The Draw Shop Built a Business off of Bringing Marketing to Life

The Draw Shop has been in business for about six years. They create marketing videos that are hand drawn, with all-original artwork matched to the pace of a voice over to create highly engaging custom white board videos.

“They blend professional quality audio with real-time illustrations that come to life before the viewer’s eyes, whiteboard animation makes even dry material interesting.”

      – Kate Harrison, Forbes

I had the chance to speak with Lorey Choe, Strategic Growth Partner from The Draw Shop and ask her about their business, what makes their business work and how they’ve grown. Lorey is responsible for sales and all client onboarding, she has 20+ years experience building client relationships and long-term retention, she has been with the company since 2013.

Q: What’s your favorite thing about what you do?

Lorey: I love going to the events and talking to people face-to-face and determining what their needs are and I love that I get to carry that over through the full onboarding process. But, probably my favorite part is getting to know the clients and what they might need and then keeping in touch with them over the years and developing that relationship.

Q: How did The Draw Shop get its start?

Lorey: We have two co-founders, Summer Felix and Erik Kerr who met through a mutual client. After running into each other at multiple conferences, Erik presented Summer with an idea. He saw a video of Dan Pink’s Ted Talk turned into a whiteboard animation video. Summer thought it was a brilliant idea for marketing and explainer videos and in fact sold three of them before they even started the first one. After figuring out how they could produce a video like this, they delivered them to the clients and the results were astounding. Soon everyone wanted one and thus the entity was born. Since then, they have been growing the business. Today some of our clients include Google, The Department of Justice, the United Nations, Netflix, Twitter, Bloomberg, Harvard University and more.

Q: What makes your business unique?

Lorey: We focus on an excellent customer experience. We want the process to be simple and smooth. We keep our point very affordable because we want this to be a tool that everyone can use, from the start-up guy to the big corporations.

Also, our history is one that comes from a place of marketing. Erik has over 20 years of experience in Sales and Marketing and Summer was a ghost writer, copywriter and marketer for over 15 years.. Add that coupling to the unique skills on our team from copywriters to artists, and our clients end up with a completely customized video that yields results.

Q: What’s one thing you wish people knew about your business?

Lorey: I wish people understood the science behind the videos and why they work. I think understanding that is a huge help because they’re going to see their video convert sales or even convert in the form of a better understanding of their product. It’s really an investment in their business because it will make their message impossible to misunderstand.

* Check out examples of their work.

Q: How do you get new customers?

Lorey: A lot of it is word of mouth and much of our new business comes from inbound marketing strategies that our marketing team produces. We also do a lot of special events and will make videos for conferences or some of the speakers and then people will say, “I saw your videos, that’s such a neat way to visualize what someone is saying.” Because it really is a neat alternative to using traditional spreadsheets or graphs—it makes it a little bit more fun and a lot more engaging.

Q: What’s a challenge your business has faced and how did you overcome it?

Lorey: I wanted us to have one system to invoice through. We were using two different programs at the time and I wanted to streamline that process. So we ended up finding PaySimple to help us with that.

Q: What do you like about working with PaySimple?

Lorey: I just have to say the customer service level for PaySimple is above and beyond. You have a question—you’re going to get an answer to it and if you still don’t understand you’re going to get a phone call that’s going to walk you through the process. Having backup like that for a business that’s growing is so important.

I would say that my overall experience has been fantastic. I know that [PaySimple is] working to build the product and listening to what clients need and it’s really unique because no other company that we do business with has actually taken as much interest in what we need.

Q: We recently launched our Online Store, which you’ve decided to try, how will you use it for your business?

Lorey: We’re going to use the Online Store for one-time fees and monthly subscriptions for the term of a year. As a test, we are launching a new subscription service to a specific group of clients that will be able to use a link that goes to our website to purchase. Depending on how this subscription product launch goes, we will decide whether or not we should offer it to more people.

Q: Beyond generating revenue, why are subscription services important to your business?

Lorey: One of the things that I work towards in our business is developing relationships to increase retention and repeat business. It’s so important to develop a way of keeping in touch with your clients and building that relationship because it keeps your client happy and you get to learn how their business is changing and how your services can work for them. We are really aiming to build partnerships with our clients because we want them to be part of our family for a long time.

Q: What advice would you give to other business owners starting out to build better relationships?

Lorey: I would make sure you have a good CRM system that allows you to keep all pertinent information on your clients and set up reminders to keep in touch with your clients. That’s been really important for us.

For example: you might set a reminder for yourself to say, check in in a month after they have started their project and then check in after two months and then again after their project is completed, then you can follow up with an email asking them for feedback. Then, maybe you send out a holiday message to them.

It’s really about maintaining those relationships so you need to have something in place from the very beginning that gives you the ability to do that.

Q: What other advice would you give a newer business?

Lorey: One thing we did in the beginning was have team meetings once a week where each head of every department would get together on the phone to run through challenges together to find solutions as a team. Those meetings really set us up for success when our business boomed three years ago. We still get together to really pound out anything we need to work through to improve and grow as a cohesive team. We also set up weekly goals that keep the team motivated and encouraging each other. It definitely keeps up the morale.

We also listen to customer feedback because we want to grow and improve so we hold ourselves accountable to listening and following up on that feedback.

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