In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by Bettina McLeod, Founder and CEO of Try@Home, a digital platform allowing brands to offer their customers a way to touch, feel and of course try on products from the comfort of their own lounge room. With a background in buying and selling eCommerce businesses, Bettina realised that much loved quality brands were missing out on sales because their customers hadn’t been able to get their hands, quite literally, on their products. By developing the tech to support this process, Bettina and the team at Try@Home have seen average order value increases of up to 88% for brands such as Sirens Swimwear, one of the early adopters. In this chat, Bettina shares why she believes customers don’t want a refund, they just want service, how her team developed an influencer feature and how Try@Home is gearing up to send everyone’s favourite Aussie brands to lounge rooms all over the world!
“Most people don’t want a refund, they want service“
Bettina McLeod
99 out of 100
“I did a survey to my Facebook customers and got their phone numbers and I rang a hundred of the top fans and said to them, hey, thanks for liking and sharing, but why aren’t you buying anything? And they all said, we need to try it on, where can we try it on?
I said, look, I don’t have a store in Melbourne or Adelaide or Sydney. Can I send my store out to you? And so I would box up a package of five and send them out to them. And they were all different styles.
I sent out a hundred boxes and of those hundred 99 of them bought…and many of them bought multiple items. And so that was where Try@Home was born because I went, oh my goodness, that’s all they need. They need to touch it, try it, and feel it in the comfort of their own home before they have to make a decision.”
Influencer feature
“We solve a whole heap of other business problems. We are working with a brand at the moment who’s a hundred million dollar brand. And they came to us and said love Try@Home, that’s fantastic. We wanna do that. However, our biggest problem is these influencers.
And I’m like, what do you mean? And she said, I use hundreds of influencers to try on our product ranges every month and facilitating getting their product out to them, like getting them to select the product, getting it out to them, getting them to try it, do their reels, et cetera, and then send it back, being able to track all of that is a nightmare.
And I thought, that’s genius, I can create that into a feature. So we went away and I went back to my tech team and I’m like, we need an influencer feature.”
Run my brand
“My team are amazing. We are really careful about how we hire. All of my team own shares in the business, so they’re all very heavily invested in the success of other brands. And we look for people who really wanna help grow brands. That’s where my passion is and theirs as well. So that’s really cool.
However, the people who are client facing, there is not one of them here who hasn’t either owned an e-Commerce brand themselves or have run my brand because I make them! So I kinda get them in and go okay, this is what you’ve gotta do is you’ve gotta become the brand owner for a month and you’ve gotta see all of the issues that occur with brands, you need to understand them.
I said to one of the girls the other day, she’s been running the brand for a month, And I said, how long do you spend on running the brand? And she goes, 10 minutes a day. And I’m like oh, okay! We’ve made it that easy and it’s so refined that it just, it’s a system that runs itself. So it’s a bit of a test baby for us, and it gets passed around in here.”
Questions answered in this episode include…
- How did you come up with the Try@Home model idea?
- How does Try@Home increase conversion?
- What is the eCommerce talent market like on the Gold Coast where you are based?
Links from the episode:
- Try@Home
- Aus Mumpreneur
- Sirens Swimwear
- Billy Cart Kids
- Shopify Plus Black Friday (sponsored)
- Packleo (sponsored)
This episode was brought to you by…
