Why Creating Community is Crucial for Your Brand and Happiness with Jordan Ellis
Episode 311: Show Notes
Today we are joined by our great friend, Jordan Ellis, from Jordanené Clothing and she is here to talk about the importance of building a community in the success and longevity of your business. Jordan is also speaking at our upcoming event, The Product Powerhouse Summit, which we know you are not going to want to miss! It is going to be incredible with over 25 speakers in 3 days. So go sign up right now, it is free! Today’s chat is kind of like a trailer to that and she will be giving some insight into the idea of creating community in your business’ particular niche and the benefits that can come from this.
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Jordan has been around our community since day zero and is part of our ride or die community, the exact thing that she wants to help you build. We will be talking about her journey with this and she even credits the Boss Project community with helping her learn the importance of connecting with people, her customers and peers! For Jordan, this means her mailing list, repeat customers, getting feedback, and much more. All these great tactics and strategies have helped her grow to where she is now with her product based business and you can even start to apply some of these ideas to your business, no matter if you are service based or are selling products. So come on, let’s get into it!
How Jordan Became Aware of the Importance of Community
One of the first lessons that Jordan learned in our community was the power of thank you codes and free gifts. As soon as she started using these strategies, sales stopped being surprises and her customer base started to grow! She would give away free gifts or coupons for posting photos and this way you can also see who is buying your products. It also offers a great opportunity to get feedback and keep the conversation going with your customers, who have, for Jordan, become amazing brand ambassadors and friends! Jordan does a lot of in person events which has played to her strengths a lot as a massive extrovert. She finds that you can get very different feedback in face to face interactions and it is much easier to be a real person to another real person! This alters the perception that customers are just numbers and makes decision making a little different - Jordan likes to consider what might be most fun for her people!
Tapping into Higher Levels of Customer Relationships
When you are serving real people it helps to make the distinction between a big corporate mindset and one of a small business owner. When Jordan began to see her business more about people than numbers, she became aware that her decisions would affect people. So she wants to service them as best she can, having her brand image representing its customer base as accurately as possible. She loves having photos of real looking people and also of actual people she knows and sells to. Jordan and her company have actually started a magazine call The Sartorial Geek, which is a bit surprising to even her as she does not even like reading or writing that much! The opportunity presented itself after they had been going for a while and she wanted to utilize all the cool connections she had made and showcase everyone’s work. A magazine seemed like the right way to go about this but it was quite an insane project. Jordan reminds us that it was a good idea to prove themselves as a company before starting this branch of their work. The credibility they had gained meant that they were able to ask for favors and get a lot of really great people involved. It is definitely more of a passion project and they run it with pretty low resources, so it would have been a bad idea to start it earlier in the game. This is a good lesson for everybody, take care of yourself before reaching too far, you have to safeguard against running out of road!
Staying Motivated Through Early Challenges
Jordan admits that the community she has built has been the main reason she was able to overcome challenges early on. She also says while selling shirts and screen printing are not technically her passions, what really motivates her is the idea of the joy these products bring. So she can get through a bad day because her audience and community make it possible and worth it. She feels she is not just selling clothes, but rather bringing beauty and happiness into a growing group of people. Jordan is able to battle any burnout through the support and motivation that this community provides and this feeling of knowing your tribe is truly special to her.
Quote This
If you do want to give back you just have to make sure you keep having the resources to do it.
—Jordan Ellis
Highlights
How Jordan Became Aware of the Importance of Community. [0:05:28.4]
Tapping into Higher Levels of Customer Relationships .[0:09:36.7]
Jordan’s Magazine and the Idea Behind It. [0:16:10.2]
Staying Motivated Through Early Challenges. [0:21:36.1]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Jordan Ellis
Jordandene
Website | Instagram | Facebook Magazine and Podcast
Jordan founded Jordandené instead of putting her teaching degree to good use. She's a huge nerd who loves dressing up and throwing extravagant theme parties. Jordandené started as a fun way to put a nerdy twist on traditional handmade goods.
KEY TOPICS
Community, Human Touch, Customer Service, Summit, Products
