When Kathrin Hamm first launched her weighted blanket brand, Bearaby, she didn’t have a team member trained in search engine optimization. But she knew someone who did.
His friend, Dannie Hansen, was well versed in the subject. His Munich-based company CBD, Nordic oil, could not run paid ads legally (as is the case with cannabis-related businesses), so it relied heavily on SEO as a key customer acquisition strategy. Hamm asked if Bearaby’s director of growth could shadow an SEO specialist at Hansen’s company for eight weeks.
He agreed. “We developed that and developed a buddy system, so our employee could spend about 50% of his time learning about how Nordic Oil worked and helping his team, 30% of his time working on the Bearaby SEO with the help of his friend, and the remaining 20 percent looking at other departments,” says Hamm. “Their company was further along than ours, so it was really interesting to see what they were doing successfully.”
Two months after the Bearaby employee returned from the shadowing experience, Hansen called Hamm: His company was just starting to use Shopify, and he knew Hamm’s team had a lot of experience with the platform. And so Bearaby returned the favor, hosting one of Nordic Oil’s employees for a two-month shadowing experience.
“The goal is to make it not just this eight-week program,” says Hamm. “It’s that you really develop these relationships between startups so that if, later on, you run into a problem with Shopify or your SEO, you have someone you can call and chat with for five or ten minutes.”
Since that first exchange, Hamm has formalized this cross-company follow-up process, which the company now winks at “summer camp.” It happens between June and August; nine Bearaby employees are taking part this year (about 30 per cent of the company). One participating startup is the New York City-based sustainable bag company advent; Bearaby sent two employees there to learn more about product design and Advene sent two Bearaby employees to learn more about digital marketing.
Bearaby has used the same concept to strengthen its relationship with suppliers. This summer, Bearaby’s sent three team members to work directly for their contract manufacturers in both Sri Lanka and Guatemala. Hamm hopes this will help them better understand product innovation, as well as strengthen the company’s relationship with its key product sources.
This is the first time since 2019 that Bearaby’s ‘summer camp’ is back in the office. It’s a change that excites Hamm and his employees. “We still saw benefits with a remote buddy system, but we had to be very disciplined when scheduling calls,” he says. “If you’re sitting in an office, you don’t have to be so strict on a schedule. There’s a huge cultural benefit to just observing what’s going on around you.”
Beyond the catchy name, there’s a good reason Bearaby’s improvement program takes place in the summer. For CPG brands, especially, it’s a time of year with a little more “breathing space,” especially compared to the holiday rush that happens in the fourth quarter.
So far, Hamm has worked exclusively within his own network to find partners for the program, and says founders are usually “very excited” about the idea. It mainly reaches out to startups that are at a similar stage to Bearaby, or “a bit further along”. Bearaby, founded in 2018, first achieved the Inc. 5000 this year after experiencing a growth of 4,999 percent over the past three years. The key is to make sure there is a clear mutual benefit in the relationship: a bigger company like Nike or Patagonia might not get much out of this deal and things would get complicated with a competitor. “In the startup space, there’s an openness about resources,” he says. “If you have someone who’s really good at a certain skill, people are excited to access that person, even if they can’t hire that person full-time.”
Bearaby employees participate in the “summer camp” on a voluntary basis, and Hamm says most of his staff have been eager to volunteer. Employees work closely with the HR team to develop their ‘skills matrix’, detailing their experience as well as the skills they hope to gain; the goal is to fill skill gaps. “I wouldn’t send a graphic designer to learn about email marketing,” says Hamm. “But if someone has a background in web development with some experience in email marketing, that’s something they can develop further.”
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