How sewing machine makers are building a US$44bn industry with tribes.

I'd like to talk to you about sewing machines and the sewing together of a tribe. As you might have heard, I have been tasked by my daughter, Amity, to get a sewing machine for school. I did what I think most consumers will do, and the reason I share this is because from a PR point of view, if we're running our own business, it's always important to think about the overall customer journey as they look to solve a need, find solutions, shortlist the solutions, and then zero in on actually making a purchase. But after that, what do we do to help that purchase settle in, to be used and be a valued part of the purchasing process? I had a look online and, of course, the first thing that we all do, regardless of business-to-business or consumer is we go to a search engine. I use Ecosia, which plants trees every time I search, and I also use Bing or Google, or in China, Baidu. The first place is, from a PR point of view, what content do we have online in order for the search engines to be indexing us? There's the large number of banner ads for different sewing machine companies, plus websites showing sewing machine content that are ad-based. There are a number of specialist titles in this particular niche. There is sewmag.co.uk which has its own app. There is The Spruce, Best Reviews, Sewing Machine Expert, to name a few, so there are about a dozen websites professing to give me the "Top 10," "Top five," "Best of 2020" reviews. I read through a few of those, and then I looked also at some the learning sites like Udemy which have their own courses on everything from macram to sewing to home stitching, and so on. I had a quick look there to see which sewing machines are being used by the teachers and which ones are being recommended. Some companies have their own websites as well, such as Singer and Janome. There are about 15 main sewing machine brands, largely from Asia, and these are mainly coming from Japan, South Korea, and China. I then went to YouTube to see what help I can get from the world's largest search engine for video. I came across a number of videos made by what one might call the whole "influencer community," because the influencer is not posting on the search engine for long-form text that's being done by the review websites that are living off content with advertising, but the influencers are in abundance when it comes to going to YouTube. I had a look, and I found that there are a number of influencers, quite unlikely to be honest. I found videos, for example, on Abby's Den. On Abby's Den, there's a video filmed two years ago called Inserting the Front Loading Bobbin Case. It was pretty exciting. 324,000 people have viewed that short video made in someone's kitchen, by all accounts. There's also a young person called Black Diamond, and she appears to be an Australian-Asian teen. Her video, Learn How to Sew, has 2.6 million views on a 26-minute video. No microphone, no lighting, no nothing, but she has 64,000 subscribers to a sewing tutorial. Interestingly enough, as I looked at her video, I was served up a Gillette advert in advance. I'm not entirely sure whether that's tied to me rather than the average person looking for sewing machines, but nonetheless, I'm on a customer journey trying to find the perfect sewing machine. I've gone and looked at the review sites and shortlisted some, and then I have gone to YouTube and watched to see which ones are the most favorited by these influencers. I can then start to see as well the machines in action. Some machines, people complain slightly of jamming; some complained of the lighting fixtures and so on, so I'm already getting a really good idea of how my machine is going to fit into my life and work for my daughters and my wife. Having them shortlisted, I then made a list of two or three brands, including the John Lewis brand, and then I was able to then go and find the next level of detail, which was the online brochures. Different websites and different products did better and worse, and some of them, of course, then precluded me being interested because the literature wasn't in English, for example, it wasn't easy to find, it wasn't well-annotated, the infographics were poor. I liked the one from the company John Lewis Partnership, because it was all very clear and the warranty details were stated out clearly. On my customer journey, I was getting reassured that I've seen this product actually being used at length by a number of different influencers, and I've also been able to download the brochures to see the more technical detail, things like the forward and reverse, the number of stitches (this one has 14, by the way), the ability to do pockets, and so on. In other words, my checklist of comparison items has been defined as I've gone through this 1.5-hour process. I've ended up looking and liking this Janome product, but it's white-labelled by John Lewis and Partners. That's important to me because, actually, the John Lewis website and app is very clean and simple to use, it doesn't offer me multiple options when I've made a decision, and takes me to the shopping basket in a very nice way. I couldn't help but having a peek at the founders of the Janome product. If you haven't heard, Janome is a brand leader. They've sold 2 million sewing machines in the UK and over 60 million sewing machines worldwide. So for those of us that just thought sewing was sort of an idle hobby, Sean Seki, the president of Janome in North America, says that they have a mission to produce machines which inspire creativity and innovation, yet are made to provide you with reliability and durability that you deserve. He goes on to saying, "The better your tools, the more inventive, artistic, and pleasurable your selling experience will be." They've really understood the importance of the sewing machine not as a machine but as part of our lifestyle, our home lifestyle. This is, I think, really, really important for all of us, who are managing public relations and selling services and products. It's not about the product. It's about how it is integrating into the life and the experience. Funnily enough, the next choice that I had to make was which ones are available, because during COVID, sewing machines have taken off in terms of taken off out of the stores, not with jets or anything on them. The sewing machine market is projected to grow by $17 billion. It has projected growth of around $3.9 billion. This seems pretty amazing but by 2025, it is due to be a 44 billion-dollar industry. This is sewing machines, and there are some 15 brands that dominate the business. It goes to show that COVID has actually been good for some businesses, and there are some businesses that may be a little bit unexpected. And until I had a chat with Mr. Pickles this week about buying a sewing machine, I would never have thought of sewing machines as being a business opportunity for me or for anybody else that I'm surrounded by. Going back to this idea of scale and this purchasing process that someone like me would go through, in this case, for a consumer product, it starts with search, it moves off to reviews, then it goes into video for influencers, then it comes to shortlisting the merchant, and then it comes to the product specification. What we're finding in venues and platforms like YouTube are people like Black Diamond, as she calls herself, are influencers. They are young people who are taking the product or being given the product, using it, and experiencing absolutely massive amplification on their content, much more than the brand themselves could do. Some of the brand videos, in fact, are getting 5,000-10,000 views, and it'll be down to credibility, because, ironically enough, the amateurish approach and the lack of high-production values or sophisticated scenery means that it's much more in keeping with the lifestyle and the environment of the people that are going to be buying it and using it. There's an authenticity in the influencer work that makes it well more powerful than a well-polished advert, and that's why when we're thinking about promoting our products or our services, engaging those people who are influencers who are actually from the community that we're going to be selling to, is really a key part of the public relations activity. What we're really talking about on another level is how companies like Janome are not selling products. They are building tribes. This is the Seth Godin concept of building tribes. What I've realized is that there's a whole tribe, men and women, involved in sewing of various kinds of various levels, plus the industrial selling, of course, which makes up part of that $40 billion. It's this whole idea of, "What tribe are we part of, and can we either lead a tribe or can we be part of an existing tribe?" One way of joining into a tribal group is, for example, sponsorship or product placement, in the same way that KitchenAid has done on the Great British Bake Off, or Amazon. Channel 4 purchased the rights to the Great British Bake Off, which is really an institution now. My daughters, my wife, and I love to watch that as well. It's on its ninth series and has now got an estimated 5 million worth of sponsorship from Amazon. Amazon wanted to showcase their Echo speaker and the capabilities of their Alexa voice service. Prior to Amazon, Dr. Oetker and Tate and Lyle had been sponsors, and interestingly enough, the two of them probably paid about 4 million a pair in Sterling to sponsor this, so what did they get from it? Well, of course, they're in this amazing series that reached out to young bakers in the 18-25 category. The Great British Bake Off became a top-rated show. The people of Tate of Lyle said that the early results from their sponsorship by promoting their golden syrup was that they were having sales year-on-year against the same period of twofold in web traffic by people looking for recipes and tips. In other words, the sponsorship of the Great British Bake Off by Tate and Lyle doubled the interest in their products for baking. Such is the power of product placement and sponsorship. When we're looking at building our opportunities for marketing for public relations, we talk about press relations, but in our SPEAK|pr program where we talk about Storification, Personalization, Engagement, Amplification, and Knowing, under the Engagement, we talk about creating great content. But sometimes, as we've seen with the sewing, the tribe will make the content for us, the tribe motivated by a love for the product, a love and a passion for the tribe, but also from a commercial point of view by signing to get sponsorship. I mentioned, for example, The Black Diamond was preceded by two adverts and one in the middle. So there's a reward for the tribe to be helping to amplify the content that they're making, and there's also opportunities to sponsor by product placement or by cash or both. It doesn't have to be huge, like the Great British Bake Off, but it could be a local event, it can be a school event, it could be a running team locally, or a sports team, or anything really that helps to get the brand into the community and to be seen to be part of the tribe. Public relations is about content and about influencers, but also, public relations is creating the information throughout the passage of the consumer as they pass down the path from wanting to find out, becoming knowledgeable, becoming interested, and then taking decisions to make a purchase. When we build our digital footprint and our digital path out in the ethernet, but also on our own and on these other platforms, we need a story and think about the story of the people buying our product and help them along the way to create a narrative which is consistent and compelling. In our case, we bought the sewing machine the JL 110. We plugged it in and then, of course, we went back and watched those YouTube videos again to figure out how to load that front bobbin. So if you need any help with loading front bobbins onto your sewing machine, you can either check out YouTube or you can drop me a line. The point is that the internet and public relations work together to help us as entrepreneurs to guide, to lead, and to fulfil the information requirements that our consumers, our partners, or our staff have along their entire journey.