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[Voiceover]: Welcome to the Checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushy Today's checkout features
[Ad]: Rosie Collins, founder and CEO of Deja Marc. Deja Marc is a personalized jewelry brand that captures fingerprints, handwriting and even paw prints in keepsakes that will hold a special place in people's hearts. What started as a deeply sentimental gift idea has grown into a global brand with over 150,000 Instagram followers, a Western Bondi Junction studio, and customers that are across Australia, the uk, US and more. In this checkout, you'll hear why Rosie's never bought anything weird online. Spoiler it might not be self control, it might be what she sees, the retailer comeback story that she's loving right now and how she spots the early signs of burnout before they take hold.
Nathan Bush: Rosie, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout. We had an amazing conversation in our main episode where you shared the incredible story of how you've built Deja Marc from a media agency background going into creating this personalized jewelry brand that is now got over 150,000 followers on Instagram, had your first TikTok go viral to, you know, just a few million people, and now in countries all over the world, including expansions into the US and the uk Incredible story so far, but we are here to learn more about you. So I've got five quick questions. Okay, number one, what is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Rosie Collins: That's a deeply personal question, Nathan.
Nathan Bush: That's when I know we've got the good stuff.
Rosie Collins: Yeah, I'm going to tell you a fun fact is that I don't get served Instagram ads. So I would say that I haven't really ever bought anything weird online because I've never been tempted or know about potentially any of these unique things, weird products. And I know you're thinking, how can she not be targeted with Instagram ads on live on my phone, But I will give it to you next time and you will, you will see for yourself. I'm just in one of those weird cohorts that really. I never have never seen an ad on Instagram.
Nathan Bush: Stop it. No. Have you got like blocker technology?
Rosie Collins: No, I want them. I need them as a mum.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Rosie Collins: And I also need it as a founder to kind of keep up with what's going on from an ads point of view. I'd have to create a separate account in order to see them. So I see them on the business account, but I don't see them on my personal account.
Nathan Bush: Okay, interesting. All right, so you haven't been lured into weird things.
Rosie Collins: I've not been lured, no.
Nathan Bush: Number two, which retailer has most inspired you recently?
Rosie Collins: I mean, I touched upon Peanut as a brand I love. I would also say Oriton have is a retailer who has just done some transformational work since.
Nathan Bush: Incredible comeback.
Rosie Collins: Yeah, incredible comeback. And the importance of community and the like in store experience would lead me to then say Mecca, how they're just able to have such a strong community online, offline, in person and kind of just doing the full circle.
Nathan Bush: Does the Mecca business model because they do invest so much into retention and community, but they operate on pretty slim margins. Obviously they're a huge base, so slim margins add up to a lot. But how does that resonate with what you're building? Would you rather sacrifice margin for customer experience that we talked about and also in retention and rewarding customers?
Rosie Collins: Yeah, I. With the community, going back to what I explained in the main episode, I think there are ways that you can do it at a high frequency, low cost by making it no fluff and meaningful for them.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that makes sense.
Rosie Collins: So as a business, I would probably always choose the smart, which. Well, I think the smart choice is just making sure you can sustainably grow by having healthy margins and strong profit. I wouldn't shift too much into doing the fancy events that kind of suck all your money and they still need to have meaning for your customer. And I think there's ways that you can do it by making it purely about them and removing a lot of the expense around that.
Nathan Bush: I really liked our conversation earlier and even though you said that you're very much a strategic chess playing founder, you love being, you know, looking down there. It's Also that you approach how you communicate. The storytelling is one part, but you can't rely on storytelling for the forever customer. You actually have to, you know, do the conversion piece as well, which I thought was really interesting. From that main app. Number three, can you name a piece of tech that you or your business couldn't live without?
Rosie Collins: Is Shopify really boring to say?
Nathan Bush: No, it's. It's essential.
Rosie Collins: Pretty obvious, yeah. Okay.
Nathan Bush: Is there an app on Shopify that you're loving?
Rosie Collins: Do you know what? We are actually just about to test, So I can't give you a confident answer on this one because I haven't tested it to know whether it works. But conceptually, we are just about to test a new piece of personalization technology that will enable us to have a much more resonant strike rate with our customers, if that makes sense. So from an email marketing perspective.
Nathan Bush: Okay.
Rosie Collins: It's smart audiences that enable us to target our audience at, like, a much deeper personalization level.
Nathan Bush: Mm. I'm putting the pieces together in my head to try and work out who it is.
Rosie Collins: Putting the pieces together. Yeah. Okay.
Nathan Bush: Okay.
Rosie Collins: So, yeah, the concept of that is really. Is really exciting.
Nathan Bush: Okay, awesome. And is that about identifying unknown audiences?
Rosie Collins: Potentially.
Nathan Bush: All right, let's move on. Number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Rosie Collins: Oh, yeah, I have so many. So yours, obviously. So I listen to Diary of a CEO, which obviously most people would know about. Emma Greed's new podcast, which I believe is called Aspire, might have got that wrong. But just. Yeah, look, Emma Greed, she's fantastic. Probably she's the one that I'm loving at the moment, to be honest.
Nathan Bush: What do you go to? Because it sounds like you've got a lot going on in your life. What do you go to? To tune out and relax?
Rosie Collins: I love walking. And like, walking with a podcast is probably by the beach, is probably the peak of existence right now. For me, it's definitely followed by a good sleep. Followed by a good sleep and a cup of tea. Honestly, simple life pleasures. That's the top three for me.
Nathan Bush: Love it. All right, last question. I've got for you, Rosie. What is your biggest challenge today?
Rosie Collins: The juggle. It really is, because if you get it, I don't say get it wrong. If you mismanage, then you're just exhausted and it can lead to burnout. And I've had that. When I was in my advertising days, I just pushed myself too hard, and once you can't get out of it, you just stuck in that unless you quit your job or have a breakdown, which you don't really want to do, any of them. So for me, not ideal. I'm constantly thinking about how I can manage everything.
Nathan Bush: How do you recognize signs of burnout?
Rosie Collins: Sleep. Yeah, sleep and not sleeping enough and just your brain not really functioning properly. You know, whether you're in a conversation with someone and a couple of months ago you could have that conversation and now you can't.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Rosie Collins: Whether you're eating, eating properly, like just good habits. Whether they're falling to the side. Yeah, they're probably just like the basic kind of standard health metrics.
Nathan Bush: Love it. Rosie, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout.
Rosie Collins: Thanks so much.
[Ad]: If that conversation with Rosie left you wanting more of Rosie's wisdom system, don't miss the Main Episode number 532 of Add to Cart, where Rosie shares how she scaled a personalized product without compromising on quality. She talks about how she structured her business to be able to step away from it for maternity leave and why growing for her is just about alignment to her life values as it is about revenue for a business. The link is in the episode description well below. Worth a listen. If you're trying to balance growth with values or build a brand that actually means something, if you haven't already, I invite you to come in and join the Add to Cart community. It's free and it's full of e commerce professionals like you. It's where we go deeper on conversations from episodes like this and we share tips and solve problems together. Join us at add to cart.com.
