The E-Comm Show
The E-Comm Show
From Clicks to Connections: Growing eComm Through Community with Curl Warehouse | EP. #190
Is physical retail dead—or just getting smarter? In this 190th episode, Andrew Maff sits down with Samantha Cross, curly hair care enthusiast and founder of Curl Warehouse, to talk about how she’s built a thriving eCommerce brand by leaning into retail, not away from it.
While most brands are chasing clicks, Samantha’s mixing it up: local events, brick-and-mortar, and yes, radio ads. Why? Because Curl Warehouse is all about meeting customers where they are. Whether that’s helping someone choose the right curl cream over live chat, or running a product swap event IRL, this is next-level omnichannel done the community-first way. Forget what you thought you knew about ROI… this isn’t an episode you want to miss.
What You’ll Learn:
- How opening a retail store can fuel your online sales: Discover how Shopify POS, in-store reward syncing, and real-world events can create a seamless brand experience across every touchpoint.
- Tracking brand awareness: Why Curl Warehouse still invests in radio ads, and how they’ve seen real-world results despite limited attribution.
- Letting your customers make the decisions: Using feedback to determine everything from what products stay or go, to which new categories they explore next.
- Segmenting your product category correctly: Learn how to segment on needs and benefits, while offering live chat and dedicated email support to guide overwhelmed shoppers.
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I think why the retail part works, especially for our kind of business, is the internet has made purchasing online so easy that if you're not offering your customers something that would encourage them to get in the car and come visit you in person, they're just going to order online.
Andrew Maff:Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Ecomm show. As usual, I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by the amazing Samantha Cross, who is the owner over at Curl Warehouse. Samantha, how you doing? You ready for good show?
Samantha Cross:Yeah. I'm great. Thanks so much for having me.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, super excited to have you on the show. Obviously, been doing a ton of digging into your business. Got to know a lot and very interested to learn a lot about it. Today, I always like to do kind of the stereotypical thing, give you the floor for a second and tell us a little bit about your background, how you got started with Curl Warehouse, and then we will take it from there.
Samantha Cross:All right, sounds good. I started Curl Warehouse in my house in 2019 and we took the risk and moved into our retail space and warehouse in 2020 the summer of 2020 Right kind of in the height of the pandemic. But the decision paid off, and I'm happy we made it. We've got a team of six at the moment, including me. And yeah, we're in Calgary, Alberta, and we've got over 1000 curly hair products specifically for curly and textured hair.
Unknown:That is amazing. So what made you start business in 2019?
Samantha Cross:Well, you can tell I am my own customer. I have curly hair, and I couldn't find specifically what I was looking for in the Calgary area, Canada doesn't have a lot of great options for curly and textured hair care, so I was ordering things from the States for myself. Most of our products do come from the US, or at least most of our popular products do, and I just it was easier for me to bring in more and more products and sell them to people in our local area. And that kind of snowballed and took off, and now we're here.
Unknown:Interesting. Now, is a majority of the business retail, or is it e commerce? Is it like what? Tell me about some of that element.
Samantha Cross:We do about 80% of our sales online. So we are an E commerce forward business, but we run the Shopify system throughout the store as well. So our POS system is Shopify too, and it's all the same inventory, which makes it really simple for us to keep track of. Our store and our warehouse are in the same building, so it's nice and simple to pull and pack orders and help customers at the same time.
Unknown:Yeah, it's always very interesting when I could speak with like an E commerce seller that, like the that also has the retail brick and mortar side, because it does make a ton of sense, right? Like you've got it all sitting in a warehouse, so why not showcase it and allow some people that are at least in a local area to be able to come by? How do you kind of cross pollinate the two of them?
Samantha Cross:I think why the retail part works, especially for our kind of business, is the internet has made purchasing online so easy that if you're not offering your customers something that would encourage them to get in the car and come visit you in person, they're just going to order online. But because we have such a wide range of products, and curly hair care is its own kind of beast, we have really knowledgeable staff that can answer questions in person, see people's hair provide them with personalized advice and recommendations for products. And it just makes sense. It's the type of thing people want to talk about, and they and the best way for them to talk about it is for us to be able to see what they're working with, right to see their hair, and so doing it in person and having the online aspect to support it. You know, maybe once a customer has gotten comfortable with us, or they know what products they want to buy, they don't obviously have to come make the trip. But I think if you're not offering that additional step, or the additional excellent customer service, or some reason for someone to come purchase from you in person, it doesn't work for an Ecomm Business to also have the retail store, even if you have the inventory sitting there because there's, there's no reason for people to come visit you when they can just buy online.
Unknown:Yeah, it's a very good point. Do you have, like, people traveling from like, all over the place to come visit you?
Samantha Cross:We do, yeah. It makes my day when customers come in and say, Oh, I'm visiting from Edmonton, or I'm just here for the weekend from Toronto, and I had to come to Curl Warehouse. And see you. Yeah, it's it's an amazing feeling
Unknown:That's crazy. Are you is for, I know you mentioned you're getting a lot of the product from the States, but are when you're selling it yourself? Is it just in Canada, or are you also selling back to the States, or or what's that?
Samantha Cross:We ship across North America. So oftentimes we import products from the states and then we send it back to the States.
Andrew Maff:Nice, okay, how's, I know it's most of it's cleared up for the most part now. But how are the tariffs end up becoming like a problem with that back and forth?
Samantha Cross:Yeah, and not cleared up for our HS codes, we're still paying tariffs on them, so no difference for us.
Unknown:Yeah, like, what'd you do to pivot for that? I know a lot of people had kind of different approaches to how to deal with it.
Samantha Cross:We were actually really lucky. So many of our American brands offered to help us with the tariff costs so that we didn't have to raise prices so significantly on their customers in Canada, our customers in Canada as well. So of course, we had to raise some prices. It was unavoidable. You can't as a business, just suddenly absorb a 25% increase on your wholesale price without sending your business into the ground. But I'm really grateful that we had those amazing relationships already established. So when I went to them and said, Look, here's our problem, I can't afford this without raising prices, it was adding $4 a bottle, or it is adding $4 a bottle to our average product price and and, you know, that's not something that I'm really excited about passing on to my customers, but not something that we can just absorb. So the fact that that we had those relationships already, and they were very receptive to helping split the burden made a huge difference in how well so far we've weathered the storm.
Unknown:Yeah, good. How are you marketing it like? Is it? Is it? Obviously, it's mostly online. How are you kind of connecting with that audience? And is it, I guess, just completely blanketed across North America? Are you mainly focused on marketing within Canada?
Samantha Cross:I'm not a marketing whiz, so I hire people who are good at it, but we do Google ads, Instagram, Facebook, we've got Pinterest ads running. We've started running radio in the last year, actually, in our cabinet, and that has been going really well. So I really enjoyed working on the radio ads. Yeah, it's been awesome to to have people come in the store and say, I heard you guys on the radio, because I incorrectly didn't think people listen to the radio anymore.
Unknown:Yeah, I didn't really. Either I assumed it was mostly like podcasts like this, or like Sirius XM, or some type of, like, just streaming thing. That's very interesting. So that's working well for you. So is it all just directed to getting people into the retail store I imagine.
Samantha Cross:The biggest goal for the radio ads was to send people into the store, but it has, I believe, helped our online traffic as well. Because Calgary is a big area, we've got lots of people who listen to the radio station that we advertise on outside the city, and they obviously then could take advantage of the convenience of having stuff shipped to them. So they're on our website too.
Unknown:Very interesting. So, you know, when I'm sure we have a lot of listeners right now that are, like, what? Like, I never thought about doing that, because everyone's very data driven, right? It's very I'm running this ad. Here's what this cost me. Here's the clicks I got. Like, it's so specific. Whereas you do something like radio, it's like brand awareness, and fingers crossed, it works. So how are you how do you kind of paint the picture of the ROI there, and whether it's justifiable for you to keep doing it or not?
Samantha Cross:I was surprised actually, the cost of advertising on the radio is not super expensive compared to what I expected to be. So for an exposure purpose. It's not a bad place to put a little bit of money every month, but the fact that people come into the store and say to us more often than they say they saw Google ads or Facebook ads or Instagram ads, they say, I heard you on the radio, and they actually lead with that part of the conversation, that, to me, means it's working. We run Local Lead Generation ads now on Google and Facebook specifically targeting the same audience that the radio ads are targeting. It's sort of to try and figure out more of that ROI data that we can't get just from the radio ads themselves. But as far as I'm concerned, it's it's working and it's positive. So as long as that continues, we'll keep doing
Andrew Maff:That's pretty cool. It was very interesting. Yeah, it. the the product line. Tell me about that. How do you How are you sourcing product? How are you figuring out which brands to offer? You know what? What's that approach been?
Samantha Cross:We bring in so many products based on customer requests and recommendations, but we also bring in products that are really popular on social media that you can't get anywhere else in Canada. So part of the reason customers shop with us and continue to shop with us is because we're the only place you can get them in Canada, if not in Western Canada, in the whole country. And so it's it's really a case of seeing what the demand is, what the activity is online for these. New brands and new products, and then sometimes brands will approach us. Now we're at a point where brands will come to us and say, We want to break into the Canadian market. We want to have our products carried at Curl Warehouse. How do we do that? And as far as I'm concerned, that means we I've made it. People are coming to me trying to sell their product in my store, and that makes me happy.
Unknown:That's pretty cool. For a lot of brands, like, they dream about opening up a store, and they kind of always hesitate with it a little bit like, when do you know, or when did you know that it was the right move to open up the retail element of it?
Samantha Cross:We were needing a warehouse space anyways, and so I specifically looked for warehouse space that was zoned so that I could have a small retail store in the same building, financially, that made sense for us, but it also makes sense from an inventory management perspective. It's all under the same roof. And I think if a business needs the warehouse space anyway, and they think there's a demand, they're either seeing it or hearing it from customers that they want to come in and see you in person, or they have a bazillion questions, and it'd be easier just to deal with them in person and discuss, you know, their needs, face to face, rather than online. I think it's a it's that's the time to figure out if you can make it work with your existing warehouse space to open a store,
Unknown:Yeah. And so you have the retail establishment, then you have your D2C website. Are you selling anywhere else, like, are you reselling on any marketplaces, anything like that, just just the two.
Samantha Cross:We have three things on Amazon, mostly our own branded and stuff, but we, we put all of our effort into our own channels.
Unknown:Yeah. How? How do you differentiate where to focus on your own branded stuff versus the other brands?
Samantha Cross:Based on customer needs, customer demand, they really dictate the brands we bring in, the products that we carry, the amount of inventory we order, all those things. And so the stuff that we have branded as our own is mostly accessories. So it's just things to complement the products that we carry.
Unknown:Nice that's interesting. So you, you mentioned you opened up the warehouse and the retail establishment in summer of 2020?
Samantha Cross:Yep, that's correct.
Andrew Maff:So when you opened up, I would imagine initially, were you thinking, like, oh, this was a bad idea because, like, no one was coming into the store. Or was it, how were things there were people able to come in?
Samantha Cross:Yeah, people, people came in. Um, the nice thing about our location is we're in a industrial park, and so it's not the type of place where people are wandering through the mall and they just sort of stop in to have a have a peek. You have to make the effort to come and see us. So generally, our store is not that busy, um, which, you know, at that time was a good thing, but as the pandemic situation eased off and restrictions were lifted, people were so, I think, starved for face to face contact and communication and social interaction that we did, almost immediately see an increase in customers in the store who wanted to talk to someone about their hair concerns.
Unknown:Yeah. Where are you trying to take the brand? Like, so you, you've you've got the E commerce side. You've gotten into a lot of brands that already sell in your product line. You've got your own accessories. You have a retail establishment, marketplaces, I could agree, not exactly, always the best place. So like, how are you focused on continuing to scale it?
Samantha Cross:We're just doubling down on what's working. I'm not interested at the moment in expanding or franchising or opening new locations. I just want to be doing what we're doing the best we possibly can, be doing it, and then just growing the business from there with the property we already have.
Unknown:Yeah, is most of your business in Canada, or is it in the states?
Samantha Cross:The majority is in in Canada, obviously, with with selling a majority US products, we have a lot of European and British products as well, but with the majority US products, there's not a ton of incentive for American purchasers to buy from us, except for the fact that we have everything under one roof. So if you want this product from this brand, and this product from this brand, rather than ordering from them individually, you could just order individually, you could just order from us and pay one shipping cost.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, that's a good point. Your you know your comment of someone being able to come in store and get all the answers, it makes a ton of sense. But if you're not near you and you're coming online to your your website, it's a huge product line of everything, curly hair. So it obviously like, if I'm a first time visitor, it can be daunting. How do you what things do you have in place to like help people that are just shopping online figure out kind of the best things to be looking for?
Samantha Cross:We've split our inventory into collections or categories based on a lot of the biggest needs that we see. So for instance, people come in they're having scalp issues, or they come in and their hair is damaged, or they're coming in and their goal is X, Y or Z. And so we try and split up what we have to make it easy for them to find what they're looking for. We also have an online chat, and we have a dedicated email. Inbox for product suggestions and recommendations, so people can email us or chat with us to help them narrow down the selection that we have. Because, yeah, it is overwhelming. There's a lot to choose from, and a lot of our customers, especially our first time customers, don't know exactly what they're looking for, and so we do try and make the purchasing journey as much online as it is in store as possible. So in the store, you can talk to someone who can say, Okay, well, what are you looking for? What are your goals? How would you describe your hair? Is your hair damaged? And then we can narrow it down from there. And so we try and do the same thing online.
Unknown:Yeah. Are you just drop shipping, or are you, I'm sorry, are you taking in all inventory? Are you drop shipping anything?
Samantha Cross:We have all of it. We do all fulfillment.
Andrew Maff:Okay. I mean, that's great, because then you get to, you know, control the messaging, control the shipping, all that fun stuff. What do you how do you control, you know, product quality, obviously that part, it's still you're getting in product and then shipping it to them. So even as a reseller, I know sometimes that can be a bit of a challenge every now and then, what how do you kind of combat that?
Samantha Cross:We don't bring in anything we haven't tried or tested out ourselves. So it makes a big difference. Either we may not have tried the brand every one of their products, but we have tried something from their line. Sometimes they'll send us products to try, or we'll order a small amount first and try it out before we put on the shelves. So from a quality control perspective, we have a very good idea of what we're selling. That's not to say that occasionally there's a bad batch, or, you know, something goes wrong, or stuff gets damaged, it happens. It's business. We do the best we can to look after our customers, and then, thankfully, for the majority of the brands we deal with, they then look after us to make sure that we're not out for something that we have no control over. Yeah, I know you mentioned marketing is not entirely in your in your wheelhouse, but the the do you know between your advertising channels you mentioned, you know you're doing Facebook and Instagram, Google, all those like is, I would assume Google is probably the one outperforming, because you're kind of piggybacking off of these brands, like pre existing brand awareness for the most part, right? Yeah, exactly. And honestly, as a reseller of those brands, the fact that some of those brands are so well known and spend so much money on marketing has really benefited us, especially because we might be the only place in Canada you can get them. So if your alternative is ordering from the States, especially with tariffs and international and international shipping, you're going to come to us or you're going to look for a Canadian seller of those brands, right? So Google is our top channel for sure every month, without fail. And then behind that, Instagram and Facebook, we don't do a lot on Pinterest, it's kind of more of an awareness channel. And then obviously, now with radio, that's more of an awareness thing as well.
Unknown:Yeah, you say Pinterest, I've always found it's great for top of funnel, but getting people to convert on that thing is a challenge. Yeah, with Google doing so well, have you ventured into doing like Microsoft or Bing Ads at all?
Samantha Cross:We tried Bing. We did it for about three or four months, had zero return and stopped.
Unknown:Really interesting, huh? Usually I find that, like, typically we find Microsoft has a really nice return. It's just the volumes, like, super low on it, but it's also a very different audience, so that very well could be the case. And then then the Pinterest side obviously doesn't shock me. Do you do anything in terms of, like, reward programs or anything like that, just like, from a retention perspective, to keep people coming back?
Samantha Cross:We do have a reward program that a lot of our customers love. The nice thing about having Shopify POS running our store is that it connects, and so customers in the store can spend their loyalty points as well, even if they've gained those points from shopping online, we also have a very active community of people in our immediate area that I think helps with bringing in new customers and helps with customer retention. So we do local events. So we do product swaps. We don't take returns on used products because we just have to throw them away from like, a health perspective. So what we do is, twice a year we have a swap. You can bring in something that didn't work out for you, whether it's from Curl Warehouse or not, and you swap it with other people who bring in stuff that didn't work out for them. And the last one we had one a couple weeks ago, and we had hundreds of products, and then we donated them at the end to a local nonprofit so that they could use them.
Unknown:Yeah, interesting, huh? Okay, and so, so in that scenario, you have people come in to swap products with each other based off of stuff that's not working for them, and so just kind of a big conversation of, hey, this didn't work for me, maybe it'll work for you, and they're just trading, more or less.
Samantha Cross:Pretty much. We have the products dropped off in advance so we can assign, we call it curl box. We assign a value to it based on how much is left and what your original purchase price would have likely been at regular price, and then you have that same value to spend on other products. So you don't necessarily know who donated the product, but because we're getting everyone in one room at once. Yeah, the conversations are fantastic, like that didn't work for me, but it'll probably work for you, because your hair is completely different from mine, and everyone's trading tips and suggestions and, yeah, our community is amazing. I'm so happy we have the store, because otherwise I wouldn't get to see that.
Andrew Maff:That's so interesting. I would imagine that's probably some great content for social media too. Just the amount of curly hair everywhere that whole day.
Samantha Cross:Yes, honestly, we we have big open houses once a year for our anniversary as well. And to get that many, our store is only 400 square feet, to get that many beautiful curls in one store is amazing, and it's it's one of my favorite days of the year. I absolutely love it.
Andrew Maff:That is pretty cool. Samantha, this was awesome. I don't wanna take up more your time. I know you're super busy, but I really appreciate all of that information. It sounds really cool. I would love to give you the floor. Please let everyone know where they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about Curl Warehouse.
Samantha Cross:Curl Warehouse, we're in Calgary, Alberta, so if you wanna come visit us in person, we're not far from Chinook Mall. If you wanna find us online, we're at curlwarehouse.com and our Instagram. Com, and our Instagram is Curlwarehouse.
Andrew Maff:Easy enough. Samantha, thank you so much for your time. Thank you everyone who tuned Yeah, everyone who tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual, rate, review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to Ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you all next time. Have a good one!
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