E-Commerce Marketing, Organic Growth & Viral Content with Catalina

Hi! My name is Catalina, and I currently work at Clutch Loop, which is an e-commerce brand. We sell phone accessories, and more specifically, we sell what’s called a Clutch Loop, which is a tether for your phone. It’s anti-theft and anti-drop, so it basically helps with anything to do with those two issues. Whether you’re going hiking, heading to a festival, or just using it day to day, it keeps your phone safe while you’re on the move. We’ve seen some real success with e-commerce, so when Stephen reached out to talk about the business, I was super excited to be here.

Sure. I think a big one is communication. A lot of people feel overwhelmed by the amount of interaction you get online. If you have one, two, three viral moments, it can feel like it’s all coming in at once, and you’re asking yourself, “How do I manage this?” You really don’t know what’s going to stick. But say a video goes viral and people start asking about your product. Do you have someone there who can answer those questions? Do you actually know what those questions are? Do you have a system in place to funnel that interest into a sale?

So one of the biggest challenges is finding a way to do that which suits your product and your brand. That means leaning on anything omni-channel, platforms that let multiple channels feed into one place, so one person can sift through the messages and understand your FAQs. What are people asking? What are they interested in? What do they actually want from us, new products, new colors? Are they having trouble opening the package? Is there an issue with shipping? Staying on top of all of that has meant building out a system where we know exactly what to do in each of those cases.

A lot of the early work the founders did was upfront, going out to festivals and meeting people in person. Actually, one of our founders wouldn’t tell people who he was. He wouldn’t say he was the founder of Clutch Loop; he’d just go as a regular festival-goer. After a bit of word-of-mouth push, he started seeing the real-life effect of the product, people out there actually wearing it. So he’d walk up to someone and go, “Hey, what is that?” And they’d tell him, “Oh, this is a Clutch Loop, you put it on your backpack, it stretches out, and you can carry your phone.” He had people selling him his own product, and he’d be like, “Oh cool, where’d you get it?” and they’d say, “Clutch Loop.”

Seeing that real-life impact was really cool, and it’s a testament to what they did in person. On the marketing side, they also found a community of people who received the product and made it their own. Those people have ridden with us from day one and still ride with Clutch Loop, and that’s been a huge foundation of the brand.

 It did start in person at festivals, and now we do a lot of outreach within the community online, the music-festival online space especially. There’s so much opportunity out there and so many worlds to expand into. I’d say the base of our customers still comes from that word-of-mouth space, and then there’s another tier of people who find us online. There’s still a lot to be done there, but we have that organic base, and then we layer paid media on top of it. We’re running Meta and Google now. Google is very recent, but it’s already showing up organically in search really well too.

You also see a good amount of search come up for phone tethers for all kinds of uses, people using it for hiking, for construction, for fishing. Those are different niches we’d love to develop into once we have the time. So it really depends on the person, but those are a few of the key touchpoints for customers.

I always say it’s a product with really good market fit. It solves a problem everyone has: your phone keeps dropping, or you don’t want it to get stolen. And who doesn’t drop their phone a couple of times on a regular basis? I know I do. That, plus seeing people out and about wearing it, is really where the initial spark comes from. Once you see it used in real life, you get used to it. You clip it onto your backpack, and suddenly your hands are free.

That’s why one of our taglines is “Walk around hands-free,” or “Hold your phone hands-free, no anxiety.” Part of the messaging is really “Live your life and be free.” A great example is skiing. We have a lot of skiers who use it. You can go out onto the mountain and be free, with your phone just hanging there safely. Nobody had really found a solution to that problem until now. It’s easy to use and it solves a real issue, so people genuinely want the product.

Right now we have a lot of internal AI use among individuals on our team. But we haven’t really looked into the search-engine side yet, things like GPT models or GEO. That’s definitely somewhere we want to grow into. We’re building out different extensions of the business, and AI is absolutely going to be one of the next things we look at.

I’d say TikTok is where we have the most development to do, purely because the nature of the platform asks for a high quantity of content. You want to put out quality, so you don’t want to just be regurgitating content, but you also want to curate it in a way that speaks to the brand. TikTok is kind of about pushing out as much as you can, but it also needs time to grow. There’s so much space and room for us there. It’s really just a matter of time, and treating it as its own separate focus.

Focus on organic, focus on content you can create, and don’t be afraid to have a voice. A lot of the time people are scared to make content that’s a little funnier or more out there, because they don’t want to sound unprofessional. I’m not saying go out and be unprofessional; I’m saying there’s a line you can play with where you have a voice, you’re special, you’re recognized for being special, and you translate your audience’s voice into your messaging. That’s where the magic happens: you’re pushing your product out there, but you’re also building a voice for yourself.

The other piece is to highlight a problem. For us, that’s phone theft. We recently had a video go viral where one of our founders staged a scene on the subway. A girl has her phone in her hand, he runs past and yanks it, and you see the Clutch Loop stop the phone from being stolen and sling it right back to her. That really captures the fear a lot of our clients have. If you can understand why your customer buys what they buy, capture that, and put it into a video, your likelihood of growing is much higher.

I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Take care.