Funny Story: Building Sheets & Giggles into a DTC Success Story

They say that laughter is the best medicine. For Colin McIntosh, it’s also been a pretty good business strategy. After a couple of fits and starts in business, Colin found himself with no job but quite a few domain names in his possession, all of which were pun-based. So he cycled through what he owned and formed a plan to build a company in a disruptable industry where he could make a splash and earn some market share. 

What he landed on was Sheets & Giggles, a direct to consumer bedsheets company with a social good component that became the most successful bedsheets company to launch on the crowd-funding site, Indiegogo. Since then, Sheets & Giggles has grown to millions of dollars in sales. 

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Colin gives the behind-the-scenes story of building Sheets & Giggles, including how he worked backward to build an email list that led to an unprecedented 45% conversion rate. Plus, Colin dives into the pros and cons of selling on Amazon, and gives an exclusive preview of some of the ad copy he’s working on to bring more humor to the Sheets & Giggles campaigns across channels.   

Main Takeaways:

• Going Backward: In order to meet your goals, it’s sometimes useful to work backward. Define what it is that you want to achieve and then reverse engineer the steps you need to take to get there. 
• Navigating the Amazon Waters: DTC founders agree that Amazon is simultaneously the best and worst partner you can have. There are pros and cons to working on the platform, including massive discoverability but also deep cuts into profit margin. It’s important to weigh all the pros and cons of selling on the platform and find the strategy that works best for your brand and that leaves you with more of the pros than the cons. 
• Laughing With You, Not At You: Selling with humor is an effective strategy if you can actually get potential customers to engage. Consumers are reading less and less, so if you are going to use humorous copy, it needs to really resonate, grab the attention of the customer, and get them to keep going along the customer journey. It’s easy to be funny just for the sake of being funny, but you have to remember that the ultimate goal is to sell the product, so there needs to be a call to action.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Hey everyone, this is Stephanie Postles, Co-Founder of mission.org, and your host of Up Next In Commerce. Welcome back. Our guest today is Colin McIntosh, the Founder and CEO of Sheets & Giggles. Colin, how's it going?

Colin:

Pretty good. Thanks so much for having me today.

Stephanie:

Yeah, thanks for coming on. I was very nervous about messing that name up. I'm sure you get that a lot.

Colin:

MacIntosh, McIntosh. Yeah, [crosstalk 00:00:28]-

Stephanie:

Oh, I meant your company name.

Colin:

Oh, Sheets & Giggles. Yeah. No, of course. Yeah, sorry. I feel like I've gotten so used