always something that I’m going to be showing on my website, because I’m not going to be able to get the everyday consumer to send me a video while they’re on their bidet, talking about how awesome it is,” Lotrecchiano says. “But when we do use that approach, it’s been in the influencer space. A lot of people look at influencers as people they trust, guides in their lives, people they aspire to live like. Whether you agree or disagree with how people portray themselves on Instagram or social media, it’s still a place for aspirational content and to look at people and see what they’re doing.”
What Omigo wants everyone to be doing is using their bidets for environmental and hygiene reasons. According to research the company has done, a bidet is actually a better choice than traditional toilet paper. Lotrecchiano believes it’s only a matter of time before the world realizes this truth, and he knows that Omigo will be there to meet the needs of the bidet converts. How is he so sure? Because he and the entire Omigo team are falling back on some of the key lessons Lotrecchiano’s father learned in his days as an ecommerce gamechanger.
“[My father] was consulting with ecommerce brands of all sizes: $5 million a year to $120–150 million a year and everywhere in between. So what we took from his experience into Omigo was what he calls his ‘ecommerce playbook,’ and it was the fundamentals of where you need to start with a direct-to-consumer business. And the basics of that were: great customer service, solid fulfillment and the fundamentals of a website, that being: something simple and functional, having a great hero and landing page, having solid email capture, having all of your email flows built and all of your knowledge base in place and everything ready to scale, because something could happen overnight like it did with Omigo, and you have to be ready to go from 10 orders a day to 150.”
To learn more about how Omigo handled that very scenario and what they are doing to build an even bigger future, tune into Up Next in Commerce.
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