What are some resources for learning about lifestyle-brand ecommerce businesses? [more answers welcome!]

It's all starts from the positioning. Think of your audience as a friend of yours that you've known for years. What interests someone with his/her personality traits.

The more you think of your target audience as one individual, the easier it is to identify with them.

A valuable resource for this is Shopify's blog. They have a ton of great content on there:

• How to Choose an Ecommerce Business Model
• How To Start An Online T-Shirt Business: The Ultimate Guide
• Ecommerce Trends
• Ecommerce Inspiration

Some more:

• Consumer Behavior: Using Psychology to Convert More Customers (HelpScout)
• Step-by-Step Guide on How To Find A Profitable Product To Sell (Startupbros)

In terms of the business model, there is big uptrend in curated monthly subscription boxes. People have created little niches for everything from socks to doggy treats. Dollar Shave Club is unarguable the most profitable in this segment. Bark Box is another great example. Noah Kagan started SumoJerky based on this model and was able to get $1000/month in subscriptions from just a Paypal landing page before even starting anything.

The biggest key to success will always be how you position the marketing message. Dollar Shave Club did it with their humor. ThinkGeek is all about wacky gizmos for nerds. Rather than needs, you're looking for what will make your target audience tick.

A little off-topic but related to this:

A good way to get insight first-hand on what products would interest your audience is dropshipping. It'll require little to no capital to understand your target audience and see which products make them tick. That's how I started in nootropics, dropshipping others' branded products on Amazon marketplace. Read Shopify's Ultimate Guide to Dropshipping. There's a chapter in there on how to pick which products to sell.

Sometimes you'll discover that the products you decided on end up attracting a completely different audience than you had planned to target! With nootropics I was targeting entrepreneurs but the bulk of the sales end up coming from college students instead.

After seeing any success from dropshipping, your options will basically come down to:

1. Buy from wholesalers (and use Fulfillment by Amazon for logistics -- it's a huge distraction to do this yourself).
2. White-label products manufactured by someone else (this is the sweet spot between dropshipping and manufacturing it yourself).
3. Manufacture the product yourself (I wouldn't recommend this unless it's something that doesn't require much capital like T-Shirts).

With both (2) and (3) you're able to tap into larger distribution channels to push your product (apart from selling directly to the consumer yourself).

I agree with Nishank on the Shopify blog. They put out a lot of great content on building lifestyle businesses. Here's one on starting a brand solo from the ground up: How To Build a $120K per Month Ecommerce Brand in Less Than A Year

Others that I check regularly:

• eCommerce sub-Reddit
  
• The Tropical MBA Podcast (formerly Lifestyle Business Podcast)
• Forever Jobless
• GrabApple
• SmartMarketer

Read Justin Winter's article here: 7 Shortcuts for Building an E-Commerce Startup to $1M in 12 Months

Guy Kawasaki's The Macintosh Way is also a great primer into how to build a brand that your customers evangelize.

Eric Bandholz built a brand around the lifestyle of his audience: BeardBrand. Read his case study here: How One Man Listened to His Community, Then Built a $40k Per Month Ecommerce Business in Under a Year. He later appeared on SharkTank and that skyrocketed his sales as he reached more of his audience.

From the BeardBrand case study:

I had actually launched Beardbrand as a blog / community in February 2012. I talked a bit about beard care, the lifestyle, and always had a vision to build the business.

Beardbrand was formed after I attended the 2012 West Coast Beard & Mustache Championships in Portland, OR. I had an absolute blast and I realized there is a community of like minded individuals that wasn't being serviced.

Not one to wait; I created Beardbrand. I didn't do any formal market research other than becoming immersed in the community. We are entirely bootstrapped, and our startup costs have been extremely low. We are growing organically and because the risk for loss is so low the need for market research isn't needed. I suppose that our entire business is the market research.

Because I have been blogging about beard care products for a while I have had access to products on the market. I contacted a manufacturer of beard oil and mustache wax and asked if he was interested in wholesaling his product and he was. We made a very small initial investment and grew from there.