In 2016, Anaita Sarkar founded Olivia & Co, an online retail store selling personalised accessories.
With a masters in commerce and marketing, Sarkar knew the importance of trying and testing different strategies to get her brand in front of the right audience.
But when Olivia & Co started growing as a result — going from one order a month to 80 orders a day — Sarkar recognised a different issue: packaging waste.
Enter Hero Packaging — a new business venture that Sarkar set out on with the aim of reducing waste by manufacturing and selling plastic-free, home-compostable shopping mailers and packaging to other small businesses, globally.
After nine months of talking with suppliers, testing the prototype and getting the final product, Hero Packaging officially launched in 2018.
At the time of writing, the business is on track to hit $5 million in revenue by June 30 this year, up from $2.5 million in 2021. As Sarkar tells SmartCompany Plus, that figure is forecast to grow to $10 million in 2023, and a whopping $14 million by 2024.
Here’s how the brand’s marketing strategy has allowed it to grow so rapidly, and how Sarkar plans to keep that momentum going.
Good SEO is paramount to getting your name in front of customers
Customers want to be involved in the business — they don’t just want to be a transaction
Community building is a sure way to ensure you “never just have a product sitting there”, unable to sell
When Hero Packaging first launched, it was only Sarkar on board. As the brand grew, so did the need for resources — Sarkar’s husband, Vik, left his full time job to help the booming business, and they’ve also hired eight staff since, across accounts, customer service, web development and more. But the marketing for Hero Packaging has stayed in Sarkar’s wheelhouse.
Sarkar says she went into the business “knowing that we were going to make a difference”. To actually make that difference, she needed to get the word out there.
“And in order to do that, we need to be really, really good, and we need to be number one at SEO. That’s the number one thing.”
Hero Packaging founder Anaita Sarkar. Source: supplied.
Sarkar had already spent years establishing Olivia & Co, using a refined marketing strategy to do so. Over that time, Sarkar learnt first-hand what kind of things would and wouldn’t work for an e-commerce company.
“It actually worked much better and grew exponentially faster [than Olivia & Co] when I moved those strategies across [to Hero Packaging].”
When it comes to marketing at Hero Packaging — or at any business — Sarkar says it all comes down to “a really cliche thing of understanding who you’re actually talking to”.
Olivia & Co was a “very difficult market”, Sarkar reflects, because she kept believing that they were “targeting everyone and anyone who wanted to buy personalised accessories”.
“I think I spoke to so many people, that I wasn’t able to target the right people,” she admits.
Now, Sarkar applies the same tactics to a much more niche market: small and medium business owners who are consumers within themselves.
“If I can identify specifically who I’m talking to, then every single piece of marketing collateral — if it’s a reel on Instagram or a TikTok video — is always catered to that specific audience,” Sarkar says.
Even with this targeted focus, the e-commerce market is no small fish to fry. According to Australia Post’s eCommerce Industry Report 2022, more than 9 million Australian households now shop online — an increase of 39% from pre-pandemic.
In such a crowded market, standing out is paramount. For Hero Packaging, this means promoting the brand’s ethics and sustainability practices (with one-in-four shoppers now choosing brands based on such), and increasing searchability to the website through backlinks, key terms and visual ease.
From these efforts, Hero Packaging is, at the time of writing, ranked number one for 50 different search terms, helping it to stay ahead of its ever-growing competition of sustainable packaging brands, as others desire to reach the sustainability-focused audience.
Still, Sarkar says the specific term ‘Hero Packaging’ is searched for more than 10,000 times a month.
While she also “can’t discount” the huge part paid ads, email marketing and the like have played in Hero Packaging’s success, Sarkar says ultimately she views this overall marketing strategy as “community building”.
“We don’t view customers as transactional customers. We’ve built them into some sort of community; whether that’s through our loyalty program, or whether that’s just by me showing my face as the owner and then owning up to mistakes when they’re made,” she explains.
Sarkar admits her knowledge of branding has evolved significantly over the years, as she once thought it boiled down to simply a logo and company colours.
“But branding is actually having communications constantly with customers and making them feel like they’re a part of us.”
Sarkar says being transparent with the community, and also asking customers for their input — such as the next colour packaging should be — means that “by the time the product comes in, customers are already aware of it; there’s demand for it”.
“We never have to have a product sitting there, because the customers have already said ‘yes, this is what we want’”.
“It’s been a winning strategy.”
Having an invested, loyal community and having Hero Packaging name already established in the market due to strong search optics was extremely beneficial once COVID-19 hit, too.
“It got to a point where, three times in 2020, we completely sold out of our mailers,” Sarkar reflects, saying that the company “didn’t predict that level of growth”.
“We had to wait for more mailers to be made, and then we sold out again. So then we waited, and we sold out again.
“It was a really hard year,” Sarkar notes.
“It was great for growth; great for demand; but at the same time, it was hard for us operationally.”
Moving forward, Sarkar is now anticipating the growth that Hero Packaging will see through the revenue predictions — pandemic or not.
To achieve said growth, Sarkar is planning on a large, international expansion, which will require onboarding more sales staff to target “custom clients, national retailers and big fashion houses”.
Already, Hero Packaging has launched its first warehouse in the US to serve the 600 customers based there.
“But I also want to open [a warehouse] in Canada, because surprisingly, Canada is one of our biggest markets. And then we want to do Europe [but] we need to find a place that can cater to all of Europe in a really fast way,” Sarkar said.
Along with all these international plans, Hero Packaging is also launching a new product — one that Sarkar can’t disclose the details of yet — though she does say it’s a “game changer” for the circular economy.
Once the product actually gets to Hero Packaging from the manufacturer, of course.
Sophie Venz is a freelance writer and editor working remotely from wherever she can get an internet connection. You can find her bylines in Forbes, SmartCompany, Mamamia, Punkee and many more.
