We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Amelia O’Dowd a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Amelia, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the most important things we can do as business owners is ensure that our customers feel appreciated. What’s something you’ve done or seen a business owner do to help a customer feel valued?
It’s the little things that make me feel appreciated as a customer. When I like a business and I get behind their story, I feel good about giving them my money and am proud to use the product or service they provide.
It’s easy to do monetary things like giving a free hat box or free feathers or a discount. But what really counts is knowing customers as people. It’s asking – and really caring about – how they’re doing, how their kids are, how their dog is. Finding places and people that we really connect with is a huge challenge, even more so in the post-covid world. We send hand written notes with every order we send out, so that our new online customers understand that we really are a small business packing every order by hand in our. brick and mortar store. For my really good customers, I do all kinds of things from calling spouses to get them to surprise their loved one by paying off a layaway to working closely with our milliner on designing and making the most perfect powder blue western-inspired wedding hat. My team and I work hard not just on selling hats but also building community.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m Amelia O’Dowd and I am the owner of Brim on Fifth. My store is in Dayton, Ohio, where I’ve lived for the last 15 years, after a long stint in Boston. I opened my store at the end of the Great Recession in 2012. I’d gone back to school and finished my undergrad at Antioch University and upon turning in my last paper I realized that my job options with the degree where essentially the same as they’d been before, which is to say, not great. Facing a lifetime in a soul crushing cubical, I bought a really ugly building that had sat empty for two years, paying for it in absolutely all the ways no one should ever finance a business. We’d tried to get a loan the normal way, but there were no comparables and the bank wouldn’t do it (they told us they would lend to us if we wanted to open a coffee shop). So my husband and I took out a bunch of cash advances on credit cards all on the same day, cashed out my retirement, and asked family for loans. We had six months to renovate and turn a profit before the penalties on my IRA and interest from the credit cards hit. With the help of our neighbors and friends, we go the building renovated and opened the doors in three months and by six moths we were able to get a mortgage and pay off the credit cards and put my retirement back in the IRA. Every one of the people who helped us renovate has confessed to me that they thought I was absolutely crazy and that I’d lose my shirt trying to sell hats. Eleven years later, here I am still selling hats.
Hats are a niche market, with a really wide variety of customers. Frequently, people don’t know they’re hat people until they start shopping with us. There aren’t a lot of hat stores in the US and there are even fewer like mine that a person can walk into and just start trying things on (in most traditional stores, hats are kept behind glass). First time customers often say that they don’t look good in hats, but their experience with hats up until this moment simply hasn’t had enough sizes, colors, and style variety for them to find the right one. And, a lot of the time people have a narrow idea of what hats are – Prohibition era gangsters, hipsters, church ladies, the SNL Big Dumb Hat skit, that cap dad’s been wearing since the dawn of time, or vacation sun protection – that don’t get challenged or expanded until they walk into a hat store. So we get people trying things on, listen to what they do or don’t like about each one they try and adjust our suggestions accordingly until they find something that they love. We take a lot of pride in getting people into the right hat.
A few years ago we started hosting Customer Portrait Day. We do it twice a year, usually in the early summer and again in the fall. All of the pictures of people on our website and in our social media come from these events. No model will ever capture the confidence of a real hat wearer nor will any stylist put together the variety of looks our customers bring. I love shining a light on the individuality and beautiful humanity of my people. And it’s a really fun day – hat people hanging out talking about hats and meeting people that they would normally never come into contact with. We’ve had a lot of friendships blossom through these events.
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
Last year, I started working with one of my milliners, Cha Cha’s House of Ill Repute (www.chachashouse.com) on small scale manufacturing of private label goods. Private label had been out of bounds for my brand up until this point because the main manufacturers had huge per color per style minimums that would have taken years for my store to sell through and tie up massive amounts of capital in the meantime. Working with Cha Cha has enabled not only small scale testing but real innovation. Cha Cha approach to work is experimental – she never holds back from trying whatever crazy idea we come up with, even when she doesn’t see where I’m going. Because we’re working on a small scale, I’ve been able to source raw materials that none of my competitors are using, which we then use in innovative ways, creating hat styles with functionally no competition. There are two reasons this is important. First, as I grow my online business, having styles with no direct competition means I won’t loose over small price differences. Second, my customers who have everything they need from the mainline manufactures are seeking new and unusual styles.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
I started Brim in 2012. Social media was an entirely different animal then. For the first year, I got really good interactions on Facebook and was building an online community but then Facebook changed to pay to play for businesses. Now my Facebook page functions more as a second website. It’s essential to have but is not a source of new customers. 2012 was also the early days of Instagram, when it was just photos and filters. We’ve maintained a steady stream of mostly regional followers, though at a certain point, organic growth became harder and harder to achieve and the type of content both Instagram and Facebook push has grown more and more time consuming.
I started using Later to schedule my posts years ago and I went back and forth with different employees, juggling responsibility for content creation and posting. Twice I tried outsourcing social media to agencies. Both times were expensive failures, with neither agency getting the voice or really understanding what my business does. Last year I found a local social media manager in Hofrichter Creative. Working with Abby has been wonderful. She really understands the voice of the brand, what we do, and who our customers are, because she is local and visits the shop regularly. She’s creative and genuinely enjoys the puzzle that is social media algorithms.
To anyone looking to hire out social media, really look at the body of work of the agency. If you have any hesitation about what they’re producing for others, keep looking. Understand if you are responsible for supplying photos and if you are, don’t be fooled by how good the photos of other accounts the agency manages. Look at what they do with the content their client provides them with and read all the copy. Have your questions about voice and audience detailed and well thought out before you meet with them. Trust your gut on whether or not it’s working and be willing to cut and run if it’s not working. Dragging it out isn’t good for anyone – remember that bad content hurts your brand.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.brimonfifth.com
- Instagram: @brimonfifth
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brimonfifth/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR-uZnDY3WWXF1i36DMhmXg
Image Credits
All portraits are Aaron Paschal (https://ap2photography.com/) All product and store photos are Brim on Fifth