- Kaylin Marcotte runs Jiggy Puzzles, which has sold more than 250,000 units in three years.
- She says word-of-mouth marketing — partnering with brands and customers — has helped it grow.
- She says the key to a good organic marketing campaign is making it a two-way partnership.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kaylin Marcotte, the 32-year-old founder and CEO of Jiggy Puzzles from New York, about marketing tactics she's used for her business. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I've always been a fan of word-of-mouth marketing for my small business.
I started my direct-to-consumer puzzle brand during what felt like the D2C e-commerce boom. All the founders around me were following the playbook of raising big VC money to pump into social media and Google ads as a way of getting their brand out there. It seemed like a fast way to grow a multimillion-dollar business — until we saw how quickly those platforms could change, effectively shutting off your whole growth mechanism.
I bootstrapped my company, so I never had the money for that strategy anyways. But even if I had, I don't think I would have taken that approach. I think word-of-mouth marketing is so much more powerful, providing an affordable way to reach new audiences and build a stronger brand through trusted recommendations. Plus, it's much more in our control than the major marketing channels.
Not following the traditional playbook didn't really slow us down: We've sold 250,000 units, gotten 100,000 email subscribers, and reached multimillion-dollar-business status during our three years in business.
I believe this kind of organic marketing is really setting up my company to succeed in the long term. Here are three strategies I use to do it, including partnering with other brands and individuals.
Collaborations are built into our business model
From the start, Jiggy Puzzles has featured the work of contemporary female artists. While we could have just commissioned their work, we opted to pay them through royalties. More recently, we launched Jiggy Studios to allow even more artists to partner with us on creating puzzles.
Part of this was out of necessity: As a bootstrapping founder, I couldn't afford the up-front cost to pay for their art. But it also created a powerful word-of-mouth marketing channel. All of these artists were suddenly incentivized to help us market their puzzles.
It really becomes a scale play: Each artist may only have 3,000 to 50,000 social-media followers or email subscribers, but when we get in front of all of their audiences, that's tens of thousands of new people who know about Jiggy. While some of our artists do bring larger followings — like Sara Boccaccini Meadows, Charly Clements, and Joanna Muñoz — each and every collaboration contributes to our growth.
Part of why I think this has been so successful is that we really see this as a two-way partnership: We're here to help with manufacturing, distribution, and even marketing materials, and they now have a new way to make money with their art.
We've pursued partnerships instead of white-labeling
A lot of product-based businesses pursue business-to-business partnerships as a way to grow a new revenue stream. But when these are used only for income, I think it's a lost marketing opportunity. When we opened up the opportunity for companies, nonprofits, and celebrities to create branded puzzles, we decided these would be cobranded (clearly made in partnership with Jiggy) instead of white-labeled (sold to the partner without our branding).
For instance, when the bourbon brand Woodford Reserve approached us about creating a puzzle as part of its big Kentucky Derby campaign, we could have simply manufactured the puzzles, passed them along to the company, and celebrated the revenue success. Instead, our goal with each collaboration is to create a brand moment that amplifies our partners' initiatives and, in the process, introduces Jiggy to their whole community — often getting us access to audiences we never could have afforded on our own.
To do this, we typically pair the launch of each custom puzzle with a custom marketing campaign, which may include things like social-media giveaways or a press push to encourage our partners to share widely. We also view each as a lead-generation moment, making sure we have all the best practices set up with our website, email capture, and tracking pixels for ad retargeting to get this new influx of potential customers into our sales funnel.
We treat ambassadors like a part of our company
Of course, we can't forget about the classic word-of-mouth strategy: ambassadors. From the start, we've empowered our organic ambassadors by including instructions and encouragement on our product packaging to help puzzlers share their progress on social media.
Lately we've stepped things up by starting an official ambassador program. We really see these ambassadors as part of our company and have done the work to help them help us and make sure they feel valued. Each ambassador gets a unique code that offers a discount to people they share it with and then earns them a commission on the sales they drive. We also put together a kit for them with brand language, Jiggy FAQs, and best practices for social posting.
We've already seen the results in terms of them helping drive sales, helping create user-generated content, and getting us in front of audiences we otherwise wouldn't have had access to. Even if they aren't large audiences, they're often highly engaged: For instance, one ambassador regularly shares Jiggy in her private Facebook groups for moms.
Word-of-mouth marketing isn't necessarily the quickest or easiest win. And doing it successfully involves a lot of care and dedication to finding the value proposition for all parties involved. But I've found that, when done successfully, it can really build an enduring brand with a lot of power behind it.