Digital Culture · A Note · For Alex & Abby
Growing Just Hanging
The Order of Operations

The bigger
picture.

Before we start spending and scaling, I want to walk you through how we’re thinking about growth for Just Hanging — and why the order of operations matters more than the spend.

At this stage, growth isn’t about picking one magic channel and dumping money into it. It’s about understanding which levers we can access, which ones are worth paying for, and which ones we can unlock creatively.

For a brand like Just Hanging, there are really three engines available to us. Each one plays a different role — and the mistake most brands make is leading with the most expensive one before they have the foundation to make it efficient.

Engine 01
Paid ads
Engine 02
Email, SMS + direct mail
Engine 03
Organic content

A quick note on direct mail. It lives inside the owned-audience engine alongside email and SMS, but it’s worth calling out. Postcards and printed sample cards get 90%+ open rates — the signal-to-noise ratio destroys email. And Just Hanging is exactly the kind of physical, tactile, made-to-order brand that wins disproportionately on paper. We’re not leading with it. But for the warmest segment, a single beautifully-designed postcard later this year will likely outperform a month of digital sends.

Paid ads absolutely work. They’ll matter. But ads are also the most expensive way to learn. Our strategy is to avoid paying full price for learning wherever possible.
01The Asset

We didn’t have to buy this audience. We already have one.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking for ways to get Just Hanging in front of the right buyers without immediately spending thousands on cold traffic. Normally, a brand at this stage has to buy that attention through Meta, Google, TikTok, or rented media.

In this case, we uncovered something much better: access to a 45K-contact customer list from a retail brand in a closely related category that’s winding down operations. That’s not a small thing.

It’s not random traffic. It’s people who have already shown buying behavior in a category that overlaps strongly with Just Hanging — home projects, organization, utility, tools, accessories, space improvement.

45,371
Total contacts. The full inherited audience.
31,147
Opted in for email. Explicit consent in the category.
15,684
Proven category buyers. Already paid for something in this kind of category.
4,577
Repeat category buyers. Bought more than once in this category before — the warmest segment in the list.

For most brands, getting in front of 4,500+ people who’ve already purchased more than once in this category would require a serious media spend. We’re able to start there without paying Meta or Google for every click.

That gives us a real head start. But we have to treat it carefully.

02The Warmup

We can’t blast 4,577 in one day either. Here’s the staged plan.

Just Hanging is sending from a new domain to a list that doesn’t recognize the brand yet. Even the warmest segment has to be introduced carefully — not because the audience is hostile, but because Gmail and Yahoo are watching every signal.

If we send all 4,577 in a single Tuesday blast, the volume itself is a red flag for spam filters on a new domain. Industry guidance for warming a fresh sender is unambiguous: start small, watch the signals, double only if the previous day held clean.

So Week 1 isn’t one send. It’s five.

400 · 800 · 1,200 · 1,500 · 700. Five days, conservative ramp, full segment completed by Monday.

Thursday begins with a careful test: 400 emails to the most engaged sliver of the 4,577. If complaint rate stays under 0.1% and inbox placement looks healthy, Friday we increase to 800. Saturday 1,200. Sunday 1,500. Monday a final 700-email taper completes the segment.

Each day’s send is conditional on the previous day’s signals — including weekends. We monitor deliverability and engagement seven days a week through this warmup phase, ready to pause and adjust if anything looks off. If complaints spike, opens drop, or inbox placement dips, the next day’s send waits until we understand why.

The cost of being too cautious is zero. The cost of being too aggressive is a year of degraded deliverability. We choose caution every time.

03The Content Engine

The real value of creators isn’t their audiences. It’s speed of content production.

Our creative will rely mostly on video — roughly 70% video, 30% photo — and we’ll be building across the two platforms where Just Hanging buyers actually live: Instagram and TikTok. Instagram is the storytelling layer — Reels, in-feed posts, and Stories that build trust over time with the home-and-organization audience already engaging with the brand. TikTok is the reach layer — short, scroll-stopping moments that surface Just Hanging to buyers who don’t know us yet. Different jobs, same creative library underneath.

Creators and influencers are part of that, but not primarily because of their audiences. Most creator reach is smaller than people assume. The real value is that creators can generate native, in-the-wild content much faster than we can internally. That gives us a creative library we can use across paid ads, landing pages, email, retargeting, and social.

We’re treating creators less like billboards and more like a content engine.
04The Long Game

Pegboards are the starting line. Not the destination.

The real opportunity is to become the name people associate with intentional spaces — organization, creative rooms, and the walls that quietly say something about who lives there.

That kind of positioning doesn’t happen overnight. It gets built slowly, through repetition, trust, consistency, and story.

I’m pretty convinced the future of the company expands well beyond pegboards and accessories. The brand has room to grow into broader organization and storage systems, lifestyle setups, workspace products, and categories we haven’t even touched yet. But that expansion only works if the brand becomes trusted first.

We’re not just trying to generate sales. We’re building mental ownership in the category.
05The Moat

The strongest advantage Just Hanging has isn’t the products. It’s the two of you.

A real Mom-and-Dad workshop in Pennsylvania. Designing, printing, packing, solving problems, building something together as a family. That’s the part no competitor can copy.

People are tired of polished fake brands. They want to buy from real people again. I want to lean into that more heavily across the website, emails, TikTok, and future content. Nothing overproduced — just honest moments:

01

Workshop footage.

3D printers running, designs being refined, the two of you talking through a problem. Raw and real.
02

Design process.

The before-and-after of a new accessory — sketch, prototype, iteration, final.
03

Packing orders.

The handwritten note, the careful tape, the thank-you card. What happens between “order placed” and “order delivered.”
04

Setup transformations.

Before and after — the moment a wall goes from chaos to order.
05

Family life around the business.

The kids in the workshop. The overlap between running a small business and raising a family. The heart of the brand.
To do this well, we’d need your okay to feature you and Abby more directly in the content moving forward.

We’ll set up a simple, repeatable system — someone comes to your place every two weeks to capture short videos, behind-the-scenes moments, and the story of the workshop. For the first month, a local creator (TBD); once the rhythm is set, we’ll train someone closer to Pennsylvania so the cadence is sustainable. The lift on your side stays minimal. No prep, no scripting, no directing. You keep working — we capture the process as it happens.

06What’s Next

From this week forward.

Thu May 15
Warmup begins — 400 emails to the most engaged sliver.
The test send. Watch deliverability, opens, complaints.
Fri–Mon
Conservative ramp — 800 · 1,200 · 1,500 · 700.
Each day conditional on the previous day’s signals. Full repeat-category-buyer tier completed Monday.
Tue May 20
First weekly report — 5 sends compared, deliverability verdict.
Brief and useful. No giant decks. Weekly cadence going forward.
This month
Instagram and TikTok production ramp up.
Parallel
Creator outreach continues in parallel.
The opportunity

Much bigger than accessories.

The reason this brand works is because people aren’t just organizing walls — they’re expressing identity through their spaces. That’s the part we’re building around now.
Together, we can build something that changes how people think about organization — and the walls they live with.