On the latest episode, Jonathan welcomes David Wachs, founder and CEO of Handwrytten, to The Seller’s Edge podcast. David and his company are bringing back the human touch – with a twist. They have built a fleet of robots that wield pens and craft personalized handwritten notes for all customer occasions. With open rates three times greater than traditionally printed envelopes, these handwritten notes are proving to be a game-changer for businesses, especially in the CPG space. Read the full transcript of the conversation below.
Episode 26 of The Seller’s Edge – David and Jonathan talk about:
- [00:00] Introduction to David Wachs and Handwrytten
- [03:50] The Impact of Personalized Marketing
- [04:15] 3X Greater Open Rate
- [05:39] Consequences of AI and Generic Form Responses
- [09:19] Authenticity Matters
- [11:46] Handwrytten’s Variability/Dynamic Fields
- [13:13] Integration Into Omni-Channel Approach
- [14:28] Gimmicks Are Not Necessary
- [16:42] Handwrytten Automations
- [22:30] Personalized Vs. Generic Approaches
- [24:42] Scaling the Operation
- [27:16] A Service for All Occasions
- [28:35] Recap and Closing Remarks
Key Takeaways:
- Break Through the Noise with Genuine Strategies – Avoid ordinary marketing gimmicks. The common consumer or business lead has grown immune to them.
- Create Memorable Moments – Integrate handwritten notes into an omni-channel strategy, particularly for special occasions or milestones in the customer journey.
- Stand Out By Stepping Beyond Digital – Use handwritten notes to differentiate your brand from competitors that solely rely on digital communication.
- Build Loyalty Through Personalized Touches – Evaluate using handwritten notes to improve customer retention and encourage repeat transactions.
- Focus On Establishing Sustainable Growth – Commit to the long game. Not all of your efforts are going to pay off immediately or present in a data spike.
Full Transcript of Episode:
DAVID WACHS: Handwrytten started because I sold my last company, which was a text messaging company. And at the time it was very, the text messaging was. I mean, people were using it left and right and you know, we’re doing over a million texts a day. But when I sold that, I figured, oh, you know, what am I going to do next? And I thought, you know, everybody’s receiving a million texts a day and emails and tweets and everything else. Slack wasn’t. Slack was starting to grow at that time. And I thought, you know, everybody’s overloaded by electronic communication. But what I really want to do is send handwritten notes. Because when I receive a handwritten note, it goes on my desk behind or on my bookshelf behind me or on my refrigerator. And I always want to send them but like to family and friends. But I get too busy, I pick up the cards at Walgreens, I walk home with them in my bag. When I was living in Chicago, by the time they get home, they’re all banged up and I don’t have stamps, etc. So I thought there had to be a better way. So that’s kind of where Handwrytten came from. I had to stick with the prior company for two years. So in 2014, pretty much the day after I was released from that company, I turned and I started Handwrytten. And initially we were using off the shelf handwriting machines, but over the last, now we’re 10 years old or almost 11 years old. Over the last, I’d say six years, six and a half years, we’ve developed our own. So now in our facility in Phoenix, Arizona, we have about 200 robots. These robots are built entirely, we’re totally vertically integrated. So we build and program the robots in House. They’re 3D printed and laser cut and custom circuit boards and all that put together. And then we put the robots on the shelves to help us fulfill the orders. So with those 200 robots, we’re doing about 20,000 pieces a day. And each robot holds a real pen. And then we have a bunch of technology surrounding that to handle quality assurance and making sure the writing looks good. And then additional technology to ensure the right note gets in the right envelope, which is obviously very important. So it is a very tech heavy business considering our end product is an old fashioned handwritten note. It’s kind of interesting how something so simple could get so complicated at scale. But that’s what we do. So long answer to a short question. But what I really wanted to do was make sending a handwritten note as easy or Easier than sending an email. And that’s what we do through our suite of integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot and Shopify. That’s zapier, that type of thing.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I love that. Just the personalization of it, especially in, I mean, if I get an email from like any company or, or just a random person, I’m more than likely not to read it. I’ve heard that the newer generations will, but I think that they’re probably more prone to it. But I mean, handwritten notes is something that really does just hit people in the solar plexus. Like, I know, chewy. Does that really?
DAVID WACHS: Well, handwritten notes have been proven. Well, first of all, they have about a three times greater open rate than printed envelopes. So just the envelope, if you hand write, you’ll have huge uplift. And then with our clients, we’re seeing about a 27 times greater response, greater response than print. So if you send the same offer printed and handwritten, you’ll get a much higher response rate. As far as emails, it’s a little hard to fully compare, but like coupon redemption rates and handwritten notes can be as high as 18, 20%, you know, and I’m not saying get rid of emails or get rid of texts or anything else, but you got to layer it in and use it because it’s expensive, first of all. But you got to layer it in and use it where it’s, where it’s effective, you know, so whether it’s a thank you note, which is our number one use case, birthday holiday, or maybe you wanted one or two additional touch points a year, you really don’t want to go over four touch points a year. That’s kind of what we help our, our brands with.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I really like that. I didn’t even think about the address or top of the envelope. Like, I’ve just thought about the note itself and that’s actually a great point because if I see something that’s written by hand on there, I’m definitely more likely to open.
DAVID WACHS: Yeah. You know, I used to say that when I open up my own mail, if I see a handwritten note in there, I put it at the back of the stack because I want to get through all the bills and all the junk first and then have that dessert of the handwritten, you know, of something actually personal. But you touched on something interesting earlier too. You said when you get emails, you don’t read them. And I think that’s getting worse and worse with AI because now people discount every form of Electronic communication, emails the most, they just assume they’re auto generated. Whether it’s, you know, a mailchimp style email or a one to one email. They still think, oh well that’s just probably AI but they haven’t made that, that leap with handwritten notes yet. So I think that’s another reason why we’re, you know, what’s old is new again.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I used to work for a company that did heavily direct mail. I mean they were just starting to try to break into the, the digital age with their marketing, but they were, I think it was like 80% of their marketing was direct mail. And I know that at the time we were like, hey, we should really be doing something with handwriting. But at the time the fonts and the way that it was mass produced wasn’t that great. I know that that has come leaps and bounds since I’m curious, you said you had a number of robots. Do each of them have like different ways of writing or is that more uniform as well?
DAVID WACHS: They’re programmable, so each robot actually can write whatever you want. Here’s a bad sample on my desk, but you know, so yeah, that’s great. Each robot can write whatever. It’s just programming. So it’s not like one robot’s hard coded with a handwriting style or anything. We have about 35 handwriting styles that anybody can choose from. But then celebrities and politicians and everybody, they will provide their own handwriting and then we can kind of recreate that. It takes about a week for us to do because it’s an art and science and all that. So we’ll do that on behalf of them. And then those handwriting styles are private for them, but any robot on the floor can, can reproduce them. We were joking that we should just go on Wikipedia and steal. You know, if you go on Wikipedia, there’s often a lot of signatures. If you like look up presidents or celebrity, we should just steal their signatures then, you know, fake, fake little pieces of, you know, whatever, like autograph sports cards or something as a side hustle. But, but we haven’t, we haven’t turned to that yet.
JONATHAN: When I write the movie, that’ll be like the Breaking Bad version of like.
DAVID WACHS: Yeah, exactly.
JONATHAN: That’s too funny. Yeah. And then as far as like, is there. Have you found that there are specific, I don’t know, moments in the customer journey or occasions when handwritten notes do better than others? I’m curious about that piece of it.
DAVID WACHS: Yeah. So I talk a lot about the value of being appreciative and the value of a thank you. I think thank you notes are the best use case because there’s a difference. We have a lot of nonprofit clients, and what I try to imbue with them is there’s a difference in being thanked and feeling thanked. And especially with nonprofit. I mean, nonprofits is where we’ve done a lot of the research. But the number one reason people don’t re donate, meaning they don’t donate again, is they don’t feel thanked. You know, you go to, you know, pick a cause and you donate and you immediately get an email back from their automated donor management. Is that a thank you? Technically, yes. But you don’t feel thanked. Right. So using our service to make people feel thanked, I think is a big use case. And I say do what we call a full stop thank you. So you just thank them. You don’t throw in a hey, refer a friend, or here’s a coupon code or anything like that, because that will make the thank you seem less genuine. So I just say, just simply say thank you. You can then follow up in six months and check in and offer a coupon or something like that. You know, sometimes what you can do is, is the handwritten note can be very genuine and it could just say thank you, but on the back of the handwritten note, on the back of the card, maybe you say, you know, don’t forget to rate and review us or something. So you can kind of fit it in there where you’re not fitting out the genuine nature of the thank you and still offer a few calls to action or maybe include, you know, 10% off your next order or something that way. But I wouldn’t put that in the notes. So thank yous are the most important. We’re also used a lot for anniversary of purchase, birthday, and of course, right now with the holidays happening, we’re humming over here just sending holiday cards. So it is a different use case. It’s not like a transaction of purchase or anything. You know, like you get an email or your order’s on its way because by the time that gets to you, your order will be collecting dust in your house. So the number one use case is really just simply saying thank you.
JONATHAN: Yeah, you called out a really great example with that I can identify with is the donations, because there are times when I will feel strongly about a cause, donate, and then get that generic form. And it’s really. It hits odd because you are. You feel like you’re doing something. I mean, there’s very few times, you know, in daily life that we get to feel good about something that we’ve done in an intrinsic way. So when we do that and we get just some generic form letter response, it’s really kind of disheartening. So I, Absolutely, that’s, that’s one that really hits home with me.
DAVID WACHS: A lot of people say, well, you know, as a disingenuous, you’re sending a robotic written hand or a note. And I say, well, it’s either that or some other quote unquote disingenuous thing. You know, these nonprofit heads of development don’t have time to sit down and write thousands of thank you notes. So they either use a service like Handwrytten or they don’t do it, or they have a room full of volunteers do it. And is having some high school volunteer write thank you notes in exchange for pizza really any more genuine than having a solution that can write out exactly your words in legible handwriting that you choose with your signature? So it’s a debatable issue. But, but we think that, you know, like back in the day when you complain to the CEO of TWA or something about your bad flight, the. The CEO of TWA wouldn’t respond to you. His secretary would. So again, you know, it’s not like we’re doing anything new. We’re just doing it in a more scalable way.
JONATHAN: For sure. I’m curious as far as, like the variability and personalization. Like, like, yeah. And you’re obviously, I would, I imagine you’re going to tell me that it varies from client to client because I’m sure that there are just circumstances where you’re mass producing like uniform letters, but I would imagine you can also make variable fields like names and so on and so forth.
DAVID WACHS: Yeah. So there’s variability of the content. And every single, we don’t charge for variability. So every single note you send with us could be different. Then there’s a variability of the writing itself. So if you send out a hundred or a hundred thousand handwritten notes and they all say exactly the same thing, they’ll all look a little bit different because we’ll vary the line spacing on an individual note basis because people don’t write on ruled paper. Will vary the left margin start point on a line by line basis because people don’t write down a hard edge will warp the text ever so slightly. So it’s not, you know, it’s, it’s on varying line spaces, but it’s also on, you know, it’s not totally straight across. It’s ever so slightly, you know, and it is an uncanny valley of sorts. And then we’ll also vary the character by character. So if two O’s together will look different than two O’s apart, two T’s together, you know, do you cross them with one crossbar, two O’s throughout the document, these, you know, whatever. All those letters are different to create a kind of more realistic work.
JONATHAN: And then earlier you mentioned we were talking about email, and you said, hey, don’t get rid of it entirely. Have you found, like, a great way for people to sort of integrate it with their broader marketing efforts? Like, is there a way that you’ve seen work better than others? Or, like, different examples of how people have integrated it?
DAVID WACHS: Yeah, yeah. The way we use it here is when we’re prospecting, we’ll send people handwritten note, and then we’ll wait two weeks and we’ll send them an email after saying, hey, did you receive my handwritten note? And they’ll say, yeah. So it’s a great way to kind of hook the email and come in warm versus coming in cold. A lot of people will send a thank you via email, but then also then follow up with a thank you via handwritten notes. So, yeah, you can certainly go cross channel. And my last career, I pushed a lot on having a preference center, a communication preference center. Where do you want to receive text messages? Yes. No. Do you want to receive handwritten notes? Yes. No. And, you know, but layer those in where appropriate. But the short answer is, yeah, especially with prospecting, it works great.
JONATHAN: Yeah, for sure. I love that. Coming in warm and then following up with the email, that’s really. Actually, yeah. And I love that you probably are more likely to get a response from that, especially because you know what?
DAVID WACHS: I think there’s a fine line. Just to give you an example, I had a SEO firm reach out to me. They wanted my business, and they sent me an email saying I’d expect to receive a FedEx package. And I got the FedEx package, and inside was a card, a thick card. And when I opened it, there was a little video screen. And it started playing like, we at Johnson’s SEO do this, this, and this. And all I could think, first of all, the video was so boring. I watched one second of it. Second of all, because I’m a geek and I build robots, I just wanted to know how it worked and what was the processor in it and all that. And then third of all, I thought, gee, this must be so. The video was distracting because I wanted to know how the thing worked. And then Most importantly, I thought, gee, this is expensive and ingenuine and if it’s so expensive they’re probably going to make a lot of money off of me. And I don’t want anybody to make a lot of money off me. I want to be a zero margin client. So I just thought and I sent the guy the thing back so he could recycle it because that was an option because it’s wasteful. I said, have you thought about just using a handwritten note? Because it will get open and read, it won’t be distracting and it won’t give the allure that you’re going to make a ton of money off me. You know what I mean? So I just think sometimes people go to the extreme and they try to find a gimmick when gimmicks aren’t necessary. Just go with something genuine.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I love that. Especially in a scenario with an SEO company because they’re always going to pursue it digitally and so are their competitors. So I feel like that’s a great differentiator for them with their clients. 100%, yeah, solid. Have you worked with a lot of e commerce businesses? I’m curious like, or like any sort of retailers?
DAVID WACHS: Certainly retailers, a lot of brick and mortars. We do Christmas sales right now for some big department store chains. For an eyeglass company, we do new store openings and that type of thing. For online brands we have a Shopify and I’m not here to talk about Handwrytten, I’m here to talk about the benefits of a handwritten note with an I not a Y. But we do have integrations to Shopify that would allow you to set up rules to trigger a handwritten note after first purchase or they spend a certain amount of money or whatever you want to do. So we have that built out for Amazon or FBA. It’s a bit more complicated because they don’t typically allow you to reach out to them after the fact. So for those, what we can do is we can include a note in the box or if you include a little, you know, click here to register or you know, scan here to register, scan here for an extended warranty. Then you send a follow up handwritten note. But we’re not allowed to do it, you know, we’re not allowed to pull the data and send you a handwritten note after a purchase.
JONATHAN: Yeah, and then what does that look like from like an automated. I mean obviously the FBA you’re gonna, you’ll be producing those Beforehand. But for someone where you actually have that data, like is there, do you sort of have that process automated where like monthly like a retailer will like kind send you a spreadsheet with like customer names on it?
DAVID WACHS: Yeah, yeah, that’s my favorite. Like for, for example with a high end luxury retailer, they’ve got online and then they have stores throughout the, throughout the world. And for their US and Canada stores, when you go into the store and make a purchase, we pull I believe weekly data from every store with the name of the store clerk that assisted you. And we’ll send you a note from that store clerk with their phone number and the name of the store automatically. And it’s just coming from point of sale data. Most clients just send it to us in real time using Zapier or something like that or Shopify. So yeah, I mean we have all those tools built out. We have APIs and we plug into make, which is the other really cool tool. I don’t know if you’re familiar with make, but it’s like shop, it’s like Zapier on steroids. We do that too.
JONATHAN: I love the example of, from a brick and mortar store with the, the actual salesperson from the point of sale, like having that really just connect the dots and win over customer loyalty.
DAVID WACHS: Well, you know, back in the day, like five years ago, I walked into a department store that was, they had a cologne that was a client of ours and I went in with my wife and kid in the stroller at the time and I pointed out the colonists at all. This clone’s a client of ours. And then the store clerk or that department clerk came over and said, may I help you? I said no, I just, you know, we write out your handwritten notes. And she said no you don’t. I have to sit here and write my own handwritten notes. And I realized that we wrote out the online notes but for that brand, the clerk had to write out their own. And this is after they have to merchandise and deal with clients and close the books and all the rest. They weren’t doing it. So for a while. And honestly I think, you know, most online brands these days actually create more enduring personal relationships than offline. Because tasking a sales clerk to do it, it’s just not going to, it’s not going to get done. And when you contrast that cologne brand, that fragrance brand with that luxury store where we automated both online and offline, what a difference it makes. I mean then you’re, you know, the, the in store experience should have the most Personal follow up. So I, you know, it’s great we were able to work with them on that.
JONATHAN: And as far as just, I mean, across the border, do you have sort of aggregated data to say that like, hey, like when you, when people integrate this into their marketing, that it yields X percentage increase in, I don’t know, customer loyalty, future revenue, lifetime value of customer…?
DAVID WACHS: Yeah, yeah. So if you go to Handwrytten.com and it’s H-A-N-D-W-R-Y-T-T-E-N.com, click resources. And we’re revising it actually right now. But the 2023, I believe, customer outreach survey, we used a surveying company to reach out and talk with 2,000 individual consumers, not Handwrytten consumers, and ask them, you know, what forms of communication do you find more personable and you know, do you feel appreciated by brands? And the number one most personal form of communication is actually phone calls. We learned that. But the number one most potentially annoying form of communication is also phone calls. Handwritten notes were the second highest personal and the least annoying. So being able to reach out in a safe way to your customers really helps. And then we asked, do you feel appreciated by brands? And they said no. And we said, what would make you feel appreciated by a brand? And they said, handwritten note outreach. And then we said, what would you do if you feel appreciated? Well, you know, surprise, surprise. You buy more, you spend, you know, you buy more often, you refer more, all the obvious stuff. But it was good validation that what we’re doing, you know, makes a difference.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I’m in the middle of a ongoing. I don’t want to say it’s a feud, but I want to say feud with a brand that I’ve always loved. And then I recent, my most recent encounter with them has just been, been terrible from start to finish. And they like, it started with me trying to like sign up for a service again. And then like one of the agents called me the wrong name and then they like promised me a phone call back and I didn’t get it. And then I just got all these generic customer service emails in response and I’m just like, this is awful. Like you guys are going to lose me as a customer just because you’re sending these form letters. And I don’t feel, I feel like I’m just like a box that you’re checking. I’m not actually a person. And then as far as like mass producing, I’m curious. And you kind of spoke to this a little bit like, what are the sort of nuances or challenges with, with producing sort of in bulk, but also remaining personal. Because I feel like, I mean, you mentioned variability, but is there. Have you found that like certain. I mean, you’re only as good as the content you get, right? So if somebody tells you to write something, you’re like, oof, like this is this isn’t that great? Like, have you found that there are kind of handwritten notes that do better than other handwritten notes, depending on how they’re structured?
DAVID WACHS: You know, I think you do want to have an opener, you know, dear so and so or high so, you know, not just be like, thanks for your purchase. Because then it looks like you had a big box of them and you just mailed them out as people, I think personalizing the card itself, meaning the graphics on the card. So through our website, you can go in and put your logo or a photo or make a folded card with two photos and a logo, whatever. I think that’s important to really stand out. And you want to do a combo, really personal cards with all that and then some more generic depending on the occasion. So for a birthday card, maybe make that a little bit more generic because then it looks like you went to the store, you bought a birthday card for that person versus a thank you card should probably be on company stationary. So there’s those triggers to pull. But yeah, I mean, honestly, it’s just thank you notes. It’s just that’s the content that we think. You know, people say, well, how do you measure the effectiveness of a thank you note? And to that I refer you to Albert Einstein who said, not everything that can be measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured. You know, you want to play a long game here and understand the value of that. You know, when somebody buys from you, you know, if it’s a product, they could go on Amazon and find a trillion other similar or go to Alibaba and make their own. And if it’s a service, there’s Yelp and everything else. The fact that somebody chose you, it deserves a thank you. So we’re just really big on that around here.
JONATHAN: Yeah, for sure. As far as like technological advancements. And it’s just I’m always blown away by this because just like thinking back to 2021 and how like ChatGPT and everything that’s. And how quickly everything’s proliferated, what sort of changes do you see like coming in the future for this?
DAVID WACHS: So we do integrate with ChatGPT and you can say, you know, write a note to Jonathan for Being on his podcast and you know, it’ll hype up the content, then you pick the handwriting style and off it goes. So there, there is that. We might do something similar on our card designer. So as opposed to uploading a picture of two people saying thank you to each other or whatever, you could say, you know, make an image for the front of this card and then use that to do to, to do that. We use AI throughout for the machine vision component to ensure quality assurance of the notes and stuff like that. But our product I think at this point I will say is pretty cemented. We don’t have a lot of additional features. Now we’re all about scaling and like, you know, how can we, instead of being able to do 20,000 notes a day, do 40 and 80 and you know, how do we scale that so it’s just internal stuff. And then additionally maybe offer more gift cards too because right now you can like include a Starbucks card or an Amazon card or something like that, but maybe some three dimensional items. So maybe include a box of chocolates or whatever, you know, box of brownies with it. How would, how would that fulfillment look? So we are talking about that, but you know, that’s down the road.
JONATHAN: That’s great. I’m curious as far as like demographic data, have you seen sort of, and I can’t think of anybody that wouldn’t enjoy a handwritten card, but have you seen it do better with a certain demographic versus other demographics?
DAVID WACHS: I’ll tell you, our users are primarily women. You know, it’s about 45 or 55% women, 45% men. As far as who benefits from the handwritten note? No, I think they’re honestly like, we have hipster vinyl record subscription services where their clients are, their customers are 20 year olds and they love it. They post them to Instagram and all that. And then we have companies that are reaching out to Medicare clients because you can’t reach those people through email. They don’t check their email. So yeah, I mean, kind of both ends of the spectrum. It’s kind of universally applicable, I will say.
JONATHAN: I mean it’s good for all occasions. You can’t say that about many products. So great thing. And then the last thing, I wouldn’t change it, but I’m curious about it because I really. It sticks in the mind is the name of the company is with a Y. I’m curious, was there somebody who had a trademark on handwritten and you change it or was that the initial intention all along?
DAVID WACHS: Well, so this was 20. I came out with the name in 2012. This is, you know, so think lift with a Y and that type of thing, but also handwritten with an I.com was taken. That said, I am so glad I didn’t get handwritten with an I. I got Handwrytten with a Y, because we’re not handwritten. We’re branded. We’re Handwrytten with a Y. We’re sending a Handwrytten with a Y note, not a handwritten with an I note. You know, I’m a huge narcissist, so I Google my company all the time. If it was handwritten with an I, I couldn’t Google it. You know, so having it with a Y is really brandable. And it’s. I love our name. I’m very happy with our name, actually. So people except. And thank you for not doing it. Everybody calls us Handy Written, which causes my skin to crawl. It sounds like fingers on a chalkboard. But. But, you know, so now we own the domain name handywritten.com. and it redirects. Yep.
JONATHAN: And it redirects.
DAVID WACHS: Yep.
JONATHAN: And I’m sure the PPC on that is probably cheap, so you guys can do exactly. I love that. I mean, obviously we can wrap it up, but is there a specific topic that you might have wanted to cover that I didn’t mention?
DAVID WACHS: No. I would just say, you know, get out your pen and paper and start writing handwritten notes. And when you see the magic of what that can do for you personally or your business and you want to grow it, then talk to a company like us. But everybody should start this today. A. It’ll make you feel good for feeling appreciated, and then certainly you’ll see impact on your brand and sales because your clients will feel appreciated too, and that moves the needle.
