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- [00:00]
A
We don't do any retargeting. What I see time and time again is that maybe 70 or 80% of your hardest excluded campaign is still going to have like a 20% bleed into retarget. It will naturally retarget for you. All of my ads from last year were performing all through this year. We couldn't beat it and we were just constantly trying to beat our ads from Q4 last year and it just wasn't happening. Then all of a sudden, randomly, it'll just switch. Meta is so random sometimes that you get caught in your head thinking it's a certain way and then as soon as you put that thought out, it just changes and you're like, okay, never mind if you're sub eight figures or, you know, if you're doing $5 million a year in top line revenue, you're not going to be able to like CRO your way to success. What ads can I make? Let's just make more ads.
- [00:53]
B
Welcome to the DTC podcast. I am here with my friend Taylor Fraser. Recently you just told me you are now the cgo, which is actually the first time I've heard of a cgo. Yeah, same at Outway, which is one of the most successful, if not the most successful sock company in Canada. I love the socks. Fantastic product here in Victoria. You've been at this now how many years?
- [01:15]
A
Today's my seventh year anniversary at Outway.
- [01:17]
B
Oh my God, that's an eternity in this industry.
- [01:20]
A
I know, right? Like we've, we've managed to get through, but yeah, cgo, I, when I first heard it, I was like, what is that? You know, but Chief Growth Officer, so. And there's a reason behind that. I was cmo, but it didn't really make sense. We didn't really need a CMO right now. Just didn't really make sense to us.
- [01:36]
B
Talk to me about the distinction. Just from the outside looking in, what, what, what does a CGO not do or do that a CMO doesn't?
- [01:42]
A
Yeah, I just think that like, first off, we're not a huge, huge team. We have a lot of external partners and so, you know, there's only 10 to 15 of us on the island. I think with like AI, you're seeing kind of like a flattening of a lot of middle management and the communication is changing and the hierarchy is changing. And I think when we really just looked at our own needs of the business of like, where, where do I exist all the time, where do I need to be and where should I be? Kind of did that to everyone. And then just the realization was like, we don't really need a chief marketing officer. We need someone that's obsessed with growth. And so we break growth into three pillars. So it's performance, retention and E comm. Obviously performance is like, you know, that's where we're going to grow the most. But retention being like email, SMS and E comm being the store, also arms of growth because, you know, how we do things on those determine like, you know, LTV and things like that. So we just basically, in a nutshell, broke down the growth department into three sections and just said, what's the main function of it? And retention was ltv, performance was acquiring new customers and E comm was conversion rate. That was it. So.
- [02:52]
B
And then you said Emily is the. The chief cbo Chief Brand Officer.
- [02:55]
A
Yeah. So Emily was kind of like, she had so many titles and basically just content, but she was doing so many other things. And so while we were trying to hire around her to kind of make her work on the things that she should be working on, it also became clear that content didn't really necessarily need to live inside the marketing under me, you know, and now there's no cmo. I'm focusing on growth. So now she's kind of in her own arm with like brand. So she's just basically making content for all the channels. Obviously that changes every month. Sometimes we do a product drop, sometimes we're doing a big campaign or a summer sale or sometimes just making like evergreen ads. But basically her job is to work with me. I provide, you know, numbers, metrics and reports. And she comes to me with kind of more gut instincts and things, you know, what's going on in the world. And we work together to try to make creatives and get good assets for emails and all that stuff. So it's kind of nice actually having that split because I'm not so involved anymore. If anyone's seen our ads, I'm in like so many ads, hundreds and hundreds of ads, and I will still be in them. But I was also so deeply a part of like writing the scripts and the hooks and getting them put together and I can kind of just go, hey, this is what the account needs. And then she can just sort of make the magic happen. Tell me what to do.
- [04:06]
B
This might be a better question for Emily, but in your, from your. Where you sit, how has the brand evolved over the past year or a couple? Because it's interesting to see, to see how much you're. You and Rob and your like fitness journeys, for instance, are like in, in the brand at this point. How would you categorize how you guys have evolved that?
- [04:22]
A
I mean, I guess the last time you were saying we Talked was like, 20, 24. Yeah, but we've talked like, you know, yeah, we bumped into each other at the grocery store. I think probably a lot of simplification in the brand being a little slower to make hires. Like experiencing pain for a lot, an extended period of time until we're like, hey, let's hire and like patch this hole in the boat. Yeah, really like thinking long term on everything and then also just being able to, like, when, say, we're hiring someone to the team, being able to understand how we can attribute revenue to that person, like, even if it's directly or indirectly. So really just like slowing down. We have like a decision framework. We have like management meetings where we actually stop and we listen to Rob's ideas and we go through like, does this make sense? Like, you're right, it's cool. It's the coolest idea ever. But should we be doing it? Is the consequence of doing this that we're gonna keep our eye off the ball and miss something else down the road? So I would say the growth that we've experienced has actually just been like, very smooth, calm, wise, battle tested approach to everything that we do.
- [05:24]
B
Very cool. How do you characterize the growth that you've experienced over the past. Call it two years since our last podcast.
- [05:31]
A
I would love to just say up and to the right every single month. I would say on a larger graph for sure. We have grown every month. We're always beating year over year. Sometimes it's harder to get there than we would think. I think what we're seeing a lot now, especially in our space, is it's very promo driven you're seeing. I obviously sign up for every brand just because it's annoying, but you want to see what's the temperature. It's very promo driven out there right now. So it does suck when you feel like you're always having to have some sort of offer every weekend to sort of hit these, like, top line revenue goals.
- [06:07]
B
What's the most effective? Just you brought up offers. What's the most effective offer you've run in that time? Or is it more about the shape of all the offers over time?
- [06:14]
A
Yeah, for socks it's been interesting. Like, you would think, like, you know, Bogos would work really well, right? Because people buy socks in sock packs. That's what they're used to seeing. They're used to seeing 8, 10, 12, all that. So, you know, when you're selling them a single sock, it actually kind of doesn't make a lot of sense to sell them one sock. So the offers that we do, I do find the most straightforward and clear ones. Like, we had one, it was basically. It just said 30% off everything and literally just everything. And we just didn't try to, like, change discounts per SKU or whatever it is. It was just like one size fits all. And it was really successful just because it's so easy to understand. When you go to our site, there's so many designs, there's so many combinations of heights and yarn comp, you know, compositions that I think it can become a little bit overwhelming for some people. But when they see one solid number, they just know, no matter what I pick, I'm getting the same deal where when we run like Bogos, people don't understand them very well. They're like, wait, so if I buy two, I get like this one free or like the next one free? And it's really hard to communicate that deal. And then ultimately you don't actually see like, like big carts and stuff. So we're always playing with different offers. It also depends on, like, the season, the time, the product, is it a performance offer or is it something that we're having just like live on the website? So typically what we'll try to do is just like fill the funnel during the week or the beginning of the month. We get people excited on new releases live in that momentum. And then once that momentum starts to die and those loyalists, you know, are already bought their new releases, we start to then have like a couple promos in the back end of the month. So our conversion window is like, you know, seven to 14 days. So if we get someone's attention in the beginning of the month, we're trying to consider, like, how do we really grab their attention near the end of the month and so to liquidate the
- [07:57]
B
funnel kind of thing.
- [07:58]
A
Exactly. So, like, we have like quarterly peak moments. So we, like, look at it in a quarterly and a monthly. So the quarterly does the same thing. It's kind of like we have like little peak offers around moments, like whether it's Father's Day or Mother's Day or whether it's, you know, prime days. And we try to take advantage of those moments, but then at the end, we like, unload the, like, the funnel and try to, like, clear everything up and then we start again. So we do that four times a Year, and then on each month, it's like a microcosm of that quarter. That's.
- [08:22]
B
Yeah. I bought my whole family outweigh socks for Christmas this past year.
- [08:26]
A
Yeah.
- [08:27]
B
And I love the. The mystery sock that you have as well. I have a pair of avocado of, like, anthropomorphized avocado socks.
- [08:34]
A
Now, that's the only sock I've drawn that I never.
- [08:36]
B
Oh, you draw?
- [08:37]
A
I drew that, yeah. We were, like, really low on designs, and Caroline at the time said, taylor, can you draw, like, a sock for, like, I think it was Valentine's Day. It's like, me draw a sock. Like, I'll try. And I sketched it in paper and, like, went to a bunch of websites and drew it, and then it became like, a sock. And then I see people wear it all the time. I'm like, hey, did you know that I drew that?
- [08:58]
B
I drew that sock. I will wear it with more pride now, knowing that. How. What's the take rate on something like a mystery sock to offer? Because it's such a novel thing in your funnel that I bet is pretty high take rate.
- [09:09]
A
Yeah. Okay. So Mist repair is, like, the most annoying thing ever for us, but it's the Golden Handcuffs. Like, it works so well.
- [09:17]
B
Yeah.
- [09:17]
A
So, like, the reason we first had it was because we used to warehouse our products here in Victoria, and we would turn over designs quite frequently, and we would literally have shelves filled with socks of, like, weird sizes or, like, maybe designs that didn't do well with the male demographic or the female. So we'd be stuck with all these, like, remnants. And it's cash, so we'd have to clear up cash because we were bootstrapped. And so we were like, let's create this mystery pair. And It'll be, like, 50% off. People won't know what they're getting. And we'll just make this big bin of, like, random socks that are still decent, but, like, you're getting 50% off.
- [09:49]
B
Drawn by Taylor.
- [09:49]
A
You can't be mad, right? Yeah, some of them are drawn by me. And it worked really, really well. So it was this really cool way that we could sort of just make room for new stuff while also, like, giving people the socks we had. So we did that. And then once we moved to a 3pl, we have one in LA and one in, like, you know, Toronto area. We don't technically need to do anymore, but it works so well. And it adds, like, one. Like, it's like 30, 40% of every order has, like, a Mystery pair in it. Sometimes like two or three. And I don't get it. I like to know what I'm getting personally, but some people really like it, and then they like the deal too. So it's a really tough setup on the back end to be able to have a mystery pair. I won't get into the technical side of it, but it's been the most annoying thing ever. But, yeah, we've continued to do.
- [10:35]
B
So how important your growth has been, your product line expansion? Because when we last spoke, I think. I think still probably your. Your three or your. Your millennial no show white socks, or maybe still you're among your top. You're just your simplest stuff, but you have so many different patterns. And now you have my. Like, a personal fave of your. Your merino wool socks. So you now have all these different threads or variations. How important has been adding all of that? Has. How important has that been to your growth?
- [11:04]
A
What. What I see is that most people still typically buy crew socks with designs on them. So the stuff that we, like, initially came out with, yeah, that made us outweigh is still the predominant item in people's cart, which is nice to see. Like, we've, you know, we. We nail it in that way. But I think, you know, when you look at the actual sales spread of, say, no show or merino, they definitely take up a smaller percentage of people, but they're really great, like, items to have seasonally, because most people, when they like a certain sock, they're not really gonna change. Like, someone that's like, I really like ankle socks. It's just really tough to be like, hey, you should also try crew. They're like, no, I like ankle. And we see that there's a singularity in most of our carts. Like most. Most cards, you would think, oh, everyone's buying a variety of flavors and different yarn comps and heights, and it's not true. It's like, always, like, one type of sock. So the beauty is, is that, like, seasonally, it's been kind of nice. So, like, when we go into spring or summer, ankles will tend to do better. And then now we have printed marino. Are yours printed?
- [12:05]
B
Yes.
- [12:05]
A
Okay. So, yeah, they're like the light version of it.
- [12:08]
B
Yeah.
- [12:08]
A
Okay. Yeah. So, like, those will do well in, like, the spring, summer, because people that really like merino that are going on hikes, they'll be like, oh, cool. A thinner merino that looks cool. And I can still wear my yarn, but it's not super bulky. So the product expansion has Been really good for just having a little bit more interesting things to say and being able to increase our tam. But it's not necessarily that like we've taken a customer that's a die hard crew crew sock person and now they're like wearing everything else. If anything, they maybe they'll just refer their friends to it.
- [12:38]
B
It just helps you reach different avatars and different need states.
- [12:41]
A
100%. Yeah, it's more like actually just expanding like the funnel of people that might be interested in our brand. Because there's a lot of people, I've even seen it where they're like, hey, I saw your ads. They're like super cool. I really like the product. But like I went on here and there was no this. That's all I wear. I would totally wear them if you had them. And you're like, we don't have them. So how many times is that happening? Right? Yeah, it's like those silent killers that you never really see.
- [13:06]
B
Yeah. There's always so much discourse on, on the, in the DTC world around meta and meta performance. How would you characterize meta performance and have you had to make any fundamental changes to how you guys think about how you do meta with. With Andromeda coming onto the scene?
- [13:22]
A
Yeah, we're like in the right in the middle of kind of that whole Andromeda thing right now where I think. And it comes from me, like I've been doing Facebook ads for a long time. Like you know, way back in the day when it was like interest based targeting, lookalike audiences and things like that. It is really hard to unlearn that stuff and understand that you need to get out of meta's way. It's like the most difficult thing to just go. I mean, I remember the first time doing like broad targeting and I just, it was like, how could this possibly work?
- [13:53]
B
Yes.
- [13:53]
A
And understanding that your new targeting is your creative, consolidating your account down, keeping it more simple, not having a hundred different campaigns and really obsessing over offer and creative and not doing the other part. So you don't really feel like a media buyer. Like, like that media buyer role is like kind of gone away.
- [14:17]
B
Yeah.
- [14:18]
A
Even though I very much am in the numbers and I'm looking and I feel like a media buyer. I'm doing the old things where I'm like tweaking.
- [14:24]
B
Yeah.
- [14:25]
A
You know, tweaking a cost cap or
- [14:26]
B
like surfing the budget.
- [14:28]
A
Yeah. Like, it's like there's no like. Like the other day I went into Claude and asked A basic question. I was creating like ad labeling for our north beam between that and like this report and it was like bof, MOF and Toff and I'm like we don't use that anymore. Like I'm not going to do a bottom of funnel like you know, at least for our product. Right.
- [14:47]
B
Yeah.
- [14:48]
A
And we have such a short consideration period that it's all just top of funnel.
- [14:52]
B
Do you still have separate retargeting campaigns?
- [14:55]
A
We don't do any retargeting.
- [14:56]
B
Yeah.
- [14:57]
A
No. You just to the algo retargeting is built into. You can have the hardest exclusive. This is. And everything I say is my experience and like and we're always learning too. So what I like the drum that I beat this month. I am happy to see data like prove me wrong and then I switch. But like I. What I see time and time again is that maybe 70 or 80% of your hardest excluded campaign is still going to have like a 20% bleed into retarget.
- [15:24]
B
Yeah.
- [15:24]
A
Or people that are on their, you know, second or third touch point. I don't do any retargeting because I just find it like you're kind of just burning money at that point. It will naturally retarget for you.
- [15:35]
B
Do you pause ads?
- [15:37]
A
Yes. But not as quickly as a lot of people do.
- [15:40]
B
Yes.
- [15:41]
A
Yeah.
- [15:41]
B
That's my understanding of where we're at now is that you never know when Gem or Lattice or whatever is going to need that one ad impression to move someone along in the conversion funnel. Even if it doesn't have a directly applicable roas.
- [15:54]
A
Yeah. If I, if I see, you know, if I look at our CAC and we're like a $50 to acquire a customer. Let's call it $50. And I see an ad at $45 spend and it's spending a couple of bucks a day. In my mind I'm like in a few more bucks it's going to find a conversion. So it's like I is a weird feeling when you're like you're trying to stop bleed in an account but the thing that's bleeding might actually end up being your best thing ever. And we've seen so many ads that have just come out of the woodworks and just been amazing for us, like randomly. Like one thing we're experiencing this year, and I've heard it from others too is all of my ads from last year were performing all through this year. We couldn't beat it.
- [16:31]
B
Yeah.
- [16:32]
A
Everything we were putting into the account, which I thought was objectively better. Wasn't beating our old ads and we were just constantly trying to beat our ads from Q4 last year and it just wasn't happening. Then all of a sudden, randomly, it'll just switch. And meta is so random sometimes that you'll, you'll get caught in your head thinking it's a certain way. And then as soon as you put that thought out there, it just changes and you're like, okay, nevermind. So kind of like, for me, I like answers. I like knowing and pointing at something. Be like, that's how it works with meta. You have to sort of let go of that part and just be like, feed it really good creatives. Get out of its way. Understand, like your, your metrics that you want to follow. So like I obsess over like NC roas. Like we did that as well too. Like with Northbeam, we'll go to like first touch, like attribution, like first day click. Like one day click roas. Like, like the most harshest look at our ads in that day. And yeah, you can watch that, but then you sort of see the conversion lag report and that changes things for you. And then you realize that you're killing ads that maybe you shouldn't kill. Some take a couple weeks, some take, you know, a couple days, some get a lot of spend and have horrible quality, like traffic.
- [17:38]
B
Yeah.
- [17:39]
A
So I think the one thing that I've just like looked at is just, are we diversifying our ads? The first metric I look for is spend, because at the end of the day, if meta is giving you spend in a cbo, that's a signal that there's engagement there and there's something there regardless of whether it works or not. And then from there, if I put out $100 in ad spend, how much money did I get back in new customer revenue? That's really all I care about. And then from there, there's metrics around there, like curiosity metrics. Like, what's the aov? Like what's how many units in their order? Like, yeah, can't really control those things. It's nice to know. But yeah, it's dollars in, dollar, dollars out. That's it.
- [18:14]
B
Yeah. Simplified. Yeah. And then what. What's your take on creative volume at this point? Because it's been a quite a discourse on, on Twitter about whether you just need really strong, diverse creatives or whether you need that. And then lots of it. Like, well, how do you think about creative volume?
- [18:33]
A
Yeah. Again, another thing we're talking about, I actually had a call Today with Emily or yesterday, and we were talking about like, you know, we typically would do like a concept and it'd be like, okay, this concept. And then we would just switch out hook lines in the. In the front and. But the thing is, is like, a lot of our videos have had very similar, like, take rates. Like, you know, like, the CTRs would be really good, but then one would just get more spend. So we're going to try a different approach where instead of taking like one concept where it's the same video with just like the first four seconds being different, actually just doing like two or three that are the same concept but completely different videos, like, they're truly diverse. So, like the actual creative is. Is a different hook instead of, you know, the 5 and 5 and 5, like all the time. I think it's. It's an easy way to produce more creatives. Right. You make a cool video and then you're like, hey, the first three seconds, just switch it out. Yeah, but I don't even know if that's the way to do things anymore. We're trying to figure it out right now. Like, what makes the most sense. You gotta. You kind of get stuck in these old habits and then. And everyone has an opinion. That's the problem too. Everyone has an opinion. Go on Twitter and someone's like, if you're not doing it this way, you're an idiot. You're like, oh my God, let's change it. And then someone's like, you're doing it that way. That's crazy. Do it this way.
- [19:44]
B
Yeah.
- [19:44]
A
And they all, like, are right and wrong at the same time. So I try to, like, keep a level head and just like, we just test our own stuff.
- [19:50]
B
Understand? It's a real time experiment for everyone.
- [19:52]
A
100%. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I was, I've been told CBO by everyone. CBO. CBO that I talked to a guy yesterday. He goes, I'm spending six figures a day with abo.
- [20:02]
B
Yeah.
- [20:03]
A
I'm like, well, I can't disagree with you because you've got like, you're doing it.
- [20:07]
B
Yeah.
- [20:07]
A
You know, and it's like, well, let's have a look. You know, so we're going to try something like that.
- [20:12]
B
What are you doing now? Are you mainly on cbo?
- [20:14]
A
Yeah, cbo. Yeah. So we're like, we're CBO with cost caps right now.
- [20:19]
B
Okay.
- [20:20]
A
I don't always love can sometimes have really slow spending days where it takes a few days to recover. It's like, just won't spend your budget and then it has some days where it goes 30% over. So it's a little bit weird. I do miss, like, high value, low costs. I just, like, they just rip, but, like, you don't always see the good, good performance with them. So right now we're going to, we're going to try and experiment with testing our new ad sets with an abo, which we haven't done for a while, which scares me a little bit because it's just a. It's a lot of money to commit to an ad set for it to fail. But we're going to create a system where we can just like, find out very quickly if we want to keep it on or not.
- [20:56]
B
Talk to me about your American expansion, because I know you guys, you have such a strong foothold in Canada. I know you've been growing in the US For a long time now as well. Talk to me about how that project has gone.
- [21:08]
A
Yeah, it's hard. It's really hard. Everything we have done is hard. So we see all these businesses that come to Canada and then they do a U turn and they go back and they're like, anyone doing business in Canada, you're insane. We're like, we have a great business in Canada. Like 80, 90% of our business has been Canadian. But at the same time, it's also very difficult in many ways. So parts of it are easier because there's less competition up here, but there's also less population. Our Canadian customers, like, when we, when we compare both of them, they're just like, a lot more loyal. They require a lot less offers. They're more considerate. When they purchase from you, if they like it, they'll refer, like their whole family and friends. In the States, what we're realizing is that it is a slightly different consumer. They have a much higher expectation level for logistics, like packages showing up quicker. I don't know. You've grown up here your whole life. I remember going on like, eBay.com and you would order something and you would be like, lucky if it showed up a month later.
- [22:10]
B
Yes.
- [22:10]
A
And. Or if it just showed up without duties on it or something. Yeah, we're just so used to paying taxes and duties and waiting a long time that are like, if we get a package that week, we're like, this is great. And I think Amazon's starting to change that for us. Our expectations higher. But in the States, it's even worse if you don't get a package to them in one or two days, regardless of how much they like the product, you're inconveniencing them at some level. So there's this weird thing where they go, unless someone that they know is telling them to buy or unless you're giving them something like a lot of value on the first offer, it's really hard to like get a customer just naturally. Interesting. Yeah, like Canadians will just try you out. So like, oh, it's a cool brand. Yeah, I'll try that out. 20. Oh, it's 20 bucks a pair. Yeah, I'll try that. They're not like asking for anything in the States. It's like, how quick's your shipping? Is it free? Yeah, can I get like 50% off today? And they need to see a landing page and a timer and all these things. It's just different.
- [23:06]
B
They are the kings of consumerism.
- [23:07]
A
So yeah, their expectations are and it's, it's not even their fault. It's just the environment that exists there. So you're like in this market where there's other, other sock brands that are just arbitraging like so many bundles and deals and then you're trying to be like maybe a legacy brand and it's really hard to keep up. So you have to kind of ride that line between maintaining your brand and also living in the realm of reality where you have to be offer based. So yeah, it's been a interesting experience. We one day Claude said something to me, I felt called out. It said, you have two completely different businesses disguised as one is what it said to me. And I was like, oh, that hit hard because I was like going through stats and going, these are totally different businesses, different margins, different cogs, different behavior on like buying patterns, way different ltv, like everything is different. And so we've now fully split off both businesses like in the back end and the front end. And so now it's like very much they're looked at in their own way.
- [24:03]
B
You were telling me an interesting anecdote about some of the challenges we've had in Canada with Trump mentioning the 51st state, which he has just started mentioning again a little bit. Talk to me about how that affected your business both in Canada and the
- [24:18]
A
U.S. yeah, that's what I was saying. It's like last year, so we've just kind of got through the wave where last year around this time and like, you know, from whatever march all the way up to now, we had this like crazy tailwind because of the tariff wars. And so there was this negative sentiment on in the political world where Canadians were saying we're Only gonna buy Canadians. And then there was also this cohort of Americans being like, we feel for you, Canada. We love you. We're gonna buy from you as well. And so we were running a lot of, like, we're proudly Canadian ads in Canada, and they were crushing. And then all of a sudden, we were like, let's try them. Running them in the States. Like, change nothing and just run them in the States. Like, post ID into the account.
- [24:57]
B
Yeah.
- [24:58]
A
And just destroyed it.
- [25:00]
B
Just did.
- [25:00]
A
So. So, well, blue states and red states. I would have to look again. I would have to look again. But probably, like, blue states.
- [25:07]
B
Yeah. Population centers. Anyway.
- [25:09]
A
So, yeah, just I. I'd have to look at which states were doing really well, but it just crushed for us. And then we just hit these insane numbers, like, in from what we thought we were going to hit. And then it went away, and we were like, oh, the high is over. And, like, the moment's over. But then when we came to this year, it was like, so we want to grow year over year. But last year's year over year was like, you know, 100 plus percent, you know, year over year. So this year was interesting because, like, we had to manage our expectations that we can't really make that moment happen again, you know, so you can only do so much. But I think, like, when you market around, certain moments is really your biggest lever, lever, other than, like, performance marketing.
- [25:50]
B
And then what's been your biggest lever this year?
- [25:54]
A
Honestly, just understanding that, like, we can't create a moment. So, like, we learned this, like, years ago. We were like, we're gonna have a summer sale. It's gonna be insane. Like, our Black Friday's crazy. So we're gonna do a summer sale, and it's gonna be like, we're gonna have two crazy moments. So we tried to make this thing happen, and it just totally flopped. Like, it didn't flop. It is. It didn't hit our expectations. It was really, really made us realize that what consumers are doing outside of your business, you're better to ride those waves than try to, like, make your own thing happen. So we take that into everything we do. So, like, if Mother's Day is coming up, there's gonna be a cohort of customers that are really responsible, and they go, I'm gonna buy my mother something for Mother's Day because it's two weeks from now, and they consider those things. So we email them and we let them know, hey, Mother's Day is coming. And, like, this is a great offer. Here, check this out. And a cohort of those people will make those purchases. But then there's also the people that wait till the last minute.
- [26:50]
B
Yeah.
- [26:51]
A
So we'll email those people as well. And then there's people that just go, oh, it's Mother's Day, I'm on my phone. It's a weekend. People are shopping, they're out for brunch, they're on their phones. You just, you know, so we message those people and offer, of course they're not buying for their mother on Mother's Day, but we're just taking advantage of those moments that are happening externally to us. So we just do that as much as we possibly can without getting involved in like weird ones like National Hot Dog Day and stuff.
- [27:17]
B
Yeah, and. And that's along and on top of your sort of like micro inter month strategies in a way. Right. Of sort of like exposing people to the new product, liquidating the funnel at the end.
- [27:27]
A
Yeah. I mean, a lot of it is very like we will pivot because every month is different. I, you know, we obviously look at historicals, but they're never apples to apples. For example, it would be really hard for me to compare this April to last April because of, you know, the tariff stuff. So, yeah, basically we launch new products at the beginning of every month. So we expose everyone to that, try not to have too many offers at the beginning. The offer really is new designs. And then, you know, at the halfway point we assess where we at, where are we forecasting to be, what are the projections look like, and then we just make some calls on some, you know, tasteful offers to certain segments or it just really depends on where we're at around the 15th that determines what we'll do for the rest of the month. But we kind of stay, we stay really like nimble, so we can just make it happen.
- [28:16]
B
You've mentioned Claude twice in this interview. We're a cloud shop as well. We're building dashboards for our various businesses. We actually have a media buyer named gary that runs 247 now on the D2C lead gen and producing uneven but overall better results than the lead gen agency we were previously using. We have a creative strategist named Blanche and she's not quite as good yet. What are you guys using Claude for on your team?
- [28:41]
A
We use it a lot. Like we. We've been very AI forward like Rob has. We've had a lot of meetings around making sure that we're all utilizing it at some level. I think, you know, a year ago all of us were A little bit nervous about it. Like, I think I was using it for like ad copy and like email copy and now I'm like in it every day. Like, it almost just feels like that's what I log into in the morning. Yeah, I've created all sorts of stuff that haven't. That hasn't really gone anywhere because you're practicing right as you're sort of practicing. What do I need from this? You're just, you're building things simultaneously and then, you know, you end up not needing it. But at least on my end, I use a lot of it for like reporting. The connectors are really nice. Our Facebook one still has not come through, which is driving me crazy. It says we're on the list, but, like, it just hasn't been enabled in the account. But, you know, even just to be able to go into all these questions I used to ask, like our agency, like, we have an email agency and they're great, but I hate bugging them with like a really basic question that I just want to know. I get a data pull on and I don't want to go into Klaviyo. It's annoying. I don't want to look through their dashboards and build a custom report for me to go at Klaviyo and say like, hey, in the last 30 days and like pull data has been amazing because I can just not make assumptions anymore and I can just pull real numbers and then pull in multiple connectors and make myself spreadsheets. And I've built like, I built some pretty cool dev tools, you know, through like GitHub and then, you know, push them live so that it'll actually, like, anytime I make a change to that artifact, it'll like automatically, like format it, save it to the drive and then push it to the GitHub and do like, you know, real life, like pushing and. But then you end up making it. You say exactly that. You say cool. And then you like, don't use it.
- [30:22]
B
Yes. How many abandoned? I have 15 abandoned projects on my cloud right now.
- [30:27]
A
I think my biggest takeaway with AI is like, don't build tools for the sake of building. Even though I think sometimes you need to do one just to learn the art of like.
- [30:36]
B
Yeah, I feel like everyone, this is a. Jeff just sent this out in our agency confidential email. But everyone should be experimenting with building a dashboard for their business in a way just to learn how to do this. And because no off the shelf tool for reporting is going to be as good and as custom as the One you can make for yourself. And literally it'll just tell you step by step how to make all these things.
- [30:57]
A
Yeah.
- [30:58]
B
The one thing that I'm interested in, we still all have individual accounts on our team and I just did this event in LA with Triple Whale at the Whaleys, and they're talking about mobi2, which is there, sits on top of cloud, but it ingests data from your Shopify, from your marketing calendar, from this, from all these different sources. And so it has context and it gives your team context. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges for us, is we're all using Claude in sort of silos where we share some stuff together, but it's not pooling into, like, one context in the business. And I feel like context going forward is going to be a huge differentiator for how people, how effective these tools are for teams. So do you guys have it feeding into one contextual pool right now or is it more siloed?
- [31:44]
A
We have enterprise, so, like, we're all on the same account and then each department kind of like, I'll build out projects and then invite people to it. So, for example, we hired someone to be retention manager because I was doing retention managing, making sure emails go out. But I had built all the stuff that was useful for me. So to be able to build that into a project, have all the feeder information, invite her to it and say, here you go now, here's tools for all that. That's all we've really done. But I agree, you do miss out on those things where everyone's siloed and building these amazing things. And when we were trying to build dashboards out, everyone was building great dashboards, but they all looked different, they had different fonts and different, like, layouts. And then I was like, hey, I'm going to take all of these and consolidate them so they all look the same. And yeah, I think that's a one thing that definitely is missing. We're still small enough where it's not, like, hurtful to us, but I can imagine, like, larger teams benefiting from, like, a central brain. Yeah, but did you try that product?
- [32:43]
B
I haven't tried Mobi I actually, I'm in conversation with them right now because it's built for Shopify brands and they put me in touch with, like, one of their lead engineers. Basically, we can make this work for you. Just tell me, tell me what you need. So we haven't jumped into it yet, but I'm excited to give it a try for it to Try to run their Mobi media buying agent versus Gary, who we've created, who is just sort of like Gary is, is. Is basically Jeff talked to, to Claude about how we think about media buying. Whereas I wonder how much with Mobi, it's like feeding in not just what we think about media. Because like you were saying, everyone has an opinion on how you want, whether you should pause ads, how you should break things out, when to do it, as opposed to something like Moby. That's, I think, taking the decisions of every advertiser on the platform and seeing how people are using it and advising you how to do it. Not on how you think necessarily you should do it, but on how the collective is, is using it.
- [33:36]
A
I've seen like Tempo, which is like an AI head of growth or something like that. Wanted to try that out just to see like how it thinks.
- [33:43]
B
Yeah.
- [33:44]
A
But I don't know, I'm. I use AI and I like AI, but I'm also like, there's this philosophical side of me that, that is also very like negative about it as well. I think right now you're seeing like this race. It's like, who can build it as quickly as possible. Like, like I was here first. And I think when you have that mentality, you see a lot of people not making like high quality things.
- [34:08]
B
Yeah, I.
- [34:09]
A
And I'm not calling out any of these services because I've never tried them, but I do notice, like, people are just like racing to be the first one to have this tool built that I feel like the quality is not there. Where if everyone just chills out, it just take like three extra months and just make it better. Yeah, I do worry about getting into this point where. And you've seen it happen with like Shopify apps. Everyone got like a dawn theme and then put like 40 apps on it and they're just like all paying 20, $30 a month to try. Like, oh, it's like add this app to your store and you can increase your conversion rate by 10%. And I think that's kind of happening right now with AI where you're seeing so many, like, AI platforms come out that all seem decent and then you don't end up using them.
- [34:47]
B
We talked in our last. I was just coming back to me that we talked on our last podcast in 2024 about what you've done a lot on the E commerce side actually on the Shopify build and how you guys kind of reoriented your site at that time. Have there been any other sort of innovations that you guys have made on that E Commerce side in the past couple years that have been beneficial.
- [35:04]
A
We're doing like a full website rebuild right now. Should be released in like the next month or so. And it actually, it's been hired out. I have basically just been, you know, that's great. That's not, here's what we need, you know, helping where I can. But no, we, you know, we, we were like very E Com heavy for the first while. I think that's another learning that I had too is like if you're sub, you know, eight figures or you know, if you're doing $5 million a year in top line revenue, you're not going to be able to like CRO your way to like success. Like there's nothing you can do on your website that's going to really change things for you that much. I think we used to obsess over that because I, I, that's my background was web development and so I was always like a guy that built landing pages and squeeze pages and like, you know, heat map them. And so I was always convinced like, oh, if I just like move this button, like we're going to get better conversion rate, I'm going to save the business. Yeah, I agree with all those things. Like yes, you don't want your page to be broken and you want to follow like, you know, industry standards. But most Shopify stores like out of the box are fine.
- [36:06]
B
Yeah.
- [36:06]
A
And the realization was like I was looking at our website one day and we were having really bad conversion rate and I was really feeling bum bummed out about the state of the website and I had all these ideas and they just, I didn't have time to do them. And then I was like looking through historicals and I was like, wait, this exact theme, we did like millions of dollars in like weeks in November. And it's the same theme I'm bummed out about now. So it's like, okay, so it does work. Yes, it can do well. So what is it? It's volume. And so then I started like every moment I was like going to do something on the website just being like, what ads can I make? You know, let's just make more ads. So yeah, we haven't really done too much on the website. We kind of got it to a state where we're like, hey, that's good enough. But we've been working with an agency to give ourselves our brand, like kind of a new look.
- [36:49]
B
And that's the impetus for it would be to sort of Refresh the brand or elevate the brand a little bit.
- [36:53]
A
Yeah, yeah. It's not like we're not changing the name or anything like that. Yeah, We've, you know, we. Our. I think what happened is when we rebranded to Outweigh, we were so focused on, like, the domain and the name and the actual, like, change of the brand that we didn't really sit around and make, like, a meaningful feeling or look for that brand.
- [37:13]
B
Yeah.
- [37:14]
A
And then we kind of like, lost our way where we were so obsessed on performance marketing and so obsessed on business metrics that we kind of. It was almost like email had its own, like, brand guide. And like, ads look different and the website looked different and us was different than Canada. And it was. There was no, like, commonality. They were all just everywhere. And so we are working with an agency here in town and they've been working with us since, like, mid December.
- [37:38]
B
Nice.
- [37:38]
A
And I'm super excited. It's the coolest thing I've ever seen, is, hands down, the coolest rebrand. I'm so stoked. Yeah.
- [37:46]
B
DTC is working on our new website right now. But in pure Jeff fashion, it. Jeff is doing it with. We were. We were using webflow and I was like, okay, we're going to build. Let's make sure we build our templates into webflow so we still have the cms. He's like, we don't need a cms. We're actually, We're. He's built an AI CMS that takes all of our information and, you know, you generate images in the spot and you can reformat text or you can synthesize text from existing articles and yeah, I'm really interested to see how it does. And it looks amazing. Like, it's just. And that idea that you can kind of like, you don't have to be beholden to a CMS all the time. We're a different business. Right. We're a content business versus an E commerce business. But that idea that you can create, you know, templates on the fly for each new report that we create to make them look amazing. Yeah, I'm pretty psyched about.
- [38:34]
A
It's cool to see, like, also whether it's AI or whether it's an agency, a third party come in and give your brand this, like, look that when you're in it, you can't see it.
- [38:45]
B
Yeah.
- [38:45]
A
It's so hard to see it because you've seen every, like, iteration of your brand and all the colors and what your opinions are, and it's just Been really cool to sort of sit back and watch these people like deeply think they're. I'll shut them out. They're called, they're called pact. P A C T. Oh, I know.
- [38:59]
B
Pact. That's great. Yeah, Evan. Evan went to work there.
- [39:01]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They've been great. So I'm super excited to launch that finally because I've always been the E Comm guy every single time. Like we've done it. It's a website update and so it's been kind of cool just to sit back and watch the pros do it.
- [39:14]
B
Nice to close out here. What are you excited about most for the rest of this year? I guess we're at the end of Q2 here at the beginning of June, so you're probably already thinking about the biggest Q4 ever. But what are you excited about?
- [39:27]
A
I think now that I'm been titled CGO and we've kind of done this reorg, I think I feel just really excited to finally obsess over performance. I've always obsessed over it in the sense that I make sure the lights are on and make sure things are good and worked with the right people. People. But I think I've really craved like getting to that next point of scale where it becomes really exciting and seeing the us actually scale. We've obviously grown the US but like I really want to see it become a brand where it's not crazy for someone across, you know, in a different state to recognize who you are. Yeah, I think we feel that in like Victoria. We feel that in Vancouver. Every single time I'm around, I see away socks everywhere.
- [40:09]
B
Yeah.
- [40:10]
A
I think what I'm really excited for is just like that next level of scale that where you really feel like, okay, like we're sort of arriving on scene as like this brand that people know about.
- [40:18]
B
And just briefly, what's it going to take to get there?
- [40:21]
A
Just more revenue, man. Yeah, I don't know. I think more. More events. It feels like such a cliche to say, but really just scaling more ads, I mean that is the quickest way to penetrate into the market. It's just like how it's. You could be sleeping at night and spending tons of money getting people's attention. But I think like getting the right attention would be really cool and getting into more like long form YouTube partnerships and getting into some more brand collabs, like doing the, you know, those kind of things. Yeah, yeah.
- [40:46]
B
Have there been any platforms that have popped for you guys? Like whether it's like aside from Meta. I know you guys do Google as well. Are there any of the other tertiary platforms that have popped for you guys?
- [40:55]
A
We are like 98% meta.
- [40:56]
B
Yeah.
- [40:57]
A
Yeah. We almost don't even run Google Ads. Like, we have very small budget.
- [41:01]
B
Yeah.
- [41:03]
A
But yeah, we're mostly meta. I do. I would really like to get into some meaningful YouTube stuff and get into, like, more like the creative side of things. Like, they're the creator. Sorry.
- [41:12]
B
Yeah.
- [41:13]
A
And like, do more like whitelisting. But then again, that just leads back to meta. Any of those with whitelisting, I feel
- [41:18]
B
like TikTok shop could be a fertile ground for you with. With affiliates, especially right in the right space. Yeah, it's kind of that digestible purchase that can do well there.
- [41:26]
A
Yeah, I agree. There's definitely some stipulation. I think it's like 10,000 followers in the States and I think it's only available in US.
- [41:33]
B
Okay.
- [41:34]
A
Yeah, I can't remember exactly how it is, but yeah, it's definitely something we talked about. But we, again, when we talk back about, like, simplification and just like making things, condensing things down, we just really focused on the levers that are giving us the most results right now, which is just meta. So as we start to expand, those are definitely ones we want to get into. I was running a Reddit ad like, a few weeks ago just to see how. How it went. Because you never know, right? Yeah, it hit gold and it did. Okay. But, you know, maybe for another day.
- [41:59]
B
Well, Taylor, thanks for coming in to be our first external interview in our new studio here at the. At the.
- [42:05]
A
Yeah, I feel like I haven't seen this yet.
- [42:06]
B
No, it's brand new. This is awesome. This is all brand new. We're going to be doing more. If you're in the audience, especially if you're in the US go to outweigh.com and grab some of the finest socks you'll ever wear and tell your friends and family about them. Prove Taylor wrong that you're not as fickle as he thinks you are and that you'll help. Help them scale.
- [42:21]
A
Stop being so fickle.
- [42:22]
B
Stop being so fickle. America.
- [42:24]
A
Yeah. Jeez.
- [42:24]
B
Let's get a deal. Let's get a Kuzma deal on the table.
- [42:27]
A
Canadian brand that wants to sell you socks.
- [42:36]
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 direct to consumeralloneword.co. i'm Eric Dick and this has been the D to C podcast. We'll see you next time.