Ever wondered how a razor company slices through the competition?

Tune into our latest episode where Ashly Knox from Henson Razors reveals how an aerospace machinist and a team of digital marketing wizards turned a single product into an 8-figure sensation.

Forget discounts and flashy gimmicks—Henson Razors is all about precision, focusing on one stellar product, and keeping a laser focus on cash flow and financial health.

Ashly’s got the inside scoop on the principles that are driving their phenomenal growth so get ready for some sharp insights and a fresh take on eCommerce success!

‍

Key topics and lessons:

• How Henson Razors achieved 8-figure success by selling a single premium product with no discounts, subscriptions, or gimmicks.
  
  
• Why focusing relentlessly on making the first purchase profitable is critical for cash flow and sustainable growth.
  
  
• How Henson uses creative constraints and the power of saying no to stay laser-focused on what matters most.
  
  
• Mastering inventory management and the cash conversion cycle to steadily scale the business.
  
  
• Why manually tracking key metrics helps develop invaluable business intuition before automating reports.
  
  
• Doubling down on 1-2 acquisition channels that work rather than chasing every new trend.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction to Henson Shaving

(08:55) Reducing Irritation + Secondary Benefits

(14:56) First Order Profitability and Low Acquisition Costs

(24:41) Why The Philosophy of No Promos, No Discounts

(29:46) Understanding Cash Flow 

(38:28) Inventory Management

(41:06) The Power of Focus

(45:20) Focusing Your Acquisition Channels

(49:26) Conclusion

---

Show Notes:

• Ashly Knox (LinkedIn)
• Henson Shaving
• Ezra Firestone (LinkedIn)
• Boom by Cindy Joseph
• Sean Frank (LinkedIn)
• Ridge
• Taylor Holiday (LinkedIn)

---

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:

Ashly:

I've just seen it often enough to say that operators will take a win, a quick win, and then the temptation is to exploit that win as much as possible instead of sort of backing away from it and going, why did we get those results? And are we happy with that as an ongoing part of our strategy or not?

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 my guest today is Ashly Knox of Henson's Razors. And what I'm really excited about here is this is a company that does no promos, no discounts, no email popups, they're not on Amazon. They essentially have one product. They're doing eight figures online. They're extremely profitable. And so we're going to show you how, talk about the operational philosophy and what's working right now for hints and razors. And so with that, Ashly, welcome to the show and how's it going? Thanks,

Ashly:

Brett. Yeah, going great. Thanks for having me.

Brett:

Yeah, thanks for coming on, man. And such a great story. As you and I were prepping and we were kind of talking about the hints and razor story, I was like, man, this is unique. This is definitely unique to the space of razors because talk about a space that's a little gimmicky, right? Let's pack 15 razors on this little shaver, and so if this brand's got four, we need five and then let's go six or whatever. And then let's do extreme discounts or discounts on the front end to hook you on a subscription on the backend. Let's charge you a dollar for some kind of club that we got going on type of thing. And you guys really came in and said, no, not going to do any of that. Just simple, great product, fair price, no gimmicks. And so let's dive into that a little bit. First of all, what was the genesis of this? Because I think if you were to sit down and talk to some e-commerce experts and you were to ask, Hey, what category should I get in? I'd like to build an eight figure E-commerce brand. Razors would probably not be at the top of that list. So how did you get going here?

Ashly:

Yeah, so it's sort of a little bit of a bizarre story because Henson is this weird mix of aerospace machinists and digital marketers, e-commerce guys, operators. And so back in the pandemic, actually the aerospace machinists are one of our co-founders. They mix parts for satellites, parts for Mars rovers, legitimately hard to make very in demand aerospace parts, legitimately and sort of just through a series of circumstances during the pandemic where a lot of those projects got either paused or shut down, they had to pivot. And so one of the machinists over there was like, I think we could make a safety eraser. And so they did. And when they did it and it was actually good, they came over to us and okay, well here, what do you think? And could you sell it? And we're like, well, we can sell anything. Sure. And we really just thought, honestly spoken

Brett:

A true marketer, can we do it? Yes.

Ashly:

How many is tbd, right? We honestly thought it would be a little side project. We'll spin up a Shopify store, we'll put it online, we'll help these guys out and we'll see what happens. And then it just took off. So that's sort of the genesis, but then leading into your intro there, because we had this product that was well made and sort of functional. Again, remember this wasn't like a bunch of MBA guys getting together saying what business model should be attacked? This was aerospace machinists looking at cutting forces and angles and going, how do I make this tool as efficient as I can? So that was the genesis of the product. So then for us as marketers, we said, well, how do we build our brand and marketing effort around that, which I think other brands do, but sometimes it's very often the other way.

It's sort of like business approach. How do I get ebitda? How do I get high lifetime value? It's all the things that e-commerce operators want to get, and those are the driving forces, not product necessarily. For us, it was entirely about the product. So since the product was well made efficient, lasts a lifetime, uses 10 cent blades, we're like, we don't want to do subscriptions or clubs or any of that stuff. We just want to sell it on its merit, which means no recurring revenue for us because you buy it once, use it forever. We don't even make the blades. We don't really make money on them. They're 10 cents. We don't sell any other products currently. So our business model is actually terrible. It's garbage. You wouldn't want to do it the way we're doing if you had your choice, right? Because that razor razor blade model is highly profitable.

You sell the handle no money or very low profit, you sell the consumable part of high profit, and that's how you get your high LTV and your profit over time. That's what all the big guys do. What if you go to a jug store and look at the razor aisle? That's what you're looking at, the razor razor blade model. And we just said, well, they're already there. They're already doing that. Our product doesn't really need that kind of bells and whistles. Let's just see if we can sell it as it is and see if we can get that to be a profitable business and we can. So now that we can, we're like, okay, there's an interesting sort of lesson here, which is what if you just sort of focus on a really streamlined, doing something as a very simple sort of effort, putting all of your eggs in the let's make that thing profitable. And then from there, from that sort of profitable foundation, then you can start to expand things. Because trust me, we would love higher lifetime value. We would love all the things that all those other models have more intrinsically, but now we have the upside of trying to build on them in a way that has a really strong base, if that makes sense.

Brett:

Yeah, it totally makes sense. And yeah, there's nothing wrong with the model that those bigger razor companies have. In fact, I think if you looked at purely the math and purely the business model, you would probably favor one of those models. But you have a superior product literally designed by aerospace engineers. And so you've got to lean into that. And it turns out as you try to sell this and sell this the way that you have, it resonated with people. The marketplace was hungry for a product like this. And it's interesting, mention a company, they're out of business now. So think it's okay if I mention them where they came out with 99 cent razor. So this is not Dollar Shave Club, this is 99 cent Razor Club. I'm like, come on. Really? No innovation there. That's just let's be more gimmicky than the last. But you guys said no, it's going to be simple, straightforward, awesome. Razor, let's go. So as you were launching this, when did you understand, man, we've got product market fit here, this product and the way we're structuring the message, this is resonating. I'd

Ashly:

Say it happens pretty quick. Probably within the first eight to 12 months we're like, oh boys, there's actually a market here. People like this. As soon as we started to get enough feedback, I think probably the switch for us was when we started to realize that we were actually winning cartridge users. There's lots of safety reasons around for over a hundred, the actual fundamental design isn't necessarily that's new. How we make it is very innovative, and the devil's in the details for sure, but safety raisers has been around forever. We're not the first safety raiser by any stretch. So early on we were selling to people that already had familiarity with safety raisers. As we started to win more and more people coming from the drugstore, sort of multi-blade cartridge razors and saying they much preferred ours. We're like, okay, we're onto something. Because now this market, our total addressable market isn't just that group that had familiarity with safety razors, it's everyone. And that happened within the first year. So that was when, okay, holy crap, we're onto something

Brett:

Super interesting. So talk about the difference here in the quality. And we were just talking before we hit record. I got served one of your ads on meta recently. It was brilliant. But explain to people that are like, well, why should I trade in my four or five razor setup here to go with something like the instrument?

Ashly:

Yeah, I mean fundamentally, so there's a couple of things that we know to be true. One is that two thirds of men still expect irritation when they shave. That's a really high number for a category that's been around as long as shaving has. That's a really high number of bad outcomes. I actually can't really think of any other product category that's that well used that has that many bad outcomes, right? Yeah.

Brett:

60% of you will use this product, you'll feel horrible afterwards. You'll have bumps, you'll have whatever.

Ashly:

But we're guys, we just keep using it idiots. So because that's true, fundamentally, if irritation is something you would like less of, you need to use a single blade just full stop, less blades, less friction. It's fundamental, not pitching hens in here. Just go and get a safety razor single blade better for your skin. So that's one thing specifically for us, it really has to do with how we support the blade. Something to get too boring here, but think of anything you would use to cut. You're cutting carrots at home, you're sawing a piece or whatever it is, you would never want to cut anything with a blade that's not supported. Well, you wouldn't want the blade moving, vibrating, flexing, bending. You wouldn't have as much control, just fundamentally wouldn't have as much control. And that's what these aerospace machinists really identified when they were making their first design for the razor was they're not holding the blade well enough.

And remember their whole job is doing very specific cuts on titanium, really hard metals that have to be within 12 microns of tolerance, very difficult things to do so they understand cutting action blade support, all these things as good as anyone on earth. So that was sort of the consistent flaw. Multi blades, other safety razors, disposable razors, none of them support the blade well enough to hold it rigid. Their design and then the manufacturing execution of that design is what lets us do that, which means you just have less of those less collateral damage when you shave, right? You want to cut the hair and not your skin. In a perfect world that's much easier to control when you have a blade that's not going to move.

Brett:

Interesting. And so as you listen to customers, hear from customers, what are the main selling points? What are people either buying it for originally or what are they most delighted with after the fact? I'm assuming it's a combination of what you just said, but curious there

Ashly:

Definitely people are hoping to have less irritation. It's still our number one reason why people buy it. What's interesting though is in the data that we have on this is there's a few benefits that people really like once they own it, but aren't necessarily big reasons to buy, which is a little unique. I'm not sure I've really seen that before. So two examples would be one, the sustainability piece. There's no plastic in our blades or a razor. The blades are recyclable. Our packaging has no plastic. There's just no plastic anywhere involved in anything we do. And I think there are certainly some people that might buy for that reason, they like it, but really they're buying it for the precision or the lack of irritation. But then once they own it, they're happy that they're not polluting. The other one is the cost. So we're $70 us to buy a raiser.

I understand that's more than the $9 raiser you might buy at the store because the blades of 10 cents, instead of say $3 for a cartridge, they're 30 times less. The consumable part is 30 times less. So over time you're spending less. And that's sort of a tricky thing to pitch people on when there's the dollar shaves and there's all these perceived to be cheap options out there, even though they add up over time, it's not really how people's brains work. Totally. So that cost of ownership, while some people go, oh, that's neat. It's really once they own it, they're like, okay, wait, I just bought my razor. I bought a pack of a hundred blades, which we sell on our site for $10, right? A hundred blades that'll last you three, four years. So once they have that at home and they try it and then they're like, okay, I'm now two years in and I still haven't spent anything else.

I'm now three years in and I still haven't spent another cent. Then they're like, okay, this is great. Because a lot of people used to go into Costco getting those big sheets of cart razors for 40 or 50 bucks and going, oh, that sucked, but oh, well, they just don't have to do that anymore. So yes, there's that upfront cost, but then once they own it, so that's just kind of a weird dynamic I've seen where the sustainability and the cost of ownership when you own the product, people can't stop raving about that, but it's not totally why they buy it, which is sort of a unique scenario.

Brett:

I think it's really important to note that those are kind of secondary benefits. They're meaningful and people will likely talk about them. And I'm sure your power users, your most passionate customers, they're telling their friends and they're talking about the long-term cost savings. But that is secondary, right? I'm not thinking like, okay, I would like to save. I'm budgeting out my razors for the next three years. I'd really like to save a little bit here. That's not enough to get me to switch, but less irritation or understanding that every time I shave, I've got bumps, I've got nicks, I've got scratches, I'm bleeding. This is enough, is enough. That's really where you win people over. And so that makes sense and I think that's really important for everybody to kind of outline what are my primary benefits, what's the real reason someone will switch, may not be the reason they stay, but it's the reason they switch.

So really important to call out. Well, let's kind of dive in. We walked through your operating tenants, and I love these. I think these are, there's lessons packed in here, and so we're just going to kind of go through this and have a dialogue on it. But I know one of your operating tenants, and this lines up with my buddy Sean Frank from Ridge, is first order profitability. Now, I think it's probably obvious why you guys do this, but talk a little bit about that. Why first order profitability and how does that impact what you do?

Ashly:

So for us, it's a bit of a necessity for sure. When you sell one product that people are going to use forever, you have to, if you want to make money and we do, then you have to make money on that first transaction. We sort of don't have any other option currently, but what that does, so that requirement really forces a very pragmatic approach to everything that we do because we don't have any get out of jail cards to play. And this is what we see in e-commerce all the time where they're like they're do some acquisition channel that maybe they haven't cracked or maybe they haven't totally solved and it's got a really high acquisition cost. Yeah, but maybe we'll make up for that later. Or there's just a lot of the fundamentals of an approach for us don't, as you mentioned off the top, we don't really email our customers almost at all. If you buy a razor, we'll give you tips on how to use it and take care of it, but we don't really email them because why we have nothing else to sell them. And so you can imagine every day we get pitched dozens of email vendors being like, why aren't you emailing your customers? And I go, what would we tell them? They have the thing that we sell.

But that lens allows us to really focus. We really, really focus. And the thing, when I talk to other and look at the landscape, I'll look at companies that are, I don't mean to necessarily compare revenue, but just in this context might be doing a 10th of our revenue and they have three times the employees and are working on six times the marketing efforts. And I'm just like, you're too small to be that diverse. You have to really focus on making something work, whether that's an acquisition channel or a product or whatever it is, a campaign. You have to focus on making it work. And that doesn't mean you can't test things, but that's all you're doing is testing. You focus on the things that work, you grow them as best as you can, and then you test, you just dabble, you dabble, dabble, dabble, dabble.

It's weird because at Henson, I feel like we're obviously doing really well and we're successful and we're pleased with the macro results. Those little tests that we do, most of them fail, but because we didn't have any real risk associated with, we're not hiring a headcount, we're not spending huge budgets. We know that the core parts of the business are finely tuned machines that are very reliable sources of revenue and profit that we can count on and rely on. And so those tests are only that, and most of them fail unfortunately, but the ones that work, we then nurture into new pillars of the business. So for us, day to day, it actually feels like we're failing all the time, but in reality, we're winning because we focused on the things we're good at.

Brett:

Absolutely, and listen, as we look at this, and I've run a traffic agency now for 14 years and done marketing forever, and there is something real about a CAC LTV ratio, your customer acquisition costs compared to LTV and let's just say for the sake of argument that my average order value is $60 and I know with quite a bit of certainty that I can get someone to purchase three times in the first six months that they're a customer. So maybe I would spend all of the first purchase on customer acquisition. Maybe I would even go in the hole a little bit. And we've worked with some businesses, worked with some brands that do that, that they've got their backend dialed in. They know that once they make a sale, then they've got email followups and they know they've get a certain percentage of people to buy.

So the math works, and you said this, I love the way you framed it, the get out of jail free card that does create or can create someone to become lazy and to say, it's okay. It's okay that this wasn't profitable. We'll make up for it on the back end. That's kind of like everybody's, every agency's favorite pitch or every marketing person. It's like, no, no. Okay, so we lost a lot of money upfront, but we're going to make it all up in the back. You guys don't have the luxury of that. And so you have to hold every dollar accountable upfront, and I think that creates a bit of clarity. It creates a bit of focus. It allows you to say, okay, yes, we're still going to test. You can never really survive and grow a business if you're not testing, but you're going to test in limited quantities so that you can remain first order profitable. So I love that focus and I love that puts on and also think there's this approach that like, hey, constraints lead to creativity, guardrails actually lead to creativity. They don't inhibit it. So any additional thoughts there? Yeah,

Ashly:

I think maybe just the one thing I would build on in that example you talked about there is if you do have a good C to LT V ratio, and there's plenty of businesses that would, and there's certainly different products that lend themselves nack to that, right? I was talking to someone the other day that sells baby food. Well, for the duration that that kid is a baby, they're probably going to be a high use customer. So it's not a forever LTV, but it's a fairly predictable one in that window. And they should exploit that for sure. They should. I'm not opposed to it. The caution is if your fundamentals are bad and if you're leaning on it too much, let's just say that you get a little, like you were saying, almost lazy or something there, or you take your eye off the ball all a little bit and you start to live with that inflated CAC because you're like, I know I have the LTV.

If that happens too long, then all of a sudden you're like, okay, well my ratio's not as good as it was, and then what you do, it's like, well, we have to drive our LTV back up because now our CACs higher, let's make the LTV higher. So we get back to that ratio and now you're doing, here's the reality of e-commerce. The tactics you do to drive a higher LTV are sort of the unpleasant ones very often. They're spamming, they're emailing, they're getting in front of it, it's discounts, it's offers, it's bundling. It's all the sort of trickery that you might do to try to convince enough people to participate in whatever that mechanic is. And then if you end up doing that too long, the thing that I am very wary of is what's your ultimate experience you're delivering at that point? How happy are your customers At that point?

I get the spreadsheets might work and maybe the math is still there, but now you're, you're committed to the hamster wheel of, because I have such a high cac because I took my eye off the ball there and relied on my LTV, but then that went up, so then I had to get that up. Now I'm over here. Now you're on the hamster wheel and good luck at mass. And then you see these brands and even as a consumer, I see it all the time. I'm like, man, the acquisition thing, the ad, the whatever, I liked them bringing me in, but boy, I don't love the experience now that I'm in.

I don't know how many customers love the brute force approach to marketing. I don't think anyone does. I get that the math works because so long as enough people convert on low cost channels, you kind of keep doing it, and that's just never been our approach. We're like, we want actual loyalty. We want be, and we're in a category where that's prevalent, so we're like, let's be different. Let's really focus. So for us, it means focusing always on low acquisition. If we can never take our eye off that ball one, we have to now, but imagine a world where we come out with other products down the road and we could sell them other things, that becomes a benefit for us, not a driver. Absolutely. It becomes something we get to benefit from versus a thing that's driving our focus. LTV would be something we would enjoy having a higher wolf of course, but LTV being high isn't a gun to my head, if that makes sense.

Brett:

Yeah, I really love it. I love the focus and I think it is served you well, and I wish more companies had a more rigid focus on customer acquisition costs. Even those with good. So let's talk about you do no promos, no discounts, no real offers and things like that. This is really important, and I'm not saying you can't run sales. We have clients on varying degrees of the spectrum. Longtime client as a Firestone boom by Cindy Joseph. They would do one sale a year around the holidays, was like a 10% discount. It wasn't major, but they just want to do something for their customers around the holidays. Other than that, nothing. This is our price. It's a great offer. This three six replace your makeup bags type thing's, just a great offer. Newer client we're working with now where they've kind of come to us and they said, Hey, we really can't close deals unless we're running a discount. So it's an awesome product, but they've kind of gotten on this discount hamster wheel, this discount spiral where they've got a discount right now or else it's not working. We've got several ideas we're about to execute for them, which I think will actually help quite a bit. But why the philosophy of no promos, no discounts, no, and how has that worked for you?

Ashly:

Yeah, it's two parts, right? It's the one which we talked about. It's the slippery slope. The hamster wheel. Once you start, are you committed to it and how do you backtrack from it? It's easier to not have to deal with that if you never do it. So that's definitely one of them. The other one is just sort of back to our sort of first principles company is that we're trying to, we really are, in this case as marketers trying to, my job is to show the product's merit, show the product's competence because it's a good product. So that's why a lot of our videos are more explanatory or informative because the average person doesn't really know much about shaving. If we're going to say less irritation, we're going to tell you why instead of just say it.

So it's really because that we want to just have it at a fair price kind of forever and not let it be about anything else. So will we ever do a discount at some point? I don't know. We always reserve the right to try to think about that in the future, but we've never discounted the razor ever. We actually just this month, because I was listening to the Ridge guys talk about how well they do it on Father's Day and we don't, so we did a little free shipping. We actually chart us. Another thing we do, we charge for shipping.

We're so gimmick list, we actually were offering free shipping just for Father's Day as one of those little tests I'm referencing doesn't seem to be moving the needle. So that's just another thing for us. Yeah, another thing for us to say, it's almost like if gimmicks move the needle for you, gimmicks, that might be a little harsh if sales discounts move the needle in some cases, for sure they were. I get, especially if it's a commodity type thing. So it would vary by category or by store. I understand the variables, but as an operator you want to really look at that carefully and the temptation would be is, Ooh, sales are up, let's go. Or it's like, why did sales go up so much?

Are we not off? Are we not convincing the value of the product at the price we'd like to listen for well enough and should we go back and focus on that first? Knowing discounts are always a lever we could pull later. I think that's where people, again, I'm not trying to overgeneralize, I've just seen it often enough to say that operators will take a win, a quick win, and then the temptation is to exploit that win as much as possible instead of backing away from it and going, why did we get those results and are we happy with that as an ongoing part of our strategy or not? I know there's plenty of brands that are having very thoughtful conversations like that. I see a lot that just sort of grab a win and go grab a win and go, and then again, eight months from now you're like, how did we get here? It's like, well, that's the path you chose.

Brett:

Yep. It was one step at a time. I took Brazilian jiujitsu for a little while and it didn't stick. It wasn't my sport, but I really enjoyed parts of it. I remember kind of rolling with some guys and then I would be like, well, how did I end up here? And they're like, well, you made a series of about eight mistakes in a row. I'm like, alright, you're going to need to show me. I have no idea what I just did, but I think the same thing happens in business. How did I end up here? Well, it was not just one thing, but it was several things that kind of led to this spot. I do have a thought related to your email list. Have you ever used the email list to get your customers to buy another razor as a gift? So leading up to Father's Day, Hey, you don't need another one, right? You're set these things last forever, but buy dad one. Have you thought about that? Just curious

Ashly:

A little bit. Yeah, we've dabbled. I think we often send an email on Black Friday usually with no offer or no update just to say Hi, you haven't heard from us. Merry Christmas, whatever. We did one early this week actually for Father's Day. We did exactly that. Hey, friendly reminder, this could make a really nice gift. You get a 36 hour spike for sure. It's like, again, we probably make things too hard on ourselves, but we really resist the temptation because while that spike looks nice for 36 hours of, Hey, look at all this basically free revenue, SEMA costs essentially nothing. It's just a 36 hour spike. It doesn't really change our business at the macro level at all. We sort of are able to see it for what it is and we will strategically it when it makes sense to, but the idea of doing that every two weeks being like, what about a gift now how about now? It's not worth to me, it doesn't seem like it's worth it. I'd rather just do a good job convincing more people that they should try a

Brett:

Razor. Totally makes sense. It's national teacher's day. You want to buy a razor for your teacher, right?

Not really. Probably not. Yeah. Awesome. So one of the next tenets you talk about is understanding cashflow. I love this topic. I think there's definitely a trend in our industry, more people talking about finance and marketing going together. Sean Frank talks about it. My buddy Taylor holiday talks about it quite a bit, but I know this has to do with your cash conversion cycle. How do we turn cash into sales and sales into cash type of thing. So are we turning cash into inventory, inventory into sales sales, into cash? What is your take and how does your company look at this understanding cashflow?

Ashly:

It's probably the topic we discuss as much as anything else as operators. I think most certainly marketing gets a lot of airtime. The cashflow gets almost as much and I think we've actually learned a good amount. It's probably the place, if I look at my growth as an operator over the last three years, that's one of the areas where there's been the most. Certainly we sort of understand some of the,

Brett:

You're more of a marketer by trade is your background more and marketing. We generally don't focus as much on the finance. We like the marketing metrics like the creative side, but really nerding out on finance. Not typically what a marketer does,

Ashly:

But it's so critical. Absolutely. Here's an example where because it's tied to marketing it necessarily is, so definitely there's the cashflow in terms of how much product you order and relative and there's like you said, the negative cash cycle of having net 30 terms on an ad source where you get the money before you owe it, so you get to turn marketing effort into cash much faster than the cash cashs do those. I think most e-commerce operators are probably familiar with most of those dynamics, but there's other things at play too. I think we used to, because we're so acquisition cost sensitive, we used to look very narrowly at that. I'll give you an example. We do a lot of YouTube sponsorships, not the pre-roll stuff, like actually sponsoring the channel and the guy gets out guy,

Brett:

The creators directly

Ashly:

Sponsor creators directly and they'll do the little ad read, right? Lots of brands do it. We've had a lot of success there. We really like that approach just in general, but it has typically it's an net 30, not always, but typically it's an net 30 world. So ad the video goes live, it does whatever it does, and then 30 days later you owe a check and if it's ROI positive, you've probably earned more than enough money to cover the cost of the check, and so it's free, right? It's not actually free, but it's cashflow wise basically.

Brett:

Basically. Yeah.

Ashly:

But in that world, the thing that I love about YouTube specifically is that video keeps running, so I pay for Facebook

Brett:

Ads, it gets better over time, it often grows. That is the beauty of YouTube organic. So it's got this

Ashly:

Evergreen long tail, which means conversions keep coming in. So we've done this really big macro analysis on profit generated by YouTube channel over time. If there's a profit rate, I guess I don't know what the term would be, and a YouTube video starts, people who are listening instead of watching, I'll try to describe this properly. Basically you see this curve that goes up. You start at a negative number. If you assume the cost is incurred at the time the video goes live, and then it's actually owed later. You've got this negative for whatever it's costs, and then you just start to chip away at that, eventually get past break even, hopefully. And then you start going from there, and then if you repeat with that channel, the curve the next time around is steeper. If you repeat again, it's steeper, you repeat again, it's steeper.

Why? Because you're getting the leftovers from all the other ones that are adding onto it. So it's a compounding effect. Usually what we used to do is we would just look at like, did I hit my acquisition target within 30 days or something? If I did or I didn't, then I will or I won't repeat it because it has these compounding effects and if your business is at a point where you can possibly withstand the short-term impact to cash, then you get accelerated profit the more patient you are, if that makes sense. That's a dynamic that I don't think is discussed enough above, and certainly if you're at the early, early stage, you maybe don't have that luxury, but as you start to mature as a business and as cashflow is more stable, patience is actually profitable because the rate of profit can improve the longer you wait, as crazy as that sounds. So we've seen that dynamic a few different times and it's unlocking some really nice returns for us because we're looking at we're cashflow and marketing is the same analysis for us. We don't really separate them. We are always looking at them together and that's been something that's been very helpful for us. Yeah,

Brett:

Cashflow and margin, cashflow and finance, same discussion. I think maybe another way to look at that is kind of the contribution margin probably from those channels will be another way to discuss that. What else are you doing? What levers are you pulling? How are you looking at cashflow that would be useful to pass on to the audience?

Ashly:

So we do, it sounds lame to say that we do this in a spreadsheet, but I actually think everyone should do it in a spreadsheet at least to a point. Because your business is unique, your economics are always going to be unique. For us, we're lucky because we make the razors down the road, so we actually do monthly pos. We run out one or two big bulk a year, wait for it to get shipped from China. It's down the road. We just, were always making razors. So we've found a way that works for that where it has a very reasonable, we're basically buying razors every two weeks, which is sort of counterintuitive, but that means from a cashflow perspective, it's very stable for us.

But the spreadsheets are really great. We really, maybe another lesson within a lesson here is resist automation actually for a while until you have a level of intimacy and understanding that then you can automate. So we just automate literally six weeks ago, automated all of our cashflow and all of our internal financial reporting and stuff and how we calculate all that contribution, all that stuff that we just automated because it took us three and a half years to feel like we really understood it. I used to go and Shopify pull out the reports manually put, and it was like, why are you doing that? I want to be intimate with it. I want to know what a good day looks like and what a bad day looks like. I want to know, I want to be able to tag, okay, we had a big day on YouTube, we had a big day on Facebook, we had a wholesale order.

You sort of want to know how your business works and live at all those 30,000 scenarios that happen so you can see how that impacts cashflow, profit, all the things, inventory. So we've lived it and for sure made mistakes, but we've lived it. Now we can automate it. And so that would be something that if I was ever going to start a company again or advise a company or just talk on a podcast, I would say resist the temptation to optimize things until you feel like you really, really understand them good. Even if that means,

Brett:

Yeah, we talk about that a lot when we're managing Google ads or Amazon ads. There are great tools or scripts to run. There are things you can do to automate and limit manual work, but nothing really replaces you as a human getting into account, downloading a report, looking at things and doing that consistently because then you really know the numbers and you'll start to almost feel the numbers as well. You got to be analytical, but you'll start to kind of feel it. There's something off here, there's something, or there's something going really well here and I can just kind of feel it by looking inside the account or looking inside my dashboard that I'm manually updating. And so I really love that approach and especially in the beginning until you get intimate with the numbers, then it makes sense to automate. So it's fantastic. Then you touched on this a little bit, but we talked understanding our cashflow. What about inventory management? Anything else to kind of double click on or talk about there? Other than the fact that your manufacturer's down the road and you're kind of ordering every two weeks?

Ashly:

I think you have to just be cognizant of what phase you're in. I think sometimes that's why being reactive can, like you were saying earlier, that really good jitsu example or whatever where it's like, well, you made a series of mistakes that led to a thing. A lot of times the decisions you make in isolation or on their own are perfectly valid. They seem fine, but then they have these knock on effects you don't understand. So for us, last year we went through this big period of trying to ramp up capacity with razor production and den felt compelled to leverage that capacity and started to overorder product, and we had the cash to do it at the time, but then we ended up doing that, honestly, three months too many, not that dramatic, and that really just drained cash. The balance sheet was great. We had all the inventory, but it really drained cash.

Brett:

T and l is probably looking great, right? All that, but cash slow t and l were

Ashly:

Like, we're profitable, but where's all our money? Well, it's sitting on the shelf over there. But my point there is you sort of have to know what you're doing. And in hindsight, I think we were just trying to ramp capacity ramp sales. We're trying to do everything at once when you almost, it's almost, you'll get there faster by doing them in some sequential order. Like, okay, let's build cash and then build some inventory and then turn that inventory into cash, and then it makes more sense to do things sequentially is one of the things I've learned where you just have this desire to scale or go fast or do this or take advantage of the resources you have when actually what's almost always faster is going step one, step two, step three.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. What's interesting, I heard this quote from the military, and I don't think this always applies. Sometimes the military is kind of clunky, but I love this quote where they say, slow is smooth and smooth is fast, and that's kind of where this role is into play. We're like, no, no, no. We're hyper scaling. We're going fast and breaking things. So we're doing all this concurrently. Well, in the long run, that'll probably slow you down, not speed up.

Ashly:

I love that. Yeah. That's our motto here, without saying those exact words. Totally. The approach is do less, do it really well, and then in a year from now, you'll be in a better place. For sure. Yeah.

Brett:

Yeah. Awesome. Great segue to one of your other points you talked about as we were prepping, and that's focus, right? Keeping it simple. So what are we saying no to? And I think this is, again, you've got a marketing background. I'm a marketer. I love new ideas, I love new things. I love trying stuff. I love thinking about growth. I love thinking about adding services, stuff like that. But really saying no and focusing is one of the best unlocks to a healthy business and a business that scale. What's your philosophy? What's your approach and any examples of things you say no to?

Ashly:

Yeah, I actually think it's our superpower is our ability to say no. I think we say no all the time, and it's just so hard to do when there's so much opportunity out there. And if you look, every marketer's heads on a swivel with all the different trends that are out there and you hear, oh, well, this company A, B, C had success doing this. You really have to be able to internalize some success that some other company had and look at your business and see if you think you could replicate it or not. And we're pretty good at that. And so if we're like, no, I don't think we could do that because of X, Y, Z, whether it's, hey, we just don't have the talent to pull that off, or we don't, doesn't fit, or our price point would mean no, or just whatever.

There's a hundred reasons. Then you need to just ignore it and just go off of the things that you think ought to work and really harvest them back to the spreadsheets, become intimate with the things that work so that you can keep them working. We, we've never really done much on social. We're technically on TikTok, but I wouldn't say it's been a meaningful part of our business. We don't do email, we don't upsell anything. We don't do what most people do or a lot of companies have had success on, but we're very successful. So there's no buyer's remorse there. It doesn't mean we wouldn't get to them, but it would have to be like some fundamental light bulb would have to go off to say, oh, I know how we should do TikTok, and then we would do it in the absence of that conviction, we're not going to just put resource against something and we're not going to try.

That sounds weird. We're not going to overinvest in trying for the sake of it. We're going to take smart little tests and stuff, customers, Hey, come up with this. Hey, I love you to a different color. No, we're just, no, sorry. Not that we don't want you to be happy, but just because you say you want a red razor doesn't mean we're going to sell them at scale, right? So sorry. So we've just been really good at focusing, and I think it's served us well because again, nothing's in a vacuum, right? Okay, well, let's go and do, let's focus on organic social and do more of that and let's do 10 posts a week and let's really focus. Well, you're either going to have to hire a resource internal, external and manage that resource, which requires effort and cost or an internal resource is going to get shift priorities to do it, which means the other things they're working on, don't cap. Everything has a cost, everything has a cost, and we're just very wary of those costs. Not that we're not willing to invest in things that make sense. We spend a lot of money on a lot of things, but most of our money goes to things that we know work.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really great. And it is one of those things that we got to understand everything you say yes to. Those do stack up and often compound, and then eventually you're going to have to say no to something that you don't want to say no to. And so I love that you frame that as a superpower. Our superpower is saying no to stuff that we don't have conviction about and to stuff that we're not ready to fully exploit or leverage. And so I think that's really smart.

Ashly:

Any agency agencies listening to this thinking about prospecting us. Sorry.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, such a good point there for sure. So cool. So another thing that I think you've talked about, I've heard a few other leaders in the space talk about this, but you've kind of focused your acquisition channels, right? It's mostly been YouTube sponsorships and meta ads, correct. Have those kind of been the primary areas of focus or what has been your customer acquisition channels?

Ashly:

It's been those two for sure, and they've done all the heavy lifting. We have some wholesale business, we have some distributors here and there kind of all over the world, which does contribute some volume less so top line revenue, but definitely volume and profit for sure. But no, we're sort of a two channel company now, pragmatically, we sure we'd love to see TikTok go or we'd love to have some other channel contribute to that. But it's back to just back to that focus in deploying those resources. We know we can grow meta and YouTube because we sort of know the recipes there. It doesn't mean it's easy, it just means we sort of know how. It just takes time and effort. And so what's the trade off there? Well, if I took the time and effort away from there, which I know the formula to, and I go put it in TikTok, which I don't know the formula in our case, do we end up with two plus one equals one and a half? That's the thing that we guard against. So we're always doing the smart limited effort tests and other things and the hope of, but those are our channels. And I saw, actually there's, I should give them credit, but I don't remember their name, but there was a company that came up, I think it was, no, I don't want to get their name wrong. A company just actually came out with a report on the top a hundred brands for YouTube sponsorships, and we were number 57, I think. No

Brett:

Way.

Ashly:

Which I thought was neat because we wouldn't be number 57 on meta, I'm sure, but we are there. So we're sort of a big player in that space, relatively speaking because we've just focused on it.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that you've kind of identified, hey, here are two channels that fit our product. They fit our market. The guys and gals that are shaving, we can reach them in these markets. We understand how these work. On the YouTube side, it really fits both a marketing objective and the cashflow objective. And so in those cases, it's almost always worth it to say, how can we double or triple? Or maybe not even that. Maybe it's just like 10, 20, 30% improvement on those. How can we spend more and do better on those channels versus how do we spin up something brand new? And so I love that, and I've heard a few people say, and I believe this, you can get to low to mid eight figures likely with just one channel or maybe probably more likely to, you can achieve a lot of growth and a lot of profitability with a pretty simple traffic and customer acquisition strategy. Yeah, we did. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Love it. Love the story of Pinson Razors love what you guys have built. It's refreshing. I think it's also challenging to us as marketers and operators, how do we focus on some of the fundamentals? How do we say no to things? How can we be less gimmicky and more focused on value? And so really, really good stuff. Any closing thoughts or any asks for the audience? Or if not, where can people go and get an amazing razor?

Love it. Love it. Are you on the socials? Are you active on LinkedIn or D two C, Twitter or anything like that? I love it, man. Talk about a hamster wheel that can vary easily. And I know it because I'm living it right now. Kind of become a hamster wheel. It's fun too. I like it. But dang, it can be time consuming to get into both D two C, Twitter and LinkedIn. So kudos to you for that. Well, Ashly, this has been absolutely brilliant. Thank you for the time. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. If you've not left a review on this show, please do so. And if you listen to this and you're like, man, this is a perfect episode for so-and-so please share the podcast would mean the world to me. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.