Connect with Carolyn Strauss
Website: www.CarolynStrauss.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolynstrauss/
Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. My guest today is Carolyn Strauss. Carolyn is an expert on leadership sales persuasion and execution. She works with companies who want to increase their dollars per minute. Carolyn grew up in the manufacturing business; her father owned and operated the oldest leather tannery in North America.
Carolyn spent 18 years on-air at the Home Shopping Network designing and selling her own clothing line - the Carolyn Strauss collection. While she was there, she created a dollars-per-minute formula that led to her consistently selling over $500 per minute and ultimately exceed over $1 million of product in one day. Carolyn, welcome to the show.
Carolyn Strauss: Thanks, Lisa, it's so good to be here with you.
Lisa Ryan: Carolyn, share with us a bit of your journey and what led you to do what you're doing.
Carolyn Strauss: Well, the speaking and consulting that I do came out of decades of learning how to work with companies in my own business. I love this podcast. I love your show. I've listened to it many times, and I love it because I think manufacturing is the basis of everything on the planet. If it's not made, we can't buy it.
I love that all of your listeners are creating something. I love working with companies that produce things. Like you said in my intro, I had my own clothing company for 18 years on the home shopping network. We had one client. We had one source of selling our goods. I wouldn't recommend that, but if it. That's how you structure your business; that's how we structured our business.
We manufactured in the United States when I started my company in 1997. We manufactured in the US until 2007. What happened in 2007 is we got an order for today's special. For anybody who hasn't watched the home shopping network, I highly recommend you guys watch that and have your salespeople watch it all the time. Nobody does sales and persuasion better than HSN. In 2007, we got an order for it today's special. We had 36,000 sets: three-piece sets. It was a tank, a jacket, and pants—36,000 of them - seven sizes: extra small through three x and petite average and tall.
Lisa Ryan: Wow, that's a lot of SKUs.
Carolyn Strauss: It was like 144 SKUs. We did the math because of the different and three or four different colors. It was like 144 skews for one item. Not only that, but we had four collections around it that had pants and jackets and prints and all of this. At that moment, no factory in the US could handle an order that big.
We got the order in February. We weren't going to be selling it until November. But there still were no manufacturing capabilities in the US to handle it. That broke my heart. It broke my heart because my dad lost his business. We closed the tannery in 1987 because of overseas competition. The chemicals that he needed in the leather industry and because of the pay structure, he had to close. My dad ran a Union shop, and he lost his business in 1987 and had to go overseas.
So when I had to take my clothing manufacturing to China, my heart broke.
I stepped away from my company for six months at the beginning of 2008 because I was heartbroken. I was like, if I can't manufacture in the US, I'm not doing this anymore. It's not fair. It's not right. And then 2008 happened, the recession occurred, my retirement vanished. That's a whole separate story that I can tell on another disaster podcast on financial disasters.
So I went back to it, and the Chinese manufacturing did an incredible job for us; I hate to say it, but they did. So we did a combination of us...
