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Ep 582: How SURI Sold 5,000 Toothbrushes in a Week: DTC Growth in a Boring Category
00:33:26
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- [00:00]
A
Loads of people brush their teeth. It doesn't matter, like, which country you're in. Doesn't matter whether you're 5 or whether you're 95, whether you're male, female, or anything in between. Like, you brush your teeth and you do it twice a day. It's one of the highest penetration categories in the world. It's a utility. It's something I have to do. And everyone brushes their teeth. No one currently loves it. When expectations are very, very low, you have an opportunity to create, like, a distance between expectations and reality. Maybe I should not say this on a podcast. Maybe I'm about to give away the secret sauce to all of our success.
- [00:40]
B
This episode is brought to you by Contentful Marketers. You know that feeling when your creative clicks, when that social post sends engagement through the roof, when your outside of the box campaign hits ROI positive, when a personalized homepage turns prospects into customers? It's utter marketing bliss. Content. Contentful helps you create tailored omnichannel experiences without working overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the feels@contentful.com Mark welcome to the DTC podcast. I have been enjoying your toothbrush. It's quite a. I've been using electric toothbrushes for quite a while. This one is quite substantial. There's a lot more going on with this toothbrush than a lot of toothbrush I've had in the past. Welcome to the podcast. Why did you build it?
- [01:30]
A
Well, firstly, thank you so much for having me. I'm a big fan. I'm genuinely excited and honored to be here. Why did I build it? It sounds pretty. Pretty basic, but just loads of people brush their teeth, Eric. And, you know, it doesn't matter, like, which country you're in. It doesn't matter whether you're 5 or whether you're 95, whether you're male, female, or anything in between. Like, you brush your teeth and you do it twice a day. It's one of the highest penetration categories in the world. And yet, despite that, you know, when you actually look at the competition, you know, two companies hold a roughly 80% market share in most developed markets. And so you think, is that because the brushes are great? Is that because everyone just absolutely loves everything about them? Well, my co founder and I were like, let's investigate that because we don't love ours. And, you know, we spoke to thousands of different people, dental professionals, consumers, and what we discovered was time and time again, people are like, you know, we said, oh, do you use your Bluetooth? No. Why would I use Bluetooth on my toothbrush. That's crazy. You know, do you ever have that gunk, that horrible, crusty, weird stuff on the people? Like, oh God, I hate that. Like, absolutely disgusting. How long does your battery last? Oh, I have to charge it all the time. Like, do you take it traveling? No. Why not? It's too bulky, it's too loud. And so we're like, well, what if we could create a brush that delivered an unbelievable, you know, parity or better clean with a beautiful design with features that people want, like a 40 day battery life, like a travel case. And also with more sustainable materials. You know, we have cornstarch in our head, casserole in our bristles. So that was our hypothesis. And so we launched Suri, which is short for sustainable rituals, in May 22 and it's been a wild ride since then.
- [03:05]
B
How long did it take to develop the product?
- [03:07]
A
A year.
- [03:08]
B
And what went into that? Did you work with professional designers to sort of come up with the sleek look?
- [03:13]
A
So first of all, you know, Alibaba is obviously a great friend of ours and we reached out to every factory that we could find to study every brush and to take them apart and to understand why they made that way. Then we combined that with. And I say we. My co founder Giv is I think a product visionary and also one of the most stubborn people I've ever met. Like, he was like, hey Mark, I've found this research that other companies, it might even be a Canadian company, Pela, are using plant based materials and using them injection molding. And I think we could use that in a toothbrush head and speak to factories who don't want to do necessarily something that's totally new. And they were like, it's not possible. So we set about really researching the category, understanding, you know, the landscape from manufacturing. Then we combine that with research. And then when it came to the design, this is like one of those like moments of real luck. We found someone, I don't know if it was on Fiverr or on one of those kind of platforms to design the brush. And he was just graduating from an industrial design degree and he was, you know, it was a summer before he started his job at like one of San Francisco's top design firms. It just so happened he, he did our project and he's a world class talent. And so then, you know, he helped us with the design and then joined the company and here we are.
- [04:27]
B
It's a very mature category. People have been brushing their teeth for a long time. A lot of people are Using not great products, the products they're not psyched about. But talk to me about how you entered the market and how you knew that you had a viable product market fit.
- [04:42]
A
Yeah. So I think we first realized we probably were onto something when a week after we launched, we sold out of our first batch of 5,000. So we had done some pre sale using just like we didn't do Kickstarter. We just ran, you know, good old Facebook ad and said, hey, like, you know, do you love the gunk on the bottom of your brush? You know, does your battery always die? Hey, you know, are you worried about, like, what happens to your brush when it at its end of life? Here's a solution. And what we were seeing was a great roas on, on those ads, even on pre sale and, and that, you know, kind of gave us some, like, early indication. But then the uptake when it was in market, that was the second one. But the third one, and I think the one that sort of the secret sauce to all of our success is the reviews. You know, I think yesterday or this week, we just crossed 15,000 reviews on Trustpilot. So it's not like some of the other review platforms where you can just hide the negative ones. It's like good and bad. They're all on there. At a 4.7 rating, that makes us by far the most highly rated electric brush on trustpilot. And it's really, excuse the pun, but the word of mouth where people, I'm sure, use ChatGPT like everyone else. We made one of those custom GPTs by downloading all of our 15,000 reviews, putting them into a custom GPT and then we can interrogate the data, ask questions, et cetera. And we asked what's the most commonly used word to describe Siri in the reviews? And there's lots of great words like sleek, great, clean, dentist feel, all that kind of stuff. But the number one is love. And people describe like, I never thought I could love brushing my teeth, but I love this brand, I love this product. And I think I've got a hypothesis that if you look on any brand where the consumers and the shoppers are describing it as like, I love this, you will see that, like, that has like a certain virality and word of mouth, like an organic reach. Because if someone feels compelled to say I love something on a random review, like I love my toothbrush, then I think it's human nature to share the things you love with the people you love. You know, if something made that much of an emotional impact and, like, it's been surprising and you love using it. You're more likely to say to someone else, like, oh, hey, you know, I love my mum, I'm going to buy it for her. I love my son, I love my sister. I might be totally wrong about that and maybe there's another reason, but that. That does definitely seem to be something behind our success.
- [07:11]
B
I feel like love is always a good reason. Why do you think. Why do you think people love it so much? Do you think it's because of just the extra care you took with the design? Is it the. It's. It's like a product that a lot of people don't love. You know what I mean? A lot of people don't. You said it in the intro. They go through life, like, not knowing they could love their toothbrush. What's the reason for the love?
- [07:31]
A
Maybe I should not say this on a podcast, right? Like, I'm not sure. Like, maybe I'm about to give away the secret sauce and, you know, sporting a whole bunch of competitors. But I think you just said the secret sauce, which is a lot of people do not currently love this product. People have very low expectations. It's a. Yes, it's a utility. It's something I have to do. And I think what we've stumbled across is this incredible problem. You know, it's like. It's like a problem in plain sight. Everyone brushes their teeth. No one currently loves it. It's a chore. It's like, I have to do it, I have to buy that brand. It's the only one available. It's just this thing that has no positive emotional resonance generally with people. And so expectations are very, very low. And I think when expectations are very, very low, you have an opportunity to create a distance between expectations and reality. In fact, I don't know. Again, I've never really thought about this until you asked it this particular way. But someone once told me, happiness equals expectations minus reality. And normally that's for why you're disappointed. Or at least the context I've ever heard that phrase in is like, happiness is expectation minus reality. And so it's like, if you've got really high expectations, reality is not there. You're dissatisfied with your relationship, with your job, whatever. But it's also true the other way around. If your expectations are here and the reality is this, you're also, like, pretty happy. And so I think part of our success has been people's low expectations. That's not to take away from Suri, but I think Whether it's the unboxing, the product, the performance, the customer care, the branding, the purpose, I think we really take care to make sure the experience is positive from pre production through to aftercare.
- [09:24]
B
And you mentioned in your ads, we talk a lot about ads and growth in this podcast. And you, and it sounds like you really started problem aware, right? Understanding the problems people have with their toothbrush, talking about how this solves it. Some pretty basic stuff. How have your ads evolved as you've grown? Is it. Have you kind of really just doubled down on the same angles and value propositions with, with bigger and better ads or kind of thing? Talk about how your ads have evolved.
- [09:49]
A
I think the very first evolution, which was a funny one right at the very beginning, was when we first set out. We paid an agency, I can't remember how much, it was like maybe $10,000 to make three ads. And then we had some guy placing them and we ran those ads for I think like eight months or something pretty successfully. And we were about to move to another agency and they were just charging an obscene amount of money. And we took a bit of risk and hired someone. Nick, director of growth. And even though, you know, he was like, I don't even know if we're paying ourselves at that point, and we gave him like, you know, opt out to us, like an enormous salary, he was like, hey, let me just make some ads for you. Like, okay, well, we'll have to, you know, pay someone like maybe $20,000 and get six ads and you know, it's a big outlay for us. He was like, no, no. Like I got some editing software, like, watch this. And then like four hours I made like 10 ads. And you know, some of them were way higher performing just from our existing assets. And I think that was quite a pivotal moment just to see how like basic evolution and testing was going to shift things. And then Nick has, you know, clearly built like a better team since then. So I think the ads have evolved in lots of different ways. I think another major step was hiring Kate, who's our head of creative. And she really elevated the creative look and execution of those ads. And that elevated look of the ads matched then also our PDPs and we saw instant increase in click through rate conversion because trying to get that balance between brand and performing ads is a difficult one. And so I think we've kind of looked at different methods. And then obviously we've done whitelisting. We try lots of different things. And I think Nick really runs a really great. Iterative process where the team are constantly assessing what's working elsewhere, trying new things. And I think we found even when we find a winning ad, doing iterations of that and as we pour more money into that has been a really effective way to scale those ads.
- [11:52]
B
So are ads right now and maybe meta ads, are they the main driver for the company? What does your sort of your growth mix look like at this point?
- [12:00]
A
Yeah, so CRM email is like a really important one for us. That's like a significant portion of our monthly and annual revenue. We also have invested heavily and really grown behind influencers and creators in the last year. In fact, increasingly I think people are discovering sui for the first time through someone who they trust and who they follow already. But the majority of the business is still meta Google Ads. But then we also have in store presence. So World Exclusive will be launching in Target in the US nationwide. We're in Erewhon in la, we're in. Maybe we're in Best Buy. Um, so I think people are also, you know, seeing us in store then maybe they see our ads and they, maybe they see an influencer. And also we work with a lot of dental professionals who love and recommend our product. And so there's this kind of like virtuous cycle building between the channels. Like a bit of a flywheel.
- [12:57]
B
You mentioned the two big players in the toothbrush space and that's gotta be Oral B and Philips. Is that. Are those the two. The two big boys in the toothbrush space?
- [13:04]
A
I've heard of both of them.
- [13:05]
B
You've heard of both of them in store. How do you get picked up? Do you get picked? Because I think they both are these older brands. They both look I think like electric toothbrush have. Brushes look. Have looked like for the past 30 years. Whereas you guys look more like a, like a home good. You look more or you look like something that you'd find in a, in a. You know, as a decoration even more than. Than is. Is that. Is that maybe how you see yourself positioned against the two giants? Like when you're looking at all the products on shelf.
- [13:36]
A
First off, I think I'm going to give you a ton of exclusives on this because we. I don't normally talk about stuff like this but we. Why not? The former global CEO of the entirety of Philips Health and Wellness is on our board and you know, like she's a huge asset to us and she helped like the global expansion. And then we've recently had another person from. Who led all of Oral B's dental Strategy across Europe join us as well. So we have, we have like these really great industry people who are like helping us, you know, both understand the dental industry, but also like the international expansion and the omnichannel journey. But in terms of differentiation, I think we have three core pillars like performance. So having a really high quality clean, we're clinically tested in the same places that all of the leading brands are. And we have all the evidence that shows that we give as good or better clean, which is great. And then we have design and sustainability. And so to your point about why do people pick you off the shelf? I think from an eye catching perspective we do have a differentiation versus the traditional tropes of the category. And I think it plays more into a consumer who also maybe invests in having an iPhone or maybe Hourplay's pans at home or all these different sort of things which people spend money and care about in the rest of their lives. But then we really win them with the quality of the clean and the performance of the brush. And then there's obviously the sustainability, which for a lot of people is really important. We offer free recycling of our heads. In fact, another little exclusive for you is only just because I saw them, they've just appeared on the desk for the like. This is a soap dish made out of 18 of our heads which have been returned to us. We grind them up and re injection mold them into this soap dish, which is super fun, you know, and it kind of like demonstrates like what we believe in.
- [15:27]
B
It also it expands your category. And I'm curious, is that something that you see? Do you want to expand into other jobs to be done in the, in the bathroom?
- [15:35]
A
You know, if there's somewhere where we can improve the performance, the design and the sustainability and really solve a meaningful problem to consumers, that's something that we're interested in. So you'll see. You know, we launched a toothpaste recently, sold out, relaunch it, sold out. And you know, we've managed to get it back into supply now. But that's a really exciting, you know, part for us because a lot of people subscribe on first order. We have, you know, a huge database of subscribers with a very low churn. And one of the more hilarious sort of like things we see in our reviews is like, hey, why don't you sell more products? I'm bought in. I want to be more involved with Siri, which is great feedback.
- [16:15]
B
How long until we have AI toothbrushes where it's like Siri and it's like you didn't brush long enough. You missed this spot.
- [16:21]
A
You know what, Eric? I love this question and I love it because happy to be proven wrong. AI is amazing. AI is going to do loads of stuff. But my hypothesis is it's not going to brush your teeth. You're still going to have to pick up a toothbrush, you're going to have to put it in your mouth, and maybe there's some AI component. But whatever happens in the entire world, and whatever happens, people are going to brush their teeth. And I think that's something that's a base need. In fact, I met someone recently who was there at the early days in Google and she used to report into Larry or one of the founders. She told me this. But then I've subsequently checked on the Internet to make sure it's true that when people come into him with new ideas for products, he said it had to pass the toothbrush test, which is, I think, something that people have to use every day, twice a day, and something that they wouldn't want to live without. And what was quite funny about that is we just skipped making Google Maps and instead just made a toothbrush because it passes the toothbrush test.
- [17:25]
B
You mentioned reviews and I think, like, absolutely essential customer proof points. What have you done to ma? Do you just kind of wake up one day and realize you had like a crazy amount of good reviews? Or how have you. I guess my question. I have a couple of questions. One, how have you maximized reviews for the business? And then how do you leverage the reviews most effectively in the. In. In the. Funnel. Funnel. In order to. To drive conversion.
- [17:51]
A
Yeah. So reviews and like our NPS score and our review score is like one of our kind of North Star metrics, you know, because, like, you know, if customers are happy, then you're doing something right. And we have, probably my favorite integration with Slack is we have an API between trustpilot and Slack. And so every single person in the company receives every review, positive or negative, live. And every Monday morning meeting, when we have our weekly meeting, you know, we have a look at their score. We have a look at like reviews from the week, positive scores, negative scores, like what people are saying. And we have a customer service team who are constantly looking at reviews and responding to people and having these conversations, trying to maybe solve problems if there's been a shipping issue or if there's been a really positive review with a comment, like reaching out to those people to say thank you. And I think that trying to stay close to the customer and to listen to the customer is kind of what set us on the journey in the first place. And being close to that feedback, I think probably the best example of that is while we have a 4.7 rating and people generally have really loved the product, our hardcore customers, like, hey, I love the product, but I wish the case, the UV light just worked without having to be plugged in. Or I really wish it had a pressure sensor. That's something we heard from a lot of dental professionals. And so we watch all that feedback and that feeds into our product development. So on our new product, the UV case works just, you know, we've got a battery inside, so it works like that. We have wireless charging on our new brush and we have a pressure sensor. And so that's one of the ways in which it's integral to our product development. And then in terms of like using reviews in the funnel. Yeah, we use them on static ads. You know, it's a proof point on our pdp. We have it throughout our website and then we have different ones. We have, you know, reviews from dental professionals, we have reviews from consumers, reviews from parents. You know, like, it's really very core part of what we do.
- [19:51]
B
Let's talk about retention a little bit. You mentioned it being a big, big pillar for you and you mentioned subscription. So people are subscribing to the brush heads in some cases.
- [20:00]
A
That's right.
- [20:00]
B
I've had one, I think, for probably 10 years that I've been replacing out the heads on, but I haven't thought of like changing the base unit. Are you getting people retained, actually buying your upgraded model as opposed to just the heads, or do you find you're retaining people mainly with the heads?
- [20:16]
A
It's like, so the majority is with the heads. What we find, though is a lot of people who buy brush within year, we'll buy a second one for someone else. So it's a big gifting category as well. Like November, December is, you know, like, if you look on the search volume on Google for electric toothbrush, it's a big Christmas gift that mom loves to buy for the family. So. And like I said, you know, when you love a product, you want to give it to someone. And so you know that that's a huge part of a repeat. But actually it's the repeat heads, which is like the bread and butter of the business. And, you know, some people love subscription, some people, it's not for them. But either way, you know, the brush isn't very effective without a head. So, you know, you're Kind of bought into the ecosystem through buying the handle.
- [20:55]
B
And people criminally overuse the heads, I believe. I find myself like, oh, I guess you should change them like once a month or something.
- [21:02]
A
So dental professionals recommend once every three months.
- [21:05]
B
Every three months. Okay.
- [21:06]
A
Some people, like, will be like, oh, hey, I'm changed my brush head in two years. And you'll see it's like this like splayed thing and like they're just knocking their teeth. I sometimes think about it, like, you know, when you wash your sheets and your duvet and you get into like a fresh bed and it just feels so much better. It's like you get this amazing feeling when you change your brush head and you're like, oh, wow, I should have done this a little while ago. Like this, like, my, my teeth feel so much cleaner just because the bristles are in the right formation, you know, the right tension, etc. But yeah, no, it's a, it's an interesting part of the category, sort of seeing how often people change their heads.
- [21:44]
B
Have you expanded into Amazon?
- [21:46]
A
Yes, actually, we were based in Amazon's headquarters in Europe. For the first year we got onto this accelerator. We're meant to be there for two months and then they said like, hey, you guys want office space for like the first year? Like, it's Covid. Like, no, like post Covid. No one's coming into the office. And we're like, absolutely. And they were, you know, they were really supportive and yeah, love Amazon. Actually, for last, I don't know, like 10 weeks, we've been number one bestseller in sonic toothbrushes. Recently we achieved number three on total electric brushes, which is phenomenal. It's a really exciting place to be. I think a lot of shoppers are obviously very familiar with Amazon and with the fast delivery and the convenience and also being able to see all the features. So, yeah, Amazon's not insignificant part of our business.
- [22:32]
B
Where do you see the biggest growth horizons for Surrey at this point? Is it retail or is it doubling down on digital?
- [22:39]
A
If you brush your teeth, we're coming for you. That would be what I would say. So in terms of growth, I think, you know, it's probably the same for many companies. You know, you have new geographies, you have new products, you have new channels. And I think, you know, obviously you have everything that under. Underlies all of that. But, you know, we have some phenomenal new products coming through which really push the boundaries of performance, design and sustainability. You know, we have some great new retailers, like I mentioned, which are coming online. And then we have, we have people from all around the world, retailers, consumers, journalists reaching out to us, saying, hey, like, why. Why is this not available in Germany, in Japan, in Australia, in Sweden, in Mexico? You know, it's, it's, it's an exciting, exciting time to be a toothbrush sales guy.
- [23:29]
B
Did you launch it in the US or did you launch it in the uk?
- [23:33]
A
We launched it simultaneously in the UK and the US actually, and we did a little bit of Germany at the start, just to see what the cost of acquisition would be and, like, how it would fare using our same ads across all markets. I think quickly we realized that logistically it'd be difficult to run three markets from the outset with language barriers. And so we've run from the UK and the US from the get go.
- [23:56]
B
What are the differences that you found between those two markets?
- [24:00]
A
There's a lot of differences. There's a lot of similarities. I think the US consumer is more likely to shop on Amazon than the UK consumer slightly. And there's cultural nuances around how you charge your brush. Say, in the US a lot of people have the sockets in the bathroom, whereas that's less popular in the uk. And so there's very tactical little things, but broadly speaking, you know, everyone is, is united in the desire to have a really great clean, to have a product that they enjoy using that feels great, that looks great, that has a long battery life and is more sustainable. So I think, although there's, like, you know, this differences in how you like, market or position things, that the broader, you know, desire to have a great clean of your teeth is. Is fairly common.
- [24:51]
B
Aside from being in the mouths of everyone brushing their teeth, what do you look at as goals for the business? Do you. When you're like, I'm always interested when you're, when you're going into a market that's so saturated by, you know, 100-year-old incumbents, is the goal one day to have them be like this, these, this guy's really eating our cheese. We got to buy them or just to slowly take them over and erode their market, their market cap. What's your goal for how big this can be and what do you want to do with it?
- [25:19]
A
Yeah, so first of all, I think we're bringing a lot of new people into the category. People who don't necessarily use an electric brush already. Maybe they're using a manual and, you know, they were like, oh, I don't need Bluetooth, I don't need that stuff. So I think there's like an, like there's a large number, like the majority of people are using a manual brush. And so I think there's this like, big thing we're doing to help people upgrade and that's actually much better for your oral health, which is like, is pretty much like undisputed now. And so I think growing the pie is like a big part of what we do then in terms of like the long term vision, we really do believe in that North Star metric of like creating a brand that people love and like, makes them feel great and gives them, you know, superior oral health as a result of, you know, you know, wanting to brush their teeth for longer, more regularly. So, you know, you know, a lot of people will say to us, like, my teeth have never felt so clean. Like, how do you do it? And actually for a lot of people, you know, just brushing for the full two minutes, we have a timer which goes off after two minutes. And doing that twice a day and looking forward to brushing your teeth is a big factor in that. And so I think the vision, wouldn't it be amazing to bring that same joy, that same performance and really to step change the sustainability of how we make and use and dispose of these brushes globally. And when you think about people who are five people who are 95, you know, using your products, you know, you really can see how you could continue just like building something for forever to, to make the world a slightly better place. Which I know sounds a little bit lofty, but like, it's kind of exciting.
- [26:50]
B
I remember when I first switched to an electric toothbrush and I went to the dentist for the first time after. And the amount of scrape, because scraping is the worst. The amount of like the time, you know, when you're in the dental chair and they're scraping away at your, at your plaque and tartar and everything, that's absolute worst. But I remember her being like, did you. Have you changed toothbrushes? Your, your plaque is like a lot like, I got less scraping. I got a, you know, a compliment from the dentist and I was like, I made a correct choice. If you can tie that emotion into people's purchase choices, it'll do really well. It'll continue to do really well, obviously, 100%.
- [27:23]
A
And actually it's funny, like, even like that anecdote, we should, we should make this into an ad because that's something that we see all the time in the reviews. It's like, oh, I went to my dentist and they like complimented me, like, because kind of people, you know, you're kind of always a little bit hesitant about that interaction, but, like, going and getting like, that positive reinforcement, like, hey, what. What are you doing? And so getting a lot of inbound from dental professionals being like, hey, look like lots of my patients come in and I love it. Like, I want to learn more about it.
- [27:48]
B
In the pre chat, we were talking about some of the gallivanting you're doing. You're coming to Seattle. You're coming actually to Victoria randomly, which is amazing. And you were just sort of reflecting on this sort of like this life you've created for yourself. What's your favorite part about being a successful DTC entrepreneur?
- [28:06]
A
Firstly, I'm not sure I define myself as successful yet. Like, which I know, I don't know, might kind of sound wild, but, like, I feel like I'm just trying. I wake up every day and I just keep trying. And totally, honestly, we're making up as we go along. I had a previous company that scaled to low millions, but not one that's gone to tens and tens and tens of millions. It just feels. The emotion is almost like every week and every month we're breaking new ground. It's like you're an icebreaker, literally breaking new ground and doing something for the first time, which is. I find it exhilarating. You know, it's. It's scary. It's. Is it going to work? Are we gonna. Are we gonna get to our destination? But, boy, like, do we see some incredible things on. On the way, you know, and. And, you know, there's moments that kind of catch your breath where you're like, wow. Like, to use the icebreaker analogy, I don't know, maybe you see like a polar bear or, you know, one day you see like some shooting stars or. Or whatever it is. And I find myself constantly just being so grateful to get to experience these things, like, with phenomenal people around me, you know, like, really people who are, like, passionate, hardworking, who care what they're doing and enjoy the process of building alongside me. And it's just incredibly rewarding. I kind of hope that this sort of feeling, regardless of, like, outcome, doesn't end. And it's. I don't know, it's highly addictive. It's kind of. And don't get me wrong, it's like, also absolutely terrible, you know, like, there's been probably as many or more awful moments and terrifying and scary and, you know, humbling, but that's what a way to live. You know, it's like, I'd rather be at that Forefront, feeling the ups and the downs and. And, you know, trying and be on the pitch, you know, trying to make a difference versus on the sidelines.
- [29:56]
B
What do you think it would take?
- [29:57]
A
What?
- [29:57]
B
When I asked that question about. About being successful, what do you think it would take for you to be, like, at what level? I think. I think a lot of business owners, when they're in the maelstrom, it's sometimes hard to feel successful. And I think that's why people keep. Are driven to kind of keep going. But what do you think it would take in the business for you to be like, yeah, this is. This is really successful? Like, what.
- [30:20]
A
What would.
- [30:20]
B
What would that be?
- [30:22]
A
It's probably not profit, and it's not like. Like, you know, that's like, one sort of, like, small element, I think, for me to feel successful, I think. And maybe this is like, I don't know, moving into therapy, but it's just feeling like we're doing the best we could be doing. Is everything at the best it possibly can be. And the truth is, nothing is ever at the very, very best it can be in terms of efficiency and operation. But I really enjoy the process of trying to get better. Does that make sense? And so, I don't know. I think once upon a time, I had a company before this success was an exit. And I got to that point and I don't know, I just didn't. It wasn't what I thought it was going to be, to be honest. Like, and then it sort of made me think, like, oh, actually, maybe success isn't, like, the outcome. It probably is a process of. Of enjoying it, of being grateful, of getting the right balance. You know, I've got two young children, and I'm. I'm traveling a lot. I work really hard. And, you know, like, I've got dinner tonight with some lawyers, and, you know, I have to do that, but it means I'm not putting the kids to bed. And then next week I'm in the US I'm not going to see them then. And, you know, it's like, is that success? I'm not sure. But, you know, I'm just trying and trying to work it out as we're going along. Build a plane as you're flying it.
- [31:47]
B
Almost everyone I talk to on the podcast is doing that. That's what we're doing here on the D2C side. Thanks for coming on the D2C podcast today, Mark. This was really awesome. I look forward to kind of continuing to follow your journey and continue to love brushing my teeth, using my surrey.
- [32:03]
A
Thank you very much. And like, yeah, maybe I'll see you in Victoria next week. Wouldn't that be wild?
- [32:06]
B
Yeah, that's right. Let's connect on that after this. And I'm, I'm headed for my buddy's 50th ski trip on the following day, so my time might be compressed. Washington, Mount Washington for, for a nice four day ski trip up there. We've got 14 men in a house, so it's going to be, it's going to be an event, that's for sure.
- [32:26]
A
You doing some backcountry stuff?
- [32:28]
B
Nope, just, just regular, regular mountain stuff. And we'll see. The snow right now is it's actually supposed to get quite warm up on the mountain and it's supposed to hit a cold snap and start really snowing like a couple days before we show up. So hopefully it'll be perfect for some fresh powder.
- [32:41]
A
One of my, one of my more fun life adventures was doing a ski safari. We flew into Calgary and then, you know, hit like, like Banff and Kicking Horse and Lake Louise. And Lake Louise and you know, all the way across to Whistler and just, oh, that' what a country. What a country. And what skiing is incredible.
- [33:00]
B
Beautiful. All right, Mark, Thanks a lot, man.
- [33:02]
A
Thank you.
- [33:09]
B
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 directtoconsumeralloneword.
- [33:18]
A
Co.
- [33:19]
B
I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.