Under The Hood: Rachel & Amanda From Dotti
Rachel, Amanda, give us the backstory on Dotti. How did you come up with the idea and what drove you to build a business around it?
Amanda: Dotti is a high-design cleaning brand elevating everyday tools like sponges and brooms with beauty, performance, and convenience in mind. Dotti started with the simple business mantra of “We went looking for a product and it didn’t exist”. Rachel and I are both design enthusiasts and previously ran marketing businesses so we love creativity.
When we both started renovating homes we kept talking about how we couldn’t find cleaning tools that matched the aesthetic of our homes. This culminated in a true sister moment when Rach went to clean up after one of my kids and realized that I didn’t even own a broom. When she asked me why I just explained how I couldn’t stand the red plastic one on the market and hadn’t been able to find a better option. Then the pandemic hit and I think we can all agree that this fundamentally changed the role our homes and the products we invite into our homes play in our lives.
Rachel and I knew that we wanted to create a business together and what we love is that, while we both come from marketing backgrounds, we have very different and complementary skill sets. I’m more focused on the sales, operations, and finance side of Dotti while Rachel owns the marketing and branding.
One of the areas we both love most is product because that is the key area where we both get to apply our strengths and collaborate.
How do you think about building a brand in the cleaning supplies category? Is it something that has been “mission critical” from the start?
Rachel: The cleaning category has always been an important focus for Dotti. We wanted to create a brand grounded in our social mission of supporting mental health research and programming. The more research we did the more we uncovered the direct correlation between clean homes and happy minds. In one study it cited a 53% boost in happiness for every hour of cleaning we complete.
And I think we can all agree that whether we like cleaning or not, there is a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction, and calm that comes from keeping a clean home. Since day one we’ve dedicated $1 from every order to support mental health research and programming and hope to be able to make a meaningful impact in reducing the stigma associated with mental health as we scale Dotti.
What’s one thing about operating Dotti that you didn’t expect to be true when you initially started?
Amanda: Every single person we spoke to told us that manufacturing and logistics would be hard. And we believed them. What we didn’t understand is that it would be 10x harder than we imagined. Creating beautifully-engineered products that are high quality and functional has taken a lot of testing and learning. And most importantly, we’ve learned that creating something simple in aesthetic is quite complex. We’re in the groove now and have learned a ton about bringing exciting DTC products to market, but those first two products we had to cut our teeth on.
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Tell us about your tech stack - what are some of your favorite tools and apps you currently use? Any you can’t live without?
Rachel: Our whole DTC tech stack is built off of Shopify, but I’d say that Klaviyo is one of the more powerful tools we’re using to power our DTC marketing and sales efforts. Its powerful integrations help to automate our marketing and customer engagement. We also love that it covers a wide range of marketing opportunities from email and SMS marketing to lead generation and extensive automation capabilities. It streamlines our marketing and allows us to keep our team lean.
We’ve also newly added Rebuy to Shopify and are using it to refine our conversion rate optimization. In the three months since we added it, we’ve been able to improve our conversion rate from 1.5% to 2.5% by leveraging their AI-powered recommendations, Smart Cart, and other features including Gift with Purchase.
Last, I’d say Meta. It has been a core customer acquisition channel for us but we’ve had some serious highs and lows. The good is that we’ve been able to drive strong customer adoption although no surprise at a higher CAC than we’d like to see based on escalating acquisition costs.
Still, we’d say that for a small brand like ours, it has been effective. The ultimate low for Meta was back in November, our account was hacked and disabled and it took us over six weeks of trying to get our accounts reactivated before we had to say screw it and completely start from scratch. That really hurt. It took a lot of patience and persistence to get it restarted and also forced us to look at other acquisition channels earlier than we expected.
If you had to boil your success at Dotti down to one thing - a habit, culture trait, etc - what would it be?
Amanda: Consumer-obsession. I think one thing we’ve done well is being consumer-obsessed in the development, design, and launch of our brand identity and how it informs our product design. We’ve heavily leveraged consumer surveying and insights to inform our decision-making and ensure that we keep evolving consumer tastes and needs at the forefront of Dotti. After all, cleaning essentials are products we have to touch, see, smell, and use every day and we believe that with our consumers’ support, we can completely reimagine the entire category!
