Executive Voice
How To Succeed As An Entrepreneur – with Justice Jubilee
In the vast landscape of entrepreneurship, it is extremely difficult to find success and create longevity in this field. Justice Jubilee tackled this challenge head on within the e-commerce space. Born in 1999, 21-year old entrepreneur Justice Jubilee is the owner and founder of a successful basketball-themed clothing brand called Bucket Culture, which has revolutionized the e-commerce apparel business using digital marketing. From New Jersey, Justice Jubilee founded the Bucket Culture brand back in August 2017, the summer before entering his first year in college. He was able to grow his business from scratch to over 7-figures in sales in just under 3 years, all while simultaneously studying Computer Engineering at his University. Justice now continues to grow and scale his businesses, while also mentoring and building connections with other fellow entrepreneurs.
What do you do now?
I currently run an ecommerce clothing brand called Bucket Culture. At Bucket Culture we sell basketball themed apparel. Our apparel is uniquely designed to appeal to all basketball fans, players, and enthusiasts of all ages. I have grown this brand to over 7-figures in revenue in just under 3 years since official launch. I am continuing to grow the brand by connecting with more up and coming basketball influencers and personalities, while also continuing to broaden our design portfolio and overall customer experience. Additionally, I have a teaching program designed to help other entrepreneurs start, and more importantly, scale their businesses efficiently.
How did you start your career?
I started my business the summer before my freshman year at Rutgers University. Combining my interest in basketball and entrepreneurship I started Bucket Culture to make clothing designs specifically for the basketball community. I had started off with one design and started to grow organically through Instagram. After getting a lot of positive feedback on the first design, I duplicated the process with different designs. From there I began to jump into paid advertising and continue to learn and grow within the ecommerce industry.
What marketing techniques did you leverage to scale your brand?
The main marketing strategies I used were Facebook & Instagram paid advertising. I believe paid and organic social media marketing is the most effective way to start and scale any new e-commerce brand from scratch. This consists of the differrent sponsored posts you see throughout your Facebook and Instagram feed. The amount of reach and exposure you can get from these platforms at their general cost per impression mark is very effective at a low barrier of entry compared to other aged methods. Addition to these platforms is also Google, Snapchat & Tiktok which are also effective marketing platforms if you have the right systems in place.
What main factors within your business helped you grow the most?
The main thing was to improve and optimize the different systems within my business. Constantly improving and streamlining the systems within your business not only improves your businesses productivity, but also directly improves the overall customer experience; which is vital for growing any direct to consumer business. In my opinion, improving the customer experience should always be the short and long term focus of a brand. Right now I have a lean team; I have hired two VA’s to handle all our customer service emails, an inhouse graphic designer and one other virtual assistant to run our email marketing campaigns. Other than those areas that I have outsourced, I handle all the other front end, social and marketing. As for shipping and fulfillment, this is also an important system that needs to be streamlined enough to progress the customer experience. For our brand, within the last year, we have switched our fulfillment to a new warehouse in Ohio that provided faster shipping & processing, larger inventory space and better store integration, in comparison to our previous fulfilment system. Obviously from this, our customers get to receive their products faster, and it is easier to track and manage inventory. These systems are important because it helps automate my business. Like any successful business owner this frees up my time and allows me to focus more on scaling the business when I don’t have to manage customer service, fulfillment or any other exterior tasks. In my opinion, I think it is good to “wear all the hats” in the business at first, but as your business grows it is important to create systems that are cost efficient and positively improve your business and productivity.
