Today we’d like to introduce you to Nate Powell.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Nate. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
In 2017, I decided to grow a beard for the first time. I had previously grown goatees, but never a full beard. After I started, a bearded friend at work brought me in some homemade beard oil he had made and I was instantly hooked on how the beard itching stopped and how soft it made my beard feel. He told me “A beard will change your life”! I didn’t realize at the time how true this would be!
With this initial knowledge and a passion for creation, I started experimenting with various all natural oils and essential oils to blend beard oil mixes of my own. I built about twenty different blends, each uniquely scented. I gave some oils to people I knew who were growing beards to get their feedback. Thankfully, they all really liked them. At the same time, a Vice President at my day job told me that my “beard was looking quite ferocious”. Suddenly – everything clicked. I had been wanting to create a web site to sell my beard oils and Ferocious Beard Company sounded like the perfect name.
I registered Ferocious Beard Company LLC with the State of Texas and opened FerociousBeard.com in September of 2017. As a USAF Veteran, I knew I wanted to offer Veterans a meaningful discount as a sign of my gratitude for their service, so I set the site up so that all Active Duty Military and US Veterans could authenticate their military service and receive a 25% discount on every product every day at FerociousBeard.com. I’ve worked in Customer Service roles for the better part of my working life and knew that a huge part of what I wanted to do for my customers would be to treat everyone with unparalleled support for their individual needs. This meant offering honest feedback on the benefit of each product I made and a lifetime guarantee on my products so they would truly have nothing to lose.
Ferocious Beard Company has grown each quarter since 2017 to the point that now my wife Barb also works providing much-needed support in making products, filling orders, and running inventory control. Since opening Ferocious Beard Company, We’ve shipped out over 2000 orders to people literally across the world. We’re up to 50 uniquely scented Beard Oils, Beard Balms, and Beard Butters now which are organized by category on FerociousBeard.com. Everything I create is purpose-driven, so I even created a Beard Wash which helps replenish oils that are naturally stripped out of your beard when you wash with most shampoos.
Our pricing is designed to be affordable by a large majority of the bearded population and we also offer many discounted “add-ons” to really provide value to our customers. We recently implemented a review system on FerociousBeard.com. Since then, we’ve received 175 reviews and average 4.9 out of 5 Stars. We post both the good and the bad, as we believe in customer transparency. With our beard oils, we know we have a great mix of ingredients, so when it comes to reviews, generally customers are actually reviewing the scent, so this allows for others to read reviews prior to making their own purchase to decide which ones might be right for them.
This year Ferocious Beard Company has been a vendor at several local events, to include Funky Finds in Fort Worth, several beard competitions such as Come & Shave It 13 in Austin and MobbFest 2 in West Monroe, LA, and starting in May, Ferocious Beard Company will be a regular vendor at the Keller Farmer’s Market every Saturday morning through November.
Ferocious Beard Company is a company that takes our customers and products seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. We’re all about having fun, meeting new potential customers, treating them the way we would want to be treated, and without a doubt, the opportunity to grow this family business has been very rewarding. We are super excited about the future of Ferocious Beard Company!
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
From the beginning, our philosophy at Ferocious Beard Company has been that we’re a small company that ACTS BIG in ways that we can, and we think of our company as the best part-time job that will grow bigger as more people find out about us and what we have to offer.
Our biggest challenge, like many companies, is finding solutions that work well for us without spending more money than we need to. Some choices we made up front have helped us to move products to market quickly. As an example, since we now have 50 scents to choose from, our bottle labels are black and white because we use a thermal printer which only prints in black and white. As much as we are sometimes a bit envious of some of our competitors color labels, the benefit to our label system is that we can truly print only what we need on demand for the products we create at any one time, and not waste money buying thousands of full-color stickers for products that may or may not sell.
Another perceived struggle we’ve experienced is the sheer number of competitors. However, we’ve found that by embracing our competition rather than worry about what they are doing, Ferocious Beard Company can focus on doing what we do well which is provide excellent products at fair prices with outstanding customer service. And although many companies have their fiercely loyal supporters, we’ve found that we also have gained our own fiercely loyal supporters too and we have found that as long as we keep taking care of our customers, they will continue to return and tell their friends about us too. It’s a win-win for everybody.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Ferocious Beard Company – what should we know?
What makes Ferocious Beard Company different from our competitors is that we offer product scent choices for just about everybody. With 50 of our own unique scent blends ranging from woodsy to citrus scents, from tobacco to cologne scents, and from spicy to sweet scents (we even have a great Butterscotch scent), we always have at least several scents for just about everybody to enjoy,
And if that weren’t enough, Ferocious customers can create their own unique beard scent profile that we guarantee nobody else will have. We carry 31 essential oils and 44 fragrance scents and our customers can even name their own bottle label. If a customer were to choose just 4 of those essential or fragrance oils, there would be literally well over 6 million unique scent combinations that we could make uniquely for each customer.
Our support of Veterans is something we take very seriously and we’re proud to offer a 25% discount on every product every day to our US Active Duty Military and US Veterans. It’s our small way of saying thank you for your service.
Finally, our customer service is truly amazing. While we believe in our products, making sure our customers are satisfied always trumps our product pride. So if a customer ever orders a product that they are not happy with, we will always provide the opportunity to swap it out for a product more to their liking or a full refund of the product no questions asked.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
I believe that the most important quality for our business success is to listen to the needs of our customers. We continuously seek out feedback on every product we make to ensure that they are working in the way we intend them to work. Customers also provide us with some great ideas about potential new products that they are looking for that we might not yet make. I believe it’s important to continuously evaluate processes to see if there are better ways to become more proficient in our operations.
Also, listening to customer feedback helps us make determinations about if a product or service is worth keeping or removing. With the continuous development of products, not every product is going to be a winner. Some products, for whatever reason, just don’t resonate in ways you think they would. It’s better to fail quickly with a product and move on rather than keep a product around that either does not work quite the way you want it to or there is just simply not enough interest in to continue building.
Pricing:
- US Veterans and US Military Save 25% Every Day on Every Product
- Beard Oils are $15.95
- Beard Balms are $19.95
- Combination Beard Oil and Beard Balm is $29.95
- Save 15% with Code FEROCIOUS
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.FerociousBeard.com
- Phone: 682-593-5905
- Email: ferociousbeardcompany@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ferociousbeardcrew
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FerociousBeardCom/
Image Credit:
Nate Powell
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