Under The Hood: Sheeva from HoldOn
A chat with Sheeva, founder of HoldOn: Compostable Trash Bags
From day 1 to today. What’s the growth been like on HoldOn? How has revenue / team grown?
After 2 years of research and development, we launched in May 2022 on our D2C site holdonbags.com and within the first six months—we’ve seen more than 10x growth on both order and sales growth. It’s been incredible to see the consumer demand for everyday essentials that are a more sustainable option, but still deliver on the convenience that they expect.
In January 2023, we also launched on Amazon and have continued to see exponential growth there as well. And we’re beyond excited to step into retail in Q2 2023.
Internally, we’re a small but mighty team and have been able to bring on multiple full-time roles in addition to working with a team of freelancers and contractors that help bring everything to life and drive success.
Tell me about acquisition? What’s working?
In addition to strong organic demand—our core advertising channels are Facebook, Instagram, and Google. We’re also experimenting with TikTok to diversify our overall marketing mix.
Paid social is a channel that is very effective for us—specifically UGC content that leverages authentic testimonials, shows the product in use, and demonstrates how HoldOn is a simple, sustainable swap that can help make a big impact on our planet and the environment while meeting the consumer demands and expectations.
There is definitely a preconceived notion that natural or eco-friendly alternatives don’t work as well as traditional product, which is what makes content and video so important in our acquisition strategy— we have to show customers that our products work, and most importantly, that they are as strong and durable as the traditional single-use plastic products that they’re already using.
We also continue to acquire new customers at a cost that is ~50% less than what we forecasted for the business before we launched and had no baseline for performance. We made the assumption that the sustainability space would be super competitive, but we’re clearly filling a consumer need as sustainability is more and more in the forefront of the consumer mindset. People want a better solution and a better way to do the things that are part of their daily routine, and HoldOn fulfills that need perfectly.
What about conversion rate optimization?
Our first six months were really about establishing our baseline performance and this year, we’ve been more focused on CRO and finding ways to remove friction from the consumer experience. We recently brought on a new partner to help set us up for success on this front and have a robust a/b testing roadmap in place that will allow us to test, learn and iterate to continue to improve our sitewide conversion rate.
What about retention?
Having launched only 6 months ago—our main focus was on acquisition. We are still in the early learning stages of understanding the behaviors of our customers on the retention side, but we’ve incorporated tools that will help us understand and optimize cohort behavior, LTV, and more. Retention is a big area of focus for HoldOn this year as we shift towards more of a subscription-first approach.
What’s your stack?
Shopify for ecomm
Okendo for Reviews
Peel Insights for data & analytics
Smartrr for subscriptions
Klaviyo for email + sms
Superfiliate to create custom landing pages for partners
Share a sale and up promote for affiliate marketing
Gorgias for Customer Support
Fairing for post-purchase surveys
Superfiliate has built a platform that empowers brands to run end-to-end affiliate, influencer and referral programs, turning every link shared by a creator or customer into a co-branded landing page. Co-branded landing pages create a personalized experience for the shopper as every page has its own unique content, curated products and reviews from the creator, driving a higher conversion rate (by >20-30%) and deepening the sense of partnership between the brand and the creator. Superfiliate also handles campaign management, product seeding, payout management, tracking/ analytics, promotions and much more within the affiliate, influencer and partner workflows. Native integrations with email, sms, subscription, payment, analytics & measurement providers make it seamless to onboard, launch, accelerate growth and measure success.
Shopify is a commerce platform that allows anyone to set up an online store and sell their products. It's the go-to eCommerce platform for young direct-to-consumer brands. It's ease of use and setup is what's most attractive to merchants, but also the incredibly vast Shopify app store.
Turn customers into Superfans with Okendo, the unified customer marketing platform for reviews, referrals, loyalty, quizzes, and surveys, making it easy to cultivate advocacy, scale word-of-mouth, and maximize lifetime value. 8,000+ Shopify brands use Okendo to mobilize their customers for faster and more efficient growth, including SKIMS, Liquid Death, and Oh Polly.
Peel is a retention analytics platform that provides the insights to grow and nurture your customers. Peel upgrades your analytics with a full suite of automated DTC metrics. In a single click, you can view your LTV, AOV, measure your ROI, and get RFM analysis, Cohort Analysis for both Revenue and Retention. Daily Reports via Slack & Email keep your team up to date on what metrics are trending in your data. Get deeper insights on customer behavior, product purchasing patterns, subscriptions, and dozens of filters that allow you to segment your data and build Audiences for better marketing & measurement.
Gorgias centralizes all your support tickets in one place and enriches them with lots of extra context about a buyer's profile. Through Gorgias, you can connect directly to your eCommerce store and edit orders, modify subscriptions, and refund payments without leaving your helpdesk.
Fairing is a post-purchase survey tool that gets category-leading response rates. With Fairing's Question Stream, over 3,000 DTC brands and 2,000 Shopify Plus brands are getting 40-80% response rates on their post-purchase survey, leading to better data about their sources of growth, their customers, and the potential for future improvements.
What’s your key to success?
Staying focused! As a company, we stayed laser focused on making the best 100% home compostable bags that are also strong and heavy duty to meet the expectations of modern consumers. We launched with 4 products, and that is still our current selection ten months in.
Focus and consistency helps us build trust and also better understand who our consumer is. Going forward, our deep consumer understanding will inform if and how we expand into new products. It will also allow us to feel confident that any new products we launch are items the HoldOn customer wants and needs.
Internally, it also allows us to avoid falling into the “shiny object” pitfall where “more is more”, a mindset that can often result in distraction and misalignment. By staying focused on our core products, we’re also able to refine our marketing strategy to really optimize performance and get the most out of everything we do, which is super important as a new brand.
