From My Dad's Garage to £100k in 24 Hours — MHI Media Testimonial

hey Stephan I got Stefan here um Stefan's a good friend of mine have you known each other before for a while we were together um but yeah Steph why don't you start by telling everyone uh like what you do like what what things have you done sort of like a general overview about yourself yeah yeah I'm Stefan and I'm the director and owner of Sorrow General um the street where well I would say it's probably under

the bracket of a streetwear store um e-commerce yeah it's an online store right I wouldn't you know we haven't got a physical location or anything so it's just an online store for now um but yeah we sell vintage and new streetwear uh sneakers streetwear and luxury products yeah and how did so how did you first start out with that yeah at first it was kind of just like a hobby so I was like collecting uh baref

pieces for myself well babe and supreme pieces for myself like you know I was into Mr badenip which is like a um Blazers and it's like Formal Wear so I was into that first and just like collected just such random [ __ ] like I had like a big chair couple of t-shirts like 90s babe t-shirts and stuff like that so yeah first he was just collecting and then I started to like post some uh some of my

stuff in like Facebook groups in into like babe talk so then I kind of realized that you know there was people interested in the stuff that I had and you know if there was a few pieces which I'd had for a while I'd I'd see if I was able to get rid of them and and yeah I could you know flip a profit on a few things so yeah I just started from there really yeah started

out as a hobby yeah yeah I know I was like huge into like the Supreme scene as well so when I was kicking off like back in 2015 2016 me and my friend used to to take the the bus up to London to to like camp out for like drops and stuff so and and yeah we bring it home and and you know flip it for a profit so it was it was easy you know yeah

hustling yeah hustling but there was a lot of money to be made in in Supreme back then it was you know kids which were 15 making you know a thousand a thousand pounds like just camping out every couple of weeks yeah definitely and you thought of you went from just doing it running down to uh to London grabbing stuff flipping it you saw then you started crying you made bait talk which is a Facebook page right

one of the biggest yeah okay yeah I didn't actually make that myself it was it was already there it was it was a like 10K um members but then I started to post in it a lot more and it just kept growing so people people think I'm you know the creator of it but I'm just like one of the admins so yeah yeah I guess yeah I guess I I was the the one admin out of

out of the the few admins the they had like a real passion for for the Babe clothing and and the whole street we're seeing so yeah it was like a hobby grew into a big passion like started being a leader in a community and then like from there yeah it was keep on collecting keep on posting cool stuff keep on you know selling stuff and the collection and the stuff that I had the stock just kept

on building up so I just knew I was sitting on like a small fortune like when I when I was you know only 17 18 so it was it was cool yeah because this is way before we met yeah yeah I've been running for a couple of years before we met yeah when we met a university that's when he was like really kicking off and then I decided you know I'm I'm doing this all the time

it's it's my passion I'm just going to stop doing the University at least for the time being dropped dropped out and then just kept on resetting yeah because I remember coming in you friends with a friend and they were telling me Oh yeah Steph I made loads of money he sells loads of clothes I never come in for a party or I can't remember what it was and then I just came into your room and it

was just like Stacks and stacks and stacks but lost super expenses everything I just didn't understand I didn't really understand it and you earned money man that's what I understood um and that was sort of like a transitional phase you said you like you were you weren't planning your goal wasn't to to do this forever you're at Uni do an architecture yeah yeah engineering and an architecture yeah yeah that's it so yeah your goal as soon

as Bennett just got it just got to you know he summed it up yeah it was the best way to go right exactly yeah it's like you know there was a lot of people at Uni kind of just messing around so I was like I've got an opportunity so I'm gonna kind of take it you know yeah and I was definitely in the messing around category yeah but you kind of knew what you wanted to you

were smart enough to you know you were gonna figure it out eventually yeah for sure um but yeah so like eventually you got your own place and then so it went from a shared house even and then you moved into your own place and it was still sort of like it was bootstraps a lot but you have you would do how much at this stage how much would you do in a month do you reckon it's

hard to tell but maybe like 10 20K a month Maybe yeah but it was a big it was like a more of a transition stage between the shared house and get my own place as well because I went back to my parents for like half a year or something um and and that's where I was kind of just going crazy I I was like up all night taking pictures of stock trying to get onto the website

every single week and it the amount of hours I put in was crazy and I was lucky that I had a place to put all my stuff because at that point I had like a garage full of stuff like the inventory must have been worth like 50 to 100K at that point and yeah it was just all stacked into my parents garage and yeah I was going crazy at that point and then I managed to find

a place to to live in back in Bristol and then yeah I started to I I turned out pretty much into a warehouse as well yeah so yeah just kept on going from there managed to to build a mini warehouse in the flat anyway that was the yeah that was the first time I hired somebody and and it was just like kind of through friends like uh that I knew from University so it was cool to

work with people but I was just like super super focused at that point like nothing nothing was going to stop me I was like I'm gonna be like a self-made millionaire you know you're gonna do it yeah yeah for sure and like that was this is around the time when I started helping you out a little bit as well like it was around then yeah I was yeah I moved into the flat I was doing it

for maybe like half a year and then you said to me yourself like can I run a couple of ads for you and I was like yeah yeah why not yeah and yeah I think it like maybe a rocky start but from there like I learned so much because you gave me a chance yeah and then like I remember you met like and you were still in the house then and you had some employees but I

guess everyone had gone home um because everyone was working from your house as well because that was the only place um but it was over Christmas I remember you saying I can't keep up with these orders it was crazy yeah I mean that's just like the the one Wonder of like the marketing that you do the ads that you run it's like you can scale something so quickly and get it you know get a customers there

that you need and then it's kind of like where do you go from that step as as a you know as a business how do you keep up with them orders you know you have to you have to have the space you have to be able to handle the the shipping and stuff like that so yeah and then that's when we kind of well when I decided I needed to to kind of move out a flat

and get like a another Warehouse which was even bigger yeah yeah so we're literally like yeah you would you would I think when I came when you were doing you're crushing it as well you had to kill new ideas for new products it scaled up a lot by Christmas yeah you were like you couldn't keep up with the orders I think it and then you spend like you maybe had a month or where it slowed down

a bit whilst you were you took out well you know a lot of business owners don't slow down a bit but you slow down a bit for a month and you found a bigger office you hired more as well because you had the big question like is this gonna [ __ ] last yeah um how do I who do I how do I hire and like where do I go because like I mean it was at that stage

it wasn't it wasn't a case of like I don't know where my next order is going to come from it was like I don't know I need to get the products yeah yeah it was more like weird how do I get the stock quick enough and get out quick enough you know but it was the employing people was kind of easy because one you know it was just like friends of friends and two I had you

to be able to to just be like look this guy's looking for work he can just you can just hire him and and and yeah it wasn't really at that stage he wasn't like you know permanent contracts and stuff like that it was just kind of super flexible when you work so yeah boys and boxes you know what I mean yeah yeah bringing the boys in getting the reinforcements in yeah it was super yeah it was

it was so much fun it was you know yeah like a group it turned out to be like a group of well it was like four or five boys and we were kind of just you know just enjoying enjoying doing work I guess because you don't usually get that opportunity to enjoy the work that you do usually you're working for some guy who's you know telling you to do some kind of [ __ ] job go and do

this go and do that but I was it was more of like there was a lot of creativity we were talking a lot we were doing bringing forward ideas and I kind of just smashing it yeah yeah we were yeah I mean it was super like chilled out and everyone sort of buying their own perspective like I was marketing obviously you were like leading leading the show and then you had some creative inputs even though you're

you probably learned that as well um you're you're very I remember you spent like you've had a whole day for one Instagram post yeah I think that's what brands Miss he said Stefan spend like six seven hours working on one instagram one picture yeah I did that I did that all the time like that's that's the stuff that I love doing is that create creative stuff create an Instagram posts and and putting it out there to

people for people to see like the the rest of the rest of us just kind of you know it's it's not as fun as as the creativity so yeah that's the thing like the creativity is fine and that's what made my job super easy at that time because you had enough stuff to put out there and it was fire like it's the stuff which I'm always trying to tell the brand to go out with now I'm

just like this is like that was exactly what people wanted it wasn't like what you wanted it so I thought but YouTube to be fair you were the people at that point as well like very much so so you know exactly what the people wanted it wasn't like a vision like oh [ __ ] we gotta make like this like big Coca-Cola style sort of like high production value it was like no no this is what people want

I've been doing this for years yeah this is [ __ ] work yeah well you know what people want they want the best product possible at like you know the the best price as well so it's just about finding finding that and and pointing out there and yeah these products are always going to sell because they're just they're such good value is yeah a lot of a lot of these uh other sellers are selling them are like a

ripoff price so I've been to a to so many stores around the world and you just I know that I'm putting good product out there and it's you know these guys are not able to to match that price yeah yeah I know something which like very separate enough from everyone else because you the stores in person were just like almost like way more expensive than we were so we sort of crushed it on price yeah we

thought were very similar to the audience and then like the problems we had to tackle were like actually getting the products and we could get we could get them in but like at the scale we wanted to came a lot harder and then customer service which we were pretty good at like we ship pretty quick actually yeah um as well I think we had like we spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best

way to like ship out really fast to our customers because we wanted to be like Amazon a little bit Yeah Yeah you could tell them you might not have needed to no yeah yeah that's true yeah but yeah the orders are flying out at least for majority of the time you know there were sometimes when we would put so much into marketing and we kind of like we all were spent and we we had like a

backlog of all orders and that's kind of when it made it more difficult yeah I mean yeah I mean I think we had a I think for one year we spent you know about six about about 100 Grand on on Facebook ads and we had a million in sales just from that account so it was like a 10 times return um but obviously like we might not at some stages we might not have had a million

like you know the the supply the products yeah yeah so yeah we were kind of backlogged it was kind of keep up with them orders it was like a quest yeah we wanted to spend more when it was working though as well like yeah yeah it could have easily scaled up now you just need the stock was just wasn't there and it would yeah it just wasn't rolling out smoothly as it could have been but you

know it's it's all learning anyway you know it's like I think we yeah I think we did pretty well yeah all the time yeah yeah for the time definitely yeah if we're talking about like literally like six months before you're getting you're in you're in your dad's garage your parents garage yeah yeah and then like you have then you move to the house then you got for office a warehouse you hired yeah um but we went

from doing like 10K um to like what 60k on average a month or something like that maybe 100 and some some months we did 100K over 24 hours on that Black Friday yeah I remember we were it was last minute the ads I think for that weekend we had 25 times return on on the Facebook ads which is insane and we spent we spent a decent bit as well um but like I remember last minute rough

to try and get this influence the campaign going um do you remember that yeah I mean we had we had a lot of influencers like Paulson on us and then we also had like I'm pretty sure we had a Harrison never video out that's what I mean yeah she kind of all just came through in the end it wasn't and then yeah we couldn't we were like [ __ ] how do we even keep up with this you

know yeah what do we how do we do this yeah exactly but yeah legitimately like like we used to do this you did this that was like your your whole year last year how do we do this 20 like how do we Supply this in 24 hours now yeah and you said Harrison Neville Harrison Neville big YouTuber super perfect for our Niche but at that time we've had like a massive list of influences so that's what

worked like really well on Instagram yeah now I think your fans did the same thing we were doing then on Tick Tock like it was a lot of [ __ ] work messages but if they did what we did then on tick tock and it's just like in general there's just so many more influencers out there these days yeah yeah you could crush it just on that alone if you were to you just need the right amount of

money to put towards these influences to to be able to get a brand pop in yeah and that's the thing like we we did like deep dives into figuring out how many views he like what was the cost per view and Etc like that but it's super hard to tell what what influence is working for you how well they're working and also like the big ones like we were pretty good we had a good relationship with

a lot of super good big guys yeah so probably get quite good rates but it's all about building relationships to those guys yeah definitely yeah like you said it's it's hard to tell how much value they actually bring as well there were some huge ones that we did use and you know they didn't end up being great like there was one you remember Becky G yeah 20 million followers but when you see the followers that you're

picking up from from the promotion that she did is kind of just like you know kids like Spanish kids yeah it doesn't yeah yeah you know they're not really going to convert so you have to just think you know is it all by the numbers or is it you know the person is the person going to bring True Value to to your company like Harrison and and the star life they were all in our seat in

the streetway scene sneaker scene so you know the value they brought was was crazy some of the videos like the one we did with Harrison like if you look at it now it's on like two million views plus so that's a crazy achievement yeah massive and I remember like it was like a we need to do this for Black Friday yeah last minute and I was like can we do it and you were like we can

do it uh and we just like okay I will say I can't we must have said yeah I think it was a Friday before we stayed really late and you made this mega mega mega parcel for him there's a video of them holding this parcel I think you must have wrapped it in so much tape and it looked awesome and we sent it out I think it cost us quite a lot to send it it was

like next day yeah because but then it was like so worth it because by the time it came Black Friday he posted it he was super quick on posting it yeah everything thought everything's all worked and then it just popped off yeah exactly yeah but like that's the fan what you were saying about Becky G is something which I always try and that's the lesson I remember from then but I always try and implement it now

it's like and it and also with the ads as well it's like numbers big numbers stuff great like it's an ego thing more than anything else and also like you think if you see Coca-Cola do it you see like boy the Kylie Jenner on the Pepsi ad and you're just like what if they're doing it it must really really work right yeah but actually it's a completely different thing for like when you're a smaller Brands because

you actually gotta you talk if you talk to less people who are the right people make way more money um yeah it could be like you know a small YouTuber who's only getting a couple of thousand views on it on a video about if it's your Niche then it's gonna work yeah it could work way better than something I guess like half a million views so yeah yeah we we had a lot of um and also

we sort of made a product had a product which encourage people and we added extra little things to post on YouTube organically they posted on Instagram organically we had so much content like that it was together yeah we weren't sure for Content yeah well we made assistance like we say we were saying yeah it was like yeah we did spend time and we did rush it but also everything we did was just like okay this is

going to work this is gonna work yeah now it's been a massive learning curve for me for sure because it's like you know nowadays I think a little bit more before I make certain decisions where whereas then within that period when we were working together and before that it was so rushed I was you know it was like [ __ ] how do I make so much money quickly yeah so yeah it was there in front of us

right so we just went and got it yeah but we weren't sure we didn't even think we didn't even ask the question if we actually wanted it yeah yeah there were some things where we probably didn't discuss for long for long enough it was just like yeah let's let's just do that [ __ ] but then like the learning the experience you get from that is just so key to then working on the business in the future like

you've probably learned so much that you can kind of provide value to to your existing customers now and the same for me like this just yeah there's decisions that I just wouldn't make that I made back then yeah yeah exactly and like you always learn from your failures failures more than your successes right um But like after that like I spent a lot of time trying to make really pretty ads like content which like yeah and

I I went into sort of like the Becky G thing you know what I mean I started trying to make stuff which just looked really good but just didn't it didn't didn't think about the audience enough didn't think about who I was talking to just tried to just oh yeah this will work and it just was way worse um so it took me a while to like actually think back to those times and remember what actually

worked back then and it was just fantastic you know being a bit ugly bit like no one was doing stuff what like what we were doing that like content was what you were doing yeah I mean people copied it yeah it was crazy when people used to copy like anything yeah it was just so like protective over it like anybody's trying to copy it I'm like [ __ ] those guys like like if something's gonna happen like you're

gonna it's gonna be people which which are gonna do the same thing or similar things that you just got to kind of deal with it or just like make something which is bulletproof like if you're that creative you can make something which nobody else is going to be able to duplicate yeah exactly that's kind of yeah that's what I learned the more I I continued to to kind of stand by yeah and there's a lot of

money out there as well for everyone but it's like spending more time thinking about like coming up with a big idea for a sort of content something which is more disruptive something which gets in their face a little bit and what people actually really want to see you know what I mean for all the inspiration rather than just rushing it out like a lot of people we're just like oh we need to post every day on

Instagram and then they'll just make 30 posts or whatever or Tick Tock as well and just put it out then just like oh why why isn't it working why isn't getting traction yeah yeah dude they need to figure out who Their audience is and connect with them in in a better way like if they've got a hundred followers they need to make sure that them 100 followers are engaging in in what they're doing before they try

and put out more content it's probably probably best if and I'm just talking about like these really small businesses like startups like how they how they approach it yeah it's yeah it's better to like work on content for a long period of time like a couple of weeks and put out one or two videos that are gonna you know gonna be eye-catching but yeah like you said a lot of these companies they're putting out like 30

posts and and they get like 10 likes on each one and it's like well just going through the emotions you can't expect things to sell when you're not like fully engaged with with an audience yeah yeah and like that was one of the things which you you always had because of I think it was naturally happened you know what I mean because like it was a community it's a very Community thing when you first started out

right yeah exactly I had the the Facebook group and that was like 50 000 members at that point so I kind of if I posted anything in there I had a whole community of people which were kind of backing me so it worked well and then from there you pick up you know a lot more people because it's kind of people are finding like a trend so yeah and at the time I probably didn't understand it

but it's a key marketing principle it's like Authority obviously trust as well yeah yeah so many times and I remember telling my friends about it I was just like yeah no like when I try to explain to my friends like what I was doing I was like you know like he's like I've been a baker 50 000 members people go to him that was one of the things we said people came to you to see if

the products were real legit you have a guy to talk to you know what I mean yeah like you gotta you gotta make sure that the the followers know that everything you're selling is like super authentic because nowadays we're selling you know Louis Vuitton and it's you know it's a brand where a lot of people are like well these are really authentic you know especially the prices that we put it up for but but yeah I

try to like dig into like details so like make making sure the there's like showing the customers how to authenticate to themselves like like showing them the tags Etc so yeah they can they know for sure that products are authentic yeah and that's one of the things we did as well is we tried to make that guy the authenticity guide for free we could see yeah we're always trying to do something super time consuming to do

stuff like that but you've got to try and try and put it out there yeah and like um what I'm saying about the authenticity and Trust like other brands can do this it doesn't have to be like specific to like legiture like legit checking that's what it's called Louis Vuitton to see if it's real like it can be anything like it can be if you're a doctor or you get a doctor to approve your your supplement

or if you know you've got a history of like health and food products like you can be an authority figure um if you're selling like a home workout gym or like a workout yeah it's like Mark Wahlberg like he's you know Marky Mark you know what I mean and uh Chris Hemsworth he's he's you know he's massive he sells his uh Center app it's Authority and Trust massive sellers yeah obviously so like if you can build

a community give value then it makes it way easier to make sales in the long run yeah we always had that to go back on and people Googled to find out if you're a legit everyone's just like yeah obviously legit it was more like that rather than leaving questions so I know this is the guy yeah I think you just froze then yeah yo you froze for like a couple of minutes I think I think you

liked out but anyway I I go like it's been a half an hour um we're gonna do a longer form one of these but I just want to go over just that like I highlights what we spoke about hobby into passion you know and then it went at University doing about 10K a month to moving back home dropping out of uni taking the big risk back in the garage from a garage to a home office to

a full-time office with I think we had we had four employees at that point yeah I think of is like the the you know all of these people they were on full-time wages as well it's like five or six people I'm like providing you know the the money that they're gonna take home for the year you know they're gonna yeah they're totally rely on me it's a good feeling to to to have you know people which

are working for you for sure yeah yeah it's a bit daunting but yeah so like it was literally but you from not from like in a garage to having that by the end of like within 12 months it was like you had I don't know how many boys you had at the most maybe six or seven um and you we did 100 can a day within a year periods through a power of all for having an

authentic authentic brands or foreign people trust in US kill our Facebook ads focusing along with creative on content they're just like being the audience so really really understanding the audience and they were like the five key things we did which just allowed us to just to grow rapidly in 12 months yeah for sure yeah it's like the five key principles bro like we should tell us