An eCommerce Podcast Hosted by Brett Curry

TikTok Shop right now is bigger than Amazon or Shopify was from launch. That is what TikTok Shop is right now." Bold statement? Maybe. But Jordan West, founder and CEO of Social Commerce Club, has the data to back it up. With CPMs dropping 26% last year while ad spend increases, and creators with under 10K followers generating $250K in monthly sales, we're witnessing the early stages of what could be the biggest disruption in e-commerce since Amazon itself. In this explosive episode, Jordan breaks down his exact three-phase playbook for scaling from zero to $100K per month on TikTok Shop, reveals why big brands like Estée Lauder are struggling to adapt, and shares the underground strategies that are creating millionaire creators overnight.

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Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!

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Chapters: 

(00:00) Introducting Jordan West

(05:18) The Exponential Growth of TikTok Shops

(10:48) Understanding the TikTok Shops Ecosystem

(14:12) The Power of Social Search

(16:16) Understanding Social Commerce

(19:34) Misconceptions about TikTok Shops

(24:33) The 80/20 Rule for Viral Content

(26:16) Best Practices

(31:36) Making It From Zero to Viral

(33:20) The Tiktok Shop Playbook: Phase One

(38:18) The Tiktok Shop Playbook: Phase Two

(42:44) The Tiktok Shop Playbook: Phase Three

(46:21) Exploring YouTube’s Potential in Social Commerce

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Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

Relevant Links:

• Jordan’s LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/jordan-west-marketer

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Transcript

Jordan West:

TikTok shop right now is bigger. The exponential curve that we see right now is bigger than Amazon or Shopify was from launch.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we've got a returning guest. We've got a long time friend on the pod, and we're talking about one of the hottest of hot topics TikTok shops. What do you need to know? What are some misconceptions? What's the growth playbook? And we're going to zoom out beyond that as well and look at social commerce as a whole. What's YouTube up to and what's going to happen in this space? And so my guest is Jordan West. He's the founder and CEO of Social Commerce Club. He's also the host of a fabulous podcast, scaling your E-Commerce brand. And so we're going to get into it, but with that, Jordan, welcome to the show and how's it going, man?

Jordan West:

Brett, so nice to be on here. Last time you and I met a couple months ago, you came on my podcast. It was good. It was actually very, very well received. I looked at the download numbers and I was like, oh, people really like brand. They like YouTube. People like talking about this kind of stuff. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Jordan West:

I should put some money behind that one. So secrets to Scaling your e-Commerce brand. We've been around, it's like 650 episodes now.

Brett Curry:

Whoa.

Jordan West:

I'll tell you, if there's one thing that I am good at, it is finding something and then just doubling down, doubling down, doubling down, which is why TikTok, TikTok Shop, I am telling you I haven't been this excited about something in a long, long time

Brett Curry:

And with good reason, there's merit behind it. We're going to talk about the data. We're going to talk about the case studies. We're going to talk about the stories that'll motivate you to go hard into TikTok shops. But first, I got to hit the pause button. 650 episodes, is that what you said? 600 episodes?

Jordan West:

Yes, yes, yes. Holy, how so? There's a couple of things that I do every single week I take, and just so you know, it's very, very selfish. I just take all of the different things that I'm learning in our different businesses. And all I do is I consolidate the learning in a podcast. And in LinkedIn, if you guys follow me on LinkedIn, I'll post multiple times a day and it's just selfish, everyone, just so you know. I'm just taking what I'm learning and then putting it out there. That's the only reason that I do this. And then it just happens to help people. And I kind of forget when I'm on this side. I forget that there's, for us, it's like we're in the thousands of downloads per episode. I'm like, oh yeah, that's right. I was at Shop Talk recently and you, I'm walking down and people like, Jordan, I listen to your podcast all the time. I watch your podcast. I'm like, oh yeah, I forget. I do it. Honestly, I just forget that I do it because it's just a matter of consolidating all the learning that I have. That's why I do it.

Brett Curry:

Such a great way to look at it. What do you want to learn? What do you want to add to your business? What expert do you need to get to know? Do a podcast on that. And now you're creating media that your marketplace is going to enjoy. It's going to attract people into your network and your learning, and you can share the learnings with your team. And same with LinkedIn. I love that approach. Super, super smart. And yeah, quick funny story that's related. So we're about 300 episodes in on e-commerce evolution. I'm not as prolific as Jordan West. Now you set the bar up here. I got to see what I can do to up my game. Maybe there's been a few times where this is a grind. It's also a grind to do a podcast when you're running a company and hiring people and running marketing and all this stuff. And so there's been one time in particular where I was like, I got to quit the podcast. It's just too much of a grind, too much of a hassle. I go to a trade show and three or four people stop me and say, I love the podcast, man. Keep up the good work. It's so good. And I'm like, oh, okay. No, this is part of why I do it. And so I've been doing it ever since. And

Jordan West:

I also have to say, so last week I had Curtis Matz on my podcast. Curtis is the founder and CEO at Portland Leather Goods big company. Awesome.

Brett Curry:

I met him in Austin just a couple weeks ago. Great guy.

Jordan West:

Yeah, Curtis is awesome. So I had him on when they were little too, and he came back on and they were going to do two or 300 million this year. Pretty good company. But

Brett Curry:

Think maybe pushing four, I think I heard pushing four. But either way insane

Jordan West:

To me, once you're over a couple hundred million, I mean, what's another a hundred? Here's the thing that Curtis and I talked about that I think is really interesting for everybody who's listening to this, especially if you're a brand owner. Curtis has been absolutely grinding at building a personal brand this year.

Brett Curry:

And

Jordan West:

I asked him, I said, what's the number one reason you do it? And he said people. He said, the reason why I'm doing this is for the people and the kind of people that come in when I post on LinkedIn and I say, Hey, I've got an open position. A players that come through are just phenomenal. And yes, I have to S through, but those people that are the learners, that's who I'm always going for. I'm like, if you are listening to all of this new stuff, you're probably my kind of people.

Brett Curry:

Totally. It's a great call out. Great call out. Okay, awesome. So now everyone's motivated to start their own podcast or it is a grind, but we love it and we do endorse it. So with that, let's dive into TikTok shops. And so Jordan Dazzle us. Wow us, motivate us. Why should we consider TikTok shops? What are you seeing with your agency clients and the brands you're investing in? What's going on with TikTok shops right now?

Jordan West:

Alright, here's your soundbite. Brett TikTok shop right now is bigger. The exponential curve that we see right now is bigger than Amazon or Shopify was from launch. Wow. That is what TikTok shop is right now. People will make fun of it on some of the bigger brands will make fun of it. So from a

Brett Curry:

Wait, unpack that a little bit or define that a little bit. So TikTok Shops is bigger now than Amazon was after launch, or what do you mean specifically?

Jordan West:

Exactly. So it is bigger than Amazon or Shopify was when they launched, and it's not even close the exponential curve. None of us understand what an exponential curve looks like. It's really difficult for us to wrap our brains around. All we know is we see it afterwards and we know we're like, oh, that's what exponential growth is, right? AI is one of those things right now that we're like, everyone's like, oh yeah, I was sitting in my backyard of a different house that I have, and I was sitting back there with my brother-in-law and we have to redo the roof, right? Oh, great, we have to redo the roof. I'm like, I'll bet you in three years that there's going to be a robot that goes and does that. And he's like, oh, no way. No way. I'm like, then you don't understand an exponential curve because if you look today, oh three PRO is released. It is scary, intelligent, what oh three Pro does, and again, we're at the bottom of an exponential curve, the same thing right now with TikTok shop. So when you see that curve starting to rise and you understand what that looks like for people who are not watching it, is this exponential hockey when we understand that we're at the bottom of it on TikTok shopping,

Brett Curry:

Social commerce. So you think we're about to hit that inflection point

Jordan West:

Right now? Absolutely. I don't even think we're even close to it on TikTok shop. I don't think that people are getting trained right now how to purchase, right? They're getting trained how to socially purchase. We've done it for a while with Facebook, but we haven't really Facebook and sorry, meta never really cracked the code on Social

Brett Curry:

Promise, right? They tried a few years ago social shopping, and I think Zuck was just ahead of his time a little bit there that it looked promising, it made sense, it didn't work. But TikTok shops has kind cracked the code. Now, I want to clarify a little bit. So you think we're just getting started with TikTok shops, is that because, I mean, it's huge. So the number of users was hundred 30 million users in the US or whatever the users are there.

Jordan West:

It's 180 million are on there for 60 minutes or more a day.

Brett Curry:

Holy cow. That's insanity. So are you saying it's really just beginning to explode though TikTok shops because people are still not buying mass on TikTok shops. So of that 180 million, there's only a smaller percentage that are actually buying. And so there's all that upside there.

Jordan West:

Yes. Because the trust factor is not there yet. And also the affiliates aren't quite there yet either. So I will tell you a leading indicator that tells me that this is the biggest opportunity ever. CPMs dropped last year by 26% on TikTok.

Brett Curry:

No way.

Jordan West:

So what does that tell you? To me, that doesn't tell me that that's a demand issue with advertising because advertising dollars have only gone up. What it tells me is that it's a supply issue in a good way. Sorry, that there is more supply that is driving CPMs down. What me? Super excited. I was on a webinar yesterday with Triple Whale and Fin Loop, and they were going over these stats. To me, I'm just a huge nerd when it comes to this stuff. And I was looking at some of these numbers just being like, nobody realizes right now still 70 to 80% of all spend, and this is from Triple Whale who has tons of stats out there out there. Hopefully you don't have a triple oil competitor as a sponsor of this or anything.

Brett Curry:

I don't. No, but I'm friends with a lot of them and friends with Triple oil. Love those guys.

Jordan West:

Wonderful. So in the stats that they see, 70 to 80% of all ads spend is happening on meta. Just think about

Brett Curry:

The disruption and their purview is like D two C brands. So D two C brands, 70, 80% is on meta. Yeah,

Jordan West:

Totally. The amount of brands that have tried TikTok and been like, well, I'm just not getting the right attribution, right? Oh, attribution isn't working. All of that is going away. By the way, in the world of ai, mms are going to be so cheap and we're going to be able to measure all this stuff. Well, that brands are going to realize, oh, there's all of these 180 million people that could be discovering my products over on TikTok that aren't yet.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it totally makes sense. And it's one of those things, and we experienced this a lot on the YouTube side of things, where billions of users long engagement time is 40 some minutes a day. Average session for YouTube users are both behind TikTok, it seems. So there's a ton of supply there. There's really no reason that it shouldn't work other than if your approach is wrong, your creative is wrong or something like that. Same is true with TikTok. It has the users, people are addicted to it. So if you can get the right message there in the right way, there's zero reason it shouldn't work. And so if it hasn't price some fundamental reasons for that, which we can unpack. And so yeah, so it's about to hockey stick, even though it's been growing rapidly so far.

Jordan West:

But really when you look at it, you're like, okay, so the top brand is doing 15 million a month, right? That's not that big. It's not that big. That's not that big when you compare it to an Amazon or Shopify

Brett Curry:

Brands that's on Amazon or whatever. Yeah,

Jordan West:

It's not that big. And that's why brands are ignoring it. And I'm like, go ahead and ignore it at your own peril if you want to ignore it. And especially big brands, look at, I'm just going to name them. Look at Estee Lauder. They just laid off 6,000 people in q1, 6,000 people. They laid them off for a reason. They are having a hard time penetrating that market. It is a very difficult market to penetrate, and they are having a very difficult time. They own a ton of different brands and they laid 6,000 people off. That is wild. And it continues to happen. It's continuing to happen in the space for brands that are not changing. P and g just happened to them too, and I think it was around 6,000 as well. Now, AI I think is part of that, right? AI's part of that,

But I do think that these old dinosaurs are having a very difficult time moving over and thinking about social commerce. I'll tell you why, Brett, the reason why they're having such a hard time with this is that they don't get to say yes or no to the content that comes out. I sat in a boardroom recently, TikTok shop headquarters are in Seattle. I live just as Vancouver. And I went down there and I went down for a coffee, by the way. That's what I was told, that it was a coffee. I get in and there's a boardroom of 30 or 35 people.

Brett Curry:

I thought you went over to seven

Jordan West:

Coffee. There's your coffee. Sit

Brett Curry:

Down, we got questions for you. Yeah,

Jordan West:

Look, I didn't have a presentation or anything. I was just like, okay, so we're just going to do q and a or what's it going to look like? Don't worry, I'm really good on the spot. So it was good. But I was with the global key accounts team. So this is brands that do 4 billion in a bus and they have to be across. They can't just do 4 billion in the states. It has to be in multiple markets, right? Really big high-end team. And they said, what do you do when a brand, one of the biggest pushbacks that we get from the global key accounts team, from the, sorry, global Key accounts. Brands, is that they want to say yes or no to content. I'm like, okay. So the salesperson to me says, yes, absolutely you can, but you can't. You can't. You can't. I'm sorry. You just have to say yes to all of it or no to all of it. And that's why they're losing. That's why the big brands are losing. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

I mean, think about it this way. Are you going to say you want to say yes or no to Amazon? Product reviews pretty limited there. If it's fraudulent or whatever, illegal or malicious, you can get that removed. But other than that, those reviews are going to be there. So that's the way it works. And shoppers want those reviews and they trust those reviews and they look at those reviews. And the same is true on TikTok. People go there for product recommendations. I was talking to my 17-year-old daughter just the other day, and I was trying to convince her to use TikTok less just for her own mental health. She's very healthy, she's an amazing student, all these things. But I'm like, Hey, spend less time there. And she's like, well, but I search for stuff there and that's where I even crazy details, crazy stuff I want to find. I search on TikTok. I'm like, okay, makes sense. And so that's where people want to consume content. That's where they want to get product recommendations. So you can avoid it, but you're avoiding it at your own app peril.

Jordan West:

So this is really interesting. Let's go into social search here for a second. This is really interesting. All of the stuff out there right now is AI search is going to eat, Google AI search is going to eat Google. It's like, yeah, probably. I'd search for so many things using CHA bt,

Brett Curry:

But

Jordan West:

For the upcoming generation, social search will crush Google. It will absolutely crush Google. I mean, you see it on YouTube and I consider that social search. Social search. I think that's one of the places that's where I put money. I put money on my podcast on YouTube just because it's a great place for people to discover the podcast. And we get tons of subscribers just from putting a little bit of money behind it because that's where they're right. I'm talking about D two C here, but the same rules apply and social search is massive. So a brand that we work with, we started working with them last August. In August, we ran a study on TikTok because they're a global key account brand. And we ran a study to see how many searches they had on TikTok. The answer was zero. They didn't show up, nobody was searching for them on social search on TikTok. We ran that same study after bringing them to over 2 million a month on TikTok, and they had 880,000 searches in the previous two weeks. We ran this in December. Whoa. It's crazy. Crazy. Think about that. Think about all of, and then the halo to everywhere from that, it is the discovery engine. It's also, I think about these big brands, p and g, Estee Lauder, all these big brands. Do you know how much money they spend on product research and marketing research?

It's crazy.

Brett Curry:

It's a pretty meaningful line item. So we're talking about tens of millions of dollars a year. Yeah,

Jordan West:

Totally. And my bet is that a lot of that is going to go away with social commerce because you put the products out there. Now people, what they have to do, the reason why I love TikTok shop so much is I own brands over the years. That's the thing that we did. I ran brands. I love building brands. One of the things I hated was working with influencers. I despise working with influencers. The reason is because you never know what you're going to get. You can pay a thousand dollars for a post and be like, oh, is this going to be good? At least I like the CPM model. I think that there's a really interesting CCP M model like, well, because then you're paying for reach. So if the video works, I'm paying for it, no problem. Totally. But I'm not just randomly paying for something to go out there. That's the scary sort of part of working with influencers. So when TikTok shop came, I understood it immediately. I was like, this is the first time that we've aligned incentives. And how many salespeople do you hire? You're always aligning comp, the incentives with what you want to get out of them.

That is always what you do. And it's the same thing with influencers. You want to get sales out your

Brett Curry:

Influencers, show me the incentive, I'll show you the result. And it's very true here as well.

Jordan West:

And so all of these creators on TikTok shop are only incentivized to make money. Rarely are you paying out big commissions, right? Sorry, big retainers. Very, very rarely. And so let's think about this. You are completely incentivized. They are just trying to sell your product. And so what they're going to do is they're going to get really creative and they're going to think about the different ways to sell your product and what exactly is unique about the product to sell. And so now you get all of this market research, you're like, oh, it was when they said, use the eyeshadow under your eyes. And that's a cool use case. I dunno. I dunno makeup. But what I'm telling you is there's all of these different ways with a shoe brand that we work with. They came up with catch phrases, Brett, there's catchphrases that the brand now uses. There was a product for with a shoe brand that we work with, a very big, well-known shoe brand. It was a dog, the product, nobody was buying it, absolutely no one. And then the crazy thing is that they from this product ended up going absolutely viral on TikTok selling out completely. Now Sydney Sweeney is representing that product and it's now one of their core products, the ultimate influencer of our day right now. What is

Brett Curry:

This product? Can you mention this product?

Jordan West:

It's shoes. I don't dunno if I can mention the brand, but

Brett Curry:

You can probably search on TikTok for Sydney Sweeney and Shoes and you'll see it. So there you go. Yeah, so check it

Jordan West:

Out and you'll be like, Sydney Sweeney represented this shoe brand. It was incredible. Such a great play. But guys, these shoes were sitting doing nothing. They were dogs, absolutely. But this person came up with a really unique hook for this shoe, and it just ended up going absolutely viral. And again, then they got Sidney Sweeney on. Wow,

Brett Curry:

Crazy, crazy.

Jordan West:

This would've never happened. They never in their wildest dreams would've been able to do that through some kind of focus group, which is why I'm obsessed with talking to the big brands and all the time, I cannot wait to tell people about some of these huge brands that we're working with because it's really, really fun. And you'll be like, oh, this old chap is coming into the social commerce space. Interesting.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, I love it. But talk about real time feedback, unvarnished truth. This is people taking action and voting with their attention span and with their wallet on what they want to pay attention to, what they care about. Focus groups are nice but misleading and kind of old and old approach, so get real time feedback. You can get that on TikTok for sure. So I love that. What are some misconceptions, because I talk at a lot of events as to you, I'm usually talking about YouTube or Amazon, but TikTok comes up a lot. I hear all kinds of wild things sitting over a lunch or dinner table or talking in hallways and stuff, but what are some misconceptions about TikTok shops that we need to bust and clarify?

Jordan West:

The misconception is that any old Amazon brand can come over and sell on TikTok. The biggest misconception that I see with all brands is that they think it's a demand capture channel. It's a demand gen channel. This is why so many agencies don't understand it because they come from Amazon world. You and I have talked about this. A lot of them have been trying to acquire us because they don't understand how to demand gen,

Brett Curry:

Right?

Jordan West:

When you come from direct to consumer, and I have to say when for me, coming from direct to consumer in apparel is, and not cheap apparel is the most difficult thing you can possibly do, right? Totally agree. Coming from there and trying to sell on TikTok shop is like, awesome. This is so easy. So

Brett Curry:

Easy.

Jordan West:

Yeah, you're just generating demand.

Brett Curry:

But

Jordan West:

I think that one of the biggest misconceptions is that it's just easy and that it's just going to work. It's like, no, it takes a long time. We tell people, when people come to us, we're like, are you willing to light 50 K on fire? It might not.

Are you willing to? Now one of your competitors has done pretty well, but you need to be willing to light $50,000 on fire or we can't talk because this is one of those channels. I recently was with the top TikTok shop agencies, the other ones, there was four of us in a room and we were talking and we're like, so how are things going? They're like, well, things are really, really good. And I'm like, well, how good. They're like, well, I would say we're about as good as the average all star baseball players batting average. Awesome. So about 400.

Brett Curry:

So yeah, yeah, three, maybe 400. Yeah, 400 is like Ted Williams type stuff. So

Jordan West:

Just remember that this is a brand new channel that we just don't know. Now what you get out of this channel is phenomenal. I just got off of a workshop that I was presenting on and I was talking about this, and I think that this might be the biggest takeaway that people get from this, Brett, is that that content, even if you light $50,000 on fire, let's just say, right? I'm being hyperbolic here, but let's just say that you light $50,000 on fire and you get back $20,000 in sales or something like that. You still have all of this market research and all of this content now that you can repurpose across other channels. YouTube being one of the main ones. How much inventory is now on shorts? Think about all of this incredible content. I think of TikTok Shop as the content. TikTok shop content particularly is the content that moves across channels. TikTok is a Rubicon, so a Rubicon being a door that you can enter, but you cannot leave. It's a one way door. TikTok content is a Rubicon. It can travel wherever you wanted to travel. You want to travel to Meta?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Jordan West:

Awesome. We're obsessed right now. So one of the things I didn't tell you before at Social Commerce Club, which is the agency that I run, unless they're a huge brand that's working with a performance agency that they just can't get out of the contract, we're actually not taking on anyone that doesn't work with us across channels.

Brett Curry:

Wow. Yeah, I

Jordan West:

Know.

Brett Curry:

Crazy because that's smart. I mean, you've got the greatest opportunity to influence real growth if you do it that way.

Jordan West:

Totally. And all of the brands that are working with us are crushing where they're seeing all of their channels up here. And you and I know this consolidation play in the agency world. The reason why we're doing it is so that we can actually help brands with their entire business.

This is the reason why you and me and people like us are doing this sort of thing because it's so important for all of the areas. And so I picture these creators. First of all, a year from now or two years from now, every single brand is going to have a creator community. And if they don't, they're not going to be around. They're going to have a creator community and they're going to be leveraging that creator community. I tweeted about this yesterday. I had a UGC creator quote me, $450 for one post and $50 a hook. I'm like, no. In the world of TikTok, that will not happen. It just will not happen because TikTok shop, they're just going to do it for free and they're going to probably make five videos. We try it. Social commerce club. We try and get five videos out of every single TikTok shop creator. Interesting. Sorry. Out of every sample we send out, that is our goal. That is one of the big metrics we do that we

Brett Curry:

Run every week. Why is that? So why five pieces, and then what are you doing to ensure that? I love this angle. Okay,

Jordan West:

So let me walk you through the numbers. So we know that we must live in some sort of mathematical, whatever this world is that we live in, but there's weird things that happen with numbers, and the Pareto principle is just one of them. We know that 80 20 works all the time. You can just look at an end. You can continue to go down on 80 20. So the more videos we get, so let's say that we seed to 200 influencers and we get five videos from each of them. We're getting a thousand work at that point. We're getting a thousand videos from them from there, 200 of those videos are going to be pretty good. So 200 of those videos are going to be good. Now take the 80 20 of those 200. So now we're looking at 40 videos of those will probably go viral. The more videos we get, the more chance we have to go viral. That's just how it works.

Brett Curry:

Makes

Jordan West:

Sense. It's just the numbers of what works and

Brett Curry:

Why the PA principle works. The 20 rule is so one out of five might work at all. So if a creator only creates four, they might not have gotten to the one that actually works yet. And so those all four are a bust at that point.

Jordan West:

So the numbers are really important. Putting in the numbers, the 650 podcast episodes, this is where this comes in handy, right? You're like, I'm just going to put in the reps. Most brands will send out a hundred samples and be like, TikTok shop doesn't work. I'm like, you're right. You're right with that attitude. You're absolutely right. That's where I get fatherly.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, exactly. Not with that attitude. It won't. Yeah. So that's amazing. Let's talk about this for a second then. I want to get into some X factors in a minute of what really moves the needle in results. I'm sure it's a numbers game, of course, but what product categories, what product offers, what tends to work well on TikTok and what tends not to work as well on TikTok? What's your experience there?

Jordan West:

So in general, now there are exceptions to this rule. High A OV does not work high, high A OV does not work. Now, mind you, I cannot tell you which brand this is, but we are working with one of the high A OV electronics brand that I think is going to crush their A OV is going to be around 400 bucks, but really fun product that you want to buy on TikTok shop. Now, I've seen Dyson. I wish that we worked at Dyson. It'd be a sweet logo and just very fun to work with because I love their products. I've seen Dyson starting to crush on TikTok shop. Think about how Spencer Dyson are. So there

Brett Curry:

Are exceptions to every rule,

Jordan West:

Exceptions to every rule.

Brett Curry:

Couch, oovs, like AOV is over a hundred, or what are you considering high OV here?

Jordan West:

I would say anything over 200, I wouldn't touch Ninja's. Done really well. So Ninja has sold their creamy, which is round the $200 mark and done a really, really good job. Bunch of the influencers at Social Commerce Club, sorry, creators at Social Commerce Club work for Ninja as well, and have done really, really well. So they're in this multimillions of dollars a month in sales, so it can work, but I wouldn't go there first if I was a big Got it.

Brett Curry:

Totally makes sense.

Jordan West:

Yeah. I would work with TikTok, shop creators to create content. So we do that at Social Commerce Club and be like, Hey, let's not go all in because we have to send these massive samples too. Really big backpack company came to us recently wanting to work with us, and their cost of goods is like a hundred bucks per backpack. And I was like, eh,

Brett Curry:

Tough man.

Jordan West:

I don't want to send that many out because your post rate is only going to be about 80%. So 20% of those aren't even going to post. So that just happens. That's just part of TikTok shop, unfortunately.

Brett Curry:

Yep. Yep. Great. So hi ov, avoid that. Any particular categories or impulse purchases, which that's lower A OV and stuff like that, but what categories work versus don't work, generally speaking?

Jordan West:

So supplements is an interesting one. If you are a supplement brand, you're going to have a hard time working with an agency, because I actually saw recently on the TikTok shop chat, somebody's like, Hey, I've got 20 supplement brands. Don't want to work with them anymore. Anybody want them? Because it's just a grind. It is a grind because let's be honest, 90% of supplements are bs. Right?

Brett Curry:

Right. That's

Jordan West:

True. And so you're

Brett Curry:

Trying to, I take a lot of supplements, but most of them are garbage. Yeah,

Jordan West:

Totally. And so you have to wade through and figure out what is a good supplement? What do I actually want to stand behind? And creators are kind of getting sick of working with supplements. Now, another reason why supplements are so tough is because there's so many guidelines that will get your account shut down if you're a creator and you talk about the supplement. So they're just like, I don't want to touch it. That's why it's getting difficult to sell supplements there. Now, can you Absolutely. Some of the biggest brands out there are supplement brands. Goalie is still one of the top ones, right? They've done an awesome job, but also they sell great stuff, goalie. We all know and trust Goalie already. So there's already that factor. So supplements, I'm sorry, you're just going to have a more difficult time doing that, right? Yeah, you can try. You can try, but it's just going to be a lot more difficult. So just so you are aware,

Brett Curry:

Right? But things like beauty, fashion, maybe food and Bev, some of those categories tend to work well, right?

Jordan West:

Yeah. We have a new beauty brand, fairly well known who came to us. They were doing 6,000 a month. We've gotten them this month they'll probably do 200 K profitably. So again, people are like, oh, those aren't big numbers. It's like, well, actually they'll have 30 million views. Do you know how much in media value that is? Crazy. Amounts insane. And every other

Brett Curry:

Channel is popping. It's low cpm. That's an insane amount of money.

Jordan West:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

Totally.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And you've got now, if you're selling on Amazon or on your own Shopify store or whatever, to buy those 30 million views on YouTube or on Meta or on tv, forget about that. It's a massive, massive budget. Massive.

Jordan West:

Probably had a $30 CPM to buy those views

Brett Curry:

Depending on where you're buying. Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe you get it down into the single digits if you're buying certain YouTube areas or like Amazon DSP or something. But if you're buying premium stuff like YouTube Select or Hulu or Netflix, $30 CPM for sure.

Jordan West:

So people don't get this, Brett, these are premium placements. These are in the feed.

This is all premium inventory and it's organic inventory. The thing that we didn't talk about before was the ability then to take that content use. There's a tool that I like called Funnel that identifies the content. Then you can whitelist that content right in there. So you just ask for whitelisting one click over into meta, right? And then there's awesome. I mean, you'd be able to speak more into whitelisting on YouTube, but there's very simple ways to whitelist on YouTube as well, right? This content, and this is the way of the future, and this is how brands are going to succeed.

Brett Curry:

Totally makes sense. Walk me through some, what are some of the X factors? What are some of the things that need to be true about your brand, about your product? Is it feature driven? Is it something new and novel? Is it something that's just really visual? What are some of the X factors that can help determine whether this is going to be a success or not?

Jordan West:

So that's the crazy thing. You can sell boring products on TikTok shop, right? I made a whole YouTube video on this. Here's how you position boring products, and actually boring products do really well. It's what the creators do with it. It's the little bit of the value that you give to the creators and the little bit of direction that you give to them that really make your product go and it doesn't need products, don't need X factors, they just don't. That's great. I could probably sell a pencil on TikTok shop. I've often thought I'm like, I want to become a TikTok shop creator. Just I can show people, Hey, here's how you do it. Here's how you're going to go about this. Storytelling is a really big one. People who tell really good stories, they crush.

Brett Curry:

Nobody thinks they're selling, telling that story that lands it's benefit oriented, and then yeah, it can be something simple every day and can still work. So it's amazing. So

Jordan West:

No X factor. I hate to tell everyone the X factor is your creativity.

Brett Curry:

Good. That's good. Yep, yep. So your creativity, the creative's, creativity, creativity, totally makes sense. So walk us through high level. What does the TikTok Shops playbook look like? So how am I starting, how am I hopefully not completely burning my 50 K or whatever, but how am I starting? How am I finding influencers? How am I seeding products? How am I testing, iterating, learning, and then how am I eventually getting to viral success?

Jordan West:

Totally. So let me walk through the zero to a hundred K playbook. There's three phases to this playbook, okay? So number one is make sure your products are set up correctly, right? This is a massive part of this. So make sure that your products are set up very similar to Amazon, where you want to make sure that you have the ability to use to sample. So if you were using a bundle, sorry, you're trying to sell a bundle, which I highly recommend that you do, don't just try and sell $15 products. Try and bundle those products. You don't want to send your bundle out to them. You want to the creator, you want to send out one product to the creator, and then they talk about your bundle. So making sure that stuff like that is set up correctly. Making sure that your listings, your TikTok shop listings are pretty and are going to convert. So there's a bunch of stuff. I won't get into all of that, but making sure that all of that is set up correctly is really important. Then using, I do not recommend this movement out there right now of people manually reaching out to people. I'm like, there's no value in manually reaching out, use a bot.

So I recommend reacher. I've been an advisor to theirs for quite a while. They're awesome guys. They're really building some cool stuff. I recommend using them, or Yuca is the other one that's out there. Reach out to as many influencers as you or creators as you possibly can. So again, two different things. Creators, influencers.

Brett Curry:

So you're reaching out to them, offering them product, seeing if they're interested. What does that outreach message look like?

Jordan West:

Totally. So sorry, before that, one thing that I want to make sure that people understand is that you can syndicate your reviews from D two C over into TikTok shop. Really important that you do that, because what you're trying to do at first is build up all of this social proof that you don't have yet. So if people know, oh, good, there's 7,000 reviews that they have from D two C that you move over there with. Awesome. Judge Me is a really good one. It's like 15 bucks a month. It actually will scrape all of your Amazon reviews and move them over again. Nice. I did not give you that advice. I think it's somewhere grayish in terms of service. Just know that you can do that

Brett Curry:

One, but you need the social proof there for the

Jordan West:

Influencers and for the shoppers. Exactly. So the biggest thing that you're actually trying to do is you're trying to sell to the influencers at first. So what you're trying to do is be like, Hey, by the way, we've sold X number of millions of these over on Amazon, over on Shopify. We're new to TikTok shop. We would love you. Look like you've got some great content and that you can really help us out here. We'd love to offer you X percentage to be able to do this. Now, be as generous as possible at first. So offer whatever your even is without running ads. See what that is and offer that. If you can offer 40% commission at first, do it like, Hey, look, I'm going to offer you 40% commission, and if your videos also let them know if your videos do well. We're going to put ad spend behind your videos right now. So greater

Brett Curry:

Visibility, greater audience growth for you potentially as an influencer. Is that kind of part of the benefit there or the pitch to them?

Jordan West:

Totally. And get in on the ground floor, all of the things, all the messages that you would use in multi-level marketing, just use here. Get on the ground floor, get your friends involved. I

Brett Curry:

Love that. Love that. It's hilarious.

Jordan West:

So one of the things that you're going to want to do though at first is make sure that you have two different levels of commission set up. One for organic and one for ads. Really important that you do that. You do not want to also give them 40%

Brett Curry:

On ads because ads, you're funding a lot of that reach. So that needs to be a lower commission.

Jordan West:

Totally. And as more and more creators get on there and more people create content on TikTok, it's just harder and harder to go viral. And so you'll want to spend a decent amount of money on ads. Now when you get to a certain point, there's a screenshot that I shared this morning. It was like $3,500 worth of ads spend for like $55,000 worth of sales. That's crazy. Crazy. That is what happens when you start getting this flywheel going. That's like a 14 return on ad spend. Just wild numbers doesn't

Brett Curry:

Anywhere else.

Jordan West:

They're not crazy numbers, but it takes a while. You need to be patient. These things take a while to be able to happen and snowball. So just know that this takes a while. So that's all part of phase one is getting those Got it messages out there. You want to be on it. So as soon as they say yes and make sure at this point too, I don't know how detailed we can exactly get here, but I'll try and get into some of the gotchas. So one of them is making sure that you don't auto approve samples. Make sure you want to, when have a cast a pretty wide net, there's going to be people that say yes that you don't want, right? Right. Cast a wide net. See who wants to take the sample and then approve them from there, right? But don't be too picky. Definitely not too picky at first. I don't ever go after any creators that don't already have GMV. They have to have GMV. They have to have produced some revenue for somebody before I'm going to go after. Makes sense?

Brett Curry:

Yep. Yep.

Jordan West:

So that's the first phase.

Brett Curry:

That's all phase one.

Jordan West:

So yeah, what's phase two? So phase two now is seeing what works and pouring gasoline on that fire. So now you've gotten to your first thousand sales in phase one, and now you're looking and seeing, okay, who do I now want to recruit for? A couple different things. One is brand owned content is awesome, and what you can do is you can actually work with some of these creators, give them a retainer and a percentage of sales to start posting on your brand handle. So that's one that TikTok is going to be pushing a lot in Q3 this year. From what we've heard, they're going to be pushing brand owned handles a lot, and so this is where you can start to hire a creator to do that for you, for your brand handle. So start identifying some of those creators now. Start putting money behind creators that are doing well and let them know.

By the way, if you do 10 videos for me, I'm going to put minimum a thousand dollars behind your ads, behind your content. That's where you start to get this flywheel going. Start to then take those people and put them into a brand owned community. Like I said, every single brand is going to have a brand owned community in the future. We have a massive, really high GMV creator community at Social Commerce Club that we have curated and is incredible. Start to take those people and put them into your own brand community. You can use Discord, you can use WhatsApp. I like WhatsApp personally. I think it's the millennial in me that likes it. Discords a great option as well though. It's just the engagement on Discord isn't quite as high to be totally honest. People have a million discord. Discord

Brett Curry:

Is kind of messy. I don't really enjoy being on there personally,

Jordan West:

But it's like being in another Slack group. You're just like, oh, another Slack group. I just can't keep up with all these. Oh my gosh, yes. So this is something to do at this point, and then this is where you're going to identify. So at first, I forgot to mention in phase one, you're going to pick your top three skews. After this, your top three products after this is where you're going to start to pour gasoline on one of them. Go after one of them as your Heroku, right? You'll find out which one works really well, and then you're going to go after that. This is where you're going to start scaling,

Brett Curry:

But I like that versus just testing one because you may be wrong. That may not be the one that takes off or catches fire on TikTok. So try three, then zero in on your hero product.

Jordan West:

Totally. And if you're a huge brand listening to this, try 10. Just try again. Try some of your products that might not be working because people might not be searching them on Amazon or caring about them on D two C. Just try. The worst thing that you can do is you sent out a bunch of products that weren't moving anyway, and you got some good content out of them. This is where you're going to want to start to build your relationships, and you're going to want to start to ask about whitelisting across other platforms. So again, this is why I am so obsessed with this where I'm like, no, you're not brands. You may not work with us on TikTok shop unless we have the whole thing, because otherwise you are wasting all of this incredible content. That's the only content you should be using is all of this creator content listed. The studies

Brett Curry:

Are you're only get a fraction of the benefit. You're creating all this content. You got all this gold that's being created here, you got to redeploy it or else you're not getting max value.

Jordan West:

Well, meta just put out a study, and there's actually five of them, five different case studies. The sort of average across the case studies is that whitelisted ads, the CPA is 50% lower than brand ads would you not do? Why would you not stop literally everything you're doing right now and go whitelist every single ad that you have because people buy from other people that they like know and trust, not from your brand. Nobody wants to buy from your brand. Maybe they do, but they would much rather buy from somebody they like know and trust and a third party that is talking about Totally. It's the same principle in everything. This is the way that SEO works, right? This is why still the number one signal in SEO is backlinks because

Brett Curry:

It backlinks, even when Google denies it, it's still backlink. It is a vote of confidence from the rest of the internet right there. Social

Jordan West:

Proof, social proof. There's no better way than for you to do that. That's why people like Brett and I go on each other's podcast to say, Brett, you are an awesome guy. I just gave you some of my social proof over and I'm hoping you're going to do the same, Brett.

Brett Curry:

Yes, exactly, exactly. But it makes a huge, huge difference. So I love that. Okay, I think we're ready for phase three then.

Jordan West:

So phase three is where we get a lot of brands into, which is really fun. So this is a hundred thousand dollars a month plus. This is where you are going to now go out to an even bigger creator community. So this is where I like to start sending out. So if you had a hundred thousand dollars a month, this is where I want you to start sending out 500 samples a month to only the highest SGMV creators because they can see how much money people have done on your particular skew, right? Or on your particular product id. PID is as people internally always call it, I'm like, can you just call it product id? I hate the word pi. Pi, but PID is also where you house multiple. You can house multiple skews in a pi. So anyway, there's all that boring. You can cut that part out.

Brett Curry:

No, let's leave it in. The occasional touch of nerdiness is great. We want that.

Jordan West:

So this is where you're going to start to go after a lot of high GMV creators and then pour gasoline on the other ones. So now throughout all of this, we're using different kinds of ads throughout. So at first, during phase one, we're using product shopping ads and video shopping ads. Product shopping ads are essentially Google Shopping ads. So if you think about them like that, they happen on search. Again, social search is massive. So they're happening over there and we're just leaving it wide open. We're doing video shopping ads, which are basically spark ads, whitelisted ads from these creators. We're just getting permission to use them and we're doing those in phase one. In phase two, we're going to start to set some target return on ad spends and see how much better we can get as far as the amount of efficacy that we're getting from those ads during phase one.

Don't care. Just don't care. You're just trying to get to a certain level where other creators want to work with you. During phase three is where we're going to transition into GM v max and GMV Max is like, it's their AI on steroids that's working for you. Once you get to that certain level into phase three, that's where I recommend going into GMV Max. Now, the problem is you do not choose where your ad spend goes with GMV Max. So I recommend using that at the end. It's like a very automated system. This is where during phase three, you now want to start identifying other products that could potentially work and start seeding those products as well. Interesting. That's the really high level playbook for you.

Brett Curry:

So I love that. It was really a very clear breakdown, and it'll be all be in the show notes. We can see it, but it sounds like ads are actually a pretty important component of this, right? Did you ever see someone excel with TikTok shops without the ad component?

Jordan West:

Nope. Nope, nope. Ads have to be a

Brett Curry:

Part of that You use at every stage, or mostly like stage two and stage three or phase two and three.

Jordan West:

No ads need to be a part of it the entire way through the entire time, the entire way through. Unfortunately, you just cannot just send product out and hope it goes viral.

Brett Curry:

Totally makes sense. Totally makes sense. Love it.

Jordan West:

Once you pour ads onto it, creators want to work with you, you're going to get into the algorithm a lot more, and it's just the way that it works. It's unfortunate too, for organic YouTube, it's the same thing, right? There was a heyday and maybe, and also if you hit the algo absolutely perfectly right on organic YouTube, you can do this. For the most part, you need to promote that with ads to get it into the algo and start working for you. It's just the way, I hate that that's the game, but that's just the game.

Brett Curry:

It's the game. It's the game. Totally makes sense there. Totally. It makes sense. Well, let's step back a little bit. First of all, this has been fantastic. Thank you, Jordan. We're about out of time, but I want to talk about one final topic here as we wrap up, or one big topic and then a subset. So social commerce, you and I are both very bullish on this, obviously. I think we're really in the early innings. It's going to take off. I think meta is going to solve it. I think Google's going to solve it, or YouTube rather, with YouTube affiliate and YouTube shopping and things like that. But what are you guys doing right now with YouTube? So I know your focus is mostly TikTok shops, but you guys are doing some cool stuff on YouTube as well. So tell us about that.

Jordan West:

Totally. So we're beta testing something right now with a few really big brands that I, I'm so excited about, and these are creator ad reads, right? Within YouTube videos. The big issue as everybody knows is trying to actually get ahold of these creators and then negotiate with them. So we found an awesome partner that we are working with right now that does this using ai, and also there's all of the brand safety issues, all of this kind of stuff. We are seeing some insane, insane results with this right now. Nothing. You guys have seen

Brett Curry:

You paying them those creators on a CPM basis. So you're using this AI tool to find them. Then you're paying them on a CCP M basis or commission

Jordan West:

Them on the CCP M basis. Exactly. And the AI is taking care of all of the measurement and everything in the background. Wow. The cool thing is, is that you're actually only paying for the first 30 days of CPMs. Interesting. And YouTube gets better over time or the right videos. Do the right videos get better over time? They get the long tail on those videos, massive long tail on those videos. So it ends up being, so let's say you're paying like a $50 CPM at first, your CCP M ends up usually coming in at about half of that. The actual effect of ccpm plus, these are incredible reads, and they don't show up as ads. They're not skippable, right?

Brett Curry:

Yep. It's in the content, the creator, it's Mr. Beast. I don't know that he does that, but other creators being like, Hey, this is the thing I use and this is why I love it, Ridge wallets. It's how Ridge Wallets really initially got their hockey sick growth, and now they do a ton of stuff, biggest spinner on meta stuff like that, but they did live Nvidia reads with influencers or with creators on YouTube. That's kind how they took off.

Jordan West:

So to me, this is our foray at Social Commerce Club into YouTube until the YouTube, until YouTube figures out how to replicate what TikTok Shop has done. I just want to talk to that. They're working on it. They're working on it. I think they'll get there, but they're not there yet. For sure. I'll tell you why I'm scared about it is because their platform, YouTube's platform is not built for virality in the same way that TikTok is. We have a TikTok shop creator that has less than 10,000 followers who produce $250,000 of GMV last month, less than 10,000 followers. That's not the way that YouTube works, right?

Brett Curry:

Think the algorithm not that aggressive. You don't go that viral that quick. Yeah.

Jordan West:

Last time I checked, you have to have 10,000 followers to even be in the affiliate program versus TikTok. It's like anyone can go be a TikTok shop creator, and it's incredible the amount of people that are making careers out of this and literally paying their house off. It's wild. The people that are doing this YouTube has not yet figured that out, and I have talked to 'em many times and told them, here's your issues that you're having right now, is that not anyone can just go on there and do this. Right? And maybe that's on purpose. I don't know. I don't know. I think that it's going to be a really cool channel. I'm bullish on anything Google does. They do, right? So I

Brett Curry:

Think they'll figure it out. I mean, the creators are there, the viewers are there, the watch time is there, all the components are there. So unless YouTube just completely screws it up again and again, I think they're going to eventually nail it. But you're right, and content doesn't go viral as quickly. Back to my 17-year-old who I'm trying to convince to spend less time on TikTok, she's like, YouTube shorts. I think this is going to sound real professional, but I think the work she used was it's booty cheeks compared to TikTok.

Jordan West:

I've never heard that term before.

Brett Curry:

Isn't it funny? She's like, okay, that's a weird way to say it, but okay. She's like, no, TikTok learns you so quickly and the content is all really valuable and what I want, I don't get the same thing on YouTube shorts is what she said. So I think YouTube's got some things to figure out there, but I am bullish on it. I think they will figure it out. And so man, I love what you're doing within Nvidia live reads. Is that something you can share that source? So that's probably a little bit proprietary there, the AI tool and what you're using to manage all of that.

Jordan West:

As of right now, I'm going to keep that one between. Totally get it totally between you and me. So the interesting thing actually, we were actually, I was doing some sponsorship kind of stuff with them and I realized, and they came to me and they said, Hey, we have all these giant brands coming in and we thought that this tool could be used without an agency and actually it needs an agency.

Brett Curry:

Interesting, interesting.

Jordan West:

It needs somebody monitoring it and the AI cannot yet say approve these things and the brand safety is really important. So there has to be someone in the middle. So it's either a full-time person on your team or an agency. Right. Doing it. Totally makes

Brett Curry:

Sense. Totally

Jordan West:

Makes sense.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. Well Jordan, this has been fantastic, man. I absolutely love what you guys are up to. Love watching your journey, love doing the podcast swap with you. Super fun. And so if there are brands out there that are like, man, I need to get on this TikTok shop train, but I need someone who knows what they're doing to guide me through those three phases, how can they get in touch with you? Who should get in touch with you? And then how else can we get our daily fill of Jordan?

Jordan West:

Let's go to LinkedIn. I am very active on LinkedIn and Twitter, so you can go there and just search for Jordan West marketer over there. But we work with two levels of brands. So we work with the bigger brands on a full service sort of basis. You can go to social commerce club.com. That's the classic agency offering. There's something actually recently that we just launched right now that is in beta. It's called Tick TikTok Shop os Plus. The idea is that we actually walk smaller brands through who should not be hiring an agency who need to be doing this stuff on their own, right? These are brands under 5 million ish generally, and this walks them through their first six months of scaling from zero to a hundred thousand. We meet every single week. You can tap into all the resources that we have as an agency, but it's more of a done with you type of program. We are like, every single brand we talk to about this is like yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Because they want to learn the muscle. They just don't have the strategy or the expertise to do it, and we do.

So very

Brett Curry:

Excited about that.

Jordan West:

Love that,

Brett Curry:

Love that. And what's that called One more time? And that's all@socialcommerceclub.com.

Jordan West:

That's all@socialcommerceclub.com. That's called TikTok

Brett Curry:

Shop OS Plus. Amazing. Love it. Jordan, Wes, ladies and gentlemen, Jordan, really appreciate it, man. Ton of fun. Can't wait for round three or four, whatever it's going to be when we do this again.

Jordan West:

Absolutely. We not nearly as much time in between this time, Brett. Okay.

Brett Curry:

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Let's make it a regular segment. That's what we got to do. Love it. Awesome brother so much, Brett. Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? And if you've not done so, we'd love that review on iTunes. Makes my day, helps other people find the pod. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

What does it take to build a skincare brand that not only survives but thrives for over two decades in one of the most competitive markets? In this powerful episode, Stefan Kalu, CEO and owner of Dr. Brandt Skincare, shares the remarkable journey of how a dermatologist's vision became a $100M+ beauty empire that pioneered the "doctor skincare" category. From surviving the tragic loss of their founder to navigating COVID-19 and a complete brand revamp, Stefan reveals the strategies, mindset, and bold decisions that kept Dr. Brandt at the forefront of innovation while staying true to their core mission: "Take the doctor home with you."

Key Topics & Insights:

• The Power of Product Positioning - How Dr. Brandt created an entirely new category by bridging clinical authority with accessible pricing, and why their "needles no more" philosophy resonates with customers 25 years later
• Surviving Without Your Founder - Stefan's incredible story of becoming CEO, then owner after Dr. Brandt's unexpected passing, plus how they evolved from a dermatology brand to "integrative dermatology" without losing their identity
• Retention & Loyalty Mastery - Inside their $49 Glowgetters membership program and how they've built products so effective that customers become "addicted" (their microdermabrasion hasn't changed formulas in 25 years!)
• R&D Innovation Secrets - How they work with University of Miami and their "Dr. B Experts" network across dermatology, nutrition, and psychology to create breakthrough products (including a micro-needle mimicking cream launching soon)
• Digital Transformation Under Pressure - How COVID forced them to pivot from 35% to 65% digital sales while executing a complete brand revamp, and their strategies for competing in today's content-saturated landscape
• Purpose-Driven Business - Why Stefan created the Dr. Brandt Foundation focusing on mental health and self-care before it was mainstream, turning tragedy into meaningful impact

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction to Dr. Brandt Skincare

(03:27) The Unique Aspect of Dr. Brandt Products

(07:10) Notes on Product Positioning 

(09:31) Balancing Clinical Authority and Accesibility

(12:21) Longevity and Staying Relevant in the Skincare Market

(16:16) Strategies for Customer Retention and Loyalty Programs

(21:21) Innovative Research and Development Practices

(26:55) Attracting Customers & Storytelling in Marketing

(30:59) Stephane’s Journey to CEO

(36:14) Mental Health Advocacy and The Dr. Brandt Foundation

‍

Stephane Colleu:

It's so important when you bring new people, they need to understand the history of the brand. They need to understand the DNA and what's really the value. I would say value of the company, yes, but the value can evolve, depend on the years, but the value of the brand.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG commerce. And today we are exploring the longevity, the growth, the innovation, the storytelling of Dr Brandt skincare. I love this brand, I love this category. You are going to learn a lot as we explore the story of how this brand has stayed relevant offline, online for multiple decades. And so lots to unpack. We're going to talk about product positioning. We're going to talk about r and d, we're going to talk about storytelling. We're going to talk about all kinds of ways to connect with consumers and how to increase loyalty and retention. It's going to be a fun conversation and so I'm delighted to welcome to the show, the CEO Dr. Stephane Colleu. And he's got an amazing story, just a charming individual. I can't wait to dive in. And so with that, Stephane, welcome to the show and how's it going?

Stephane Colleu:

Thank you Brett. Thank you for having me. I'm very delighted to be there and to be able to speak about our story and our journey and especially mine with Dr Brandt because I've been with the company for 23 years.

Brett Curry:

23 years. It's amazing. And yeah, you guys have stayed relevant for so long. I'm a huge fan. I've loved the skincare, haircare, personal care. I've loved those categories from a marketing and business standpoint. And so excited to unpack your story. But tell us, for those that don't know who Dr. Brandt is or what products you sell, give us a little bit of the background. What do you guys sell? What makes you unique?

Stephane Colleu:

Absolutely. So first and foremost, we've been one of the pioneering doctors skincare line in the beauty industry. It was early in 2000 that we can see the first doctor skincare line. And we were one of them. And it was very innovative at this time because for people who maybe don't remember, it was very basic. You used to be the mass and the prestige and that's it. And then suddenly there was this doctor skincare line that came out that provide very efficient with instant efficient products. And also the price point was quite a very good starting point for the consumer side. And this is where we start having our own success. And lucky enough, we have been scouting at this time early by Sephora that gave us a huge visibility and being distributed with Seron. And that's where the story started on the commercial side because initially the concept started with Dr. Brandts himself, with his own medical office, 1996, he starts selling his own products and knowing that he didn't want to recommend certain product, that he don't feel he was efficient enough. And then when he saw the potential, this is why he created a concept which was very revolutionary. Take the doctor on with you. So very simple. What I do, I'm trying to mimic what I do the best in dermatological procedures and take the doctor home with you, with Dr. Brian. It was the beginning of the advent for early in 2000.

Brett Curry:

I love that. Take the doctor home with you. We'll unpack that a little bit, but do your products, you kind have like a Botox alternative or compliment, microderm abrasion some of those things. Can you describe the products just a little bit and what makes them unique?

Stephane Colleu:

Yeah, really, and I think I should maybe highlight this point. We're still a private company today, which is pretty exceptional. Meaning that we, what we want, and I think in Amir for that to protect that we try to sell products that we believe in that truly deliver the promise inside of products. And Dr. Ba was so visionary, it became one of the most well-known dermatologists in the world. Why? Because it was the first dermatologist to use as anesthetic side, the Botox of the fillers. And he became the masters and started being part of the board of the biggest pharmaceutical company and tried to develop new ingredients and laser, new technique of injection. And he became the king of Botox. Having big celebrities now become Evangela. Everyone used to go in his medical office. We used to have two medical office, one in Miami and one in New York.

But also we used to do r and d with the biggest pharmaceutical company, which was for me very interesting because we were working on potentially new laser new ingredients, new delivery system that will be approved by the FDA, which is the food drug administration. And just because of that, we can see the future potentially before even the big corporation. And it was very inspiring for me and the team to dig in and to find news, idea new concepts, new innovation in terms of products. And Dr. Brian, like to get back to your question, was the first kit care line to bring your Microderm vision. And if you have told anyone early in 2000, you would do your own Microderm vision in your own bathroom, people would tell you it's crazy. No

Brett Curry:

Way. Yeah.

Stephane Colleu:

And Dr. Ben, I think what he was very smart and wise what he did, he used the same pharmaceutical, great crystal using his own medical office and these products became a masterpiece, became an iconic bestsellers. And as of today, this product is still sold after 25 years without changing any ingredients. That's amazing because they work and people is addicted because when a product course why you would change. And that was the beginning of the venture having the micro, and of course Dr. Van was one of the first in Caroline to invent Botox like products. Obviously it was the one we inject the most Botox in the world, but we wanted to create something for people first cannot afford an ejection, but we love to minimize expression lines. So also we try to be very truthful with our promise. We're not saying that every wrinkles will disappear, especially their wrinkle cannot disappear.

But expression lines, we have the technology in the delivery system to minimize expression lines. And that's why we created the release was our first Botox. And then a lot of Botox like products has been duplicated in the market, but we were one of the first to provide this new innovation and to be the trend, et cetera, in terms of Botox like products. And it came from Dr Brandt and that was the proper of the Brandt. Take the doctor home with you so you can have your own Botox like products that could be a continuity of what you do in a medical office and use that to minimize expression lines during the day. And for people who doesn't like the needles does the wrong process or cannot afford it, you can use a similar products that give you also the kind of similar effects. And that's why we try to provide to our customers, our patients and to the skincare market.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good man. And one of the things that I'm a firm believer in as a long time marketer, a long time entrepreneur is that product positioning and brand positioning means so much. And my favorite definition of positioning is what a product does and who it's for. But really bringing that to life in a visual way, a way you can really hold onto. And so this idea of bringing the doctor home with you, it's awesome, right? It communicates, hey, these aren't just standard results. This is not just your over the counter moisturizer, this is doctor grade stuff, the stuff you'd have to pay big money for in a doctor's office, but you get to do it at home. And so how do you guys think about positioning? How do you think about that line and how that influences other products? How do you guys view product positioning?

Stephane Colleu:

It's a good point. So when the story started, it was with a uniqueness to differentiate ourself and obviously it was to create this line, which is ours called we used to do today. It's called Needles No More, which is truly instant gratification products,

Brett Curry:

Needles no more. I love that. Yeah,

Stephane Colleu:

That's truly inspired directly from the medical office. That's why we have a Botox, we have a micro patient, we have an oxygenation, we got also no more baggage, which is poof and minimize inflammation around your high products instantly. And these products can be combined with your current skincare regimen even if you don't use DR Brandt's products for the rest of your portfolio. But as we have been evolving as a skincare line obviously was very important to start to create some collection that respond to the needs of oily and combination skin. That's why we got the al line that's focusing on pores for all in combination skin. We got also another line called Bright this way that is more focused on pigmentation and also brightness and uneven skin textures. We got also another one, it's called DTA dare two edge, which is more for mature. We give improved collagen elasticity and firmness the skin. So we got a variety of collection, but also we decided for a good purpose not to have 6,100 skew. We barely have 29 skew

Brett Curry:

Based

Stephane Colleu:

On different collection. So it's still very concise and for the purpose just to really focus on a very strong products assortments that allow us to target the right message with the right audience and not to overwhelm ourself and also the customer

Brett Curry:

Totally makes sense. And it's all about all of those products fit that line of bringing the doctor home with you and so that they all fit. And one thing, I know you guys talk about the tension between balancing clinical authority. So this is scientifically backed stuff, but also being accessible, right? Because we kind of think clinical authority, very expensive, very high price stuff, it's Beverly Hills, is Miami, something like that. So this clinical authority but with an affordable price tag. So how do you keep that tension? How do you view that tension?

Stephane Colleu:

It's a very good value point because obviously when Dr. Boy was there, Dr. Boyn had the philosophy that I'm trying to respect every day since we lost our bill, beloved Dr. Fred brand since April, 2015. And his message was the following one, I think a product should not exceed over than 1 50, 200. And why? Because if you can spend more, you can come to see me and I can give you a laser or whatever and I can fix exactly what you do. Because being more than 23 years on a dermatological field, I'm telling you I'm pretty amazed what the technology and how we've been evolving. Meaning that today if of course you see the right doctors, I can mostly solve any skin disorders or what you're facing because we truly have anything that can improve your skin type or the disorders that you're facing. So if you need to find a complimentary products, because I think obviously it's very important, you need to have your skincare regimen and this is what Dr.

We believe it's the same thing if you go to the dentist, you want to whitening your teeth. Yeah, you can whiten my teeth and I can pay for that, but if I don't clean my teeth day and night, I'm not going to do something very healthy for myself. It's the same thing for the skin. And because of that, we establish a price point that us today, if you look on our website, our price won't go from $35 until one 50. And sometimes our margin could be lower because obviously the DNA of this brand is to provide a very good formula. And I think if we have something that we truly achieve over this year is to have a very good reputation about our quality of other the products. And sometimes we spending little bit too much on a formulation that probably anyone would do it from the business side. But that's our way also to differentiate and that's what we believe as long as we afford, we're still pushing into this direction despite some time might not take a lot of sense if you want to get the best of the margin, but that's not our philosophy and we're trying to keep it like this. It always been since day one and I'm so happy we can still doing that after 25 years.

Brett Curry:

I love that. And the price point resonates obviously with consumers and your focus on not profit maximization, although nothing wrong with that obviously, but you really want to deliver a great product and delight customers. And so let's talk about the longevity for a minute. So been around for 25 years, even longer if you consider Dr. Brandt's clinic starting in 1996. But it's just hard. It's hard to stay relevant. Bands usually only popular for a few years. Products go out of style. What has been the key to your longevity and how do you stay relevant year after year, decade after decade?

Stephane Colleu:

This is a very good question and I'm going to try to answer from my own perspective and getting the chance being involved with this brand for now 23 years. I would say first people, I think if you're lucky enough to have people who have the passion and make it pause here, passion could be good and bad on a daily basis, trust me, managing people. But truly speaking, based on all these years that I face, when you have people and you're surrounding people with passion when you need them the most, when there's the most challenging time, you better to be surrounding with people who are passionate and they really believe on everything they do every day. So I think one of the reasons that we've been able to do it's to have this quality of people around this brand. The second aspect, I think after it's how you entertain and you remain truthful with the brand DNA and the identity of the brand.

And for me it's so important when you bring new people, they need to understand the history of the brand, they need to understand the DNA and what's really the value, I would say value of the company, yes, but the value can evolve depending on the years, but the value of the brand and this needs to be very well explained and I learned that. And believe it or not, I was very amazed about Esella order, Esella order. Every time I heard someone speaking about Esella order, they always try to remind themself what Este Lauder should have done if she would sit on my chair. And since I heard that it was 15 years ago, I said, wow, everyone should think like that. What Dr. Ben would think, because Dr. Ben was innovative, Dr. Ben was very bold. Dr. Ben was very cosmetic in a very unique way in so many way a sense of humor who was very known for and all this characteristic needs to be maintain. If you want to make sure the brand can resist on any challenges, you need to remain truthful with ourself, your identity and everything else. And then if I can say the third one, we have been, I would say lucky to be scouted by Sephora. Sephora has been one of the major retailers we're sitting in Alta, well

Brett Curry:

Totally, those two are the top retailers really, right?

Stephane Colleu:

But yes, they sell top on the prestige markets here they are. Otherwise you have Walmart and CVS, which is more the mass, but it's not the case anymore since the COVID happened. But just to give you also some insights working with Phora, you have to do a market week every quarter and every quarter you have to defend yourself. Whatcha going to launch in new innovation. And we were a private owned company and we were not the first year to be launched. So every quarter to do that for more than two decades has been exhausting but also very rewarding as well because one of the reason to answer to your question actually believe getting every quarter and to reinvent yourself, making sure you get the best of the best as being able to keep us in our, despite challenging time and having a high competition and such a congested market environment, it help us to maintain the level of high expectation that we should be able to deliver if we want to be lucky to still sell through all these big retailers channels that we have been selling our brand. Now things change lately with the digital, but getting back to your question, I think for 20 years, having every quarter to have a market tweak when you need to defend, if you go into be able to have co-eds or marketing or support from your own main chain of distribution was a challenge. And I think he helped us also to give our best every day, every year, every quarter.

Brett Curry:

So good. Yeah, there's no free rides. It's not one of those things where once you're in, you're in, you've got a constantly show that you can deliver, that the customer wants your product, that it's innovative, that it's good, all those things. And so again, kudos to you guys for being so relevant for so long. I know part of that goes back to retention of individual customers. So that's something you guys have excelled at getting a customer, retaining them, you've got loyalty programs and I know the Glow getters membership is super interesting to me. So talk a little bit about that. How do you guys view customer retention and loyalty programs and what have you done to increase the LTV and to get customers to stick for longer?

Stephane Colleu:

So it means first you need to understand better how you talk to them. And obviously today with digital, the beauty of it, you can segment and get a better understanding which one you would like to talk with based on what you have to offer or which kind of products you think you'll like to address that fit exactly with the kind of profile. So the beauty of the digital today, you get the data and the data allow you to be more specific and more driven in a way you want to speak and whatever you would like to speak about the products or what will be the offers. So that's not an easy exercise that you need to master. The more you master that, more you please and more you entertain a relationship. On our side, we're doing that today, but still we have a lot of space for, because I want to customize, I want to personalize more and more and this is what the doctor Skin Caroline should do, being able to personalize everything we could offer outside the product itself.

Because today you're talking about resilience, I don't want to jump to get back to the first initial products, but the market has been shifting a lot and to answer to new expectation from the customers and from the retailers, we decided to revamp the brand during the COVID, which was a very bold move. And we did that because we know that was the only way to answer to the new expectation from the consumer and the retailers. So getting back to your question, being more digital driven, allow us to segments, bringing some program, getting the loyalty program is one of them, the getters, it's something we want to speak with them because it's a kind of subscription program. And the subscription is very interesting also because people is willing to pay to get obviously a better offer on the long term, but give us the ability now to speak in a very different way than I would say the loyalty program or the current Sierra meeting. So all of that is a great way. Now what you do have also it's when you work with retailers, they do have this database, but unfortunately they're not access to the brand. So it's a question of negotiation. When you can get special VIB, which is the special people who spend the most in Sephora, you can also be part of this kind of program that allows us to have a different way to tackle the communication with this kind of customers.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, man, that's so good. Can you unpack the Glow getters membership? What does that cost roughly? I know that's something that could be changing over time, but how does that work and then how do you get more people to take advantage of that?

Stephane Colleu:

So you pay $49 and you are part of the program of glow getters and it give you a very good way to have a discount of the products itself. So then you can replenish yourself with, I would say a better offer. And at the same time you get direct communication from the brand that allow you to have access or different events or different package of being aware and having a products before anyone else. All these kind of advantages that we try to build that give you something very special and very unique that no one else can have access. That's the purpose of the locators.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. And then how are you promoting that and then how are you increasing the take rate of the membership?

Stephane Colleu:

So still how we do that, obviously it's to use pay media, pay media to target audiences that we do it. And that's what we do with our agency to target the kind of profile. And sometime what I like the most me is to convert. To convert people already there on data and to convince them to the Gators. That's quite not an easy task to do it, but that's where we're trying to do and to execute because for me it's very valuable when you have a gloated set and it can increase this

Brett Curry:

Community. Yeah, totally makes sense. And I know you made a comment in the beginning that hey, if I'm using a Microderm abrasion product or I'm using this Botox like product and it works, why would I ever stop using it? And you're not constantly jacking up the price, you're still saying within that range Dr. Brant envisioned the products to be in. And so I know that's a big part of customer retention is it's a product that works and it's priced well. And so that makes a ton of sense. How do you then view product r and d? Because you've done a great job of defining your product position, staying true to that as you've launched in new lines, you got products that just absolutely work. How do you view r and d?

Stephane Colleu:

So the r and d, for us, it's definitely being innovative because this is what we've been known for and for that we need to master this piece. So how we do that, there's many way to do it internally, we have a process, obviously first 25 years of expertise that give you a lot of insight that you can use. The second one is we're working directly with the University of Miami since Dr. Brandt is not involved in the brand. And we also working with, we call the Dr B experts. This is a group of experts that we agreed to work with and maybe I should do a step back for the audience to make sure they understand the full journey of the DR Skincare. It could be

Brett Curry:

Great. We love that. We'd love that

Stephane Colleu:

Because we Dr. KinCare for the people who joined the show for 25 years and we were one of the first p Dr. Skin Caroline. And what happened is 2015 tragically we lost our bill, beloved Dr. Frederick Brandts in April, 2015. And it was quite difficult. Imagine a brand that is private owned that depending on his name, and that was obviously the visionary, the leader, and it was quite a difficult way to think how we pursue the best way. We'll have to probably to replace him with another doctors. But as I explained earlier, this guy was a genius, was very unique in so many way. And I don't think you can replace easily a person like this. And at the same time, I know this is what I learned with Dr Brandt, you need to challenge the status quo. And I saw already the holistic wellness approach that was studied on the food industry and also on the dermatological fields.

And this is what I decided that to pursue. And he was part of the philosophy of Dr. Biden already because he always explain your skin, you need to take care of the inside and the how you look good, you feel good and you feel good, you look good, very easy. But he works for everyone at the end of the day. So when we did that, we decided to become more than a dermatologist, Carolina and we call doctor brand. And today if you see our tagline is called Integrative of dermatology and integr of dermatology. For people who does know dermatology, it's a branch medicine that would take care and target skin disorders. And integrative is the tendency to unify separate things. And what that means, it's we're going to combine non-conventional therapy and I think it brings all the different fields of medicine. So today as we're getting back, to get back to your question on NPD, we're taking our inspiration for dermatology but for nutrition, for biology, for psychology, dermatology, and also we have a nonprofit organization focusing on mental health and self care.

So we build a different can of skills of expertise that we call the Dr. B experts. That was the nickname of Dr Brandt called Dr B. So we kept it like this and we said the doctor B experts and all these people allow us to find different venue to come up with ideas and direction that will be great for the consumer that allow us to evolve above and be beyond the dermatology brand. So getting back to your point, 25 years is good. We go also on mini show that shows different kind of delivery system, raw materials, but we're working with University of Miami as well. And last but not least, I think today that's the beauty of it. I think we discussed that earlier is the data, the data today, the data, it dictates a little bit what the consumer is looking for. Obviously our data is not as big, so I won't say that the data is dictating me what my NPD is, but I need to take into consideration certain parameters and this is what we do.

But the same day, in order to create uniqueness, we need to come up with things that no one heard about it. When we talk earlier, we said with Microderm vision no one knows what it was and we're one of the first Botox likes we're one of the first. And right now I'm very excited with bringing a new technology that will be launched in September. You will see it's something that will mimic the micro needles. I don't think it has been seen on the retail. It's very unique. You go on the cream and inside the cream you have the micro sponges that will heat your skin and hitch it but in a very uncomfortable but comfortable way at the same time. But the beauty of that, it'll open your pores and you're going to deliver very deeply collagen ingredients that will improve quite drastically in 48 hours. The collagen, the elasticity and the film nests very exciting about this new products coming up.

Brett Curry:

Amazing, amazing. I love that. And man, it really shows also in some of the awards you guys have won. I know in style, allure, travel and leisure, did I see that Oprah, didn't Oprah recognize one of their

Stephane Colleu:

Products many, many times We've been very lucky and fortunate that over these years a lot of people from the industry, despite, I'm going to tell you officially, we cannot afford an advertisement. We never put ads on magazine and anything else. And usually when you put ads it's easier I should say, to get some reports. So we got so many awards over the years just based on the products, on how the quality of the products. And so very happy that also continuing because like I just said, we just launched Rev months ago, we already received four five awards, which I was very surprised to get it so early. So it's very encouraging and also it's the beginning of the journey of this new revamping with our customer.

Brett Curry:

That's great. That's great. What have been your primary vehicles for customer acquisition? So how have you gotten the story of Dr Brandt and your amazing product line? Have you gotten that out there? How are you attracting customers? What's worked the best there?

Stephane Colleu:

Few things. First, when you're lucky to work with retailers, sometime you get access to things that they can give it to you. So they get some data, they can give you end caps inside the stores that showcase the products. And for that you need of course to be recognized, you need to negotiate depending on the terms of the people you're speaking with. On our side as a brand, there is two different way. One is the pay ads. Of course that is very important because you still need to chase new customers and the only way to do it is to have a relevant storytelling with paid media that can resonate. But that's not an easy exercise. It's very congested, it's very competitive. And the cac, which is the click power spanning customer getting more expensive every day.

So that's why we're forced also to make sure the organic side is very important. And for that today, I know I'm sure your auditors knows that, but the streamline it becoming more powerful every day and TikTok is one of them. I know Amazon is already there, but I think it's going to increase significantly how we streamline our products and having our own shopping inside. So that's something we're trying to get much better on a social and organic because we saw the power of streamline and the YouTube. So we try to educate. Educate is very important because I think it's a point of differentiation we can do better than the others. And the second one is to show a bit that system money or before and after that can showcase the quality of the products are delivering. So that's be our mantra that we're trying to push much more than what we have been doing the past few years. And now with this neuro revamping, this is something we're going to accelerate in the next months. That's so good. That's so good.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And how do you guys view any philosophies to approaches to how do you tell great stories? How do you bring the benefits of the product to life? I know you mentioned before and after and I know you've got the doctor be experts and things like that. But any other thoughts on how do you tell the story in a powerful way?

Stephane Colleu:

Mia? I think I love to show when you can show a drastic result before and after. I think that's the best way because a visual will tell more than anything that we try to tell then after how you can tell the story, which is very interesting is today I would tell you this is what is so unique and the time we're living, I think there are no really rules because you can see a mic whole influencer that is going to resonate with not really a big audiences and she's going to have a better a I than potentially someone who get to million. Why sometime I don't have the explanation to be honest with you. So I think today I think it's to have a good understanding of who can talk about your products and how you're going to select these people. It's not an easy exercise, it's a conversation I'm having every day with the team and then can translate the story that could be customized in the way that where we're going to see the channels because we all know that TikTok request a different kind of content that if you do

Brett Curry:

YouTube it does, YouTube does totally, totally different.

Stephane Colleu:

So it's much more work for the brand nowadays. You need to customize constantly and adapt the content based on YouTube, based on TikTok, based on Instagram, based on the pay ads. And that's an exercise that you need to do mostly every day and build all the content that you should be enough for you to make sure you can capitalize and get the Hawaii. So I think that's the challenge of any brand lately, how you do that, how you push, how far, how much money you spent to make sure that is relevant. At the end of the day, I don't think there's a kind of recipe and I think the more difficulty is when you're not at $100 million company, how you navigate with all this cotton and spinning and that's an difficult task.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, well said. And then I think yes, sometimes it's finding those micro influencers, sometimes it's finding lots of different people to tell the story from their own perspective and that's going to resonate with certain audiences and so you guys are doing a great job of that as well, which is really impressive. So that's great. And then I would love to hear the story, so you've been with the brand for 23 years, you're the CEO been the CEO since 2015, is that right? 12,012. And so talk about that. How did you rise from helping with the European expansion and things like that to now being the CEO and CEO for a long time of the company?

Stephane Colleu:

So here's the true story, 24 years. I joined the company in 2002 and I studied on the US markets, I became market manager and I became pretty fast and been very key to become the national sales director and then a new management came on board. It was a very kind of nice way to ask me, but I took the challenge because international expansion did not exist. It is a true story. And I studied, I came with my small luggage in France and I have no clue what I was doing. And it was the beginning of SE to scouting international brand to bring it back in Europe and I was one of them. I think I was very, very lucky to be French. So I understand the French style and the demands and I can smooth the American branding with how it will fit with the European market.

And it was at the time that Ceara was willing to do anything to push all this more brand. They were doing extremely well in us and this is where jojo started. And I've been very key to expand in 35 countries in three years from 2005, 2008, then after they gave me the far east. So I was still managing all this international expansion from Paris until I became the new president and CEO in 2012. So during this time it was not an easy also for our brand for people to understand who was aware about the skin. Carolina. I went through five different C meaning every two years, two years and a half. Management and president was mostly dismiss. And I survived because I was the cashflow of the company to be honest with you. So when I came it was a big challenge. It was not an easy task and I was very happy to find a way to bring a vision and to explain to Dr.

Boy and you're acting in be like a startup, but you're already a brand and you don't realize that. And I realize how big it was with the two medical office, the RD and the skincare line. And I put all these entities as a trilogy and I put a vision that the vision and from the consumer, the consumer and from the goods and we can go that with the practice. And it was a very virtual positive circle that put us to explore ourselves and our size three times until 2015 and 15. This is where something very unexpected. We lost our bill of founders, Dr in 15. And just to get back and being completely truthful with your audience, because I know this is a question that has been asked for me for so long, I became by coincidence, the owners of the brand and it was the only way to save the company because at this time there was no one, the bank didn't want to backups.

It was a lot of people and a lot of praise. And I think I wanted to keep on what we were doing. It means the legacy of the brand and no one truly cared this time there was no backup, nothing was anticipated. So I decided to figure out how to convince people from the estates and becoming the new owner of the brand. I was lucky that everyone has been backed me up. I mean my team in skincare line, but also the bank. And this is where I became also the owners. And then after a new adventure study for me, I needed to prove the rest of the world that this brand can survive without Dr. Brandts, which I know we do because it's difficult. It's difficult

Brett Curry:

Without the founder and with the name, the namesake of the brand.

Stephane Colleu:

And this is where we bring this new vision, the integrity of dermatology, how we should evolve. And I think we'll try to do as best as we can. And then in 1920 the COVID happened, but we're mainly driven by brick and mortars, motor distribution, which was so hard for us. So I'm not going to lie to you. For people who sometimes saw our brand much less, we suffer a lot because of the COVID, because we shut down our brick and mortar and we were not as strong as a digital as we should have been. We knew that we were in a process of building our digital and during this process and the COVID, this is where the study to do the revamping, which was crazy, but I think there was the only way to make sure we the ability to pursue the next 10, 15 years. And I'm so happy because I'm telling you, the past two years we have been shifting. We're mostly driven at digital at 65% now. It's amazing. It's amazing. The Rev thing is it just ending this year? So now we mostly revamped the whole brand and a very happy that we multiply by twice for the past two years, our website, which show me that the consumer has been very well welcoming, this new revamping on top of chasing new customers. So this is where we are, but there's been my journey with the brand.

Brett Curry:

It's an amazing journey from kind of getting pushed out to saying, Hey, okay, I'll help you in France. And then you became the cash cow of the business, five CEOs come and go. Finally you become CEO become owner. And yeah, it's tough to lose the face of the brand for sure. You stepped in there and then COVID for a retail focused brand. Come on. I mean glad you had some digital focus already, but I know that accelerated things and was not a welcome news. And so kudos to you man. Entrepreneurship is hard, running a brand is hard and you guys just seem to answer the challenge no matter what the challenge is. So kudos to you guys for that. And then one thing I want to kind of close with because I know this is near and dear to your heart, and it's a really cool thing you're doing. You guys talk a lot about mental health and mental health. It's popular now or it's acceptable to talk about now. You guys really leaned into mental health before it was popular. So talk briefly about that. Why did you decide to do that and why did you decide to do that at a time when it wasn't all that acceptable?

Stephane Colleu:

But thank you for letting me know to speak about it because it's very close to my hearts. When I lost Dr. Brown, as you can imagine, I was very close with him. He was like a motto, was a friend. He was the godfather of my kids. And I just tried to educate myself and educate, understanding what depression means, and I have no clue. And when I dig in, I realize what people start knowing today. This is a dramatic statistic and I saw how many people are depressed, but no one used to talk about it.

Brett Curry:

And

Stephane Colleu:

At this time I decided I cannot hide how he passed away because internet was already everywhere.

And it was at a time where also company needs to chase. How are you giving back to the community, how you define yourself? And I told everyone, no guys, it's very easy. This is part of our story. We should not be ashamed, but I think we should find a way to embrace it. Let's correct the doctor Brandt, foundation, and we're going to focusing on multi life. And at this time it was very bold because a lot of people told me, and I did my checking, if you look on the beauty industry, you got Mac who did an incredible job about HEV eight on the nonprofit organization is the one who raised more money every year. We got also a state order with the breast cancer and we got over causes that also is discussed. But at this time in 15, no one talk about health and self-care. So I decided to create the Dr. Brenton. Our first action was to do what we knew the best is mostly doing marketing action to s the conversation around health and self-care. And this is what we have been doing. And now we're going to celebrate out 10 years of the Dr. Brand Foundation. This year of 2025, this is where we are. So 10 years that this foundation has been created. Great. So great man. And

Brett Curry:

Yeah, some people could have hid from the story or run from the story or just hope people would forget about it. You guys leaned in and said, no, let's honor the legacy. Let's do something about this. And so he started the foundation and kudos to you guys. So with that, we are out of time, Stephane, but really thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for being transparent. Thank you for talking about all the great things you guys have done through the ups downs, the twists and turns of building a brand. And so kudos to you guys and keep up the good work.

Stephane Colleu:

Yeah, thank you. And thank you for having me, Brett. Thank you so much.

Brett Curry:

Bye. Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. If you found this show helpful, powerful, please share it with somebody else. And if you'd like to leave a review on iTunes, that helps other people discover the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

When most brands struggle to break through the noise online, Chris Lang and Fresh Chili Company cracked the code by doing something radically different: they started with story, not sales. In this episode, discover how a small New Mexico chili company became a top 1% Shopify store with explosive 85% year-over-year growth, a 4.96% conversion rate, and 3.74% ROAS—all while building an engaged community that devours their content faster than NBA games get views.

Chris reveals the exact strategies behind their meteoric rise, from leveraging organic social as a testing ground for paid ads to creating "addictive" content that turns customers into brand evangelists. This isn't another generic growth story—it's a masterclass in building authentic connections that drive real business results.

Key Topics & Insights:

• The Foundation-First Marketing Philosophy - Why Chris posts 7 times daily on Facebook and how he uses his Shopify product pages as a content roadmap (most brands have this completely backwards)
• The Organic-to-Paid Testing Strategy - How Fresh Chili discovers winning ads by boosting organic posts first, then scaling the winners through ASC campaigns—saving thousands in ad spend
• Search Domination Beyond Google - Why they're ranking #2 for "hatch green chili" and how they're preparing for the YouTube/TikTok search revolution (plus their ChatGPT optimization strategy)
• Community-Driven Product Development - The Facebook group strategy that turned customers into cookbook contributors and created authentic urgency through strategic "sell-outs"

The Meta Profitability Problem - Chris's candid discussion about pulling back on Meta spend and restructuring toward content-first growth for better margins

Chapters: 

(00:00) Introduction to Fresh Chile Company

(02:30) History of The Chili Capital of the World

(07:03) Keys to Success: Storytelling & Community

(11:20) Balancing Organic and Paid Strategies

(16:57) Creative Content & Testing Philosophy

(21:47) Building a Brand Story

(24:22) Search Visibility

(27:46) SEO Strategies & Content Plans

(34:20) How Fresh Chile Builds Community

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Chris Lang:

One of the number one things people do, especially inspired how we just pour chili on burgers. People just started kind of tagging us and in and out and Whataburger and McDonald's or Wendy's we're like, Hey, let's just get this a contest for people and get the winner 10,000.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we are going to unpack a phenomenal success story, a top 1% Shopify store, one of the coolest brands, one of the tastiest brands you'll encounter. We're going to be looking at the remarkable success of Fresh Chili Company. I've got Chris Lang on the show today of Fresh Chili Company. He also is involved in email marketing and helps run an organic social agency. And we met through Ezra Firestone's Blue Ribbon Mastermind and just overall a really cool and really smart dude. And so with that, welcome to the show, Chris Lang. And how's it going man?

Chris Lang:

Good man. Yeah, thank you for having me. Actually drove up to the mountains today. We're going to go get on a lake and some paddleboards in a little bit after this. Amazing. I had my son,

Brett Curry:

What lake? And tell the folks where you are so everyone can be jealous.

Chris Lang:

Yeah, it's New Mexico is where we're at. So Hatch, New Mexico is the chili capital of the world and just think Napa is the wine. And so we live in Las Cruces. So you travel through the desert, you travel through White Sands, and then you end up in these mountains and Ruidoso. And the name of the lake is Grindstone Lake and it's just a good place. The paddleboard fish kind of enjoy the cooler weather. It's already creeped up in the nineties, so it's in the seventies right now. So we're just going to try to take advantage of that today.

Brett Curry:

Go enjoy some cool weather. Yeah, my stepbrother actually just vacationed in New Mexico. It's like the second or third year is done and he said it's phenomenal. We live in Missouri and so I'll have to get out there and check it out. Now I am a huge hot Sauce fan, chili fan, spicy fan. Not like the so spicy that you have to wear gloves or that you pass out or faint as a hotness or anything like that, but I love a little kick. Right. So what makes Hatch New Mexico the chili capital of the world? Why is that?

Chris Lang:

Yes, I mean that's a great question. So what I love to tell people is that New Mexico is the untold story of America history. Growing up in America, you have a very much a east coast education level of America, and a lot of it's actually here in New Mexico you had kind of the Spanish missionaries coming up through Mexico and to New Mexico. And so the oldest wine region is in America, is

Brett Curry:

There in New Mexico. What part of New Mexico is that?

Chris Lang:

Yeah, so actually the southern part of New Mexico in 1629. Interesting.

Chris Lang:

The Spanish fry is planted, the first grape and the name of that grape is called Mission. So that's the name of the grape and it's just been a fertile hotbed for agriculture. And so everything from grapes to Lechuga, that's lettuce and Spanish pecans, chili cotton. So it's actually the number one producer of cons in the world, our area. It's also the number one or one of the top two to three producer of onions in America. It actually produces more onions than chili actually. And so when you think of kind the Mexican plate and fajitas, you got onions, you got peppers, you kind of got it all. I mean obviously the oldest cattle drive existed through New Mexico as well. So kind of just a really great history. History. And the Rio Grande that flows from Texas up into Colorado is really kind of the base line for agriculture in a lot of ways throughout history.

Chris Lang:

And so all the farmlands kind of hug up against the riverbed. And the Chile was kind of grown by native Peblo early on and then it was adopted by other kind of farmers. And the farmer that we work with now, his family's been doing it for six generations. They came from Italy and into the area and six generation is strong. And it's just something that, I'll tell you what it is, it's addicting. Okay. I'm just going to be totally honest with you. Okay. What is the secret? There is something about it that it's almost like the crack cocaine, and I'm not even joking. It's one of those things that the official smell of New Mexico is the smell of roasted green chili. That is the official smell. I think we're the only state in America to have an official smell because it's intoxicating that cap. And then the flavor of it is that you kind of have this kind of thick, meaty chili pod and then the flavor of it, especially when it's flame roasted, it's like nothing that anyone has experienced. And so the way that Italians kind of brought tomatoes into a Western cuisine, I really feel like that's where we're at with American cuisine over the next 20, 30 years as Hispanics are the number one.

Chris Lang:

And I think American taste palettes are getting a little spicier. That's where they want the flavor. And so it actually is closer to, it's a fruit, it's closer to a tomato than most people realize, but it's just think of it as a more flavorful, spicier

Brett Curry:

Type of tomato. Man. Sounds absolutely magical. I can't wait to visit some of those places and see the farm in person. But leading up to this, of course you hooked me up and got to order some product

Chris Lang:

From

Brett Curry:

Fresh Chili Company and I've been cooking on a Blackstone for quite some time now. Love to cook. Yes, and love making different types of burritos. I love a Cali, be a California style burrito. And so with the fresh tortillas that you cook on the griddle and then carne sada and sometimes fries, and then having the hatch green chilies. Oh my goodness. I know that may not be traditional Cali be, but come on. It was awesome.

Brett Curry:

So a few other people in my family extended family are into spice and they were raving about Hatch green chilies from fresh chili company. And so really good stuff, man. Kudos to you for creating an amazing product and telling an amazing story. And as people are listening to this, they're like, dang, this guy tells a good story. And so we're going to get into storytelling here and how you do that. I know you're all about storytelling, community building strategy to grow great brand. And so we're going to unpack that as we go, but I want to share a couple of stats about Fresh Chili Company because I think this will blow people away. It's top 1% Shopify over the last 365 years. You're up 58% roas, 3.74% mer 27% website conversion rate 4.96%, so pushing 5% on conversion rate, which is insane year to date though so far you're up 85%. So the growth rate is accelerating, which is phenomenal. And listen, it's a great, great product as we've discussed, but you're clearly doing a lot of things well. So can you unpack that a little bit for us? What have been the keys to this meteoric rise aside from just a killer product?

Chris Lang:

Yes, it's really about the story and I'll go into why and not really just have a cop out answer, right? Because as I kind of told you, Chile is a way of life in New Mexico and throughout the southwest, so west Texas through southern California and for all the transplants that moved to Florida from those places. And so my partner who he and his wife were cooking this recipe in their home for his real estate clients, and this was his dad's recipe again, it was passed down from another generation. And so they were making this product out of their home, an entrepreneur and had some success in some other industries locally here. And they reached out to me and was like, Hey, we'd like to sell this online. We think we got something here. And funny enough, my wife had actually just bought a jar around that holiday season or found a jar somehow and I tasted it.

Chris Lang:

And so Hatch has really done a good job of branding itself for chili, but I saw an opportunity that everyone was focused on retail and there really wasn't a lot of competition online. And I just saw it as an opportunity to really tell, not just my partner story, obviously that's the foundation, but I was like with this opportunity of what does Hash Green Chili do? It brings family and friends together over their favorite recipes around the dinner table. It was bringing people together. And so how did I make it the customer kind of the hero kind of really their story too. And I would say one of the biggest things we did is we had a Facebook group and it just wasn't just hash chili everything. Obviously we could have grown that really a lot faster, but we kept it around fresh chili products, specifically kind of kept it private, a little more exclusive. And then we started selecting weekly winners, recipe of the week winners, and then we turned those weekly recipe of the week when's into a cookbook. And all of a sudden those people have something tangible to show their family and friends, Hey, check out my recipe, check out my story. That is aligned also with the Fresh Chili story. And so for me, that's probably been the biggest thing that we've done is we've really just kind of, how do we bring people together over their favorite meals?

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. It's amazing. And that's really what it's about. I mean, that's the magic of food. We eat food obviously because enjoyable and we have to have it to survive. But the magic of food is the gathering, right? And the sharing and the, Hey, I want you to taste this recipe and I want you to try these fresh chilies with a chip or with the burrito or whatever. And it's a magical experience. And so you saw an opportunity to sell online, and I think we've all had this experience. We walked down the aisle at the local grocery store, and even if we're at a place, maybe it's in the local section or we're at a local health food store or something and we'll see some salsa or some chilies, but you don't know the story. You don't really know what's behind this and is it good or is it not good? I say, this show is 12 bucks, this one, six bucks. What's the difference? I don't know. And so you leaned into a channel that was leveraged, told a great story, and now it's really grown. And so I know the cool thing about what you guys are doing is you're doing a lot with organic storytelling, correct? You're also leaning heavily into paid as every good Shopify brand is to a certain degree. And so can you talk about the balance there of organic to paid? And again, I know that all kind of ties back to storytelling.

Chris Lang:

Yeah, I mean, I've been buying meta ads since 2011 I think in some way or shape or fashion. And I actually don't do this for anyone else. To me it's a very, I feel like every season of meta, I mean I feel like 20 19, 20 20 21, I feel like every year it's like every season of Meta. I like that every season of

Brett Curry:

Meta, a lot of distinct seasons.

Chris Lang:

And I remember even last year, January, February, where it was just like, man, what is going on here? And so that's where the foundation of the cooking group, organic social has really kind of I would say helped carry us through really hard times, especially when you marry it with retention, with some really solid retention strategies. Because I know when meta is sort of volatile, I can lean on my community and I can lean my retention strategies to kind of carry the brand through. Obviously if you've got some product drops and those kinds of things, that helps. But the thing that I really do now, I really marry the two strategies together. So I actually do a lot of testing of boosting organic posts, and I'm looking for buy signals and how many likes, how many comments, how many shares, how many engagements. And I've constantly just kind of always thought of them as a unified platform, whereas everyone treats them very separately, paid is doing paid and organic, is doing organic, and they don't really talk to each other. But I don't really believe in that philosophy. I believe that once you have a good strategy for both, then it really sets you up for success. Again, we're going, I think we completed our sixth year. This will be our seventh year. And it's because we have kind of both really educating people top of funnel, but also testing creative that if it's working well, we'll throw the a SE campaign and sort of let it run its lifecycle as a winner.

Brett Curry:

That's a great man. And so just to unpack that a little bit, so you're making organic post storytelling post, maybe it's a recipe, maybe it's telling what the founder is up to cooking or making things.

Chris Lang:

Exactly.

Brett Curry:

So you create an organic post, you boost it, just plain old, boost it, see how it performs, and then if it performs well, you'll turn that into an A SE ad.

Chris Lang:

Exactly. Exactly.

Brett Curry:

Nice, nice. Are you finding that a lot of your winning ads are coming from that pool of ads or do a lot of your winners come from ads you created with the intention of it being an ad?

Chris Lang:

No, I mean, if you look at our A SC library, it's going to be mostly live videos from the farm or videos that

Brett Curry:

We

Chris Lang:

Do. People really liked authenticity, and I know some brands struggle with it. Well, it's because you're a food category. How many other foods are out there too competing for the same thing? I just don't believe that. I know that we as founders are showing up every day and every week for our customers, and I think our customers see that. And a lot of people treat metal. I kind of like it to a casino now, and it almost feels like a money slot machine. And if you just want to go in and put in a quarter and try to get 50 cents back, I mean you're just playing the wrong game. You really got to tell a story.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, totally agree. I mean, if you look at what has good marketing been from the beginning of time, it's good storytelling. It's storytelling to the right audience in the right way with a clear offer attached to it. And that's really it. And I'm a firm believer that every brand is in the business of whatever they sell,

Brett Curry:

Plus they're a media company. They're in the business of getting and keeping attention and then moving people to take action. And so that really begins with a good story and the ability to tell great stories. And so let's unpack that a little bit. So you say some of your best content is on the farm, showing people where the chilies are grown. Is it a combination of that plus seeing the product? I saw a post just recently and it was like a taco or something, dipping it in the chili sauce. I was like, oh my goodness, I'm so hungry right now. But talk about what does the creative mix look like, what's working, and then maybe unpack a little bit of your creative testing philosophy.

Chris Lang:

Yeah, I'll kind of start from the back there. So I have a philosophy on meta where I'm posting up to seven times a day on Facebook and people are like, well, that's too much. Not really. I mean, people are just thumb scrolling nonstop. And I also have the stats to prove that it's working. So I'm not concerned, I don't know if every brand can do that, but we're at a place where we can do that. But the philosophy behind that is think of your Shopify product display page. You got your carousel images, you got your hero product. Then what do you have? You might have a testimonial, you might have a money back guarantee, you might have an evergreen photo. You might also have ingredients or how it's made materials. And then also one of the other ones would be how to use the product, the best case, and then marry that.

Chris Lang:

The last seventh one would be a reel, a video reel, some kind of how you're using the product. And so when you think of, Hey, I don't know what to post every day, go to your product display pages, there's your game plan. And that's basically what we're focusing on and we're really focusing on educating people every day. And then so we rotate all those posts through the entire catalog. We have over 50 plus products, and so we rotate. We have all that line, we have all those seven benefits lined up for every one of the products, and we rotate that messaging out. And I guess one thing I didn't mention was behind the scenes farm stuff that is our foundation. So most people don't have a foundation. We only focus on creative.

Brett Curry:

So

Chris Lang:

They're like, okay, we've got to be creative. We've got the ad what it is, and you're just sort of like, okay, build a foundation. It's a very simple process. It's about education now, then when we go to the farm, that's the creativity. That's the stuff that's going to move the needle for us from an ad perspective. But guess what? When we go out to the farm and we have say a jalapeno mustard, you know what, I saw that jalapeno mustard a couple weeks ago. We got to really think about how customers consideration cycles one day, seven day, whatever you want to call it. But we don't really spend enough time trying to educate them through the entire process because I was a guy who 30 day marketing plans, 90 day marketing plans, six months annual. I've done it all. But what was missing is now I don't have to do any of that because I'm just rotating through all my products.

Chris Lang:

And that's really helped us with just educating and also on conversion. And then going back to the farm thing, what set us kind of different was we always went to the farm. My partner always did a great job of making sure we get to the farm and we do some videos and we kind of just talked about the product, or maybe the farmer was there and we talked to the farmer, but one day we were driving to the farm and I was like, you know what we should do? He's like, what's that? And I was like, let's grab a cheeseburger and let's just pull down the gate of the pickup truck and then let's just pour our chili on it and eat it. And then if you see my partner, he's like, Sam Elliot meets Morgan Freeman is he? He's got the voice, he's got the look. I mean, he looks like an old Hollywood Western star. So I mean, obviously that helps a lot. I've done videos too, but the reality of it is when we did that winlock something that was crazy because these cheeseburger, there's more people that watch these cheeseburger videos than watch an NBA game now, which is really weird to think about. It's such a weird,

Brett Curry:

It's crazy. Part of that, the NBA ratings are down. I still am an NBA fan, but part of that is, man, we want authentic content and we love our food, and it's just something really, really special. So yeah, that's

Chris Lang:

Crazy. Kudos to you guys. Just really kind of marry that connection of like, oh, this has to be the freshest product because they're literally standing in front of the farm eating with it. And so that

Brett Curry:

Was just, I love how you talk about that. You start with a strategy. You start with a platform. Don't begin with a, I need to create an ad.

Brett Curry:

You start with a, Hey, what is our story? Our story is these are fresh chilies from the farm or real farm in hash New Mexico, the chili capital of the world. And these are family recipes. And we've got Sam Elliott, not literally, but your co-founders like Sam Elliott, he's the farmer. And so we're going to start with that. We'll rotate through our products. We'll try to tell these stories in a unique way. We'll do fun stuff like pop open the tailgate, eat a burger, put some chilies on it. And so you're starting with a foundation, you're starting with strategy, then you're expanding from there really makes a lot of sense.

Chris Lang:

And again, just sort of, everyone has it backwards. They do paid, they do retention, and then they're thinking about what creative they need. And it's like now you need a foundation first. And that's really, I mean, again, you and I know some really savvy Shopify entrepreneurs. I'll go and look at their organic social and there's nothing there. I'm like, you're leaving money on the table or you're leaving growth on the table or lifetime value on the table. I mean, whatever you want to call it. Does it take work? Yes, it takes work. And we also do a little bit more.

Brett Curry:

Anything worth doing does,

Chris Lang:

Right? Right. And we also do a little bit more systematic where we like and comment on posts on Instagram. We go on the explore page, we go on the reels page, we go on the search, we look for terms, we engage with posts and stories and dms and we'll DM influencers. So again, it is a strategy. It is not as just simple as just creating content, posting it. But again, I wouldn't say that it's taking more than an hour or two a day for us to do this for ourselves. And so again, I think a lot of people just don't know where to start. And I think maybe that's a disconnect because there probably hasn't been a lot of course boys on Twitter selling this kind of information. So that's probably why it doesn't exist. It's maybe not

Brett Curry:

As flashy, not as sexy, not as enticing or not as throw a switch and get results.

Chris Lang:

The number one thing people are like, well most return on results. It's like, I mean, meta holds that close to the chest because they want the attribution, right? But when you marry it with the paid, then you see the results because the ads are performing better because there's already a little bit of social proof.

Brett Curry:

Totally. Totally makes sense. Well, I want to unpack a couple of other things that you mentioned are working. One of them is search visibility. And this is interesting from a couple perspectives. One, I've been a Google guy for a long time. I'm really a fan of just any marketing that works. So that's my foundation. I love great brands. I love great storytelling, I love marketing that works. But I've been doing Google forever and did SEO back in the early two thousands. So I've always loved search. But you said organic Google is up 76% and now some chat GPT queries are up.

Chris Lang:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

But can you talk about that a little bit? What is driving that Google growth and chat GPT growth? What's making that happen? You're talking about

Chris Lang:

My biggest pain point I'm going through right now. I'm trying to get to number one on Google for the term Hatch green chili, and I'm number two.

Brett Curry:

That's amazing. It's amazing. But the difference in traffic, as we well know from one two is pretty significant. But kudos to you, man, being number two in a highly competitive, highly contested term that is no small feat. So kudos to you.

Chris Lang:

Nah, I appreciate it. But we could just lower customer acquisition costs down if we could just get to number one. And so it's something that's interesting right now and you'll be able to talk to more brevity in this use case. But what's interesting is a lot of our social media videos that we do from Facebook are actually showing up in Google's feed.

Chris Lang:

A lot of social content is really starting to influence searches. And then chat GT again, they're opening up the Shopify brand listing. If you want to list your product on chat gt, there's a submission process right now that they're going through, but also they are pulling up information from us and from our top competitor on Google. And it's something where recipes are obviously going to be a big factor in what we do. And Backlinking, I think is probably the hardest thing that it's been the hardest thing to do for us. It probably is going to be the noodle the most for us. We're actually working with a firm right now that is trying to help us to get to number one. And the reality of it is that timeline looks like it might be August. But at the same time, I think the influence of chat right now, it's really quite compelling and not in addition to YouTube search. And so we're asking the process of going through all our hard drives, terabytes of footage, and just making clips that we can just upload to YouTube and TikTok kind of search and intent volume.

Brett Curry:

It's such a smart idea because one, YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet behind Google. And especially for things like recipes and cooking a lot of other categories, a lot of the how-to categories that it really crushes on TikTok search is exploding. So both of those make a ton of sense. And I'm really glad you brought this up because I think there's a narrative that says, Hey, Google is going to get eaten by chat GT or Perplexity or TikTok search. And listen, I think there are some existential threats to Google out there without question. But you mentioned something, and I've actually seen this. Google's earnings are up quarter over quarter. There's more searches conducted on Google now than a quarter ago. And so they're still in good position if they play the game right

Brett Curry:

To be viable. But regardless, there's still some opportunities for you right now to lean into search. And so there's some SEO pieces that help with traditional search. I know you're talking about the AI SEO or whatever, AI optimization. I think that's really important as well. And it even ties into Google with Gemini and AI mode and things like that. And so love that you're still leaning into trying to get good quality back links. That's something that I think a lot of people have abandoned. It's still relevant, even though Google tried to say a few years ago and I wouldn't really pay attention to the backlinks they do. That was the core of Google. Google's original innovation was looking at backlinks because those are third party votes on what content to trust, they still matter. So backlinking leaning into traditional SEO into AI optimization as well. And so what all you guys doing there from a content standpoint that's helping with SEO?

Chris Lang:

I think we've kind of done it in two stages. The first SEO firm we worked with really just helped with getting a lot of technical aspects together. I didn't realize your website had to be, it was mind blowing. The amount of detail that you have pay attention to

Brett Curry:

From a crawlability standpoint, a speed standpoint, the algorithm making sense of it or the crawlers making perfect sense of it, that sort of thing. So yeah, the technical aspect of SEO does make a difference.

Chris Lang:

And then we were doing recipes and we kind of got away from that a little bit, but we're launching a new YouTube channel. And I think it's more in my thought process is we kind of got the website foundation sort of done and now we're ranking on number two. Again, I think the back linking, I think some more kind of current information obviously can help. Really we're trying to be the authority for hatch green chilies. So what does that mean? It means you just don't come to us for sauces. It means you come to us fresh peppers, frozen freeze dried powders, spices.

Brett Curry:

So we have to be hatch green chilies equals fresh chili company. That's what you're trying to create.

Chris Lang:

Exactly. And I think too, also not discounting hot honey, spicy ketchup,

Brett Curry:

Both those products are having a moment right now. I just started seeing some local pizzerias that are doing hot honey serve with your pizza and lemme tell you something that will blow your mind and we'll change the game for pizza.

Chris Lang:

It's so good. And we make an excellent hot honey. And so there's definitely those factors to consider too. But really where I see moving is we got to show up on YouTube consistently every day. And that's really the strategy that I'm implementing right now.

Brett Curry:

And it's so powerful because not only are people searching directly on YouTube, but this is something that Google announced during Google Marketing Live just about a week ago, is that there's going to be more, and you kind of alluded to this, there's going to be more visibility of video content in search results. And Google's been testing this for a while, but if I ask a question of Google and we're now seeing with Gemini, the queries of five words or more have exploded. They're up like 150% this year versus last year. So more people are searching with voice more people are searching with kind of an AI mindset rather than a traditional SEO 10 blue links mindset. And so Google's then weaving in like, Hey, here's a clip from this YouTube video that answers your question, so check it out. And so I think there's just immense value to a brand like yours consistently cranking out great content. You'll get the YouTube search traffic, you'll start getting your videos showing up in Google search, and then of course you can take that audience, that audience you're building on YouTube, monetize it with YouTube ads as well. And so just tons and tons of benefits there.

Chris Lang:

And that's where it is. I mean, what's funny is I have all these numbers up year over year, and I'll be completely transparent with where I'm at now is I'm not really happy with the business numbers from a profitability standpoint. Got it. Because meta just eats so much. And really within the last two weeks, I'm started to pull back on meta a little bit. We're about to get into chili season in July and August, so I think I can take this gamble a little bit. And if we finish up 40% or 20%, what matters is it's profitability, obviously not the vanity me of top line revenue. And I'm actually restructuring everything to be more content focused. And we're going to focus on the creative, we're going to focus on the content, and we're really going to treat, we're going to make sure our websites getting updated daily. We're going to make sure our YouTube gets updated daily. We're going to really try to do that for the rest of the year and see where we end up. So kind of an interesting approach and interesting conversation right now.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so interesting. But as you look at how as a brand do we differentiate, how do we differentiate versus the competition? How do we build total enterprise value, whether we just hope to capitalize on that and take distributions and enjoy those profits for a long time, or if we decide to have an exit, having a community, having a consistent content engine so hard to duplicate, it's so hard to match when you do that really, really well. Most other competitors, most other brands just can't. And so love that you're doing that. Love that you're leaning into SEO to YouTube content, to organic social and paid social. And we're coming towards the end of our time, but you also talked about what's working is the owned channel growth, and this really ties into storytelling and being intentional with your marketing, but you got a great email list. You just put out great content. Can you talk a little bit about that? How have you built that own media

Chris Lang:

And

Brett Curry:

Then any powerful lessons from email and SMS that have helped fuel that stable growth for fresh chilies?

Chris Lang:

Yeah. What's good is we have a pretty high repeat purchase rate. So it's not a product that you sort of buy and you're like, oh, okay, that was cool. Oh, that was great. Lemme try it again. And so I think one of the things that we do kind of differently to kind of help is, again, I'm an agency guy. I'm a designer. I mean, I've worked with Virgin Galactic and done stuff for ESPN and Discovery Channel. And so I get design, I get how much brand matters. But I tell you, man, when you just write an email from the heart and sign your name at the bottom, and it's just text only. I mean, people just feel like they're right there with you kind of growing along you, it truly feels like a one-to-one

Brett Curry:

Communication.

Chris Lang:

And I think that's been one of the most helpful things that we do. And the other thing that we kind of do is we really lean into product drops and development and small batch. So they sell out. I mean, I think we're going into the season sold out of, I was actually going to try to do this for the next update next week of how many products we've actually sold out of going into this season because it's a fine line where we're trying to forecast, but also be a small batch in a way that people feel like it is exclusive, that you just can't get a retail setting. And so I think

Brett Curry:

That, and selling out a little bit's kind of cool. It really creates urgency, authentic urgency to buy the next drop because you're going to sell out.

Chris Lang:

And so I think just people know the email list is where you're going to find those opportunities is something I think that kind of helps people engaged.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, that's great. Well, last thing I want to chat about as we wrap up here. You talked about the Hatch chili challenge. What is that? How did you execute that and how's that working?

Chris Lang:

Yeah, so we did a sweepstakes giveaway that did really well for us that we won last year and just kind of got the ball rolling. We did just another 10,000 giveaway two that my partner's flying out to give a check to the winner in person, the person's in Georgia, so it's going to fly out there this Friday and do that. And we just got to thinking, okay, what else can we do? And so we're going to give $10,000 away to, it's a contest, but basically one of the number one things people do, especially inspired how we just pour chili on burgers. People just started kind of tagging us and in and out and Whataburger and McDonald's or Wendy's, we were like, Hey, let's just make this a contest for people and get the winner 10,000. And so we just launched it and people are already kind of excited and already kind of posting about it. And I think it's something too that it's just helped builds network effects and what are you eating? And I think that's what we kind of want to do is we want to create a burger revolution in America. I think that's something that we can have fun with. I

Brett Curry:

Love it, man. I love it. That is a noble cause right there at the Burger Revolution.

Brett Curry:

I like it. Chat around with it and have fun with it. Cool. And so then you're building social proof. You're building community network effect. You're also, you can use some of that content for ads. And so it's just a brilliant way to build community, leverage that for storytelling and ad growth as well. And so Chris, man, keep up with the good work. As I said, I'm a huge, huge fan. I'm a customer. I love the product. As I've introduced it to people in my family and to my community, they love it as well. And so I keep up with the good work. And now I didn't want to visit in person and see the farms and see what you guys are up to anytime I have to make that happen. But for those that are listening that're like, man, I got to try some of this stuff as well, how can they try some of your products?

Chris Lang:

Go to fresh chili co.com or you can find us on social at the Fresh Chili Co. And then I'm a sucker if you want to follow me at Crystalling Social and DM me, I might send you a gift card. We'll see.

Brett Curry:

He's a good man as far as that's concerned in all other areas. And hey, you are a really good follow on LinkedIn. Thank you. You talk about storytelling, you host a podcast as well. You share amazing clips. And so one, you got to go and just buy some fresh chilies, but also check out Chris's content, get on the newsletter, the email list, you'll get to see the marketing in action. That's a great way to learn as well, to check him out on LinkedIn. And then actually, do you want to plug your podcast, Chris, because you actually create some great content with your podcast.

Chris Lang:

Yeah, no, I appreciate it. We just launched Share Your Story. It's sponsored by SendLink, and it's something that's just about 40 days old, 45 days old, and there's response again, I'm sort of new to it, but as you kind of see, we're doing some things outside the studio. I do have studio, but today we were in Washington Park and New York City, and we were interviewing the street style interview kind of ads. Yep, yep, yep.

Brett Curry:

In on the street type thing.

Chris Lang:

Yeah. So this 21-year-old kid, his office is a park bench. And just to see the enthusiasm and the rawness of a 21-year-old entrepreneur, just really inspiring. So we're trying to just kind of share stories of how other people are kind of building in the space.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. We'll link to that in the show notes. Check out Chris Lang on LinkedIn and all the socials and Fresh Chili Co as well. With that, Chris, thanks so much, man. This was awesome. Thanks for taking the time. Yeah, thank you. Absolutely. And as always, appreciate you tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. If you found this show inspiring, share with a friend, share with your network, that would mean the world to us. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Russell Breuer, founder of Spot & Tango, shares the remarkable journey of building a $100+ million pet food company from a New York studio apartment in just seven years. What makes this story even more impressive? They've remained profitable while operating as a subscription-only, direct-to-consumer brand in the competitive pet food space. Russell reveals the strategic decisions that set them apart—from their innovative "Unkibble" fresh-dry process to building their own 70,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania. This conversation is packed with actionable insights on vertical integration, subscription model optimization, and performance marketing excellence.

Key Topics & Insights:

• The "Unkibble" Innovation: How Spot & Tango created a fresh-dry pet food that delivers premium nutrition without the refrigeration hassles, capturing market share at 30-40% less cost than competitors
• Vertical Integration Mastery: Why building their own $70M manufacturing facility was crucial for quality control, margins, and tariff protection—plus when other D2C brands should consider this path
• Subscription-Only Success Formula: The specific strategies for converting cold traffic into subscribers, including their 14-day trial, risk reversal guarantees, and 3-minute customer service response times
• Return on Invested Capital Framework: Russell's "North Star" metric that combines lifetime value, contribution margin, and customer acquisition cost—how this mindset keeps the entire team aligned on profitable growth
• Performance Marketing at Scale: Their balanced approach across Meta, Google, TikTok, and direct mail, plus why that "grainy office photo" outperformed studio-produced creative assets

This episode is essential listening for any D2C founder looking to build sustainable, profitable growth while maintaining premium positioning in their market.

Chapters: 

(00:00) Introducing Spot & Tango: The Value Proposition of Fresh Pet Food

(06:15) The Importance of Vertical Integration

(11:56) Subscription-Only Model: A Strategic Choice

(15:52) Key Lessons for Increasing Conversion Rates

(19:03) The Role of Education in Customer Engagement & Relationships

(23:09) Understanding Return on Invested Capital

(28:58) Growth Levers & Marketing Strategies

(32:29) The Role of AI in Performance Marketing

(35:05) What’s Next for Spot & Tango

‍

Russell Breuer:

It's not set it and forget it. We continue to work at it. We continue to try different things and really push the envelope. I think that's one of the reasons why we've been successful on the performance marketing side.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we are talking to a really remarkable founder of an amazing brand with an amazing story. Talking to Russell Breuer from Spot and Tango. Listen to this, a hundred million in revenue, profitable, almost exclusively DTC subscription only. Amazing value prop in the marketplace are doing some amazing things. They're vertically integrated, which in a world of tariffs and no tariffs or uncertainty and all that craziness, that is a brilliant play. And so lots to unpack, lots to discuss, lots to learn from. So excited that you're here. And with that, welcome to the show, Russell. How's it going man? And thanks for taking the time.

Russell Breuer:

Awesome, thanks Brett. You hit some key highlights. We're excited to be here seven years into the journey. Still a lot of wood to chop, but it's been very rewarding and happy to share some of my experiences today.

Brett Curry:

Love that. A lot of wood to chop, man, that is the game, right? The game is always, I'm going to do this thing and then I'm going to go build this mode and then competitors catch up. I got to keep going. Things like that. It's a never ending game, but hey, that's what we signed up for as entrepreneurs and so we just got to enjoy it. What I'd love to do, Russell first, because as with any great product, any profitable company, it starts with meeting and need and being different. And so how did you kind of come to the value prop and explain it to people, what you sell and why it's so special in the market?

Russell Breuer:

Sure. So Spot and Tango is a pet health and wellness brand. In short, we make incredible food for dogs. It's a mission-driven brand. All of our products use fresh human grade, whole ingredients. We exclude anything artificial, no synthetics, no food colognes, no fillers. Really. The founding story hearkens back to a studio apartment in New York City, which is cliche but true. My wife was cooking fresh meals for our Golden doodle jack. In fact, her mother was cooking fresh human grade meals for her dog, George. So there's a family history here and of course aspirations to be an operator and entrepreneur. I was head scratching why and explored the space and looked into the category and our belief is that health and wellness as a right, not a luxury. And what started as really a bootstrapped, incubated concept, we found vets and nutritionists to develop recipes that meet the nutritional needs of dogs for all life stages.

Russell Breuer:

And it's really studio to incubate our kitchen to a hundred million dollars plus business in seven. It's amazing. It's amazing. It's been a big wave, but the mission remains true. Again, everything that we produce, all products, all ancillaries, treats, supplements, our fresh line Unkibble, which we can talk about, it's all whole fresh human grade ingredients and that's what we do. It's all delivered online. So we are a subscription model. It's all personalized. We learn a lot about your dogs age, weight, and activity level to really inform the portion, the caloric portion per meal, per day per dog. So personalization's a big point, but we're digital junkies. It's what we do. It's all online. The value prop, it's convenience. Skip the trip to the pet store and Pon Tango shows up. That's the high level

Brett Curry:

That, dude, you're speaking my language. And as we were prepping, you were talking about performance driven, conversion focused marketing, which that's been my world since the beginning of my career, and so love hearing that as well. But let's talk about Unkibble just a little bit because you and I we're also talking before we hit record. There's some other food products on the market that are fresh food, but they come cold and you got to put 'em in your refrigerator next to your food, which I love Our dogs, my family, especially my wife and my kids, huge animal lovers. So we take care of our pets. I don't really want my food next to my dog's food, just my personal opinion. But what is Unkibble and how are you differentiated in that regard?

Russell Breuer:

Yeah, so Unkibble offers the benefits of fresh and the convenience of Unkibble. Back in 2019, again, the original recipes were fresh, fresh, frozen. And to your point, it's expensive and it's inconvenient. For an example, urban City Center, the freezer, Aviva German Shepherd, you're choosing either dog's, food and freezer or your own, okay, park the Bengal Bites on the counter. So really is in response to customer feedback. And the question was, is there another way of the mountain? Is there a version mission-driven that's shelf stable that delivers pound for pound the same ingredient integrity? And the answer is un Unkibble. We call it fresh dry again. So we use all the same fresh she in grade ingredients, but we take out the water through a very novel, fresh, dry process. No water removes the need to freeze, it removes the dry ice, it removes the installation in the box. Those savings get passed along to the consumer. So what we're offering is affordable health and wellness. And from a pricing perspective, on average we're 30 to 40% less.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing.

Russell Breuer:

And other fresh brands you may have heard about. And so we're occupying a unique white space from a pricing perspective where we're attracting a lot of aspirational consumers, Unkibble consumers who want to feed their health and wellness, but they want the convenience, it's scoop and serve in the pantry personalized. And they don't want to deal with the headache of, oops, I forgot to defrost my frozen food overnight. Right? Right now my dog's eating ice cubes. So we're in a very different business and we've been doing that since we launched Unkibble in April of 2020.

Brett Curry:

It's brilliant. I think it strikes the perfect cord, kind of threads the needle of exactly what people want. We don't want to feed our dogs junk, and that's become very, very clear that most of what we'd be feeding our dogs is junk, but we also don't want the inconvenience sharing freezer or fridge space or whatever. And so love what you guys have done there. I know a big part of that is your vertical integration and your manufacturing facility in Allentown, pa. And as we talked about in the intro, in a world of tariffs on and off and all kinds of craziness, you guys look like absolute geniuses having your own facilities here. So talk about that decision. Why did you do that and what does that unlock for you and for your customers?

Russell Breuer:

Great question. It's been an incredible journey for the vertical integration build your own factory piece. Yes. In hindsight, it looks like we had the perfect crystal ball. I can assure you at the time we were focused on the supply side, we launched Unkibble in April, 2020. We tell this story that our first purchase order we thought would last six plus months. We sold out in four days in very short order, one co manufacturer turned into six co-manufacturers and they couldn't keep up with demand. There's questions on costs of goods margin. You're shipping freight all over the country between comans to logistics centers, product consistency, there's a number of

Brett Curry:

Questions. Quality control. Yeah, consistency. When you got six different

Russell Breuer:

All over the co, if you asked six people to make a chocolate chip cookie, the cookie is going to look a little bit different. We took that to heart and we decided shortly after launch, having Unkibble that building our own factory and owning our own supply chain was very important. We have now constructed a 70,000 square foot facility in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It's about two hours west of New York. We have a hundred people on site. It's been a huge win for us. It's amazing. We push all the volume through that facility. It's unlocked, tremendous margin wins, it's boosted inventory, it's hedged against stockouts. We we're rapid innovators. And I think the most important point for us, when you think about the food landscape within the pet category, most brands don't manufacture their own products.

Russell Breuer:

They

Russell Breuer:

Don't know where the ingredients come from. They're not involved procurements, they don't understand food safety plans. They don't understand quality control. They don't understand packaging, shipping or logistics. They are marketeers selling somebody else's product as their own, which is a reality that's existed since the beginning of time.

Russell Breuer:

Sure.

Russell Breuer:

Which is fine for us. We take ingredient integrity very seriously and delivering an exceptional customer experience. And our Allentown facility has been the tool, the enabler of that since we own every facet of supply chain, that for us has been an incredible differentiator in this space as we are the leaders in fresh dry, in a fantastic moat and something frankly that most people just aren't doing. And then to your point, yes, the phone rings now and gosh, you guys tariff proof, resilient. You know what the answer to that question is? Yes. Did we know? So at the time, no. It was a bit of a false send and here we are and we're reaping the rewards.

Brett Curry:

I love it, man. I love it. I know this isn't the path for everybody for a variety of reasons, but what did you learn in that process of going vertically integrated and what advice would you give? When do you think other DTC brands might consider taking the path that you took?

Russell Breuer:

Sure. I think the business case needs to be very strong product market fit firstly, and depending on growth rate. And look, ultimately there are thousands and tens of thousands of brands that outsource production A okay, my point was more within the pet space, and so that's fine, but for us, demand, outstripped supply significantly. So there was a need. So rapid product market fits is one two, unity economics is the second consideration. Are you better outsourcing or insourcing? And in many cases, depending on the category, it's better to have someone else. If it's a commoditized trade, it's better to have someone else do it. And you focused on what you do best, whether that's marketing or

Brett Curry:

Marketing, sales, whatever. Yeah,

Russell Breuer:

Exactly. And then ultimately when it comes to actually building a facility, give yourself a long lead time. Like two years. Okay. This

Brett Curry:

Is not overnight notes. We're not spinning this up in six months. This is not our tariff for leaf plan. This is like I'd say thoughtful, intentional, strategic. Yeah,

Russell Breuer:

Exactly right. Brett, I think at a sprint it's 18 months if not two years. Identifying a site, obviously there's a bill design firm involved, there's CapEx, there's equipment, there's staging capital, there's equity, there's debt, there's a lot of pieces involved and team to bring that to life. And of course operating a facility brings a number of other challenges that we've managed and managed well. But nonetheless, there's an early consideration set. But I would say that having your own assets, having your own manufacturing unlocks significant intrinsic value for any company in any more. I think a lot of brands that are winning do own those types of assets and the strategic landscape looks at and says, these are different. Haven't seen that playbook.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, love that. Totally agree with that for sure. So you guys are subscription only. Was that the plan from the beginning or was that a pivot over time? Why did you guys land on that and what have been the pros and cons of going that route?

Russell Breuer:

Great question. So day one, yes. At the person personalized product firstly. So we have kind of an onboarding questionnaire. We learn about your dog's weight activity level to really inform portion or calories consumed per day subscription is fit for the pet category. Why is that dogs need, it's not a want, it's a need. Subscription is a convenience, it's a value prop. You don't need to go to the pet food store. It shows up on a regular cadence. On average, for us it's every four weeks. Customers love it. We're building out broader product platform with treats and supplements and other food products as well. Dental care, which we're launching soon, which we can talk about. But because that need exists, people need the box every four weeks. And so for us, it's always been that way from a reoccurring revenue perspective, commercially speaking, that's certainly a way to scale business. Brilliant. And I think the other point here is within the pet landscape, dogs do need consistency of diet. We don't advocate the dogs to change proteins every day. This is not Turkey on a Monday, beef on a Tuesday, lamb on a Wednesday. That can be a disaster for the Persian rug digestion important. So consistency of diet is also very important and that also leans towards a subscription model. So it's very fit for purpose for the category.

Brett Curry:

Totally makes sense. It fits the value prop for the consumer in terms of the pet owner, but also for the pet and also for you guys. So perfect alignment there across the board. Curious, what have you guys learned? What have you done to make that Yes, easier for shoppers? Because I know a lot of people will probably hear the story and hear the value prop and think, I want that for my dog, but what if they hate it? What if I hate it? What if something like that. So how do you get someone to take that initial leap? They've never seen the food, they've never held the bag, they haven't seen it in store. To immediately go yes to a subscription. How have you made that an easier yes.

Russell Breuer:

Right. So firstly, it's a considered purchase. So we're not selling tennis shoes or to your point, what is this thing? I've been feeding my dog Unkibble since the beginning of time. Why are you using fresh human grid ingredients? There's a lot of education. Firstly, I'd say we use a lot of email marketing and funnels on SMS to continue that education. The pros, the benefits of these types of recipes. We use a trial also, so there's a 14 day trial, there's a happy pup guarantee. These are our tools to give consumers comfort, that

Brett Curry:

Risk reversal guarantees type of thing.

Russell Breuer:

All of the above. And I think it gives people, look, I think the landscape's changed. I think obviously e-commerce is playing a greater role in purchase decisions and people have greater comfort online disclosing their credit card details, receiving a box in the mail when they haven't maybe heard of these brands previously. Our job is to educate, give people comfort that we're here to support them. And then we have an incredible customer service team. We're available on SMS, email chat, voice messages, don't go unnoticed for days. They are responding. It's amazing lesson. So it's those multiple touch points that I think builds a relationship and that's unique to direct to consumer. We have a direct relationship with our customers. They tell us what's working well, they tell us things that we can fix or improve upon. They inform new product innovation and it's an amazing first party. Data is an amazing dynamic and again, our job to serve the customer, but those are some of the tools that we use initially to help give people the idea that we're here for them, give 'em comfort to make that purchase decision.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. As with most things, when you're building a great business and running great marketing or building great offers, it's not just one thing that you do that kind of creates the unlock. It's lots of little things, stacking lots of little things to create a delightful experience. But what would you say are the biggest levers, the biggest levers or the biggest lessons in increasing conversion rate? Increasing the number of people that take you up on subscriptions.

Russell Breuer:

Yeah, I think when you think about the marketing funnel, and we're very much focused on direct response, lower funnel, I'd say consistency of call to action. What you're advertising in terms of product image and copy, is that experience replicated on site, on homepage or landing page is the consistent checkout Is pricing consistent? It's the no surprise rule. What we promise we deliver through the funnel through checkouts following through post conversion as far as onboarding with email or otherwise. So I think that's really important. Supply chains

Brett Curry:

Also, one thing I'll kind of interject there because it's such a great point, Russell, is we talk about you don't want to create whiplash where it's like I see an ad, I see an offer that looks great, I click on it and then I'm like, wait a minute, where am I now? And what is this

Russell Breuer:

Exactly?

Brett Curry:

And if it creates a disconnect or whiplash almost, man, it's hard to overstate how impactful that is negatively. So

Russell Breuer:

That's right.

Brett Curry:

Really let call that up.

Russell Breuer:

I completely agree. I think rapid AB testing informs that consumer feedback informs that. And look, everyone's busy. There's many distractions online. People always ask who are your competitors? And look, e-commerce, we're all competing for clicks, right? We're all competing for your attention online. And so totally in terms of the marketing funnel, that's one point. And then look on the supply chain side, maybe Amazon ruined the party, but people expect product to be delivered soon thereafter. Once you check out, they want that box within one, two days max. And so we've spent a great deal of time ensuring that we can do that. We work with four distribution centrals across the country for business. And so monitoring that one to two day shipping, radius delivery accuracy, all of the above, that's really important. That's important for retention. And again, to my point about food being a need versus a want, food can't be late, right? And it's late three or four days. Again, maybe you can

Brett Curry:

Wait, looks like you're fasting for the next couple of days. Fido doesn't work, doesn't work, yeah,

Russell Breuer:

It doesn't work. Maybe your tennis shoes can be delayed but not your food. And so that's another really important point here. And then expectation management with our customer service folks have a lot of questions about, again, back to the benefits. How do I transition to this new diet? How often should I expect this? I want to try a new recipe. I have multiple dogs, all of the above. There's a lot of education handholding. And so we've invested significant resources in our customer service team and our kind of customer data tech to ensure that we are in rapid response mode in education mode at all times.

Brett Curry:

That's amazing. Let's talk a little bit about the education piece. So you've kind of broken it down. It sounds like there's definitely an education piece upfront. So you're competing for that click, getting someone to the website, maybe they're signing for your email list, you're educating them on why Unkibble, why this process? How is this going to work? So there's some upfront education, there's then education after someone becomes a customer. Can you talk through that? What have been some of the big lessons you've learned there and some unique things you do in terms of education?

Russell Breuer:

The most important consideration upon purchase is ingredients. And we've learned that through Hotjar. Heat maps on websites, iterate surveys, talking to our customers directly, voice of customer people have always said the first consideration when considering a new diet or new food is what's in it, right? And I think ultimately the consumer is much more educated than maybe they used to be. We have very simple ingredients. It's very straightforward. There's no confusion. If you look at a pet food label, if you have a dog, it's confusing. We're that. That's one point. And so that education piece is like, here's what it is. I think two reinforcing vertical supply chain story about this is where it's made, this is how it's made. Again, that builds confidence in our brand. And then

Russell Breuer:

Ultimately there's a lot of touch points after purchase in terms of the inbox experience with feeding guides or brochures, continual education, whether it's in regards to new product launches or breed specific data. We have content marketing, a blog if you will, called what the Pup, which is really talking about love that parenting and pet issues. Is it okay for your dog to sleep in the bed? I'd rather spend more time with my dog than my spouse talking about breed specific information or what diets would work or what to do with your dog's paws in the winter or in the summer. So again, it's this kind of ongoing relationship. And honestly, it's not all about selling product, it's about building a relationship. Pet parents too. And I still have a ton of questions and I've been doing this for a long while. I've 80 pound English golden retriever named Sully who takes up half house's, my fourth child, and I ask her that questions often. So again, we want to be a resource. So it's not only providing food, it's being a resource and supporting the pet parent too.

Brett Curry:

It's so important and that education piece upfront, but also understanding the education doesn't really stop. I had a great experience recently with these amino acids that I purchased for myself, trying to follow a pretty strict workout program and have for years, but I'm 45 now. It's like building and keeping muscle masses hard. So I bought these amino acids based on an influencer's recommendation, but then I got this great guide to amino acids in email after the purchase. It was talking about, Hey, how you should use this 30 minutes before workout, take it immediately after workout. Here's how you can take it, how it differs from protein and creatine and all these other things. And I'm like super helpful. I feel like I understand fitness decently well,

Russell Breuer:

But

Brett Curry:

I felt more empowered. I'm taking more of the product, I feel better as well. I started ordering more. And so it's just one of those things where I think we underestimate the value of education post-purchase because that's going to create sticky relationships, more referrals, more all the things we want, plus happier pets and happier pet owners.

Russell Breuer:

That's it. And that speaks to channel as well, right? Yeah, so any direct to consumer brand, whether you're in pet wallet, razors meal kit or otherwise, there's an opportunity to educate versus on shelf. So on shelf it's unpacked, but once that purchase decisions takes place, a person leaves store, that relationship doesn't exist. And so that's part of the power we have from this channel of acquisition.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. Yep, totally, totally agree. Okay, so you'd said something when we were prepping very unique. I've been in this m and a space and I have some friends in private equity and we're looking at acquiring a couple agencies and things like that. So you mentioned return on invested capital. That is not a term that I hear marketers use a whole lot. Not a term that's really come up on this podcast a whole lot. So how do you guys look at return on invested capital to measure and manage your growth and related to marketing? And I will say just another bit of context, I think I'm really delighted that there's this trend towards marketing and finance becoming friends and how, and I know you're a direct response guy, I've been doing, I started doing DRT V in the early two thousands and so direct response tv. And so I've always lived in this world, but it's really a trend in e-commerce of hey, let's get finance and marketing communicating and let's make sure we're getting good return on our marketing dollars. But even then, I don't hear people talk about return on invested capital. So why is that a metric for you? What kind of insights does that unlock? Unpack that a bit for us,

Russell Breuer:

It's our north star, our ops, our finance, our marketing, the entire organization speaks this language. A lot of direct to consumer. Brands have learned hard lessons. Growing top line and hypergrowth with product market fit is possible for many businesses. If you understand performance marketing, meta search, TikTok, direct mail, you can generate outsized returns on the growth side. But oftentimes brands forget about the unique economics. They forget about things like net income, cashflow, ebitda, and they've learned hard lessons years later when they look to exit or go public and third parties deeply discount valuation or otherwise.

Russell Breuer:

Totally, totally.

Russell Breuer:

So I think that's a starting point for a mind shift in terms of how we've operated this business. We are very prudent operators. And what I mean by that is prudent growth. So return on invested capital really is a measure of our marketing spend and it combines three key metrics, lifetime value, contribution, margin, and customer acquisition cost. Okay, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. When we spend our dollars on any channel, let's say we spend, I'll give you a very rough example. Let's say we spend a million dollars on marketing today. I'm now minus a million dollars. The question is how soon do I repay that a million dollars and get to zero? That's one x return on invested capital. And then how long does it take to generate a million dollars of profit?

Russell Breuer:

And so we look at the lifetime value of our customers. In other words, how much do our customers spend on average per year? That's my numerator. Multiply that by the fully loaded contribution margin in the business. So what is my average profit per customer per year? And then I divide that by the customer acquisition cost and that informs the timeline to repay my investment in marketing. We use that paradigm to inform everything that we do, such that there are caps in terms of how much we are willing to invest in marketing in terms of customer acquisition cost. Of course if our LTV or our average revenue per customer increases over time and our margin increases, we can spend more dollars at a higher acquisition cost. But we use that framework and route everything we do in that framework and that ensures that our operations team, our customer service team, product innovation, they're thinking about we need to boost retention, we need to find margin wins, we need to figure out higher LTV, we need to figure out channels of acquisition that are more efficient. We need to rapidly AB test. Is our creative strategy working? How do we actually get CAC lower on that or search? And so when you combine those elements, that has enabled us to be a nine figure business and be profitable. And we've had that mentality really since inception. And I think ultimately that the other reality is data. You've got to understand

Russell Breuer:

From day one, if you're spending a dollar on market and you've got to know attribution, how do you allocate your money and does that dollar go far? Are you acquiring a customer in a subscription business? If you acquire a customer and they churn 10 days later, that's not good for business. What percent of your customers are churning in second order or third order? So the sooner you are aware and understand the data that will inform and can lead to this type of ROYC equation and that really drives decision making.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good man. And it's one of those things where, yeah, looking at lifetime value, looking at contribution margin, looking at customer acquisition cost, creating these KPIs where your entire team is seeing it and managing against it, it's what matters. It's what matters most. And so you've got alignment across the team on it. And I'm going through the book right now, Moneyball, I dunno if you've seen the movie or the book, but it's so good. And it's one of those things where they're kind unpacking this guy, bill James who kind of revolutionized baseball metrics. He created Saber Metrics is the title that he gave it. But he's like, Hey, looking at rbis and looking at batting average, that just tells a really weird part of the story. But what matters is on base percentage and slugging percentage without getting inside baseball, he unpacks why that matters. It's like that's how you manufacture runs and that's how you manufacture wins. Those are the numbers that matter and there's some other things they measure too, but getting that kind of clarity and getting that clarity across the team, man, it's valuable. So kudos to you guys for getting that clear.

Russell Breuer:

It's part of our onboarding. We talk about it incessantly throughout the organization and again, I would advocate any brand really uses those types of metrics.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, it's really, really great. So that's awesome. Let's talk growth levers for a little bit. So I mean you guys have experienced some great growth and it's all within the constraints or with the guardrails of your return on invested capital, but what have been your best growth levers over the years? What's really allowed you to scale?

Russell Breuer:

So we have a balanced playbook between meta search or Google TikTok affiliates, influencer direct mail. We've been experimenting with OTT over the top and also linear television. You could argue some of these are very lower direct response channels, other are more mid funnel. We haven't spent and invest as much in top of funnel things like billboards or subway cars or wild pasting or otherwise. I think that's intentional because ultimately our belief is that in impressions and an impression, and you may be spending dollars on meta and getting a million impressions and fewer conversions, but nonetheless you're still getting brand awareness. So you could argue that lower funnel is both lower and top and mid, correct. There are different both at the same time. Exactly. And I think that's oftentimes it falls on deaf ears because more traditional brand marketers think they need a billboard in Times Square to justify proper funnel investment. We see lower funnels as kind of serving both purposes. But look, we've got a performance marketing playbook. I think for us, two big differentiators. One we focused on building on incredible team internally that focus, we have channel specific buyers focused that are pulling lever in-house, that's really important. And then two creative. We are in the entertainment

Russell Breuer:

Business at the end of the day,

Russell Breuer:

Totally

Russell Breuer:

Busy on the go parents, they're getting solicited for clothing, food, SaaS services. There's a lot of distractions. And so

Russell Breuer:

Creative is key and it's all about feeding all of these channels, whether it's meta or otherwise with a lot of options. AB test created and maybe iteration, a slight iteration on creative. It may be woman with dog with then Unkibble in park and then it's copy test A and you can run the same image, but copy test B, copy test C. In fact, some of our best performing creative, we took a grainy photo of Unkibble on shelf in our office with a post-it note sale that we ran and we tested that versus studio produced assets, gifs, you name it, and the grainy photo because it looked realistic. It is

Brett Curry:

Looked authentic. It was authentic. Yeah.

Russell Breuer:

People identify with that. That's why GC user generated content plays quite well, but ultimately it's not set it and forget it. We continue to work at it. We continue to try different things and really push the envelope. I think that's one of the reasons why we've been successful on the performance marketing side.

Brett Curry:

I love it, man. And one of the best pieces of advice I ever heard was any business should view themselves as in the business they're in plus their media company. Plus you're in the business of getting, keeping attention, driving some sort of action. And at the core of that really is creative testing. I've always been a media guy and a strategy guy. I love that stuff, but I love creative too. And really creative is the biggest lever that we have now and into the future. And certainly AI and other things are going to enable more rapid testing and more rapid expansion, things like that. While we're on the topic, we didn't really plan on this, but any insights or any perspectives on how AI is going to change performance marketing or e-commerce in general or your business? Any POVs on ai?

Russell Breuer:

Absolutely. No, we are all exposed to it. It's topical innovations here. I think it's a wonderful, we're looking at AI from both workflow automation on the ops side. We're working with it on the performance marketing side in terms of either creative ideas or creative iterations and helping AI to inform how rapidly creative gets tested in platform and helping us make some of those decisions. We're using it on the coding side. I won't mention all the vendors we're working with. But nonetheless, even on the coding side, there's suggestive code to help our engineers actually iterate faster when they're in the development cycle. And so customer service as well, there are tons of opportunities where you can start to not automate everything. We're still a very high touch business, but nonetheless, there are some very standardized questions that are better served through automation, not FAQs, but where is my order?

Russell Breuer:

Totally, totally

Russell Breuer:

Necessarily to give a tracking number or provide guidance to where boxes. So we're looking at AI across all functions of our business really to improve efficiency and ultimately compliance in many ways and push the envelope. I would argue AI is not going to replace everybody ultimately in a hightest, totally,

Russell Breuer:

Totally.

Russell Breuer:

Humanity will rule, right? People do like having conversations and asking questions and there's TLC that customers expect when we're talking about their dogs in particular. But look, AI is here and I think there's a steep learning curve for a lot of brands, but there's a lot of folks out there having the conversation. I think ultimately it's going to be beneficial for all of us.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I 100% agree. That's what we view it. And I've got a very run, very people driven business. Our greatest expense is people. We can't scale without people. And I have the same view where one, I think at a base level, AI is allowing us to do the things we just have not ever had time to do. So that's part of it's allowing us to do some of these things we would love to have done but just haven't been able to. So that's one layer, but then it just supercharges your best people and becomes personal assistant, personal strategist, executioner to make people more productive and better. And so yeah, we're very bullish on ai. We're testing it in lots of different ways. So yeah, I think that's a great perspective. As we wrap up, we'd love to hear what's next for Spot and tangle. It sounds like you got a big product release coming up, or actually at the time of this release, we'll just come out, but talk about that product release, talk about what's next for the brand.

Russell Breuer:

Great. We are very excited. We are building product platform. So we have our food, we have UNC Unkibble, we have our fresh recipes. We sell treats and supplements. Again, addressing all the needs states of the consumer. We know a lot of our consumers feed supplements or treats, even a third feed supplements. So there's ways and we've used that input to launch new products. The human grid version of that product for pets, the dental care solution is the game change. It comes out next week, you'll hear more about it nonetheless. It is a scientifically proven two years in r and d. The big game change here is a lot of the existing dental care products in the marketplace are really physical in nature. There's a physical mechanic that scrubs the dog's teeth, periodontal disease, it's a problem for dog penetration with dental care products within the pet food landscape or pet category is very low.

Russell Breuer:

I think there's a lot of education required. The worst case scenario is your dog gets periodontal disease and ends up at the vet and spends $2,000 for a cleaning or teeth removal or otherwise. This product does two things. There's a very novel ingredient, a novel fermentate that reduces oral biofilms. What does a biofilm is bacteria that leads to plaque on a dog's teeth, plaque leads to bad odor. This product actually removes those biofilms. So there is a scientifically proven mechanism to do that in addition to the brushing. So it's health and wellness, it reduces plaque, it reduces bad odor, it fights periodontal disease. It's a big game change. We're excited. We think it's another tiger by the toe, if you will. And Unkibble has been a hero product and we think this product will be one as well. Yeah. So we've been scaring away behind the scenes and it goes live next Monday, June 2nd.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. And it's one of those things where I think that's so well aligned with who your target buyer is and what they care about. And yeah, just a huge tam there for you to tap into. And so that's really exciting. And then one thing I was curious about there, I know that there's been really some education over the last few years on human health and how really oral health for humans impacts so much of the rest of your health, right? You could be healthy in a lot of ways, but don't take care of your mouth. And that has an impact on potentially the rest of your body. I'm assuming it's got to be the same to some degree with pets.

Russell Breuer:

Exactly. It's all connected. And this is holistic health and wellness. It's not just here's a single ingredient treat or here's a supplement. It even comes, it

Brett Curry:

Sounds a breath mint it serving a real health purpose.

Russell Breuer:

And to your earlier point about being really health conscious and focused on exercise, it's the same with your dog. Healthy exercise, going for a walk. It's really a mentality. It's not just scoop and serve and it fixes all problems. You need to really embrace that. An active lifestyle is really important. You need to think about all aspects, all moments of consumption and dental care is no exception to that.

Brett Curry:

It's awesome. It's awesome. Well, Russell, this has been an absolute pleasure. Kudos to you guys on building a great brand, a great product, a great offering is loyal following people love you, pets and owners alike. And so I'm excited to see where you guys go and grow from here. I'm definitely a fan. And so for those that are listening, they're like, man, I got to get on this Unkibble Train and I got to check out what Spot and Tango is up to. How can they learn more? How can they figure out what their pet needs?

Russell Breuer:

Spot and tango.com, all information's there, whether it's Un Unkibble or our treats or supplements in this new dental care product. Spots and tango.com, we offer discounts on trial. It's a 14 day trial with a happy pup guarantee. So there's no reason not to give us a try. And Brett, thank you so much. Amazing, fantastic opportunity. Really enjoyed the conversation. Again, thanks for the opportunity here.

Brett Curry:

Absolutely. Russell Breuer, ladies and gentlemen, Russell, good luck to you and Spot and Tango and look forward to watching the future success. Super exciting. And as always, we'd love to hear from you. So I'd love to hear feedback. What would you like to hear more of on the podcast? If you found this episode inspiring, please share it with somebody else. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

What happens when you build a company specifically to sell it—and then execute that plan? 

Liz Saunders went from running registration at Seller Summit to delivering the closing keynote, all while building Fluencer Fruit, the Chrome extension that helps Amazon Influencer creators optimize their content strategy. In this powerful episode, Liz reveals her entire exit playbook, from reading "Exit Preneur" before she even started building to keeping GAAP-compliant books from day one. But this isn't just an acquisition story—it's a masterclass in understanding the Amazon Influencer ecosystem, where creators earn 1-4% commissions and brands are discovering that video converts better than text, and UGC converts better than brand videos.

Key Topics & Lessons:

• The Strategic Exit Playbook - How Liz built Fluencer Fruit knowing she'd sell within 3-5 years, why she hired a bookkeeper from day one to keep GAAP-compliant records, and how a single LinkedIn comment led to her acquisition by Wayward through a consulting relationship
• Amazon Influencer Program Deep Dive - The difference between driving traffic (TikTok/social) vs. converting traffic (on-site Amazon videos), why commission rates vary from 1-4% based on product categories, and how brands can unlock video carousel placements to boost conversions
• Commission Stacking Strategy - How creators are maximizing revenue from single pieces of content across platforms, why brand attribution links can offset creator commissions with 10% referral bonuses, and the emerging licensing opportunities for creator content in Amazon ads
• Brand Strategy for Amazon Influencer - Why you need brand registry and at least one product video per listing, how to work directly with creators for authentic problem-solving content, and the difference between educational on-site content vs. benefit-driven social content
• The Infrastructure Stabilization Phase - Why the "blue ocean" of easy influencer money is shifting to more strategic "commission stacking" approaches, how platforms are building long-term sustainability, and why brands should focus on creators who post across multiple platforms
• Cross-Platform Creator Strategy - How to identify TikTok creators who also do Amazon Influencer content, why the skill sets are different but complementary, and Liz's advice to double down on what's working rather than trying to be everywhere at once

Chapters: 

(00:00) Re-Introducing Liz Saunders 

(03:30) The Journey of Fluencer Fruit

(07:20) Amazon Influencer Program Insights

(10:09) Shifts in Influencer Marketing

(13:35) Brand Strategies for Influencer Engagement

(19:05) Multi-Channel Selling

(21:31) Building and Selling Fluencer Fruit

(28:03) Insights from the Sales Process

(32:05) Future Endeavors

‍

Liz Saunders:

Everybody is making more money than they've ever thought they could make off of one piece of content in their life, right? They're like, I posted a five second video and retired, and everybody's like, congratulations.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we have a returning guest. It's going to be an amazing episode. I have Miss Liz Saunders back again with a new title and a lot of new developments that I can't wait to unpack, but she is now the president of the creative division at Wayward. Talk about what that means and why she's doing that. But with that, Liz, welcome to the show and how's it going?

Liz Saunders:

Thanks, Brett. It's going so good. I mean, it's been, I guess a little, almost two years since we chatted, so this is a really fun opportunity to reconnect.

Brett Curry:

It's so crazy when I first thought, man, I should have Liz back on. I thought, well, it's been just a few months. And then I looked and yeah, it's been almost two years, which that's just the way life and e-comm goes, man. It just goes by so stinking fast.

Liz Saunders:

It feels like yesterday and seven years ago simultaneously,

Brett Curry:

Right? 100%. That is 100% true. Yeah. Yeah. So you've had a really big year, Liz. We were both at Solar Summit in Fort Lauderdale. You were the closing keynote of that event, which is a major honor, so kudos to you for that. You sold your company Fluencer Fruit, you sold to Wayward, which is where you are now, so I can't wait to unpack that. And now you get to be on this show twice in a couple of years, so it is a big, big year for you, so congratulations.

Liz Saunders:

Thank you. Thank you.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. Which by the way, what was that, given the closing keynote, was that kind of a bucket list thing? Was it something you wanted to do or something you're really nervous about? Kind of walk us through that

Liz Saunders:

Kind of all of those things, honestly. Well, not Bucket List, that's the one that I'll say, and this was part of my keynote, was when I started with Seller Summit. I mean, it's was my entryway into e-comm, and when I started, I was running registration and was just a new Amazon seller, and my whole life was kind of in flux. And so never did I ever think, oh, I would like to be closing keynote, right?

Brett Curry:

Go from run of the admission table years and years ago to now doing the closing Genome,

Liz Saunders:

Checking Bunch badge. And now it's like, and here you're as the, so I will say it definitely wasn't something that I initially was like, that's what I want to do. And also when we got closer, it was like, that would be really cool. And in talking to Tony, because they had a scheduling change with the original closing keynote, and she was like, you've been traveling. Who do you see? And I kind of was like, I'm going to pitch myself. I was like, I'm a rags Riches seller Summit full circle moment. Heck. And she was like, I like it. So they took it and

Brett Curry:

Amazing.

Liz Saunders:

It was nerve wracking, but it was really fun. If you're ever going to do something that big, being in your, I would call it our home audience, those are my people, is like,

Brett Curry:

Yeah, everybody's rooting for you. Everybody was cheering for you. It was a perfect

Liz Saunders:

Environment, so nerve wracking, but also if you fall on your face, they're still going to love you. So it's a little ambivalence.

Brett Curry:

Takes some pressure off for sure. So yeah, it was great. And your background is Jungle Scout. You're a successful seller. You've been doing Seller Summit now, doing some really cool things. And then a few years ago you had this idea, let's build a platform. You called it Fluencer Fruit, that's the company you just exited, which I want to hear all about the exit because I just know so many people we're kind of in the m and a game we're looking to acquire. I know a lot of people that are looking for exits, and so can't wait to unpack that a little bit. But for those who don't know, what is flu fruit and then how does that fit into the wayward ecosystem?

Liz Saunders:

Absolutely. So Fluencer Fruit is an extension that helps content creators on or in the Amazon Influencer program helps them do product research, and it helps them manage their video library. So that's the fastest way to explain it. It's a Chrome extension that just helps visualize all of the things that you care about for onsite content in an easy to digest fashion.

Brett Curry:

Nice. And so what are you seeing right now, and we'll talk about how this fits in with Wayward, but what are you seeing right now with Amazon Influencer? I know this has been an initiative with Amazon for a while. Amazon's always trying to solve the problem of discovery. How do we get customers to discover new products? They still mostly rely on search. They're looking for things to go beyond that. But what have you been seeing with Amazon Influencer as of late?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, so it's interesting because I think there's two pieces to that coin, which is where it's like they're trying to solve for discoverability, and they're also trying to solve for authentic feedback. So we have seen a lot of change for written reviews, and I use it in quotes because are they really reviews from customers? Amazon's been fighting that

Brett Curry:

Battle. Is it a real person? Is it someone overseas?

Liz Saunders:

Is

Brett Curry:

It just fake? It's a bot. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Liz Saunders:

It's like a competitor being paid to leave one star reviews. So they've been trying to simultaneously solve both of these things. And so where I see the onsite content being the biggest win for them is its authentic user feedback for a product. And so in a way, it does battle some of those paid for bad good, whatever reviews with really authentic conversations in video. The other thing is from

Brett Curry:

A, so it's not just a discovery thing, it's also like a conversion piece as well, right? Yes. And lending real feedback for a specific product that should help with conversions or

Liz Saunders:

Purchases. So the onsite piece up to this point has been almost 100% on the conversion side. It's like you're paying all these other places to drive traffic to the listing. This is the one thing that they let you do that helps with your conversion rate. But something interesting that they're playing with in way of discoverability is surfacing these videos in search results. So every once in a while, and they're still, I think, testing, we don't see this consistently, but every once in a while you'll be searching and instead of a main Amazon image product picture, you'll see a video that's obviously not a brand videoing. So I do think that they're trying to pull that in.

Brett Curry:

So there's no way at the moment for a brand to influence that. But if you have those videos, perhaps Amazon's going to grab that and display that on a search results page?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, correct. I call those miscellaneous placements because we don't have any insight into them. Amazon never tells us when they're doing them, but we see them and they'll just plug our content into all of these placements, just I think to test conversion and see how much they help or don't.

Brett Curry:

Got it. We do a lot on the Amazon advertising side, huge fan of the ads ecosystem, love sponsor brand video. You be called video and search. What are you seeing, if anything, from your perspective on brands using some of this influencer content, these influencer videos, and running those ads, sponsor brand ads?

Liz Saunders:

So this is really interesting that you asked about this. I do office hours with my subscribers every Thursday, and we were talking about this morning. So out of curiosity, are you seeing the ability to put money on influencer content through the ads console?

Brett Curry:

Well, I don't run the campaigns myself, so I'd have to ask my team. I've not heard anyone mention that yet. But is that maybe in a beta right now?

Liz Saunders:

So 18 months ago, they sent us a bunch of questions, would you rather this for three months to license your content to a brand or this for six months? And they did this whole whatever. And now in the backend, on the creator side of Creator Connections, we have a licensing tab, but it's blank.

Liz Saunders:

So

Liz Saunders:

Where I think they're going is to allow brands to kind of let run traffic to creator content through the actual Amazon ads platform. So I was wondering if you guys were seeing it in beta yet,

Brett Curry:

And then pay a licensing fee potentially to the creator is the way that might work?

Liz Saunders:

That's what we're guessing,

Brett Curry:

Yeah. So either they would pay a licensing fee or the way it works now is if I'm a creator, an influencer, I post content about, let's call it a coffee product on Amazon. If someone views my video and then purchases, I get some kind of a commission for that. Is that correct?

Liz Saunders:

Correct. Yep.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And what does that commission look like? Are there ranges? Does it depend on me as an influencer? How does that look?

Liz Saunders:

There are influencers who have their own rate cards, but those are the super producers. So your average creator, it gets between one and 4% for those onsite commissions, and it's tagged by category. So however you as the seller have decision trade. If your nursery bookshelf goes in furniture or in kids, those are two different commissions. For the onsite creator, it's either 4% of furniture or two and a quarter percent for baby stuff.

Brett Curry:

Interesting. I wonder why, any insight into why those commissions are different for different categories for influencers?

Liz Saunders:

I have no idea. I mean, I'm assuming that Amazon has discovered

Brett Curry:

Margin profile for those categories, maybe something like that.

Liz Saunders:

I kind assume that they tag it based on the difficulty to sell and drive traffic. So baby stuff sells all day every day. They don't need to incentivize people

Brett Curry:

To that's

Liz Saunders:

Sell that stuff. Whereas furniture, how many people are selling bookshelves?

Brett Curry:

Right?

Liz Saunders:

That's my guess.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, makes sense. So what have you seen change then? So you started Influencer Fruit, what is it, a little over two years ago? Is that right? And so what have you seen shift, what have you seen improve? What have you seen change in terms of the Amazon influencer program?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, I think it's in the influencer program as well as just in product focused content in general. Right now we're kind of seeing this moment of what I call infrastructure stabilization. So we've been in Blue Ocean, everybody is making more money than they've ever thought they could make off of one piece of content in their life, right? They're like, I posted a five second video and retired. And everybody's like, congratulations. So now we're in between TikTok shop affiliate and Amazon Influencer. We're seeing a little bit of, it's not a slowdown, but they're pulling back to create the infrastructure that will build the long term of the programs.

Liz Saunders:

And so we're seeing people having to adapt to how they're making money. So what we're seeing working is, I call it commission stacking, where from the same piece of content, I want to optimize how many ways I can make money off of it. Will the brand pay me for it? Will they send me a product? Do they have additional commissions available through Creator connections or Wayward? What are their sales? Just trying to think through as opposed to just picking a product and creating content for it, thinking through the big picture. Are they on TikTok and Amazon? Can I create cross-platform content for them?

Brett Curry:

Yeah. So what about from the brand side? So if I'm a seller on Amazon, how should I be thinking about Amazon influencers? Should I be going out pursuing recruiting influencers? What should I be doing?

Liz Saunders:

So if you're on the brand side, the first thing you want to do is make sure your brand registered and that you have uploaded at least one product video or brand video to every listing, because that unlocks that upper video carousel placement, which is the number one converting thing, thinking about the fact that video converts better than text, and UGC converts better than brand videos.

Brett Curry:

Totally.

Liz Saunders:

So getting that above the fold close to the buying decision is always positive. The next piece that just opens the real estate, the next piece is actively working with Amazon influencers is really a cool opportunity where TOS compliant and we're FTC compliant and we're not a black box. So it's not like the Vine Review program, which I understand holds a necessary place, but you can't talk to Vine reviewers. You can talk to us. So if you have something, people keep returning this coffee product because they don't understand that you have to clean the filter this many times a week or the coffee tastes bad. It's like, well, as a content creator, I can go in and be like, you guys, number one mistake that I've made with this is I didn't clean the filter and it hits different when I say it than when the brand does

Brett Curry:

It. It does, it does. But then you can also say, Hey, it was

Liz Saunders:

Really

Brett Curry:

Easy to clean, and man, now I get the perfect cup of coffee every

Liz Saunders:

Time, user error type of thing, error. That's on me. You know what I mean?

Brett Curry:

Much more acceptable coming from a user where you're like, oh, it's normal to do this rather than the brand is making me do extra work. Exactly. Totally makes sense. Yeah, and we've leaned into this for some of our brands. It's something that we can help with where we go out and find influencers. And so I know for a particular betting client, it's been really effective for 'em. Good. But yeah. Any other things you've seen change or shift from a brand's perspective, or actually, I may have cut you off. You said open up videos, open up the carousel, brand registered, get brand, open up that carousel. Then what else should brands do?

Liz Saunders:

Well, I think the brands finding a way all watching everybody trying. Everybody's always trying to be more efficient with their spend and how they fixing their margins, whether it's tariffs, whether it's changes in terms of service, whatever the current challenge is around margins. So some of the things that we're seeing brands do in way of new opportunities, creative problem solving around this is working with creators directly. So you have more control over those conversations. And sometimes that means pulling the actual transactions so that they're outside of Amazon, meaning I'm paying you a flat fee for this as opposed to whatever, but then I can use your content or

Liz Saunders:

Working

Liz Saunders:

With a company like Wayward where you can use brand attribution links to get the referral bonus to offset the commissions you're paying to the creators. It's like a win-win win.

Brett Curry:

So explain that a little bit. I know hardcore Amazon sellers know exactly what you're talking about, but for those that are less familiar

Liz Saunders:

For sure,

Brett Curry:

What is that referral bonus?

Liz Saunders:

Absolutely. So the brand attribution link is basically a brand's version of an affiliate link. Amazon wants you to drive traffic when you drive traffic. They've done something where they'll give you a brand referral bonus. They're not cutting you a check, but they're cutting back on the amount you're paying them for the referral fee, and it's usually around 10%. That's not standard or that's not global, but that's approximate. And so what happened in this conversation was brands were like, if we drive traffic, we don't want to pay for you to drive traffic. And Amazon was like, you're right. Here's how we'll solve that. But then it was like this other piece entered the chat and was like, brands would be happy to pay creators almost a hundred percent of their margin for that first sale to get a new customer. And so this allows people wayward will take your brand attribution link, then what the creator is using, you are getting the brand referral bonus, and then you can pay the creator a higher percentage than if they're just going through Amazon affiliates

Brett Curry:

Because why not? That's free money you're getting from Amazon. Why not pay that to a creator? Give them more incentives, fuel your growth there through influencers. So yeah, it makes a ton of sense.

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, I mean, it's such a cool opportunity. It incentivizes. It's a literal, everyone wins, right?

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. Super cool. Good. Have you seen more and more brands adopting Amazon influencer? Is it still kind of slow to pick up? How has that been going?

Liz Saunders:

It's a lot of education conversations. It's interesting because I think this is not uncommon, but Amazon will launch a program and then it kind of takes on its own side life from what they initially intended it to be, which is great, right? Because it is its own living organism, right?

Brett Curry:

Sure.

Liz Saunders:

Because of that, though, I think, and I don't have anybody at Amazon that's told me this, but I think the way they initially designed this program was to be a much tighter sister to the affiliate program. So affiliate being the people driving the traffic, influencer being the people who are helping convert the traffic. And I think they initially thought that this was going to be like a one for one people. Were going to be doing both, but it's become a very, there are people that do both, but it's become a very separate skillset. The difference between if you're on a product listing and me helping you make that buying decision is much different than me on my Instagram being like, these are my favorite wrist wraps when I lift, you should go check out their stuff. It's almost like a different selling motion.

Brett Curry:

Totally, totally. Yeah. You're more demonstrating the product on that product detail page and showing how it works. It's a little more education type of thing. Someone's already in the store, they're already talking to you, where if someone's on TikTok or elsewhere, you got to convince them to go to the store to check it out. Exactly. So yeah, different feel. And so what you're finding when Amazon is finding is that's often a different person. So the person running TikTok influencer content is maybe different than the person who's doing Amazon Influencer or it's maybe the same person, they're just creating different content for different places.

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, it's a combination of those two things. But yeah, it is. It's like if I'm on TikTok, I'm trying to get you moving and to click on a link. If I'm on an Amazon influencer or if I'm on an Amazon product listing, I'm like, check out how I can push up this shade tent. It just clicks right into place on my TikTok. People don't care about that. But on the product listing, if you're five four and you don't know how you're going to set up this tent by yourself, you want to see how I can do it. And so it has more educational, more faq, more like feature based, then

Brett Curry:

It's more feature rich where the content to get someone to go to the store that's got to be more benefit oriented, more action oriented. You're moving someone, and then on the page there's kind of overcoming objections, answering questions, talking about features, helping them decide between this product, your product, versus a competitive product. So yeah, makes a ton of sense. How then are you seeing this pair? And we've sort of just talked about it, but TikTok shops obviously it's huge. We have some clients that have exploded with TikTok shops. It's also not for everybody. Amazon's got their own affiliate program. I'm really excited about YouTube's affiliate program. It's basically their answer to TikTok shops. We're doing some early testing here.

Liz Saunders:

It's

Brett Curry:

Been very favorable, but it's early days. So how do you see these things working together and how would you advise brands to consider how they work together?

Liz Saunders:

It's a good question. So I think one of the current struggles that everybody in this product focused content seller space is struggling with is the interpreted need to be everything to all people and to be on every single platform. And while I think there is a space for yes, be on TikTok, be on Amazon, sell 'em, Walmart, all those things, I do think there's a little bit of, depending on how big your team is, how early you are in your company phase, you can't personally probably simultaneously run all of those sales channels. So I think making peace with, if you took off on TikTok, double down, right?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah. If

Liz Saunders:

You took off on Amazon, double down

Liz Saunders:

In

Liz Saunders:

Time, you can add all of those from a content piece though, if you're a brand who is selling on all of those, when you're vetting creators, check and see where they're posting specifically if you're on TikTok and Amazon and you find a creator on TikTok, because that's the more likely direction this goes.

Liz Saunders:

Ask

Liz Saunders:

Them if they're Amazon influencer and if they would post an influencer video in addition to what they're doing on TikTok, because it's much harder. You can reach out to influencers from Amazon through their storefront to their socials and to their, but if you're interacting with them on TikTok, you've already got a little bit of conversation going, that's where I would the best direction.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, totally makes sense. So start that conversation with someone on TikTok and do an influencers working with you there. See if they'll create some content on Amazon as well. And that kind of goes back to the earlier discussion where same person, different flavors of content

Liz Saunders:

Based

Brett Curry:

On where someone is in the buying journey. And it makes just a ton of sense.

Liz Saunders:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

So very, very cool. Well, awesome. Well, let's kind of go back to what we alluded to at the beginning of the show. So you built Fluencer Fruit, amazing site, amazing product. Kudos to you. It really, really great.

Liz Saunders:

Thank you.

Brett Curry:

Why did you decide to sell, and actually when did you decide to sell? So did you build it in order to sell it or did you build it just for fun and you're like, wait a minute, there's something here. This is valuable. I'm going to sell it.

Liz Saunders:

So I built it to sell it. I went into it knowing that I wouldn't run it forever. I know that my skillset falls between zero and two, right of the stage of the company. I do really well with ambiguity, chaos, and pulling it all into one place with enough of a structure to start handing things off to specialists. So over time, I've realized that that is my skillset. So I knew that I was probably not going to be the person that took it past stage two or whatever that turns out to be. And I read Exit Preneur by our mutual friend, Joe Val, as I was

Brett Curry:

Joe Val, shout out to Joe. Great book. Great book.

Liz Saunders:

I mean, if you are even thinking about Ever in the Future, I just devoured that book and I had legitimately been waiting to read it until I knew I was getting ready. I wanted it to be so fresh. I should have read it twice, but

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, one thing I've noticed there is, so we started going through this journey and like I said, we're looking at acquiring, we're trying, we're an agency right now trying to get it across the finish line and looking at another deal as well. But one thing I noticed is once we started thinking about m and a, and we'd even explored do we want to sell to an investor? What do we want to do? If you go through the process, if you read Joe's book and there are some other great books, buy, then Build, buy Walker, and there's several others just going through the process, you'll run your business better. Because if you start to look at your business like an investor or a buyer looks at your business, you are just going to run it better. And then you may decide, wow, I'm more profitable running it this way. I'm just going to keep the business. So anyway, I think even if you think you're not going to sell for a while, read those books and run your business, you're going sell it, it be a better business.

Liz Saunders:

I think the best thing that I took out of the book was my books. I'm not a bookkeeper anyways. And so as I set up the LLCs hired a bookkeeper because I just wanted, because when I was at Jungle Scout Chief of Staff, I did a lot of coordinating around m and a conversations and when we acquired Downstream and those sorts of things. And so I've seen the process of when people's books aren't clean and what that looks like. And I was like, so my number one thing was to make sure that my books were always whatever. Anybody could come in if they didn't like the books, that was one thing. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

Compliance super clean. Correct. Someone looks at it, they trust it. Yeah. End of story.

Liz Saunders:

Exactly. So that was my favorite thing, but I knew all along, so I read the book and then I was building, I did think that I was going to run the company for three to five years.

Liz Saunders:

I

Liz Saunders:

Figured it would take me about that long to be interesting. The risks that I took that I knew were risks was my brand was and is still very attached to me as a person. And so when people talk about flu fruit, they talk about you should buy flu fruit so that you get with it Liz's office hours or

Liz Saunders:

Those sorts of things.

Liz Saunders:

So I did know that that was a little bit, but I also assumed because I very specifically picked a pretty niche community that I was going to be a strategic acquisition for somebody filling a gap that nobody else has that fits a bigger picture, whether it was an ads play or those,

Brett Curry:

You likely weren't going to be a platform you were going to be more bolted on or tucked into a platform most likely.

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, my I was like, nobody else is doing anything in this space. I can fill that hole for whoever thinks that it's the most valuable to them at the time.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And really building a brand that is a little bit dependent on your personality. I mean, that's what done here at OMGA, public facing, I'm speaking, I'm doing all kinds of things. And so certainly my brand and OMG, they're intertwined, which is fine. I think part of that though is you got to lean into your strengths, right? Absolutely. You're good at building community. People know you, they trust you, they like you, so don't shy away from that just so that a future exit is

Liz Saunders:

Agree

Brett Curry:

Easier, whatever, lean into it a strength, you're going to build a business faster, it's going to be more profitable, and that's going to make the business more valuable. Absolutely. And they kept you on as well, which I'm sure was part of that was related to your personal brand being attacked.

Liz Saunders:

So I was planning on being around a lot longer solo, and then we've talked a lot about building your network and being open to conversations is really critical in whatever realm you operate in. And the wayward thing came out of a LinkedIn conversation.

Brett Curry:

No way.

Liz Saunders:

So

Brett Curry:

Like a post you made on LinkedIn, someone commented on it, or just a connection?

Liz Saunders:

I made a comment on another post, and the head of growth from Wayward reached out to me and was like, I'd love to get on a call and just kind of chat. And so I take a lot of those just because interesting in our space

Brett Curry:

And learn something.

Liz Saunders:

And then he was like, Hey, you should meet our CEO. So I met Allie and then she and I had lunch, and then I did some consulting for them. And as we worked together, it was like, oh, this is actually a really good fit. We have a whole offering together.

Brett Curry:

By the way, what a brilliant strategy from wayward part, I'm assuming this was part of the strategy. Hey, here's Liz. Cool product, cool tech, let's hire her as a consultant and let's see what it's like to work with her. That's actually something we've done several times as we looked at acquisitions is, Hey, let's run some projects together. So we're looking, we're talking m and a, we're talking about joining forces, whatever. Let's run projects together. Let's just see how this goes. I mean, that's the best due diligence you could ever do, or the best addition to due diligence you could ever do. So cool. So what was it like going through the sales process? Any tips, suggestions for someone who's considering it, about to get into the sales process, the selling of their business, that process? What was it like? What tips do you have?

Liz Saunders:

So I think probably the two best decisions I made were I had a broker. So even though I had kind of sourced or whatever, I was working with Wayward, I worked with a broker to help me put together my valuation, my kit, just some of those things. So even though technically the sale happened outside of the broker situation, there were so many things that putting together specifically around the valuation that was really valuable to have his input around what's currently going, what the multiples are. And then the next best thing I did was an attorney. Because initially I was like

Brett Curry:

Got to

Liz Saunders:

Got, I was like, I can do this with chat GPT, and then I was like, will I regret that if I do it wrong? I was like, yes, I will. So you

Brett Curry:

Will. I mean, I love chat GPT or Claude or other tools for legal

Liz Saunders:

Help

Brett Curry:

Structuring advice in the early days. It can help guide you, and those tools can really show you some things, but man, if you're doing a big deal, this may be one of the biggest transactions of your life. If you're looking to acquire or sell or whatever, hire a good m and a attorney. It's so worth

Liz Saunders:

It. Yep, exactly. So those are the things I wouldn't do differently, you know what I mean? Those are the decisions that I'm really glad I made those two decisions

Brett Curry:

For sure, for sure. Anything you would've done differently?

Liz Saunders:

It's a good question. I've been trying to think about that. And honestly, at the moment, I don't have anything. I think probably because I'm a big believer in if you feel like you're trying to kick the door down that maybe that's not the direction. And it just felt like every door in this situation just kind of opened, and so I just kind of walked down the path, right? The CEO, Allie and I have a very open relationship, and so if I had a concern, I would just go to her and there was nothing major. But anytime you have these types of big detailed conversations,

Liz Saunders:

Making

Liz Saunders:

Sure that you're clear on things is super important, obviously. And so I don't currently have anything where I'm like, I wish I had done that part differently.

Brett Curry:

It's so great. Well, and one thing, and because of the way this unfolded, got to know them by meeting in person and then working as a consultant with them, you really got a feel for their character and the way they operate. And because even though this isn't a forever thing, it's kind of getting married, especially if you merge companies, that's like a marriage. So you got to really make sure, is this someone I want to be married to for the next X number of years?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, exactly.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And that's where I love being tenacious and if I get a no, I'm going to figure out a way to get a yes and things like that, but you don't want to have to, Hey, this is going to be a partnership. I don't want to have to fight for everything. It should feel somewhat seamless or effortless, at least in parts of it, like the communication and the openness and the, Hey, are we collaborative? And stuff like that. Yeah, it sounds like you definitely took the right path there and it paid off. It paid off.

Liz Saunders:

I'm really pleased with the outcome. I love being on the team, and that was part of the reason that when we started having those conversations, I had been solo for two years, which pretty extroverted. So being able to join a team that's moving in the right direction has been like, oh, good. I have people again,

Brett Curry:

Dude, I thrive in a team environment. I can do okay on my own. I don't mind to sit and write or crunch numbers for a little bit. But doing that for a long period of time, no, that's not where I want to be. That's amazing. So now kind of foreseeable future, you're going to be helping build this out, or is this a short-term thing? Are you allowed to say what does the future hold for Liz and for flu fruit?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah. Well, I have this really cool opportunity with Wayward to build their creator division. That's awesome. So I get to visualize, strategize, scope and help execute on this in a way, to your earlier point, know your strengths. I get to build a community that's rooted in education and tools and straight knowledge sharing around a lot of this. So I'm really excited about that. So I don't know how long that takes or where that takes me, but for right now, we're natural builders that appeals to me is I get to go build something cool with additional resources and helping the community that I'm bringing along

Brett Curry:

With a team with capital, with a structure. But you get a little bit of the best of both worlds. You can still be entrepreneurial and build, but with some resources at your disposal. So that is awesome. Well, Liz, kudos to you, man. Great job. This was your goal at the outset. Let me build something that is valuable enough that someone wants to buy it. You did it yet a successful exit.

Liz Saunders:

Thank

Brett Curry:

Now you guys are building together, which is super great. So if people are listening to this and they're like, man, I want to know more about wayward or about flu fruit. I want to tap into Amazon, the Amazon influencer ecosystem, either as an influencer, I probably just got brands listening, but I could have some people who want to do an influencer, but how can people find more?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, absolutely. So wayward.com is like if you just want a general whatever, I also do calls with brands. So if you're like, you know what? I just have questions, I'm Liz at, at wayward.com, just shoot me an email. We'll set up a time. I'll walk you through. I'll do an audit of your listings and tell you organically what you can be doing to attract those influencers and or how we can help you push more traffic, kind of figuring, solving for the problem you're having.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. And then it's Fluencer fruit.com as well, is that's the

Liz Saunders:

Yep. If you're looking for the extension, it's Fluencer fruit.com.

Brett Curry:

Amazing. And then Liz, what about on the socials? Are you active? Are you active on LinkedIn, or was just the onetime comment that changed your life?

Liz Saunders:

Yeah, yeah. I know, right? It's like random comment. I'm, I'm active on LinkedIn, so I think my profile is like Liz Saunders, but if you look up Liz Saunders, you should find me.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. I'll link to everything in the show notes as well. So check out what Liz is up to. Liz, thank you so much. It's been a ton of fun, super valuable. And man, I'm excited to watch you guys build and make the Amazon influencer space even better.

Liz Saunders:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? And if you've not done so, we'd love that review on iTunes, helps other people discover the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Think SEO is dead in the age of AI? Think again. While ChatGPT referral traffic surged 112% month-over-month across e-commerce sites, Google still commands 99% of search market share and processes 13.6 billion queries daily. Jeff Oxford, SEO expert and founder of 180 Marketing, reveals why smart brands are doubling down on search optimization—and how the strategies that work for Google are also positioning companies to dominate in AI search results. From his data analysis of 152 SEO campaigns showing consistent 75% traffic growth, to the "ranking factor leak" that exposed Google's true algorithm priorities, Jeff breaks down the exact 4-bucket framework that's still generating millions in revenue for e-commerce brands.

Key Topics & Lessons:

• The State of Search in 2025 - Why Google's 13.6 billion daily queries represent a 64% increase from 2024, how ChatGPT traffic grew 112% month-over-month (but still represents only 1-3% of total traffic), and why the "Google is dead" narrative is premature despite real AI disruption
• The 4-Bucket SEO Framework - Jeff's systematic approach covering Technical SEO (mostly handled by Shopify), Page Optimization (title tags, meta descriptions, headers), Content Strategy (200-300 words on category pages), and Link Building (the 0.3 correlation factor that still dominates rankings)
• What Really Moves the Needle - Data from 152 campaigns showing 20% growth at 3 months, 50% at 6 months, and 75% at 12 months, plus insights from Google's leaked ranking documents revealing click-through rate as a massive ranking factor
• The Great Blog Apocalypse of 2023 - Why standalone content sites lost 90% of their traffic while e-commerce stores with blogs thrived, how Google's "helpful content" update rewarded real businesses over affiliate spam, and Jeff's theory about Google My Business as a ranking signal
• AI SEO Optimization Strategy - How to reverse-engineer ChatGPT sources to identify link targets, why product roundups have a 0.45 correlation with AI citations (higher than traditional backlinks), and the overlap between traditional SEO and AI optimization
• The Future of Automated SEO - Jeff's experiment building a fully autonomous AI agency with zero human account managers, AI tools that can screenshot pages and generate optimized title tags, and how Gemini 2.5 Pro is changing the automation game

Chapters: 

(00:00) The Relevance of SEO in the Age of AI

(12:38) The 4 Components of SEO

(16:19) What Is the Payoff for SEO?

(20:22) Breaking Down Technical SEO

(23:43) On-Page SEO and Meta Descriptions

(25:58) Content Optimization Strategies

(33:27) Link Building

(38:30) AI and SEO: The Future of Search

‍

Jeff Oxford:

The tricky part is deciphering a good backlink from a bad one. So let's say you have two blogs. Trying to determine which blog is going to be helpful and which is going to be harmful is extremely difficult.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we've got Jeff Oxford on the show, and we're talking about SEO search engine optimization. Going to weave in some ai, some AI optimization, but you may be thinking what, is anybody still searching? Is anybody still talking about SEO these days? Isn't everything ai? And have we got some insights for you? Because the good news is if you're doing good SEO, it's going to help with AI as well, and I can stay with authority. SEO is not dead. And so with that, Jeff, welcome to the show, man. And how's it going? It's going great, Brett. Thanks for having me. Yeah, dude, it was awesome. Connecting at Steve Chu and Tony Airbox, event Seller Summit Fort Lauderdale, one of my favorite events. And I think you've spoken there multiple times as well, correct? You're kind of a

Jeff Oxford:

Radio. Yeah, this is my third time speaking there.

Brett Curry:

Nice, nice. And you talked about SEO. I sat in on your talk. I loved it. What a lot of people don't know is that actually at the very beginning, so OMG is now 15 years old. The first service we offered Jeff, SEO, really SEO for local companies. It was just something we knew, something we liked. I was a search engine nerd, and so a business partner loved it as well. And so that's what we did. Yep. Search engine optimization. That led to Google search, led to Google Shopping. I had a video background that led to YouTube, but in the beginning, SEO baby.

Jeff Oxford:

Okay, so we can go deep in the trenches. It sounds like

Brett Curry:

The We can totally nerd out for sure. Now, I have not been in the SEO game in detail recently, but I still keep up. I can still talk shop for sure. But why SEO as a topic now? And was that just something that Steve, the VIN organizer was interested in, or were there a lot of requests for it? Why SEO as a topic?

Jeff Oxford:

So I guess a little behind the scenes of what happened with that is he was also, he was asking me about AI optimization chat, GPT optimization. And this is after we already got SEO O in there, but we're kind of at a possible paradigm shift of how people are searching. If we just look at right now, June, 2025 as a data point, we just freeze this chat. Google is still the 800 pound gorilla. It still has 99 some ridiculous amount of market share. Chad GD maybe has one to 2% maybe of the search. So this snapshot in time SEO is still just kicking butt, making companies millions of dollars. But the trend is what gets people talking about chat. Yes, it's 1%, maybe one to 2% now, but a year or two ago it was 0.1%. And I mean, I can actually drop some stats for you. So being an e-commerce SEO company, we have access to a lot of Google Analytics accounts, and I had my VA a few last week. He went through all of our analytics accounts. He looked at how much referrals our clients, our e-commerce clients got from chat GBT in April versus May to see what's the

Brett Curry:

Fluctuation. Okay, great comparison. Love that.

Jeff Oxford:

112% increase in referral traffic from month to month. Yeah, from month to month. Wow.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And I can even Now, did he also look at, and not to get too far ahead of you here, but did he also look at what percentage of overall traffic came from chat?

Jeff Oxford:

Jt? Not impressive. We're talking like most clients, it was one to 2%. But there are some e-commerce stores that we're seeing where chat GT is up to like 20%.

Jeff Oxford:

Whoa, that's significant.

Jeff Oxford:

Of course, it depends on your niche. It depends on how much content marketing you've done, how much blogging you've done, how much do you have enough stuff to get cited and chat GPT? But just if we're just looking at the e-commerce world and averages from this dataset, yeah, it was about a little over a hundred percent month over month. And then average across, this was about just shy of 300 visits a month from chat GBT.

Brett Curry:

Interesting. And how does that compare to Google, Google Organic and

Jeff Oxford:

Google paid, or did you do that comparison? Luckily, I have those stats here. I mean, Google's, I don't have the month over month for Google, but because it's probably pretty steady, I would assume similar data point would be for 2024, we took a sample of, I went over this to my talk, but we took a sample, like 80 e-commerce sites that we have Google Analytics access to, and also have Google search console access to. And across these, you want to see what's the highest performing channel on Google Analytics. And number one outside of direct, which just means it's not attributed, but number one was non-brand organic search, followed by paid search, followed by organic shopping. So yeah, it's one of those things where, yes, if we freeze this point in time, SEO is still the number one top performing channel, even non-branded SEO or non-branded search traffic. But the tides are shifting a bit. I was just on a call with a client earlier today who sells refurbished computers, and we were looking at some of their AI referral stats, and they've already, this year have had 23 in from chat GBT. So everyone should be paying attention to the trend

Jeff Oxford:

I live in here in Bend, Oregon, where we have the last blockbuster. And if you're, you still have a blockbuster, we have the last blockbuster on earth.

Brett Curry:

We were just talking about that. So my oldest kids are 23 and 20, and so they still remember when they were little, we still would go to the video store. There weren't a ton of 'em. It wasn't super popular, saw red box and stuff like that. But there was something magical about walking the aisles of a blockbuster. Maybe they didn't have what you were looking for, but that was all part of the fun. So we were reminiscing and missing the video store days.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, come to Bend, you can get a T-shirt and take a look, see what they have.

Brett Curry:

So okay, there's quick dive diversion here, but how's business at the last Blockbuster? Do people come from nostalgia to buy? Gees, a tourist

Jeff Oxford:

Attraction now? It's kind what? It's, yeah, it's all about the nostalgia. You can get some merchandise and they still have the big blockbuster sign outside front and they put little marquee letters on it. Super fun.

Brett Curry:

So I guess the question is, will Google and SEO one day go the way of Blockbuster far off in the future? We don't know, but I think we could say, Jeff, the demise of Google right now is potentially

Jeff Oxford:

Overhyped. What? Say you about that. I mean, no matter how this plays out, Google's going to be fine. Google has a corporation, they've got the infrastructure, they have all the best AI researchers in the world. Their new Gemini 2.5 Pro model is just killer.

Brett Curry:

It's insane. They've been play with a lot.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, they've really caught up to the AI race quickly. So props to them. The big question though is what about search these 10 blue links that we have on page one? Are we still going to be searching that way? And there's a big question mark there. Google's now testing their AI mode where it changes the homepage of Google instead of having a search box, it's now a conversation box more similar to chat GPT right now that's just in testing. So we don't know what's going to come out of that test. Is Google going to be like, oh, wow, the engagement's way higher, people are staying on our site longer, we're going to make this the default, or are they going to be like, ah, people don't trust it yet, there's still some hallucinations. We're still the best experience and they're going to stick to how it's now?

Jeff Oxford:

It's a big question mark, but the one part of it that no one really talks about that's so key is just the processing cost to serve a query. So if you go into Google and you type in, let's just say what are the best gaming laptops? What Google can process that quickly, it pulls from their index, it has temp links. Great. If you're on AI mode's, it'll pull five to seven queries. It will then have to pull in all this processing abilities from the LLM to process the results and then serve it up. So their cost per query is going to go up a lot. Now, Google are the kings of infrastructure and servers and data centers, and so they'll be able to get these costs down over time. But if their cost per query goes way up and their ads, the revenue per query goes down because there's less ads, it starts to not make financial sense for them. So even if the user experience is perfect and way better, I'm sure they're going to be balancing out the financial viability of moving to a more of an AI focused search result.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's a really good call out. And we got to remember that It's like 80 90% of Google's revenue is from search ads or query-based ads, and you could argue that a larger percentage of their profits come

Jeff Oxford:

From this. Oh, okay. Profits. Yeah, profits are probably way more than that.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah, which is super interesting. And so a couple sets that I was looking at, because I was curious about this too, right? An executive at Apple recently said, Hey, for the first time ever, we saw fewer searches, fewer Google searches on Safari was the caveat. Google, however, released some data. They did not comment on Safari specifically, which would lead you to believe that was probably true. But they did say, Hey, we're seeing increased search volume across all platforms, including Apple users. And so what's interesting, I looked at this. If you look at daily search queries on Google, 8.3 billion a day in 2024 and now averaging 13.6 billion a day in 2025. So that is a massive leap. And just from the financials just to say, Hey, Google's going to be able to keep the lights on for a little bit. Earnings are up 12% year over year. They had a beat. So their projections or their guidance they gave to Wall Street, they beat it. So things are good from that regard from standpoint and what Google has said, and I was at Google Marketing Live, what Google has said is that, Hey, the AI mode, that's part of what's driving this increase in searches. But your point is spot on where it's heard different estimates, but it's a multiple higher to in terms of compute costs

Jeff Oxford:

To

Brett Curry:

Generate those AI mode results than it is just a normal query. And so Google's going to have to figure that out. I think they will. I think they'll be able to incorporate ads in a pretty unique and pretty clever way. And so listen, I think there's some existential threats facing Google. There's also the antitrust lawsuit and things like that. And so the future is not super clear, but I do think Google's going to be able to figure it out. And yeah, you mentioned AI scientists in 2015, that's when Google bought Deep Mind, which is one of the leading AI research companies on the planet. Some of those top researchers, top scientists are still at Google. I think they've got the best team. And so yeah, I think they'll be able to figure it out. But it is interesting, right? It is an interesting season right now. And so any other points on that, on Google's demise or what the future is going to hold for them before we get into some tactical stuff?

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, I think that pretty much covers. I mean at this point it's no longer an infrastructure issue with data centers and servers. It's no longer a software issue with LLMs. They have all that. It's really just a user experience UI issue. How do they take this all and give the right user experience? So we'll see what comes up with AI mode. It'll be interesting. It'll be really

Brett Curry:

Interesting to watch. For sure, for sure. So came in super good. I'm excited about it. Why don't we do this before we talk about SEO and AI optimization? They do go hand in hand. Let's back up a little bit and talk about what are the components of SEO. So I know in the early days we would always talk, Hey, there's technical SEO, and there's onsite SEO, and then there's offsite, SEO. How would you define though SEO now and what are the big components of

Jeff Oxford:

It? I have what I call the four buckets or four components of SEO you already mentioned. Some of 'em, technical, SEO number one can Google crawl. Your website is your insight indexable. This is site maps. This is robots tech structured data, basically making sure Google can crawl all your pages, can index all your pages and you don't have any issues that's going to slow down or hurt your ranking. So that's technical. SEO number two is page optimization. This is making sure of your keyword and the title tags, the meta descriptions, the header tags, also having it in your content, just making sure your pages are properly targeting the right keywords. Number three is going to be content. This is e-commerce. So do your category pages and collection pages. Have a description that describes your products and provides a good user experience. Do your products have good descriptions? Do you have blog posts targeting relevant keywords? So that's number three. And then the last one, which for most people listening to this is probably the most important. I mean, if you're a large brand at very high authority, you probably don't need to focus much on link building, but most people who are doing seven figures to low eight figures, the biggest benefit is probably going to be link building that's getting other websites to mention you and link and have a hyperlink back to your site.

Brett Curry:

And it's so interesting, and I remember several years ago, Google's been trying to downplay backlinks and even say they don't work and stuff, but I think a lot of the people that have been doing SEOA long time like yourself, like me, were like, well, that's kind of what Google was built on. The original innovation that Google had. It was a project called bankrupt just to get super nerdy. And the whole idea was Larry Page and Serge Bren were like, Hey, what if we could look at the entire internet, but based on the links? And then wouldn't that be a vote of confidence if a lot of people are linking to this page or this site, that is what gives it authority or makes it trustworthy. They created page rank anyway, so super interesting. So it's like, yeah, I don't think they're going to get away from that, right? That's still got to be the best signal. Probably Google's just getting better at weeding out spammy paid for junkie links, although that's maybe debatable as well.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, and I mean, there's a study done recently as just earlier this year in January, and they looked at, this is coming from hfs. They looked at something crazy. It was like, I think it was a million keywords. So that's a million search results. And they did all this statistical analysis to see what ranking factors correlate or which factors correlate with rankings and the number of backlinks to a page. So if we stick with the whole gaming laptops, I'm a recovering gamer, so if we stick with gaming laptops, and I have my Jeff's laptops.com website and I have my gaming laptops page, the number of links to that collection page is one of the highest correlated ranking factors for those stats Nerds listening, it was about 0.3 out with one being perfectly correlated, but in perspective, most ranking factors in SEO have a correlation of 0.05 or 0.1. So to have 0.3 is substantial. It's very, very high correlation. You're going to have to have, if you don't have back lanes, it's going to be really hard to rank. Well,

Brett Curry:

It's like three to six x more valuable than other ranking factors. So to put that into context, that's great. And maybe, okay, so we've, we've got those four buckets of SEO, let's break those down in a minute. But maybe to back up just a little bit before we do that, what's the payoff here? Why do we do this? If we invest time in this, hopefully we've convinced you that the demise of Google's a little bit down the road at least, so you should invest in it. But if we get this right, what's in it for us? What could the payoff be? What are the results you see? I know it varies from category to category, site to site, but what could we see here if we do this right?

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, I mean, that's the question everyone should ask before you invest in SEO. And it's going to depend on some, a few things. It'll depend on are people searching or even searching your keywords in Google, or do you have a product that's new to the market that people haven't heard of where maybe you're better off doing Facebook ads or YouTube ads? So firstly, is the search interest there, how competitive is it? If someone said, Hey,

Brett Curry:

I want to just real quick on that, Jeff, I think that's a super important point.

Jeff Oxford:

One

Brett Curry:

Of the ways we like to describe that is does your product and does your category depend more on demand generation where you need to go out there and convince people to start looking for your product? They're not maybe thinking about it, but if they saw it, they'd be interested. Or is it more about demand capture

Jeff Oxford:

Where

Brett Curry:

You are capturing existing demand? And so a couple of examples there. On the demand capture side, we've done quite a bit in the automotive space, in auto parts and things like that, especially on paid search. And that's one of those things where it's like, yeah, if I need brake pads, well, first of all, I'm going to go to a dealership, but if I need brake pads, they're squeaking and there's an event, and so then I just go search and I buy brake pads. But if it's something like, Hey, some new apparel that I've never worn before, or maybe the chiefs just made the Super Bowl and so now there's something popping up in my feed and I want to buy it. That's demand generation. And so understanding where your product, your company sits on that continuum is going to also determine how much is it going to pay off to invest in SEO.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, 100%. So we talked a little bit earlier about dissecting a bunch of e-commerce analytics accounts, non-branded organic search's traffic. So that means people going to Google searching for a keyword, but not having your brand name in there. They're not searching OMG commerce, they're searching YouTube ad services, something like that. So that was the highest performing revenue wise. So we know the potentials there, but as far as what can you expect as far as increases go, I have some data there. I looked at 152 SEO campaigns over the past few years to see on average, what was the increase after three months, six months, nine months, and 12 months, three months on average, we saw about a 20% increase. Six months was about 50%, nine months was 65, and a year was 75%. So

Brett Curry:

That's just

Jeff Oxford:

Ballpark. And it

Brett Curry:

Changes increase in non

Jeff Oxford:

Organic brand organic traffic. Correct.

Brett Curry:

Nice.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah. So if you're a massive brand and you're getting hundreds of thousands of visits a month, that 50 to 75%, it's going to pay for itself a thousand times over. If you're a smaller startup and you're only getting maybe a thousand visits a month, a 50 to 75% increase might not be as substantial. So a lot of this depends on for SEO to be worth it. Obviously, the more traffic you have now, the more organic search revenue you have now the better. Think of it as like a multiplier. If you're starting out, it's going to be at least a year before you really start getting good momentum. But the potentials there. If you do it and you're an industry where people are searching your products, it's not too competitive. And the last caveat I'll give is that your prices aren't too expensive. I mentioned this briefly, but if you have a premium product that costs three x to four x, so people get on Amazon, you're going to have a much higher bounce rate and Google's just not going to rank you as high as your competitors.

Brett Curry:

Right, right. Yeah, totally, totally makes sense. Okay, super helpful. So then let's kind of break down those buckets then. Let's go through each one and kind of talk about some of the tactics or approaches that we should consider two to

Jeff Oxford:

Fill that bucket. Sure. Bucket number one, technical SEO. If you're on Shopify, you probably don't have to spend too much time on this. Shopify is a very SEO friendly platform. I'm sure most people listen to this right now. If I had to guess more half are probably on Shopify. Totally.

Brett Curry:

Yeah,

Jeff Oxford:

Totally. It's a great platform. Very, yeah, you probably don't have to spend too much if you're on Shopify, Magento two, BigCommerce or WooCommerce, any of those four platforms, you're probably pretty solid. If you're on a custom platform, if you're on Volution or you still haven't left Yahoo stores or some of these old legacy platforms, you're probably going to want to spend a lot more effort on technical SEO. But for most people

Brett Curry:

It's you're probably going to want to migrate, honestly,

Jeff Oxford:

More so migrate. But for most people, technical, SEO gets overblown. I honestly think people talk about it too much. People love to talk about it because it's something you can control. You can go in and make updates to your XML side map, and you can make changes to your robots text that your crawl efficiency is super dialed in. You can make sure you have schema on all these pages, which a lot of times Google's not even respecting all the different schemas and structured markups these days. So honestly, yes, there might be. It's still good to have a professional, do an audit and say, okay, fix this and then move on. Don't dwell on the technical SEO stage. It should be a one and done type thing. It should not be a big project. Totally makes sense. Number two, page optimization. Very simple. Make sure whatever keyword you're trying to rank for, you have that in the beginning of your title tag. And if you're not familiar what a title tag is, if you search a keyword in Google, it has that blue or purple link that's the title tag. It's a very important ranking factor. Google puts a fair amount of weight into what keywords you put in there

Brett Curry:

In the search in general. Then in the search results, that title tag is going to become kind of the headline almost for that organic listing. Not always, Google can kind of put whatever they want to put there, but a lot of times the title tag shows up there, but also shows up in the tab of the browser as well. So it's going to have some pretty prominent placements and Google gives it a lot of weight.

Jeff Oxford:

And speaking of title tags, like this is one thing I see a lot I a mistake a lot of people make, and you can have a very brandable name. So I was talking with a client who they sell leather conditioners and leather cleaners. It's a product for, if you have a car and you want to have the leather look in its best, you get this leather conditioner that you can put on the car seats. But they don't call it leather conditioner. They call it rejuvenator oil, and that's the brand name. So the issue with that is people aren't searching rejuvenator oil, they're searching. So their products weren't ranking very well in Google because they're calling it what they want to call it,

Jeff Oxford:

Not

Jeff Oxford:

What the customers are calling it. So finding a balance between brandable names and keywords is always something that you're going to have to keep in mind, but you're going to want to have that whatever keyword you're ranking for, ideally you want to have that in your title tag as close to beginning as possible.

Brett Curry:

Love

Jeff Oxford:

It, love it. And then meta descriptions, that's those two lines of black text that we see in the search results. These aren't really a ranking factor. It doesn't matter if you have your keyword in there a bunch or not at all. The best way I like to describe it is meta descriptions are your ad copy for SEO. So having really well written meta descriptions with your calls to actions, unique selling points, it's going to have a higher click-through rate, which will send more traffic. But if Google sees your listings getting a higher click-through rate, that's also going to have a positive impact on rankings.

Brett Curry:

Yeah,

Jeff Oxford:

I

Brett Curry:

Love that. So it's an indirect ranking factor, isn't it, where it's like, use this text to get more clicks, organic clicks, the more organic clicks you get. Actually Google's going to reward that by ranking you higher. So yeah, it's an indirect but important piece.

Jeff Oxford:

And just to nerd out a little bit more, Google had this massive ranking factor leak last year. We saw thousands of documents, internal documents on what they're looking at when scoring websites. One of the things that's confirmed is they look at the click-through rate and the search results. So if you're in position three, but you have a higher click-through rate than position two because you have either a brand name that people recognize or a really well-written meta description, Google, it's one of the most powerful ranking factors. Google will move you up so fast.

Brett Curry:

Yes.

Jeff Oxford:

So yeah, metas script is going

Brett Curry:

To huge impact. Again, that's a vote of confidence, right? That's Google saying, Hey, people are voting with their clicks and with their attention that they like this result. So we're moving it up.

Jeff Oxford:

Exactly. And then the last piece of page optimization, second to last would be header tags. This is what's actually displayed on your page. This is the big header that users see. Not as important as a title tag, but still there's some ranking benefits there. So make sure you have your keyword and the header tag. That's kind of like the

Brett Curry:

Headline for the page, right? So when you open a page, it's

Jeff Oxford:

Basically the headline that you see exactly. It's the big bold text you see at the top. And then the last piece is content. You want to include your keyword in the content, preferably at least once in the first 100 words or so. You want to include variations throughout it. You want to include related keywords. So having your keyword throughout your content is also a very helpful ranking factor, which is why for category pages and collection pages, you want to have at least 200 to 300 words of content and sprinkle your keyword in there a few times.

Brett Curry:

Love it. Love it. Okay, so we got technical SEO that's probably covered before on a reputable platform. Most listeners are probably on Shopify, so you're mostly good there. Then we got page optimization, which is really those factors, title tag content, header tag. Yeah. So it totally makes sense. So then what's bucket number three

Jeff Oxford:

Content? So with content, where I see the most opportunity is making sure your category pages and your collection pages have that 200 to 300 words of content. It can make such a big difference in ranking. It's so easy to do, especially with ai. There's honestly no excuse not to have some well-written category descriptions on your pages. And then there's also blog posts now I think gets overblown a bit. In the SEO world, everyone feels like they have to create content. You have to keep having fresh content on your website that way Google keeps indexing things. There's all these myths about it. My take on blogging is you should only blog if there's particular topics that have high search volume and decent conversion potential. So sticking with the gaming laptops, I bet you there's a lot of people searching best gaming laptops or maybe they're searching Dell versus Lenovo gaming laptops. Any keyword like that, that's like best gaming laptops or comparison, Harrison, or maybe it's laptops for programming students. Anytime that the keyword has some type of search intent that they're looking to do research and byproduct, those are great blog posts to create That way you're not just getting traffic, but you can get conversions. But writing about what is a laptop, how to clean your laptop, how to install Windows 12, whatever it is, those are not going to convert. Yes, they'll drive traffic rank. Whatcha going to get from that? Exactly.

Brett Curry:

That's all going to be answered in the AI overview anyway, so

Jeff Oxford:

That's a hundred percent. So realistically, most clients I see, I'd say maybe 20 to 30% actually have some good topics where it makes sense to go down that direction of blogging. But for me, honestly, about 70% of e-commerce sites I take a look at. I don't think blogging's a waste of time and that they're not going to get a positive ROI from it.

Brett Curry:

Just put content on the category page, product page, things like that, and leave the blog alone. Yeah. Now another interesting thing, I was talking to Steve at Seller Summit and he was talking about how his blog traffic has died. A lot of blog traffic has died, and that was tied to a recent, somewhat recent Google update. Can you talk about that a little bit? When did blogs, again, maybe die is overdramatic, but when did blogs die or when did they reduce in importance? Because there was definitely a day early in our SEO careers, I'm sure where leaning heavily into blogs, that was a winning

Jeff Oxford:

Strategy. Yeah, we can go deep into this one. I was actually working with Steve on his blog while all this stuff was unfolding. So we had worked together, we Forex his blog traffic, and then it was around 2023 that Google had a barrage of updates, different core algorithm updates. They had the helpful content update, and I'm going to give you a little backstory and a tie it all back into your question. So essentially what happened is Google was pretty good at giving results, but what really dropped the ball and really failed was anything like best gaming laptops, best protein powders, best weight loss supplements, best VPNs, the affiliates. And for those that dunno what affiliate is, it's basically I have a blog. I am going to be an Amazon affiliate. I include links to products on Amazon. If people with those links, I get a commission.

Jeff Oxford:

So there's an incentive for these affiliates to rank as high as they can. They can make a lot of money, and they were making a lot of money, millions upon millions of dollars. So they're just flooding Google with all these really crappy low quality affiliate sites that just regurgitating information on Amazon. It's causing a nightmare for Google. Everyone knew the results. You just can't trust them. It's just you're hearing reviews about products and it's obvious they've never even touched the product in their life. They're just regurgitating Amazon reviews and other information. So Google what their solution to this was. They pretty much just decimated any middle tier, low tier, standalone blog. If you're just a blog, you're screwed. But if you're an e-commerce store with a real business that has a business address and has customers and you happen to have a blog doing great, you're blogs can perform better than ever. If you're a service provider like Brett, you or me, and we have a blog, we're established businesses. We might even be Google My Business, we might have a physical address and we have a blog, that's great. But if I'm just a blog and that's all I do and I don't have a product or a service, those sites got decimated,

Brett Curry:

Which makes sense. And a lot of those were back in the day when you would pay for backlinks and things like that. Not that I ever did that, but you'd get links from sites like that. And so a lot of them just got torched.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, it got destroyed. I mean, the results now are way better. But one of the byproducts of that is even really good quality content. Like Steve and his website, my wife quit. Her job is good stuff. He's a true industry expert. He knows his stuff, his content's great. It's a high authority I think of for those SEO nerds, domain rating 70 or domain rating domain authority around 70, huge, huge. But even then his traffic dropped off like 90% because these updates. Now I am working with one content site that's pretty authoritative, and we're doing an experiment right now. So I have a theory because when I work with Steve and I did analysis, all his competitors that are just standalone content sites, they plummeted. They dropped off like 90%. The sites that absorbed all those rankings and benefited were the product and service sites that had, they were in Google My Business, they were in Google's knowledge graph. So if you do auto complete, they'll show up as like a known entity and Google. And so right now I'm doing an experiment to see if I can take a blog, get them and Google my business, get them a Wikipedia page, get them all the signals that show it's a legit business.

Brett Curry:

This a real business,

Jeff Oxford:

A real business. What impact will that have? So TBD, but the correlation is there.

Brett Curry:

I love that theory, man. That's smart. Yeah, keep me posted on that. That's super interesting.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, so to be determined, but the correlation is still there. The sites that have a physical address, a phone number, they're in Google my business, they're in the knowledge panel. Those sites were fine. The ones that didn't have a knowledge panel or any of that, they all just got decimated.

Brett Curry:

Got it, got it. Interesting. Okay, super interesting insight there. Thanks for sharing that. What else about this content bucket? What else would you advise or coach us on for our e-commerce store?

Jeff Oxford:

That's pretty much it. I have 200, 300 on category pages. Include your keyword and then just one little pro tip. If you're wondering what related keywords to include in your content, just search your keyword and Google image search and you'll have that refinement bar at the top. Those are all great related keywords that you might want to consider ones that are applicable, including your content.

Brett Curry:

Interesting. Great, great insight there. Cool. So we've got our technical on page, our content.

Jeff Oxford:

What's bucket number four? Bucket number four is link building. You want to get as many other sites linking back to you as possible. Now, if you want to do this, the white hat way, one strategy that can work really well for e-commerce sites is product reviews. If you have a direct to consumer product, you can find some blogs, you send them some product for free, they take some photos, they write about it, and in the writeup, they're going to include a link back. So that's probably one of the best ways to do it. And you can also get some referral traffic from these sites if it has a big enough following. Another strategy that can work well but is extremely difficult is content marketing, creating content, promoting content. And the reason it's so hard is when you're doing content marketing for link building, it's less about what topics will appeal to your customers and what topics will appeal to bloggers.

Jeff Oxford:

So you're probably going to create content that might not even interest your, it could be if we're sticking with gaming laptops, I could do an article about gaming statistics, like what percent of Americans youth spend 10 hours a day or more on video games, which video games are the most popular by hours? I do a whole breakdown on all these statistics that's not really going to interest someone looking to buy a gaming laptop, but it could interest a journalist who's writing about screen time on kids and wants to reference a statistic. Now that's going to get some backlink. So it's why it's so hard to do it is you have to really kind of change your thinking and less of what will my customers want versus what will the journalists and the bloggers want to link to.

Brett Curry:

Super interesting. Yeah. So what are the most used tactics then, and what are you coaching your clients on in terms of practical ways to build links? Because this has always been one of those areas where it's the highest correlation in terms of ranking factors. It's how Google was built based on backlinks, but to do it the right way is really time intensive and really difficult. So what are some of the tips, suggestions, advice that you give to clients?

Jeff Oxford:

So I'd say try go the white hat as much as you can. Definitely do the content marketing or the product reviews. But here's the sad truth about it. If you want to get a link to a product page, if you want to get link to a category page, nine times of the 10, a blogger is going to require payment. You could have the most compelling pitch with the best product. That's truly groundbreaking. But these bloggers, this is how they put food on their table. They live off this. This is their income. And if they check your site, if you were a library or you were a nonprofit, they're probably not going to charge you. If you reach out to them and they click on your site, it's like, oh, this is an e-commerce site. Nine times out of 10, they're going to require payment.

Jeff Oxford:

So they might call it an editorial fee of like, oh, we'll write about you, we'll feature you, but it's going to take time to pull up that post and make the edits and then publish it and do all this stuff. So you can expect anywhere from 50, I'd say, to a hundred dollars of these editorial fees or blog fees to get featured. So that's the sad truth of it. What's even kind of more sad is I wish it didn't work as well. I really wish that the links paid links from blogs didn't work, but they do. And the correlations there, insights rank. Well, the tricky part is deciphering a good backlink from a bad one. So let say have two blogs, trying to determine which blog is going to be helpful and which is going to be harmful is extremely difficult. I see even SEO veterans have been doing this for five to 10 years. They still get it wrong. You have to look at, well, what's the domain rating and domain authority of the site? Is this going to help me? Okay, let's go a step deeper. How much traffic does this have? Does it actually have some rankings in Google?

Jeff Oxford:

But now they're getting smart, and I don't know if you know this Brett, but a lot of sites will manipulate and game their traffic numbers by artificially running a bunch of fake searches on nonsense nonsense keywords and that they ranked for. So now they're inflating that. So you have to go a step deeper and see the keywords that are driving traffic are those keywords related to the site's main focus. So there's so many checks you have to do. We'll even go deep and look at who is this linking out to? Is it linking out to porn sites and escort sites and Viagra sites? So for most people, they stop at level one and level two, they'll look at the domain rating, the traffic, they'll move on, but you'll end up buying links that are just absolute garbage and can hurt your sites. So link billing, it's so hard for that reason. So that's why I say if you're going to do it, the white hat approach, going to real blogs and product reviews and take a stab at content marketing is probably best. But just know of all the four buckets, link billing is the most difficult and the hardest for an e-commerce brand to make a core competency.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it totally makes sense, man. Super, super helpful. So let's then get to maybe the question that was most burning in people's minds. Well then what about ai, SEO? So what do we do? So, okay, this is our core SEO, and that's aimed at Google, but what if we want to rank in Jet GPT or Perplexity or Gemini, which is related to Google or other AI that's yet to come? What's your advice on that?

Jeff Oxford:

It's a great question. There is some overlap. If you're doing SEO, right, a lot of it's going to carry over to chat GPT. So one thing that chat GT does is a lot of times they'll show the sources of where it's pulling information from and it's pulling from the web. So content marketing and blocking can be great if you have some posts and anyone to this, if you want to show up better in chat g bt, first thing you should do is do a best gaming laptops, best protein powder, whatever your product is, create a buyer's guide or a product roundup about it. So those get picked up very frequently in chat GBT, so you get a little more influence on swaying the model, whatever you think is best. So blogging, content marketing is one. Link building is another one. We see if there's getting mentioned on other websites, getting your product reviews on authoritative sites, those are also getting picked up as sources. So that can help. It's like a PR play where the more sites and webpages in the web that mention your products,

Jeff Oxford:

The higher chance you have of being cited in these large language models. But if you want to be just kind of go straight to the jugular on how you're going to rank, well search your keyword or go into a chat, GPT type best protein powder, whatever your keyword is in there, scroll down, look at the sources, it's going to tell you exactly where it's pulling from to generic this result and try to get your product featured in those. So it's going to show you all these top 10 protein powder, top eight protein powder type pages. You're going to want to reach out to them. You're probably going to have to send them free product. You'll probably have to send them an affiliate link to make it worth it. You'll probably have to have a compelling pitch on why they should include you. But that what I'm seeing is the biggest impact. We did some correlation research on this, and it was like we talked about links being highly correlated with 0.3 when it came to chat GPT and getting your product included, it was like 0.45 correlation of the number of different product roundups you were cited in. So the more product roundups your product is found in, that's in the sources, the much higher chance you're going to have of showing up in those chat GBT shopping carousels.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it totally makes sense. And in some ways it's similar to product reviews. And what I mean by that is looking at Amazon reviews, product reviews make a big difference in terms of ranking and conversions and all those things. And the issue is that they can be gamed, right? People can manipulate them. There's tons of fake reviews. So it's like, well then won't Amazon just get away from that? And the real answer is no, they can't. There's no better signal. Every user or every shopper wants to see reviews. And so it's got to get better at weeding out the crappy reviews. And I think it's the same thing with these roundup blogs, with backlinks, with things like that. These are signals that when done right are the clearest, most powerful signals that are out there right now. And so really just got to do it the right way, build those things the right way. But it makes sense to me that those are going to continue to be a ranking factor for SEO and for AI SEO.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, I would a hundred percent agree with that. Cool. Cool.

Brett Curry:

Awesome, man. Well, this has been fantastic. I really want to pick your brain on AI as well. So how about, let's do this. Let's be like a little teaser. We'll do another ai, let's do an AI focused episode. This will be the little teaser for it. What models are you playing with the most right now? What are you most excited about with ai and specifically like AI and working with your agency and automation and stuff like that? And is there one cool thing you can share with the audience related to ai?

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, so models wise, I was using Claude 3.7 a bunch, and then four for a while, but then I started using Gemini 2.5 pro, and I think that's my favorite one right now. What I love doing for fun, I'm not a coder, I've always wanted to be a programmer, but I dunno how to program. So I've been using this tool Rept, which is like an AI code generator, and I've been able to build some pretty powerful apps that can take a screenshot of a blog, pass that screenshot to an AI model, analyze it, and then from that analysis also pull on keyword ranking data for page and then generate title tags, meta descriptions and headers. So basically automating the SEO process where you take a screenshot of a page, you pull on the ranking data, you give all this to the AI model and have it optimize the page. So as far as your teaser goes, literally just last week I pulled the trigger and hired three full-time AI automation specialists. And we're doing an experiment to build a fully autonomous AI agency where there'd be no people. It's just I'm going to see how many of the SEO steps can I automate with ai? And instead of having an actual account manager, you have your AI account manager. So this is something that we're building out.

Brett Curry:

Dude, can't wait to see that. Okay. That was a good teaser right there. That was powerful. Definitely going to do an AI episode coming up next. And so looking forward to that. But Jeff, as people are listening to this and they're like, dang, alright, I got to think about seo. I got to think about ai seo. I need to talk to Jeff. How can people reach out to you? How can they work with you?

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, you can go to my website. It's just 1 8 0 marketing.com, 180 marketing.com. Or you can just shoot me an email directly. My email is Jeff at 1 8 0 marketing.com. Happy to hear from you guys.

Brett Curry:

And Jeff, as you can tell, just super cool dude, the kind of guy you want to hang out with. Grab a beer with talk, SEO and talk e-commerce with. And so with that, Jeff, awesome job, man. Thanks for the time and looking forward to that AI episode. Thanks, Brett. This has been fun. Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. Would love to hear from you, connect with me on LinkedIn or shoot us a note about the pod. Or if you like this episode, share it with somebody that you think will enjoy it. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

I had fellow agency owner JC Hite join me on the pod to discuss some really important topics. Namely, is it possible to scale with stability - which for JC means scaling your business while prioritizing, family, faith and personal relationships.

Here’s a look at what we discussed: 

Key Takeaways

• The "Video of Awesomeness" Hiring Hack - JC's simple 15-minute interview addition that reveals more about candidates than traditional methods, including real examples of applicants who wrote songs about his company
• Overseas Talent Strategy Mistake Most Make - Why the "how cheap can I hire" mindset kills results, and JC's approach to paying international talent competitively to get world-class team members
• The 5 Love Languages for Workplace Retention - How applying Gary Chapman's principles in business dramatically improves team satisfaction and reduces turnover (especially crucial for the next generation workforce)
• Building a "Bench" Like Sports Teams - JC's systematic approach to always having pre-approved candidates ready, eliminating the panic of unexpected departures and empowering leaders to make tough decisions
• Mentorship Through Fear, Not Ego - How JC built relationships with icons like John Maxwell, Damon John, and Dr. Gary Chapman by being honest about his fears and willing to invest in proximity to wisdom

Chapters

(00:00) Join Us in NYC at Our Exclusive YouTube Event!

(01:08) Introduction to Scaling with Stability

(08:28) Attracting and Recruiting Top Talent

(13:55) International Recruiting

(16:00) Understanding Appreciation and Team Dynamics

(21:55) Navigating Retention and Challenges

(28:35) The Importance of Mentorship in Business

‍

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I am delighted to welcome to the show Mr. JC Hite. He's the co-founder and CEO of Hite International. You'll hear more about that in a moment. He's all about scaling with stability. You'll also hear what that means and why that's so exciting. And I first heard JC and his lovely wife, Karen, speak at my partner and friends event, Tom Shipley deal Con, and so just hit it off. Similar values, similar faith, similar approach to business I think in a lot of ways. And so we're like dude and also Midwest guys. And so hey, let's hit you on the pod. So with that JC Hite, welcome man, and how's it going?

JC Hite:

Oh man, it's going great. I'm excited to be here. Hopefully we can add some good value over the next 30 minutes, so I'm

Brett Curry:

Excited. Let's deliver some value. Yeah, so want to get into a variety of topics. I know one of your specialties is recruiting and hiring talent, retaining that talent. And one thing we see, whether it's in the agency space, which I'm in on a day-to-day basis, or we help e-commerce brands, if you don't have top talent, and yes, we know that AI is disrupting and getting the right tools and the right approaches, that's all good, but without the right people and without the ability to attract and retain top talent, you're going to be a step behind. And so I'm excited to talk about that. I'm excited to talk about mentorship and you've actually formed friendships with some real leaders in the leadership space. I'm excited to unpack that story here about your event. Also, you and your wife work together and you genuinely appear to each other and you appear to working together most of the time. And so I think we'll throw a few nuggets in there too for those that may end up working with their spouse as well. So we're going to be fun times, but first of all, what is Hite International and what do you guys do to get a little context here?

JC Hite:

Yeah, I mean our big focus as you said there in the beginning is how do we help people scale with stability? And what we mean by that, obviously we want to scale the business, we want to grow, but what I have found is business could be one of the most destroying things in the world. It can be the most stressful. You throw your finances off, you take big risks, you can fail hard, but it can also be one of the most freeing things in the world. I never miss a ball game. I got to coach my kid. I can give to the church, I can help, I can serve, I can invest time in my marriage, and it can also be the greatest thing. And so when we talk about scaling with stability, it's really about having a business that can allow you to have a really great deep marriage, to be very involved in the church and your relationship with Jesus and as well as serve and help and raise amazing children. And so these three principles, and so we do that really focused on three areas, Hyatt International, we have an advertising firm, and we got about 80 employees in our advertising firm. And then we have our education side, which we have events and a mastermind, and then we have our investment wing, which I'm really excited about. We started investing in companies that are on that same mission of growth and how do we get more involved in the details of helping them scale?

Brett Curry:

I love that man. And you and I are a hundred percent aligned on that scale with stability framework. It's one of those things where why would you do this if the most important things in your life fall by the wayside? And so I think the idea for everybody is how do you get your business to align with your personal mission and to help fuel healthy families in a healthy relationships and things like that rather than destroying those. And so love that approach. That's awesome. And Yemen, just excited to dive in. Now you are just coming off the heels of a really big event. Can you tell people about

Brett Curry:

Scale

Brett Curry:

With stability, what that was, where that was, and kind of how that went down?

JC Hite:

Stupidest thing we've ever done, but it worked out really well. So I'm always really honest with ideas. Sometimes it's just you take jobs. And so we wanted, on this framework, we wanted to do an event, and so we did Skill with Stability Summit, and then we had the crazy idea, we have a university, Harding University in Arkansas that we're very passionate about. So one day I told my wife, what if we had the event here? And she was like, why in Arkansas? It's in Arkansas. It's 45 minutes from, there's not a Marriott here. There's not wide. I was like, well, let's think about it. They already have av, they have all the rooms, they have space, they have food, they have all, and then we're bringing people to our alma mater. We're bringing in celebrities here. Could this be something that, and it worked really well. We had 750 people. It was a brand new event. That's crazy, man, from logo to you name it, and seven 50 people. We had Daymond John came down. We ended up inviting three college students and pitched Damon and I. That was super cool.

Brett Curry:

Many shark Tank. By the way, did either of you invest in these pitches?

JC Hite:

Well, we did not invest in anything on that one. They got an award for the best pitch, and so we actually got all three of, makes a lot sense, the money sense. So it took the pressure off of the table there. We actually were, the premise of the pitch was that as entrepreneurs, we all have millions of ideas. So which ideas do we jump on and which ideas do we shelf? That's brilliant. Brilliant. And that's based on timing. It's based on who you've got around you. It's based on money, it's based on a lot of factors.

JC Hite:

And so the calling was for these students to pitch the idea that should be the thing that they take off the shelf and jump into. And then which one had the best. Anyway, it was fun. We had Willie and Corey Robertson there. They talked a lot about marriage and faith and raising children and how you're in the middle of this huge jump and just everyone's pulling you and everyone's wanting you and wants access, and how do you raise really healthy, God-fearing amazing children in that cycle? And so I feel like they've done really well, which

Brett Curry:

Is really the hardest thing. And you and I have talked about this a lot. I mentioned it on the show as well. I've got wife and I have eight kids. There's really nothing harder than raising a family. There's nothing more rewarding and there's nothing more important. And so getting that right in the midst of businesses is awesome.

JC Hite:

And you have a limited business, we can fail and start

Brett Curry:

Over again. Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JC Hite:

I guess technically you could just have another child and do it over, but probably not the best approach. And Karen and I, anyway, we got two, you've got eight, so it's fun. So yeah, we had Dr. Gary Chapman came to the event as well, and Dr. White and who wrote the book Appreciation at Work, which we can talk about here in a minute as we talk about team. But it was good. It was fun. Super fun.

Brett Curry:

That's amazing. And yeah, I know you mentioned John Maxwell, one of the all time greats as far as leadership goes. And so yeah, Harding University in Arkansas attracting some big, big names, attracting 750 people, which if anybody has done an event or tried to do an event, they know that is a monumental lift. And we do events a couple of times a year, but they're for just business owners and smaller events. But dude, it's still a lot of work. It's a massive, massive lift. And so kudos to you guys for doing that. I want to talk about attracting and retaining talent. And I want to kind of frame it this way. I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts on the drive in today called Founders Podcast, and the host was reading the original Jeff Bezos shareholder letter.

Brett Curry:

And one thing that Jeff Bezos talked about then, but he is talked about ever since, is our success hinges on our ability to continuously raise the bar in terms of who we hire. And so they've got this idea called the Bar Raiser program. And I'm not going to get this exactly right, but it's something like, Hey, with each new hire, we're going to ask how will this person inspire us or how will we admire this person? If we bring them on board, how will they raise the bar in their department and collectively? And then there's a third component, there's always a third component, but it's kind of along those lines. It's not how do we just hire the next person who fills a role but makes me look good, not quite as smart as me type of thing. How do we raise the bar with those hires? Now that's difficult to do and it's difficult to do if you're a small business because sometimes the best talent comes with a really high price tag, but not always. That's not always the case. And so I'll kind of make this a broad question first and we'll dig into some details, but how do you approach hiring and hiring the right talent? And I don't know if you want to start with any kind of frameworks or philosophies around that before we get into the tactics.

JC Hite:

So a few things that we do. So number one, I'll mention something on the interview process that I have found works stupid good for us, and I stole it from Mindvalley forever ago. I don't know if they still do this. And then two, let's chat about where and how I recruit from a standpoint. Then we can talk about the team itself and how do we retain them. So we require every single person that applies for high, they do one interview, 15 minutes, and by the end of that interview we asked for what's called a video of awesomeness. And on that video, it's very simple. I say, Hey Brett, you going to do a video of awesomeness? I want three things that make us awesome and three things that make you awesome. And that's it. And they're going to ask questions. They're like, okay, how long should it be? I don't know, when is it due? I dunno, well, can I use friends? I don't know. Just the video, three things. That's it. And I have learned, Brett, you can learn so much by this video. So some examples I have some people they'll take two, three weeks, but I mean it's like perfect.

JC Hite:

Well, there's certain positions that that's really, and then they have people that just take out their phone and film it. They give me exactly what they, but no more, no less. But it's done. Immediately.

Brett Curry:

I

JC Hite:

See people with their personality and some roles, you want that some roles, you want that person. Yeah, that's right. And you see their personality. You see, most people aren't comfortable filming videos. Well, welcome to the life of working at Hite. We never know what we're doing. JC is always telling us to go do crazy junk, like start a event in the middle of Arkansas. There's no roadmap. So there's no rules, there's no boundaries, there's no anything. Hey, can I get friends to help? Sure, any job you have at Hite, you can go have as many people help you. So I

Brett Curry:

Learn, this is kind of like if you look at personality tests, right? So we used to do it called Culture index. We love it. We also use Patrick Lencioni's widget, the Working Genius. There's some tools like that. They do it in some ways this cuts through all of that and just allows you to see it. Their working genius shows up their disc, whatever. You're going to see it on display on this project. That's really,

JC Hite:

Really, and I can show you some videos, but we have so many of these crazy creative videos. And what's interesting though is you start making it where first off, people wanting a job are not going to take the time to do it. It's just it's too much, right? They'll show up for another interview. But those that really want, then I'm actually hearing what do they actually know about us? What made them want to apply are the things that they think

Brett Curry:

Are your website's awesome? You were really friendly on

JC Hite:

The

Brett Curry:

Surface level stuff,

JC Hite:

All that type of stuff. And so that's my one tip. I think it's the easiest from a time standpoint for me as the CEO, because I like to be involved in a lot of our hires. It is the easiest way for me to get to know without a 30 minute meeting. I can watch a video in two minutes and learn. I could see probably did they use Brent? I have probably six people that have written songs about hype. I'm talking about full on banjo songs edited, and I'm like, dude, this is the coolest thing ever. Amazing. Anyway, that's a big one. Big one for me. The second thing, I'll say this, obviously a lot of people are going overseas for talent, but I think one thing we do way wrong there is that when for some reason in the us, our mindset is here's my budget.

JC Hite:

What's the best person I can do? I can afford 6,000. Who's the best I can find? But yet when we go to latam, it's like, did you know you can hire someone in the Philippines for seven 50? Did you know that you can hire someone in Nicaragua for 2000? Like, dude, I'd have to pay six grand in the US in Nicaragua, I would only have to pay two. That's the wrong mindset. So one of our big secrets is going, okay, I would've to pay someone 5,000 in us. Who could I find for 5,000 in you? Get out.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. It would just be the best of the best there.

JC Hite:

I mean, holy cow. So if you're willing to pay this Now, this has gotten more competitive in the last couple of years, but I really encourage companies to go find the top layer. So for example, yes, you can find someone in the Philippines for 600 bucks, but you can also find someone with an MBA that's worked for Verizon for 10 years and then a bank for five years and pay 'em 2000. And that lift is undeniably better.

Brett Curry:

Clearly going to be a bar raiser in your department, whereas the 600 a month person is going to save you some money on your p and l potentially, but you may get what you pay for there.

JC Hite:

But for some reason, our mindset when we recruit overseas is always different. It's always

JC Hite:

How do I save money? The lowest is the reason why I'm going is to save money. And if you go with that intention, then just naturally you're going to be thinking, how cheap can I pay? And we don't pay perfect. We went through some really bad seasons there. We made a couple of bad acquisitions and it was really, really tough for us. And so that's where it comes to my next point of view. Ron Kaufman wrote the book Levels of Service and it's all about how do we uplift our service and serve our team as the best way possible. I built Hite with the intention that every single one of those team members are going to pay for my kid's college. This company will bring every dream I have and my job as CEOs to serve them. We had at our event, Dr. Chapman, along with Dr. White as I mentioned, and they together wrote the book Appreciation at Work, which is the five level languages for the workplace. So it's the same once,

Brett Curry:

Right? Interesting

JC Hite:

Works of affirmation, quality, time, access, service, tangible gifts, physical touch, but we don't think about that. So often the workplace, this next generation is much more into appreciation versus rewards. So they want quality time with people. They're really interested in words of affirmation. And so just like I do with my wife, how do I figure out, especially my team around me, what is their love language? How do I connect with them? And it's incredibly different. Some of my people, man, they just want money. I mean tangible gifts is what it's about if you pay 'em.

Brett Curry:

And nothing wrong with that at all.

JC Hite:

I used to have a personal assistant, I love her to death, I love her to death, but her appreciation at work, her love language was words of affirmation. And that is not, I mean, I do really well with my wife and my kids, but outside of that, I'm the most, I'm just not very lovey word wise

Brett Curry:

With your words.

JC Hite:

And it was a problem because I would go a week without talking to her just because I was busy and she got the work done. She was so efficiently, so gc, are you mad at me? No. What happened? Did I miss something?

Brett Curry:

Did I say something? Did I say that I was mad at you?

JC Hite:

No, but you haven't like no, because you're crushing it and you don't need me to tell you what to do right now. Words of affirmation, she wanted to just be told. And so I think, okay, how do I find the right talent where and what if my strategy around finding the right talent, and then once I get them, how am I loving on them as much as humanly possible world, this next generation, they'll quit and they don't need another job. They'll quit and they'll go move back with their family. They'll quit because they got 30,000 in the bank and shoot, I can go live in the Philippines for six months without much money. And so they think differently. And so we got to be prepared. How do we build the relationship with them?

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good, man. And it's one of those things where yes, you got to pay people competitively and you have to have a job and a role that's structured well that gives someone a chance to succeed. But people really need that appreciation and those extra things and they need to be seen and loved. We'll use the word loved, even though it's maybe not a word you use in business a whole lot, but I love that. And we're big fans, big believers in the Five Love languages. It's true at work as well. It's going to be the work version of those things that work. And so how do you see that and recognize that in your team, and then how do you show them appreciation? How do you lead them in the way they want to be led or to see appreciation?

Brett Curry:

That's

Brett Curry:

Right. That's great, man. And I always think about it, a good coach, man. I think about coaches I had because I love playing sports growing up. And who were the coaches that they were fine. I learned and they pushed me. And some were just hardcore and that was fine, but who are the coaches that I love? The coaches that I would run through a brick wall for? And I think we have the same thing with bosses. Who are the bosses that I'll show up for? I like the job, I'm going to do the right thing, but who are the bosses that I would run through a brick wall for? It's not just about pay. It's about those intangibles of how am I getting appreciation and receiving love from this boss?

Brett Curry:

That's right.

Brett Curry:

Really, really great. Hey, what are some of the other, but before we talk about retention, some of those things, I want to talk about this overseas recruiting. I think that that's just becoming more and more common in every business that I know from the agency space to the e-commerce space and everything in between. What are some of the other mistakes that people make there? So I love that you pointed out our default is how do we go to the cheapest rather than how can we pay more than anybody else and just get an unbelievable team member. What are the mistakes do people make when they're hiring internationally?

JC Hite:

Well, I think a couple of things here. I think the mindset around it is very different. Most in our culture and even the digital marketing world, we call almost anyone that's outsourced a VA in some way shape. We have our team in the US and we got 10 or 15 VAs in Nawa, and it's like we just have a mindset problem around what team looks like. This is the team. And so I have an issue with that. I think one of the things that we just have a huge opportunity for is that Nick and i's three and a half hour flight from Dallas, Honduras, all these things beforehand. So a lot of things are shifting to latam from the Philippines and Asia, things like this, which creates an opportunity to visit the team, be a part of them. So again, just like these love languages, physical touch trainer for gifts, acts of service, quality time, four of those can be done in person quality time, being present, being able to touch someone. Hey, here's what it is. The affirmation of course can be online, but there's very different when they feel the body language around it,

JC Hite:

So much can be done in person. So I think that's a huge opportunity. And again, us we're really like, what does comp look like? The world is getting flatter and flatter. I feel like there was 10 years ago we were talking about the world is flat, it was opening up the doors, but it wasn't like it was still very unlevel wise. That is starting to gradually equate more and more over time.

Brett Curry:

Yep. Yep. Love that. Well, let's talk, let's shift gears. Talk about retention. And this is one of those things that if you've been in business for any length of time, you've had a key team member leave and it's painful. And we've all had experiences where someone turns in their resignation and we're like, oh, I've got a fake. I'm sad here. This is so terrible. But then there's some people that they leave and you're just gutted, right? Oh my goodness. We had someone on our team who I mentored him and trained him, and I invested so much time in him. And then when he left, it was almost like a gut punch. I was also proud of him. He was going to pursue something bigger, which was just tough. Some people are really tough when it's really tough when they leave. So how do you think about retention strategically and also tactically,

JC Hite:

Have you ever read of the book, the Dream Manager, Brett,

Brett Curry:

The Dream Manager? I have not.

JC Hite:

I love it. It's a little fable about a company that scaled and grew and they were a cleaning company, clean toilets for a living. In that book, it talks about how they finally realized that they were a stepping stone elsewhere. There's certain roles in their company. I think I struggled especially earlier where it was like an ego Hite was the savior for everyone. You couldn't leave. Why would you leave? You are going to be served your best, we're going to be able to pay you, we're going to be all these things. And I think finally I got where that's not the case for most people. And so I try to segment and go, okay, what is my retention rate on leaders, managers, these types of individuals and then everyone else at Hite? We don't get a lot of leadership roles that open up. We just don't turn over, which means I actually need to expect there's a big group of people that will move because there's no spots for leadership unless I'm trying to scale Hite. I am in growth mode, which quite frankly right now, high digital, we're not because I don't know where the world of digital marketing is going. And so how do we treat our company more as a, I like sports teams. I think they do two things really well. Number one, they don't get affected. Well, I mean they do, but people move. That's just part of

Brett Curry:

It. People move, people get traded, people contracts,

JC Hite:

Don negotiate that. But another move really well is they're always recruiting. They always have this bench. And so one of the things that we've really tried to do from an HR standpoint, even if I don't have a, let's say a Google Ads person, I have a bench waiting now. It even changes the framework to my leaders. I mean, you've done this and I got a B player, and it's like they're not super good, but do I want to go recruit and find No. My leaders are going, I have a B player, and we got Sarah on the bench.

JC Hite:

Sarah's got right? So what our HR team is for all of our core roles, we try to have someone on the bench somewhere and we'll literally just like sales. We'll call 'em up every month and go, Hey, Brett, hey, we don't have the role just quite yet. My thinking is maybe the next two to three months. But you still wanted to join Hite if an opportunity came up, right? Yeah. Okay, cool. And so that's the conversation. We have two or three of them that are already approved, already have the videos. We're just waiting. And that brings so much security to our company.

JC Hite:

And so again, I think we have as owners just a huge God complex that we are the lifeblood of our team. And once we get over that, we just realized like, dude, I have had so many people that I hated to leave and one of two things are not true either. One, I didn't truly care about them because they ended up with a way better job or a way better opportunity or whatever. So either one or two things are not true either. One, I didn't care about them quite as much as I thought, or two as you thought you did. Exactly. And so I think we got to loosen up there a little bit. If your deal is retention, I think that goes back to appreciation at work. I think at the end of the day, nonprofits are your greatest example of people that have a lot higher retention than most for-profit companies yet they normally don't pay that much. They focus on what they're good at. And so there's been seasons where we're like, guys, we're really struggling with, we are going to love on you. We're going to be able to serve you. I mean, I've got two people right now at Hite. One just had cancer treatment, another one's got a daughter with cancer. Both of them are fully out. We're paying them. We have no rush back. We're taking care.

JC Hite:

We want to be an organization that serves our people in the greatest way possible.

Brett Curry:

Same here for sure.

JC Hite:

And that's where we can win. It doesn't matter where you're at or who you are, that's possible.

Brett Curry:

That's so great, man. And it's a really important thing. And one of the things I reminded myself very early on in business is if you look at the best companies, the Googles and Facebooks and other Mag seven companies, they attract really great people. But with attracting great people, a lot of times they want to move on to something else. They want to go build their own company, they want to go do their own thing, something like that. And so if you are constantly attracting talent, they will move on. And I heard my pastor said long ago, and I shared this from the early days of O mg, we're going to bless people when they come and bless people when they go and maybe we'll give people a hard time. And that's what we did. We did a cake you dead test type thing just as a joke. But it's always like, we're going to bless 'em when they come. We're going to bless 'em when they go. We're going to talk good about them even when they go. I think that's one of those things that's common. Like this person left and we're going to bash 'em internally. No, not going to put up with that. And so

JC Hite:

We had had a team member, and we've done this many times. We have a team member that was here for two years and he was like, man, I just don't. And we were honest with him, I don't know that you would get a promotion if we had it. You're good and I love you to death. And we had a real conversation and then we hired a recruiting firm to help him find a new job. And he stayed with Hyatt another three months, 90 days or so until the recruiting firm got him something. That's amazing. But it also I think loosens the conversation and ideally, and we're not perfect at this, but how do we create a culture where people are just really honest? And I would much rather a team member tell me, dude, I don't see my future. Cool. Let's plan it. I will help you find a job. If I know

Brett Curry:

Let's help you find a place where you are fulfilled. Yeah, weeks,

JC Hite:

It's going to be better for you, better for us weeks notice in our world, especially account managers and leaders. Man, that's tough. And it's tough when you're a smaller business with a smaller team, it's even worse. And so open, honest communication can be really, really great.

Brett Curry:

That's great, man. I love it. Well, let's transition to our final topic here. Let's talk mentorship. And you've had the privilege. I know it's been by design and by effort and by just getting out there and doing stuff. But you are friends and have mentors that are really world-class leaders like John Maxwell, like the Robertsons from Duck Dynasty, like Damon John, and we'll throw our mutual friend, Vinny Fisher in there as well. First of all, how do you view mentorship and why is that so important? And then I want to talk about how you meet these world-class mentors.

JC Hite:

I am scared to death of business. I have seen so many of my friends sacrifice it all to get to the top. And I mean great people, good people that just somewhere one mistake, one bad night, one whatever, successful business. And then overnight something happened and it wasn't, and my mentorship is just straight out of fear. I look at some of these men and women that John's been married to Margaret forever, and Dr. Chapman, we were texting just a few.

Brett Curry:

Dude, how old is John Maxwell? Do you know? Or are you allowed to say he's got to be 70 or something?

JC Hite:

Eight.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, if

JC Hite:

I remember right,

Brett Curry:

Hearing about the global leadership summit's still articulate sharp as attack, just killing the game.

JC Hite:

We were just talking yesterday about him coming to scale with stability next year. And this guy, Dr. Chapman impresses me more. Dr. Chapman's 87, he

Brett Curry:

No way, he's sharp. I didn't know that

JC Hite:

He's sharp. I mean, we had him just as event the other day and we did a q and a. So the audience is asking random questions, it not, and he's joking, spitting back, no time. He knows this stuff. And so for me, I am, I'm a big believer that wisdom just transcends generations. Obviously as Christians, we believe in this thing called the Bible, and it's absolute truth. It's

Brett Curry:

An ancient book.

JC Hite:

They struggled with their marriage. And so I love this and it's been such a blessing. I remember I had a season where I had to get rid of a couple of partnerships and that caused a couple of other partnerships. It was just a big drama. And I called up John, actually his right hand, Mark Cole, and we were chatting and he's the CEO of all of Maxwell now. And I was like, dude, I just feel like a failure. I let these partners down. I broke up and that's creating drama. And then I feel stressed and just everything I feel like has been affected.

JC Hite:

And I was like, how does John prevent this stuff from happening? And he just chuckled. He is like, John's going through a huge breakup right now, right now. And the leader on leadership in the world had a bad, it didn't work and it was a drama and it was a problem, and there was legal involved and all this. He's welcome to it. And so I have spent a lot of money, time and energy connecting and being with around some of what I have seen be some of the most successful folks out there. And some have failed with it and overcome, some haven't. Right? So John will Roberton, Dr. Chapman, Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank, and the list goes on. Jesse Itzler, got a couple of

Brett Curry:

Dude, love that guy. Yeah, met Jesse, he's the don't know, he's the author of Living With a Seal, which is a phenomenal book. And Jesse just wants to live a legendary life. And I love his big calendar that he plans on and stuff. And so it's really cool. And yeah, I love the way you framed it. So first of all, mentorship and getting wisdom from people that have gone where you want to go, been where you are right now. It's really hard to put a value on that. It's so incredibly valuable. But you mentioned a couple of things. You said one, you paid for it, two, you worked for it, and you built those relationships. You're not just going to wake up one morning and John Maxwell call you unless you're doing something earth shattering or whatever. Sometimes you got to pay to be in the right room.

Brett Curry:

Sometimes you got to pay to be around people and you form these friendships. I can think about relationships that I've built over the years that started with a paid relationship like my buddy now we're really good friends. Ezra Firestone, we've done lots of business together and I call him up when there are things going on in business or whatever, but that began with a paid business type relationship. I met my wife and I go to Life church. So Craig Rochelle is the senior pastor, one of the best leaders I think right now, the Craig Rochelle Leadership podcast. So he flew into Springfield and my local pastor said, Hey, will you and Brittany go pick Craig up from the airport? So we did got to meet him and Amy, his wife, and then also Bobby Grunwald, who's the founder of YouVersion Bible app.

Brett Curry:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

The Bible app. For those that don't know it is the most downloaded Bible resource, almost a billion downloads. It's a free app, a church put this together. But Bobby's a business savant and he's built businesses. He's been in life church for like, I dunno, 26, 27 years. But we took Craig to church. He got mobbed like a rockstar. And so Bobby's just hanging out. So I started talking to Bobby and I start telling him about some m and a deals that I'm working on. And so then a week later, Bobby calls me, he's like, Hey, how's the m and a stuff going? So he's like mentoring me and coaching me a little bit, which is just super cool. So I think you've got to be able to do all those things. How can I get out there? How can I be the one to form a relationship? I did a partnership with Russell Brunson back in 2009. I saw him in the lobby of an event and came up and just start talking to him. You got to be willing to talk. You got to be willing to pay, got to be willing to put yourself out there. But man, I'm telling you, those relationships are more valuable than almost anything else in business. It's huge.

JC Hite:

I mean, I feel confident I can call any one of those folks and they would make sure my wife and I were not homeless. And so big secret, that's why I do events. Events are not really profitable, but events fund some of those relationships in a big way. Most of those guys are less. If you've got a really good mentor, I find they never tell you what to do. First off, I rarely get told what to do, but there's, they

Brett Curry:

Help you process things. Yeah, that's right. Stories.

JC Hite:

But I think so many of us of entrepreneurs think we're special. And what I mean by that is that we've got special problems or man, no one else has these relationship issues and no one else is running a $4 million company and can't figure out how to do payroll. And no one else has struggled with turnover and no one, we feel we're special in a negative way. And the reality is once you talk to these folks, everyone's got the same stink issues. Everyone's struggling with fire, everyone is, and the encouragement there is to give you a little bit of peace in the ability to go, okay, it's a normal problem, so how do we fix it versus wallowing it in it compounding in a negative way.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good. Yeah, we noticed that in early 24. We had just grown headcount massively. E-comm was scaling and we were scaling we through two rounds of layoffs. And so it's been remarkable though, as I've shared that with other leaders. They're like, me too, man. And this is what happened. We did it. This is what happened afterwards. This is what the mistakes we learned while we were doing it. And so one of the worst times in my life as far as business goes, but every business goes through something like that. And the cool thing is those that are mature and who've done it before generally want to help you not crush in and give you some tips. We'll just help you walk through it. So dude, this has been fantastic. We're kind of coming up against time here. What do I want to do though? Let's talk about your events. You're going to do scale with stability part two, I believe, next year. So any plug you want to give for that would be awesome. And then you also have an event for agencies. And so would love to hear kind of who that's for, what type of agencies, what that looks like. And so it's, tell us more about that.

JC Hite:

Yeah, the Commitment Summit is in Cancun. That is kind mean. It's a VIP type event all inclusive. We got Mike Mitz coming, several others. We have had John Maxwell there, Damon, John, Jesse came, all those guys. Nowadays it's turned into, it's anywhere from two to 10 million agencies coming together. We got speakers in the morning and then everything else is like hot seats working together in the pool, collaborating. And a lot of people ring their families. It's fun. Four nights, three days. The commitment summit.com scale of stability summit is just more holistic. It's all about helping businesses scale with stability. And it's a faith-based conference as well. And we are scaling it. So right now we'll have our location in April, which is in Arkansas. It's kind of in the south, but we are actually debating Brett having another one, either Missouri, Nashville or potentially up. Let's go. And so as you're talking about your church, I'm like literally someone just the other day was like, have you considered having scale stability Summit at one of Greg's churches?

Brett Curry:

Love church location. I think it's pretty smart. They'd probably up for that. So that's amazing, man. Love what you're doing, keep up the good work. You guys are building an amazing business, profitable, scaling, growing and all that, but you're also doing it the right way, sticking with your mission, taking care of your family, good relationship with your wife. So love what you're doing, man. Thanks for delivering value here and looking forward to connecting with you in person soon.

Brett Curry:

Yeah brother.

Brett Curry:

Alright, man. Thank you so much. And thank you for tuning in as always. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the podcast, have you not done? So we'd also love that review on iTunes, helps other people find the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

I had the privilege of sitting down with Andrew Faris, CEO of AJF Growth and host of the Andrew Faris Podcast, to break down the critical elements of P&L design that separate ecomm brands that are dead on arrival vs. those who thrive. Andrew shares his hard-won insights from holding nearly every seat in the e-commerce ecosystem, including his experience running an aggregator "into the ground" and the valuable lessons learned along the way.

Key Takeaways

• The Four-Quarter P&L Framework: Learn the essential buckets every e-commerce brand needs to track - cost of delivery, CAC, OpEx, and profit - plus the specific percentage benchmarks that define a healthy business
• Why 95% of E-commerce Brands May Be Worth Nothing: Andrew explains the harsh reality of current brand valuations and why proper financial forecasting is the difference between building a sellable asset vs. a lifestyle business
• The Hidden Goldmine in Supply Chain Optimization: Discover why supply chains are the most under-optimized part of e-commerce businesses, with real examples of brands cutting product costs by 60% without any customer complaints
• Cohort-Based Forecasting That Actually Works: Move beyond "hope-based" projections to build reliable revenue forecasts using historical customer behavior and LTV modeling (plus Andrew shares his free spreadsheet resource)
• Why E-commerce OpEx Should Be Under 15%: Learn how successful brands leverage AI, offshore talent, and operational efficiency to maintain lean overhead while scaling revenue - including the brand doing $5-6M in revenue per employee

Chapters

(00:00) Join Us in NYC at Our Exclusive YouTube Event!

(01:08) Introducing Andrew Faris & His eCommerce Journey

(07:06) The Current State of eCommerce

(13:16) The Influence of Moneyball by Michael Lewis in Marketing

(19:29) Understanding P&L in eCommerce Success

(23:34) Understanding Your Profit Goals & OMG Commerce’s Case

(29:35) How to Structure Your P&L as an eCommerce Brand

(34:48) Optimizing Operational Expenses

(34:56) CAC and Cost of Delivery

(39:33) Channel Strategy and Product Margin Fit

(42:51) Forecasting and Adjusting Business Strategy

(49:50) Resources & Closing Thoughts

‍

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today, man, am I pumped about my guest. I have the one, the only Andrew j Faris host of the Andrew Faris podcast, CEO, founder of AJF Growth, and just had the privilege of being on his podcast a couple of weeks ago talking about YouTube. We hit it off. I wanted to have him on the podcast to talk about p and l design and forecasting, and also why e-commerce brand owners should back off from the ledge if you find yourself there because of all the craziness going on with tariffs and whatnot, and so pumped to get into your story, Andrew, but then also deliver some value for our guests. So welcome to the show, man, and thanks for taking the time.

Andrew Faris:

Yeah, thanks, Brett. You asked me how I like to be introduced, and I think the one the only is good. That's all I

Brett Curry:

Need. Just the one, the only, that's all we need.

Andrew Faris:

Yeah, yeah, that's right. So that was good. Thanks.

Brett Curry:

It's so funny, one time I was traveling with my team, three team members, and I was not in first class, but it was just sitting in front of the plane. They were in the back of the plane and they all separately walked by and they touched me on the shoulder and they're like, are you the Brett Curry? And the people sitting around were like, who is this guy? Should we know this guy? The name doesn't ring a bell, but who is this guy? And I'm like, it's my team. It's just being nuts. So anyway, huge deal. Fun times. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, exactly. So dude pumped about this, but for those that don't know you give us a little background. I believe you told me you've held every seat in e-comm, just about. And so talk us through that and then what are you doing now?

Andrew Faris:

Yeah, well, what I just try to tell people is that in the e-commerce ecosystem, at least on the marketing side, I have been in just about every kind of organization in most of the seats. So I started off working at klo, selling silicone wedding rings on the internet as a media buyer. I was trained, working directly, closely. I was Taylor Holiday who had been a friend for a while at that point. And so Taylor and I became good friends and crossed, crossed paths over that time. Well, we were already friends, but crossed paths or continued to work together in a bunch of different ways. So I was working with Common Thread collective from there as a growth strategist, and then eventually the head of growth there led strategy at CTC for a while. At some point, CTC spun off its own brands into an aggregator called Four Rifle, 400, and I led growth there and then became the CEO promptly ran that into the ground. I always try to clarify this. It sounds like when you tell a story like this, it's like, wow, look at my great career advancement where I'm only ever successful and it's just not true.

Brett Curry:

I learned a lot. Never happens that way.

Andrew Faris:

Never happens that way. We did some good things, 4, 400, 1 of those brands still is going Bamboo Earth and Bamboo Earth. Yeah, it's profitable, but sold off all of 'em, but won. And I ended up leaving. And I would just add, I learned, especially the longer I've reflected on the experience, I've learned a lot from my mistakes there. From there, now, I've been running AJF Growth, which is a boutique agency where we service right now four brands, and I've got a team of a few of us in the US and seven or eight more in the Philippines and work together to do a great job as good of a job as we can do servicing brands, really meta adss focused, but we end up functioning sort of almost like an outsourced mix of CMO CFO kind of deal. CFO is too strong of a word. We're not forecasting somebody's cashflow, but we do actually take on the forecasting of the full business in terms of DTC cohort forecasting, that kind of stuff. And then we ladder our media plan to that and then end up being in a lot of conversations around marketing efforts and stuff like that,

Brett Curry:

Which is super, super interesting. Yeah, I love that. And I've always been a believer, I've always, always been a fan of infomercials and marketing that drives results, and I've always believed that marketing should build your bottom line in addition to your top line. But now the trend is you're putting real legs behind that where as a marketer, you're helping run the forecast and you're helping manage the p and l, not from a gap accounting perspective, but from a practical, helpful, let's hit these profit targets lens and you're doing it and doing it well. And so it's super, super exciting. And also, man, I really appreciate you sharing, hey, not everything in business goes well, right? And there's one of these things I heard Alex Hormoz say recently where it's like, Hey, you expect for entrepreneurship running a business to be hard, but then you're discouraged because it's even way harder than you think, right? You go in thinking this is hard is, but it's really, really hard. And so you have to be ready for that. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Andrew Faris:

Yeah, I think some people, sometimes when I hear people, you talk about people being talked off the ledge. I actually think one of the things that happens in conversations about the ledge in e-commerce is that sometimes people's expectation is just that it's going to be easy the whole time or that

Brett Curry:

Or

Andrew Faris:

That you should always grow prospect lifestyle each

Brett Curry:

Stage up to the right.

Andrew Faris:

Yeah. I think if you thought that somebody was going to hand you millions of dollars on the bottom line, that's not an e-commerce problem. Just so anyway, I think there is a real thing there where people need to expect that there's going to be challenges along the way, and not every outcome is what you expect,

Brett Curry:

Dude, totally. I know you're a family man, I'm as well. But it's almost one of those things where pre-kids, you see a family from a distance and you see a kid acting out and you're like, my kid will never do that. My family's never going to be like that. And then you're like, you have no idea what you're talking about, everything you want to avoid or not have happen. It'll humble you for sure, but business is the same way. It's really, really hard, but it's also rewarding and fun and exciting at the same time. So let's talk about that a little bit. You hosted a podcast or delivered a podcast recently where you said, Hey, I'm still bullish on e-comm, and so we don't want to fully unpack that, right? People just need to go listen that episode. But why did you say that? And I agree with you by the way, I've got a couple of things I want to add to this, but why are you still bullish on?

Andrew Faris:

Well, there's a lot of reasons, but at the end of the day, I think there's more intelligence about how to operate an e-commerce business now for a larger market of customers than there have ever been for e-commerce. And I think most of the headwinds are more short term. Most of the tailwinds are more long term. So tariffs being the biggest headwind. And I just should clarify really quickly, if your brand is existentially threatened by Chinese tariffs, I understand. I'm not trying to make light, that sucks. I'm not trying to say it's

Brett Curry:

A big, big

Andrew Faris:

Deal and no, obviously

Brett Curry:

Even taring are currently they were super high and now they're low, and who knows what they'll be with when this is recorded, but still volatile.

Andrew Faris:

Exactly. Yeah, and I just think so anyway, so having said that, there's a carve out there, but yeah, I just think that the tools are also getting amazing. This is something people will sit here and talk about how AI is producing all of this value to make it so that the ad platforms are performing better and delivering business results better. And they're doing that in all kinds of ways, and also creative is getting cheap to make at endless scale and all this stuff. And then they won't take the next step and say, oh, who does that accrue value to? It accrues values to meta it, accrues values to Google it accrues values to chat GPT, who's going to charge you to do it and all that stuff. But it also cruises values to brands, values to brands who reduce their opex meaningfully. So if that's the future you believe in to where the distribution of your ad creative is getting much, much cheaper, the labor involved with things like customer service and all these things is getting much, much cheaper. And then at the same time, the production of your ad creative and of other creative assets in your business, including copy on your website and social media and all those things, that's all getting cheaper as well, drastically, phenomenally, ridiculously cheaper. If that's all happening, then that means you can run your business more efficiently at every level,

And that means it accrues value to you. So you can't, it's just really hard to say both those things at the same time that now the counter argument to that is that the barrier to entry is getting so low that all of these people will do it, and there will be very few winners, and I don't know quite what to make of that. I think if there's still more winners ultimately, and if it's very cheap to test the idea, then yeah, there are going to be some losers, but, but anyway, so the combination of all those things makes me still bullish and I just try to tell people as far as putting my money where my mouth is here, I'm starting a brand right now. I just got another sample, the sample yesterday. Love it. So just like

Brett Curry:

When will this brand be released? Will it be launched

Andrew Faris:

T by October? Hopefully

Brett Curry:

That

Andrew Faris:

Would be, but that means for sure later than that because that's how this kind of thing goes. So

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I fully agree with you. I've invested in some retail and DTC brands even over the last year. Yes, there headwinds. We have an Amazon practice at OMG. Amazon is challenging. There are always challenges there. The game is always shifting a little bit there, but people are going to buy in the future more online, not less online. I'm very, very confident in that. I do believe we're in a world where great products and great marketers will win. And so it's difficult. It's challenging, yes, if you're getting hammered by tariffs, sympathy to you, empathy, all of those things. But there are still big opportunities in this space. And I was listening to the operators podcast recently, Mike Beckham, co-founder of Simple Modern, and he imports everything from China, or maybe he's actively working to not do that, but Currently's

Andrew Faris:

The case. Yeah, they stood up a manufacturing facility in Oklahoma City. I've been there and it's really, really cool and awesome, but when you hear them talk about it, it's a tremendous pain. So it's really

Brett Curry:

Difficult. Exactly. But he talked about on a recent episode, he is like, Hey, this is chaotic, but there's more surface area right now for me to make changes and pivots and shake things up. And I'm confident this is going to be going to create windfalls for our business. And so I think if we remind ourselves that during every time of uncertainty, every economic downturn, fortunes are made and people transform their business in a powerful way, it's just a good mental reset.

Andrew Faris:

That's right. Because

Brett Curry:

Sometimes being an entrepreneur is lonely and we get down and discouraged and I got to give myself a pep talk on occasion. And so I'm glad you did that. Thanks for posting that episode. Everybody should go check that out.

Andrew Faris:

Well, maybe I need to have you back on again, Brett, because Taylor is one of the biggest critics of my e-commerce is a good business mentality, and he said, you need to bring somebody on who agrees with you. Yeah, yeah,

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I know he is. Yeah. Well, because you tweeted recently with your friend fan, I think that 50% of e-comm brands are worth nothing. And Taylor tweeted back that it's like 95%,

Andrew Faris:

95%. And that is a good clarification because fans sample is brands that are trying to exit, and so

Brett Curry:

That

Andrew Faris:

Skews disproportionately towards brands that have some

Brett Curry:

Value, a little bit, little bit of cherry pick there.

Andrew Faris:

And I didn't mean, I just didn't think about that when I proposed that I wasn't trying to be click fatty or whatever, but it's a fair point. But yeah, anyway, it's

Brett Curry:

Still money to be made still success to be had.

Road's not easy, but still there. So I want to talk about this. We're going to get to p and Ls. I want to talk about how to design it, and again, not from an accounting perspective, but how to look at it as a marketer, as a business owner to drive profits, drive real business and finance outcomes. But we were talking about something really interesting prior to hitting record. You're a big baseball guy. I'm more of a basketball football guy, but I love baseball too. We love the same movie, and you were inspired more by the book, but tell us about the book that maybe shaped you as a marketer that will, I think, surprise people, but talk about it and why.

Andrew Faris:

Yeah, Moneyball. Moneyball I think shaped a lot of people in a lot of ways actually. I think it did. It did. Reach was well beyond baseball fans

Brett Curry:

For sure,

Andrew Faris:

Because in my experience, so I grew up playing baseball as a huge baseball fan, and when I heard about analytics in baseball and the early stage, I had the same reaction as a lot of people, which is like, this is soulless and these nerds are, they don't understand how baseball really works. And then I read the book and was totally convinced that I was wrong about that

Brett Curry:

A hundred percent

Andrew Faris:

Percent. But what ended up happening is that that book exposed to me, not so much just a statistical paradigm for baseball, but it taught me how smart, analytically minded people think about everything about the world. So I'm a big Dodgers fan of wearing my Dodgers hat right now. The guy who runs the Dodgers, the president of baseball operations, his name is Andrew Friedman, he came from Wall Street. He was a traitor. And so he had an ability to think about statistical probabilities and some of those things and how you use data to inform better quality decision making, and to think about the world as a matter of bets that you place and things like that. Working with him for a long time, a guy who eventually ran the Giants eventually got fired and is now back as a specialist of the Dodgers. His name is Dr.

Farhan Idi, who has a PhD from MIT and has never played serious baseball. And there's teams that have various levels of those kinds of guys. Some former players now are those kinds of guys or whatever. So it's not only that, but the point is those guys were not thinking about baseball first when they developed those muscles, they just took a set of muscles and applied them to baseball. And what I did was the opposite direction. Moneyball for me was the way that I learned how to think about how to look at a set of numbers and think about what they mean and how to interpret them and what they don't mean, which crucially, and I mean Brett, I'll just tell you, I think I actually just tweeted about this today. I think that people's inability to have a baseline understanding of then the concept of probabilistic thinking about outcomes and of the difference between signal and noise and how to make a distinction between those two things is a gigantic hole in their thinking, especially media buyers. Media buyers are terrible at this hundred percent, and they overreact to tiny samples. And just for the record, I am media buyer. I am the person that we're talking about.

So all of my thinking about how best to optimize a lot of media buying approaches is like, how do I get the machine to make the decisions for me because I am so bias prone in all of my thinking. So anyway, Moneyball, for me, the book really helped me to start working out those muscles and those muscles then became transferable to other things eventually. Also listening to the Freakonomics podcast helped me a lot with this. Listening to the Planet Money podcast helped me a lot with this. Really, Freakonomics I think was especially helpful as well because very similar thing, right? You've got guys who are sort of exploring the world through the lens of data and what data can and can't tell you, and sort looking under the surface, little taglines, exploring the hidden side of everything. And the hidden side is how data creates incentives and some of that.

So they have all kinds of really fun things, outcomes of like, oh, look at that. If you look at the numbers underneath this, you see patterns and behaviors emerging. Yeah, I just think a lot of people would do really well to, if you like baseball, you have the best world for this because it's the place where a lot of this stuff is the most publicly digestible. But if you're a basketball fan, Brett, surely over the last bunch of years, the thing you've noticed the most is the rise of the three pointer. It is a simple calculation, which is a three pointer is worth more than 50% of a two point. It's worth 50%. It's worth 50%, right? More.

Brett Curry:

Yeah,

Andrew Faris:

Sorry. It was worth more, which is 50% more than a two pointer, and therefore there's a massive incentive unless you make it essentially your shot doesn't have, you can be a fairly amount less efficient at the level of the shot and still be a more efficient use of your shot in that case. And

Brett Curry:

So

Andrew Faris:

That kind of little tradeoff, it's like, oh, once you see that, that's good. And by the way, if anybody ever goes and plays pickup basketball and you're playing with ones and twos as instead of twos and threes,

Brett Curry:

That's even crazier. It's not twice as much. You should shoot a two every time, every time. If you're a drive to the bucket type of player,

Andrew Faris:

You're doing

Brett Curry:

It wrong. You can't play in a game, that's one versus two. It's like you've got to develop that three point shot, which I don't have. I grew up in an era where I was a post player, we just pounded down low to take a close shot. That's all we did. But I'm so glad you brought this up and we will talk p and l, we will talk about e-commerce.

Andrew Faris:

Yeah, whatever. We can talk whatever you want.

Brett Curry:

But I love that we got into this because people are not failing right now in e-commerce or in any business for lack of data. That's not an issue right now. It's not lack of data. It's understanding what does the data mean, but more importantly, what does the data not mean? And then based on what it means, where am I going to place bets and why? And can I confidently say this, why I'm going to place bets in this place and not in that place? And yeah, dude, it is just so good. I love the movie Moneyball, so many quotable things in that movie. And

Andrew Faris:

As it happens, I'm also a big Aaron Sorkin fan. So once Moneyball became both Moneyball book and also written by Aaron Sorkin

Brett Curry:

Was in,

Andrew Faris:

He's

Brett Curry:

One of the best, wait, what are some of the other Aaron Sorkin movies?

Andrew Faris:

Well, there's a lot. I mean, he wrote Charlie Chicago Seven is one that people liked a lot. I think that won some.

Brett Curry:

Did he write Molly's game? The poker? He did, yeah. Just so good.

Andrew Faris:

But the West Wing is maybe his still most famous thing in some ways because the West Wings a lot of people and West Wing I love too. Yeah. So

Brett Curry:

You'll be a better media buyer, better business operator, better Econ Pro. If you watch or read Moneyball, go check it out. That's awesome, man. So let's break down. P and Ls mentioned to you, I actually love math. I excelled at math in schools. It was just fun for me. I hated accounting class in college, slept through it, hated it.

Andrew Faris:

I've never taken one, so that's fine.

Brett Curry:

Okay, I regretted it once I started a business. I was like, oh shoot, I should have paid closer attention. So I've had to get better there. There's some differences. There's gap accounting principles which are useful and there's a reason for that and there's a world for that. But then there's p and ls that are useful for marketers and business owners. And so talk to me about how you think about p and ls, why it's important, and what function does that serve for you as a marketer?

Andrew Faris:

So at the baseline level, what I really think here is that many brands are dead on arrival and don't realize it. And the reason they don't realize it is that they have never done the work of forecasting every part of their p and l, the whole thing, at least in large chunks. So I am not saying you have to forecast your Shopify bill six months out or your Klaviyo bill six months out or whatever, down to those details, but maybe you should, but I'll tell you this, there are worse things to do with your time in e-commerce than to get that detail in your forecast

Brett Curry:

For sure.

Andrew Faris:

But I think a lot of brands just don't have a viable business or it's going to be really hard or they have filed business, but they are strategically so turned around and don't know it because they just haven't done the work of having a goal. And then forecasting to that goal in a way that says, here is what is actually likely or if they do the forecast is rooted in hope. And that's not a forecast. Hope is not a forecast, it's not a plan, but to have some reason for why they believe the future will be a certain way and then to forecast their whole business through that lens. And I think that basically the tool to do that with is a cohort-based forecast for e-commerce brands where you're actually forecasting new and returning customer revenue differently. And then depending on if you're omnichannel, how you work those channels in as well, this gets more complex.

But basically having that kind of thing, it sounds like ridiculous advice to say to people, you need to forecast your business. Like duh, everybody knows that. But I am telling you, I just see over and over that people do this again, either they don't do it with any seriousness or they do it or they do it with no or no connection to reality in terms of what's happened, or they do it, like I said, the Hope vibes forecast kind of thing where it's like, here, we're just going to increase spend for forever every month, and it's always going to be at the same roas and it's going to just be great, or we're going to have all this revenue and there's no separation with no understanding. It says return customers, new customers, whatever. So that's the basic principle, because if you can do this exercise well and disciplined and clearly, and if you need help, there are a lot of people who help you with this by the way. But if you could do it well, then what you end up with is a map and compass to the outcome that to the treasure that you want.

And that is the key step for so many brands to do because if you do the exercise and you get really realistic about it and the outcome of that exercise is not some profit number and some growth number that is satisfying to you, then that gets shoved back in your face and you now have to deal with the reality of, oh, this is not going to actually, I actually don't have a business that works. And then you could start trying to solve the problem. And maybe I can break down at some point, I'll pause here in a second, but break down what kinds of problem surfaces and what makes a good and bad E-commerce p and l. But that basic thing, I think a lot of people have not done the hard work of just doing that in a disciplined and careful way.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good because I think there's a lot of businesses that are in a scenario where you can't get there from here where it's not just, I'm going to work harder, I'm going to do more of this, but you are doing the wrong things and the basis of your business is flawed. The ratios in your business are flawed. You are never going to get to those profit numbers that you want to hit based on the way you're operating right now. And yeah, no amount of wishful thinking, positivity, new creatives on meta are going to get you there because it's fundamentally broken. And I remember as an agency several years ago, and we've always been profit actually every year we've been profitable. We've had some struggles and we've gone through some issues and had to do layoffs a little over a year ago and some other things.

But I remember when we started talking to some PE groups and they started talking to others and they explained the way they look at agencies, the way they look at businesses, I was like, oh wait, we've been kind of lazy in a couple of areas financially. And it just forced me to think about the business in a totally different way. And even though we never sold to PE and actually we're looking at acquiring agencies right now, that function of thinking about how would an outside finance person look at my business, change the way I ran the business, not in terms of personality, the way I care for people or anything like that, but just the way I look at the numbers and the way I look at the ratios shifted when I took that perspective. And I think really every business, every e-comm business needs to look at that. How am I looking at my p and l? How am I looking at my forecast and can I get there from here doing what I'm doing now? So

Andrew Faris:

Really good stuff when you do that, Brett, for the agency, the same exercise for an agency as it is for an e-commerce business. It's just a question of the ratios are different, right? Service business, it's about marked up time and the cost of goods is people basically, right? So do you have a framework through which you're trying to view how at MG Commerce how much margin you have per client or per head or something like that, as a percentage? I'm just curious. I think you do this if you talk through how you think about the agency, then the same principle applies across to e-commerce.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I think it's going to be really similar. So the way we look at a good agency should be in the 20 to 25% EBITDA margin range, maybe a little bit higher. And I think as AI becomes more prevalent, there are other ways you could look at making that margin higher, but that's a pretty good range. So to get there, what does that mean? And I think if you look at the big buckets in an agency, delivery is the biggest, right? So these are the team members that deliver the service. So what should that ratio be? You've got ops, so that's SG and a basically. Actually not S, but anyways, like the general operating opex and stuff like that. And then you've got growth. And so growth, we put marketing and sales together. That's just the way we do it to look at growth. And so those ratios have to line up in a way that then gets you to that 20 to 25%, or maybe it is aggressive, you're looking at 30% EBITDA margins or whatever.

So how are you getting there? And so then you start forecasting, okay, these are my team members in these departments and this is what we're investing and I'm projected to get 8% margin. So then you begin to look at, okay, where am I out of whack? How do we fix this? Do we grow our way out of this because maybe we have a lot of bandwidth and we can grow into it. Do we make cuts? Do we get more efficient? There's a number of things to look at. So those are the areas we look at. And then we break it. So we break it down in big buckets like that. We look at a p and L on of course a monthly basis. We update it all the time, multiple times a week, but then we also break down into each department kind of p and l and look at how that rolls up, and then what does each department need to contribute to then get us to the overall ratios that we need. And so yeah, we're planning things out annually based on that. We also factor in things like, okay, what is our pipeline? What percentage of deals are we're going to close? What's our average deal value? So that's layered in. We also factor in churn because even though we think we're great, we've won awards and people love us and things like that, churn still

Andrew Faris:

Happens.

Brett Curry:

It happens more when tariffs are going on, stuff like that. So then how do we factor in churn and look at that because you're never going to keep all your clients. And so we spilled that model and it's like you're constantly adjusting, you're constantly tweaking. We do a weekly flash, the finance report that looks at, okay, what changed this week? How are we looking at the rest of this month? So that's kind of the base of breakdown,

Andrew Faris:

And I think that exercise reflects there's a target profit number that you're trying to get to. You just said 20 to 25%. That could change depending on all kinds of things. It could have changed depending on the way that businesses in your sector are valued. It could change depending on your goals, depending on the cash intensivity of the business, the cost of capital, there's all kinds of things that could affect that. It could change just because of what you want in life. And that's fine. Totally. When I talk about this, to me, it's not about me saying necessarily what I think good is in this case because it's just going to change for different people depending on goals. I could tell you what I think how these brands are valued in the m and a market. I have thoughts about that, but then even how much you care about that is your own question and when you want to sell and all those things.

So there's all of these other factors that do that, but then you just kind of work back from there. Here's the profit number we're trying to hit to. Maybe you have for yourself some kind of a revenue goal that ladders down to a profit goal that ladders down to your take home that you want or a valuation that you want or something like that. So you say, okay, I need to hit this profit number, which means I need to get to this revenue number. And then from there, you just add in your costs. And this is the thing for e-commerce brands, you have to play that exact same game. And I'll say for most of them, that EBITDA number probably ought to be at least 10 to 20%.

Now, again, with the caveat of everything I just said, which is in some ways it's up to you, but for it to be valued highly, if that's what you're aiming at, if enterprise value is your goal, probably somewhere around there while the business is growing, and then now you've got to think about how you break down your costs, very similar to what you just did, Brett, for the agency. So I don't know if you want me to go sort of section by section and talk about what I think the costs ought to be, then we could talk about it. But this is where it varies a lot in

Brett Curry:

Categories. I love that, and I did skip a very important step. It's like, okay, we have very specific goals about what do we want our total profits to be for this year, and as we grow and as we do some acquisitions, what do we want the overall OMG platform to look at? So you do start there and top line goals, and then you back into all those get all percentages. But yeah, let's break it down. So what should this look like for an e-commerce brand? How am I structuring my p and l?

Andrew Faris:

Yeah, so the starting point for this conversation is if you think about the notion, Taylor Holiday four quarter accounting is a helpful way of framing this. There are four sections after revenue on your p and l. So it's cost of delivery, CAC and opex, and then profit. Those are the four sections of your p and l, okay? Cost of delivery includes every variable cost associated with getting your product to a customer. CAC is every ad dollar or marketing dollar that gets deployed. OPEX is every fixed cost in your business, which is mostly people and an e-commerce business. And then profit is left leftover. So let's work backwards. Okay, so profit obviously the number you're trying to aim at. So one of the things that should be happening in e-commerce business, basically no matter your sector, and I think this is the thing that is the most true across every category, is that your opex is a percentage of your revenue should be pretty low. And it is amazing to me how high this number still is. But one of the fundamental advantages of e-commerce is that it scales really well relative the number of heads you have and even cost of those heads

Brett Curry:

Opposite of agencies. But yes, it's very true for e-commerce

Andrew Faris:

Opposite of agencies. So as a simple heuristic here, your total fixed costs is the percentage of your revenue as you grow in particular ought to be less than 15%. So essentially that means if you have a million dollars in revenue, your total cost of all opex including salaries ought to be $150,000 or less. Now at a million dollars, it's pretty hard to hit that number because you have not actually scaled yet. But the more you scale, the more you obviously that percentage come down because, and the simple reality that happens in every part of an e-commerce business, the illustration I use all the time is that it costs basically, well, it costs the exact same amount of money to design an email that you send to a thousand people versus that you send to a million people. The design costs are literally dollar for dollar the same. You got to pay Klaviyo a little more money between those two, but otherwise, all of the other costs are pretty much exactly the same. And so that means that the percentage of your cost of people goes down a whole bunch. If you add in the ability with AI now and with offshoring, which I'm a huge believer and proponent in my team, I mentioned there's seven or eight of us in the Philippines, they're incredible contributors to my team. I don't think of them as separate or something like that.

Brett Curry:

Totally. They're pure team members

Andrew Faris:

And they are killers, and I can get access very high quality talent in the Philippines for much less money than I can access that talent in the US equivalent talent because of the differences in the economies and some of those things. It's a win-win. So if you add those two things together, now you have talked about shrinking your opex even more, and you can be really best in class here and get that number under 10% and maybe even lower. I've heard about, I think Zach Stocks has talked about publicly somewhere that, or maybe that maybe I heard Marketing

Brett Curry:

Operators, what brand does he run?

Andrew Faris:

Hollo socks, Zach, some people know him and he had started Homestead agency, some other

Brett Curry:

Brands as well. Great agency. Yeah,

Andrew Faris:

So Zach was talking, I think on marketing operators that his brand is like five or 6 million in revenue per head, which is crazy. That's wild. That is a very, very lean opex. So that is the number one thing. And I think a lot of brands actually are still sucking. They're just paying too much money for people. I recently had Ben Perkins on from Ann Call on my podcast. He was at $15 million in revenue and was drowning in debt. He had taken some inventory based loans, was paying $65,000 a week in loan repayments and trying to figure out how to stay afloat. He had $3 million in debt against 10 million in revenue at one point, which is not really workable in a lot of e-commerce brands. So he started smashing all of the costs that he could in his business. He ended up cutting half of his labor and discovered something which was that the business did not change,

Brett Curry:

Nothing happened, right?

Andrew Faris:

If anything, it got smoother. And Ben is clear and gracious to say that's not necessarily because those people were either bad or not working hard. Part of it's because managing people is very hard and he

Brett Curry:

Wasn't

Andrew Faris:

Great at managing them hundred percent. And so he had made bad hires, he had not managed them well, all those things. But he found that by being leaner, and I just think so many brands can be leaner. So that's number's number one's.

Brett Curry:

Also software of analogy on this that I think it hits. It's like is meta or YouTube incremental for your business? Well, it should be, but you could be screwing it up and if you're screwing it up, it might not be incremental at all.

Andrew Faris:

That's right. That's

Brett Curry:

Right. I think it's the same with people. They're not bad people. Maybe they're working really hard, maybe they care, maybe all those things, but maybe you've just got the structure incorrect or you're managing 'em incorrectly or you just don't need 'em. And so they're busting their tails, but actually it's not writing incremental value to you. And so yeah, Ben talked about that.

Andrew Faris:

His solution to the problem was to create a personal p and l for every one of his

Brett Curry:

Employees.

Andrew Faris:

So basically to answer this question, is this person generating incremental value in the business and here's how we're going to measure it. And he said some of them did not want to partake in the exercise, so he offered them a gracious severance and they left. And then the other ones who were willing to participate, it turns out they were driving a whole bunch of value as measured on a p and l, so he did the exact thing he

Brett Curry:

Just said. Interesting.

Andrew Faris:

Yeah, I thought it was brilliant.

Brett Curry:

So we're driving down our opex. Can't underscore that enough, especially in e-commerce. Drive down that opex, okay, what's

Andrew Faris:

Next? It's so fundamental to what makes make an e-commerce business work and people need to be really clear about that. Software bloat is the other thing to watch out for. There

Brett Curry:

Typically

Andrew Faris:

Not as expensive as people, but it can get expensive. People just have too many things to the chasing shiny object syndrome. You don't need to do that for a while. So opex should be shrinking as a percentage of revenue. Again, in a forecast you should see as my revenue now. So if you forecast up 1 million to 5 million to 10 million in revenue, whatever that growth rate is, you should be seeing that you're hiring is not going linearly with that, but that people are now able to create, again, have operating leverage in their people, which is to say they generate additional value, not just the same amount of value as before. And so you got to keep hiring them. Again, very different than an agency to service the revenue. You have to keep hiring. Okay, exactly. So that's the starting point. Okay. Then you get into CAC and cost of delivery. Now this is where you're going to have more variation across different industries. So apparel businesses are going to function in both of these regards really differently than supplement businesses, than beauty businesses, than food and Bev. All of these things are going to have just home goods, whatever. And so this is where you get to all kinds of different setups. What I will say about this is more that, so if you want to say best in class, let you just want a heuristic here. If you say 15% opex or lower, 30% CAC or lower in your business, so your total spend is 30%.

Brett Curry:

So I'm spending a third of my revenue basically on marketing or on customer acquisition,

Andrew Faris:

Correct? On

Brett Curry:

Marketing,

Andrew Faris:

30% in cost of goods, okay, cost of delivery, totally delivered to the customer. Right? Now you've got,

Brett Curry:

That's cogs, that's shipping, that's cost of fulfillment

Andrew Faris:

Costs, merchant account fees,

Brett Curry:

Refunds, all

Andrew Faris:

Those things. The 3% you have to pay Shopify and credit card companies, everything in there. The dollar 50 or three PL is going to charge you for fulfillment costs per order, plus any pick and pack. There's all of these little things that come up. The cost of ordering the product, getting it from essentially from your manufacturer to the customer. That whole journey represents all these costs. If you can get that to 30% as well, now you've got 30% COD, cost of delivery, 30% cac, that's 60% of our money is going out there, 15% opex, and now you have 15% leftover. Did I do that right now? Now you have 25% leftover, you did 5% leftover. That would be super best in class, be amazing, 25% left. The reality is most businesses do not have that much margin at 30% total, and they're not running their CAC at 30%, but if you want to know why there are so many supplement businesses in because they can do both of those things, they uniquely are able to do this.

Their CAC shrinks as a percentage of their revenue over time because customers come back so much that returning customers make up a larger and larger percentage of their revenue pool. By the way, there's some similar dynamics in skincare. The product beauty, the cost of creating the product is very cheap. The cost of shipping the product is cheap. All of those things come together and you can charge a good amount of money and get AOVs to 70 or a hundred dollars or whatever it is, which can be helpful as well. You put all that together and you can run a really high margin business. The truth is for most brands, they're going to actually be spending more somewhere. And the question is where, so for a lot of brands, if you can get even two 60 points, or if you add 10 more points of cost to your cost of delivery, 30% to 40%, that's probably more realistic for where a lot of brands end up in a lot of cases. And now you've got 15% profit margin and that's still a really healthy business, something like that.

Brett Curry:

Still a great business. Or you have someone like Sean from the Ridge who I think he said he spends about 40% on cac, right? So then this

Andrew Faris:

I going to points

Brett Curry:

To

Andrew Faris:

That side. This is another way to do it, which is I have a brand that does something very similar, which is they have extremely high margin and they want to grow. So what do they do? They turn around and they plow money into ads and they're like,

We are just going to push our growth really hard on ads, and by doing that, we're going to be really profitable and by staying lean at the same time with our team, we're going to be really, really profitable. So now, yeah, they run like 40% cac, 30% or less cost of delivery and yeah, 15% or less opex, and they're running it like a 15% margin as well. If everything goes awesome, still a great business. If everything is awesome, then there's some places where they can find some help on all of those. They're hammering away out their cost of delivery all the time. In any of those cases, you can have a strategy. Now, there's exceptions to those rules too. We mentioned simple, modern earlier as an example of this, and simple, modern did not start off first of all to DTC brand. They started off as an Amazon brand.

Brett Curry:

Amazon brand, and that's important. We've seen so many of those, by the way, so many born on Amazon brands, and when they try to make that transition to DTC, it's so hard because the math is all different. Amazon is a demand capture platform and it's razor thin margins, but all the traffic is there and that sets what you're capitalizing on. It's not really demand gen proposition there. And so it makes it very

Andrew Faris:

Difficult and in competitive categories on Amazon, being able to be priced cheaper is a really big advantage.

Brett Curry:

That's basically a marketing play, right? There is usually

Andrew Faris:

Price. So the simple modern guys tested five different products when they launched on Amazon, all within trends that they thought were taking off. It is super genius when you listen to what they started with. They're brilliant dudes. Brian Porter alongside Mike Beckham. Brian is there,

Brett Curry:

I know Brian well, and you admire Mike. Yeah, he's great.

Andrew Faris:

Yeah, both fantastic people and just killers and the softest, gentlest, kindest killers met. Yes, gentle killers. But Brian, he talks about the early days and it's really helpful to think about this through a p and l lens because what they did was they said like, okay, we're going to price cheaper with drinkware, with stainless insulated drinkware than other people are, and we're going to create more variant options than what is currently available. Because if you think about the legacy players in that space, the Yeti Hydro flask, they built for mass retail, and so their business was tuned for mass retail first, and that meant pricing strategy, product skew strategy. All these things were built for that

Brett Curry:

Black, white and blue and maybe red. That's all I can afford to do. I got to send that everywhere in retail,

Andrew Faris:

Right? And so they said, we can create more options. People like to accessorize with their water bottles, and so I can create more options at a lower price and a really great product. The net result of that, and this is the p and l implication that I think is helpful to think about is that they have, and they've been public about this, but I don't mind saying it like 30% margin. So at a DTC level, it's like 60 to 70%, I think closer to 70% of their revenue immediately goes out the door. Maybe 65% of their revenue immediately goes out the door to product costs and cost of delivery, getting it to the customer. So they only have 35 points of margin leftover, which blows up the entire paradigm I just told you about, right?

Brett Curry:

Right.

Andrew Faris:

Yeah. But it's because it was a channel strategy, which was to start Amazon first and then DTC came in after that. And this is why, like you said, some brands really struggle to go the other way, and this is where sometimes there is an issue here with product channel or product business model fit,

Where you have the right idea, but you're just in the wrong channel for it, and you need to change the whole business model to match the channel that you are in. And I think this is actually a problem. I operated a business like the SE four 400 where we just needed to be a mass retail business because the math didn't work very well for us. We had low LTV, it was very expensive to ship, and it was just really hard for us to make the math work as a DTC brand. Now, eventually, simple modern of course now has a really good DTC business as well because they're really big. And so they've been able to generate so much awareness and all those things that they can make it work, but it wasn't their lead channel. And I just think it's helpful to understand that there's reasons for that.

And when they went and launched a hydration pack brand, they're doing that DTC first with a potential mass retail output eventually because that product makes way more sense on the channel in all of the things that I just laid out before. And so brands need to get really serious about, wait a minute, if I have low margin, let's say I end up with 50% margin leftover after my cost of delivery or 45% my cost of delivery, gosh, DTC is going to be an uphill slog. There better be a reason that I think I can do it. And there may be, may be because you have some pricing strategy that gives you some unique advantage of, I don't know. But there would be ways to do it. But yeah, I think that's the thing that people need to get really clear about is how is their approach to their margin profile fitting with the channel? And if so, because my friend Kelsey Lyric and I have debated about this, but I think it changes the whole model of the business. The business model, if you don't have product channel fit in quite that way and you have to think it very differently about nearly all of it. The moment you go to mass retail, the amount of heads you have and the amount your shipping works, all that stuff changes. So sales commissions and all these different kinds of things,

Brett Curry:

Your margin profile has to fit your core channel or channels. That's really important. I think that's something that not a lot of people think about in the early days especially, but it's something you need to think about as you're grown, as you scale. So let's do this, Andrew. Let's talk about how are we projecting, how are we predicting, how are we pivoting along the way as we go? So we've kind of talked about these numbers. Obviously if we're out of whack, there better be a reason for it. We'll be able to make that work on our channels. If not, we're going to need to start making some adjustments, some cuts, things like that. And you may have another note there before we talk about projections. Yeah. Okay, cool. So then how are we looking at projections? And again, to use the Moneyball example, how are we taking data, this p and l that we're looking at and using it to make decisions and operate our business so that we actually hit those profit targets?

Andrew Faris:

So what ends up happening, if you do this exercise, if you forecast all of the parts of the p and l that I just said over a period of months or years or whatever it is, something will happen, which is that the numbers will be thrown in your face in a way that will tell you if you are somewhere or not. And then their question is if you are close or if you're somewhere, let's say you get that and you're like, Ooh, we're at 5%, and if things go wrong, 5% profit, and if that goes wrong, that takes us down to zero, that takes us down to whatever. Then you have to start thinking about what is the solution to this problem? Do I need to just grow faster so that my opex becomes lower as percentage of revenue? Do I need to fire people? Do I need to go negotiate my manufacturing? I have a little theory right now, which is the supply chains are the most underoptimized part of e-commerce businesses.

Brett Curry:

Totally agree. Nobody got to in the past, didn't need to, didn't feel like we needed

Andrew Faris:

To. And it's a lot to do. It's hard.

Brett Curry:

There's a lot to do.

Andrew Faris:

Exactly. Somebody like me gets on a podcast like this and tells you another thing to think about and listen, there's 70 podcasts like this that are new. There's probably way more than that. There's probably 500 podcasts like this, all of 'em with people telling you what to do, it becomes really challenging to stay on top of all of it. And so anyway, we went through I think the marketing revolution in e-commerce where people got really early on, that was a big part of the thing. Finance revolution has been happening. More and more brands recognize they need to be profitable. They can't just try to blitz scale. They recognize their business is worthless, it's not profitable. They're listening to the finance operators and following mates have and Drew and Taylor Holiday and people like that on X, and they're getting their feet wet with how to think about forecasting their business and some of the things I'm talking about.

But there's another step next, which is like now, okay, how do you actually go negotiate a supply chain and build your supply chain out and do those things in a way that is actually good for the business? And I do think there's a lot of bigger wins there than people realize just by talking to more manufacturers, negotiating with your three pl, there's just a lot there. I have brands who've done this, shout out to my friends at Move Supply Chain, who they've worked with on this where it was like, wait a minute. We had this product that was costing us $5 per unit to make. Now we got it down to two. And no customer has ever said a word about it being different. It's still good product. They just did a bunch of stuff to go work somewhere else in the world and

Brett Curry:

Make 60% reduction in cogs. Huge

Andrew Faris:

Gigantic impact on the business. Massive. And so there's a bunch of stories like that. So yeah, I just think that could be where it is, where you go like, oh, we have to go manufacture something different. I'll tell you from my brand, my brand is in a category where the packaging is more expensive than the product, than the actual

Brett Curry:

Product. Interesting, interesting.

Andrew Faris:

And so we are going to launch with prices that we think are pretty decent at the level of cost of delivery, but right away, I'm right away thinking, shopping. Additional manufacturers that actually worked with that same company might move supply chain. They started with 60, so a 60 on product and 20 on packaging. So we already are somewhere on that. We looked at a lot of manufacturers. But immediately I'm thinking about, okay, at what level do I get a price break by ordering more of these? Do I need to go actually redesign the packaging, the most expensive part of it? If I could shave two bucks off of this, it's probably worth doing. There's a lot of questions like that that come in because I know that everything in the business will get smoother if I have more Martian. It's just a superpower. Totally. And so anyway, so you can play that out in your business wherever it is.

What are those giant costs that are just killing you? They're somewhere in your business probably. And you just start by saying, okay, what is the place that I try to go to next? Look at it with somebody smart, got a coach. If you need some input, somebody can probably look at that with you and say, if you've been in your business for four years and you're like, I have had ideas, then you can do those things. But people will have ways to go and say, Hey, have you looked into this? Have you considered that? Have you thought about, Hey, your air shipping stuff all the time? Stop doing that because your forecasting is bad. You're behind. You need to get back to ocean freight. That's a big whatever, whatever. There's all kinds of things like that in every business because it's hard. And so you could start kind of hammering away doing that forecasting exercise. We'll start to surface those things for you.

Brett Curry:

I love it. And it's one of those things too that with all the tariff madness that's going on right now at the time of recording, it's forcing people to look at different locations for manufacturing, different factories, different ways of getting the product here. And I think in that process, even though that's painful and not something any of us want to be doing, you're going to find opportunities in there and you maybe going to shave off, you're going to find five or 10 points or 20 points or something like that.

Andrew Faris:

That would

Brett Curry:

Be, it could be a game changer for your business or maybe you're not. Maybe it's going to be a terrible experience, but you work towards that for sure.

Andrew Faris:

I have a theory really fast, Brett, that the upside of this whole thing is that tariffs will be a forcing function for better supply chain creation for people because they're just going to have to, and that it'll be, and that win for some brands, not all brands. Totally. For some way,

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it sort of relates. But if you look at the iOS 14 and just all the madness that happened there, it forced us to be better markers. We had to. And so I think it's going to do something similar here with supply chain. And I want to be mindful of time, so you lemme know if we need to wrap up, but I want to look at cohorts and LTV and composition of new customers and returning customers and how you forecast that and how that informs this process. So do I have time to get into that or do we

Andrew Faris:

Wrap up? Yeah, this is good. This's going to be the last question. So that's, there's a lot there. Best, best, yeah. I'll tell you what to do, honestly, go to my website, put your email address in the email popup or in the footer. Either one will work. You get my four free essential e-commerce resources. It's going to sign you up for my newsletter as well. I don't spam you, I promise. AJF growth.com. Go there, sign up for my newsletter. One of the things I will send you is from some lovely venture capitalists at Lightspeed Venture Partners put together a whole prebuilt like custom spreadsheet that helps you and walks you through how to forecast returning customer cohorts off customer data. It's hard work. Another recommendation I say to people is Dave Ook, CXL class. So the CXL course, he talks you through how heat forecast businesses.

He's a really smart guy. I worked with him really closely for a long time. At four 400, he still runs Bamboo Earth, but if you do that, it will give you a whole prebuilt spreadsheet for how to do it. And I basically had at one point common thread collective took the Lightspeed model and built it a little bit for themselves. I've since tweaked it a little bit for myself and I will send you mine for free so you can do that. And that's probably I think the way to do it. But if you can just see historical returning customer behavior over months after purchasing and then put that into a spreadsheet that will tell you, okay, what does that mean for the customers that acquired today in six months? How much are they worth? You can pile all those cores on top of each other. You can get a really good revenue forecast. That's surprisingly reliable. They're more reliable than people think.

Brett Curry:

And then you can look at, okay, my new customer acquisition activities are underperforming or overperforming, and what does that do to my projections? That's right. And then you can understand, okay, I need to make some pivots now because this is going to have a real material impact to my business in 2, 3, 4, 5 months, things like that. So awesome resource, a big job,

Andrew Faris:

But if you commit to it, it's a big job. You can do it in a day. It's not that of a job, but if you commit to it, then I always say my best clients live and die by that spreadsheet.

Brett Curry:

Yep. And it's one of those things that once you start down this path, it will transform the way you run your business and things will never be the same. And you can unlock a different level of performance and profitability that will never happen for you if you're not looking at your business this way. So I agree. Andrew, this is fantastic. I know you got a jet. What's your website one more time? So we want to check

Andrew Faris:

Out that resource. Yeah, AJF, like my initials, AJF growth.com.

Brett Curry:

And if people can find you on

Andrew Faris:

Everything there, podcast there, everything. Yep. X at Andrew j Faris.

Brett Curry:

Yep. And Andrew Faris podcast. Check it out. Andrew, this has been fantastic, man. Super, super fun. Look forward to the next go round and thanks for taking the time, man.

Andrew Faris:

Thanks Brett.

Brett Curry:

And thank you for tuning in. So we'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the podcast? Let us know. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Brett Curry sits with Jim Kennemer in this latest episode. Jim knows his stuff when it comes to tariffs, supply chain management and sourcing anything outside of China. Brett wanted to bring Jim on the pod to break down the opportunities and considerations of sourcing from Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and Mexico, sharing real examples of how brands like Columbia Sportswear and Converse have legally engineered their products to slash tariff costs. From understanding country of origin rules to leveraging bonded warehouses for cash flow management, this conversation is packed with actionable insights for any brand looking to optimize their supply chain in today's volatile trade environment.

Key Takeaways

• The DDP trap that could destroy your business – Why "delivered duty paid" arrangements are legal but dangerous when suppliers falsify invoices (and why you're still liable even if it's their mistake)
• Tariff engineering strategies – How adding a simple pocket or felt liner can reclassify your products for lower tariff rates, plus when this optimization makes sense vs. when it backfires
• Vietnam vs. other manufacturing hubs – Where Vietnam excels (textiles, wood goods, furniture), what to expect for pricing and quality, and why MOQs are higher than China
• De minimis rules and bonded warehouses – How the $800 shipment exemption still works (except for China), and when custom bonded warehouses can turn a 30% tariff hit into manageable cash flow
• Country of origin compliance – The "substantial transformation" rule, why trans-shipment will get you caught with 50% more audits happening, and how to properly document manufacturing

Whether you're considering your first move away from China or optimizing an existing diversified supply chain, this episode provides the roadmap to do it right without the costly compliance mistakes that are tripping up other brands.

Chapters: 

(00:00) Join Us in NYC at Our Exclusive YouTube Event!

(01:08) Introducing Jim Kennemer 

(03:55) Supply Chain Optimization Beyond China

(06:23) Vietnam as a Manufacturing Hub: Benefits and Misconceptions

(11:40) Alternative Countries to Consider for Manufacturing

(13:30) Country of Origin Regulations and Compliance

(17:36) De Minimis and Bonded Warehouses Explained

(22:25) Tariff Engineering and Challenges

(27:16) Best Practices for Importing Goods

(31:35) The Process of Diversifying Your Supply Chain

(34:39) The Future of Manufacturing in the US

‍

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we are talking about optimizing your supply chain outside of China. How do we think about tariffs? How do we think about supply chain optimization and what opportunities are there for us outside of China? Obviously, this is very timely and this is a topic where the game is changing on the field, daily, hourly, all of those things. So we'll try to keep the conversation pretty high level and also make this useful regardless of what the tariff news is when you decide to hit play on this. But my guest today is Jim Kennemer, and Jim is the founder managing partner of Cosmo Sourcing. I met Jim at Seller Summit in Fort Lauderdale last week, I guess it was at Steve Choose Events. Steve and Tony running a great event down there, one of my favorites. And so Jim was a speaker, I was a speaker, and he talked about tariffs and I was like, man, I got to get you on the pod because everybody's freaking out about this or at least wondering about this. And so with that, Jim, welcome to the show, man, and how's it going?

Jim Kennemer:

Hey, it's great to be here and doing great. Yeah, thanks for having me here.

Brett Curry:

It's been a whirlwind for you. You picked the right time to specialize in sourcing outside of China. I picked 10 years ago, so to you saw the future years ago when you map that out and you've had quite the couple of weeks, man, you were on stage before Lauderdale, you got quoted in the Wall Street Journal about this topic. And so tell us a little bit about that. How did you end up getting mentioned in the Wall Street Journal?

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, Hannah reached out to me, Hannah Mao. She's the reporter for Wall Street Journal, and she obviously covers tariffs, supply chain, manufacturing and Vietnam. So yeah, reached out. She's doing a six part story actually about manufacturing Vietnam, the whole on the ground and whatnot. But yeah, we helped for the first story, she visited a couple of factories that we put her in touch with, and yeah, she interviewed the factories and featured one of them pretty prominently in their story. And then, yeah, the one I was featured in was the second of six, I believe so, yeah. But yeah, it keeps changing with the news. So

Brett Curry:

Keeps changing. We were just talking about, so we kind a casual comment the president made recently that who knows what that's going to do to the markets, but I think we're just all our tolerance level for chaos is just going to be pretty high here for the foresee

Jim Kennemer:

Future, future, be adaptable right now,

Brett Curry:

You've got to be adaptable. And so I think there's a few things we're looking at here. I just record a podcast with Andrew Ferris, who's just a legend in terms of marketing and media buying and e-comm in general. And he and I were both talking about, Hey, in times this times of uncertainty, there are always opportunities to grow actually to get better than you were before. And I think one of the things, and this is something that Andrew mentioned, one of the potential benefits or silver linings in this is going to force brands to optimize their supply chain look for better, more stable, more affordable ways to enhance their supply chain. Every point or couple of points you can save on your supply chain makes a huge, huge difference as you can make your supply chain more stable, more reliable, that makes a huge difference. You increase your quality of product, that makes a huge difference. And so it's a time to look at your supply chain. And you've been doing this a long time, Jim.

Jim Kennemer:

Oh, absolutely.

Brett Curry:

When did you first start looking outside of China and was it because you were predicting something like this could happen or was there something else that was driving that?

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, I moved to Vietnam and started sourcing from Vietnam in 2014. At the time, everybody was sourcing from China. I just felt like saturated, there were plenty of people doing it. And then I visited Vietnam, fell in love with country, and yeah, 2014 at the time I was trying to get ahead of the transpacific partnership, which was at the time the largest free trade agreement in history. It ended up not getting ratified in the past, but I still had a lot of people reach out to me about finding manufacturers in Vietnam. And at that time, 10 years ago, 2014, it was much less developed manufacturing wise than it's today. I mean, we were doing industrial wood goods and some really kind of basic cheap stuff, to be honest at that time. But yeah, I mean there's still a demand for it. And yeah, definitely kind of saw Vietnam as being the future early and kind of got lucky in a sense, but yeah. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

Love it. You were ahead of the time and man, it has really paid off for you, especially now

Jim Kennemer:

For sure.

Brett Curry:

And so there's a few things I want to talk about. We'll talk about minimus with you. We want to talk about tariff engineering, we want to bonded warehouses. We're talk about what not to do. You really were dropping some bombs of knowledge in the talk in Fort Lauderdale that a lot of people were like, wait a minute, wait, I can't do that. Are you sure I can't do that? And you're like,

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I found out some people were doing it. I never named names, but I had awkward conversations with some people. I'm like,

Brett Curry:

Yeah. They're like, wait a minute. Careful. So there's several things to talk about there, so stay at tuned for that. But I want to talk a little bit about why Vietnam, why did you go there? But more importantly, why should we consider Vietnam right now? Because as I've learned from you, and actually one of our top clients in ports from Vietnam, their product is phenomenal. Why should we consider Vietnam? And I know there are other places to consider as well, but you've got a special place in your heart for Vietnam.

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, I mean for Vietnam mean they definitely, you have to pick what they specialize in, but what they do specialize in, they do excellent job. And two biggest categories we do are anything textile cut. And so based that ranges from clothing, apparel to bags, luggage, tool belts, our mutual client that we work with.

And then also we do a lot of wooden good and furniture. And they're definitely growing in several other industries. We're starting to do electronic more electronics, OEM, electronics, but it's definitely, I don't want to say hit and miss, but it's growing. It's probably the fastest growing industry. But when we're doing a lot more plastic ejection molding, silicon parts, we've been doing a lot of industrial metal projects, St metal goods, starting to do some car parts too. And all those industries I think are definitely growing more developed industry, but you really got to figure out what Vietnam can do and then target in on those products.

Brett Curry:

That's great. And so I think it's always important to understand, hey, what are maybe the misconceptions about a country or where are the stereotypes true or not true? So any misconceptions out there about Vietnam right now or anything you like to set the record straight on?

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, for sure. I think a lot of people do private label manufacturing in China, which is fine. Just find a factory that makes a pre-existing products slap your logo on it and sell it, which everybody's been doing for years. But Vietnam and honestly anywhere outside of China just does not do that. So the overall, I mean, majority of what projects we do is going to be contract manufacturing where you supply the factory with your product specs, sheets and tech packs, and they'll make it to your specs, but they're not going to have existing designs on hand.

Brett Curry:

Got it.

Jim Kennemer:

Got it. That's probably the biggest one. Other one too, Alibaba. And those alternatives just aren't good or don't really exist there. So when you find factories, you can't just put an RFQ on a website, have a dozen factories come to you. You have to do your own research, really follow up with 'em and chase 'em down. I know a lot of people get turned off by that. They expect factories to be tripping over fine or work with clients, but it's not the case. And they're also higher MQs. I know a lot of people say low MQs and there are kind of boutique handmade dress factories and whatnot. They do small, but for the most part, I would say MOQs tend to be higher in Vietnam outside of China as well.

Brett Curry:

Interesting. So higher, MOQ is a little more legwork upfront. You're going to have to supply the specs, it's contract manufacturing, that sort of thing. But then what are some of the benefits? Because I know in talking to our mutual client who manufactures in Vietnam, they actually moved from the US to Vietnam a few years ago, and they said their quality went up, cut their cogs by 70%, quality went up, that sort of thing. But speak to us about how does it compare manufacturing Vietnam for the things they're good at to the rest of the world

Jim Kennemer:

For what they're good at? I think they excel because yeah, the tool belt, I'm not going to name who, but yeah, the tool belt is pretty high end. And I mean they have a pretty good, the quality they have in place is pretty good. Yeah. And then, yeah, I mean just overall, I think the quality is quite good for a lot of what they excel in. We do a lot of furniture too, and we can do some very high end custom hardwood pieces that they go for thousands, thousands for a single piece and go in literally multimillion dollar homes we're doing.

Brett Curry:

Interesting.

Jim Kennemer:

The projects in Palm, Palm Beach, Florida right now. And then another comes to home builder, custom home builder out Palm Beach. So they're doing literally 10 million plus they doing

Brett Curry:

All that in Vietnam. Yeah,

Jim Kennemer:

They're doing a lot of it, not all of it.

Brett Curry:

So m OQs are a little higher, but prices, and I know it's hard to compare prices talking about it depends on the category, depends on the good, depends on so many things. But pricing general comments on pricing, how does it compare?

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, pricing for apparel and textiles tends to be cheaper in Vietnam than China outright. And same with wooden goods. Because Vietnam is a tropical country, there's lots of access to high quality tropical hardwoods. And with Asia Association of Southeast Asian nations, which all the Southeast Asian nations have free-trade, so it's pretty easy to move wood from one country to another. So the quality of wood you get in Vietnam is excellent. So for that is definitely one of the big things they sell on. And pricing for textiles, bags, backpacks, even shoes we consistently find is be about the same price and oftentimes cheaper than China and the price to quality ratio, like you're buying a $5 sweatshirt from Vietnam versus $5 in China, the quality is going to be higher. China does have a lot of very cheap low quality. So people are like, I can get, we were talking to clients getting t-shirts for like 83 cents in China and ours were coming in about one 30, but the one 30 shirts were decent versus very low quality t-shirts for that 83 cents. And that was as cheap as we could find, but it is definitely at the price to quality ratio.

Brett Curry:

So the cost of quality ratio is really good there, which goes a long way. So lots of opportunities in Vietnam and we'll continue to talk about that as we go and as we go through our other topics, we weave that back in. But what other countries should people think about? I know basically you specialize in anything outside of China, so what other countries should we consider and for what?

Jim Kennemer:

Yes, for sure. So yeah, we've been in Vietnam for 10 years and we've been expanding since last year to all of Southeast Asia, Mexico, and looking to expand even more this year. I mean, Southeast Asia is great. Indonesia has a lot of great factories. Thailand, we're doing a lot of higher end auto parts and appliances in Thailand, some rubber goods, some natural rubber. So pretty eco-friendly stuff. Malaysia does appliances and some really good metal furniture and Mexico too. A lot of interest in Mexico. But I will say Mexico is a little difficult to source from because they're very limited in what they could produce. Much more limited. People expect more people want Mexico work than it's suitable for.

Brett Curry:

What are those limitations and why for Mexico?

Jim Kennemer:

So we're doing a lot of stamp metal and industrial goods, some aftermarket car parts, some work wear denim, so we can do stuff like that. But we get a lot of requests for scrubs, which we do a lot of scrubs in Vietnam, and the quality is great, but then people specifically want Mexico just for the use of shipment, but it's just not a good quality scrub suppliers there. And there's definitely a few other products that people really want to get from Vietnam, or sorry, from Mexico. I really think Mexico is going to get more and more investment over the coming years just because the demand is absolutely there. It's just the supply has not caught up. And I will say a lot of new factories are getting or have Chinese backed investment to Mexico, but there's still a

Brett Curry:

Portion of it. Interesting. Makes sense, right? China's going to diversify themselves. They want to avoid the tariffs and so profit and from what they're really great. I was just manufacturing. So makes a lot of sense. One of the things that I know has caused some confusion, you talked about this during a talk at seller

Jim Kennemer:

Summit,

Brett Curry:

Is country of origin because I think there's going to be some creative things that people are going to try to do.

Jim Kennemer:

Oh, for sure.

Brett Curry:

Skirt around country of origin and stuff like that. But can you talk about that? What constitutes country of origin and what do we need to know there?

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, I mean what's really kind of annoying is it's very broadly written in the law. Basically the law states that a new article of commerce has to emerge in the country. So it'd be, I import raw fabrics from China having made in t-shirt, that's a new article, commerce, and you actually do, so the fabric making everything in Vietnam, it's a new article. Commerce cause T-shirts fundamentally different from fabric. But yeah, I mean broadly speaking, you have to have substantial change. And I try to advise people at least 50% of value, but as long as it me as a new article of commerce is new, but you can't simply put a new label on something. If you get a mug, you can't just put your logo on it and ship it from Vietnam, from China or just add logos or change colors or

Brett Curry:

It was a mug. It is a mug. You added a logo that is not

Jim Kennemer:

The same thing with commerce. Same. And people, I've gotten a request for people to do repackaging multiple times and I either turn 'em down or nor 'em. But yeah, they think you can just have this product shipped from China, find a package supplier in Vietnam, package it in Vietnam, and then ship it to us is a new product. But it's not, the product is still fundamentally the same thing. So yeah, I mean you have to have substantial transformation of the product and generally if you get audited, you have to document it. So I mean, if you have a factory in Vietnam, you just simply have the factory write a certified letter. Yeah, we made it, here's the invoice, here's the letter we here's the factory. You can maybe even take videos of your product being made in Vietnam. That's some nice Vietnamese worker saying, yep, look, I making this.

But yeah, just document it. It'll go through fine. But if you're just like we said, doing the repackaging or pass through transshipment, it's definitely something to get caught. And they're definitely with CBP and Customs of Border Protection who enforces customs. They're doing 50% more audits now just last month more in April, 50% more in April than they were, I don't know what the timeframe, I guess probably during the Biden administration. And they're planning on increasing that more and more and they're planted here and whatnot, have contracts with CBP now and countries like Vietnam and most other countries share import data. So what's getting imported into Vietnam is getting shared with CBP, so they know what's getting shipped in and then they can hypothetically use AI or whatever to match it. So it's definitely, yeah, don't do transgender just actually make the product in the country. It's going get more about the fines are pretty steep. And once you get called

Brett Curry:

Ones, yeah,

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah. Once you get called once you're pretty much red flagged for the rest for ever. And they can look back on previous shipments too, so it's not like they get caught one time, they're only looking back at your previous shipments.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. It's just one of those things where, and I think one of the analogies you use is like, Hey, we would never cheat on our taxes. Right? Or not file our taxes or something like that. We know, dude, you don't mess. I mean, yes, I'm going to take every advantage, every deduction that I can take, but I'm not going to screw around with the IRS, right? Oh, absolutely. And CCB P is the same, maybe going to get more intense and it's going to be such a huge revenue generator for the US government tariffs that they're not going to be messing around here. And so it makes sense to do it by the book. Yes, look for advantages, but do it by the book.

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, absolutely. You do it by the book. So make sure everything's compliant. You've got paperwork and documentation support, everything you made. Yeah, I mean they'll look at payments potentially to the factory and I mean they have as much capability, more or less than as the IRS to look at your finances and why not? Yeah, I mean Trump wants to have the external revenue service, which is, I mean as far as I'm

Brett Curry:

Concerned, basically cvp, right? I mean they're going to be connected. Yeah,

Jim Kennemer:

Absolutely. So yeah, if you don't cheat on your taxes, don't cheat on shipments, your taxes, period.

Brett Curry:

Love that. Love that comparison. I think that sets the right frame for folks. Let's talk about di minimis. This is something that's talked about a lot. It's come up a lot, but explain that for folks that are still maybe a little bit fuzzy, how has that impacted and what should we know about that?

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, so minimis was a rule in place that basically shipments under $800 in value, would not have a tariff duty rates applied to it. Just at that point they were like $800. That tax and duty collect is going to be less than what or less than what the actual cost administrator calls to get in and figure stuff out. Was that rule's gone away for China and Hong Kong? But it's still in effect for the rest of the world. And I do want to get, the big caveat is definitely something the White House and the people in charge have talked about getting rid of some point in the future, but as of today, may probably about 10:00 AM a few hours ago, I'm checking news in a few hours, it's still in effect

Brett Curry:

Any single shipment under $800, no customs or no tariffs. There does not apply to China or Hong Kong. But right now,

Jim Kennemer:

But yeah, you can ship from Vietnam and get under that $800 value and that's each individual shipment. So you have to do, I don't know, it's a lot of people just, but there are companies like port lists and whatnot that does warehousing in Vietnam. You can ship to the warehouse in Vietnam. Each time a customer plays it order to the United States, they ship each item out to the customer. And it scripts around as of now the di minimus law, assuming your product's lightweight, but I mean there is cost. Cause when you ship each individual item versus the container, you want to have small lightweight stuff like t-shirts and small electronic items. Cause once you get large heavyweight items, let's just say flat pack furniture, the shipping cost per item to do air shipping, it's going to get

Brett Curry:

Prohibitively you worth to save on shipping costs. It's worth the 10% tariff for whatever because you're saving more on shipping. So you got to kind balance that out. Great. Well, speaking of warehouses, I know something you've talked about and I've heard a few people talk about is bonded warehouses. And so explain that and then when should we consider that versus when is that maybe not advantageous to

Jim Kennemer:

Us? Yeah, for sure. So custom responded warehouses are warehouses that are more or less connected to the port. So what you can do is you can ship a product to the port and then from the port will get shipped to the custom responded warehouse directly. And then when it leaves the warehouse, so each shipment, that's when it gets to tariff rate applied to it. So yeah, the sample I use. So that way if you have a hundred thousand container with a hundred thousand dollars worth of goods, I guess new tariff rate is 30% typically goes to port, leaves the port through customs. You pay 30,000 on tariffs on that shipment at one time before product sells. But you can ship that shipment straight to a cost of bond warehouse. And then each time a customer placed an order on a product, you get revenue from the customer and then it leaves the warehouse. So let's just say as a hundred dollars items, you pay $30 in tariffs each time the product leaves the warehouse and you get cashflow in from your customer. So there's not that one big hit, you're going to still pay tariffs, but it splits it up. So you pay the tariff as you get cashflow coming in from the clients or your customers.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I know especially when tariff were 154% from China there for a hot minute, people were like, whoa, bond warehouse, I'm only going to pay that on a per item basis as much as I can. That is 30%. Maybe people are a little more flexible, but it's so nice to have that flexibility of it's there now you can absorb the hit because you got cashflow coming in from the customer. So a lot of benefits there.

Jim Kennemer:

And if you shipped it in April, like late April, early May when it's still 145%, you shifted customs on their warehouse, you can ship it out now, pay the 30% tariffs instead of paying what would've been 145%. And I know a lot of people are trying, 30% is manageable for a lot of people, so they just want to get it out and pay what they

Brett Curry:

Need to at the time. It's still painful but manageable, especially in comparison. But so the customs, modern warehouses are close to a port. I know there's some extra costs associated there too. So what do we need to consider? When would we not want to do

Jim Kennemer:

This? I mean, for the most part, I mean, just kind look at your cashflow and how you want it managed. Yeah, customs on a warehouse, they're definitely in demand right now. So they're going to be more expensive on a per square footage rate than a trip to pull warehouse. But I mean, if you're looking at the tariff rates and it's more cost advantageous where you just want to preserve your cash flow for the time being, it's definitely going to be advantageous to do. And I know a lot of people are probably shipping out of customs, modern warehouses like I mentioned earlier, just moving a traditional one and just pay the tariff now. But it gives you that flexibility to kind of adjust as the tariff rates changes. Because right now, as every day is a new announcement

Brett Curry:

Every day, a new adventure for

Jim Kennemer:

Sure, he's going to have new on

Brett Curry:

Scores of country check tariff news. It really is every day. Totally makes sense. So then let's look at tariff engineering. So tariffs, I believe we're here to stay at least for this administration, and likely beyond. Just like anything with the government though, once Democrats say they don't like tariffs, but then once they're in place, if people are okay with it, it's hard to turn away revenue. And that's true for either party. So likely

Jim Kennemer:

Tariffs.

Brett Curry:

Hearsay. Hearsay.

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah. Biden kept to 25% on China. There is administration.

Brett Curry:

Exactly. Yeah. So it's like, oh, we're pretty, well, nobody's talking about it. Let's just keep it. Yeah. So let's talk tariff engineering. How do you coach people or how do you work with your clients to engineer tariffs for the least?

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, it a little tricky. You really have to really dive in deep on what your product is, the HTS code, and then look at similar HTS codes.

Brett Curry:

And what is the HTS code?

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, HTS code. So HTS code for those aren't familiar, harmonized tariff schedule is the code that assigned to pretty much 17,000 different product categories. And that's going to be what the tariff rate is determined by. So there's going to be a list. So each product falls under a different HCS code. They're 10 digits. But yeah, what you do is you look at your HT S code and then look at similar ones. And then if you have a similar HCS code nearby, you can make changes to that, have a lower tariff rate. You can fundamentally change your product to get in. The example I used was Columbia Sportswear for all their shirts. They all started adding a little pocket on the inside of their shirts, credit card size pocket, I think. And the difference is the shirt has a higher tariff rate than a windbreaker. And so since it has a pocket, they can actually classify the shirts as a windbreaker

Brett Curry:

That meets the requirement for windbreaker change, the HTS code, lower tariff now.

Jim Kennemer:

Exactly. And they engineer the product to meet the requirements for a windbreaker. And I'm sure everybody has a shirt. It's nice to have a little pocket.

Brett Curry:

Nice little benefit as well.

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah. So yeah, they figure that out and they pay a lower tariff rate on their shirt shipments because of that change. And Converse did that. They put a felt in liner in their Converse all stars. Cause the slippers instead of shoes or sneakers and slippers have a lower tariff rate than sneakers. That's probably one of the most famous examples, but a lot of people are kind of just exploring similar products that can effectively sold the same just to get a different HDS code. But this is a little tricky to do because not every product, because most of the time products in the same category get text at the same array more or less. So even if you do change.

Brett Curry:

So not always a lot of opportunities here. And is this kind of going back to our IRS example, this is sort of using deductions, right? So then it's like do you fall under scrutiny here if you're getting too cute or too creative? Or is this

Jim Kennemer:

Relatively should would cause Yeah, I mean when you submit it through CVP, you're going to say, Hey, it's this HT S code and there's going to be some guy, literally somebody looking at their database, checking it, the product, the materials and whatnot. And if they say it's something different, they're like, Hey, we actually think it's this HTS code. And then there's going to be back and forth. And then ultimately there's an arbitration court more, I don't know the exact term, but I know there's basically arbitrator where more or less a judge rules on what the ultimate HS code is. Got it. We were looking at not, we didn't do the ruling, but we looked at a ruling. We were doing baby carriers for a client. It was trying to figure out which HT S code. Yeah, I mean there was a court, not court ruling, but customs ruling from 2013 said, is this HTS code, which is surprising catchall HT S code. It was all fabric baby carriers versus of course, most baby carriers dot have some sort of structure in it. Those structured baby carriers are actually tax at a different rate or classified as different than fabric.

Yeah. So I mean, you got to kind of figure that out. But ultimately though, it's going to be what the custom says the product is. And again, if you get cute, it's not as bad as fines. It's just straight up lying to 'em. But they're going to say it's the HCS code. There's going to be some

Brett Curry:

Got to, you don't have to pay the difference. Everything they correct got to difference.

Jim Kennemer:

If it gets held up, there's some demure, some storage charges too related to that.

Brett Curry:

And look, we got to design our product for a customer and it's got to meet our vision and mission and what we're trying to accomplish with the product. But it's just another one of those things where it's like, Hey, let me take a look because maybe this is easy or maybe we have the wrong HT S code, we need to switch it and it's going to work better for us. It's something that take a look at because we could have a meaningful impact.

Jim Kennemer:

A lot of small things too, like synthetic fabrics and natural fibers, fabrics are sometimes taxed differently. So you can look at just changing the fabric of your product, for instance, but

Brett Curry:

Just maybe you can change it and get better performance and now you get a lower turf. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So let's talk about what not to do. And I know there are several caveats here. This is not legal advice. You're not an attorney, I'm not an attorney, but what are some things that we need to avoid right now? Or at least need to be very, very cautious of?

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think the first thing I mentioned was DDP and I. If I were redo that talk, I would say there's a right way to do DDP and a wrong way to do DDP.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And what is DDP

Jim Kennemer:

Delivery duty paid? So DDP is ANCO term, which means you work with a manufacturer, they'll give you an invoice and the manufacturer will be in charge of making the product, shipping the product, paying the dues and deliveries, everything for you up until it reaches the ultimate final destination. And it's legal. It's been a thing for a while the right way. So in this case, you just basically pay the manufacturer one and they handle everything. I mean, there's a right way, and like I said, there's right way and wrong way. The right way is trust by verify your supplier, make sure you get copies of all the manufacturers, invoice the shipping, who's shipping what HCS. What they're classifying is because what's happening a lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of times is the manufacturers know that they have the lowest price they're going to go with them. So they're figuring out ways to falsify manufacturing invoice so that because what they use to the bill of lading or whatnot is what they use to calculate the tariffs on. So we can pay 145,000 or 30%, 145, I dunno, whatever it is today, 30% on 10,000, there's 20 pay 3000. But if they falsify it and say 5,000 and we pay 30% is half the tariff cost.

And so a lot of manufacturers doing that. What's happened is ultimately the person that is legally and liable for it is the importer, the person buying the product. So if you verify that everything they say is accurate, the manufacturer's invoice is accurate, the shipping bill ladings correctly listed a CS code is correct, it's fine. So no issue there, but they don't always supply that information to you. So a lot of people just turn the blind eye just accept what everything the manufacturer is saying is correct. And they have a lot of times that they have suspicious low bids. This what they're probably doing. Yeah, trust

Brett Curry:

To verify. But I think that's the piece a lot of people don't dunno is they're like, oh, no, no, no, it's my factor doing it. Right? So they're the ones are reliable,

Jim Kennemer:

The agent of record is the, or the manufacturer, and they assume, oh, since they're agent of record, they're the one legally liable and responsible. If anybody gets called, it's going to be them, but it's not the case. And yeah, I got a lot of pushback from it. I'm not going to name names, but yeah, there were people doing this and I had to explain how to do it correctly and how not to, and I was like, okay, probably gave a few people a heart attack, so I want to apologize to those people.

Brett Curry:

And again, it's just sort of one of those things where it's like, oh, well, my accountant screwed up my tax return, not my fault. I don't have to pay those taxes. Well, no, you still do. They're your taxes.

Jim Kennemer:

Oh, absolutely.

Brett Curry:

And so you got to look at it that way. Yeah, you got to absolutely verify everyth to do, basically, you've just got to look at, hey, what I'm paying per unit or total to the manufacturer, is that what they're putting on the invoice? And is that what the tariff is being charged to? And if all that looks good, then you're fine.

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, yeah. Just trust, verify everything. Yeah. If it gets caught up as held, gets red flagged by customs, they're going ask for documentation, ask you more or less. And if you don't have that, you're just, I know, I just thought they would do a good job. It's not going fly. They expect

Brett Curry:

You to. Yeah, and I think you mentioned this too, then once something is flagged for you, probably future orders, they're going to be paying attention you, you're going to be scrutinized from there

Jim Kennemer:

On. And again, they can look back on passion ship too. And if they find you were doing that on passionist, then you can also get paid fines for pass shipment. So just know how to do it correctly. Yeah, work with customers, brokers, make sure everything goes through smoothly. Yeah, I always mean just for me, I always recommend FOB have your own freight forwarder and then they'll have a custom broker and they'll handle everything and tell you what to do and give you advice for the shipment and all that. But

Brett Curry:

I never, what does FOB

Jim Kennemer:

Free on board? So it means the manufacturer's responsible for having the product shipped to the port and the country of origin, and then the freight forward will pick over at the port.

Brett Curry:

Got it. Got it. Okay. Well, let's talk about you specialize in helping people diversify their supply chain or re-engineer their supply chain. And you're looking at outside of China, who should reach out to you? I know everybody's kind of scrambling and looking just because of the chaos lately, but who should reach out to you and what are some of the things they should be considering as they're looking at diversifying their supply chain? Are you mostly helping people fully shift their manufacturing to the countries? Are you looking at, hey, let's diversify, let's have these things made here and these things made here. Walk me through

Jim Kennemer:

That. Yeah, I mean, the majority of our clients tend to shift. The majority of clients tend have a couple key products, but yeah, they're shifting for the most part, all their manufacturing to Vietnam. But yeah, we work with a lot of clients who have dozens of different product categories, and we're just, for those clients, we're going through their list saying, Hey, these three, four categories we can definitely do in Vietnam. These two are maybe, and these probably can't do in Vietnam. And then we're shifting some of the supply chain. A lot of our bigger clients, like our eight bigger plus clients, they have the means to be more diversified. So they're keeping their suppliers in China for the time being and then placing new orders with factories in Vietnam just for the time being. But I mean, for the most part, yeah, we're just ultimately shifting a lot of clients down to Vietnam, completely and interesting. A lot of people, their supply chains, but they've been buying from China, so they'll keep 'em for future orders potentially if things change. But for the most part, I think a lot of people are moving permanently to Vietnam or permanently away

Brett Curry:

From China. What does the process look like? So I've now decided I'm going to start shifting my manufacturing. Some were all from China to Vietnam or one of the other countries you work with. What is that process like? How much time are we talking here? Is this a six month plan, an 18 month plan? What does that look

Jim Kennemer:

Like? Yeah, it's definitely is ballpark six months. Do you actually get your first order in hand? Yeah, once you kind of reach out to us, we'll let you know if the product can be made in Vietnam or not. But once we get that point, our team will go out, research suppliers verify, and that we've worked on, we've probably placed orders with a few hundred factories already in Vietnam. So we have pretty good working relationship on pretty good idea what they can and can't do. But yeah, once we get that, we'll get quotes for our clients, do direct introductions to the clients and the manufacturers. So everything we do is transparent in that way. And then, yeah, once they do that, obviously there's samples to be made, make sure they can make the product. Exactly. And then purchase order. So yeah, you're looking at about four weeks, actually get the quotes verified that the suppliers make sure everything's in line with your expectations a couple weeks per each surrounded samples. And then purchase order, which place purchase order lead times tends to be about 30, 45 days for most products. Got it. Yeah. I mean then shipping. And so realistically, you're looking at actually having the product in hand from Vietnam in about five to seven months once you actually start a project.

Brett Curry:

Got it. Got it. That actually does not sound too bad. I mean, that still seems very reasonable. Very cool. So what are you hearing? I'm just curious if you have a perspective, how's the US going to play a part manufacturing in the us? Is this going to, are you seeing that there's going to be a lot more investment in US manufacturing? Think that's something you guys will eventually help with?

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

Is that just definitely a lot of things expand.

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, I mean, our ultimate goal is we want to find the best buyers for our clients no matter where they are. And you got to have expertise in each country of origin. But I'm American, so obviously I want to find some great suppliers in America. So actually, if any Eric Manufacturers are listening to this, please feel free to reach out to me. I want to

Brett Curry:

Our database. Yeah, reach gym man. He's connecting people.

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, I know. Yeah. I mean, we looked to a captain woodworker manufacturer literally last night, and I really have a couple projects that I'm willing to recommend to him and get quotes as well. So I think it is going to be a good time to look at American manufacturers, but it's still very limited because what most people need is contract manufacturers. Ones you can reach out to with a tech pack and RFQ and then actually quote and make it, well, most manufacturers in the United States tend to work for brands like there's auto power manufacturing, flashing injection warning, but they're set up by a client to make it for those specific things. So there's not as much, even though there's a lot of manufacturers, not as much contract manufacturing in

Brett Curry:

Place, they're manufacturing for a specific, it's manufacturing spun up by a specific brand and needs type of thing.

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

It makes sense.

Jim Kennemer:

And I mean, people are setting up too. I know of a laundry sheets manufacturer, they are buying from all over. They just weren't happy with the quality. Started looking into what it would take to actually build a manufacturer for laundry sheets, and they did it themselves. I know they sell eco-friendly laundry sheets made out of North Carolina. So yeah, people are doing that.

Brett Curry:

Is that true Earth? Or you may not be able to say who the company is, but we used to work with True Earth, which was fun, but yeah.

Jim Kennemer:

Oh man, actually name it might be.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, no worries. But yeah, this is one of those things. I know we were talking about simple, modern, I was talking about that on another podcast, one of the founders there, and they're manufacturing some of their stuff now in Oklahoma where they're based, they still get most of their products from China, but they're manufacturing a lot in Oklahoma now. There's some benefits, right to speed and cash flow and m OQs if you're manufacturing here and things like that. So yeah, unit costs could be higher in the us, but maybe it's more cashflow beneficial to you to manufacture

Jim Kennemer:

Here. With manufacturing, everything's getting more and more automated too. So a lot of stuff like flexion injection molding is more or less just get a mold, a machinery, one guy knows how to program it.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. Pressing buttons at that point, right? I know. Yeah, totally makes sense. Well, Jim, this has been fantastic. This is one of those things where I'm glad now that people are getting serious about their supply chain. I think anytime you can find margin in your cost of goods, that opens up opportunity for you to grow and has been more and marketing or just to profit more, and so painful time. But I think the best operators are going to come out ahead during this. And so Jim, for those that are looking at moving outside of China, how can they contact you and Cosmo sourcing?

Jim Kennemer:

Yeah, so yeah, you send to my direct email, which is jim@cosmosourcing.com. You can get the spelling back there, sander. And our website is cosmo sourcing.com or just Google Cosmo sourcing. We come up first. Yeah.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. I'll link to everything in the show notes as well. But if you've got questions, chip is a really smart guy, good guy, knows what he's doing. He's worked with some of my clients, people that I know trust him and so do I. And so reach out to Jim if you have questions with that, Jim, good luck to you. Congrats on your amazing timing and predicting the future that one day there'll be massive tariffs on China or we want to be moving out. So

Jim Kennemer:

Absolutely,

Brett Curry:

Kudos to you on that and keep doing good work.

Jim Kennemer:

Great. Thank you. It's a pleasure being here.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. And thank you for tuning in as always. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the podcast if you have not done so? We'd love that review on iTunes. Share this podcast with someone that you think would enjoy it or benefit from it. Somebody that's thinking about what do I do with my supply chain or my manufacturing share with them this episode. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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In this episode of the Ecommerce Evolution Podcast, host Brett Curry welcomes Mickey Winter (CEO) and Carrie Weidenbach (COO) of Ascend, a digital agency specializing in purpose-driven ecommerce brands. As industry veterans with decades of combined experience, they share invaluable insights on maintaining brand mission during economic uncertainty, particularly amid recent tariff challenges. This conversation delivers practical strategies for navigating market pressures while staying true to your brand's core values and purpose.

Key Takeaways

• Purpose-Driven Strategy During Tariff Chaos: Learn how brands like All Birds are weathering tariff challenges through diversified supply chains aligned with their sustainability values, and discover transparent pricing approaches that maintain customer trust.
• The Conscious Commerce Maturity Matrix: Explore the five-level framework that helps evaluate where your brand stands in balancing business maturity with purpose-driven initiatives, from "emerging" through "pioneering."
• Mission as Competitive Advantage: Hear real examples of how brands like Patagonia have leveraged their purpose to create unique offerings (like their "Worn Wear" collection) that simultaneously solve economic challenges and reinforce brand values.
• Internal Alignment for External Success: Discover why cross-departmental alignment around your mission is crucial for brand growth, and how leadership development can eliminate common roadblocks to scaling.
• Creative Revenue Models: From community pricing structures to marketplace expansions, learn how purpose-driven brands are finding innovative approaches to business challenges without compromising their core mission.

Chapters: 

(00:00) Introducing Carrie & Mickey

(02:22) Navigating Tariff Chaos and Supply Chain Diversification

(04:19) Defining Purpose-Driven Brands

(06:29) Pricing & Profitability in Uncertain Times

(12:25) Carrie & Mickey’s Background

(16:50) The Conscious Commerce Maturity Matrix & Level One, Awareness

(22:29) Level Two, Scaling

(27:06) Level Three, Optimizing

(32:38) Level Four, Leading

(36:15) Level Five, Pioneering

(39:38) Staying Mission-Driven in Uncertain Times

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Carrie Weidenbach:

Every one of us that starts a business, we have this vision, this creative vision of doing something important and providing a service or providing meaning. And sometimes as companies grow, they lose sight of that.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today I have two very special guests. We got female co-founders of Ascend. And when I say that these two are legends in the e-comm and D two C space, I'm not exaggerating, they've done some amazing things, worked with some amazing brands you're going to hear about in just a minute. But we've got Mickey Winter, the CEO of Ascend, and Carrie Weidenbach, the COO of Ascend, and they focus on working with purpose-driven e-com brands and creating solutions for them. And so we're talking about today is one, how can you remain purpose-driven in a time of uncertainty? So when there's margin pressure, which there has been in our space for some time at the time of this recording, there's tariff chaos in the industry that no one knows exactly what to do with. And so when there's times of uncertainty or change or chaos, how do you stay purpose-driven in that? And then we're going to look at what they call the maturity matrix and see where you are as a brand on that matrix and how you can get to the next level. And so with that, Mickey, Carrie, welcome to the show and how's it going?

Mickey Winter:

Thanks for having us, Brett. We really appreciate taking this time to talk with you today.

Brett Curry:

Absolutely, absolutely. And it's one of those things we connected because Carrie, you and I go way back, Mickey, we've met more recently, but Carrie and I go way, way back. In fact, I think it'd be interesting to note, Carrie, when did we first start working together through Classical Lama? That was like 2011 or something like that, maybe 12.

Carrie Weidenbach:

I dunno this forever ago. It's definitely over 10 years ago, over a decade. And we've done a ton of exciting projects together. But let's dive into this tariff conversation

Brett Curry:

Because

Carrie Weidenbach:

People have to be nimble and quick and adjust to this. And what we're seeing across the board is if you have a strong foundation in your values, in your purpose, you can really weather this storm of tariffs. So we look at brands like Allbirds, they build sustainably for their shoes and they have their resourcing based on that, their suppliers based on that. They have a diverse supply chain based on the sustainability. And so they can adjust and refocus their supply base. So I would say that's your number one strategy is having a diversified supply base divers. So you're not just dependent on China. Brazil is a really appealing country to do work with. That's what All Birds has as an alternative. And so they're just shifting more of their supply base to Brazil.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, we're hearing that from a number of brands and the brands that are in better shape now than others are those that have been working on diversifying the supply chain, not something you can just kind of snap the fingers and get a new factory or a new group making your stuff in another country. So those that had the foresight and we're like, Hey, see this coming. We've heard of some that have pre-purchased inventory for the year that was a winner. I've talked to a brand today that did that. So they've locked in their pricing, gather, got everything imported. Not everybody can do that. But then others have worked to diversify the supply chain, which makes a ton of sense. Do you think there's, and we would love if you have a point on that as well, Mickey, but is there something also about being, well, let's maybe step back and define what does it mean to be purpose driven or mission driven and give some examples. You want to tackle that one, Mickey? Sure,

Mickey Winter:

Sure. So it's taking your values as a brand and using that as your north star when it comes to making decisions. It helps to create this pathway that you can balance and take trade-offs on when you're consistently looking at what your ultimate purpose is, be it being a sustainable brand. Being a brand who, one of the brands that I've worked with in the past Garden of Life is supplements. So thinking about them, they focus on creating supplements that are fully organic made with Whole Foods and sticking to that as their base mission and not veering from it. Because ultimately what it's going to do is create this strong connection with their customer base. And the customer base can trust that they will consistently follow their mission and use that as the driving strategy, but then making the decisions based off of your mission. So it's really whatever your purpose is, it's really using that as your guiding light.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I love that. And in some ways that can really help with messaging during this time. So you are Garden of Life and maybe you are about to have to raise your prices. You communicate to your customers, Hey, here's why we will never compromise on these ingredients or this approach to our product. We're going to be sustainable. Come hell or high water, we're going to deliver good ingredients for you because we believe this is why we're here. So to do that and to not to keep the doors open, you think of an elegant way to say that we've got to raise prices a little bit, and I think your core audience will likely understand that piece.

Mickey Winter:

And when it comes to the prices and the price increase, you want to be as transparent as possible with your customers. So we've even seen examples where brands are, you're in the checkout flow, you didn't even enter the checkout flow, actually, you're in the cart and within the cart you see your estimated tax, your estimated shipping, and the estimate on tariffs, the additional charge for tariffs. So it's not something that's hidden, it's not something you're burying. And we've always found that e-commerce brands who are very transparent about the total cost of ownership and the total expense that their customers are going to have to spend, then they're more likely to convert in the end. Otherwise you're going to get a lot of abandoned carts and people are going to be confused as to why is everything so high once I'm ready to pull

Brett Curry:

The trigger. Interesting. So yeah, I've heard a few people talk about that and I would love to hear your perspectives and make you sort of laid it out there, but would love to hear how this has gone. So I know that there's one camp of people that say, just raise the price and for certain categories, the consumer will just deal with it, other competitors are raising prices, it's just going to be the new normal. Others say some of what you just said where hey, keep the price the same in the cart, we're adding a line for tariff, obviously then customers will see that that's going to change the total things like that. Does that cause a spike in abandoned carts or have we not seen that have that impact? Is it too early to tell? What's your perspective on that?

Carrie Weidenbach:

Yeah, so Mickey and I are always proponents of testing things with your customers using test strategies to determine the tolerance for pricing changes. So there's a lot of tools out there that are dynamic pricing tools where you can test this also with customers to see

Carrie Weidenbach:

What

Carrie Weidenbach:

Their level of tolerance is for just tacking on this tariffs surcharge. In some industries, it's very dependent on the industry, how price sensitive your product is for what your strategy's going to be. There is no one size fits all. So we recommend being transparent, testing this, seeing what the reaction is for what people will tolerate.

Brett Curry:

And it really is a matter of running tests on at what price point does, how does that impact conversion rate. And then you

Carrie Weidenbach:

Can absolutely

Brett Curry:

Chart that out and see what that's going to do to your business. But this is significant in a lot of cases. I listened to the Operators podcast, which is one I highly recommend Mike Beckham, who's the CEO and co-founder of Simple Modern, their drinkware brand. And they import everything from China is what it sounds like from the podcast. He said that they would have to raise prices 25% and sell the same amount of volume to stay profit neutral. So to keep profits where they are, 25% increase in price and keep the same sales velocity, not super likely that they'd be able to do that. But that's one of those things where to me, maybe there's a limit here to what that tariff add-on at the end can be. If it's 25%, I think people are going to be like, what is this? I'm out of here. In that case you want to add it upfront I think, but it probably is worth testing doing it both ways depending on how much of a tariff upcharge there is.

Mickey Winter:

And it's not always, the solution doesn't always have to be raising prices. It could be a little bit more creative in even what you're offering. So one of the brands that I always look to as a leader in the space is Patagonia. And I don't know if you're familiar with their worn wear collection, but it's pre-warn items and they also, you have the ability to refurbish products. So instead of buying a whole new jacket, you can get your zipper repaired or maybe you snagged it on a tree hiking or climbing a rock or something. But in those cases, they were creative in staying within their mission, but also creating a whole nother less expensive way to purchase their products. And now you're refurbishing, so you're not having to bring in from the manufacturers.

Brett Curry:

Super interesting. And that requires a build out of services or build, but way easier than spinning up a factory or getting out of manufacturing relationship. And so that's an interesting spin as well. I really like that. What else are you hearing brands do right now? And also I wonder if you are purpose-driven or mission-driven, you can probably protect the margins a little bit better. You may have had better margins anyway, but are you hearing anything else? What are purpose-driven brands doing right now to protect margins and to keep their mission?

Carrie Weidenbach:

So I think doing broader communication of that mission and developing that relationship with the brand, the more that you can increase loyalty and talk about other value that you provide as a company, your culture focusing on that, taking the focus off of price, I think is really helping brands.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I realized a few minutes ago, but we were in the flow so I didn't want to stop, but we just got right after delivering value to the people, telling people what they need to think about and do right now, we didn't talk about your backgrounds. I said, you guys were legends. I said, we known each other for a long time and we got right into tariffs.

Mickey Winter:

What do mean? They dunno who we are. Come on now. Nobody knows

Brett Curry:

Who. For the audience that doesn't know your names immediately, let's give the 32nd background because Mickey, you've done a lot of amazing things. What have you done in the industry and why did I call you a legend?

Mickey Winter:

Yeah, so I've been in the space for a little over 20 years probably. My longest stint was actually as the chief creative officer of something digital, was an e-commerce based solutions provider, digital agency, and worked with a number of brands back then. I come from the creative side obviously. So I am always looking at creating customer experiences that are based on data. Like Carrie said, I'm a huge advocate of creating a culture of experimentation, not only internally, but with our clients as well. And aside from being in the e-commerce space, I am also a painter, fine artist. And my first career, actually, I was an educator, so I taught high school nice art back in the day, way back in the day. That's pretty the 20 years in this space and also at the college level. So for me, it's always important to have that educational element in everything that I do, be it with our internal team or with our clients.

Brett Curry:

Love that. And some of the cool brands you've worked with over the years.

Mickey Winter:

Oh yeah. So some pretty big brands like Nestle and L'Oreal, but then everything from high fashion and boutique fashion brands like Love Shack, fancy, more mission-based brands like Bur Bees, burs B's Baby was one of our clients for quite a long time as well as Bake by Melissa really. So it runs the gamut. And even pre e-commerce, a lot of nonprofit organizations we are focusing on. So in the creation of Ascend with Carrie, my goal was to go back to the heart of things and working with brands who are, we don't care if you're just starting out or you've been in, you're a successful leader in the space, we want to work with you regardless. And we want to be able to provide value to our clients and helping them excel and lift their mission and their impact make their impact greater.

Brett Curry:

So good, so good. And then Carrie, what about you? You've been A-C-O-O-A long time, you've been running ops at some amazing agencies. You've worked with some amazing brands and companies, but give the quick background for you as well.

Carrie Weidenbach:

Yeah, for sure. Brett, when you and I first met, I was COO at Classy Lama and then eventually became president of that agency. I was a COO of another B2B e-commerce agency called E seven Solutions. And then I was vice president of programs at something digital in Wright Point, where Mickey and I got a chance to work together. And my superpower all along in this space has been creating value by delivering e-commerce websites, the software development on time and on budget with quality. And you would think that that would be the norm in our industry. But for everybody who's ever done a build out of a new site, I can tell you it's not the norm.

Brett Curry:

It's not the norm at all. It's like construction always late, always over budget, just the way it goes. But yeah, I got to see that firsthand. You guys deliver real solutions that work and on budget and on time, which is very impressive. Okay, awesome. Now that people are like, Hey, I got great tariff insights and now I know who you guys are, so let's get after a little bit. So let's talk about this maturity matrix, five levels to the matrix. I'm not sure who's doing which level, but level one, what is it? And give us some examples and then where do people get stuck in level one and how do they move to the next?

Mickey Winter:

Yeah, sure. I can kick us off. So overall, we call it the conscious commerce maturity matrix. I know it's a mouthful. Anyone has better ideas and what to call it, we are open, but basically it's a framework that helps us evaluate in e-commerce business, digital maturity and then balance that with their purpose and their impact. So each level outlines like key marketing strategies, e-commerce capabilities and functionality, and then brand positioning to help that business scale effectively. So the first one is we call it emerging. So this is a brand that's in its infancy. They're establishing like a e-commerce experience, and they're beginning to explore purpose-driven initiatives. So basically they have a basic online presence, minimal optimization, they're reactive in their marketing. They have very limited, if any customer segmentation, and we're really focusing on helping them define their why and then piloting their first initiative. So there's a brand that we work with today called chena. They're a new gym in community center in Brooklyn in New York, founded by on Acosta. And we work with them to create on our offering that we call our minimum lovable brand, which is very similar to a minimum viable product, but from a branding purpose. So you're focusing on the foundational elements and you are focusing on making those foundational elements lovable, right? Because you want people to have an emotion as soon as they interact with your brand, a good, a positive emotion, not

Brett Curry:

Repulsion or

Mickey Winter:

Right, exactly. A affinity, some love goodbyes. So in working with them, because they're a brand new brand, it's really about establishing the base visual identity and then what that brand strategy is. So we ended up building their site on Squarespace and integrating with mindbody. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but all of the e-commerce engine is run by mindbody. It's very much a platform for businesses who are in the wellness space, spa salons, gyms obviously. And so right now we're just speaking with her just yesterday actually, I was speaking with Anna about how are they going to react to all the tariffs and the chaos and everything that people are feeling, right? Everybody's uneasy and is it time to buy a new gym membership or do you have any extra money to spend here? So we're looking to develop community pricing model where you can pay as you a lower priced model interesting for customers. And it's really about the messaging there because if you can afford it and pay the standard fee, you are helping to support other people in the community that can't and creating a balance there. And that's part of the mission of isch is to really create this open inclusive community in that area and fostering wellness and joy.

Brett Curry:

And I think during times of uncertainty, change and stress, never a more important time to work out than now. And so the last thing you want to skimp on or cut out of your budget is something that's going to improve your health and your wellbeing. But I love that where you can kind of present the message of, hey, if you can't pay full price, great, because what you're doing is you're supporting

Brett Curry:

Those that can, and we got this community pricing, and so then it kind feels like, Hey, I'm doing my part. I don't like the tariff, but I've got money. I'm just going to pay the full price that can allow someone else to get in there. And so that's an interesting angle. I love that. So at this emerging level, we're building the foundation of a minimum lovable brand. We're creating all the branding and all the foundation, the messaging and things like that. Anything else to add to level one? And then what are the things we have to solve for to get to level two,

Mickey Winter:

Right? It's basically working through the list of strategies. So getting to a place where you have an email subscriber list that you can consistently market to and start segmenting if you have less than 500 emails, does it even make sense? So it's not just from an e-commerce experience perspective, but also the marketing and the brand strategy behind it. Blockers could just be as a new brand is just getting awareness, making people aware of the brand, and so increasing membership at this particular gym so that you can start putting money back into evolving the business.

Brett Curry:

Great. Great. So then what about level two? What is level two and give us an example.

Carrie Weidenbach:

So level two is when we want to start to scale the business, we feel that we have a solid foundation and we're ready to grow. So that starts with a structured marketing plan, and that's often where teams like yours come into the picture after we've built the site and we have that foundation stable. But what we see a lot of times is we start with the roadblocks and the misalignments. So I don't know if you remember this, Brett, but years ago you and I worked with a brand that was up and coming that nobody had ever heard of called Johnny O. Right now everybody knows Johnny O, but when you and I worked with them, I was working on the marketing strategy with you and we were sending traffic to their site, but it wasn't converting, the message wasn't out there, the brand couldn't sell it. And so John O'Donnell, when he created that brand, he had this vision of taking East Coast Prep Ralph Lauren and combining it with Southern California grunge and relaxed where, and we were sending great traffic to them, but it wasn't converting. So we really had to focus on improving the CX and improving the story there. And so what level two is in scaling is you try something and you tweak, you try something and you tweak and you're really learning on how to get there. And I just love to see the transformation of the Brandon Geno and now they give back by giving away clothes to disaster relief areas is

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. It's amazing. And it's one of those things where first of all, love Johnny O. Love their style, love the way they approach things. But yeah, when you start to see, hey, we're driving traffic or we're getting people to the site, they're not converting it, what is it? Is it the shopping experience? Is it the promise or the message isn't the same as what they're seeing on the sites? There's lack of congruency. Are we just pulling in the wrong people? What is it that's not working? But that's really what takes a little bit of time to figure out time and data. But then when you do get it right and it is the right message to the right person at the right time and then a good shopping experience, it can create some magic as is the case with Johnny O. So that's awesome. Good. So what then are some of the blockers? What are some of the things we've got to solve in level two before we get to level three?

Carrie Weidenbach:

So misalignment, inconsistent messaging, not evoking that emotion and that feeling that you're trying to convey with your brand. We see all kinds of stuff sometimes. And so we watch that conversion funnel all the time. Where are people not getting it? Where are they bouncing? What's happening? And like we talked about and then we test, we do that conversion rate optimization. It's so much less expensive for our clients to do a test on the front end to change something before changing code, right? Code's expensive to change, you've got to do a deployment, but we start tweaking with testing.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, I love that. And it's one of those things where it's both on the messaging side up front but then also on the site and some things you think are going to work, don't. Boom, beauty longtime climb. My buddy Ezra Firestone runs the company and there's always been skincare for women like boomer women and older, and they thought most women view themselves as so young and whatever. So for a while they always had the age appropriate models in their ads and they thought, well, let's just try women in their late forties or whatever. And there was almost a coup, there was a protest, the people reached out and they're like, that is not me. What are you doing in these at? And you're like, oh, sorry, we'll go back to the core. No problem. But yeah, you got to test stuff like that because sometimes little things like age of the model or how we're displaying this thing, you wouldn't think it would would've a big impact. It could have a big impact. So really, really important. Good. What about then what level are we ready for? I

Mickey Winter:

Said

Carrie Weidenbach:

Three.

Mickey Winter:

We level three. Yeah, level three. So

Brett Curry:

Go for it. Does that back to you?

Mickey Winter:

What is level three? So level three is optimizing, talking about testing. So level, level two, you start dipping your toe into that. But now level three is taking that data and then using it to make the actual change. So you're testing, but now you are implementing those tests that have proved successful. You're leveraging automation and personalization. So now you know more about your customer, who they are, what they're looking for. You had mentioned with Johnny O and sending possibly maybe unqualified traffic to the site and people were converting. We know who the audience is at this level. And there's also from an impact perspective or purpose perspective, there's a structured impact strategy in place. You know what you're trying to convey, what the values are within the organization, and you're putting that first as you execute. So you're looking at holistic marketing strategies, data-driven marketing automation, like I said, even ai predictive search, if you're thinking about the customer experience on the website, loyalty and rewards programs. But you always ask also what might be a roadblock, what's stopping them from moving to the next? Right. At level three, one of the blocks that we see is a lack of cross-departmental alignment. So the marketing team might be misaligned with the technology team while the purpose and the mission is there, not everyone's bought into it internally, everyone has their own initiatives going on. And so that can really prohibit the overall brand from successfully moving forward. It's not always what's happening with the customer, you got to look inside as well.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's such a good point. What tips do you have? What examples do you have? And then do you have any suggestions on tools or other things that are appropriate for this level?

Mickey Winter:

So specific tools, there's so many tools out there from if we're thinking about functionality and everything from Algolia search and VU and things like that to help with AI driven search, but tools in thinking about how do you mend that disconnect internally, think about maybe there's leadership training that you're giving to the leaders within your organization. Carrie and I are actually in the process of taking this really great conscious leadership training this month and I'm like, everybody should take this course because it's been very eyeopening and also doing things internally to get other people aligned. If you're more friendly with the people within your organization, you respect them and it's really working together to do that. And you need that leadership from the top to help encourage the teams to really get along and to get on the same page.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I love it. I really believe businesses only really has two things, brand and culture. Brand is the outside perception. It's what the marketplace believes about you, thinks about you when they see your logo or your product, what do they feel? What are those emotions like we talked about before? But brand and then culture and culture is who you are on the inside. How are those departments communicating with each other? How are you actually operating? Are you actually mission-driven or is that just something you say and it's not real? What is the culture? Because ultimately the culture will influence the brand and it will shine through and people will see that. So both are important. So I love that you brought that up. Sometimes it's not just a tech solution, sometimes it's an internal department solution. Maybe that's part of the blocker that's keeping you stuck where you are. It's the need to get more alignment and better communication and better leadership inside your team, which impacts culture overall. It's great, great insight.

Mickey Winter:

Just a very visual example that you can see where there might be misalignment in a brand is just the carousel that they might have on the homepage. There's five, six slides of different, maybe it's products, maybe it's mission-based branding and messaging. But when there's so many different slides within a carousel, it's because everyone in the organization is fighting for the top spot.

Carrie Weidenbach:

You can't

Brett Curry:

Choose it's decision by committee or everyone

Mickey Winter:

Gets a choice. Everybody fighting internally of they want their thing to be upfront and center. So the carousel kind of in my opinion, developed because of internal struggle and less about trying to assist the customer in their experience.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's a really good call out when something looks kind of Frankenstein together or where are we going here? This is a committee decision thing or everyone fighting internally or whatever. Yeah, that's a really great example. Okay, cool. So level four ready for that. Back to you. What is level four? I'm going to

Mickey Winter:

Take this one. Oh, sorry. Just to mix it up, make things up for you. But I wanted to take this one because the name of this level is called Leading. And like I mentioned before, Patagonia is one of the leaders in this space. And so if you're at level four, you're recognized as a leader in the e-commerce space and as well as the impact you're integrating sustainability, employee wellness, customer experience at every touch point. And they are a great case study for that. They're strong brand loyalty driven by values and innovation. Their purpose is what differentiates them from their competitors. Deep personalization happening on the site. There's very high loyalty. What I mentioned earlier about the wear as a solution to a different perspective on how to deal with increasing costs. One of the things that could be a blocker though is losing your authenticity as you continue to scale, as you continue to grow.

Mickey Winter:

That would be one area that you'd really need to keep an eye on because you don't want to lose that mission. I'm not saying Patagonia is doing that, I'm just saying for an organization in this space, that's one area you definitely want to pay close attention to. But outside of the warm wear collection, I don't know if you're familiar in, I think it was 2010 or 2011, they created this campaign called Don't Buy This Jacket. And it was a Black Friday ad that ran in the New York Times and it was like featuring their bestselling product at the time, I think it was a fleece or something. And it wasn't about, they were saying don't buy this jacket because what they're saying is they want customers to buy less and repair more and they were really encouraging them to go through the process of using their wear collection or their refurbished products. So you can just send in your products that are Patagonia and then have them repaired by the brand.

Brett Curry:

Super interesting and a bit risky,

Mickey Winter:

So

Brett Curry:

Don't buy this. But the cool thing about that is everybody's like, wait a minute, what? Definitely a pattern interrupt, not what you're expecting. So then you lean in potentially a little bit more, which is super interesting.

Mickey Winter:

And their sales that year increased I think by 30% after that. And so their purpose and profit can coexist, right? It's not one or the

Brett Curry:

Other. And it's also one of those things too where that resonates with their customer. So people that are active that are climbing and affluent, they're also conscious about the earth and environment climbing, things like that. So that feels good. Just say, wait a minute, yeah, I do have this awesome coat, I'm just going to get that repaired. But you know what, we all like to buy stuff too. So there's also a lot of this people that are like, yeah, but I'm going to buy this pair of pants as well. I'm going to buy this new thing for sure. Just I want to. And now I feel like I'm giving back sort of even though I'm just buying something. So yeah, it just all

Carrie Weidenbach:

Works money. So now maybe I

Brett Curry:

Save money.

Carrie Weidenbach:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

We're always looking for the justification of how can I justify this purchase with logic? I already made it emotionally. Yeah, absolutely. Really

Carrie Weidenbach:

Great.

Brett Curry:

Absolutely. So that's level four. So then level five, bring us home. So back to you, Carrie. Yeah,

Carrie Weidenbach:

Yeah. Level five, pioneering. So I have spent the last five years working with a very pioneering brand in the e-commerce space, AB InBev, the parent company of Anheuser-Busch. I worked with them on their digital sales transformation, B2B globally. And they really went from an in-person sales strategy to transition to online selling in a space where you wouldn't expect it, where you're selling to bars and restaurants and corner stores, beer. But they have done some incredibly pioneering things in this space. They custom built and algorithmic sales predictive engine using AI and using historical data of what customers were purchasing to say, okay, now we think this is what your next order is going to look like. And so they would build up the entire next order for the customer and present that to them so they could put the entire thing in the cart and just check out. And that increased sales significantly. And after they built this infrastructure and we launched it in 24 countries in four years, they said, you know what? We're going to take this a step further and we're going to become more like an Amazon for B2B. Now they've taken their e-commerce platform and they're using it as a marketplace for other consumer goods companies. They've onboarded Nestle and Mondelez in a bunch of countries around the globe into this platform. So that's when you're transforming business, then you're a pioneer in this space.

Brett Curry:

Really interesting. So what is their primary objective with this marketplace or creating the Amazon for B2B? What's their objective with that?

Carrie Weidenbach:

They were really smart about it. They have 2.5 million customers that they're selling beer to around the globe, and they have the infrastructure already. They're shipping weekly to all of these locations. And they said, wait a minute, why don't we share this infrastructure? Love

Brett Curry:

It. I love it. It's

Carrie Weidenbach:

Brilliant with other companies that are selling to our clients, we've done all the work. Let's expand this.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's really what a great idea. We've already got the distribution system, the relationships, the system customer,

Carrie Weidenbach:

Our stuff, customers using our app or our website to purchase every week, what

Brett Curry:

Other products there

Carrie Weidenbach:

For their store. If you have a grocery store, a bar, a restaurant, a corner kiosk, you're replenishing the beer every week, you're in there ordering.

Brett Curry:

So how can we create new revenue lines and new opportunities here through what we already have?

Brett Curry:

I think that's just such an important business skill of how can I leverage existing assets, existing tools, existing relationships to open up new opportunities and really create a solution. I love that. What are some of the things that you're hearing right now from your clients? Are they doubling down on mission? Are they a little bit fearful because they're mission driven? Because to me it seems like this is not the time just to start slashing prices. Nobody's slashing prices, I guess, but it's not the time to go cheap or to just go into survival mode necessarily. This is the time probably to lean into whatever your purpose is or whatever your mission is. And there may be a little bit of riding the storm, weathering the storm, but I think you can use this to your advantage and to your customer's advantage by leaning into your mission. So what else are you hearing or seeing from your clients right now?

Carrie Weidenbach:

I think you're exactly right. I think leaning into the mission and why you're in business in the first place, every one of us that starts a business, we have this vision, this creative vision of doing something important and providing a service or providing meaning. And sometimes as companies grow, they lose sight of that. And we focus on all the nuances of our business. The bottom line this, the how are we going to change this? And sometimes we forget that original purpose. And what we see time and time again is every company who focuses on that culture piece, on that purpose piece, they really start to thrive.

Brett Curry:

It's more of a sustainable model in multiple ways. It's more of a sustainable brand when you have a real reason for existing, that's not just selling a widget, which we're always all here to sell stuff and make money and make profits. Obviously we can't exist without that. But if there's more to it, usually you're a little more insulated and a little more stable in times of uncertainty,

Carrie Weidenbach:

Right? And what all the studies show also is your team is more engaged, they're more motivated to help you pursue that purpose. So

Brett Curry:

I like it. I like it. Well, as we wrap up, who should be reaching out to you? So if people are listening and thinking, I'm liking these tips and suggestions, and I maybe I'm a level three and want to go level four or wherever they may find themselves on the maturity matrix, who are you guys really best equipped to help and how can you help who should reach out to you and why?

Mickey Winter:

Like I said earlier, it is not a specific type of brand. It is anyone who is maybe struggling to define a mission for their brand, a brand who might just be starting up in the space, but also brands who are just looking to engage with their customers in a different way. So we provide everything from, like I talked earlier about the minimum level of brand offering. We can help you establish a brand from the start. Or if, I don't know, say for instance, you're looking to do a refresh of a brand, really start focusing on a mission. We are here to assist you. There's other ways in dealing with the tariffs too and the uncertainty thinking about testing and really increasing the conversions that you have. You still have the same traffic that you had yesterday, but how are we going to get those people to convert more? We can assist with AB testing, conversion rate, optimization testing, and even if you're looking to maybe switch platforms, we are a shop wear partner and we work with Shopify as well. So anyone who might be out there looking to make a little bit of a change and start thinking more about their mission both internally in the organization as well as externally to their customers.

Brett Curry:

So from the branding piece to the technology piece, you guys have really built and been involved with some very complex technology deployments. You talk about the AB InBev app and some of these things. You guys have really executed and delivered some very complex technical solutions, but you're also good at the branding piece and tying that in with mission. And so really, really good. So how can people find you? So if someone's listening to this and like, Hey, I want to talk to Mickey and Carrie Edison, how can they find you?

Carrie Weidenbach:

Yeah, so we are as send a YSN d.com, our Y is you. It's all our clients that we serve so they can reach out at hello at Ascend and talk to us. And we wanted to offer all of your listeners a chance to connect with us and let's test out this conscious commerce maturity model. We'd be happy to do an assessment for where they're at and share their level with them and how they can level up in their business.

Mickey Winter:

We can help look for those gaps and opportunities for them if they're just maybe even feeling a little bit stuck and not even sure where to look.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And you guys have such a keen eye for what's actually going to move the needle with a business, and here's what you're trying to do with your brand, but I don't think it's resonating. And so here's how we need to pivot. You have a breadth of experience and technical knowledge and brand knowledge that tied together is a really unique thing, really unique offering and unique skillset. And so A YSN d.com, check it out. And are you guys on the socials as well? Sorry, I butchered that. But are you guys, you're on LinkedIn as well? Both of you?

Carrie Weidenbach:

Absolutely. Instagram, LinkedIn, even Facebook, you can find us. And we're always putting out value and advice for people, so definitely follow

Brett Curry:

Us. Cool. So reach out, get that maturity matrix assessment, see where you fall on that. And hey, now is the time to stay mission driven. Stay the course. Look for ways to pivot and stay profitable. Reach out to good partners like Ascend or like OMG. And with that, ladies, thank you. Thank you for bringing your knowledge and your experience and for your time and keep up the good work.

Mickey Winter:

Thank you, Brett, thank you so much for this time. Yeah, thank you for having us today, Brett. We appreciate it.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? And if you've not done it, please leave us a review. That always makes our day. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

In this episode I had the privilege of sitting down with award-winning entrepreneur Leah Garcia, founder of Nulastin. 

Leah has a remarkable journey building a beauty brand with shocking retention numbers—80% blended returning revenue and 65% subscription-based customers. From her bootstrapped beginnings (going from zero to $17.5M before hiring her first employee!) to developing bio-designed elastin products that deliver real results, Leah unpacks the strategies that have made her company a standout success even in uncertain economic times.

Key Takeaways

• Product is Everything: Leah emphasizes that customer retention starts with having a product that genuinely works and solves real problems. Nulastin's focus on elastin (instead of collagen) as the "miracle youth protein" created a market differentiator with demonstrable results.
• Reducing Friction Points: By partnering with the right tech stack (Recharge, Shopify Plus, and Absolute Web), Leah transformed her subscription program, resulting in a 50% reduction in customer service tickets and significantly increased LTV ($436 for subscribers vs. $186 for non-subscribers).
• Smart Cancellation Prevention: Understanding that customers were often "overstocked" led to subscription innovations like offering a 10-week initial supply followed by 5-week refills, creating manageable cadences that reduced churn and saved an additional 7% of would-be cancellations.
• Consistent Brand Messaging: Creating a "golden thread" of consistent communication across all customer touchpoints—from ads to emails to customer service—helps reinforce the value proposition and keeps customers engaged throughout their journey.
• Navigating Business Uncertainty: Leah shares her approach to managing through uncertain times, including maintaining an abundance mindset, focusing on essentials, and seeking opportunities for industry collaboration rather than panic-driven decisions.

‍

Leah Garcia:

My superpowers. I make really, really fast decisions when I make them. I give the person that I'm going into business with or making a decision with my all and I don't keep one foot on each side of the fence.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I am delighted to welcome to the show Leah Garcia. We met in Denver, Colorado. We both spoke at Ezra Firestones last ever, the final, the grand finale, glue and Mastermind. Lee and I both spoke there. I think you spoke right after me, and so I was up close to the stage. I heard you talk and thought, man, got to get you on the podcast. And so here we are today. But Leah is an award-winning entrepreneur. She won the EY winning Entrepreneur, female entrepreneur class of 2024. So that's Ernst and Young. We'll hear more about that as we go. She's built a company called New Lastin, which is really has some shocking retention numbers that we're going to unpack and that you're going to learn from.

She's been involved with the rodeo, she's been on tv, she's sold on QVC. She's done a little bit of everything. It turns out as we got to talking, we know about a bunch of the same people, and so she's just an impressive human and brings amazing energy. Although she did confess to me this energy is going to be raw. It's going to be all Leah because she's got no coffee right now, no caffeine. And so I love that you're willing to do this podcast without caffeine. You're traveling, didn't have access to coffee. So with that, Leah, welcome to the show and how you doing?

Leah Garcia:

Thank you. I tried to make my screen smaller to see your face not so ginormous. And right now all I've got is an exclamation point that says, thanks for joining, but if you can still see me, I'm literally looking at a blank screen right now, which is fine.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, you look great. You look great. So yeah, perfect,

Leah Garcia:

Perfect. This is more like a Braille podcast, and I'm actually down with that because oftentimes I sit around staring at myself in the mirror way too long. So we're done with that. No coffee, no reflection, complete, just full on transparency.

Brett Curry:

I love it. I love it. So amazing. So let's start here, Lee, I want to get into some of your story as we go because it's really fascinating. You've done a lot of amazing things, but what is Elastin? Why did you start it? And then we're going to talk about some shocking numbers you've been able to create in terms of subscriber percentages and return customer percentages and LTV and some stuff that's really, really valuable right now. But what is new lesson and why did you start it?

Leah Garcia:

The journey really was personal problem, resourceful resource, meaningful monetization. I had an issue that was going on as I was aging and losing elastin and it manifest itself in ways I was in television, but the wrinkles, the lack of vitality, hair was thinning eyebrows. I over plucked, that was all on me. Things were happening in my body as I started aging in this world of being front facing camera. And I was introduced to this very powerful protein called elastin, and I met a microbiologist and I had my aha moment where I realized that this was truly the miracle youth protein that nobody else was really addressing. People were talking about collagen but not about elastin. So elastin was for me that aha moment. And the company was founded on science. So bio designed an elastin replenishment product for scalp hair, beautiful skin. And the thing that makes it so novel is that it's one of the first bio designed proteins that's identical to the human body, meaning that when you put this product on topically, your body recognizes it as native so it doesn't fight with it.

And now they use fancy words like biomimetic bioidentical, but your body loves these types of proteins. It says, oh yeah, I make this, I produce this. I know what to do with this so that I'm going to work for you. And it's probably one of the most natural ways to continue getting the results that you're looking for. So I fell in love with the science, even though I'm not a scientist, but that's how the whole business started was I had a personal problem. I found this solution which was elastin. It wasn't being addressed in the marketplace, and I thought, I can really change lives here. I can do something for women, especially. I started with women that wouldn't just give them results, but that would give them so much something bigger like their confidence, their identity, their sense of self, and that's what we're doing at Elastin.

Brett Curry:

That's fantastic. And so your core products are hair lash, brow, correct. So talk a little bit about your hero products and then we're going to talk about your incredible results and what we can learn from 'em.

Leah Garcia:

I started the company with two hero products, which is lash and brow, and boy, timing is everything. So we did have some skincare. I've been using the skincare for about a decade, but it was a prototype formula and wasn't really commercialized, but I used it. I've always been using science-based skincare, wound healing, tissue regeneration. I've never been an Avon girl. I've never used anything that was sort of what you would at a department store. So I don't know if that's just because of my professional athletic background. You're always playing around with what's the newest nutritional supplement or what's the newest thing that you can concoct so that you can go faster or climb higher and do all the things that you want to do to win. So the lash in the brow serum had demonstrable results within some people a couple of weeks, six weeks, eight weeks by 12 weeks.

It was just mind boggling, the changes. And so we had these gorgeous before and afters and that was a really fun product to bring to market. But my dream was always to be able to tackle the hair, but I just knew that that was to try to get the same amount of active ingredients in a 50 mil container that would give the same demonstrable results in an amount of time that wasn't going to cost somebody their arm and a leg. That was the journey that took a wee bit longer to get that really pinpointed so that we just didn't have a $400 bottle that we were trying

Brett Curry:

To sell. Yeah, little bit difficult. Even if the results are great and we all want to look youthful enough, vibrant hair and skin and brows and lashes, hard to justify 400 bucks for a bottle of shampoo. That's for short. So let's unpack something Leah, because there's a lot that's impressive about you, by the way. You're an amazing presenter on stage, you look great, you take fitness seriously. You're aging gracefully. You got so many cool things going on, but you shared this with me. You have 80% blended returning revenue, so 80% of your revenue is blended returning customers, 65% subscription based for customers. Your A OV is 90 in the 94th percentile of your vertical, and then your LTV is off the charts. We'll talk about that in a minute. But how have you done this? Because I know this is by design. You said this was the goal from the beginning. I know it's a great product, but how do you get to that 65% of your revenues from subscriptions? 80% is blend to returning customers. How do you do it?

Leah Garcia:

Well, first of all, you better have a product that works, right? And so now there's all sorts of fancy words for it, but back in the day it was word of mouth and the trajectory to getting a really nice return customer isn't just putting in cancellation prevention, finding the right tech stack, which is key. I think that if you break it down into four categories, you're looking at discover, discover your customer pain points, that's going to be the first thing that you need to do. Put skin in the game, literally something that is a personal problem that you've lived through that you can then identify and that immediately is going to give you a product that people are going to want and to understand and can be the heartbeat of the formula. And then you want to make sure that you're identifying the things in your business model that are the defeat, repeat moments, what's defeating them?

Is it a bad value proposition? Is it a shitty product which we don't have? And then the final one, which I think is really, really key is do you have a gap? Is there a frustrating technical experience for the customer? Because let's face it, nobody wants to get to the finish line to buy something, to have tech breakdown or their website not work or gosh dang it, I've already given you my credit card five times. Why do I have to go find that number again? There's these points that happen in a customer journey that will just throw them off. They'll just, I'm done. I'm done with you. That was frustrating. It wasn't fun, it wasn't pleasant. So these frustrating experience will break down that repeat customer. And then the biggest one for us, honestly, we did really well up to, geez, last year because we had such a great product, we cared so deeply about our customers, we did nice things for our customers, but I still didn't have the right tech partners, and that was really the missing link for me getting up to this 80% and 65% was finally plugging in the right tech partners.

And my tech stack isn't anything novel, but it just started working once I had left hand and right hand talking to one another.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, so it all starts with product, right? We got to have a product that is amazing that we want to keep ordering again and again. That's so good that we're telling our friends about it, things like that. That's solving a real problem. We got to then make the process easy. We've got to have good tech solutions. There's a lot that goes into that. But what's interesting, and you talked about solving a real problem, I want to give a quick shout out to Dean Brennan. He was a guest on the podcast, CEO of Heart and Soil. These are meat based supplements as a weird concept. I do plant-based supplements in these supplements, but he tipped me off on this joint care because as I've been aging, I work out, I run, I do things, joints hurt, and he tipped me off to this joint care supplement.

It's fantastic. I've never taken anything like I don't ache at all. We went on a trip to Vegas just before actually the Denver event where I spoke with you and a couple of guys were with me. We were running on the pavement and they were all complaining about being sore. And I'm like, I feel great. My joints don't ache at all. Anyway, so that's a product where I started taking that. I am not going to unsubscribe from that. That is going to become part of my routine because I feel awesome. And so same is true for you though, man, the skin is looking good, the brows looking good, the hair's looking good. We're just going to keep buying. So that makes a ton of sense.

Leah Garcia:

Talk this out. Lemme on to what you just said because that is so key, right? So you have a product, he tells you about it, you use it, it works, and then what do you just do? You told me about it. Now I'm curious. And that's what we're talking about. That's how you get that sticky customer. It's no one. If I can get on that soapbox again, and you've heard me get on my soapbox. If you've got a product because you just want to make money because you want to sell, because you just want to cut corners, do people, if you will, they might buy maybe once or twice, but ultimately it's not going to be the longevity. It's not going to be what's going to serve them well in the long run because ultimately people don't want crap. They want something that works.

Brett Curry:

It's going to be grind. You're always going to have to be hustling for that next sale where, whereas with you with your product now 65% of your revenue comes in automatically through subscriptions, and then another 15% comes in through repeat customers anyway, so it's really awesome. Talk about some of the things you did to remove friction from the shopping process to make subscriptions easier. And you have any insights on, do you get first purchase take rate on subscriptions or is it more like they try it once and then you're getting them on subscriptions through email and SMS and remarketing campaigns? Talk through some of the tactics there

Leah Garcia:

First. Yeah. Okay. So when I first started, I bootstrapped the company and my claim to fame was that I went from zero to 17 and a half million before I hired my first employee.

Brett Curry:

No way,

Leah Garcia:

Yes, that's the claim to fame. That being said, I did have, excuse me, I did have an agency that I had hired that really helped me with my digital marketing and they helped me with my paid media marketing. So I wasn't able to really control. They had their things they were working on. So I started with bold subscriptions and Bold just did not work for me. We didn't have the right website and the right theme and the right anything to manage that subscription platform. And then we transferred. Once I started professionalizing and bringing in employees and we're looking at like 20, 21 at this point, then I transferred over to another subscription platform and that one didn't work out at all. They were very tech heavy and I still didn't have the internal tech because I was bringing everything in house. So it was just a mismatched relationship, just literally oil and vinegar.

And so then ultimately I got a cold call from a recharge rep that said, Hey, Leah, so-and-so from Recharge and I don't like cold calls, but I said, you've got five minutes to convince me why I should switch to your platform. And then ultimately we arm wrestled and negotiated a good contract, which is something that was very important to me. And then I signed on and when I go, I go deep. I don't wish my superpowers, I make really, really fast decisions when I make them. I give the person that I'm going into business with or making a decision with my all, and I don't keep one foot on each side of the fence. It's amazing, a good

Partner. So they then introduced me to a web development team that at first I didn't hire, but I really liked them. And then eventually I realized that I still didn't have left hand and right hand talking and that these teams needed to all be working in Shopify Plus. So my basis for my tech stack is literally absolute web recharge and Shopify Plus. And then from there you can build out with the Klaviyo's and the postscripts and all the new things that come around. But because they all work together collectively and kind of synergistically, that made my job easier so that we could use the insights. And I'll tell you with Recharge, constantly innovating, they came out with their cancellation prevention, which was telling me I knew my customers were overstocked, but I didn't know to what degree. So then when I find out that I'm 30% plus overstocked with customers, which is why they're churning, then I can really do something about it. So then my web tech team got together and we created a really bespoke, a really bespoke journey whereby now we changed our subscription so that we open with a 10 week supply because Elastin is a product that you need to use over time to see the results.

Brett Curry:

Got

Leah Garcia:

It. So instead of maybe them picking haphazardly six weeks, despite the fact that we tell them otherwise, then they get overstocked. Then we transfer from that 10 week supply to a five week supply, for example, so that they now have a manageable cadence coming in with their subscription. And that immediately turned things around. I mean that alone, we saw an uptick in our subscription take, and then we saw a decrease in churn. So churn can hover between eight to 10 ish percent, which me I'd love churn to be about 2%.

Brett Curry:

No doubt

Leah Garcia:

I'm a dreamer. But the customers that were sticking around then became stickier, if you will. And that's when that lifetime value for our subscription customers could also be identified as a ridiculous number compared to non-subscribers. I think it's $146 for our, no, excuse me, $436 for our subscriber lifetime value compared to 186 for non-subscribers. Way

Brett Curry:

More than double.

Leah Garcia:

That's huge, right?

Brett Curry:

It's huge.

Leah Garcia:

And then we do that smart cancellation prevention, which then saves us an additional 7% of would be cancellations. And that's all done through automation and thoughtful touch points. So something that we just didn't have before, but I'll tell you the biggest thing for me, the thing that really turned my business is that our customer service team, which we have an in-house team of work from home moms that are just amazing.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing.

Leah Garcia:

We have always been one of the top performing brands on gorgeous, the platform that we use for cx, our tickets went down 50%, I'm pausing there. Tickets went down 50% by having all of these optimizations, all of this website flow, this smarter website, this smoother website, all of those friction points, once they were removed, I'm saving money, I'm making more money, and my customer service team, it has 50% fewer tickets, happier customers, and we're not even paying that higher platform anymore. On Gorg. We'd had to keep up in our fee for our agreement because we were just so much customer service, so much customer service. And now that's being eliminated.

Brett Curry:

It's amazing. So now you're cutting down, you're able to staff less or you're saving on costs for answering tickets. But think about it from the customer's perspective. Nobody wants to submit a ticket, nobody wants to interact. Even if customer support is delightful, it's a stay-at-home mom, and they're just a joy to talk to. I still don't want to do it. And so if you can eliminate that, it's even better. So part of that, so let's talk about why. And I want to look at, you said something a minute ago was really important. You said, Hey, people need to take this for 10 weeks to see the results. So that's what you started selling, right? So is that like a 10 week bundle or just sign up and you get it for 10 weeks or

Leah Garcia:

Two pack for example, just a two pack of lash, two pack of brow or a two pack of the hair treatment. And that's the vibrant scalp treatment. So use it consistently, use it every day. You need to premix that fuel, if you will. You want to get those hyper results in the beginning because if not, people will lose interest. It's already hard enough that I am not a mascara where you put it on and you get longer lashes immediately. This is something that depending on where you are naturally with your hair growth cycle, it takes a while. Get those real results. So some people, depending on where they're at with that growth journey, they may have results right away. But for the most part, aging women, who is our demographic, me, I am the demographic, we don't exactly respond. Those young bucks do. So it takes us a little while to get that diesel engine revved up and we just need to make sure that people are using it and then they start seeing results. And that's when the excitement sets in. And then when

Brett Curry:

You at that point, and then you

Leah Garcia:

Go for Vegas with your buddies and your knees don't ache, you're like, hello?

Brett Curry:

Yeah, exactly. Tell me what you're taking. Tell me what you're taking. Yeah,

I wrote a lot statement. So it's a two pack so they can use it for 10 weeks, get the best results. So that's the first start. The first piece says, what do they need to take to get the best results, whether it's a physical product, something you're using or something you're putting on ingestible, whatever. So what do they need to take to get the best results? Let's sell them that. And then what did you do in terms of messaging or just making it easier to understand and to say yes to? Talk to me about some specific tactics there.

Leah Garcia:

The tactic, I think that's the most important, just if we're talking D two C and just brand building is I had a lot of fractional copywriters for a while, so we didn't have a single voice, and then we hired a gal who is leading our brand and our brand copy and her copy then hit that whole customer journey. So what we see on our macros from customer service is what we see on the post-consumer flow for our email marketing, it's what they're getting when they're seeing the ad perhaps on meta or wherever they first found out that top of the funnel perspective. So they're seeing, here's what they're seeing in the top of the funnel, here's the middle of the funnel, here's the bottom of the funnel, here's the email marketing campaign, here's how it's flowing with the SMS, here's the information they're getting from all angles.

And it all sounds the same and it all makes sense. So you're not sending mixed messages anymore. And before, I'm probably guilty of having sent more mixed messages or just not having that through line, that continuity so that we're all just really making sure that people understand what we're delivering to the customers. And it's a serum. I'm at my temporary desk here, but for example, here's, here's a sample of the vibrate scalp treatment, the lash and the brow that's in just a single box. This was one of our promo boxes that we put together. So they're all serums. You use 'em twice daily, once in the morning, once at night, and people will inadvertently say, oh, so I need to keep using that product, and if I stop using it, it stops working. And the answer is yes. If you stop drinking water, you get dehydrated. Of

Brett Curry:

Course, yeah.

Leah Garcia:

If you stop eating food, you get hungry. If you stop, I want to vitamin I can take,

Brett Curry:

That's

Leah Garcia:

It. Things change. But it's still that age old question. And that comes from, I kid you not, that comes from old school mentality before people really got a little bit smarter to realize that consistency is what delivers results in everything. If you want to stay fit, stay fit,

Brett Curry:

You, I've got to keep working out. I've got to keep sleeping well every night. Come on, that's want to do it once, it's so good.

Leah Garcia:

But it's not necessarily even a nice to have once you start fighting back mother nature, it's a must have. And this is where that longevity game comes in there because what we're doing to biohack our bodies and our health and our wellbeing is really the rage right now. And I've been biohacking since day one. I think the biggest thing I did to biohack was not have

Brett Curry:

Children. I'm sure I've never

Leah Garcia:

Said that out loud before.

Brett Curry:

New biohack don't have kids. Turns out that's also a great savings plan. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leah Garcia:

I know a lot of parents that get pretty dang stressed right now in this world. There's enough stress going on. So I always laugh that my husband and I are able to just pick up and go whenever we want. We've got all this freedom. And I could also focus on the business. So truthfully, my business is those are my children, my

Brett Curry:

Members.

Leah Garcia:

That's who I care about right

Brett Curry:

Now. I love that. I love that. My wife and I, we can get up and travel anytime we want to as well. We just have eight kids that we have to tow around with us. Actually they don't all live at home. So it's not eight, it's only like five or six. It's no big deal. But

Leah Garcia:

That to me, I think that single voice to the question going back to

What are the mechanics, what can you do right now? What are the actionable items that some of the individuals listening to can take and take from this? And you talked about that ability for us to get on the phone. And something that I always say flies in the face of what we've been taught is to really know your customer. So we do have a lot of older women who have felt unseen and unheard and undervalued in their lives. And so our customer service team is empowered to spend however extra time they need on the phone with those individuals until that individual feels like they've gotten what they need. And sometimes they can be on the phone for a long time, which is why our gorgeous score has probably gone from a 4.8 and not to a five. I mean, we're still at 94.8% of all gorgeous platforms. That's that 5% stat. But we stay where we're at because one of the metrics that's timed on gorg is how quickly do you answer those questions for people? And sometimes we just don't answer them that quickly. We'll respond quickly, but then we take our time.

Brett Curry:

Take your time. But yeah, and it's more about optimizing for satisfaction than it is to hitting some metrics that may indicate satisfaction, but not always. And so I love the way you guys do that. This idea of consistent communication, I've heard it's called the golden thread or consistency. So every message we share, whether it's a video with static image, it's on med, it's on YouTube, it's on Google, it's an email, it's an SMS, it's all saying the same thing. It's reinforcing, maybe we're hitting the same message from a couple of different angles, but ultimately it's the same thing when you get on the lander. Also the same message. Simplification and clarity are super important. Sometimes we overcomplicate things and a confused customer does not buy. So what are some of the messages, the go-to messages or what are you trying to communicate when you're creating this consistency across all

Leah Garcia:

Channels? We fall back always on our pillars at elastin. So real science, real results, real people and real responsibility. But that's the pillar. And then from the pillar then you identify what is the pain point for the customer. And it really always boils down to their sense of self, their confidence, their sense of identity, their desire to be the best version of themselves. So I'm going to go back to what you said. You said, I started taking this supplement, I feel so much better. I'm not hurting anymore. I wake up, maybe you don't need coffee. And all of a sudden now you didn't say, oh, I like where they source their product. They did a really good job of where they sourced and they're environmentally friendly and they've done all these things. Well, that's a given. Now you need to have all of that. You can't come into a beauty brand right now if you're not sustainable, if you are not taking care of vegan and cruelty-free and no preservatives and all of the lists. So we call those our safe science standards, but you can't lead with that because nobody buys a product. Nobody buys a product because it's got the best biodesign proteins and the most peptides

Brett Curry:

For sure.

Leah Garcia:

That doesn't sell. What sells is, does it do what they want it to do. So the message has to always be about what the customer needs and what that pain point is that we're solving or what that aspiration is that they're looking to gain. And then ultimately, if we don't deliver the product that really works, they're never going to come back again. But the other flip side is because of where people are, whether they've got thyroid post-treatment, post stress, aging, loss of elastin, naturally too much sun, exposure, exposure, environmental, stressing out about what's happening in our political and our culture right now, all of these things are causing people to lose their hair. And we saw this during Covid as well. So what we also have to do at Neulasta is we have to look at how we can kind of bundle that and make sure that we're still giving the customer the time they need to get the results. So if 12 weeks isn't enough, I'm going to take care of them and give them more product so that they get the results they're asking for. And whether I do that sometimes with free product, sometimes with a deeper discount, but if they call me, I will literally say, you didn't start this journey because you were just trying something. You want something. So I'm going to give that to you for as long as it takes till you get that result.

Brett Curry:

That's so good. That's so good. Talk to me about the process of reducing churn. You talked about some of the programs you run. If someone's about to cancel their subscription, how do you mitigate that? What are some of the strategies that you've used?

Leah Garcia:

Most recently, it's going to go back to just that very, very powerful buy box that people are seeing so that the web functionality, I believe I mentioned this, smoother, faster, smarter, but that buy box, which is the small powerful decision point, right? That's transformed so that it now has above the fold because before it wasn't above the fold, but it's a smarter way of customers to get the right cadence with the right subscription that they needed. And then as they go through the checkout process, not too many more decisions to make, but then there are some upsells and there are some cross sells, but mainly trying to serve the customer with a very smart flow so that they don't have to get confused or question it. So the result of that alone with that buy box and the web functionality was a 13.4% increase in conversion rate. So we immediately started getting that. And then the next part of it is just continuing to innovate when we see something that's not working. We work with the web partner now and we try to innovate and solve around the entire customer journey and anticipate their needs so that we can exceed those expectations.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good. I'm looking at your detail page now, and we'll put this in the video version. If someone's on YouTube, they can see it. But I love the way this is laid out. So the top section you automatically selected subscribe and save 25%. You got three different options, deliver every eight weeks. In the middle it says deliver 10 weeks, it's got a check mark and it's bolded and it says recommended right under it. And then or deliver every 12 weeks. And it says free shipping, cancel any time, full flexibility, try really compelling, and then it's got the strikethrough price and the price that you'll pay saving 25%. And then below that you could choose a one-time purchase. You save 12% that way. What is, so you talked about 65% of your revenue is subscriptions. What's the take rate on subscriptions when someone's checking out with these products?

Leah Garcia:

I don't have that answer off the top of my head.

Brett Curry:

It's got to be a pretty high, it's got to be a high take rate since everything else is off the charts as well.

Leah Garcia:

Being the owner of the company and the founder, I always get just a little bit puckered up there because you still have people who want that big deep discount and they're playing the game. So you're always going to get the people who are like, oh, I can get free shipping. Oh, I can get this really deep discount, possibly almost 30% on my first order. And they have absolutely no intention. They're playing the field. They might be doing the stance with a lot of other companies, but ideally if they've purchased two products from us or the Tupac, then they are going to see results. And they might have a aha moment themselves where they stick around for a little bit longer. But it is high, and we're working on it because we actually didn't have as robust of a landing page funnel as we do now. It's still not the Ezra Firestone funnel, but that is something that we're working on so that we have the capacity now to build out more landing pages so that it makes it easy for that first take rate. I want to say 80%, but I might be wrong, so don't quote me and hold me to that particular number

Brett Curry:

With every other number being off the charts, the take rate's got to be really, really healthy as well. And so can you talk about the landing page work that you guys are doing? Is that tying specific offer to specific ad and what are you doing and any interesting learnings with that journey?

Leah Garcia:

Yes, better. It's still not set up. I've seen so many great landing pages that I start falling in love with, but if they're seeing an ad for, with a particular human being being featured in an age category and an offer for lash, and then they come over to a PDP page as a checkout page versus going to a landing page where then we continue selling them on that journey where then we get that buy box that really speaks to what they're after, because at that point, they don't want to mess around. They just want to get in there. I'm like, yeah, that's what I want. That's what I want to buy. So you want to make sure that you're not confusing them. And that's what we've been trying to do is follow that journey from what ad they saw on meta, for example, to where they land and get that checkout. And it's the landing page strategy is by far the best performer, but we also find that our PDP pages are equally as good. And back in the day, we were sort of, and we would just go to the homepage and that was a disaster. I mean, it works a little bit, but it's just, it's too much. It's like too much. Nobody wants to,

Brett Curry:

Yeah, you're introducing too many options in most cases. But I will say, yeah, your PDP, which is what I just showed a second ago, it's fantastic. And

Leah Garcia:

That's only the landing page. So I can send you links to get to the landing pages, which are those mysterious pages that unless you're following a particular link, you'll never find again. I was laughing about that the other day. I'm like, geez, even I own the company and sometimes if I can't find my landing page, I'm like, what's that foreign slash, where did we go and how do you get back to it again? So funny, once I lose it, man, I can't find it again. And that's an old anchor trick that I learned from back in the day of direct response infomercial is they were just classic landing page

Brett Curry:

Marketers.

Leah Garcia:

It was just

Brett Curry:

Guthy Riner legends, legends in the game. And so what did you do with them again? Was that one of your products or you worked with Guthy Riner?

Leah Garcia:

No, but I was in the infomercial world, so that's kind of where I cut my teeth with direct response marketing is I started in the direct response. I was selling on HSNA particular AB belt, and then I helped launch the contour core sculpting system, and that's a product that was in 2008, one of the most successful shows of its time. And we went from zero to 220 million in about three years, and we had a seven to one media marketing efficiency ratio.

Brett Curry:

So

Leah Garcia:

Seven to one

Brett Curry:

A seven mer. Everyone listing is like,

Leah Garcia:

Come, we're back in the day, the Anthony Sullivans and the Cindy Crawfords, but we were watching them, they were watching us. We were all competing. But it was back, it was in the good old days where crepe erase was rocking. And I mean, I am old, so I remember the Suzanne Summer's in,

Brett Curry:

I remember watching the ThighMaster

Leah Garcia:

X

Brett Curry:

90 XI bought because of P 90 X. Yeah, actually friends that ran the erase campaigns and

Leah Garcia:

Stuff. But I always ask, do we reflect, and this is something I said in one of my presentations recently is do we ever reflect on that is really where we learned the formula for our direct response marketing. And they had three segments, 28 minute show compelling problem solution, and H one had a call to action. So if you're jumping in somewhere in between, it's here's how we're going to save you time, money, energy, get you what you're looking for. Here's your call to action. If you order now, you're going to get this, this, this, and this. But wait, there's more. And all that stuff worked. And you know what? It still kind of

Brett Curry:

Works. It still works. Maybe you're executing it a little bit differently. But the psychology there, the problem solution, the presenting it in a compelling way and an engaging way with high energy, it still works. And that's something you and I were talking about. I'm a huge YouTube guy. We are seeing a lot of people that have been historical TV advertisers now trying YouTubes. We're leaning into that.

Leah Garcia:

Love

Brett Curry:

It. But I'm also seeing some D two C brands, brands that are born online that are now leaning into connected tv, whether that's through YouTube or other platform, and they're dabbling in TV advertising, but it's direct response style, TV advertising, getting someone to take an action to visit a site to get a free download or to free trial, whatever

Leah Garcia:

Just works. I think we need to be more clever and I need to meet more of a brand recognition. I tried some, our mutual colleague Stacy helped me try to buy some linear TV spots. It just didn't work for us, but we didn't do enough. It wasn't long enough, deep enough. But elastin as big of a brand as I think we are, we're still not a name brand. So you can walk down the street and people aren't going to really recognize us. So we're staying somewhat niche in that. We have, I believe, the best science in the industry, and I would challenge anyone to match our 38 US and international patents all in the elastin space.

Brett Curry:

It's

Leah Garcia:

Amazing. We've got a category that no one else is really focusing on to our depth and breadth. But at the end of the day, again, science isn't selling. So now I've got to be able to just communicate to people that we have a beautiful product with a founder and an entire team that cares deeply for that customer journey and that we're going to do everything in our power to get them the results that they want. And they can also trust. I think small brands, one of the beauties is that they can trust the integrity that goes behind it and that what we say is what we do. Sometimes when you get that thought of a big brand, you kind of wonder did they lose it? So if JJ buys a business and all of a sudden you see it on the shelf at a target, then old school people would think, oh, they must have done something different. Now it's lost its allure or it doesn't have the same formula. And maybe they're right. Maybe people take a formula, they buy a company and then they fairy dust the active ingredients and it might not have the same punch that happens.

Brett Curry:

Right? Right. Yeah. I think your passion rings true. Listening to you talk and if someone can see you or hear you talk in an ad, it's clear you're going to do whatever is necessary for someone to get the results that they want, which is great. I want to kind of end on this. We only have a few minutes left, but times are uncertain right now at the time we're recording, we're dealing with some tariff, chaos and madness. Consumer confidence is at a low. Business owners are worried. We work almost exclusively with D two c e-commerce brands. Many of our clients don't import from China, and so they're feeling a little bit better than those that do, but there's still just uncertainty everywhere. So what advice do you have and what are you leaning into now when times are uncertain? How are you operating?

Leah Garcia:

I have been guilty of falling into a trap of feeling the scarcity mentality and the panic, but I am doing everything that I can to try to come from a point of abundance, and that might be a little too metaphysical for this podcast, but I literally need to stay true to what we do over here. We need to make money to stay in business, but do I need to make a 94% contribution margin every day, all day? Probably not. I need to take a hit with everybody going in, and I'm willing to do that so that I don't have to put it on my customers. During covid, when people were upping their prices, I stayed the same. As a matter of fact, just earlier this year, first time I increased my prices since 2017, I am going to do everything I can to get clever to figure out how to, I only get packaging from China, only my primary packaging. So that's the stuff that you see, like this

Brett Curry:

Packaging,

Leah Garcia:

And I get a few, and it's not pretty. You don't want to pay something that might cost you 60 cents and all of a sudden have to pay $2 for it depending on where you're at. I've got a product right now on the water that was a little scalp scrubber that I got from China, and it was a 50 cent product. And right now we don't know because when it went on, it was before the tax went up to 148%. And at the end of the day, if I have to pay the tax, what going to do? Say, no, I'm going to send it back. That's one option. It is an option. My CFO said, you need to deny shipments coming over right now so that you don't have to pay $26,000 in taxes that you don't know where it's going. And I agree. And then tomorrow they could change it and I could end up paying $12,000 in taxes versus a 46 versus a hundred thousand dollars in taxes. So it's huge. I mean, it's going to cut into profit margins, but my hope is that smarter brains will prevail. That somebody will at some point talk to the government and talk to somebody. And there's got to be, if enough of us come together without being hysterical and we have those smart conversations, we have to reach a point where there's stability. And I will do everything I can to join that movement if it happens. But otherwise I am just not going to bring stuff over. That's a nice to have. It's got to be a must have.

Brett Curry:

Totally. Yeah. And I think it's a really good take where a couple things to keep in mind, and you talked about mindset. I think that is underrated in some ways where yes, we get tactical on this podcast. We want to look at how can we increase our subscription take rate and how can we reduce churn and things like that. But your mindset matters, and if you are overly stressed or panicking, you're going to make bad decisions. You're going to craft bad marketing, it's just not going to work well for you. So work on the mindset. It will only make everything else better. But I always believe there's always a move to make. There's always something you can do and every other one of your competitors is dealing with the same stuff you are dealing with. So if you can be more scrappy, more resourceful, more crafty, you can find edges. And it's like there are always opportunities in crazy times like this. I do believe there'll be adjustments made with tariffs and stuff. Who knows what that will be or when or what direction it'll be. But I think you're smart. How can we limit what we're bringing over right now? I'm hearing that from a lot of different customers. How can we just bring over the essentials

Leah Garcia:

Or how do we work together? So let's say there's five of us in the beauty industry that have a similar product that might be coming. Why not set up another manufacturing or another warehouse, for example, somewhere without taxes? Share the cost on that, bring product over. I mean, this is a time where we need to kumbaya and lean in with one another. There's ways around this. Even if it doesn't change, I'm hoping it changes, but if it doesn't change, let's not panic. Let's collaborate. Let's work together. Let's figure it out.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that so much. And yeah, there will be winners during this season. No doubt. It's just not easy and not overly fun, but it's where we are. And so got to focus on solutions. Leah, this has been absolutely fantastic. I love your brand. I love the energy you bring. I love what you're building, and we need to catch up again soon sometime. So thanks for coming on.

Leah Garcia:

Thank you very much. We didn't even talk about bull riding, but we'll get to that later

Brett Curry:

Bull riding next time. So I will end with this though. People have to follow you on social. So you're a great follow on LinkedIn, but you're also active on Instagram and other channels.

Leah Garcia:

Yes, yes. I'm still old school, Leah Garcia TV Act. Elastin is where the brand is found, but I am more on the speaking circuit these days. So LinkedIn is probably one of the best places to find my whereabouts.

Brett Curry:

And you got some great content recently about those speaking engagements, so check it out. Leah Garcia on LinkedIn and Instagram. Leah, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure and we'll chat soon.

Leah Garcia:

I'm stoked. Thank you so much. Cheers.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. As always, thank you for tuning in. Would love to hear feedback from you. If you've not left us, that review on iTunes means the world to us. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

This one is a bit nerdy. But it’s soooooooooo important to the success of your marketing efforts and the future of your business.

For this episode I sat down with Tom Leonard, a fractional marketing leader who specializes in operationalizing Media Mix Modeling and incrementality testing. 

We dive deep into the often confusing world of marketing measurement. We debunk myths about attribution and we reveal what truly drives customer acquisition. 

For ecommerce brands struggling to understand where their marketing dollars are actually working, this conversation offers practical insights on how to move beyond misleading platform metrics.

‍

Key Takeaways

• Attribution is broken: Learn why Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) tools often fail to deliver accurate insights, especially in today's privacy-first digital landscape, and why they can lead to poor budget allocation decisions.
• The power of incrementality testing: Discover how properly designed tests can reveal the true causal impact of your marketing efforts by comparing control groups against test groups, allowing you to see beyond your .com sales to impacts on marketplace and retail channels.
• Media Mix Modeling demystified: Understand how MMM correlates marketing activities with business outcomes over time, providing insights into diminishing returns and helping answer the crucial question: "Where should I put my next marketing dollar?"
• Avoid the high ROAS trap: Find out why channels showing the highest ROAS in platform metrics (like branded search) might actually be the least incremental to your business, and why cutting them first during budget constraints could be your smartest move.

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Tom Leonard:

How much is media contributing relative to customer base is a really nice place to start. And the benefit of running incrementality and media mix modeling is informing the model with some of that causal data.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we have got a doozy of an episode. We're talking about the three horsemen of measuring your marketing effectiveness. We're talking MTAs Multitouch attribution. We're talking M'S. Media mixed modeling. We're talking incrementality. It's going to be nerdy, but I also promise you it's going to be practical and it will make you more money. And so we'll hopefully make it fun as well. And so my guest today is Tom Leonard. We are LinkedIn friends first. So I saw Tom on LinkedIn posting about incrementality, talking about MMM, throwing shade on certain tools and stuff like that on LinkedIn. And I'm like, this is my type of guy. So I reached out, we had a call, and then we're like, Hey, we got to record a podcast. Let's create some insights for people on the pod. And so Tom is a fractional marketing leader. He's operationalizing MMM and incrementality testing, and I'm delighted that he's my guest today. So Tom, with that intro, how's it going? And welcome to the show.

Tom Leonard:

Good. Thanks for having me, Brent. Excited to be here. And yeah, some of my favorite things to talk through, so excited to do it. Good stuff.

Brett Curry:

It's good stuff, man. So briefly, before we dive into the meat of the content here, what's your background and how did you become a guy who's operationalizing MMS and incrementality?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah. And what does that even mean?

Brett Curry:

That's a good point,

Tom Leonard:

For sure. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So spent most of my career thus far on the agency side at performance agencies. And I'd say the crux of how I got to where I'm now, or I've been reflecting back a little bit more on the why I have such a passion for measurement. And I was at a pretty hardcore DR agency, and it was right shortly after TRUBY for Action came out when YouTube was starting to invest in, DR. Moved into a new role we had created with a centralized group of basically people who had different areas of subject matter expertise and a few analysts that ran tests across a pretty large client base. And I was our YouTube SME, and worked with a couple analysts to run a bunch of tests. And really it was to evangelize how to, and is YouTube a platform to drive growth?

And it was really interesting because I started spending a lot of time on YouTube and then also connect to TV and broader programmatic video. And it was this really interesting, for me, the biggest learning was less about how to make YouTube as effective as possible, but more how to help brands think about demand creation as opposed to just demand capture. And frankly, the difficulty of getting brands to leverage YouTube relative to connected tv, because YouTube sat so close to Google ads and therefore last click attribution and see tv, you couldn't click and was sexier in a deck. And it was just this sort of recognition of the irrational kind of human behavior just in any sort of industry or any thing in life. But it sort of helped frame up this idea of you really have to do more than just, I don't know, represent logic or rational arguments.

You really have to also bring the easy to understand clear data. And that's, I think what draws me to incrementality testing specifically and why that's sort of the backbone of a lot of what I do now. And I think I use the word operationalizing, NMM and incrementality testing. And really what I mean by that is a lot of people will run medium mix models or run incrementality tests, but oftentimes they'll sit in a slide or in a report to be shown once, but never to be looked at again. And so what I'm really trying to do with brands now is how do you build a framework and a repeatable methodology to get insights from tests, but not just leave them as insights but to take action? Because the only way that you create value from any of these sort of testing methodologies and measurement methodologies is by acting on the insights. And so that's sort of what I mean by my funky little headline of those words.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good, man. And it's one of those things where data really doesn't matter if you don't take the right actions from it. And what's so interesting, and our paths are similar in that I got my start in actually TV and radio and doing traditional media, and then I got into SEO and paid search, but I loved video. Video was my thing, but I love paid search as well. And then when TrueView and TrueView for Action came out, I was like, whoa, these are all my world's colliding.

Tom Leonard:

This is

Brett Curry:

Video and there's some search components, at least some search intent involved there. And it's direct response. I've always been a direct response guy. I believe that marketing should drive an outcome, right? Advertising should drive a measurable outcome, and that should be measured in terms of new customers and profitable new customer acquisition. And what's really interesting, Tom, and I think this kind of feeds into the conversation we're having today. There was a period of time, so I grew up reading some of the classics. So David Ogilvy of course, but John Cap's tested advertising methods, Claude Hopkins Scientific Advertising. And they would do things like they would run and add in a newspaper or magazine and people would clip a coupon and bring it in, or they would call a certain number and they would track it and they would have codes and stuff. And I remember thinking once I got into e-commerce, I was like, oh man, we've got so many tools.

The world is so clear now we have every piece of data at our disposal. And now the more I've gotten into it and the more I've matured, I'm like, we've got more data. But I don't know that we've got more insights, and I don't know that we've got any more clarity. In fact, there's maybe more confusion. And I think it goes back to what you said a minute ago, this idea of demand generation versus demand capture. We're really good at measuring channels and campaigns that are demand capture, meaning they're capturing demand that's already out there. That's harder to measure the demand generation, which is usually where the magic happens. And so super excited to dive in here. I think what might be useful is let's talk about what are these kind of three horsemen that I laid out there, MTAs, multitouch, attribution, and incrementality. So let's start with MTAs first. So Multitouch attribution tools, what are they and what is your take on them?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, big question. Great question. Yeah, I mean, MTA been around for a while, different flavors and ways of trying to make it work, especially as so much has changed in privacy and the tech and tracking landscape. But ultimately the goal is to try to give fractional credit to all the touchpoints along a customer journey with a recognition that the last touchpoint click or last impression is ultimately not what drove that person to purchase. That may be the last or the only thing that you might see in something like Google Analytics or your analytics suite. But there's this general recognition that that is not what drove the purchase. So MTA, the kind of promise, which I ultimately think is a failed promise, is whether all the different touch touchpoint and then how can you value those differently. So maybe you use first touch, maybe you use even distribution.

The idea of data-driven attribution was the holy rail or the Promise many years ago, and I guess still to a degree for some is like, how do you know this channel was more additive or more necessary and therefore should get more credit than that channel? Which I think makes a ton of sense in promise. I think in reality it's really hard and I would argue impossible to do, especially as a lot of the ability to track users at a one-to-one level degrades generally my perspective, I'm very bearish on MTA, so that'll probably come through pretty strongly. But I guess I don't think the toothpaste is going back in the tube in terms of the ability to track a customer across all these different touchpoints, especially as the ability to track through or impression based touchpoint erodes. And then you really get reliant on clicks, which I think then leads to a lot of all the issues that just last click in general has. So I think it's really hard to make a compelling case for MTA. I've seen too many brands, especially trying to build MTA tools internally and just be a huge time and resource suck. And then when you ask to compare, show the multi-touch view versus last click, it's like, I don't know, 80 or 90% only had one touch point anyways, that's all that MTA model could see. So is it really that much more useful than last click?

Brett Curry:

It's sort of multi-touch when that can be measured, but usually it can't be.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, and

It never really answers the causality question either, which we'll get to when we talk about incrementality. And I always kind of tell this, I think the short story of why MT A isn't really viable anymore as all the tracking and privacy changes. But I think the slightly longer story is the kind of recognition that just because an ad was shown or a click occurred doesn't mean that that medium was needed or that channel was needed. It doesn't answer the causal question, what would've happened without this ad running? Did somebody just happen to use multiple touchpoints as navigation or was it more convenient to click on one of these ads that happened to be served? But if you're not comparing that to some sort of control group to really hard to assign causality to the fact that there just was a touchpoint.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it is so good. And it's one of those things where I remember again, early on, you would look inside of Google ads or you look inside of Meta or was back when it was Facebook only, and you were like, the data's here. I see row ads and I see clicks and I see performance and all that. Then you realize, well, wait a minute, this isn't fully accurate. If I add the two together, that's double my total revenue, so I can't just rely on what's in the platform. And that got worse as I was 14 was introduced and other privacy changes were made. But then MTA came along and it's like, oh, finally we're going to get to see the full picture. It's going to decipher, decode the shopping journey, and we're going to finally see with a keen eye in perfection exactly what caused this ad or what caused this purchase to happen.

And then we finally realized MTA is maybe just a third option. It's like, okay, Google's imperfect, Meta's data's imperfect, and then mt A, it's just imperfect too. So now we just got three imperfect things to look at and make decisions from. And in some ways it leads to more confusion than it leads to clarity. And now I don't want to wholesale discard MTAs because I do believe there's some helpful insights that can be gained there, but it's incomplete and incomplete at best. And one of the best analogies I've heard, and this actually comes from Ben Ter, who's also a LinkedIn friend, but I met him in person as well, but he talks about this analogy of, Hey, if we're trying to measure what caused people to watch this movie at our movie theater, and we look at all these results and 30% say they saw a billboard for our movies, 20% say they saw a TV ad, but you know what?

A hundred percent say they saw the poster on the door. So we're like, let's just cut everything. Let's just do the poster at the door and that's it. And you're like, well, wait a minute. Everybody saw it. Everybody was walking in the door. But the movie poster is not what caused someone to purchase. It was the billboard and the TV and some of the other things, word of mouth and other things that caused them to come in. And so this idea of causality, super, super valuable. So that really leads us to incrementality. So talk about incrementality. What is it and why are you on a quest to operationalize it?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, it's really the best way, if not the only way to establish that a causal portion that we've been talking about. It has a distinct control group, so it has a counterfactual, it has what would've happened without this intervention, whatever that intervention is. And there's a handful of ways to derive that counterfactual that control. The most common would be geographic based. So like a match market test. I've got this market over here that historically has behaved similarly to this market over here. I can see that in an AA test, the lines sort of move similar to one another. They're not, if they're influenced by outside factors, they're influenced

Brett Curry:

In what's an AA test for those who don't know

Tom Leonard:

Before an intervention happens. So just over time are those lines essentially moving together? Are external factors or stimuli equally impacting both sides of that test so that you can feel confident that when you do intervene and it becomes comparing A to B, the delta is what was a result of that intervention. So oftentimes it's my Atlanta and I don't know Memphis, maybe some other midsize city that you've done this market matching for. Historically, they both look like this on a line, all of a sudden you turn off ads on Facebook in Atlanta, what happens to your top line that Delta is what was attributed or should be attributed to advertising in Atlanta. Whereas the flip side of that would be attribution would say basically anything that was attributed to that could be attributed to that would really, it should just be the gap between a world where that ad does not exist compared to a world where that ad does exist.

We can't take credit for everything. We can only take credit for as much above and beyond what would've happened anyways. And so that's the basis of incrementality testing. There's other ways to do it. If you use a Facebook or Google conversion lift study because they own that auction or anybody that owns an auction, they can do that hold out for you at a user level. They can track all of those users regardless of if you serve an ad. Good examples are maybe easier to describe in a first party data capacity. If you're running email, you may blast all of your customers and say, Hey, I sent an email to all my customers and this many purchased. They went back to the website or clicked it. But if you just said, Hey, I'm going to serve just to odd number of customer IDs and not to even number customer IDs, I can then just compare, forget about who clicked on ads, who did anything.

I'm just going to look at my backend. I know I exposed these users, but not these users 50 50 split. They've historically kind of done the same thing. All I did was even an odd and just measuring the difference between those two groups. So really any way that you can establish a true control that passes that AA test. So before you intervene, do they continue to look similar? Are they influenced at the same rate so that you can feel confident that when you do intervene with new media, retracting media, some new sort of test that you are confidently comparing to what would've happened in a world without that intervention?

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. It's applying the scientific method with some rigor behind what happens when I turn this channel on, or what happens when I turn this channel off? What is the actual impact of this channel? And what's interesting is I remember back in my early days of being in the advertising world, this was when online stuff was just getting kind of warmed up. I was talking to this furniture store owner and I'm like, Hey, what do you do? Do you invest in radio ads? Do tv, do you do newspaper? And so as I went through Themm like, Hey, do you do radio ads? And he is like, yeah, I mean, yeah, I sort of do. And I'm like, newspaper's like, yeah, there's a big sale, something will happen. I'm like, well, what about tv? And he said, yes. And his eyes lit up and he is like, when I run TV ads, I feel it. People walk in the door, it happens. And I remember early on in my online career thinking, man, that was so unsophisticated. Did that guy really know what's going on? But now looking back, I'm like, yeah, that's maybe all that matters. That is incrementality in a real loose easy just to observe with your eyes think because you had one. Totally.

Tom Leonard:

Which I think people take for granted. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

They do.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

That's not exciting. That's not like, where's all your data? It's in my cash register. That's where all the data

Tom Leonard:

Is, especially for smaller brands, when you have the ability to feel if something's working or not working, if you double spend in something that you think is working really well because attribution says it's working really well, and all of a sudden your cash just doubles, even though your attributed number scales linearly, something has to give, right? And what has to give is it wasn't really causing any additional top line growth. It was just really good at getting the attributed credit. So I think the feeling it in the p and l is definitely overlooked.

Brett Curry:

It's valid, and it is overlooked though. You're a hundred percent, especially now that we have so many tools at our disposal. And I think another way to look at this, and look, I'm a Google guy, YouTube and Google is kind of where I really got my start in online

Tom Leonard:

Marketing.

Brett Curry:

But listen, branded search is a perfect example here. What happens, we see this all the time. What happens if you turn branded search completely off? Now, I believe, and this is top of front of the podcast, there are strategic ways to use branded search and there's ways to run it and not waste money, but a lot of people could shut it off and nothing happens, nothing. Maybe sales get in a little bit, but you take meta meta's really working and you shut it off and you feel it. Sales go down and that's an incrementality. Same is true for YouTube if you're doing YouTube the right way. And so yeah, I really like this. And one kind of anecdote here to share, we just did a test with Arctic, Arctic coolers, Yeti competitor, my favorite cooler, my favorite drinkware as well. And so they wanted to see, Hey, can YouTube drive an incremental lift at Walmart?

So they had just gotten into most Walmart stores, coast to coast. So we did exactly what you laid out there. We had a 19 test markets, 19 matched control markets. So similar markets. So think like a Denver and a Kansas City or the example, use Atlanta and whatever else that's kind of comparable. And hey, let's run YouTube in one and not in the other. And let's measure then the growth in Walmart sales, and let's do a comparison between the two in Walmart sales. And it was remarkable. It was about an eight week test. We had three test regions, so 19 markets, but three test regions, test region. One, we saw an average of 12% lift in Walmart sales. The test region two was like 15% lift. And then our final test region was 25% lift. And there were some standouts, like Oklahoma City was up 40% and Salt Lake City was up 48%.

But it was one of those things where, okay, now we look at that and we can say, okay, YouTube had a big impact. And what's also interesting, Tom, is we just ran the YouTube portion at OMG. They also did a connected TV test in other markets, not related, didn't see a lift, didn't see a measurable lift. And so it could be lots of that was not to throw shade on CTVI like CTV, so maybe they just did a wrong or wrong creatives or who knows what. But it's one of those things where it's like, okay, if you do this the right way, you should see an impact.

Tom Leonard:

And I think touching on the piece that I didn't mention, the other beauty or value of incrementality testing relative to attribution or mt a is the ability to see beyond your.com to be able to see what's happening on third parties like Amazon, what's happening in store. If you get that data own an operated store or if you can get that through wholesale data, it really simplifies. There's so much complexity. And I think that's, again, one of the rubs that I have with MTA is all of them, all of the data you have to wrangle together to try to patchwork this kind of story together. Whereas in incrementality testing, it's pretty straightforward. It's what did I spend and how did I run that spend in these by market by day or by week, and what was my sales? What were my sales? What were my new customers or whatever metric I'd want to look at with that same granularity and same dimension. And that's really it because you're really just trying to understand the relationship that calls the relationship between spend and outcomes, all that kind of muddy middle in the middle, trying to get it at the user level, which again, not going back into the tube really simplifies things.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it does. And another thing that was kind of interesting that came a light doing this test for Arctic is all of the ads we tagged with available at Walmart, shop at Walmart, find on the shelves and Walmart, whatever. We measured everything though in those markets. So you could look at Walmart sales, online sales, so the.com and Amazon. And what's interesting is the push to Walmart really worked. It's a reminder of what you ask someone to do in an ad is what they're going to lean towards. Because in some of the markets, we didn't see that much of an online lift. We saw some clicks and stuff like that, but the Lyft was at Walmart. But we also saw a pretty strong lift at Amazon as well, because I think that just speaks to, there's some people that are just going to buy everything from Amazon right there, tell 'em to go online value pro proposition. Is it on Amazon? Yeah, yeah,

Tom Leonard:

Yeah. Here in a day or two, it's hard

Brett Curry:

To beat, dude. It's hard to beat same price in a couple days. I don't have to leave my house. But yeah, really, really interesting. And so we'll circle back to that of course, but let's talk about then MMM or media mix modeling. What is that? How are you using that? And then how does that kind of relate to incrementality testing? Because again, going back to your tagline, Tom, you did not say operationalizing NTAs. You said operationalizing m and ms and incrementality. So what is MM and how does that pair with incrementality?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, basically a big correlation exercise trying to suss out without a true kind of holdout group, what is the impact and contribution of each media channel and also what would happen without media. So trying to suss out a lot of the same questions as incrementality, but basically using correlation as opposed to having a true holdout group. So basically, and I'm sure all the hardcore MMM people and data scientists will thumbs down this or whatever you can do to podcast, but hey, in this period of time, sales went up and nothing could really explain that other than the fact that TikTok spend went up and essentially doing that at a mass scale over longer periods of time trying to take into account anything that could explain that. So you'll always kind of flag it with these are promotions that happen, it should because you're going to give a model at least like two years worth of data or two years worth of data, it'll bring in seasonality and try to understand those sort of trends.

So it's trying to pull out if not seasonality, if not promotions, if not some other things that we are flagging. And it wasn't price reductions, it wasn't all these pieces, what was happening in media that could explain that change. And so that's ultimately what MMM is doing. It's a big correlation exercise, figuring out roughly what is the channel contribution to a top line revenue or order number and what's really important. I think the nicest part or the best first step with M is trying to get an understanding of a base, which is what it's going to be called or intercept what without the presence of ads, does this model think that my sales would be such that I can then calculate not a total CAC of just looking at total new customers divided by cost, but incremental to media or remove base from that equation, how many conversions were contributed because of media as this model sees, which no model is going to be perfect, no measurement method is going to be perfect, but it's a really nice place to start to say, I knew I couldn't account all new customers to advertising, but what's a good number to use or to start with?

Well, it looks like, and this will depend on the maturity of the brand, but a really mature brand, I mean super mature brand, the big CPGs might be like 99% base smaller brand might be something like 50% because you've got this word of mouth flywheel, you've got product market fit, but trying to get an understanding of how much is media contributing relative to customer base is a really nice place to start. And the benefit of running incrementality and media mix modeling is informing the model with some of that causal data. You see that a lot and there's a really powerful feature of media mix modeling is saying, Hey, yes, that's a correlation exercise, can't pull everything out, but let me inform the model or at least restrict the priors it can use or the coefficient, whatever you want to call 'em, what it's searching for to try to find a fit in this model and say, well, I did a hold out test. I know you don't have the causal data, but we ran this in this channel and that channel and helping that restrict the model and giving it data that it can't have without that human intervention can be a really powerful flywheel.

Brett Curry:

So using your incrementality test data, feeding that back into your MMM model to make it more accurate and more causal and make that correlation

Tom Leonard:

Stronger. Because the two things that are really like you're really trying to get, but you don't get with Multi-Tech attribution or attribution in general. And you do get with the combination of media mix modeling and incrementality testing is the incremental impact, the causal impact of what would've happened without the presence of ads as well as the diminishing returns curve, which we know can be really powerful and important too, is what has happened over time as I spend in that sort of a feature of big feature of media mix modeling is understanding where are you on a diminishing returns curve? Is there if I keep spending more, I know it's not going to scale linearly, but are there channels that diminish faster? Is there more headroom in other channels? And it really becomes this true optimization game of where do I put the next dollar? Ultimately the question that every marketer, every finance team is trying to answer is, Hey, if I find $20,000 into couch cushions, where do I put it? And if I need to give back $20,000, where do I pull from to have,

Brett Curry:

I want to hang out at your house and look at your couch cushions and find 20 grand? That's

Tom Leonard:

Great. Yeah, it's easy to give it back, but yeah, right. We're trying to figure out what is going to be the least impactful if I have to give the money back and cut budgets and where is it going to be the most impactful if I have another $20,000? Because the answer is not going to be found in what has the highest or the lowest ROAS in an attributed view. And in fact, that can have the complete opposite impact that you want.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, it's really great. So I want to actually talk about that point in a minute where if you've got cut budgets, which hey, listen, there's been some uncertainty even as we record this, tariffs up, tariffs down, markets up, market down, whatever consumer sentiment is all over the place. So if things get a little bit tight, what are we going to do? We can't slash marketing, we can't slash growth. I think that sends you into a death spiral, but we might have to get pull back and get more efficient. And so let's talk about that actually for a little bit. So where can you be led astray? I think you just made a post on LinkedIn about this, right? Where you start looking at performance, which feels like the smart thing to do, looking at ROAS and whatnot, and you're like, well, great, well, let's just cut the lowest ROAS campaigns and channels. We'll be fine. How does that lead you astray? And if you want to talk about your specific example to help illustrate these points, that'd be great.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, totally. I think the other one you're referring to is I think branded search, which we were talking about earlier. And I love using both a, because it can be really, if a brand is spending a lot of money there, it can be a really great place to go find those savings without impacting top line. But also frankly, it's really easy to understand. I think most people understand that up and down the organizational chart across departments, everybody sort of understands the idea of, Hey, if somebody's already searching for my brand, do I need to pay to get that click and that conversion? And I found that just the fact that it's easy to understand can be a really good gateway to incrementality testing because it's easy to get buy-in. Everybody understands that idea, whereas it may be more challenging to express that idea in other types of campaigns.

But branded search is a good example, and the example that you're referring to, kind of a midsize brand that I was working with went through that exact exercise, had to cut budgets. They looked at up and down the campaigns they were running. It was like, Hey, we just got to make the best decision we can with the best available data. They were basically running p max non-branded search and branded search and p max and branded search where had the best attributed roas Best CPA non-brand was really hard to justify in a lower budget kind of environment based off the attribution data cut that leaned a little bit more into branded search as a percentage of their budget. And over the next couple months, new customers in total revenue was declining despite the attributed ROAS and CPA looking even better than ever. And that's where was brought in, looked at all these things, saw the loose correlation to non-brand and new customer acquisition and top line, just the general skepticism that many have around branded search, especially in a low competition environment, which they were in.

There weren't many competitors in the auction that we could see in Auction Insights. So yeah, ran a very blunt instrument match market test, which at a brand of that size and for a branded search I don't think is ever a bad idea. And yeah, no impact to branded search. It was about 20% of their budget, which was substantial that you can either make the decision, I'm going to put that 20% back in my pocket or save it for a rainy day or give it to some other place in the org or say, Hey, I'm going to redistribute this to something that I see in correlation data that might help drive top line backup. Let's reinvest that in non-brand as opposed to keeping it in branded. Again, complete opposite of what attribution would say. And you see that a lot frankly with branded search is an easy one to pick on.

Same with retargeting, but really anything that's especially challenging with the black box solutions that blend, and I'm sure we could do a whole talk show on p max Advantage plus some of the things that bundled together historically radically different levels of incrementality can be a real challenge when you're then measuring on attribution. But yeah, a ranty way of saying yes, finding areas to cut oftentimes if you follow the attribution kind of data can lead to really kind of impactful in a negative way business outcomes because the attribution view just does not take into account what would've happened without the presence of those ads like Incre Ality does. And so can definitely lead brands astray as they're looking to cut.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, really interesting. And yeah, max notorious for leaning into remarketing or branded search. If you're not diligent about that, it can lean into both of those things. And so got to be mindful of that. You also quoted something that totally ties into this. It's from a shop talk talk that you went to shop Talk the show, and I can't remember who said it, but if you see high roas, I know something is wrong and that the auto targeting is just finding existing customers. Do you remember actually who said that and unpack a little bit?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, I forget his name and I could look real quick. He worked for

Brett Curry:

Mic

Tom Leonard:

The Post Dan Danone, the big CPG. Yeah, I just really appreciated that quote because I mean always wonder if I live in sort of a bubble of being super passionate about incrementality versus attributed metrics, but that was just really refreshing to hear because I don't think that's the natural,

Brett Curry:

It's not

Tom Leonard:

Thought in people's

Brett Curry:

Head spend more,

Tom Leonard:

But I really think it should kind of spark some skepticism, especially when your goal really is to try to drive new customers.

My first, especially if you think about both incrementality in the context of a SC or pex that's blending retargeting and prospecting by default and knowing diminishing returns are my first dollars, yes, they're going to be the most effective, but if they are focused on people that are already buying from me and my goal in my head is new customers, I should be shocked that I can spend a hundred dollars and drive this amazing new customer revenue and not think that something is up or even over time as I continue to spend our BS meters should probably go up a little bit more. And I don't think they do by default. So I found that comment really refreshing.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I think that really illustrates that, right where it's like most of us would think, oh, ROAS is going up great, we're printing money. Whereas maybe you should say BS detector, something's wrong here. This campaigns leaning into customers that we're going to buy anyway. And I'll give two examples here to illustrate this a little bit more. And I'll also, since we've been picking on branded search so much, I'll share a couple of ways I think we should use it. One,

Tom Leonard:

If

Brett Curry:

Other competitors are aggressively bidding on, just know that if you're not Nike and you're not Adidas and you're not like Ford or something, it's not a lock. If it's a new customer, they could be swayed by a competitor. And that's generally how we like to separate it out is like, let's have branded search for returning customers and let's make that crazy efficient or just turn it off altogether.

Tom Leonard:

If

Brett Curry:

It's a new customer, then again, we want it to be very efficient, but maybe we want it on because we don't want our competitor to come in and swipe us to give and swipe our customer. And so one example of this, I did a podcast with Brian Porter, he's the co-founder of Simple, modern, great Drinkware brand has become a friend and they did a study incrementality study and they found, I'll get these numbers off, but it was like branded search was 10% incremental. So basically what that means is if it shows that I got a hundred new customers from Branded Search, I probably would've gotten 90 of those if I had shut it off, right? Only 10% were incremental. So then what you would need to do there is you need a 10 x row as on branded search for it to even make sense. If it's below that, you're completely wasting money.

Pair that with, and you and I were commenting on the House analytics, HAUS, Olivia Corey and team did 190 incrementality studies involving YouTube and they showed with tremendous amounts of rigor that hey, YouTube is probably 342 times more incremental, meaning if you see a one in platform, it's actually like a 3 42 in terms of incremental impact. And so wildly different between those two. But again, we're just so drawn to in platform row as man, we'll just say spin, spin spend on p max and branded search when really we should be saying, let me lean into YouTube or let me lean into top of funnel meta.

Tom Leonard:

I think both those examples too are really good examples. To me it also speaks though to the importance of cost per incremental almost being more important than incremental percent incremental. And that's something I always use with branded search. I think you and I have a very similar feeling around branded search. There's definitely a time and a place for it, and it's one of those things where it might not matter that it's 10% incremental, 10% incremental relative to what Google's attributing. If your attributed CPA is a dollar and now it's $10, but your margin when you sell a product is a thousand dollars like hammer that all day long, that cost per incremental is still extremely profitable and valuable. And same with the YouTube piece. If YouTube was four times as incremental as Google said, but your YouTube was crazy expensive, it still might not be worth it even though it's four times

Brett Curry:

More

Tom Leonard:

Incremental than the platform was making. And that's how I think a lot about this with connected tv where connected TV can be super powerful and maybe more so than linear tv, but if you can buy scatter linear TV for a 10th of the cost of CTV, well it just has to be more than a 10th as effective and it's accreted, it's a positive. So it becomes more of comparison of a cost per than just a blanket. How incremental is something which I always think is important to focus on and call out

Brett Curry:

To. Yeah, it's so good. I mean measuring something in terms of percentages can provide insights and help make decisions, but ultimately it's the cost per right. Translate that into real dollars to see if it makes sense. 100% agree with you, but I think this also goes back to and use your linear TV example, and I still love TV and connected TV and stuff. Again, I'll use YouTube just because I've got the numbers in my brain, but with YouTube sometimes we'll see a $5 CPM or a $7 CPM in certain audiences compared to other channels that are 15, 20, 30, 50, whatever. Totally. And I'm like, well, if we're reaching the right person and if the message and offer are good, how could this not work? And it's one of those things where it's like, okay, we're either one of those is off, we're talking to the wrong person, that's the wrong message, or we're just not measuring it properly and that's where we need to look at it. So did you have a thought on that? You another question on MM here in just a second.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, yeah, totally. But it made me think of the idea of, I think the reason I'm starting to become way more bullish on any channel that's historically been hard to measure where I think there's that arbitrage opportunity of costs are still relatively low because people haven't all moved in because it's easy to attribute. It'll be really interesting with a house example, does that inspire a lot more YouTube buyers? That's something that Google should have put out way long ago, but I think it would undermine undermine search and that's their bigger business. And I could do a whole kind of rant and I'll save you that, but the idea of incrementality first measurement probably wouldn't be great for the search business. So probably exactly, haven't been able to make such a good point that case on YouTube. But you think about all the channels that have historically been harder to attribute, that's where costs are deflated just from a supply and demand perspective. So when you can move in and get CPMs at five to $7 and it's really effective, but most people that are measuring through attribution don't know it's really effective, that's a huge win for certain period of time until everybody's flood, everybody and the costs go

Brett Curry:

Up the market. I'm sure there's a lot of people that were not excited to see that study from house like dang it, that means my costs are going up. I don't like that at all. So really good man. So we talked about incrementality testing and I think you can use tools like House and then there are others. We're just talking about work magic and there's a number of others you can lean into. Full disclosure, they're pretty expensive, but you can also do stuff on your own too. If you've got someone that can measure this stuff, you can do a little bit of it on your own. What about the MMM side of things? What's kind of the easy way to start there? Is there an easy way to start? What do you recommend to people

Tom Leonard:

There? I don't know. I dunno if there's an easy way to do anything. I think, well, I guess that's not totally true. I think there's some ways to run relatively easy incre tests. So I think that's the easier place to start. Certainly you can always ratchet up the scientific rigor. I think the problem with looking for an easy MM solution is anybody could run a model with Robin or there's a lot of open source packages, but just because you can run a model, it could say anything. It's not necessarily rooted in this can all of a sudden predict the future and tell you exactly the contribution from media. Whereas incrementality can do that a little more out of the box. You may have wildly wide confidence intervals, but it answers the question. It gives you the comparison. I didn't do it in this market, I did it in this market.

What is the Delta Media mix modeling? You could build a model to tell sort of any story. The proof is sort of in the pudding of if I do the thing that the model says, does it change my top line? Can I see over time that when I listen to the model that improves my top line? So it's a lot easier to get started with incrementality testing. You can run poor man's match market tests as I sort you can just sort of pick, some markets historically behave similarly and there's certainly some risk there, but with a model you might think that it's an amazing model. I just don't feel like there's a great place to DIY that together without some real scientific or statistical rigor. Or if you do, you've just got to try to prove it over and over by taking some big swings.

And that's really, I sort of feel like you can get away with the kind of feel it sort of tests without really running a true incrementality test or model. If you're a small enough business and you spend a decent amount on Facebook, maybe you're not willing to turn off Facebook, but are you willing to drastically increase spend and see if you can feel something at the top line? Okay, then what happens if you cut it in half? What happens? And start to understand those curves on your own is probably a less risky way than trying to, I've never done anything in R and I'm going to run or done any sort of medium amount. I'm going to try to run one. That's probably a risky proposition.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's a really good insight. I'm glad you answered the question that way. I think, yeah, leaning into the poor man's incrementality test or just leaning really heavily into a channel and measuring your top line if you've got a small enough business to look at that, but probably if you're going to lean into MM M1, you need a couple years of data and so to be able to make some correlations and you probably need to lean in to someone or a tool with quite a bit of experience because you can do that astray.

Tom Leonard:

And on your comment on cost too. I mean it's all relative and a lot of times where you're going to need a medium mix modeling is when you're spending a significant amount in a significant number of channels, which you're probably only doing if you are spending a lot total, which you're probably only doing if your revenue can support that high level of spend, which means that a tool may not be all that expensive relative to the opportunity you could derive from it, which is where I always net out.

Brett Curry:

So I'm paying 10 or 20 grand for a tool monthly, but it's allowing me to redeploy millions in ad spend. And it totally in completely makes sense. So Tom, this has been fantastic. I'm just watching the clock. I know we're kind of coming up against it, but one, I recommend people follow you on LinkedIn. You put out some awesome content. I love reading it.

Tom Leonard:

Thank

Brett Curry:

You. People should definitely follow you on LinkedIn and you are, is it Tom, what is your handle on LinkedIn? You are Thomas B. Leonard. Thomas B. Leonard. That's probably confusing.

Tom Leonard:

I'm very self-conscious of LinkedIn, so I'm glad to thank you for saying that.

Brett Curry:

I think it's good, man. I think it's really good. I like it a lot. Yeah.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, it's been fun to start doing connecting with folks. Definitely an area that had a lot of excitement and passion for, it's fun to have these sort of conversations, so I appreciate you reaching out a while ago and that we could connect. Absolutely,

Brett Curry:

Man. Absolutely. So then if other people were like, Hey, I just want to talk to Tom because maybe you can help my brand or my business, how can they connect with you and who are you looking to or who do you feel like you can help?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, definitely appreciate that. Yeah, reach out on LinkedIn. I spend time there. I love reading everybody's thoughts and content. So yeah, reach out on LinkedIn mostly we work with consumer facing brands that are trying to understand where to put the next dollar or where to pull in the scenarios. They have to really kind of rescue people from attribution, trying to better understand where they can get more with their ad dollars. I think to your point that you teed up now is such an interesting time or anytime that there's margin pressure, there's more scrutiny on a marketing budget. Really want to try to help empower marketing teams to feel more confident with what they're doing and ultimately the finance teams to feel more confident with what marketing team is doing. Hundred percent. That's where I love to plug in, but also just love to talk about this stuff probably more than I should. So always open to the conversation.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I talk about that a lot. I've read analytics and measurement books on vacation and my wife is like, what is wrong with you? And I'm like, it's interesting. I don't know. I like it. And so totally, we are just a different breed I suppose, but I love that. And then I think this is a great way to end it where if I've got an extra dollar to spend on marketing, where do I put it? If I need to cut a dollar of spend, where do I cut it from? And that's really what this approach is about MMM and incrementality. And so I think their necessities, I think attribution is broken and or misleading in so many different ways. There's some correlations there, so we don't have to throw it out completely, but I do believe you need to lean into MMM and incrementality for short. So connect with Tom on LinkedIn. And with that, we'll wrap. Tom's been fantastic. Thanks for the time, the insights and the energy. Yeah,

Tom Leonard:

Thanks so much Brett time. Glad to connect.

Brett Curry:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. If you found this episode helpful, someone else in the D two C space or marketing space, and you think, man, they got to listen to this, please share it. We mean the world to me. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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In this insightful episode of the E-commerce Evolution Podcast, host Brett Curry sits down with Jhana Li, founder of Spyglass Ops, to tackle one of the biggest challenges holding back growing businesses: operational constraints. While many entrepreneurs excel at product development and marketing, they often hit a ceiling when it comes to building operational systems and processes. Jhana shares her expertise as a transformational operations consultant who has helped hundreds of seven and eight-figure businesses scale by creating systems that allow founders to work on their business rather than in it.

Key Takeaways

• Strategic Vision Beyond "More Growth" - Jhana reveals why simply wanting "more" isn't a strategy and how to create a meaningful vision aligned with your personal goals. She explains why many founders reach their revenue targets only to feel trapped and unfulfilled.
• Creating an Environment for A-Players to Thrive - Learn why hiring top talent isn't enough; you need systems, clear expectations, and a culture that empowers them. Discover how to transform your existing team into high performers through better leadership.
• The Four Essential HR Processes - Jhana breaks down the systematic approach to hiring, onboarding, coaching, and firing that creates a high-performance culture. Her 14-day "bootcamp" approach to onboarding new team members is particularly eye-opening.
• The Power of Radical Ownership - Find out how transferring ownership of outcomes to your team members creates accountability and allows you to step into the visionary role instead of being stuck in day-to-day operations.
• Reframing the Firing Conversation - Discover why letting someone go can be an act of service rather than something to avoid, and how to approach these difficult conversations with compassion and clarity.

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Jhana Li:

We got all these all-star athletes on our team, we're saying, why the heck are you always three steps behind me? Why are you always waiting for me to make the next decision or hand out the next task or come up with the next idea? We get so frustrated and what we realize is actually we haven't told them where they're going.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about operations, operational constraints, operational bottlenecks, issues that you need to fix if you want to scale. Because here's what I believe most agency owners like me, most brand owners like you, you're really good at product, you're really good at marketing or scale or growth, but operations, maybe that's a part of the business. You don't want to think about a whole lot, but I guarantee you, without operational systems, processes, the right people, all of that good stuff, you will hit a ceiling and we're going to bust through that ceiling on this episode today. So want to welcome to the show, Ms. Jonna Lee, she's the founder of Spy Glass Ops. More on that in a second. Jonna, how's it going? And welcome to the show.

Jhana Li:

Thanks, Brett. I'm really excited to be here. It's going fantastic. It's spring here in Salt Lake City. No complaints.

Brett Curry:

Springtime in I love.

Jhana Li:

I know. I'm ready for it. Love

Brett Curry:

Springtime. And so John and I got to hang out at an event recently hosted by one of my business partners, Tom Shipley, called Deal Con. Jonna was rocking the stage talking about how to form good integrations if you're doing m and a, but it was all around ops. And so your company, John, us, by Glass Ops, you guys help with your transformational operations company, right? So you help with consulting, recruiting, coaching. You help seven and eight figure brands and businesses get unstuck and scale from an operation standpoint. Can you talk a little more about that, a little more about your background there?

Jhana Li:

Yeah, I think you covered it beautifully. So my background is as a COO, I was in that second in command operator position for multiple different successful startups, and that's where I really learned the tools of the trade. And then I had the opportunity to be an operations coach in this coaching program that had hundreds of startup owners in it. And that was really the big unlock for me, Brett, because I had hundreds of businesses pulling back the kimono, so to speak, and just showing me the reel of what's going on behind the scenes, what's not working, what's breaking, where are they struggling as they're scaling through 7, 8, 9 figures. And so I got to just compile all this data around what are the common patterns and themes that hold startup founders back from achieving, not just the revenue and the profit goals that they have for the business, but also the lifestyle, the freedom goals, creating a version of their company that can actually run without them.

And so that is really what I became passionate about. And four years ago I started the company to help entrepreneurs go through that critical stage of growth so that the company can start to become an asset, a machine that is going to run with or without them, and they're able to take that to a successful multi eight figure nine figure exit. They're able to take that to a lifestyle business that produces passive cashflow, but ultimately it's around unlocking the founder so that they're able to achieve the best version of their business and the best version of their life.

Brett Curry:

It's so great. And yeah, allowing the founder, the visionary, you've got brilliant ideas. And again, you're a product person, a marketing person, salesperson, whatever. For me, I'm all about setting vision, forming partnerships. I like sales, I like solving interesting marketing problems. I'm not an ops guy. I can respect a good system. I can spot a good system. I'm not going to sit down and design one, and at least I'm not going to do it and enjoy

Brett Curry:

Myself.

Brett Curry:

And so I've had the privilege of working with two amazing COOs throughout the journey of OMG commerce in our path to multiple seven figures. So I see the value there and I'm really excited to unpack this and give some insights to our listeners, but would love to hear from you what are some of the mistakes, bottlenecks, issues that you see founders running into when it comes to ops?

Jhana Li:

Oh my gosh, how long we got? Okay, so I would say that statistically, right? So we start all of our client relationships with a company-wide operational audit. So we've actually looked at the data and we've run these numbers and about 80 to 90% of the time, the key and critical bottlenecks holding startup founders back fall into one of four categories. The first category is strategic vision, meaning they don't actually know where they're trying to take the company or how exactly they're going to get to their revenue

Brett Curry:

Profit goals. We want to growth is

Jhana Li:

Our vision exactly more better. That's hot strategy. Strategy doesn't offer your team a direction to run in, and it ultimately leaves the founder pretty directionless in terms of what decisions to make and what to drive towards. So a lack of strategic vision or what's an interesting one that we see, Brett, is that they'll have a strategic vision that is totally out of alignment with their personal goals. So my personal goal is that I want a lifestyle business that's going to run without me, but the version of my company that I'm building is one where the product is totally reliant on me. Nothing can move forward without me, and I want to double revenue in the next 12 months. It's like these things are at odds with each other. And so we often have to hold up the mirror and say, which do you want more?

And then let's build a roadmap to get you to that and let's adjust your business and your plan for growing your business. So it actually gets you to the goals that you have outside of just work and revenue. So that's a big one that we see fairly often. The second big one is a lack of an operator, which should not be a surprise to anyone. And this is why we layered in operations recruitment as one of our core offers because either you've got somebody who's been in that role and is now no longer cutting it, in which case we have to figure out can they grow and can the business afford the time that it's going to take for them to grow into the COO that you need, or you do not have that person. Maybe you think you do, right? Maybe it's your wife, maybe it's your best friend, maybe it's a actual COO that we hired off on LinkedIn, but are they actually the person that you need in the role? Yes or no? And we need to go out and find that person because like you said Brett, you can respect operations, but you respect it enough to not touch it and to know the value of having someone who is an expert who can actually do the work.

Brett Curry:

And if the goal is getting that building, that machine, that machine that consistently produces results and spits off cash, you got to think about ops. And I really liked the way you laid that out. And I think it's one of those scenarios where we all do want more. We all do want to grow, but what will get you there is not what got you here. What got you here won't get you there. The title of that famous book, and I think that's true both in terms of your systems or lack thereof, your processes, but also that operator, right? Yes, the COO or the operator that got you to 5 million or to 10 million is probably not the same operator that will get you to a hundred million.

And maybe because people can grow and people can change and evolve, but generally speaking, you're going to have to either upgrade that person and upskill them or find someone who can grow you to 20 million, 50 million, a hundred million and that type of thing. So really great. So I love the way you identify that. So as you kind of lay that out, where do you see people in that, let's call it 10 to 50 million range? I know it's going to be different depending on the business category, brands that can still be a pretty lean team agencies, that's a pretty big team. What are some of the hurdles that they have to overcome? What are some of the systems they need to put in place or people they need to put into place to really become that operational machine?

Jhana Li:

So this really comes down to a couple of core categories, and the big one that I see in that 10 to 50 million range is that it comes down to leadership and not just can you as a CEO founder become a bigger, better version of yourself and the leader that your company needs next from you? Can you step fully out of our executive coach calls the three levels of entrepreneurship. The first level is producer where you're just showing up, you're doing everything. Okay, we probably got out of that a while ago. We stepped out of that level. The next level is leader. Great. So now can we be a leader that is able to delegate tasks, action, align a team, drive them towards a vision, that's the leadership level. And then the third level is visionary. Can we actually hand off day-to-day leadership of our team to managers, to department heads to people who are not only able to manage tasks but actually make decisions on our behalf? And when we're able to create that, we get to step into the third level, which is visionary, where our role, our highest value work is to make decisions and set strategy on behalf of our company and to have the vision, to hold the vision, to keep the team aligned around the vision, but to then to hand off the actualization and the execution of that vision to a team that we've put in place that we trust.

Brett Curry:

So hard to do, man, so hard. As someone who I do, I am a visionary, I'm not the integrator. And so I do setting the vision, casting the vision, but giving up control the vision or delegating decision-making can be quite difficult. Before we get there though, I do want to maybe step back for a second and talk about how do you clarify, and I've got some thoughts here on what we've done as an agency and some work we've done even recently internally. But you talk about the strategic vision and the strategic vision is not more do it better, do it more. That's not it. That's not clear at all. How do you coach people or what advice do you give them to say, okay, it may be clear in your head, but the way you're saying it is not clear to your team. How do you coach people in making that vision clear?

Jhana Li:

Yeah, a hundred percent. So the first thing is that we have to clarify. Two, we have to answer two questions and how, what does success look like? What is the finish line for this business? What are the north star goals and metrics that we are going to drive towards? So what looks like revenue, looks like profit, looks like a target valuation that you want to exit at. It's the finish line of the race that you are running. If you don't have a finish line, how the heck are you going to run the race? And so what we often see challenges around the, what is that? I talked to a dude at a mastermind who exited for 50 million million. So now I want to exit for 50 million. The challenge is that's the vision, 50 million, that's the vision. I did it right? But the problem is is that 50 million means nothing. That is a totally arbitrary number. It's not attached to any deeper meaning. It's not attached to any quality of life you're trying to create. It is throwing a dart at a dartboard, picking a number and saying

Brett Curry:

That's not good or the value, value you're going to be generating and offering to the marketplace to be worth 50 million. It says nothing

Jhana Li:

A hundred percent. So we pick these arbitrary finish lines and then what happens? It gets hard to run the race. And so we end up just switching the finish line and picking a different race, and we end up just pivoting and pivoting and pivoting and creating all these different sets of goals because we don't actually have fundamental and intrinsic conviction or attachment to those goals, or even we end up hitting those goals and then we feel nothing because it didn't mean anything to begin with. And so that's the existential crisis that we have to coach our clients through where they're like, wow, I really wanted to get to seven figures. I really wanted to get to eight figures and now I'm here and I'm more trapped by my business than ever. I'm falling out of love with my business. I've never felt less free. I'm not doing any of the things that I wanted to do or that I thought I could do by the time I reached this, why the hell am I doing this and do I need you to just burn this thing down and walk away? So strategic vision again is like, let's define the what and let's define the what against what actually matters to you as a founder, as an individual, as a human, and not just as an entrepreneur. And then let's make sure that the target you're setting for your business is actually going to get you what you want. So that's the first part of strategic vision.

Brett Curry:

So good. I'll share a couple of insights from some work we've done recently here at OMG because I really believe that setting the mission and vision and things like that, it really shows the team, this is who we are and how we're going to show up. And this is very clearly where we're going. And so I'm a big fan of statements and simple statements that carry meaning and that can help make decisions and help guide you. And so a couple that we've leaned into as an agency, and then I want to talk about the thing called the V two Mom. I'm curious if you've heard of that, talk about that in a second. But the first thing that we've leaned into here over the last couple of years is we want to be the most trusted, most loved digital marketing agency that feels like an in-house team.

Now, that may seem a little bit like a strange statement, most trusted, most love that feels kind of mushy, but here's what I believe that is tied to that trust piece that ties back to competence in the agency world. People want agencies they can trust and that they trust your expertise and they feel like, Hey, if I'm getting your feedback on something, I can count on it, I can believe it, I can take it to the bank, that type of thing. The most loved piece is when I figured I would get a lot of pushback on. But actually as I've showed this to PE firms that I know and others are like, dude, I actually kind of like it because, and we've heard this, we've heard this even from clients that are leaving OMG, they're like, we love you guys. We love your team, but we're leaving for this, that, or the other. Our team is we sold or whatever, but then also feels like an in-house team. And so it feels like an extension of the team. We've had people say to us, Hey, your team feels like my team. And so we crafted that in such a way that that should guide. How are we going to respond to emails? How are we going to show up to meetings? How are we going to respond in Slack because of those things? And so that's one of the statements. Curious how that strikes you

Or anything that sparks there.

Jhana Li:

I love that so much. It is a reminiscent of an exercise that we walk our clients through EOS calls it the three uniques. We call it the golden triad. And it is the three core characteristics that you from your competitors, why would somebody choose to work with you? And the example I always give is think about McDonald's versus a five star Michelin restaurant, right? Here's the vision statement. I so often hear Brett, and especially in the agency space, oh my gosh, we want to be the best. We want to be the best agency for e-com brands, but what is the best?

Brett Curry:

That

Jhana Li:

Means nothing to me. McDonald's is the best, but STO is a Michelin star restaurant.

McDonald's is the best at being fast, cheap and easy. Those are their three uniques. A Michelin star restaurant is the best at being a luxury white glove experience, farm to table, whatever. So what are the three uniques that guide your business, that differentiate you from others? What I heard you say was loved, trusted, feels like an extension of your in-house team. Cool. What's amazing about that is that now we get to go through our entire client happiness journey and anything that does not directly drive love, trust, or seamless integration, we don't do it. We don't do it. We don't have to do it because it's not why clients choose to work with us. And we get to become the best at those three things because we're not trying to be the best at everything else. Everything. And that's where most agencies and brands get stuck is that we're too diluted in who we serve in how we serve them uniquely well. We try and be everything for everyone and then we end up being nothing for no one.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's one of those things where you can do anything. You can be anybody. Your company can be anything, but it can't be. Everything can be everything. You've got to choose. You got to select. So I'm curious. We actually went through this process. Actually our current COO is the one that turned me onto this called the V two mom vision, values, methods, obstacles and measures. So I think this was actually designed by Salesforce and marketing off there. It's really cool though. So set your vision. So this is where we're going clearly what we just talked about, your values, so this is what we believe about ourselves and what we will or won't do to get us there. Then your methods are these are the things we're going to do in all these departments, high level obstacles, these things are standing in our way and then measures.

These are clear targets that we're setting for ourselves in all these key areas. So it's been really great as we crafted that, shared that with the team, I think it's, I've already heard it sparked some interesting discussions, especially around the measures. We've got this 50% profitability target within each department and it's triggering everybody to look at like, Hey, how is that going to impact the profitability of the department, right? Because I know we got this 50% target, so I don't know that the actual structure of the strategy really matters. It's way more about do you have it? Does it make sense? And is it guiding the team?

Jhana Li:

Yes, a hundred percent. And that's such a key. That final piece is the point, right? Because what you just said, Brett, you've got this incredible vivid vision in your mind. You as the founder know exactly what that finishing line is exactly how you want to get there. But if you haven't shared it with your team in a way that they not only see it as clearly as you see it, but also understand how they can uniquely contribute towards it,

Brett Curry:

What

Jhana Li:

You end up doing is disempowering your team to be proactive. Because now again, no all-star athlete can run a race if you don't tell them where the finish line is.

And so we got all these all-star athletes on our team. We're saying, why the heck are you always three steps behind me? Why are you always waiting for me to make the next decision or hand out the next task or come up with the next idea? We get so frustrated and what we realize is actually we haven't told them where they're going. So how the heck could they help us get there? How could they walk alongside us as opposed to behind us if they have no idea what to be proactive and what to drive towards? So no, the framework really doesn't matter. EOS has a great one, V two, mom love it. We have our own right? We call it the navigational chart. It's less about whether it's the right framework and more around are you being consistent with it, and then are you repeating it and coming back to it constantly with your team? It takes the average person seven to 12 times of hearing something before it actually sinks into their brain. So we say it once and then we're like, cool, did that. Everyone's got the vision. Everyone knows where we're going. Our job becomes to be the chief repeating officer.

Brett Curry:

We

Jhana Li:

Say this again and again. We articulate the vision and the values and the goals and the metrics and all of these things again and again and again. And to us, we feel like crazy people because we've repeated ourselves a hundred times and how can they not get it? And when you feel that way, I can promise you your team is only just starting to get it. Keep going.

Brett Curry:

So good, so good. And I've heard that forever in the marketing world, just about the time you're sick of hearing an ad or hearing a message. Only then is the market even beginning to pay attention, right?

Brett Curry:

Totally.

Brett Curry:

And it's sort of similar with internal communication as well. You got to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it before people even start to get it. And so

Really great. Well, let's talk people for a minute because I'm a firm believer. This is true in the agency space, also true in the brand space. Any business, you're only as good as the people that you have on board. And I was listening to a podcast founders podcast that I love, and they were talking about Steve Jobs and maybe Elon Moss, maybe somebody else. They were talking about how they don't worry about overpaying for great talent because what they've found in certain industries may be a little bit different depending on your industry. But Steve Jobs said, Hey, the best talent, they may be two or more times, two or three times more expensive, but their work isn't two or three times better. It's 10 times better, a hundred times better, the output. And so I don't worry about that. I am getting the absolute best of my team now. Everybody's on their own journey. And so finding the right person for you isn't going to be what Steve Jobs was necessarily looking for, but how do you coach people on finding the right people when to identify that they need to hire, and then also would love to hear any hiring tips that you have. I think this is something that scaling businesses are often pretty bad at.

Jhana Li:

Yeah, a hundred percent. Oh my gosh. So this pillar of team is probably where we do the most amount of work with our clients because again, it actually becomes the deal breaker systems, not the deal breaker strategy, not the deal breaker. Do you have the right people in the right roles executing the right things and running in the right direction? Without that, your business will never be able to scale you without that. You will be that point of escalation. You'll become the system where every decision has to be yours, every idea has to be yours, every sign off and every right task needs your eyes on it and every quality assurance. If you are feeling stuck running the day-to-day of your business right now, I can almost guarantee you a root cause bottleneck is team. Now to be clear, that doesn't mean the solution is we have to go out, fire everyone and then just double all of our salaries and that will

Brett Curry:

Fix the problem. Exactly.

Jhana Li:

What we most often see is that clients will have incredible team members on the bus, but what we haven't done is created a player environment. We have a players,

But we haven't invited them to bring all that they are capable of to the table. We haven't given them a clear strategic vision that they can be proactive and innovative and creative and run towards. We haven't empowered them so that they feel confident in solving their own problems. They have the critical thinking skills to do it, and they know what they're authorized to make decisions around versus not. We haven't given them the right systems and technology so that they can be efficient and effective in their role. We're having them run around chasing down information, picking up dropped balls, putting out fires that didn't need to exist to begin with. And so we're wasting all of their time playing defense and doing all this low value work instead of doing the really high value, high leverage things that you actually paid them for. So my number one pro tip around team is that before you go out and just get better people, make sure that you have created an environment where your current people are able to bring their best to the table. And what that fundamentally comes down to is us as leaders, us as the founder, and then the leaders that we put in place to again, manage that frontline team. Do our leaders know how to build and manage a players and manage a high performance team environment?

Brett Curry:

Sometimes you don't have a players on your team, you're not ready for them. You've not done the work to make your company attractive for a players or where a players can shine. And I actually was thinking about football while you were laying that out. Honestly, I'm a chiefs football fan, longtime chiefs fan from Kansas City, and they've had several situations over recent years where they'll have a wide receiver that'll leave and go somewhere else and they don't do very good and they come back and then they're on the chiefs. They're amazing. And it's because you got Patrick Mahomes as your quarterback and you got Andy Reed who's helping call plays. You got a system that's a winning system, and so maybe a receiver that really sucks for another team. You put 'em in the chief's environment and they're going to shine because of all the things around them.

And so I think that's one of the things we got to keep in mind. It's not the key is not just paying more for talent. That just means you're guaranteed to have more money going out the door. It could work. It's not just about hiring a talent, it's about having the system where they're going to shine and the environment where they're going to shine. So what are some of the things, some of the tips you lay out there for business owners, founders to say, am I ready for A players and if not, what do I need to do to get ready?

Jhana Li:

Yeah, great question. So I would offer a reframe, which is you probably already have a players. The question is what are you lacking that's inviting them or not to bring it to the table? The

Brett Curry:

Top may be you, not the team in place.

Jhana Li:

Correct,

Brett Curry:

Correct.

Jhana Li:

Yes. So right, there are four core HR processes that I think every team needs to have to be able to consistently attract and retain a player talent. You need your hiring process, your onboarding process, which is absolutely key. Do not skip onboarding. You need your high performance management. So that's ongoing management and growth coaching for the people on your team. And then you need firing. How do we systematically either manage people up if there's underperformance or manage them out where we determine they're not the right fit and we get them off the bus? These things need to happen systematically. What I often see happen is they're happening organically. We're hiring by dropping a job description on Facebook and then hiring the first person that comes along because we needed this person three months ago and I really just need this person. And you seem smart and competent, not a proven system, not going to get you the A player.

Most of the time onboarding, we skip entirely. We just throw 'em in the deep end and we say they're an A player, they should learn how to swim. Truly a strong onboarding process will three x your average employee retention and increase your average employee productivity by 72%. And that has nothing to do with the caliber of people that you're hiring and onboarding. That just comes down to whether you are onboarding them effectively or not. Hiring, onboarding, growth, coaching, right? Managing. This is the area where we get to turn our B players into A players. This is where we're creating an environment that invites them to be their best or not. Are we tapping into their intrinsic motivators? Are we creating an environment of clearly defined accountability and radical ownership? Are we paying our people fairly with scalable compensation plans? Have we defined clear and exact roles so people know what is my job and what is not my job? There's a whole checklist, Brett, I could even send it to your group. I've got

Brett Curry:

That'd be amazing.

Jhana Li:

Eight core pillars of what goes into a high performance, a playing environment. And I'm happy to share that with everyone because just by implementing those eight things within your existing business, your existing team, you don't even have to pay them any more than you're currently paying them.

Brett Curry:

They

Jhana Li:

Promise you you will get a productivity increase of a minimum of two x because that's just how big of a deal it is when you start turning on a high performance environment.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good. And I want to go back to something I said a minute ago, just to clarify. The reason I shared the Steve Jobs of I don't care if I pay two or three x times for an employee, they're going to be

10 or a hundred times more valuable. That wasn't about salary, that was more about the right person can unlock things. But what I think is also really interesting about this environment right now is that there's a lot of A-players out there. There's a lot of great talent out there, and you can get them for a reasonable rate, like a good competitive salary. It's not the insanity that was kind of mid pandemic when everything was just off the rails. It's kind of more of a normal job market to a certain degree. And so there is good talent out there that you can find. So would love to have that checklist. We'll put in the show notes, we'll share that with everybody, but I also like the way you laid that out. So hiring, onboarding, ongoing coaching, and then firing. It's got to be systematic. That's to follow up process. But I think what most people will do are like, Hey, you're good. So come on board and figure stuff out. Watch this person. Watch that person. You'll get it.

Brett Curry:

Yes.

Brett Curry:

Imagine if going back again, going back to a football example, imagine if that happened there. That doesn't happen. You bring on a player, you get 'em indoctrinated and what you do, they immediately go to their position coach, they go to all these practices, they're watching film, they're constantly being evaluated, everything, everything is thought of. And obviously we're not quite like a professional sports team, but we need to be more like one, right? If we want a performance-based culture, we could probably learn a lot from that structure. So

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I love that. I love that.

Brett Curry:

I want to talk a little bit about hiring just because I think that's something that

Brett Curry:

It's a big one

Brett Curry:

Is intimidating to people. We screw it up so often. I can think about a couple of really bad mistakes that I've made as a business owner when it comes to hiring, but what are some of the, yeah, yeah, I mean we all do, but what are some of the hiring tips, insights, processes you recommend? Should I go with a recruiter or no recruiter? How am I going to find the right talent?

Jhana Li:

Yeah. Okay. So a couple of best practices when it comes to hiring, especially because for some positions or many positions, Brett, your clients are hiring remote team members, which is amazing. It means we get to tap into international job markets and all of these things. And also overwhelming because when we launch our average ops COO hiring funnel, we can get from 500 to a thousand applications. So how do we whittle that down? I always say that a strong hiring funnel is like a magnet. What does a magnet do? A magnet attracts, it attracts your ideal candidate avatar, right? You're a marketer. If we wanted to build a marketing funnel, what will we start with? We would start with our ideal client avatar.

Who is this person? What do they think about at night? What drives them? What motivates them? What do they want? Let's build that for our ideal candidate. I call the tool that we use for this, the job scorecard. We have to define success in the role, and then we build a hiring funnel that is messaged towards that person and is designed to be a magnet that will attract them through our process so that by the time they get to the end of our hiring process, we have COOs who have 20 years experience being like, this was the most incredible hiring process I've ever gone

Brett Curry:

Through. Wow,

Jhana Li:

I'm so excited to work with your client. When do I get to have my next interview? Do you guys have any other job opportunities available? You want them to be so excited because you have built this just for them? What else does a magnet do? A magnet repels. So this funnel should be so specific and so fine tuned that someone who is not your ideal candidate will self-select out. They literally will just stop. They'll stop going through the process. So while we may get 500 COO applications on our average job description, by the time our process is done and we're actually looking like we're looking at applications, we're looking at resumes, we're looking at the top 20 to 30 for that role because we have such a robust process that it will literally take out 95% of the candidates that apply because they're not the right fit. And it would literally be a waste of me and my team's time to have any sort of conversation with them or to spend a minute looking at their resume. So if you're going for a remote job market where you're getting overwhelmed by just sheer volume, rely on the process, let the process kick out 95% of people so that you're only focused on the 5%, that could really be that ideal candidate you're looking for.

Brett Curry:

That's so good. That's so good. I love that. The job scorecard and really thinking about how am I going to position this so they get the job done so that it meets its objectives so that I'm attracting the right person, repelling the wrong person, really good. And again, I think a lot of us that listen to us are marketers. If you own a brand, you're probably good at marketing, but you don't really put your marketing hat on when you're crafting that job scorecard or looking at attracting talent, but you kind of should be, right? There's quite a few parallels there. It's the same thing, isn't it? It's the

Jhana Li:

Same. Humans be humans, and it's a marketing funnel. Your hiring funnel is a marketing funnel for your ideal candidate.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good. So good. Any other specific tips you can give on the hiring process? What should that look like? Should you outsource it? Should you do it? How many interviews should you have? And I know there's all kinds of conditional statements there, but any other tips on the hiring process that you'd recommend?

Jhana Li:

So we have a eight step hiring process. I can walk through it very quickly if you would like, but not to get too deep into the weeds. Essentially, our proven hiring process is we launched the job description on the front end. The job description will take them directly to a written application. So the application is going to take them off of whatever job forum they're on, indeed or LinkedIn. We will drop JD into these huge, again, these huge ponds of candidates, hundreds of people. Thousands of people will see that job description, but only hundreds of them will click on the link and apply through our link. So that's a huge filtration system that kicks a lot of people out. Then we take 'em to the written application. The written application is quick. It's easy for them to fill out, but the written application takes 'em directly to a skill assessment. The skill assessment is where we generally see 80% of candidates plus stop the process. They literally just won't submit it because the skill assessment is hard. Back to marketing here, Brett. One thing we know about marketing funnels, the greater the friction in the funnel, the higher the quality of lead, right?

Yep. Same thing with hiring. So we make it hard. It shouldn't be

Brett Curry:

Hard to, what does that look like? I know sometimes, so it was one thing we do as an agency is we give them a fake project. Here's an made up client, and here's a bunch of scenarios. What are you going to do in those scenarios, right? Yes. How are you going to optimize this? And then we grade those answers. Is that what you're recommending here?

Jhana Li:

Pretty much, yep. It's two to three. I call 'em crunchy questions that again, your A player ideal candidate will have no problem answering why? Because they've done this at three other companies already. This is as natural to them as breathing, and in fact, they fucking love it. Such a nerd.

Brett Curry:

They

Jhana Li:

Get to the end of the skill assessment and they're like, oh my God, that was so fun. I cannot wait for this job. Most people, 80% of people will say, this is hard. This is going to take too long. I don't know how to do this. I don't want to do this. And they will, again, self-select apps.

Brett Curry:

Perfect.

Jhana Li:

So that's the skill assessment.

Brett Curry:

See you.

Jhana Li:

Yep. It's a big one. From there'll then start interviews. So we'll do a culture interview, a skill interview, reference interviews, and then we'll finally close them on the job.

Brett Curry:

That's amazing. That's amazing. Really, really helpful. So we've kind of set our vision, our strategic vision, and kind of mapped that out. And we're now talking about hiring. And let's talk a little bit about what that environment looks like that allows a player to shine. I know you've touched on a handful of things, but if we want a performance-based culture, what are some things we need to have in place for that to be true? So I'm assuming you got the job scorecard for when you hire somebody, probably a scorecard ongoing where you can show someone how are you doing and how can you do better type of thing.

Jhana Li:

And again, it comes back to onboarding. So we take that same exact job scorecard, and then on the very first day of that new person starting their job, I still personally do a culture onboarding call, right? How important this call is in this culture onboarding call, we cover vision, mission, right? Your V two mom, this is when you would share that this is your vision, your mission, your core values. This is the team they're going to be working with. This is the lay of the land, and this is your performance and cultural expectations. So I'll say things like show up on time to meetings and be on camera. Do I have to say that most of clients would be like, no, they're a players. I shouldn't have to say that. Set expectations. This is client. Think of your team onboarding. Again, like client onboarding. We know how important it is

Brett Curry:

For

Jhana Li:

Successful client onboarding, to have an incredible experience, to set realistic expectations and to understand, especially in a service industry like agencies, Brett, what do they need to bring to the table in order to be successful in this partnership? That is exactly what you're doing on day one. Here's us, here's what success looks like in your role, job scorecard. And then the third and critical component to this conversation is a transfer of ownership. The single greatest characteristic of high performance teams is radical ownership. So here's your job scorecard. This is yours. Now,

Brett Curry:

These

Jhana Li:

Are not my targets. These are your targets. These are not my challenges to solve my daily tasks to fix for you. These are your tasks, your challenges, your growth opportunity, your level up, and in fact that the next two weeks of training that we're about to launch into for you, that's yours as well. You are responsible for becoming the version of you for gaining the knowledge that you need to hit these targets and achieve success as measured by this job scorecard. Welcome to the

Brett Curry:

So good, so good. And some people would hate to hear that message, but the right people, it will light them up. They will love that. So even kind of you hint about some of those things, I would assume in the hiring process as well to kind of weed out the wrong people.

Jhana Li:

Yeah. Again, the hiring process is built for that ideal candidate, the person who should get lit up. When we then deliver that message in onboarding, if by some reason somebody has snuck through the hiring process and pulled a fast one on me, the onboarding is also intense from the culture call. We launch 'em into what we call the 14 day bootcamp, and I tell 'em, the first 14 days on this rollout are going to be intense. Why? Because I want to stress test you because the person that I met in the interviews is not the person I'm hiring. That is a shiny blow up version of the person that I just hired. The person I actually hired is a person who's six months from now whose kid is sick and they left the stove on and the mailman is here, and there's a client fire exploding. And how do they show up to the team meeting? That's the person I

Brett Curry:

Hired.

Jhana Li:

I want to know who that person is, and I don't want to have to wait six months to figure it out.

Brett Curry:

Tell me more about that. That is great because, well, we've made the mistake in the past of making the first two weeks month just so easy, and part of it's like we want to be a great place to work and we want to challenge people. We want to coach people. And sometimes we made it just way, way too easy, almost boring. That has since changed. But how do you stress test in those first two weeks? What does that look like?

Jhana Li:

So I want to draw a difference between hard and disorganized.

What does an A player want? An A player doesn't mind a high pressure environment. A player doesn't mind drinking out of a fire hose in terms of learning new information. An A player doesn't mind throwing themselves into something, getting their hands dirty and figuring it out. What doesn't set people up for success though, is again kicking them into the deep end. So we're just throwing you into things with no structure, with no organization, with no guidance around what you should be looking at, what you should be focused on or what success looks like. So our responsibility as leadership is to develop that structure. So that's what we call the 14 day bootcamp, and it's that blow by blow of for the first 14 days, you're going to train on these things with these people. You're going to watch these meetings, shadow these client calls, read these books.

We're going to give you all of the information that you need. We're going to front load it. And at the end of two weeks, the goal is that you are functional, not that you're exceptional, that you're functional in the role, and I'm going to download any and all information into your brain that you need in order to become functional. It will be hard, but we've got your back. Also included in that 14 day bootcamp is daily check-ins with their manager, end of week check-ins with me, a 14 day check-in around, where are you at? Where are you struggling, how are you feeling after your first two weeks? So there's structure to it, but that doesn't make it not hard. It just makes it hard with support.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah, man, it's so good. So we are running out of time a bit, but I do want to talk about the final two things. How are we coaching someone and helping them really grow and reach peak performance? And then when do we fire people as well? So let's talk about both of those. What tips or insights can you share on the coaching and helping someone level up?

Jhana Li:

So the first thing is if you want a high performance team, coach them. Every high performer has a coach. Michael Phelps has a coach, and I hear clients say a lot, if I'm hiring eight players, why should I have to manage them? Management is

Brett Curry:

Coaching the best. Want a coach? Yeah,

Jhana Li:

Correct, correct. Right. And so I have not just coaching as in an end of quarter performance review. We do active growth coaching on a weekly or biweekly basis with our team members. So every week for new team members, every other week for veterans, they are sitting down with their direct manager. And what I am working on, again, included, I'll just send Brett, I have SOP and tools and templates for literally all of this. I'm just going to give it to your people. Does that work?

Brett Curry:

Amazing. Amazing.

Jhana Li:

Thank you so much. Yeah. So that includes in there a script and a one-on-one template for how I run these meetings. But essentially I am taking the last one to two weeks of their performance in the role, and we're using it as data. Where did you do well? Where could you have done better? What are you going to do differently moving forward? What are you struggling with? What's blocking you? I have a lot of clients who have a lot of fear around giving constructive feedback,

But you're a coach. Constructive feedback is literally your job. What you're afraid of is demotivating someone. What you're afraid of is making them feel bad. But that must to do with the culture, not the feedback. If the culture says that you getting feedback means you've done something wrong, then yeah, I'm going to be afraid to give feedback or receive feedback. If instead, feedback is an act of service and coaching to help every single person on this team level up all the time. I have team members coming into those meetings being like, what could I do better? This is what I struggled with. How would you tackle this? I feel like I really botched this meeting. They're looking for it. They're leaning into

Brett Curry:

It

Jhana Li:

Because they recognize it for what it is

Better, which is an active level of service, and they want to get better. So again, this is where we get into the less tangible side of team development, which is like, what's the culture that you've built around growth and feedback and failure? How does your team respond to failure? How do you respond to failure? If we can control the cultural context, then every single day my team is showing up, looking for an opportunity to grow. My job is to just hold up the mirror and say, Hey, here's your next gap. Here's your next opportunity. Grow this way.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. It's so good. Well, let's talk a little bit about the F word firing. So when is it time to fire and move on from somebody? What insights can you share with us there?

Jhana Li:

Yeah, so if we've done all the rest of this stuff correctly, then firing becomes actually a pretty easy process. We've got a job scorecard. We gave it to them on day one. We transferred ownership over those targets to them. We aligned their goals with company goals. We've coached them every single week, and we've established a regular rhythm where if there's a gap in performance, we're immediately calling it out, offering feedback and trying to correct it. What then happens if that person is still not able to perform? We have an immediate conversation, and it's a very simple conversation that says, Hey, this is the job scorecard. We covered this on day one. This is your job score card. We covered that on day one, and you're performing down here. Help me understand, what do you need for you? Again, radical ownership stays with them for you to close this gap, and what do you need for me to be successful in that?

So it's a growth coaching conversation to start where I call that the pep, the personal elevation plan. And that is, Hey, as soon as I see a gap, I'm going to call it out, and we're going to co-create a game plan for you to close that gap and take radical ownership for doing so. Then if I don't see that they've closed that gap, then we'll escalate to a pip. That's the last warning conversation of like, Hey, to be clear, you cannot have this job if you're not meeting the expectations outlined in the job scorecard. So again, help me understand why haven't I seen the change and what needs to change in order for you to be successful, because we both want you to be successful here.

Brett Curry:

So the PIP, that's the personal improvement plan, right? Correct. This is where you got to improve here else. This is going to fit. And my guess is, John, if you are a company and you're leading someone through this process after the pip, some people are going to make it a lot. People are going to be like, yeah, this price isn't right. Correct. The firing is not going to be a surprise to anybody at that point. You go through that process, it's going to be a pretty natural next step for you and for the person you're firing.

Jhana Li:

It's not a surprise. And what you'll actually see is people will just quit that phrase, manage up or manage out. Credit to Layla Hermo for teaching me that one. When you've done a great job of building a high performance, high pressure environment, people who don't like that, who don't want that, who don't want to be held accountable to constant growth and constant targets will leave. They'll literally just leave,

Brett Curry:

Which is akay even better, right? Than having to f

Jhana Li:

Fire, which is best case scenario. Exactly.

Brett Curry:

Exactly.

This is so good, and one thing I'll share too, and we've had our ups and downs as an agency when it comes to ops and hiring and firing and things like that. But what I've also found too, because I think there's this fear that business owners have too, about firing. I can't think of a single time that we fired someone at OMG where I've had outrage from the team. Almost always it's like, yeah, I saw that coming, right? Or yeah, we got that. We did have to go through a couple of rounds of layoffs as an agency about 18 months ago. That sucked, and that sucked bad. A lot of agencies and a lot of e-comm brands had to do that. So I did get pushback there. People were like, how could you let this person go? I'm like, I know. I know. It sucked. But the firing piece, I've never had anybody. How could you, I mean, maybe the person's getting fired, but everybody else was like, yep, yep. Saw that Maybe you're a little bit late.

Jhana Li:

Do you want me to offer you a reframe so that even that person,

Brett Curry:

Please, please,

Jhana Li:

Is on board with it? And guys, this is, again, this is coming from me messing this up so many times because I really care about my team. I do. And so I don't want to fire them. I don't want to hurt them. Oh my God. Maybe they're going to get better. I'll give them just another month. Just another month, and then we all know where that ends. Anyway,

Brett Curry:

Right?

Jhana Li:

Here's the reframe. I will offer you, your job as a business owner is to create a vehicle for growth. Growth for you, growth for your clients, growth for your team. People deserve to be successful in their roles. They deserve to be able to grow with your business. And if they are in a role where they cannot be successful or where their pathway for growth had diverted from yours, then it is an absolute act of love and service to let them go and find the other opportunity where they will be successful that does get them to their goals. They deserve that. It is in fact selfish to let your own emotional discomfort at the conversation, keep them in a place where they cannot be successful. So when I show up to a firing conversation, that's the lens that I bring. And guess what? I still get coffee every month with half the people I've fired because they're so grateful and I'm so grateful, and we love each other so much, and they've found another job opportunity or started a business, and they've become these incredible next level versions of themselves. And all we did when we fired them was determine that, Hey, the next version of you can't be unlocked here.

That's okay. That's so okay. But it's time for us to part ways

Brett Curry:

And understanding that people desperately want to be successful.

Jhana Li:

They do.

Brett Curry:

They know that they're not being successful with your company if they're in this position, especially if you've got

Jhana Li:

A job scorecard,

Brett Curry:

Especially if you've going through this, measur them against that process, then they really know and they really know. Right? And one story that I heard, this was in the book, radical Candor, which is one of my favorites because I'm not naturally a candid person. So that book really helped me. But I love the story between Steve Jobs and Johnny. Ive and Steve would ask Johnny like, Hey, did you give this feedback to your teammate? Did you tell them this isn't good enough? And Johnny would be like, well, I don't want to hurt their feelings or whatever. And Steve would say, no, Johnny, you don't want to be nice. You're just vain and you want people to like you, right? It's like you've got to give people the feedback. And of course, we don't have to put on our Steve Jobs and show up just the way he did, not our personalities. But it's one of those things that say like, yeah, the frame you gave, it's actually not kindness. If you are, and maybe it's actually selfish if you're holding onto somebody when you need to let them go so they can go not be miserable somewhere and be successful somewhere,

Jhana Li:

Or you're holding onto that piece of feedback that you're unwilling to tell them when it's actually just depriving them of the opportunity

Brett Curry:

To

Jhana Li:

Know what the gap is so they can do something about it.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. So good. We could keep going. You've got me fired up for operations. I'm not even operations guy. This is amazing, John, this, I can't believe it. So good. So definitely share with us the SOPs. I'll get that out. We'll put that in the show notes. Anybody can get that. But also, I'm confident there are people listening that are just like, I don't need the SOPs. I just want to work with Jonna and her team. So how can people connect with spyglass ops? What does that look like? Who are you right for? Talk to us about working with you.

Jhana Li:

Yeah, beautiful. So guys, the best way to connect with me is actually on Instagram, and if you will add it into the show notes. But I'm just going to give you guys my entire resource vault. So DM me the code word vault, click on the link in the show notes, DM me on Instagram. It's the best way to get in touch.

Brett Curry:

What Instagram handle

Jhana Li:

That is at the Jonna Lee. So J-H-A-N-A-L-I, Jonna Lee.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. And so DM you the word vault.

Jhana Li:

Correct.

Brett Curry:

You'll get the whole thing there. The whole all the goods, man. Okay. That's amazing. Jonna, this has been fantastic. I can't wait to review this, share this with my team. Really, really good. I know this is going to create transformational change for people that listen and apply and especially those that get your details and or work with you guys, but you guys are really, you're geared to work with brands, work with agencies, work with just service-based companies. You can work with just about anybody, correct?

Jhana Li:

Yeah. We work with online based startups, right? So eCom brands, given that you're running your business off technical systems, remote team building, that's the stuff we really specialize in.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. Jonna Lee, ladies and gentlemen at the Jonna Lee on Instagram, connect with her there, DM her at the word vault and you'll get all the goods. Also put stuff in the show notes as well. So with that, Jonna, thank you so much. This was amazing. Thanks for bringing the energy. Thanks for bringing the insights.

Jhana Li:

Thank you, Brett, it

Brett Curry:

Was fantastic.

Jhana Li:

Appreciate it.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. And thank you for tuning in as always. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? If you've not done so, please leave us a review on iTunes and if you know somebody who's struggling with ops share, share with them this episode and with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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In this timely episode, Brett Curry sits down with Nick Flint, Director of Email Marketing, to tackle the pressing challenge facing e-commerce brands today: how to maintain profitability amid rising tariffs. As import costs surge, they share actionable strategies for protecting your bottom line without sacrificing growth. Whether you're considering price increases, optimizing marketing spend, or leveraging email to boost customer loyalty, this episode delivers practical solutions you can implement immediately.

Key Takeaways

• Strategic Price Adjustments That Won't Kill Conversions: Learn how top brands are implementing 5-20% price increases, creating premium limited-edition offerings, and shifting from percentage-based discounts to flat-dollar thresholds that protect your margins while maintaining customer appeal.
• Cut Costs, Not Growth: Discover the hidden areas where you're leaking profits—from underperforming ad spend to unnecessary software subscriptions—and how regular P&L reviews can reveal thousands in recoverable expenses without compromising product quality.
• Email as Your Profit Preservation Tool: Capitalize on relationship-building email strategies that turn price increases into opportunities, including exclusive "lock-in" offers for loyal customers and subscription incentives that stabilize revenue during uncertain times.
• Inventory Intelligence for Cash Flow Optimization: Master the delicate balance between avoiding stockouts and preventing capital-draining excess inventory with practical forecasting approaches that protect your cash position.
• The Human Touch in Challenging Times: Find out why connecting authentically with customers through personalized communication may be your greatest competitive advantage during economic pressure—including specific question-based campaigns for your most valuable customers.

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- All right, Nick Flint, the buzz for right now and likely the foreseeable future is what do we do about the tariff madness that's impacting our industry? And so wanted to have you on here so we could talk briefly about what are some ways that we can mitigate risk, that we can protect profits so we can cut costs so that we can still find opportunity for growth and opportunity to thrive even in this climate. And so let's dive in. But first of all, how's it going? By the way,

- I'm doing pretty good over here. Really starting to dial in with some of our clients and the strategies that they have with these new changes and what they might see in their price structure, differences in the future.

- Great. Well, email's gonna play a big part of this. So Nick is our, our director of email. And I think now is the time we lean into the tried and true, right? Doing more for our customers, leaning into them more. Email is one of the, the most guaranteed returns and the lowest cost to execute on. So now is the time for emails. We'll lean into some tips there, but ultimately what we're looking for right now and whatever brand wants is how do I protect profits? How do I continue to grow? How do I protect profits? And I think ultimately the first thing, Nick, that we gotta look at is how can you increase prices and or increase profit per order without tanking conversion rates, right? Without killing conversions. 'cause not just as simple as raising rates through the roof, right? Raising prices through the roof because then people will stop buying. And so let's talk through some suggestions here on, on what we can do. So, so raising prices. One thing to keep in mind, Nick, and you know, we've been talking to a lot of our, our bigger clients. I've had 10 to 15 calls recently. We've been texting, messaging, you know, talking to clients frequently. And so one thing I'm hearing a lot from bigger brands is, Nick, they're just gonna raise prices. They're just gonna raise them, have not heard fully, you know, what, what percentage kinda lift that's gonna be that that's gonna be brand by brand, it's gonna be depending on the category, depending on how much room the brand thinks, they have to still remain competitive. Depends on the strength of the brand as well. But also a lot of people are just gonna raise prices, right? And so I think you gotta look at that and whether that's a 5%, 10%, maybe a 20% increase, it's gotta be on the table and you gotta be talking about it. One of the other things that we're looking at is how do we maybe bundle things and come with creative offers so that we can raise the a OV and and like the raise the profit per order. So what, what are your thoughts on both of those items? What are you hearing? What are you seeing?

- What's, what's funny is a lot of the stuff that we're looking at, you should be doing this year round, but it's really top of mind right now. Like

- Yeah,

- What does it come down to? Charging the right amount and then cutting your costs across the business when possible and trying to run a lean operation so you stay profitable. And it really comes to the forefront where you're starting to look at every dollar, every statement, every transaction coming through. Yep. So some of the easiest low hanging fruit that they can be doing right now to help raise that average order value, not give away too much margin. 'cause if you can not discount your products and extra 10%, that kind of combats that 10% extra that you're paying Yes. Over on your, your cost of goods coming across the seeds. So off the bat, one thing we've been shifting is the initial, just the popup offers on the site and the intro, instead of going with like a standard, you know, 10, 20% off your first order, we're putting a minimum threshold in there now. So, you know, $10 off any order of $50 plus if they're gonna spend 70, 80, 90 bucks, that $10 is gonna stay the same and not gonna be that fixed percentage versus 20% off of your $90 order. It's eight bucks that the brand saves.

- Yeah, I love that. So, you know, one, one of the, the best tools we have to grow our email list and grow our email marketing is the, is the popup in the offer. But nows may be a time to, to be less liberal with your, your discount. So make that a flat dollar amount so it doesn't scale to infinity. Also, maybe just raising the threshold for when that kicks in. So yeah, we're, we're going to limit that, right? I think the other thing to think about is, is, you know, how do we bundle products to, to, and create some interesting pricing there where we're, we're still getting more profit per transaction even while maybe our, our cost structure, our cogs have gone up. So I think that's an interesting one to look at. And it's something you've talked about Nick, and we, we've seen this with brands like Nike and others, is it's not just raising prices, but how do we introduce things like limited edition specials? How, how can we introduce things that feel more valuable and are more valuable so that we can charge a, a premium? So what, what are your thoughts on that

- For these limited edition items? It works for whatever level you're at. That, that's one kind of really unique thing about this strategy. If you're selling a $10 cup, launching a limited edition collab with someone, or even like a new colorway, you're just doing 200 of, you can now sell that for 15 instead of 10. Same thing on like the sneakers. Just like you talk about, you know, instead of $150 via sneakers, you're now going for 180 'cause it's a limited edition release. So if you can find some kind of way to implement scarcity with a new product, launch a new variant, we have a coffee brand doing this, they're leaning into more select roasts from around the world and they're really putting the emphasis on the Costa Rican farmers who are making these beans. And that's why it's slightly more per bag, but the quality's there and people appreciate it. And you also see people start to splurge on some stuff like that, you know, when they're starting to look at their own bank accounts a little bit tighter, you know, I'm not gonna go buy a new car right now, but you know what, I'll spend 15 for bank coffee. Might not my coffee. Yeah, totally. It's every morning then. Really good.

- Yeah, it's a really good thought that, that even when the consumer is, is pinched a little bit, even when the consumer confidence is low, it's not that they stop buying, right? We still, we all, we love to buy things. It's our favorite recreation, you know, retail therapy is a real thing, will always be a real thing. But yeah, how can you lean into something where, hey, okay, may, maybe I'm trading down in other categories, but I'm trading up in your category and and that's what you want to try to, to create there. So yeah, I I really wanna underscore, you know, this is not a time to cut growth costs, I believe, right? And, and this is, we were talking about this in our morning, Monday morning meeting today, Nick, where you know, David, David Ogilvy, legendary ad guy, the the guy behind Dove stoke and man in a halfway shirt and Rolls Royce and a number of others. He talked about, man, I I view advertising as an essential part of every product, just like I would an essential, an essential ingredient or central component. And just when times get tough, I'm not gonna cut, I'm not gonna cut the tires outta my Rolls Royce, you know, because times are tough. I I've gotta, I've gotta invest in that. And same is true for marketing. We don't wanna pull back on marketing otherwise we'll lose market share otherwise we'll, we'll create a death spiral potentially. And so lean into marketing, maybe you wanna lean into it in a more efficient manner. Maybe you raise your mirror, things like that, but don't but your advertising and growth budgets. But on the topic of cost cutting, Nick, I think this is a real thing, right? We've gotta look at how can we get lean? How can we be lean and mean right now? So what are some suggestions there? What have, what have you heard from others? What tips do you have?

- Especially on the SMS side of things, we're getting really tight with who we're sending to right now. You might have a 20,000 per SM person SMS list with, you know, 10 k those being engaged and the other 10 k is like, you're hopeful they'll purchase one day, they've been hanging around forever and you will send them those texts for the big launches or product drops. But now we want to tighten up that window so those SMS sends are to your more guaranteed segment, keep the revenue coming in from them and then as things start to normalize, then breach back out into that broader audience that you were looking at before, kind of that hopeful window you're spending some extra money on.

- Yeah, I love it. And you know, one of the other things we're, we're leaning into, you know, we do a lot with obviously Amazon ads and Google ads and YouTube and things like that is, you know, there, there are times when, when things are smooth and easy where, where maybe you kind of ignore some wasted ad spend, right? Where maybe there's some keywords that are not gonna performing with an Amazon ads with Google ads, but when times are good, you kinda let that slide. We audit, you know, dozens of accounts every month and we regularly see, you know, wasted ad spend in the 10 to 15 to $20,000 a month range, meaning you could cut that ad spend and sales would not dip. Now's the time to be looking at stuff like that. So don't cut your overall ad budget, but man, cut the waste. And so I think that's something you wanna lean into and look at right now. You know, one of the basic things we do all, all the time as an agency, Nick, is we at least quarterly and, and now I'd say you probably do this monthly, look at all your recurring expenses. What, what are, what are we paying for? What tools, what softwares, what are we paying for that we're not using? And we see this a lot where maybe you're like, oh wait, we're paying for three multi-touch attribution tools, right? We're paying for these two tools and those reporting, we don't, we don't need all that, right? And so what can we cut to get lean and mean? Because really I think right now we're kind of fighting and scrapping for every point, every point of profit that we can get. And so looking to cut expenses, cut software costs, cut, cut opex, things like that. What are the tips or insights you have on, on cost cutting? Nick,

- It is funny for that. That's one thing I don't recommend automating it is going over your p and l. Yeah. Like, yeah, QuickBooks could automate for you and shove into the different categories, but even for my own personal finances on Sundays, I sit down and I go look at every line item. And if I have a, a late fee for my gym, 'cause I missed a class, I punch myself in the arm for that $15 feed. I they hit you with

- Your wife's like Nick pushups right now.

- They, they get you with those cancellations. But looking at like cost cutting as a whole, get aligned with your inventory forecasting, sit on the extra inventory might have been a nice safe play and good to have in the future. And what if sales just spike up outta nowhere? Then I have the inventory for it. But really start to figure out how much you are selling through on a 30, 60 day basis. How much you need to be ordering so you're not running out of product. And then start saving some costs. 'cause you don't have a bunch of debt inventory sitting there in some kind of three pl

- Love it man. And this is also the time of you looking at your three pl. How can we cut costs there? How can we renegotiate? How can we lower shipping costs? Obviously talking to your factory, to your, your factory, to the manufacturers you work with. How can we extend terms, how can we maybe share in some of the price increases? So get creative there and, and really just look for any way that you can save and partner. Really nothing should be off the table because every point of margin matters at this point. And, and you know, another, another thing we recommend on the, on the Amazon side, we got a couple services we recommend where they will go and help you recover fees from Amazon because there's probably some fees you've been charged that you can get a refund on for a variety of reasons. But often that amounts to 1000, 5,000, $10,000 a month type of thing in, in recouped fees. So now is the time to look at everything like that as well. Try to save as much as you can without reducing product quality and without taking your foot off the gas pedal because you want to still be gaining market share and growing through this time. Now another thing we, we talked about Nick, as you know, hey, now's the time to lean into email marketing. So what are some creative things we can do to make our email marketing better that's going to lift sales, lift profits. What can we do right now?

- I really like leaning into the brand's tone and the brand's voice. And just remember that you're talking to other people on the other side of this transaction email or SMSI can see a lot of brands kind of just sending out this one way informational bit. One account I was auditing earlier today, a text, it was just super scientific, followed by read the blog post here. I'm like, do you think your customers really want to get this text and will it make them feel special like that the blog post? Like, come on, figure out a new way to phrase that and relate to your customers and work on your tone. You know, general population probably a little bit stressed out now as well. So connect with them on a personal level that'll make them feel more connected to your brand. And a great way to do this is just, you know, asking questions and having a real conversation with them. Especially if it's your top a hundred, 300, 500 customers. I always recommend sending out a question type email campaign to get those replies to help with deliverability and to boost your results in the future. But for now, if you don't have like the customer service backend to deal with a thousand replies, start with your top a hundred, 300 customers and figure out what question you wanna ask them and actually relate to them and have that back and forth conversation. And it's more likely could get you some referrals in the future when they send people your

- Way's. Really great. And you know, one of the other things I'll mention an idea that we actually, we did this a couple years ago for another client where they were about to raise their prices. They had not raised prices in quite some time and so they emailed their entire list. I think they started with our VIPs and then they emailed everybody, but they said, Hey, you know, we're raising our prices on this date, here's why. And I, and I think it's another way where email gives you the, the freedom to do this. You just explain this to your customers that hey, our cost of goods are going up 50% right now, so we're not raising our prices 50%, we're raising our prices 10% or whatever the case may be. But here's why we have to do a price increase. We just, we have to, right? But here's what we wanna do for you because you're a valued customer locking in the existing price through this date. And what's interesting about that is it, it's basically a sale. It's not a sale. 'cause you're not discounting, you're just saying we're about to raise our prices, but you can order right now. Now obviously there are a few things you gotta keep in mind there. If you're low on inventory, you can't do it if, if you're, you know, inventory forecasting is not precise right now you can't do it. But if all those things are good and you wanna raise a little bit of cash right now to kind of help weather the storm, it's a great way to do a quote unquote sale without doing a discount.

- Especially if you have a subscription based business. Hey, you know, subscribe now to get 10% off for every order moving forward. Yes. And that'll give 'em reason to not cancel in the future because we'll see those new price increases. Oh, if I cancel then I gotta come back into this new higher

- Rate. Yeah. And maybe, maybe make that offer just for subscriptions only. We're like, hey, we're about to raise prices, but not only are we not raising prices on our existing subscriptions, we're on this current discount. So get locked in now so that you don't have to worry about it later. And, and yeah, that creates predictable, consistent revenue, which is worth it in the long run. So Nick Flint, any, any final thoughts? How do we protect profits, cut costs? How do we find ways to win right now?

- Yeah, closing out in less than a minute here, focus on what's working for your business right now. Probably don't use this time to test out a ton of new things that are gonna cost you a lot of money. So focus on what's working for you. Communicate with your customers openly and like a human, actually connect with them. Look at all of your costs. And then lastly, consult an actual tariff lawyer. You know, yes, before you do something silly, like try to backend this secret deal with your manufacturer where they put it as half the cost when it comes overseas and you're gonna get audited and probably sent to prison, dodge all that by talking to an actual professional. 'cause it's hard to sell products when you're in a jail cell.

- Yeah, yeah. That, that cut in profits, reduce profits much easier to tolerate than prison foods. So I I like that. That's really, really sound advice, Nick. I appreciate that. And, and just final thought as we wrap up here is that even in the midst of tariff craziness and, and the way this all will, will shake out and likely change a million times here in the, in the coming months, there's always, always, always a path forward. There's always a way to win, there's always a way to grow, there's always a way to gain new customers. And so that's why we wanna bring you solutions. And so with that, we'll wish you good luck. Thank you Nick, for joining us and until next time,

- See you then.

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This is a recent recording from my appearance on Jordan West's podcast. There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the incrementally of YouTube after Haus Analytics revealed a groundbreaking report from 190 incrementally tests involving YouTube (link: https://www.haus.io/blog/do-youtube-ads-perform-lessons-from-190-incrementality-tests).

On this episode I share eye-opening case studies demonstrating how YouTube drives significant incremental growth - even when traditional attribution models fail to capture it. If you've been skeptical about YouTube's effectiveness or struggled to measure its impact, this conversation reveals why it might be the missing piece in your marketing strategy and how to approach it correctly.

Key Takeaways:

-Beyond Last-Click Attribution: Discover why obsessing over ROAS metrics can be misleading, and how YouTube drives significant business impact that often isn't captured in traditional attribution models but shows up dramatically in incrementality testing.

-The Real-World Proof: Brett shares compelling case studies, including a brand that saw Amazon sales cut in half when YouTube ads were paused, and another that achieved a 12-25% lift in Walmart store sales through targeted YouTube campaigns.

-The Anatomy of High-Converting YouTube Ads: Learn the essential elements of effective YouTube ads, including how to craft the perfect hook in the first 5 seconds, the importance of standard and "over-the-top" product demonstrations, and why 45-90 second videos often outperform shorter cuts.

-Production Value Matters: Unlike TikTok, YouTube requires slightly higher production quality (though not Super Bowl commercial level) - Brett explains the right balance and why combining polished footage with authentic UGC can be particularly powerful.

-Testing & Measurement Strategies: Get practical advice on how to properly measure YouTube's impact through geo tests, holdouts, search lift studies, and why tracking your overall MER (Media Efficiency Ratio) might be the simplest yet most effective approach.

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Brett Curry:

This is like TV advertising for our generation, but way better than TV advertising could ever be. Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today is a unique episode. This is actually a recording that I did. I was a guest on my buddy Jordan West's podcast and we dove into YouTube. Now, Jordan West is a pro. He is a master of TikTok shops. He's built multiple brands, and his podcast is the secrets to scaling your E-Commerce brand. And we talked all about YouTube. Now, the reason we dove into this episode right now, this is coming off the heels of really a groundbreaking research piece or research project that was released by House Analytics, HAUS. Olivia Corey and team there have done some brilliant work all around the idea and the practice of measuring incrementality.

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Brett Curry:

We're seeing the true impact of channels. And so they tested, they did 190 incrementality tests that involved YouTube with 74 brands, and the results were mind blowing. She was on a podcast with Andrew Ferris Albe on that podcast soon as well. But the idea here is that YouTube severely underreport or Google Ads severely underreport, the actual impact the YouTube ads has to the tune of about 70% underreporting. Or another way to look at that. The reverse is it's about 3.42 x more incremental than what you see there. So if you're seeing a one row as an example in platform, the actual impact is probably a 3.42 x ROAS or 3.42 roas, which is amazing. And so in this podcast, Jordan asked me about our experiences as an agency. We're known as one of the top YouTube ad agencies for D two C brands. So tell lots of stories, lots of examples on the creative side, on the measurement side ways we've used YouTube to grow retail sales, omnichannel sales, I think it's going to be informative, instructive, and hopefully fun. So with that, please enjoy the interview that I did with Jordan West YouTube ads.

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Jordan West:

Hey guys, Jordan West back here Today. I am so excited about this podcast episode. I have one of the experts in the space in the YouTube space that is Brett Curry on the podcast for I believe a second time, maybe even third time. Brett, welcome back to the show.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, Jordan Min awesome to be here. It is for sure, at least the second time. And maybe the third, I'm not sure, but let's make this the best one yet. That'll be our goal.

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Jordan West:

I was so happy when you reached showed to me, I'm like, yes, I want to. I was really hoping we were going to talk about YouTube. I just said, Brett Ray showed. I'm like, I will have him on the podcast. I have no doubt that there's going to be tons of value here. So really looking forward to this. Brett, before we begin and really dive in, tell for people who dunno anything about you, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Totally.

‍

Brett Curry:

So I'm the CEO co-founder of OMG Commerce. We are a performance digital marketing agency. We focus primarily on D two c e-commerce and omnichannel retail brands, specialty with YouTube ads as we'll talk about today. But also all things Google. We lean into meta. We're full service on Amazon and we do retention marketing as well. So email and SMS, but I'm just passionate about marketing that works and marketing that builds a brand and also drives bottom line impact. So got team of about 40. We've been doing this since 2010, won some cool awards, been featured with some Google case studies and some other fun stuff. But at my core, I'm a marketing and business junkie, and so thrilled to be talking with you today.

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Jordan West:

Awesome, awesome. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I think one of the interesting things that you and I were touching on before we actually pressed record here was this idea around trying to measure incrementality of some of these channels that are really hard to measure. So for me, everyone knows I've gone super hard on TikTok this year. I think the reason why TikTok shop was so interesting to me is that we always knew TikTok was driving business results.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yes. But

‍

Jordan West:

No one could ever tell you that there was no measure, couldn't

‍

Brett Curry:

Measure it,

‍

Jordan West:

Right? Because it just doesn't work like that on TikTok. It's not a direct response channel. In the same way now TikTok shop is right. Shop has changed all of that, and we have this nice closed ecosystem that you can measure, but I talk about this halo off of TikTok shop the entire time. But interestingly, YouTube is such a similar channel to me where it's like how many times do I, am I watching something on YouTube? I see an ad and I'm like, yeah, I should go buy that product. I totally forgot about that. I never in my life have ever clicked from a YouTube ad over into buy a product, never once because I'm watching something, but it's there with me. It's the TV of 2025.

‍

Brett Curry:

Exactly.

‍

Jordan West:

Yeah. And

‍

Brett Curry:

It's so interesting.

‍

Jordan West:

Walk me through this. What are your thoughts? Why are you still in the YouTube game and how do you continue to scale?

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Brett Curry:

I don't like to do anything the easy way. Apparently. I like to get beat up on a daily basis. So leaning into YouTube, it's a bit of a battle. A lot of people have rid off YouTube as a viable channel for growing their business. A lot of people opt to just pour all their dollars back into meta and hey, I'm a believer in meta ads. We spend on meta, even as an agency, of course, not just for our clients, but for omg, but for

‍

Jordan West:

Yourselves, of course,

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Brett Curry:

YouTube is so unique, and I love the way you framed it, and I fully agree with this statement. This is TV advertising for our generation, but way better than TV advertising could ever be. And I'll kind of set this up a little bit. So I got my start when I was in college in the early two thousands. I worked at a radio station and they got involved in some TV and stuff, but I just remember talking to local retailers, local furniture stores, local car dealerships, local restaurants, and they would tell me things like when we advertise on radio, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, I don't know. But when I run TV ads, people come in and people mention it, and they couldn't directly attribute, but they could feel it and they could see it. When the TV ads were on, people were coming in, right?

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Brett Curry:

That's incrementality. You shut TV off. That business goes away. And so that's what YouTube is now, and we've all just gotten addicted to last click or multitouch attribution models where we want to see the click. We want to see the evidence that this ad led to this sale or this result. Ultimately, I think we were all coming to that. We've kind of come full circle. It was like, oh, offline is so difficult. You can't measure it. Online is magical. You can measure everything. To always we're measuring online is really shortsighted and maybe not very helpful. We want to just as an example, lean in fully to roas. Well, if you want to maximize roas, just run branded search. That's the maximum

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Jordan West:

ROAS course. Of course. And then try scaling in.

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Jordan West:

Yeah, right. This is the hilarious thing. It is funny. I've been trying to lean in on how, for me, I owned a bunch of brands over the years and trying to lean in on how I can help e-comm brand owners, especially the smaller ones that we don't work with anymore. I'm trying to figure out, I'm like, how do I help you guys that are listening to this podcast? A lot of you guys are listening to this podcast, and profitability is an interesting thing. We've been obsessed with these marketing metrics that just don't matter What we see in branded search, what we see in most people running Facebook ads on bottom of funnel. I'm like, good. You think that looks good? Who cares? It doesn't do anything for your business. It's not going to make you profitable at the end of the day. This is something I obsessed with

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Brett Curry:

It off up, probably no negative impact to your business. Shut that off. You'll probably get all the sales. You're currently kidding.

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Jordan West:

Totally, totally. Exactly. YouTube again, I was telling you about a funny little small case study and from a colleague of yours that's running this ad accountant, it's us spending a ton, I think it's 20 or 30 KA month right now, but I will tell you it as we scale it up, right on platform, it's showing about a one return on ad spend. So normally you'd say, let's turn that off, right? Yeah. Well, when we turn that off, everything dies. There's no business. So that's number one. Number two, the MER is about 3.5, so I'm not dumb. I know something's happening there. So that's my sort of look at all of this of like, wait, we've got to get out of this granularity that we think that we know how a customer journey works. Come on. We'll never know how a customer journey exactly works.

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Brett Curry:

Customers don't know how their customer journey works. They don't know they're, they're seeing things and reacting and then reacting again. And they probably couldn't even stitch together their buying journey. So what makes you think you'll nail that with 100% accuracy? You just won't.

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Jordan West:

So tell me what you guys do. You've been all in on YouTube since I've known you. You're the YouTube guy, Brett.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah. I mean, this is what we're known for. A lot of big brands come to us because we've cracked the code, so to speak, on how to make YouTube ads work. And the good news is, while it's not measurable in the same way that meta ads are, or in the same way that search or shopping ads are, you can measure it. You've just got to work a little bit harder. You got to kind of triangulate the truth a little bit, but you nailed it earlier, Jordan, when you said, I've never clicked on a YouTube ad, right? YouTube is the TV of our generation. Nobody clicks on their tv. So you just use that as your comparison. And actually this is interesting. Over 50% of views now, and I've seen numbers show as much as 60% of all views on YouTube, just the YouTube app are on TV screens. It's the fastest growing platform or fastest growing screen for YouTube consumption. Yes, there's the option to send a phone or you can scan a QR code on those YouTube ads that appear on a smart TV or a connected tv. But that's so rare that usually you're doing something on YouTube, you're probably not going to do those things. And so it's just people don't interact with YouTube the way they do, even Facebook or TikTok. And so you have, I want to give you that at a core level. Yeah, go ahead.

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Jordan West:

I just want to give everybody a fun anecdote here. So my kids watch a lot of YouTube. They've got the few creators that they love. My daughters love Mariah Elizabeth, she does all these crafts and stuff, and then obviously Mr. Beast, right? Everyone, Mr. Beast,

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Brett Curry:

Mr. Beast. Beast. Yep. He's the best.

‍

Jordan West:

And there's these massively long YouTube ads in between, right? There's like 62nd. My kids recently came to me and they said, dad, I hope in the next election, now remember I'm Canadian and we are now going, right, of course. Just like everyone's making the swings. And so they come up to me and they're like, dad, I really hope in the next election that you're going to be voting for Pierre Polly because his tax plan seems really good. Remember this is 11 and 9-year-old. I've heard a lot of things about what he said, and I'm like, don't ever tell me YouTube ads don't work because exactly. You

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Brett Curry:

Have to be watching them, dude, that is so good. And I remember as a kid, for me, and this still was stuck in my brain and probably meant that I was destined for a career in advertising. I remember trying to convince my parents to buy Ginsu knives because I saw these great commercials and I'm like, guys, you don't understand. You can cut through a can of Pepsi and then you can cut a tomato without sharpening. And I'm just regurgitating the ad, but it's such a good example. So yeah, your kids are now a spokesperson for political qualities.

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Jordan West:

Exactly. Exactly.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, that's such a good story. Anything.

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Jordan West:

So what's funny is that this is years ago, I think this is 2018, maybe 2017 or 2018, somewhere around there. And we just had this little tiny agency at the time. Now we're kind of similar to your guys' size. I was actually just looking around 40 right now,

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Brett Curry:

And

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Jordan West:

I think there was three of us at the time, and my accountant decided to run for mayor, and I thought to myself, well, what's the best way that I can get him seen by everybody in the city that we live in? Abbotsford, it's called. It's like, how can I get him seen? And I was like, I think I'm just going to go to YouTube. And so I've made these really long videos of him. Remember he was a candidate that nobody knew. He ended up getting second place and getting about, I think it was somewhere around like 30% of the vote. And I was like, whoa. And even more, we have this meme account on Instagram called Asford Memes, and one of the posts on there was about his YouTube videos being everywhere. And I was like, crazy. Yes, this works. I wish I would've just tripled down on that.

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Brett Curry:

No doubt. No doubt. Yeah. Last kind of little anecdote that's related to this part of what we're talking about. We have an appliance store client, someone that I've known a long time there. They've got locations here in Springfield in Missouri where I'm based, but all over Oklahoma and stuff. So we've been talking to them for a long time about, Hey, give us a little bit of your TV budget, because they spent a lot on tv, sell appliances, give us a little bit for YouTube because we were running all their Google search ads and stuff like that. And so they finally gave us a budget, not a ton of budget, but some for a few key markets for one of their appliance chains. And they just came back to us and they said, guys in Q1 so far of this year, these stores are up 35% over last year. One of their other chains is flat, basically. And they're like,

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Jordan West:

Interesting. So you got to have a case study,

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Brett Curry:

A case study. Yeah. So I don't know if they want anything released publicly. So I've got a few case studies I can get into in detail with you, please. Yeah. Yeah, 35% over other stores. And the only thing they changed was taking some TV budget, putting it onto YouTube, and voila, they got more gross.

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Jordan West:

I mean, this is the thing that we've talked, and we've talked about this. It's funny because I'm on TikTok land over here and you're over in YouTube land, and these are the two things that nobody on Twitter really ever talks about because they can't measure them, and yet we all know that they drive both of these, drive this massive halo. Right? There is, I'm sure we'll talk in very generalizations here, but I was talking to a guy the other day who happens to do some advertising for one of the biggest supplement companies on Amazon, and they're the biggest supplement company right now on, or one of them out on TikTok shop. Their Amazon business has doubled this year with no more Amazon spend. All I'm saying is we've got, if you guys are going to get anything from this episode, just remember that in the meme curve, the person that is obsessed with Triple Whale is not the one at this end of the curve, right? Yep, yep. If you're obsessively looking at your numbers like that, that's not how you run a business.

‍

Brett Curry:

Totally.

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Jordan West:

That's not how you do it.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. So true. So let me give you a couple of examples, a couple of additional examples, and then we may want to talk through too at some point. When does it make sense to start testing YouTube ads? When are you maybe not ready to test on YouTube ads? Because I will say, even though I am a believer in YouTube ads, I talk about it all the time. I speak on stages. I get invited to YouTube offices a couple times a year to teach brands how to do this. It's not for everybody, and it's not the place to start if you're a young brand, probably so happy to talk through that. But one case study that I think is really interesting, so this was a brand we worked with a number of years ago. It's a haircare product for women with thinning hair, and this actually works so well that now the founder, he sold the business and now he's a partner in OMG, which is kind of a cool fun first.

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Jordan West:

That's so fun.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So with Kiran, they were doing a lot with direct response tv, doing a lot with Meta and a few other channels, but they could not get YouTube to work. They tried it, tried and failed a number of times. So we came in, we remapped the campaign strategy, we tweaked their creatives because the creative were powerful, but they weren't quite built for YouTube, so we redid the creatives.

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Jordan West:

Are we going to get into that? Because I think that's an interesting thing to get into is what makes a YouTube creative amazing. Sure.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah. So we can kind of dig into our formula guidelines there on creative, but we tweaked the creative, we redid the campaigns. We focused on who we're going to target on YouTube because targeting is so important on YouTube, we went from zero to a million dollars in spend on YouTube and under 90 days while hitting their target CPA. So this was direct response, applicable sales. Wow. They had a high CPA ceiling, they had a landing page that converted really well. They had a great product. They had a high take rate on subscriptions so they could pay a lot for new customers. So it all worked, but that was just purely D two C. Now, what we found then is as we started doing that for months and months and months, we were asked to help them with their Amazon business, and they were like, Amazon's really taken off. Amazon is going like gangbusters. And so we started helping them grow on Amazon. We do full Amazon channel management. Well, we hit a patch where we had to pause YouTube ads for a bit due to some internal tracking and a couple of the things you had to pause it for a bit.

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Jordan West:

Oh, my favorite kind of AB tests where it's like, yeah,

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Brett Curry:

Exactly.

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Jordan West:

I was forced to do this. The credit card bounced and I didn't see it for seven days. The best tests.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It wasn't a credit card best, but they had to pause for a bit right when they did, because we had full visibility into Amazon, we were managing Amazon branded search cut in half, cut in half when we had to pause YouTube. Then we got YouTube back and they were rock and rolling again before long, but we were like, holy crap, that's pretty crazy. So basically we came to the conclusion that it was about a one-to-one ratio for every conversion. We saw D two C, we were getting at least one on Amazon, and one of the data scientists on the team was like, it might be two. It might be two to one for every one you're getting D two C, you might be getting two on Amazon. And so it's one of these things where were they in retail as well that were they in retail as well? They were not in retail. Now I've got another case that I talk about that there was fully retail in Walmart stores. That's incredibly fascinating. But this brand, no, they were multi-channel. So they were D two C plus Amazon plus a few other marketplaces. They were not in stores at that time.

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Jordan West:

Okay, okay. Insane. And also I think that we all brand people who have been in this game for a while are those things you do that you can't measure

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Brett Curry:

That

‍

Jordan West:

Is the right thing to do and actually drives the top of funnel business, but then you're convinced by somebody, maybe it's a new CMO, maybe it's a new somebody who comes into the space, maybe it's just a viral tweet on Twitter or on whatever we call that thing now that just shouldn't have gone viral because it was wrong. You must measure everything. I only scale things that are measurable. And then you're like, oh, okay, well I'm going to turn this thing off and then your business tanks.

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Brett Curry:

And I think it's important. We're certainly not making the case to measure less and we're not making the case to pay attention to your numbers. It's just that not everything can be measured the same way. I heard this, some of my team made this analogy one time. They were like, Hey, think about a light switch. You flip a switch and the result you don't see on the light switch, the result is over here with the light. I was like, this is a pretty good analogy where that's a really good analogy, Brett, like YouTube, you're running YouTube, you're doing this thing right here. The results are over here. You see the results over here, they're there. You've just got to look for them. And measuring them is harder. So I don't think you should measure less. I think you should measure more. I just think you should understand that ROAS is a bad metric overall if that's all you're looking at and the whole picture, understanding incrementality and real growth and real impact. It takes some work. It takes some work to measure it. So you got to look at everything. I can also show you a case study that might be helpful. It's from RTIC coolers, so coolers and drinkware, a Yeti competitors. Happy to dive into that or I think you may have had a question right there.

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Jordan West:

I do have a question I have to put in the middle here, Brad, I'm so sorry. But how are tools like Prescient and mms, do you trust them? Do you think that they are telling the full story? Do we need to move from an MTA model into an mm M model? Just what do you think about that?

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Brett Curry:

It's a great question. So I think there's a couple things at play here. I still like MTA tools. I think they serve a purpose. We have clients who use North Beam clients who use triple whale. I like them. I think we can gain some insights there. They got different models you can kind of play with. And so it can give some insights. Certainly, I do tend to think that an incrementality test plus an MMM type of approach is probably a little bit better. I would lean that way. But I think you can also do things like, hey, if you can track in platform performance and you can do things like incrementality tests on your own, which you can do that. You can set up geo tests, geo holdouts and things like that.

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Jordan West:

Totally just do holdouts, right? It's that simple. Just do a geo. Let's say New York and California are bringing you basically the same. That's right. California and Texas, just because they're similar and similar populations. If they're doing that, you can just hold out Texas and then you can know measure the impact. There's the

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Brett Curry:

Impact. And so there's also, there's some tools that Google can help you with. They'll do things like search lift studies, they do conversion lift studies, which basically is a way for them to do their own kind of holdouts and tell you the incrementality of a particular campaign type. Quite useful. So I think that can kind of get you on the right track. And I do think one of the best numbers, the best metrics, which you really don't need any fancy tool for is mer, right? Look at your total media efficiency ratio and watch how that fluctuates as you lean into one channel over another. Hey, when I really lean into YouTube for a couple of months, my MER improves and my top line grows. That sometimes simple is all you need, but you've got to be looking in the right places. I love MMM. I've not used prescient, but I've heard good things about them. But I do think the world is probably shifting more to MMM and incrementality tests and less towards MTA.

‍

Jordan West:

Yeah, yeah. MTAI think was something that we brought in when we needed it, right? And especially post iOS 14.5.

‍

Brett Curry:

Solve some real problems there for a bit. Yeah, for sure.

‍

Jordan West:

Absolutely. So Brett, I want to get into your case study and then after your case study, I want to hear your, so guys, stick around because Brett is going to break down what makes a perfect YouTube ad.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So excited about that. I guess about a year ago I was speaking at the YouTube offices in Los Angeles teaching a group of brands how to grow on YouTube. Met the folks from RTIC, which I was not that familiar with that brand prior to that point, but RTIC is, they sell wheeled coolers like indestructible, the best cooler I've ever had. They're direct competitor to Yeti. I think they're better and they're less expensive. They also sell drinkware. And I'm a big Tumblr fan. I drink a lot of coffee. Jordan, are you a coffee drinkers? Well, Jordan,

‍

Jordan West:

I drink a cup or two a day. My son got me this cup here. I dunno, like a liter basically.

‍

Brett Curry:

It's kind of cool. Yeah, love coffee. I go to bed singing about right as some of them big fan. But RTIC has drinkware that is ceramic lined. One pet peeve, and this is going to show that I'm a little bit of a snob when it comes to drink beverages. If you drink out of a metal Tumblr, it smells and tastes a little bit like steel, right? Almost like you have blood in your mouth, a little bit of that, right? The ceramic lining completely takes that away. It tastes like you're drinking out of your favorite ceramic mug or whatever. It's brilliant. Anyway, met RTIC. They were like, Hey, we want to get YouTube to work for us, and here is our hypothesis. Can you help us prove it? We want to see if YouTube will drive in-store sales. They were just put into all Walmart stores are almost all Walmart stores nationwide.

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Brett Curry:

They wanted to know if we ran some targeted YouTube tests, can we see a measurable lift in Walmart sales? And so we said, we love this idea. They had great creatives. We coached them a little bit and helped them with their creatives, which we'll get into more in a minute. But here's what we did. We basically did some studies with the help of Google to find what cities had really high category demand, meaning people looking for coolers and wield coolers, but then had varying ingredients of demand for RTIC. And this was all based on Google's search behavior. So we mapped out and we said, okay, let's do a test. Let's choose 19 markets that we think are poised for growth, got good store count, good inventory levels, things like that. Let's match those with 19 control markets that are basically the same size and same everything. And we're going to spend YouTube dollars in the test markets and we're going to hold out and the control markets, we're going to do that for five. And

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Jordan West:

There was Walmarts in all. Walmarts

‍

Brett Curry:

In all of them. Yeah, exactly. So then we could do, so it's a mashed pair holdout type study. So we lean in hard and we used all of our resources to build out the right campaigns and maximize views, and we did lean in heavily to connected tv. So that was a great placement for these ads. And we measured on YouTube. On YouTube. All YouTube's connected like YouTube's TV placements. Exactly.

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Jordan West:

This is now

‍

Brett Curry:

YouTube tv. A lot of people ask about that. I'm a subscriber to YouTube tv. It's a good cable replacement. That's a separate inventory though. It's powerful, but it's actually a pretty small percentage of YouTube views. And if you buy YouTube ads in the platform, like in the Google Ads platform, you're going to be on traditional YouTube. But here's one really crazy side note that ties into this. More people stream YouTube on connected TVs. So the good old fashioned YouTube app on connected TVs that stream any other platform. So YouTube, I

‍

Jordan West:

Do not doubt that even for a second,

‍

Brett Curry:

Bigger than Netflix, bigger than Hulu, bigger than Disney plus, it's bigger than Hulu. Disney Plus and a few others combined. It's bigger than Netflix, but not that dramatically. So we leaned in heavily to connect to TVs. There's so much inventory, there's so much. The inventory is insane. So many people aren't advertising here because they don't get it and they don't understand it. And so CPMs are pretty low compared to men and other places. A lot of opportunity here. So we did this five week test and we measured it all along the way. We did see Lyft and D two C, so we were able to measure those and track those. All the ads said, go to Walmart, go buy this at your local Walmart. You could click to find a local store through Google tracked people that visited stores. All of this was all about local, but we did see some D two C sales, right? Some people were just like, of course I'll buy it

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Jordan West:

Online course. No, I want to buy it now.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I want to buy it now. I want to buy it online. We saw Lyft on Amazon because a lot of people were like, yeah, I want to buy it now, but I don't want to buy it from your store. I want to buy it on Amazon because that's my favorite. So we saw that. But here's what we saw inside a Walmart stores. We had three different groups of markets. The worst performing group saw a 12% retail store lift in comparison of the test markets to the control markets, test markets 12% high degree of confidence lift over their control markets were very similar in size and nature and all that stuff. The best group was 25% lift over the control market. So basically they were like, holy crap, this is great. Let's do more of this. It actually lets us run a whole bunch of, or getting more of their business.

‍

Brett Curry:

Google was like, Hey, we got an agency excellence award for it. We really leaned into this more in the process too. We also did what's called the search lift study where Google can look at, hey, people that saw your ad versus people that didn't see your ad, what kind of impact does that have on people searching for your brand? So we saw a 241% lift in branded searches from this ad campaign, and this is where it's like, okay, you've got to kind of look at the holistic picture. And I will say, this is where YouTube really shines from omnichannel retailers. They can shine for multichannel retailers as well, but the results were stagger

‍

Jordan West:

Incredible. We don't have much time here. Brett, I want you to walk me through before you go, walk me through what the perfect YouTube ad looks like.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, there are a few elements and I've got a guide that we can mention that's free that walks through 17 of our favorite YouTube ads. It breaks down each one and shows. Great. We'll

‍

Jordan West:

Get that down in the show notes. And if you guys are watching this on YouTube, it'll be down in the description

‍

Brett Curry:

Below. Awesome. So the first thing, no surprise here probably, but you need a hook first. Five seconds is critical. People are, if it's a skippable ad, which is most of what we run, you got five seconds to really hook somebody. Some people are watching hovering with their finger of the mount over the skip button ready to click. So you got five seconds to convince them, Hey, wait a minute, check this out a little bit longer. So hook is important and what we say is you need to make sure you're hooking the right person. So don't come up with just some random hook explosion, something funny guy in a gorilla suit, something just wild. You want to interrupt the right person, right? So your ideal target, but then you want to up because you only pay based on

‍

Jordan West:

An actual view through. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you don't want the wrong, you basically want to be like, Hey, everyone else don't watch.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, you want the non-ideal shopper to skip because you only are paying for good views. And so you want someone to choose to watch your ad if they're in your market. So something to grab their intention, thought provoking question, a bold statement showing something right in their face. But it needs to be related to what you saw. So it needs to be related to the problem you're solving or the relief you're bringing or the enjoyment that your product is offering. So it's got to be relevant, a relevant interruption, a relevant hook to the right person. So the hook is critical. Next, if you're D two C, essentially most of our clients are retail in some way. It's got to be a product demonstration. You need to now show me the product in action. And Jordan, I like a typical demonstration. So what's the proper use case of this one? A good example is a flex seal, like the spray on thing to seal. If you have a leak, leak in your gutter or leak in a pot or whatever, you spray flex seal on your obsolete. So I like a standard use case demonstration. This is how you seal your gutters type of thing. But then I like an over the top demonstration. If you can throw that in there too. It's kind of like the, I dunno if you like the

‍

Jordan West:

Pepsi can thing you talked about before.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, exactly. So it's like the knife, the Ginsu knife commercial where they cut through the can or the old, old super glue commercial where they in one cut, put super glue in the bottom of a guy's shoe and stuck him to the ceiling, held it, and then he stayed there anyway. So show a dramatic product demonstration too, because you want them to see the standard demonstration and say, I could do that, right? But then they're also kind of skeptical. I like talk about Missouri, where I live is we're the show me state and our state animal is a mule. We're stubborn. We believe nothing. You got to show us before you believe us. Picture that your audience is from Missouri, right? You got to show them and they're going to be skeptical. Standard product demo and then over the top product demo. Then I like some social proof, so show me something that proves that other people like me love this product.

‍

Brett Curry:

So this can be reviews. So when we were doing stuff for native deodorant and we helped them really scale on YouTube, we said like, Hey, there was only over 50,005 star reviews. How could 50,000 people be wrong type of thing. So some kind of social proof. Then I like some kind of risk reversal or some kind of offer where it's like, hey, do this, try this, experience this. We'll take away the risk. And then a firm call to action. And so that call to action is, Hey, click here to learn more. Go to Amazon and buy it. Buy it from your favorite retailer. Something like that. So how

‍

Jordan West:

Professional does the filming need to be on YouTube? Again, I talk about TikTok all the time, right? It's the opposite, right? You don't want professional filming, it doesn't work. It's the antithesis. What about YouTube?

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's kind of the same with meta too. Sometimes it's the unpolished, the shot with the phone kind of raw candid stuff. It works on YouTube. You do need a little more polished. Think again about the frame that this is like TV and a lot of people are probably watching it on tv.

‍

Brett Curry:

A little more polished is important. Now we found that we've a lot of success with an ad that is professionally produced. You don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on it, but you need good lighting and a good camera and good audio and things like that. But sometimes when you mix good production value with some raw stuff mixed in, so good high production value, then throw in some UGC either in the middle or at the end. That combination extremely powerful. Now we've also, we scaled this auto brand on YouTube a couple of years ago, and basically all they had was UGC, but it was really good UGC. And so we did UGC mashups, which just a whole bunch of customers showing their car, talking about why they love the product, things like that. But then we added some editing and some graphics and some transition that really made it look polished and that thing scaled like crazy.

‍

Brett Curry:

So it's definitely going to be higher production value than TikTok or Meta, but it does not have to be million dollar type of stuff that you see on Super Bowl commercials. You don't need that. And then I'll also say if you're running an ad on Instagram reels or on TikTok or TikTok shops, whatever, you can take that ad almost exactly how it is and run it on YouTube shorts. I will say though, I haven't seen as much results with YouTube shorts only as I have when you're kind of doing all of YouTube or you got YouTube shorts, you got YouTube on desktop and mobile and connected TVs, which takes all a little bit different format for each of those. That's when it really works. We've seen less of an impact when it's just YouTube shorts.

‍

Jordan West:

Last question, because I am late for a meeting.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah.

‍

Jordan West:

What length are we looking at here? Is there an ideal minimum length? And I am saying minimum because I understand that there probably is a minimum.

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Brett Curry:

There is. I prefer 45 seconds to three minutes as kind of an ideal length that if you could shoot for 90 seconds or 60 seconds, that's great. Ultimately it's got to check the box, it's got to hook somebody, it's got to be compelling, it's got to have the product demo and the social proof and the offer and all that. But usually if it's a little bit longer, the more you tell, the more you sell, right? The more you show, the more dough. I just made that on the spot. That's actually really lame. We've that are like 62nd cuts, outperform 32nd cuts when it's basically the same ad, just the 60 numbers, A 32nd, the 62nd does better with clicks and overall lift in sales. So generally speaking, we want to go kind of in that 45 to minute and a half range, but as much as three minutes can also work.

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Jordan West:

Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Where can people find out more about what you are up to and chat with OMG commerce?

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Brett Curry:

Absolutely. So omg commerce.com, click the Let's talk button and that's how you end up getting with our team. You can find my podcast there by clicking on resources. You can see the YouTube guide and up there as well. And then I'm active on LinkedIn, so hit me up on LinkedIn. Would love to connect to you. I do talk about all things D two C and retail and business and Google and Amazon and all kinds of stuff. So would love to connect on LinkedIn as well. Awesome. And

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Jordan West:

I'm looking forward to coming on your pod.

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Brett Curry:

It's going to be, let's do it, man. It's going to be a blast schedule talk TikTok shop. So I'm excited. Awesome. Well thanks again for your time today, Brett. Thanks Jordan. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. So let us know what topics would you like to cover on this pod. And if you know somebody that would benefit from this episode, please share it and leave us a review on iTunes. That would make our day. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Molly Pittman is a bit of a legend in the digital marketing space. Bartender turned marketing intern for Ryan Deiss, turned VP of Marketing for Digital Marketer, turned entrepreneur - Molly's story is an inspiring one. And she flat out knows her stuff!

‍

In this episode, we dig into some real gems. We go pretty deep on what's working now on Facebook, but we also talk about the benefits of building an in-house team vs. the benefits of an agency. We discuss entrepreneurial lessons and what life is like in Amsterdam (where Molly currently lives).

‍

Here's a look at what we cover:

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• Why being fluid might be the most important entrepreneurial trait...and why it's important for digital marketers
• Why curiosity and fascination are crucial in our current marketing landscape
• What CBO is and how it's impacting Molly's Facebook ad campaigns and what you should do about it
• What the 3 facets of Facebook's new Quality Ranking are and how to optimize your ads
• How low quality rankings can dramatically drive up costs or get your ads shut down
• Plus more

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(04:51) How To Analyze A Hooks Effectiveness

(16:43) Engagement Metric’s Impact On Top Line Revenue

(23:21) Creative Strategies & Targeting

(33:24) Maximize AOV Through Systems

(44:43) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Molly Pittman 
• Smart Marketer 
• Nathan’s Famous
• Olive My Pickle
• Eugene Schwartz's
• Ezra Firestone
• Haus - YouTube Case Study
• RTIC Coolers
• Arrae
• Ella+mila
• Flewd Stresscare
• Recovery Labs

‍

---

Connect with Brett:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

‍

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.

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---

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Transcript:

Molly :

Meta wants people to engage with stuff on their platform and they are going to reward advertisers that do so

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And back with me is the world famous, Molly Pittman. She's an agency leader. She's a CEO of Smart Marketer. She's running masterminds. She's on every podcast imaginable. She's speaking on stages. She's rescuing dogs. She's making the world a better place. So what's up, Molly Pitman, how are you?

Molly :

What's up, Brett Curry? This is really funny, but when you say world famous, for some reason I think of Nathan's hot dogs. I think they're, it's like world famous hot dogs.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you're so much cooler than Nathan's famous. I mean, that is a legendary hotdog eatery. You know what I like about Nathan's famous is they don't serve ketchup on their hot dogs. I'm a fan if you're going to do a hot dog, you got to do mustard. But I'm also a fan of, now that I'm in my mid forties, I just really don't do hot dogs a lot because I feel terrible after I eat one. So

Molly :

Yeah, I think once you know what's in a hotdog too. The only ones I'll really eat, we have a farm to table restaurant that my husband runs and our

Speaker 3:

Business

Molly :

Partner is a farmer and he has amazing 100% Colby beef hot dogs.

Brett:

Dude,

Molly :

I feel good about eating those.

Brett:

Absolutely. Yeah. Got to go all beef. None of the additives. Nobody always got time for that.

Molly :

It's a great brand. We're talking about it. Hey, they do that hotdog eating contest. I mean they something going on.

Brett:

They do. And when was the last time you saw an ad for Nathan's famous? Probably not in forever, but we're talking about it because of the hotdog eating contest, just the iconic brand. And so yeah, it's great. It's great. This segment unofficially brought to you by Nathan's famous hot dogs. So you're welcome. Nathan's.

Molly :

Hey Nathan, we would love to do your marketing, so reach

Brett:

Out. Reach out. You need some D two C, you need need some omnichannel stuff we can help with. Sell through and Walmart, whatever you need. We're your team.

Molly :

Right? I saw something this week that blew my mind. Nothing really blows my mind anymore, but this was very interesting.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, what's

Molly :

That? It was a brand in my newsfeed selling pickles, but they were selling pickles in a bundle. So the average order value isn't $5. It was a really cool D two C brand, I think it was called Olive Pickle. And the whole hook behind the brand is fermented foods are really good for your gut. Wow. We've left them behind in society. You need to get more fermented foods into your body. So they're selling pickles. I think they're selling sauerkraut, kraut.

Brett:

Wow.

Molly :

Deida seed eggs. That

Brett:

Was super interesting

Molly :

For pickles. You never know what you're going to see on the internet.

Brett:

Yeah, and it's true, right? Get you some kraut in your diet. I don't really like plain kraut, but on a Ruben, sure. Get Yeah, some pickles in there because kombucha, whatever. You need some fermentation in the gut for gut health. That's brilliant. And so yeah, leaning in with a good angle, good hook one. That's true. And then bundles. So do you remember what was the price point on these

Molly :

Pickles? Yeah, the bundles were about 30 to 50 bucks and then there were multiple bundles. So I bet their AOVs over 50 bucks, get people on subscription. Let's rock and roll.

Brett:

That's what you need, man. You get that AOV over $50, get a decent conversion rate on Facebook or on Google, and you're ready to rock. So hey, if somebody can sell pickles D two C with good ads, you can sell your product as well. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. So what we thought would be fun is I run OMG, so we lean a lot into Google and YouTube and Amazon. Molly is just running smart marketer and they do a little bit of everything, but a lot in meta and paid social. And so we're going to talk about, hey, what are we seeing? What's working now? What are we telling our clients they should be leaning into? What are some of the trends we're seeing? Because we get to peel back the curtain in a lot of accounts. We get to see stuff. So what are we seeing? We thought we just lay it out for you and confident you're going to have at least a couple of takeaways that you can apply it to your business right now. So with that, Molly, what's some interesting stuff you've seen lately? I think you told me you had something kind of tactical but kind of wild that you wanted to share.

Molly :

So one thing, and I like this episode, Brett, because I think my favorite part of the agency game, other than getting to work with a bunch of awesome companies is I feel like our brains, we get so many data points from all of these businesses and then we get to zoom out and say, okay, everyone that's succeeding, what do they have in common? What are the trends of even our conversations? And I love that about this game. I think when you're running your own brand, it's really fun, but sometimes you're kind of in a cave by yourself. So that's really the goal here, guys, like giving you all this information. And one thing, Brett, this is tactical that we started doing, that's having a really big impact across all of our clients, is really thinking about the concept of a hook, which has been around hundreds of years. Everyone defines it differently in marketing.

We define it at Smart Marketer is essentially a message or a theme that you are using in an ad to get someone to buy your product. And it has to be something that existed before the internet. This has to be a way people were selling to each other in conversation back in a fish market a few hundred years ago. And all of us as marketers we're using hooks every day and email and ads on billboards. I mean, this is marketing, but it's been something that's really difficult to measure. So we created a system, it's started in our ad creative department out of a need, and now it is company wide and it's really simple. So everything that we do of course starts with the hooks. What's the why? Now we are starting to put the hooks through a really cool naming convention, which Brett, I can send you and people can download.

Speaker 3:

That'd be

Molly :

Amazing in the show notes. Very simple. You look at our hook library, you come up with your hooks, you're probably already doing this. You choose the naming convention that you want. The naming convention is a reflection of the business goal. We know every campaign has a different goal. The hook, so the message and then the angle. There are so many ways to actually use a hook, right?

There's so many different formula styles, we call them angles. So we are putting those details into UTM parameters. So they're passing back to triple whale Google Analytics, wherever it is that you do your measuring. And then for a brand, we can literally pull up a report, Brett, of the hooks that are working for their business and what's not working for their business. And what's cool is that this shows us opportunity, it also shows us risk. So when we started doing this, what we discovered for a lot of clients is like, oh, you are relying 80% of your marketing efforts across the board are this one message, this one group of people. And then if you layer on the idea of upside Eugene Schwartz's model that he came out with 50, 60 years ago, understanding a market and essentially that scale comes from solving problems in the market, but then starting to scale up your hook so they can speak to an unaware part of the market.

This analysis is showing us that piece too. So we can, for example, look at a business and say, oh my goodness, we are using zero unaware hooks. There is so much scale left for this brand. And it also starts to show us opportunities. Okay, what's working? What other hooks are similar to what's working? How can we go into the creation process there? And again, this is every channel using this same tracking mechanism where we usually use tracking for attribution, which is so important. Totally, and you should continue to do it. And this isn't perfect. But now we are using tracking to actually try to put science behind something that is usually seen as art. And brands that are able to do this are scaling so much more quickly because they are able to see those opportunities and the messages that they're using.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good to be able to understand, okay, what are the hooks, what are the angles that are actually working? And then what are we missing? Because a lot of times it's just one hook that wins or it's just one offer that wins and that can cover up a lot of ads that are underperforming. And generally speaking, I mean if you have one great hook, one great angle that can work for a while and to a certain level of scale, but if you want to go beyond that or if you want to be diversified or if you want to be able to sleep at night knowing that, hey, if this one thing stops working, we're not sunk. I love this analysis because then it shows you, okay, what types of offers do we potentially need to lean into and test? And then understanding why are those not working? So you can push ahead.

Molly :

Yeah, a good example of this is one of our dog supplement clients. They have been so pain benefit, your dog has allergies. Take this supplement. Your dog is anxious. Take this supplement your dog. Is this, take this very much in the problem solution aware. And no matter how many new UGC ads or certain variations of ads we created, we couldn't scale. And it's because we weren't reaching that unaware part of the market.

Brett:

So

Molly :

Once we saw this hook analysis, we started creating stories of Bobby, the world's longest living dog to 31 years old and dang backing longevity back to a need for the product and starting to develop those hooks that are more built for that unaware audience. I think this is a huge missing piece, Brett, for most businesses, they're not zooming out enough. They think it's more creative, more creative, and a lot of it is no, you got to really look at the hooks that you are using. And really a hook should only make up five to 10% of your marketing efforts. If you're really diversified,

Brett:

It's good. And if you look at the, let's go back to the pickle example just because that's top of mind, then it's kind of fun. So they're leaning into, Hey, fermented foods are good for your gut, that's great. That's going to hit a ceiling. That's not going to appeal to everybody. You can also lean into something that's kind of basic, but hey, these are the best tasting pickles you ever had. So these are people that are pickle lovers, but maybe there's a freshness about these pickles that somebody wants or maybe lean into, Hey, this is best for hydration. Why do athletes drink pickle juice? Nothing's better. I'm just making itself on the spot, but nothing's better for hydration. So you lean into a hydration angle, you look at all the angles or you look at like, Hey, we're just going to lean into how do these pair with different foods. We've got hooks for audiences of people that like to put a pickle on their hot dog versus other things. But that's a really good call out. I think a lot of us get stuck on one hook, one angle, and that is not going to build a scalable business. And so being able to codify these or label these hooks and begin to form an analysis is super powerful. As you guys have done this. Any other insights or any surprises that have kind of come out of it?

Molly :

I was just surprised how many businesses really are relying on one or two hooks, and those were the clients that we have had the most difficulty scaling. So it's something I knew, but it was amazing to have data around

Speaker 3:

It

Molly :

Because you say something to this like a client without data, they're like, oh yeah, Molly's just talking about nerdy marketing stuff. You show them the data, Hey, you spent $500,000 last month and 450,000 of it essentially was the same message. This can't continue now they're bought in.

Brett:

Yep, yep. Because every offer, every angle, every ad eventually stops working. It's just like that's the nature of marketing. So you've got to be inventing the next thing. And one thing we always talk about as we're looking at hooks with our clients is obviously the goal number one is attention, right? You got to get attention. That's really the point of the hook. And going back, you mentioned the fish market, people walking by local merchants or whatever, or even trade shows. We go to trade shows a lot, OMG does. And what's even more important than what's on our banner and what's on our signage is what the people in the booth say as people are walking by, Hey, would you like whatever. I'm trying to think of some of the great hooks we've used, but what you say there,

Molly :

What's that conversation?

Brett:

Let's start conversation. Yeah. How are your ads doing right now? We hear so many people saying this type of ad is sucking right now. Are you feeling the same thing? So yeah, what you say, there're super important, but goal number one is attention, but it's got to be attention with the right person. So with the right audience. And then it's got to be attention in the right way, meaning you got to interrupt someone in such a fashion that they're thinking about you, they're thinking about the problem solution. They're thinking about enjoying a tasty pickle, or they're thinking about my dog and how can I care for them? Not just interrupting the right person in any old random way, but interrupting them and getting them to pay attention based on your product. And so all those things have to be going together. And what's really interesting, while I mentioned this for you record, but just in an order, a large CPG brand, and I can't talk about the category who they are or anything, but they have done all different types of creatives, but their founder story creatives have been working a little bit better than others.

And so they've just gone ham on founder story stuff. This is a brand that's trying to appeal to a younger audience, but actually a pretty diverse audience. Founder's a little bit older. And what we saw, all of the growth, all of the scale was happening with 65 plus audience. Now that's not bad unless you want to be diverse in your customers. And so just another reminder that the hook we were using, the person we were using was appealing to an older audience. And so looking at that in detail, what is the hook? Who's providing the hook? Who's the hook appealing to? It makes a big, big difference. And you start to look in the data and then you see what you need to do next.

Molly :

And Brett, imagine that is a hook analysis. You guys would've been like, Hey, you're spending X amount of dollars with this hook. This hook is good. What are other styles and variation of people? We can use this story hook, but it doesn't always have to be you. Okay? That's where we think the next amount of scale is coming from. So

This is where I spend most of my day to day, and I love it on with our creative director, our email director, our director of advertising. Part of my job is analyzing the hooks and pumping out new hooks that other people they just can't see. And Brett, I was telling you, we've recently took the last three years of meta ads data from every business that we are connected with. So there was over a billion dollars of spend in very different types of businesses. And we used AI to start to analyze trends of what truly matters to get the results you want, the scale you want, the rollout you want, all of the things we want. And one of the most surprising things that came from that actually led to the conversation we just had was that for social, for meta, for Instagram, TikTok works in a similar way. We've always known that the social proof and the engagement on the ad was important, but this analysis blew my mind when only picking one variable that was most important to the overall

Speaker 3:

Success,

Molly :

You would think that that would be a OV or conversion rate on page or some metric that feels very close to the bottom line. What do you think it actually was?

Brett:

So what metric

Molly :

Led to success monetarily most frequently? So

Brett:

Well, maybe you kind of gave it away, but is it the social proof, like the engagement with the ad number of people liking, sharing, things like that, commenting on the ad?

Molly :

It is. Yeah. I did kind of give that away. And that Brett is also what led to this conversation because we've always known that it was important, but this allowed us to go out on the ledge a little more. The example I was talking about, tell a story about Bobby, the dog that lived 31 years, then start to transition that back to the sale. The fact that so many people are commenting and engaging and reading that story was actually more impactful than how close to the sale is this particular marketing message. So it's not always the case, but it was so and it makes sense. That's what Meta wants. Meta wants people to engage with stuff on their platform and they are going to reward advertisers that do. So a really silly example of this that I wouldn't replicate, but it just proves the point. We have a student who sells floor cleaners and they were saying the word caulk to call cure your

Speaker 3:

Bathroom.

Molly :

Well, other people heard that as another word that isn't as appropriate,

Brett:

Right? Right.

Molly :

Totally

Brett:

Different meaning. Totally

Molly :

Different meaning. So the social proof is insane on this ad. It's their highest converting ad in terms of sales.

Brett:

Yeah, that's so funny. That actually reminds me this will be a fun story, Ezra, and this was several years ago. I went to his house in New York. We were about to launch one of the versions of our YouTube course or whatever. And so he and I are doing a webinar and they're taking screenshots of what's happening in this webinar. And towards the end I throw a piece sign kind of like this. So whoever's doing the ads, can't remember who it was. They just were grabbing screenshots. And so they grabbed a screenshot of my peace sign, but when they did, they cut off my index finger. It just was like, I'm totally throwing the bird at the camera. So it's like by the course, and I'm just flipping off the camera. And that ad worked really well. It was a total accident, but I had so many people text me, you're throwing a different kind of energy right now in this ad. I'm like, yep, yep. So buy my course. Anyway, sometimes that from Brett, Brett Curry, nobody was expecting, nobody saw common caught him off guard record sales on that thing. So I got to use that. Again,

Molly :

A way to summarize that, Brett, is essentially when looking at a correlation metric of which secondary metrics on platform most effect sales, it was engagement.

Brett:

So interesting, and this is something we're talking about a lot right now. I'm sure you guys are too, and this is a buzzword, everybody's talking about it, but incrementality, right? Or what activities can I engage in? What platforms, what channels, what campaigns, what ads are incremental, meaning they're leading to new customers and new sales that I wouldn't have already gotten?

And what's interesting is we find there is a meta very incremental in general, YouTube when done right, very incremental. It's also difficult to accomplish at some points. But Haas Analytics just did a big study at our house and they found that YouTube is extremely incremental. But what we find there, and we just did a big push on YouTube, did a big case study with Arctic coolers, my favorite cooler, also my favorite, Tumblr, YouTube, and Google did a case study on it, but we did a big push to see if we could use YouTube to drive in-store sales in Walmart. And really almost all the campaigns we ran were view based. And so we were leaning into view rate metrics, overall engagement rate metrics and click through rate metrics. We were really not optimizing towards conversions at all. And I mean we were looking at some things, but it was really more about that engagement. And I think that's what's interesting. If you look at net new customers that you reach, it's probably some of the view and engagement metrics that signal incrementality and also that lead to a sales lift.

Molly :

Super interesting. And even before we go all in on creative production or offer production around a new hook, that's exactly what we're doing. Let's set up some quick ads, is not to sell anything, but we can test 10, 15 hooks with five angles a piece, even just with copy really quick. Okay, let's look at the engagement metrics. Let's pick the hooks with the most engagement. Okay, now let's go deeper in production here. I think it's so important.

Brett:

It's really great, really great. What are you seeing on the creative side? Anything new this, we talked about hooks and angles, but anything else on the creative side that you're finding is working especially well now?

Molly :

It's interesting. What is most interesting is how different it is for every brand. So some things remain true, but we have quit trying to even say, here is a formula that works, let's create this for each client. It's really, let's analyze this account. We talked to a company earlier today that sells apparel. Not that video can't work for them, but still images crush for them. So when we take them on, we'll go deeper down that rabbit hole, then we'll come back around and figure out why video's not working and can we get it to work. Where the account I looked at right before that, Brett was complete opposite. It was like, wow. So also just creative is really where we, again, hooks are marketing 1 0 1, but it's still 90% of people are not going deep enough. So for us, creative is way less now about a template or how it looks matters, but 80% of what we're doing is that hook research. We go deeper into that every single month. The more time we spend there, the bigger the lever is for the creative. This is not always possible, but I would rather produce less volume, higher quality creatives where if you get a 20% hit rate on those a month, that is really good. One creative can change an entire business.

Brett:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Molly :

Our creative director, Ben, he made one ad for one of our clients that sells leggings that doubled their business because it opened them up to a completely new market.

Speaker 3:

That's crazy.

Molly :

People come to us, our service is expensive. And they're like, oh, I could go get X amount of creatives over on this service. And it's like,

Brett:

Sure, sure, yeah.

Molly :

That's not the way we want to look at this. That's not what this is about.

Brett:

And that is the beauty of the right creative is that it can unlock scale like nothing else. And obviously the campaign structure is super important. The way you buy media, the way you structure it, it does matter and I think it will always matter. But man, creative is just such a massive lever that if you get it right, you can really unlock some scale. One of the things' kind of interesting, we got a client that sells furniture, they sell gaming chairs and stuff. Kind of cool

What I think people need to consider when they're looking at hooks or understanding what reshot test and how can I leading into it, have some confidence that this is likely to work. I think it's all about what is most important about this product, what does the client care about related to this product? And then what's a way I can show that or demonstrate that in a way that's believable? And so I think that combination is kind of why it's a little bit different for every business because your customers are a little bit different. What they're going to believe or not believe is probably a little bit different. What's important to them is also different. But this was an example. This was an awesome gaming chair where they kind of led with some weird adjustments with this ad, some weird adjustments that I'm like, I don't think anybody cares about that.

So we started talking to gamers and figuring out what they liked and they wanted neck support. And I don't ever think about neck support with my chair working on a computer, but sometimes they're reclining and gaming, so next support and back support. And so it's like, okay, well then we have to lead with that. We have to lead with that in the ad. And so I think it's often less about do we lead with UGC or do we lead with a picture or do we lead with something kind of crazy and well, it's like it depends what's most important and what presentation is going to be most believable than do that.

Molly :

Yeah, most people start with the presentation part and that's all they focus on. And it's like, no, just because you did UGC doesn't mean the marketing message is good enough for this to

Speaker 3:

Work.

Molly :

And I guarantee you for gamers, what it really is is they spend so much time on the computer, they don't want to be a hunchback in 10 years. So starting with that as the problem that you're solving and the who of this is becoming more and more important With ai, you look at meta every month that goes by our ability to specifically target people in platform based off of us actually selecting interests or us telling meta who we want to target that's decreasing and it will only continue to decrease, but that doesn't mean we just run broad campaigns. Yes we can, but just, Hey, here's my product, want to buy it? Because now with ai, the main way that meta is deciding who they're going to target is by indexing your copy and creative who is pictured, oh, this person has a cowboy hat on. So this probably is more of a western market. Oh, this ad copy sounds like it's written to women over the age of 50. We should show this campaign to that audience. So your copy and your creative is the new targeting.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. Just to riff on that a little bit, what are you guys seeing? Because I know the trend has been over the last few years, that going a little more broad in your audience targeting, so who you're speaking to, who you're showing the ad to, obviously really important, but the trend has been kind of going broad. Is that what you're seeing on Maddix? I'll share my perspective on YouTube. Are you still crafting audiences pretty frequently? Are you leaving it up to the algorithm?

Molly :

So we're still doing both because the options are still there. And yes, broad works, but you're missing a lot of scale if you're also not getting granular. This isn't a, which works better. This is the difference in I spend a hundred KA month or I spend 200 KA month. This is a scalability thing. But also Brett, even with the broad styles, depending on the brand and how many avatars or hooks are at play, we are building broad campaigns where maybe all of them have no targeting, but the offer, the copy and creative are built towards the

Brett:

Creative is the targeting, isn't it?

Molly :

Exactly. So that's where most of the scale is coming from.

Brett:

Yeah, super interesting. We still see on the YouTube side, there are a lot of campaigns that we'll scale with pretty open targeting, but I think it's interesting, this is one of those differences between YouTube and Meta. We are still seeing most success with audience targeting and looking at in market audiences or audiences based on someone's Google search behavior or what else they're shopping for. So that's almost always the way we train campaigns and get things going is by being pretty focused in our audiences. We'll open it up more as we go, but it's a really interesting thing with YouTube is that the audiences do matter. And then the other thing we have to look at is placements. YouTube is kind of notorious. There's some really great placements and some bad placements. You got to weed that. You got to weed that out. So

Molly :

That makes sense.

Brett:

Yeah.

Molly :

And Brett, one more quick thing on this is we've noticed a big difference in CPMs. So let's imagine we're selling a haircare product for women. You launch a broad campaign that really just sells people on this product, Hey, this will help your hair grow. This is most people. That's what they do. It's all about the product. You are entering the auction and meta is going to place you in front of people that are actively searching for a haircare

Brett:

Product. So true.

Molly :

So true. It is the most expensive application of the market. That's the most expensive part of the market you can be in. Now, can you win there? Maybe, maybe not. I hope you can. Okay. What if we take that and we position it to moms? The ccpm is probably half right. We've completely changed the economics of the media buying because of the creative and the copy.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really good. On the YouTube side, it's a little bit different where sometimes it's just the structure of the campaign, but if you can still say kind of focus with the audience, but you can do some things that will lower your CPMs by half or a third, that can be a complete economic game changer for the performance of that campaign.

Molly :

And so

Brett:

We're looking at a lot of innovations there

Molly :

And just who you're getting in front of like, okay, you get in front of someone for haircare products, that's okay. But then it's really like they are solution aware. They're comparing you to a bunch of other people.

Brett:

You

Molly :

Can make the sale. But what about showing up in front of someone who's lost a lot of hair because they had a baby and they haven't looked for a solution? No, you're not competing against anybody.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, it's really good,

Molly :

Really good. It's really how it's always been. It's just different, if that makes sense. The broad targeting is there, but it's the exact same thought process that we've always used.

Brett:

Super interesting, super interesting. What are some of the recurring conversations you're having with clients right now in terms of what they're wanting and how you're guiding them to get that?

Molly :

Yeah, I mean this is always a conversation, but it's interesting where this has been leading recently in terms of success and really trying to boost a OV, really trying to boost what a customer is worth after 90 days, after 120 days, and especially for physical products, we have been preaching, Hey guys, how can you sell a system instead of a product? So here's a good example. We have a client that has had crazy success the last few months, not to brag, but they just told us today hiring us was their win on their company meeting today. But it really, it's

Brett:

Good. That's what every agency wants to hear. So kudos to you guys. That's awesome.

Molly :

Well, it's good marketing, but really it was one thing. So they sell mouth guards and there are many different applications of their mouth guards. Like you could wear the mouth guard to help you with snoring. People wear this mouth guard for MMA fighting. So there's lots of different avatars, there's lots of complexity, but they have a night mouth guard and they have a day mouth guard.

And yes, they were cross-selling upselling. They were using these together. But we said, Hey guys, no, we need to send all traffic to a product page that is positioning this as a system based off what that person wants. So a snoring system, a high performer athlete system, and then you are prescribing to them that they need to wear this one during the day and they need to wear this one during the evening. Okay, that's an immediate two x of their A OV. Now they're coming back later to buy both of them just because we prescribe this as a system instead of a la carte product. And this is something all of us can do. That's a really simple example that's like, duh, that worked. But every business can do this. You think of supplements. Anytime we can sell two or three supplements as a system instead of one off and upsell, it's a huge game changer. So that's a conversation we are having with every client no matter what they do, what are the offers we can build? Because if someone wants to solve a problem or they want an end result,

They want to be told what they need to do. A array that used to be a client of ours, they sell supplements and now yes, they sell a supplement that helps you lose weight. Yes, they sell a supplement that helps with bloating, but they also have their lean and tone system. So it's like if you are losing weight, you also need to tone your muscles. So why don't you buy these two products together? It's simple, but it can make a really big difference. And then if they say no to that, okay, now let's downsell them the a la carte product.

Brett:

But

Molly :

It changes the economics of the media buying in a big way. If you're able to double a OV or raise it by 50%, it's like, okay, there's scale right there and what we're already doing

Brett:

That doubling or even 50% lift in a OV that can unlock another level of scale on meta or YouTube that you're not getting now because there's a certain percentage of traffic that you've got to just bid a little bit more for the cost a little bit more. But if you change the economics of your offer and what your A OV is, now you've got more money to play with, which is super interesting. What's also cool about that is I think it does a few things. One, it positions you differently. So we were on a lot of Google shopping and Performance Max and stuff. I think it's great. It's a lot of comparison shopping, but that's where I'm usually just looking at one product, one product of this company versus all it's comparison shopping. I'm looking at just product versus other products. That's fine. But what if you said really what you need to solve this problem you're looking at is you need a bundle, you need this system, you need these things because if you only take care of this one thing, then you're not going to get the results you want. If you are not toning and losing weight, you're not going to feel as good, right? Or your body composition is going to change. You'll lose weight, but you're going to have a higher fat percentage, whatever. You can start to paint that picture.

Molly :

And

Brett:

So I think it differentiates you as well as changes the economics. And then also if you get better results, you get better results for a customer, they're going to spend more and going to tell more. And again, it's a virtuous cycle there.

Molly :

And you can get really creative with this, Brett, if you allow your mind, Ellen Mila, the nail polish brand that both of us have worked on, they have so many colors of nail polish, but nail polish a bottle, there's only so much you can charge for that. So we posed this question to them guys, what is a system you can sell? And their owner came up with a brilliant idea, Skittle nails. You paint each of your nails a different color that completely changed their business. Now we show them the Skittle nails in an ad, they want it. We've created a trend. Now they're buying five bottles instead of one. So this can be done in almost every scenario if you let your minds really go to a creative space around it.

Brett:

And I love that you framed it that way. It's really about letting your mind go to a different place than it always goes to. Because in e-commerce marketing, what do we think about? We think about very product specific marketing. This is my joint care supplement. I'm just going to think about joint care audiences and stuff like that. Well, but what if we step back and thought, what does the customer really want and what is the problem they're really trying to solve? And if they bought a combination of things, what would give them the best results? And let's lean into that and what would also increase consumption? And so

Molly :

I

Brett:

Love it. Really smart looking at systems instead of products. It's great.

Molly :

And then Brett also, especially if it's a consumable like nail polish, now you have them on subscription at such a higher rate than you would have with one product. I want to leave you guys with one business that I think everybody should check out that's doing most of the things that we talked about today. I have no affiliation with them, but they're just, we nerd out about brands that are doing smart things. I'm

Brett:

Always looking for good marketing.

Molly :

Yeah. I want you guys to go to their website, check out their ads in Facebook, ad library, everything. So it is called Fluid stress Care, F-L-E-W-D. Have you heard of them by chance?

Brett:

I have not.

Molly :

Okay. Which makes sense because this part of their brand is mostly for women. So I found them through a Facebook ad. And what they've done is taken a commodity product selling essentially bass salts that have been around hundreds of years, but with a twist, which is my favorite commodity with a twist, something I've heard of before, but different than I've ever seen.

Brett:

So there's immediate acceptance because I've heard about it before. But this is making it this way new and exciting and a reason to

Molly :

Buy Never this way though. So they are infusing vitamins into the soaks

So that they have specific in results. So they have a sad smashing soak. That's for when you're sad. They have an ache erasing for when your muscles hurt. They have one for stress, so they have one for anxiety. So not only is it smart because it's commodity with a twist, they didn't name these products. Here's the lavender soak, here's the rose soak. No, they are all named a specific thing that we're wanting to work on. So that's the second part of what I love. Their branding is insane. You guys just have to check out their website. It's simple, but it's beautiful. It works. But what I really love, especially if you guys check them out in Facebook ad library and see the destination of their ads, they are also selling a system. So their entry point offer is $80. That's what I bought. My first purchase with them was $80. It was a sampler pack where you try all of them, then they get you on subscription.

Brett:

Brilliant.

Molly :

I love everything about this brand. They're doing everything that we're talking about. If you guys look at their ad library, they so understand their avatars and the hooks they got me with basically, Hey, stressed out female entrepreneur, this is for you. That is me. That's exactly, now I'm on subscription every single month. And what's cool is I recorded a podcast just reviewing this brand on the Smart Marketer podcast. Someone listened to it, connected me with one of their owners, and I got to chat with him and just nerd out.

Brett:

It's amazing. It's amazing.

Molly :

And then I learned, if you go to recovery labs.com, this is the really cool part you got to check out after we're done recording Brett, they have duplicated this brand, rebranded it a little bit just based off of color, repackaged it. It is the same thing, but it's for men who are wanting to recover from certain athletic endeavors. I've really never seen that before. Take a brand that works and actually duplicate the brand to another avatar that is next level.

Brett:

And what a brilliant thing to do too, because I'm a dude and I'm also larger. I'm six three, so I don't really take baths. I don't really fit in the bathtub. And you're probably not going to get me to change my mind there by a stress relief thing.

Speaker 3:

But

Brett:

Maybe just if I was pushing hard in training and you said, here's how you recover, here's how you increase the training. Maybe I secretly do like a bath, but I'm not going to admit it, right? But if there's that angle, I'm like, okay, I'll try that.

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Brett:

That is so smart. That is awesome. So Recovery labs.com you said was the brand for men. What was the flu? What was the other one?

Molly :

Luge Stress Care. F-L-E-W-D. Stress Care. And one of their owners also has an agency, so his team's running both. And it's so cool. Guys. Go look at their ads in Facebook ad library, look at the site. It is the same. Marketing principles, just a different person. So

Brett:

Fantastic. So cool. So check that out. Brilliant. I know we've both got hard stops in like 60 seconds, but Molly, you've got some cool things going on. You've got mentor, your mentor table group, you've got Smart Marketer Live coming up. I dunno if you want to mention dates or anything like that, or if you just want to tell people to go to your website and check it out. But what asks do you have for people as we wrap up the podcast here?

Molly :

Yeah, check us out@smartmarketer.com. We did launch a new mastermind for seven figure business owners, which is really exciting. We are getting great reviews. We have tons of access coaching live events. It's really not a Mastermind, it's more of a coaching program with the community. Brett Curry's in there, so check that out under our mastermind tab. It's called Mentor Table. And then yes, we are doing our big annual events, smart Market or Live Again in October. Brett will be there, you guys are sponsoring. And tickets for that will be available on our website at the end of March.

Brett:

Awesome. And can you reveal the city of that or is that kind of under key?

Molly :

Back in Denver. So

Brett:

Back in Denver. Mile High.

Molly :

Yep. Exactly. It's great

Brett:

Spot. Great spot. Awesome. Molly Pittman, blast. As always, thank you so much and look forward to the next episode we get to do together.

Molly :

Likewise. Bye Y Allall. Bye, Brett. Thanks.

Brett:

Bye-bye. See you. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. So let us know what topics would you like to cover on this pod. And if you know somebody that would benefit from this episode, please share it and leave us a review on iTunes. That would make our day. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍

In this episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I welcome back Chris Mercer (co-founder of MeasureU) to discuss how e-commerce store owners can transform their approach to data and understanding customer behavior. We dive deep into Microsoft Clarity, a powerful free tool that helps visualize how users interact with your website, and explore how AI can be leveraged strategically to enhance measurement and business operations. This conversation is packed with actionable insights that can help you understand what's really happening on your website and how to make data-driven decisions that boost conversions.

Key Takeaways:

• Microsoft Clarity: The Visual Analytics Game-Changer - Discover how this free tool provides heat maps, scroll tracking, and screen recordings that help you see your website through your customers' eyes. Learn how its built-in AI can analyze patterns across numerous user sessions to identify friction points you might otherwise miss.
• The Measurement Mindset Shift - Understand why e-commerce measurement is really about "listening" to the customer side of the digital conversation. Mercer explains why you should focus on behavior patterns rather than just conversion metrics, and how to set up proper expectations before analyzing data.
• From Data to Action - Learn the three-step framework for effective measurement: 1) Plan what questions you want to answer, 2) Gather the right information, and 3) Decide in advance what actions you'll take based on different potential outcomes.
• Strategic AI Implementation - Discover Mercer's revolutionary approach to using AI effectively. Rather than telling AI "how" to do something, learn to focus on communicating the desired result and letting AI determine the optimal path to get there.
• UTM Parameters and Traffic Identification - Find out why properly tagging your traffic sources is critical for understanding which marketing efforts are working and how to optimize them for better performance.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(04:41) What Is Microsoft Clarity? 

(16:40) Shifting Your Mindset About Measurement 

(19:10) How To Get The Most Out Of Microsoft Clarity

(33:52) The Measurement Framework

(42:36) Simplifying Measurement for Actionable Insights

(47:24) A New Approach To AI

(58:29) Conclusion 

---

Show Notes:

• Chris Mercer
• MeasureU
• Social Media Marketing World
• Michael Stelzner
• Mike Rhodes 
• Ralph Burns
• Microsoft Clarity 
• Why We Buy
• AutomateToWin.com
• Jeff Sauer
• Unreasonable Hospitality 
• MeasureU.com/evolution 

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

---

Transcript:

Chris:

E-commerce owners in particular need to understand how their stores are operating specific to the behaviors. It's not just about ROAS and ROI that's important, but it's about how you're getting ROAS and ROI.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today I've got a long time friend, a return guest coming on to the pod, but we also discussed leading up to this that it's been too long. He was a guest, but it was years ago, plural, more than one. And so I've got on the pod with me today, Chris Mercer, AKA Mercer, probably nobody calls you Chris except for maybe your mom. I'm not really sure. But we're going to talk about some CRO stuff, some cool new tools. And then I think we might just blow your mind a little bit talking about the way Chris AKA Mercer is thinking about ai. And so we're going to dive into that. But with that, Mercer is the co-founder of Measure You and he and I go way back though because I think we were a couple of the OGs speaking at Traffic and Conversion Summit I think for maybe four years in a row, something like that. You may have spoken there more times than that, but I think it was four years in a row. Does that sound right to you?

Chris:

It was a while back. And then I think we may have crossed paths to it, the Social media marketing world, social media

Brett:

Marketing world, shout out to Michael Stelzner. Absolutely. Great event then. Yeah, I think the last pod we did Mercer was GA four

Chris:

Maybe. It probably was, yeah. Which makes it years ago because

Brett:

Kind of been an old story now

Chris:

Back universal to GA four days. Absolutely right.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome man. And so certainly want to hear what you got going on at Measure U. And I know for the longest time you talked to with smart people, Mike Rhodes or Ralph Burns or some of those guys, and if there was ever a question about measurement or how to set up your Google Analytics or how to really measure what's going on in your business, the response was always just go talk to Mercer. Right? He'll take care of you. And so delighted to have you back on the show, man. And so do you want to give everyone just a quick update on what's new with Measure U and kind of what you guys are building there?

Chris:

Yeah, absolutely. So measure u.com, so it's measured with the letter u.com. We've got a whole community out there. We've got a free community now with training resources and places for people to get help that are just sort of starting out. And then we've got the done to do it yourself level courses and everything else that's there for people of various techniques and skills if you're just starting out all the way to experienced people that need to level up. And then we've got done with you training. So we just sort of made this one stop shop where everybody can understand measurement because to your point, back when you and I were on those stages, first kind of meet and greet, this is what, a decade ago, we've probably been doing this stuff now. So it's like when that was around, there was pretty much Google Analytics and that was the tool. There was a tool, now there's thousands, there's Tag Manager, there's Looker Studio stuff, there's Big Query, people have to have first party databases. Now there's data transformation, there's all this stuff to try to keep up with in the measurement industry, measurement truly has become a department. And so Measure U is there to help educate and make sure that people in the companies have their skills in-house, whether it's a measurement department or just the marketers that understand how to use measuring to improve their results.

Brett:

And I can attest to the quality of the training as we have team members inside of OMG that want to level up on their understanding of GA four, any type of measurement, we have sent them through your courses and receive rave reviews. So shout out to what you guys are doing and kudos to you for Ability, just a great company and some amazing training that's leveling people up on the measurement side. And I think it's good transition to talk about CRO for a minute and a tool that you were telling me about that I was actually unaware of. But before we kind of talk about it, I think it's really important to underscore that what we don't need right now is more data. That's not the solution. Exactly. Just give me more numbers. I want more data on my business is no, I want more insights. I want more clear actionable data going on. Here's a problem or here's an opportunity, let me then fix that or exploit that. And so with that in mind, let's talk a little bit about Microsoft Clarity. What is Microsoft Clarity and why are you so jazzed up about it?

Chris:

This is one of my favorite tools, and this is kind of the benefit of being a part of Measure U because Microsoft Clarity has been around for four or five years at this point, right? It's been around for a while, maybe even longer than that, but it has essentially what it is, is a replacement. I think for tools like Hotjar, crazy Ag, any sort of heat mapping, scroll mapping, screen recording, mouse flow, things like that. Lucky Orange is another example of a tool that used to do that or does that. But what Clarity did Microsoft in particular when they created Clarity, they wanted to have an answer to Google Analytics. They wanted to say, this is our analytics platform, but they didn't want to do what I think Facebook's mistake was because Facebook, way back in the day had Facebook analytics, which had a very brief one year existence and then went away.

But it's because they tried to just create Google Analytics and everybody was like, well, why would I do both? This is ridiculous, except theirs was more limited. So what Microsoft did is said, okay, we're not going to do the data side, we're not going to do the data tables. Don't get us wrong. We're going to have data, but it's not going to be these ugly tables and charts, and your job is not to sit and figure out how to analyze reports all day long. That's not what we want you to do. We want you as a marketer to be able to understand what's happening on the site, understand the behaviors that are happening, and then be able to now that you know those behaviors, to be able to say, Hey, if those are the behaviors we want, awesome. Let's scale traffic. If those are the behaviors we don't want, here's some insights that might be something you can do to adjust the marketing or adjust how the site is on your side.

So those behaviors are less likely to occur and that's what those heat maps show. So they will show visual, and this is what I like about this platform, it's visual, so it's intuitive for somebody who's not a trained data person or something, the people who own the stores, you're running a Shopify store and you're not quite, you don't really consider yourself a numbers person, but you know need to kind of know your numbers. You're in that I need to take my medicine, but I don't really want to, you know, need to. Microsoft Clarity is that spoonful of sugar to kind of grow back to that Mary Poppin song, right?

Brett:

Love

Chris:

It is the spoonful of sugar helps medicine go down and it's freaking awesome because it's visual. So you can instantly, intuitively understand what a heat map is telling you by the color code. What parts are red are really hot. People are seeing this. Parts that are blue are not so much. Same with scroll maps. They have a thing called click maps where you can kind of see generally what area of the page is being clicked on,

Should that be the area that's getting clicks. These are the questions that you can start answering. And then finally it does screen recordings so you can actually see users as they're interacting with the page and you can see the recording of it. They want from page one to page two to page three, the entire session. And there's nothing better than that over the shoulder view of actually seeing a user do that and go like, wow, maybe that's why the checkout isn't quite working. Or maybe that's why this particular product isn't selling compared to all the other products we have in our catalog that are, let me go see people who just saw this product page versus the other product detail pages. And then you can watch and see how they're interact with that. There's nothing better than that. And the other thing I'll say about it, because it's very easy to understand, it's also very easy to set up. It's literally just a piece of code, a script, just put it on your site, whether you use Tag Manager for that already, some of you already have that with Shopify stores or BigCommerce, whatever tool you're using, however you're getting measurement on those sites, clarity does it the same way. The beauty of it though is where a platform like GA four truly requires some setup to get the most from it. Clarity doesn't. Clarity will give you action, just drop the code

Brett:

And you're good.

Chris:

Action actions, yes, you'll be able to interact with these reports, give it a day or two just to collect some data, but that's it. And then you can instantly start going, oh, that's something useful. I can do something with this without having to worry about three hours of learning how to use the tool.

Brett:

Totally. So we got heat maps to see what are people seeing, we've got this click breakdown, where are people clicking, how are they clicking? And then you've got the screen recordings and it's so valuable because we want to see our marketing and specifically our landing pages and our website through the eyes of our customer, and this is what this tool allows you to do. It's free, it's easy to set up. So pretty

Chris:

Powerful and it's free. Exactly right. Didn't mention that, but Microsoft is just gladly paying for it on their end, which is awesome and it truly is a fantastic product. I'll say one other thing that's a huge pro for this versus some of the pay tools that I no longer use was the paid tools. You would have to go in there and set stuff up. So I would have to say like, oh, I need you to set up screen recordings for this page and we have to do it before the email hits so I can see what people are doing. And if somebody forgot to do that in the company and traffic already hit, then you go back to look at screen recordings that were never going to be there. You forgot to set 'em up, right?

Clarity, everything's on all the time, all pages. So it's not like you have to say, I need to set up a heat map for this. What you're doing with Clarity is you're going to Clarity and you're just looking at the heat map, which will already be there for every page that has clarity code on it. It's doing that now, the catch, because everyone's going to be like, how is that? The catch is it doesn't keep it for very long. So 30 to 90 days is kind of all you're going to have some of this data for, but that's all you need it for. That's all you need. It is for that just what's going on right now, are these behaviors we want? If so, scale if not change, right?

Brett:

Yeah. It's very rare that you want to go back and look at your heat maps from six months ago, a different page, different design,

Chris:

And honestly, you can snapshot, you can just take a little graphic image and just snapshot it if you want. Right? Totally makes sense. You can download the data, by the way. So usually you have access to do that sort of stuff too. It really is a fantastic

Brett:

Platform. And then there's also AI that's kind of baked in. So with some of the other tools, you've got to manually break things down, kind of decipher, especially screen recordings are super cool in that you can see what an actual user's doing, but then that's a lot of data to sift through the AI science

Chris:

Going to, yes, I'm going to restate that question because you sort of gave away the lead there, right? Oops, oops. But you go, okay, well how do we use heat maps? How do we use scroll maps? How do we use these screen recordings say in the past, and we will cover this aipi in the second, but in the past you would have to look at the heat map and the heat maps are different because you can see 500 people seeing the page and you say, okay, do I have enough data? And it kind of, okay, cool. Now this is something useful versus one person on the page. If that one visit you don't really know how to change, you need a lot of people seeing it. That works for heat maps, that works for scroll maps. And again, you can kind of tell by the colors what's working, what's not.

But with screen recordings, you would literally have to watch a screen recording and then you have to watch another screen recording, then you got to watch another screen recording, and then you have to hope that you're detecting a pattern out of all of that. It is problematic. They're powerful but problematic. I was literally at a conference, and this was years ago, but it was a CRO conference, which I thought was exceptionally dangerous to be talking about this. They were talking about this new screen recording tool. This is back when it was New Tech, and they were talking about how somebody was going through the checkout and they were watching the screen recording and they were playing this for everybody on the screen. They're like, see where they stopped right here? Right around payment information. That's how we knew we had to change the cart. And I was like, or that's when this person's kid came in and said, Hey, dinners, where's dinner? Or, oh, I got to get my card. Oh, they expired. Crap, I have to go call the bank now. Or a million other things that would've caused that or the doorbell. And it's like they made a decision off of one screen recording, assuming this person was definitely going to buy no matter what, and they couldn't figure out how to use the truck checkout. And it was such a mess, I thought

Because it was just based on one visit, one person's opinion changed their company, which is dangerous, right? Because you can make a lot of bad decisions that way. So the beauty of Microsoft was with chat GPT when they invested in this, so Clarity Hass been around before chat, GPT was a thing, but when Microsoft came into chat GPT and bought into it, they instantly integrated all of that love into their platform. So now they download, essentially what they're doing is they're downloading all the dataset in the chat, jt, they've already got their assistance perfectly written to be able to give responses that are useful and it'll analyze all of that. And so instead of just even looking at a thousand screen recordings, you can literally go in there and say, I want to see the screen recordings where they saw this product detail page and they came from our, let's say, promotional email for Father's Day or whatever the thing was.

So we want to see how just this really tight segment of people interacted on screen recordings. What did they do? Did they do the behaviors you want in? I don't even look at the screen recordings anymore because now you can create that, what they call filter segmenting is all that really is. You create that little filter and then you just say, summarize all the recordings and it'll look at 'em all, it'll analyze and then it just sort of chat. G PT spits out a story and it'll say things like, well, it looks like a user was, maybe because some of us have membership components or a login, it looks like users were having problems logging in. And you'll see numbers next to that comment. What those numbers are are the actual screen recordings where users had problems logging in. So now instead of going, I'm not sure what that means, you go, okay, let's go see that.

Brett:

And

Chris:

Now what it's done is it's told you a story and said, if you want to go find out more, here's where I got that from. If you want to take a look yourself, which you should always do, we never let AI just make decisions for us, but it's a tool. I wouldn't let my computer automatically just work and do everything for me without ever checking it. Same thing with ai.

Brett:

Totally, totally, totally. Yeah.

Chris:

But it makes it so much faster to get to action because you don't have to watch a bunch of videos. You can just have it build this segment and then say, what is this generally telling me? What are the trends and patterns that you see? And it will do the same thing for heat maps and scroll maps and the click maps and everything else. So

Brett:

Not

Chris:

Only

Brett:

Can you do that, it's so good at doing it's right,

Chris:

Exactly. Which ation data pattern

Brett:

Recognition than humans are.

Chris:

And here's the key, I get asked this a lot, how are you guys using AI for data? And the answer is not much honestly. But that's because the way that we use measurement, we don't need AI because our reports operate. Our reports the way they're made operate faster than ai. They don't need interpretation. So I don't need AI to interpret anything. They just tell me the action automatically. So that's how we do that. That's why we don't need it. The reason it's powerful with Microsoft Clarity is because Clarity is adjusting their data and they're pre reformatting it, so it's garbage in, garbage out. That's the problem with ai. Everyone's sprinkling AI into Google Analytics for if Google Analytics four hasn't been set up properly, it's going to make bad calls because the data isn't useful. Clarity understands, Hey, chat, TPT is going to be looking at this, so they're automatically organizing it for you, so you don't have to do that.

So chat t PT can do something useful with it. So it's all contained, right? It's all in their platform. There's nothing you have to do at all, which is again, why I really like it, because I think e-commerce owners in particular need to understand how their stores are operating specific to the behaviors. It's not just about ROAS and ROI that's important, but it's about how you're getting ROAS and ROI. And if you're not seeing the behaviors going through the site, are they looking at your images that you just replaced or are they not even looking at the images? You can tell stuff like that with clarity. Are they looking at the testimonials so they even scroll down and spend some time doing that? You can literally what they call smart events with this platform. Again, little bit of setup at this point. This is what I like about it. The platform grows with you, but you can literally say, I just want to know the people that have seen our testimonial for a certain amount of seconds and have interacted with it, looking at the reviews of the product, whatever it is. And you can have a nice little segment of those. That's why I love this platform because within seconds, within seconds, could you not of looking at something, you'd be like, okay, now I know what marketing action to do.

Brett:

Yeah,

Chris:

And there's no setup. It's just activation super, which is super cool,

Brett:

Simple. And it's one of those things where really our goal with CRO or marketing in general is about behavior modification. How can I guide someone through this journey or through this process to one, be interested in my product and then to trust it and then to buy it? And so where are they getting hung up along the way and help me make sense of that. And so let's back up just a little bit. Now we've got this really great overview of how the tool works and even the AI component, which is amazing, but what should we be looking for? What strategies should we form as we look at, okay, we're going to set up Microsoft Clarity, plug it into our website, what should we be thinking about to make sure we're getting the most out of it?

Chris:

So I'll start with a mindset and then we'll get into a little bit of a framework. So the mindset really is just like you and I are having a conversation, I'm going to adjust what I say based upon what you're asking.

You're going to adjust what you ask based upon what I say. It's a series of listening, responding back and forth, right? Digitally that same thing is happening. And I think most digital, anybody in the digital world forgets this. Humans are still human. They're just now interacting as humans with a digital thing. So there's still a conversation that's happening except now it's happening on the website. In fact, you probably have heard yourself reading copy from websites so vocalizing, it's a little conversation for most people. So when you're on that and you think about this, well, if you and I were having a conversation, I can easily adjust listening to your side so I can adjust my side and vice versa. That sort of happens naturally. But how do you do that digitally? How do we listen in to the user side of the conversation, whoever's on our stores? So we listen in through measurement.

Brett:

That

Chris:

Is why it's important to have behavioral measurement because if you're not listening for that, you will never know their side of the conversation, never know. And so you have to guess or ask other people to guess for you through professional masterminds and things like that. That's what happens. And then everybody eventually just sort of settles on this is the style everybody should do because everyone's been doing it and it ends up never being tested because no one ever took the time to learn to set up measurement so they can hear their users tell them, Hey, if you move the button over here, I'll buy this. Hey, if you add testimonials that are more like this, that feature this stuff, instead of that stuff, I'll totally buy this. Hey, if you add images that are this high quality or a video demonstration, I'll absolutely buy that. But if we're not listening for those behaviors to see how the impact our sales, how can we possibly make the move and how can we be confident that the move is more than likely going to move the needle?

Brett:

That's

Chris:

Why listening is so important. So the very first step is that mindset shift. If I have to use measurement, not just for O and r, o, I get CPAs cost per lead. I understand all that. Yes, clear not the only thing, right? It's like those are the results, but you also need to know how you're getting those results and those are the behaviors left behind. So that's the mindset shift. So the way then to use a tool like this is you're coming at it with, okay, I need to listen in to our user side of the conversation because they're going to tell us what's working, what's not, and what to change. They want to also be successful. They want you to be successful. Why else would they be on your site if they had zero interest at all? Right? They ultimately want to complete that journey even if they couldn't. So now we're going to listen in for that conversation. So what we're listening for are all those little how behaviors.

What I would start with is three. One is the start of the journey, whatever that means to your business model. We'll get to specifics with e-commerce, but the start of the journey, the end of the journey when they finish that journey, and then someplace in the middle at least one. Now what we'll do is do a bunch. So as you get better and better at measurement, you start adding more steps. You understand more specifics of the journey, but it might start with who started looking at a product detail page, any product detail page. That's the start of a journey. It could be for e-commerce, the checkout process when they're starting to begin checkout, and that starts, so it's not the view cart, but I'm actually starting the checkout process. That might be the middle step that where they're actually considering completing the journey at this point. So the one they're aware of, there's a journey. The second step they now considering completing because that's what they be on the checkout. And then there's that final transaction step of them paying for whatever G average ticket is, and then they complete. So the beauty of that is if they're not completing, meaning, if you're not making sales, you would at least know some ideas to why. And Clarity can tell you this because did I mention it also has funnels? Then you can set up funnels of clarity. Again, one-stop shop to get started with.

So you could set up a nice little funnel and say, okay, why are we not getting bottom of funnel sales? Is it because everyone's getting stuck at the checkout process or stage of it? Because obviously with e-commerce you've got multiple stages normally. So it could be that you could set all those up, or is it because they're not even seeing the product detail pages to begin with? So we have something even further up, we have to get fixed so we can get traffic to those pages. Maybe they're not making it through your category pages or whatever the user journey happens to be, but the beauty of it is you can set it up and then ask those questions, have those questions ahead of time, and then when you've got it set up before you go into it, think about the actions you're going to take before you even look at it.

This would be my biggest tip I can give anybody because when you go into Clarity, when you go into any analytics platform, I think the gut reaction from most people who are not measurement oriented in the beginning, they haven't learned the skills yet. They think it's open up the platform and they go, what do I do with this? Let me try to figure it out. And that's where they start. That's already your game over. You've already lost the game if that's your first thought. So instead of that, what you do is before I open up Clarity, you go, alright, I know I'm measuring for the people that are product detail pages, I expect maybe 30% of those should go to the cart. At least half the people should complete the cart for this average ticket. This is what should be happening. Now let me go to Clarity to see is that happening?

Because what's happening now is you're going to clarity to say, I understand how my marketing machine should be working. How many e-commerce stores should be working now? Is it working the way I expected it to? Now you're going to Clarity. Clarity to say yes or no, but because it says yes or no, it's not just giving you information anymore. It's giving you an action now. Oh yes, great, I'll scale traffic. Oh no, it's not okay, let me dig into why and what can I adjust to fix that and why is one working really well, but the other one's not. And that's where I would look at especially with e-commerce descriptions. Did you describe one just a little bit juicier than you described the other pair of shoes, and maybe that's why they're bearing first pair but not the second pair. Were the images better? Was there a closeup version of the stitching on one of the shirts, but the other shirts don't have that and maybe that's the quality and that buyer was would be for quality signals.

Was there a video demonstration on one of 'em that's selling but the other video aren't on there? Maybe we should create more video demonstrations of the product or being worn or whatever used, whatever the widget is that we're selling. So those are some of the things you can do with that platform that are very, very quick and it doesn't take a lot of learning. It just takes awareness. Now that everyone's listening to this, they're aware that that's a thing, just keep that in your head, just be aware of that, never forget that and you'll automatically get more value from this tool.

Brett:

It's really interesting that you frame it that way. So this is a conversation and it totally makes sense. If I visit a website, I'm going there and I've got a question in mind, I've got an interest in mind something and I'm kind of conversing with that page so to speak, but no one is necessarily listening to my frustrations or my excitement or whatever. And that's where measurement comes in and that's where some of these tools come in. But it does seem to me like there needs to be some training or some understanding for how can I listen and listen effectively. So it sounds like part of what you're saying is have some expectation going in of what should be happening on this page. Are we setting something up specifically in clarity for how it's going to measure, or is there much customization on the setup to get in and be able to listen properly or not

Chris:

Really? Yeah, really good question. The answer is yes and not right away. So I'm going to give you another phrase that I want everybody to repeat as a mantra. Just get good enough to get going, come back and make it better later. Because the tendency is, oh, it does funnels. Oh cool. Oh, it does smart events. Oh, okay, cool. I'm going to set up all this stuff without even using the platform at all. I'm going to figure all this stuff out. And then you're having committee meetings and everyone's like, what do you want to measure? What do you want to? And everyone's like, well, I think, and then you hear this, the most dangerous phrase in any organization, I shudder to even say it. What would be interesting, as soon as I hear that phrase, I'm like, interesting does not mean useful. I just want to hear what is be useful.

Brett:

We're not here to be entertained.

Chris:

Not exactly don't care. It'd be interesting to know if people from blah blah, blah, blah, I know it's not interesting at all if you can't make it useful.

Brett:

Once you know that, what would you do differently?

Chris:

Exactly right. That's how you handle that. You say, that would be cool. What actions would you take? Actually first thing used to say, what do you expect the answer to be?

Brett:

If

Chris:

They don't even have that, it kills it. And then if they do have that, you're like, cool, what actions would you take? If it's within that range, actions would you take? If it's lower, what actions would you take If it's higher? And if they know those three directions, they totally are ready to see that number because now they know what to do no matter what. If it's perfect, they know higher. They know if it's lower. They know because they've preplanned it, they thought it through, and you want your team doing that. So these are really good questions to ask

Brett:

And sometimes to know what's specific questions to ask or how to converse, you almost just need to listen to the raw stuff a little bit, right? Just get in there and check it out.

Chris:

Yeah, and I'll go back to get good enough to get going, come back and make it better later. With Microsoft Clarity, the good enough to get going is just turning the thing on. Take the code again, it's clarity.microsoft.com to go there. You'll create a free account. You can log in with your Google account and then, or Microsoft account, doesn't matter. Create your account. It'll give you a piece of code. Put that on your site 24 hours later, go back in and start looking at screen recordings. Start playing with filters like, oh, how did people with my Facebook traffic do yesterday? How are the ones with my email that I sent yesterday, how did they do? Just start getting used to how that platform works, but for a specific purpose, right? Because you're trying to see how is email different from cold Facebook traffic? It should be wildly different emails, right? Have a No, I can trust with the brand. Facebook Cold traffic probably doesn't. Let's just retargeted. In which case it may be it will, but all of a sudden you start seeing differences and you start going, okay, cool, I can see what maybe I can do with this.

But all you're asking when it comes to questions, there's only ever two types ever. There are results questions, which are typically questions around the end of the journey. And then there are the how questions, how are those things happening? Most companies are asking the results questions, how many do we sell? What average ticket is? What's a good conversion rate? Stuff like that. But how steps they don't really ask questions around. And what I mean by that, and I don't mean today, but I mean eventually in the not too distant future, everybody listening to this could be setting this stuff up. You can have a report that says, okay, not just they landed on the product detail page, they landed, they stayed for at least 10 seconds, which implied that they wanted to be there. It they've confirmed as not an

Brett:

Accidental clicked. They're in the

Chris:

Exactly wasn't they were trying to play a game and get a gold coin to watch your video or something, right? Fat

Brett:

Problems are trying to hit X and they click on your ad type of

Chris:

Thing. All the reasons. Yeah. So now you can see that 10 seconds there. Then you would go, okay, well, did they actually start interacting with our product detail page? Are they clicking on the different images that are there? Because a real buyer that's looking at stuff probably would, let's hit the side of the buy, which is different. But an investigative buyer would start investigating. They would look at reviews, they would scroll into the description, they would start interacting with variations, large, medium, blue, yellow. They're starting to play with colors. That's a completely different behavior you can absolutely measure for. And by the way, bullet audience is on. So now you've got, okay, this product detail page, how they are supposed to work. I know a certain percentage will do this with the images. I know a certain percentage will do this with variations. Certain percentage will do this with reviews and testimonials, whatever the product is.

And now you have an understanding of how your product detail page is function, what are the behaviors they generate? And then what you do is you start comparing them to each other because occasionally you're going to find one of your product detail pages crushes it. They just buy everything with this product. And you start going, okay, what is that one? How is that different from these other ones? And that's again where you can go back to clarity. Let's do the heat maps and see if they're completely different. Let's compare and contrast. Do the same thing with screen recordings, see if they're interacting with it differently. Eventually you can and should use tools like GA four and other things to grow out your measurement skills. But I want to emphasize, yes, all that's there, but that's like talking about what the end of the marathon's like and trying to motivate yourself by saying, I'm going to cross that marathon, but I can't even get to the end driveway right now.

So you shouldn't be thinking about the winning the marathon. Just get to the mailbox and make that your win. Turn on clarity, start to use it. I think that platform especially is because it is so intuitive to use, doesn't require a lot of where are things. And I'll give you another example of that. When you come into the dashboard, this is how I know they speak marketer on their dashboard, they will say, rage clicks, and it'll give you a percentage. You know what rage click is? A rage Click is when somebody's clicking on a button or something,

Brett:

They rage click, rage click is a category inside of

Chris:

That Microsoft. And from day zero they have had this, they came out with a platform dashboard says rage clicks. It's when you're clicking somewhere and it's not quite working, so you're clicking again, maybe the site's slow, maybe something's not hyperlinked, right? Maybe something looks like a button, but it's not. And then you go, oh, it says like 7.2% of that people were being raised goes, would you like to see the recordings? Yes, click. Now you've got all the recordings. They will pres segment, please tell me ai, please tell me what's going on. And it goes, oh yeah, it looks like this button on this page is having problems when you see it. Yes, I do watch. Okay, let's go fix that button. Instant action. They have another one called Quick backs, which is when people go to a page, this happens a lot in direct response where it's like sales page and some people find it useful to hide a price.

So then they go to the cart to find how much it is, and they go back to the sales page to see if it's worth it. Anyway, so that idea of quick backs, they go to this page and they immediately go back to the previous page. They were searching for something. What were they searching for that we should have provided on step one that they thought they would find on step two? Clarity builds you an instant segment like that. So it's a lot of this, it's made for marketers to be as intuitive as possible for them to take immediate action such that they go, I kind of like this platform. I wonder if we should set up funnels now. And then you start getting into, okay, now I have to start using the platform. And whether you use YouTube to do that is fine. Measure you.com. Obviously there's courses on that and we can show you to do that too, but I don't think it's necessary on day zero. Day zero is just create the account. Everybody here has now been educated. Go to Clarity microsoft.com, create your script, activate

Brett:

It, you know enough to get a now, plug it in and insert.

Chris:

Exactly right.

Brett:

Yeah. One of my favorite retail books is called Why We Buy by Paco Underhill. I'm not sure if you've read that, but

I

Haven't been alone. Dude's been around a long time. And so what they used to do, maybe they still do it, but they would have people that would just sit in retail stores all day and track people's movements.

Yes.

What do people do when they walk in the door? How do they approach this display? What if there's something that they want to get the feel for, but it's all packaged up? What do they do then? What do shoppers do when it's like a female with a male and the male looks impatient? How long do they stay and shop? What if we put seats over here for the dudes to sit so then their female companion can shop a little longer? It's a fascinating book and really creates some great insights, and he kind of helped reshape retail experiences, but this is sort of what you're doing digitally. That's exactly how are people interacting with my stuff with my

Chris:

Online store.

Brett:

Now, how do I shift it to make it better for them?

Chris:

And this comes from retail, it comes from grocery stores. They have planograms, they have the floor plans. So and hopefully most people know this. When you go in a grocery store, there's only going to be one place where that milk is, and it's at the worst possible location. So you walk through everything. Very, yeah, very back. Make sure you walk through everything. Where the cereals, are they way up high where the adults can see them? Nope. They are eye level with the kids. Everything is planned. Everything is there for every inside

Brett:

Based on science and observation,

Chris:

Everything. They have an understanding of how much Walmart knows how much boxes are supposed to move through this little three foot section of the shelf that are supposed to do. They have that measured. Digital marketers are missing the boat because they don't treat e-commerce like actual commerce.

Brett:

And

Chris:

That's what I mean by digital marketers kind of lose their mind. They're like, oh, but the digital world, it's different on the internet. It's not, humans will always human always. So you have to treat them like that. Humans,

Brett:

Humans are always human. I love that.

Chris:

Humans are going to human, so you just go, okay, they're going to human anyway. We're just going to measure it so we can see what they're doing. And the beauty of it is the old fork folklore where it was like, I don't know how prioritizing works, but I'm not sure which half

They want to make a quote from 150 years ago. And now that became, oh, well, now can be a measure, everything. But it was always about the attribution. Part of measurement. That very last step is all anybody ever cared about. So we could kind of answer that question, which surprise doesn't have an answer, but the problem is that was the decoy. What they should have done is what you were talking about. Go, let's sit in the store and see how people use the store. Just the shop, walk the shop. And now you can totally do that automated all the time. It's called Microsoft,

Brett:

And get AI to do some of the

Chris:

Watches and get AI to do the analysis,

Brett:

Help you out. Pattern recognition, some of the

Chris:

Heavy lifting. Yes.

Brett:

Yeah, it really makes sense. So any other anecdotes, love the framework, love the setup and the mind shift and all that. But any anecdotes or thoughts on like, Hey, these are the types of things you can really uncover and shift and then the results you can see there?

Chris:

That's a good question. So in terms of it depends upon, let me just go through the framework quickly, maybe

Talk about some of those. So the way you use measurement, and this is another little bit of a mindset shift, but important measurement is not about the tools. Your tools are almost irrelevant. Some tools are better than others, easier to use than others do more things than others do different things than others, but they're just tools. The problem I think in most digital businesses in general is they're overwhelmed with tools. They do not need more tools, but we always have new ones. So Sumo is one of my worst things. Like, oh, don't go in, but I have to go in and you come up with 45 different app. So it's like, I understand the desire to have tools is shiny objects, but with measurement in particular, because there's so many tools, Wiki reports, triple Whale, Hiro, GA four, Microsoft Clarity, insert 75, others that were just created because AI now.

So it's always everywhere all the time. With that, you have to have a measurement strategy that tells you how to use your tools and when to use your tools in the way they need to be used. If you don't have a unifying strategy to kind of coordinate all those tools, you end up getting a bunch of different reports that aren't coordinated. So of course Facebook tells you something different than what Wicked Reports tells you, and you're like, I don't even know what's going on. I don't trust anything. We're just going to do it. I think I'm going to do anyway, which is what most marketers do, or most business owners Trust my gut. Trust my gut, because yeah, and half the time they're looking for the data to justify the decision they've already made, right? Yeah. So instead what we're going to do is you go through a framework, right? Go through a process. So we're going to move from just kind of wander around the dark, not sure what's working, what's not all the way through. We automatically get improved, optimized revenue and results by just following a series of activities

Brett:

Using

Chris:

Measurement, how to do this. So the first step is planning out our measurement. So really three keys to that step. We asked the questions, we talked about that already, results and how I need to know the result of my journeys. I need to know how those journeys are happening at whatever level I'm comfortable with. You start where you start. It's a muscle. And that's what people don't understand about asking questions. They think I'm going to get a magic list of a thousand questions, and they will always, it's not how it works. You start with results and how questions at whatever comfortable level you can handle. The next time you do it, you've already had some experience with the results and how questions, so you ask different more enhanced results and how questions, but now they're coming from you, not me. So your questions will be better yours.

So you do the results and how questions, we gather the information necessary to get answers to those questions, and that's where you're setting up your measurement. You might say, oh, I'm going to use Clarity to get that answer, or this one I'm going to use a spreadsheet, I'm going to pull from Shopify reports or whatever it happens to be. And then you have your actions, and that's what we talked about earlier where you have to have an understanding of at least a guess as to what that number's supposed to be, what the answer is supposed to be. I am asking the question around our average ticket. I'm going to gather all the information from shopper report so I know my average ticket and then my average ticket should be three to 350. Cool. What if it's with three to three 50? What are you going to do?

Well, I'm going to scale traffic. What if it's 150? What do you do if it's really low? Well then I'm going to start looking at upsells and the related products and see if maybe they're not doing those well, what if it's five, 600? What if it's way high, unexpectedly high? That's interesting to you. I'm going to see if maybe there's a product that's kicking that off. Maybe if they buy product A versus product B, it leads. So now I'm thinking about the activities before I even set up my measurement, and I already know what I'm going to do based upon the things that I don't even have yet turned on. But now I'm excited to do it because I already know how to fix things because of that planning process. So very quick, but very powerful questions, information, actions. So then you go into your build and that's where you're using clarity. You turn it on. If you want to set up funnels, you can, doesn't really matter. Just play with stuff. The one thing I would definitely suggest people do is pay attention to UTMs, just three letters, UTM. You can Google that. There's a billion different trainings now on how to use UTMs, but they identify traffic so that you can tell the difference between an email sending you a visitor versus Facebook cold traffic or the latest webinar you did, or product, demo, whatever it was.

Brett:

Got it. So to use Microsoft Clarity, you need to set up UTMs.

Chris:

You don't need to. This is the key. You don't need to. You should though, because if you don't, clarity can't tell the just student email and Facebook, you know what I mean? If it's not told what it is, it'll guess. It can make a decent guess, but be a guess. And I would much rather tell it

Brett:

A hundred percent.

Chris:

And the way that we do this with TMS for those are a little more advanced on the UTM thing. The way that we identify as UTM identifies the source of the traffic. So it's Facebook, Google, Microsoft email, ke. In our case, we use Keap. So it'd be Keap is the source, the type of traffic it is paid is it's social where I'm not really paying for it, but it's out there. Is it an email? Is it a podcast like this?

And then finally, the purpose, and this is the part that I think people mess up on their traffic. They're not telling their measurement system why the visit was there in the first place, what it supposed to do. Because if Facebook can't tell me, Hey, listen, I'm a Facebook ad. I'm the one that's got a picture of a horse at it. I am retargeting the audience of people who have come to the Academy Insiders page, but they didn't quite buy yet, but they did see the offer and the order form. So I sent them an ad with all the testimonials of people, my job is to get them to close, so they should be closing. That's how you need to judge me. Please let me know how I did compared to the other ads that are doing the same thing. And then right after that, there's email that says, oh, by the way, I'm email number seven of the 12 part auto responder series.

I'm talking to community members who have come in for free and they're using their resources. I'm getting the user's resources now. I'm trying to make them aware that there is a program they could upgrade called Academy Insiders. Just let me know how I did on that compared to the other emails. And now all of a sudden, you start understanding which traffic sources are causing which results. So you can start using those traffic sources better, which means efficiency in ad spend, which is what everybody tries to call ROAS and ROI. But it's really in the behaviors that tell you what to do with that when you're willing to listen. But listening takes time and patience, which most people don't want

Brett:

To. Most people do not have. We want an easy button, we want an easy solution. We just want to fix this ad or

Chris:

Spend

Brett:

More money here. Make this easy for me. But the thing about this is, I think once you learn to ask those better questions and learn what to do with the information and how to kind of decipher it, it's extremely empowering. This is almost like it's a superpower. If you could develop this, I'm sure you start to get pretty juiced up about, man, I've got stuff I can use to move the needle in my business.

Chris:

Your confidence and your level of certainty and the level of drama drops, right? Because you're not guessing anymore.

Brett:

I mean,

Chris:

You are, don't get me wrong. There's always the element of uncertainty. It's a

Brett:

Hypotheses in some that, yeah, it's

Chris:

Huge probabilities that start happening now. You're like, oh, well, the customers told us. It's like sending an email to your list saying, Hey, would you be interested if we started stocking brown shoes instead of gray shoes? And they're like, oh my God, yes. I would love brown shoes. I've put Brian Brown shoes from other people. I'd love that you carry brown now to carry brown shoes. You don't just go, well, maybe not. I don't know. And if you did, what would you do? Would say, cool, here's a link to pre-order brown shoes. And then they buy it and you're like, okay, now we do brown shoes. Because the market told us to do it. It wasn't hard for me to do that. It was simple. I just listened to what they wanted me to do in order for them to give me money and for me to provide the value. That's it. It goes back to that listening to the conversation. And that's the trick. When you're using your numbers, when you're using your measurement, no matter what tool it is, clarity or otherwise, you just compare it to what you thought was going to happen.

But that means you have to have a guess, at least as how this thing works. How does your machinery work? How do the behaviors work? Think through that.

Brett:

No, go ahead. Finish the

Chris:

I was going to say, most students will come to us and they'll say, well, we're just trying to figure out how our e-commerce stores work, how people move through the store. That's what we're trying to figure out. My first answer always is the same. How are they supposed to, and it's blank,

Brett:

Blank.

Chris:

Like, I never thought about that. But that is literally the equivalent of dumping a bunch of stuff into an empty warehouse, opening up the doors, seeing who buys what, and goes, oh, I guess we sell shoes. Because nobody wanted the bikes. You would never do that. You would plan a shoe store and then you would try it out. You would always have a, here's how it should be working. But again, digitally we skip the simple steps because it's simple. But simple is the skill, simple's the skill, and it

Brett:

Takes five minutes

Chris:

Fast. So here's what

Brett:

We expect. Now we're going to measure it. If it's higher than expected, what does that likely mean? And what are we going to do?

Chris:

If

Brett:

It's lower than expected, what does that likely mean? And what are we going to do? But then you prove it out. And

Chris:

If it's in Goldilocks, if it's in the sweet spot, what are we going to do? Also, what if things are working? What do you do? What

Brett:

If we hit that expectation? Exactly. Exactly right.

Chris:

It might be, oh, we're going to have to order more inventory. It might be that just to bring it, not even to digital marketing, but more just brass tax, e-commerce stuff is, oh, well, if that's working, we can start scale traffic. So we should order from China now because it's going to take six months to get here, or whatever the thing is. So a measurement can impact all areas of an organization, not just the marketing.

Brett:

You said something really interesting a minute ago, and I want you to maybe unpack it just a little bit. You said the way you set up measurement, it's so straightforward. You don't really need AI to unpack it or to bring clarity there. Can you talk about what that looks like? Because that was super interesting

Chris:

To take a step back. What's happening right now, like chat ct? It's very easy. AI Studio will also do this. If you go to ai studio, google.com people, everybody here has access to that too. You can show it your Google Analytics and say, tell me what insights you see,

Brett:

Which

Chris:

Again is basically saying, tell me what information you see. Just tell me in words instead of numbers now. And it'll say, oh, well, it looks like your direct non-traffic. You're doing a lot and PayPal seems to be really selling a lot of business for you. And you're like, okay, but you're still going to be like, well, what do I do? So then you're going to ask ai, what should I do with all this? And AI doesn't know to say no, or you shouldn't be asking me the question. AI just gladly gives you the results. So it'll say, oh, you should do this, that, or the other thing, but it's not right. And the problem is you don't know. It's not right, because you don't know measurement either. So it's blind leading the blind. You're asking blind questions. This thing does not know how to say no.

That'll give you an answer, but it's going to convince you your genius. Now you're finally getting insights from your data that you couldn't see before. But the problem is, again, it's garbage in, garbage out. That data hasn't been set up properly. But almost everybody, because they, most companies don't have measurement departments yet. They're starting to. They're finally because of the efficiency push, they've realized, oh my God, measurement's a department. Now we have to really do this. So the ones that are now, they can start to say, okay, here's how this is supposed to work. Is it working like this? And now you can see, compare and contrast and actions become much, much simpler, right, to get to. So anyway, the idea behind the AI ability, it's typical AI is you're going to Google Analytics four saying make up a story based on what you see here.

It's going to make up a story no matter what. It doesn't mean it's a useful story, but it's going to sound awesome. You know what I mean? So I can prompt AI to say, look at my Google account and proof that Facebook is awesome and it will do it because I asked it to. So that's the problem with ai. The way that we do our measurement is we make it so that AI is not necessary for at least up to the reporting phase. But this is why. It's because what we already talked about, we've already listed out our questions. We already know the information we're going to

Brett:

Collect. We already

Chris:

Know the know we're.

Brett:

So

Chris:

We've already preplanned when this number says 37%, no matter what that number is, we've already known is that within range, higher or lower, and we automatically know what steps we're going to take to optimize because we planned for it in the action step.

Brett:

Got it.

Chris:

So we don't have a need to go to AI to tell us what we already know because we saw the number. Think about this, like your car dashboard. That's always my favorite example with this because people go like, this is impossible. You can't really do that. You totally can. Your car dashboard did. When you driving down your street, you see how fast you're going. You see that number, you instantly know hit the gas or hit the brake. You do it

Brett:

Unconsciously. You

Chris:

Instantly take action because you see the number. You don't need AI to tell you. Right? The

Brett:

Query chat, DBT, what do

Chris:

I do? Yeah, even it was automated. You don't need AI to tell you if you're the one in control of it. So that's the point is you can make your dashboards, especially for marketers, they need to be like one minute dashboards in and out because marketers do not need to be looking at numbers. They need to be marketing. You

Brett:

Need be doing stuff. Yeah,

Chris:

Exactly. So that's how we think about that. Make the report simple so it leads to action. So now we don't have reports that we don't have to analyze. That was another thing. I'm trying learn how to analyze reports. I'm like, well then your reports are too complicated. Why would you do, that's a waste

Brett:

Of time. It makes sense. And then you're leaning into AI for the complex, time consuming. I'm just sifting through all these recordings and now AI's looking for patterns

Chris:

And

Brett:

This is

Chris:

Where we're doing it. BigQuery data and combining it with the CRM data and that stuff can definitely be used. But remember we've got measurement muscles, so nobody should be trying this at home yet to

Brett:

Practice for this

Chris:

Going to a gym, right? I've gone to the gym for 10 years now. You're not going to have the same measurement muscles that day one, but you will have them as long as you keep going to the same gym. It won't take you 10 years to grow that muscle.

Brett:

So

Chris:

Practice it and get used to it and eventually, yes, all this stuff will come to pass and you'll have AI and big create databases and first party and everything else, but you don't start there. Keep it really, really simple. Get used to it, which again, bring it back full circle. That's why Clarity is such a powerful tool. It's a good quick start.

Brett:

Love it, man. I know we use clarity as the gateway into this conversation, and I think it's a powerful tool. I'm excited to use it for our website, but really this is more about that conversation you have with a customer. It's about setting expectations and how are we going to measure what matters here and then make shifts there. But super excited about that. We don't have a lot of time left, so I'm going to do a grave disservice to this topic, but I want to at least get a couple thoughts. We'll tease this. Okay. Then we planned maybe session two, but then also I want to send some people to some of your resources where they can dig deeper.

Sure.

I love how your dashboards are simple. You can understand them. You don't need AI to unpack it. We use AI for more complex stuff, but how are you guys using AI in your business and how are you thinking about ai? That's different because as I hear you talking about ai, it's quite different than what I'm hearing from other people. So would love to hear that kind of the brief overview and then we'll send people to some free resources and stuff.

Chris:

Sure. So I'll by saying, I've been using AI wrong for the last couple of years,

But I've been using AI like everyone else has been using AI for the last couple of years, which is why I'm getting the same results that everybody else says they get, which is it sounds like AI wrote this, right? And you get that sort of like most isn't really useful or it took me longer to figure out how to do with AI than just doing it by myself. So I'm not going to worry about it and all the same stuff. And it is because I had the wrong strategy. Just like with measurement, you need a unifying strategy of how to think about measurement tools to unlock the tools. Same thing with ai, and it took me a long, long time to realize that. So shout out to sean@automatetowin.com. He's a buddy that is a huge system engineer, super geeky when it comes to ai, and so much so he speaks AI more than he speaks human. But I have fascinating conversations with him because we're so systems oriented together. We share that overlap. He's the one that really led me to this insight where he's like, listen, humans, and this is the way I would describe it back, humans, we talk about results and how questions humans think in terms of results and how we're trying to get results, but the way that humans try to get results is we explain to each other how to get the result.

Brett:

We

Chris:

Can't quite see the result, but we know the first step or two, so we know that. So we describe that first step or two and we'll figure out three, four or five when we get there. Later as we get closer, we'll figure out the next steps. So there's always that we communicate in terms of how for the actual result that we want. So there's results and how in that way we don't quite know the how, but we have an idea of what the result is. And with humans talking to other humans, that's okay because humans will work out the how's amongst themselves. They speak in terms of how's what humans, again, humans are going to human when they interact with ai, they interact with AI as if it was human, and they are discounting to their detriment that the fact that AI is very different.

AI also has results in how the difference between a human and an AI is humans are trying to figure out the how and they kind have an idea of the result. AI knows every possible, how that exists ever will exist, ever. It knows everything all at once, all the time. It doesn't think in terms of time sequence, it's completely different formatting. You can't wrap your head around how it works. You shouldn't even care. It's not relevant. It just knows everything. So the fact it knows everything is awesome. I don't have to teach it how to do anything. It knows how to do stuff. What it needs from me is what result I want to have it deliver. So the way I've been sort of training this recently, and especially we started with our team, which unlocked everybody, which was so cool because now everyone is the power of 10. So that was great. We didn't have to add to headcount, but we totally added to headcount at the same time. Creativity. Totally.

Brett:

Yeah.

Chris:

So essentially what's happening is when you're going to ai, we're not saying, oh, you are a professional copywriter who's really good at writing product detail pages for Shopify stores. Please now go look at this catalog and write descriptions based on blah, blah, blah. That's all fine. Don't get me wrong. You're going to get someone decent. But it's also going to be like, well, that sounds like ai. So what instead I would do is I would say that and I would put that into a prompt. I try to do everything I can spell it out the way I do it. This is my biggest tip for ai. Take all that out of the prompt. Don't send it. Just write it out the way you think you should write it out. Then re-prompt it. What you're going to do is you're going to say, please analyze the following prompt until you fully understand the intended result.

Note, I'm not telling it the result. I'm asking it. Look at what I'm saying here. You figure out what I'm trying to do. So then it does that and it'll say, oh, okay, I see by your prompt you're trying to get me to do this, this, this, this, and this. Awesome. Now write that prompt, rewrite that prompt so I get a result better than the intended result. So now what I'm doing is I'm telling ai, you figure out what the result is. I don't know how to speak result. It needs to hear result, though. That's when it really performs well, and I cannot tell it how, because if I tell it how I constrict it, if I say You're a copywriter, it now knows, okay, I know everything about copywriting, but it forgot about the farmer, orange grove tree that had a blog post. That may have been the secret weird sauce thing that could have given some cool creative answer. Won't even think about it. I told it not to accidentally.

Brett:

So

Chris:

Instead I say, understand the result I'm trying to get. Then create for me a prompt that will get me better than that. In other words, I can kind of describe Mountain One. What I really want is Mountain Two, and I can't even see that, but you can. So you tell me how to get an even better result than I even know is possible because you know how, and it does it. Then you take that prompt when it gives you that prompt. It'd be the trick when it gives you that prompt. You start a new chat, you have to start a new session. This is the first prompt. And that first prompt is so important with AI because it sort of sets its space in its database of content.

Brett:

It frames that whole chat.

Chris:

Exactly. Right. Everything's framed from that source. So if you accidentally triggered it to talk about cats, the musical, even though you wanted cats, the animal, it's always going to start with cats, the musical as its base and try to stretch over it. It's only going to be answered so much stuff. But if you nail that prompt and you put it in the exact right spot, it gives you better results because everything that it needs is right there. And the beauty of it is, I'm not telling it where to go. It figures out where to go because it understands the result that has been.

Brett:

It's been really, really clear on the result, and you're using the AI to help you get really clear on the result. And then you're just taking that.

Chris:

And when I say clear on the result, I mean not clear at all on the result. I understand I'm not speaking. I'm trying to communicate the result as best I can as a lonely human.

I speak in terms of how I would like this and this. You should be this, it should be this. It should create a sales page that's highly likely to convert to three different avatars here, the avatars that want blah, blah, blah. Then I say, take all of this. Tell me the result I'm trying to get. And he goes, oh, you're actually just telling me to do this. Cool. Now give me better than that result. What's the prompt? I would tell you for that excellent new chat entered that prompt that it created for itself. So there was never a human interaction at all from its perspective. And then all of a sudden you get this amazing, amazing response where you're like, okay, all of a sudden I get emotional driven words, benefit driven words, value-based things, open loops without having to say that because it already knows that stuff.

Brett:

You don't

Chris:

Have to tell how I see this healthy result I want.

Brett:

Can you think of either a specific example of what this looked like or maybe just general how your team has been able to tap into this?

Chris:

Oh yeah. So we just talked to our developer this morning as a matter of fact, on the offers call we had with our team. And as I was talking to her, except it used to be, oh, I need Jeff, my co-founder, Jeff Ser. So it was like, oh, I need Jeff to write copy on this, and I'm just waiting on the copy or the three bullet points that I need or whatever the things are. Now she's coming to us with complete copy that's written, and now this is what we've built out. So there's a little bit of build that's happened, but remember when you build these things out, they're bricks. Now you can use 'em over and over again. So it takes an hour to build it, but once you have it, you have it forever. And this is a great tool. So I've built an Avatar gem that's three different avatars and they are extensive like 300 pages each. So we know everything about these people. Journal entries. I've got 'em based on sales call transcripts. So everything's in there for the different avatars. So she'll take the copy that she got from the initial prompting that she was, again, speaking in terms of results. She uses the results style prompting. So she'll get this decent copy. Then she'll go through and say, Hey, I need all the avatars to look at this, and then tell me what they agree on.

And then you will literally see a conversation where it's like, David, he's like, well, I'm kind of concerned about the team really buying it for my team, and I'm not sure this headline really speaks to me. And then Alex comes in and says, yeah, totally walks for me though because I'm doing this for my skill. And Sarah comes in and says, well, I don't know. I'm kind of world for clients and I'm not sure how this would help my clients. And then they all have a conversation. Then they will say, well, we're thinking about this. And then it goes, you know what? We've reached a consensus. This is the one we think we should start with that is most likely to help us. So what I've basically done is create avatars that write our sales pages. I could, and again, I didn't do that by saying, create me an avatar that can write sales pages.

I asked it for result after result after result, and eventually I started getting an avatar that was so good it could write sales pages, so I could ask it to do that. That wasn't my intention. I didn't build an avatar write sales pages. It was so good. It started to be able to do it and have conversations and help our team members. I've got Notebook LMS with another popular tool with Google that are training podcast. That's a little podcasting feature. You can prompt that. So I set up custom training. So it'll speak to you as part of the Measure You customer experience team on how you can use some unreasonable hospitality from that book. A Reason Hospitality, such good book, such good book, good from that. So we have that. I've got a webinar optimizer that will go through the webinar and go through the 10 steps of every webinar, rate it on a scale of one to 10, and then offer suggestions. But it's talking to Jeff or Julie or whoever did the webinar. So they have these auditory trainings that they can always have. So I have constant experts on demand all the time for whatever I want, and so does the rest of the team. This is the beauty of it. It's not just me that can use this. As soon as you create anything, one of those little bricks and ai, a feature you can use over and over again. It can be used by the admin assistant now to write

Brett:

Copy, to

Chris:

Write all the emails. So the admin assistant literally is doing that. She's writing all the email stuff because AI gets 80% of there. And I'm not saying humans go away and just let AI do its thing. Go all there. So we still edit, we still touch it on the way out. We make sure it's brand standards and all that fun stuff. But holy cow, the idea of AI is it collapses time.

And that's the trick. Speed is the new currency. I don't think money's going to matter much in the future, but speech or will. So the people who can get speed to result the fastest will get whatever the value is that society has to want to distribute. So get fast at stuff, get AI in things and realize, I think to summarize that it is game over and game on the old way of doing stuff. We have to stop playing the old way. I come to work and I work through my computer. I'm using my computer to have this call right now with you. But I don't think like, oh, I'm using a computer right now. It's just embedded in my brain how it's like breathing. That's what AI needs to be. So for me right now, I work through AI for everything that is my computer level now.

So in the beginning when it's new, you sort of think like that, but pretty quickly it just becomes embedded. And now you just do everything through ai. It's like AI layer that everybody operates. And I wouldn't let a team member of mine use a typewriter because they didn't want to use a computer. So I would never say, you don't have the option to not use ai. You have to use it in this way. And then once we do that training, because it is so inherently intuitively useful, they instantly fall in love with it. And then they come back and they're like, oh, I figured out I can do this. I figured I'd do this. And I'm like, this is awesome. Because they're going to hundred X themselves in a year. They're going to 500 x themselves in two years. Easy. And then where are we as a company? Much, much better. So ai, everybody should be looking at that.

Brett:

It's amazing. So I knew we would run out of time. I got a million questions related to that. We'll have to come back. You have to come back. We'll talk about that way to open the loop. Another, yeah, way to open the loop, exactly. But if someone's listening to this and they're like, okay, I want to go a little bit deeper on measurement, actionable insights there. What resources do you have for that? And then any resources around your thinking related to ai, any blog posts or courses or anything like that?

Chris:

Yeah, good questions on both. So I would say measure u.com, again, measure in the letter u.com is where our company is. We've got a free community that you can join. So if you go to measure u.com/evolution. So again, measure u.com/evolution. And now you know what? I'll say that for two reasons. One free community that'll take you there. Second is look at how I'm UT Ming. So go into the browser window, everybody at Shopify stores, and you'll see where it says E-commerce Evolution is where it came from. It was a podcast for the purposes of the community from a podcast that I recorded in February, 2025 that talked about AI basics. It'll say all of that in there. So our measurement systems know why you came and what sent us, right? So this is another example, just eating our own dog food. But yeah, measure you.com for US evolution. We do AI training now in Measure You, and we've got another division within that called Profit School that we're doing a lot of more of the business ops AI training. So if you go to measure u.com, you will get access to the AI training stuff too. You'll be able to see it there.

Brett:

Awesome. Awesome, man. Mercer, this was gold, buddy. I always love to talk to you. My head explodes and then I'm always just amped up to go do some of the stuff you're talking about.

Chris:

There you go. You're going to be installing Clarity in a half hour. I can feel it,

Brett:

Right? It's going to be on the site before I go home today. There you go, Mercer. Thank you so much, man. So measurement U,

Chris:

Measure.com. Measure U,

Brett:

I'm sorry. Measure you say the URL again because I'm going to butcher it if I try. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll go measure u.com. Yep. Yep. Slash evolution that gets you to evolution. Yes. Awesome stuff, man. Really, really appreciate it and excited to do this again, and we'll try to make it a little shorter than a year or two from now.

Chris:

Looking forward to it. Thanks, Brian.

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. Let us know what you'd like to hear more of on the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

In this eye-opening episode, legendary Amazon expert Kevin King reveals game-changing insights about how Amazon's search and ranking systems really work. From the little-known concept of GeoRank to Amazon's powerful AI engine Cosmo, Kevin shares insider knowledge that every Amazon seller needs to understand to stay competitive in 2024 and beyond.

Key topics covered:

• The truth about Amazon's GeoRank system and why your products might rank differently across regions – plus actionable strategies to influence your rankings in specific geographic areas.
• How Amazon's Cosmo AI analyzes your listings, images, and customer feedback to determine visibility – and why you need to start "selling to the AI," not just optimizing for keywords.
• Why the future of Amazon search is shifting from keywords to intent-based shopping, and how tools like Rufus are changing the way customers discover products.
• Fascinating insights into Amazon's incredible data collection and how it's shaping the future of personalized shopping experiences.
• Advanced marketing strategies combining AI with custom audiences and personalization that are generating "ridiculous conversion rates.’

Whether you're doing $100K or $100M on Amazon, this conversation with one of the most knowledgeable figures in the Amazon space will transform how you think about optimization and marketing on the platform.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:08) Understanding GeoRank

(18:09) Exploring Cosmo

(21:24) From Keyword to Intent-Based Search

(27:47) Brand Building Beyond Products and Problem-Solution Marketing

(32:12) Embracing AI and Customer-Centric Sales

(39:15) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Kevin King - LinkedIn
• Billion Dollar Sellers Newsletter
• Marketing Misfits Podcast
• Norm Farrar - LinkedIn 
• AMPM Podcast
• Helium 10 
• Tom Shipley - LinkedIn
• T&C Summit
• Podcast Movement Show
• North Face
• Patagonia 
• My First Million Podcast
• George Mack - X
• DataZapp
• Reddit

‍

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

---

Transcript:

Kevin:

Us as sellers, we use the tools and we try to influence what Amazon, what we think our product is. But Amazon's like, yeah, Kevin, you can say that your product's the best or it does this or this or this, but reality is what the customers say.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I have an esteemed guest. This guest is a legend in the Amazon space, billion dollars sellers. My guess is Kevin King. He's the host of two Count 'em two podcast Marketing Misfits with our mutual friend Norm, also the AMPM podcast with Helium 10. Been hosting that for two and a half years. He's had over 220,000 students host the billion dollar Seller summit, the billion dollar seller newsletter, and then he is also an Amazon seller. So he's doing this stuff in real life on a daily basis and is just doing very, very well. So probably didn't need to do that introduction because if you're in the Amazon space, I say the name Kevin King, you know the guy. So with that, Kevin, welcome to the show and how's it going

Kevin:

Man? It's going great, man. You talk about all my gray hairs, how I got all my gray hairs here, doing all this crazy stuff.

Brett:

Yeah, I'm joining you, man. I'm joining. I got the grain, the goatee here, and so it happens. It happens for sure. But yeah, you and I connected at our mutual friend Tom Shipley's event in Nashville

Kevin:

Deal. I think we met before. I think we met at a trafficking conversion years

Brett:

Ago. We have for sure, for sure.

Kevin:

I think we met somewhere, or maybe even more than that maybe.

Brett:

I think you're right. There's been TNC, we both, I think both spoke there and then a couple other events. But most recently was that Tom Ship was event. As we were chatting, we're like, we got to do a podcast together. What are we doing here? Haven't ever made it happen. So yeah, we're 300 episodes into the eCommerce Evolution podcast and just getting Kevin on the

Kevin:

Show. Congratulations.

Brett:

Yeah, I was looking that up. You doing a little research on chat GPT, less than 1% of podcasts get to 300 episodes, so I

Kevin:

Just went to pretty podcast movement show in August in DC and they actually said there that the average podcast makes it to seven episodes.

Brett:

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I heard. There's this phenomenon called Pod fade where

Podcast hosts is like, eh, I thought this would be more fun, or I thought this would be easier. I thought I'd publish one episode and become famous. Does not happen. Right? It's a grind. It's a grind, but you got to love it. So a variety of topics I want to talk about. Kevin, I want to get into AI a little bit as we go. I know you're doing some really unique things with ai. I know you're talking to just some of the top sellers on Amazon, some of the top brands that are doing cool stuff on Amazon, but you introduced this concept that I was not very familiar with at all. And in one of your newsletters recently about rank, so ranking on Amazon from a geographic basis or at a geographic level, can you explain what geo rank is and maybe some misconceptions around ranking that negatively influenced the way people approach selling on Amazon?

Kevin:

Yeah, sure. So Amazon, for the longest time it was no matter where they had the product, they would ship it to you. So that's why it was two day delivery. So if I'm living in Austin, Texas and I order some construction paper that's sitting in the closest warehouse is Los Angeles, Amazon would get that over to a warehouse near to me and within two days and get that to me, maybe they should sent that by Prime Air. Maybe they sent it by before Prime Air, they were using regular airlines and the cargo holes and Cargo Airlines and they would get that over close to me. And you know what, this is getting a little bit expensive to actually do this. We need to change this system to where we only show results for what's nearby so we can get to 'em the same day or we can get to them within a day and cut down on our distribution costs. We're going to charge it at the same time we're going to raise the fees to the sellers so we can make a little bit more margin. That

Brett:

Has been the theme of this year. How do we charge sellers more?

Kevin:

Exactly. But if you take a look at their p and l, look at how much more profit they had off of that. So they're raising the price and cutting the expenses, which is smart business. So what they've done is, so they basically went to, it was a direct route. So it's like in the old days of airlines before deregulation where if you wanted to fly from Los Angeles to Waco, Texas, there had to be a direct plane or you had to go through some other little city. And the airlines came up with this hub and spoke system where they said, okay, we're going to have hubs and like American Airlines for example, has a hub in la Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago, Chicago, Miami, JFK, and Charlotte and almost all their flights at some point go through one of those hubs. They do have some directs in between, but a lot of almost all the flights go to those songs and then they disperse the people out. It's a much more efficient system. So about two years ago, Amazon started like, we got to get control of this distribution system. We have, I don't know what the number of warehouses they have now is 300, 3 50, something like that.

Brett:

It's a lot.

Kevin:

So what you used to do is you would send into what's called a cross stock. And so if when you go into fulfill to Amazon, FB, a, Amazon would say ship it to these one, two, or sometimes you get lucky and they say ship everything from Austin to Dallas. Other times they'd split it up into three locations all based on their algorithms and where they need the stuff and their systems. But a lot of times from one of my businesses, I sell wall calendars. I would just ship to Dallas, it's convenient for me, Austin and Dallas, it's cheap. Gets there today, it gets checked in quick and it would go to what's called a crosstalk. And these crosstalks have airline code. All the Amazon warehouses start with the same as the local DFW one, DFW two, whatever. And those docs didn't store it where our shipping doesn't store the product, it actually disperses it out.

So if I send a thousand calendars in, their algorithm will say, oh, take these thousand, break it down, send 27 to Waco, 16 to Sherman, 25 to Houston, and 82 to Austin, whatever. And they were paying on their dime. They're charging us indirectly, but to get 'em out to those warehouses to get 'em closer to the customer. And then they cited this last year like this is stupid. We need to regionalize this and do the hub and spoke system. So they broke it down into eight regions. So Amazon now has eight core regions in the United States where everything in that region is serviced by that region. And so they really don't want to show you something for sale if it's not in stock in that region because it's going to cost them more to get it to you and it's going to take longer. And so if you're not in stock, I

Brett:

Think another important point just to note there, Kevin. One, the operational efficiency and really nobody understands logistics like Amazon, but they also know that if they can show a customer, Hey, you get this tomorrow or you get this within however many hours that increases conversion rate purchases go up, the shorter the time lag is between clicking and buying and getting the product the more people buy. So showing people what's local increases conversions.

Kevin:

Case in points, last night it was 10 30 at night and I was doing some sort of a little project. I needed some black cardboard stock to put behind this little picture. I go on Amazon and it shows me a bunch of stuff, and this was on a Tuesday and it says a lot of it'll be delivered on Thursday or Friday. I'm like, no, no, I want the stuff that's going to be here in the morning. It's 10 30 at night. And so I click on the filter, it says, next day delivery, show me only the results for next day delivery and it filters it down to 200 instead of 600 or whatever. And it showed up hour at 10 30 at night. It showed up at 8 45 this morning. That's crazy. It's local and Amazon knows that. And so they went to this system where now when you ship to Amazon FBA, they're asking you to do ideal situations five or more locations because they want you to share some of that cost and spread it out, otherwise they charge you a fee. In a lot of cases, they're moving more and more towards this where they don't show results if it's not local. Your results when you type in black cardboard paper in

Brett:

Missouri,

Kevin:

Missouri may be different than mine. And so knowing that it's going to influence your rank, and if you use some of the tools that your ranks heating 10 other software tools, monitor your rank, you might see different results than what I see because based on your IP address. So there's ways to influence that though. Just like in retail, if I'm going into a Walmart and trying to get into a Walmart store, let's say in retail, Walmart takes my product and says, we're going to test you, Kevin, in a hundred stores before we roll you out to all 4,000 of our stores, we're going to test you in a hundred in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida and see how it goes. Well, I want to list those stores because I'm going to go onto Facebook or somewhere and I'm going to target those cities and run ads from my product and say, Hey, my construction paper is now available in Target in Huntsville, Alabama.

Go pick some up, send me a picture of it and we'll send you a free gift or whatever so that people are going in buying it. Then the executives in Little Rock, not Little Rock in Arkansas, in Bentonville, Bentonville, Bentonville are looking at it and going, holy cow, this stuff is actually moving. Kevin is doing good. We're going to roll you out to a hundred more stores. You gave 'em the system that way. The same thing you can do on Amazon, so you can influence, you can't really dictate where you ship your products, Amazon let you say. Well, you can use tools like Helium 10, and there's other ones, smart Scout and some others. They'll show you heat maps and they'll say, if they take a look at, they tie it to the A PA of Amazon, they take a look at the backend and they say, this is where your distribution is. So Amazon may say you have a thousand units in stock. Well, these heat maps will show you exactly which warehouses Amazon has 'em in based on the API. Interesting.

And then you could target, you can say, oh, shoot, looks like Minneapolis. I'm a little bit low on, I'm not ranking very well on, and I know I'm selling well everywhere else, but for whatever reason, Amazon hasn't sent enough or they can't keep enough in stock in Minneapolis, let me influence that. But I can't go in and say, I want to ship to Minneapolis. Amazon dictates that. So I go in and influence Amazon's algorithm the other way I go and use Pinterest ads where you can actually geotarget or use DSP on Amazon where you can you geotarget and coming soon to sponsor ads. I think it's in a beta invitation only now you'll be able to geotarget your Amazon ads. And so to actually influence that. So that's coming and it's pretty sophisticated and it's what a lot of sellers are not aware of it and how it's affecting them. They've been testing it, playing with it for a while. So this is nothing like groundbreaking, just didn't announce last week, but it's becoming more and more and more of a factor as Amazon gets their systems dialed in.

Brett:

Yeah, this is really exciting to me because I think a lot of people are just thinking about Amazon as where do I rank on Amazon or how do I show up organically or in paid on Amazon? But there is no such thing as just how do you appear on Amazon? How do I appear to unique users in geographic areas and where are there opportunities? And while you can't dictate exactly where Amazon stores some of your stuff, you can't influence sales in Minneapolis and you increase the velocity of sales, they're going to get more product there that's going to make things work better. Now, what I was also looking at, Kevin, as I was reading your newsletter is so Amazon wants to show stuff that's close. So I'm in Missouri, so whatever region we are in that I can get stuff in the next day or two, that's what I'm going to see first. But they're also looking at what is selling in my region. They're also looking at what's popular, what's moving in my region because, and I remember reading this as well where Amazon knows that, hey, north Face sells really well on the East coast. Patagonia sells better on the west coast. I'm kind of making some of that up, but that's true. There are different brand preferences or product preferences in different geographic regions, so they're going to show they're going to rank things differently based on what's selling in a region.

Kevin:

Yeah, exactly. And some of that's where you may get shoved out by Amazon, so that's where you use the outside traffic tools like Pinterest and some DSP and other stuff to actually influence Amazon. So now they think you're selling well in that region, and so that actually bumps you up on the list. It bumps you up in the rankings.

Yeah,

But Amazon, I dunno if you've ever done this, but it's amazing the amount of data Amazon has on us as buyers. Have you ever asked for your report from Amazon?

Brett:

I never have. We use Quicken, and so I can just look at my purchases on Amazon. I'm always like, I cannot believe how much money we give to Jeff Bezos every year. It's an astonishing amount, but no, how do you get the data on your,

Kevin:

There's a link. A link. You could probably Google this. I can't remember off the top of my head. It's an Amazon official link. It's for buyers. I'm not talking about for sellers. There may be a version for sellers, but for buyers.

Brett:

So you can see your buying history on Amazon.

Kevin:

Oh, it's way beyond that. No, it will blow your mind. So I did it for me. If you want to do this, just Google, it's free Google, Amazon buyer history, download PDF or something, you'll probably find the link. You'll have to log into your buyer account and then it'll take you to a page and you click a button and it will spit out a PDF. It takes it, it is got to pull it from this Oracle databases and whatever. So it takes it a few hours. You'll get an email link to this PDF. Mine went back to 2000, I'm sorry, 1999. First time I used Amazon and it was 742 pages. But it's not just what I bought. You would think, okay, yeah, of course they know Kevin. Of course they know everything I bought. I could look at my Quicken and I can tell you the same thing. No, it's everything I've ever watched on Amazon Prime, how much of it I watched, where I stopped, where I paused, how long I paused the fonts. Every computer I've ever used the IP address, I've, every computer I've ever used, it's the screen resolution of every computer I've ever used. It's everything I've ever hads a wishlist and taken out. It's every link I've ever shared. It's every address I've ever used. It's every game I've ever played on. Its every video I've ever watched on.

Brett:

I'm sure this is released now due to privacy issues. Amazon's maybe

Kevin:

Forced release years, but they don't publicize it. They don't want you to know it. It's scary. They know everything. And we talk about AI and LLMs and stuff. They got their own LLM right there. They know everything about.

Brett:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Kevin:

And

Brett:

I think you could maybe argue that Google has just as much or more data on what we look for and what we like online, but I don't know that anybody has more data on what we buy. And plus the combination of all those other things like Amazon, the amount of Amazon data that they have is unreal. And I think it's a large part of the reason why they've become the number three online ad platform, right? Leaning into some of that data creates great advertising opportunities as

Kevin:

Well. Well, you look at too, I mean one of the things I say right now is take it beyond just though those TikTok, I always say if you want to know somebody, ask 'em Can I borrow my can borrow your phone for a few minutes, roll our TikTok

Brett:

Feed TikTok know

Kevin:

You for sure, and you'll know everything about that person, what they're into, what they're currently watching just based on that feed. It's so good. It's scary what the data that's out there and there is no such thing as privacy in the United States.

Brett:

That is a really good point. Really good point. Yeah. Privacy is kind of an illusion I believe. Speaking of illusions, as we look at what are some of the myths around geo rank, which I think maybe we talked about, but how do we influence that? How do we influence that in a greater way so we can see maybe where we're not selling as well regions, we run ads around dsp, we around YouTube or on Facebook, whatever to try to get the sell through in those areas. Exactly. What else can we do to influence

Kevin:

That? That's the major thing right there is running that outside traffic in those weakened areas to actually influence that. That's basically where you can try to help influence it. Right now that's pretty much all you can truly do right now.

Brett:

Totally makes sense. But it also makes sense that, hey, if we're looking at Helium 10 and we see what our ranking is, that's kind of just a nationwide number or that's wherever. Actually maybe it'd be better to clarify that wherever

Kevin:

Pull it from,

Brett:

It's wherever it's pulling, it's wherever it's being pulled from.

Kevin:

Wherever their server, wherever their D-P-N-D-P-N pull it from.

Brett:

Got it. Okay. So then how do we get that region level data? That's where we look at Helium 10 and kind of look at those heat

Kevin:

Map there tools out there that will actually let you choose by region, ranking by region, and they're using vpn, so they're using a VPNs or not VPNs. They could be using actual physical servers and different locations and I think that's coming to Helium 10 where you can actually see the eight different regions and it'll break it down. Nice. Okay, cool. Regions.

Brett:

So love that. I think that's going to be news to a lot of people. Geo rank, you don't rank the same way in all regions across the us. It varies based on a number of factors. Talk to me about Cosmo. Cosmo's also a unique thing, new-ish thing on Amazon that influences search results and impacts both sellers and buyers. But what is Cosmo?

Kevin:

Cosmo is Amazon's AI engine that interprets your listing basically. So Cosmo is built, it's hosted on AWS, there's several components to it. Amazon comprehend is one of them. Amazon Comprehend will take a look at your listing and we'll comprehend what is this listing really about? Because us as sellers, we use the tools and we try to influence what Amazon, what we think our product is, but Amazon's like, yeah, Kevin, you can say it's your product's the best or it does this or this or this, but reality is what the customers say or what do we think or how are you wording this in such a way? So Cosmo takes a look at that and it analyzes the sentient, it analyzes the customer reviews to see what they're actually saying and analyzes your pictures. So it actually goes in and analyzes pictures. One of the examples I give is if your Amazon listing, let's say you're selling beach umbrellas and that's your listing and you got a bunch of pictures in your stack of different umbrellas, but one of the pictures doesn't show it actually on the beach, physically on the beach. Maybe it's people holding it, maybe it's the walking with it. And maybe you also are trying to get other spies on this beach umbrella. So you want people to buy a rain umbrella and other stuff. So you are not concentrating just on the word beach, but there's no pictures of the word beach. So Amazon sees that in the image stack. There's no beach pictures here. We're not going to serve this up, but we're going to deprioritize this and show it. You

Brett:

Say it's a beach product, we don't see it as a beach product based on your product images. So no go.

Kevin:

So we're going to put it down even though you're running ads on it and maybe getting some conversions. Alright, we'll give you a little bit of love for that and raise you up a little bit in the A nine, but we're not going to ranking you fully on it. So they're analyzing that. And I did a test, there's a tool luva org I think it was that you could upload a picture and I have the AI analyze this picture and tell me what it is. I took my cell phone and on the back of my cell phone I had a little case. Okay, so it's an old guy. I had reading glasses, so it's like little fold out reading glasses and I pull 'em out. And so I took a picture of my phone on the ground with the little reading glasses just kind of sticking out to the side and I put it in. I said, what is this? And it misinterpreted it and misinterpreted the image as a mobile device, a mobile phone with a key chain. It's not a key chain, it's a little eyeglasses that sit on your nose. Interesting.

Brett:

Sure,

Kevin:

I got to sit on your nose. And so then I took the picture and I rearranged the eyeglasses, took it out from underneath half of it underneath and positioned it differently. It got it right.

Brett:

Yeah, because they thought the glasses were connected to the iPhone.

Kevin:

So those kinds of things are now that's part of Cosmo. It's called Amazon recognition.

Brett:

Yeah, interesting.

Kevin:

And Amazon, you can go to AWS and type in Amazon recognition, upload photos and Amazon will spit back what they think it is.

But

They're using that to now analyze and try to determine patterns and what you're really selling and what the customer's really looking for. What's the actually intent or the buyer. And I think it's going to get to the point where in the not too distant future where it's not going to be keyword searches anymore as much Amazon will never get away from that. There's going to be some people that do it,

But they're just going to get more intent based. It's going to be where I type in, I'm taking a trip to, it's going to be more prompting. I'm taking a trip to Clearwater, Florida with my family. What do I need? What do I need? Amazon, we just talked about this 742 page PDF. They know everything I've bought. They know that maybe I don't have children, but let's just say I had children. Maybe they know that I have an overweights 12-year-old because I've been buying larger size kids' clothes or something for a 12-year-old. They know that my wife has a sense of sensitivity. She's always buying these creams of some sort for skin skin. So it's going to then suggest, in my suggestions, it's going to then suggest, oh, you're going to Clearwater, Florida. When are you going? And maybe ask a question or two qualifying question, oh, I'm going July 3rd.

Okay, July 3rd to the 10th, the weather's going to be this and this and this. Alright, here's what you need. You already have a beach chair. We're not going to show you any beach chairs. Or maybe we're going to show you one you bought one four years ago and you need to upgrade. Here's the new version. And it's going to show you, oh, you need this S SPF 50 for the wife, you need this for the kid extra wide chair for the kid beach chair. You need this, this and this and you need a beach umbrella. Let's just throw it in. Whatever. And that's the type of stuff. I think you're going to start seeing more intent-based results rather than keyword based results.

Brett:

Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. And I think in the near term or even now with Cosmo, we have to understand what does the AI think about my listing? What does the AI think about my pictures? And it's no longer just keyword stuffing and gaming the algorithm.

Kevin:

You got to sell to the ai.

Brett:

Yeah, you got to sell to the ai. And I think there's still good overlap between the two, the things that

Kevin:

Are working. So defense right now, right now it's still you got to do the old way. If you quit doing the old way, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot. But the new way is coming and it's coming. I don't know how long it's going to be. Rufuss is the test of this, so Rufus, the next, it's taking the Cosmo data and let's put it in a set of a technical way, let's it in a way that the average user can interact with. And Rufuss is only on mobile right now and it's a little rough around the edges, but just so was the first iPod, so was the first iPod. So they'll get this dialed in. But that rufuss taking the Cosmo data and taking your history and taking what it knows about you and trying to suggest, and I'm not the expert on Rufuss, but my friend Vanessa Hung, has figured out ways to actually influence that on the backend.

And a lot of that is by making sure that you're not just keyword stuffing, like you said, that you're actually talking situational things and putting situational stuff and filling in all those backend little fields that a lot of us skip some of the simple things of fabric and color and whatever. But being very complete and thorough and actually giving thought to exactly what's in your images, not just the pretty images, but actually images that'll convert, but also giving thought to what's the AI going to think of this? And then you take that a step further. I have not played with this yet. It just came out. I have a story coming in my newsletter about it, so I'll be playing with it tonight actually. But Perplexity just introduced shopping and a lot of people that have been playing with it have been saying it's better than rufuss.

Interesting.

It ties into Amazon. So actually it's a better tool to get results on Amazon than Rufuss itself and it's shopping and they did it just in time for right before Black Friday and Cyber Monday that we just had. So they did just in time for that. And they're saying this is the next evolution of shopping and it's not just going to Amazon, it's going all over the web and picking stuff. Google's doing some stuff with the Google lens.

Totally.

They're doing, there's a ton of that kind of stuff coming and you're going to see this evolving and becoming more and more and more. It's a shift in the way you search. So I don't know how the adoption rate will be 3D movies. Were supposed to be the next hot thing 10 years ago and everybody was buying 3D projectors and getting little glasses and that didn't take off. So maybe it doesn't take off, but I think this is going to take off and this is where the future's going to

Brett:

Be. Absolutely. I think exactly what the flavor is or is it rufuss or something else, but this is going to be the future for sure. I think the thing we had to think about now is we always used to talk about SEO. We still do, it's still relevant, but SEO for Google, SEO for Amazon. But now we're also optimizing for the ai, right? Because I do think the way most users are going to interact with platforms, the web in general, but also Amazon and other places to shop, is going to be kind of with an AI assistant. I would love to get your take on Rufuss and how popular you think it's going to be. But I watched my 7-year-old son, he used my iPhone. He was shopping for, he wanted to get this toy from the movie cars and this tractor trailer thing, and I didn't tell him to do this. He saw the rufuss thing, he clicked on it and he started asking it questions, how big is this? Will this fit? Can I drive the car into the trailer? Stuff like that. And I was like, that's really interesting, but that's probably the way we're going to interact with the shopping platforms

Kevin:

And that's how you guys start doing your backend is figuring out what are those questions When you launch a new product,

It's focus groups, it's knowing your customer and it's going to get to the point where right in the past we've been able to control our destination in a way by controlling the keywords, look for the opportunities, look for someone where someone else is not optimizing on these keywords or only three people are, and there's a lot of depth. I can just go fill in the gap or I can beat this guy, I got a better price or more reviews or whatever that control that we've had is going to start going away. And the control now is on the ai and you got to start selling to an avatar. You got to truly know your customer and truly become a true brand, a brand's, not a logo and a name, but a true brand and actually know your avatar and know what are the questions that a 7-year-old is going to ask. That's our audience.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so powerful, and this is something we've been speaking about for a long time, I know you have too, is that long-term success on Amazon, it's building a brand, not just selling products, right, selling products. Anybody can do that. That's going to come and go, but building a brand that's about really understanding who are you serving? So what's your positioning for your brand and what problems are you solving and having that clear avatar picture and then understanding what are the use cases, where are the questions, where are the problems, what are the things someone needs to know and how will they interact with the ai? So I can bring that to the surface or allow the AI to bring that to the surface. Really powerful and it's a different way of looking at it.

Kevin:

One of the things I teach in one of our most recent presentations I just did in Singapore, and I'm doing it on a webinar soon is it's on the psychology of marketing. I'm known for lots of hacks and stuff, and teaching hacks and hacks can be great and can get you out the bind, but like you said, it's not long term,

But the psychology of marketing, your 7-year-old, the way he's approaching things is the same as you and I did 30 years ago when you were seven and I was 57. No, I'm just kidding. It's the same. It's just different technology and different ways of doing it. So if you understand the underlying psychology, and so I did a presentation called the psychology of marketing and how to do it on product sales. And one of the things that's, I heard this actually on my first million podcast, a guy named George Mack, really brilliant advertising guy out of the uk. He said that you should actually do the advert before you choose the product. So not the other way around. Right now we choose the product based on all these tools and then we create advertising around and say, no, it needs to be first. What is the problem? Then go figure out how you're going to sell the problem. And in two seconds or less, you need to actually, they need to say, that's me. Not two seconds to stop the scroll with some sort of crazy waving or crazy flashing or whatever, but two seconds, they look at it in two seconds when his words or when they're scrolling, they don't give an F about you and they're like, oh, what's that? Oh,

Add that ad is me. That's my situation, that's my problem, that's my solution. Two seconds and then what's the product that fixes that solves that. A perfect example of that is of doing this is the baby changers. So you go into the airports when people travel this last Thanksgiving, everybody's out traveling, you're traveling with a baby, sometimes you need to change the diaper, so in the old days you'd find a place to do it and then now a lot of us have seen those little things. There's a little diaper changing station, the little thing that folds out of the wall. Yeah, totally makes like a little table. Well, the people that were manufacturing that 15, 20 years ago, were trying to sell that to airport facilities managers or whoever manages the stuff in the airport and they were putting this out and putting out pretty pictures with the thing, how it folds out and folds back up of happy families, mom, dad, kid all sitting there smiling, holding a happy baby that's not crying, and that was their ads that they're using in their brochures, in their marketing, and they sold something like a little less than a million bucks, maybe $800,000 worth of these things.

They then changed the marketing to a single picture and the single picture was a bathroom stall, dirtiest all get out with toilet torn toilet paper on the floor, a little bit of pee on the toilet, and a woman leaned over with a baby on the ground trying to change the diaper, the only big space that she had, and they put a tagline tag, it's

Brett:

Horrifying, right? It's horrifying. We got to change this.

Kevin:

Sales went to 800 million.

Brett:

Wow.

Kevin:

That's what I'm talking about is when you guys start thinking about it in those terms, it's problem solution, and that's how you move along.

Brett:

I think that's why Amazon, before they launch a new feature, before they launch a new initiative, what they do internally is they start with a press release. They start with what's the press release? Same thing. What's the ad going to be for this feature? How is the customer going to benefit from this? Should we even do this?

Kevin:

Yep, that's a good point. That's exactly the way Amazon does it, is start from the end and work backwards and I think somebody goes start the other way around in the Amazon world. Another thing you're talking about, an AI that I'm testing right now, that's just scary. We're talking about privacy and how much Amazon knows about you and there's no privacy in the US is I'm doing two things right now. There's a fellow that I'm testing this with for my newsletter. I've been running newsletter ads on Facebook and doing lookalike audiences to my list. It's doing all right, but there's a guy that came to me and said, look, I have an AI tool that combined with a couple other things that we're doing. I can find out anybody that's searching on Google, so if anything that's typed into the Google search bar, I can create custom audiences of that without them even knowing. I'm like, how are you doing that? I said, don't worry about it. We got it figured out. I'm like, okay. So I said, I'm game. I'll try it. So you can say that if I want, I'll test it for my newsletter. So I want people that are Amazon sellers, 7, 8, 9 figure sellers. So what would they be typing into the Google search bar? They'd be typing in Amazon seller support, Amazon seller central

Tips for DSP or something. They're not going to be typing in, how do I sell on Amazon? That's a new person. I want the experienced people. So I gave him a list of keywords and he went back out and pulled a two week run of trailing report of 484,000 people that supposedly fit that audience profile. He then imported that automatically into meta into a custom audience in the meta, and I'm testing it right now. We started five days ago and it looks like it's freaking working. We're doing lookalike on it and we're doing direct to them raw. It looks like it's actually working pretty damn well. And then he's able to take that information as four 84,000, overlay it with Apollo and some other stuff, and give me this spreadsheet that's got their physical address, their LinkedIn profile, their all this other data, their age, all kinds of other crazy stuff. And so I'm like, holy cow, you could do this across all kinds of platforms for all kinds of products and dial in better than what Facebook is dialing in. Is it still early? Give me another couple weeks and

Brett:

Totally. Yeah. Yeah,

Kevin:

This may, but if this works, my company, dragon Fish that I mentioned earlier, we're going to be offering this up. I'm not going to get that source out right now, but there's another fellow I just met in Montreal this last weekend. I was up there on some other business and we met with him and he's doing personalized stuff with AI right now. So where I can give, set up a landing page, enter my email address, you could take it a few steps further and ask a few questions if you want to. Levesque is ask method, all knowledge, ask two or three questions, makes it better, but just with an email address instantly, he can actually go out and figure out who I am. He reads all my social media, he reads any blog post I've ever posted, anything that's out there on the internet reads everything about me, and they can customize the next page to make.

The next page says, let's say, Hey Kevin, since you're a Texas a and l, Maggie's football fan and the big game is coming up Saturday, he know I posted about something. You might be interested in X, Y, or Z, or I'm an Aggie too or whatever. He can customize it and do you this with emails, set up an email sequence that customizes each email take. I did a test with him and took my, I just gave him the URL, my website, billion dollar sellers, and he sending me a five part email series as a test, and it's freaking dialed in. It looks like this guy researched me crazy. It's powerful. And he says it's in beta and the people that are using are seeing ridiculous conversion rates. And he just did it with, he's going to do a press release. He did a press release. I was trying to get press, sorry for somebody, and rather than just buying a press release, he went out and had the AI pull all the reporters that have ever written about, I'm just going to make this up a slow feed dog bowl,

And

Here's all these reporters that put in gadget and gizmo and whatever ever spoken about a SFI dog bowl and find their email address usually on their byline or find their contact or using Apollo. And then he told it, go read all the articles every one of these reporters have ever written, and he read all the articles and then it created a custom message to every single reporter that said, Hey, Brett, great job running for the Washington Post. That article you wrote on X, Y, and Z on the dogs was amazing. It really did this and this and the other article you wrote about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in this one, did you know that we have this new dog bowl that does x, y, z? Because you said that was a problem you'd like to see in this other article you wrote, we'd love to send you one if you want to take a review of it.

The person gets that like, holy cow, this person researched me. He does all this in a matter of 15 seconds, 30 seconds that that's where we're going to in marketing. It's this power. I'm about to test it with postcards or it's custom postcards to every single person. So if I'm selling hiking boots and I know that I get you to come to my website and I can even use retention.com or DA app, or not even have you enter email address and probably match up 50% of you, I could then, Brett, you come across my website, I'm going to know exactly what you're into because I'm going to immediately use Daaz app. Oh, there's his email address, Brett omg.com, dot com or whatever it is. And then, oh, here's all the posts he's made. Oh, he mentioned, he may have mentioned that he's going to take a trip soon with his family and go climb out to Kilimanjaro in Africa. Let me send him a postcard, drop a postcard in the mail, not a Facebook ad because postcard marketing still works very, very well. I'm going to send a postcard in the mail automatically that's cut the coast hardest custom printed by companies that do this. It's tailored to him. It has a picture of Mount Kilimanjaro, has a picture of my boots, and it has something to the effect of, I'm not going to say I know that you're going there, that would freak you out, but I'm going to say that

Brett:

Little too creepy. Yeah,

Kevin:

Not too creepy. But I'm going to say something to the effect that, hey, as an avid hiker that's concerned about the quality of the seat and wants to be able to hike an extra three hours a day without sore feet, our boots are the best boots. People have them from Mount Kilimanjaro to Everest and beyond, and they're great, and you're like, holy shit, I'm going to freaking Kilimanjaro. That's

Brett:

Crazy.

Kevin:

The boots I need, that's where it's going to get to. And that's

Brett:

Where, yeah, and I think really what AI is allowing is all the little things that would take hours of research or an unthinkable amount of time to actually execute on. It's allowing it at scale, right? It's allowing these customizable messages and direct outreach and building audiences and all these things that we'd love to do, but you either need a massive team of people to do or just can't do in general. AI is making that possible, for sure. Good. Any other perspectives on Rufuss or Cosmo or what we need to do as sellers to really take advantage of those?

Kevin:

The biggest read my newsletter, of course, billion Dollar Seller, there's always tips and strategies and tools in there, but beyond that is really thinking about selling to a customer, not to a keyword, selling to the AI and doing enough testing to know what are people asking? Looking right now, you may not know you're launching a new product. I don't know if my 7-year-old is going to ask, does the firetruck fit through whatever you said your son was asking? I don't know that, but maybe they've been asking that question and some of the other similar products or other similar toys. So analyze those reviews and see what people are asking. Look at the q and a section

And analyze that. Go to Reddit. Reddit's a massive tool right now, and Reddit has exploded in popularity. It's been around 20 some odd years, just went public, but Google put a bunch of money into it, and when Google put the a hundred million or whatever it was investment into it, they actually boosted it and its ramping. So Google, Reddit is exploding, but there's a lot of tools that will monitor Reddit threads, and there's a lot of good discussion that goes on in these threads of pain points and of issues that people are looking for beyond just what you see on e-commerce platforms. And sometimes you can get some really good insight off of that. So taking that kind of data and then structuring it in a way like, okay, what am I really going to focus on here? Maybe it's too massive to try to include everything, but what am I going to really focus on here? Maybe you create three different versions of your product, and each version is slightly different packaging, slightly different color or whatever,

Brett:

Just bit, right? Built specifically for an avatar,

Kevin:

Built specifically for an avatar, and that's where you got to go.

Brett:

Yeah, this is the headache pill. This is the low back pain pill. This is the soreness pill. Maybe all the same active ingredient, just slightly different, but different products. Position.

Kevin:

Ty Tylenol does that. Totally ol migraine Tylenol, this Tylenol ex. You look at the

Brett:

Ingredient, the main active ingredients, the same. There's some other things added, but yeah,

Kevin:

Yeah, exactly. Same

Brett:

Thing. Yeah. And so I think, man, I love the points you made there where hey, build the product for a customer, not for a keyword. Think about that avatar, build a real brand. The AI is going to be able to uncover that, optimize so that the AI can uncover what's going to be most important to your shoppers. Think about how to really influence rank, not just on a national level because that doesn't really exist, but think about those geo rank opportunities. Love that. And of course, subscribe to Kevin's newsletter, the Billion Dollar Seller newsletter. I'll link to all of that in the show notes. But Kevin, how else can people connect with you? So if people are like, man, I need more Kevin King in my life, I need to attend some of these events, or

Kevin:

I don't want that. It might be dangerous for your health, dangerous for your wallet, but dangerous for your wallet. But no, I mean, I'm on LinkedIn. Just a year ago, August of last year, I got on LinkedIn for the first time I was ignoring LinkedIn and it's growing pretty good. So I post on LinkedIn, so that's a good way to reach out. Just Kevin King or billion dollar sellers.com is my newsletter. It's free every Monday and Thursday of action. It's not a marketing email. It's a lot of actionable tips and strategies and news about what's going on in the world and tactics and the latest in the software side and everything. So those are the two best ways probably.

Brett:

Awesome. Check it out. Kevin King, ladies and gentlemen, Kevin, this has been awesome. Can't wait to schedule round two. I will not wait another 300 episodes. It will be much, much sooner.

Kevin:

Awesome. I appreciate it. It's been fun. Thanks for having me on, Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. Give us the feedback on the podcast. Leave us a review on iTunes if you've not done so already. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

In this tactical episode, OMG Commerce's Email Director Nick Flint reveals game-changing strategies to maximize what should be your most profitable customer acquisition and retention channel. With rising costs across advertising, shipping, and operations, Nick shares how leading brands are using email and SMS marketing to protect and grow their margins in 2025. Whether you're doing $2M or $50M in revenue, these practical insights will help you unlock more revenue from your existing customer base.

‍

Key takeaways:

• Why getting organized across marketing channels is critical for scale – and the simple tools Nick recommends to coordinate email, SMS, social, and paid media for maximum impact
• How to design "bigger A/B tests" that drive real insights (including one test that recently doubled campaign revenue for a client)
• The counterintuitive reason why adding friction to your email-to-purchase journey could significantly boost conversions
• Why SMS is becoming increasingly crucial as email deliverability tightens, and the exact tactics to build your SMS list without annoying customers

‍

Plus, Nick shares his unconventional "cat keyboard" subject line test that generated unprecedented engagement for a pet brand. Don't miss the bonus segments on advanced segmentation strategies and mobile-first optimization techniques that could unlock hidden revenue in your business.

---

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction

(05:09) Organizing Your Email & SMS Strategy 

(11:01) Implementing Bigger A/B Tests

(17:59) Being Unique in Your Brand Messaging

(22:14) Leveraging SMS for Enhanced Engagement

(26:20) Bonus Tips for Doubling Email Results

(27:40) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Russ Henneberry
• AI Marketing Mastery with Russ Henneberry 
• Ultimate Email Marketing Testing Checklist

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.

---

Transcript:

Nick:

As we add it and it gets more popular, more and more people are taking us up on those SMS offers.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about four ways maybe going to sneak in a couple of bonus ways if we can for how to get the most from what should be your most profitable, most effective channel for acquiring new customers, but also increasing repeat purchases, increasing lifetime value. We're talking about retention, marketing, email plus SMS. I have our resonant expert, our eight year veteran. This guy has been in the D two C space in email marketing space for eight, count him eight years. That is not an old joke. You can tell by looking at him, dude, as young and fit and spry, but he is been at the game a while and so welcome back to the pod email director for om g commerce. Nick Flint. What's up Nick? How you doing?

Nick:

What's up Brett? So apparently established is the new old, since he said eight years, you're pretty established.

Brett:

Established is the new old. But hey, there's only one of us on this call has a little gray, their facial hair and that would not be you. So, but yes, you are established, seasoned, all of that good stuff. Now, before we dive in to these four ways to smash your results or get more profitable, get more effective with your retention marketing in 2025, you just completed something that a lot of people aspire to and this is not your first rodeo, but you just completed a marathon, but not just any old marathon. Nick, where did you run a marathon?

Nick:

That was in the beautiful New York City. Turns out

Brett:

The big apple,

Nick:

Now it's the biggest marathon in the world. So I don't know where I'm supposed to go from here. The biggest am best over 50,000 people. So I got to figure out which one to pick next

Brett:

50,000 people. Do you know where you finished? And it's okay if you don't want to reveal this or where did you finish in that roster of 50,000 people?

Nick:

I think in the late 20 thousands. So maybe 20, 26, 27, 8,000 we're up

Brett:

There. Very respectable and I believe, and you and I were actually just in New York recently had a leadership offsite there, meeting with some partners and with our leadership team. So we were kind of hanging out in NYC, which was a good time. And you revealed to me one of your fastest miles was mile 26, which is crazy. So you saved enough energy to really bust it that final mile. Tell us about that.

Nick:

Yeah, so I have this little TikTok series going on where I do a mile doing different things. So a mile with a weight vest on a mile, pushing a truck a mile while juggling. And one of the ones I haven't done yet is how long does it take to run a mile after running 25 miles? So when that 25 kicked in, I had to book it and get a nice video at the same time. It hurt.

Brett:

That's amazing. So anything for TikTok or the grim, but that final mile after running 25 miles, your 26 mile was like eight minutes, right?

Nick:

Low eight, yeah, it was a tough low eight for sure.

Brett:

Dang. Pretty good, man. Pretty good. So hey, I think you could compare e-commerce and especially if you look at our fiscal year of e-commerce, it's a bit of a marathon and every mile every month is a little bit different. We got to approach it a little bit differently. And so as we're recording this, we're kind in the home stretch of 2024, so we're wanting to maximize what we're doing now, but really our eyes are also on 2025. So let's dive in, Nick, we got four ways to make this the best year yet with your retention marketing. Let's talk about way number one

Nick:

Today we're going to talk about doubling your email and SMS revenue in 2025. This channel is still alive and well, you just got to know how to use it, right? I know you're price spending more on ads than ever before. You're probably spending more on shipping than ever before. You're probably paying your employees more than ever before. So let's go ahead and maximize this to help bring some of that profit margin back into your business.

Brett:

And I think it's really important to note, and that can be a little bit depressing, Nick, if we look at, hey, you're paying more frauds in your before, more for shipping and cost of goods, more for your team, but that's the way business goes, right? It's never going to get cheaper in most cases for most of your business. And so email can be a great adjuster, it can be just a very effective lever to pull to dial up your profits and your business. And I think a lot of brands are just missing out on all the opportunity that's in front of them as it pertains to email.

Nick:

The last leg of that was you should be charging more than you've ever charged before. So toss that on top of everything else. So get those margins back by up and those prices on the site. Absolutely.

First thing you got to do before anything else is just get organized within your business. You want to make sure email and SMS tie in with everything seamlessly. And a couple of ways to do this, the main one is getting a content calendar laid out. You can use notion, you can use Google Calendar, you can use Google Sheet, you can use pen and paper, whatever works for you, but just make sure you have a full picture of everything that's about to happen within your brand. Blog posts, social media posts, product launches, any new ad initiatives. I think of those email and SMS is tied in as well.

Brett:

Yeah. And where do you think most brands fall short here? So you've got a unique perspective, Nick. You audit dozens of Klaviyo accounts every year for some pretty big brands that we talk to. And what are some of issues or the misses that you see when you're auditing accounts as it pertains to being organized?

Nick:

They stay too siloed. The different marketing efforts that a brand could be doing. Sometimes if it's an owner running their own business doing everything, they have all that tracked in their head and they don't necessarily have to have this set up. But the more complex your brand is, you have someone running Facebook, someone running email, someone running your website. You got to make sure everyone's communicating with each other to make sure everyone's aligned and on the same page. And the next thing is getting ahead of the game. A lot of things seem to be very last minute for the brands that I audit, it's like, Hey, this is going out tomorrow. I'm going to get it done tomorrow morning. So it's ready to go, which the more of a heads up that you can give yourself and more of a headstart, the more seamless it'll be when something actually goes live.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really important to note that the structures in the systems and the marketing calendars you had in place at $2 million in revenue are not the same as when you're $10 million in revenue. And the structure you have in place when you're 10 million in revenue is not the same as what you'll need when you're 50 million in revenue or beyond. And I think it's really important to note that this is not just about working smarter, right? We don't work five times harder to go from two to 10 million or 10 times harder than that to go to a hundred million. It's more about getting the right systems, the right communication processes in place, maybe partnering with the right agencies. Quick plug to Nick Flynn and the email team. But yeah, it's about getting organized because this cannot just live in your head as the entrepreneur operator. You got to get your teams in sync.

And yeah, we definitely see this. We have a unique perspective because running Google and YouTube and running Amazon, running email for a lot of brands. And so we see the need to coordinate even within our teams, but a lot of brands are missing that. So any practical tips there? I know you laid out a couple of tools and I know your perspective. My perspective is tools are just tools. Whatever you use, whatever works for you is the best tool. But any tips or tricks to make those tools effective or to make marketing calendars a reality,

Nick:

Start easy. Start with Google Sheets, get that free version up and running before you go into some complex page software. Utilize that free one. You can get a simple dashboard set up and the perfect example would be, we're diving into black Friday this week, so let's pretend you sent out an email saying 20% offsite wide, come and get it. They go to your website, they enter the code hopefully and they check out. But now imagine if your website had the banner that said 20% off the product page is also mentioned that they're posting on social media organically on your stories, getting people to go to the site. And then also your paid ads are also mentioned that 20% off sale, that way if someone's browsing on social, they're going to end up on your site and get reinforced and they're getting the same message across everything. You don't want it to be disjointed.

Brett:

Yes, it's really great where everything is communicating the same thing makes a ton of sense. And so you talk about the calendar, but also KPI tracking and this is something that you do internally for all OMG clients and we can actually look and see all our clients together and see who's really performing, who's lagging, things like that. What are some of the things you recommend getting on that calendar, and then what are the KPIs that you're recommending? We track,

Nick:

Again, keep it simple and straightforward here. Let's say you have eight campaigns lined up for the upcoming month. Those are eight unique emails going out, set up four unique AB tests you want to run for these campaigns. And that way you can use the learning from those for your future campaigns and add that same learning into your flow, all those flows you have up and running. So let's say it's almost unrealistic to keep AB testing every campaign. You got to get some normal ones out there as well just for the sake of the time if it takes a, set them up. So we have four broad tests within those eight campaigns. I just sent out an email today actually showing off one of our recent AB tests and the analogy I used was, if you're a shoe brand and you have a shoe launch coming up, I want some drastic AB tests in here. So I want to have show them the shoe and that variation one of the email V two that your AB testing, don't show them the shoe on one side. Hey, if we show it to them, they're going to like it. They're going to go to the site and buy it on the other side. If you don't show it to them within the email and you make them click through to your website to actually see it, they're getting targeted with a pixel, they're going to hit with all of your flows. Now in the future for all of your future campaigns and the launches for your new shoes, do you want to show it to them or not?

Brett:

Yeah, it's so great. So building in, we can't test everything because done is better than perfect. And if we strive for perfection in everything we do, you're just going to do less stuff and you're going to likely be less effective. So in eight campaigns, yeah, maybe we're running four ab tests. I really like looking at that. We're tracking our KPIs and then that's informing our next round of tests, our next round of campaigns. Super, super smart. Now I believe that kind of leads into one of the next big things to double your results, and that's bigger AB tests, right Nick? So maybe we talk about that next. I think that's a natural tie in to what we just discussed

Nick:

A hundred percent. A lot of times when I'm hopping into accounts and giving some audits, giving some recommendation, as I'm looking through the campaigns or the flows, the AB tests that are set up are two different subject lines that are pretty similar to each other. And the hard part there

Brett:

Is do we want to say big, what's your takeaway at big sale? Or do we want to say huge sale? Let's test big versus huge.

Nick:

And it's like a 0.2% difference. Everything looks the same and you don't actually learn anything from it. So have these broad tests. I'll go back to that shoe example. Within the imagery, should you be showing the shoe by itself? That way you can see the details, you can get a little bit more of an up close look or should you be featuring models wearing the shoes within the emails? Then you can see what it looks like on a person. You can get the outfit inspiration going on, have these broad tests within your campaigns and then transfer that data. I like about three days to pass by to get a fair gauge of enough people have gotten it clicked through and purchased at that point, three days afterwards, pull that data from Klaviyo into your centralized dashboard. That way as you're making your next upcoming campaigns, you can reference all those AB tests from the last one all in one spot. So you can say, okay, what worked in the past and what should I do differently?

Brett:

How do you work through that and determine what should we test or what should we not test? Because there's this old adage, which I think is really false and counterproductive, where it's like you should AB test everything, test everything in your business. And that's just not practical. And I remember the old example in internet marketing 1.0 was like, test the color of your button. Is the green button better or an orange button better? And just see, and that's the kind of stuff they're generally speaking does not yield wins, but how do you decide what to test? I do think in some cases subject line testing does make a lot of sense, but how are you determining, okay, these are the elements that we think are going to move the needle. Let's do an AB test here and let's then get our learnings.

Nick:

So we'll have a broad theory to start with. We'll work with the brand owners, run some different theories or ideas by them, make sure they're on board with it, and then we will run with it from there. And afterwards we'll look at the data to make sure there was enough of a difference between the two of them. For example, for one brand that we just started working with, we had a two x increase on their campaigns. We switched to one test and the test was, and had been using these links on the website that automatically took you to the cart with the product already added to it. So on that logic, hey, let them click on this product, it'll take 'em to the cart automatically and they can easily check out with less clicks. I a hundred percent see the logic there. But instead we took them to the product page to see, hey, how does that compare to taking 'em to the cart?

And that product page brought in twice as much revenue than taking 'em directly to the cart with the yeah, literally a two XI was surprised. It's crazy. And the difference I can see there is the people who haven't brought this product yet, bought this product yet, it's giving 'em a lot more information on that product page. If there's any kind of other callouts like that free shipping threshold of the money back guarantee or the product specs or if there's an upsell process after they add it to the cart. All that was getting skipped by taking 'em directly to checkout.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really great. And then I think part of this Nick is looking at, hey, what are our core metrics and where are we maybe off a little bit? So maybe you look at performance historically and you think click-through rate is a little bit low, right? We're not getting as many people as I would expect to click through on this email. So that's when you look at, well, what if I do something radical and not show them the shoe? What if I just make it all about kind of intrigue or we're just making them curious? And so we're using curiosity as a tactic to get them to click. Or maybe in this case you're looking at it and you're saying, okay, a lot of people are clicking and we've certainly made it convenient for them to check out, but fewer people than I would expect are actually converting. So why are they not converting? Well, they're probably not converting because they're not convinced or because they need more information or because of some of the reasons. So yeah, let's change the page we're sending them to and see if that makes a difference. So I really like that. I think you've got to look at the data from the data form a hypothesis from the hypothesis then or thesis, then you create the AB test and then you take your learnings and you go from there. It's really, really smart.

Nick:

And when you're organized, you can let some of this stuff play out. A lot of the times, if you're last minute and you watch that shoe, you're going to say, shoe's live, come and get it in the subject line. Picture of shoe is here, come and get it. That's you. Don't take you. Exactly. Yeah, you're rushing it. You're trying to get these sales up. So with that curiosity thing that you mentioned, I won't even tell them what we just did. So for the AB test that I sent out an email for earlier today, I said, Hey, this campaign at two x, the client's revenue and this campaign, because we ran a test, if you want to see what that test was apply to me, I'll give you all the juicy details. And that way for all of the potential clients out there, I've now peaked their curiosity. I'm now going to get that conversation started and I can send them a more in-depth breakdown of those details.

Brett:

That's great. And in that case, maybe you'll get fewer people responding than maybe would've just clicked or something. But in this case you're like, let's see if we can get more interactions, let's see if we can get more conversations going. And that was kind of the goal. So really smart. Love that. Any other tips on bigger AB tests before we move on to the next way to double your results?

Nick:

Yeah, this one actually just started using recently. I'm sure a lot of you out there started using AI chat GBT and clog to help with your email campaign creation. And instead of me feeding it the two ideas I wanted to test out like, hey, write this campaign twice, focus on urgency for one and focus on the vegan aspect of our brand for the other. Instead of doing something like that, I would say, give me four unique value props. Write four campaigns for it. And then I kind of picked two that I think could work well. So instead of you coming up with the tests, two tests, use AI to help you with that.

Brett:

Yeah, lean on ai, man. AI should be your primary research assistant test assistant. You should start using it and everything. And quick plug for another episode that I did episode with Russ Henneberry on how to use AI to improve your marketing results. I've already gotten tremendous feedback on that episode, so go back and check that out. So alright, the two ways we've talked about so far to double your email results, one, get organized, two bigger AB tests. What's next?

Nick:

You got to be got to be unique as a brand. Get rid of all the default stuff that you see in Klaviyo. That's the lazy way out and it's not going to have a good impact for your brand. You left this behind how many different brands are using that because the default Klaviyo subject line, get rid of that. You left this behind and really lean into your brand voice as some products are becoming more of a commodity. There's a lot of people selling hats out there, there's a lot of people selling shirts. What can you do to help your brand stand out, lean on your strong suits.

Brett:

Examples there examples of how do you weave personality brand, how do you weave that into your marketing?

Nick:

So within those subject lines, keep them focused on the products that you are selling. If you are a camping brand and instead of your abandoned cart email saying You left this behind every other brand is doing, say going camping soon. Now in the inbox, I'm like, oh yeah, I am going camping soon. That's why I was looking at the tent. I should probably go buy that now so it can be here in time for my trip. Small things like that can help you stand out. You can develop your brand voice, how you're talking to people on social media. You don't have to have a separate voice. I feel like people default to professionalism when it comes to writing emails. I'm not sure why. It'll be fun and goofy and people will engage with them on social. And then when it comes to writing these emails, they kind of just go back to these safe defaults and they're not leaning into it. So figure out what your brand voice is or what you want it to be and make sure it's the same across all the platforms you're promoting yourself on.

Brett:

It's really good advice. I don't know why we sometimes lean into more formal communications when we get into email marketing, but in general it doesn't work, right? You do want that same voice, that same if it's whimsical or fun on social, use that in email. If it's a little bit irreverent and funny in social, use that in email if it's driven and in your face and performance. If you're like a sports brand or something, use that in email. I really like that advice. Don't shift the tone of your messaging just to fit some idea you have about what email marketing should be. You be unique, stand out. Where should someone look? How should they evaluate what's going on in their account to understand, hey, these are the areas where I'm just boilerplate copying what Klaviyo recommends versus where am I being me?

Nick:

So you can check into your flows. I would say look at those first. See what the current flow setup is, and you can look at your history of changes and see what was the original subject line here and what did I end up changing that to? Did I play it safe and stick to it? One of the best campaigns I ever sent out was for a cat brand and the subject line, I just mushed my keyboard and I just smashed my fingers on it. So the subject line made zero sense. When they opened that email, it was, sorry, my cat was walking across while I was trying to type this, but come check out this thing that we just launched. Dude, it's so good. And they got a ton of replies because they're a cat brand, they're fun, they're playful. A lot of the owners appreciated that. And now it makes sense. Stand out.

Brett:

We could all, if you're a cat lover, whichever one on your email list was, they've all had their cat walk across their keyboard that immediately endears them to you. It's like, yes, we're cat owners. That's what happens. And what a fun email and what a bizarre subject line, right? You're looking through your list of subject lines like, hey, just following up and our event next Tuesday and blah blah, blah. And then you just see the string of letters, the string of nonsense that you pretty much have to click on.

Nick:

Yeah, I mushed it and it didn't look random enough, so I had to do a couple to make it look random enough.

Brett:

That is awesome. That is awesome. Okay, cool. So we've got three ways to double our email here. We're getting organized, we're running bigger AB tests, we're being unique to us, we're being our brand. We're not being boilerplate. What's number four?

Nick:

This one might be the most impactful, so maybe we should have started with it. But hey, if you're hanging around this long, then you're in for a treat. The last one here, if you have not leaned into this yet, I strongly recommend that you do in 2025. And I'm talking about SMS as the email providers, the inboxes are getting more and more strict with who they are, letting into that main inbox and not sending to the promo tab even within Klaviyo, they're recommending now you stick to that 30 day engaged audience. It's going to be more and more important to own more of your customer's information, know their email, know their SMS, know their address, get them pixeled on your site too. And SMS is one that you can control because you know that they're going to see the text message whenever it comes through. You're not guaranteed that they're going to see the email when it comes

Brett:

Through.

Nick:

The best way to get started with this, I know it's kind of intimidating. There's new rules and regulations and I don't want to annoy people. There's a lot of pushback that I'll get when I'm recommending this. The best way to get started is adding the SMS signup as an optional step within your pop-up. Instantly. Some people are going to be comfortable with that and give you the number off the bat. Add it in a checkout as well. Another optional thing. That way people are opting in to hear from you because they wanted that discount that you offer them on that pop-up and they actually like your brand because they're buying from you. So you get this nice warm audience to start with. That's the first two steps and start building up your list from there.

Brett:

And do you recommend sometimes offering like, Hey, for the biggest discounts or the best deals maybe is a way you want to word it or for to find out first about new releases, big drops, big events, whatever. Give us your phone number as well. Give us your mobile. Do you deploy that tactic?

Nick:

There's three main tactics that we'll use the escalated discount. So hey, 10% off of your email, the next step they see 15% off a phone number. Sure, why not? Let's save a little bit extra money. The next one is giving them that exclusive early access. And what's nice about this step is you can also target your current email subscribers. So if you have an upcoming launch coming out, a lot of times we're hiding the popups from everyone. So either popups from all of our current email subscribers because we don't want them to see this 10% discount again. So you make a new one for your upcoming drop coming out December 1st, sign up to be the first to know about our upcoming drop. December 1st. Put your phone number here. That way all those email subscribers who you already have are going to see this pop up as well.

Brett:

It's really smart and could not agree more. Email is going to run into more and new issues as we go. Mailboxes, inboxes are full, things like that. It's still going to be a relevant channel for the foreseeable future and beyond. But you got to add SMS, and I know a lot of people have resisted a surprising number of quality brands have resisted, delayed, maybe halfheartedly tried and abandoned SMS marketing, but if you're not running it and not running it effectively, you are leaving so much money on the table. In fact, if you can just kind of, and I know this is putting you on the spot a little bit, Nick, but when we add SMS to our email clients, what kind of lift do we often see on the retention side of marketing?

Nick:

It's funny because as we add it and it gets more popular, more and more people are taking us up on those SMS offers compared to some of the email ones. So it's almost becoming more popular. A reasonable split between the two channels is like 80% email, 20% of revenue coming from out of those. So if you have 30% coming from email and SMS combined, about 24% of that will be coming from email. About 6% from SMS. So if you're doing a hundred KA month right now, if you fire up SMS, you could probably expect to lift about five to 10 KA month.

Brett:

Love it. Love it. Really, really powerful. So okay, let's do this, Nick. We've got about two minutes left in the pod or something like that. If you had to rapid fire quickly come up with two additional ways to double your email results in 2025, what would they be?

Nick:

Two extra ways. They're getting a little bonus here, aren't they? Bonus? First one I would say is you need an air horn bonus. I would say dive into segmentation and let people hear from you on a very specific level. Easiest one is past customers versus current customers. That's an easy segment to break off. Talk to your current customers differently than you're talking to people who have never purchased from you before. Or if you have a hero product, people who have not gotten that hero product yet, try to sell them on it because it's their most popular option that they've avoided up to this point. And anyone who has purchased your hero product, cross-sell them on the other lineup. Even call out like, Hey, if you love the running shoe, try out these socks as well.

Brett:

Better segmentation. I love it. All right, one more. Make it quick.

Nick:

After you get deep with that segmentation, you want to focus on mobile first. A lot of people are on their phones a lot more than last year. Even more are going to be on next year. So just double check, triple check that everything that you're sending out through email or through SMS just looks good on their phone.

Brett:

Mobile first. Love it. So Nick, I know there's going to be a lot of people listening or watching to this that think, okay, I'm likely missing something. I'm missing opportunities. There's more I could be tapping into more I could be doing. And they may be saying to themselves, Hey, it's time that I talked to a pro, Simon that I talked to mg. I want Nick Flint to look at my email setup. What can we do for people, those who want to upgrade their email and SMS approach, what can we do for them?

Nick:

We have this nice little checklist that we put together. It's actually the top test that you could be running. I know it was one of the first things we focused on today is those AB tests. And you were asking what specific ones can they run? We knocked out 50 of the biggest AB tests that we've ever done, put it onto a spreadsheet. We can give you that for the price of $0, $0. Just hit me up through email, nick@omgcommerce.com, and I'll go ahead and send you that full checklist, free of charge.

Brett:

Love it. And then we're also happy to dig in, audit your account for qualifying brands. We can get in there, show you what you're missing, show you exactly what we would do for you to take your results up a notch. And hey, I know just from talking to dozens and dozens of brands, I'm very connected, dozen agency owners. Profitability is hard, right? The D two C game, the retail game in general is hard. And so you need email and SMS to be firing on all cylinders for you to reach your profitability targets. And hey, maybe you can go loan and that's the perfect fit for you. And if so, that's awesome. Hopefully Nick just gave you a couple of nuggets that you can use to supercharge your results. But if not, then we'd love to chat. And so reach out to us, omg commerce.com, click on the let's chat button or let's talk or whatever it says, I dunno. And then we'll go from there. Or email Nick directly, nick@omgcommerce.com. Nick Flint, ladies and gentlemen, Nick SuperPhone as always, thanks for coming on, man.

Nick:

I'll go ahead and hit the outro button here. Bye.

Brett:

We got to add that. That's so good. So appreciate it, Nick Golden as always. And also as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us that review on iTunes. If you've not done that, let know what you'd like to hear more of on the show. We'd love your feedback. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

In this fascinating episode, beauty industry veteran Carey Grange shares invaluable insights from her journey building major brands like Proactiv, Murad, and numerous other successful beauty and wellness companies. From the early days of infomercials to today's digital landscape, Carey reveals how the fundamental principles of effective performance marketing remain unchanged—and how modern brands can leverage these principles to drive growth across multiple channels while building lasting brand value.

Key Topics Covered:

• The essential elements of successful performance marketing campaigns, including authentic founder stories, compelling transformation narratives, and the critical role of social proof—and why these elements are more relevant than ever in today's digital landscape.
• Why channel strategy matters: How Murad used infomercials to become the #1 clinical skincare brand in Sephora and Ulta, and what this teaches us about modern omnichannel growth.
• The truth about value creation: Why discounting isn't necessary and how to build real value propositions that resonate with customers and protect your brand.
• The importance of constant testing and innovation: Why successful brands allocate 10-20% of their budget to experimental marketing, and how this "slush fund" approach drives long-term growth.

This episode is packed with actionable insights for any brand looking to scale through performance marketing while building lasting brand value in today's competitive landscape.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(08:59) Lessons From Carey’s Time At Murad

(20:41) Elements Of A Good Ad

(42:11) Always Be Testing 

(45:20) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Carey Grange
• Growth Envy Marketing 
• Guthy-Renker
• Nestle
• Proactiv
• Meaningful Beauty
• Crepe Erase
• WEN by Chad Dean
• IT Cosmetics
• Murad
• Sephora
• Ulta
• Bare Minerals
• Boom By Cindy Joesph
• Ezra Firestone
• Flex Seal
• Ozempic 
• How OMG Commerce Throttled BOOM! Cosmetics to a $5m Per Year Brand on Amazon

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.

---

Transcript:

Carey:

You might need to be on Amazon as much as you don't want to because your competitors are going to draft off your awareness and be there anyway. B, it's where customers are going to get reviews, and C, it's a built-in trust element.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we are talking about literally one of my favorite topics in all of marketing. We're talking about brand building through performance marketing. So I think historically people view those as two separate buckets, two separate worlds, two separate mind spaces. Am I building a brand and creating awareness or am I doing something that's performance driven, measurable, tangible, roas, CPA, things like that. But here's the deal. I think the two are not at odds with each other. I think they go hand in hand. And so if we think about what is building a brand other than driving demand for your product, allowing you to maintain prices, to build a following brand building allows you to expand your product line. It creates so many opportunities for you.

And performance marketing is really just marketing that gets people to take action and take action relatively quickly. And so my guest today is a pro in this space. She comes from the infomercial world, the direct response TV world, and she's really connected with so many great brands, CPG and other categories, and really few people understand brand building the way she does. And so my guest today is Carey Grange and she is the chief brand strategist for growth in the marketing. And we're going to get to hear some war stories, some good stories of brand building and performance marketing and really some lessons and some things that have always been true in marketing, how those apply to today's landscape. It's going to be a ton of fun. And so with that intro, Carey Grange, how's it going? And welcome to the show.

Carey:

Hi. Hi Brett. Well thanks first of all for having me here. I'm super excited to be here. And I also love talking about building brands through performance marketing. And that's kind of been my background since the beginning of my career. Pretty niche to the beauty space and the wellness space almost exclusively for CPG. But yeah, really working with brands that are tasked with driving omnichannel growth and finding new ways to intersect technology and media with where audiences are consuming content and find the financial utility in that. And that's actually how I see performance marketing as just a delivery vehicle for your brand message and one that generates an ROI be quite

Brett:

Efficient. And that allows it to be scalable, right? If it delivers a measurable, it delivers an ROI allows it to be scalable and yeah, love that framing. So I want people to get your background just a little bit, and then we're going to talk about some strategies and some tactics here that are very applicable for today. So you guys started in the infomercial space. What was that like and why did you get into that space?

Carey:

Yeah, well, it's great. I totally accidentally got into the infomercial space. I actually started my career at Guthy Ranker as a marketing coordinator, and it was the nineties and it was shortly after the deregulation of commercial advertising. And so people were able to do direct to consumer marketing and build that long form infomercial format. And it was the wild wild west, and it was the wild wild west, I think similar to the wild wild west that we're living in today as media continues to change. And so with that, it can be really overwhelming and intimidating and messy, but there's also a lot of opportunities. And so I think for those people who are naturally curious and can figure out how to find the utility in that media to reach audiences and build brand and generate revenue, they're the winners. And so Guthy Ranker, they were pioneers in using long form marketing to build brands.

And I like to say, in fact, I started, I was on the inaugural proactive team, which is like a mega brand, and it sold for a significant multiple to Nestle ultimately. But it didn't start that way. It started as a scrappy brand that was just on infomercial. There wasn't even an e-commerce component to it in the beginning. And so I like to say that became really an accidental brand because we had spent so much TV media on it with the sole intent of driving revenue, of acquiring customers and pulling them down an acquisition funnel and getting them to subscribe and to stick for as long as possible, and that was the objective. And then to find other brands that you could plug into that model.

Brett:

Yeah, it's super interesting because I think the proactive story where it was just strictly A-D-R-T-V play in the beginning, very similar to strictly D two C brands today. So your Shopify e-commerce brands that are just driving sales through Meta and Google and other places now expanding to other channels and then eventually wanting a big exit. I mean, that's really what Proactive did, but back in the day, pre Shopify and all that. So just as a bit of a frame of reference, so Gut the Ranker, if anybody's been in the director of marketing space, they know that name. They're the best of the best in the infomercial space. So you mentioned Proactive, that's one of their best known brands. What are the other brands that were part of the Guthy Riner family that will give people context?

Carey:

Yeah, I mean, the ones that I think people will know the best today would be Proactive Meaningful Beauty, which is Cindy Crawford's haircare Line Crepe Erase, which is a body line of products that deals with crepey skin for the aging woman when Haircare by Chaz Dean was another one. They had a partnership with IT cosmetics, they were part of that brand and had the exclusive direct to consumer distribution rights for that brand. Those are some pretty big ones that they're well known for. Yeah, it's such a good point. First of all, it was an incredible foundation to start there and to learn the industry from the ground up and to understand tracking and analytics and to even be like boots on the ground when you're adding a URL to a TV commercial for the very first time and gasping in fear over how are you going to do the attribution modeling? But we didn't even call

Brett:

It attribution

Carey:

Modeling. We didn't know what to call it yet. Will

Brett:

Anybody buy online? What are we going to do if they don't call in?

Carey:

Yeah, or no. The scarier part was will they buy online and how are we going to know the impact of our TV commercial? And it's exactly the dilemma that brands have today, which is what is the impact of our spend If we're spending over here, but we're getting the revenue over there, how do we know its impact? And so of course, again, that was before attribution modeling, but even today, attribution modeling is only so intelligent. Totally. And it becomes, you and I have talked about it before, it becomes increasingly complicated because the more fragmented media is, the more specialized each one of those channels are, the harder it is to keep all of those entities talking to each other and then to know how to look at those activities on a granular level, but then to understand how they're rolling up to your p and l ultimately, which is the objective of the brand owner, is to drive a healthy p and l. Totally.

Brett:

And it is one of those things that just the age old marketing question, how do we understand what's working? How much is it working? What's really driving growth? So what's driving incremental sales? What's more of a support medium? How does all this tie together? And I do think it's easier now than maybe it was in the early days, but I don't know, there's a lot of confusion. So we'll dive into attribution and some of those topics here just a little bit. One thing I would love to know, because you nailed it when you said, Hey, all of this has to feed into the p and l. And I think that's been one of the big resets in the D two C and e-commerce space is that pre pandemic, and certainly during the hypergrowth stage of the pandemic, when everybody was ordering online, it was like grow, grow, grow. We'll figure out profits later. It's going to happen, whatever to now, e-commerce brands know we have to be a real business. This all has to feed into a healthy p and l. And so marketing must drive business objectives. What are some of the things you learned in the infomercial space? I know those infomercial marketers or DR brands, they are dialed in. What are some of the principles you learned or some of the fundamentals you learned from a finance side p and l side

Carey:

And

Brett:

Make for a healthy DR business?

Carey:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I'd love to just step back a little bit and kind of frame it up in the context of where I probably spent the largest chunk of my career, which was actually at Murad. And the reason I bring that up is that was a true omnichannel business model. And I think that's what we're finding these pure play brands, like you were saying, that were launched during the pandemic. And really it was such an exciting time of entrepreneurialism. And as much as we see these unicorn moments of fast rise brands on TikTok and fast rise brands through Shopify and all these other areas, we've also seen a lot of brand failures because they don't understand how to run the business side of things. They don't know how to scale, and they reach that point of diminishing return. And so in fact, I read

Brett:

There's single channel, single source of new customer acquisition.

Carey:

When

Brett:

Something fundamentally shifts there, then they're in real trouble. And so there's also dangers to expanding channels and expanding customer acquisition channels. But

Carey:

Most of the successful brands

Brett:

We see are totally, most of the brands we see though are going multichannel or omnichannel. I do believe that's where you maximize value. And whether that's just to have a long sustaining profitable business or to have a successful exit, you got to be got to be more than just D two C. So probably D two C marketplace and retail or some combination thereof, hundred percent omnichannel brand. Go ahead.

Carey:

It's perfect because what you're trying to do is go, where is my customer? And so you're always looking for market

Brett:

Fit and how do they want to buy,

Carey:

Right? If you're building a brand, what's the market fit? So how do they want to buy? So if you're really being customer centric, then that will drive your media strategy, that will drive your distribution strategy. And so often you're right that singular channel is not enough, and that's actually not how customers are buying. And so one of the risks then is you are spending money and creating category awareness and brand awareness that you're not actually picking up then where your customers are making purchase decisions and actually making that purchase. And your competition will draft off of that and pick that up, those clever marketers. So if your objective is, Hey, I just want to sell some stuff through this channel that I'm really good at, cool. But if you want to build a brand and really grow something and scale it as much as you can, which is usually the name of the game of the people that I deal with, and I imagine the clients that you bring into OMG commerce, then you really are looking at an omnichannel strategy.

And then you want to go, okay, what are my channels of distribution and how is the media that I'm spending a being spent as efficiently as possible? But by efficient, I mean it's returning an investment on that direct spend, but it's also pushing the sell through in all of our other channels because it's an all ships rise. And so that's why I'd like to kind of joke about the accidental brand build of proactive, the brand building at as accidental. It was actually quite strategic. And so I often like to talk about brands are really good at knowing their what, this is my product. And a lot of innovators are so great at that, and they're great at knowing why I wanted to develop this, but what's missing is how am I now going to build this business? And that's where strategy comes in. And I have noticed that in today's marketplace, a lot of brands are playing in tactics.

I need to be on YouTube, I need to be on Amazon, I need to be in meta, I need to have social organic, I need, and there's all of these activities happening on, and it gives the illusion of growth, but the reality is it can lead to bloated infrastructures, a bunch of cross channel conflict, and ultimately an impotent marketing spend that isn't having impact, that isn't realizing the growth that you need. So at mrad, we went into infomercial as a strategy. And in fact, I was recruited specifically to launch an infomercial for the business, and it was kind of revolutionary at the time. And having come from Guthy Ranker, I was super excited because I had only worked on beauty brands at Guthy Ranker, and I thought, oh my God, I'm going to go work for a real beauty company in rad. They're in spas and salons, they're going into retail. Well, my counterparts were not as excited about me being there. I did not get a warm reception because the only people that wanted me there were the Mirad family members were Dr. Mrad and our CEO, Richard, his nephew. And so they hired me. So the rest of the

Brett:

Team see you as competition, or they just saw you as some kind of alien. What are you doing? We've got our stuff together.

Carey:

They saw me as the person who was going to denigrate the brand. How can you bring in this lowbrow cheesy format into our business? And so our

Brett:

Buyers are more sophisticated.

Carey:

Our

Brett:

Buyers will not respond to this low brow, low class, dr. Direct response type that

Carey:

Exactly, exactly. But the RADS were figure it out. I think what I did right in that situation and is a learning to apply to today's landscape too, is to then get really curious and understand why. So how could this potentially be an obstacle to your retail growth? And then how do we overcome that? And so in those days, production values for example, was a big part of it. So we had to be really careful not to have the cheesy bells and the whistles and the dings and the dot wacky stuff like the sound effects. It needed to be elegant and high end, but it also needed to do what an infomercial does. And what an infomercial does is or did, there're not as many. They're still out there. There's not as many of them anymore.

Brett:

Still out there.

Carey:

Still out there. They're still out there. But what they do is what we need today's performance media to do, which is to get your audience to stop. It's the thumb stop, it's the stop the scroll. It's to take action. If the TV's on in the background, it's to, Ooh, I'm listening to that headline. How do I stop, turn around, take notice and create need and then pull them down an acquisition funnel. So it's really, there's a lot of skill involved actually with getting an audience who's bombarded with information and a lot of external inputs to stop and say, oh, I'm curious about this. I want to learn more. I might need this. And then to actually get them to make a transaction is pretty powerful. So we needed to do creatives that did that, but that also were aligned with the brand message now in our omnichannel environment. So we had an infomercial, we had a website which was not optimized at all. And that's a whole nother story about how you build a D two C business from a technology and an infrastructure standpoint within a brand. It's a monstrous task, although much less expensive and easier to execute in today's landscape with

Brett:

So many open

Carey:

Source solutions. Easier for sure, for sure.

Brett:

I'm curious though, just real quick, why did the mirad want to do DR tv? So why did they want to do an infomercial? So I mean, their omnichannel, they're growing. Things are good, and their team didn't want it. Why did they want to do

Carey:

Infomercial? They had had an early experience with infomercial where the sales were just explosive, and so they really wanted to drive the growth of the brand period. They knew the value of it. So then what we were tasked with is going, well, what channels of distribution are we in? How do we support those channels of distribution while also making sure that this channel of distribution, which was the infomercial, which we looked at as a sales channel in that organization in addition to a marketing function. So it had a cross functionality. How do we make sure that it has all of the sales promotion and the elements that it needs to perform? And so that's what we set out to do, and we launched an infomercial and it was multifunctional in its benefits. It created brand awareness, it educated the customer. And actually, I am circling back to answer your initial question, which was, what did you learn that's relevant today? And that is what are those elements, right? It communicated on authentic founder story, which I'd say to this day is

Brett:

Still

Carey:

Powerful

Brett:

Today. Yeah,

Carey:

It's still powerful today, and it's a really powerful trust element, and that's what customers are looking for. It showed that we solved a problem. And in today's marketplace, again, people are looking to have their problems solved. So in our case, it was we were clearing acne, we were addressing hyperpigmentation on the skin, we were addressing fine lines and wrinkles. We were able to communicate a transformation benefit, which is if you use this, you'll get this result. So again, that could be shown through a problem solution, but transformation can also be shown through emotion, and that's the value of testimonials. So we were able to use testimonials, which in today's day and age is influencers and reviews.

Brett:

Yeah, UGC, totally.

Carey:

It's UGC, and it's your reviews. It's the social proof. So again, the infomercials have that social proof as part of it, but that again, is a really powerful trust element for customers. Oh, it worked for them, maybe it'll work for me. And that also had the function of that person then being able to communicate, here's how this changed my life. So it's one thing to just show a person with clear skin and you're like, okay, that looks efficacious. Maybe it'll work for me. But if you have a testimonial who now with great emotion is like, I feel beautiful. Again, I can go out with confidence. I went on a date. There's a transformation message that's quite powerful and is still powerful in today's media landscape. We were able to show the proof scientific claims, and I can kind of break down further what that formula is. But ultimately, it became a self-sustaining advertising vehicle that drove the overall growth of the mrad brand. And it drove significant sales for Sephora and Ulta placing us as the number one clinical skincare brand in both of those channels. And at the same time, it was in its own channel, quite profitable. And we were able to acquire customers. And it was great from a cashflow standpoint for us because, well, I should say from a margin standpoint, it was a tricky cashflow model because we would deficit finance the acquisition of our customers.

Brett:

Got

Carey:

It. But it's also a realtime collectible when you're selling direct to consumer, and it had better margin. We weren't

Brett:

Selling a wholesale cash right away, at least that initial sale.

So I do want to break down that form. I that'd be super valuable. I think it totally applies to today, but I think what's really important to point out here is that, yeah, you were running this infomercial. It was driving direct sales either on the phone or someone ordering online, which was kind of new-ish at that time, but then it was also driving tons of sales in Sephora and Ulta making you a top seller there. We see the same thing here, right? If you've got a killer YouTube campaign, meta campaign, you're doing something OTT or whatever, it's going to drive direct sales on your.com, but it's also going to create great lift on Amazon. If you're selling on Amazon, it's going to drive retail sales if you're doing that. And so yeah, these principles apply, but what are some of those elements? What's that formula look like?

Carey:

Yeah, well, so from rad, I actually went and ended up launching a beauty brands incubator, and Guthy Ranker ended up being mine and my partner's investment partners in the brand. So it was a Guthy Ranker beauty brand incubator. And when we would look at brands that we could acquire and do various different JV and licensing deal structures with, and we had a very specific, I guess, lens of what we would look for from these brands to be like, these are going to be powerful performance marketing brands. And it's what worked for us in the proactive days. It's what worked in murat. And it's what I see when we evaluate brands today. And I imagine the ones that you're seeing so effective with your business model of that YouTube top of funnel, and that you can then pull down that kind of acquisition funnel pushed to Amazon.

I imagine they have similar attributes. What I would say is they just happen at different times now, so it might be parsed out a little bit differently. So whereas an infomercial or a longer format might have all of these elements now, I would say, does the brand have these elements? And at what point in the customer journey do you bring these elements to the table? So I have my notes here. So the first one I already mentioned, which is that authentic founder story. And if you don't have a founder, can you have a sounding story? This product exists for these reasons. Are you able to communicate that? Because customers will resonate with that. It's a powerful trust element. It has to solve

Brett:

The problem. I want to give you a quick example here too. I think this illustrates the point nicely. We were just evaluating a pet brand. It's pet brand, actually quite a few people have heard of that are listening and they had some killer, funny, engaging multiple actors. You're laughing, you're watching, you see Kaz in the thing, and you're like, that's a great ad. They also had a very, very simple founder, just founder direct to camera, but this founder is passionate about cats and passionate about this product and how it helps cats. Very simple production quality. But I'm telling you, the CPA was very similar between that brand, that founder's story, simple low cost video, and some really high production value ads as well.

Carey:

I love that.

Brett:

I think the high production value price is a greater upside. It's probably more scalable, but man founder stories, they still work. Do not overlook them.

Carey:

I love the product so much. I bought the company message, right?

Brett:

Remember those from the

Carey:

Seventies and the eighties growing

Brett:

Up? I'm not just a hair club for men president,

Carey:

I'm also the

Brett:

Customer, whatever.

Carey:

Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. There's just such credibility behind it. I give this to my own children. I made this out of this need. And because of that, we believe you. It's a strong trust element. We think you've got our back. There's a real life person or a real life message behind it. Totally. We also know that purpose is really important for people. So again, in the absence of a founder story, if you can have a founding story, a reason for being, I think that's really important that, and if you don't have it, come up with one. And I'll say, we brought in brands that had really great technologies and we actually created a founding story behind it. We saw this need, we took our backgrounds, we've created it, and we're bringing it to you. So have that founding story. So smart, 100% smart, love it. And it gives you great storytelling about your brand. And that's ultimately what you're trying to do is that you want there to be a reason

Brett:

That's commercial is right. That's what a good ad is. It's a good story. It's storytelling for sure.

Carey:

It's what a good YouTube ad is. Actually, I was watching one of your YouTube trainings that it broke for commercial and it went to Chuck Norris's wife talking about this product that they developed that came out of her needs and his advocacy for her and staying by her fed. It was a great story. And now you're like, Ooh, what is it? I want to know more. Maybe it's great for me. Totally. So yeah,

Brett:

Love that.

Carey:

So

Brett:

Founder story, that's one element

Carey:

Solves a problem. It addresses a pain point. And the pain point could be something like, I have acne. I want to lose weight, I want to grow hair, I want to lose hair, I want to remove hair. Whatever it may be. What's that pain point? The other thing is it needs to be transformational, and that's either visual or emotionally, but it needs to be something you can communicate through your media. And maybe that's through users, maybe that's through celebrity endorsement. Maybe that's through your reviews, but ultimately, are you seeing lives transformed? I feel more confident. I feel more beautiful. I have more time with my children. I'm achieving financial freedom, whatever it may be. People aren't buying stuff. They're buying an outcome to make their life better. And so transformation is a really important emotional hook,

Brett:

And it's really transformation that you can see and feel, right? It's transformation that the buyer, the consumer can see and feel. And then it also has to be a transformation that you can convey in a way where people watching can see and feel it.

Carey:

Yeah, it's engaging and it's emotional. And I do think there's this subconscious attachment to your brand that forms as well, and a real positive brand affinity that comes with the transformation. It's inspiring. Proof is really important. Proof can come in a lot of different ways. Obviously befores and afters are really powerful scientific claims. Did we study? Is there a study behind an ingredient? Is there research? Is there, we put X amount of people on, this is a subjective claim, a hundred percent agree that they experienced X with this, but that proof, and again, you're probably not going to lead with proof and a thumb scroll, but if you're starting to pull them down a funnel funnel, make sure that you have that proof. Because again, these are all really powerful trust elements in your creatives. And then social proof. And we see now it's the old school infomercial, but it's the user generated content. It's the influencer, it's the reviews where people genuinely believe it's going to work for them. And so I don't think I need to beat the drum of social proof to this crowd. I think we all actually really understand the value of social proof in today's day and age. I think if anything, it's more how do we use that social proof now as part of our whole campaign. So

I like talking about those

Brett:

Stories. One thing I'll double click on there, which I think is important, is I remember when I was getting started in TV in the early two thousands, I would hear people say, oh, testimonials don't work. And now there's a little bit of a trend towards people saying, UGC doesn't work. And I think the only principle I would underscore there, or the only nuance there is that bad testimonials don't work and boring U GC doesn't work, but the real stuff, the stuff from real customers where they're conveying their story and their emotions, and you can feel the authenticity that works. Now, it worked 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and I think it will always work, right? It's just the lame,

Carey:

Boring system. It'll work. I would wager my house on it that it's important. And I think you raised a really good point. It's the quality of it. And I'll give you an example. We have in infomercials, we would test removing or on a website and other forms of creative, we would test moving different testimonials in and out. And sometimes a testimonial in and of itself, it can be a lever mover, a dial mover for a campaign, adding them or removing them. So I think you're right. And I think we're also living in a day and age again, where we put so much pressure on the immediate performance of our ads that if something doesn't work, we kind of make this sweeping judgment. This does not work.

Brett:

Exactly,

Carey:

Exactly.

Brett:

GC mashup, it didn't work. And you're like, well, yeah, but the

Carey:

SOC doesn't work

Brett:

Properly. Didn't run it. Yeah. Right?

Carey:

Yeah. And so strategically, the value and the value of working with agencies is you have to test not everything is going to work. And that's what traditional performance marketers do, is they're always testing and you never let rest on your laurels. Totally. You keep testing every

Brett:

Ad, every angle, everything you test eventually will stop working. So you always got to be finding the next thing. So you talked about social proof, other elements that you're looking for. Yep,

Carey:

Value, you just brought it up your offer a value proposition and value and offer too. Sometimes they're not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Having a good offer is very important, and an offer can and will make or break your campaign. And I do believe offers need to be refreshed, but oftentimes withstanding between you and success is a really compelling offer. But a value proposition and value can come in a lot of different ways. And value is not synonymous with discounting. So I think, again, when you're in a world of offers and sales promotion, the first thing that a lot of rams do is they discount. And that's another fear of being in the performance marketing space, is they don't want to discount because again, they're afraid it's going to denigrate their retail brand, but discount and value are not the same. So how do you build up and create that value for your customer? And so that value,

Brett:

That's just really where the perceived benefit, the perceived benefit of the product outweighs the monetary cost. Right. What else would you say about value? How do we create value apart from discounting?

Carey:

Yeah. Well, value can come in different ways. So among them being, are you giving me more time in my day? There's value to that. Are you replacing multiple products that I'm already using with this single step? There's value to that. Is it highly concentrated? And I'm not, I can add water at home and I'm not paying these big heavy shipping fees, which is negatively impacting the environment. There's value to that. Do you have a give back program to someone else? Oh, that's really important to me. That makes me feel good about being part of the brand. Tom's Shoes one for one. There's value to that. So there's lots of ways to create value without discounting.

Brett:

Yeah, I wanted the shoes anyway, but now that I know I've got a little bit of philanthropy or I'm helping kids in need or something now that allows me to justify the purchase. So love that discussion on value. And I'm really glad you framed it, that it does not have to be a discount. It does not have to be coupons. You do not have to cheapen your brand, but you do have to create

Carey:

Value. You have to create value and then demo. And of course that's so great about a place like YouTube where you can show how the product works and just for whatever reason, what's coming to mind is, and some of your older viewers might remember Bare Essentials or Bare Minerals. It was color cosmetic brand, and it was a loose powder format, which was kind of different at the time. And they were experiencing high returns because customers didn't know how to use it and it was messy. And so in their ads, they would do the you swirl, tap buff Swirl, tap Buff. Well, by the time it got to the retail shelf, or even when they shift it to the customer, they understood how to use the product. And so demonstration is a really, I know how to use it, which means my compliance is going to be higher, which means my satisfaction in the product is going to be greater, which means I'm going to achieve better results, and I'm less likely to make a return or leave a negative review. So is there demonstration? And then of course, education and those can often be one and the same. So again, you might see maybe that's not necessarily on your leading media, but if you pull them down like a long scroll landing page, you might see some demonstration in there about here's how you use it. And that's really valuable.

Brett:

And we think that's a key component. If you're designing YouTube ad creatives, the demonstration piece is absolutely critical. I would say the same is true for Meta and TikTok as well. So yeah, to your point, if someone sees an action, I swirl Tap Buff, if that was

Carey:

Buff,

Brett:

That right?

Carey:

I can't believe that came. I was so old. But yeah,

Brett:

That was great. It was effective, but I remembered it. And that's not even my product type of thing. And so one, I think it makes it easier to say yes to the purchase because now I see, oh, this was pretty easy when we were running a boom by Cindy Joseph, when Ezra Firestone's brands, they had

Brett:

Boom

Brett:

Stick, which is kind of like a makeup stick that that could replace your whole makeup back. And so when they would do the demo, it's like, Hey, you choose one of these three sticks, you just apply it here, then you put it on your lips and the demo's super easy. You're like, that's it. That's all I have to do. And now I don't have to wear any other makeup if I don't want to. And so seeing that demonstration I think removes or reduces the buyer hesitation, helps you overcome objections, but then to your point, it ensures you use it properly. You're more satisfied with it. So more likely to leave a good review, less likely to return the product. And so demonstration is really valuable. And one thing I've heard, I'm curious your perspective on this, because I don't know that this fully applies to the beauty. I think it kind of doesn't, but I've heard Flex Seal, that's another example of start as an infomercial. Now it's become a bit of a brand like the spray on stuff that you can use to seal your pots around your house, your gutters or whatever. There's this concept of a magic demo where he

Brett:

Sprays

Brett:

Flex Seal on the bottom of his truck and then he drives it into water and it floats or whatever.

Carey:

I love a magic solo. Yeah, a visual hammer. We call those visual hammers. How are you showing visual hammers? Yeah, this is how it works.

Brett:

So you'll never use it in this capacity, but if it's good enough to do this, think what it will do for you just as you're sealing your pots or whatever.

Carey:

Oh my gosh, Oz. So how do you apply that is, yeah, I was going to say, Ozempic, what is $130 too much to spend on a weight loss product if you don't have five or 10 or more pounds to lose? So then you're like, oh my gosh, if Ozempic was the biggest audience for it was people who had more like five to 10 pounds to lose. Because if it's going to help someone lose 80 pounds, then it's going to help me get my last five off. So those extremes can be really, really powerful. But the Boone Stick is the perfect example. You guys did so many things right with that because there was a compelling, and I watched it, there was a compelling founder story, but then you did the other thing that's really important was they filled a white space, they weren't look, it was makeup and a stick.

Brett:

Brilliant.

Carey:

That doesn't exist already. So it was taking something that already exists. It's applying it in a way that, because the other piece is it needs to fit into someone's regular routine. Women apply makeup already. It hits an emotional pain point, which is I'm an older demographic, I have these concerns. I'm feeling older. I am looking older. No one's making anything for me. Traditional makeup is going to sit in my fine lines and wrinkles. No one's making anything for me.

Boom, stick to the rescue. It's simple. It fits into your routine. It's specifically formulated four fine lines and wrinkles, so it's not going to sit in there. Here's how you use it. Less is more. It's going to make you not look as age. Now you've hit my pain points. I have a founder story. You've demonstrated it. It's inclusive. You have a real broad demographic of users. And that's the other thing that's mission critical in today's day and age. So first of all, it was older women. You had, in addition to the founder who is Caucasian, you had an African American, you had an Asian, right? It was showing the range of skin tones that it worked for, and it was really representative of that customer. And then there was value because this is replacing all of those other things. You didn't have to discount it.

So I would say with that campaign, you crushed all of these things and through your channels of distribution, and it caught my attention 100%. And then the other thing that you brought up, so does it fill that white space for us? We were always looking for something that was replenishable. Can you get people into a continuity? And that might fit into the offer component and then the trust are there easy returns? So in addition to the founder story, which is a powerful trust element, and all of the things that we know to do about EasyPay, all of those things, a money back guarantee, are there easy returns? I think that's why channel strategy

Brett:

Is you're removing the risk, right? You're taking away the risk that a customer may perceive about making the purchase and just lowering the barrier to say yes.

Carey:

And my feeling is back in the olden days, that might come through easy returns and money back guarantee today that might determine your channel strategy, which is you might need to be on Amazon as much as you don't want to because your competitors are going to draft off your awareness and be there anyway. B, it's where customers are going to get reviews. And C, it's a built in trust element. I know I can return here. So there's the value and there's the convenience. So again, that's where channel strategy rolls into all of these attributes that I talked about.

Brett:

Yeah, really good point. And just to put a bow on the boom, my Cindy Joseph story there, or Boom, beauty is the brand now, but we helped them launch on Amazon a few years ago, and they were leaning heavy into Meta. We were running YouTube and Google. And so the new customer acquisition channels were on fire, but they were not on Amazon. Well, some other brands had kind of built up, launched on Amazon and were kind of squatting on the brand name of Boom.

Brett:

They were

Brett:

Just selling products capitalizing on that. So when we launched them on Boom, and there were headwinds and there were difficulties, and we did some ad strategies on Amazon. And so there was pretty comprehensive what we did there, but they went from zero to almost 6 million in sales on Amazon the first year. And

Brett:

That's incredible.

Carey:

It

Brett:

Did not cannibalize their core business. Now, I think a lot of that was just pent up demand. A lot of it was we opened up a new channel and we were able to grow that as a standalone as well. But yeah, you got to be thinking about these other channels. I know there are still some cases where it makes sense to not be on Amazon, but you've got to really think that through. For most brands. You got to be there.

Carey:

I think for most brands, you have to be there. It's a necessary evil for all of those reasons. And to your point, you're otherwise creating demand for your competition. And yeah, it's a bummer. And I feel the same way about paid search. You can put all of this effort into your meta advertising, into your YouTube advertising, and customers are still going to go to search. And if you're not buying your branded term, which is just frustrating, someone else will. So how do you keep owning that? And so again, that kind of goes back to the brand side of things is like, and you and I talked about this too, why I really value agency partnerships.

You need to really understand all of those variables, and you need to lean into the wisdom and the guidance and the experience in these respective channels that your agencies have, but also listen in terms of the education, in terms of what type of repetition do you need, where should you be taking risks, like going into an Amazon versus not fine tuning your marketing messaging, your offer, you're never going to hit it out of the gate ever. And then once you do fine tune it and nail it, you're going to have to keep updating that anyway. And so build into your budget and into your strategy and into your planning, that kind of slush fund and that time to always be learning and refining and testing. Because every time you do land on that magic mix, you kind of want to hit the gas and optimize that as much as possible while you're running that parallel path of getting the next thing going. It's a unicorn experience to nail it all at once. It's very rare. And so I think where a lot of brands miss is, again, this didn't work in this configuration, I'm out. It doesn't work. And the reality is, if you're in the ballpark, you can fine tune it and you can get it there, and you'll be able to scale your brand and drive total channel growth. 100%.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, it's really good. And so kind of those elements, if you've got them all, and you're still not quite there, it's not quite hitting your goals or your targets and you need to refine and maybe that the thumbs stop or the scroll stopper wasn't quite on point, or it's maybe you're telling the founder story, but it's missing an element, it's missing some emotion to it. Or maybe you've got UGC, but it's not the right UGC, or maybe you're showing some value, but it's not landing. And so I think that's where you got to test, you got to iterate, you got to get feedback from other people that are in your market.

Carey:

Totally.

Brett:

Elements are there. It should work. You just got to keep iterating. And so one thing I'll say, and we're bad out of time when it comes to having this slush fund or this test fund, I've heard different brands have different philosophies. Google called it for their employees, they call it the 20% time, Hey, do your core job, but then take 20% of your time and explore, do wild stuff, invent the next Gmail or the next other billion user product or whatever. I know some brands will say, Hey, we're going to take 10% of every channel's budget and we're going to try wild stuff. We're going to try just experimental. So because we're going to land on something, most of that will not work. We're going to occasionally land on something that will be a moonshot. And if you're not always testing something, eventually your core stuff's going to die, and then you're not going to have anything left. But any perspective on that slush fund or test budget or however you look at that?

Carey:

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. So I've looked at Slush fund a couple different ways. So one of them is when you have a working campaign, let's say at Rad,

We're humming, we've got all the channels going, there was always 10% of slush that was going toward newness. What else can we be testing, iterating, whatever in different environments? For example, when I was doing consulting work for Guthy Ranker, prior to us launching the incubator together, there was a resource allocation to innovation. And I got to be a part of that, which is we can't be competing for resources. We have these 100, 200, $400 million a year brand. We have a function-based organization. So good luck if you're trying to innovate and create new. And ultimately, that's how we ended up investing in the incubator they invested in. The incubator that I ended up running with my business partner was because they realized it's a very different budget, skillset, mindset, resource allocation, than what's required to run your core brand. And so some brands will do it within their company, and I've seen a lot of companies actually just create full on incubator environments. If you can create an incubator environment within your company, cool. But I like that 20% idea, which is just always facilitating that new creativity. And what's great about that is what you're learning there, you then apply to the core business. And so I like that. Always,

Brett:

Always be learning, even so it doesn't totally hit. You'll almost always learn something. There'll be some happy accidents. There'll be the accidental brand or the accidental strategy that, Hey, we were testing this, we learned something else. And so you think you've always got to be

Carey:

Testing 20% somewhere.

That's it. And I know we have to go, but that's the thing. If you're not always learning, you're missing the next thing that's happening and things are moving so quickly. And so again, that's where your agency partnership is mission critical, because when you're busy running your brand, you just can't have your finger on the pulse of how technology is evolving. What you do know is what your business objectives are and who your customer is, and what your brand is and what you stand for. And then you can partner with your agency on those strategies and what levers you're going to pull to roll up to that p and l objective.

Brett:

And for the record, I did not pay Carey to throw in those plugs for working with your agency, but we both just believe it's true, right? For the right brand. Some brands do well with in-house teams. I think that requires another skillset, and it's really hard, and it probably fits for a certain large size brand, but man, lean on your agencies, lean on your agencies because they do bring a wealth of knowledge.

Carey:

I credit some of my agencies over the tenure of my career with the success of some pretty big campaigns, it would be arrogant to suggest that I did it all by myself. I made it's 100% of team effort. And so lean into the skills, the expertise, the passion of those outsourced solutions. And from a p and l management standpoint, oftentimes those costs then can be variable to your fixed expense. So that's

Brett:

A plus

Carey:

Too.

Brett:

Awesome. Carey Grange, ladies and gentlemen, chief Brand Strateg, growth Envy Marketing. So if you're listening to this and you're like, dang, I need some strategic help, some brand growth help, I need someone like Carey to help tie things together for me. How can people get in touch with you, Carey, and what's the best way for them to start that dialogue?

Carey:

Oh my gosh, thank you. I mean, first of all, I'm on LinkedIn like everyone else, so my name is probably spelled on here somewhere, C-A-R-E-Y, Carey Grange, and growth envy marketing.com is our website. And yeah, we love working with founder brands. We love working with startups. I love working with legacy brands who are looking to inject newness and life and growth into an existing brand without losing the essence of who they are. So what's that evolution and how can you use performance marketing to drive brand growth? And that's typically to position you for some type of an exit or event. And so I love working with brands too, on then how are we driving sales and getting that healthy EBITDA and building that right, the right brand strategies, but also the right infrastructure strategies and business strategies around that. So come to our website. We'd love to talk with you,

Brett:

And I'll link to in the show notes, but it's Carey Grange, C-A-R-E-Y-G-R-A-N-G-E. So check her out. I feel like Carey, we're just getting started. I could talk to you for another several hours about this. And so we'll have to schedule round two in the near future. But thank you so much for your time. Tons of fun.

Carey:

Would love it. Thanks for including me.

Brett:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us that review on iTunes. If you've not done so, share this episode with a friend who might find it valuable. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍

Learn the secrets behind securing free press coverage for eCommerce brands. Contrary to popular belief, free PR isn’t reserved only for companies that hire expensive PR agencies. Whether you're launching a new product or looking to boost your brand's visibility, this episode is packed with actionable insights that could make all of your other marketing efforts better.

Key topics covered:

• The CPR (Credibility, Point of View, Relevance) method: A foolproof framework for crafting compelling pitches that grab journalists' attention.
• How to approach gift guide pitches and maximize your chances of inclusion in coveted holiday roundups.
• Strategies for leveraging product launches and press releases to create buzz and secure media coverage.
• Tips for building and nurturing relationships with journalists, including how to use email tracking and follow-up techniques.
• Cost-effective tools and resources for managing your own PR efforts, even without prior experience or agency support.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn how you can take control of your brand's narrative and secure valuable media coverage without breaking the bank. Gloria's practical advice and insider tips will empower you to become your brand's best advocate and unlock the untapped potential of PR for your eCommerce brand.

---

Chapters: 

(00:00) Introduction 

(03:29) From Diplomat to PR

(08:00) PR Basics

(13:00) Gift Guides

(16:33) Crafting Your Pitch

(23:11) Building Media Relationships

(24:32) Finding Your Media Outlet

(27:27) Product Launches

(32:13) Founder Stories

(33:16) Case Studies

(34:26) Follow-Up Tips

(36:26) Tools & Resources

(37:30) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Gloria Chou
• Gloria Chou PR
• Small Business PR Podcast
• Free PR Masterclass

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

---

Transcript:

Gloria:

How can we disrupt that industry? Because here's the thing, if you keep paying an agency, the moment you stop paying them, they walk away with the relationships.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we're talking about a topic that I don't believe we've ever discussed on the podcast before, but it has tons of potential and I believe it's a missed opportunity for you, and that is pr, getting free press for your brand, for your product launches, and how you can leverage all of that to your benefit. Now, as you know, listening into the pod, I'm a paid ads guy. I love YouTube, I love Google, I love meta, Amazon, all of that works. All that is critical. But the best brands I know, the brands that truly scale and the brands that maintain that growth always have something other than paid ads working for them. It's either organic rankings or it's virality and lots of people just naturally talking about them or it's pr. And so can't wait to dive into this topic I have with me, Gloria Chou from Gloria Chou PR and the host of Small Business PR podcast. She's a wealth of knowledge. She's got a unique story and she's going to show you how to leverage PR for growth for your brand. And so with that, Gloria Chou, ladies and gentlemen, Gloria, how's it going? And welcome to the show.

Gloria:

Hey, thanks for having me. It's good. It's getting cold here in Brooklyn, so the seasons are changing.

Brett:

I love it. I appreciate all seasons now of kind of like, Hey, let's enjoy every aspect of life. Don't like it as much when it's a hundred degrees in the Midwest and humid. Not my F, but dude, when it starts to cool off, I just get fired up. I got more energy, I feel more alive. So yep, I'm here for it. And you're in Brooklyn. One of my favorite spots, I'll actually be there in a few weeks, but what do you love so much about Brooklyn? Are you a long time Brooklyn resident?

Gloria:

So I'm actually from la. I was born and raised in la. I also grew up a little bit in Beijing where my mom lives. So I speak Chinese. I've been in New York now for about 10 years, on and off. Interestingly enough, previously to this, I was a US diplomat, so I worked abroad in Canada and also one year in Washington dc but I love New York. It's my sole home. It's not the highest quality of life, we all know that. But the diversity here is unmatched and I love it. I don't think it's our forever home. My husband's from Italy, so I think eventually we'll move to Europe, but we got a few good years left here.

Brett:

That's great. Yeah, the energy, the cultural diversity, the restaurants, the views, so many cool things that New York has going for it. So let's just quickly make the New York LA comparison. You prefer New York over la and if so, why

Gloria:

A hundred percent? Well, first of all, I don't like driving at all, so that's a no-no for me, I love biking and walking, so just from that perspective, New York all the way.

Brett:

Perfect. So we're going to dive into PR and you've got some very practical tips and advice for retail brands, e-commerce brands, omnichannel brands on how to leverage. Super excited about that. But I'm curious, how does one go from US diplomat to PR rockstar? How do you make that transition?

Gloria:

It's a very untraditional thing. So I actually never worked a day in my life in any PR or marketing agency, and that's very unheard of. And so when I was in government, I always wanted to switch into communications. I was writing speeches for the ambassador, and I just love to see my friends win. I always say that in my previous life I was like that hip hop mc like hyping everyone up. I just love hyping my friends up. And so I applied for I kid you not a thousand jobs in PR firms. And they all said, your experience is interesting, but we're really looking for someone with that traditional agency background. And so immediately

Brett:

Nobody saw the ability to make that leap. It was not computing for the hiring managers. And I

Gloria:

Realized, wow, this is an industry that is so not narrow-minded, but very gate kept, very traditional, very kind of insiders, like cool kids club. You're either in the club or you're not. And so as someone who was never in the club, I had to literally, I got my first client and he's like, we're a small FinTech. I had no idea what that was. I didn't study finance. And he's like, if you can get us on CNBC and New York Times and Wall Street Journal, we'll pay you a couple hundred bucks. And first of all, no PR person would do guaranteed features, but I had to start somewhere. So I paid my dues. And so I literally sat with the engineers looking at just data, and I'm not a numbers person, I'm an agent that's bad at math, trying to figure out what is the best story that I can pitch. And then I didn't have any contact, so I didn't have journalists and I'm like, Hey buddy. And so I kid you not dial zero from the operator by googling New York time newsroom.

And with my shaky hands and my sweaty palms, I had to practice cold pitching from the operator and to get them to stay on the phone with me until the producer or the editor. And I think through doing that thousands of times and just emails that cold pitching made me see patterns on what worked and what I ended up getting my clients featured on everything New York Times for as Wall Street Journal, CNBC. And then I turned it into a framework. And so now my whole thing is, you know what, yes, the industry is gate kept, but there absolutely is a way to cold pitch and journalists want to hear from the founder directly. So how can we implement that as a system? And so that's what I teach now in my program.

Brett:

I love that so much because I really believe doing things like that where you're pitching on the phone live, you're getting rejected, you're battling that, you're trying to keep people on the phone. I think that's a master's degree or more in PR because a lot of people that got the PR degrees never did that and they never learned it. My son is selling door to door, he's selling solar, residential solar, and I told him, I'm like, Hey, this is a grind and maybe it's an untraditional path or nontraditional path, but you will learn sales in a far different way than somebody who's just had formal training. And so a big believer in just getting out there doing it.

Gloria:

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Brett:

So very cool. I do have just one question that I'm kind of curious about. So you're a speech writer for the ambassador. What's that? Are you listening and you're like, man, you totally butchered that line. That is not the inflection I meant for that piece. Or you were like, we just stick to the script because what I wrote is beautiful. Well, what's that hearing someone deliver your speech?

Gloria:

So it's very, in the bureaucracy, there's many different layers. So I didn't write all of his speeches. It depended on the event, and I was given an opportunity to write a few of those speeches. Now, obviously because it's very bureaucratic, there were many different people involved all the time, and it moved very slowly. So it wasn't like what I wrote was what was delivered, right? There was so many other layers to it, but it was probably one of the more fun parts of my job doing the external communications. And that's really what I love and is my natural habitat. I just didn't get to do a lot of it because when you start, you have to stay in your lane. And I realized very quickly that I'm just not made to be a bureaucrat. I'm more of a creative entrepreneur. And so that's why I gave up my pension and a 25 year career that would've pretty much set me up for life to pursue something else. I moved back home, got on unemployment and kind of restarted everything after killing my ego.

Brett:

That is the true entrepreneurial vibe and spirit there. Just cutting that loose. Who cares if I lose the pension on other things? I got to chart my own course and do my own thing, so that's fantastic. Well, as we dive in here, what are some things about PR that brands need to know that they probably don't? Because my perspective is, and we were talking about this before we hit record, I think most brands, most brands in the 10 million to a hundred or a couple hundred million are just forgetting about pr. They're sleeping on it. It's not something they're fully leveraging. So what do we need to know about PR that we don't know right now? And

Gloria:

It's so funny because brands who have made it to that level, it is so easy for them to implement PR more than anything else because they have the traction, they have all of the website assets, and most of what I teach, my founders are way more beginner than that. So if they can do it, so can the other companies. I will say that traditionally we're taught, okay, well if you want an agency, and it's so exorbitantly expensive in New York, it's about five to 10 grand a month for six months, no guarantees and a minimum contract. So I understand that if you do play it that route, if you're a founder, you're looking at the ROI, you're like, maybe I should just pour this into ads 60,

Brett:

60 grand. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I don't know

Gloria:

When I know I totally, and so what I'm doing here is how can we disrupt that industry? Because here's the thing, if you keep paying an agency, the moment you stop paying them, they walk away with the relationships. How can we break that mold and take it? I think we're not really taught that as founders because again, it's been very gate kept. Very few people are learning how to take it, but obviously after listening to this episode, it will have some actionable tips. But PR is the only activity for me that out of all of your marketing, it checks all of the boxes. So it checks the boxes of traffic, it checks the boxes of SEO because you get those powerful backlinks from a high domain authority website. And then it also gives you that trust, which all three things, it's very hard to get with social media or ads alone. And my favorite thing is I always say it's not about one or the other. It's about how can you leverage your time? Because if you can get onto one gift guide, then you can repost it onto your social media. You can repurpose that for an ad as seen in, and that's to me a way more powerful way to do your content.

Brett:

Just to piggyback on that last part really quickly, it's something we've done for years and years and it's nothing new, but a few of our clients, one that's an automotive client and one that was a skincare client, we would take clips for when they were on A, B, C or Fox News or something. Take those clips and now you can run those in paid ads. You can put those on product detail pages. You can really lean into some of those press releases in a major way. And yeah, another one of my favorite definitions for marketing is marketing is really the transfer of confidence or the transfer of trust As the brand, I have total confidence in my product, but as the shopper, as the prospect don't have confidence. So marketing is just that transfer of confidence. And I think you could argue that the few things that do that faster or better than pr.

And so yeah, I just think it's a missed opportunity and something that we all need to lean into. I think one of the misconceptions I had years ago was, well, if you want pr, yeah, you either talk to massive agency and pay through the nose and hope or you just wait, just wait and hope somebody reaches out to you, right? Hope that a reporter reaches out to you. But really the news cycle is 24 7 now it has been that way for quite some time. So news outlets are kind of desperate for stories. They're looking for angles, they're looking for content. And so if you package this correctly and you approach the right people, it's probably not that hard, right?

Gloria:

No, it's really not. I mean, we have hundreds of founders who are literally solopreneurs doing this. And so imagine if you had the scale and the resources of your audience, how much further they can go. So I will say that because the industry, the PR industry has gate kept, it made it seem like, well, we cannot do our own pr. When in reality, journalists want to interview indie brands. They want to interview not just the Unilevers of the world, because put it this way, if they were only featuring Fortune 1000 companies, they would lose their credibility very quickly. They need to feature new brands. That's how they maintain their journalism integrity. So you're actually doing them a favor. And I will say that with the new cycle ramping up more ferociously than ever, they are churning out these stories like no other. I actually have a lot of journalists who write gift guides coming into my program to teach my students, and they all say Q4, we are working overtime.

I am tasked with writing one gift guide per day. And that's one journalist. And if one gift guide has 10 products, you can just do the math on that. So there's no better way, especially in Q4, to capitalize on the fact that they are monitoring their inboxes like a hawk. And it's your time to put your name in the hat. You just need to know what to say and who to say it to. And so my whole ethos is like, yes, PR is painted as this complex thing that you need privilege and access to pay for, but how do I make it accessible? I make it accessible by really making it simple. And PR is really at its core, writing a good pitch and sending it to the right person. That's it. And if you can put the tune two together, you can repeat it as a system in your business where you monitor the inbox, where you are sending it from your inbox, and that way you don't need to depend on someone else because then you own the relationships.

Brett:

So we're getting close to, we're in Q4. Holiday shopping is about to ramp up as we're recording this. So let's talk gift guides really quickly. You mentioned that now a couple of times. It's a really popular thing for the media to create. It's a great way for them to drive traffic to their platforms. And everybody loves gift guides. We're all looking for ideas. So I'm an e-commerce brand. Let's say that I sell apparel. How should I approach this? And so what am I saying and who am I saying it to try to get my product featured in the gift guide?

Gloria:

Yeah. So I will say with any physical product pitch, you're always going to have your gift guide, which is more product focus, and you have your evergreen angles about larger trends that maybe positions you as a founder. So we have someone who is in our program who makes apparel, and so she got interviewed in Vogue and it's about the future of sustainable fashion. Now she can still take her same company, take one product, and then repurpose the for gift guide. So those two angles simultaneously will always exist, but at the time of recording, like you said, Q4 is really about those product roundups. Get on a list, link it back to your website. So when I think about gift guides, it's really important for you to first figure out, out of all the products that I have, if you have more than one, which one is the best fit for this season?

Here's the thing, you don't want to send an order form to the journalist. You don't want to sell to the journalist. You want to solve a very quick problem for them, which is I'm compiling something for various gift guide categories. How is this going to fit? So for example, the main gift guide categories are gifts for him, gifts for her, gifts for mom, gifts for dad, gifts for kids, gifts for all the ones that you read, right? There's also budget friendly gifts, stalking sufferers, travel gifts. I could go on and on and on. And so knowing that there's so many different buckets, it's your job to first figure out which of my products fits in that bucket? Is it a luxury item? Is it a stocking sufferer? Is it good for travel? Do you have any winter bundles for skincare? If you make apparels, what's really good for this cold weather season? So pitching with the season is the number one key to getting featured because that way you're constantly refreshing your pitch so that you're not pitching sweatpants in the summer. That's the number one thing.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really great. And I love the way you position that because really good marketing and what we're doing, whether it's with our ads, our product detail pages is we're helping someone solve a problem or we're helping them take advantage of an opportunity. It's aspirational. You can look great, feel great in these close, or we're solving this problem you may be facing. Same is true when you're reaching out to a reporter. It's just that the problem you're solving is not the product delivering benefit. They need content, they need good recommendations, they need something they can plug into that gifts for him, gifts for her, gifts for kids, gifts for stalking, stuffers, whatever. And so you've got to kind of package it in that way. So totally makes sense. So I'm selling apparel. I then I guess first begin to think about, okay, who is this a good gift for? And then from that I start to craft my message.

Gloria:

Yeah, so I love what you said about your marketing pitch, which we're so good at as founders is fundamentally different than your pitch to the media. Why? Because the journalist is not ever going to buy from you. So you have to take a different frame of mind. I always say, you got to take off your marketing hat and stop talking about the benefits and features and start talking about the season and who it's good for. So if you can do that, then it becomes so much easier because what we don't want is for you to pitch a journalist with your order form and benefits, and they say, well, we have an entire ads department who will be happy to take your money. Exactly. We don't want that. So how do we repurpose that pitch? And it's not that hard

Brett:

Pitches incorrectly, and you're getting sent to the ad department.

Gloria:

Exactly. They're happy to take your money. So we're not talking about benefits and features. Yes, we will in the pitch, but you're not leading with that. You're leading with the insight, the season, the problem, the trend. For example, remember the show White Lotus on HBO O?

Brett:

I've heard of it. Yeah, I've never seen

Gloria:

It. So any of these pop culture things, right? A great way to pitch. We have a swimwear founder, and it was like the pitch I wrote for her was How to pick the best swimsuit for your white Lotus Italian vacation. And people are going to Taylor Swift concert. So if you make something that would be perfect for that, it's like top 10 accessories for your next Taylor Swift concert. Do you see where I'm getting at? Absolute. It's like you're leading with the trend this season, and so it's still your product. So that's the biggest thing that you need to do. And then I have my CPR framework, which is my own framework that I came up with from pitching and being rejected thousands of times. I picked on up on a pattern. How do I get that person who doesn't know who the hell I am to say yes, tell me more. And the pitch, whether it's written or verbal, usually has these three components. So C stands for credibility, P stands for point of view, R stands for relevance. And when you put that in a pitch, it's really solid. So let's bring it, let's break it down.

Brett:

And you lead with credibility, I guess. Well, I don't want to get ahead of you, but why do you lead with credibility?

Gloria:

So I actually don't lead with credibility. That's just the way to remember it phonetically,

Brett:

But

Gloria:

I actually do it reverse. So I actually start with the relevance. Why? Because you want to grab their attention at the get go. And what is news if it's not relevant? Totally. So the beginning of your pitch should say something like, as your readers are looking for cold weather skin solutions this December, do you see how that's relevant?

Brett:

Totally, totally.

Gloria:

Or as busy moms are looking for back to school pencil cases. So that's the relevance piece. And then you go, so the point of view in CPR is usually three bullet points. Why? Because it makes the email look better and it doesn't turn them off with a bunch of texts. So it's usually three insights, three do's and don'ts, three ways that your product solves that problem better than anyone else. Three unique points. And then you conclude with very simple credibility, which is like, I am a mom and I figured this out, and now we've scaled our business and customers love us because of X, Y, Z, or we've been featured and you don't have to be featured, but it's really the least important part. And then you conclude with, I'm happy to send over some more high res photos. What I like to do is include A URL.

Instead of putting high resolution photos, it's going to cost spam. I say, put one normal photo, but then have the rest be a URL that links to other things how they can find out more. If you're pitching a gift guide, it's very important, three things, your subject line, your subject line is what gets open or not open. So your subject line needs to read almost like an article title. So instead of saying SO'S brand pitch winter gift guide, that means absolutely nothing. It needs to read why this eco-friendly Australian sheep wool sock is perfect for socking stuffer or whatever that is. And then you go into the CPR method. And so that's kind of the general structure of how it is when you're talking about your product, when you start with the relevance and you introduce why your product is solving that seasonal problem, you always want to put in where it's available. Is it at Marshall's, is it on Amazon? Is it only on your website? And you want to put the price point immediately and then you want to put where it ships to. So all of those things is going to help the journalist decide where and when to put it. So that's like non-negotiable when you're trying to pitch for a gift guide, is having those specifics.

Brett:

Super interesting. And really as I'm listening to this and trying to imagine this email in my mind, if I'm a reporter and you've done this properly, I could almost take exactly what you email me and just run with that. You've essentially done all the hard work for me. Maybe I want to reach out and confirm things or do, but you've done most of the heavy lifting for me.

Gloria:

That's exactly it. Look, this is an unnatural act, so don't feel like, oh, why didn't I, it's like we're not taught this, right? So don't feel bad that you haven't done this. It's just that the industry has gay kept it from us. And so we actually had people use the CPR method to get into Oprah's favorite things, buzzfeed, Vogue, allure, and even use it to get into retailers and wholesalers. So the CPR pitch is a way to have a value driven conversation with someone who has never heard of you, and how do you get them to quickly respond? One thing I will say is that the CPR R pitch is not writing the article for them. So you don't leave that to the journalist. The journalist knows what their editorial calendar is and where to fit your story. So don't think that you're writing this whole article and no, you're just simply offering a point of view that's perfect for this season. And the whole point of the pitch is to get them to respond, yes, I would like more information. No, this is not a good fit for me. And so that takes away the pressure of everything. It just has a very simple, simple goal and just don't overthink it.

Brett:

Got it. And it's really valuable. Yeah, we may be tempted to put on our writer hat, and I got to write the intro to the article and the that's not your job. Your job is to make this very clear, very easy to understand your credibility, your point of view, and the relevancy and working all that in. So totally makes sense. How do you recommend, so we've got our copy for the product on our product detail pages and things like that. How are you modifying that copy to fit bullet points that you're sending in this email?

Gloria:

So the bullet points are a little bit more subjective, so it could be point of view on, so if you make something that's completely unique, so I'll give you an example. We have someone who in Canada works with aboriginal native women tribes and they make beaver for hand warmers. So it's from beaver fur and means that it's, you keep it for life. It's not those ones that you throw away, right? So because it's really unique, the point of view, the three bullet points are like why the beaver first solution is better than the traditional ones that you get at your ski shop, right? One, it's sustainable. Two, it lasts long. That's what I mean by the point of view.

Brett:

That's so great. What can we expect then? So if you craft this email properly, how many of these do we need to send out to hopefully get featured somewhere? What are you seeing in terms of success rate and how much time do we need to put into this to make it work?

Gloria:

Yeah, I've had people get a response within 24 hours. I think when you first start, it's really about a volume game. So you might pitch to a wide variety of journalists, but then you always want to highlight your top 15 to 20 outlets that will move the needle for you, whether it's a refinery or a pop sugar or even outdoor sporting goods. So I always say, first you cast a wide net, but then for those 10 to 15 journalists, you really want to build a personal relationship by just personalizing the first line of the email. So it might be something like, I loved your coverage last year in Sporting Good magazine about the best fly fishing gear for dads. Are you doing it for this year? So you see how it chosen that you're actually read their article. And for those 15 journalists, you really want to cultivate relationship by engaging with their content because they're writers too. It's so common on their LinkedIn comment, on their Instagram, use social media and say, I loved your article, right? Stroke their ego a little bit. And so that's going to help you build that relationship kind of like a customer where you increase the touch points and they get familiar with you because they're seeing your name in your brand.

Brett:

How are we finding these contacts? We're building our list of top 10 to 15 media outlets that will move the needle for us. How would you recommend we do that? We may all be tempted to reach out to Fox News or CNN or something like that, but that's probably not the place to start. How do we build that list and then, yeah, walk us through that.

Gloria:

So that's a really good question. So remember I said PR is very simple. It's writing a good pitch and sending it to the right person. So with the CPR method, we talked about how to write a pitch. Now let's move on to who do we send it to. It's not going to be info@buzzfeed.com or Media Forbes. It's going to go into an internet black hole. It's also not going to be the editor in chief of Vogue because they're busy doing their speaking tour. So you want to find out who is that specific writer who writes your beat or industry topic? Is it the health and wellness reporter? Is it the sustainability person? Is it the person that covers tech gadgets? So for a lot of gift guides, you're going to look for someone that covers your industry and also the commerce or shopping writer. Those are the people who are responsible for conglomerating those shopping guides and product lists.

So that's who you want to look for. Now in my program, we have a database of a hundred thousand journalists across every industry, but you can start to do it in your own way and start to compile your own media list. And you can do it very simply by typing into the Google search bar, Google News alert and Google will create an alert where any digital article that's being published will be sent to your inbox and you can click on that article that's about your industry and copy and paste their name and email, which is public information by the way, and start to fill it into an ever expanding Excel spreadsheet. So that's kind of your own way of doing it. You can also sign up for a service called haro, which is bought by another company now. But you can type in HARO, help a reporter out, and every day it pings you with the 200 or 300 inquiries for journalists wanting to interview a specific person.

And if you fit the bill, then use a CPR R method to reply. We had someone just using Harrow and she got onto seven different pieces of media like Wall Street Journal and PopSugar this year alone. And then there's also hashtags you can follow. So on LinkedIn and Instagram, you can follow the hashtag journal request. And so that is when journalists are looking for a specific person to interview. So these are all the grassroots way that you can start to autopopulate that. But you want to have a good size media list. You want to have at least 50 journalists, and then out of those 50, your top 50, that'll really move the needle for you.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really great because it is a numbers game. You can't expect to reach out to two media outlets or two reporters and get the ball rolling. It is a numbers game, and so play accordingly. We talked about gift giving guides, and I love that angle, but you also talked about founder stories. I think that's interesting. I also want to talk about that in a minute. Let's talk about product launches because that's something our bigger brands, they're always launching new products or new lines of products. So I've got my haircare, now I'm launching my sun care, now I'm launching oral care or something like that. So how do you recommend approaching this? I'm sure it's a lot of the same frameworks and stuff, but how do I approach this if it's a new product launch?

Gloria:

So the way I think about product launches is that it's doing pr, but with a specific time sensitive call to action. So for the journalist, you're saying, I am launching this on this date. And so what you want to do is you want to create a very well-written press release, and you can see all the list of my press releases on gloria Chou pr.com/services. There's a very methodical way of writing it, but you always want to say that you're the first to do something right, because newsworthy, so you might not be the first to do X, y, and Z, but you might be the first to do X, Y, and Z in this way. So see how you can wordsmith it so that it's really punchy at the top. And so for example, I worked with a seven figure electric flosser company, and they're not the first electric flosser, but they're the first to use X, Y, Z materials to guarantee a full mouth clean in under 60 seconds. And you see how that's really the headline and the sub-headline. So I like press releases, but I don't like it when people are just putting out press releases every other week. It's kind of a waste of money. See how you can couple two or three different things? Maybe you have a product launch and then you also have a new board member,

Or maybe you won an award and then you're giving back to charity or whatever that is. And the worst thing I think, and we're not really taught this, is we're just taught, oh, well issue a press release and just hope and pray that someone will respond and it just doesn't work that way. I actually use press releases as an incentive, kind of like a bait, if you will, to get the journalist to respond in X amount of days. So instead of just putting the press release on the wire, you're writing an email using the CPR method and saying, Hey, we know that you cover consumer electronics. We've invented this really cool dental tool, especially as we get into health and wellness season for the whole family to enjoy dental health is linked to heart diseases and brain health. There's growing number of research to say that it's really, that's why we've made it very easy and under 60 seconds for anyone to clean their teeth. We've also made it so that it's good for people who have dexterity issues kind of go into that. We're going live with the press release announcement in two weeks or seven days. So let me know if you'd be interested in learning more. I've attached the draft of the press release below. I'm happy to chat. So do you see how that's a stronger call to action? You're basically using your launch as a conversation starter,

So you want to do that before you just put the press release live onto the Newswire. And so for all of my clients, I do this kind of two step process with them.

Brett:

So that lets them know, hey, this is going to happen. Almost some kind of credibility mixed in there that this is going live in one week or two weeks.

Gloria:

Also, I'm going live with or without you.

Brett:

Yeah, but then this also makes them say, okay, well I'd kind of rather be first, or I want to be early in the game, not picking it up once it hits the wire type

Gloria:

Of thing. Yeah, I got my client Forbes within one week because they just want it to be the first to break it, but you have to make it exciting for them. So that's where the pitch writing comes in. So I think this is one of the things that a lot of people aren't taught. They're just publish a press release, but you are wasting on a very precious opportunity, which is that time sensitive call to action.

Brett:

Super smart. So are you always wrapping multiple things into one press release or sometimes is it just a product launch?

Gloria:

This is a very good question. I would say it's somewhat subjective. It depends on the newsworthiness of the announcement, if you will. If your startup and you secured funding, that's important because every milestone on Google, you want to put it there as a part of your journey for your investors. But if it's something like you have a new board member maybe, and then you're also partnering with a charity, you could couple that into one and there is a way to write it. So I will say if you have multiple things you want to announce, get out a piece of paper and write in the hierarchy of what is the most important, and then see how you can couple it into one press release. Because in the press release, I've written many funding announcements about how they've secured, but then in the body of the press release, we're saying by Q4 of next year, we plan to release X, Y, and Z features. So do you see this kind of a look ahead date to get people excited?

Brett:

Yeah, totally Cool. Totally cool. Now what about if you kind of talked about founder stories, and I know this would apply if it's a new company, you're solving a new problem type of thing, but it's something to be said here, even if you're a little bit established, how can you take that founder story angle and turn that into a press release?

Gloria:

So the founder story is important, and you can put it even in your gift guide pitch, but it needs to be under two sentences. So if you're pitching yes, if you have an interesting founder story, put it in there. If it's one or two sentences now in your press release, I usually put it in about section of the press release on the bottom, how was it founded? Or maybe the last paragraph founded by two research chemists or whatever that is. If you're making a skincare product, I wouldn't say that that is the most important part because your press release is not your autobiography. It's a very time specific snapshot of something that you're announcing. So the purpose of the press release is not to announce your story. So the story will go into the press release, but you're not going to lead with that. The headline of the press release, and I do this on my VIP day, but the headline is the what and the sub-headline is the how. So that's how you can start to figure out what is the framework of what you're trying to say.

Brett:

So good. So I love the example of the oral care product. You talked about the electronic flosser, other examples that you can talk about. I just think as someone here, as an example, kind of triggers additional thoughts.

Gloria:

So for press release, I've run a lot for products that are white labeled. So we have someone who she makes a 24 karat facial massager tool that also is like solar charge, right?

Brett:

It's

Gloria:

Not her proprietary product, but then she white labels and stuff. So in her press release, we couldn't say that she was the first to do this. It's not her invention, but she is the first Filipino owned skincare brand or the first one. So it's like how can you keep wordsmithing that to say that you're the first, and let's be honest, unless it's a groundbreaking invention, you're not going to be the first but

Brett:

Not be the first anyway, right?

Gloria:

Yeah, everything is a remix, but then you still want to keep just finessing that headline in the sub headline to make it super concise and specific to that right out of the bat, we know that it's newsworthy because you are the first or the only to solve this problem maybe for this specific demographic.

Brett:

I know from a career in sales and sales related things that it's very rare to send one email and then stuff just happens, right? One email and now the reporter is jumping all over themselves to try to get you on and interviewed and stuff. How do we follow up and how much should we follow up after we send that email?

Gloria:

Yeah, I mean follow up is absolutely key because remember, they're getting a lot of emails and they just need to be reminded. And I think a lot of times, because again, this is an unnatural act, a lot of founders who are doing incredible things, they send out first email and they go run and hide in the bathroom. And so the journalist is not monitoring like, oh, this person followed up with me. How dare they

Brett:

Actually

Gloria:

Depend on you to follow up? And it's really just about top of mind. But I will give you one tip is that before you send out any emails, please install an email tracking device. So if it's being open or not. So then you don't have to make a drama in your head about, oh, this journalist hates me. It's like, well, no, they actually just never open it because it could be a deliverability issue, it could be an out of office issue. So let's for the right problem. Now, if the email tracker is telling you that they're opening it multiple times, it means that they like the story. They just don't have a place for it right now in their editorial calendar. But journalists, what they do is they have a very meticulous way of filing and foldering their inboxes so that anytime that they're tasked with something, they're going to go back and type that keyword.

So that's why I always say you have to pitch early and often so that you're at least in the running when they do search back into their inbox. Now if they are multiple times, I'm just working with someone who makes a real kids' kitchen for children. It's a beautifully designed like toy real kitchen, but for kids, and she said that the pitch that we wrote for her got opened 16 times or something like that. So it means that the journalist really likes it. And so that's when you go in and you really engage with the person's content. And so it might be commenting on an Instagram post, it might be resharing one of their stories. It's kind of like how you would nurture a lead when you know that it's kind of a hot lead. It's the same way you're building a relationship with that journalist.

Brett:

Sorry, I muted. There was a train. Totally makes sense. So as we're looking to leverage our time, whether we're the ones executing this plan or we've got a team member that's doing it for us, what are some tools that we can use that makes this process easier?

Gloria:

So the email tracking device, right? I like Chrome because I've heard that Outlook doesn't have the best deliverability. So I like Chrome and I like to schedule, send my emails in a campaign. I use MailTrack do io, which it's like, okay, it's like middle of the road, it's not too expensive. And it just gives you data on whether or not it's been and open. Obviously the Google News alert is really important. You want to have that one tip is that if you do want to take this in-house and for a lot of your audience, they do have a team, it's really helpful to give your PR person, it could be an intern or marketing assistant, like the password to an email that's different from your customer service emails. So it could be like a media ad or a team ad or just something, and then they can kind of own that inbox and just kind of keep that separate.

Brett:

Super smart. Super smart. Well, Gloria, this has been fantastic. Any final tips? I want to allow people to connect with you through socials, and I know you've got a course and some other great stuff, but any final tips or anything that you wanted to chat about that we didn't related to pr?

Gloria:

So I think we all know this, but everything you want is on the other side of the send button. And so we pour so much money in social media and ads and there is room for that, right? But why not just a reality, a little bit of that to do something that has a crazy potential upside.

So it's really about working smarter and not harder. And here's the thing, your business needs you to be. Its number one advocate. I cannot tell you how many founders come to me and join my program after they paid $40,000 for an agency. So it's not about not working with an agency, but it's about knowing how the process works so that if something happens that they don't deliver, then you are not stuck at square one with no contacts because at the end of the day, it's about building those contacts with the journalist. And so my program gives you the database, it gives you what to say, and then you can kind of repeat it. So you can find me on Instagram at gloria Chou pr Gloria, C-H-O-U-P-R. And I have a free masterclass that actually outlines word for word from subject line down to the last sentence, a pitch I wrote in the CPR method that got someone featured like 15 times. And you can watch that for free@gloriaChoupr.com slash masterclass. And if you DM me on Instagram, the word pitch, I will give you a pitching freebie so that you can get started.

Brett:

Nice. And then did I hear, are you on LinkedIn as well?

Gloria:

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn as well. I'm mainly on Instagram. That's kind of where you can get the fastest response. But I also check my LinkedIn. Yes.

Brett:

Got it. So check out Instagram for sure. And it's so true. You don't get what you don't ask for in life. You don't get necessarily what you deserve. You get what you negotiate and you get what you actively pursue. I'm fired up, man. I'm excited about pr. Like I said, I think this is a missing piece that great brands need to leverage. It will make other efforts better. You can use it to leverage your ads and you can use it to make clients stickier. And there's so many ways you can use this. And so Gloria, love this content. Thank you so much. We'll link to everything in the show notes, but go check it out. So before you hire a PR firm, talk to Gloria first and hey, I think it makes sense. Send someone through the free masterclass, do the paid class or whatever. That's probably better than paying for a high priced firm for most brands. So Gloria, thank you so much. This was fantastic and thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? If you have not done so? Please leave that review on iTunes. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍

In this data-packed episode, Brett Curry and the OMG Commerce team break down the most successful strategies from Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2024. From optimal discount levels to timing strategies, the team shares real insights from hundreds of millions in tracked revenue across Amazon, DTC, and email channels. If you're already planning for next year's holiday season (and you should be), this episode delivers actionable insights you won't want to miss.

‍

Key Takeaways:

• The "sweet spot" for discounts: Amazon sellers saw the best results at 25%+ off, while DTC brands found their optimal range between 15-25% - unless going big at 50%+ (with surprising data about why the middle ground underperforms).
• Why individual product discounts outperformed site-wide sales across multiple channels, with specific insights about how this impacts Google Shopping ads and conversion rates.
• The shift to "Cyber 12" - Why the seven days before Black Friday actually outperformed the traditional Cyber 5 period on Amazon, and how to adapt your 2025 strategy accordingly.
• Critical timing insights for email marketing - Why the ninth email often outperformed earlier messages, and how follow-up campaigns frequently beat initial launches.

‍

The combination of broad trends and specific tactical insights makes this a valuable episode for any ecommerce brand looking to improve their holiday season performance in 2025!

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(03:33) Global Sales Trends

(08:16) BFCM Trends Nobody Saw Coming

(19:11) Strategies of Top-Performing Brands

(24:54) Analyzing Year-on-Year Deal Performance

(30:20) Successful Campaign Examples

(34:00) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Christine Shiloni
• Bill Cover
• Ghost
• Ryse
• Shopify
• Triple Whale
• Why Your Prices Are Probably Wrong - Episode 255
• Live Bearded
• CRBN Pickleball
• Manta Sleep

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

‍

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

---

Transcript:

Brett :

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and this is the Black Friday, cyber Monday recap edition. It was a wild ride. We're going to look at Cyber five, cyber 12, which is a new concept for some. And so this is going to be a high level look at how things went globally, how things went for our clients, what did the winners do, what did the losers do? How can you harness these learnings for your next sales events? And as we begin to plan for next year, because hey, when we're in retail, we're either in holiday, we're prepping for the next holiday, we're thinking about holiday dreaming about it. It's always on our minds. So with that, first I just want to do a quick health check. How's everybody doing? Mental health, physical health? Have you slept any? And with me on the pod back again. Everybody's a repeat guest here. We got Christine Shalon, Amazon director. How's it going, Christine?

Christine:

I'm good. How are you doing?

Brett :

Doing good. Doing good. We got Bill Ver Google Director. What's up Bill? Hey, how's it going, Brad? Good. Good. And Nick Flint, you're back. You were just, you're fresh off a podcast appearance, so you're like all warm and loose. Email and retention director, how's it going? Two in one month,

Nick:

That

Brett :

Might be a record. Two in one month, man, man, it's like you're basically a co-host at this point. So I asked a question, then I introduced you, but would love to hear your answers. Are you sleeping? How do you feel? How's the team? Are we still riding high or what's our status?

Nick:

It's no coincidence that within Arm's Reach is an energy drink for me. That's how it's going.

Brett :

And we are not endorsed nor sponsored by any energy drink. But Nick, what is your energy drink of choice?

Nick:

I'm a flavor addict, so my two go-tos are Ghosts and Rise. Both them have killer collabs

Brett :

Rise. Nice. Bill and or Christine, what is your caffeine source of choice and does that shift during the holiday season?

Christine:

I need to regulate my caffeine. I need to keep it pretty level, more than one cup of coffee and things go off the rails.

Brett :

We were just talking about how Christine is loud, intense, in a very good way. So you've got to make sure too much caffeine and it's too much.

Christine:

No, it's not fun for anybody now.

Brett :

Okay, yeah, what about you? For

Bill:

Me, if it's before noon, then coffee black and I might drink a whole pot. And then if it's afternoon, like right now, my

Brett :

Peppermint tea. Peppermint tea, man, I love that. I feel like so much of that conversation just really describes who you guys are, describes your personality, and a quick couple sentences is really, really great. I lean more caffeine as well, but I like to throw some healthy fats in there. And I'm with you, bill. If it's before noon, I can crush a whole bunch of it and I feel pretty good. So we're going to get into some specifics. We're going to get in the D two C side looking at Google Performance and some year over year numbers and just what we saw with our clients. Same with Amazon, same with email. But before we do that, I want to unpack a couple of global numbers that I think are really interesting. So Shopify, of course, they do their Black Friday, summer Monday tracker, you can follow along live and there's an hourly minute by minute sales tracker, which is super cool.

So I do recommend next year following that if you've not done that up to this point. But the Shopify data showed there's 24% year over year growth in terms of GMV. So obviously Shopify is not fully tracking someone's profitability and things like that. I think they generally know it, but 24% year over year growth from a GMV standpoint, 11.5 billion in sales tracked through Shopify. As of this recording, Amazon data's not outsourced, going to rely on our client data for Amazon. Also, I like looking at Triple Whale because Triple Whale, they're one of our partners we love. Triple Whale is a third party attribution tool, but also they got a lot of GMV running through their platform. So 2.02 billion tracked over Black Friday Cyber Monday. Total ad spend 313 million. Just a quick note. So 200, 2 billion in revenue, 313 million in ad spend. What's the merr on that? Anybody want to anybody do quick math in your head or paper Bill? You can use paper. I just don't use a calculator. More on that in a second.

New customer revenue, 59% of total revenue was from new customers. So kind of underscores that, Hey, black Friday, cyber Monday is a good time to drive new customers, although more nuance than that in just a second. 40% then was returning. But really the new versus returning depends wildly on category. And so this does skew if you are a repeat purchase type product, so food and Bev, some health and beauty, that's going to lean more returning customer. And then other one-time purchases are more new customers. So Art and Baby led the way with 60 and 64% of the shoppers over Black Friday. Cyber Monday were new customers. Food and Bev, only 41% of Black Friday Cyber Monday shoppers were new to brands. And then Health and Beauty about 55%. So super interesting there also, anybody want take a, well, first of all, anybody do that MER calculation? If you're all like, dude, that was Lam, I'm not into math, so let's just skip it. But anybody do the mecal?

Bill:

It's got to be like a 0.000 something, right?

Brett :

Well no, no. So it's 2 billion in revenue on 313 million in ad spend. So it's a little over a six, right? It's a little over six. Six X mer. Anyway, everyone at home was like, that was a lame segment. I won't do math on the spot anymore. Okay, it's fine. But anybody wants to see a guess what category led the way with the most sales? This Black Friday cyber money according to Triple Whale. So obviously lots of ways we can look at this data, but according to Triple Whale data, which triple whale's generally D two C brands, some omnichannel brands, not massive enterprise brands, but these are bigger Shopify and big commerce stores. I want to take a stab at what was the number one leading category?

Nick:

I'll guess Home Goods.

Brett :

Home Goods that did crack the top five. That was number four of the top five.

Christine:

What my guess supplements.

Brett :

So I'll throw them with health and beauty and that's kind of, it's a big category, health and beauty, but that was number two. Health and beauty is number two.

Bill:

I will guess apparel.

Brett :

There you go. So actually this is a weird breakdown. Clothing was the number one, but then they have fashion and accessories as number two. And I'm not really exactly sure how trip wail delineates, I mean the accessories piece. That makes sense. And then anyone wanted take it? So we got clothing, health, beauty, fashion, accessories, home goods. Anyone take a stab at that fifth category Pet? Ooh, that's a good one. But no, Christine, this is how you spend probably most of your evenings during the school year. Alcohol, I'll let you know. How did you know? Actually I was doing sporting goods. I know Christine's a big soccer fan. Her son is a great soccer player. I was leaning sporting goods, but yet after that then we got

Christine:

So much not good during. Not good during that. Yeah, we do not. So no, we

Brett :

Do not want enjoy high school soccer. I mean maybe we do with the help of lots of wine. It's round upon, it's round upon. Yeah, so alright, well let's dive in guys. So I thought it might be interesting to start with what were some surprises, some unusual things you saw either in the data or anecdotally during this season? And Christine, I'll start with you on the Amazon side.

Christine:

So two things. The first seven days saw the peak performance starting from November 21st, which those are three more days than we had last year. And the second, which I thought was really interesting is of our top performing brands, 60% of their total revenue came from deals. So extrapolating from that, those who ran deals, they were winning the day on Amazon, they're also looking at a percentage off of at least 25%. Those who went in at 10 or 15 didn't really move the needle. So 25% seemed like the sweet spot to get conversion.

Brett :

Yeah, let's talk about a couple of things related there. This year, 2024, black Friday, cyber Monday happened a full week later on the calendar. Cyber Monday was in December this year, which is unusual. And so sales have been trending that they would start earlier and go a little bit longer. It's been the trend over the last several years anyway, but this year especially more people are tracking that Cyber 12. And so the way you think about Cyber 12 is it ends on Black Friday and it's the 12 days prior to that. So basically a week before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. And so here in 2024, that started on November 21st and then on December 2nd. And so yeah, what's interesting, so the two biggest days looking at the Amazon data, the two biggest days, no real surprise, were Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but the seven days leading up to it were bigger than the five days of the Black Friday cyber Monday. Now I know it's more days, but it's still interesting because there have been some years where the Black Friday, cyber Monday, that Cyber five just crushes everything else. And so the early days of the sale were pretty strong, very strong in fact on Amazon.

Christine:

Well Amazon, if you wanted to run a deal to cover Black Friday, a seven day deal, you had to start the previous week,

Brett :

Had to start early. And so Amazon's thinking, yeah, Amazon's probably thinking how do we level out demand? How do we grab more of the wallet? How do we make sure we've got all our deals in place? I'm sure there's probably several motivating factors on Amazon's side, but yeah, they force you to get those deals

Christine:

In

Brett :

Sooner. What about from your perspective, bill? What was surprising on the D two C slash Google side of things?

Bill:

Yeah, for sure. So I agree starting earlier and earlier, you've got to play the game. You've got to jump in when Amazon is jumping in and when the rest of the retail world is jumping in.

Brett :

I mean, think about it, Amazon really kind of sets the stage. If you look at July prime day, that's now a shopping day for everybody. Walmart gets on board, our clients get on board that are not on either platform. So if Amazon starts things early, everybody else pretty much falls suit.

Bill:

Yeah, absolutely. And so I think lean into it. I think if you're going to jump in early, go ahead and launch with that Cyber 12 in mind. Go ahead and launch on the 21st. It doesn't mean you have to start promoting right away though. In fact, I would recommend launch it on the 21st, make sure the promo code works, make sure everything looks good on the search engine results page on the digital shelf, make sure Facebook, Google, YouTube, everyone is all cylinders are ready to go. And then start promoting that sale through email and through YouTube and through Facebook and all of those. What was surprising, so Christine already kind of threw out a discount number 25% and above, or sorry Christine, you weren't seeing anything from what, 10 to 15,

Christine:

10 to 15,

Bill:

You're recommending 15 to 25. Yeah, that's interesting. And so on the D two C Shopify side, what we saw when we analyzed all of our client's data is that the sweet spot is 15 to 25%. Anything over 25% doesn't seem to result in additional top line revenue.

Brett :

Interesting. You're just eroding margins at that point. So you go past 25%, you're only hurting yourself. That's super interesting.

Bill:

Exactly. So people will act on 15 to 25%, but they don't seem to act in a bigger way when you get to 30, which is interesting because over the past few years a client would ask me, how much should I discount? And I would say, oh, 30, I walk that back now I would say 15 to 25% should cut it. However, when you get to 50% and above, so we had some that were running like 50% off, 55% off, then the numbers just skyrocket. Amazing top line. Amazing, Rowan.

Brett :

Interesting.

Bill:

Yeah,

Brett :

Interesting.

Bill:

So you have this dead zone from 25 to 50,

Brett :

Man, so that's really good insight. So 15 to 25% for D two C, you're likely in the money, you're probably getting a nice lift in sales, you're probably protecting your margins a little bit. That dead zone of 25% to 50, don't go there. Don't even do it. Right. If you're going to go bigger, you got to go really big or just stick with 25 render super insightful. Love that. Nick, what about you on the email SMS slash retention side? Obviously this is a huge time of year for leaning into that email list, but any surprises?

Nick:

What still blows my mind is how many people are purchasing when Monday rolls around for Cyber Monday. I see the backend of our calendar and they've gotten eight emails about this sale already. And somehow number nine on that Monday is what gets set to buy

Brett :

The ninth time's the charm. Yep. I was going to buy, but it didn't. Yeah, why do you think that is, Nick?

Nick:

I think it's busy during the holidays. So as you're getting ready for Thanksgiving that week leading up to it, you're having guests come over, you're buying food, you're cooking, you're laying stuff out, you're getting everything ready, and then that weekend hits, you've got past Thanksgiving and now it's say, all right, I'm unwinding now I'm kind of shifting into Christmas mode. Alright, I'll start again. Come that Monday. And a lot of people, not us of course, are shopping while they're at work, so they're on their laptop shopping at work instead of working and that full week they might have off so they don't back into the office until Monday and it's time to procrastinate and start spending money.

Brett :

Totally, yeah. Yeah. I mean Cyber Monday, there was a time, I think everybody on this call probably remembers it when Nick, you would've been really young, but when we would maybe wait and shop on Cyber Monday where we had the high speed internet, right? Shop it at home over the weekend we got slow internet, but Monday we're back in the office high speed and we're shopping away. But I think one thing that underscores Nick is a lot of times we make the mistake of just not communicating enough, just not reminding enough, just not sending enough emails and enough SMS messages and we're like, whoa, man, I already sent three people are going to be sick of hearing me. And our feedback is usually they didn't see two of those, they missed them completely or they read one and they were busy but they were having a Turkey hangover or whatever. And so you got to hit 'em more. And yeah, sometimes the ninth time is the charm, so sometimes we give up a little bit too soon. So that's great. Any other surprises on the email SMS side?

Nick:

Based on the naming convention that we set up, the campaigns, we try to make it super easy for us and the brand owners to be able to look into Klaviyo or their chosen SMS platform and to see what's name the campaign and how's it doing. And we'll have something like Black Friday Live or Black Friday follow-up or Cyber Monday live. And a lot of times the follow-up campaigns were the ones beating the initial launches. So just like what you said, we got to send more, make sure you're setting those follow ups.

Brett :

Yeah, the follow-ups where it's like, okay, hey, that's almost leaning towards, I'm about to miss it, right? So I know you launched it, but now it's the follow-up, I might miss it. So I'm going to take action now. A couple of things that I pulled from the data that Christine and team put together on the Amazon side. So if you look at the first part of the Cyber 12, so the first seven days, basically the week leading up to Thanksgiving, 46% year over year growth. So big growth year over year. Cyber Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday only up about 36%. So much slower growth still good still let's get excited about it, but we did pull a lot of those sales forward. Other big wins that you saw, Christine during the Cyber 12 or during that Cyber five weekend?

Christine:

I think one of the bigger wins that our team had was selecting these deals early.

Not everyone has an opportunity to even run a best deal, which is a seven day deal. So getting in there, our team was in there making sure our clients knew what was the making sure we grabbed whatever we could. That was number one. And then backing that up with Prime exclusive discounts. So although a best deal or a lightning deal, they were our best performers by far. We did have a few brands that leaned in more on Prime exclusives. Again, they ran at 25% and that was actually our third highest generating deal. So if you're not selected to get a best deal or a lightning deal from Amazon, lean in hard on your prime exclusives. What we do though is I have the team checking them daily to make sure there's no pricing errors. So when we go live, everything is live. They can get a little tweaked sometimes. So we like to go in, check them, make sure everything's running perfectly. And one tip about a prime exclusive, if you don't know it is it will automatically pause if you have a lightning deal running. So Amazon will not let you double dip on that deal.

Brett :

That would help

Christine:

It

Brett :

Help protect your market.

Christine:

It gives you a badge and everybody wants to see a red badge that improves your click-through rate. So Prime exclusive is my second tip.

Brett :

Cool. Cool. So let's think about this. What did the best brands do this year, 2024 versus those that really underperform? Then I'll open this up to everybody, but Nick, you want to maybe go first on that one?

Nick:

When they were omnipresent across everything, that's when we saw the best results. So instead of just saying, Hey, let's send out some emails and SMSs about our Black Friday sale proactively, they had planned out, this is our social media campaign ideas, this is our paid ad side, this is what we're doing on the website, this is what we're doing for emails. And that way all those different touch points are another way to get your customer to buy because they might see it on Instagram and then go to your website. They see that banner on the site or if they are on any kind of paid ad platform, they're seeing it there and clicking through to your site. So the more in your face you can make it, the better they even got pretty deep with some influencer strategies, making sure all their influencers associated with them. Were posting those deals on their stories. So hey look, we're everywhere. You can't miss it at that point.

Brett :

So you got the marketing calendar, so of course you're hitting 'em with email, but you've also got your ads on Facebook and on Google ads, remarketing ads, and then also the organic content. So getting influencers to also post and comment about the deals and about the sales. Love that. And actually I was just buying my two youngest kids, they're playing basketball this year. I was just buying this dribbling training thing and I started the checkout process, had to go do something else, so I, I was responding to a paid social ad, but then it was email that actually got me to close, but there's so much going on that if I'd just seen the ad and kind of started the process but didn't finish it without the email, I might not have actually purchased it or might've waited until later and who knows if it would've happened. And so really great. Bill, what about from your perspective, what did the best brands do, those that had the biggest results versus those that really struggled? Do you want to compare and contrast that?

Bill:

Yeah, that was another interesting thing that we found in our data as we looked across all of our accounts doing Google and YouTube, so the best brands, the ones that really killed it now sitewide sale is very popular, did very well also doing sort of the tiered discount. If you put this much in your cart, you get this discount. If it's this much, you get this discount. That does very well. However, something interesting, what beat both of those, at least across our accounts in our data, is discounting individual products. And now, and it is a clear winner in our data and we had small brands doing it and we had very large brands doing it. And so what's interesting though, I wonder if the reason that works so well is because the discount is clear to the consumer. Because if you look at any discount whatsoever, the better you communicate the discount and the deal going on, the easier it is for the consumer who has a lot of things they're looking to buy, a lot of things going on, they're being bombarded all the time. So when you're discounting an individual item, it's right there on the product page, it's right there in the cart, it's very clear that you're getting a discount that this is rare, this isn't evergreen pricing. And so I wonder if that's why it does so well, because just right there in front of you.

Brett :

Yeah, it's really interesting. And so you saw that through the different channels within Google, so YouTube search shopping?

Bill:

Yeah, you look at our data holistically, but I do kind of like a walkthrough to see how does this look to the consumer? And so it's definitely characterized by, okay, we'll say cherry picking products, but I'm sure there's strategy there, like a product with the best ROI or a bestseller or whatever it is, but we'll say it's individual products, not like a category, not like a site-wide sale, but individual products that are discounted and it's like strike through pricing, red, discount price, add to the cart, cart slides over, you see the discount right there in your cart or your checkout. And that did the best.

Brett :

Yeah, it's interesting because I think that this specific product with this deal, very clear deal on this product kind of helps eliminate decision paralysis or decision fatigue where if I'm just saying, Hey, X percent still got to go decide what I'm going to get, and it's maybe just not as clear or as compelling where if you tell me, Hey, this comforter, which I'm buying a comforter for my wife, hopefully she doesn't listen to this. I don't think she listens to the podcast, so that's one of the guests. But if they said, Hey, this one is on sale, I'm like, great, that's the one I want. All right, done. I'm buying it. Right? Versus the other angle, just sitewide discounts up to whatever. It can work too for sure. But I like that specific offer on a specific product. It's really good.

Bill:

And I'll add one thing to call out about that. So we're promoting across YouTube and everywhere display and all that stuff P max. But when you run it that way, it's going to show up in your ps, give or take some caveats I could throw out there, but it's going to show up in your ps and when people are doing comparison shopping across multiple brands, you're going to see that promo price in the shopping PLA on the Google search engine results. I think that influences behavior as well.

Brett :

Totally. So yeah, PLA is product listing ads, Google shopping ads, if you will. And really if someone's searching for a product online, they're either going to Amazon or they're going to Google most likely. And so getting that promo attached to a product, it's going to show up in those Google shopping results very clearly in a very compelling fashion as well. Any insights guys? And it's cool if there's not, but did any specific channel, like any specific ad type inside of Amazon or any specific ad type inside of Google really shine or was it kind the usual suspects

Christine:

On the Amazon? It's usual suspects?

Brett :

Yeah, yeah, always sponsored product is always going to be

Christine:

The product. Always

Brett :

Going to win day.

Christine:

We all know the ccpc is through the roof, but we kept our ACO down, which was good. But

Brett :

Yeah, if CPCs go up and conversion rate goes up right along with it, then it doesn't matter. You protect the same ACOs or the same roas yet sponsor products, usually 60 to 70% of our, usually six 7% of our total spend is sponsored products. So it sounds like

Christine:

That

Brett :

Remain the same.

Christine:

Exactly. One thought process on the decision making to run a deal or to not run a deal besides your margins, et cetera, is if you're not running a deal, you're still paying the high cost per click and you're not going to generate the sale, you're not going to have the conversion that you need that if you are running something. So it is something to consider when you decide to potentially maybe sit it out, you're still going to have to pay the same price to display somewhere on your advertising. So God, I just want to make a conversion, maybe take the little hit and participate.

Brett :

Yeah, there's some math you can run there. And I had a podcast, I'll look at the number of the episode, but basically where you can run pricing optimization calculations. And so basically what you have to look at then is based on how you change your price, how the conversion rate would need to change. And I think that's worth looking at, especially if you know, hey, the CPCs are going to up 20, 30, 40%, maybe double in some cases what has to happen to my conversion rate for the math to work? So yeah, and I think it'd be really interesting for someone to look at because it seemed like guys based on, and this is just anecdotally based on what I heard from you, but also from the team, there's a lot of people experimenting with their deals. So the deals for a lot of our clients were not the same this year as they were last year. And so now you've probably got two clear case studies of here's how this discount worked conversion rate, here's how that discount worked in conversion rate, and now we can do some calculations. Am I right in saying that we see deals that were different this year than last year?

Christine:

Yes, only because of the date range also. So it's not necessarily comparing an apple to an apple any longer, it's more the timeframe starting the week earlier, but the actual deals were about the same. It's just what you decided to participate in. So a good exercise for us is, okay, let's take all of the brands from this year and last year. What did they do 23, what did they do in 24? And then extrapolate what actually performed the best. And now we have our 2025 roadmap.

Brett :

Got it. So the discounts on the Amazon set discounts were kind of the same.

Christine:

They were pretty much the same. Amazon pushes the discount for a lightning deal or a best deal based on your lowest price and last 30 days.

Brett :

Got it. Episode 2 55, Byron Myers from Glimmer, which one of my favorite episodes. But while your prices are probably wrong and he kind of walks through how to determine your optimal price, but I think now if you've got at least a few years of sales data around the holidays, take a listen to that episode and then work on tweaking your price

Christine:

For

Brett :

Next year. What did you see on your side? Bill deals mostly the same this year, meaning clients did the same thing they did last year. Do we see a lot of clients experimenting?

Bill:

Yeah, that's a great question. I think we were getting better, our clients were getting better at being simple and being clear. I think we had a lot of complex deals. I think on our end we also get better because when someone brings us the complex deal, it's complex for us to promote and set up. And so we up our game a little bit each year as we learn how to work with those and communicate those to the customer. And so we do see ebb and flow. Some people, some brands might have been just D two c e-commerce last year. They can do whatever they want now they have to sell into retail and they're confined to map pricing or something, so they can't run a big a discount.

Brett :

Yeah, right. Yeah. We've seen 'em with a couple of our larger retailers where their Black Friday, cyber Monday weekend was down a little bit, whole holiday period is up and profits are really up, but it's because they've pushed hard into Walmart or other retailers. And so they're like, Hey, we can only, now we're just all in agreement. We can only discount a certain amount. So that's impacted online sales a little bit, but over total sales, total profits all up. So that's the real

Bill:

Need for sure. And kind of some fun stuff, like last year we convinced some brands who had never run a discount whatsoever to go ahead and run something for Black Friday. It brought this huge wave of sales, and so now they're all about it. And so customers are watching for Black Friday from some of these brands like, oh, I'm going to buy this Black Friday. And then they run a discount. They haven't run all year and it just cleans up

Brett :

Any callouts on what was the best performer that we saw. And we can be on the Amazon side, we need to be close lipped or keep it close to the vest, so to speak. But what did we see any callouts for what was the best? And the one I'm thinking of, bill on the Google side is live beard. And obviously we can't give away any of their sales data, but they crushed it this year and they did not go simple with their offer. They went over the top. But any insights there?

Bill:

Yeah, definitely. And so that comes down to good communication. They started planning months in advance for what this was going to be, how they were going to structure their landing page and so on and so forth. So yeah.

Brett :

And what was their offer? You want to kind of walk back through and you get all the details right,

Bill:

Was a sitewide sale plus a chance to win a truck, a Ford Ranger I believe. And so

Brett :

Ford Raptor. Ford Raptor, big difference. Big difference Bill. Big difference. Yeah. Come on now. Come on. Everybody wants a raptor. Not everybody wants a ranger. No offense to the Ranger drivers out there, but Raptors, dude, that's primo.

Bill:

Yeah, no, for sure. And so yeah, live Bearded was a really good one. I'll also shout out to Carbon Pickleball. They did very, very well, and so I don't have the numbers in front of me. They did very, very well,

Brett :

Which we don't want to give away. Yeah, I tell numbers anyway. Percentages you find I guess. But yeah, man, what a great year for pickleball and shout out to the guys at Carbon Pickleball, CRBN. We met them Christine when we were at Amazon Accelerate in Seattle and people were giving away paddles. These are really good paddles, they're really good. And then we connected with the guys from Carbon and now they're clients, so super, super fun there.

Bill:

I also just want to throw in there, manta Sleep did very well. We were very excited to see the results on Manta sleep.

Brett :

Dude, big shout out to Manta Sleep. I have focused a lot on how do I improve the quality of my sleep because I think the data is just there in overwhelming fashion that that's how you, it's really one of the keys to longevity, to productivity, to being able to handle stress, all those things to be able to work out. And I know you guys are the same Nick, I hear you talking about a lot, but Manta Sleep, yeah, those are sleep masks, right? To help create the fully dark environment and maybe some other sleep enhancements.

Bill:

Yeah, it's the Ford Raptor of sleep masks.

Brett :

Nice, nicely done. Ford Raptor of sleep masks and so really helped them crush it and they're benefiting one from great marketing and a great partnership with OMG, but also I think there's just a collective understanding of I need to prioritize my sleep and make that a bigger area focus. So really good. Nick, from your perspective, any specific deals you want to call out that kind of won the weekend or won the sales period?

Nick:

Not necessarily a deal, but just how to help your brand stand out during this busy season where everyone's blasting everyone with different sales is a follow up email or text. Probably email because you get a little bit more room to work with to everyone who purchased during that Black Friday sale, just thanking them and showing some appreciation. I think commerce could be a little bit more two way. So instead of just blasting it with 20% off, 25% off, get your little list of has purchased during Black Friday and say, Hey, as a small brand, we appreciate it and we're getting all those orders shipped out and we hope you enjoy it.

Brett :

Love it, love it. Alright guys, we are just about out of time. Any final callouts suggestions or recommendations as we wrap up the pod?

Christine:

The week between Christmas and New Year's? This is prime gift card season, so if you're holding onto some inventory that if you unfortunately didn't move it, consider running a deal over that timeframe because it might save you some long-term storage fees in the end.

Brett :

Yeah, it's great. People maybe didn't get exactly what they wanted during Christmas or the holidays or maybe they just got cash and now it's burning a hole in their pocket. They got a gift card they can use anywhere Amazon gift card and so have 'em spend it on your product. 100%. Love that.

Bill:

I will say go with the Cyber 12 model next year for this year it would've been 1121 through 12 two I think we said. And use those first two days on the Shopify side to soft launch. Make sure everything's click in on all cylinders and then really go heavy on the promotion. Do the majority of your spend on Black Friday and then whatever is left on Cyber Monday, just go big on Cyber Monday.

Brett :

Yeah, and one other quick call out that I can't remember if I said earlier, but want to underscore it on the Amazon side, cyber Monday won, it was bigger than Black Friday or any other day on the D two C side. Black Friday is the winner and we've seen that consistently year in and year out that for D two C, Shopify and or Big Commerce stores and the like Black Friday is the winner off and on Amazon, it's Cyber Monday.

Bill:

Correct? I did look at 2023 data and Black Friday was the winner in 2023.

Brett :

That's why. Yeah, for sure. Awesome. Closing tips, remarks or comments? Nick Flint.

Nick:

Just like how you should be splitting off everyone who purchased during this timeframe and setting up a little thank you. Think about everyone who's engaged but didn't purchase. There's probably a huge segment of your list that falls into this. You just hit 'em with your best offer the year and they still didn't buy. So internally, get together with your team and say, what could we do to get these people through the door? It might be selling at cost. I mean, it's never fun, but you try to get them in the door with a discount, it didn't work. Let's go ahead and get this product in their hands. At least you break even or get a little bit more personable with it. For a supplement brand, they're taking this list and they're emailing them saying, what are your goals for 2025? We'll help you put together a custom supplement stack. They're going to get hopefully a ton of replies and they're going to get them squared away of the new year.

Brett :

Love it. Awesome. Well, thank you guys. You delivered the goods as always. And hey, if you're listening to this and you're saying, my holiday has not been as strong or as stellar as I'd hoped it would be, and so next year I need to do something different and I want that to start right away, reach out to us. We would love to work with you. We know that everybody is kind of planning thinking about Q1 and beyond. And so hey, if you want Christine and the OMG Amazon team running your Amazon and really unlocking growth there and turning that into the powerhouse that you want it to be, or if you want Bill and team running your Google and YouTube and opening up a new channel of growth there, you're like, Hey, email is not at 40% of my revenue and growing like it should be. And you want Nick Flint and team to look at the email, then reach out to us because the time for us to do a strategic review audit. Kind of look at your game plan for the new year and help you take it to the next level. So reach out to us. We'd love to work with you and with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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In this milestone 300th episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I've distilled the most impactful insights from recent top-performing episodes to help you prepare for eComm success in 2025. From AI marketing innovations to viral content secrets and customer psychology insights, these carefully selected takeaways represent the cutting edge of eCommerce strategy. This special edition delivers concentrated wisdom from industry leaders to help you stay ahead of the competition.

Key Highlights:

• Why "out-of-the-box" AI is dead and how to create custom AI marketing hubs that deliver real results for your business.
• The truth about UGC in 2025: It's not dead, but the bar has been raised - learn what actually works now.
• Surprising insights about customer purchase timing: Why 60% of buyers take longer than a week to make their first purchase, and what this means for your marketing strategy.
• How Simple Modern built a half-billion-dollar brand on Amazon, and their replicable formula for category dominance.
• The "infomercial math" principle that's changing how successful brands approach omnichannel measurement and attribution.

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction

(04:00) Harnessing AI for Marketing Success

(08:45) Why UGC Isn’t Dead

(12:20) Leadership and the Power of Real-Time Feedback

(14:42) The Critical Role of Offer Systems

(16:25) Strategies for Winning on Amazon

(18:18) Mastering The Art of The Hook

(20:58) Insights From Post-Purchase Surveys

(25:04) Performance Max vs. Performance Meh

(26:17) Creative Thinking as Your Competitive Edge

(28:05) Lessons From Infomercials

(29:57) Conclusion

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Show Notes:

• Miki Agrawal
  • TUSHY
• Ezra Firestone
  • Blue Ribbon Mastermind
  • Smart Marketer
  • Boom Beauty
• Roland Frasier
  • Business Lunch Podcast
• Ryan Daniel Moran
  • 12 Months To $1 Million
• Rachel Tipograph
  • MikMak
• Sean Frank
  • The Ridge
• Daniel Harmon
  • Harmon Brother
• Andrew Yuderian
  • eCommerce Fuel
• Steve Chou
  • MyWifeQuitHerJob
• Michael Stelzner
  • Social Media Marketing World
• Russ Henneberry
  • theCLICK
• Dara Denney
  • Motion
• Ray Dalio
  • Bridge Water
• Molly Pittman
  • Smart Marketer
• Bryan Porter
  • Simple Modern
• Eugenia Chen
  • Pandaloon
• Jermiah Prummer
  • KNOCommerce
• True Classic Tees
• Trevor Crump
  • Bestie
• Savannah Knight
  • OMG Commerce
• Will Hughes
  • Organifi
• Joran Pine
  • SciMark
• RTIC Coolers

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Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

‍

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.

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Transcript:

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another very special edition of the eCommerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I'm flying solo on this episode, but for good reason. This episode, this very episode that you're listening to right now is the 300th episode of the e-Commerce Evolution Podcast. Now, I'm a little bit blown away by that fact when I started this, had no idea that it would go this long. To put that into context, most podcasts, the average lifecycle lifespan of a podcast is seven episodes. It's called Pod Fade. Someone starts a podcast and they start to fade, lose a little bit of interest goes away. So podcasts that enter into the 300 plus episode category, that's less than 1% of all podcasts. So thank you to you for tuning in consistently and making this show a success, and also thank you to some amazing guests.

Before I get into highlights, really what I want to do today, so I'll preview this just a little bit, is I've selected 11 fairly recent episodes that just blew my mind, changed my perspective, changed the way I approach marketing, e-commerce business, and I want to share the big idea from those episodes with you and a couple of nuggets. It's going to be rapid fire, 11 quick episodes, 11 quick big ideas, plus some additional big ideas from the content. And I also selected these because not only are they just like highlights of the show, but I believe these get you ready for 2025. I believe the competition's going to be unique in 2025. Things are going to be maybe more difficult than ever in some regards, but also I believe it's going to be a great year of opportunity. I think the economic outlook is pretty bright.

So a lot of opportunities in the coming year, and I want you to take full advantage. So these 11 takeaways and 11 big ideas, we'll get you ready for the new year. Now, I just want to show my gratitude to some amazing guests over the years. This is not a complete list of guests, obviously 300 episodes, but a couple of noteworthy ones. One, Mickey Agarwal, founder of Tushy on this show, dropping truth bombs and wowing us with their creativity and just being in general, a very, very fun episode. My buddy, Ezra Firestone, the legend in the e-com space, blue Ribbon mastermind, smart marketer, boom, beauty and others. He was on the show. He's been a multi-time guest. Roland Frazier, host of the Business Lunch podcast, business investor, leader of the Epic Challenge, just an amazing business mind. Ryan Daniel Moran, author of 12 months to 1 million Great influencers, super sharp guy.

Who else have we had on the pod? Tons of other great guests. Rachel Topograph from Mack, Sean Frank from the Ridge Ridge Wallets, Daniel Harmon of the Harman Brothers, Andrew Derian, commerce Fuel, Steve Chu, my wife, quitter Job podcast. Michael Stelzner, social Media Marketing World. And list goes on and on. Amazing guests. So keep tuning in. Got an amazing docket or amazing lineup of guests coming up in 2025 as well. So let's dive in. Let's dive in and talk about, hey, what are the big takeaways? What are these 11 big ideas and some supporting ideas that we should talk about? First one comes from Russ Berry, pretty recent episode about ai. And his big idea is don't just use out of the box ai, but create AI marketing hubs. If you are in the camp of thinking, Hey, AI is really cool, it's really interesting, but it's not particularly useful.

I can't just use AI to create a meaningful project or save myself a lot of time. It's because you're getting what Russ calls boiled chicken results, and that's because you're not using finely tuned ai. So here's the big idea. AI has been trained on essentially the entire knowledge base of the internet, right? The whole internet basically has been ingested by ai, large language models, but you know what? The AI doesn't know your business or your project that you're working on. And so what we have to do is we have to feed the ai the proper information. One analogy that Russ gave in the episode is, Hey, imagine you hired a top notch business consultant, like one of the best business consultants on the planet. You brought them in, but then you proceeded to tell them nothing about your business, nothing about your industry, nothing about your customers, no data points, no specific knowledge about your business.

You just started asking that consultant questions. You would get very generic answers, maybe insightful, but not particularly insightful for you. So Russ talks about creating these AI marketing hubs. What does that look like? Well, in chat, GPT, that's a custom GPT in clawed AI by anthropic, it's creating a project. And this is where you're feeding the AI all the relevant data for your business. So documents, reports, rubrics, customer feedback, ratings and reviews, transcripts from videos or podcasts or whatever. You're feeding the AI as much relevant information as possible. And then you're asking specific questions. And what's so cool about this, and I've done this a number of times in my business, the more specific information you feed the ai, it just unlocks a level of brilliance. And Russ also laid out a couple of other tips I think are really good. He said three main roles that the AI is really good at.

One is the scribe. So just kind of creative content. I think Claude is exceptional at this exceptional at the written language. So come up with this email, come up with this copy for a landing page, that type of thing. Again, still feed it relevant information, the optimizer. So how do we evaluate and improve what we're doing right now? So here's this landing page copy. Here's this email sequence. Here's a video script that I've got. How do you make it better? So the optimizer and then the strategist. So, hey, given all these inputs, here's our sales data. Here's historical data over the last three years, here's what we're trying to accomplish for this season. What are some big ideas? What should we do this season? So those three roles, scribe optimizer, strategists, all very effective to use the AI for. And then last thing before I move on is he talks about the RTIF framework for better prompts.

So Russ's argument is the real missing piece with AI is you're not feeding in enough relevant data. You got to bring your data to the party, but also better prompts are going to create better results. And so what does RTIF stand for? Well, it's role, task, input and format. So basically you're saying, Hey, chat GT or Gemini or Claude, or whatever, you are a marketing assistant research assistant, or you are a copywriter for a D two C brand. I need you to give me 50 headlines for this product launch. Here are examples of winning headlines in the past. Here's some examples of competitors' headlines. Here's examples of other things. And this is the format that I need that put into. And so I believe that the future is going to be ruled by smart humans who know how to lean in and use ai. I don't believe that the machines are taken over anytime soon, but I do believe that you need to learn AI and leverage it because you very well could get beat out by another agency, by another brand, by another, fill in the blank that is leveraging ai.

So Russ Henneberry's episode on marketing, ai, custom marketing hubs. Check it out. If you have not listened, it is a banger. The next guest. The next episode is from Dara Denny number, episode number 2 87, content that converts. I believe Dara is one of the leading minds when it comes to better creative for ads and organic content. And one of the things we talked about, one of the big ideas is that UGC is not dead. Coffin is not sealed on UGC, but the bar has been raised. And so the key here is that it's not that UGC stopped working user generated content. It's not that testimonials no longer carry any weight. It's just that we've seen testimonials. We've seen UGCA lot now. So just having it isn't the strategic advantage. Just having it isn't going to unlock new results. You've got to have really, really good UGC, and that's the kicker.

The days are gone when you can have bland, boring, pedestrian, UGC and just expect it to work. So no longer are we moved by clips of real customers saying, yeah, this is a really good product. I like it. I like using this product, or this has been a game changer for me. Just really bland engineer stuff. However, if you can capture video of your actual customers or real influencers saying, I've tried dozens of products like this. Nothing has worked like this, or I've tried lots of protein powders, they all wreck my stomach, but not this one. I drink this one. I feel energized. I feel alive. No bloating, no upset stomach, nothing, right? We worked with a jewelry store for a long time and a lot of guys were intimidated to go to jewelry stores. And we captured a customer saying, I used to be really intimidated to walk in the jewelry store until I went here.

The minute I walked in, I felt comfortable. I connected with the salesperson, I talked to the owner, and they gave me ideas and solutions. I'll never go to another jewelry store. So you hear a testimony like that or UGC like that, and you're moved, you feel something and it overcomes objections and it solidifies the value proposition. It brings to life some of the benefits that you're talking about. But generic, UGC, bland, UGC, it is in fact dead. And I would argue that it's probably never worked anyway. It just certainly doesn't work now. So UGC is not dead. The other thing that I'll talk about from Dara Denny's podcast, from her episode, episode 2 87, is that you need to take bigger swings. You need to make bigger tests. It's not really effective to say, Hey, this was our winning ad before. What if we change the color of the headline instead of blue?

Let's go green. How would that do form a hypothesis? Why did this ad work? What is it tapping into? What emotions, what fears, what concerns? What desires? What about our product? Is it highlighting in a unique way? So let's form a hypothesis. How can we create something similar to that, but different but edgier, better but clearer, whatever? So form a hypothesis and take bigger swings, make bigger tests. Of course, lean into what's working, but take a small part of your budget, lean into bigger tests. That's where you're going to find breakthroughs. You're not going to find breakthroughs by making small little color tests and things like that. Next one, episode number 2 79, Dave Klein. We talked about leadership and management within a D two C brand. Now, Dave Klein, one of the best management thinkers of our time. He's one of the best trainers, one of the best coaches that I've ever been around in terms of developing your leadership and developing you as a manager, your managers, and their leadership style.

And so he talked about somebody, he was at Bridgewater Associates, so Ray Dalio's company, and he talked about they had this environment of constant real time feedback. So they would, even as someone is delivering a presentation, people are on iPads giving real-time feedback that didn't make sense, that wasn't believable, this could be improved, and they just gave raw, real-time feedback constantly. Now, not everybody could handle it. Not everyone could handle the pressure, the transparency, the feeling like you're maybe under a microscope all the time. Not everybody can handle it. But those that could grew and improved consistently, it unlocked new levels of growth. Now, you don't need to go to the extreme of Bridgewater, right? There are a few places that operate just like that, but I guarantee you, your team and you need better real time feedback. So one of the best ways to do this is to invite that feedback from your team.

Let your team know, Hey, I want real feedback from you. What can I do better? What can I improve? Was this meeting good? Was this idea clear? How can I make it better? And then especially if you get feedback that's not what you wanted to hear, meaning it's feedback that's, Hey, that idea wasn't very good, or that meaning wasn't a winner, or I don't think I am aligned with you in this. Celebrate that feedback. Thank someone genuinely thanks someone publicly for that feedback that's going to encourage more of it within your business. He also did a great job laying out understanding what are the bottlenecks within a company? What are the constraints for growth within your brand? And spoiler alert, if you're a small business, the constraint, the bottleneck could be you. So go back and listen to that. That's episode 2 79 with my friend Dave Klein.

Highly, highly recommend it. Next up, Molly Pittman. Dear dear friend, Molly Pittman, episode 2 94. I think this was the $600 million meta ad survey results, how to make Meta Ads better. And the big idea here is that you don't just need better ads. You need an offer system. You need better offers, and you need a greater diversity of offers. So Molly's point was, Hey, if you're spending like a thousand dollars a day on ads right now, you may get away with one offer. So one offer, sending people to your product detail page, here's my widget, here's an offer, take it. If that's all you want to do, just scale to say a thousand dollars a day in spend, that may be enough. But if you want to scale to a hundred thousand dollars a day in spend, that's profitable, you need an offer system. So of course, you still need Buy Now offers, but you need learn more offers.

You need sign up for this webinar, offers you need, join this class offer. You need download this guide offer. You need other free offers, experiential type offers that you test. And so this is something that as she, and as OMG, as we work with supplement brands, food and beverage brands, other brands where the price of the item is a little bit higher, how can we get someone into a funnel? How can we create offers that are more than just buy this product now? So you don't just need better ads. You need better offers. Check out the full episode. Molly Pittman, episode 2 94. Next up, Brian Porter from Simple Modern Drinkware Brand. The episode is 2 74, and so they talk about how simple Moderns has sold over half a billion in drinkware in just eight years. And really this is a unique brand because it was basically born and launched on Amazon.

And so this is not just a product being sold on Amazon. This is a real brand, a multi nine figure run rate brand, all born and launched on Amazon. And so they said, really, their formula for success on Amazon, and I think this is going to be the formula that will win for some time to come, is they win the search. So they win the click and the conversion from category level searches. So Tumblr, drinkware Coffee, Tumblr, 40 ounce, Tumblr in yellow, things like that. So they win that generic search and they win that search through a combination of SEO paid search and merchandising, how to get the product on the right shelf, how to get that product to jump off the shelf. That's how you win the click. Then how do you get them to buy? That's really the conversion rate optimization part of Amazon.

So we win that first purchase. Okay, then how do we delight them so that the next time they go to Amazon, they don't search for the category terms, they don't search for generic terms, they search for our brand. Now we've won them over. Now they go look for a Tumblr or other drinkware. They're just typing in our brand name. And so that's where you consider like, Hey, from unboxing to first use, ongoing use, what is that experience like? And am I winning someone over so that the next time they come to Amazon, they're only searching for me and not any of my competitors or the generic terms? So it's episode 2 74, Brian Porter from Simple Modern. Next up, Eugenia Chin. This is episode 2 88, viral Content. Love this episode. Eugenia started the company Panda Loon. She was on Shark Tank, and her big idea is that winning with Hooks, so getting the right hook or the right opening to a video is 50% of the game to making your content viral or creating an ad that has the potential to really scale with its spin.

And so she breaks down three components of hooks that go viral. The first one is a visual scroll stopper. So visually, am I arresting someone and getting them to pay attention to my content? For her? This was she sewed and put together this panda costume that she put on her dog. And so when the dog was walking, it looked like a panda with a dog face walking around. So immediate scroll stopper is there. Then some kind of audio grabber, some kind of audio sound that goes with it. This is especially important on TikTok, and she recommends build for TikTok first because then that translates into other channels, whereas building for Instagram or other channels first does not necessarily translate into TikTok and then use text reinforcement. So can I put some text on the piece of content that reinforces the visual and the audio hook and really, really brilliant.

Watch the full episode to get the full download there. But then she also talks about leading with emotion. Do we start with something emotional? So think about it from this way. As you watch your content, as you watch your ad, what are the parts where you lean in? What are the parts where you perk up? What are the parts of the video where you laugh or where you feel something, where you're moved a little bit, whatever that is likely, that's what you need to bring to the front. Back in the old days, and this is kind of gone in a post pandemic world and just a virtual world that we live in, I used to to play ads in front of a room of people and watch them. When do they lean in? When do they literally laugh out loud or conversely, when do they start looking at their phone?

When do they seem to be drifting and not paying attention? So the parts where they lean in, the parts where you can tell they're feeling something, maybe they get a little choked up, a little teary eyed or something. If it's kind of a moving piece, I want to bring that towards the front almost certainly. So lead with emotion, 50% of your results come from the hook. So Eugenia Chin, episode 2 88, viral Content. Next up, Jeremiah Brummer, our friend from No Commerce, episode 2 62. So no Commerce is a customer survey, a post-purchase survey platform. There are other things you can do with it as well, but the primary offering is post-purchase surveys. And the big idea, the big takeaway from Jeremiah's episode is that 60% of all your buyers take longer than one week after hearing from you before they make that first purchase. And you'd be surprised to learn.

And we unpacked a couple of studies. One was from True classic Teas actually wearing a true classic tea right now that I think it was 30% of their customers, they learned about true classics and didn't buy for up to a year after that. So whatever your platform is telling you, whatever you're seeing in Google Ads or Meta or whatever you're seeing in Google Analytics that hey, it's usually one day or two days after click someone purchases, okay, sure. But that's not from the first time they saw you. That's not from the first time they learned about you. There's this old marketing adage, this old marketing philosophy that I think still rings true where most people have to see or hear of a new brand seven times before they take action. And so this should shift your perspective a little bit on what's truly top of funnel and what we should expect our ad platforms to do.

I'm not advocating that we don't look at ROAS or MER or things like that. I am advocating that we understand that the length of time from someone being introduced to your brand and purchasing is probably quite a bit longer than you think. Okay? So go ahead and listen to that episode, episode 2 62 from Jeremiah Brummer. Now, closely related episode, and I want to give love to this one as well, is Trevor Crump from Bestie, also post-purchase survey platform. And the takeaway from both of these is you should do post-purchase surveys. But the biggest takeaway I got from Trevor's episode is, Hey, the reason you think people are buying from you, the reason someone chooses you over your competitors, or the main reason someone buys your product in the first place, probably isn't the reason you think it's, and so one of the things we can ask in our post-purchase surveys is, Hey, what's the main reason you bought this product?

So Trevor gave this awesome example of a client that he worked with, and they sold underwear for kids who wet the bed, right? So embarrassing issue, some kids struggle with it for years. They went to bed, they can't stop. And so they sold these underwear training pants, so it makes you feel bigger than if you're wearing a pull-up or something like that. But the owner of the brand was convinced there were two reasons that people bought one cost savings. You buy this, it's cheaper than buying pull-ups and two environmentally friendly, right? We're not filling landfills with pull-ups and diapers and things like that. Turns out those two were not even in the top five. That was not why people were buying. The number one reason that people were buying this product is it gave their kids confidence, right? There was a real emotional reason here.

Parents said, my kid, when they're struggling with wetting the bed, it wrecks their confidence. And I'm very, very motivated, very motivated to help them. I'll invest money, I'll spend money to fix that. Okay? The environment, that's a nice bonus and saving a little bit of money on not buying Pull-ups bonus. That's not why someone invested in this. It was to give their kid confidence. So understanding that, understanding why someone actually buys your product that can unlock a new approach to your advertising. Think about how that shifts the message of your video content or your image content or your ads in general, knowing the real reason somebody buys. So check out the full episode, episode two 50 with Trevor Crump. Next up, Savannah Knight, OMG Rockstar. We talked about Performance Max in this episode, and so I love this episode not because we talk about Performance Max, because if Google follows kind of the course of their history, max will be phased out at some point in the future.

There'll be other campaign types that replace it. But what I think is true about Max that will be true forever is that campaigns are always going to lean into AI and machine learning performance Max in kind of a special way. But the big takeaway here is that your campaigns are only as good as the data that you give them and the creatives that you give them. So the real unlock with Performance Max or whatever campaign is popular in the future is give the campaign good data, clear insights into this is my ideal customer, and then give the campaign really great creatives. I think we run a real risk of becoming AI dependent or smart bidder dependent, rather than bringing our best to these campaigns and then really allowing the AI to work some magic. So that's the takeaway from that episode. Next up, will Hughes, episode 2 31, the Million Dollar Mindset.

Will Hughes grew Organify to $100 million a year run rate, but he had to do so profitably, he could not acquire customers at a loss. So had to be first order break even, or first order profitable. One of the big ideas that he talked about in that podcast was creative thinking as a competitive advantage. So how can you unlock creative thinking, creative problem solving to give your business a competitive edge? And we talk about a concept in this podcast that I love called a reticular activator. So this is a part of your brain that's always looking for something familiar or something really out of place. And so you can kind of train your brain here as well. So one of the best examples of a reticular activator is your name. Think about it this way. You're walking through a crowded airport, all kinds of noise and chaos.

You can't make heads or tails of it, but you hear someone say your name out of the clutter, your name shines through. That's because your name is a reticular activator. Your brain, your subconscious is scanning the environment, looking for things that are familiar or things that are really out of place. Another example is if hey, you decide you want to buy a car, bought my wife a four runner. Once I started looking at four runners, everywhere I drove, I saw every forerunner on the road. It's not that suddenly there were more forerunners on the road, it's just that I was in tune with them and my reticular activating system was looking for them. You can train yourself to do the same thing. Look for patterns, look for things that are missing. Look for companies that are doing something really unique and really different. So train your brain to start looking for patterns and leverage creative thinking as a competitive advantage for your brand.

Last one, actually, as we wrap up here, my buddy Jordan Pine, episode two 30, lessons from DRT or Direct Response tv. We talked a lot about infomercials, and I love infomercials. Talk a lot about the Ginsu Knife commercial or other great infomercials that are on TV P 90 X. I bought the P 90 X program way back in the day because of their amazing infomercial. But what I loved about his podcast, a lot of things, but he talked about infomercial math. So what do they expect when they run an infomercial on tv? Where do they expect the sales to come from? Well, they expect 20% of sales to come from direct response, meaning someone picks up the phone or they email in directly, right? 30% they expect to happen on the website so that we go to beachbody.com or P 90 x.com, whatever, to buy the product.

And then a full half of all sales, they expect to happen on Amazon. So even if that infomercial does not mention Amazon, we expect a lot of those purchases to take place on Amazon. Now, those numbers shift a little bit if you get in store placement, if you're in brick and mortar stores as well. But just understand, this really underscores a really important point that when you're investing in things like tv, YouTube, meta, even the versions are going to happen someplace else. In a lot of cases, you may be sending someone to your website. The conversion may happen on Amazon, you may be running a YouTube ad, which did a big campaign for Arctic coolers, may running a campaign on YouTube, but the purchase is going to happen at Walmart, or the purchase is going to happen on Amazon. And so understanding where the purchases take place and where you expect them to take place is going to impact your measurement, how you determine if you were successful or not.

And it's going to dictate then what you do based on those results. So I'm so excited for you for 2025. I'm so excited for the podcast for 2025, and I can't wait to help you crush growth this year. D two C, omnichannel and the like. We would love to work with your brand, whether that's on the Amazon side, email side, YouTube side, Google side, meta side. If your brand feels stuck, you've been spinning your wheels with some important channels. Chat with us at OMG Commerce. We'd love to run a complimentary strategic review for you and see how our team can help you level up. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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When the pandemic left Garrett Goslin without his sommelier job, he turned his passion for pickleball into an innovative paddle company. Alongside childhood friend Kyle Goguen, CRBN Pickleball has emerged as a leading premium brand in one of America's fastest-growing sports. Their journey offers valuable lessons for any brand looking to build authentic community and stand out in a competitive market.

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Key Takeaways:

• Product Innovation & Customer Feedback: Learn how CRBN maintains its competitive edge by leveraging multiple feedback loops - from pro athletes to local ambassadors - and investing heavily in R&D to stay ahead of larger competitors.
• Building a Multi-Channel Brand: Discover their strategic approach to building a premium brand across direct-to-consumer, Amazon, and retail channels while maintaining consistent positioning and storytelling.
• Community-First Growth: Explore how CRBN built a powerful ambassador program without spending big marketing dollars, and why their grassroots approach helped them compete against established sporting goods brands.
• Founder Authenticity: See why sharing the founder's story - even when uncomfortable - has become a key differentiator in their marketing strategy and helped forge deeper connections with customers.

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The episode provides a masterclass in building a premium brand through community engagement, product innovation, and authentic storytelling.

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction: The Founding Story of CRBN

(09:51) R&D and Product Innovation in Pickleball

(15:03) Understanding Customer Feedback: The Heart of Product Development

(19:00) Building a Community: The Role of Ambassadors in Growth

(24:32) The Power of Authenticity: Leveraging the Founder’s Story

(28:25) Sponsoring Athletes: A Strategic Approach to Brand Visibility

(32:20) Maximizing Amazon: Strategies for Growth and Brand Building

(40:16) Future Innovations: What's Next for Carbon Pickleball?

(42:31) The Affiliate Strategy: Quality Over Quantity

(46:39) Conclusion

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Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

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Transcript:

Garrett:

I don't think you're going to get anywhere in this sport or any industry without really trying new things. And I think that's really what's setting us apart so far is just being different.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we are talking about something that has been sweeping the nation. It's incredibly popular. I don't think it's going anywhere. We're also diving into brand building, product building, some unique marketing and growth aspects. So we're talking pickleball today and I've got the two execs from CRBN Pickleball on today. I met with these guys in Seattle at the Amazon Accelerate Conference. We hit it off, we had some mutual friends. I got one of their paddles. We became bros and we decided, hey, let's do a podcast and tell people the story behind CRBN. So with that, we've got the founder, Garrett Goslin and his right hand man. I guess I don't even know exactly how to intro you, Kyle, but Kyle Goguen as well. And so Garrett and Kyle, welcome to the show.

Kyle:

Thanks, Brad. Thanks for having us.

Brett:

Yeah, man. Really excited to have you guys. And so let's tell the story briefly because I always love it when it's like, Hey, we're business partners, we work together, but we're also brothers or childhood friends or whatever. But you guys are childhood friends now. You run a very successful business together. What is that like? And then also Kyle, I know you kind of run marketing, but you run a lot of stuff. So talk about your individual roles as well.

Kyle:

Yeah, sure. Garrett, you want to start?

Garrett:

Sure, I'll start it off. Okay. So CRBN started in late 2021. I was working in the hospitality industry as a wine sommelier and the pandemic hit and lost my job. And there's not a lot of need for people pouring wine at country clubs when you can't go to any.

Brett:

I've heard. Just a quick pause on that. I think this is an interesting, Garrett. I've heard it's very complicated to become a wine sommelier.

Garrett:

It is not easy. I was studying, there's four levels. I was studying for my level three when the pandemic hit. My boss was a master song, which is the very top level, and it took him about seven years to become a master.

Brett:

That's crazy.

Garrett:

Yeah, crazy.

Brett:

So do you still like to impress people with your wine knowledge at parties and things like that, or you

Garrett:

It's definitely fallen off a bit. I've lost some of those skills, but I can still impart some knowledge on people, but

Brett:

Got it.

Garrett:

Yeah, so it was a good time while I was doing it, but when that ended, I found myself with a lot of time. I had been playing pickleball since 2017, and so being unemployed at that time allowed me to play a lot more pickleball. I was playing every day of the week, a couple hours a day. And in that process I started kind of running up the ranks a little bit, getting a little bit better, starting to play more competitively. At that time, there weren't as many people in the game playing, so my skill level seemed a lot higher than what it would be now. It's very competitive now, and I do not compare to any of the pros these days. But

Brett:

Back And you guys in southern California area, right? Orange County is kind of where you're competing?

Garrett:

Yeah, we're in Costa Mesa, Newport Beach area. So anyways, since I was playing so much, a lot of my paddles that I was using just kept kind of falling apart, breaking, falling down, falling and losing grit, surface grit on them. And it just came to the point where I was just like, maybe there's something better out there. I feel like I can find something. And there was a company doing something with CRBN fiber on the surface at the time, but didn't really the shape that they were doing. And so I took that idea with CRBN fiber and applied it to, I would say more user-friendly shapes of paddles and had it made for myself, myself and my double's partner at the time. And the idea was we'll have these badass paddles that we'll use and play tournaments with, and it kind of worked. And then we were playing at our

Brett:

Was your goal just at that time, just like you wanted to go pro and pickleball or just playing?

Garrett:

I think so. I think, did

Brett:

You think product business at that time or you were just making the paddles so you could dominate?

Garrett:

Yeah, exactly. I didn't have that thought at all. It was really just so I could have a competitive edge. And then at the club that we were playing, people started noticing our paddle and it seemed like we were getting a lot more power and spin and longevity out of these paddles. And so eventually people started asking like, Hey, can I buy one of those? We were just like, no, they're for us, sorry. And then eventually it came to the point where I was like, all right, we'll try this out. So placed an order and a very small amount and to see how it would do, and they sold out right away within a couple of weeks. And then I kind of knew we had something going here. Then Kyle wasn't on from the very beginning. But then very shortly after, once we started getting a lot of traction and I realized this is not a one man project. I had reached out to Kyle since we've known each other for the better part of 25 years, and I knew his background and his success that he's had in marketing and e-commerce, he's the perfect man to partner with and there's a lot of trust there already. So it's worked out.

Brett:

Totally. I love it. And did you guys ever at recess in elementary school ever like, dude, one day we're going to build a business together?

Kyle:

I don't know if it was in recess, but Garrett and I have chatted about starting a business in the past. I think it was more in the college years. I mean, if I think back, actually, I think the first business that I considered pursuing first real business was with Garrett. And we went as far as meeting with people and sketching out what a business plan might look like, ended up not pursuing that idea thankfully. But it is kind of fun to think back and realize that the writing was sort of on the wall and then this sort of happy accident happened. And then we have since done it and things have gone well. And I think Garrett already touched on this a little bit, but we have very complimentary skill sets, I would say, and that plus a high level of trust makes this partnership work really well.

I mean, Garrett, as he already got into handles basically all of the r and d and since the beginning, but I mean these days we have a full-time engineer with a workshop in Southern California where we can iterate very quickly, which we might touch on later in this pod. But Garrett, he handles all of that and a lot of the branding and a bunch of other parts of the business that I'm not great at and I handle, I'm more so focused on the marketing in general and specifically that's my background. So prior to partnering with Garrett, I had a pet brand that I started 10 years ago right after college. So I spent the last 10 years building up that business, building a team, running it. And so it kind of gave me, while it wasn't pickleball, paddles gave me a ton of experience. I mean, selling dog treats online in many ways is similar to selling pickleball paddles online. So I'm able to kind of bring that experience to the table while Garrett focuses on the product, since he's frankly a much more talented player. He can bring a lot to the table knowing exactly what we want want to create.

Brett:

But I hear Kyle, that you're gaining on him because you're playing more. He's got a kid now, he can't hit the courts as much. So is your goal to beat Garrett consistently in pickleball or what he striving for

Kyle:

Sure we could say gaining on him, but I would not say quickly gaining on him. And no, I don't think that's a goal. I think my goal is to not embarrass myself

Garrett:

Like

Kyle:

That or the company. And outside of that, I'm happy with Garrett being better than me. Totally makes sense. He can have that trophy. You can keep that title. Yeah,

Garrett:

Kyle's better at me than plenty of other things, so I'm going to

Brett:

Take it out.

Garrett:

Yeah, I'll just stay number

Brett:

One

Garrett:

In e-comm.

Kyle:

There you go.

Brett:

Love it. But that is interesting that you bring that up to Casso. So selling, building a pet brand, which was very successful, you built, there are some similarities between pickleball, right? Because it's a large market, so the tam for both is large, and it takes some skill to differentiate your product amidst a lot of competition. There's a lot of competition, pickleball, a lot of competition in the pet space. And so yeah, definitely you guys have cracked the code with this combo of great product and great marketing. And so let's talk about r and d and the strength of your product because I think there's a lot of lessons there that other brands can learn from. And I remember, Kyle, you were telling me this story, Adidas, I think obviously probably put a lot of money into launching their own pickleball paddles and they flopped. And I think the theory or the guest there is they just did it right without maybe a lot of deep knowledge into pickleball and what pickleball players wanted. And so you guys are pickleball players, Garrett, you played tournaments and you're competitive and the sport. How do you approach r and d and what do you think it is that makes your product so special? Because I know one thing you guys said, and I've seen this with other businesses, when you get the product right, everything else is so much easier. Marketing is easier, distribution is easier. Charging a price that allows you to have the right EBITDA is easier. So what are your secrets to making a great product?

Garrett:

Yeah, I'll start by kind of saying that Adidas has stepped their game up. I don't want to completely disparage their name. I think first their first splash into the market was a little bit more cookie cutter, and they were just kind of testing the waters to see how it worked. But they've definitely, they've invested a little bit more into r and d and stuff like that recently, it seems.

Kyle:

I think just broader, not speaking specifically about Adidas is that I think a lot of big brands have tried to get into the pickleball space because they realize it's growing really fast. And I think early on, a lot of them just assumed, look, it's just this random hobby that's very simple. It's maybe not for hardcore athletes and they didn't put the time and effort into the r and d or they just hired, they had their existing engineers develop product or whatever, or they licensed out their brand or whatever they did where they didn't develop a very thoughtful product, frankly, which was great for us because it gave us opportunity, which Garrett's going to touch on here in a second. But it was just fascinating to see these behemoths of a company across the board come in, try to do well and have every advantage in the world, and then people not take them serious in the hardcore pickleball world.

Brett:

And it sort of seems like some bigger brands or brands that don't know pickleball just coming in and they're trying to access that market. It's an opportunity. I'm trying to take advantage of that opportunity where Garrett looked at it and said, Hey, I'm trying as a pickleball player, I'm trying to solve a problem. I am losing my grip on this. My paddles are wearing out. I want more velocity, things like that. So you're solving a problem rather than just trying to tap into an opportunity. So yeah, how do you kind approach r and d and how do you approach iteration? I know you guys are always iterating, improving, launching new products, things like that.

Garrett:

Yeah, so I mean definitely from the get go it was solely myself and a couple of drilling partners that were doing the RD for the company. And from an RD standpoint, it was like you said, just based on trying to solve a problem. And I think we started with a very innovative product and noticed that it kind of caught on that technology we found ourselves. We would start high and then get caught up to, and then we'd have to make another jump and then get caught up to, so it's always been a little bit of cat and mouse with developing and innovating. So I think that's just because that we feel like it's been kind of that chase game since the inception. That's just kind of how we position ourselves now is always trying to just set the new bar. And we really started taking that seriously a year and a half ago and decided this is what we want to be doing and really pushing the limits.

So we invested in an engineer and being able to just iterate on a dime, a new paddle every couple of days, stuff like that, just really trying to, and not being afraid to fail. That was a big thing too. And it's just really trying to just push things that haven't been done before. And if they don't work, cool, at least we tried it out. But I don't think you're going to get anywhere in this sport or any industry without really trying new things. And I think that's really what's setting us apart so far is just being different.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. And so you're constantly trying to look for that next thing because if you create a great product, it's going to be knocked off, it's going to be duplicated, other competitors going to catch up, and so no product lasts forever. So you got to be constantly reinventing. You've got the advantage in that you both play pickleball, you're both in the sport, but what else are you doing? Are you going to tournaments and talking to players and finding out what they want, what they're frustrated with, how are you, any insights that other brands can latch onto for how you're iterating and coming up with those next designs?

Garrett:

I think the really cool part about this sport is it has such a passionate customer base and really strong following, and you are able to track that on a lot of different levels. And I'll let Kyle kind of take over, but there's so many different platforms and channels to reach our customer and to get feedback. And we have a lot of ambassadors and we have a Discord channel and a lot of reviews, whether it be our website directly or YouTube. So there's just a lot of ways to get feedback and really have what we feel is a beat on what's going on in the world and what people are looking for.

Brett:

That's so great. Yeah. I want to talk about the marketing and growth side too, but before we do that, what are you doing to create feedback loops and to create mechanisms and opportunities where you can hear directly from your customer?

Kyle:

Yeah, for sure. So I mean, I think kind of like you mentioned at the highest level, if I think top down it's number one, the company is full of people who are passionate about pickleball players or passionate about pickleball rather. So Garrett and I are both pickleball players. Most of our team, if not all of them, are really passionate about the sport across all different skill levels. I also think that's important too. I think if it was just people at a very high level, we wouldn't be able to think holistically about the industry. So we kind of touch every aspect. We are our customers, so that's most important. And then I think going down the different level, the different tiers that I would think about it is next is our athletes. You already mentioned that we sponsor a bunch of different athletes on the pro level and the pro scene.

Garrett's working with them very closely to get them prototypes, get feedback on a regular basis outside of what he can gather himself. So you have that at a very, very high level. The athletes that we're actually sponsoring and you go down one tier below that, we have our affiliates that we work with, and these are the hardcore paddle reviewers, like the paddle heads that know every spec of every brand, all of that sort of thing. These people exist and they're really great for getting feedback as well because while they're maybe not as skilled as some of the pro athletes, arguably they know more about paddles than the athletes do. So you kind of get that perspective. And then maybe one tier below that is our ambassadors. So we have thousands of ambassadors, mostly in the US but really globally. And so we get paddles and product in their hands and whether we want them to or not, they give us a lot of feedback.

We have a closed community with them and they're telling us all the time what they, what they don't like, new product ideas. All of that is kind of built in, which has been really cool. And then I guess one level further below that is just our regular customers. So we use what you would assume different apps and tools to solicit feedback, product reviews, and just frankly emailing people as well whenever we need to. We'll just straight up ask them for feedback if they've bought a product. So that kind of covers many different people and many different stages. It really just depends on the product that we're trying to launch,

Brett:

Covers all the skillset levels and all the use cases and different types of buyers. And so it makes a lot of sense. I want to actually talk about each of those groups a little bit, but let's start with the ambassadors. So this is going to be different skill levels. Maybe some of those are competing, maybe some of 'em are not, they're just playing with their family or whatever. How are you identifying potential ambassadors and then what does that program look like?

Kyle:

Yeah, so lucky for us, we've mostly built that program with inbound. We've never really solicited ambassadors. It's just a form on our website. People share it with their friends, they're excited about the brand. I think that's a big part of this is we've built a strong brand that people want to be a part of, so they're applying. So they fill out this pretty thorough form, essentially trying to become an ambassador and our community manager vets all of them and makes sure that they're a good fit for us both in culture is probably the most important thing. Trying to make sure that frankly they're a good person ideally and someone we want representing the brand. But sometimes that's hard in a form, but we do the best we can. And then outside of that, we're looking at all different attributes, things like how good are you at the game, but also how involved you are in the community and what you are doing or what you can do to promote our products. So I mean to boil it down, I would say our ambassadors usually fit in a couple of different buckets. One of them is just the best player at your local courts. Ideally that person is repping our product, kind of that aspirational the person you want to be. Then you also have the person who's heavily the

Brett:

Person or the doubles team that they're winning all the local tournaments, what paddle are they

Kyle:

Using? If you're getting crushed by someone or a team that's using CRBN, you're going to give it another look. Then you also have the people that are just heavily involved in the community, whether they're the person club president or the one putting on little local tournaments, influencer in person locally. So that person's great. And then another bucket I would say are pickleball coaches. So those are the people that are giving people lessons, teaching them the basics or even more advanced level tips and stuff like that. What paddle are they using and what paddles are they promoting? That's hugely influential I would say. And so we just want to get as many of those people as possible and that's been a fun experience kind of vetting all the applicants that we get and building out that community.

Brett:

It's such a smart approach where you're looking at, hey, who has the eyes and ears and the influence of our target audience, and then how do we build a relationship with them? Because I think a lot of brands that we talk to really are just leaning into paid ads. And obviously I love ads, we're running an ad agency, so big believer, but the more you can do to brand build, to build a community, to get a following, to get other people out there, becoming ambassadors for you makes everything work better. So any success stories you want to call out from the ambassador program? I think this is something that a lot of brands are missing. Obviously it's a little easier for you because this is a product that is part of a community anyway and it's growing and it's fun and people like to talk about it a little harder if you're selling pain cream or something like that. But any ambassador success stories you can talk about.

Kyle:

Yeah, sure. I think mean you hit on it like you just said, there are some advantages because our product lends itself to being out in the public and in these communities. But I think the one thing, if you can figure it out, if you're a business owner and you can figure out how to build something like this, the cool thing is it's a perfect program for a bootstrapped business or one that's got a tight budget early on. This is something we were able to build just with our effort early on in the business. We didn't have a ton of funds for advertising or hiring a nationwide sales team. I think a lot of the bigger brands don't take the time to build out these grassroots efforts because they're just like, well, we'll just hire a sales team.

Brett:

Totally.

Kyle:

And yeah, that actually is effective, but in a different way. Those people are going after retailers. We want to influence the people on the ground at the courts. So I think it's just one of many different marketing tactics people should probably be using. But for us it was once we identified big how community focused pickleball was as a sport, it was a no brainer. So I think if there's any sort of community aspect to your industry, this is a perfect fit, some version of this.

Brett:

How do you incentivize your ambassadors? Are you giving them discounted product free product? Are you paying them affiliate commissions? And obviously you don't have to share anything that's confidential, but how are you incentivizing your ambassadors?

Kyle:

Yeah, no, happy to share. I mean, it's public on the application itself. So yeah, they're unpaid outside of commission that they drive through sales, and then they also get heavily discounted product. So perfect. Again, cashflow wise, it's great. I mean we're paying them after they've made the sale. It makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint and they're really excited to do it. They love the brand and they want more swag, more gear, more everything and just be as kitted out as possible I guess on the courts.

Brett:

Very cool. I want to talk about some of those other groups in a second as well, but I got a question for you, Gary, because I think this is interesting. You are a unique business in that you are the founder and you're a customer and you've got this great story. How much are you in your marketing? How much are you leaning into that founder's story versus just leaning into the brand and maybe athletes and affiliates and things like that? How do you strike that balance? Because there's this classic story of Wendy's, right? Where Dave Thompson, I believe is the founder and always they'd hire a new ad agency and the ad agency's like, well, let's get Dave out of the commercials. I want to get Dave, but nothing performed as well as having Dave in the commercials. I think it's good to have a good mix of things, but what's your philosophy on that, you being in your ads versus just leaning on the brand or other spokespeople?

Garrett:

Yeah, I mean, I don't dunno the exact percentage split, but we're definitely using that founder story and I think to pretty great success with that. I mean, like you said, I think we're getting pretty solid feedback when we do talk about my story or my journey into starting this business. It's something that a lot of people can relate to. It's a very personal story and as much as it can be awkward for me and a little, because I definitely don't want to be in the limelight, but it's cool to be able to share something that I'm passionate about and where the brand is going from my point of view. But yeah, I let Kyle kind of finish that up, but

Kyle:

I can chime in here. Garrett's a super humble guy and frankly he doesn't like being in front of the camera. He doesn't like putting his story out there and it's been something that I've been working on with him for years basically is just convincing him that this is a story that people want to hear. And absolutely, we we're well known in the pickleball industry, but we are not one of the big, big guys in the space. There is a unique aspect to us is that we are a fairly lean team. We're pretty young in our overall business journey and people want to buy from people and you tell Garrett's story and people want to buy from him and talk to him. And so from an email marketing standpoint, a lot of the emails Garrett's writing because people want to hear from him. A lot of these big brands don't have the ability to do that because the founders or the business owners are long gone. They're not part of that. And I think it's something we can take advantage of right now because Garrett is in the weeds and I think again, he doesn't love it. But we'll continue to double down on that story because I think it's a compelling one.

Brett:

And I think Dave from Wendy's didn't like it either. I think he wanted to get out of it. I think it wasn't just the ad agencies, but he never did because it always worked. And I think it's a competitive advantage for you guys, just like you said, lean into it. As you grow, there's going to be more and more people that just come to the brand because their favorite pickleball athlete use it or some friend or they just see an ad or they see it on Amazon and they buy it and they love it. But that's something you got to lean into for now, and I think it's going to continue to pay dividends. It's really interesting. We get to audit dozens of great brands, Google ads and YouTube and Amazon and stuff, and just audit a really large pet brand. I can't say who it was or who it is, but they've got these hero videos and they're funny and they're so good and they work really well.

We're going to lean into them on YouTube, but then they have these founder story videos and it's literally just the founder, one dude on camera talking about why he designed the product. And I know it costs almost nothing and not nothing, it looks good, but the comparison of the two, the hero video and that founder video and the CPAs are about the same. The founder video, they just work. So I think you got to always lean into that because people are going to resonate with that story. So love that. Glad to hear you're doing that. Let's talk a little bit about athletes for a minute. So is this something you started doing from the beginning like, Hey, let's go sponsor athletes and we're at a stage in the development of pickleball where this is not the NBA where we're going to pay somebody millions and millions of dollars to be an athlete that reps our products or is the athlete thing, is that more new for you?

Garrett:

I'll start, I guess, but I think, so the first few months before Kyle came on into the company, I have very little internet marketing experience to almost none. And so the lowest hanging fruit was to sponsor local pros around me that I knew and that were already advocates of the paddle. So it was just kind of a really easy match. They wanted to use it, and so it made a really easy relationship. Even fast forward to now, we still do sponsor a good amount of athletes because it's just really good to see those eyeballs on it. But I, there's a lot of importance on what Kyle's doing, and so I think that's really even split at this point.

Kyle:

Yeah, I mean, one thing I would say too, Garrett, I have to assume early on, well, I guess always taken inspiration from that southern California surfing industry.

Totally. Garrett and I grew up in Southern California together by the beach every day as much as possible. And so we grew up around these brands that were created in Southern California, and so much of the marketing was sponsoring surfers. And so much of what we take inspiration from is the look the field, the vibe that we're going for as a brand, but also that as well. I think that's what Garrett knew these companies were doing. We followed a similar model, and I will say we were lucky when we were kind of early days of CRBN. The pro scene of pickleball was still kind of in its infancy. It had been around for years, but it was just starting to really garner some momentum. And so you could argue ton

Brett:

Of money flowing at that point either, right? Nobody's getting necessarily rich off of being a pro pickleball player

Kyle:

Exactly early on. So it like it matched our growth. So it was like the money that was needed to sponsor a pro pickleball player was matching the money we could afford, if that makes sense. So like you said, if I were to start a basketball shoe company today, you can't afford any of the NBA athletes, but at the time we could afford pickleball athletes. It's changed drastically very quickly, but it's still a big part of our strategy. I think what I've been able to do is combine what Garrett has done, which is that grassroots effort. These players are playing with it, people see it, they get influenced, they want to buy with the digital set of things. So when we sign athletes, we're looking at white listing ads with them, creating ad content, how can we leverage their likeness everywhere in ads, but also on our website, all our landing pages, everything to just really get the most, maximize the exposure and also the benefits that come from sponsoring these people.

Brett:

Super smart. I think that that's where you really can make a sponsorship pay for itself. You never know. You sponsor an athlete and then you may find out, yeah, they're not really that outspoken about my product, but if you structure where, hey, we're getting videos with this athlete and then we're going to create mashups with other athletes, we're going to run this in our ads, we're going to put it on the website, we're going to put it everywhere, emails, things like that. Now you are almost guaranteeing an ROI for that sponsorship, so very cool. So we've got these three A's right, athletes, affiliates, the ambassadors. Let's pivot to another A really quickly, then we come back to affiliates if we have time. But Amazon, so we met at an Amazon event in Seattle, which was super fun, but I was just a dude there attending and talking to people. You guys were guys were rising stars at the Accelerate conference. I met you guys, you had Jean jackets on with your logo and Amazon Rising Stars on it. But in all seriousness, you guys were featured by Amazon ads because you've just seen tremendous growth on the platform. I think I got a little card with my paddle that said 14 x growth, something crazy like that. But how are you guys viewing Amazon as a channel and then Amazon ads as a means to accelerate growth on Amazon?

Kyle:

Yeah, I can take that one. I think for us, our strategy frankly from the beginning is that we want to sell our products and our paddles to anyone wherever they want to buy them. And I mean if you look at just the internet, obviously that includes our website. It includes Amazon is a huge player, it includes some of the other big online retailers of pickleball equipment, but that also includes brick and mortar retail. So we sell quite a bit into retail. So we are pretty well diversified and we just want to be in front of customers wherever they want to shop. So Amazon, a lot can be said about Amazon, good and bad, but there are a lot of customers on Amazon and if they want to buy us there, we want to be there. So that's been our strategy from the beginning and we've had good success.

And I think because of that success and some of the relationships I had kind of gathered over the years with the pet business, we were able to kind of get that unique opportunity to be part of their season. One of Rising Stars, this new kind of series, this program that they've developed, that program I guess is they have it overseas and it was really successful. And then now they're bringing it to the US for the first time. So I know they're doing season two and doubling down on this. And it was a good opportunity to get a ton of content shot about our company and get some good PR and free marketing and free marketing is the best kind of marketing, I guess. So it was a good experience.

Brett:

Cannot beat that. Yeah, it was really great little documentary they put together that Amazon ads put together about CRBN pickleball and a few other brands. And so what a really cool experience to see that. And I love the way you frame that, Kyle, because we're now working with larger brands and more Omni-channel or multi-channel brands. That's really where things are headed. We've worked with Native for years and years now, and I can't really share any details there, but they started as D two C only and then when p and g bought them, P g's playbook is really retail store, that's where they grown, where they take a brand from millions to billions.

But this is what we're seeing a lot of where as we talk to bigger brands and help them craft some of their strategies, it's often retail stores are their biggest source of distribution, Amazon's second or sometimes those are flip flopped, and then D two C is third. And that's even true for brands that started D two C, but now they're just expanding. And I think it makes a lot of sense. There's still so many things that we like to buy in store trying, holding it, seeing the paddle, comparing the paddle to other paddles, or we want to buy online, we just want to buy on Amazon because it's easier and it's simpler and we can check out in seconds type of thing. So I love that approach. How do you guys view Amazon ads as that? And obviously you're a rising star there and they featured you, so you must believe in it, but how do you look at Amazon ads compared to just organic growth on Amazon?

Kyle:

Yeah, I mean Amazon ads are hugely important in my opinion, and can be hugely profitable if you do it. I think my opinion is Amazon ads are probably the most straightforward ad platform online. Totally. I mean, everyone's got their credit card out ready to shop. Conversion rates are nuts on Amazon compared to other channels. So I think it's very straightforward. It's like the most bottom of funnel traffic you could probably go after. So it's a no brainer. Obviously you need someone to be managing the ads that knows what they're doing or you need to take a course or learn it yourself or whatever. But pretty much everybody should be running ads if you're going to be selling on Amazon, I guess is my answer.

Brett:

Totally, totally. And I love that. I fully agree with that. We run an agency, obviously we offer it as a service, but we partner with Ezra Firestone and Smart marketer built an Amazon ads course just so people like it. There's a lot of people that want to learn, and at a base level, it's not rocket science. You can learn it and grow using it. And so one of the things you guys do on Amazon though that I think is so, so important, and this is what we've been telling brands for years on Amazon, is it's not just about making a sale on Amazon, it's about building a brand. You guys have an amazing storefront, you have an amazing presence. As I look at your paddles and what you're doing on Amazon, I feel like I'm buying a quality product. And then later if someone said, oh, what kind of paddle is that? I wouldn't say, oh, it's just something I bought on Amazon. I'm not really sure. I'd be like, no, this is a CRBN paddle. And I think that's a good litmus test is like, hey, if someone's telling somebody else about what they just bought, are they saying, oh, it's just something I bought on Amazon, or are they saying it's this brand? And I think you guys are definitely in that category of this brand. People are talking about you. How do you guys approach the brand building side of Amazon?

Kyle:

Well, I mean if we're talking specific to Amazon, I think it's lucky in that we're doing all that work for our website and retailers already. So a lot of times we're just taking similar content and repurposing it. I mean, Amazon has a whole slew of different requirements and different strategies you can implement when it comes to content. But yeah, we're just repurposing. Luckily we shoot a lot of stuff with our pros and a lot of different influencers and content producers. So we have a ton of lifestyle content that we just slap in a different format and put on Amazon. And that's been great. And I totally agree with you. Anything you can do on Amazon to stand out as a brand is hugely beneficial. It's a huge marketplace with every product under the sun. So anytime that you can get your logo and your brand in there and tell a story, it's worth it.

Brett:

And I think what a growing trend is, so many people have bought something on Amazon without really digging in and then they were kind of burned to buy it. And so I think there's definitely a trend where people want to buy from brands from quality, reputable brands. And so we got to lean into that. And the way I like to frame it is if I go to Best Buy and I want to buy an Apple product, it's not just an Apple products sitting on a shelf. I'm going to the store within a store, the little Apple store within Best Buy. I think that's what you should try to create for your brand. So where someone's shopping on Amazon, it's like, no, I'm experiencing CRBN. I just happen to be shopping on. And

Kyle:

I think Amazon realizes that and has started doubling down on that. I mean, every new feature they come out with is giving you more and more ability to do that. So you mentioned the storefront, same thing. We sell complimentary products, accessories and all kinds of different things. We want people to check out our store and see that we sell bags in addition to paddles for example. Those are the cheapest sales when people do that. You don't have to run ads to sell them on it.

Brett:

Absolutely. They're getting those add-ons and Hey, I've got the paddle, I love the paddle. Let me just load up with CRBN gear so I can look cool at the next pickleball tournament, make up with people jealous. But let's talk. So I want to to circle back to affiliates in just a second, but what's next? And Suge, maybe you take this on the product side. I know you may just have to tease, this may have to keep things under wraps, but what's next for CRBN?

Garrett:

So we're always coming out with new fun accessories, stuff like that. But I think most importantly, we're a paddle company, so that's where we spend all of our resources on innovation and engineering. And so we've been working on a new paddle line for the better part of a year now. And honestly, it's been just a grind trying to figure out a totally new platform for a paddle. And it's something that we're really excited about and something that we think has a potential to really change the game and change how people look at a paddle. Because right now it's just a very, not linear, but it's just the way that paddles are made right now is it's just kind of very one sided and they're like, this is how they're made and this is how they're always be kind of that. So we're just trying to flip that on its end, try something new and just say, Hey, it's not only this, it can be this or this or this. And so we're just trying to really branch out like that. So we're excited. We'll hopefully be able to announce something within the next couple months here.

Brett:

Really cool. Can't wait to see it. I love that awareness of your brand and what the brand is all about, but also what drives you, what propels you. And I think it's similar. We talked about some of the bigger brands. If you take Nike or something, they are a shoe company. Obviously the accessories and the apparel all super, super important. But I got to think that without the shoes, nothing else really has momentum. And if the shoes really fall off the map and the shoes are no longer cool, they're no longer great, I'm not going to buy the shorts either. Right? And so you guys understanding that, that you're a paddle first brand just makes a ton of sense, so very cool. Kyle, what tips, insights can you give us on affiliates? How are you finding affiliates? How is that working and is that a significant part of your growth?

Kyle:

Yeah, it's definitely a significant part. I think differing from ambassadors a little bit, I think affiliates are more of a quality over quantity play. I mean, at that level where someone has got a serious blog or social media presence or podcast or YouTube channel or fill in the blank, this is person's job or side hustle, they're focused on it and you want the best of the best that is speaking to your audience. I mean, the difference in conversion rate between the best people and the worst people is massive. And I think, yeah, we try to work with most people, but we really focus on the best people that align with our beliefs and goals, but also can sell a lot of paddles. And I think we've tried to be good partners to them. I think that's a big part of it too, is don't take them for granted.

Don't treat them like they don't matter because they do. And I think being really honest and transparent with them has been huge for us as well. I think some other brands have gotten themselves into trouble where they try to overly influenced whatever would be a review, will be on a paddle or frankly they get upset if their paddle is not reviewed. Five stars across the board. I think for us, we want our products to do the talking. Of course, I prefer someone to give us an a plus rating, but we understand things are subjective, so we want these reviewers to be authentic. And I think giving them the ability to be authentic and encouraging it is refreshing for them. So all of those things, I think most industries have these affiliates that are living somewhere and you just got to go find them and reach out and convince them that they should take the time to look at your products.

Brett:

That's really great. I love the idea that let the affiliates say what they say, let it be authentic and real. I can always tell, and I think most people can, when you watch a video and you're like, does this person really like this product? Are they really using this product or is this just a performance and they're just doing this to sell some stuff? I think a lot of times you can tell, you can sense it. Are you taking the approach where you're pretty open about who you accept as an affiliate, but then you're putting your time and resources in to those who really prove themselves that they can drive sales? Or are you pretty picky about letting someone join the program in the first place?

Kyle:

Yeah, I think we're kind of somewhere in between. I would say we're fairly picky when it comes to affiliates, but I mean if we see promise in someone, we're definitely going to double down on that. So what I mean by that is maybe they have a low, small following, but we can see the potential. I mean, this sport is so new and it's growing so fast. We've had success in kind of trying to pick the diamonds out of the rough kind of thing. You see the trajectory that people are on or that they're doing good things, it's only a matter of time until they're going to take off. So we've invested in kind of those early stage content creators, athletes, really across the board we've invested in taking flyers on people who we see promising.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so cool. I mean the industry is a rocket ship. You guys are a rocket ship, but you're doing things the right way. You're building community, you're taking risks on product, you're iterating, you're getting feedback from people, you've got multiple channels that you're using for distribution and for growth. And so love what you guys are doing. I'm going to keep watching. I'm going to be a fan on the sidelines. And also I've got your paddle. I can't wait to play. I'm very inexperienced player, but I do like it. I can't wait to track the paddle. So I'll let you guys know how it goes when I do. Awesome. If I dominate my kids on the court, I'll definitely give you guys the credit for that. So it's awesome. Hey, as people are listening and or watching, if they say, man, I want to check out CRBN pickleball paddles, where can they find it? Where can they connect with you online?

Kyle:

Just everywhere. It's at CRBN Pickleball, so CRBN pickleball and it's CRBN pickleball.com. So check us out.

Brett:

Awesome. And now in a growing number of retailers as well, so people can buy it in store and it sounds like that's really growing, so very cool. And then are you guys active on the socials? You guys like sharing the entrepreneurial journey anywhere? Are you mostly working under the CRBN

Kyle:

Name? We're pretty private. I would say just follow all the CRBN channels and when I make Garrett share stuff about himself, it'll be there.

Brett:

That's awesome. Alright, well Garrett, Kyle, so much fun. Love what you guys are doing. Keep up with the good work and really appreciate the time.

Garrett:

Awesome. Thanks Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. And thank you for tuning in as always. We'd love to hear from you. What do you think about the show? Leave us a review on iTunes if you've not done that. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.