Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to end of 2017. What kind of revenues were you tracking at?

Hannah Fastov: Close to a million. At this time, most of our revenue was coming in from our wholesale business but we were doing over $250,000 on our website. When we saw what was working in advertising, then we were able to put a bit more into our advertising and use our profits to reinvest back.

Sramana Mitra: What are the highlights of 2018?

Hannah Fastov: It was definitely the growth of our B2C business. In 2018, we had doubled revenue. That was exciting for us. Another exciting thing that we did was, we signed a contract with a Japanese distributor. That was interesting and a cool opportunity. We were able to work with them to duplicate our business in Japan. We also launched our ambassador program.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue did you achieve in 2018?

Hannah Fastov: We beat the million-dollar mark. We were close to $2.5 million. This was B2B and B2C. That was when we started to see our B2C business start to take about 50% of our revenue.

Sramana Mitra: What is the ambassador program?

Hannah Fastov: One of our best forms of marketing was word-of-mouth. We wanted to capitalize on that. We developed an ambassador program. We named it our DASH Squad. We invited a select group of influencers who we’ve worked with in some revenue-driving capacity. It was at the start of the affiliate program. We used our top revenue drivers. We also opened it up to our top purchasers.

As a DASH Squad member, you had first access to new product drops. You had a discount on products and you also have a small discount for your community. You earned commissions. We also had different events for our DASH Squad to encourage other people talking about Go Dash Dot.

Sramana Mitra: When did you launch that?

Hannah Fastov: At the end of 2018.

Sramana Mitra: That took off in 2019?

Hannah Fastov: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What metrics did you see in that program?

Hannah Fastov: Starting in 2019, the advertising space on social media started to get more competitive. It was starting to get more expensive to advertise. Our ambassador program started to help supplement that. There is a lifecycle with the ambassadors. As with any brand, you have someone who’s a die hard fan. With other ambassadors, once you go through the lifecycle of the first event with us, X amount of sales, and earning swag items, you’ll still support it. But you’ll probably move on in some other capacity. That’s just the way the influencer world works these days.

In order to maintain this program, we say, “You’re an ambassador for three months. Depending on the revenue that you drive, we decide if we want to keep them on.” We recruited for ambassadors for every three months. Once you became an ambassador, you got your intro package which included all types of information about the brands and assets that you could use. In the beginning, we wanted you to drive about $10,000 of revenue. Once we saw what type of volume they were driving, we would either continue and do a couple more collaborations or part ways.

Sramana Mitra: How many were driving sales?

Hannah Fastov: It wasn’t a ton. The ones that did was definitely a success. There was a couple of influencers where we did a co-branded bag with them. We had local companies that we worked with that was able to decorate or embellish products that were already manufactured in the US.

We did a partnership with #thehealthyhustle. We took her favorite backpack and we put her logo on it. We put that onto bags. We did a revenue share. She promoted it on her end. That was a great collaboration that we did that drove much more revenue. I would say the ambassador program was a great way to continue driving that brand awareness and reaching a lot of people with low effort and cost.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov
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