The Teespring Turnaround: Announcing profitability.

Originally Posted on Medium: here

The past two and a half years with Teespring have been the most challenging experience of my professional career. I knew that joining Teespring was a huge undertaking, but never could have imagined the extreme lows and thrilling highs we’ve experienced on a journey from near death to finding profitability.

I initially joined Teespring’s European team to focus on growth in Europe, but my role quickly transitioned into leading the global commercial team (sales, marketing, growth & partnerships) and eventually becoming CEO of the company.

Teespring’s core concept of ‘create and sell online’ still rings true today, but the business in 2016 was in an incredibly difficult position. It had become over-reliant on its merchants running digital ads and as the ad’s eco-system was maturing, it became increasingly difficult for small independent merchants to compete at any viable scale. The company was burning millions of dollars a month and was unable to raise more financing — we were staring death in the face and it was a matter of weeks until the money ran out and we would have to close shop.

After a lot of long nights, deep discussions and some pretty difficult calls, we put a plan together to save the company. It involved a very painful recapitalization and organizational restructure that involved team layoffs. This was my first time doing a restructure at this scale and honestly, these were some of the darkest days in Teespring’s history.

We had built a plan to build new growth in the business through diversification of new channels that would change Teespring’s value proposition…it was a bold strategy and with it, we were venturing into the unknown.

Fast forward 18 months and we’re able to say that  Teespring turned profitable in 2018. Words can’t describe how proud I am of the team that managed to pull this off, but it’s vital to the story that we stand back and explain how we went about it. I hope our story can serve as a helpful resource to other companies in similar positions to prove that coming back from the brink is possible.

‘The Turnaround Playbook’

I have always been obsessed with ‘playbooks’ and the concept of codifying work to create replicability of the process you followed. Below are the key steps we took as a business to go from burning millions of dollars a month to becoming profitable.

1. Call your ‘profitability play’

In making the decision to recapitalize the business we worked closely with our board of directors and investors to explain what our path to profitability looked like. This ultimately gave them enough confidence to back us as a management team moving forward.

Calling the profitability play isn’t just a case of saying the right things — it’s a mindset. This mindset was driven by a phenomenal CFO and VP Finance & Ops who changed the narrative in the business to bow to EBITDA. We forensically looked at expenses and operational efficiencies and worked quickly to make changes. On the growth side, we restructured the team to think holistically and become open to new areas of growth but with an ROI mindset.

2. Understand your identity

Without realizing it, Teespring had gone through an identity crisis. In trying a variety of different tactics to search for growth the business had distorted into a number of different areas that had caused it to lose a sense of self. I’d spoken to a number of members of the team who all had very different views of what Teespring was and what it should be.

Externally, the positioning of the company had slipped into a very negative place. We had negative press surrounding the re-cap and layoffs, awful glassdoor reviews from disgruntled former employees and worst of all had been caught up in a wave of negative stories related to offensive content. At this time, I remember thinking to myself “Wow, this company really can’t catch a break!”

In finding our identity, it took a deep understanding of who our customer is and beyond that, the value we are creating for them. On a daily basis, we see tens of thousands of creators make money from selling products they designed on Teespring. For some users, these are life-changing amounts of money, for others, it’s a side-hustle, and for some, it offers the ability to continue to do what they love. This all felt incredibly powerful. At this realization, we finally understood;

“Teespring is a platform to create and sell online”

We have worked hard to change our identity externally (more on this) and having clarity internally has been vital to giving our team a solid foundation we can stand on.

3. Study the ecosystem

The world of e-commerce moves astonishingly fast. We spent a lot of time being wrapped up with trying to solve our own issues and consequently didn’t look up and understand what was happening around us.

I spent months trying to meet as many people as I could within e-commerce. This largely involved turning up at peoples’ offices, bugging them on the phone, and jumping on planes in the hopes of getting face-to-face meetings. I did all this to get an understanding of what success looked like in e-commerce and how they were achieving it. Whilst often it felt like time wasted, I am convinced that this experience helped us to stop thinking like Teespring and instead start responding and reacting to the world around us.

4. Get behind the plan

The real-life problems we felt in going through these transitions were tough. We lost many good people during the recap and the few months following. I underestimated the amount of energy needed purely to motivate myself and others during those times….I don’t think I have ever been so exhausted.

As we began building some of the blocks called out above, we started to create a new culture in the business. I was incredibly impressed to see individuals in the teams step up and become leaders and start to spread the message of ‘the plan’. This was an amazing moment. It’s the time that our ideas started to become tangible. As a company, we started to believe in what we were saying. This was facilitated by refreshing some of the company all-hand structures, promoting more cross-functional activity, involving more teams in group discussions, empowering each other to lead, and creating a safe environment to encourage more people to share ideas.

I knew getting team ‘buy-in’ was important to what we were trying to do, but I underestimated how truly powerful it could be. Without this team, we wouldn’t be where we are today. It is extremely important that everyone is a part of the planning process as well as ensuring they understand their role in making it happen.

5. Execute / Execute / Execute

This seems obvious, but the key to all of this has been execution. I am lucky to say that at Teespring, I have worked with some of the most durable, hardworking and persevering individuals I have ever met.

Long hours, different time zones, last minute emergencies, PR crises, tech meltdowns and pretty much everything you could think of has happened whilst I have been at Teespring (at some points I thought this whole thing could have made a successful reality TV show).

The extreme focus we applied is down to a combination of amazing leadership (with many leaders doing 3 or 4 roles at once) matched with a remarkable work ethic from employees — most of whom were in their first jobs and managed to knock down anything we put in front of them.

So what does it all mean?

Turning profitable is not the only thing we are celebrating here. It’s the progress we have made from being on death’s door to taking charge of our own destiny. Profitability is an important milestone in Teespring’s history, but for us, it’s only the starting point of where we want to take this company.

Lastly, I can’t help but call out the inspiring people that I have been lucky enough to be side by side with over the past two and a half years. Not only Teespring leadership but each and every one of Teespring 170 employees, our loyal sellers who have stood by us, the tens of thousands of new users who have flocked to our platform and finally our amazing partners who have helped us create a strong and healthy business. Thank you.