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Inquire about Tax Services:
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August 21, 2024
6 min read mins read 
0 Comments Today we share an interesting story from Davie Fogarty. Davie is the owner of a popular e-commerce brand called The Oodie, which he was able to go from $0 to $500 million in the past 5 years. Davie also owns several other e-commerce brands that generate millions of dollars in annual revenue.
Davie went straight into digital marketing right out of school. At the time, he was running an Instagram account to over 600, 000 followers. He spent time learning the algorithms and systems behind social platforms and how to use them.
Like all other young entrepreneurs, he became distraught and many of his other business ideas failed. Some of the businesses Davie started and failed include a fitness apparel business, a headphone business, an iPhone case business, a personal training business, a seasoning business, and the biggest failure was his Vietnamese roll shop.
He was studying marketing and mining engineering at university, but dropped out after his first semester. Davie then started a marketing agency as a solopreneur because he wanted to learn a holistic approach to marketing rather than doing unlicensed online marketing.
He learned how to shoot video ads, how to run Facebook ads, and how to build websites and landing pages. He approached numerous businesses, shot content for them, built their websites, and then ran their ads. At first, he did this for free, just to learn skills.
He provides a lot of value to his clients and is considering building a full marketing agency and hiring people. However, he changed his decision and chose an e-commerce business instead of a marketing agency. This was when he founded two Shopify e-commerce brands, The Oodie and Calming Blankets, in 2018.
When starting his e-commerce journey, Davie developed relationships with agents, not just manufacturers in factories. Agents were sending him tons of product ideas every week from hundreds of different factories. This happens when you clearly let them know that you are willing to sell anything.
“All my brands started in different ways back then. I guess what I would advise now is to be vigilant when you come up with an idea, like look for a problem that needs to be solved. Sites like Alibaba really It’s great to see what’s available,” says Davie.
When Davie started The Oodie, he released clothing in some basic colors and was excited to get into the comfort clothing space. He asked his family and friends to model for them. He took tons of pictures and videos and uploaded them into the first default Shopify theme.
He wrote his own copy based on several direct response marketing books he had read to ensure the copy would convert. Then he launched Facebook ads and started selling from day one.
He packs the orders by himself in the warehouse and does all the customer service work. After about a month, the business started to pick up as he also started selling calming blankets.
After months of overwork, Davie hired his first employee to assist him, his brother, who still runs the business today. His brother helps with everything from packaging customer orders to providing customer service.
“I still remember filling up the huge room with orders for Oodie and Calming Blanket, ready to be sent and picked up by Australia Post.”
To continue growing the brand, Davie knew he needed to focus on 4 main elements:
“I remember going on a big trip to Europe with my friends and spending every morning designing The Oodie patterns, which we still sell today. Looking back now, I think the reason The Oodie has been so successful is because of our relentless desire to make our The customer is happy and as happy as possible. We have a lot of opportunities to cut corners, but we never do. We want the softest, nicest, warmest product in the world,” explains Davie.
Davie doesn’t ship his products directly from China because it makes his customers wait too long for their orders. Sometimes, people can buy lower quality products at cheaper prices, and sometimes they can even buy crappy fake products.
“I think the best thing about our company culture is how much empathy we have for our customers when things don’t go right. We know we’re delivering a quality product that’s happy, so we just have to make sure we’re there in the first place. One story that comes to mind is , when Brexit happened we had thousands of customers’ orders stuck in shipments and we just couldn’t deliver them to customers before Christmas as we had originally promised.
That literally destroyed the entire office, and since then we’ve really changed the way we approach short-term profits versus long-term customer satisfaction. “Davie said.
For now, Davie and his company always put the customer first.
In addition to Oodie, Davie also operates a number of other brands. These brands include:
Davie advises entrepreneurs that if you have $0 to start, start by learning a skill. You can start selling these skills and get into the industry. The main skills you’ll need are:
“Don’t get obsessed with an idea because it might not work. Get obsessed with the process of learning, finding out what actually works, or just get obsessed with the industry itself. Test the idea as leanly as possible, determine exactly what success looks like, and then Keep at it. It’s okay to fail. I’ve failed a lot but it’s important to find a little bit of success to help you understand what really works.
You need to be aware of positive feedback loops that can scale. Pay attention to little tidbits, like products your friends like that you know you can improve. Take a closer look at the data and some marketing case studies that can help guide you in the right direction,” explains Davie.
Over the next few years, Davie plans to create a simple, fast, risk-free process and develop software to do the entire thing so he can take bigger risks and invent some really cool brands.
