Introduction
Discover the inspiring journey of building an ecommerce business from retirement. Nikki Buchanan, after 25 years in the restaurant industry, transitioned from owning five brick-and-mortar locations to launching the luxury eco-sustainable brand, IReuse2. In just 14 months, she scaled her on-the-go cutlery business from $0 to over $200,000 in revenue. This Q&A delves into the exact strategies, pivotal moments, and mindset shifts that fueled her remarkable success, proving it’s never too late to start a new venture.
Founder Success Story QnA
Before we start chatting more about your amazing business, can you tell me a little bit about where you were prior to IReuse2?
Sure. So, me and my husband have been married for 20 years. We used to own five brick-and-mortar locations of a restaurant in Manitoba, and going from that to this is a lot of change that we went through. So, we had retired; it just ran its course. We had been doing that job for about 25 years, believe it or not, and yeah, we were looking for something new, and IReuse2 kind of presented itself.
What really started the idea of cutlery for you? Was it from your experience in the hospitality kind of world?
Yeah, so we saw a lot of garbage. You could imagine with five stores, the amount of garbage that you see in. We had busy stores, so yeah, it was just so much waste. And yeah, when we were looking for something else to do, the new business, we knew we wanted to own our own business again, but I really wanted to come from an e-commerce type of business. We had a horrific murder in one of our locations, and that drove me to find something a little bit more safe for the employees and ourselves, and this was an easy choice.
Was that the selling point to try and move e-commerce based rather than brick and mortar?
We definitely knew that we had to do something for ourselves, and we enjoy that life. We enjoy owning our own businesses, the challenges of that, and believe me, there are challenges for sure, but it’s like a puzzle you have to try and figure out which pieces go where and then what to do next. So for us, it was an easy decision, but the e-commerce side of it was very different for me. I’m not a computer savvy person, so for me, I had a lot to learn, and the Start and Scale course sure helped me out a lot.
How did you feel going from five stores to now one e-commerce store? Walk me through how you felt.
It was scary, like for real scary, just because you never know how that’s gonna turn out. And we still don’t; I mean, you know, we’re on a continual journey, we’ll call it, and it’s been an awesome ride to say the least. But yeah, it was a lot to think about, especially saying I’m not super savvy with computers, so for me, it took more courage than I think for my husband. He had a lot more confidence than I did, but yeah, we just jumped in with two feet and just had to go, and we didn’t turn back.
Is that how you stumbled across the Start and Scale course with Gretta?
I knew I wanted to do something with e-commerce, I just wasn’t sure what it was. And with algorithms and Facebook and Instagram, once you go down one rabbit hole, it kind of leads you to more of the same type of products, if you will. And so I was collecting data and information and things that I wanted to do with my free time now that we were retired, and things that I wanted to learn and that kind of thing. And then I just kept on seeing her course and her, and it just kept popping up. And then I thought, you know what, this is something that I’m gonna have to do. And so yeah, it was a big investment at first for us because we were on a budget after being retired. We weren’t sure like what we were going to do next, if money was going to come in. And so after that, yeah, we just, I did it, I bought the course. And I think we had been retired for probably less than a month when we said, okay, we’re doing this. So yeah, that’s how that happened.
What was the biggest deciding factor for you? What made you want to jump back into it and say the retired life isn’t for me?
Well, we’re young, right? We’re, I’m in my 40s, like I think I’m 45, I’m not sure. But yeah, I knew it wasn’t time to stop working. I always knew that no matter what, I wouldn’t ever really stop working. I think that’s when you kind of go down. But yeah, so for us, it was just, I knew her success really inspired me. In the infomercials or whatever you want to call them, the ads, and I thought I got really excited, and I thought, yeah, that looks like something I can learn from. And even if I only pick up, you know, a little bit, it will be worth it, I think. And it hit me a little bit harder than a lot of the other information that I was picking up. It just felt more real and tangible, and it was amazing. The course was really awesome.
Was it hard for you to let go staff and transition completely to just you two?
It’s always been me and him at the core. We work really well together. I have strengths and he has strengths, and we complement each other. It was definitely hard to not have staff anymore, going from a really busy environment and business and always having staff around, almost like friends or family, then having that let go. It wasn’t difficult, but it was a change. But yeah, we work really well together, so for us, it wasn’t a hard transition. We’ve always worked together for 25 years together, 24 hours a day, go home together, you know, we’re always together. We’re a weird couple like that, but yeah, it wasn’t super hard for us to transition. The hardest part was just me learning computers.
When did you actually start IReuse2?
We started in 2019. We retired in September and we started in pretty much October, and we got our first order in November. And before we had even gotten an order, we had been invited because we started an Instagram account, and that was like one of the first things that we did that was major, besides picking up a company and like, there’s a lot of steps to it, but that was a big one. So we were found by Cottage Life Magazine. Cottage Life Magazine in Canada is really, it’s like a cottage country, and they have their own TV shows and they have their own magazines, and they have their own shows and stuff. So they actually approached us on Instagram and asked us to come to Toronto, which is like a while away, probably 2,000 miles away. And we had to decide if we were gonna go without having any stock. The day that they approached us was the day that I placed my order for my stock, so I wasn’t sure if we would even have stuff to go. And that was our big first boost, really. And when we went to the show in Toronto, at the show was when we launched our website. And so it was a three-day show, it was intense because it was 12-hour days, and it was a Christmas show, so it was like pre-Christmas, and we had just received only four boxes of our stock. So we took what we had and we went, and we drove the whole way there, and that was how we started.
How many followers did you have on Instagram when they found you?
We didn’t have a whole lot, but listening to the way that you start your Instagram, you start with hashtags. You make sure that you’re using at least, well, not at least, 30 hashtags every time you post. It helps people find you, and it also builds your following. I don’t think I had more than a couple hundred followers, actually. And I guess it was just one of those things that stuck out. Everyone understands the straws, like the metal straws, that’s done, everybody gets it. So now this is a little bit more comprehensive, right? And so it plays to camping, it plays to restaurants, it plays to work environments, it plays to school. So I think for them, they picked up on that too.
Did you have a particular strategy that you adapted from the course for Instagram? What sort of things were you posting?
No, it was the whole thing. So it was a lot from the course. I was familiar with Instagram but mainly from a personal side. What we had to do was we posted every single day at the beginning. We changed it up, so at the beginning my format was a little different than it is now. Now what we do is every second day we post about our business, and then every other day we post either about food because it’s cutlery, so it makes sense. We also post about environmental animals; I’m a huge animal lover. We have four Pomeranians and I love nature, so we post information about animals. We post about debris that people find, so there’s a lot of artists that collect the debris and they actually make art with them, so we have some beautiful pictures like that. We also have people that actually do beach cleanups. We’re not by an ocean, so that really makes me sad, but I can highlight people that are, or even all the garbage on Mount Everest or in other places that aren’t oceans. So yeah, we share a lot of not just our product but the environment itself.
How many followers do you have now on Instagram?
About 2,500 or so. We don’t buy followers. We have had contests which worked out really well, mainly multi-brand contests. You get a lot more response, you get a bigger following when you do stuff like that. We’ve also done influencer marketing, so contests through that. All these tactics you learn in the course, so yeah, it helped a lot. And we have a huge win at the beginning. I think it was in December, we were doing a contest with one of them, an influencer, and she was a woman in California, and that, you never know what’s going to happen when you do influencer marketing, right? So nothing really panned out with that, but one of her followers contacted me. She was a chef in California as well, and she had lived in an RV. And so one thing I didn’t share with you is that when we had retired, we were contemplating moving out of our house, selling everything, and going RVing forever. So I was following some of these RV lifestyle influencers and seeing if that lifestyle would work for us. And so yeah, I was familiar with the chef, and because she had been RVing for the past year, she contacted us through this contest and she said, I’d like to do something with you. So she did, and we collabed, and one of her followers bought four sets of our cutlery, brought them to a party in Miami, and there was a rep for the Super Bowl gifting suites. They said, hey, we need you to come to Miami, bring your cutlery, we’re gonna give away a hundred sets to players, to celebrities, and the 25 top spending customers at Bloomingdale’s. And so we weren’t sure if that was true, if this was real, and yeah, we did some research, and we found out yes, this is true, and we were allowed to go. And so me and my husband actually drove to Minneapolis, we flew to Miami, and yeah, we attended the Super Bowl gifting suites. It was amazing. And so that was one of our huge wins. And so from that, that was just one little like contest that we had done, and the chain of events that occurred after that, so yeah, it was unreal.
What initially were you doing with your giveaways? What sort of brands were you teaming up with?
Really anybody that the influencer wanted to work with. It didn’t even, I didn’t care so much that it was a like-minded brand. I know that’s a big thing that you want to stick to your niche, and that makes sense because if somebody is following that niche, they’re going to probably keep following you. But if you have a unique product like ours, it’s so different, and it kind of fits in with a lot of different things, right? So I just looked for cool things that I would like be interested in, and so that’s how we started working with different contests. And people would approach us on Instagram, I would kind of decide if it seemed right. Now I’ll only do large group giveaways because it just, you get so much more. So then you just provide your, so you have to have a product, ideally, or yes, a gift certificate for your product if you don’t have one yet, that helps. But for me, because a gift certificate is a lot more than financially than my actual product, in trade if you will, I always send them one or two. I prefer two because it feels like you’re getting a lot more, you can give for them and a friend or two contests or whatever. And yeah, it usually boosts our followers by I’d say a minimum of a hundred every time that there’s a contest. So I know that doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s a lot. Like when you’re not buying your followers, every single one is a lot. It’s an extra 100 people that are seeing your brand which may have not seen it before.
Talk me through the relationship that you ended up establishing with that chef. Was that something that you would end up continually using her for giveaways?
It just led to new opportunities. So really, what I initially had done was I gave her a set of four because we have a deal when you buy four, you get one for free, so you pay for three but you get four sets. So that’s our like hook, if you will. It raises our bottom line, and more sets get out, and helps the environment a little bit more. So based on that, we sent her five sets, so she got to give away as many as she wanted, and that’s how that happened. And yeah, we’ve kind of shifted from Instagram. We still do Instagram, it’s very important for us, and we do ads every single week through Shopify and KITS, I believe is who we use for our Instagram ads. But we have shifted from mainly focused on Instagram, which is a huge, I don’t want to say free, but it feels like free way to start, right? And it helps you get that exposure easy and at a very low cost. So we’ve shifted from Instagram and ads to TV commercials across Western Canada. So we’ve actually grown as well. So yeah, it’s crazy.
What was the real pull behind TV commercials? What was the deciding factor for you?
Well, our product is very visual, and we tried a couple different ways to advertise. So coming from the restaurant business, we knew flyers, but and we tried flyers once. We didn’t really want to do flyers, but we wanted our name to be out there locally, so we did do a flyer run. It was pricey, and we were very cautious because we are an environmentally concerned company, so we really didn’t feel like that was a practical way to keep going. It’s there just in case, but it wasn’t for us. And because it is visual, it helps to have that visual product. So actually one of our flyers, it’s not the traditional flyer. This is our flyer, it’s shaped like our case, it has all of our colors that we have, and then there’s the deal at the back. So that was one way that we went. But we also tried radio. Radio didn’t pan out as well just because you can’t see it. So knowing that, we thought, okay, TV, we’ll try it. And so we hit a local company, a TV station, and because of COVID, like everything panned out at the right time. But because of COVID, people were pulling their TV spots, but it got cheaper for us because they wanted, still, they had to fill the air, so they took us on for a decent first intro price, and it worked out really, really well. We got, because we’re on Shopify, we got a lot of hits every time that the commercial aired. So you could actually see when it was hitting, and it was almost the same as the contests on Instagram. You felt like that real tangible things are happening, you can see your followers going up, and that helps a lot.
What was your strategy behind the TV commercial?
Our big what we wanted was just people to know our brand. It wasn’t even price, it wasn’t the special, it wasn’t our incredible delivery service, it’s not our luxury packaging or any of that stuff. It was literally just here’s IReuse2, here are the colors, and here are the cutlery sets that you can get, and then go to the website for the full collection. And it’s only a 15-second commercial. We have classical music playing, so it gives it a luxe feel. We actually use the music from Ocean’s 11 because it’s recognizable, so hopefully people will actually turn around and like pay attention to the TV, they’re like, oh, what’s that? So that was how we decided to pick that. And now coming up in the spring, we’re actually working on us, and we did a Christmas commercial too, and that was really cute. It was the sets in stockings, and the panel of the sets in the stockings hung on a fireplace. It was amazing. But yeah, in the spring, I’m very excited, we’re working on a commercial highlighting our good doings in the environment as well, because we’ve sold over, oh, thousands and thousands of sets, and each one of those is potentially three meals a day, and all the plastic that you’re saving out of that adds up to millions of saved plastic utensils that didn’t get to go into the ocean and our landfills. So we’re super excited about that commercial, and it gives the customer a different perspective to our already growing brand, and that it’s not just luxury, beautiful stainless steel cutlery in eight designer colors, it’s actually functional, and it’ll help save the environment.
How was your brand performing from Instagram ads to then the TV commercial? How many sales were you getting?
Our first goal, the first year, was to hit a hundred thousand dollars in sales. And to be honest, at the beginning, I wasn’t sure if we were gonna hit it at all, like even a little bit. But what ended up happening, after going through that Super Bowl event, we don’t have employees, it’s me and my husband, so I became our own PR person. I have no idea anything to do with PR, but I thought, okay, we’re invited to the Super Bowl, this is newsworthy. So I actually emailed every single news outlet, radio station, newspaper, literally whoever would listen to me, and said, newest brand in Manitoba is going to the Super Bowl. And from that, we got a little bit of a snowball effect, and that’s how that became important to us, the TV. So when we were landing in, I think it was in Miami, when we got off the plane, we had an invitation from the CTV National News in Canada, and they invited us to do a spotlight the day of the Super Bowl. And so we were doing, like, B-roll film, walking through our hotel, and they picked up different things, and when they aired it, it blew up. Like we blew up. We were driving from Miami to Orlando where our hotel was, and I looked at Shopify on my phone, and there was like 50 people in the store, and then like 100, and then like 300, and I was like, I think that is broken. So I said to Jamie, my husband, I said, he was parking the car, and I said, Jamie, I think that Shopify is broken. But then we started getting orders, and I was like, holy cow, this is crazy. And then what ended up happening, which I wasn’t aware of, I thought it was going to air in Calgary only, but it had aired in every province about, I think it was every half hour or every hour till three o’clock in the morning. And so after that crazy day of the Super Bowl gifting suites and driving back to our hotel in a different part of Florida, I was up until three in the morning answering, like on messenger, any questions customers had and that kind of thing. And I think we had over, oh geez, over 100 orders just in that like day, and it continued after that too. So we didn’t anticipate that at all. And poor Jamie, his mom was watching the store for us and filling orders while we were in Florida. I think we broke her. So yeah, we knew from that point, that exposure, that TV was a definite way for us to go. So part of our strategy as well, not just paying for TV commercials, in our negotiation with that, we made sure that every single province that we’re in, we have a TV interview, so that people start to get to know me, and they also get to know that I’m a real person. I’m not just like it’s some brand that whatever, you know what I mean? I want people to know who we are, why we’re here, and it helps boost the sales quite a bit, like quite a bit. It’s the same thing as a contest, really.
From that, did you end up reaching your $100k goal?
Yeah, so by the end of the first year, we hit 100k, and then I think within the next two months, we hit another hundred. So the progression was really slow, and then it just kind of like took off. And so we’re in that taking off kind of phase, and so yeah, it’s very exactly what you were saying, you have to adapt, you have to learn. Right now we’re actually looking at hiring sales people to approach stores because we have a four-way revenue stream. So one is e-commerce, two is in-person shows locally or in Toronto, three we do fundraising initiatives because we’re trying to give back to the community. So one of our set sells for thirty dollars, let’s say, we give those sets to the schools or church groups or actually rescue groups for animals, and they keep ten dollars of each set. Whereas sometimes in schools, they do like a grocery giveaway, so it’s a grocery card that you buy, the school or the group is only making two percent of the sales from that, and we’re trying to like help the community way more than that, so it works out really well for everybody involved.
What’s the fourth revenue stream?
Oh, and the last one is retail. So we have retail locations too. So we’ve actually grown to 36 locations across Canada and expanding more. So we haven’t hit the States yet, so that’s a huge, or Australia. So yeah, we’re excited about the future. There’s so much more that can happen right now.
Talk to me more about the Super Bowl. You were able to meet a fair few people and grab some of your IReuse2 cutlery?
Yeah, so it was really cool. We had a list of people that were, I’m gonna show up with photos because you never know, and I mean, I like football a lot, like we’re a football family, but that doesn’t mean that I recognize everybody. So yeah, they had a list, and actually the people that didn’t, weren’t able to show up, you still got their contact information, so you were able to send them product as well. Some of them reposted on their Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, whatever they’re on, so that was a cool boost. And then yeah, the the 25 top spenders from Bloomingdale’s, that was awesome too. So yeah, we got to meet everybody. What ended up happening with the event is that you were assigned a photographer for the day, and so the photographer took photos of our product, like magazine quality photos. They took photos of the celebrities and players with the products, so we are able to do, you know, it’s you have the ability to share that as you wish. And then we also, we were able to take photos with the players, and it was really awesome. It was just one of the best experiences that I’ve had so far with this whole brand. It was just really a dream. It really was, especially to be a big football fan and being able to be there in person.
Have you still managed to use influencer marketing? Is that still a big channel for you?
We haven’t, just because we shifted. So we still do contests, I really love the contests. If we’re doing anything, that’s where I like to be. We, yeah, we really kind of shifted away from the influencer marketing for sure. We were supposed to, we were invited to go not just to the Super Bowl, but we were invited to go to Coachella, and we were about to go to Coachella in April, but then COVID. And they also invited us to go to the Oscars and the Emmys and the ESPYs, so there was a lot of opportunities missed, but at the same time, you know, hopefully there’s next year.
How did you get into retail? What was the process that you went through?
By foot. So I went to stores that I thought would benefit from our product in Winnipeg, and I went in the