Darby Cox on trust, e-commerce and building Smoke Cartel
Darby Cox is a business operations consultant who helps e-commerce and growing businesses improve operations, scale, and build effective teams. Drawing on eight years at Smoke Cartel, Cox discusses how product education and direct communication helped win customers, and what business owners should consider when hiring and building an online store.
Trust is built through useful, direct communication, but growth also depends on strong foundations: thoughtful website structure, reliable operations, and clear boundaries when hiring. Cox advises planning the website before building and treating technical SEO as a specialist discipline.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
We started Smoke Cartel in 2013 out of our living room and kitchen, as one of the first US-based online headshops to launch in years. At the time, the industry was extremely taboo. Very few people were willing to put their names or faces behind anything cannabis-related, and we even had competitors operating under fake names. I saw that as an opportunity to build real trust with customers, and that bet paid off in spades.
The other gap was education. Most of the competition, even physical retail shops, wouldn’t talk directly about the products, largely because of how fast the legal (and illegal) cannabis market was changing. So we did. With guidance from a business lawyer, we leaned into the risk and became known for digging into the why and how of the products and how they were made. We also offered free shipping when competitors didn’t. I was willing to lift the curtain and let customers behind the scenes, and it turns out that’s the exciting part.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
With Smoke Cartel, our early traction came from Reddit and Tumblr (back when Tumblr was still the place to be). Our products needed a lot of explaining but were also really visual, so a mix of an information-driven platform and a photo-driven one let us get both messages across to a huge audience at the same time.
Today, my consulting clients come from the work ethic and connections I spent years building. You never know who will become your next client or hand you your next job, so never underestimate networking, and I don’t just mean conferences. Community events, local theatre, the coffee shop down the street. Building connections across different fields, industries and kinds of people beats paid advertising every time.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The choice that dramatically changed Smoke Cartel’s trajectory was going public. It put us in front of a whole new arena of customers and potential investors we’d never been in the same circles with. People who had been afraid of the industry because of the federal stance on cannabis lost a lot of that fear. For better or worse, being a public company lends an authority that adds validity to your product. State-by-state legalization helped too. I’ve long argued for federal legalization and still do, but the slower state-by-state rollout raised interest nationwide, and because we’d already made ourselves an information source on smoking products, we had one of the best platforms in place for new customers.
The mistake: hiring a friend. I would never do it again. Coworkers and employees can absolutely become friends later, and I’ve written a lot about that, but putting an existing friendship inside a boss-employee dynamic is something very few relationships survive without some tarnish. The older I get, the more I value friendship, and it isn’t worth the cost, even if your friend is exceptionally talented in your field. Open a door for them somewhere else in the industry if you can, but keep existing friendships out of new business ventures. If you want to be friends with someone who works for you, do it after the working relationship ends.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
E-commerce has changed dramatically. 2020 was remarkable in so many ways, good and bad, and it exposed major gaps in supply chains, product sourcing and online communication that couldn’t keep up with the massive shift to online shopping. Now, with AI, anyone can spin up a website or roll out a product line in an afternoon, but that doesn’t mean the quality has gone up. There’s something to be said for a higher barrier to entry: it keeps out people who aren’t truly invested. I love the added accessibility, because e-commerce is a phenomenal way for people to build their own businesses, and I’ve always said small business is where we as individuals can make the most change in society. But right now we’re seeing a lot of low-quality websites and fast-produced items. I expect that to fade, and we’re already seeing AI fatigue in advertising.
Customer expectations have shifted just as much. In 2017, I’d have told you companies could still charge for shipping. Today, even with shipping costs way up, customers expect it free. They know they can price-match and shop around, and they can click away at any moment. You’re competing with ten browser tabs and a stack of pop-up notifications for their attention. So you adapt: your site has to be effective and built correctly, because customers don’t give any leeway for lazy user experience anymore (rightfully so!).
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Before you build anything, map out everything you want your website to do. Every product line, your blog structure, every touchpoint and every area of the business you plan to touch on the web, and plan all of it into your site structure from day one. Proper preparation up front will save you so much time, headache and customer confusion down the road, not to mention the SEO value of having a well-built site from the start.
What to ignore: SEO advice from AI. It’s pulling from sources that were never reliable for real technical SEO guidance, so you get confident-sounding tips built on bad information. Technical SEO still wins. Get your structure, speed and indexing right, and learn it from people who actually do the work.
Thank you to Darby Cox and the team at Darby Cox for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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