Manly Bands is a direct-to-consumer vendor of males’s rings. The corporate launched in 2016 after John Ruggiero, the co-founder along with his spouse Michelle, couldn’t discover a appropriate wedding ceremony band.
That is Ruggiero’s second look on the podcast. In April 2021, we mentioned the corporate’s founding, distinctive ring supplies, and extra. Since then, Manly Bands has acquired its producer. The making of rings from, say, Jack Daniel’s whiskey barrels or Fender guitar strings creates compelling video, says Ruggiero, good for storytelling on social media and elsewhere.
Your entire audio of our dialog is embedded beneath. The transcript is edited for size and readability.
Eric Bandholz: Give us a rundown of what you do.
John Ruggiero: My spouse, Michelle, and I began an internet ring firm referred to as Manly Bands in 2016 to resolve an issue of wedding ceremony bands for males. We have been simply married. I’ve massive fingers and couldn’t discover a ring that I preferred that was not overpriced. My choices have been ordering from a catalog or having one thing custom-made.
I ended up shopping for from a web site. The ring arrived in a flat mailer, with no field or customer support. It was a horrible expertise by at present’s ecommerce requirements.
We bought married, moved to Florida, and wanted a job. We informed ourselves, “We’re each entrepreneurs. Why don’t we create our personal enterprise?” We mentioned the varieties of issues we’d seen and methods to remedy them. My ring expertise got here up, and we opted to attempt to remedy it for different guys.
Our aim once we began was to pay hire. We thought making a pair thousand {dollars} a month from this is able to be unbelievable. We thought of it a life-style enterprise, not high-growth. It was simply Michelle and me in our storage designing rings and sending them out to clients. We had hit on one thing. Our message resonated with prospects.
Michelle and I make a superb crew. I provide you with concepts, and he or she’s the implementer. Loads of our success goes to her artistic thoughts. She names the rings and develops personas. She connects the rings to clients. Describing a hoop solely as “eight-millimeter black” didn’t lower it.
We designed rings from distinctive supplies, equivalent to Jack Daniel’s barrels or particular metals. The enterprise took off. Since then, we’ve grown dramatically. We now have over 55 folks within the Manly Bands household. About half of these are ring artisans who work in our not too long ago acquired manufacturing store in Utah.
Bandholz: When did you purchase a producer?
Ruggiero: A few yr and a half in the past. We had been their buyer for years, so we knew them effectively. Most of their enterprise was wholesale, which didn’t curiosity us — going to mom-and-pop jewelers. They retained their wholesale clients and model identify. We acquired a few of their belongings and introduced over workers.
Bringing on a producing crew has been top-of-the-line issues we’ve finished. It’s been unbelievable to go on the market and watch them make rings out of Fender guitar strings or steel from an M1 Abrams tank.
Bandholz: How does in-house manufacturing impression advertising and marketing?
Ruggiero: It’s been enormous. Taking a digicam to the opposite aspect of the workplace and filming the crew utilizing lathes to chop the steel rods or whiskey barrels into rings makes for unbelievable video. We’ve our digicam crew on the market on a regular basis. We use that footage on our social media and in our adverts and newsletters. We attempt to promote that as a result of most corporations within the males’s ring area don’t manufacture. They drop ship or order from abroad after which ship it out. However we wish it to final a lifetime and be one thing folks can take pleasure in.
We’ve had lots of success with our navy heritage assortment, the place we supply distinctive navy supplies. We’ve the M1 Garand rifle inventory, the wooden half, from World Warfare I. Watching our crew put that within the lathe and lower a chunk out for a hoop is fascinating.
Our advertising and marketing for these rings talks in regards to the historical past, the troopers, the place the weapon was used, and issues like that. My spouse and I studied filmmaking in faculty. We use our expertise to educate and inform a narrative. As an example, I not too long ago obtained an electronic mail from a buyer who shared that his grandfather used to drive M1 tanks. The client gifted a type of rings to his grandfather, and so they had fairly an emotional change. It’s good to assist clients join with their previous and create one thing significant.
Bandholz: The place can folks purchase a hoop from you?
Ruggiero: ManlyBands.com. We’ve footage on Instagram, too. I’m on Twitter and LinkedIn.
