Kim Kardashian puts small Aussie business on centre stage with Instagram post

The founders of a small Australian business say their plans to sign up more stockists in the US have taken a leap forward after celebrity influencer Kim Kardashian gave their product an unsolicited glowing recommendation on Instagram. 

Michael Jankie, Gary Tramer and Andrei Safonau founded Natural Patch Co in April 2020, drawing on their wealth of experience in e-commerce and startups to develop stick-on bug repellent patches for children. 

Natural Patch Co uses natural, essential oils in its brightly coloured BuzzPatch stickers, which are designed to help families avoid mosquito bites while avoiding putting potentially harmful toxins on their children’s skin. The products are plant-based, non-dermal (meaning they can be stuck on clothes, not skin) and come in bright, playful designs. 

These benefits were enough to win over one of the most famous women in the world, who Jankie and team were unaware was one of their customers. 

Kardashian shared a photo of the products in her Instagram story last Wednesday night, the notification catching Jankie by surprise when he logged on to get some work done at night while on holiday in Paris. He initially thought it was a fake account, but a quick check showed that it was legitimate and Kardashian had put the Natural Patch Co in front of her 329 million followers. 

Natural Patch Co didn’t pay Kardashian for the endorsement, or provide her with the products, echoing a similar endorsement from Oprah Winfrey for Australian drink bottle brand Beysis, which also happened this week. 

The team quickly assembled online — from all parts of the globe — to strategise on this unexpected stroke of good luck, but Jankie tells SmartCompany the right strategy was abundantly clear.

“Kim is a person, she is a customer, we were happy we had another happy customer,” he said. 

“It honestly brings a smile to my face whenever I see someone wearing [a patch], or a friend catches on that it is our company and lets me know they have purchased. This felt like a more serious case of that.”

The Natural Patch Co team chatted with Kim via direct message, thanking her for the post and asking if they could re-post the story on the company’s Instagram account. 

“She said that her kids were allergic to bites and she found our product and loved the stickers, and said they were easy to use and it means she does not have to spray tons of stuff onto the kids,” he said. 

“It’s a story we hear so often, but it somehow landed heavier. Kim just turned from being the biggest personality in the world into a real person with the same real problems that we’d made our solution for.”

Validation for a growing business

The mention resulted in a bump to website traffic and orders for Natural Patch Co, says Jankie, although he admits it hasn’t been “mind-blowing” as “Kim’s followers are probably not our typical customer profiles”. 

But perhaps even more importantly, it did result in a call from an US retailer that was considering stocking the products in 2023 but now plans to accelerate that timeline. 

Jankie believes this is where the unexpected endorsement will give the two-year-old business a boost. 

“Although we’ve created the category, according to trend data from search volumes in Google and Amazon, for our products, we fly somewhat under the radar with retailers,” Jankie explained. 

“Some of our best retail partners have come from inbound messages from buyers or store owners who have seen or heard of our products and realise the demand we generate for it. This simple, genuine post, amplifies that immensely.”

On one level, Natural Patch Co is very much a business inspired by the founders’ own experience with dealing with mosquito bites on their own children; plans to spend a summer down on the Mornington Peninsula with Jankie’s young daughter sparked his initial conversation with Tramer. But it is also a venture born out of the pandemic. 

That first conversation happened in October 2019 but it wasn’t until April 2020, when Australia and the world was grappling with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, that the founders got serious about launching a new business. 

“We were quite stressed and thought we might need money if our software companies collapse, so we should start this now — pile on the pressure and the stress,” Jankie recalled.

Jankie and Tramer have long worked together, co-founding PoweredLocal and LeadChat among other ventures, and building upon a friendship that began when they were at kindergarten together at the age of three. Partnering with Safonau had also been years in the making, after the pair helped Safanau migrate to Australia with his family back in 2016 when he was working on an e-commerce site they used to own. 

The first BuzzPatch packs were sold in May 2020 and Natural Patch Co has blossomed into an international business, with sales in Australia, North America, Europe, the UK and Singapore. 

The company has sold more than 1.5 million packs of its stickers across its range of stickers and its revenues are “well into eight figures” across its direct-to-consumer, marketplace and wholesale channels. 

While Jankie says the business has experimented with influencer marketing, it is now focusing its efforts on resharing genuine posts from customers as its main method of generating awareness, as those “are the ones that work and resonate”. 

“It’s exactly what Kim did. She bought our stuff — we don’t even know where from, it could’ve been our website, or a retailer, or Amazon — and just posted about it because it works and happens to have all these great social qualities about it,” he added. 

Ultimately, Jankie says Kardashian’s post has given the business even more “validation that what we have created and are continuing to build upon is right — we’ve actually create great products and our customers genuinely love them”. 

“As inventors and owners, we’re constantly wondering if our product is good enough. Always wondering if sales are a function of marketing or great product,” he said. 

“Kim Kardashian has enough money that she can have any problem solved, she has influence and reach so strong that products she wants she could get given to her for free. But she discovered us.”