Well that's the end of the year...
The 2024 End of Year Recap
Hello people of the internet! I’m Ross and I’m here to talk about 2024! Well… at least in regards to Teddy Eva Scents. If you’re expecting a political rundown for the year then you’re about to be disappointed. But, if you’re curious about what happened with us this year, what our best sellers were, or any sort of “number” related stuff, then this is the email for you.
Side note: This is going to be VERY boring if you’re not interested in this sort of thing.
What happened this year at Teddy Eva Scents!?
I’ll be honest, we had a very difficult start to 2024 after struggling quite a lot in 2023. It felt like our misfortune just followed us over into the new year.
February actually marked the first time since September 2020 where we didn’t manage to have over 100 new customers in a single month. I guess your new customers is kind of a marker for how well you’re getting seen. If barely anyone new is ordering from you, then you’re struggling to get noticed.
Side note: It’s hard to get noticed when we’ve REALLY struggled to grow on socials the past year or so - more so on TikTok. In May 2023 (not sure why I have the numbers for then) but we had 97,800 followers. Today we have 99,200. That’s not much growth for 18 months.
But by the end of February I was genuinely worried about the business. I knew that if we had another month or two like it then we’d likely be done. The way it was going, the only way we’d be able to survive would be if I took some sort of loan out to try and keep things afloat - but that’s more likely to make things worse if anything.
So I did something that I never really wanted to do: I turned to Facebook ads.
To say that Facebook ads saved the business is an understatement.
We went from 98 new people and 310 returning for in Feb, to 484 new people and 516 returning in March. That’s 408 people to 1000 in the space of one month.
I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing - standard practice for the business to be fair - but just getting seen by more people clearly helped. I mean it makes bloody sense when you think about it 😂
Ohhhh but eventually I still managed to almost cock it ALL up…
Making big mistakes…
In May 2024 I made what I now consider one of the biggest mistakes I’ve EVER made for Teddy Eva Scents.
I’ll be honest, running a business is literally FULL of risk. You kinda learn to stomach it, and you certainly learn to take your losses. I know every choice I make comes with an upside and a downside. If the idea works out it can really help the business, if it doesn’t then we could lose quite a bit of money.
Sometimes they can be seemingly insignificant choices that lead to HUGE changes.
Take for example back in the latter part of 2020 a few months after we moved to the unit. Sales were a bit slower than we hoped and we were suddenly sat there with a 5 year lease of £1000 a month going “ahhhh shit.”
I was mildly pooping my panties then someone on Instagram asked if I could pack their order on TikTok.
I was clueless what they even meant until I did some digging.
Eventually I was like “ummm… ok then?” and I got around to doing them a video.
That video lead to someone else wanting one. Then another. Then another.
700+ videos later and I’ve gotten very used to packing orders on camera 😂
Don’t get me wrong, packing videos do awful now on TikTok and people seem fairly bored of them. But at the time, they did really well and REALLY got us seen. Not to mention I VERY MUCH had fun doing them. Don’t get me wrong, they occasionally got weird and I’ve probably shattered far too much Baby Powder as a result, but still.’
Suffice to say, that one choice blew Teddy Eva Scents up and took us from struggling for sales to having to shut the website.
Technically, I could even consider that a pretty big mistake. I mean who shuts their website for weeks on end!? We would literally open for a SINGLE DAY. Sell out, then shut for 3/4 weeks. Like we’ve could’ve just hired more people? 😂
But again, I didn’t want to take the risk.
See what I mean though? Sometimes NOT taking the risk is a bigger risk than taking the risk. I probably cost Teddy Eva Scents £1000s and lost us countless customers purely because we were always shut. We lost regulars who suddenly couldn’t order, and we lost new people who wanted to try us, couldn’t, then got bored and went elsewhere.
Genuinely, if we go back and see people who used to order quite regularly in 2020, we have around 130 customers who have 5+ orders but haven’t ordered since the middle of 2021.
Side Note: If you ever want to worry and feel bad, just look at customers who haven’t ordered for quite a while. It’s very hard to see someone on 20+ orders but hasn’t ordered for 3 years. It’s even worse when you recognise the names from conversations and thank you cards. You do learn not to take it personally though.
Anyway… We’ve always tried staying on the safest path and not get too “greedy.”
I’ve since learned that “making hay when the sunshine” isn’t greedy, it’s just a good way of offsetting the rough times.
Anyway… back to that HUGE mistake I made this year…
God I don’t half talk shit sometimes, right?
But in May our Facebooks ads had gradually been declining to the point where I was wondering if I just didn’t have a clue what I was doing. Which was half true in fairness. I’d never taken the time to fully learn them and was simply winging it. So I took a call with an ad agency and ultimately signed a 6 month contract for them to handle them.
On paper, it seemed fairly simple.
Myself and Sharmane would handle the creative side of things - like doing videos and photos - and they’d actually manage the ads. They’d post them, check them, and hopefully work them better than I was doing.
Again, on paper, all they had to do was increase their performance by a small amount and it would pay for their fee AND free me up to focus on doing better videos and give me more chance to be with the family - which is ultimately always the goal.
But, rather than increase the performance they made it worse.
Over the following few months the ads continued to do worse and worse. Luckily, I refused to be “hands off” and kept my own “testing” campaign where I could still get stuff done
Had I not done that, this business would’ve gone bust.
All of a sudden I was back in this place of “oh shit, how are we going to survive this!?” - which was made all the more worse when we still had 3 months left on a contract
Effectively, I was paying someone £1200/month to make things worse.
Like I said, you need a strong stomach when running a business at times. It’s one thing losing money or making a bad choice myself. It’s another thing entirely to pay someone more than I pay myself, to then have to do THEIR work for them, AND lose money from what they’re doing.
For every £1 they put into ads we were basically getting maybe 90p back after staff cost, product cost and VAT - if we were lucky.
So imagine a machine where you put £5000 in and £4500 popped out, then someone said “I’ll have that £1200 for putting the money in.”
To put things into perspective, in July we spent £6200 on ads - which is still our biggest ad spend in a single month. The only reason we spent so much is because I had to keep upping the spend to try and recoup the money they were losing. My “little” testing campaign - that they didn’t want me to have - literally saved us.
It also gave me sufficient evidence to show them that they weren’t really doing their job, and couldn’t use any excuses for the poor performance. I mean if I could do it ok, why couldn’t they? It was literally their only job 😡
Luckily, I managed to get out of the contract 3 months early and I can still vividly picture the moment they said we could get out with no charge. It was probably one of the biggest feelings of relief I’ve EVER felt in all my life 😂
God. It felt like such a weight being lifted. As much as I love this business, sometimes you can really feel the pressure as you know others depend on you too.
But imagine being happy that you get to pay someone £1200 one last time for doing sod all, costing you £10,000+ and wrecking your business for 3 months 😆
I’ll be honest, it probably took us all the way up until today to truly recover from working with them.
Shall we move to something more positive?
Best selling scents of 2024
Ok, so I dare say some of you are curious as to what the best selling scents of the year were, right? Well I can say that our sample box was our best selling PRODUCT, but our best selling scents go like this…
Baby Fairy - 1445
Baby Fever - 949
Snow Fairy - 842
Bum Bum Cream - 826
Cheirosa 62 - 822
Baby Cherry - 571
Coco Encantado - 564
Starry Night - 524
Baby Bergamot - 501
Sugar Plum Fairy - 499
You know what, I’m proud of Snow Fairy and Starry Night there - more so Starry Night!
Like I’m not that shocked the others did well. Out of all the ads we did this year, three collections probably had the most attention: that was Baby Powder Blends, Snow Fairy Blends, and the Sol de Janeiro ones. But Starry Night made it without ANY ad spend and barely any attention 😂
That’s some of you old schoolers that know it’s banging.
To be fair, we also sold all of those as sample boxes too, so god knows how many pots of those we actually sold.
Oh, and for those wondering, here’s the best sellers from 2023 for comparison:
Snow Fairy
Black Cherry
Starry Night
Baby Powder
Fresh Unstoppable
Alien
Bedtime Baby
Dettol
Fantasy
Hundred Acre Wood
So yeah, Snow Fairy and Starry Night are all timers 😂
Teddy Eva Scents in 2025…
2025 marks a pretty big moment in the history of TES.
Not only will it be our 5 year anniversary - we kinda count the 8th of Feb since that’s when we started selling - but it also marks the FIRST TIME EVER where I’ll get a prolonged period of time to be undistracted.
To put that into perspective, this email has been written on and off over the course of several hours throughout an entire day as I deal with demands for drinks, food, arguments, and all sorts of other shit.
My time has always been super limited or very infrequent when I’m up the unit. For those that don’t know, Rachel usually goes up the unit to work whilst I’ve stayed home with Teddy. Since a lot of what I do is laptop based, I can technically get a bit done from home. Even if it does have to be weaved between bouts of snacks, Paw Patrol, and bloody Super Wings.
I think I’ll always have nightmares of “up, up, up, up, that way, no up, no down, up, up, up, up, that one. Not that one. UPPPPP. Ahhhhhh.”
That’s Teddy trying to pick something to watch.
Yay to rising 3s soon!
What to expect next year from us?
I’ll be honest, I don’t have a clue.
Who can honestly predict what any year will actually look like? Going into 2024 I was genuinely concerned, entering 2025 I’m hopeful and optimistic. in fairness, last year I had good reason to be worried. I even wrote last year:
“In comparison to 2022, we’re down roughly 40% in terms of overall orders on the year. In 2022 we had 12341 orders, whilst this year it’s down to 7252 - which puts us almost on the same number as 2021.”
Oh, for 2024 we had 11,028 orders so we managed to bounce back quite a bit!
At the end of 2023 we had 480 people in the Ten Order Club. That’s now up to 716.
We’ve now had 15,594 people shop with us - of which, 4,863 was this year.
We’ve hit over 43,000 orders too which is cool.
So there’s some cool numbers for you 😂
But looking ahead…
I guess I just want to continue trying to make your day as good as we possibly can. I know a wax melt, or a candle, or a vibrator can only do so much. But it’s all about making a tiny difference, right?
I want Teddy Eva Scents to keep getting better - and we do have some sexy newly designed products coming!
The better I can run Teddy Eva Scents the better I can help other people. I’d love to get more involved in the food bank stuff and other areas where we can help people. Unfortunately, I do understand why they say you should put your mask on first before helping others if a plane goes down. You need to be at your best before you can actually help.
On a personal level, I just want to be the best husband and father I can be, and provide my kids with an awesome childhood. I know that doesn’t come from doing stuff, but from being more present.
Next year, that’s just what I’ll [hopefully] be able to do. Less time on the laptop at home and more time actually being there.
Genuinely though, from the bottom of my heart I want to thank ALL of you for being here. You could all go and spend your hard earned money somewhere else, but instead you pick to support us. One day, I hope that I can make you all “proud” at your choice to help us grow.
I see all the time “influencers” and “streamers” get famous and then people say “we made the wrong person famous” when they realise they’re not as nice as they thought they were.
Hopefully, one day you’ll manage to say “I’m glad I supported Teddy Eva Scents.”
Or you might say “that Ross is a right wanker, jeez.”
To be honest, you could sandwich them into one sentence and it would be fair 😂
Like by this time next year Kath and Rachel would’ve survived an ENTIRE YEAR of working with me almost every single day up the unit. It’s going to take a miracle to not have them both walk out 😂
So who knows!? I might be putting another job out AND a bonus one that’s the position of “wife.” Not sure you can legally hire a wife though. I’ll check with the HR department. Oh wait, that’s Rachel! HA.
Anyway… that’s it from me today! I just want to say a big thank you - again - for all the support this year!
Much love,
Ross & Rachel + everyone else x
PS. if you want to buy anything to end the year, here’s a button…