S9 E11: Perfect Unicorn Business: DTC Framework (with Ryan Babenzien, CEO and Co-founder of Jolie)

Summary

Episode Summary: Limited Supply S9 E11 - "Perfect Unicorn Business: DTC Framework" with Ryan Babenzien, CEO and Co-founder of Jolie

Release Date: October 2, 2024
Host: Nik Sharma

In this compelling episode of Limited Supply, Nik Sharma delves deep into the intricacies of building a successful Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) brand with Ryan Babenzien, the CEO and Co-founder of Jolie. Ryan shares his journey from founding Greats to launching Jolie, offering invaluable insights into startup funding, profitability, marketing strategies, and the challenges of scaling a DTC business.

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1. Startup Funding and Achieving Profitability

Ryan begins by discussing the funding strategy behind Greats, raising a modest $2 million which propelled the company to profitability in just five months—far ahead of their one-year projection.

[03:32] Ryan: "We were hopeful at that time... we thought we could get profitable in a year. We got profitable in five months."

Unlike many first-time founders who continue to raise capital upon seeing signs of success, Ryan opted to maintain financial efficiency, avoiding additional fundraising rounds.

[04:23] Ryan: "First-time founders generally think I'm going to keep raising money because that makes me more successful. That was not my experience."

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2. Lessons from Legacy Brands

Ryan reflects on his early marketing career at Puma, a legacy brand that dominated the sports shoe market until overtaken by Nike in the late '70s. He emphasizes the limitations of corporate structures in fostering innovation.

[06:13] Ryan: "I was always challenging the status quo... frustrated with the corporate structure not allowing for innovation."

This frustration led him to pivot and establish his own ventures, valuing autonomy and the ability to implement innovative ideas without bureaucratic constraints.

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3. The Transition from Greats to Jolie

After Greats, Ryan identified inefficiencies in the fashion industry, particularly around sizing and seasonal changes. These challenges highlighted the need for a more efficient business model, steering him towards launching Jolie.

[12:03] Ryan: "Sizing is a huge challenge. It creates lots of SKUs and massive inefficiency."

Ryan developed a unique framework focusing on Sizing, Vanity, and Behavior to create a product that fits seamlessly into daily routines.

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4. Jolie's Unique Framework and Product Development

Jolie's innovation lies in addressing fundamental daily behaviors—showering—by introducing a filtering showerhead. This product not only enhances the user experience but also improves skin and hair health by addressing the constant exposure to water.

[14:12] Ryan: "Something that's one size fits all, something that is focused on vanity... something that customers do every single day without even thinking about it."

The development process emphasized premium quality, efficient packaging, and an emotional unboxing experience, setting Jolie apart in the beauty wellness market.

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5. Marketing Strategies: Incrementality and Creator Partnerships

Ryan critiques traditional attribution models in marketing, advocating for incrementality testing to truly understand the impact of ad spend across multiple channels. He highlights how Jolie utilizes creators—not just influencers—to build authentic brand affinity.

[35:00] Ryan: "People influence people... it's why we lean so heavily on creators to share their story of their experience with Jolie."

This strategy has allowed Jolie to build a loyal customer base organically, leveraging word-of-mouth and authentic endorsements over conventional advertising methods.

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6. Critique of Meta (Facebook) Advertising

A significant portion of the discussion centers on Ryan's critical stance towards Meta's advertising platform. He argues that while Meta can generate awareness, it fails to deliver profitable customer acquisition costs (CAC) essential for sustainable growth.

[38:36] Ryan: "If Meta was such a valuable platform for marketing, we'd have more profitable e-commerce companies. It's that simple."

Ryan emphasizes the importance of not relying solely on platforms like Meta for growth, advocating for diversified marketing strategies that prioritize profitability over mere reach.

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7. Retail and Distribution Expansion

Transitioning from DTC to an omnichannel approach, Jolie has successfully penetrated retail spaces like Erewhon and is expanding into major outlets such as Nordstrom and Ulta. Ryan underscores the significance of professional hairstylists as brand ambassadors, leveraging their expertise to validate and promote Jolie's benefits.

[49:03] Ryan: "Professional hairstylists know more about water and what it does to their clients' hair than anybody. They were the first group to speak on our behalf."

This strategic expansion into physical retail complements Jolie's online presence, enhancing brand visibility and credibility.

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8. Creative Marketing: Truck Campaigns

Jolie's innovative marketing doesn't stop at digital channels. Ryan shares the success of their truck advertisement campaign, which has become a cultural fixture in cities like New York and Miami. These trucks, designed to resemble muddy vehicles, serve as moving billboards that spark conversations and brand recognition without direct sales metrics.

[51:00] Ryan: "The truck ad... we've achieved that [brand awareness]."

This unconventional approach has led to organic mentions in media and user-generated content, amplifying Jolie's reach effortlessly.

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9. Building a Content Flywheel

Ryan highlights the importance of creating a content flywheel that continuously generates buzz and engagement. With over 35,000 pieces of content generated, Jolie leverages user-generated content to maintain an ongoing conversation around the brand.

[54:37] Ryan: "And the content is evergreen... what we do at the scale we do it in is not easy. It's super manual."

This strategy ensures sustained brand visibility and fosters a community of advocates who actively promote Jolie through their networks.

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10. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Throughout the episode, Ryan emphasizes the importance of efficiency, authentic marketing, and a clear value proposition in building a successful DTC brand. His journey with Jolie serves as a blueprint for aspiring entrepreneurs aiming to create impactful, sustainable businesses in the competitive CPG landscape.

[56:15] Ryan: "No, no, I'm not here for that. Let them hang themselves. No, this was super fun."

Ryan's candid insights and strategic acumen provide listeners with a deep understanding of the challenges and triumphs in the DTC space, making this episode a must-listen for anyone involved in CPG, retail, or e-commerce.

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Notable Quotes:

• Ryan Babenzien [03:32]: "We were hopeful at that time... we thought we could get profitable in a year. We got profitable in five months."
• Ryan Babenzien [04:23]: "First-time founders generally think I'm going to keep raising money because that makes me more successful. That was not my experience."
• Ryan Babenzien [35:00]: "People influence people... it's why we lean so heavily on creators to share their story of their experience with Jolie."
• Ryan Babenzien [38:36]: "If Meta was such a valuable platform for marketing, we'd have more profitable e-commerce companies. It's that simple."
• Ryan Babenzien [51:00]: "The truck ad... we've achieved that [brand awareness]."

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This episode offers a treasure trove of insights for DTC brands and marketers, highlighting the importance of strategic funding, authentic marketing practices, and innovative product development in achieving long-term success.

Transcript

[Ryan]

And you know, sadly like local government, state government, national government are not great at user experience. So they have this data but if you actually wanted to find it, it's like a fucking mouse hunt. So we just sort of looked at that and said we can improve the front end of this database and make it really easy that if you want to know what's in your water, just give me your email and your zip code and I'll send it to you as opposed to going to newyork.gov epa, whatever, whatever, whatever and then fucking click 10 different things to get to the thing because that's what state experience looks like. Driver's license rules on your garbage. It's horrible. I don't know why, but we simplified that. And you know, in my experience that was that's the best lead gen tool ever.

[Nick Sharma]

Welcome to Limited Supply, the place for refreshingly real takes on what D2C is really like. I'm your host Nick Sharma. Lets start talking about money. Have you ever added up all the conversions attributed to each of your paid channels and realized that the sum of those conversions is greater than the actual number of conversions on your site? That's likely because most ad platforms tend to over report and get more credit than they deserve for the conversions they drive. Today, sophisticated marketers are moving away from attribution and moving toward incrementality testing in order to maximize growth and understand efficiency. To find the incrementality of your marketing tactics you have to run test and control experiments. But these tests are hard to do on your own and that's why I recommend using House. With House you have an automated self service platform that allows you to configure regional test and control experiments to measure incrementality, identify points of diminishing returns, optimally allocate marketing dollars and maximize your growth. The platform is built by world class scientists and allows you to test all your marketing channels both online and offline. You can measure the impact across all your sales channels including direct to consumer retail, Amazon, et cetera. And you can calibrate your in platform reporting for incrementality with House. My friend Connor at Hexclad uses House and he was actually able to share that when they ran an incrementality test around Meta and Amazon, they realized that a lot of their meta spend was indirectly driving revenue for Amazon. These learnings actually changed their acquisition strategy for Amazon going forward. If you're a seven figure brand and you're running on multiple marketing channels, I should say if you're at least a seven figure brand, then you can potentially save millions of dollars by starting an incrementality practice and learn what's truly driving your business. Houzz uses superior science and makes this type of testing accessible. And so I recommend you check them out. Go to Haus IO Limited, that's H A U S IO Limited to learn more and get a demo.

[Unknown]

All right, Ryan, this is, this is an exciting one. I'm excited you're here.

[Ryan]

I'm happy to be here.

[Unknown]

And yeah, I'm just smiling because I'm thinking of all the, all the people that are about these spice. That's about all the drama that's about to come.

[Ryan]

Keep it lovely.

[Unknown]

Well, we'll try. Okay, why don't we start with this? How much money did you guys raise to start Jolie? I feel like you guys barely raised any money. I was obviously very honored to be a part of the early round, but.

[Ryan]

Yeah, you know, most people, we've raised very little the scale of business we've created, but we raised just about $2 million.

[Unknown]

And that got you through to a point. Where was it anticipated that that 2 million would be the only money you'd have to raise for equity?

[Ryan]

We were hopeful at that time. It wasn't, you know, it's an, it's never an exact science, but we had a clear plan to operate the business very profitably, quickly, truthfully, we thought we could get profitable in a year. We got profitable in five months.

[Unknown]

Oh, wow.

[Ryan]

But that 2 million was meant to sort of get us through the year, and we just saw sort of accelerated market fit and traction. So we cut it, cut the profit, and we got profitable. Half the time we thought. And we've never needed to raise capital again.

[Unknown]

Most people, I feel when they see signs of success, they use it as a signal to go raise more. Was that ever a thought?

[Ryan]

It was never a thought. I think a lot of first time founders get this wrong where. Well, let me back up. There are certain businesses that have milestones and actually need more capital at certain milestones, or you raise an enormous amount up front. Our business is not like that. We need capital, but we needed just enough to get going. And then we thought we can get profitable. In businesses like that, of which I think most businesses are, we, you know, there's not these, you know, $100 million development feat, you know, cost needed. Right. Like I'm using 100 million as an example. AI is a totally different thing than what we're doing. And most businesses are closer to what we're doing. So you never need as much capital as you ultimately go out and raise. And that's where first founders like over raise. First time founders generally think I'm going to keep raising money because that makes me more successful. And that was, that has not been my experience. I, I wanted to raise the least amount of capital. I wanted to have efficiency across the business team capital margin or profit. Right. Those were the three things I wanted to be hyper efficient about. So no, I never thought about raising more money again.

[Unknown]

I like I'd love to go back like you worked at Puma, Is that where you started your marketing career?

[Ryan]

No. Oh well, yeah, like officially as a, in a corporate environment. But yes, that was my first real marketing job. I was consulting as a manager of acting talent. I was advising companies but I did not hold an official role. So my first one was at Puma.

[Unknown]

And what, what was it at Puma that you felt like you learned or you saw that took you to then launch greats?

[Ryan]

You know Puma's a legacy brand, right? They between Puma and Adidas at one time before Nike, they owned 100% of the sport shoe market. One was one or two at any given time up until the 70s, from 1946 until the mid 70s and then by late 70s, Nike became the number one and never looked back. So my point is they're a legacy player still. You know, multi billion multinational player. So I learned a lot, right, like you're working in infrastructure that built the market that Nike ultimately came and took, right? They were responsible for building the sports shoe market. So it was a really good experience. What, you know, what my learning was was that I even in that big corporate structure and they're German so this is sort of the ultimate structure. I wasn't built for that. Like I was always challenging the status quo and the way we do things because I thought there could be better ways. And I was frustrated with the corporate structure not allowing for innovation in the way you think, let alone what you do.

[Unknown]

So did you literally just have a thought of like I could probably do this better?

[Ryan]

Well, it wasn't exactly or maybe not.

[Unknown]

Better but like, but there's a path here.

[Ryan]

I was like, this is bullshit. I ultimately went to a different brand, K Swiss, which was, you know, they recruited me to try to save their brand or help say reposition their brand. Same thing, sort of smaller company still around from the 60s, had a meaningful business, publicly traded company. And I just got frustrated with the structure of that. That's what ultimately said. I just said to myself, you have two choices you can continue to do this and complain all the time because you're frustrated with the structure or you can leave and start your own thing. So at least you're doing what you believe is right or better or more efficient and not have to deal with the corporate lane.

[Unknown]

Yeah. And when you left to start Greats, how did you think about starting that? Like, is that where. Because you raised money for Greats.

[Nick Sharma]

Right.

[Unknown]

So did you. Was your thought like, okay, there's actually. Yeah. How did you even evaluate that there was space in the market? Like, you go to a shoe store, you know, floor to ceiling, it's covered in shoebox.

[Ryan]

Like, did the world need another sneaker?

[Unknown]

Like, how'd you. How'd you decide that? Because it's also. It's consistent in your. I feel like in your. At least with Greats and Jolie. Like, you do a lot of things instinctually and they always work.

[Ryan]

It was a different time, but, yeah, the world certainly didn't need another footwear brand. What I felt we could offer was premium made in Italy luxury at a accessible price. That was sort of the pricing calculus of what Greats was. We made everything in Italy and we sold it for a lot, lot less than you would for, you know, Brunello or Zegna or any of these sort of other brands that are four, $500 or more. And we were $180. Right. That was sort of the model. And that model was only a very short lived model because at that time, and you have to remember this is 2014, this was like right when I graduated high school. Right. But it was D2C 1.0.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

It was when D2C was a fundraising machine acronym. You could raise money on D2C shirts, D2C glasses, D2C watches, D2C anything.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

And I was the tail end of that DTC 1.0 cohort. So we did raise money. We didn't actually raise a lot in comparison to my peers at that time. We raised less money than, frankly, I should have. I started with the. I had the same philosophy. I want to raise the least amount of money that I need to get where I want to go. But I didn't do it in the right sequence. Like, I raised like $2 million, $2 million, $8 million. And what I should have done was raise $8 million. And then I would have never had to do these, like interim things and it would have been like structurally better. But that was a lesson. Like, I didn't under. I didn't appreciate what round structures did to the business overall cap table management, brain. Brain. You know, just the whole thing. I just didn't. Until you go through it and then you're like, yeah, okay, there's value and there's. There may be value, there might not be. But that's how we did it with greats. I did believe that it belonged in the world. And I think when you can offer something better for less, that's always usually a pretty good thing. There's a big market for that. What wound up happening, though, is we all learned very quickly that DTC was not a business model. It was just a distribution channel. And that's when dtc, the luster came off the DTC thing. And now we're back to where we should be, which is nobody's raising money on D2C.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

And they should have never in the first place, but.

[Unknown]

And then what were the lessons that. Because there's a list of, like, four or five traits that you had as your checklist to start. Jolie. What were the learnings that led to that checklist from Greats?

[Ryan]

Well, fashion. And I'm just going to put greats inside fashion because it's like fashion footwear. There's sizes, there's seasonal changes. Fashion, broadly, is a very inefficient business. It's really hard to build a great fashion business for all the reasons you got. Like the way sizing fits. Like, your measurements might make you a medium in one and a large in another and a small in another. And that's really hard to solve for.

[Unknown]

Why is there no universal?

[Ryan]

There sort of is, but it. It's. People interpret fit not based on size. Some people just like their shoes to fit bigger.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

So they buy half a size bigger.

[Nick Sharma]

Interesting.

[Ryan]

But you're a size 10. But you buy a fucking 10 and a half. Like, you can't solve for that. And there's millions of people like that. It's. It's. So it's more about the human interpretation of what they like, how they. How it makes them feel, how do they think they look in it? Some people think their feet look too big, so they buy shoes that are too tight, and they'll suffer through, like, a tight shoe because they want their feet to look smaller. Women are notorious for doing this. These are. These are human traits that make running a business like that very, very difficult. So fashion's hard. That was learned very quickly. Sizes are huge challenges. It creates lots of skus. Changing the styles or the colors every quarter. Think about, like, this is a business that you have to change every 90 days.

[Unknown]

Yeah. That's pretty nuts to think about.

[Ryan]

Think about that.

[Unknown]

You have to turn through inventory. You have to get rid of unsold inventory.

[Ryan]

So. So. And it creates this massive inefficiency because like today, right now, on this day that we're recording this, fashion brands are designing. Fall 25.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

Maybe even spring 26 actually.

[Unknown]

Yeah. I feel like the larger the brand, the further out there.

[Ryan]

So they're trying to do that which nobody's a fortune teller. Trends move ultra fast. So the things they think might be working by the time it gets there didn't like, it's just really hard. And that just led me to thinking about what type of business can you have the ultimate efficiency around? And particularly for e Commerce, because D2C as a business model isn't great, but E commerce is great. So you have to be a multi channel brand. But E commerce is, you know, still a big part of. It's certainly the biggest part of Jolie's business and still growing as a channel in general. So that led me to the framework that ultimately led me to Jolie.

[Unknown]

And what is that framework?

[Ryan]

Sizing. So something that's one size fits all, something that is focused on vanity because vanity really drives like what we buy and when. And you will protect that part of your wallet until you have zero left. You will go into debt. You're not going to not buy your deodorant, your shampoo, your skin load. You're just not. But you might skip a meal or not going out to friends with drinks. Whatever the budget restraint is, you're definitely not cutting the vanity part of it until the very very, very, very, very end. And the third part was behavior and customer behavior, which I've been sort of studying in a non scientific way for a long time, is just really hard to shift. It's really hard to change. So what is a behavior that most customers do every single day without even thinking about it? It's like breathing. And that framework, which I sort of thought about over like a vacation and then put on a whiteboard and looked at for a really long time, led to a filtering shower, which is Jolie. Right. It is a vanity. It's a beauty product. So it's, it's helping your skin and your hair and sometimes your health. It's one size fits all. And you're doing it every day from the time you're six or seven until you essentially die. And I don't have to retrain you to do this thing that, that formula that, that's pretty Magical. And I to this day can't think of another product that fits inside of it, unfortunately.

[Unknown]

I agree.

[Nick Sharma]

I've had a lot of morning showers.

[Unknown]

Where I've thought of your framework and tried to think what else fits in there. And there really isn't anything. Like Jolie is kind of a perfect unicorn business and it's crazy that nobody was doing it the way that you were doing it.

[Ryan]

Well, that's when you sort of get, you know, that's where gut and instinct, like investors will historically ask you if you think you've discovered something magical.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

They'll go, why hasn't anybody else done it? Like, well, I have no idea. Yeah, but that's good for us that nobody's done it. Right. Because we discovered this thing that we think is going to matter and Jolie is definitely an example of that.

[Unknown]

I remember when you were raising and I sent the Jolie deck to a few people and I was like, guys, this is a no brainer. Like this is a no brainer. You should go in and they go pass. And then I remember them later like that's the only thing I love bringing up to them is remember when you passed on Jolie? Remember when I told you?

[Ryan]

Yeah. And we weren't really aggressive in our fundraise. Like we were fortunate enough that we didn't have to be.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

So but we also didn't go through sort of traditional institutional sources, although we did meet with a couple and it was more about curiosity for me. Like I wanted to validate my own belief that they have no fucking idea what they are looking at when they're looking at it, when it matters. And I'm not going to name the names, but there are five New York based funds that most people think are excellent at what they do. They all passed. A year later is when the email started, like, hey, are you still interested in raising capital? Right. So. And these were people that were early stage investors. These are not the big late stage funds, which is just a different strategy. Right. They don't do pre launch investing. But if you're an early stage investor and you miss a business like Jolie, you're pissed. I just have to challenge. What are you doing? Yeah, like what did you look at that you did invest in?

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

Because I know there's no, not. No. There's very, very few businesses in history that have done what we've done in the timeframe we've done it the way we've done it and how profitable we've become. So they miss that. What did they actually pick.

[Unknown]

Yeah. I remember Vinnie said he's looked at tens of thousands of businesses and Jolie is in the top 1% of businesses he's ever looked at.

[Ryan]

Vinny Puji.

[Unknown]

Ever. Yeah.

[Ryan]

All right. Shout out Vinny. He didn't tell me that, but good, I'm glad.

[Unknown]

No, he did. When we were in Montana.

[Ryan]

Oh, that's right. That's right. He did say that. He's got a ton of data, by the way.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Ryan]

Data he shared with us. About us.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

I was like, what the f, man?

[Unknown]

It's funny, too, because now we'll move on, but now all those investors are investing in your competitors, which I want to talk about in a second. But when you launched Jolie, you launched it with a water report that we drove Facebook traffic to, and that became, I think, what is now the new gold standard of lead gen in CPG in general. How did you come up with the water report? And also, can I explain the water report real quick? Essentially, if you just Google Jolie water report, you'll see a landing page. You put your name, your email, and your zip code, and then that creates a klaviyo record. Klaviyo pulls from the EPA's API, your local water report, puts it into a klaviyo template and sends it out within 30 seconds.

[Ryan]

Yeah. And so it's giving you a local report at your zip code level. So it's super customized.

[Unknown]

Real time.

[Ryan]

Real time. I'm a marketer at heart, right? So I knew that education was going to be key here. And there was this insanely great database out there that every state has to manage. So every state, by law, must report what's in the water.

[Unknown]

Whether or not it's at the legal levels doesn't matter.

[Ryan]

No, just it's like this is what's in your water. They're sort of giving you an index report against the EPA levels like EPA recommends. 1, we're at 2, EPA 1, we're at 0.5. Whatever the result results are. And you know, sadly, like local government, state government, national government are not great at user experience. So they have this data. But if you actually wanted to find it, it's like a fucking mouse hunt. So we just sort of looked at that and said, we can improve the front end of this database and make it really easy that if you want to know what's in your water, just give me your email and your zip code and I'll send it to you. As opposed to going to newyork.gov EPA, whatever. Whatever what? And then fucking click 10 different things to get to the thing.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

Cause that's what state experience looks like. Driver's license rules on your garbage. It's horrible. I don't know why, but we simplified that. And you know, in my experience, that was. That's the best lead gen tool ever. Like we were converting in the beginning, pre launch, 50%. 50% of tracking traffic. Yeah. Well, it fluctuated, but on average 50% of the people that went to the landing page gave us their email.

[Unknown]

Yeah. Which is unheard of.

[Ryan]

Unheard of.

[Unknown]

Absolutely unheard of.

[Ryan]

Like you at 10%, you're killing it. 50% is never. I don't know of any other tool that's ever done that.

[Unknown]

I remember seeing those numbers and then that's when I started Masala capital for 1/4. I was like, yeah, this is the biggest check I've ever written in my life.

[Ryan]

First and last.

[Unknown]

First and last big check.

[Ryan]

But yeah, that was a great tool. And we still use it.

[Unknown]

Yeah. And okay, so once you launched there was a. Or actually even before you officially launched, how did you even think about developing the product? Like you had this idea. I remember Arjun, who's your co founder, had all this, all these ideas about the way the pattern of how the holes were on the shower head and then you guys brought it to life so fast. And this Apple like experience when you open it, like how'd you go about that process?

[Ryan]

I mean, I've developed a lot of products in my life, not particularly in the beauty space, but just product. We're product people, we like brands and product. And I had a philosophy that, you know, it should look premium, it should feel premium, it should be an experience on the unboxing that's beauty oriented, not hardware or plumbing oriented. Plumbing experience is like you get like a cardboard box with nothing on it and it just like falls out or it's like wrapped in like plastic that you cut with a razor blade. And that experience wasn't going to match the utility of what we were building. Right. We wanted something that was going to emit emotion or drive emotion. When you unboxed it all the way down to like the Fibonacci sequence that we referenced in the pattern of holes. And in the beginning some people said, hey, there's no water coming out of these holes. And we're like, yeah, it's not supposed to. It's there for like design, but the function is only coming out of these holes. And like that's just how we. I remember like doing the box and I was, you Know this, this goes down to like what happens in the warehouse. Right. So three pls warehouse jobs are, you know, thankless. Like it's a really mindless job and it's really hard, it's monotonous and you know, it's. You're not inspired when you're working in that sort of environment. And the more you ask that sort of that person to do, the more likely there is to be a mistake. So what I'm getting at is if you have to pick three things to put in a box and then do a certain way to seal it, that takes one time, two costs money and three, you may get it wrong. And that means every customer is getting a different thing. Because this person's really good at packing and this person's not so good at packing and this person forgot to pack. I wanted to eliminate that. So ultimate efficiency. So we designed a box. One I don't like waste environmentally and money cost wise. We designed a box with no shipping peanuts. Like you open our box and nothing comes falling out, right. And you're like picking up off the floor and like stuffing it in the bag. It's just a beautiful, simple, self contained box. You pull a tear strip, top comes off. It's in a paper pulp molded thing. So it holds everything in place. And that's all recycled material and nothing goes inside it. There's five colors. Your job at the fact at the warehouse is to just pick the thing off the shelf of the color that was ordered and put the sticker on it.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

For the mailing. That's it. We eliminated every single step possible. No corrugated, no inside this box. Right. That was a, like a really. That was a learned lesson from building a company where there were things that had to be packed in boxes and there were shipping materials that had to go in there and how many mistakes got made at that level. And that's part of design to me.

[Unknown]

If you were redoing the great's shipping experience today, would you do it the same way? Like a wraparound box or a box that you kind of pull the tab but you just slap the label on?

[Ryan]

I always wanted to do something better. I always thought there was better. I just never got to it. But I talked about it or we at the company talked about it all the time. Like can we design a better packaging for. For E Commerce, for footwear? Because the big traditional retail box that we use is for retail and it's meant to stack on shelves and then go back to the back and you pull it out and you bring it to the customer. That doesn't apply to E Commerce. Right. We don't. Or we don't need that for E Commerce. Right. And then that box went in another box, cardboard that had to be taped up. And then. Right. So there were all these steps and all these costs that we didn't need. So I thought about it, but I never got to it.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

But it led me to, like, you know, when you start with a clean slate, you're like, okay, we can one. We're creating the market. We can create the experience.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

There's no. I didn't have to look anywhere to go. Not that I believe in best practices, but I would have looked and said, what are other people doing? We just started from, like, here's what we're gonna do. This is how we think it should be. And now everybody that's followed us has done some very similar things.

[Unknown]

Yeah. So before we get to that. So I feel like you've basically taken the first third of aisle 17 at Home Depot and turned it into, like, a beauty brand. And there's so much isle 17, like.

[Ryan]

The hardware brand, or you just made that. That would be great.

[Unknown]

If you knew that, that would be crazy. But you've sort of, like, intertwined it within culture as this beauty. It's not. People don't even call it a beauty device. They call it, like, a beauty tool or a beauty. A beauty product. Like, how did you. Can you just explain how your brain thought about the positioning? Because if. And yeah, we'll talk about in a second. But there's so many competitors that, like, they just can't do that. And if somebody were to try, like, I genuinely believe if somebody were to try to copy everything Joely did today, it would not work at all.

[Ryan]

We know it doesn't work because we actually talk about what we do pretty openly. At least I do on my LinkedIn and other podcasts. And then we see the version that somebody tries to do, and you're just like. That's when, you know, like, there's an art to what we do and there's an execution. Like, maniacal execution. You can be. You can be good at execution, but we haven't found a competitor that actually has yet. At least not the way we do it. The way I was thinking about it was really simple. And this is where complex ideas can be boiled down. If you can take complex things and make them simple, which I believe you can do for many things, then you get to the root of it. And, you know, the. The water that we shower in is the constant in your routine. Right. So you have all these beauty products, all these hair brands. They're all focused on like the thing you put on your head or the put you put on your skin. And many people will change out of those brands, like all the time. Like they try new stuff all literally like monthly. Right. So that's this like rotating thing of new product. The one thing you're doing every single day for your whole life is showering. And water is so essential to your skin and hair health. And the beauty industry at large has like ignored it. They just didn't even think about it. Why? Because they are good at putting things in jars, not solving this other.

[Unknown]

And I guess for them, like the worser, the worse everything else is, the better their products.

[Ryan]

Well, theoretically. Right. Because there's limitations to what efficacy they can get. If the water is the constant that's used all the time, that's wiping away the natural oils on your skin and destroying your skin biome. Yes. Putting more lotion on will alleviate that temporarily, but it doesn't really help it long term. It doesn't solve it. It's like a band aid solution. I understand why that's in their best interest as an industry. Because it get it means they're going to continue to be able to sell lotion. If we solve the problem of water, which is doing this harm in the first place, then you'll need less lotion. Now. Yeah, I get why beauty company didn't say let's just solve the problem.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

But that's where innovation comes and that's where Jolie gets to live. And that's where the opportunity was. And that's why we're a beauty wellness product. Because we're solving a massive problem that everybody has nationwide and around the world. For the most part, they do it all the time. And if we solve that problem, you're just going to have better skin and hair, like even if you use no products. So that's what we were excited about. We can create a new market in beauty. We can solve a massive problem. 260 million shower heads in the US alone, just in houses, residential. And we can build a really big business by doing something really good.

[Nick Sharma]

All right, I need to interrupt this podcast to ask you a very important question. Have you ever wondered how much of your DTC ads, the ads going directly to your website are impacting other sales channels in your business? For example, even with YouTube showing a 0.8x ROAS in platform, do you understand the impact that it has on driving sales in Target or Amazon. Chances are, unless you have an incrementality practice in place, it's hard to understand the impact of your ad dollars at a true incremental view. Meaning you know that Even though the YouTube might show a 0.8x ROAS, it's driving incremental sales to Target and Amazon and therefore YouTube has a true incremental ROAS of 2.2x. Recently with one of my favorite brands, Inkbox, Haus ran a test and when they looked at Snap ads, it drove a 5% revenue lift on their DTC business. However, when they ran an incrementality experiment isolating a control and exposed group to the Snap ads, they saw that Snap delivered an 11% lift on Walmart sales and an additional 5% lift with Amazon sales. Experiments like this are so necessary when you have more than two channels of marketing or two channels of sales and distribution in platform reporting over reports itself because they look for correlation, not causation. This specific case study or use case alone is why I recommend you get a demo of House. House is a self service, automated, easy to set up incrementality and experimentation platform. It's built by the best scientists and economists and is trusted by leading brands to understand a marketing channel's true impact. If you're a seven figure or larger omnichannel business, I highly Recommend you spend 15 minutes check out a platform demo of House. It blew my mind when I first saw how easy it was to to set up the experiments and I'm sure it's going to do the same for you. Go to Haus IO Ltd. To learn more. That's H A U S IO Ltd. To learn more.

[Unknown]

And do you feel like that the, the positioning of Jolie as a beauty brand is like the way that you did the positioning. Is that an unlock for a lot of other brands that are struggling in.

[Ryan]

Terms of our competitors?

[Unknown]

No, not competitors, just brands in general. Like if, if, let's say like a butter brand was launching right in retail.

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Do you think positioning is the thing that's stopping them from getting 0 to 10?

[Ryan]

No, no. I mean it's hard to say you're a butter brand but you're not a butter. Like what would you say you are? Right? Like.

[Unknown]

Yeah, but that's fair, I guess.

[Ryan]

But positioning matters. What I'm saying is like within butter, where are you positioned? Are we the best butter? The tastiest butter, the most expensive, the cheapest? That would all be part of positioning.

[Unknown]

Sure.

[Ryan]

That's all part of brand, right? Like what brand are you? What do you stand for? That matters to me in the end, I think, and I've said this for a long time, I think services are becoming more and more commoditized and we'll get to a flat field for everybody from Google, Meta, TikTok, all of that. The edge was really big when it all first started. You had to have this sort of expertise and understanding of the platform and somebody learned that first and fastest and best. And there was one of them. And now there's. Now it's like it just went like this. Like, that person is no longer there. They're like, there. So edge is almost eliminated and essentially they'll be commoditized entirely. We're basically there. So then what do you have in terms of marketing? You're like, well, my brand, if my brand is perceived or is, and I'll just use them interchangeably better, or, you know, then the market says, we don't care about the marketing, we just want that brand. I'm loyal to X because of whatever, because of what that brand stands for, why I believe they're better. You create an affinity and that's where you see outsized results. Creating demand is very different than creating awareness. Demand is not generated from a digital ad campaign. Awareness is. But demand is like, I want that. I want. That is not generally the reaction somebody gets from a meta ad, at least not on a first. You know, it might be a thing that they learn about. They go, ultimately, I want that. But it's not originating from like an ad.

[Unknown]

Right, so how do you think about separating them? Because I feel like most people think demand comes from digital ads and awareness comes from, oh, we're going to run, we're just going to have a few cute TikToks that go up or we're going to sponsor an event or, you know, kind of like these things that don't really move the needle. But how do you think about demand and awareness? Because I think, like, honestly, I can't think of another brand that has done it so well in such a short amount of time.

[Ryan]

And they're oftentimes difficult to separate. And I understand they're very nuanced. I think when you get down to why does Nike sell this many pairs of shoes and Adidas sell this many. Right? Because the intrinsic value of the thing they're making is relatively the same. They're leather or they're wovens on a rubber sole. Right, but. And one has this logo and one has that one. But why does one so far out Exceed. Right. And that would be brand. And brand is a really, really like. It's. We can define it by a definition, but it's really hard to put your finger on it when you, like, get into the psychology of it. It's. It's complicated. But what I think the behavior is around Brand is. I respect Nick's opinion. Nick talks about a brand that sells that shirt. What is that?

[Unknown]

Queen theory.

[Ryan]

Oh, okay. You talk about whatever brand you like. And I go, yeah, man, that shirt looks pretty good. And then I go, and I research theory. Right. Because you're a respected thought leader around polo shirts, I'm giving you a lot of credit now. But because you are, you then convince me just by the fact that you're wearing it that I should know about it. That's how demand really gets created, in my opinion. And people influence people is what we say at Jolie. It's why we lean so heavily on creators. I won't use the word influencers, but just creators to sort of share their story of what their experience is with Jolie. Because if you're a creator with one follower or a million followers, if you talk clearly and practically about the thing that you like, we believe you will influence somebody within your social circle to go research Jolie. That has been our philosophy from pre launch. That's how we pre launch. That's what we started doing, like making sure that certain people had jolies.

[Unknown]

Even with the Water Report, you had a lot of creators that were putting out content for the Water report.

[Ryan]

That's right.

[Unknown]

Pre launch.

[Ryan]

Yep. And that's worked really well for us. And I think you can replicate that strategy. I don't know if you can replicate the results, but the strategy can be replicated. And I think each brand should think of their own spin on how to do that because every brand is different. You can't do exactly what we did and expect it to work for you if you're selling butter. But you can gift butter to people who cook and eat, which is a lot of people, and then make sure that your messaging around your butter is communicated totally.

[Unknown]

What about. So you touched on meta a little bit.

[Ryan]

My favorite topic.

[Unknown]

Yeah, your favorite topic. So when we were at a. I forget what VC office we were at a few months ago talking about AI for the. For a few hours.

[Ryan]

Oh, yeah.

[Unknown]

But I remember you. You were very anti meta there. I mean, you always meta. Yeah, there was a meta person and.

[Ryan]

She didn't really like me.

[Unknown]

No, she didn't. But you do spend, you know, six figures on meta.

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

So like, how do you justify that thinking? Or like, how do you see. Actually, yeah, better question, how do you see Meta fit into this, into the awareness and the demand piece and like, you know, would you cut Meta off completely?

[Ryan]

I have in the past and it's worked, actually. Meta is not zero and it's not 100. Right. And I think what, the way I try to simplify it for everybody is if Meta was such a valuable platform for marketing, we'd have more profitable e commerce companies. It's that simple. Right. Meta is a platform that you program in, ultimately what you're willing to pay for the customer. And ultimately Meta will take you to that number and beyond it really fast, within weeks. So you'll never really see my cac. I'm going to just use these as round numbers. My CAC is 100 bucks. I'm willing to pay up to 100 bucks. You're never going to see Meta deliver you for a year. 50 bucks, ever.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

Okay, so you basically have to lie then and say, my CAC is only 50 bucks and it'll charge you 60 bucks. But what happens then? Then you get caught up in this, like, who's willing to spend more, right? Then you get throttled and you never get to get right. So they built a brilliant, like Facebook built a brilliant machine for printing cash. That doesn't mean it's good for you brand because you can't make money from Meta. You cannot. And you, this is what you do for a living. So if, you know, we tell our team, like, you have unlimited budget, all we care about is CAC. If you, if you can spend $20 million this month, great, spend it. But you can't because you'll never get there at this number. That's how businesses should think about their business. And unfortunately too many of them are relying on Facebook and they have this belief, or Meta rather. They have this belief that the good old days of Meta are still going to be possible. They're not, they're never coming back. So you must change your methodology. And if you're spending more than 70% of your budget on Meta, and you've been doing this for years and years and years, and you're not profitable, you're not going to get profitable doing that. You just won't. And I don't know why that's not been like, so holy shit, we have to like, either like shut down, like shut down growth and reset our business somehow. And I, I know this is hard, but the other alternative is what?

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

Just on this Wheel of, like, never making money. Like what? That. That doesn't sound fun to me.

[Unknown]

Is your view that Meta is a piece of the puzzle versus the entire puzzle.

[Ryan]

So it's a tool and a wheel or a cog in a wheel, of which, if you are less reliant on it, is really useful. We're an example. Like you said, we spend six figures easily on a monthly and can. Can afford to do that. Meaning we're not relying on it to drive cash flow for us. We're saying we can force this thing to live right where we want it to and extract that out of it. But unfortunately, I can't spend seven figures. I can't. We have not come close to that. Not. Not efficiently. I can spend seven figures, but I won't make any money on it.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

So why would I do it? Like, our goal is to just be profitable, remain profitable, get more profitable. And unfortunately, and we're sort of in this view right now. Like, we're sharing it real time today on this podcast. If I could spend a million dollars a month and be profitable on Meta, we would. We can't. So it's only good for a certain amount.

[Unknown]

Yeah, makes sense. Meanwhile, when I open Instagram, I get three. Now I get three Instagram story ads in a row. I don't know if you get that too. I don't, but there's just how many.

[Ryan]

Times you visit our site.

[Unknown]

No, I'm not talking about Jolie ads, although I do get all the ads.

[Ryan]

Oh, you're getting all the competitors.

[Unknown]

Yeah, but I get all your competitor ads. And yesterday I got three of them.

[Ryan]

Go for.

[Unknown]

Yeah, keep spending. I got. The first ad was from a company that's using your clinical study as the creative. But then you swipe up and there's no mention of it on the page itself. The second ad was comparing a brand competitive to Jolie. It's like brand versus Jolie. You know, we found the winner, and you swipe up and it goes to a bullshit article. And then the third one is a new brand that just raised money from all the VCs that I know passed on Jolie, and they copied the exact same product design as the ad that was comparing themselves to you. Yeah, and then there's a bunch of others. There's like, you know, there's one that is a tiny little one. I mean, all these brands just keep comparing themselves to Jolie in some way. But, like, they. They are all Home Depot brands. They're not Nordstrom brands.

[Ryan]

Yeah. You know, it's a really big market. We think that the competition validates the market that we've actually created. Whoever raised VC money to do this, good luck because you're now going to be put under a thumb to do something that you will not be able to. And we're fine with that. You know, like, again, it's a big market. We never thought that we'd be the only player in the space. I think what, as a founder, you know, who shares strategy and like these guys are reading our. Like, I'm not, you know, that's fine. As a founder though, to watch them go out and then just try to copy it. That's where I'm like, guys, you, you need to get creative, man. You can't. Like, you. The market is talking about you because you're like, that's the exact same language. That's the.

[Unknown]

We're the only number.

[Ryan]

We're the only clinically proven lab tested filtering shower in the world. You can't just take our data and use it as yours. That's illegal. Which all of these companies have gotten letters from and eventually like, we'll take them to court because they, they can't do that. It's misleading. It's illegal. It's not misleading. It's actually illegal to make that claim. That is not yours of ours. So, you know, it's all good, man. They spend most of their money on meta too. So.

[Unknown]

Yeah, the worst is when I swipe up to a landing page and I know it also follows like my format of a landing pa. Yeah. And then I'll cross check it with my newsletter database.

[Ryan]

But you do the same thing. You've literally written newsletters. Here's how to do it.

[Unknown]

Exactly.

[Ryan]

And then you watch them do it. You're like, wait, didn't I tell you how to do it? And you're still doing it wrong. Yeah, but isn't that frustrating?

[Unknown]

No. 100%.

[Ryan]

It's like you're a teacher and you're like, dude, what part of the lesson did you not listen to? All of it?

[Unknown]

No. 100%.

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Okay, so I remember one of the first retail accounts that you guys were in was SX market and it was like, for, I think it was like less than 10 showerheads. Is that right? Essex down in Lower east side?

[Ryan]

Yeah, we. Yes, but that was like a, like a, almost like a pop. Not a pop up, but like a.

[Unknown]

But first place Jolie was sold, right? Yes. And now, now when I go to la, it's like Jolie's got the biggest end cap in all of Erewhon's, all the Air ones. How did you decide when it was the right time to go hit retail?

[Ryan]

I mean, we were.

[Unknown]

And same for Amazon, actually.

[Ryan]

I would not include the essay market. No, I wouldn't count our test as into retail. Yeah, that was just like a person we knew. It was like, yeah, let's just put it in there. It's like awareness for us. Air1 was our first legitimate retail account and we were always going to be an omnichannel business. I don't think there's a way to run a business today without being omnichannel, particularly in beauty and Erewhon. It was a radical idea, frankly, because Erewhon has a really robust beauty section that skews sort of natural and clean. But they didn't sell this kind of thing. And, you know, to their credit. When I spoke to the family that owns it, he's like, so why do I need a shower head in my store? Like, he was super. Matter of fact, I'm like, well, here's why. Here's what this is. Here's what this really means. And he's like, well, I don't know, man. Just send me one and I'll have the team try it out. And like a week later, he's like, holy shit. Okay, so the woman that is using it said her hair is this. And he's like, this sounds really cool. And that was how that started. But there was skepticism and then there was belief. The belief came from experience, right? It was I. They. And they're in la, which has horrible water. Like, they used it. They saw the results. That's it. And that's what we do. Like, we don't. You don't grow from zero to where we are without providing a real solution.

[Unknown]

Yeah, but was there. Was there like a. A revenue target that you were like, all right, once we hit this or once we feel like there's a certain level of awareness, like, how did you. How did you feel confident that people were gonna go to the store, see it and end up buying it?

[Ryan]

Well, there wasn't a revenue goal. And we just believe that the sooner we get into the right retailers, the better our business will get. Because retail is another source of discovery.

[Unknown]

And worries that, like, if you didn't sell enough units, you'd be taken down and not be able to get back in.

[Ryan]

I mean, it's not that I was worried, but we had limited risk there, right? It was Erewhon, right? There was 10 stores. It's hyper focused in LA. Only so like, if it didn't work, we could turn around and say it didn't work because it's a grocery store.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

If it didn't work at Ulta, that would be a different. That might be a different.

[Unknown]

Oh, right.

[Ryan]

But it did work and it worked in a grocery store. So now cut to today. You know, we're going all doors and Nordstrom's in a week.

[Unknown]

Wow.

[Ryan]

We'll be in 70 ultas at the end of the year. When I just had a meeting this afternoon with our fourth hire. So we have a full time team of four now.

[Unknown]

Wow, you're really growing the team now.

[Ryan]

Grew the team by 25%.

[Unknown]

Damn.

[Ryan]

We're in 575 professional hair salons.

[Unknown]

Is it. That's fourth hire or fourth person? Because you and Arjun, I feel like.

[Ryan]

Shouldn'T have fourth person.

[Unknown]

Okay, so it's just you and Arjun.

[Ryan]

Yeah. Co founders and two, if you want to look at it that way.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

And yeah. So we're in 570 pro salons and we'll be in 1000 by the end of the year. So, like this distribution channel of hair, like high end hair salons is a really awesome channel.

[Unknown]

There's a. Do you know that brand, Solo Wave, they have a really interesting distribution channel which is like makeup artists. Celebrity makeup artists.

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Have you found any interesting avenues? We would.

[Ryan]

Our equivalent is a hair stylist, professional hairstylist. So like the equip. The person that does the makeup and the hair. We got the hair person.

[Unknown]

And is that. Was that something really hard to do to go break that network? Because I imagine those people are like, they're not clicky but like, they probably have things they're used to. They've got reps they're normally talking to.

[Ryan]

Yeah. It wasn't, it wasn't hard in that we were just like, hey, we want to send you one and try it. And they started using it and it worked. So they started recommending it to their. To their clients. No, I. It wasn't hard, frankly. The truth is style hair stylists know more about water and what it does to their clients hair than anybody. So they're sort of our. They were the first group to sort of speak on our behalf right before customer. They were like, water's bad for your hair. I use jolie. You should too is sort of the simple version. And now we have thousands of stylists that use it, but we're in almost a thousand. We'll be in a thousand doors by the end of the year.

[Unknown]

And last thing I want to touch on is like creative. I feel like you guys have done such an interesting or taken an interesting route with creative, at least from the assets I've seen run as ads or on your site. I don't think you've done more than like three proper shoots since the beginning.

[Ryan]

I'm. We've. We've done more than that, but from a product level.

[Unknown]

Yeah, just product.

[Ryan]

Yeah, product. Yeah. We've not really done a lot from a content level. We're doing more than that. Like for ads now.

[Unknown]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ryan]

And. But like I, you know our truck advertisement, which we are nominated.

[Unknown]

No way.

[Ryan]

Ad Age not nominated. It's sort of. They. Ad Age does this like, you know, breakout brand thing. This week we just got a Monday and we were like one of 10 brands.

[Unknown]

Wow.

[Ryan]

Like coterie's at one of them. A brand that Pepsi owns, Cotopaxi. So like we're a really nice company and we're sort of like the young. The youngest of the group.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

But that truck ad that we have now in New York and Miami. Right. Like, what if we told you this truck is. Or your. What if we told you your shower water is dirtier than this truck and the truck just looks like it's covered in mud. We've gotten more unmeasured value out of that than any out of home campaign I've ever seen. Because it's a truck and it drives around all day and people see it all the time. So much so that yesterday somebody sent me a video of this YouTube guy doing a really, really funny bit on Zinn. And it's. It's like a 12 minute content piece. It's. He's really. He's like a comedian. It's fucking hilarious. You should watch it. I'll send it to you. But the opening sequence is him like a reporter, like walking down the street and behind him drives the Jolie truck. So this video that he's done on Zinn has gotten like a million and a half views. And the first thing you see is a Jolie truck driving past.

[Unknown]

That's amazing.

[Ryan]

So like we've. We've sort of penetrated the Zeitgeist in New York like every this. Our truck will continue to run. It's kind of like a thing.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

Does that make sense?

[Unknown]

No, totally.

[Ryan]

I mean, and there's no measurement that we have that says we do this, we sell more jolies. We don't have. We don't have that metric.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

All I know is like it starts showing up and up and up. And people start talking to him. And somebody's stopping on the street. I saw your Jolie truck. We do that. That's what, like, we're fine with it not being measurable. We just want it to be part of the conversation, and we've achieved that.

[Unknown]

I feel like you started. You started with those with like, what, three to five trucks? Five, Five trucks. And then now I feel like I see one at least once a day.

[Ryan]

There's 15 trucks.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

But now we.

[Unknown]

But they're always moving.

[Ryan]

They're always moving. 24. Like, not 24 hours.

[Unknown]

I definitely see one on the way to the office.

[Ryan]

Literally, like seven days a week. They're driving all over the city.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

And it's a super valuable campaign for us. And we just opened Miami, so now we'll do the same thing in Miami.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

And then we'll, you know, LA is a little bit harder because it's not as dense. Like, it's so spread out. But we could do Chicago, we could do Austin. There's other cities that we will do this in.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

And I'm sure the guys listening, my competitors will be doing something similar as well.

[Unknown]

Yeah. 100. They'll jump in and try to make their truck dirtier than the chili truck. See. Oh, last thing was. So last time we did, like a talk or something together. It actually might have been last year around this time at the build conference.

[Ryan]

Yep.

[Unknown]

And you mentioned at that time that on that as far as that date last year, you had made 10,000 pieces of content or received or been tagged in 10,000 pieces of content. How has that number changed this year? And, like, is there any sort of a summary around how you guys have been able to do that?

[Ryan]

Well, we're north of 35,000 pieces for this year. Total.

[Unknown]

Total.

[Ryan]

I don't know what this year is.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

My guess is it's, you know, probably like 17. But that's just a guess because I look at the collective because it's not about how many we do this year. It's about how many exist in the market all the time.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

And the content, sort of evergreen. Right. It doesn't go away. You know, what we do at the scale we do it in is not easy. It's super manual. It's super manual. That is sort of the issue. Most people don't want to put the time into this very manual process of getting the address, contacting person, getting address, what color do they want, having that shipped out and then waiting. Right. We're getting. I don't know. 4, 3. The last report from yesterday, I think it was 350 pieces last week. So we're getting like 350 pieces of content a week. When you get the flywheel moving, it. It is the most obvious thing in the world to. To do. But getting the flywheel moving.

[Unknown]

Yeah, it's the hardest part. Totally.

[Ryan]

And most people don't have the time to do it. The resources. Right. They don't have the resources, which is time. You need to wait for this stuff to connect.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

You need to do it for six months before you can really say this is working for you or not.

[Unknown]

And it's not necessarily something I think brands can just be like, oh, I'm going to go hire an agency to do this.

[Ryan]

Yeah. No. And like, we have a team working on it that is now an agency. But she started working for us with our playbook.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Ryan]

And that. And she just started getting a lot of people asking her to help them and she just sort of replicated that. But, yeah, it's been super successful for us.

[Unknown]

Yeah. Anything else you want to say? Any hot takes opinions?

[Ryan]

Hot takes thoughts?

[Unknown]

People you want to call out?

[Ryan]

No, no, I'm not here for that. Let them hang themselves. No, this was super fun.

[Unknown]

Sick. All right, cool. We'll wrap it there.

[Ryan]

All right.

[Unknown]

Thanks, dude.

[Ryan]

Thank you.

[Unknown]

Thanks for listening.

[Ryan]

Listening.

[Unknown]

We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on cpg retail and e commerce.

[Nick Sharma]

If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you.

[Unknown]

Listen so you don't miss the next one.