30. Bringing the Big E-com Vision to Life with Katelyn Glass, Founder of Fifty Six

Katelyn Glass of Fifty Six Advertising has devoted over a decade to growing in tandem with the e-commerce world. She started her own marketing agency without having worked for an agency before, but after becoming the first female C-suite executive at Rowing Blazers and scaling the lifestyle brand to #8 on SimilarWeb's 15 fastest-growing DTC brands, she’d proven what knowledge she had acquired in her work.

Katelyn focuses on marketing strategies for small brands. This keeps life more interesting, she muses, since each small brand needs a unique strategy to reach their particular goals. And with that point of view, Katelyn joins this episode of E-Commerce with Coffee?! to talk about small brand digital marketing.

What to listen for:

• Katelyn is clearly a coffee fan, and her recommendation for where to get delicious whole beans in NYC definitely doesn’t disappoint.
• Early in the interview, we get a full look at where Katelyn came from and how she landed in the e-commerce world. She jokes that she’s “so old” that she “remembers when there was no internet.” One look at her and you see her millennial youth, however, so “old” is a stretch. She truly has seen extraordinary change in how marketing works, though. Listen for her full take on how marketing has changed—even in the last three years—and what the implications are.
• Small brands don’t care about a lot of the nitty gritty details of marketing, Katelyn says, they just want to partner with someone who takes care of it. Katelyn saw this need. Small brand leadership are always those wearing multiple hats, so why should they have to become digital marketing experts, too? Katelyn rose to the call and started her agency with the target of serving these businesses exclusively. “Typical agencies are either too expensive or too robust for what they need,” she asserts.
• Katelyn also speaks to the greater satisfaction of working with these brands and seeing them grow. It’s not just seeing someone walk down the street in the sweater you just helped a brand sell, it’s the “total evolution” of the brand (which is longer-lasting than growth).
• The interview then turns to some specific strategies Katelyn focuses on with brands. “Nine times out of ten,” she says, “brands are underutilizing email marketing.” She also works closely with brands to identify where they are in their marketing now as their customer lifecycle is developed.
• When asked when the right time is to launch to e-commerce, Katelyn says, “I'm insanely biased and I'll say it's always the right time.” There are more expensive times to do it, without a doubt, but it’s always the right time if you haven’t gotten into e-commerce already.
• The interview moves from launching to e-commerce to the pie-in-the-sky idea of DTC brands going global. Listen in for the specific advice Katelyn has along with a clear list of what brands need to consider (payment processing, tax implications, logistics).
• On the topic of gurus and all the digital marketing courses out there, Katelyn reminds us that it’s 2022 and whatever your marketing pain point, “you can google it.” Find the partners who help you make this happen—not the “#1 pro” who only tells you how. “If they were #1 in anything,” Katelyn quips, “they wouldn’t be selling their course on Instagram.” The kind of partnership Katelyn recommends is one that leaves listeners feeling braced for anything that comes next.