Treehut

From an Etsy Marketplace Seller to an eCommerce Giant with More than $20million in Sales

Everything has changed since Tree Hut started selling on Etsy in 2014. Nowadays, Tree Hut sells directly through treehut.co and they have generated more than $20million in sales. Morover, the company employs more than 20 people and has a 8,000square foot head office in San Francisco. They manufacture their products in this facility, too.

Tree Hut’s growth path

Just two months after started selling on Etsy, Tree hut opened its own store using the Shopify platform. As Tree Hut has not raised any venture capital, this was a very little investment. This for sure makes Tree Hut one of the best eCommerce success stories on Shopify.

Tree Hut is continuously making some changes to its website. Firstly, they are regularly testing different features on their site. These could be changing the colour of the button or the font size. Secondly, the team at Tree Hut is testing some business practices like the email times, at which price to offer free shipping and how all of the changes impact their checkout rates.

The CEO of Tree Hut Julia Olson, says that testing or talking to the customers is the only way to understand their needs. She also underlines that being original is very important if you want to achieve eCommerce success.

Tree Hut does not have a super polished social media account. But people enjoy their style. Instead of the social media management, they decided to focus more on getting a product in front of the eyes of their customers and improving it every single day.

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Day by day, Tree Hut’s sales have started growing rapidly. They are doing everything in house and they have to overcome every challenge of the operational part. As you can imagine, they have an operation-heavy business.

Each of Tree Hut’s watches is handmade. Therefore, it takes a long time, approximately four to six months to train someone to make watches that will match the quality of Tree Hut. Not everyone makes it to be a watchmaker but they try to find different positions for everyone.

Olson says that they have to hire watchmakers. But before hiring they need to understand if they have the suitable mentality and the right skills to be watchmakers. If everything is okay, they start to train them.

Another challenge is finding the right place for their business. It’s not a surprise to hear that Olson had always dreamed of having both an online and a brick and mortar store. For this, Tree Hut’s team found a place and moved in 2015 but the store was never opened. Being unhappy with the full production in that specific location, they moved to their new headquarters, into her own home.

Finally, after their busy holiday season in 2017, they moved to their current headquarters in San Francisco.

Olson, is still dreaming of opening an experimental physical store for Tree Hut in which customers will have the chance to customize their own watches.

Today they generate more than $20million revenues from their online sales, and they only focus on growth, which makes Tree Hut one of the best eCommerce success stories

Olson says that she thought quitting many times. However, this is true for most of the eCommerce entrepreneur success stories. Most people think of quitting before they eventually succeed. 

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