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Ep 584: Building in Pubic: Inspecting Bushbalm’s 70% Growth via Retail & the Pro Channel
00:40:01
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the DTC podcast. Today, David Gaylord from Bushbaum is returning for his third time. I've been following this brand since the early days, right after he left Shopify and experienced 1000% growth in his first few years. What's wild is that even today, as a much bigger business, David says they still did around 70% growth last year. And in this economy, that's nothing to sneeze at. In this episode, we get into the strategy behind that growth about going deep with one key retailer. Think a thousand plus doors, plus expanding the pro channel and treating it like a community, not just distribution. Let's get into it. I hope you enjoy it. And on with the show.
- [00:38]
B
The fundamentals changed this year for Bushbomb. For a numbers perspective, we grew 70% on like a pretty good base. And we went from like more or less break even. Like always. We were kind of growing quickly break even. This past year we did 10% EBITDA. Like our fastest growing year in three or four years and we grew at 10% EBITDA. We're really starting to build the engine for profit.
- [01:07]
A
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. Contentful helps you create tailored omnichannel experiences without working over overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the feels@contentful.com David, welcome back to the DTC podcast. I had to just start with the last podcast title because I think I don't even title podcasts like this anymore. But the last podcast we did was in 2023. In March, Bushbaum's David Gaylord goes B2B enters US retail bigly and rides the vagacial wave on DTC. Tough to top that title. But how, how are we going to top that today? What? How has life been since we last spoke in 2023?
- [02:05]
B
Yeah, things are good. We've grown a lot as far as just everything, like revenue, top line, bottom line, team size. I think we just passed 52 people.
- [02:15]
A
Nice.
- [02:15]
B
Which is kind of crazy. And then, yeah, we're, we're by far a much larger retail oriented company now. Like, it's by far our largest revenue area both professionally and with Ulta beauty. So yeah, D2C is a chunk of what we do. Amazon obviously. But yeah, in person is now like the core of like everything Bushbum does.
- [02:36]
A
And I think you Were just entering in 2023 when we last spoke.
- [02:39]
B
Yeah, we were probably just like, just investing in it. We. I have the numbers, actually. I think we probably still had, like, 2,000 accounts at that point. But, yeah, we were kind of just like, adding team members for the first time to that team, even though we already had, like, a ton of momentum.
- [02:54]
A
So what's been the biggest factor in. In that much retail momentum? Because that doesn't happen for everyone.
- [03:00]
B
Yeah, I think it's just been, obviously, momentum hits, but it's a combination of product market fit being perfect, and if you have perfect product market fit, like, the momentum's there if you accelerate it. So, yeah, we have really, honestly, like, amazing product market fit on the waxing channel. So we just accelerated it with investments into, like, we do trade shows all the time. I think last year we did six on the pro channel. And then we also do a ton of education now, so, like, live wax demos, how to use the wax pro tips. Like, there's so much more that we give back to the community. So it's now, like, word of mouth is really taking us to, like, a new level for sure.
- [03:43]
A
And then what's B2B versus sort of B2C, Ecom or retail? What's. What's bigger there?
- [03:50]
B
How we see our world is like we. We call it the pro channel, and it's like a dedicated space. It's focused obviously on the waxing salons. So they use it in service and then they also retail. So there's like, a lot of revenue there that's like, technically retail, but it's with waxing salons. And then we've got our, like, retail channel we call it, which would be like, Ulta Beauty Shoppers, Drug Martin, any of these kind of like, one off or like, different partnerships, like FabFitFun, that kind of thing. But yeah, we. We call them, yeah, professional. And then retail is kind of how we decipher the two.
- [04:22]
A
And then did you guys. You pretty much created a category when you first hit the retail markets. Like, are you in a bit of a blue ocean space or is there a lot more competition at this time?
- [04:32]
B
It depends how you think about it. It's a weird area because waxing is like a different channel and it's like a different area with different competitors. And then at Ulta Beauty, for instance, we're in the hair removal section. So in that category, yeah, you look around and you go, yeah, there's not much skin care here. And you look around and it's like, oh, you're a shaving gel and a razor and a hair removal cream. Whereas, yeah, we're kind of one of the only players that makes skin care that's really good. We've got routines for it. But aftercare itself is like a pretty small category. It's very focused, very niche. But we own like a lot of it at Ulta now and then. Yeah. In the waxing side, there's way different competition in weird ways. There's like the wax companies that are all around for like 30 years, 40 years, and then there's a lot of just companies that just do skincare or there's like one off companies that do wax and skincare, but they're kind of smaller. It's just like a very fragmented world over there. Whereas you would know in shave, there's like Gillette and there's Schick and there's. Yeah, so there's like a lot of bigger players on that side.
- [05:40]
A
You mentioned trade shows. Are those mainly for the pro side of the business, for the B2B side to sort of like trade shows to reach other waxers and salons?
- [05:48]
B
Yeah, so most of them. So six a year probably for B2B. So we do the pro, we go to those shows. It's a lot of work for those ones and it's very busy and there's a lot of education we do and in person, which is good. And then we probably do another three trade shows a year on retail. So, like, we do one with Ulta Beauty. We're going, we're going to Expo west this year. So those are more so to like build up the brand and also connect with, like future buyers. And we've taken a good stance of like, we, we commit hard to our retailers. So like Ulta Beauty, we've said no to like so many other retailers, but yeah, kicking hard on Ulta and saying, hey, we're in. That's like our goal. So we're not at Expo west to like sign deals tomorrow, but we're there to, like build relationships for the next, like five years for when it might make sense to go to another retailer.
- [06:38]
A
Talk to me about that environment. Alta wants you to be more exclusive to them.
- [06:42]
B
Yeah, I think anyone does. Like, everyone kind of wants that and wants you to focus on them and give them attention. And for us, our thing is like, yeah, like, we want to too, because the more you focus on one retailer, the better it's going to do. And for us too, it's like we have the Pro channel doing amazingly well, so we might not Even have the bandwidth yet to focus on an Alta and a Target. And so we've kind of said Alta gets a very focused assortment. We can sell and move a lot of units there. But yeah, a lot of brands in our space. It's so easy to accidentally be like, oh, we signed up with this retailer, that retailer and this retailer and all of a sudden you have seven retailers and none of them do well. Yeah, versus like you want to land a whale and then like really focus on it. I think.
- [07:27]
A
Talk to me about what that means. What, what, what does that practically mean to really focus and sort of double down on a retailer? Does it mean promotion strategy, end caps, that kind of thing? What, what goes into really focusing on a retailer?
- [07:38]
B
Yeah, we, we haven't done a great job of it actually. Retail is like, I think hard and different. D2C is so nice because you get to say, hey, we spent this much money on this ad and it led to this many sales. Whereas at retail, in the early days of Ulta, we didn't have that much money per se to like invest in it. So what we did is we didn't invest a ton of marketing spend that went direct to Ulta. So like, it's not like we transitioned our Facebook ad Strategy to do 40% to Ulta. We just kept our DTC engine going. And not to say we were lucky, but bush bomb in the hair removal category, our natural sell through on shelf was just great. So we like naturally sold well and then the next year we got more products in and it sold better. We moved up a shelf, it sold even better. Whereas this year we're at the stage where, yeah, we're actually investing in Ulta in more ways and we're doing obviously some digital stuff like Critio and then Facebook ads, but we're also spending a lot more money on like classic trade marketing. So we're probably spending like 200 grand on like a shelf riser. So like a display that looks beautiful and sells more. And then we're doing like at PDQs, which are these like in aisle displays that sell during like sale periods or whatnot. So we're. Yeah, we're spending a lot more on classic trade marketing is what you'd call it. And that that stuff seems to have a pretty massive in store impact versus online.
- [09:04]
A
And it's cost effective.
- [09:06]
B
Hard to say from what I've been told from like industry experts is the number one place you need to spend money first is on your display. Because 100% of the people come into Ulta are going to go there and look at it. That sells them right away, right? It's like a touch, it's like a physical right there touch point. It adds a ton of value. And then I've heard the second place is if you can get involved in Ulta Beauty's like sales and promotions and their, it's like their brand calendar. If you can be a part of it, that's how you win. But that's really hard. That's easy to say, really hard to do because they're not going to add you to their brand calendar if you're not a very good seller. And also if you're not committing money and resources to it, they're also probably not going to involve you. So it's, it's kind of a give and take negotiation where oh hey, we will do that end cap but we would like to also get featured in the sale emails or the website promotion. So you kind of got to give and take and so some of it you like overspend on something but ideally you get it back and get value over here. And then ideally Ulta also sees your sales go up and everyone's kind of happy. But for a small brand it's really hard to be like, oh, we're going to do this $30,000 end cap for three weeks. I don't know, I think it's not in the budget right now. That's the hardest part. Probably.
- [10:29]
A
Super interesting. What does your end cap look like? Because you mentioned, you mentioned the image behind you. If you're listening to this as most people do, you've got a beach scene, you're in your newly non renovated office, you finally, you put up some decorations to add some personality. And it's, it's part of the brand of how you guys show up at trade shows, which is a beat. What like a lifeguard stand basically on a beach does that. I just think it's interesting to think about how you think about that next level of branding for your product because your products are all very functional. I remember in our first interview you talked about really naming things kind of a little bit, how you know for the function that they're supposed to have and how you're sort of built problem aware like that. But then you elevate it to this other piece which you know, which is the beach. Speak about that a little bit and how that plays into your retail and strategy.
- [11:11]
B
I think the retailing side is sometimes the best way to think about it, which is kind of odd way to think is like if you go to a grocery store and just genuinely look at the end caps. You'll see the like generic ones that have no signage and display. And then you'll see the ones with what they call it a pdq, which I always thought like, what does that mean? And it's, it stands for Pretty Darn Quick, which is like a hilarious. Yeah. Acronym that is. But the, the reason it is, it's like meant to sell it pretty darn quick. So you, you do a lot of like selling features and it explains how it works quickly to the eye. So yeah, we're, we're doing more of those like PDQs. And for us, yeah, you're right. Like, we focus on very specific. So we're doing a PDQ in the summer and it's going to be three step Smooth Shave. So a bit of a mouthful and then it's really three products that are those steps and we're launching like a new shave product in the summer. So on the pdq it'll be very clear. Like, oh yeah, I use this one. This one, this one. That's why they're all here. I understand our names are very specific. So it's like Hydrating Shave Jelly Ingrown Hair Oil, Ingrown Hair Exfoliating Scrub. So they're, they're very specific. But yeah, the PDQ will, will add like very. Here's why you need it. But also here's like the beautiful brand images alongside it to make you draw your eye to it. So then you do want to buy it.
- [12:32]
A
How are meta ads doing? How's, how's the meta world for you guys?
- [12:35]
B
DTC is just, just hard in general, I think for everyone. So what we're seeing is DTC. We were up like 25% last year, so something like that, which is like pretty okay. However, the brand grew as a whole, like 70% revenue. So all the other channels are like ripping and growing. And our, our focus is how do we make the flywheel work better? So getting people from waxing salons to then go into an Ulta or D2C and purchase. And we're starting to see that now. On D2C, like our, our amount of word of mouth sales is much higher. So it's been, yeah, it's been good, but they're just hard. Like you're always like cycling new creative. There's more competition than ever. But yeah, we're finding wins. Like we, we've had a few things where we've, we've pulled back certain items that don't have high retention or lower retention than others. And we focus our ads more on the ones that have the highest. And that's actually helped like over the year. It really changed our like retention across the board. But yeah, we're, we're more focused on the pro side, which means we're less reliant on Meta ads, which is kind of handy.
- [13:41]
A
Do you ever use meta ads for the pro side?
- [13:44]
B
Yeah, we do, like retargeting a lot of that stuff. Yeah.
- [13:47]
A
I'm just amazed as a B2B advertiser myself, Meta's ability to deliver, you know, D2C brands to subscribe to D2C or with our agency, business agency owners, like, it's, it's quite, quite adept at, at B2B stuff as well.
- [13:59]
B
Yeah, for sure. It's like definitely getting better. What, what's helpful for us is sometimes with B2B, it's like you kind of don't want to sell someone. So that's why we spend so much money and time on doing the education as well. It's, it's a lot. People want to get better at their job. So we're always doing educational content. We're getting them to these webinars demos and that just naturally leads to people signing up and kind of purchasing.
- [14:22]
A
I meant to ask you about Ulta. You mentioned getting on their marketing calendar. Are you guys lined up for something in June for, for bikini season?
- [14:28]
B
Yeah, like the calendar is always very specific and there's like lots of things and typically what happens is you get involved in this certain sales. So they've got like the spring break, I don't know, spring hall or spring break sale. There's like the summer sale. It's too early to say like, oh yeah, we're perfectly involved. However, we've been working and we're doing some like trade spend on certain things with the negotiation to, hey, we want to get featured on the homepage for summer sale. So guaranteed we're in the sale. But the next phase is like getting commitment that, hey, you're on the homepage and then, oh, you're also in this email. Right. So those things have huge impact in your sales. It's just hard to negotiate otherwise. Sometimes you're like, imagine the website. There's a little box that says 25% off hair removal. Right. Like that's fine. You're mixed in with like 20 other brands versus it saying 25% off Bush Bomb. Like it's a huge delta in the clicks and the amount of traffic and like competition. Right. So we're trying to do more of.
- [15:26]
A
That and you're just trying to court them. You're not trying to come out and give them an overture and say, lock us in. You're just trying to let them see you and see your growth and show that you're investing and you're just hoping.
- [15:36]
B
Yeah. Like it's kind of a conversation usually like 2, 3, 4 months out where their team is also trying to lock these things in. Right. So you've got to be at the right time with the right momentum to like get there and with the right products as well. Because if, if something's too niche, they're probably like, well, no, it doesn't make sense for that block. Like you need to be big enough to sell. So yeah, it's, it's an all. Like we've had it a few times and it's worked really well. We pushed. Whereas you also don't want to overdo it and push too hard, especially if you're not as big as certain other brands. So, yeah, we've grown a lot the last year. So it's been easier to get those features than our first year would have been. Honestly, almost impossible. Unless we like were really aggressive and pushed the buyer really hard.
- [16:17]
A
Yeah. Took them up for dinner, got something over on them.
- [16:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [16:21]
A
Well, congrats on this growth year. You mentioned your team growth up to over 50 at this point between 2023 and 2026. Can you think of. I don't. You don't have to call anyone, give them too much praise. But any, any hire made that have been absolutely critical for the business.
- [16:37]
B
Yeah, we've brought on a data team. So we have like that really in house now. So we've automated like so many of our reports or weekly meetings, like all the graphs that show they just like update and. Yeah, that's been really huge. And then, yeah, we've really, I don't know in 2023 how many products we were launching per year, but we've really grown our product development team and to the point now where I think this year we'll launch like 18 new products.
- [17:06]
A
Wild. And how many do you have now?
- [17:08]
B
I don't know. Actually, it's a good question. We have probably like 35 or something. Yeah, yeah. But we, we do a lot of limited editions. So we launch those, they go away, we launch more, they go away. Right. So that leads to us launching at least 10 limited edition products that are like true beauty skincare wax products. And then we probably have another like three that are like accessories. As like whatever that might look like. And then we probably have like 4 full time SKUs that are coming on as well.
- [17:41]
A
Cool. And I, I see you've got some hypochlorous acid. Hypochlorous acid or Sass spray. What's that? Is that a new category?
- [17:49]
B
Yeah, hypochlorous acid is like a really new ingredient compound and it's like super popular. So another brand, Tower 28, launched, I forget what theirs is called, SOS Spray, and it just like took over. What's amazing about it is it's like a disinfectant, but it's also like unbelievable with the skin. So there's so many use cases where it kind of started from what I understand is in surgery, they use it for like wound care. So like kind of crazy. And then there was found all these benefits. Like it helps with eczema, it helps with acne, it literally like disinfects. So you see people on like an airplane, like spraying it on their face just to kill germs, but it also helps your skin. So it's like all these crazy benefits. It's like blowing up. But we launched it and this is where our scale comes in. Our waxing salon business. Now we've got about. We're just over 18,000 independent waxing salons that use and carry us actively. That's like an insanely large group. We'll probably have 30,000 by the end of the year. So this Sass spray, amazing ingredient, amazing formula. We decided we're only launching it to our professional channel, so you can't get it at Ulta, D2C, Amazon anywhere. And we're launching it first to them as backbar because getting a wax like this is a really good product because it helps with redness. It's kind of a disinfectant pre and post wax. So there's all these reasons. It's amazing. And then in I think it's May this year, we're launching a retail version that's like a smaller size for travel on the plane and that we're also only launching to professionals. The reason is like there are other brands that do hypochlorous acid. The way we do it, we, we know is more potent, stronger, lasts longer, like all these things. However, when someone else is selling something that literally the ingredient list looks the exact same, like, what's your advantage? So like if we launched a D2C, like what would our advantage be against Tower 28 or just your brand?
- [19:44]
A
I guess.
- [19:45]
B
Yeah. However, if we launch it just to Pros the advantage is like all those other brands like they don't have this distribution network we have that's this massive. So we may as well use that to our advantage and also give an advantage to our pros. Right. They have an exclusive product so that's like a huge bet for the company. And we're doing a lot of unique things for that product. Come May they were doing a pdq like they'll buy six at a time. We always sell case back of six. But that case pack, well, it's like a beautiful display box that they just put on their shelf that like shows the logo, it sells the product. So yeah, that's like a big one. It's a huge trend. If you look at like Google trends data to see and we don't think it's going anywhere. It's like massive category.
- [20:29]
A
Which of the of your product launches does that one fit into? Is that one one of the four like permanent SKUs?
- [20:35]
B
Yeah, that would be like a permanent SKU. Different size. That's like one of the easier ones to launch because it's just a different size. But yeah, definitely a permanent for sure.
- [20:44]
A
What goes into across? So you pick maybe another product, one of your other four permanent SKUs that you're launching. What goes into your sort of launch strategy? Because you guys have so many different channels, I guess you treat each one separate.
- [20:56]
B
Yeah, sort of. There's like beauties takes a long time and it's kind of slow. Ulta Beauty for instance, like today I'm starting conversations for my what we launch April 2027. So we haven't even done the April launch this year and we're already. We have to plan for the following year. So you got to be on retail really far ahead. And then typically every product we launch we try to understand the channel first. Like which channel is it primarily for. And the more we've become pro oriented, we tend to be focused on the pro channel a lot. And then D2C. Actually what we're finding is this is the year we're actually getting even more focused. So we might actually like last year we actually discontinued products on D2C to make it so that the assortment is more clear. Because DTC is tough when you've got like five different categories with different products and different scents. Whereas now we're trying to focus it on we basically got this three step shave routine and that's going to be really clear and focused. And then we've also got our trimmers and hair removal devices. So those two categories beside each other. It's super clear and easy. But as soon as you add, like, call it like a body care line, all of a sudden it's just like too much for the consumer to understand and too hard to do your ads for three, four or five different categories. So D2C, we're trying to focus a little bit more for the assortment. A lot of it on scent, to be honest. But then pro, they can sell all kinds of categories. Like, we've got a chafing stick. Like, pros love the chafing stick in the summer. We've got like the post wax. We've got like dark spots that, like pros can communicate it in person, whereas on your website, it's. It's hard to communicate that many things.
- [22:41]
A
Yeah. Scent is such an interesting. I talked to so many different health and beauty cosmetic people where scent is playing a bigger role. My daughter's obsessed with Sol de Janeiro, so. Oh, yeah, bathroom just smells. Smells like. Like a beautiful place all the time. Yeah, it's a good smell. But talk to me about, about Sense and. And how you're. How you're working with them.
- [23:01]
B
Yeah. So when we launched, I would say the world of body care, it was. It was a weird period. Not a weird period. It was just the way it was. Was unscented was what everyone wanted. It was like natural and unscented. That was it. Like, that's all the conversations. Whereas Covet Hits Brazilian Bum Bum Cream by Sol de Janeiro explodes. Right. So that moment and then add on to it TikTok as a conversation and lots of dialogue, Scent became a huge boom in body care. So when Bushbump launched, we don't come from beauty and at the time, like, we weren't even thinking about the combo of unscented and. But we naturally launched with three different scents and that was how we did it. It was like standard. So scents always been in the bush Bump DNA. Whereas it's probably like three years ago, we decided it's time to do. Let's try a limited edition, like a new scent. And we did it and it was a huge hit. And then we were like, okay, let's try it again, but instead of one item, we'll do two. So we did two limited editions, same scent. That crushed it even more. So this year we're actually doing our first ever limited edition with three different products, so different formats. And the idea is maybe in the future we can do a limited edition drop for a month or two that has four items or five items. Just different formats. So Sense. Yeah. It's like right in our DNA. It helps with Ulta Beauty. Like, we have three different scents at Ulta now, so that should be a big part kind of long term.
- [24:23]
A
We just developed this thing called the D2C podcast brain. So we just put like all of our transcripts into a GPT. And so before this interview, I was just sort of like, I was like, call back up our past year interviews because my brain can't do that and talk to me about, about the most important things and then take a look at your, your public profile and so, and, and to pull out some, some things to talk about. It's working extremely well. I. And one of the coolest things that pulled out is something that you're talking about I think on LinkedIn a little bit more is this concept of category rewiring, which I think is super important, especially for a product like you guys, which where it's, you know, it's. It's an under the waistline, you know, product that a lot of people like, don't talk about a lot. It's probably thought of as like a necessity that people have to deal with. People don't like the problem that they have or facing it or something. Talk to me about what you mean about category rewiring and why it's been important for you guys.
- [25:12]
B
Yeah. So shaving and hair removal in general, how we see it at Bush Balm is it's a category that has a lot of baggage. That baggage stems from one, waxing is super painful. Immediately waxing, super painful. Number two, people are like, oh, my God, shaving such a chore. I hate shaving. Number three is hair removal creams are toxic. That's terrible. And then number four is, oh, like razor burning your own hairs. That's just part of it. That's how it works. Like, that's totally fine.
- [25:43]
A
Just accept it.
- [25:44]
B
Yeah. Our category has all these like, bad baggage assumptions. So we're trying to rewire the whole system and how you think about the category to the point of we just launched a wax that's now clinically tested to be less painful. So, like, waxing doesn't have to be as painful. It doesn't have to lead to irritation, redness, all these things. And shaving, like, we're adding this amazing scent, this routine to it. Our goal is to make shaving kind of cool and fun and not a chore that you hate. Right. Like that everything shower combo, make it big hair removal creams. We're not even touching. It's not really our thing. And the idea of like ingrown hair is razor burn. It's just part of it. It's just natural. We want to make it to the point. So right now. So, you know, if you get a wax, your esthetician will typically say, don't play sports, don't have sex, don't sweat for the next 24 hours. Like, we want you to leave a wax in the future where you're. You're just good, you can go and you go on your vacation, you don't worry about anything. You go play sports, anything you want. But that's like a world we're trying to get to with like our. Our roadmap.
- [26:48]
A
One of the things, I guess we talked a little bit about meta, but one of the things I'm talking about with everyone who comes on these days is how much, I guess kind of like deeper people are going with their marketing when it comes to identifying actual use cases and actual psychological profiles of people who use the product. You guys seem to think deeply about the brand and sort of everything you do. How have you guys maybe dealt with Andromeda, maybe specifically on the meta side when it comes to psychologically profiling your users in your ads?
- [27:17]
B
Yeah, we've done not as much of that, probably, but we started to do more like actual customer feedback to understand, like, what they say. And there's a bunch of things. Like, we're launching our new shave jelly, and we quickly realized, like, first off, we sell a routine, right? Three steps. You do this, this, and this, and it'll leave. It'll honestly lead a smooth shave. You won't have razor burn, all that. What we've realized is people don't see the shave concept as a routine. They just see it as like a. A product. Right. I use a shave cream and that's it. Or so that's like a mental model that changed our opinion. And then also just the concept of people seeing it as a chore. If you see it as a chore, that's good language that we can kind of rip into. So we more so used it for like a lot of interviews to understand. And we do so many surveys now push bottom to our customers if we get tons of responses. And that typically will shape like how we position a product. But we're trying to do more. It's kind of hard at times. We're trying to do more content. That's estheticians talking to our D2C clients to educate them on the routines and aftercare and all these things. So it's. We're Less about our old school direct response ads. Like, we're trying to change it more into like, brand ads, which is a. A different endeavor.
- [28:33]
A
What does that mean?
- [28:34]
B
Right now we typically are like, oh, you've ingrown hairs. Here's this very specific product you should use it versus being like, hey, there's a new standard for hair removal and it's all about skin care and, like, focusing there. We're trying to do more of that so people understand, even waxers. As an example. Like, we're genuinely trying to become like the best wax brand in the world because we just have better formulations. We come from skin care. We're turning that into the wax game. We're trying to do that more instead of being like, our wax is hypoallergenic and it does this and it's better for that. We want them to remember, like, who Bushbum is as a whole versus the individual, which sometimes it's hard to do that through ads and get like, the immediate return.
- [29:17]
A
It makes me wonder if there's. I talked to so many people these days about TikTok Shop, the affiliate strategy on TikTok Shop, and I. I don't follow a lot of estheticians on. On TikTok, but I imagine there's a bunch. What. What are you guys doing in the. In the TikTok shop? In the affiliate space?
- [29:32]
B
Yeah, we don't do anything. We do a lot of affiliate stuff, sort of. We have a lot of word of mouth just organically. We've got like a. A small program we're starting for the pros. But yeah, no, since we're Canadian, like, we just can't do TikTok shop, which is good and bad. The. The good is I worry that if you do TikTok shop and you crush it and do really well, your comps the following year are really hard to beat. Like how scalable, how consistent. Like, that's on our minds. And also right now it's been nice. We're so focused on the other channels and the fact that we just can't do just focuses us more on what is working. Um, but yeah, TikTok's definitely got lots of potential and like, we do ads and all that stuff separately. But yeah, the affiliate model on TikTok shops, like, kind of shocking how much it's grown so quickly.
- [30:17]
A
Yeah. I've been following Brock Mameser, a friend of mine from Frostbuddy, and I think just absolutely crushed it this year with. With affiliates, the simplest strategies in the world. Right. Like, just explaining why Your product's good like over and over and over again.
- [30:30]
B
Classic old school like routes as well.
- [30:33]
A
How long do you think before you, you would consider another retailer?
- [30:36]
B
So we, we added Shoppers Drug Mart in Canada. So that's different country though. So that's why we've, we've basically tried to find our key retailer per country that we're in that we are going to focus on. And then we, we are doing some very small things that are exciting where like we're, we're going to probably do a Costco test for a very specific item. So that's like exciting and we, we want to like long term attached is great because you get to see and then analyze the data and figure out is this something you really want to do long term. But our goal in the medium term is really we want to actually expand our space at Ulta. This year we're going from 21 inches of shelf space to 31, which sounds like a small amount of growth but that's massive for the brand. So our goal eventually is to have probably two, two foot shelves so get up to that like 48 inch of space and then from there we can really work to optimize and kind of grow it. But yeah, when you're, that's the thing. We could go looking for other retailers but at the same time we think we can still add like a few feet at Ulta. Right. Which is, it's almost, it's probably better than adding another retailer at the moment.
- [31:45]
A
Yeah, I'm thinking of Monopoly and it's like do you, do you buy all the properties or just you know, get, get your hotels up on the, on the, the big ones.
- [31:52]
B
Yeah, exactly. The bigger opportunity for us isn't to try to go after like a Target or Walmart at the moment. It's actually probably to land like some of the biggest wax chains in the country. Right. 300 doors, 400 doors, their volumes will be way higher. We've just never. Next year we're going to be building a key account team which right now we don't have. So we're not equipped to do like payment terms and all this stuff with a ton of retailers. Like we do it with Ulta and shoppers, don't get me wrong. But to do it with 80 new accounts that are like high profile studios and salons and chains, that's a, that's a lot harder. Um, so we got to set up like the systems and structures to actually do that type of thing at a, at a scale.
- [32:38]
A
That's so cool. So most of your, most of your salons and estheticians, this right now are more like grassroots, like individual practitioners versus those, those huge accounts.
- [32:48]
B
Yeah, yeah, like we don't use distributors whatsoever. We've got 18,000 accounts and most of them are one to three locations. Yeah. So it's like super homegrown, awesome people. They're typically pure entrepreneurs. Like it's actually really, really cool.
- [33:06]
A
Yeah. And connecting with them in your events and things like that is so smart. Just fostering that community. Do you have a digital community for that as well? Like do you have, are you guys on a slack or anything?
- [33:15]
B
Yeah, we don't have a digital community for like a classic way to describe it. We've got like a group of small, like it's I think a 10 person group that's like our product community that helps us make products. And then we've got our like broadcast channel and Instagram that's got like, I don't know how many people, like three or 4,000 in it. And that's like pretty fun. That's like community oriented. But yeah, there's more areas that we definitely could grow is community like through and through, whatever that might look like. And then we have an amazing loyalty program. But as we scale there's so much more we can do to make it even better. But yeah, loyalty on pros is absolutely crushing it. It's just we launched it like a year and a half ago. There's so many upgrades you can really add to that and bigger things. Like if you're a Pro, you spend $500,000 at Bush Bomb, like a year. We probably should do something cool for you, something amazing. We really should treat you differently. We should. So the standard of loyalty stuff is. It's pretty standard. Right. Whereas when you have these exceptional accounts, like you really want to do something bigger. So we're, yeah, we're figuring that kind of stuff out for the next like few years.
- [34:24]
A
And it's funny, I remember I, in 2021 when I interviewed you pretty early, I think you just won like maybe the Shopify, you'd won, you know, some internal Shopify award or something. And I just like, I just knew.
- [34:35]
B
That you were going to be huge.
- [34:36]
A
And it's still, still so much room to grow. So it's super exciting. Congrats.
- [34:40]
B
It's funny like every year I think what's good about a certain business, certain businesses, this is bad. And certain businesses get. Every year I feel like our market, our TAM is way bigger and I'm like, I'm like, oh, my gosh, the wax industry is huge. And then the next year, I'm like, oh, my gosh, I didn't realize the shave industry is so big. And then every year I'm like, oh, my God. Whereas other businesses, I think at some point you're like, oh, we're in this very niche market and it's not very big, and we're kind of tapped out now. This kind of sucks. Whereas, yeah, we feel every year we're like, oh, my God, we're still so small and there's so much room to go. Like, it's such a good feeling.
- [35:15]
A
Thanks for coming on the podcast. I guess we'll catch up again in a year or two and we'll see where you at. You gotta follow David on LinkedIn. That's where you're most active, I think. And you're starting to do a bit more on the speaking side of things, coming out to events and things like that. How's that been for you?
- [35:29]
B
Yeah, it's good. I've seen you at a few now, and, yeah, I'm doing. Yeah, definitely more speaking. I go to a lot of beauty events, which has been fun because I don't. I don't come from beauty, so I've learned a lot there. And then, yeah, I'm getting back into, like, the commerce d. To see, like, everything there, which is. Which is also my. My roots from Shopify. But, yeah, I love. I love doing chats. I've. I don't do as many as I want to, but I've. I've gotten a knack for it especially. It's just fun. I find I just.
- [35:55]
A
Just to dive back into a little bit too. You. You've built this business that has so many strong, like, fundamental, you know, things going for it. This 2025 was a really challenging year for a lot of people, whether. Whether, you know, especially with tariffs and consumer and all those things. It sounds like the fundamentals of your business are maybe so strong that you. You've really weathered that with a lot of continuing growth. Did you feel the pinch in 2025 with some of the things I mentioned?
- [36:21]
B
Yeah, like tariffs wasn't that big of a deal. There's definitely tariff impact, but also being Canadian and Kuzma, all these things actually was fairly favorable. It didn't sound like it was, but a lot of our US Counterparts, right, they've got to pay tariffs on their jojoba oil and this and that, so that kind of hit Americans as well. Yeah, the fundamentals changed this year for Bush Bomb, for a numbers perspective, we grew 70% on, like, a pretty good base. And we went from like, more or less break even. Like always. We were kind of growing quickly break even. This past year, we did 10% EBITDA. Like our fastest growing year in three or four years, and we grew at 10% EBITDA. It's crazy, and it's mostly because we're really starting to build the engine for profit. The metric that. I don't know if everyone else looks at this, but we have percentage of revenue spent on marketing. So at times we've been like 40% of all revenue is spent on marketing. And now that's dropped. I think we're like 21%. So that, like, difference. We don't have to spend nearly as much to acquire customers to keep them coming back, just because the program, the system, the revenue we have is much more sustainable. And that's taken three or four years to, like, get down to kind of the way we want to do it. And yeah, a lot of it comes down to the pro, but also, like, retail is a huge, huge part of that too. But, yeah, hard to wean yourself off like classic paid ads. Facebook grow dtc. But we've tried to do that the.
- [37:49]
A
Last, like, few years and streamline DTC to make it more efficient, too. I think that's a great, A great show to streamline the offering. And it also makes your pro offering, I don't know, more desirable or if, you know, people see all these other products that maybe aren't available on DTC in the hands of the pros, it only makes them maybe more desirable for a really avid user, for sure.
- [38:07]
B
Yeah, we call that, if you talk about retail, Ulta, dtc, Amazon, they've got limited assortment, right? Pros have our full assortment, so that does give them a huge advantage. They got newness, excitement. Whereas, yeah, D2C, like, it genuinely has a limited assortment. And Alta, if we had our full assortment, we'd have a full gondola, which is not going to ever happen, but it does. It's a good narrative and it does work. It's like limited assortment at Ulta. Go there, get these, like, core, core items.
- [38:37]
A
And then. How big of is Amazon? I just did a quick search and found you guys are on Amazon. How big is Amazon, the channel for you guys?
- [38:42]
B
Yeah, it's pretty good. It's like very. It's a little bit less, I think, than our D2C, but very similar. And it's, again, we don't tell people we're on Amazon. We don't go out there and put it in our email marketing. We don't advertise to it. But it ends up we get a lot of branded search. So being there is kind of defensive. It's kind of part of it. And then I looked the other day and we've got like thousands of subscriptions on Amazon. Like I didn't realize so many people use Amazon subscribe and save. But yeah, we've got like thousands and thousands of people on subscription on Amazon, which is kind of cool to see.
- [39:15]
A
That's a nice thing to not realize. And it's like finding cash in your winter jacket.
- [39:19]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [39:20]
A
Spring. That's very cool. Nice. Well, great catching up with you as usual. Hope to announce some. Some things in the future. We'll be. We'll be in Ontario and all around doing, doing some little events that I'll say mum about right now. But I'll keep you posted as soon as we can talk about it.
- [39:35]
B
Right on. Yeah, I can't wait.
- [39:37]
A
Thanks again, man. This was awesome. 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 DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.