Dealing with Major Market Shifts: Aphrodite’s CEO Jonathan Foltz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What product were you selling?

Jonathan Foltz: We were selling LED shoes. We could have kept on going. Then we had a problem in China. They didn’t do the proper paper work and they had batteries. They had to recall them and send them back. It was a huge problem. We could have probably made a million to $1.5 million if we didn’t have any of those problems.

Sramana Mitra: How were you getting the customers?

Jonathan Foltz: It was a Shopify store. I got really in tune through the non-success of the reptile company. I started learning Facebook ads. We were not doing that much Google, but it was mostly Facebook and Instagram. We were targeting parents that would buy it for their children.

Sramana Mitra: When you decided to shut down the LED shoes business, what was the next step? Now we’re in 2017?

Jonathan Foltz: Yes. We started testing out a lot of different products. We found a jewelry product that had a buy-one-get-two free offer. There are probably at least a thousand people selling it. It was quite beautiful. The buy-one-get-two free product boomed. It got us to switch our model. Now we had to change the name of the company.

We found a domain name Aphrodite’s. There was no way that that was available. We did the research and the trademark wasn’t taken. For some reason, no one had it. We changed the name and we’ve been building that one ever since. Ever since, we’ve done $42 million in revenue.

Last year, it was acquired by a public company. Since then, I became a major stakeholder in the public company. We acquired the company that I used to look up to in 2015 and 2016. He was a mentor to me. His name is Donald Wilson. We ended up acquiring his business.

Sramana Mitra: Go back to the beginning of Aphrodite’s. Buy-one-get-two-free was converting.

Jonathan Foltz: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: It was a jewelry product?

Jonathan Foltz: It was three bracelets that came in a single pack.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of numbers did that do?

Jonathan Foltz: First, it started bringing back returns. We were getting 3x returns. Our margins were around 85%. We made a new version. This line in totality, to date, made us over $8 million.

Sramana Mitra: Another kind of bracelet with a similar kind of marketing?

Jonathan Foltz: Yes. The other was a Tree of Life bracelet. We just played around with different versions. It was also a way that we looked at it. The reason we did so well was that we scaled horizontally.

Sramana Mitra: It’s with that horizontal scaling strategy that you did $8 million.

Jonathan Foltz: Exactly. Even today, we still sell that product in different ways. At least 30 countries have that product.

Sramana Mitra: What was the next product that was a success?

Jonathan Foltz: The reason that we came up with the original name of Pandora’s Box was that we wanted to have amazing gifting experiences. We didn’t know that we were going to go into jewelry. Another thing that we ended up doing is we found these unique pieces with a cellophane in the middle. You could put the jewelry in, and it makes the jewelry look like it’s floating. We talked to our designer. We created a box where you would magically open it up. We called it Magic In a Box. People would take it out. It was a floating jewelry piece. It was an amazing present. It went wild online.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Dealing with Major Market Shifts: Aphrodite's CEO Jonathan Foltz
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