Welcome to an exciting episode! Today, we have Levi Knox, the Director of Marketing at Laundry Sauce
In this episode, host Samir ElKamouny chats with Levi about the unique value proposition of Laundry Sauce, the role of subscription models in driving customer retention, effective marketing tactics and customer-centric messaging, turning mundane chores into enjoyable experiences, and insights into product development.
Understanding your customer’s pain points allows you to create messaging that truly resonates and converts.
Key Takeaway
- Laundry Sauce infuses luxury scents like Tom Ford and Le Labo into laundry pods, making laundry a sensory experience.
- Levi Knox's experience spans performance marketing at Tube Science and leadership at Darkroom, equipping him with diverse marketing skills.
- Defaulting to subscription and optimizing retention rates has significantly improved Laundry Sauce’s customer lifetime value and profitability.
- Understanding and addressing customer pain points through feedback has ensured high satisfaction and loyalty.
- Effective marketing requires balancing engaging creative ads with clear conveyance of the product’s unique selling points.
- Focusing on ads that directly convert customers rather than just generating awareness has driven profitability.
- Expanding the product line and offering upsells like dryer sheets and fabric softeners boost revenue.
- Random, surprise sales help avoid high competition and costs associated with major sale periods while driving significant sales volume.
- Unique fragrances create an emotional connection and play a crucial role in customer retention and brand loyalty.
- Levi emphasizes learning from both successful and unsuccessful campaigns to continually improve marketing strategies.
View Written Interview
Hey everybody. Do I have an exciting episode for you today? Because we are going to be talking with the director of marketing at laundry sauce. And if you have not heard of laundry sauce, maybe you're living under a rock or maybe Levi's got to make sure he gets an ad in front of you. But one or the other, you have either heard of them or you're going to be hearing of them because they are one of those brands that's just killing it. They're killing it. They're doing a super great job of their marketing. They're creative. Everything that they're doing is a testament to what you should be doing in the direct to consumer market these days. And so I'm super excited to be talking with Levi Knox. Levi, welcome to the podcast.
Hey, thanks, Samir. It's great to be here. Super excited to chat.
Likewise, I would love to have you just kind of kick things off and tell the audience about laundry sauce and what the brand is all about.
Yeah, yeah, I'd love to. You know, if you've seen our flashy fun, wild ads, or you just heard the name Laundry Sauce, you can guess that it's a fun brand. But it's not just the branding that's killing it. It's the fact that it's a very new product for a very neglected market, which is Laundry detergent. Laundry detergent smells boring, but it doesn't have to. You can actually put Tom Ford Le Labo Quality Scents into your laundry pods.
And not only will you smell good, like a cologne would like your clothes will smell good longer. Your sheets will smell great. Your, your bedding, your, your towels will smell great. It really is bringing a signature scent to your entire house and your whole persona. so laundry sauce is killer brand marketing, but also incredible product development, which to any marketer that's watching this, you know, that once you find that client
You can sell like hotcakes just because it's great, that's the perfect client to work for.
So true, it's so true. And so I'm curious, just, you came in as a fractional team member over there. And so I'm just curious, how did you get into that?
Yeah. So, kind of path to fractional growth marketing. I started performance marketing at a place called tube science. That's a really cutthroat paper performance video advertising agency. and that's where I really learned the fundamentals of taking a product, taking what customers are saying about it, breaking those down into, okay, these are the solutions that, that are actually backed up that, that, that people love about this product.
Finding the problem framings, and finding the personas and then shooting ads that are really tailored towards relating to, really a variety of different people, who come from different backgrounds, have different reasons for why they need the product, and converting them to buy. So, that, performance marketing background of tons and tons and tons of creative AB testing to find a handful of winners that you can scale really quickly.
And that actually taught me a very customer -obsessed method to messaging and creative development. But I didn't really have the ability to have an impact on product development and on the site and on a bunch of other channels like email or direct mail. And so I wanted more access.
I wanted more ability to take the learnings that we have in performance marketing and the systems from marketing and apply it to a bunch of other areas. So that led me to Darkroom. Darkroom is a New York based but it's also full remote all over the world digital marketing agency. And I jumped over there in beginning of 2023 to help build their director of growth role and create the growth strategy team.
And that was a blast. I mean, I hired several growth strategists, had a fantastic job time acting like a fractional CMO or a fractional head of growth for anywhere between three or five clients per growth strategist. And it's a role that's meant to flex based off of, okay, do you need just more consulting for your current head of growth, for your current CMO?
Or are you a younger brand and you really need someone who's going to own the ideation and execution of almost all of your marketing? So, it was really fun, like alternating between both the roles. laundry sauce actually came to dark room, in August of 2023 and, got assigned to them. And instantly I was like, this is going to be a blast to work on. and it's, it was one of those like agency nightmares.
Where I just loved the brand so much and it was such a good fit that I ended up leaving Darkroom and going internal to Laundry Sauce. But it worked out all for the best. I mean, I still love Darkroom and Darkroom services are still a core part of our like agency vendor wheel that is the execution of Laundry Sauce. So yeah, that's how I ended up here.
That's awesome. So where, as you entered laundry sauce, I'm really curious, where did you find areas of opportunity maybe early on to kind of make a big impact?
Subscription hands down defaulting to subscription and heavily pushing it. That was the one thing that was seriously missing with laundry sauce and I come from Almost all of the e -commerce brands that I worked on and that were very successful were subscription based businesses I had two major food delivery services that were subscription based that I scaled I don't know if you remember freshly freshly is gone now, but back in the day, they were a huge hit and I was behind those ads. So I knew there was just a tremendous opportunity to make our subscription, one, like defaulting to it, to ads talk about subscription, you're opening like intro, offer landing pages or focus on subscription. And then optimizing our subscription retention rate and making the subscription like limit up one more on the brand side, like adding some surprise and delight and making the subscription something that you're very proud and excited to stay a part of. But thankfully the product does most of that work itself. Once people try it, they're obsessed.
That's awesome. So every marketer's dream, finding that perfect product that you can have creative freedom, lots of fun, but you also got to shake up the customer experience, I guess, in a way, but then you're also trying to reframe customer purchasing decisions, I guess, in a way.
Definitely. Yeah. I mean, we were really the first major fine fragrance laundry detergent. There's now some like knockoffs of us, which is like very flattering
Yeah
Like, happy to have some knockoffs of us. I think it's actually lifting the industry of luxury scented, designer scented laundry detergent overall. Like, so I'm, I'm excited for it. But.
The main hook that we use is your laundry detergent smells boring. And I think almost everybody can agree with that. Like laundry detergent is generic names. It sounded like AI generated titles for these scents before AI even existed. You know, like cool winter breeze and island ocean. Like just boring stuff or a generic scent that is like a signature scent that you can't tell what it is.
You have no clue what the key ingredients are, which in turn means there's no transparency to the ingredients, right? So, yeah, you can shop for laundry pods the same way you would shop for a fine fragrance. Find scents that you like, like ingredients that you like. Find a personality that fits you. But also we see that, similar to candles, people swap out the scent that they want to feature for their towels, their sheets, their clothes based off of mood, based off of season, based off of like my husband wears Indonesian patchouli, but I wear Egyptian rose. Like that ability to flex but still have a really high quality scent is awesome.
Yeah, no, it makes sense. I have, I don't even know how many different clones I have and I use them for different purposes and different, right? Like, yeah, my, it's all, I'm totally with you. I'm curious though, when you came in and even now, do you have like a clearly defined ideal customer profile or is it just so...I imagine it casts, there's a wide cascade of kind of who the ideal customer is, but as you, but the first, you said it, first thing you were thinking about was customer lifetime value and how do we get people to subscribe and be, and acquire more soulmate customers versus just try it once customers or whatever it is. So did they have that? Is that something that you've worked on since you've been there? I'm just personally curious.
Mm -hmm.
Yeah.
Totally, yeah. So it's the business is I think three years old. And so just because of the age of the business, it's relatively broad. We have not super delineated a bunch of different personas. But the method that we're rolling out personas, I was actually working on a doc for this just before the call actually is scent based.
And so really trying to build out a sense of place lifestyle hobbies, values associated to each individual scent. And, you know, there's, there's higher level values that laundry sauce will always stand for of just like laundry day should never be boring. A laundry day should actually be fun and you should look forward to doing laundry. Like we're trying to change the perception of laundry day. So that will always exist. But, but yeah, defining persona is based of of scent is what we're doing right now. And it's actually really fun. We're doing a huge annual customer survey that's going out in one week, and that's gonna help us refine that even more.
So, and it's an interesting one to me and I obsess over it because so often, you know, we at Fetch Refinery have so many clients that come our way and they don't know who their ideal customer profile is at all. And we need that in order to really cater the messaging and the creative and everything else, right? So we'll do that deep dive in order to figure that out because without it, for a lot of brands, not for necessarily for you guys, right? But for so many brands, it's so important because they aren't super mass marketed, right? They're like in their minds, they're like, my customer base is all snowboarders. No, it's not. Or it's everyone who buys laundry detergent. Okay, no, it's not everybody that buys laundry detergent and you guys know that, right? But there certainly probably becomes these quasi maybe demographics or locations or income levels or something like that. As you extract that.