Website Closers® presents an eCommerce Brand in the Backyard Chickens sector, selling Chicken Coops, Chicken Coop Equipment & Coop Accessories DTC via its Website. The company continues to grow aggressively year over year after 7 years of being in business and is still seeing monumental growth in the TTM despite already high sales during the Pandemic. They market to a high-growth niche where more and more families at all levels of the income stream are interested in backyard chickens for egg production (knowing where their food comes from), kitchen scraps solution (chickens are omnivores and eat just about anything), compost for gardens and landscapes, and for children – they make an excellent pet as well as an alternate to screen time. This is anything but a small market, or one that is limited to rural areas, since more than 150 of the top metropolitan areas in the U.S. have a growing percentage of families raising chickens.
This was an industry that saw high growth during the pandemic, as more families than ever embraced having backyard chickens for a host of reasons, from generating their own food to selling their fresh eggs. And since the pandemic, the industry has continued to grow as families realize that raising chickens has so many benefits.
This company benefits from having its main product, chicken coops, manufactured directly for them under their own designs, and sold under their brand name. The company offers several different models, with a high Average Order Value of $1,200. That enabled this brand to begin diversifying its product line and they now market SKUs that include chicken accessories, and automatic chicken coop door openers, among others. While most of their sales are on their Shopify website, the company has expanded onto Etsy where they market hand-sewn egg aprons, t-shirts, and tote bags.
This brand is already operating within an immensely lucrative industry. The global poultry sector of the food industry is the world’s fast-growing agricultural sub-sector, with a market value of $322.55 billion in 2021, and projections are that it will rise to $422 billion by 2025. Among poultry species, chicken is the main breeding area around the world, representing more than 90% of the poultry sector.
There is increased demand for effective chicken shelters in both small and large poultry farms, and among individuals who raise backyard chickens, making this one of the most important and profitable accessories in the poultry industry, which is rapidly increasing the demand for chicken coops.
All products are unique and proprietary. This business, launched in 2015, started out with three chicken coop models, sourced from a factory that manufactured their products according to their own in-house designs, suitable for backyards in urban and rural America. All their chicken coops have supporting nesting boxes and other key features that appeal to buyers. Just as significantly, their customers are buying a coop from a small family business that puts a lot of love and passion into their products, ensuring they are well designed and go beyond the products being mass produced by large corporations.
With their high AOV, the company also excels at customer service, ensuring their coops are carefully packaged and sent by expedited shipping. This has enabled the company to maintain a top position as a chicken coop manufacturer as opposed to simply being resellers of more generic coops.
Their customer base keeps expanding. Their average customer is an individual or family that has just invested in backyard chickens and is looking for the best possible coops to protect them from predators, illness and changes in the weather. Their growth has enabled the brand to continue introducing new products, including a gift card, iPhone case with original chicken pattern artwork, socks with chicken artwork, artificial wooden eggs, and more, providing them with plenty of upsell opportunities with their customer base. That’s already happening, since the company has a large email database of 14,130+ subscribers and a Repeat Customer Rate of 13%, which is also rising. They are making up to 50 product shipments a day from their 5,000-square-foot warehouse, where they maintain up to 70% inventory levels during the peak seasons.
The company has diversified its sales channels to include their Shopify website, PayPal, and the sale of their clothing on the popular crafts site, Etsy.com.
Their marketing has helped broaden their audience. The company’s own research indicates that people looking for coops can spend weeks or even months researching the best options available, including styles and designs, and the company has been able to reach many of them through PPC ads that have helped them get noticed during that customer research process.
Their social media platforms have also helped boost their organic traffic; they have 26,000+ followers on Instagram and 16,700+ on Facebook, and photos of their chicken coops outdoors have helped illustrate how superior their coops are compared to what competitors offer. These tactics, and a blog on their website, are boosting their organic traffic and giving the company 18,970+ unique monthly visitors today, which is up from an average of 12,800+ unique visitors in 2021.
The company also upsells third-party automatic chicken doors at checkout to help offset their PPC marketing costs, which has been an effective revenue generator. These products are drop-shipped from their third-party company at no cost to them, which is reducing their PPC costs dramatically.
They are highly automated, allowing the current owner to spend less than 10 hours each week running it, with a focus on customer service and fulfillment. There are plenty of opportunities to scale this business, including expanding from DTC sales to B2B, targeting wholesalers and retailers, an untapped avenue for them. Expanding onto new sales platforms such as Amazon and Walmart would drive sales considerably higher, and so would new digital marketing tactics, including selling their products through affiliates, and starting an email marketing campaign.
There are additional possibilities for higher revenue by reducing their shipping costs after negotiating better terms with FedEx and other carriers, and by redesigning and reducing the size of their shipping boxes.
