How Marnie Consky built a $10m Chafe-wear Brand with a Freelance Team Ep 100

I hope that we can come up with a solution to keep this team and keep growing as a freelance business, if only to sort of shout from the rooftops that, "Hey, it can be done right. Let's set a new normal and new possibilities."

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Now let's get right into it.

I'm one of those entrepreneurs who has a classic, I had a need and couldn't find what I was looking for on the market. So it was 2008 and literally I needed long leg underwear for women and all I could find was men's underwear or shapewear. And I had an incident one day, walking on my lunch break at my old job where my thigh started rubbing together was one of the first days of summer.

And I was like, "Oh God, I forgot to put my shorts on underneath my dress."

Because I always was used to wearing little bike shorts, like Spandexy thick bike shorts, or like a shaper company. We shall not name that ends and angst. And I thought there has to be a better way on these humid days for someone who just needs some fabric coverage between her legs.

So I spent this summer. Looking for this product that I wanted and couldn't find it anywhere. It did exist in a very basic format for some plus size companies that were offering size 16 plus, but they were still really like a basic cotton like ranny penny, and I just shook my head and said, I think I can do better.

So that's essentially how it came about. All right, let's talk about thighs.

People that are all shapes, sizes, and ages may not have a thigh gap. Right.

Many. Yeah.

So even skinny girls might have chafing thighs. So let's just get that out of the way.

Yes.

I wanna hear your, I mean, you probably have done a lot more research on this than that statement I just gave.

Yeah, I mean I'm really glad you brought that up right at the top of this conversation cuz it's so core to why I started this business. Yes, I wanted a short to prevent thigh chafing, but I've been deeply passionate about dispelling this myth around thigh chafe, that if you're a thighs chafe, it must mean there's something wrong with you.

Marnie Rabinovitch Consky: It must mean you have a weight problem only plus size, people chafe. All of that is complete nonsense. So what we like to say at Thigh Society is any skin that touches where there's presence of friction and moisture is prone to chafe. So if you are a size two, you may get thigh chafing and you're, you're of size 22, you may not have thigh chafing.

Marnie Rabinovitch Consky: It's a skin sensitivity issue as well. I know women who size touch all the time, who never experience thigh chafing or have to really be extra, extra, extra sweaty in order to get chafed. For me personally, I knew it when I started the business. I had sort of been what we would now call a disordered eater for many, many years for my teens onwards, and my weight was, I fluctuated from a size six to a size 12, and no matter what my weight was, no matter what the circumference size of my thighs were, they always.

Marnie Rabinovitch Consky: Shave no matter what, if I had bare skin touching in warm weather. So we're really big on that mission to let people understand that there's, this is a totally normal thing. Runners shave, people who are super fit, babies shave. Let's normalize this. Totally normal.

Everybody chafes.

Everybody chafe. I mean, and not everybody chafe at the same time, but it's so normal. It's like it really isn't something that should be stigmatized. Yeah.

Okay. So not naming the angst, but naming them.

Yeah.

How do you differentiate and compete with a company like that?

We don't, full stop. When I started the business, I was absolutely very clear in our marketing and messaging, and we still are today, now that I have a team, that we are not shapewear.

If someone is looking for shapewear, they can look somewhere else. We can make recommendations. There are tons, maybe even hundreds of shapewear companies out there, and I'm not anti shapewear. I think there's a time and a place for shapewear. I do own a few pieces. It's just, the design for this product, if you sort of boil it down to the basics, is a long leg boxer brief for women that is seamless, invisible under clothing, lightweight, breathable, moisture wicking, and just it feels like a second skin.

I don't know many shape wear brands where you feel like, A second skin, you often have to wriggle and contort your body to get into it. You're essentially redistributing parts of your body when you're wearing it. It's very difficult to take off to put on.

It's really uncomfortable.

It's uncomfortable. Sausage in a casing comes to mind as a metaphor, and from the perspective of us. Wanting to help people feel confident and comfortable in their skin. Putting on shapewear is a bit self objectifying. It sort of forces you to contemplate your body and what you think about it. And especially women, all these negative thoughts come rushing to our minds like, "Oh, I wish I was just smoother along here." And I wish my terms will use like muffin top and all these things.

It sounds super cute, but actually it could be quite detrimental to our psyche over and over again as we tell ourselves these negative messaging. I never wanted thy society undergarments. Anyone feel that way? I really wanted an underwear that you could put on, set it and forget it. And I always do the analogy when people start ask me, but why?

It's like, well, do you think men struggle to put on their boxer briefs when they get dressed in the morning? Like no, they don't. They literally grab the most comfortable pair of underwear they put it on and then they wear it underneath their jeans and whatever else. Like why shouldn't women have the same options.

So I like to say we don't compete against shape. Where, yes, our products do offer some light smoothing, but at most it feels like a really comfortable, gentle hug. It's nothing like sneezing that you'd experience with shape wear. I own a pair.

I believe you gifted them to me five years ago.

I did, yeah.

Absolutely. I don't go to the drawer and think, "Ugh."

Right.

Oh God. Like this is gonna make me hot. Just thinking about having to put it on.

No.

This is gonna make me feel uncomfortable. I once, and I know we're not talking about bras, but I put on a bra that was, I think, It was shape wear. Yeah. And I think that it not only did mental damage, but physical damage to me and then like I pulled a muscle trying to get it off.

Oh yeah.

I throw it away. And it was like $68. Yeah. Back to you. They're lovely and I really appreciate it and I've been seeing some of the ads that you're doing and really love where you've come from. When I met you, I think it was five years ago, so let's back it up to me not being such a fan girl. And tell me how your business today is structured.

So how it's structured today is not so dissimilar to how it was structured five years ago, except we have more people on the team. So when I started this company in 2009, and yes, that's 2009, not 2019 , I've been at this for a long time. I was very deliberate in staffing my company with freelancers and predominantly freelance women who were entrepreneurs in their own right and who were experts in a certain area of e-commerce, whether that was email or ads marketing or social media, et cetera. And so right now my team is structured with a network of freelance women who are all remote and virtual. And we have been since day one before we even knew.

Pandemic was, which both well for us at the beginning of the pandemic for sure, but my team structured all over the world and everybody sort of has their area that they work in and we communicate via slack and many of the ways that now it has become normal for most of the world in this sort of post, if I can say post pandemic, I think we're still in it, but post pandemic world.

And so yeah, we do everything digitally. I've only met in person. One member of my, or sorry if I include my, our third party fulfillment, our warehouse, which is an entity into themselves. I've only met about four people of my roughly 20 person team. The rest are all digital.

You've grown incredibly over the years, and you're at a really big number with, I mean, I don't know if I've met, another entrepreneur at the revenue level that you are at that doesn't have a dedicated full-time team.

Yeah, it is pretty unique and I, I love to share the story cuz I think it opens up possibilities for other people. I've been very fortunate. I think there is an element of timing in terms of people that you run into.

The team that's with me now has not been the team that was with me five years ago, and I think that's normal as you grow a company. Some people are gonna stay with you and grow as the business grows. In the case of thigh society, being a direct to consumer online brand, we really have grown quite fast, especially in the last four or five years, and even in the last six since I've been on it full time.

And so the skillsets that are required at different. Sort of revenue thresholds and size of the company change as time goes on. And so we have parted ways with some freelancers over the years and brought in new freelancers who have worked with businesses our size who are on our path. And it just seems to have evolved at a pace that feels very natural and normal, that, okay, we're approaching this next threshold.

Who do we need on the team? Where are our gaps? And the people that have come into the team. I've actually met at very fortunate times, actually my current CMO, she and I met by complete fluke because I was, she called me to conduct a reference for a web design and development agency that she was considering using for another client.

And so I didn't realize when she contacted me that she actually wasn't an employee of that other company that they were, in fact a client. We started to get chatting and it turns out to be that she was exactly who I needed on my team moving forward. This was in 2020, so moving forward into 2021, and she has amassed in her Lance business, her own group of freelancers that she knows and trust that she can sort of bring and sort of plug and play into the brands that she works with.

And all of us are aligned in the sense of we all wanna be work, they all wanna be working for mission driven. Ideally female led brands that are trying to make a difference in some positive way. So there's really been a lot of synergies in alignment, and I count myself as so lucky, honestly.

Would you consider your CMO a fractional CMO?

Very much so. Yeah. Yeah, very much so.

Does anyone have equity in the business or is it completely yours? It's completely mine. We're starting to think about, and I'm starting to think. What's next? As we look at our next stage of growth, we've essentially been doubling the business for the last few years, and now gotten to a point where I really need to give some serious consideration to what an equity play might look like with my team.

Natasha Miller: And we have pretty open dialogue about things like that. I think you have to, I mean, I'm not a very hierarchical person by nature in terms of an organization, so we're pretty flat. I mean, I certainly have my key leadership team who I work with, my CFO and COO, my fractional CMO. So we're in discussions right now about what that might look like for next year.

And then back to your COO, COO is also fractional. She is, yes. And she also plays a dual role of CFO and she has been with me the longest. She's the longest serving team member. I met her through my previous career actually working as an MBA career coach at the University of Toronto. I had shared my idea at the time with a couple of professors at the university and one of them, introduce me to her and we hit it off. And actually she started off as a mentor and coached me out of my fulltime job off that, taking that leap off the cliff.

I know I met you and you still had a fulltime job.

That's right. I think I did. Yeah.

Honestly, you were telling me you weren't sure at that time. Yes. You were gonna continue.

So here we are at the next question. What was the pivotal moment that made you forge?

Such a great question. I think it was a couple of factors. I think number one, I was turning 40 and it was this attitude of, if not now, when I had already been running the business for about eight years, I'd seen the sales steadily increase.

I'd seen some opportunities bring forward with Meta, well now Meta, but Facebook ads, and I could sort of start to see the potential that I always was afraid to even dream about for this business. And I think that combined with. Well, seeing the trajectory of the business and also, quite frankly, having coached MBA students for seven years prior on these major career changes.

But it's hard, right?

As a coach to other people.

Yeah, it's much easier.

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I'm starting new businesses outside of my core business, and I can coach somebody like you wouldn't believe, but I can't do the thing. Can do in my core business or that I can coach other people within this new business. And I think it's because I'm learning a new business.

Yes.

But for you to be able to coach MBA students and then apply that to your own core business, how did you make that stick?

It's like your mom tells you something and you're like, whatever, and then somebody else tells you and you're like, "Yes!" right . But it was the exact same thing.

Yes. I was running the business very part-time for six years prior, so I don't like to call it my side hustle cuz I really wasn't hustling that hard, to be perfectly honest.

Like I really loved my, my day.

It was like a pet rock.

Yeah.

It was kinda.

Yeah, like it was a hobby and I resented when people would call it a hobby, but I also wasn't prepared to call it a hustle. So it was somewhere in between, like I wasn't taking a salary from it. I was taking a few dollars here and there.

I remember I was all excited because I took some money aside. Built in closets in our bedroom. And I was all excited cause I was like, "Yay, this is bonus money that I get to take from the business." And so, and I always have been, and I like to call myself a reluctant entrepreneur. Really, I never thought I'd be doing this full time and certainly not in the rag trade, but honestly, I think.

Wait, back it up. What did you just call?

The rag trade. That's a, so I'm from Montreal originally, which was a hub before everything went offshore. And offshore manufacturing became more of a thing in the last, I'd say 20, 30 years, let's say. Montreal was a hub forma business, as we like to call it, or the rag trade. And I knew nothing about apparel manufacturing making garments, sewing fashion. I still don't know anything about fashion, but when I started the business, but I was really devoted to finding a solution to a very simple problem that I perceived as a simple problem. Like, why aren't any of the big brands coming up with this? And so it was that curiosity and desire to find a product to meet my needs ultimately led me on this path.

I will say two at 40, having coached MBA students by that point for seven years, having had two other careers before that, working in the government and then working at an international consulting firm, I sort of had been around the block. I had three career changes by that point in my life. I really had a pretty broad skillset, and my attitude was, if I take a year off to try to do this full time, what are the risks really?

Like I can always find a job somewhere else. I believed in my employability is really what it came down to. I had savings, my husband and I had a. Long chat, many chats about what that would look like. And the agreement was try it for a year, let's see how it goes. And after a year, if it hasn't, if the sales don't keep increasing or you're not able to pull a profit or a salary from it, we'll reevaluate.

But the year finished and things were, I wouldn't say it was like a complete pendulum swing, but things were looking positive. And so we were even negotiated another year. And that's when things started to really happen. And I haven't looked back. So I think it's really about believing in yourself. I will say this, and I like to say this for people who are listening and wondering, what does this mean for me?

Because I was a reluctant entrepreneur, I'm really a fan of people trying to do both a full-time job and see if there's opportunity for their business to take off on the side. There are enough hours in the day you can decide how many hours you devote. No one's saying you have to work till 2:00 AM and also if you're not sure, Or you don't even have an idea to pursue, try to pursue entrepreneur opportunities in the organizations that you're working in.

Because if you think about it, if you're with an organization that allows you the creative freedom to plan and strategize, whether it's a new program or a new service offering for something that is. You know, unchartered territory. See if you can do that. See how that makes you feel. Are you energized by those projects?

You might be terrified. That's okay. I was terrified. I'm always terrified. It's like you just start to build a kind of resilience and a belief in yourself that you can figure it out and you can test the waters before plunking down thousands of dollars. For a startup idea. You can start small, you can start within your organization.

There's so many different ways to figure out if entrepreneurship's right for you. And you may have to fail a bit to figure it out too. So, yeah.

Yeah, you gotta try, you gotta fail.

I hate regret and for me it was really, I think I heard this on one of your other podcasts with, a maybe it was the Crossroads Founder, I think it was where it was the fear of not trying that was outweighing.

My fear of doing it, it was the fear of regretting not trying. And that fear combined with my now COO, CFO, mentoring me out of my very cushy pensioned secure job , that was enough motivation to say, "Okay, I'm gonna give it a go." It's only one year. Very low risk. I can do this.

And how did you get to the revenue you're at now?

Like what was the impetus and the catapult? I mean, cuz you really, you went

Yeah,

So far-

Yes. So I would say the key to our success really has been fundamentally spending money on marketing. And a large chunk of that has come down to Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and Google. When I started the business, there was barely an Instagram in 2000 and I think it was still really on the fringe just starting out. The way I built the business before I quit my job, before we were investing heavily in advertising was good old fashioned sending product to what we then called bloggers, which you probably remember now. The terms evolved into influencers, and it's a whole new world as we know on Instagram and TikTok, but it's predominantly been spending on marketing efforts specifically in paid, and now we're looking at diversifying and actually focusing on some sort of influencer strategy, which we really hadn't had a, if I'm being honest, like we really had not had a clear cut influencer strategy over the years. A lot of the time it was me sending product, reaching out, "Hey, I'm the founder, and I think readers would love this product. And that transitioned into same thing with what we call seating, where we would send some nano influencers and micro influencers and even people like yourself, quite frankly, people who we thought would, would wanna try the product and enjoy the product. Because it's a different world now in 2022 than it was even five, six years ago, where there's so much conversation happening online about.

Women in particular's bodies, just being free to be what we look like and not having all these hangups and so conversations around things that were previously stigmatized are now starting to become more openly talked about. So to the point where, I mean, if you had told me like 10 years ago was really difficult to get what we would call user generated content because people were a little shy.

They would admit that-

They, they didn't wanna admit that they were wearing these shortage.

And now people are gonna throw up their skirts and go, "Yeah, right here."

Marnie Rabinovitch Consky 20:13And we love it. I'm so here for it. Like I, nothing gets me as excited as when we get people just randomly showing pictures of themselves on vacations, on their honeymoons, wherever Nurses and scrubs showing their, lifting up their scrub bottoms to show they're wearing the shorts underneath.

Yeah.

Because a lot of scrubs, they have this dropped in seam and you've got that opportunity for chase in between your thighs and it's just,

Plus scrubs are not made of really nice material.

Marnie Rabinovitch Consky 20:37 They are not.

I don't want that touching the inner.

Don't wanna talk your bear.

Marnie Rabinovitch Consky20:42 No, same thing with like unlined wool pants, for example. Things like that. So that for me has been so rewarding and satisfying just to literally watch that happen of, wow, we used to have to, how are we gonna beg people to show us what them wearing short?

And now we just, we get such an influx from our customers who are excited to show us how the shorts are helping them. It's just beyond.

Yeah.

It's in.

Do you focus on SEO much? And if so, what are people putting in as a keyword looking for this ?

So, yes and no. We could do a much better job. It's definitely a focus for us next year.

The funny thing is, so people are searching for the same terms now as they were in 2008 and 2009, and those terms are shorts, under dresses, shorts to wear under skirts, underwear to prevent thigh chafing, long underwear for chafe. And the funny part, There isn't much creativity, you know, really around this.

We've seen a few wacky search terms for sure, but in general, the search terms haven't changed. And because thy society was really the OG in this space, we were the first brand to make size inclusive slip shorts. So when we started, there really was nobody else. Like I mentioned, there was, I think a handful if I have to cap it at three or four plus size companies who did not make smaller than a size 16 who are making these very basic shorts.

We came on the scene saying we're gonna offer something size inclusive, this chafe wear, we've been calling it chafe wear for the last couple of years. I wish I had thought of it sooner, but because we were the ones putting in Chafe and Art, I knew enough, I was self taught in Shopify back then, so I knew enough to put in keywords like chafing and wear these under your skirts and dresses for a long, long time.

'm talking like seven or eight years, we were consistently ranking number one in SEO because. We were the first, we just had the longevity of having these chafing keywords in our seo.

But now, now

Chafing is kind of a fancy word for rubbing together, so I-

[00:] Marnie Rabinovitch Consky 22:32

Absolutely

Thigh rub.

That's it too. Yeah. I forgot that. Inner thigh rub, thighs rubbing together. Rash between thighs. I mean, there's probably in total about 25 or so common phrases, but not much so new under the sun. I mean, Chub Rub again, is one that I've been using for years. People search that. It's interesting on some platforms people are searching Chub rub, whereas on other platforms people don't know what it means.

I think I'm starting to see that with TikTok. We're starting to notice that.

I'm in San Francisco Bay area. Maybe it's just not a term that is used here. And yeah, so you gotta account for everywhere. And is this, are people ordering from Japan and Australia, or is it really North America?

Marnie Rabinovitch Consky 23:16 So we're mainly North Americans focus. When I first started, the funny thing was we were selling quite a bit to Australia and New Zealand, and that's because I, in my early days of reaching out to influencers, then bloggers, I found this incredible blogger in Australia who was based out of, oh my gosh, I'm gonna get it wrong. Was it Melbourne or Sydney?

I wanna say it was Melbourne and she had a beautiful blog site and had followers who I felt would be interested in this product. Long story short, I sent it to her. My husband and I ended up taking a trip to Australia. We met. It was pretty cool. It was like she was such a fan of the shorts that she was promoting it and her blog was getting super popular.

So for a long time we were getting a lot of traffic and sales by people finding us through her. And so, We continued on that path without really putting too much money in marketing as far as like attracting customers from that geography. But we did have a dedicated site. We had to shut it down during the pandemic, unfortunately, because crazy story, DHL, like major international, global shipper stopped shipping internationally out of Canada.

Crazy.

And so we had to find another supplier, and that shipper was just very unreliable. Packages were taking like eight weeks if they arrived at all. And so we shut that down in addition to our international shipping in total. So now, yes, we do ship globally, but it wouldn't comprise more than, probably not about 1% of our sales.

I think it's still, I'd love to get back into Australia and New Zealand. It's offset some of our seasonality, even though we say our-

It's hot down.

Yeah, it's hot. They're getting into their spring right as our temperatures are cooling down. So definitely an area of focus for us to reenter and reengage with some of our customers who had been following us for years and years, and then eventually put some more strategy behind Europe as a market, south America, Australia, and all that good stuff.

But for now, we're mainly in the US and Canada, and actually 80% of our sales are in the states.

Yes.

Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. You've got a huge road ahead of your, of doubling, doubling and tripling. I mean, I love that you're able to run your company the way you are now, but once you get to a certain level, it's I mean, maybe we can talk in five years.

Yeah. I dunno if that will work.

Yeah. You and me both. I don't know. Yeah. I don't pretend to have all the answers. I'd like to think that I have a good relationship with everyone on the team. All of the team members are excited to work with this brand. They love what we're doing. They take immense pride in their work and everybody understands the contribution they're making to this company, to this brand.

The difference they're making in people's lives. So I hope that we can come up with a solution to keep this team and keep growing as a freelance business if only to sort of shout from the rooftops that hey, it can be done right? Let's set a new normal and new possibilities. I know a,

Can you imagine if $50 million, like a $50 million brand. Why not with just freelancers?

Why not?

Maybe they should just challenge you right here and right now to do.

Why not, I mean, we may need to bring in who knows or may be some agencies that we might need to, and I sort of glossed over this part. And no disrespect to agencies, it just, I found it difficult in the past to work with agencies.

They just tend to be like very hierarchical. There's many layers of people to go through to get something done and I just like the directness of working with.

Yeah, and there's a lot of overhead that you're paying a lot. So-

And you're paying and you're paying more money for sure. So yeah, who knows? I love that challenge. Let's see what happens in five years.

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Wanna know more about me, go to my website OfficialNatashaMiller.com. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you loved the show. If you did, please subscribe. Also, if you haven't done so yet, please leave a review where you're listening to this podcast now. I'm Natasha Miller and you've been listening to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS.