Die-hard community through high-quality products with Reagan Cook, co-founder Vaer Watches
Here's a brand that runs 30-minute ads that work. Read how some tough decisions and right choices built a fiercely loyal community for this Los Angeles watch brand.
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A few weeks ago, we had a chat with Reagan Cook, co-founder of Vaer Watches, a Venice Beach, Los Angeles-based watch and jewellery company and one of our customers here at Ubu.
Vaer is a bit special to me because I met Reagan in Los Angeles when I worked there as an intern at a tech startup, he was my manager at the time. I own 3 watches myself, and I truly love the brand, their products, and their aesthetic.
They make elegant, sophisticated wristwatches that are also ocean-ready — which means that you can take it into the ocean before work, and then wear them into the office right after. Their idea has always been to create a value proposition that stacks up well with watches that are 2 or 3 times the price point.
Reagan started the company in 2016 with his co-founder Ryan, and they spent the first year coming up with a solid product. It was after they did this that they launched their online store. Initially, their business was a side hustle from their main jobs — but it was in 2018 that they really started committing to it.
It was their first time launching and running an DTC e-commerce company, and there was a lot to learn. And learn, they did.
Their first month, August 2017, brought in $5000. September, $10000. October, $14000. November, $23000. That’s how they learnt, just in their first year of business, how growth can be so incremental in DTC.
Today, they’re a multi-million dollar business. They have a wide range of products from $150 all the way to $1200. 60% of their business is American-assembled. They also offer Asian-assembled at a lower price point, and Swiss-assembled on the higher end.
In this article, we’ll learn about how their community was a result of the decisions they’ve made, and how an engaged community doesn’t have to mean hundreds of thousands of IG followers.
Keep in mind that all views expressed reflect those of Reagan and Vaer, and not those of Ubu or Selling Social.
Creating community through hard business choices
In 2018, we had more or less figured out a model [to scale our business]. But from a marketing and branding standpoint, we decided to bring the entire assembly operation of the company into Los Angeles in the US.
This was a logistical nightmare, and to be honest a real challenge. But we thought that in the long, long run, it would really give us an angle to market and build a brand around, and I think that proved to be the right decision. And we’ve grown exponentially since then.
I don’t know if we necessarily understood the choice we were making in terms of the community we were building when shifting assembly into the United States.
The downside of a high profit margin
You could totally create a high margin product that’s more reliant on marketing fluff. And because you’ll have a lot of money, you’ll be able to blast that brand name or product to more eyeballs.
But the problem here is, that because you have a big margin, there’s actually not as much value in the product itself. And so the harder that people look at the product, the less likely they are to be able to actually buy your product.
But when you have a high-value product…
But when you have a very, very high value product and a relatively small profit margin, you’re actually going to attract those people who are actually more thoughtful.
These are the ones that will spend three months researching a product, that are watching dozens of YouTube reviews, or third-party pieces of feedback, reading every one-star review in addition to the five-star reviews.
This generates a certain type of community — with people that don’t just give short, low effort five star reviews saying “awesome” or “great watch” or “loved it”, or something surface-level like that. They instead choose to write a 400-word review or even longer, which is actually very very common for us.
Receiving 350+ responses to a marketing email
Normally we send out the traditional, image-based marketing emails all the time. Product updates, promotions, these types of things. But two weeks ago, we sent out a 1400-word essay, all plain text. To our list of around 50,000 people.
In our modern culture of Twitter and TikToks where things are supposed to be short and quick, it was kind of a hilarious decision to make — to send something like this with no images, and barely any links. But it also reflects our understanding of our community.
The awesome validation of this was that we actually received 360 responses to this email. And the responses are as long as people writing their life stories in an email. I think it takes a special community and a special brand to build that.
I would rather have a 1000 ultra-loyal people that are like, ride or die, than 10,000 people or even 50,000 people that are like “bought it once, couldn’t care less about it”.
Because those 1000 people will be your evangelists. They will always be with you. They will back you, preorder for you, and will keep your brand alive if you hit hard times. That’s our mindset.
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Community on Instagram
On Instagram, Vaer is not one of those brands with hundreds of thousands of followers. And while their Instagram account hasn’t grown tremendously in the last 3 years, their business sure has. And their community has grown as well. The kind of engagement they get on Instagram is also incredibly high.
An underutilised platform in the beginning
In 2019, we had like, three Instagram posts — which was a strange reflection of our business, or our mindset as an e-commerce brand and a digitally native company. We were still finding success, but not necessarily talking to the entire world.
The thing is that we were and we are just a small company — so we don’t have infinite resources. We don’t have a social media manager, or even an agency or otherwise.
But that being said, Facebook and Instagram ads were more our main marketing focus. We were also hand-holding a lot of those relationships live, responding to individual customers, trying to make that $500 sale.
We were pretty clear about it from the beginning that we don’t care if we have 100,000 followers. We’d rather take 500 customers, direct email conversations, because it’s more of like, depth, rather than breadth of experience.
The community was still there though
Even though we weren’t necessarily posting ourselves, we were still in a dialogue.
In my experience, men can be very territorial and very tribal with their brands. So for example, if someone likes Audi — they probably hate BMW. And if they see an Audi ad, they feel obliged to explain how BMW owners are idiots. The same thing with sports teams as well — men are very macho and territorial about that, and this is hilarious when it comes to marketing.
So with watches, it’s very similar as well. There’s people who will come out of the woodwork to pull you down, and explain how your business is pointless, and how your watches or your product are a waste of time. So that’s kind of a hilarious side effect of just marketing to men more generally.
But what that creates is that we had like 500 comments and the comments were all like, Twitter debates and like back and forth messages will 100 likes on them.
And then you have people buying our product, because they’re like “Oh, I saw the debate that you guys are having within your Facebook ads.”
And it works well, because Facebook sees even the angry comments as engagement — so they start serving the ad to more people. It just stirs the pot more and more.
Ultimately, it was just a way of creating a digital dialogue and creating a digital community, I guess. And those that liked our arguments were then flowing back to the business.
Fuelled by passion
Certain brands are solving a short term need, other brands are more utility based. But watches, like cars, are very emotional. There’s a really complex equation of why someone buys an Omega versus a Rolex versus a whatever. So when someone, especially when they’re expensive, makes an investment, it requires a lot of thinking.
We have customers who have watch collections in the $10000 and even $100000 ranges. Men are like that too wine things like wine — you can call it an addiction, but I guess it’s also fuelled by passion.
I guess that’s also the nature of the vertical we’re in — watches just tend to draw out a lot of strong opinions, a lot of interest, and a lot of expertise as well. And that’s kind of neat.
Neither me nor Ryan comes from a watchmaking background, so we’ve had to learn as we’ve grown the brand. Our brand is focused on delivering comparative value to the best brands in the world.
We also need to understand the value proposition of those best brands and be literate, and speak intelligently to those people, to the press, to the watch editorialists, who again, it’s like speaking another language. It’s very dense, and very, very sophisticated.
And because we can speak that language, about different lume compounds and beat rates and those affect performance and accuracy, it’s like speaking to a forum on engineering. And because of this, people respond with more feedback, because they know that you’re speaking to them.
YouTube and long-form content
This is perhaps one of the reasons why we weren’t as focused on Instagram, since we felt that our product and brand is better fit for a deeper discussion which YouTube was a good match for.
Even our own videos are very in-depth. When we do a product review, it’s usually a 30-minute conversation. And I don’t think there are a lot of brands that can pick a single product and make a video that long on it. It can be quite intense. But obviously we have customers that want to watch a 30 minute review.
We’ve even taken some of our 30 minute videos and run them as ads. You have to have patience, or be really interested in watches for those. But it’s actually worked pretty well, which is kind of fine.
Wrapping up
This is the first part of the articles series with Vaer — in the second part we speak about what they could be doing differently, how they’re using ambassadors and influencers, and the various different challenges they’re facing.
Thanks for reading this far! See you in the next one :)
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