My name is Carly Bonfonte. I am calling from Los Angeles, California, and I am the founder of Full Moon Fairy, which is a children's book series and trinket subscription that's very immersive and interactive and meant to be experienced on every full moon. And we also do a line of premium organic stuffed animals to bring these characters and these stories to life.

Cool. And what's your question?

So I am a solo founder. I'm self-publishing. I'm self-funded. I'm trying to do it all myself. And I'm currently gearing up for now a D2C launch. And I really am just wondering how I can create a really magical launch for Fullmoonferry.com.

Cool. All right. Well, a couple of questions before we dive into your question. So this is a, it's a subscription model. There's a book. Parents read the book to the kids, but they also get some trinkets. And then when the kid goes to sleep at night, they put it like under their pillow, like the tooth fairy?

Yeah. We say in our family, you put your shoes out and the full moon fairy will just come and drop a little trinket in their shoe to be discovered in the morning. And do

you do this on the full moon? Yes.

Yes. So the first book in this series tells the story of Faye, the full moon fairy, and she visits children and brings trinkets for them to discover in the morning. So every month, Faye goes on an adventure with another nocturnal critter friend, and there's this adventure to be had, and then the kids wake up to these trinkets that are kind of, there's a nod to something in the book that they'll discover in their shoe in the morning.

And are you the writer, the author of the stories?

So I actually, back in 2022, when I first thought of this concept, I actually invited a good family friend of ours who is the writer of Toy Story, the first Toy Story. I invited him to lunch and I told him the concept and I was like so excited and he got so inspired and excited. And he actually was like, I want to help you write these. This would be so fun, such a fun project to work on. And so we ended up kind of brainstorming back and forth. He ended up having too many other priorities, but he introduced me to a gal that he'd been mentoring. And so her and I have been really working on bringing these to life together. Tell

me what you were doing around the time you founded this or what, I mean, I'm assuming you work on this full time now? I

do. I actually lost my day job back in January. And so, you know, I'd been at this as more or less like a passion project, side project for a little over a year prior to that. And then back in January of this year, I thought, you know what, what the heck, I should go for this, you know, let's see what we can do here. So I've really been trying to ramp up to really launch soon, any day now. And

what were you doing? Tell me a little bit about the work you were doing before.

Yeah. So I've been in fashion and wellness for a little over 20 years. I've primarily worked on the wholesale sales teams for brands. So if I was working for Manduka, I would be selling to Nordstrom's and Yoga Works. And then I've worked for other large brands like Seven for All Mankind and True Religion. So my product background ranges quite a bit. And

where are you getting the books and the trinkets and stuffed animals made? Are you working with factories in Asia? Yes.

So my books and trinkets are being made in Asia, and then the stuffed animals are actually all handmade in Nepal. So there's two different factories that I'm working with. And

this is totally self-financed right now.

Yes. Yes. Which is, I mean, every day I'm like, oh my God, this is totally insane, you know, but it's, it's a pretty big undertaking.

Jeff, questions for Carly?

And Carly, you mentioned you have kids.

I do. I have an eight-year and a six-year And, you know, so when I started this a couple years ago, they were really right in that sweet spot of the magic years is what I call them.

That's so cute. My kids are just a little bit older and the tooth fairy, I think, just died for the last one of ours. But for the longest time we believed and it's the sweetest. So I empathize with the magic years. And then you mentioned you're launching soon, like imminently? Yes.

So the website actually just went live as like a soft launch. And then I'm really ramping up for an August ship date for the first book. But I have been seeding this and kind of selling to my smaller network for a while. I got some advanced copies late last year of the books and the reactions have been amazing, which definitely fueled my passion and my excitement to really go for this.

Great. And so your question, of course, is an important question and a good question for Jeff about customer acquisition and then subscription retention. You're hoping to launch this in August. You want people to subscribe to this so they can get a book every month and then leave a trinket for it. By the way, I have blamed the Tooth Fairy on many occasions when I have forgotten to leave the money. I know.

I was

like, wow, she completely forgot us. This is personal. I'm going to find out what's going on. It's tough. We're doing a lot, right? Parents were like

juggling it all. And the last thing I want to do is layer one more thing. But the beauty of this is the full moon can last a few days, you know?

That's true. Yeah. Oh, it's still a full moon. Yeah, it's still full. Yeah. Look out there. Yeah. Looks full to me. So, Jeff, let's talk about customer acquisition and then maybe we divide it into subscription retention into two. Where does Carly start? Yeah.

So I think in the early days, one of the thoughts I'd have for you is to start with your own network and your friends. They're the people who are going to be the biggest advocates for the brand because they know you and they know your story. And then figure out how to get them to tell their friends and their friends. When we started Harry's, we had this crazy idea to build this referral campaign. And I think a lot of other people have done similar things. And maybe now it's many years later and a bit played out. But when we started, we're like, we just want to tell all our friends about this. And then we're going to give them incentives to tell all their friends about this. And then their friends, we turned into a game. Yeah,

that's a great idea. What

did you give them? What was the incentive?

Graduated. It was like graduated reward. So if you told five friends and they came back and they had like your link that you got free razor handle and up to I think 100 friends, you got like shaving for a year. And it was this fun game. They're great. And I can't underestimate like just the importance of doing that and building community and then i'd imagine there's lots of other communities out there that you could tap into rather than spending a lot of money on marketing day one i think about what are the communities that you can tap into just to build awareness of this around groups of parents that you can just start to spend time with who can get to know you and you tell your story that might mean you grow a little bit more slowly in the other days. But I think what you get from that is you get to start to really understand how customers feel about your products and how they talk about your products. And then you can use that as kind of the core of any of your future marketing campaigns.

Yeah, I'm definitely looking to create, you know, the super fans, if you will, or the people that are really going to be like, long term supporters. So that's a great, that's really, really great advice. You

know, and if you can reach a few hundred people to start, and they tell a couple more people, and then, and you can build this great loyal customer base. And then it gets down to this retention point, which we can talk about a little bit. But then how do you make each of those people have such an incredible experience that they want to go talk

about it to others?

Right.

Yeah. You know, you mentioned that you worked for Manduka and we had Peter Stereos, the founder on the show a couple of years ago. But I remember that the way he got Manduka out there, right, because there were a bunch of yoga mats available, was he got them in the hands of yoga instructors. And they could see that these were different, that the quality of the material was different. Then students would see the yoga teachers using these mats and they would say, how can I get one? And that's really how they built it out. Now, obviously, you're not, you know, this sort of an apples to oranges comparison a little bit, but not totally, because if you can get it in the right hands of people, certainly, know, mommy bloggers, I hate that term, but it's still a term that you hear, right? You got to get it in their hands for free. The other thing I think could be really interesting, and Jeff, you could speak about this too, because I know you guys, a big part of your business as a social mission is can you include a charitable element? Like for every subscription, we send a percentage to, you know, Make-A Foundation or some other group that brightens kids' lives, something like that. Yeah.

I think there's still such a draw for socially conscious brands that are doing good and giving back. So that's a great call out.

Yeah. Harry's, we give 1% of our sales to organizations that support men's mental health, which makes us feel great about what we do every day as a company. But I think the guy's point, it also gives people another reason to talk about the brand and to tell others about it.

Yeah. The through line in all these books is really taking care of each other and taking care of the earth. So I think there's something there for sure of like, whether it's, you know, we do something on Earth Day, or we do something, you know, along those lines, which could be really meaningful. And

when you build that in really early, it's a lot easier than having to kind of start later, just because it's part of the business model. And yeah, and then I love the idea that I had around talking to mommy bloggers and other people, highly engaged people in the community. I think that that's a great audience for you. And as you start to get customers, I think what you'll try to start to figure out is like, who are your best customers? Like, who are the people who love this the most? Right. You know, what is it about them that's different from other people? How old are their kids? What is it about their kids that's different? And then you can go to people like that in the world and say, hey, you're going to be someone who loves this, which I think will then create even more virality because you're going to the people who you think love it. The other thing that we did early at Harry's when we started to advertise was we looked at all the things that our customers were saying about us and that press and other people in the world were saying about us. We tried to find nuggets of things that were interesting that we could talk about in the world. And, you know, when we launched, we were very fortunate. GQ, in the magazine of GQ at the time, wrote an article about us saying that your dop kit just got handsomer. And we created an ad that said handsomer. We liked that word. We thought it was funny. We created an ad that said handsomer, sharper, or less expensive. And we put razors under each of those words. We put it out. And that was our highest performing ad in the company for our first couple of years. Yeah,

so good. And

so I think there's like so much magic in learning about how people talk about your product and your brand. And then turning that into the messaging that you can put out in advertising communications and on your site, etc. And I think where the world is shifting a little bit today versus where we started is maybe it's not, you know, a banner ad on Google or something. Maybe it's having the right things to say to someone who is a paid influencer on, you know, a social platform, right, who can go out and just talk, tell their own story about the product and the brand in a way that's interesting. And those places seem to be getting a lot of reach right now.

Great. Yes. Thank you so much. These are very valuable nuggets. I really appreciate it.

Carly, thanks so much for calling in. The brand is called Full Moon Ferry, and we'll be watching out. Good luck.

Thank you, guys. Thanks so much. And

you got a customer here.

Awesome. I love it. Thank you. Awesome.

You know, this question about

customer retention, which we're unable to kind of get into sort of too much depth, in part because I think acquisition is really, it's where she needs to put her focus on now. But I feel like a lot of brands learn this lesson late, which is they focus too much on customer acquisition at the expense of customer retention, right? Totally. And retention is really where the, at the end of the day, that's really where the value is.

Totally. I couldn't agree more in how that kind of math works in any business is the higher retention rates are on an existing customer, the more valued customers are to you. And then the more you can spend on acquisition to acquire them. At the end of the day, you can only spend to acquire a customer as much as those customers are worth to you. One thing if Carly is listening, I would say is like, she should be very involved in the early retention efforts. Like, I mean, how cool would it be if the first hundred customers of Full Moon Ferry got on the phone with her? Or she personally reached out and emailed them and said, hey, thank you.

Yeah, I agree.