Greater>Than Clothing

Hey there. Let me be the second to welcome you to the new, improved Greater>Than Clothing blog, complete with actual blog posts! As Ryan mentioned previously, we are both going to be posting more frequently from now on. For me, this is partially going to be an exercise in stopping myself from over-thinking things, which does not exactly come naturally to me.

My strategy will be simple, however: I’m going to do stuff so that I have stuff to write about. The daily struggle to move this little enterprise forward an inch at a time should provide plenty of blog fodder, and I think we are finally in a place where we can really concentrate on the business. I’m pretty pumped.

So, in that vein, I have an announcement: we are temporarily suspending e-mail newsletter sign-up. I know it’s disappointing, but calm down; it’s going to be OK. At some point in the future, e-mail newsletter sign-up will be back. Every reputable e-commerce company has an e-mail marketing program, so it’s something we’ll have to do sooner or later.

For now, though, it’s coming down for two main reasons. First, honestly, I kind of jumped the gun when I put the sign-up widget on the site, seeing as how we don’t yet have any products to market. I read about this great free e-mail marketing service and I signed right up. We did not, in fact, find an occasion to send a single newsletter. Lesson learned: add features to the site only if they are likely to provide a near-ish term benefit.

Second, it has basically been all downhill for that service provider I was so excited about, Zookoda. First, they were purchased by an at-best-controversial company, IZEA (Michael Arrington is not a fan). After this TechCrunch post putting them on deadpool watch, I figured it was time to pull the plug. Lesson learned: even startups with well-reviewed, working products can turn on a dime. It’s good to have a backup plan. We got away with this one mostly due to the fact that we don’t yet rely on an e-mail program.

Which brings me to the e-mail sign-up post-mortem. I have to say, for something that I just slapped up on the site, we didn’t do too badly. Of the five people who signed up, four of them weren’t me, and one of them was someone I don’t personally know. I salute you all, but especially the unnammed t-shirt enthusiast with a hawaii.edu e-mail address. If you send me an e-mail, I’ll put you on a super-secret discount list that I just made up right now.

I have a lot to learn if I’m going to bring a company into existence. My plan is twofold: A) Read lots of books. B) Maintain a grateful attitude towards anyone who is willing to teach me something. If you can think of a book that a new entrepreneur should read, please leave suggestions in the comments or e-mail joey [at] greaterthanclothing.

Seth Godin has long been considered an authority on marketing in the internet age. He founded a pioneering online marketing company and sold it to Yahoo! before writing Permission Marketing in 1999. That makes this book fairly ancient by internet standards, and it does show its age at times (he gushes about My Yahoo!, which isn’t exactly groundbreaking any more), but I was actually surprised at how relevant the message still is. There certainly are companies that have yet to adjust their marketing to take advantage of the opportunity represented by the revolutionary change in the nature of communication (or, more fundamentally, information) over the last decade.

Godin starts by describing the late 20th century’s dominant paradigm, which he dubs “Interruption Marketing”. He’s referring to the mass broadcast commercial, junk mail, spam, and all other forms of marketing that are a mile wide and an inch deep. Response rates for this type of message are very low, but with enough resources it has been possible to make up for that with volume. He makes a great point about how traditional media and Interruption Marketing are mutually reinforcing. They can’t exist without each other.

As programming choices multiplied and new media started vying for the consumer’s time, attention became a scarce commodity, which put new constraints on the efficacy of Interruption Marketing. I’d argue that the fragmentation of the entertainment landscape has only accelerated since 1999 (this was before YouTube, before blog readership gained any momentum, etc.). The internet, part of the “problem” for traditional marketers, provided tools that made another form of marketing, “Permission Marketing”, much easier to scale.

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