“It’s a flywheel — people buy the shirts, they start conversations, they share their stories, people love the message, they buy the shirts, they start conversations, they share their stories, people love the message…”
— Dan Allen, co-founder

It really is that simple.

Simplicity is key.

People love TradeMutt. Once you buy a TradeMutt shirt, there’s an 83% chance you’ll end up owning more than five. Sure, that data’s skewed by the die-hards who answered our July ’24 brand survey. But what we learned from that simple survey surprised us.

Because while these ~1,500 respondents had thousands of TradeMutt shirts between them, and wore them sometimes five days a week — or “TradeMutt 365 baby!” in the case of James “Hobbzie” Hobbs — not a lot of them could give us messaging that was anything close to how we described ourselves.

Sure, we got lost sometimes in trying to explain what the shirts were, how they worked, what TIACS was. But when we asked in this survey how important, out of five, it was that TradeMutt donates 50% of its’ profits we had 87% five-stars-super-important.

When we asked them two questions later what TIACS was?

Less than 10% gave us on-brand messaging.

So the action was, as it should have always been, simple: just keep repeating the same brand message over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

TradeMutt shirts start conversations about mental health.

Brand storytelling.

TradeMutt is a brand brand. Every business needs some sort of story, it’s true, but TradeMutt is more like an idea than just a work shirt. That’s something that became nebulous to grasp, to be honest, but what we realised was more powerful than stills of reviews or dynamic product carousels of new shirts was the brand storytelling that only customers can do for us.

This became pervasive.

These stories, courtesy of Dan’s flywheel above, became the beating heart of our marketing machine.

Ad account structure & creative.

So we built our ad account around it.

At a 10% MER we needed to run a tight ship. But trying as well to just push product all the time without consideration for what made customers buy from the brand — emotion, empathy, their own relationship to the ravages of suicide amongst blue collar workers — was like pushing rope.

Les Binet and Peter Field have advocated for a 60:40 marketing spend split between “long term” and “short term.” I took that pretty aggressively to heart and, given that the brand is ultimately an emotional one with a price point outside of our more “commodity” work shirt competitors, skewed even more in favour of brand.

Our Advantage+ campaigns had a 20% customer cap to control for the large returning customer rate we could get via email and via new product releases every month. For every $10 we spent on Meta, $6 of it at least was going to either super cold (Purchase, 60 day web visitor, email database, social follower, and 180 social engagement exclusions) top of funnel or to an Advantage+ campaign that just had Brand creative inside, no Product.

We had separate campaigns for standard Product creative and for DPAs. I love DPAs, I swear by DPAs, but they just eat budget when you don’t isolate them from other creative.

With this simple account structure, monitored daily and adjusted as required, we doubled the DTC business in two years. In fact: we doubled the whole business in two years.

Scale.

The ‘scale’ part of this piece is about what happened when I pushed the needle. When we had great stock, brand creative that could handle more impressions because it was handling the impressions we had well — great thumbstop rates, great clickthrough rates, great CPAs — and then we just sent it.

20% a day up and then, once we’d sold through limited edition stock that really hit, we scaled back down 20% a day.

Our limit, we realised, wasn’t whether or not we would find revenue enough to support the increased budget. Our limit was how much in-demand stock we had inside the warehouse. Even outside sale periods, we went through teething issues with scale where our customer service team was too busy with tickets, where our warehouse team couldn’t get shirts out the door fast enough for us to send another email, where the rest of the business was a bit confused how we did it all so fast.

The thing about compounding is that 20% a day gets you to big numbers pretty fast.

Day One	Day Two	Day Three	Day Four	Day Five
$1,000	$1,200	$1,440	$1,728	$2,073

Day Six	Day Seven	Day Eight	Day Nine	Day Ten
$2,487	$2,984	$3,580	$4,296	$5,155

Want to scale your business? You might only be ten days away from 5x growth.

For TradeMutt, we followed these principles at a lean 10% MER.

Email cadence.

An unsung hero of this overall success was our email campaign structure and strategy.

An underrated part of the TradeMutt brand is Funky Shirt Friday. It’s the one day of the week that you should wear a TradeMutt shirt if you’re not sure what other days you should wear them. Our sales lead came up with that a few years ago, back when we were still just emailing on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

So we built our email strategy — and our organic social strategy — around Funky Shirt Friday. Every Friday morning, at 5am Brisbane time, we’d email our database encouraging them and reminding them to wear their conversation starting TradeMutt shirts to work today.

We did so with stories of people who had a chat to someone at work they hadn’t spoken to before last Funky Shirt Friday. We did so with photos of Mutters in their TradeMutt shirts who’d tagged us on Instagram or emailed a photo through to our customer service team. We did so by writing out permission slips for tradies whose bosses were tightarses and wouldn’t let them wear shirts that were better than boring.

And then we worked backwards: on Wednesdays at 3pm — cuz that’s knockoff — we could push product if we needed to move some inventory of a particular work shirt style or we had accessories who needed some love or we wanted to support the sales team with bulk or embroidery comms.

On Mondays at 3pm, we would share stories we heard in reply to our Funky Shirt Friday emails. We’d share stories people had commented on our brand ads about a time they’d spoken to someone while they were wearing a TradeMutt shirt. A retired concreter brought to tears in a Woolies aisle because he wished TradeMutt had been around when he was on the tools.

New releases monthly.

All of this, of course, is made much simpler by a straightforward business model decision: we would release a new shirt design every month in a range of standard styles (long sleeve, short sleeve, alternating high vis colours, polos, accessories, plus relevant seasonal gear).

Not all of these hit. But the ones that hit hit big. Special shoutout to Bin Chicken, Gone Fishin, Sunburnt Country, Swoopy Bois, Dundee, Who Let The Frogs Out and now, I hear, Blinky Chill.

Super simple Google.

No one’s shopping for TradeMutt on Google. So instead of trying to outperform cheaper shirts in Shopping placements — which is ultimately a price comparison engine — I opted to just run a branded PMax campaign. This did a few things.

One, it kept ROAS looking great at all times.

Two, it made sure that customers looking for TradeMutt would find us over our growing network of wholesalers who were slowly starting to come online.

Three, it would serve Display to existing customers. I am normally not one to write anything in favour of Display but when we’re frequently releasing new product with a high returning customer rate (think somewhere in the realm of 40% over the course of a year) I’m happy to let Display slide into people’s Gmail inboxes and news articles (but not mobile apps!) with new shirts they might like for pennies.

Results.

First seven-figure month. This was not during a sale period.

First seven-figure week.

Doubled DTC business. Doubled overall revenue together with B2B and Wholesale teams.

Record EOFYS and BFCM results, each better than the last.

Hundreds of thousands of work shirts sold.

Millions of conversations started.

Want the same?

Get in touch.

Call me on 0478 694 526 or flick me an email at zac@zacvanmanen.com.