Making Your Brand, Marketing and Logistics A Bit More Human
After his first trip down the eCommerce road ended in failure, Jay B. Sauceda swore to never again travel down that path. But life has this funny way of coming full circle and turning your failures into successes. Today, Jay is the founder and CEO of Texas Humor, an eCommerce shop so successful that Jay decided to take the leap and also build Sauceda Industries, which helps manage not only Texas Humor logistics, but the logistics of many other D2C companies.
The journey from failure to repeated success was a winding one, and the path back down the digital road began when Sauceda saw that a funny social media profile he had been building had slowly but surely amassed a massive following.
“I started from nothing,” Sauceda said. “I started just tweeting about Texas as a whole and that’s ultimately really where we developed the idea. There was no specific ecommerce goal in mind. But once we realized that we had a few million followers and this captive audience that we could do something with, that was the point at which we decided, ‘Why don’t we try to make this into a little bit more of a business?’”
Texas Humor was born and it’s cheeky, humorous products were a hit with its social media following and beyond. So much so, that Sauceda and his partners were shipping so much that they couldn’t focus on anything else. That’s why they wanted to outsource the logistical operations of the business. And that’s where the story took yet another turn.
“I reached out to some 3PLs and one of the ones here in Austin just had a very snarky and negative approach to telling me that it wasn’t really the right time,” Sauceda remembered. “[He said] ‘You’re too small for this to be worthwhile.’”
The rejection stung, and it notched a chip on Sauceda’s shoulder that he carried with him as he built an entire logistical arm of his business to not just solve his shipping problems, but to offer aid and services to other smaller DTC companies as well. Business is business though, and there really are companies that cannot, or do not need a 3PL at the moment they come knocking. For them, Sauceda has a different approach than the one that was used when he was a small fish in a big pond.
“I run an organization that has to say that to people as well,” he said. “The difference though, is that culturally our approach is to say that it’s not a no, it’s a not right now. And what we’d rather do is try to be a resource for some of these companies to help them understand what would make them qualify to work with the 3PL and/or make it cost effective for both parties to be in a mutually beneficial relationship….small merchants just get in this mindset that their business is worthwhile and they’re ready to just offload and go. And in my case, I recognized that we were too small at the time. What I was trying to point out to the guy was that, “We’re not big enough to be worthwhile today, but let me sit down and show you the marketing plan and all the things that we’re going to do that will make us worthwhile in the near future. And that was just not something he was really willing to listen to. So that was very much an approach that just rubbed me the wrong way and was something that has definitely informed how we coach brands as they come to us.”
Sauceda doesn’t like rubbing people the wrong way. Which is why everything he does at both of his companies is created in a way so that it is not seen as an intrusion or a bother to people. This is especially true for marketing and content-creation activities.
“I just see content and advertising as like a guest in people’s homes,” Sauceda said. “Most people do not want someone who’s going to come over to their house for dinner and spend the entire time talking about themselves. And so as brands or content generation organizations, if the only thing we’re doing is going ‘me, me, me,’ then of course people are going to be turned off by it. That’s the exact definition of bad advertising. So for us, and for how I thought about building Texas Humor initially, it was really trying to think and put myself in the shoes of the people who were our audience and try to say the things that they had on their mind already.”
That principle has carried through into all of the marketing materials Texas Humor still sends out emails, which Sauceda said he is working to personalize even more. To learn how, and to hear what Sauceda believes will happen to the shipping industry as resources are allocated to delivering COVID-19 vaccines, tune into his episode of Up Next in Commerce, here.
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