If you’re like me, you know the cost of prescription glasses is a fortune. Several years ago, my whole life changed when I stumbled upon Zenni. It’s a company who set out on a mission to make premium eyewear affordable and accessible to everyone. I’m here today with Deanna Dawson who heads up their social media and content marketing efforts, and I’m super excited to get an insider’s view into this company. Welcome, Deanna.

Deanna Dawson: Good morning.

Sherri Langburt: How are you? So excited to learn more about Zenni today.

Deanna Dawson: Well, I’m so excited to talk about Zenni today.

Sherri Langburt: I understand you’re celebrating a Sweet 16. Happy birthday.

Deanna Dawson: Thank you.

What are your plans to celebrate this milestone?

Deanna Dawson: Well, we celebrated our 15th anniversary. We do every five, so 16, nothing exciting. But we’re planning for next year, which is the year 2020. Obviously, very important in vision, so they’ve got big plans for next year.

Sherri Langburt: Awesome. So I guess for me, being someone who wears eyeglasses since I was a little, little girl, seven years old, I had to go to an optometrist, an ophthalmologist;

How could you overcome the need for that specialty when delivering glasses online?

Deanna Dawson: Yeah. So you still need to go to your ophthalmologist for your prescription. And what they do, what we have people do often is they will upload their prescription, write it in, and then they can buy affordable glasses with us, sunglasses. A lot of times people’s insurance will cover that first pair, so they’ll get their first pair with their optometrist. And then they want sunglasses, they want special computer glasses. They are a style maven and they want glasses for every outfit. So we go hand in hand with your ophthalmologist and your optometrist.

Sherri Langburt: And tell me a little bit more. I know even when I was younger and my prescription was so bad, glasses way back when were four or five, $600 because I…

What are your price points for these glasses?

Deanna Dawson: They start at $6.95, that is a simple prescription included. The average person checks out with a pair of prescription glasses for $40. And the reason we can do that is we are not a middleman. We own the factory, we make the glasses, we make the lenses; and so we can save on a lot of costs that other people who are selling glasses from a company or a third party cannot do.

Sherri Langburt: That’s amazing. I mean I know you touched upon the style, and obviously we’re an influencer marketing companies so we have a lot of fashionistas out there. People still, they’re still that, “I want to look at what I look like in the glasses and what the style of the frames are.”

What have you done kind of virtually to help people select the right frames?

Deanna Dawson: Yeah, so we just launched this year, something called Virtual Try-On. What you do is you take a little movie of yourself turning each way so that you can see the sides of your face. And then you upload that and then you can see yourself with all of our glasses, hundreds of frames at once and exactly how it would look on you.

How the arms look on you, how it fits on your face; and that’s something you can’t even do if you go into a brick and mortar retailer. You’ll try on a pair, you’ll ask somebody how it looks, you’ll look in the mirror. Then you try on another pair and then you go back. This is a comparison of you in all the glasses you want to buy immediately.

So you can see, “Yeah, I’ll take this one.” And you probably won’t just pick one, you’ll probably say, “I want these three,” and check out with three pairs of glasses.

Sherri Langburt: Right, right. Do you have a pair of glasses that you love?

Do you have a signature pair that you’re always going back to?

Deanna Dawson: I do. It’s the rose gold glasses and I would say there are at least six people in our office wearing these rose gold glasses. They’re just beautiful.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah, I think I just bought a big pair of black frames and I love them.

Deanna Dawson: Oh good.

I stumbled upon your Festival and Pride collections. So they’re very colorful. They have an amazing statement. Can you tell us about those designs and collections? How did they come about? Who styled them?

Deanna Dawson: Yeah, so Festival is a trend collection for us. We put out the latest trends for Festival for fall, for spring. Our merchandisers do a lot of research into what’s trending, what people are wearing on the street, especially with Festival. It’s not just what designers are putting out, it’s what millennials are gravitating towards. So that’s how we come up with those styles.

For Pride, we put out three pairs of rainbow glasses and we had no idea how they were going to do. We donated 30% of the proceeds to It Gets Better, an organization we really believe in. It was our best selling pair of glasses last year. The thing about Pride glasses is they’re so unique-looking that not only did they sell well, but they’re so photographic.

You want to take a photo of yourself in these glasses. And so it’s always good to have products that people really want other people to see them in. It’s like when Starbucks comes out with that Unicorn Frappuccino, everybody wants to take a picture holding that. And so it’s great when you get that product that everybody wants to take a photograph of.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah. I think that might be on my list of next to order, but also there was floral ones that I loved as well.

Deanna Dawson: Yeah.

Sherri Langburt: So I guess, I know kind of your history. You worked at Snapfish. For those of you don’t know, Snapfish is a photo editing kind of collaborative tool to create story books.

How did your experience at Snapfish help you to get to this position at Zenni where you head up social and content marketing?

Deanna Dawson: Yeah, I was at Snapfish for so long. I was there prior to social media and I headed up our intro into social media, so obviously a lot changed. Snapfish was interesting. I saw the building of the opportunity, and then when we were growing really great year over year. And then I saw the decline of the industry, so I was there through the whole thing.

I think one of the things, I can see a lot of mistakes made, but there was a time when people were really buying on discount. And when you do that, when you train customers to buy on discount, it’s really hard. You have to keep that up.

With Zenni, we’re an everyday low price. And I think consumers right now are more interested in quality products at a really fair price versus deep discounting. The sustainability is much greater when you can do something like that, so I’m really excited to be part of a growing business now.

Sherri Langburt: No, it’s definitely a good place to be. You’ve been there for how many years?

Deanna Dawson: Two years now.

What were some of the first things that you did to move the needle for the brand?

Deanna Dawson: Yeah. When I got here, one of the things I realized about their social was they were using the same content in all their channels, so they would use the same on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. I think they were doing Snapchat at the time, and really very different content as well on different channels.

If at the end of the year, I look at our very best performing content, you will see they differ greatly depending on whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. So right away, I diversified the content. But the other thing I did was, we had amazing user-generated content coming in and we weren’t taking advantage of that.

So the very first thing I wanted to do was to have our users become our amplifiers, and so I started a group of brand advocates that has continued to grow.

And what’s the Hashtag? Just #GotMyZennis?

Deanna Dawson: Yeah, and we also have a #Zennista tag for those who are very close to the brand.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. How would you say, I mean just in terms of like Instagram differing from Twitter, differing from Facebook. I mean, obviously Instagram is very visual.

Do you still see Twitter as a good channel?

Deanna Dawson: The only reason I see Twitter as a good channel is that we have sports relationships. So we are the jersey sponsor of the Bulls and we just signed the 49ers as the official eyewear. Our sports content does not do well on Instagram or Facebook. It does amazingly well on Twitter. So the fact that we have such a diverse marketing plan, that’s why Twitter works for us.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah. No, I could see that because Twitter is really good with real time. So if it’s sports and it’s real time, then that’s where it’s going to flourish.

Deanna Dawson: Exactly. Instagram is not a great avenue for our sports commentary.

Are there any specific criteria you look at, obviously not when you’re talking about athletes?

When you’re looking at micro, macro, nano influencers, what do you look at in terms of selecting and identifying influencers?

Deanna Dawson: Well first, they have to really wear glasses, so that narrows down my field. I want authentic influencers who understand the pain of glasses or the joy of glasses’ fashion. And then recently, I’ve moved, I’ve been doing influencers for probably six years now.

I gravitate towards influencers who have something else of interest, either they are writers or musicians or gardeners, they make great food. So I’ve become more interested in influencers who have a larger following due to a skill or a specialty.

Sherri Langburt: Right, like that subject matter expert.

Deanna Dawson: Yeah.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah. I mean I would say computer wearers, I feel like there’s much of a need for special glasses when you’re staring at a computer all day.

Deanna Dawson: There is, and that’s why we have blocks, which is a blue light blocking lens that prevents the blue light from harming your eyes. It helps you with sleep, it helps with dry eyes and it’s also great for gamers. So we have started in entire esports marketing campaign for gamers who are in front of those screens for hours and hours at a time.

Sherri Langburt: That’s so interesting. Yeah. We just had an interview with Turtle Beach so we had a whole gaming conversation with them. I’m sure you’re going to be looking at that Twitch channel.

Deanna Dawson: Oh yes. We are all over Twitch now. New to me, but very fascinating.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah, it’s very interesting. Happy to share any insights that we recently learned if you need them.

Deanna Dawson: I will.

Sherri Langburt: I guess my last question that I always ask is …

Name an influencer in any vertical that you love to love and hate to admit you follow?

Deanna Dawson: Oh, I’m trying to think if I hate that I admit that I follow them, but I’m a big fan of Brad Goreski and we just got to work with him recently. He’s a stylist to the stars. I think everything he does is hysterical, and so I’m a big fan and follower. And I got to meet him about two weeks ago and he was just as lovely in person as he is on Instagram.

Sherri Langburt: And what did he do? Was it a collaboration or… ?

Deanna Dawson: It was we. We are announcing we got a star to represent Zenni and he styled her for us.

Sherri Langburt: Oh, that’s amazing. Well, thank you, Deanna. Is there anything else you want to add to this talk or anything else you want to share with our community?

Deanna Dawson: Well, I just want to say that BabbleBoxx, one of the things I love about BabbleBoxx is I like learnings. And one of the things I learned was I did not think we would do so well with men’s gift guides. And without BabbleBoxx I would not have known that. That content did amazingly well for us. Women have a high need to figure out what to buy men, and I’m so glad we discovered that.

Sherri Langburt: Oh, I’m so happy to hear that. Hopefully we can make some other discoveries for you soon.

Deanna Dawson: Yes.

Sherri Langburt: Thank you so much and we’ll speak to you soon, Deanna.

Deanna Dawson: Thank you. Bye.

Sherri Langburt: Bye.