On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Walter Hinchman. Walter is the CEO and founder of the athlete and active lifestyle brand Swolverine. We talk about taking calculated risks, optimizing content marketing, continuous efforts to grow your business, and so much more!
Walter Hinchman is the CEO and founder of Swolverine. He has multiple fitness certifications, as well as a Masters in Business from the University of Nevada.
Walter has more than 12 years in the fitness industry, and is currently pursuing his Masters in Human Nutrition And Functional Medicine.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Walter Hinchman
Figuring out exactly where to place your investment and how to do it and being strategic about it is the name of the game.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today, I'm welcoming to the show Walter Hinchman. He is the CEO and founder of the athlete and active lifestyle brand, Swolverine. Walter, welcome to the show.
Walter Hinchman
Thanks for having me, Chase. Awesome. I'm excited to get into it.
Chase Clymer
Quickly though, let's just talk about the types of products you guys are selling right now. If I went to your website, what am I going to find?
Walter Hinchman
Yeah. So we have a whole line of different sports and performance vitamins and supplements. Just anything from a pre-workout to a protein powder to your everyday vitamins and capsules like probiotic or crude oil.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome. Alright.
Well, take me back in time. Where did the idea for this business come from?
Walter Hinchman
Yeah. So right out of my master's program, right out of my MBA, I was looking for a job, but I couldn't find a job and I’m going to the gym every day.
And so eventually I was offered a position there as a certified personal trainer. So I was like, “Okay, whatever, I'll take it.”
So I started training there and then eventually moved on to selling supplements in the gym and they were awful. They were absolutely terrible. I mean, it was really hard to put down, couldn't drink them, they just tasted really bad.
And so it kind of spawned from that idea. And then the biggest thing was we started doing a lot– or I started doing a lot of research at that point in time and most supplements are, and still are, under-dosed.
So they don't provide enough of the ingredients you need to provide an ergogenic or performance benefit. So it's really like all these brands and companies are providing these products with these awesome ingredients in them, but not enough to really do anything for your performance.
So that was a huge problem.
So from there, fast track a few years after that, and we had the opportunity to start our own company, met a manufacturer. So we did it. We took that jump and me and my co-founder went into it.
And we started straight out of our house right next to the university. Started with a few off-the-shelf products and then it grew from there.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome. I'm definitely going to dive in a bit more about that zero to one thing.
Walter Hinchman
Okay.
Chase Clymer
How did you guys decide to differentiate yourself in such a competitive market with such a low barrier of entry?
Walter Hinchman
Yeah. The biggest thing, the dosing issue, right? That was number one. So differentiate yourself by putting the actual clinical doses in these products.
So researching, making sure that they have evidence-based outcomes was number one. It's the biggest differentiator that we wanted to have in the market.
The other part of that was providing full transparency and labeling. And most products and supplements at the time didn't tell you exactly how much of each ingredient was in the product.
So you'll hear different brands, say that, for proprietary reasons, hey, we don't want people having access to our formula, but it's really just a way to mask, how much of that ingredient is in the product so that they can just sprinkle it in and then save on their backend and get a larger margin.
So number two was the transparency in the labeling. Those are the real 2 biggest differentiating factors for us as a brand with our products.
Chase Clymer
Now, was that out of the gate? That was what you guys wanted to do? Or did you end up there and iterate to that point over time?
Walter Hinchman
Out of the gate, that's what we wanted to do.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome.
So from the ideation of this and you're like, “All right, we're going to build a supplement brand, the decision is made,” how long did it take you to get a product in hand?
Walter Hinchman
Probably took us a few months. And at that point, I was like, we had no money.
So we started very grassroots. Um, I mean, if being completely transparent, I think we started the entire brand with a thousand bucks.
So that's everything from the branding to getting on Shopify to getting, at the time, MailChimp, and all of our applications together in addition to our inventory.
And we got really lucky because the biggest barrier to entry for us at the time and probably still is, is obviously the capital investment to start with.
So we got lucky in the sense that we partnered with a manufacturer that was like, “Hey, if you need to buy 20 or 30 units at a time, we'll do it. And we'll give you really good pricing.”
They gave us very great volume pricing on nothing.
And so if we didn't have that at the beginning, it would have been very difficult for us to progress or even start with the company and brand without investment.
Chase Clymer
No, it's very top of mind for me. I just replied to an email from a young entrepreneur. And he's like, “Hey, my budget is a couple thousand.” I think he said $2,000 or $3,000 in the email.
He's like, “Can you guys help me with a custom site? I got this big vision.” I just went, “You're spending your money in the wrong place.” I was like, “Do this as scrappy as possible. Use it off the shelf theme. Any money that you have needs to go into marketing. Go get sales. I'll talk to you when you hit a million dollars.”
Walter Hinchman
Yep. Exactly.
I mean, you gotta start somewhere. And it's like figuring out exactly where to place your investment and how to do it and being strategic about it is the name of the game.
I mean, that's what you have to do. You have to bootstrap. And if you can't do that, then you're not going to be around for very long.
Chase Clymer
Do you think the fact that you guys had such a limited budget actually helped you guys get to that next level?
Walter Hinchman
Oh, yeah. I mean, without adversity and without challenge, you're never going to be able to overcome any obstacles that stand in your way.
And learning that and being able to, I guess, just overcome those things and be able to persist and have a lot of perseverance, has really taught us how to get through anything and through any obstacle that stands in our way.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I had a buddy that had a startup right out of college and he directly correlates their failure to their investment.
He was like, we weren't solving problems. We were throwing money at problems. And it's just... Once the money was gone, all the problems still existed.
Walter Hinchman
Exactly. Right?
And it's funny that you mentioned that because it's how we do things, you know, so we all say here at Swolverine, how you do anything is how you do everything.
So put everything into what you're doing, no matter what it is. Even if that's wiping down the shelves or mopping the office or going to formulation or working 12 hours a day, whatever it is, we're putting in as much effort as possible to get to that next level.
So yeah, it's, yeah.
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Chase Clymer
Awesome, Walter. Alright, so let's go back to getting this thing off the ground.
You got a product, you have an amazing partner that's helping you buy things for volume pricing and helping you with being able to afford to build this business.
How did you go and get your first customers? How are you making these sales?
Walter Hinchman
Oh my god, hustling. I mean, you have to hustle. I mean, if you're doing this with no investment and you're starting from the ground up, right, we're talking completely organic.
It's like, I'm asking my friends, I'm asking my family, hey, what do you guys take? Do you take multivitamins? Do you take omega-3? I've got that, great. Let's do it. Come to the website, here's the website, go buy it. That's just how you have to do it when you're first starting.
Just straight asking everyone we knew and getting them familiar and raising and hyping that brand awareness.
And then really going out and getting into the community. Doing events as much possibly as we could. We were weekend warriors, man.
We were going out every weekend to a CrossFit competition or to some kind of fitness event, to gyms, wherever it may be, driving 4 or 5 hours, setting up a little booth with 5 products and just talking to people.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. This comes up so much. Founders that build something cool are out there doing the things that don't scale at the beginning to get in front of people and get real-time feedback from potential customers.
Walter Hinchman
100%. Yeah. I mean, nothing that we do at the beginning is really scaling. That's not even on your mind. You know what I mean?
I remember when we first started, I kept Photoshop open for like 6 months on my computer because I didn't want to pay the $50 from the trial.
It's like, oh, we're doing that kind of stuff, trying to save every penny we have so that we can just buy another 10 units of a multivitamin. You know what I mean?
Everything we've done for, every year we've been in business goes directly back into the business to grow it.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome.
Now, was there an inflection point in your mind where all this hard work from going to these events and just the organic growth starting to happen? Was there ever a moment where you're like, I think we're onto something?
It's starting, something’s starting to click.
Walter Hinchman
You know, from the very beginning, I knew that we had a really strong brand.
The branding is great. I knew we had something special. We were doing something different. My founder and I are both really passionate about what we do. I have a business background.
There was no option for failure.
So it was like, it's going to work. I don't care how long it takes, but we're going to do everything we can every day to make sure that it does work.
So there was never a moment in my mind where it's like, hey, we're not doing enough or we're going to fail.
Because also, as you know, everything in Ecommerce, it's a micro failure, everything you do.
Whether it's an email marketing campaign or it's a promotion or whatever it is, it's never going to meet your expectations until you start acquiring more customers and getting to the next level.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, how did you guys do that? How did you acquire those more customers? How did you get to that, quote, unquote, next level?
Walter Hinchman
A lot of patience, I'd say, number one. But strategically speaking, there was just… there's always been a lot of things that we do all the time.
So a lot of irons are in the fire, no matter what time or season it is.
So we are huge on content marketing. The number one thing for us, obviously content is king, right? Traffic is God. We'll go back to that saying that's been around for 20 years.
And it was a matter of how do we grow this brand without spending any… without having any ad spend, how do we do that? Not easy, right? So we write.
Whether it's commercial content or informational content, whatever it may be, YouTube videos, getting that organic content out there to acquire heightened brand awareness from the top of the funnel, get people to the website, and then get that retargeting traffic has always been our number one strategy.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely, yeah.
Walter Hinchman
So right now we're almost at 10,000 sessions per day. And that's 80% organic traffic.
Chase Clymer
When did you guys start to go all in on organic and writing?
Walter Hinchman
Day one.
Chase Clymer
And how long until you noticed the organic traffic taking up on the website?
Walter Hinchman
I know it's funny. So I'm thinking back. I remember we had a meeting like the first couple of weeks, we're like, all right, we have 10 visitors today. That's insane.
How do we get to 20? And then how do we get to 50?
So it's just the idea generation, you know what I mean? And sitting there and saying, hey, here are the topics we can write about. Here are the customer marketing pieces, the educational pieces, whatever.
And we noticed it right away. I mean, you're not gonna get ranked. I think the average may have changed. I haven't looked at it in a long time, but it was like two years before something actually starts moving up, you know what I mean?
Especially when you're not doing a lot of high level SEO. So we knew it was gonna take time.And I'm like, we're just going to keep waiting. We're going to keep writing every day.
And then we're going to just keep waiting until we see that exponential J curve. And once that J curve comes, then we're just going to keep going.
So it really was like, you notice the change over time, you know, with every five to 10 pieces you're putting out, okay, you've got an incremental amount of increased traffic, great, let's keep doing it.
Um, and at the time too, it's like, we didn't have any ad spend. We didn't, we didn't advertise anywhere. So that was it. That's what we had to do.
It was social media and it was content and that's what we're driving.
Chase Clymer
And you said you were writing every day. Were you releasing content every day? Or is it once a week?
Walter Hinchman
Yeah, every day. I still write every day. On my computer right now, I have an article about yohimbe... So I'm going to release that probably later today.
Chase Clymer
Oh, that's amazing, Walter. Alright.
So you guys are producing content every day and this flywheel of organics is starting to take shape. And you alluded to it.
And then you said you started to set up the retargeting. And now was that like through paid?
Walter Hinchman
Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of that organic traffic that we're getting, we're retargeting right through Meta or through Google, whatever it may be.
So using those two channels, probably the most common channels for our advertising and retargeting campaigns.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I mean, that's the best way to do it. I'm assuming that your acquisition costs are quite low, having that traffic coming in from an organic source first and being super highly qualified.
Walter Hinchman
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, if you're spending specifically on prospecting, I mean, your acquisition cost is going to be through the roof.
So we're already having people who are connecting with the brand, right? We're going to seek information, whatever it is, those people are already coming back.
So the acquisition cost is much lower, much more optimized and efficient.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that's fantastic.
And you mentioned that you weren't putting much work into the SEO side of things. Obviously, content is a big piece of SEO.
But did you guys ever go back and revisit that and start to really turn up the juice on the SEO of all this content you have produced?
Walter Hinchman
Yeah, that was... So since content was our main and still is our main driver, our main strategic point, it's like, okay, cool.
We spend all of our time doing this. This is our number one strategy when it comes to marketing and organic marketing. How do we take this to... How do we optimize what we're doing now to rank higher?
So we found a really great technical SEO firm. We've been working with them for a few years now.
They're fantastic. And they've really helped us take all that content and really push it to page one, page two of Google. And it's been great.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah.
All right, Walter, if someone's listening to this and they want to check out the product, where should they go? What should they do?
Walter Hinchman
Yeah. So if you want to check out the product, you want to go check out more sports performance vitamins, you're looking for if you work out or a protein, you can go to swolverine.com.
We have over 35 products. We also do one on one nutrition coaching, which is awesome.
This is definitely the step you want to start with. If you're looking into supplements, get your nutrition dialed in.
We also do training programs. So we kind of have a whole 360 core offering.
Chase Clymer
Awesome.
Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Walter.
Walter Hinchman
Yeah, man. Thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Until next time!