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Limited Supply
S14 E2: 5 Tactics to Make Your Brand Unforgettable (with Jerel Blades, Head of Growth at TUSHY)
00:42:49
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e commerce, digital marketing and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at Nick Co Email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics and the insights. All so you can unlock your next hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode. Think about your best friend and how they shop. It's vastly different than how you might shop online and you both should never get the same cart. Reminder emails. That's where Instant AI takes over. In just the last few weeks, instance rolled out AI flows for over 300 brands. The momentum is crazy and I've been talking on stage with liam at the Q4 summit and grow ny about it non stop. Here's why it works. Instant can immediately understand what who's on your site and what all they've been looking at. The discount, the copy, the imagery, the on site promotion, all of that's pulled dynamically into personal email flows. Then it sends it at the exact moment that the shopper is ready to buy. Don't let your retention email stay old and lame. Check out Instant AI and start tripling your email revenue. Grab a demo by October 31st and get 50% off your first 60 days at Instant One. Sharma. All right, Jarrell, welcome to Limited Supply. Excited to have you here and put you on the show. Finally, before we get into all things DC retail, e commerce, etc, can you give everybody just a quick background on who you are and what you're doing today and you know, maybe one of your side quests too.
- [01:51]
B
Well, yeah, first of all, thanks for having me Nick. I have been reading this newsletter and watching this podcast since I literally started marketing officially at my first agency. And so it's really, it's a full circle moment because like limited supply newsletters were like going around the inboxes at the agency I was at when I first started this. So happy to now contribute and hopefully pay back with some good wisdom for marketing. But yeah, I'm Jerrel, I'm the head of growth at Tushy. But yeah, I would define myself as like an obsessive, obsessive growth marketer and operator, just like obsessed with the adrenaline of growing businesses of all sizes. I've grown businesses from 1 to 5 million, 5 to 10, 10 to 15, 20 to 25, 25 to 50, 50 to 100 million plus. And the challenge is never the same. And I think that's the fun part of like the puzzle of growth. So yeah, that's me.
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A
And okay, so before we dive in, I'm curious to get your take on the separation between direct to consumer and other E retail platforms. Like whether it's Amazon, Walmart.com, any other sort of marketplace. Are you, are you one, are you, do you help grow those E retail partners? And two, how do you view the split or like you know, where the focus should be?
- [03:19]
B
Yeah, I think I saw something. I think Sean from Ridge had said this. It's like stop trying to fight Amazon like that, that fight is, is done. They won. I think maybe like if you asked me when I was first starting marketing and was like pulling the levers of like the churn and burn, you know, meta 80% of spend mix and just looking to drive.com sales, I would have said well just focus on DTC. But I think the consumer now in 2025, I think a lot more about the mental availability and then the physical availability and then where people are accustomed with shopping. So certainly for us at Tushy, many people don't know this, but half of our business is on Amazon and half is on and we've done a bunch of measurement studies and we found that like there's very little cannibalization between the two. And the reason why is, you know, if you're an Amazon shopper, you're, you're an Amazon shopper. Like I think I'm like my mom, when I think about that customer segment, it's like if she can get it tomorrow on prime, she's stacking up a cart with a puzzle like arts and crafts for her kids. Some, you know, maybe some downy wash in there like paper towels and then like maybe like a phone case. Right. And that's like what she's accustome and with shopping. So I think it's really important now to think about those distribution channels and to be where your customers are actually shopping to achieve that mass scale.
- [04:46]
A
Do you guys actively run like a lot of or when you're running advertising on.com or e retail sites, are you actively measuring incremental sales on the other?
- [04:58]
B
Yeah, I think that's a mandate. Especially if you're, if you're going from mid to eight figures, nine figures, you're probably spending a lot of money at that point. Right? It's Non negotiable. It's table stakes. So you've got to be able to understand the impact of the marketing channels you have active. So for example, we're constantly measuring the lift, most importantly, of our top of funnel channels on Amazon. And let's just stick with Amazon because that's like the most significant marketplace we're on. We found that there is a higher incrementality factor or sales lift factor for Amazon when we are running ads on linear tv. And then it's less so for connected tv and then it's like less so for meta and that's like the latter. But when you think about it, it makes sense, right? We were running linear TV on like Fox News, espn. And you think about the viewership, though diverse. Like the people who still have those linear TV cable boxes are typically like the people that I described, like my mom. And if my mom hears this, she probably would think that I'm inferring that she's old, my mom looks and she's very active and lively. But yeah, like she's the type of person that's watching linear tv. So the incremental sales lift for that type of consumer seems to happen more so on Amazon than like a meta, for example, but like full suite of tools. Like we have the sales lift numbers for meta, for Google, for linear TV, for connected TV, for both our.com shop and for Amazon. So you can understand like the runoff in, you know, efficiency and spend and total, total business media efficiency ratio.
- [06:34]
A
And then do you do that too? Because you guys are in so many retail stores even though you're focused on online, do you also factor that in?
- [06:41]
B
Yeah, for sure. And I would say that we definitely are working on tightening up measurement there so far as connecting everything together now that our media mix is just a lot more mature and diversified and obviously now that we're spending more. But I think at that point it's obviously incrementality studies, but then there's also brand studies, there's recall. We're now signing up, up with Tracksuit to begin to tackle the questions of brand sentiment. So the measurement just continues to get tighter and you pull more tools off the belt as you add more sales channels. But I would definitely say that's a challenge because for us it's like we want to be extremely surgical about understanding every dollar we spend where that could actually be driving impact, whether it's on our dot com, on our Amazon store, Walmart, or in a brick and mortar location as well.
- [07:34]
A
That's cool. Tracksuit is such A cool company. Like what they do, what companies normally do for you know, a million or $2 million a year or even a couple hundred thousand dollars a year they do for like pennies compared to that. And it's basically like this always on like brand tracking. Right. And you can kind of look in and see if you have like a viral TikTok, what that does for brand impact, sentiment, recall, all that kind of stuff.
- [07:58]
B
Yeah. And it's, it's going to make us so much sharper because it's not like we haven't been measuring it, but you basically try to use proxies to get to the same type of conclusions that they're making probably with way more speed and accuracy. We've got obviously the main culprits, we've got meta and we've got Google and then we've got the applovins and the tiktoks and you add like Amazon ads and there you add connected TV, you add linear TV then you add TikTok shops now and then you add product seeding program influencer, send out viral Instagram videos. Our organic social is pretty, is a well oiled machine now and definitely creates lift. So you add all these different variables and it's like you do need advanced measurement at some point for that part of it. But for people who are watching this, who maybe are not at the stage of signing up with a tracksuit or signing up with an incrementality partner, a quick way to start that I'd recommend is if you can figure out a way to track your branded search volume. Like it's definitely directional. Right. And so it's very tricky to do in Google Ads because like it's a function of your spend. Like if you, you know, it's not like you have like unlimited spend hopefully flowing through your branded search campaign. Right. So you can use that just as a directional. We use like search trends, we use Google Ads. We also Amazon has a pretty robust like branded search volume and keyword query measurement tool that can allow you to understand, okay, like does my branded search volume go up in this month, like the month after we just launched our linear TV campaign? Like all those things are directionally helpful before you can get to that point obviously of working with some advanced tools.
- [09:38]
A
All those channels you just mentioned, are those all the channels that you are basically like looking at and overseeing on a daily basis?
- [09:45]
B
Yes.
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A
Do you have any sort of way of where you're like looking at everything in a macro view or like a mission control or a cockpit? Like what does that kind of setup look like?
- [09:54]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. There's a couple things. We use Northbeam obviously to sync up as many of our channels that can integrate into the platform and digest data to get it into our MTA solution. And then we use obviously MTA for intraday decisions. We use MMM for more of the funding of different channels. And that obviously doesn't happen on a day to day basis. You need more data for that that can inform monthly budget allocations. But ultimately at the end of the day, what's most important to our business, and it should be for pretty much every business, is contribution margin. So it's like how do you ladder those intraday metrics paired through mta, paired with the funding decisions through mmm? How does that actually translate into a contribution margin outcome for your business? So we have like a robust, like I love to say it's literally a Google sheet. I mean it takes forever to load because there's so many inputs. But we can say see on a day to day level across all sales channels, laddering up into total business, like what our snapshot is contribution margin per day, how it's trending through the month. Obviously we have a contribution margin target that we are optimizing towards and obviously you know, to get deeper into like the actual unit economics of it that should be kind of functioning against your fixed cost hurdle. And so like you need to currently be understanding the profitability of your business. So I like to say we use these different tools. But ultimately it should ladder up into something whether it's a master sheet that your team creates or like an IRIS Finance or you know, any of these other finance cockpits where you're actually seeing that daily contribution margin and being able to track it accordingly.
- [11:41]
A
So okay, so coming off the back of tracking every dollar, you guys launched a massive out of home campaign and it was all over Times Square. You have, there's a bunch of trucks that still are going around the city today. How do you think about measurement and you know like what those dollars are doing? I assume that you're not going for conversion rate on, on the dot com there. So how do you think about that?
- [12:06]
B
Yeah, that's, that's a million dollar question. Everyone's is asking for these fun, fun type things. I would say there's still a good AM involved. We worked with a partner and a lot of people don't know this but with the trucks, let's focus on the trucks for a second. These trucks are driving around New York City through the end of November. Some of these trucks may be delivering things, some of them may be empty. But the psychology behind it is that for the lay person walking on the street is like these trucks I keep seeing, they're delivering. I don't want to curse on this podcast, but I mean, this is tushy, but a shit ton of tushies. So it creates this feeling of this movement. Right. Like, okay, should I be getting a tushy?
- [12:54]
A
Right.
- [12:54]
B
So that's like the truck, so far as the measurement is, there's actually a good amount of technology involved. The site is pixeled. So whether you kind of buy into the measurement or not, there are metrics you can get by geofencing. The trucks essentially have a tracker, they have GPS routes, they ping the RFID on your phone. It's tracking that. I mean, obviously you don't know exactly if someone for sure saw the truck, but it's definitely directional. If you can verify that that ID that is then stitched to their IP address at home, visits the website, and then picture a traditional pixel and all the events that it would track. So there is some measurability there. It's not just like a shot in the dark, but when you pair that obviously with all the things I mentioned before, so far as brand search, there's what people are searching. So it's not just tushy, but it's specifically the tagline of the campaign. If you can begin to measure that, it moves up like slightly and it compounds over time. You're beginning to see a combination of events, hopefully, that are happening from these phones that pinged around these trucks. You're starting to see search intrigue begin to lift. Right. You're starting to see that on Google, you're starting to see that on Amazon. And these are actually things that we have been seeing. So it's very hard to be like it was for sure that. But I do like to be clear that there are tools on the belt to begin to understand it. It's not just like, pay an expensive fee for some trucks and take the shot and pray that it works.
- [14:21]
A
Yeah, it's funny, I think the percentage is 15% of devices around New York City might be higher in other places, but most people here have iPhones. So 15% of devices are opted in. And that comes when people download free apps or games or whatever.
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B
Exactly.
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A
They're selling the data. And so like if I'm on the street and a tushy truck passes by, you now know the route and then you can Basically pull device IDs based on my you know, my video game pinged something for the. For whatever, and they're all selling the data, but that's how it works. And it's crazy. And you're so right that, like, you see some directional lift and it's usually a much bigger impact. Especially like on social. You guys crush organic social. And I feel like there's. There's a lot of people who post the tushy stuff on organic social from the out of home too.
- [15:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And just one. One other note on that just before you move on. It's like there's like a million holes you can try to poke. Like, picture New York City, right? So Nick's phone is on the 100th floor of this tall building. But, like, the truck drives by. It's like the geofencing tack is good enough to not, like, ping vertically up, because you can't like, really say that Nick, even though he was in the area and his phone may have pinged something that he was like, ground level to see the truck. So there is, like an advanced science suit. And as. As Nick mentioned, like, you know, if you've enabled at location services, you're pretty much fair game for all of these types of things. But, yeah, to move on to the organic part, like, you want to create these remarkable experiences so that, you know, there's. There's a talkability around it, and that is really the fuel of tushy. It's such a. Like, if you remember, like. Well, not if you remember, but like. Like you're having a very challenging conversation where you're trying to convince people to clean their butt better when they're used to cleaning their butt one way for like 20, 30, 40 years. And it's a very challenging mission. And it's often taboo because you're not really talking about what you're doing in the bathroom all the time. It's the only way to kind of create this movement, is to make it talkable, is to create disruption, is to bring these conversations to the forefront. And sometimes you just gotta break through the wall and, like, do the most crazy shit.
- [16:36]
A
Yeah, I think too, like, we're so done with this. Like, you know, we're for everybody. Everybody come. You know, we're. We're the. We're like everybody's favorite. Like, I think it's got to be provocative. And that's the only way to cut through the noise. Especially nowadays where there's so much content being put out at, like, an insanely high volume. There's also now so much just AI generated content that is flooding platforms too. The only way to cut through the noise is to say something provocative. That's going to get people to stop.
- [17:03]
B
Yeah. What's more human than like taking a shit? At least AI hasn't gotten there yet, hopefully. I'm sure it can, but it's a very human experience that you're trying to make more palatable for people to understand. Yeah.
- [17:18]
A
And then can you leverage the out of home stuff? Do you guys leverage it anywhere else? Like a social. I assume you do. Is there anything you do with creators? Is there anything like does your retail team go and try to leverage that? Does the influencer team try to use that to go get bigger influencers? Like, are there other ways that it gets leveraged there?
- [17:36]
B
Yeah, luckily like we have built up. Many people don't know this, but Tushy has been around for 10 plus years now. There's a lot of brand equity behind the name and as a growth marketer and I've worked in projects that had like zero brand equity and it's just like dollar in, dollar out Facebook, like dialing up like low AOV products and just gamifying meta. But like a growth marketer's dream is to like apply really solid growth marketing foundations to something that has meaning and has brand equity. Like that's a perfect like combination. So luckily, so far as like, you know, influencers, celebrities, creators wanting to work with us, it's like we've been around and we have enough content out there like on YouTube, on Instagram and Facebook, we, you know, we're on SNL. Like there was a segment that we were like in 2020 during the toilet paper shortage. So a lot of people like believe in the movement and understand that. So I would say that like the out of home campaigns definitely help with that but are not necessary in that relationship. For anyone out there listening, I would say develop your brand framework first and stand for something and be meaningful and have that be the way before out of home to like get to retail, get to creators, influencers. But certainly it does validate our product in the mainstream for retailers and that's like the next challenge for us. It's like when you want to get into a bunch of doors and national retailers, they want to know obviously that you've got a brand, that you've got a community, that you've got loyal shoppers, that some of them even ask for your TV records to see if you're airing nationwide campaigns. A lot of them want to know that you're big enough to support these stores regionally. Right. With out of home. So it certainly does matter. And having like a really talked about campaign can be that, you know, step into the door for many people to validate their concept to those retailers.
- [19:33]
A
Yeah, that makes sense. I feel like another thing that's so interesting about Toshi that like enables you guys to do so many of these things is your creative production is always next level. Like there's never a bad looking photo or video or the product's never, you know, set up the wrong way. Like everything is so meticulously done on the creative side. Does that, does that like compared to working with brands in the past where maybe creative isn't such a front thought, is that a game changer from a conversion and a storytelling and like a UX standpoint? Yeah.
- [20:07]
B
And I would give all credit to our amazing senior director of brand and our senior design director. Like it is very interesting. I think I talked about this in another segment on a different podcast. But like brand and performance is always like this weird. It's hard to have a good relationship because from growth, whatever I want the next best thing that's going to drive X amount of lift in the ad account, unlock this new audience, allow us to scale. And it's like I don't care if this is an ugly ad or a super premium product render, but when you're counterbalanced by guardians of brand, I think it's a nice relationship because you always want to think about memory structures. And so I always bring up this example with Tushi. It's like when we were going heavy problem solution, we would essentially take a fruit or a peach or something that looked like a butt and spray it off to show the product benefit. Right. We're not going to take a real asshole and spray it on camera and serve it on meta. But that was our way of visualizing the tushy difference between wiping and washing. So I won't say that we've completely eradicated that concept, but it's come out of our media mix a little bit because the guardians of brand are like, do we really want that to be the memory structure that people think about down the consideration line of a product that is trying to get more premium. So I'm sure we'll talk later about our innovation and really exciting things we have coming. But it's like as we deliver reliable products for people's homes in and outside of the bathroom in our new product innovation roadmap, it's like how do we get that feeling of trust and professionalism and expertise that would come with like a Dyson and an apple. Right. And it's probably not by doing a fruit wash. Right. So yeah, I just go back to. I think it's always good to have that balance because brand is that long term thinking and then oftentimes growth is kind of scapegoated as being like, you know, the team that is like so like you know, small, like small increments. Small like small increments of result oriented, you know, team. So it's good to have that, that balance between that long term vision and like intraday optimizations of the ad account, if that makes sense.
- [22:25]
A
Yeah, totally. Brands like ThirdLove, Liquid IV and Neurogum all swear by Instant, they've tripled their email revenue and some like Karen Kane even see a 5x increase while. Why? Well, because AI can build hundreds of versions that you'll never have time to make while you're running your brand. Instant is running all the experiments, figuring out what works and then continuously optimizing those to keep the conversions growing. Don't get left behind while Everybody else goes AI, grab a demo by October 31st and get 50% off your first 60 days at Instant One. Sharma, go lock it in and crush BFCM. And another thing you said that's interesting is like maybe even an exercise of understanding what is to come on the product roadmap is a really good exercise because even from shorter term marketing initiatives it forces you to think about okay, is this customer that I get today, is it going to buy a second and third time also or am I just doing something that's going to get them just in today's.
- [23:31]
B
Yeah, for sure. And that's where our innovation roadmap is going. We are a company that pretty much at the moment has to function as a first time profitable order company to scale. And so we've got our unit economics super dialed in. But we're not at a point where we can put like a target CAC against a customer lifetime value that we feel like super confident behind. That isn't like our aov, our first time AOV and our customer lifetime value is like right now almost embarrassingly similar. Right. And it's not because we're doing something fundamentally wrong. It's that we're building durable products. We're in a durable market right now. So we're trying to scale penetration of households, get bidets into every single household in America. Hopefully by the time we're done with our mission and the excitement around the opportunity is that only like 7 or 8% of homes in the US have bidets in them. So if you're looking at a growth equation, it's like if we can continue to spearhead this mission of washing, not wiping, and having this cleaner solution, theoretically we could just continue to penetrate as a durables company against the rest of the market. However, we know that the quicker way to scale would be to do that and to also work on retention and customer lifetime value. So what that looks like is not like doing planned obsolescence and creating less durable products and making sure that you have to buy a bidet every two years. It's continuously innovating our bidets, obviously, but also adding in other products to the portfolio. So we've rolled out in the last year, we've always had bamboo toilet paper that's 100% unbleached, 3 ply. It's pretty impressive. We rolled out our sense collection last year. We've got toilet sprays and room sprays. And then we have a really, really, really exciting new product innovation that I'm really excited for. I can't say exactly what it is just yet, but think like from, as our CEO, I'd like to say from gut to butt to bowl. And what that means for Tishy is where innovation is going. So really excited about those products. Yeah, exactly. To create subscription opportunities, to create those replenishables, et cetera.
- [25:50]
A
That's amazing. That's such a cool brand expansion plan too. And it really, like, I mean, the Tushy brand is so strong. I feel like it's always been strong. But even, like, even from a brand standpoint, like, Toshi is so good at drumming up these brand campaigns. Like, you know, the one or two that I found, one was the Super Bowel Monday, one was the Asshole Activists campaign in Canada, I think. And like, Trishi is just so good at creating like, okay, it's one thing to create a brand campaign and then spend a bunch of money and put, you know, poster bills up around the city and run TV ads, but it's another thing to have like 200,000 people submit content and tag the brand and, you know, want to, want to participate. Like, you don't get to 200,000 unless people want to participate. How, how does that, like, everybody's trying to figure out, how do you get, how do you do something cool enough or maybe not even like, how do you do? But just like, how do you get. What are the frameworks to think of an idea that does something like that?
- [26:57]
B
Yeah, yeah. First of all, we have some really amazing leaders on our team who understand what it takes to hack into culture, to attach to the zeitgeist. And we have brand leaders who understand performance, but also understand that something is not worth it unless the people care about it. So we can like, there have been so many ideas drummed up in our office where it's like, we love this. If we were to take this idea outside of the room, would the people love it? And like sometimes the answer is no. And it's like you got to be able to shoot those ideas down. But it's like people always talk about like in the growth sense, performance, creative and like how you have to take a million shots on goal and it's like your hit rate can be 10%, but if you're putting out so much volume, putting out so many different ideas and content, differentiated approaches, you're going to find that escape velocity somehow. Right? So think about that in a brand war room, it's like the best ideas you guys are seeing come out are the 10% hit rate. But we're taking 100 different shots on goal in those rooms trying to figure out what's going to be most meaningful. We also do a lot of brand studies and oftentimes figure out ways to kind of survey our customers to try to predict not only for product innovation, but for culturally relevant ideas, like what people would respond to. Right. So there's brand studies involved, consumer studies involved of existing customers, but prospective customers. So again, there is this level of intention and precision attached to getting to the fully fleshed out idea that I think a lot of people don't see. But the answer to your question is you've got to be able to climb all those rungs on the ladder before you get to that point. And hopefully at that point what you're delivering is talkable. It is remarkable. And we always use shareability as a metric that we value even in our ads manager. So it's like Post shares, a lot of people looking at ROAS, CPA, like CPMs, like all those things important, but we actually look at like Post shares and then we have post shares per 1,000 impressions. And it's like, what is shareable? Like what are people attaching to so far as storylines, even if they don't have conversions, I think is also something to tap into.
- [29:19]
A
Yeah, I remember at hint, I used to always look for ads that had a one to one ratio of likes to shares because I was like this, this, this will rip with unlimited spend. And. And then we used to respond to every single comment because that would also Then help the share ratio as well.
- [29:36]
B
Yeah, it's just like a snowball effect.
- [29:38]
A
Yeah, totally.
- [29:41]
B
All right.
- [29:41]
A
So you know, one thing that people often complain about is they're like, well, I got one main product, you know, what can I do on Black Friday? Because Black Friday, you know, you try to make so many days out of it, merchandise, different things, chop up promotions different ways. But you guys have also got one main product. So like, how do you think about approaching Black Friday as a single skew?
- [30:05]
B
Yeah, I always like, I did a Black Friday webinar where I was just like, basically keep it simple and keep it fundamental here. Like, let's not forget the fact that like if you play like pick up ball, you go to the park. It's like the guy, the old guy who is not doing any crossovers is like, can it off the backboard will always be you, I guarantee. Yeah, especially in New York. Right. So it's like, you know, forget like there's so many tools out there, there's so many thought leaders out there. There's so much information. I think sometimes it distracts people from like the fundamental of whether you have one skew or thousands of skus. You need to understand your unit economics. You need to understand what KPIs matter to you. You have to have an offer that people care about and you have to make sure that it's communicated effectively so far as messaging, landing, page, destination, wherever you're selling the tr. So the number one is like, how are you even qualifying when you can scale something I think is really important. So it's like if you have one sku, it's even easier because your unit economics, you can pretty much prescribe everything from your refunds to your discounts to your cost of goods. Landed loaded cogs from warehouse to doorstep. Figure out how much you can spend on marketing and then you've essentially got your target CAC and you've got your target roas. And so understanding how to manage that through the period becomes easier because you don't have to do a portfolio average between a million SKUs. So it's a very simple equation. If you understand that your team is then aligned on. No one's confused on Black Friday, Saturday, Monday. Can we spend more? Is there room here? Or maybe we're overspending. And your contribution margin as we talked about earlier, becomes a lot easier to predict. However, the more important part, that's the fundamental. But I've seen so many instances, having run almost 100 brands now, where you try to get way too complicated with the offer and it's not clear. And what I like to say is the minute your customer has to be like wait, what? The sale is lost. It needs to be abundantly clear. The offer that you're providing people, the value needs to be there in a competitive space. And I think it's just worthwhile remembering that this is a game of wallet share. This event has a million other competitors and it's like if you show up with a poorly communicated offer or an offer that's not strong enough against the rest of the market, you're not going to have success. So I like to start there and then certainly I would like to say destination does matter. Creating a streamlined shopping experience does matter. So CRO whether it's on your PDP that you're driving to, if you're not at a point where you're using landing pages, making sure that that's optimized, I would say site speed as well is super important. Particularly in that periods where it's like a million offers, it's like if your site takes too long to load, that person's also bouncing, they're gone. So there are a bunch of these fundamental things that I think people don't expect to hear, but it's just like those things will always be the most important things and I think oftentimes people will not think about like put themselves in the shoes of like if you were a shopper, like what would you care about? You'd probably care about getting your product on time. You'd probably care that like a hundred thousand other people love the product. You'd probably care about what other people have to say. You probably care about your, the website you're shopping from not being fraudulent. You like, like think about like. So there are ways like in the combination of what you're communicating and what you're communicating on your site, the validity, the social proof, the publisher proof, the way like creator proof, all of those things matter in validating the offer that you decide that's hopefully competitive and clear minded.
- [34:01]
A
And do you run these sales just on the dot com? Are you also running them on Amazon? Do you run them on TikTok shop? How do you think about merchandising across all the different points of sale?
- [34:13]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. We don't run the same exact offer. We haven't historically run the same exact offer across sales channels just because like as people who sell on Amazon know like the cost structures on Amazon, if you are dialed in on your unit economics, you'll, you'll Realize it's a little bit more expensive to place your products on Amazon, especially when you've got bigger boxes, heavier items. So sometimes we can't offer like a mirror of like we like for example, like Black Friday Cyber Monday for us, easy, like up to 40% off. We can't really do that same offer on Amazon, but we can do something quite similar. But again, if the shopper on Amazon wants a deal and that's the thing that separates them from buying from us on that sales channel and we understand that there's very little chance or the data suggests that that person is not really browsing our.com, that's an incremental sale lost if we don't provide value on that sales channel. So I do think it is important for those sales channels to stand up different offers and create opportunities for people to find value everywhere you sell.
- [35:16]
A
Totally. What do you normally see across brands like Black Friday ads wise? Like a lot of people, you know, they're always just like you try to figure out a redirect for your evergreen stuff if you can but spend more on those. You know, Black Friday ads always do well but like you can't juice them as much because they can't ramp up as fast. How do you normally do that? Setup?
- [35:39]
B
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So this is literally something I think is like literally take it and steal. This is like how I've always run it and I've always found success. Like I, I live for this event, I love this event and I think I strong I firmly believe everyone can have success in this event. Like there's so much wallet share. Like people are out there spending money, money, crazy amounts of money. Right. So we always do a couple things. We keep our evergreen like winners like the skit, the ones that are fully defined as scaled in our account is spent multiple thousands of dollars. We keep those running as is because the reason why is because those things are gathering these learnings. But it's not like when Black Friday starts that customer education and problem solution and all the fundamentals of what is sticking with people like goes out the window and it's just like, yeah, you know. So I think there's importance of like creating continuing that momentum with that communication stream. And typically you'll see is like those ads, the performance of those ads will lift regardless of if they're communicating an offer or not. Right now level two of that is you could take those exact same ads and then like do you can at this point you can use AI, you can do text overlays. Like, literally create that version of the ad with the offer, like, and you can like put it over the content, right? As like another solution for that while also standing up, obviously, net new concepts in the ad account. And for us, like, if I were to, every season I get surprised. I think I know what the top performing ad is. And the reality is that you just don't know. Like, last year for us, it was this random creator branded partnership ad that we did with a comedian who ran out of her house with our new bidet seat, like around her head, hopped in the car with her husband, going to a date night and was like, I literally can't go anywhere with my tushy. Like, I'm bringing this to dinner. And it was like a, like a funny skit that was not in the bathroom. It wasn't an install video. Like, no one would ever do that. You wouldn't like take your toilet seat to a restaurant. But it communicated this, like, feeling of like, it was like brand centric. It like was the funny tushy that people remember. It showed how important the product was to the consumer. So much so that when you leave your own bathroom, you're like, you wish you had it right? And obviously the offer was there. And then she was like, you know, this is 30% off today only on hellotushy.com and that was it. So when I say, I guess to be more succinct is like, keep what's working running in your ad account, whether you're running it as so or adapting it for the offer. But always make sure too that you are covering all bases on the types of content that is going to give you what I like to call horizontal scale in your ad account. It's like you got to be doing the whitelisting, you got to be doing the branded partnerships. You got to have those branded statics that have the big text that say up to whatever percent. You got to have videos. You've got to diversify formats enough so that people are not seeing the same thing over and over again that the right content is connecting with the right person. There's a million reasons why you want to diversify there, but that's really the playbook that we've seen obviously really work, particularly on meta.
- [39:02]
A
Amazing as we wrap up. One, you got to come back because there's so much other stuff we didn't even get to today. But two, what's your Q4 advice for founders or growth marketers who are going into Q4? Anything you'd say or words of wisdom.
- [39:24]
B
Yeah, I would probably go less tactical with this and more like mindset. It's like, and I think I talked about this on the operators pod as well. It's like this is like, like this is like the super bowl and you want to be Tom Brady. And I say that as a Jets fan. Like, you want to be. You want to be a killer, you want to have your game plan and you want to be able to execute it. And a lot of that, I think I've seen a lot of founders and operators panic and try to just like, they have this feeling of like, I'm not doing enough. Like, let's stand up a net new channel in the beginning of November just because, like, I feel like I'm looking around and like, we're just not doing enough. It's like, at this point you should, hopefully everyone listening should have your offer. Like your plan of attack, what your calendar looks like through the rest of the year, all the way through Q5 into 2026. You should have an idea of the channels that you have active. You should be able to have an idea if you're at a level of scale where you need to understand the incrementality of those channels. You understand that so you can understand how much you can fund these channels during these high tide periods. But beyond that, it's like you need to have the mindset to be able to keep this inner peace in such a chaotic time. And the reason I say that is because if you get out of the right head space, you'll start making mistakes, you'll start making rash decisions. You may be looking at intraday results on an hourly level where you either over salt the dish entirely because you're panicking about scale and there's not enough signal coming back through your AD account. And then you end up this vicious cycle of making changes, messing with the algorithms, et cetera, just because you're nervous about stuff. So I like to say to keep that inner peace, to keep that precision and not to do anything that, that you wouldn't have done in the first three quarters of the month just because you're in a moment where you feel like your backs against the wall. A lot of that is having a plan, but a lot of it is having the mental fortitude to attack the period and feel confident in your strategies. And then the third is, I like to say, is like, Nick knows, but I do a million other stuff outside of growth. Don't let that knock you off your habits. It's like at the end of the day, it's like I know every single Black Friday I've crushed. Every single Black Friday I've done it. Every single Black Friday I've done. I've gone to Miami first week of December and I'm on a beach and it's just like that's my thing, you know. So I wouldn't, I would say, you know, stick to those routines, do the things you love and make sure that you're keeping that, that balance between the two. Because the best you as a Black Friday operator is going to be the best you that's enjoying all the other stuff that you love in your life. So I'll leave with that last non tactical note, but very important. And lastly, where can people find you? Yeah, LinkedIn. Not big on the Twitter yet, but maybe Nick will change my mind. I've got a lot of tips and skills and hopefully knowledge to share. So for now, LinkedIn and obviously hope to be back on Nick's podcast as well.
- [42:29]
A
Amazing. All right, Jerrel, thanks for coming on. We'll definitely have you back because we didn't get too much of the other stuff we had written down, but and we'll have you back soon. Thanks, brother.
- [42:40]
B
Thanks, Nick.
- [42:42]
A
Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on cpg, retail and E Commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend?
- [42:50]
B
And be sure to subscribe wherever you.
- [42:51]
A
Listen so you don't miss the next one.