We recently connected with Hansel De Haro and have shared our conversation below.
Hansel, appreciate you joining us today. Crazy stuff happening is almost as certain as death and taxes – it’s technically “unexpected” but something unexpected happening is to be expected and so can you share a crazy story with our readers
Ever since we launched the brand, it’s been composed of nothing but challenges of all different sorts. But, having the right mindset and attitude that nothing happens overnight, especially when you’re starting out, are key. The best approach that has helped us so far is focusing on our mission and vision, ensuring quality is where we can, and that our customers are not only happy with our product but we’re building relationships with them.
Now, speaking about stories, we have a few that we can name, but we’ll mention two that have navigated us and used to fuel our motivation.
Story 1 – CEASE AND DESIST: A few months before launching our second, but first official, signature collection, we received a cease and desist letter from a competitor brand that was positioning in the same industry as us. This created a lot of concern initially because we had no idea of why this was happening or was going on, especially when we have never heard about them. After getting lawyers involved (and there goes unexpected budget expenses) it turned out this brand had launched after us and was trying to use their big pockets (that came from a different source and not their business) to push us out of the way. Interestingly enough, it was later discovered that, allegedly, we may have been a source of inspiration for some of the things they did as far as their branding goes – or else it was a big coincidence, which is highly unlikely.
Ultimately, the whole thing was completely dropped by them after our lawyers responded, since they could’ve ended up in trouble because we were in business before them. We were actually offered by our lawyers to do a counter case against them, but my response was: I can’t dedicate my time to fight this or to go out of my way and try to hurt another person/business. My attention is focused on our products, providing good quality to our customers, building a relationship with a community and encouraging our fitness family that love us to become the best version of themselves when they wear our products.
Why is this story so significant to us: It showed us that, even when you think nobody is watching, there may be more people looking than what you think. Therefore, consider yourself always being looked at by a big crowd. It’ll push you to achieve a higher quality control for your brand, your products, your clients, and everything around your company. Also, even though this was an unpleasant experience, especially when we were getting ready for our second and most important release, it’s good to see that other competitors may see us as a challenge. Perspective is everything.
Story 2 – AD HACKS: Last year was a really difficult and rough year for our brand. During 2019 and all of 2020, our business was very positioned and “dependent” on social media ads to generate revenue, especially in the two social media platforms that have been around for some time. After a big clash that took place between a tech giant and these social media platforms over privacy protection, it created a ripple negative effect in the performance of our ads, resulting in a significant loss for our company.
Moreover, as all this was happening, while we were preparing for Black Friday last year, our ads account was hacked. The hacker tried to run a campaign for $10k from our budget, and not only that created a huge conflict between the ads manager, our bank and another payment gateway we use, but we were not able to run our ads since our account was temporarily disabled for security reasons.
Our take on these incidents: We try not to see things as “OMG, this is terrible”. We are more like, “What can we learn from this to improve upon?”.
The result: Great people came onboard to help and became part of our team, organically, because they legitimately cared about our brand. I’m talking specifically about a great friend and former co-worker, Sarah Garcia, our PR, Branding & Creative Director. Sarah literally rolled up her sleeves and helped me strip down our entire branding and marketing strategy. This of course, resulted in a huge pause in our business from a marketing perspective, but we were able to come up with a much stronger and much less dependent strategy that will allow us to grow without being tied to a specific platform, and, needless to say, our community deserves nothing but the best. Plus, when this strategy gets scaled very soon, it will do nothing but great things, organically for our brand.
The main motivation during this difficult time: OUR CUSTOMERS. Even though we were going through hard times, the support from our customers meant EVERYTHING and came through as a huge force of motivation like always. Every like, comment, story post, and tag complementing our products, and/or responses to our marketing emails letting us know how happy they were with their product, not only helped the brand stay its course, but were motivational forces for us to work twice as hard into figuring out a best course of actions for the brand.
The realization: Because we have worked so hard in our quality (even though we are far from perfection) and have always cared about our customers by going the extra mile for them in any case, our return customer rate is 60%, meaning that our customers are mostly happy with our products enough to give us a second try. This paid off so much from a joy point of view because by viewing all this support even when we were not running ads, meant the whole world to us.
I’d like to take this opportunity and tell every single customer and community member on behalf of myself and our team, THANK YOU. We see everything you guys write to use, email us and tell us about it. We are very thankful and give us a daily dose of strength to work hard and represent all of you.
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?
Not unlike many other business owners in Miami, my story, as well as the story of my co-founder and close friend, Gus Baldor, began prior to immigrating to the United States. Born and raised in La Habana, Cuba, I always had a passion for designing and presenting innovative products.
I’ve always liked to create things and entrepreneurship is in my heart. Throughout my adolescence and into my adult life, I’ve always been either brainstorming for my next project or actually executing it.
Gus and I founded ALPHA Territory to bring something new and unique to the world of fitness fashion because, let’s face it, the last thing the industry needs is yet another mediocre brand without character.
We did it because we hate the low-quality materials many companies use and their poor customer support. To us, building a community and delivering a product with the quality and attention to detail that consumers really deserve represents the driving force of everything we do.
We take the time and effort to deliver the best quality fashion and experience so that you’ll feel proud and confident when you wear our products. We won’t produce anything without an extensive process of revisions and quality control. That’s how we ensure our audience receives products that are durable and of the highest standard.
We don’t sell athletic fashion just for the sake of it. Our ultimate goal is for you to feel motivated, pumped and 100% convinced you have an unstoppable attitude the moment you put on any of our products.
We are extremely proud of where we started and look forward to continuing to grow with our network. It was my fitness transformation that motivated me to launch the company. I went from being overweight and devoid of energy to being the best “me” I can be – motivated and happy through the power of fitness.
But, more importantly, the natural sense of camaraderie that is formed with others in fitness motivated us to create a brand that directly served the wellness community. That’s why we aim to give you that extra little motivational push towards your goals each day, whether they be fitness-related or not.
We believe in respecting our customers, providing top-notch quality at an affordable price, and delivering on what we promise.
Moreover, one of the biggest blessings our company has been fortunate to have is how organically it has evolved from an internal team perspective. We would not be where we are today if it wasn’t for the team that has grown with ALPHA Territory and has managed operations based on the teammates’ different areas of expertise. The best thing is that each of the people who have been involved with the company have the same thing in common: the belief in our brand, what we stand for, who we are as a team, and what we want to represent as a community. Without these, things within our organization would be completely different.
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
Gus and I go way back – 15 years. He was starting out his DB Motoring Group (now the largest privately owned wheel distributor in South Florida), and was looking to develop a logo and brand identity for the business as well as a website and all sorts of digital assets for the company. At that time, I had started my graphic and web design digital agency, de Haro Group, so he and I met so we could take care of everything he needed to develop his brand further.
What started as a business relationship ended up becoming a solid friendship. I knew Gus was starting his business and he knew I was starting mine. We mutually helped each other along the way and built a great friendship. Over time, I was fortunate to see Gus’ business growing, as we developed three more subsequent brands under his main brands (Traklite Wheels, Encore Alloys, and All Terrain Wheels). The path was always the same for both as we worked together: we were just very transparent, honest and always taking care of each other. That’s it. Over time, that translates into a great trust and appreciation for each other, where as a result, we have become great friends.
Down the road, I started ALPHA Territory in 2017. Somewhere around the end of 2017 or 2018 Gus and I were talking about this brand I was pushing and he mentioned he’d loved to get involved with me in it. The rest is history and, honestly, to me it was a no-brainer. Reality is that I feel very fortunate because, besides him being a great friend, when it comes to being a business partner, he’s the type that you barely see nowadays: he’s 100% transparent, always very enthusiastic, a risk taker, and without a doubt very experienced as a result of everything he has already gone through with his own businesses.
I’ve definitely learned a lot from him, especially something that he said once that always stuck: “If you’re not putting out fires, you’re not in business.” That came very handy in one of the first real speed bumps we faced with the brand, where I was getting anxious because I always give 100% in anything I do, and when things don’t go the way I want, I get fixated on how I can remedy the situation. His perspective helped me realize that “fires” are normal and not necessarily because of something I may have done wrong.
The main pillars for the great relationship Gus and I have to do is that our relationship is based over trust, communication, being relentless and driven no matter what, not taking “no” as an options and having the same vision about ALPHA Territory, which is to make it grow globally and inspiring people around the world to become better and to feel unstoppable the moment they wear our clothes.
One last thing that I’ll leave you with about our ALPHA Territory co-founder is that, since day one of working together: even in the toughest times, his energy and optimism makes anyone around him feel comfortable and inspired.
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
Our nature as a team and company is that we are very passionate about what we do. We definitely are risk takers, no matter what we may be up against. And starting our brand was definitely a huge risk.
I remember when the time came for looking for a supplier, we had two roads: ONE: finding a supplier that would manufacture our designs, completely designed by us and make them exactly as such, or TWO: finding a supplier that would have built-in designs already created, and they would just put our logo on them.
We decided to go with the harder and more complicated way: doing our own designs from scratch. Our logic was simple: we want to provide quality and something different. We want to show attention to detail in our products, from the design pattern and style, to the quality of the hang tags, the bags, the drawstring tips with our logo on it, etc.
To us, as a starting brand, this was a risky move. Not only would the process to get started be longer, but the cost would be significantly higher. In the end, we ended up betting on our future customers and that they would appreciate what we were doing for them with our products.
The result: We have a 60% customer return rate which is the number one reason and main source of motivation for us to continue pushing this brand forward.The moment we noticed this, it was a huge relief knowing that our community accepted our products with so much positivity. No money can replace the satisfaction felt after you put so much work into something, betting other people somehow will notice it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://alphaterritory.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alphaterritory/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alphaterritory/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alphaterritory
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTx_JjW3yjaD7Vluffy3FMA
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@alphaterritory https://www.pinterest.com/alphaterritory
Image Credits
Salomon Urraca