Ace High, co-founded by Christian Kettenbeil and Nathan Hamood in 2016, started with a vision to revolutionize men's grooming by introducing their Original Pomade that offered both strong hold and natural texture. Since then,the brand has expanded its product line to include items like beard balm, hair tonic, and texture spray. Building on this foundation, Ace High leveraged wholesale marketplaces such as Faire and Peeba to diversify and expand their sales channels beyond DTC.
Wholesale Focus
Recognizing the initial traction gained from these platforms, Ace High identified a key opportunity to refine their wholesale strategy. They pinpointed barbershops, hair salons, and beauty salons as their ideal wholesale customer profile. With this insight, the brand aimed to accelerate growth by shifting their focus towards establishing more direct wholesale relationships, enhancing their reach within the grooming industry.
Challenges
Ace High faced several challenges as they ventured into direct wholesale:
- Slow, Outdated Tools: Ace High was relying on massive, slow, and clunky self-built coded spreadsheets to manage their wholesale outreach and despite being completely custom, still didn't meet their needs.
- Limited Team Bandwidth: With a small team, managing ongoing communications effectively became increasingly difficult.
- Unreliable Lead Sources: The leads they did have were not scalable or reliable enough to support growth ambitions.
Solution
Ace High turned to Overjoy to overcome these obstacles:
- Search and Email Campaign features: Overjoy's robust features supported Ace High in continuously testing and refining their outreach strategies through targeted search and customized email campaigns.
- AI-powered email features: AI features enhanced the email drafting process and enabled effective evaluation of cold email campaigns.
- Wholesale-focused CRM that can send & track samples: Overjoy's CRM streamlined Ace High's operations by efficiently sending and tracking product samples and integrating seamlessly with Shopify for one-click data synchronization.
Results
With Overjoy, Ace High has made significant strides in its wholesale operations since their onboarding in Q1 of 2024:
- 1,250 Qualified Leads: Their potential customer base has been broadened to include matches that fit their ideal customer profile.
- Consistent 10% Response Rate: A 10% response rate has been maintained over five months, reflecting effective engagement strategies and consistent success.
- 117 New Prospects: They secured 117 new prospects in the first half of 2024.
- Streamlined Sample Sending: They sent samples to 50 prospects and were able to easily follow up without onboarding more people to their team.
"Overjoy has transformed how we grow our wholesale channel. They built a simple, yet powerful set of features that have streamlined our operations, taking us from multiple sheets of code in a laggy spreadsheet. As a small three-person team, utilizing tools that drastically cut down on time-consuming tasks is imperative to our ability to grow our business efficiently."
