On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Haley Weidenbaum. Haley is the Co-Founder and CEO of Everhem, a custom window treatment brand revolutionizing the design industry. We talk about how Haley self-funded Everhem with her husband Adam, outlasted the pandemic-driven home industry boom while continuing to grow, and how the company uses sales data to identify consumer trends in the trade industry and so much more!
Haley Weidenbaum is the Co-Founder and CEO of Everhem, a custom window treatment brand simplifying the design process. After a decade as an interior designer in Los Angeles, Haley noticed a recurring pain point: window treatments were costly, inconsistent, and error-prone.
In 2018, she and her husband Adam self-funded Everhem to offer an easy online solution for consumers and interior designers. Today, Everhem is a multi-million-dollar business with a less than 1% mistake rate, serving top designers and A-list clients like Amber Valetta, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Nacho + Blanca Figueras.
Everhem has thrived beyond the pandemic boom, blending trend insights with exceptional craftsmanship, with every order still hand-sewn in Los Angeles. Haley’s expertise in design and entrepreneurship offers invaluable lessons for building customer-first businesses.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Haley Weidenbaum
Understanding our customer. I know I talked about the customer experience from the Everhem point of view is vitally important. But understanding who our customer is and what they want is something that we've done a lot of practice in doing.
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 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.
Chase Clymer
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today I'm welcoming to show Haley Weidenbaum. She is the co-founder and CEO of Everhem, a custom window treatment brand revolutionizing the design industry. Haley, welcome to the show.
Haley Weidenbaum
Thank you so much for having me, Chase. I'm excited to chat.
Chase Clymer
So, custom window treatment. Talk to me. What are you guys actually selling? What am I buying?
Haley Weidenbaum
We sell Roman shades and woven wood shades and drapery or cafe curtains for your windows. So, pieces of Roman shade or drapery that you are putting on top of your windows for aesthetic reasons or functional reasons and everything is custom made to an eighth of an inch.
Chase Clymer
That's pretty interesting. I can't wait to get into it a little bit more.
Chase Clymer
But I mean, where did the idea to sell custom window treatments come from? When did that strike your fancy? When were you like, you know what, I want to do this?
Haley Weidenbaum
Yes, it's kind of out of left field for a lot of people because not a lot of people, especially if you're not in the interior design world, understand window treatment. I had been a working interior designer for about eight years.
So during that process, I quickly learned about window treatment and how important it is for the design of your space. I was working in mainly residential but some commercial and office spaces as well.
All my clients needed to cover their windows for privacy, for sun protection, and also to finish the space from the interior. I quickly had a handbook of what products worked best, what fabric I liked.
But when I needed to make these custom window treatments, every window was different. So it's really not the best and the smartest design decision to go into a store and buy something that is a fixed size because it's not going to fit your windows and also it's not going to look good.
Custom was always the route I went and most interior designers went to make it look great. I had trouble finding a one-stop shop. I tried all the places that we all can find on Google. It just was a horrible experience.
The products they offered weren't what I or my client was looking for. There were too many options. It was very complicated for me while I'm a professional. Then the clients were so overwhelmed. I just had an “aha” moment one day where it was a combination of being a little tired of the interior design clients and a little burnt out, to be honest with you.
Then having been faced with all these window treatment problems that I was trying to overcome
and tackle and being introduced to the right people at the right time.
I want to create a brand that does this better than all the other companies that I've tried before. I want it to be design driven. I want the product to be high quality. I want the customer service to be exceptional.
Because that was the worst part of being an interior designer is when you're like, okay, I found this company, they're going to make something custom for my clients. Then they don't respond to your emails, they don't respond to your texts, they under deliver on their lead times and it makes you look bad to the client.
I was like, I could do this way better. I have a background in customer service. Previous to my design career, I worked in hospitality. The interaction between a guest or a client to me comes very naturally.
I just thought of this idea and called my husband at the time who was a graphic designer and his first life was in finance. I was like, Hey, I need you to make a brand name, help build the website, but also like to run all our financial models. I'll be like the creative director. He said yes, and we launched in August 2019. So it's now five years ago.
Chase Clymer
Congrats on 5 years. How long was it from ideation until you shared it with your husband?
Haley Weidenbaum
Literally, summer 2018, as I said, it was like an “aha” moment where I was like, I'm doing this. I called him. In October 2018, he officially quit his full-time job. I started to take less clients. I still had residential clients that I was still working with.
That was nice because I had that income coming in while I'm trying to start a new business. It took us about 10 months to get the website. Found the company, brand it and get the website built. That's why from October 2018 until August 2019.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Then did you guys get investment or did you bootstrap this?
Haley Weidenbaum
We are self-funded and we still are. We are like a true family business because I work with my husband and our team is growing. We now have a team of 8 people including my husband and I. We're small but mighty and it's nice.
Chase Clymer
All the good ones are.
Haley Weidenbaum
Exactly. It's a nice place to be. We want to grow but right now we're at such a good spot. Our organizational chart is just perfect how it is. Adam and I are founders. Right now, we are still part of the company in a very strong way. Day-to-day orders, we no longer are having to deal with, luckily. But from the beginning, I was doing virtual consultations with customers around the country. Now I have a CX team that does them all.
So it's nice that with my husband, we ran the whole company for about two years by ourselves. Then in the last three years, I hired a team. It's nice because we're so invested. But the team we hired is scaling and growing this company to a place that I actually never knew was possible. It's just about hiring the right people and seeing how all just your dreams can really come true.
Chase Clymer
I have so many questions about getting started, but this is natural. I have to follow up here. Do you find, as delegating these jobs out, that it's easier to delegate and know what success looks like because you had to do that job yourself and figure it out and go through the motions?
Haley Weidenbaum
Yeah. Because when we had to do it ourselves, we quickly learned we're not good at certain things.
We're ideal people. That's what my husband and I are really champions at. But managing and executing is not our strong suit. So when we find people that have those skills, they're able to run with our ideas. It's the best feeling in the world.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. All right. Now take me back to getting this thing off the ground. So you have a website built, you had a concept of a product. How did it materialize into building custom products? Walk me through that. Did you find an awesome partner? How does this work?
Haley Weidenbaum
Because of my knowledge of the window treatment industry and how to make custom window treatments paired with my husband's branding brain, we knew that user experience was the most important thing here.
Because when you go to make a custom window treatment, it's a considered purchase. It's not cheap. It's something that you want to do once for your house and not do again until you move or you're renovating. We knew that we needed to make the process as simple as possible online, layered with getting to feel and touch swatches that we switched shipped out or doing virtual consultations so someone could talk to someone like me who was the design expert.
When you layer all these pieces, it just gives the customer confidence that they're making the right choice. Because custom's scary, because you want to measure twice and cut once type of vibe. We wanted to do like, instead of like DIY, we're doing it with you. We're here like every step of the way. I realized that's the key to it.
Because when I was working with a lot of my interior design clients,
The clients knew what they wanted. They almost needed an interior designer to just give them that reassurance or show them the product that they know that they want. They were too nervous to purchase that sofa on their own. They just needed an interior designer to say, like, Yeah, that's the sofa. This is the correct size and get this fabric.
It's that reassurance that gives the customers the confidence that I really wanted Everhem to be able to do for just window treatment.
I also love the fact that I know the whole home. I've trained everyone on my CX team to think about window treatment, inclusive of the entire design of the home. When we're on virtual consultations, we're like, Oh, what's your paint color?
A lot of people use common paint colors. We'll be like, Oh, well, that paint color from Benjamin Moore works really well with this fabric from Everhem. IWe already have this design playbook.
When customers hear, Oh, Everhem, is holistically thinking about the design of my space, they feel even more confident.
From the beginning, that has been one of our core values is design-driven. Making sure that we are not just offering a functional product, but also a design-driven product.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. You've got customer experience at the forefront, design-driven. You launch. What happens? How do you get customers that aren't your friends and family? How did you put the word out there?
Haley Weidenbaum
We launched in August 2019. As we all know, March, April 2020 was COVID. We experienced having to shut down our workroom and we made everything here. At the time, we made everything here in Los Angeles. At this point today, we make our soft goods here in Los Angeles and our hardware in Atlanta. We still manufactured everything in America. So we closed down for a few months.
Our website was still open and we were offering, very big discount and we would follow through with the order once the workroom opened back up. We opened back up in May and COVID as we all know, everyone was home, everyone started to work on their home. Everyone was like, I'm staring at these windows, like all day long, the sun is in my eyes while I'm on my Zoom calls.
The home industry saw a big boom during COVID. We were lucky enough that custom window treatment was one of them. We had this boost in sales because of COVID and the fact that everyone was focusing on the home.
During that time, I believe my network of interior designers that were already following me on Instagram then would follow. Everhem created some natural partnerships. With people, we didn't have a partnership program. We didn't have an affiliate program. I don't even know if the word affiliate existed five years ago or I didn't know about it. Interior designers would reach out to us and then an interior designer was working with maybe a semi celebrity or an influencer and they needed window treatment for their houses.
We're like, okay, great. We'll give you a discount if you post. I had just kind of faked it. I was like, this discount and we'll get like I didn't have a playbook for what partnerships should look like. Because our product is such a considered purchase, I couldn't give away the free product.
Normally these affiliates, you're giving away a sweater or a face mask for free. We're not that. Luckily, a lot of people are like, Yeah, I'll take that discount. They posted about us. It was a loose handshake. I didn't have contracts at the time.
It was just word of mouth through organic social that really helped us gain all our initial customers and our fan base. People really fell in love with the fact that Everhem.com didn't look like a sterile brand that just looked like all the other window treatment companies that they had been to before.
They liked that it had some character and they could relate. From there, we didn't start paid marketing until 2023. We went two and a half years without putting any paid behind our marketing. It was all organic social and word of mouth. It was really cool to be able to say that.
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
I say it often on the show. If you can get from zero to one without paid advertising, it means you've got a product market fit. I think that a lot of people try to get over the hump and build their business. When I say zero to one, in my head, I'm thinking of getting that $1 million mark of revenue per year. But I'm also thinking of building an actual sustainable business. Right?
I think that. I've had these conversations behind closed doors with partners of mine in the
problems instead of understanding their product and what their customers want out of their product.
Anytime I hear a story where the first couple years, we didn't do anything because we didn't have to. We weren't looking to do that sort of scale at that moment. All it does is it highlights the fact that you have an amazing product that people want.
Haley Weidenbaum
Yeah. Today, we probably should be spending more on ad spend and we're not.
Chase Clymer
I think everyone says that, and especially in hindsight, it was so much cheaper back then.
Haley Weidenbaum
Yeah, but if we spend more on ad spend and we then get more, retain more customers, do I have the CX team to handle all of those inquiries? Because we still are sending swatches, having virtuals, emailing, one-on-one with people about their windows. I want to make sure that we can handle the influx of customers if we start to spend more on ads. It's a delicate dance there because we want to continue to provide this exceptional customer service that we've always provided.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I think that's something that's super crucial to highlight with our conversation here is nothing you are selling is off the shelf. You're creating the product after they have purchased it. Talk to me about earlier that it's considered a purchase and just to let everyone know like, yeah, it's a higher price point type item because it's custom and it's curated to what their specific needs are.
Talk to me about what you think are the advantages of that and then maybe to highlight some of the disadvantages of this model for other people out there trying to listen to this and learn from this.
Haley Weidenbaum
Yeah. I think the customer journey is a little bit longer for us. We have to look at it for 30, 60 days. What touch points does the customer have with Everhem that's going to get them to purchase what we're always thinking about.
In this day and age where everything is kind of going towards AI, going towards automation, we aren't ever going to be that because when you do something custom, there has to be a human touch point where the customer is measuring or they're getting help from us on a virtual to measure. The robots aren't going to be measuring windows.
We're always going to have that human touch point, which I think is really important to identify is your product, one of those products where the human touch point is important to get the customer to purchase. We're happy to live in that blue ocean because not many brands are staying there. A lot of brands are trying to automate everything. Even the simplest, you go and try to ask a question.
We're not giving the robot chat like it's a real person because there's not a one fit answer for everybody because everybody has different windows and the product is extremely customizable. I think that I want to be in the future and the future of our business is motorization. That's a whole nother animal in regards to the future of from a customer service point of view, we will always be real humans behind our company.
At our workroom too, people are sewing and sewing window treatment is a craft and it's a skill. We will never have an assembly line ever. It will not be that. You know the product you're buying.
Our average order volume is I'd say, 1200, 1500.
Paying for something that's a little higher, the product you're getting is going to last you a lifetime, essentially, if you stay in the house. That's what we can stand behind, which I think people value in companies that can stand behind their product.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I think to show that value, I'm just assuming I'm playing around the website. You're teaching me all sorts of stuff.
Haley Weidenbaum
I know. We really are. It's so funny because my husband knew nothing about window treatment. Now he knows more than me. There's a lot to know. What we try to do is filter the industry jargon and the way the window treatment industry speaks about window treatment. Filter it to make sense to the regular customer.
Because I've spoken a lot about interior designers. They're half of our business and then regular customers are half of our business.
Because in this day and age, people who can't afford an interior designer are able to have access to the dream home and dream furniture they've always wanted because of all these brands that have popped up that are providing interior design that's more accessible. That's exactly what we're trying to do.
We have a whole trade program with interior design where you can do whatever the interior designer dreams up of, meaning providing their own fabric if they wanted to. They want us to construct the shade in a different way. We can do that for interior designers. But everyone else, we've curated our offerings. There's only good options. It's not too many options.
We're building out our brand. We're building out our offerings year by year. But we're not going to inundate the customer with too many things because that's when you're scared and like, Oh my god, I'm overwhelmed. I'm jumping off the website. I'm done.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?
Haley Weidenbaum
I feel like what we've done a lot of work on is understanding our customer. I know I talked about the customer experience from the Everhem point of view is vitally important. But understanding who our customer is and what they want is something that we've done a lot of practice in doing.
So for example, when we first launched, we launched with just Roman Shades and Drapery. In the first 2.5 years, I got so many requests for cafe curtains. Those short curtains with a little baby rod. I was like, yeah, we can make those. We started to make them do it like one-offs for interior designers or a client who asked. Then eventually, I was like, all right, this is like, this is popular. This is gonna be a trend.
I was trend forecasting maybe for 2023, I think. We brought it online and it's been a hit ever since. There's a lot of design trends leaning towards this cottage core type of design trend, which is bringing back the quaint cafe curtains and things like that. That all came about because we were listening to our customers and interior designers and seeing what they wanted. We have laid out the next year or two of products that we want to launch.
It's really based on what a lot of people have been requesting, not just what I want to do. I keep my pulse on the interior design scene and make sure that we're incorporating things that are happening in the design world. But listening to the customer is also so vital to our business.
Chase Clymer
I think that goes for any type of business. If you're looking to upsell a customer or cross sell them something down the line, just ask them, like, well, what else do you want? It's wild how much people are like, I have money for this if you have this.
Haley Weidenbaum
Exactly. What are you not offering that your consumers need is the best question you can ask them.
Chase Clymer
If I'm listening to this, I need an awesome window treatment for my house. What should I do? Where should I go?
Haley Weidenbaum
Okay. So your first step is to go to everhem.com. E-V-E-R-H-E-M.com. We have a how it works page and step by step process.You can enter it anytime. If you don't know anything about window treatment and you just want to explore and get inspiration, we have that page. If you're the type of person who immediately wants to jump on a virtual consultation, we have a link that you can book your consultation. If you like to just email, we have a link there.
If you're ready to go and you've already explored what you were talking about and you're ready to order swatches, we can send you swatches within days. Obviously, our favorite type of orders are the passive ones where everyone explores our website and then you hop to our customizer.
The customizer is another step by step process that if you're sitting your windows just behind you, Chase, if you have a tape measure, you'll be able to measure right there and then enter your dimensions, see our beautiful renderings of the fabrics with and without linings, understand our control mechanisms.
You'll be able to check out within minutes. Another great way is to explore our Instagram. Our Instagram has wonderful photos just like our website, but we know scrolling and being able to see the videos that we've posted and the beautiful interior design photos really give people that extra inspiration and reassurance. That's a great place. That's just at Everhem.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Haley, thank you so much for coming on our show today and sharing all those amazing insights.
Haley Weidenbaum
Thank you for having me, Chase.
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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