In this episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we interview Cameron Taylor, a visionary who has scaled multiple businesses to 7 figures across diverse industries. From founding a national law firm and authoring bestselling books to working in venture capital and launching his latest startup, Sun Tail Mermaid, Cameron has a track record of identifying untapped opportunities in competitive markets and pioneering new niches.
Today, Cameron reveals the values and strategies that have helped him succeed, offering insights on how to outcompete, find profitable business ideas, and meet market demands with innovative, customer-focused solutions. This is one of our most inspiring and insightful episodes - and we are sure you will love it! So tune in now.
In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover:
Tactics for capturing existing (and unsatisfied) market demand instead of creating one.
Strategies for staying ahead of competitors on Amazon and beyond.
Financial planning tips for surviving the early drought in your business.
Ideas for using superior customer service to your advantage.
Why customer-focused product development and engineering is crucial to business success.
And so much more!
You can listen to the full interview on your desktop or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Or, click to watch the full video interview here!
Discover and share the thrill and adventures of being a real mermaid or merman with loved ones when you get your mermaid tails and shark fins for swimming from www.suntailmermaid.com. Sun Tail Mermaid’s products are built to last, are comfortable, and are widely loved. Get yours now!
To be a guest on our next podcast, contact us today!
Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenues? Set up a free consultation with us today!
Prefer reading instead of listening? Read the full transcript here!
Jon LaClare [00:00:00]:
Today's guest has built five different seven figure businesses. He shares some learnings that helped all of them to grow. And then we dive deep on his latest venture. It wasn't a product he ever thought he would develop, but he'll explain why he chose it and many of the strategies that he has used to grow it to several million dollars in revenues.
Cameron Taylor [00:00:18]:
Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Now here's the host of the Harvest Growth podcast, Jon LaClare.
Jon LaClare [00:00:38]:
Welcome back to the show. I'm really excited to be speaking with Cameron Taylor. He's the founder of suntailmermaid.com. You got to check out this website if you're watching the video, he's going to show you some of his products. If not, please go to the website and check it out as you're going to hear. It's a really cool product line he's come up with, and he's had great success, but he also has some great stories behind both this business as well as other successful businesses that he's run. So again, really excited to have him on the show today and to dive into this interview. First of all, welcome to the show, Cameron.
Cameron Taylor [00:01:08]:
Hey, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.
Jon LaClare [00:01:11]:
So I mentioned you've run some other successful businesses in the past. I think the number is five, if I remember right. This is the fifth business that you've hit seven figures with, which is saying something. I gotta tell you, I talked to a lot of serial entrepreneurs, but there's usually serial fail win, right? Like you finally figure it out and great. You know, that's part of the entrepreneurial journey sometimes. But the fact that you've had so many great successes along the way, and I think pretty diverse businesses really speaks to something. We're gonna focus most of the interview, as you know, on your current main product, or at least the current focus for our interview today. But if you could share maybe, what were the categories? What types of business did you run before your mermaid tail business?
Cameron Taylor [00:01:54]:
Yeah. And I will tell you, I did have those felled businesses before the first successful businesses. And I think that's my favorite class in college was an entrepreneurial lecture series at Brigham Young University. And I went to that every semester. Even after I graduated, I still went back and attended that class because it was just so fun to hear those entrepreneurs come back and tell their story. But that was one of the themes that I saw, was that they all had multiple failed businesses before they succeeded. And so as I graduated and started my entrepreneur venture, I said, okay, well, I'm going to try until it works. It was like the most that any of them said they had to fail business was seven.
Cameron Taylor [00:02:35]:
So I said, I'm going to try at least seven businesses before I give up. And so, luckily for me, it was my second business that succeeded. So the first business did fail, left me tens of thousands of dollars of debt. I the next business that I was able to start was actually a national law firm that specialized in lawsuit protection, tax reduction, estate planning. And there was just a great need in the market. We developed a very unique marketing strategy to bring in new clients. Our clients were, you know, well, we started with physicians, and then I started another business with dentists and another business with business owners. That was three of the businesses.
Cameron Taylor [00:03:17]:
And each of those grew. We grew up from idea to a million dollars a year, then a million dollars a month, and then we had multimillion dollar days. So there was just a huge demand in the marketplace. And so from there, from that success, I was then my dream was to write. I'm also the author of twelve books. And so when I exited that company that we built, the time I exited from the company, we were doing 100 million in sales, had 400 employees, and I took a writing sabbatical for 18 months to write a book called does your bag have 24 truths that lead to financial and spiritual freedom? And I now have had twelve books, several of them become bestsellers, translated into dozens of languages. So that would be my next successful business that's grown into a seven figure business is then the book business and the speaking business also then doing some consulting work with different businesses as a part of that as well, where I built successful businesses and sit on different boards of entrepreneur groups to give back because there were so many that helped me get where I am. So I then had a friend that asked if I could rebuild, could build the company again that I built initially.
Cameron Taylor [00:04:39]:
And I was like, well, I've already done that. I want to do something new. But he said, I'll put up with the money, I'll pay his salary, and he'll be an owner. And so we rebuilt some of that company that I'd stepped away from then, and we have built it to where it was, you know, over seven figures a year. And then I was approached, done a little bit of venture capital work. And so I had a friend approach me about the idea for swimmable mermaid tails. And so good friend, neighbor, but they approached my wife first, and when she told me about it. So they want to meet with you about, you know, helping them start and create this product and build this business.
Cameron Taylor [00:05:24]:
I was like, well, what is it? I was like, well, it's swimming mermaid tails. I was like, well, that is so different than anything that I've done. I was like, I really don't have any interest in being a merman or becoming King Triton. And so. But I was like, well, I'll have to come in and I'll visit with them. And as they presented the idea, I started doing some research. And as I started to look, I was like, there was massive searches for mermaid tails, and there was very little in the marketplace at that time. And so it piqued my interest.
Cameron Taylor [00:05:59]:
And I did have on my goal list that I wanted to have a patent, and I did want to do some product development, something different that I hadn't done. And so I was like, I was like, let's try it, you know? And I think that's the concept that really got me to do it is a concept I call the ugly Christmas sweater principal. And so there was an employee, he worked in search engine optimization SEO work, and as he was doing this work, he saw this massive search in November, December for ugly Christmas sweaters and millions and millions of searches for this. And then as he looks into it, he starts to see, well, there's really no one in that marketplace selling an ugly Christmas sweater. So he actually quit his, you know, six figure paying job and said, I'm going to start a business. Bought ugly Christmassweater.com, becomes, you know, anyone searching for that. He's now first in the ranking and started selling ugly Christmas and became a multimillionaire selling ugly Christmas sweaters. So I found in my different businesses, if I find a business where the market is pulling me, where I'm just, I'm just fulfilling something someone's already searching for.
Cameron Taylor [00:07:19]:
It's much easier than when I have to try to find the people or convince people that they want my product. And so when I saw that with the mermaid tails, I was like, wow, we just have to, one, we can create a better product than anything that's out there. But two, to be able to then just capture that search that's already there. And so in those early days, you know, after our product development and develop, getting the patent and perfecting the product, but those early days were very profitable because we spent almost no money on advertising. So as we, we came up very high in Google and back in those days, it was like more people searched on Google and Amazon. You know, we've been in business now for ten years and I've seen that every year more and more of that shift has gone from beginning their search on Google to beginning their search on Amazon. But again, when we launched on Amazon, there was very few people on there. But again, you're already just capturing people that are searching for this product.
Cameron Taylor [00:08:28]:
And so that was, that's what really intrigued me, that I was like, okay, well, I can, you know, we can build this business. We'll have the money in the product development and inventory cost, but initially we should have, you know, minimal cost in the advertising and client acquisition side.
Jon LaClare [00:08:51]:
It's a great story. You know, a lot of my career, we've been launching new products and services for, in this business 17 years, and it's become kind of a specialty of ours. And we're many times fighting upstream, right. Because there are new and unique products that no one's ever heard of. They're not necessarily searching for. And it does feel a need people have, but they're not looking for the product. And we figured out how to do it right. And the nice thing is when you can cross the chasm and get the word out in a profitable way, growth can explode, but it costs money, right? You've got to market it.
Jon LaClare [00:09:24]:
You can't just take advantage of existing demand that already exists. And I love maybe many of our listeners that be twin with an idea or maybe a way to think about their business differently. But how do you captivate? Where do you find the demand for your existing business or for maybe a new product or service that you're thinking about coming out with, it may already exist. And if you can kind of like get into the stream, right. With a unique way of doing it, a unique offering, but really meeting that demand, it can make it easier, right. And kind of going with the flow of the business, as it were.
Cameron Taylor [00:09:53]:
And there are some good tools out there to find that. So even just like with Google Adwords, they have all the data of billions and billions of searches. They know what people are searching for. And you also can show how competitive those searches are. So it gives you an idea of kind of the volume of the market potential. There are market realities. You see people enter in different markets. Well, there are market realities that you have to study and find out to say, okay, how much demand is there for this? But some of those tools that are out there and Amazon has again, all the data on there where you can look to see is there these searches that I can capture.
Cameron Taylor [00:10:35]:
But like you said, with our asset protection business, we were kind of a unique thing. My partner in that business is called the father of asset protection. He kind of created that industry because his father was sued, lost everything, and he kind of was creating the industry and he couldn't take any more clients. But he saw this huge demand for it. And that's where we then had to figure out, well, how can we get this message out to other people? So we had to come up with it because it wasn't just people are just going to come to us and say, hey, I need this done. They didn't even know it existed initially. So we developed some very unique marketing strategies through education, through seminars where we could teach them about the concepts and the legal structure that we set up. And then once we perfected that process, we say, okay, well, if we can get our target audience in the room and we can talk to them for one to 2 hours and just provide the education, a percent of those become our clients.
Cameron Taylor [00:11:35]:
And then it was built into a multi million dollar business. So, I mean, you can make it work both ways. But now, as that industry has developed, there are now people that search for asset protection. And again, you see in that business, when we first started, not a whole lot of competition, but as people see success there was then got to where like we're now, I'm still doing that business that I rebuilt, you know, after leaving that one and rebuilding. It's still going and still profitable now, 20 years later. But there is now people searching for asset protection. It is now a term that people search for when they weren't, you know, 30 years ago. And so my best selling book on audible, but I did a book for our clients, interviewed all our top experts and we did a book on asset protection.
Cameron Taylor [00:12:31]:
It was just for our clients. I was like, hey, what if I just release this on audible and just see how it does? No marketing, no nothing. It became my top seller because it was capturing all the people searching for that term. Now, one of my other best selling books is eight attributes of great achievers. That book is sold hundreds of thousands of copies all throughout the world. But they have to be looking. People aren't just looking for eight attributes of great achievers. It's not a search term that people are looking for unless they're looking specifically for my book.
Cameron Taylor [00:13:02]:
Right. But now with the asset protection book, I just stuck it on there and we started getting hundreds and hundreds of sales and just capturing people that were searching for that topic and wanting to know, okay, how do I protect my assets from lawsuits? How do I minimize my taxes? How do I set up my estate? So I was like, ah, okay, now I see an opportunity here in writing where I can say, okay, well, let me write to try to satisfy some of these needs or things people are searching for. But also I write, you know, books on, you know, different, you know, success topics and other things there. But then you, you have to market them or they don't sell. So. So, yes, you can succeed both ways, but yes, it's a, I do like the businesses where I just capture the business that the, that they're already searching for.
Jon LaClare [00:14:01]:
Well, yeah. And I think it's like, not every business is going to be like that, I think. But if you can, again, find the flow and find your way into it, so you're not always going upstream if you're not trying to create demand. Right. If there's a true need for your product or service, they may not know exactly what your product exists, as you mentioned. Right. Or what it's called, or that's where marketing comes in, making that connection to the need, but really understanding the true need of your consumer, your buyer, makes the marketing easier, certainly more profitable as well. I want to dive into competition because that world has changed a little bit for the Suntail Mermaid company since you originally started.
Jon LaClare [00:14:36]:
But before we do, let's talk about the product itself. So just those in our audience that may not be familiar with what a swimmable mermaid tail is, I know you've got one for anybody who's watching the video could show us what it looks like. Of course, for all those other ones, while he's grabbing that, go to suntailmermaid.com dot. You can see it, but if you could describe what it is.
Cameron Taylor [00:14:53]:
Yeah. So there's a few components to it. So again, the monofin is a swim fin, but it's designed so that both feet fit together into one fin. So a lot of fins, you see, are two fins where you have one on each feet and you kind of flutter kick, where a monofin is designed with two foot pockets that keep your feet together, and then it becomes more of the dolphin swim or butterfly stroke or the mermaid stroke. Right. So we help people become mermaids. And so developing the monofin, there was a finis is a big swim company, developed all kinds of fins, and they had developed a monofin, but it was all plastic and it would cause blisters and other problems. We said, okay, well, we want to solve that problem.
Cameron Taylor [00:15:49]:
And so we came up with a design that was very comfortable. We developed a mold for the injection molding for this part of the fin. But we actually hired engineers, we hired divers, we hired swimmers to test it, because we said we want to have a product that is not only fun, transforms people into mermaids, but we said we want a fin that will provide the most comfort, control, and proportion. So, again, you have to define what you want your product to do. And so we're looking at all the products that existed out there. It's like, well, there's no product that really does all these things really well, and we think we can solve these problems. So it was, we tested a lot of different versions, and we had different, you know, market testers that would test it, would see how it hold up and see how the propulsion was. And, you know, and so developing that the product is fun.
Cameron Taylor [00:16:44]:
I mean, we're designed to create. That's what. And so I think a lot of people just whatever it is that you're creating, it's just fun to create something, whether it's a book or building a business. But creating a physical product was fun, too, to see the molds and the designs that all come together into a product. So then on that product, you have then just a fabric, a fabric tail. So you'll see inside here, you then have a fabric tail that pulls over that monofin, and then as they pull that up over them, gives them that look of a mermaid. So there's a shot in the, I think, and obviously on the website with the different mermaids who have been transformed. And so as we develop the product, one of the first things that we notice is that they would swim as they're swimming in pools, a lot of concrete pools that get holes, you know, in the tips of the tails.
Cameron Taylor [00:17:46]:
That was our number one problem. Number one reason for returns, number one reason for dissatisfaction. So what? For every problem, there's a solution, right? So we say, okay, we gotta fix that problem. Initially, we had the quick solution. We had waterproof tape that the customers could kind of tape on the ends. It didn't look the best, but it kind of worked. Eventually would come up, but it. It kind of worked where it was like, okay, we gotta get something better.
Cameron Taylor [00:18:13]:
And we tested all kinds of different materials and eventually came up with a very proprietary process to put this film on here. You can now you can rub this on cement for an hour and it won't wear through. And so, yeah, we've seen tails that have used them for years and now know where on those tips. And so, so fun that we have. We have our staff right here in our shop that, that puts these on, and, yeah, it's fun to then see that, that problem solved and, and see happy mermaids. You know, that's what we want is happy mermaids. And, and then increased sales and fewer returns and better reviews. And so that's, yeah, that's the, that's the product is the.
Cameron Taylor [00:19:04]:
So we have it in a lot of different colors and sizes. We initially started with the child sizes, and we have so many requests from teens and adults that we developed teen and adult sizes, and now we sell as many teen and adult sizes as we do child sizes. And so it's so fun to now see the moms and daughters swimming together and the mom now living their dream of being a mermaid that they didn't know was ever possible, that now they're like, oh, I can be a mermaid. I always want to be a mermaid since I was a little girl, and my little girl wants to be a mermaid, and now they're mermaids together. And so it's been, been a lot of fun, you know? And so I never would have thought I would be in the mermaid business, but it's, it's been a really fun business to just see the happiness and joy it brings our customers as they, as they use the product.
Jon LaClare [00:19:55]:
I love. Thanks for sharing that story. A couple things I want to note for the listeners is we originally started off by, okay, you found an opportunity. People are searching for a product that doesn't exist. Okay. It's easy, right? There's still a lot of work that goes into it. It's kind of like that question, like, oh, I had that idea. I could have made millions, too, or whatever, right? But there's still, there's still the effort of, you got to make a great product, right? You've got to listen to the customer.
Jon LaClare [00:20:17]:
You've got to, it's not as simple as, like, okay, turn a button on. But the nice thing is, it's a lot of fun, as you said, it's so tangible working with consumer products like this that as you hear a problem, you can figure out a solution, right? Whether that's a product change, like the tips of the tails, or whether that's a marketing challenge or whatever it might be, you know, that's part of the fun of the business, ultimately. It's just that when you're, no pun intended, but swimming in the stream along with the demand, it makes it a little bit easier along that process, for sure. But of course, yeah.
Cameron Taylor [00:20:44]:
And that's the one thing that I see, one of the mistakes that people will make. I was like, you know, I'll have people approach me. It's like, oh, well, I just, you know, I just lost my job. I'm going to start a business. I was like, well, when do you need money by? And they're like, well, like, next month. I was like, well, you're gonna have to get a job. We can build something on the side. But even with this business where we were capitalizing on a market, you know, again, we also did the research.
Cameron Taylor [00:21:10]:
See, will people pay for the product? Because it may be, there may be the demand for that, but are they willing to pay? It's got to be four times manufacturing costs. So you're saying, okay, it's gonna cost me this much to make. Is a customer willing to pay at least for five times what it cost me to make it? You know, so, yeah, you can sell products all day at a loss, but that, yeah, I've always found businesses more fun if you make money. But so as we looked at that, it was a, it was a product that people were like, we've gone into other markets with, like, we have, you know, leggings that are matching colors, that are mermaid leggings. But that is such a competitive market. And trying to get people to pay a price where I can get the same margins I get with the mermaid tails doesn't happen. So I just can't come up with any, you know, mermaid product and compete. That was also a very much more competitive space in the legging space.
Cameron Taylor [00:22:03]:
And it's still a great product. Customers like it, but it's very, very, very small percent of our sales at the price point we sell it at. And I'm not going to sell it at the price points to compete with everyone else in that marketplace, is it? Yeah. Just wouldn't make us any money, so. But in that planning, and since I've had the success with the other businesses, it's nice to be able to have the cash flow, to be able to develop the business, but also to have the plan to say, hey, we set aside, you know, it ended up costing, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in product development and inventory, you know, to launch the business. And we didn't have all the advertising costs either in there. So I see that's one mistake that people make. They don't have the plan in place to say, okay, do you have the funding you need to be able to develop the product that you need to get the intellectual property protection that you need, but then also get the inventory you need, you know, to actually launch.
Cameron Taylor [00:23:15]:
And again, even when I'm doing, you know, I built a lot of businesses. I'm pretty good at getting timelines and costs, and I usually double them. So whatever my estimates is, I double the time and I double the cost, and then I'm usually about right, so.
Jon LaClare [00:23:32]:
Yeah, very true.
Cameron Taylor [00:23:33]:
And that is how it works. And again, it still took, before this business was positive cash flow. It was still pretty fast, but we didn't have positive cash flow until really year three. Right. And then, you know, then you're able to pay back that investment. And, well, I mean, I funded it all with money I had, so. But again, I still look at the return on investment. I don't look at a return until I have 100% of that money that I put into the business back before I consider it a dollar profit.
Cameron Taylor [00:24:12]:
Right. So. So that's one thing that was good that we had those. And it's a seasonal business. Very seasonal. So we do very obviously, sales are super high in the summer, Christmas. It's a wonderful gift item. And so if you have someone who does have a birthday coming up or, you know, for Christmas coming up, you get a mermaid tail.
Cameron Taylor [00:24:40]:
And that, that's one of our most common reviews is, you know, best gift I've ever given or received. You see the open box videos and the little girls just light up. They're so excited when they. When they get this as a gift. But you have to then have the cash flow in those other months. So in those. Even those early years, you know, even when we got to where we're doing seven figures a year, we'd have cash flows great in the summertime, but then when you're in the wintertime, when you're then stocking up for the next summer, there was times I was still putting 2030, 40,000 a month into the business in January, February, March, which are the slowest months of the business. But then March was usually the worst cash flow because you have all the inventory you're stocking up.
Cameron Taylor [00:25:26]:
So to make sure you have everything for summer. And so if a business isn't preparing for that cash flow, you know that not everyone just has an extra 40 grand a month sitting around that they say, I can put in the business or get a loan. You know, banks will give you money when you don't need it, but they won't give it to you when you need it. That's usually how it works.
Jon LaClare [00:25:50]:
Very true. So let's talk about competition because you mentioned in the early days, you brought this out because you looked and there's a lot of demand, not a lot of supply or not a lot of competition. That's certainly changed now. Right? So you went from, I think a couple of kind of competitors that were low quality didn't really do the same thing. So almost no competition in the very early days. Now fast forward a few years and I think you told me you have over 1000 competitors on Amazon, is that correct?
Cameron Taylor [00:26:16]:
Yeah, that would have been about that probably. I did a market research done about two years ago and I just want to see because, yeah, just everything was getting so much more competitive on Amazon. And like when we put it on Amazon, of course we were on the first page. Mermaid tales didn't even fill up a page on Amazon. I mean that's a space. You're like, hey, I can, this is a space I like to be in. It's like there's a, not even enough products to fill the page. And now when I did that market research, I said, well, how many different sellers are there mermaid sales on Amazon? It was 1200.
Cameron Taylor [00:26:55]:
And when we launched on Amazon, also to just see the evolution of Amazon those first years on Amazon, you know how much money I spent on advertising on Amazon? Zero. Because one, Amazon didn't have all the paid placement like they do now. And that slowly grown, you know, and so, and our, our fee that Amazon took when we first went on Amazon was 10%. It's now 18, plus all the other spends. But just that right off the top it was ten, now it's 18. You still have a lot of other fees in there that they take, but you start seeing but one of the big fees that the competition created because again, I always look at doing our search engine optimization, make sure that we're in those top searches on Google. But again, as more and more people are searching on Amazon, we also had to make sure we had the SEO on Amazon. We're showing up for all those key terms on Amazon.
Cameron Taylor [00:28:01]:
And as I'm monitoring that, so every week we just have a sheet that would show where we rank for our key search terms. And we dropped off the first page on Amazon. I was like, what's happening? We're not on the first page on Amazon anymore. And our sales go down. And so as I start looking into it, I probably should have caught a lot sooner, but again, I build the businesses to where they're designed to run without me. And so, but I would check different things so I'm checking this and I'm seeing that. I was like, well, there now have been all this paid placement, you know, and now on like a page on Amazon, half of the space you see on a page on Amazon is all paid. At least half is all paid.
Cameron Taylor [00:28:52]:
And in order to stay on the first page you have to advertise on Amazon is one of the main algorithms that show up in the natural search is sales volume. And if you aren't advertising, you're not going to get the sales volume to stay on page one. And if you're not on page one of the natural search, once you drop to page two, three, four, you're just going to keep dropping, you're going to be gone. So that's when we started doing advertising on Amazon to then make sure that we were showing up on the first page in the paid placement. But then it also kept us on that first page for the natural search as well. So I try to design it to where now on there, about half of our sales come from our ads, but half of our sales still come from our natural search. So I try to get a five times return. So for every dollar I spend, I get $5 in sales.
Cameron Taylor [00:29:48]:
But since I'm also getting another $5 in sales from the natural search, because those sales I get from paying for those ads and getting those sales keeps me ranked higher for all the natural searches. So I end up spending about 10%. So every million dollars in sales we do on Amazon, I spend $100,000 in advertising on, on Amazon. Well, it was nice those years, those years before we had all that competition, I spent zero. So that, so our profit went down 10% there because it, for every million I did, we spent zero in advertising on Amazon. Now for every million I spent 100,000 in advertising. That's just a hard expense. That's just off.
Cameron Taylor [00:30:32]:
And Amazon went from charging 10% off the top to 18% plus other fees. You know, it's easily gone to 20. And so you have to then figure out, okay, how to then try to still have the margins to be profitable and still compete with the 1200 other sellers. And part of that is that you don't always have to be the least expensive option that there is. People will pay for quality, durability. One of the things we did is I knew we had a product that was very durable and in order to communicate that to the customer, we did a year warranty with free replacements for your monofins. So you have any rip, break, tear, no questions asked. We send you a free mermaid tail monofin.
Cameron Taylor [00:31:35]:
Now, again, is, are any of those other low cost products doing that? No. And you see in the reviews, the other things, the reviews, you know, we have a 4.6 rating on, on our products, on Amazon with thousands of reviews. That's hard to do. You know, you have to have a good product and good customer service in order to do that. And so that helps us in the competition as people are looking the ones see, okay, this company's been around for a while. They have thousands of great reviews from customers. We have great product photos and videos. But then putting that warranty in there was like, we believe in our product.
Cameron Taylor [00:32:15]:
You know, this isn't, and, you know, you can buy the $40 product and, you know, may last you a couple weeks or, and really won't function for swimming in the water like ours were. That's where ours really stands apart. Because, like, what I was saying, like, with the fabric, the fabric, mermaid tail is not a big barrier to entry. You know, someone could actually just, you know, these are unique designs that we make and print. So all our designs are of 100% unique. But our first ones, we just actually bought different material and sewed it together, you know, and that was ordered different colors and different things. And so someone could do that. You could have just a fabric tail in a week.
Cameron Taylor [00:33:03]:
You get some fabric and cut it out, sew it together. But the monofin is a bigger barrier to entry, and that's been our real, or we can compete in the marketplace. One, it's, it's more expensive. We had spent tens of thousands of dollars in engineering and to build the molds, to make the injection molds for that. And then, you know, like, our neoprene on our monofins is thicker than anyone else in the industry. And so we just, we just have, you know, a better quality product, try to do better customer service and say, well, I'm not going to try to compete with that low end product. And that will fit a need of some of the people in the marketplace. But those who really want to be able to swim and have control and have durability and have a product that will last.
Cameron Taylor [00:33:56]:
We were able to still capture our share of the market and have continued to do well, although the increased competition has brought prices down, has brought that advertising cost up so that the margin has shrunk, but we still have kept it to where it still is. We still have a good, profitable margin that makes it work. And now that we've made it for ten years and with 1200 competitors in there, you know, we're going to be around for decades to come. But there were, I have seen several of the, several of the, there's a couple of the big mermaid companies that were kind of in those early days. Yeah. They've gone out of business. They didn't make it. So.
Jon LaClare [00:34:35]:
And part of it comes back to, I think, you know, we've talked a lot about quality. Right. And unique features and, you know, constantly being in touch with your customer to understand what their needs are, etcetera. And, you know, staying one head, one step ahead of the competition. Right. So people can copy. Companies can copy. You know, they'll catch up eventually to your version today.
Jon LaClare [00:34:53]:
So your version tomorrow needs to be better. Right. That's just a good general paradigm for most products. When you, when you're close to your customer, when you're concern and care about quality, you can do that. Right. So that's what helps you to stay one step ahead. Well, Cameron, this is a lot of fun. I've learned a lot in this interview.
Jon LaClare [00:35:07]:
Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think could be helpful for our audience?
Cameron Taylor [00:35:10]:
Well, I think one concept I was like, when I was first doing the mermaid business, I would tell people I was just in the swim industry. I didn't want to tell people I was in the mermaid business, you know, and, but as I've done, as I started doing it, and I started to see the impact that we're having with all of my companies. We tried. We're mission driven, you know, and that's why I say it's not so much what you do, but how you do it. We want to follow, you know, true principles. We want to take care of our customers. We want to take care of our employees. We want to be this a place.
Cameron Taylor [00:35:44]:
I was like, I'm going to treat each people that work with me like I would my mom, you know, and say with my customers, it's like, well, if I would do that to my mom, I'm not going to do it to a customer. I'm not going to do it to an employee. And so we want it to be an environment where people want to work here and they know we follow good, true christian principles and how we interact with them and others. But we also always have a focus on mission. And when I first seen it, I was like, well, what mission are we going to have with mermaid Dells? You know, but as we started looking at it and you start seeing, it's like our mission statement is we make the world a happier place. One mermaid tail at a time. So again, with our staff, it's like we're not just making a plastic fin. You're not just filling boxes.
Cameron Taylor [00:36:32]:
You're filling dreams. Every box that goes out, you're filling a little girl's dream. We show them the video. We make the new videos with old box offices. You see that girl that just opened her Christmas present or her birthday present, and you see that smile on her face. You helped build that. You helped fulfill that. And so again, it's so fun.
Cameron Taylor [00:36:54]:
Like, we'll get a note on our orders. If it says a birthday, our staff will hand make them a birthday card with mermaid, different stickers. And they'll say happy birthday from Sun Tilt Mermaid. And it's so fun to see. We often get responses back to the goods. They're like, we can't believe your staff's making us birthday cards. But they know I was like, they want to make that experience for the customer special, you know, because they're not just fulfilling an order. They're not just doing a job.
Cameron Taylor [00:37:24]:
They're making the world a happier place. One roommate deal at a time. We also give a lot of, you know, as an entrepreneur, you're able to give back. And so in whatever business I'm doing, we try to give back. We've been able to partner with make a Wish foundation, other charities, where we're able to give mermaid tails away. So we give away hundreds of mermaid tails every year to different causes, different organizations. And I remember one of those, there was a little girl who was in a hospital bed, and she couldn't even go to the water, but she still wanted to be a mermaid. And so we sat her mom a free mermaid tail for her daughter, as her wish was, she wanted to be a mermaid, and she sent us a picture of her little girl, the hospital bed with tubes.
Cameron Taylor [00:38:18]:
But that little girl had a huge smile on her face as she was transformed into a mermaid. And her mom sent us that picture, and she said, this is the first time I've seen her smile in months. So thank you. So we then share that with the staff. See, we can bring a little joy and happiness to a little girl who's going through some pretty tough things in a hospital bed, you know? And so whatever business you're in, you know, you can do it in a way that, that lifts the lives of your employees and lifts the lives of your customers and makes the world a better place for everybody.
Jon LaClare [00:39:01]:
I love that. It's such great advice. And thanks for sharing that story as well. It does remind me, I think I needed a better job and probably most businesses that are listening to on so we talk so much about connecting to our customer, consumer or whatever it might be, understanding how they're benefiting from our product or service or our business. And oftentimes we don't. So we may get that, but we don't always share it with our employees. I love that you talked about how sharing these experiences with your entire team, it helps every single role to understand if they're doing the accounting for your company, they still have an impact on these little girls lives, for example. I love that.
Jon LaClare [00:39:37]:
That's a great thing to share and I think great advice for all of us to think about. How do I get our teams involved, not just ourselves, but really connecting with how we're benefiting those around us through the businesses that we have. We're all in this as entrepreneurs to really help others. Growing a business is part of the fun and part of the journey, but at the end of the day, it's about helping more people in various ways. Whatever our business might be. I do want to tell our audience, please, please visit suntailmermaid.com dot. You can find it in the show notes if you're driving, go check it out. Later you'll find the URL, but go check it out.
Jon LaClare [00:40:09]:
You can see this line of products. You can find them on Amazon, but the whole selection is suntailmermaid.com and I also want to mention, did you know you can meet with a member of my team absolutely free for a 30 minutes strategy consultation. We've launched and grown hundreds of products since 2007. We learned some of our strategies while growing Oxiclean back in the Billy Mays days. We're here to help. So please go to harvestgrowth.com and set up a call if you'd like to discuss further.
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