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Ep 457: Inside Manly Bands' High 8-Figure Growth: Unique Designs, Killer Collabs, and Full-Control Manufacturing
00:44:14
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- [00:00]
John
In the jewelry industry and in the wedding industry, it's really important to understand perceived value. If we're selling a wedding ring and it's $100, the perceived value of that is not as great as if we're selling a wedding ring for $200. And a lot of that comes down to how people think about quality. We found that when we sold the lower priced stuff, people weren't resonating as much. They wanted a wedding ring that was going to last. We ended up increasing the price and we actually saw better performance. As much as we like Facebook and Google, as everybody knows, it's become more expensive and a lot more challenging to be as efficient you would like. So we said, okay, well, let's try testing other channels too, because we want to make sure at least at the top of funnel level, we're spreading the word in a way that's efficient. And so we're testing all sorts of things. So we recently got into postcards, which has been phenomenal.
- [00:52]
Eric Dick
Welcome to the D2C podcast, John. It's been a long time coming. I feel like we've. You came to our event in Las Vegas last year. You've been working with Pilothouse for a while. I've been following manly bands closely. Great to have you here.
- [01:04]
John
Thank you. I appreciate you having me. Big fan of the podcast.
- [01:07]
Eric Dick
Give us the manly bands origin story. I know you've been, you're the, you're the founder and CEO for about eight years now. Tell us why and how you started it.
- [01:15]
John
Yeah, for sure. So back in 2016, my wife and I, or fiance at that time, we were getting married and we were going through the process of finding wedding bands. And so Michelle and I, who's also my co founder and co CEO here, we were going to different jewelry stores trying to find a ring that she wanted as a wedding band and that I wanted as a wedding band. And it was just a huge nightmare for me. For her, it was great. She had tons of options, all these different stones and sizes and designs and metals and all this. And I was literally relegated to the back of the store. It's like, hey, where are the men's rings? And it's like, oh, they're back there. Second cabinet on the left in the dark spot of the store. It was such an afterthought. And I have large hands and I couldn't find a ring that even fit me in that particular store. And so it turned out not only did I only have four options if I did fit into one of their rings, but they didn't have any anyway, so they were like, here, go look through this catalog. Just pick something. And I remember thinking, wow, you know, Michelle's so excited about having a really cool band that, like, she likes, she connects with. Like, it represents her personality and quirkiness and whatnot. And, like, I just had to kind of pick something. And I was like, what a terrible experience. Like, this is my wedding. Like, this is the ring that I'm gonna wear the rest of my life. Like, it has such an important meaning to it and all of that. And so we just kind of left the store. She felt great because she got a ring, and I felt really kind of defeated and like, geez, this is not as, you know, special as I thought it was going to be. And so I ended up going online, doing a bunch of Google searching, and I found some ring on some random site. And so I didn't know my size, as none of our customers do. And we ended up just picking something from the site. It arrived in a little bag, and it wasn't even in a ring box. There was no customer service. There was no receipt or anything with. It just kind of fell out of the bag onto the floor. And I said, well, I guess that's my wedding band. And, you know, I got a couple of them. One of them fit, right? So I said, okay, I guess this is it. And so we got married with that ring. And, you know, afterwards, we left Los Angeles, where we were living for about 10 years, and moved to Florida and wanted to kind of start fresh with our new life together as married people. And so we said, you know what? Before we start doing the regular job, sear, we're both entrepreneurs. Let's see if we can solve a problem that we understand. And so that story of picking the wedding ring and finding one for myself came up, and I said, you know, I wonder if we could, like, solve that somehow. I wonder if there's a way we can put our heads together and just find a way to make it more fun for guys to get their wedding band. And so that was kind of the impetus behind manly bands.
- [03:53]
Eric Dick
How many skus did you launch with when you launched the brand?
- [03:56]
John
I think we launched with around 65.
- [03:59]
Eric Dick
So not a small number, because part of it was this personality thing. You really wanted to be able to give men a lot of options. So I guess if you just started with a few rings, it would have been the same problem.
- [04:07]
John
Well, that's right. Yeah. So we didn't want to just do the classic stuff. Right. There's Jewelry stores that obviously are all over the world that sell the traditional gold, silver, whatever, white gold rings. We wanted to do stuff that was different because that's what I would have wanted. Like, I didn't want just a regular ring. Like, I'm an outdoorsy guy. I love camping, I love adventuring. Like, just I wanted something that was unique and different. And, you know, we kind of looked at all these options and put our heads together and said, you know, let's. Let's try to find something that's subtly different, like, not crazy. Like, guys still want to have a subtle ring that, you know, represents their marriage, but maybe we can do some cool stuff, like maybe put a little strip of wood in it, or maybe we can, you know, put some deer antler in it or something kind of interesting and neat. And so that concept of having like a quirky alternative metals that weren't super expensive, but that aligned to my interests and kind of got me excited about wearing it was kind of the direction that we took.
- [05:02]
Eric Dick
What. Describe your initial go to market strategy. What was your. How did you roll this out?
- [05:07]
John
So it was. It was really interesting. So we both had background in the creative industry. We both actually went to film school, believe it or not.
- [05:14]
Eric Dick
Me too. I have a film degree as well.
- [05:15]
John
Oh, do you really? We're from.
- [05:16]
Eric Dick
Yeah, from Queens University. The Harvard of the North. I actually said that once to a guy in a bar and I was like, where did you go to school? And he said, harvard. I was like, the one guy. The one guy.
- [05:28]
John
That's amazing. I went to Emerson over in Boston and it was such a great experience. And filmmaking is so much fun and it actually applies a lot to what we do here at Manly Bands in our creative. We're actually in our studio that we shoot a lot of our videos in right now. But to answer your question. So, yeah, it was a really interesting process. So there was a lot of ideation, there was a lot of creativity behind it. And we kind of brought all that creativity from our previous roles in Jobs out in la. And so we ended up working with various suppliers and we designed them and then we kind of got them from the manufacturers and we launched them. And we were just kind of hopeful that they would stick. And we were able to do it in such a way that we got feedback pretty quickly. We were using Facebook, so it was back in 2016. It was a lot more effective than it is now. And so we were able to get feedback based on comments and purchases and reviews and things like that relatively quickly. And Kind of create this product testing cycle so we could very quickly iterate with designs. And it was super funny because when we launched a few different styles that we thought were going to be great and they absolutely bombed. And there were other styles that did great that we were like, why is that? Why do people want that? We had this one ring called the King Arthur, which we just took off the site a few months ago. We had it for seven years and nobody in the entire business understood why. Guys loved it, but they did. And finally we were like, this isn't going to work. Let's get rid of it. So we're always trying to get feedback from our customers and in that case, there weren't enough people liking it to justify it. But it's just really interesting. That's kind of how we approached it. It's like, let's get feedback from our customers and see what they want, because we want to be a customer centric company.
- [07:05]
Eric Dick
But even still, starting in 2016, you're wrote like you, you got traction right out of the gate. It sounds like. It sounds like you had return on your ad spend like right out of the gate. Is that true?
- [07:14]
John
We were really lucky. We came into the market at a time, like I mentioned, where Facebook was like, so I don't want to say easy, but much simpler than it is here. And it was actually just me doing the Facebook ads. I did have some experience doing Facebook ads. I had boutique marketing agency with my business partner out in la. And so we kind of understood Ecom. We understood Shopify and Facebook ads and Google Ads and things like that. So I wasn't a complete newbie to it. But it wasn't a very complex campaign. It was literally, we targeted people who were engaged and then we just tried to resonate with them with various creative that we tested and copy and whatnot. And when we started, I'd say we had a couple of sales in the first week and then eventually it was a little bit more the next week and a little more the next week. And it got to a point where we were like, okay, this might be something that's scalable. Let's increase the budgets and see what we can do. And I'd say within the first three months, we were really lucky in that we were able to really see it resonating. We're like, okay, let's start optimizing and bring this to the next level.
- [08:16]
Eric Dick
What was the first biggest challenge with that phase? My mind goes to sizing. I have a friend who's worked in jewelry before. And I have a big interest in signet ring. So I've been talking about a signet ring brand or something like that, but I imagine sizing, you said nobody knows their size. Was sizing a big challenge early on or what was your big biggest challenge?
- [08:33]
John
Early on, sizing was the biggest challenge and it still is the biggest challenge. It is definitely something that hasn't gone away despite our many, many efforts to try to try to solve for it. But yeah, even back then it was in 2016, guys didn't know their size and today the guys still don't know their size. And I think it's just because generally guys don't often wear jewelry. Most guys don't often wear jewelry until they get married and then if they decide to wear a wedding ring at all. And so it was quite an experience. We created all of these SKUs. Each one of our styles has about 25 different SKUs with it. And so we go from size 5 up to size 17. And of course, if it's a custom job, we can go down to three or all the way up to 25, because we manufacture here in house and so. But that five through 17, that's about 25 different SKUs for each style. And so you can kind of see how our skew count can balloon out of control really quickly. And over the years, our exchange policy, so rings coming back for a size exchange is sat right around 24%, which is pretty high, pretty high. So we have a whole department dedicated to exchanges and processing all of those. We get a lot of rings back just because guys, they're off by like one or two sizes and you get.
- [09:50]
Eric Dick
Them going into it and you have to delay the purchase. Sometimes I imagine if they don't know their ring size, you've got to send them a ring kit, describe what's worked best for that.
- [09:59]
John
So we do a lot of automations and so one of the things we do for the, for the rings that we that are more precious metal or more expensive, we don't want to just make them based on the guess of their size because like I said, About 20, 24% come back. We want to ask them to use our ring sizer to check their size first. So that way it's better for everybody then they know for sure what size they are. And we're certain that when we spend the time and the material making the ring that we're going to make a ring that's most likely not going to be exchanged later. So it's a better experience for the customer. So we actually have a free ring sizer that anybody can get off our site just by visiting it. And you can download a digital version where you can wrap it around your finger. And that's fairly accurate, but the most accurate is the actual physical ring sizer. And so we offer that for free as well. And so for anybody who gets like a gold ring or one of our more fancier rings, that comes first. And so that's automated so the order is placed, but it put on hold until they get the ring sizer. And we do a lot of like Klaviyo automations and things like this to kind of go out, send them a link to a type form that then gets that size a couple days after they receive the ring sizer. And then when they fill out that form, that then gets put back into Shopify where a team can then kind of pick it up, put it in manufacturing and make it to their specification.
- [11:17]
Eric Dick
Take me through to the. Because you mentioned the pandemic boom and we don't, we don't talk about that on the podcast every time now, but for your business, I think probably heading into the pandemic and the impact it had. Can you describe that?
- [11:28]
John
Yeah, it was really interesting. We. We were prepared for the worst. Like when, when Covid happened, we actually went probably above and beyond what a lot of local companies here did and everybody made their changes. But we ended up almost immediately like that March. We took out a loan just so we have extra funds in case something happened. We made all of our folks work from home because we weren't really sure what we were getting into. And I think everybody appreciated that it was short lived because it drove everybody nuts. And we found ways around it to make sure everybody would be safe here at the office. But initially we actually sent the whole 3 PL team home and we sent all the inventory with them. We had our entire team fulfilling out of their basements for I want to say about a month or so just because we didn't know how widespread and how. Obviously it was a huge pandemic, but we didn't know at the time what to expect. So we took some precautions and it worked out thankfully. But the boom itself was really interesting because the wedding industry as a whole suffered greatly with COVID because a lot of folks canceled their weddings. Why go and buy a wedding dress? Because you got to go to the store to try it on. Let's not worry about booking photographers or wedding planners or flowers or anything like that. But oddly enough, they still wanted to buy their rings, which was really interesting. And we tried to kind of, I don't know, look into it and dig down and really figure it out. And our best guess is that they just, they still wanted their rings because they knew they were going to have to do that regardless. But they didn't necessarily want to go into a jewelry store because that was an in person shopping experience. And so we somehow benefited from that as a wedding band company. And so for us, E Commerce, like a lot of ecom companies, saw a big boom during those years. 2020 to 2022 was, was really great for us. And so we were able to kind of expand in a lot of respects through manufacturing and through what we're doing in our warehouse. And so we got really fortunate. So we ended up taking advantage of.
- [13:29]
Eric Dick
It and growing, growing like fast and furiously through 2023. 24. You mentioned 2024 in our pre interview. That 2024 for you guys is the year of optimization. Can you talk about what led you to dub that project?
- [13:46]
John
Yeah, so it's actually the last couple of years have been the year of optimization. But really what it was is it was kind of that reset after Covid. And so a lot of the E. Com founders I've talked to have said that, you know, they've kind of gone through a similar thing where it's like, oh, we have this Covid bump. We're going to buy all this inventory, we're going to scale up, we're going to hire all these people, we're going to do all this stuff because this is the new normal. I think. Thankfully Covid for the most part went away and we're all adapting back to our normal lives. But I think that mentality of oh, we're in the big boom has definitely changed. I think it's changed for most companies, but what we saw, just red manly bands, was a normalization. Things did slow down as folks went back out into the world, which is great, back into in person shopping and back into jewelry stores. So we saw that acceleration that we experienced during the COVID years definitely slowed down. And so what we needed to do was kind of make some adjustments. We weren't going to expand quite as fast. We wanted to focus more on profitability than top line growth. And so we've coordinated with all the departments here and we have a team of about 45 right now. And we wanted to really make sure that from manufacturing to shipping and fulfillment, to customer service, to creative and everything else, that we were really optimized and we weren't spending money where we didn't need to spend. We weren't pushing as hard as we were because we really wanted to focus on becoming more profitable. And so that's what we did. And ultimately it's been great. It's really paid off.
- [15:20]
Eric Dick
Give me an example of an optimization you made that improved your profitability.
- [15:24]
John
Oh, gosh. Well, we found that there were just a number of processes that we had kind of put in place kind of really quickly so that we could grow in scale during those kind of accelerated years. And we'd put them in place and then we'd just move on and be like, all right, we're going to do this, this is going to be great. Let's do it. Okay, it's working super. And then time goes by and eventually you have to go back. We didn't realize this as much or we didn't prioritize this, but you got to go back and review these things, you know, every now and then. And so even though it was working great, you know, as an example, like our ring sizers, like we found that we said, you know what, let's make the ring sizers free, which we still do now, but there are some modifications to it and some checks in place. But we just said, okay, they're free for anybody. Just tell the world, let's get a ring sizer in everybody's hand. And so we just kind of let that go and we promoted it, we ran ads for it and we let it run for those years and it was great. And then we were looking at optimizing it and we were looking at it and we're like, how come there's like a thousand ring sizers that went to Pakistan last year? Like, that's, that's kind of not optimal. Like, do we have a lot of customers in Pakistan? And of course we looked and no, we didn't. And so we're like, there might be people taking advantage of this. And so we did some research and you know, the sizer ended up on some free ring sizer site. And it obviously didn't come in to us as sales. They were just getting the free stuff, like one of those free websites, you know, getfreestuff.com or whatever. And so it was stuff like that, like that were actually really low hanging fruit that we just became so busy with all the business during that time. We didn't really take a step back and say, okay, let's just double check everything. So now we have procedures in place to prevent that. But it was actually pretty funny. We laughed a lot about that.
- [17:11]
Eric Dick
I think that's the theme. I think these are the years of optimization for all businesses. I think that's a very common theme. I hear. The other theme I hear a lot is people who are sort of diversifying their top of funnel. And I think you described your meta ads like already being focused on people in market, people that are, you know, according to Facebook's data, potentially getting engaged or in market for. For a ring. I'm curious, how have you sort of. What other things have you used to sort of expand top of funnel awareness for manly bands?
- [17:39]
John
Oh, sure. So we're doing everything. So as. As we're. We're starting to scale a lot more with the optimization in mind. Of course, we're testing a lot of new avenues. And so, you know, our goal is as much as we like Facebook and Google, as everybody knows, it's become more expensive and a lot more challenging to be as efficient as you would like. So we're using tools like Northbeam, which has been fantastic for us to kind of figure out attribution and all that sort of stuff. And so we said, okay, well, let's try testing other channels too, because we want to make sure, at least at the top of funnel level, that we're spreading the word in a way that's efficient, but also bringing in new customers that maybe we don't need to specifically target, but maybe it's a friend of a friend who's getting engaged. It's like, well, how do we target those people? And so we're testing all sorts of things. So we recently got into postcards, which has been really phenomenal. Actually. I was a little skeptical at first that the ROI would be there, but it's actually turned out pretty good. I think we're performing at over a 2 right now, which is great. We're only targeting folks who are abandoning cart, which has been really great. So it's still sending out thousands of postcards a month and we're getting a really great return on that. So we're happy about it. Some other areas where we're testing out or we've been running ads for the last several months actually is like tv. So we're using Mountain for connected tv, which has been really great. It's a really great platform. We've done some linear TV locally. We're in Salt Lake, so we've done some stuff there, which has been great for brand awareness and also billboards, which has been great for brand awareness too. And it's all driven sales that we're able to track. So it's about testing. So we test a lot of things.
- [19:20]
Eric Dick
You mentioned Connected tv. I'm curious, with your brand having as much personality as it does, what did you do with your creative on TV to get your message across most effectively?
- [19:32]
John
Yeah. So the brand tone of manly bands is very different from what you might see in a regular jewelry store. And so it's super important for us to come across as irreverent, as fun, as humorous. And so a lot of our creative that we shot a couple of years ago, and we're shooting more stuff now, of course, but it still resonates, which is great. And we worked with a great creative house here in Salt Lake called Creatively with Jay Davis, and it's been great. So those videos have been running, and they've been performing really well. And so for Linear tv, Connected tv, we run those mostly, and they perform really well.
- [20:06]
Eric Dick
Nice. Let's talk AOV a little bit here, because I think quite often, if you're lucky, you're buying one wedding ring for life. I know people are getting more stylish, and maybe they have more options, but how have you expanded the business to expand the customer's life cycle with you, essentially?
- [20:22]
John
Yeah, for sure. So wedding bands are tricky because we all hope that we get married once and we're happy the rest of our lives. Unfortunately, for our business, that usually means one order. So our AOV was generally pretty close to our LTV for all the marketing dorks out there. We look at that and we go, huh, we got to fix that, because that's really not great. So we've come up with a few different ways to diversify our products and still stay within that wedding industry niche. And so we have things like groomsmen gifts, which are really fun. We try to do really curated things, not the standard stuff that you might see. Like, you know, we do more than just shot glasses and, like, I don't know, decanters and stuff like that. We try to do really cool stuff like fly fishing kits. We have, like, a soap whittling kit where you make your own, you know, chiseled fish out of the soap or something. We have axes, we have great cutlery, watches, wallets, all of that stuff. And of course, we do all the engraving. So if they want to engrave their wedding date on it or their groomsmen names, we can do that. And so that was one way to kind of increase that aov. And then other ways, too. Like, we launched a line of women's rings, not just in the traditional rings with diamonds and Gemstones, we do do that, but also rings to kind of match what we offer for men's rings. So we have women's rings at like 2 millimeter or 3 millimeter thickness, you know, in a smaller size range that have meteorite in it or dinosaur bone or some of our koa wood or antler. And so that's been really great too because, you know, a lot of couples, they have a similar interest with these things. And so if they like to hunt together, maybe they both are getting antler rings, or if they both love space, maybe they both want a little bit of meteorite in their ring. So that's been a great play for us.
- [22:10]
Eric Dick
Talk to me about your decision to bring your manufacturing in house. What was your solution before and what was it that made you decide you needed to really invest in. In house manufacturing?
- [22:20]
John
Yeah, for sure. So bringing manufacturing in house was really about having quality control. And so we wanted to make sure that any design that we put out that it. I mean, these are wedding rings. These aren't just fashion rings. So for us, we want to make sure they pass our very rigorous QC process that we can handle exchanges and returns really quickly or resizing or anything like that. We want to be able to do the engraving so that we can QC it afterwards and make sure it's perfect. All of that's really important to us as a company that really prides itself on putting our customers first. Before, we were using different contract manufacturers around the country here in the US and it was great. We got the orders in, but we didn't have that sense of control. We didn't have the ability to really say, huh, what if we switch this out? It was a process. Because then you got to go to them and then you got to ask them, hey, can we do this? And it can take a few weeks. The nice thing about having manufacturing in our building here is that we can go out and say, you know what, we really want to, we need to change this. Okay, sure, no problem. And like, within an hour, it's done. It gave us so much more flexibility when it came to research and development to be able to just crank out a new design and be like, this could be the next best selling ring. Let's try this. Let's do an email blast and see what kind of response we get. And so having that ability, that control, the flexibility has really changed the game for us. I mean, we are so much more able to do that testing and that iteration that we talked about earlier by talking to the customers, that's always Kind of been the core of our business.
- [23:52]
Eric Dick
And then this led me to say, like, because looking at your brand, looking at the kind of products you make and your clientele, the idea of your rings being made in America would be a pretty valuable part of your marketing message. But you were telling me there's legalities and difficulties around using the term made in America, even though your rings are technically made in your office here.
- [24:09]
John
Yeah, it depends on what your definition of made is. And the FTC in the United States, the Trade Commission has decided, for whatever reason, and we're just going to abide by it because that's the rules. But that made in America means that almost every part of the ring needs to be made here, or at least more than 75% of that original material needs to be from here. And for us, that. That's tough because we order our materials. So we buy bar stock, which we then machine into rings. That bar stock would need to be mined, made into bars. The elements need to be mined in the ground. In the US that's really hard to do. There are countries all over the world that we work with where we can get different bar stock, like titanium and black zirconium, and all of it, even the more precious metals, it's hard to necessarily get from here. And so as a business, that's just a difficult, difficult task. And so because of that, if something's made, you know, in Mexico, if we buy some rot, you know, black zirconium rods, even though it comes as a rod, and our guys spend hours machining it and making it into that beautiful ring, technically we can't say made in America. We can say designed and assembled in America. But it really comes down to where that material is from. And for us, it's far more than 75% of it is the metal, obviously, because it's a ring. So, you know, we got to abide by those rules.
- [25:37]
Eric Dick
Good to know. And I guess. Yeah, like designed. You want to say made in America. If you're going to say it, you want to say say it all the way rather than kind of dancing around it, which makes sense.
- [25:46]
John
Yeah. A lot of companies, they'll just say it anyway. We haven't actually found that there's as much value as we had hoped in saying that with our customers. I mean, obviously, we hope there is. I personally like to shop made in America. I respect that, being an American. But I think a lot of folks, it also comes down to price. So you have to find that balance. What works? What are the customers really worried About We've actually surveyed our customers quite a bit on this. At the end of the day, for our customers it really is about price and customer service and the unique styles. They are less concerned about where the metal came from in the ground. As long as we have a good lifetime warranty, which we do, and good customer service to take care of them and things like it all comes from Earth, right?
- [26:31]
Eric Dick
Yes. We're all one thing anyway.
- [26:33]
John
We're all one planet, right?
- [26:35]
Eric Dick
I did LSD one time and I learned that.
- [26:37]
John
So.
- [26:40]
Eric Dick
Talk about your pricing strategy and has it evolved over the years or did you kind of like nail it on, you know, when you first started talk about that pricing strategy?
- [26:47]
John
You know, it has, it's changed quite a bit over the years and you know, part of it is just getting to know your industry. And you know, when we started out we were selling rings for much lower than we do now. And oddly enough in the wedding industry and this doesn't apply to everybody or all your listeners industries at all. But for us in the jewelry industry and in the wedding industry, it's really important to understand perceived value. And so if we're selling a wedding ring and it's $100, the perceived value of that is not as great as if we're selling a wedding ring for $200. And a lot of that comes down to how people think about quality. I think we all think to some extent that price indicates quality. In our case it is expensive to produce a ring because our folks are doing it from hand here in the shop. In most cases we found that when we sold the lower priced stuff, people weren't resonating as much. They wanted a wedding ring that was going to last. We were able to increase the prices. We've done a lot of price testing over the years. We ended up increasing the price and we saw better performance, which is kind of counterintuitive to what you might expect. So over the years we've gone up and down. I mean there's a lot of competition out there and they may charge a little bit less and that's okay. But we know what goes into these rings and we take pride in giving them a lifetime warranty and free shipping and all of that. So it works out.
- [28:13]
Eric Dick
One of the last issues I wanted to talk to you about was your excursion into retail. Talk a little bit about what brought that on and where you're at with that now.
- [28:21]
John
Yeah, for sure. So you know, we were always, always a digital first brand. When we started we were solely on our website. Currently we are on Amazon, we've done. And our website, of course. And then we've. In the years past, we actually did a couple of retail stores, branded retail stores here locally in Utah, and they were very successful. We had a great time doing it. It was cool having our location, you know, across from the Apple Store or whatever, and that was really fun. Ultimately, what we found, though, is that for us, we weren't. Even though the stores were profitable, we weren't really making enough additional revenue to kind of justify all that went into it, because it's definitely a big lift. I mean, you have to train people, you have to have staff, you have to manage people. You have to make sure the inventory is flowing back and forth to the stores. And so for us, it didn't really make a lot of sense to only have a couple stories. So what we've decided to do is put that on hold for a little bit and just try to get into other retailers and see how that works. We've spent a lot of time and money growing our brand so that it is recognizable, at least for people getting married. We are absolutely focused on getting into more jewelry stores and regional jewelry stores. We've landed a couple of accounts already, and we're super excited to explore that. It's a big initiative for next year, and it's really promising to know that we can diversify our sales channels. And that's really where it all comes down to. Right? I mean, everybody knows you can't just be on your website anymore. You have to be out in the world. You have to be where your customers are. And in our case, we have customers in jewelry stores. So it's like, okay, how can we get in front of those people where they're shopping, where they are? And hopefully that will reduce our reliance on paid digital ads like Facebook and Google.
- [30:05]
Eric Dick
The other thing I see on your site you've done a really good job of is your collaborations. You've got collaborations on your site with Jeep. It's a Jeep thing. It's Lord of the Rings, Jack Daniels, Fender dc. Talk about your collab strategy.
- [30:16]
John
Yeah. So we've invested a ton of time into making sure that our brand stands out from all the other ones. And one of the main ways we do that is through licensing. And so it's been an absolute blast getting to know these other brands like Jack Daniels and DC Comics and Warner Brothers and Lord of the Rings. And it's something that we love to do because it helps us kind of make rings that guys are getting excited about. You know, these are guys who have, they're really into Lord of the Rings, they can buy the one ring, you know, or if you're a Jeeper and you really love going on a Jeep and you know that's a big part of your personality. Like, why not get a subtle shout out to jeep on your ring? And you know, some people, they tease us and they go, oh, come on, isn't that like what little boys do? And you know, they have their toys and they want to have a jeep ring. Like, that's cute. And it's like, you know what? This is part of their personality. Why can't they have something that represents who they are? Why do they need to get a traditional, just straight up gold band? And so I think it's okay. I think people should be able to wear whatever they want. Guys have all sorts of different watches and wallets and things like that that they have an affinity towards for any reason at all. And so in our case, we said, well, let's come up with some great licenses that we can work with that represent our customers. And it's been wildly successful for working with these different companies. And you know, companies like Jack Daniels in particular have been some of our best selling rings in the last several years. And so we're super proud of those relationships and we plan on continuing them.
- [31:46]
Eric Dick
I did a podcast with a flannel shirt company recently and they were saying that their Metallica collaboration was by far the most successful collab they ever did. I could see someone really wanting a really cool Metallica band as well, potentially down the road.
- [31:59]
John
Oh, for sure, absolutely. Yeah. No, Cars have been great, bands have been great. I mean, DC Comics has been fantastic as well. It's really interesting if you can really kind of key into what guys are interested in and kind of create something that can not only represent their commitment, but also something that represents their personality. It's a win.
- [32:22]
Eric Dick
I'm on your site right now and I see you have an early Black Friday. This is the first Black Friday Cyber Monday sale I will say that I've seen this year. All right, can you just talk a little bit about your strategy? Because I guess you're looking for people in market, but I'm curious what your Black Friday Cyber Monday buildup looks like when it's a purpose needed product.
- [32:42]
John
That's a really great question. It's weird for us in our industry and I'm not sure about everybody's industry. Of course, I'm assuming it's different for other niches, but for us, October and the beginning of Q4 is actually pretty slow. It's the slowest time of the year. We always plan for it and we expect it. This year has actually performed better than all of the years past. That's a testament to our amazing marketing team. They've figured out the secret sauce for October. I guess we said, you know what the problem with Black Friday is? Everybody then waits to Black Friday. So it's like, okay, so we want sales to still be good the rest of November and the rest of October. We were trying to figure out a way to still entice people to buy, but not necessarily wait till Black Friday. We've launched our early Black Friday sale, which has been performing really well. Well. And we're super excited about it. The thing about weddings, though, during this time of the year is there's not that many weddings. So most of the weddings for us are when the weather's really nice. So starting in February, Valentine's Day ish, almost all the way through September, folks are getting ready for their wedding in February. You're probably getting married in March or April when it's a little warmer out. And then of course, over the summer and into the early fall. But now it's more about gifting. And so it's interesting because it's like their motivation for purchasing the ring. The timing about it is just a little bit different than the rest of the year. And so now it's like, okay, I'm going to. A few people get married at Christmas. It's a very small percentage of our overall customers from what we track. But folks are doing gifts. It's like, okay, we're going to get married. I'm going to give them a ring at Christmas or maybe at Thanksgiving time. I want to go home to my family and I'm going to show them the rings we're going to get married with. So it's just an interesting part of the year for us.
- [34:31]
Eric Dick
Super cool. You mentioned Northbeam. You mentioned it was Posty, the postcard company. Are there any other parts of your tech stack that you're really feeling like you're getting a lot of value out of?
- [34:41]
John
Absolutely. So let's see. I can give you some ideas on our website. For instance, is a company. It's headless. For those who don't know, there's regular Shopify, which is fantastic. And sometimes that can get bogged down if you have a lot of apps or a lot of customizations or if your images are a little too big or not sized. Right. And one thing that helps conversion rate is Site speed. And so over the years, you know, we'd always upload lots of pictures, even though they were compressed. We'd upload pictures and the site would slow down or we'd put a new app on there to do surveys, and that would slow the site down a little bit. And so, you know, we said, God, we gotta be a way to make the site faster. And then this new concept of headless came into play, and Shopify launched its new hydrogen and oxygen ecosystem. To support Headless. You can go to Shopify and read all about it. Basically, we're working with a company called Pack Digital that transforms your Shopify site into a headless site. It does definitely require some development time to make it all work, but it's fantastic. The site is super fast now on mobile, on desktop, it's great. Our site used to take between five and seven seconds to load a product page. For those who know, that's really bad. Now it's, you know, I joke, I say, yeah, I'm on the product page before I even click. Like, it's literally microseconds. So it's cool.
- [36:03]
Eric Dick
And does that free you up for more options when it comes to, like, landing pages and individual, like, sales experiences through your ads?
- [36:10]
John
You know, it does. It's neat because it's not based on the liquid framework anymore, and I'm a big dork. So, you know, I love talking tech. So it's. Yeah, you can basically do anything you want. It's almost like having, like, you know, you just. You're able to build anything. It's all just regular code. And so it's all based on React and JavaScript. And so you can go in there and build almost any component you want and apply it to the site. And so we do it for a lot of our custom options when it comes to engraving and customizations and things like that. And so it's been really great. And, you know, having that faster speed has increased our conversion rate. So, you know, we were regularly sitting at less than half a percent, and now we've almost doubled that. So we're super happy with it. The experience is so much better for our customers. And really that's the most important thing.
- [36:59]
Eric Dick
Headless is such an interesting topic. I hear people have different opinions on it. It's great to hear someone who's doing it right. How do people do Headless wrong? Do you think they get too complex or it gets bogged down in its own way?
- [37:13]
John
Yeah, well, we've done it wrong too, and it wasn't intentional, obviously. We were learning our way into it and it just, it's actually changed quite a bit since we first tried it. We had an amazing dev team before that kind of built our own. We called it like a custom headless or hybrid headless, where it was basically along the same lines, it was a custom coded React JavaScript thing. But, you know, managing Shopify was really difficult. We almost had to have like a whole separate CMS system set up to go in and add products and update their descriptions and things like that. So it was very cumbersome and it wasn't easy to manage at all. And so that was back like three years ago now. Thankfully, companies like Pack have kind of made it super simple. Like you just go in. There's a customizer, just like we're used to in Shopify, where you go in and you can edit your theme or whatnot. And so we're able to go in there now and we can manage the front end, but we can still manage all the products and orders and customers just in the regular Shopify interface. And so that's really, I think, the right way to do it and the wrong way is trying to build it from scratch because there's just so many variables that can go wrong. Shopify, as amazing and simple as it is for us users, is quite complex and it's an amazing piece of software that they've put together. So having a simple front end option that just makes it all work together and they're always updating it and providing great support is super important, especially for, you know, a business that's, that's out there trying to get customers.
- [38:44]
Eric Dick
Last question. How are you using AI in your business today if you are?
- [38:48]
John
Oh, we sure are. We're, you know, I as, again, as a big dork, I love AI stuff. I'm always following it on YouTube and Twitter, X whatever. Like always looking into the new, the new developments. And I think as a business, AI is one of the biggest opportunities that founders, business owners, entrepreneurs have right now to grow their business. There are so many different things that you can do if you put your mind to it and new products that are coming out that are just, they take your business to the next level. So for us, like I've mentioned a few times, understanding our customer, hearing what they think about our rings, managing reviews and customer feedback, super important. And so one of the ways we're using AI and we're using it in multiple ways, but one of them is review manager. And so we get reviews from all over trustpilot from Shopify we use Okendo for that from Google, from the knot, WeddingWire, all the normal wedding sites. And it's great because we're able to use AI to go out, aggregate all of these reviews from all of these sites, put them into a single database, and then give us a daily summary. It's amazing because we then pass all those reviews from a Google Sheet into ChatGPT through an automation that we've built. And we get an email every morning when we come in that says, here's yesterday's review summary and you had X amount of review, 30 reviews that were five stars. And here's the gist of what they were all talking about and what they appreciated. And you had two reviews that weren't so great and that you should probably send to your customer service team to get back to them. And here's what they didn't like and it's incredible. And it saves.
- [40:30]
Eric Dick
Is this custom, Is this a tool that you've used or have you built something with Zapier and to go out and scrape all these things?
- [40:37]
John
The scraping part is Zapier, apify and a couple of other things. The AI integration, where it reads the reviews and all that and gives feedback and sends an email that's just chatgpt and I think then the email is sent with Zapier. So this is all built with regular old tools anybody has access to. I think AI is the kind of thing where you can do anything. The real strength is figuring out what is a good idea and what helps your business the most. And so that's one of the ways we use it. And our CS team loves it because it just makes it so much easier than going to 12 different sites to look at the reviews and then manage them on platform and things like that. So we love it and it's been great for us.
- [41:18]
Eric Dick
I use it for the podcast and it's just amazing how much better it is than when we started. When it comes to being able to even just to prepare for this. I put our pre interview notes notes in and it gave me, you know, a bunch of questions I could ask and then I was like, okay, what were some other topics that we talked about? And it nailed the nuance of each of them. Like I, it's, it's definitely my exit plan. I think I just need my AI Eric voice. And then, you know, AI could just take this thing over entirely. It's going to be fantastic.
- [41:44]
John
You know, I'm sure that's going to happen and I think it may have happened. I think I read about some AI podcasts where the guests were talking back and forth and then didn't somebody tell them, like, you weren't real? And they started having this existential crisis of, well, why are we even bothering to do this? I don't know. It was crazy.
- [42:00]
Eric Dick
I. What just. What an amazing time to live. I heard a theory on TikTok, actually, that just about AI and how it's going to kind of like, it's just going to go. It's not going to know its AI. It's going to get to a point where it's not going to know its AI and it will just be out there living like we're living in our world and it'll be living on the Internet and it'll just be like, it's going to be this other thing anyways. I don't. Usually we. You don't go down the rabbit hole usually this far, man.
- [42:27]
John
I'll go down that rabbit hole anytime. It's amazing and I definitely encourage anybody to look into it, especially business owners and entrepreneurs, because the opportunities are truly endless with the types of things you can come up with and ways you can help your business.
- [42:41]
Eric Dick
So if you are in the market for a manly band, you can go to manlybands.com, check them out right now. You said, I'm going to send you my address and you're going to send me some swag for my podcast wall here.
- [42:52]
John
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [42:53]
Eric Dick
Got to compete with Ridge up there. I see. You need to be more controversial on Twitter, like Sean.
- [43:01]
John
Yeah, you know, we just. We're just not into that. We're too busy helping customers and making rings.
- [43:05]
Eric Dick
Like, I like it to shitpost. You don't have time to shitpost every day. I don't.
- [43:09]
John
I just don't have time. You know, when I have time, you'll know I've made it.
- [43:12]
Eric Dick
That's amazing. But if people want to geek out with you on tech or on E commerce or anything, is there anywhere recommend that they follow you? Like LinkedIn maybe?
- [43:21]
John
You know, I. No, I never have time to post and maybe that's terrible. I'm not growing my brand or whatever. But if you want to chat, just chat. Shoot me an email. I'm great on email. It's just, you know, I'm happy to give it out. It's just. John j.o h nanlybands.com yeah, hit me up. Happy to chat.
- [43:37]
Eric Dick
Nice. Appreciate you coming on the podcast today, John. This was a lot of fun. We'll see you at our next event. I guarantee we'll make that happen.
- [43:42]
John
I hope so. Yeah, that would be great. You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for bringing all this value to other E Com founders and businesses. I think it's really awesome what you do.
- [43:58]
Eric Dick
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now at Direct to consumer. All one word co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the D2C podcast. We'll see you next time.