About

Hi, I’m Jeff Benzenberg.  SoapFusion is my personal website.

I’m a web designer and web marketer at eRetailing.

The purpose of this website is to convince you, dear reader, that I am both very passionate about, and very good at, what I do. I want to do this just in case you ever find yourself thinking “I need a world class web marketer” or “I need a web designer with great taste” or even better, “I need someone who can do both!”  If you enjoy this site, then maybe your next thought will be “Get me Jeff Benzenberg!” And when your underling replies “Who?”, you can respond “You know, that guy who’s really good at fusing bars of soap together!”  And your underling will reply “Ah, yes. Excellent choice. Right away, sir!”

Now, let’s begin with a story.

I got my start in the business of the web in late 2004. I had just earned a BS in Industrial Design from Ohio State and was feeling ambitious. A friend and I decided to build an online store that sold products from some of my favorite modern designers. We called it Follow Function. It was a neat little company, but alas, it remained a side project.

I suppose the main purpose was to learn as much as I could about running an online company, and in that respect, Follow Function was a big success. I taught myself Adwords and osCommerce. I learned about shopping carts and web navigation.  I was having a great time.

In the winter of 2007 I saw an ad for an open position at eRetailing. They needed someone to take over their Pay Per Click programs.  I had never heard of eRetailing before, but when I saw their flagship product, Customized Girl, I was thrilled.  I had just finished reading Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, and right here in Columbus, Ohio I found what could have been the poster child for Long Tail economics.  I think my giddiness came across in the interview and I was hired.

Customized Girl is a website where users can design their own apparel.  We have a pretty slick design center where you can add your own text, art, and images.  You can change fonts, change colors, move objects around and create pretty much whatever you want.  We’ll print it and ship it out (no minimums!). I suppose there were a good amount of similar websites around at the time, but this is what made Customized Girl special: you could save your designs to a gallery.  Only a few competitors shared this feature.

In the gallery, I found potential.  With Follow Function if you weren’t specifically searching for one of my products, I couldn’t really sell to you.  My only option was to go out and manufacture the demand.  And honestly, manufacturing demand in a crowded marketplace is damn hard.

But Customized Girl was different. All I had to do was identify where the demand already existed, save some new designs to the gallery, and use Google Adwords to funnel that traffic to my new gallery page.  It was, and continues to be, a beautiful thing.

As an example, let’s say I notice that Roller Derby is growing in popularity. I’ll have my team save a bunch of Roller Derby t-shirts, bags, and hot shorts and tag them all “Roller Derby”. I might had some custom HTML to the page if necessary. Then I’ll build PPC campaigns in Adwords and Adcenter.  I’ll add the keywords, write the ads, and link them to our new landing page.  I can even create a couple sets of banner ads and place them on Roller Derby websites. Pretty cool, right?

Over the years, I’ve become an expert in web marketing. When I build an advertising campaign, I know exactly what I need in both my ads and my landing pages. I’m sure there are a thousand people out there just like me, but again dear reader, this is where the selling comes in; I wish to sell you on myself. Out of those thousand people, I wonder how many can actually double as the designer, and build both the ads and the landing pages, from scratch if necessary?

I’m very lucky to have my position at eRetailing. I think it’s a unique place where I can grow my skill sets in multiple areas. I know it’s often a struggle for marketers to communicate their vision to the design team.   When I’m working with a team, I can at least spend a few minutes mocking up my vision in Photoshop.  If we’re crunched for time, I can implement it on my own.

We have a dedicated support team in Google’s Ann Arbor office. Google rotates it’s team members pretty frequently, so we are always working with new people. Every new team, at least once, will utter this comment: “You guys are so lucky to be able to move so quickly.  My other clients have to get approval, then they have to outsource the design and production work. It takes forever.” These comments make me feel outstanding, because even though they don’t know it, they’re complementing both of my departments: marketing and design.

So that’s an intro to what I do. Please, explore some of my other posts for an in depth look at marketing and design for a leader in the print on demand industry.

Oh, also, I’m really good at fusing pieces of bar soap together. You know when you’re almost done using a bar of soap and all that’s left is a skinny sliver? I’ve really honed the skill it takes to fuse that sliver into your new bar of soap, and I’m quite proud of it.  Perhaps I’ll create an illustrated tutorial soon.  Look out for that.

 

You can find me all over the web. Here are some of my accounts:

 

I am also the chief artist and co-author behind It’s a Wonderful Empire.