The Official Suitjamas Store is the brainchild of Zac Borrowdale who, after seeing Neil Patrick Harris’s character (Barney Stinson) on How I Met Your Mother saw an incredible niche market to exploit.
Checking out Facebook Zac noticed that the show had several fan pages. On one particular fan page, there were over 1,000 people expressing an interest in buying a pair of Suitjamas, as featured on the show. No one had yet taken advantage of the idea, and Zac saw money to be made. His company now manufactures, advertises, and distributes Suitjamas to buyers from their Facebook store.
In his experience, Zac says the Suitjamas store was relatively easy to set up. There was no coding required, and all it really involved was dragging and dropping items onto a landing page. In setting up the Facebook store, Zac used his own graphic design skills to render the pages himself.
To help start up the Suitjamas store, Zac originally used the paid advertising feature on Facebook until the Suitjamas store reached the 5,000 friends mark. Since then, they have not paid for any ads at all, and the growth has been purely organic by word of mouth.
Regarding store analytics, Zac was able to track the demographic data of buyers through Facebook which lists their gender and their location. Once they were able to narrow down who was liking their store, they were able to break the demographics down even further and discovered that 70% of their store’s fans were men in the 18-24 and 24-35 age bracket.
Other advertising venues that have been used to support Suitjamas include Google Ads and free advertising done through a number of Barney Stinson fan pages online.
While Zac would like to create a website dedicated to Suitjamas, there is only one problem. While people buy the product, what makes them buy is the product’s association with someone or something else—in this case, Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother. TV shows and characters come in and out of popularity regularly, and Zac acknowledges this. He estimates that the Suitjamas Facebook page has only about a year or two left before its popularity wanes. After that, he says they will need to shift the suitjamas product from online retailers to traditional retailers for holidays including Christmas and Father’s Day.
Zac notes that one advantage their business has over others is that Suitjamas has a fan page which boasts over 11,000 dedicated fans. Through that fan page, Zac is able to gather the general age of the fan page’s audience and disseminate what they like so that when the popularity of Suitjamas runs out, they will be able to offer their customers something else that they will use and enjoy.
Following the inception of the Suitjamas site on Facebook, Zac was fortunate enough to talk with the producers of How I Met Your Mother so that they could provide him with information about what the original suitjamas looked like. After their consultation, it was made clear that Suitjamas cannot have any official affiliation with the show because it could cause a conflict with CBS, so Zac owns the trademark to the word suitjamas in Australia.
What’s next for Suitjamas includes an expansion of their product line. Zac plans on selling a number of other Barney Stinson products which include What Would Barney Do? wristbands, leatherbound editions of The Bro Code, and other Barney Stinson-inspired goods. In fact, Zac originally approached publishing giant Simon & Schuester about helping to produce and publish The Bro Code books. Simon and Schuester were so taken with the brilliant idea that they wound up using it themselves.
What Zac has learned from offering Suitjamas products through Facebook is that the people who order the product want to be more like Barney Stinson and that perhaps on some level they feel that if they own that particular product, they will be more like him.
With Facebook being Facebook, Zac encourages Suitjama wearers to take pictures of themselves wearing the attire. Suitjamas fans are then allowed to post them to the Suitjamas fan page photo section. As well as having the interaction with people who have already bought the product, this also allows prospective buyers to have a visual image as to what the product might look like when they wear it, which may also encourage sales.
Suitjamas elected not to have a fan store page outside of Facebook where people could click on a link and be brought to an external site. Zac has found that as soon as a customer is made to click away from the Facebook page, they end up losing that customer. Zac has created a unique solution to this problem. Through an application on their Facebook page, the Suitjamas fan page is attached to an ebay store which appears directly on the Facebook site—no external clicking needed.
When they first started offering sales through ebay on their Facebook page, Suitjamas noticed a huge shift in sales. Within the first month, they saw a 74% increase in their sales come directly from the ebay app associated with the Suitjamas facebook store. While Zac has noted a gradual increase in the amount of sales made through the Suitjamas fan page, using third party applications like ebay make their product sales skyrocket.
Unlike other online and traditional retailers, Suitjamas has found a rather profitable niche in the Facebook market where others are still trying to find their feet. Zac believes that social media marketing is the wave of the future and that when harnessed, it is something that every business can benefit from.
