Black Friday Cyber Monday Recap & The Forecasting Process Behind Ecom Profit - with Richie Mashiko

Summary

Marketing Operators Podcast - Episode Summary

Episode: Black Friday Cyber Monday Recap & The Forecasting Process Behind Ecom Profit
Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Guest: Richie Mashiko
Date: December 9, 2025

---

Overview

This episode explores the hosts’ and guest Richie Mashiko’s hands-on experiences and strategic insights from Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2025 as top operators in the ecommerce industry. They deeply recap what made BFCM campaign execution smoother and more profitable this year, dissect lessons learned in media mix and funnel health, and then dig into Richie's zone of genius: financial forecasting for ecommerce brands—how top DTC operators build, pressure-test, and act on their forecasts for sustainable profit and growth.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. BFCM 2025—The Smoothest Yet

• Flawless Execution:
  All speakers agreed this was their smoothest Black Friday/Cyber Monday, especially compared to the chaos of 2024.

  • “By far smoothest Black Friday Cyber Monday, which was like a night and day difference over 2024.” (C, 00:05; 13:46)
  • Only minor tech hiccups (e.g., Shopify, Postscript admin) disrupted otherwise seamless operations.
  • Shift from stressful, scrutinized efficiency in 2024 to growth this year:
    • “I finished 2024…I was like, dude, I don't know how many more of these I can do. I'm so tired. It was like extremely stressful. We like didn't get a lot of growth. We were really focused on efficiency and because of that it just felt like every, every dollar we spent had to be like so scrutinized.” (C, 13:46)

• Performance Highlights:

  • Ridge: Up 30% YoY revenue, best week and biggest BFCM ever.
  • Hexclad: Most organized planning, only small pivots needed around budgets or stocking.
  • Birdie (Richie): Came back from distress, relaunched ads only in October but saw very profitable results.

2. Brand & Channel Diversification Wins

• Media Mix Matters:
  Panelists credited year-round investment in diversified media for their BFCM wins—TV, podcasts, YouTube in addition to Meta.

  • “The brands that struggled at scale are just the ones that never really figured out how to diversify their media mix.” (A, 00:11; 25:32)
  • “Our biggest rock…was like, we got to be less on meta and more in other channels because we just weren't reaching new people through meta.” (B, 16:58)

• Funnel Health as KPI:
  Tracking unique users, product page views, and active cart users (“funnel health metrics”) proved a leading indicator for BFCM success—these outpaced revenue growth.

  • “I was seeing that… those funnel health metrics I was tracking all year long…are the right metrics to be looking at.” (B, 16:58)

Quote:

“Media mix diversification 1…I think on the smaller end, call it like the sub 30 million…the media mix is basically Facebook, right? Or meta, whatever you want to call it. And then there’s a category…call it like +50…And I think…the ones that really invested in like top of funnel impressions…those brands won.”
— Richie, 25:32

• View Content Campaigns:
  Running “view content” (add to cart and product page, not just purchase) campaigns on Meta provided critical funnel expansion during BFCM.
  • “If you want to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, it just like makes sense to be expanding your account in that way during Black Friday.” (C, 21:33)

3. Creative, Measurement, and Conversion Optimization

• Creative Quality and Diverse Testing:
  Brands leaned into new formats—Flex ads, UGC, and robust creative testing—leading to a direct impact on engagement metrics and costs.

  • “We also put a ton of budget into our…Flex ads…we are seeing huge scale…meta's new version of…dynamic creative test.” (B, 20:40)

• Measuring and Interpreting CPMs:
  Intense debate over CPM’s value:

  • “Meta can probably squat £400, but linear TV can run a 10 mile at a 6:30 pace. You're totally right.” (B, 30:03)
  • “I am so not a subscriber to that [CPMs don't matter] ideology…If CPMs double year over year and you're reaching half the people, like that absolutely matters.” (B, 38:24)

• Site & Offer Conversion:

  • “The way we implemented the deal drop, we had like really nice badging and flaring and it was like kind of intuitive to navigate. So those were all things I Would list as wins.” (C, 43:39)
  • AOV stability was celebrated—lower entry point offers increased traffic, units attached grew, basket size was preserved or improved even with deals.

Quote:

“This sale was really a culmination of everything we've been doing…testing into the UX of our sale collection page…inserting more branding…instead of building…net new swings, it's like, no, this works, let's just make it 5% better, 3% better and just stack those wins.”
— B, 45:17

4. Financial Forecasting for Ecom Profit

Richie dives into his “zone of genius,” demystifying how the best brands forecast and act on their numbers.

a. Understanding Business Goals & Path to Profit

• Are you building a cash-flow business, or blitzscaling for an eventual sale/multiple?
• Example: Supplement/hydration brands can justify loss-leader acquisition and blitzscale for LTV/tam. Birdie is more focused on sustainable, smaller-scale cash flow.

Quote:

“There are two fundamental ways that I…think of, of how do you make money in E commerce business? Are you going to sell your thing at the end…or are you gonna, are you gonna harvest and, and take out cash along the way?”
— Richie, 59:10

b. Forecasting/Modeling Revenue Responsibly

• Build bottoms-up financial forecasts along two axes:
  Cohort-based (repeat vs new customer revenue) and/or SKU-based modeling.

  • Use real, conservative assumptions—don’t over-project how much CAC (customer acquisition cost) will stay flat as you increase spend.
  • “As you scale, for every 25-30% increase in spend…your CAC’s gonna probably go up 10 to 15%...until you get to maybe low 8 figures in spend.” (A, 75:02)

• Empower marketing/growth to directly shape forecasting in partnership with finance, not just have numbers handed “from above.”

Quote:

“Where people get in trouble from a forecasting perspective is not necessarily being tied into reality… If I'm going to double my spend, my CAC probably isn't going to stay the same.”
— Richie, 70:13

c. Impact of Marketing Choices on Profit & Health

• Forecasting informs everything: whether to run more promos, launch new categories, or adjust the media mix to maintain growth and healthy CAC.
• Don’t “squeeze the email list dry” just to hit a top-line goal if not structurally supported.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Analogies

• Meta vs. Linear TV:
  “Meta can probably squat 400 pounds but linear TV can run a 10 mile at a 6:30 pace.” — B, 28:57

• Cuts of Meat Analogy:
  “Not all ads are created equal… It’s like a cow. The filet and the ribeye are a little bit different than the…oxtails. You may pay a different price for a different cut.” — Richie, 39:51

• Forecasting Wisdom:
  “It’s easy to throw numbers around, but just…having that growth background, like, you just know some things are, are, are reasonable and, and not reasonable…empowering [marketers] to have…a seat at the forecasting table.” — Richie, 77:22

• Brand Building Mindset:
  “You could have some, some nice moments. So that's what I…think…not all people who play basketball are cut out to be LeBron James…maybe having a really good high school varsity career is like where you're capped out, right? But there's no shame in that.” — Richie, 60:15

---

Key Timestamps

• [13:46] – Smoothest BFCM yet, contrast with stressful 2024
• [16:28 – 21:33] – Funnel health, media mix, and top-of-funnel metrics as leading indicators
• [25:32 – 30:20] – Business types, CPM measurement, and the “fit” analogy
• [33:20 – 34:07] – Meta performance: CPMs, clickthrough, and “blessed” costs
• [43:39 – 46:59] – Conversion optimization, UX wins during peak season
• [53:44 – 74:08] – Richie’s forecasting masterclass: how top operators build, stress-test, and enable plans
• [74:46 – 80:16] – Growth/finance collaboration, how not to set unrealistic acquisition/spend targets

---

Flow and Tone

The episode is energetic, operator-focused, candid, and packed with actionable detail. The hosts and Richie shift easily between granular tactical details (e.g., UX for promo pages, rolling reach reports, forecasting templates) and big-picture modeling and analogies, all with a friendly, direct tone (“You guys are so smart…I listen to yours all the time, so it's fun to be on, dude.” — Richie, 84:11).

---

Practical Takeaways

• Nail your media diversification strategy before BFCM for better performance and wider reach.
• Track funnel health metrics year-round—focus less on just revenue and more on signals like product views and add to cart users.
• Let marketing operators shape, not just react to, the financial forecast. Tie spend and new customer expectations to real data and realistic CAC growth.
• Don’t obsess over conversion rate—growth can sometimes mean lower CR at higher volume/AOV, which is still a win.
• If you're stuck on growth without spend, it may be time for new products, new channels, or a bigger rethink, not just squeezing harder.

---

Episode Highlight:
The detailed walkthrough of how financial forecasting truly works for ecommerce brands—especially the cohort/repeat revenue split—was a masterclass for any growth leader hoping to partner better with their finance team and hit both profit and growth.

---

“If you can create a sense of understanding between the relationship in media spend and revenue growth and efficiency trends… invest in the time it takes to kind of educate the finance department… it is so well worth it to save you hours and hours…down the line.”
— B, 80:57

---

For more hands-on forecasting resources and templates referenced in the show, contact the hosts or Richie directly.

Transcript

[A]

It was actually probably the most interesting Black Friday.

[B]

We got Richie Machiko on today.

[C]

No hiccups. By far smoothest Black Friday Cyber Monday, which was like a night and day difference over 2024.

[A]

The brands that struggled at scale are just the ones that never really figured out how to diversify their media mix.

[B]

Meta can probably squat £400, but linear TV can run a 10 mile at a 630 pace.

[A]

If you get the economics right and you get the LTV right, it might make sense to try to blitzscale.

[C]

We ended the entire week up over 30%, year over year. I finished 2024 and I for how we discussed it on the pod, but I remember telling the executive team, I was like, dude, I don't know how many more of these I can do.

[B]

All right, let's do it. We got Richie Mashiko on today. So a little background story. Me and Richie's. Richie's like the first person I knew in Ecom and I. It actually goes way back before then. So, like when him and I were both kind of doing our own digital marketing hustles in college, I was doing like lead generation for local, like lead gen companies in Madison, Wisconsin. So we were working with like dental offices and like real estate agents. We were also doing. So we were doing lead gen. We were also doing just like branding stuff for local businesses that like, had no digital presence. So we'd like create some branding for them, like build an Instagram page, start putting out content. We would even do like locally geo targeted, like working with some restaurants. So we would do like, hey, there's a taco happy hour going on. Like, you just have to screenshot this ad and show it to the person at the front cashier register. So we were doing stuff like that when we were first getting going. Richie, can you explain what you were doing? Because we got connected through the guy that I was working with through the lead gen stuff. Can you explain what you were doing with like that? I forget his. Was his name Curtis?

[A]

Yeah, honestly, we were, we were doing a. We were doing a bunch of stuff. And honestly, like when we met. When we met through our buddy Gabe, right? That's who I went to high school with. And that's who you met in college was kind of actually like the first exposure to like, some of the digital ad stuff. And I think how it went was we were. We thought we could, you know, get some of the dental offices or some of like the clients to work you guys magic with the, with Facebook ads back in the 2017, 2018, days. And that's how, that's, that's the origin story or that's part of the origin story.

[B]

At least that's part of the, that's the first part of it. So that's how we got connected. Nothing really came of the whole like lead gen stuff you were doing and we were doing like we got a few more clients and I think we worked together a little bit. But fast forward like I guess a year and a half, maybe two years from then I started working at Homestead and Richie slides into the LinkedIn DMs like, Yo, I just came on to this brand called She's Birdie. Like here's where we're currently at. And this, you know, this new brand, She's Birdie had definitely found product market fit and had like a really uniquely positioned product and, and solution that they were offering to this problem. And yeah, so long story short, Homestead ended up working with She's Birdie for like a year. And that, that 12 months was like that at least that was my first experience with like hockey stick growth for an ecom brand. Like really leaning into Facebook ads, landing pages, you know, email and SMS marketing, like all the classic levers that can really propel an econ brand forward. That was like back in the day when UGC was like the new unlock to drop into an account and we were just like peppering the account with tons of review videos and yeah, that was, that was a pretty crazy time and my very memorable econ moment for me.

[A]

Richie, I know it was, I remember those were the, the good old days. I mean it's good old days now, but remember you taking it from like 1 like 150k a month and took it to like a million a month in like two months and it was a fun ride. Connor is the. Connor's the reason I'm here.

[B]

I spent a hundred grand on Facebook ads in a day. I was like, man, this is crazy.

[C]

That's awesome. I'm glad you guys made, you know, going from friends to, to friend relationship to client relationship goes much better when you scale them from 150k to a million dollars a month. You know that could of two ways.

[B]

The friendship sticks around when, when the growth is good. All right, we got a really fun episode today with Richie Machiko. We are first going to do a little bit of a recap on how Black Friday, Black Friday Cyber Monday went. And then we're going to go into Richie's zone of genius, which is doing forecasting for e commerce brands and how to affect that forecast. Thank you to the sponsors, Motion After Cell, Prescient Rich panel and House. And if you're liking the show, make sure to like, subscribe, comment and share with your marketing friends.

[D]

Hey Connor, I don't know if you know this, but there's a lot of talk about creative diversity right now on all platforms. We've been talking about it a lot.

[A]

Andromeda.

[D]

I don't know if you heard about that. It's apparently a Greek legend, a Greek myth, but I believe it is something that Meta has done that. Obviously. Obviously I'm kidding. But everybody's talking about creative diversity. Everybody's talking about Andromeda and how the game has changed. We are all focused on it. I think there's not a DTC operator who, who does not know it at this point and how important it is. And being able to test, measure, do creative diversity, get a high volume of diverse assets is really the.

[A]

The.

[B]

The name of the game.

[D]

And I'm super excited because Motion has just rolled out AI tagging, which helps to simplify as our volume's going. Diversity is going up. We have more different types of styles. You know, I know you're a big name and convention guy. I know that you think they're the heart and soul of DDC brand. But another casualty of the AI era, Motion now has AI tagging, which simplifies all of your reporting. Automatically tag stuff just makes it easier to splice data. I know you were just saying, actually you sent it to your team. I sent it to my team. What are your thoughts on AI tagging so far?

[C]

Yeah, no, totally. And Motion's premier sponsor, we're supposed to say nice things, but legitimately, as soon as I got the video from them, because we got early access, sent it right to my team. I'm like, this is. This is the way to go. It makes the comparative analytics just so much simpler. I was just looking at it this morning. Bucketing between UGC lifestyle photo with text, product photo with text, all these different breakdowns that we used to have to labor over to tag and automate and then. And then break down the reports by those dimensions. It's all kind of working out of the box. So you got it totally right. We were talking about creative diversity all the time. Producing that I think is a big challenge for brands right now. Analyzing that just as big of an issue. And Motions AI tagging system is a great solution for it. So if you want to check it out, go to motion app.com and let them know that the marketing operator sent you.

[B]

Cool? So we finally made it through Cyber5. We're excited to talk about that a lot today. Before we do that, I gotta do a quick, quick plug to Hexclad's new YouTube series that just dropped. Our content team has been working on.

[C]

This.

Undisclosed sponsor sponsorship here. I had no idea.

[B]

We gotta rack our views up, guys. We gotta rack them up. This is. No, seriously though, like I've talked about Huckberry a lot. I've talked about, like, we've talked about Yeti Presents a lot. They were very much amused for this content series. These are like 12 to 16 minute, you know, short films basically. And it's called Open to Close. It's basically covering like what actually happens operationally in a Michelin star restaurant from the moment it opens to the moment it closes. And it goes like time stamp by timestamp. I think it's really well done. I think our head of content, Matt Ducker and our content team just absolutely crushed it. Already up to 136,000 views. We just launched it yester Monday and then we did an email for it yesterday. So if you haven't checked it out yet, go check it out. It's pretty dang cool. And we got I think four more episodes launching in this first season.

[C]

How often are they going to come out?

[B]

I think weekly. I think we're going to release one a week for, for the next like four or five weeks is my understanding. They're already fully launched on Tubi, so our partner Fox has a streaming platform or network called Tubi, so if you want to go watch all of them, you can go watch them all on Tubi right now and then on YouTube, we'll keep to. We'll roll them out week over week, I think.

[C]

And it's called Hexclad Presents.

[B]

The. Yes, the. It. The brand is like hexcloud Presents and then the series is called Open to Close.

[C]

Got it. Oh, dude, it sounds awesome.

[B]

Yeah, it's really cool. Yeah, I appreciate it. So, all right, let's get into it. Let's talk Cyber5.

I guess before we get into the actual like results that we saw for each of our brands just overall execution wise. I know at hexclad we. I felt this was our third BFCM with a full internal team. My fourth BFCM at hexclad in, in its entirety since I've been working on the brand, definitely our best plan, smoothest rollout. I feel like the only things we really had to make adjustments on were some budget decisions which in the grand Scheme of things were like pretty small decisions and then just like hey, we, you know, we, we're moving too little of this upsell. Like let's change the UX or like let's lower the price or we stocked out of this upsell, let's get it off the product page. Or we stocked out of this product, let's put it back in stock. So just kind of your normal like demand planning changes and your normal budget conversations. But other than that there was like no broken ads, no broken webpage links. You know, Shopify's back end went down for a little bit in the morning on Cyber Monday on desktop at least. So that was like the most scary thing that happened. But I felt really good about yeah.

[C]

Post script admin down on Friday.

[B]

Oh, post script. Yeah, post script went down. What was the deal with that? Our beloved, beloved post script. Everyone makes mistakes.

[C]

Yeah, I was saying I actually thought they handled it really well. It was one of those they didn't have an issue with, at least from my understanding, deliverability. Like we had scheduled sends that were going out. It was just accessing the back end that you had issues with for a couple hours. But I thought they handled it well. Alex Beller holding it down on Twitter. Our reps were super responsive. His backup an hour and a half or so. So no harm, no foul from my perspective.

[B]

And they're so, they're so forward and upfront with everything they do. Like I didn't see Bell's post but I'm sure he like recorded a video like very articulately like explaining what happened. Actually you reminded me we did have one issue. We decided to layer in one more plain text on I think it was th Friday we decided to layer in one more plain text. And like I was just going in at in Clavio and looking at it. I'm like there's no, there's no way. We only serve this to like 2000 people or 10. I forget what the number was. It was really low. And we went back and realized there was an issue with one of our Clavio emails we sent out but we just resent it and it was fine. So there was even. That was not much of a hiccup. Any, anything else on your guys end, any hiccups that you had to work through during the actual Cyber5 weekend.

[C]

I have a quick question. On the, the plaintext actually what was the data that you looked at that made your team decide to plan like to schedule another email or to create another email to send?

[B]

We, we realized midday that we and it was like our net net like the total number of campaigns we sent throughout the whole weekend was the same.

Like we had one more scheduled for Saturday and one less scheduled for Black Friday. We just decided we wanted to comp Black Friday last year. Exactly. So we just peppered a really simple plain text email in real quick. But it wasn't, it wasn't anything more than that.

[C]

Totally. Richie, how was your experience?

[A]

It was actually probably the most interesting Black Friday. We've been doing it for like six years I think. I don't know how much much of the story Connor Connor's filled you in on but basically.

The brand Birdie kind of was in a pretty distressed state and the beginning of the year and.

One of those things is we owed Facebook a lot of money.

So I essentially took.

To like over day to day operational control in May and we we literally started running ads.

In October. So for the first nine months of the year call we weren't running ads and had no idea what to expect on on. On the on Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. But probably like two, three weeks ago things started started to work again gratefully and obviously we didn't. We didn't reach the scale that we had in in with that we did in previous years. But it was really profitable and for the situation the business is in.

[B]

It's.

[A]

It. It's. It's good. It was good. No technical things. I mean there was a Shopify thing but you know we probably didn't. Our operation is definitely not as complex as your guys so I'll say that. But everything was. Was smooth.

[B]

So you just launched ads again in. You said October.

[A]

October.

[B]

Got it. So. So you really were, you were really going efficiency like really leaning in on the efficiency end of the efficiency versus revenue spectrum in the last. In the last year.

[A]

Yeah, like yeah, 100%. It was, it was very interesting. Like we were spending like literally like maybe like one to $500 a day in October, you know when historically we spent you know in October, 10 to $20,000 a day.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So was very interesting.

[B]

Well I'm excited to see what what 2026 has in store for you guys because it sounds like you're kind of at a. At that point where you might be able to start unleashing some more top of funnel and and media deployment again.

[A]

It feels like deja if we were when we were working with you guys at the beginning remember? So yeah, another another shot at another shot of growth.

[C]

The circle of life.

[B]

Yeah seriously, the ecom the you get.

[C]

To run it all back. Reggie go from 100k month to a million a month.

[A]

Again you to learn from the mistakes.

[B]

Connor, how did it go for you guys? Any hiccups?

[C]

No hiccups? No, actually, I mean look, I, I feel like I need to knock on wood. Despite us being past the period by far smoothest Black Friday Cyber Monday, which was like a night and day difference over 2024. I finished 2024 and I forget how we discussed it on the pod but I remember telling the team, the executive team, I was like dude, I don't know how many more of these I can do. I'm so tired. It was like extremely stressful. We like didn't get a lot of growth. We were really focused on efficiency and because of that it just felt like every, every dollar we spent had to be like so scrutinized over because we were really trying to thread a needle. This was 2024. Last week we had, we had best week ever. We had our biggest Black Friday. We had our biggest week. November ended up being our biggest month all time. I've got a couple like maybe observations or points that I would love your guys perspective on. One, we saw a really big, we launched our, our we call them deal drops but like our Black Friday exclusive offers on Wednesday 9am and we saw 50% growth on Wednesday and Thursday. So we come into the weekend like massively up. Black Friday wasn't quite there but we were, we improved me year over year.

And then Saturday and Sunday solid growth. And then Cyber Monday was actually our softest day. So it was like kind of front loaded in a way. But we ended the entire week up over 30% year over year. And what we're in the process of doing now is like I think there are some like indicators of success. Obviously the revenue's 1 and I also just for the group because I, I think this is kind of interesting.

It was really our EDC business so our like core wallet business where we were getting all of our growth which is not always the case. For the last couple years it's been more moderate growth in wallet business and then getting a lot of growth, 50, 60% in rings and travel and things like that. This is not the case here. We saw wallets absolutely RIP for most of the month of November. International also performed really well for us. So revenue is obviously an indicator of success. The other one is brand queries were up 30% year over year week of Black Friday which is I think extremely hard to do. It was obviously last year's Black Friday was the Most amount of people ever to have searched for Ridge Wallet on that day. We were able to beat that by 30%. And then the other one that I think is interesting is we saw meta spend targeting men perform significantly better year over year to the point that it was actually equal to women spend. So I don't know if you guys look at that sort of thing, but typically for the month of November, we spend quite a bit more on women than men. So the fact that we were able to get the rows we needed to spend basically 50, 50 split between the two over Black Friday, I think is another indicator of success.

And then what we're, what we're doing or like what we're in the process of doing now is like, okay, if we think of those as being wins, we're. What did we do from a strategic perspective that contributes to those or led to those. What are those a byproduct of? And 1 is a media mix, which Connor, I know you had a point on, but like we're spending more on TV, on podcasts, we're spending like hundreds of percent more on YouTube year over year. I think that's the sort of thing that drives us increased brand queries. I think you were listing media mix as a win for you guys as well.

[B]

Yes, I think I was talking a lot about this and with my internal team and I think I brought it up on the podcast like it's a very. We just have such a unique business model where like the performance of our business is just so, so, so concentrated and like you can use baseline revenue leading into this moment to, as like a leading indicator of, of where this peak moment's gonna go. But it's just, it's a, it's a tough thing because our feedback loop's actually really long, you know, like I don't really get the full feedback until the five days of Cyber5 have happened. We really, we made a big emphasis. One of our biggest rocks, probably our most important rock or initiative of the year was like, we got to be less on meta and more in other channels because we just weren't reaching new people through meta. It's like I think our rolling reach in the back half of the year, aside from November, which was when it was its highest, was like 10% or like 10% new people being reached of all of our impressions. So we diversified our media mix all year long. More linear TV, more CTV, more YouTube, more non purchase conversion campaigns within meta, which I want to talk about because that was a huge win for us. But I talked a lot about using this like I call them like funnel metrics, like unique users, new unique users, returning users. And then some of the, some of the metrics I was following along with the most were how many product pages, product page views have we got and how many active cart users have we got and what is, what's the comp on that year over year. And what I was seeing like leading into this Cyber5 moment was that those two metrics, product page views and add to cart active cart users, the percent growth on those two KPIs was totally outpacing our revenue growth. And it's not that our revenue growth was bad in like August, September, October, it was still solid revenue growth. But that I was seeing that and tracking that all like for the six months, four months leading into this moment. And like I was very bullish on the, on the strength or health of our funnel. Because of that I'm like, people are looking at products, they're building carts at an, at an enhanced rate compared to where our revenue is growing. And I thought that was a really good indication that we were just getting more highly qualified people do our site which ultimately comes back to our media mix. And like what I'm realizing at, at hexclad scale is traffic and like funnel health metrics are really, really important KPIs to continue to grow. Like if we're flat on sessions or like flat on product views or active car users, we're gonna have a really hard time growing. And we sell great repeat like cohort based, you know, retention performance during Black Friday Cyber Monday. But it's still acquisition that is like really moving the needle for us. So yeah, I think like ultimately I was able to sort of confirm that those like funnel health metrics I was tracking all year long like are the right metrics to be looking at. I'm gonna actually go in and look at our, our brand search queries today. I was waiting for Cyber Monday to like fully and like waiting for that data get passed back into marathon. But I'm really excited to go in there. I'm imagining we have like massive growth in, in our branded search queries over that Cyber5 weekend. So that was, that was a big one for us was like diversifying the media mix all year long really paid off also just like diversification in general, right. Like we invested more into different types of creators. We've you know, got the most impressions in tag social content. Like over like we hit over a billion like a few months ago like insane impression arbitrage and social which is also like following this diversification trend. I think the media mix was like the biggest variable that helped us drive the performance we saw. But it was just really cool to see that view content even during which we look. We look at that as like a funnel building building campaign. Not a, not a, like run this ramp it during an actual like sales event. So that was really cool. We also put a ton of budget into our. These Flex ads. I don't know if you guys have been doing a lot of that, but we are seeing huge scale which it seems to me is like meta's new version of like DCT's dynamic creative test that we used to run a ton of back in the day. But we're dropping in. We're basically grouping these Flex ads by. By concept. So it's like all the ads in it are Gordon whitelisting or all the ads in it are like static sale ads. And we're like I was just looking at our. Just by like top spending ads. I think like 5 are top 10 spending ads or that like Flex ads format or like three of our top five or something. It was crazy. So those are three of the big variables I have. I've noticed immediately that were helping us.

[C]

I want to, I want to jump back quickly to the view content component because I saw you put that in the notes and I looked up ours. We didn't see 7x the the average performance. We were above target and it ended up being about 10% of our meta budget which is like we, we had a number of discussions and we've also ran a bunch of holdouts and we went down the rabbit hole at ridge of optimizing for view content last Q4 when I saw it outperforming our purchase optimized campaigns. So I do think there's like there is a strategy at least from my perspective of like if you want to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, it just like makes sense to be expanding your. Your account in that way during Black Friday specifically. I think there's enough intent out there that even not optimizing for purchases will lead to decent direct response results.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[C]

So I'm super with you there. Didn't quite see the success that you guys did, but 10 of budget above target, like we're super happy with.

[B]

That's a huge. That's a huge. I mean I don't know what our. It was not 10 of our total budget. It was definitely under that 10%.

[C]

Sorry, 10% of our meta budget. Right?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[C]

Saying you're Gonna get down to like sub, sub 6% or something. Yeah, you could do the rough math there, but so cool. We both attribute media mix being a win, largely leading up to Black Friday, but then also week of particularly with the View content stuff.

[D]

So I remember like right around Christmas time when most people should probably normal people were like off taking that, taking their time, chilling with family. I was like looking through our P and L, our budget for next year and I was like, how are we going to save money? And one of the things I did is I leaned on a lot of our partners and I remember slacking a meet from Rich Panel and I was like, what can you do? How can you help us? We had just switched to Rich Panel a few months before, went really well. And I told him jokingly, by the way, I want to throw it out there jokingly, that if he could help cut about 500k from our customer service costs, I'd get a Rich Panel tattoo. Well, we did that. You've probably seen a tweet. He did some AI thing of me with a neck, neck tattoo. I'm not going to do it. Sorry, Amit, but I will talk about how much I love Rich Panel, how much Amit has helped us. So we had 18 support agents before. It was a lot and it just was not scalable. We had so many people. We had this like old legacy software that was slow, it was broken, it was expensive and it just took too many people to operate. So we not only made the switch, but Amit and his team really helped us. Now we have eight people and we have a much better CSAT score. Our numbers are way better, our response times are way quicker. We're leveraging a lot of automation, a lot of AI. But again, it has not hurt customer experience. We track and I get a weekly report of our csat, of all of our stuff, of our nps and it's going up because we're actually able to get back to people, give people better answers. The automation learns from our best agents. So it just continually is getting better. If we switched to Rich Panel about two weeks before, Black Friday might be a crazy thing to do. But it was super easy. We came out of Black Friday for the first time in three years with no ticket backlog. The software and support has blown us away. I highly recommend you switch. If you do it and they save.

[A]

You a lot of money, you should.

[D]

Probably get a tattoo. But it's not something my wife would let me get away with. But yeah, if you're running an E Commerce brand, I highly recommend you switch to Rich Panel. You'll be able to leverage their software, save money on software costs which is great while saving significant amount of money on personal cost. So if you want to go into Q4 with a leaner, smarter support setup and come out of there without this crazy tech backlog, just make your CX team happy, happier. Go to rich panel.com demo, tell them Cody from our credit operator sent you and tell them you're ready to get a tattoo.

[C]

Richie, I'm curious your perspective on this. Just whether it's She's Birdie or other brands you've worked with.

How did they approach? How have they been approaching?

[A]

Yeah, I, I think it's really interesting listening to you guys talk. So for context I work as really more of like a finance consultant. Do you have like kind of the, the, the, the. The marketing and growth background? But I kind of work with brands and kind of fall in two camps, right call like the sub 30 who's like their, their, their media mix is basically Facebook, right? Or meta, whatever you want to call it. And then you have. And then there's a category of brands that I work with that are. Call it like +50, you know, trending towards 9, maybe have reached 9. And I think.

I think the, the thing that I notice over Black Friday, it's a really similar story to what you guys are saying for like that that cohort of brands that is, is larger in scale. The ones that really invested in like top of funnel impressions and looking kind of like those full like what you, what you called the full funnel metrics, right? Connor, thinking about him, how many impressions are we getting a month? Not just, not just thinking of you know, one day, you know what, what the Ross is like on, on a day by day basis that though that brand, those brands won, the brands that struggled at scale are just the ones that never really figured out how to diversify their, their media mix. I think maybe because you know there, there, there could be like a lot of reasons for that which is from my perspective one could be you know just like the, the way that the business is, is made up from like a unit economic or a customer purchasing behavior, maybe they can figure out how to justify you know, looking at taking a longer term view when, when maybe we're looking at the right metrics, right? Because we're just looking at a conversion the day of.

So I think, I think in that upper cohort of brands that you guys are obviously in like media mixed diversification 1 I think on the smaller end you know, call like the sub 30 million.

[B]

I actually, I wanna, I wanna add a note on that point before you move on from it, because I, I fully agree with what you just said. I've talked about this in the past, but like, we have, we, we. What we call this at Hexclad is like analytical rigor. It's like, like every single thing you're gonna do needs to, you need to know how you're gonna measure it and like, what success or losing looks like. And it's gonna be different for every single thing you did. Because to your point, if you want to run a bunch of linear TV campaigns and you're only going to think about it the same way that you measure, let's say Meta, like we're gonna do a short URL and have like a north beam utm. We're gonna measure it that way. It's like you're never gonna see, you're, you're not measuring it the right way. So if you're, if you go into it with like the wrong analytical mindset or model, you're never going to invest in those channels where like, we look at linear TV very different than we look at Meta, very different than we look at Influencer. And like, we have different measurements or different definitions of what like, winning on each channel looks like. And that's allowed us to invest in the top of the funnel. If we didn't think that way, we would be like, oh, let's just put more into Meta, more into search, and our funnel will be really dried up. Which I think is kind of what you were saying is like, they just, brands aren't investing there, I think, because they're not doing the work ahead of time to, to be like, okay, what is, what is this serving our business? And like, what are the KPIs that we can use to measure for like, linear TV? It's like we'll look at hour over hour lift in sessions and compare that to other linear TV spots. And like, that's a pretty good way to make the right decisions. I'd say 85 of the time. So I just wanted to add that because I think that's like an amazing point that you just made.

[A]

Well, it's also a different muscle, right? Like a lot of these brands. And I mean, you guys, you guys were there at the start, you know, a long time ago, right, where you're just so used to looking in like Meta's dashboard or Facebook's dashboard and right, saying, hey, what's like my cpa? What is like My roas, it's a really different, it's like you could be fit. Right. But fit from like a bodybuilder perspective is different. Is a lot different than like a marathon runner. Right.

[B]

And I kind of think that's a great comparison. That is. You're totally right.

[A]

And as like a marketer or brand operator, owner, founder, whatever, it's, it's about evolving right. As you, as you want to scale. I see a lot of brands. That.

Was a great point. Like there's really a lot of brands that I've worked with and I've seen that are like our Facebook spend isn't working. Let's try linear TV and see if that gets a better like you know, instant impact on revenue. And I'm like well it's not. Probably not. And when you're just measuring like something like that against you know, the wrong KPIs, it just doesn't work like the, like the one brand that I think did really well. They're just focused on how do you, how do you arbitrage like views and think of it from a cpm. That's like a really like you know, basic thing. But, but that's, that's, that's like an example of, of, of a brand that I think one that, that had a really good Black Friday Cyber Monday.

[B]

I love, I love the fitness, I love the fitness analogy. Yeah. Meta. Meta can probably squat 400 pounds but linear TV can run a, a 10 mile at a 6:30 pace. You're totally right. And that's like, that's. You could basically connect that to how you measure them. Right. Like that's a really good way to think about it.

[A]

Yeah, it's like evolving, evolving your, your, your athlete type I guess. And then yeah, I think for like the sub. Call it 30 million brand. Million dollar brand. That's definitely where like Birdie fit in. And I have a handful of clients on that end. Acquisition was like pretty tough, you know, especially like, you know like the brands that are really acquisition focused they don't have ltv. So like, like electronics, like, like not, not super strong.

The brands that I saw when from like that lower end of the spectrum was one like a lot of the, the repeat, you know like apparel, skin care, beauty, etc.

And brands those brands that typically didn't run too many offers during the whole year. This kind of, you know when you know you do run that offer and you have like a decent sized email list, SMS list, just very simple tactics. Right. It worked. So that's kind of My observation from the weekend.

[B]

Yeah. I want to also offer like a. If you're, if you're that brand that's kind of like in that in between stage where you're like, let's say you're a low eight figure brand, you got there on Meta, really. And maybe some search, maybe some Amazon and you're trying to decide like, do we diversify, run a roll? Like talk to your meta rep about running a rolling reach report. If you're still, if 50 or 40% of your impressions in meta are still net new, I would say do not diversify. Like keep investing in the channel that got you there. If, if on the contrary, you're like, oh crap, only 10 of our impressions are net new, I think that's a great data point to go and diversify off of. Would you, would you agree with that, Connor?

[C]

Mostly.

[B]

Let's, let's hear the. Let's hear the. Let's hear the contrarian.

[C]

Yeah, I mean the thing is the rolling Reach report is naturally going to go down over time. So there's periods of time where we're nowhere near reaching. Like if we're doing a two year rolling reach report, we've spent so much money over the last two years, like we just can't possibly be reaching 10% new people every single month.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So you have to keep that in mind. It's just naturally like the way that it's calculated, it always naturally declines. Um, and then the other, the other point that I would make is, and I've made this one before, but there's an exercise to do around reaching the same people in a new way. I bring up like we, we were running this like Joe Rogan inspired ad and we saw a really high click through rate. We saw really high percent new business. And I thought, oh, this must be reaching new people. And you could also calculate the rolling Rich report to see like just that ad. How many new people is it reaching? And it was like none. Like, it was like, it was like 95% of people who'd seen, who'd seen that ad had seen our ads previously. It was just. Were reaching them in a new way. When we're earning a click from someone who is already familiar with us, theoretically. So you have to go through that exercise too and understand where you are as a brand. Is it literally you're doing everything you possibly can and it's just a matter of reaching new people or do you actually have to be more experimental in how you're speaking to the people who you've already Reached. So those would be my, my couple caveats.

[B]

Yeah, 100%. That makes sense.

[C]

I got, I got. I know we want to hit forecasting while Richie's here, but I've got a. Just a couple other points. I'd love to hit one for wins from Black Friday. I've never seen results like this. We saw incredibly good meta performance and I'd be curious on your take on this, Connor. We saw CPMs down 20% year over year, click through rates up. That means CPC was down 27% and conversion rate naov were basically the same. Why do you think Zuckerberg and the ad gods Blessed Ridge Black Friday?

[B]

We. I'm going to look up our. I'm going to look up our. Our our dates right now. We. We all like our our traffic was way cheaper. I know our, our know our engagement was up because our ads were just better. Let me look at our CPMs real quick.

[C]

So that's like so just to talk through it. You know people say, people always say if you have better content, if it gets better engagement, you're rewarded in the algorithm and you could reduce CPMs.

[B]

Like technically.

[C]

I've always been so skeptical of that. Feels like as soon as ads get really good engagement and good conversion rates, you actually just get charged a higher cpm because meta, like because you can bid more in the auction effectively and like you'll, you'll, you can scale more at a, at a higher rate. So I've never, we. I've never really seen results. What I will caveat is meta. And for those who've been listening to the podcast for a long time, meta was absolutely garbage for us last Black Friday. It was, it had basically never been a smaller percentage of our spend 20, 24 week of Black Friday. So we're comping like the worst performance we'd ever seen. But we just saw fantastic results.

[B]

Yeah. So our, our CPMs were up a little bit, not much A$50 which is 5.5%.

But our outbound click through rate was up 50%, 54% totally. So our cost per click was way down because of that, which I think is, I think is probably. It's hard to suss out like how much of each variable drove that increase in engagement. I think part of it is probably the diversification of media all year long. So the audience that we were serving meta ads to is just like a really juiced audience that like was warm already. Also our creative just like purely qualitatively speaking is like way better, way more engaging I think so I Think both those things are driving it. But our. We've. We were thrilled with. With meta performance. Our ROAS is up 27 in platform. That was about what we saw in North Beam as well. But we basically spent flat but saw 27 higher attributable revenue. So we thought that was a pretty big win.

[C]

Fantastic. Yeah. So, and, and so there's obviously some point around. Maybe it is the media mix and like, people are more aware, so they're clicking through at a higher rate. Maybe the content's better around the lower CPMs. There is a discussion to have around, like the industry at large. It's like, are people. Did people reduce budgets year over year? Were they taking profit at a higher rate? You know, tariffs are more of a factor. People are running higher cogs. Maybe they have inventory, maybe they have less inventory. So there's some sort of discussion to have there where maybe just the amount of people bidding in the auction and how aggressively they're doing it is just categorically different year over year. And that's like. Because even a 5% increase in CPMs year over year is like, let's. Let's basically flat. And. Yeah, I can't imagine that. I can't imagine you guys usually see that. I just feel like CPMs typically go up 10, 15, 20, or whatever. So flat or for us, down 20 is just like, makes our life so much easier, especially if people are converting at the same rate.

[B]

Dude. And also, like, not to mention, we also ran the View content stuff that. That had a much lower CPM, obviously. So, like, our purchase conversion CPMs were actually probably even. Even much higher than that, actually. Richie, were you gonna. Were you gonna say something?

[A]

You remember there was just a time on Twitter, and I don't know how long ago this was, where there was like a narrative like that CPMs didn't matter.

[B]

That's. Yeah, I do. I do remember that.

[C]

Yeah. People. Like, I do get the point of, like, CPMs don't matter in the sense that, like, there are times where you don't have other decisions to make. It's like you're going to. You, like, you just have to make matter work. And Meta is going to give you a certain cpm. Right. Like, I think that's where that school of thought comes from. But ultimately, like, I am so not a subscriber to that. That ideology. Like, even if I have another point here, Applovin actually performed really well for us. Year over year. Rose was about flat. CPMs were up 70%. We were reaching half as many people Almost half as many people for every dollar spent. We were really early to applovin last year. We had really low CPMs. It was a fantastic channel for us. Kind of saved our Black Friday. But if CPMs are up 70%, I told the team, I'm like, we saw this going into the period, it was higher earlier in October was up like 120%. We just can't spend there. We can't possibly expect to be able to spend the same year over year if we're getting half the impressions per dollar spend. So CPMs matter in that sense. It's like, yeah, other channels have better, could have better relative performance if their CPMs are only up 10%. Or in the case of meta, down 20%.

[B]

I, I Connor, I agree with you. CPMs in the context of the entire business, like macro absolutely matter. Like if your CPMs double year over year and you're reaching half the people, like that absolutely matters. Where I subscribe to the CPMs Don't Matter is like some people will hear the CPM from a channel and like it'll be a non starter for them. Like, oh, the CPM's $30 or $40. Like, oh no, I'm like that's, that's where I'm like, whoa, whoa, slow down. Because not all audience are created equal. I will pay a 40 cpm if I'm tapping into an insanely high intent audience that I'm not already getting. And like, like that's like the Amazon, like a lot of the Amazon ad units that we're starting to buy now. Like these are 30 CPMs, 40 CPMs. Sometimes I'm like, okay, that's a little high. But I also know that we've never served Amazon prime ads before. And I think we probably like inherently, I think prime prime members are like affluent people and like, I think our audience is there and we're probably not hitting them if we're not there. So I'm like, I'll pay a 40 cpm. Of course the like performance metrics have to back out, but I just, I don't believe in like letting CPMs be a non starter unless it's like you know, an organic influencer deal. And it's like 120 cpm. Like, all right, like I'm not, I'm not paying you $25,000 to get a hundred dollar CPM. Sorry, like I'll pay you 25 grand if, if you can get me a one dollar CPM or a five dollar CPM. So I think it's Kind of like a case, case by case thing there.

[A]

I have, I have another analogy for you real quick, Connor. It's not if the. Not all ads are. Are created equal. Right? Not audience are the same. It's like a cow. The, the filet and the ribeye are a little bit different than the, than the flakes, you know what I mean? Or the oxtails. You may pay a little bit of a different price for a different cut. You know what I mean?

[B]

Absolutely. That, that's, that's another. God, you always got the good analogies, Richie. Always got them. I love it.

[A]

It's been a thing.

[C]

All right, listeners, let's talk about the next couple months. Holiday spending is naturally going to slow down, but sales volume can still remain high. As you get through shipping cutoffs, as you get into the new year and as you crush your Q1 targets, one of our focuses at Ridge will be squeezing more revenue from every customer that we've been acquiring for so long. And that is where After Sell by Rocked comes in. It's the one click post purchase upsell platform trusted by over 40,000 D2C brands. And here's how it works. When someone just bought from you, they're already in buying mode. They trust you, their cards on file. All you do is show them the right offer at the right time with zero friction. No reentering payment info, no extra pages. Just yes. Add this and boom. Done. Brands are seeing up to 30% AOV lifts. And when you're running volume during the holidays or into 2026, that can compound fast. And look, Jones Road Ridge True classic Hexclad. We're not running after Shell because it's trendy. We're running it because the unit economics work and the data is undeniable. But here's the kicker. Beyond the AOV boost, After sell unlocks ROKT monetization suite. Pure profit with zero work ROKT Thanks. On your thank you page, 30 to 50 cents in pure profit per order rocked pay plus another 20 to 25 cents per order. No impact on conversion. It's found money. So here's what you do. Go to aftercell.com operators right now. Activate Rokt thanks or RoktPay plus and get the full after sales suite for free. Run it, check your numbers. Then you can come back and tell us if you want to turn it off. But I already know what you're going to say.

All right, I got, I got one other quick point and then one question for you, Connor. The quick point is we discussed this coming into Black Friday, it was called like under discussed Q4 strategies, something like that. And we mentioned how international, because international markets don't have Friday off because they don't have Thanksgiving on the same Thursday that we do. So. So Black Friday, quote unquote, Black Friday sales are more concentrated in the evening and the weekend. And what we saw in the US was international was only down 35% going into Saturday from Black Friday. So it is. And then for reference, the US at least for Ridge was down 60 from Friday to Saturday. That's like more or less what it is every single year. Just interesting calling out. We were right at least at Ridge. We adjusted budgets slightly differently. We were able to better capitalize on the intent that was still there on Saturday. It's a little. Little. I'm taking a victory lap for us.

[B]

Yeah, I'm looking at our curve right now. We. Our curve was pretty much the same like I'm looking at the UK curve. It was. It Friday was our peak then, then Saturday. Well the difference is. The difference between the US and the UK at least is that on Thursday, Thursday was our third best day out. Like so it was like so Black Friday was one, Cyber Monday was two. Thursday was the third best day. Saturday and Sunday were actually like slightly better in the uk so it was like Black Friday was the best. Then Saturday, Sunday were about even. And then Cyber Monday was the second best and then third. But it was like pretty close. So just like the, the, like the, the difference in the curve was like much lower for the UK compared to the US So just like a same curve but slightly different distribution of the curve.

[C]

Totally. Yeah. 100. So I just thought that was an interesting point. It's actually for next year I think we can get even better about more day to day pacing adjustments in international markets. The last one that I had. So the way I had this group better media mix which met as a portion of that TV podcast, YouTube like we mentioned going into the week of Black Friday I think is important. I had just conversion rate being a win for us. The idea that we're able to drive 40% higher traffic. Our conversion rate was about flat but we drove down our cost per visitor and we spent 40% more. So there's way more people. So I would think our ability to do that came from conversion rate wins. We had a good progress bar implementation to do our gift with purchase. The way we implemented the deal drop, we had like really nice badging and flaring and it was like kind of intuitive to navigate. So those were all things I Would list as wins. I know you guys have heavily tested your sales page. Anything stick out to you in terms of performance as to what worked and what didn't once people got to the site?

[B]

I wanna, I wanna, I wanna click on your conversion rate note because I fully agree. I sent a lot of time, like, I guess educating our like leadership on this. We, we saw sessions grow year over year. Conversion rate drop. AOV was flat, which I thought the AOV being flat was a big win because this year, yeah, more than ever we've had like lower. Like that was a big thing for me this year I'm like, we gotta give people like an easier entry point into the brand while still merchandising these higher value sets, like more prominently like, but with price, positioning and just where it lives. So I actually thought AOV being flat was a big win because of that. I thought conversion rate only being down 16 in spite of sessions being up for 54 was a big win. I'd say on the website.

This sale was really a culmination of everything we've been doing leading into the. Leading into this moment all year long. So like our big, like the last, I'd say in 2023 and 2024 and even this year a little bit, we spent a ton of time testing into the UX of our sale collection page. Like what is the best like experience that has the best rpu. We tested landing pages versus the collection page. So like we really feel confident in the ux. And then this year was all about like in like putting more branding and like having more like specific branding. I've talked a lot about this into these moments and like, it looked really good. Like, I don't know if you guys visited our website over the weekend and now we have our Cyber Monday branding and we're going to roll into our holiday branding. But just like there's this like subconscious feeling right when you get to our website now when there's a sale going on that something's happening. And I thought that like this was one of the best ones that our, our director has put together yet. Like the toolkit he put together for all three of these moments was amazing. And I just think it was like, you know, we just kind of put an exclamation point on all the UX and the branding work we've been putting into these experiences. I need to, we're gonna do our deck or like our recap deck and I'm gonna go into some of the softer metrics on website. Like basically the same metrics I was talking about earlier like product views, active cart user, stuff like that and see how that compared to last year. But yeah, I was, I was really happy with, with the web experience. It's been like, it's the classic example of. We've spent, we've iterated on the same experience 25 times. You know, instead of building like taking net new swings, it's like, no, this works, let's just make it 5% better, 3% better and just stack those wins. And I really liked how it turned out for, for Black Friday. Totally.

[C]

I also. Okay. And then we'll move on to forecasting from here. One next step we have, and I think this is important, we have some people in the organization who come from like more traditional retail backgrounds or buying backgrounds and they'll really worry about AUR average unit revenue. And we have examples of our wallet AUR going down. Like it was down like $5 year over year or something from 95 to 90, something like that. And that might be an indication. Obviously you're compressing your margins if you do that at the unit level.

[B]

Wait, can you, sorry, can you, can you explain what AUR is real quick?

[C]

AUR is just the, the, the average, average unit revenue. So like if we price our wallets at 95, that's not our AUR. People are using discount codes, we're running promos. So if our, if our MSRP is 95 or AUR might be like 85 or something because of the, the different discounts and bundles and things like that. So it's just how much revenue are you actually collecting per unit? And that's obviously like people, people really care about that, especially in more retail from my experience, more retail based brands and maybe apparel and things like that. So our AUR at the unit level was actually slightly down year over year, but AOV was flat. And what that means is we're actually doing a better job driving up the units per transaction. We're getting more things attached with our pdps, with our cart, with our post purchase upsell. So because I think you bring up a really good point, Connor. If you guys had a lower entry price point, you're obviously going to be, you're obviously dropping aur. You're allowing people to have a much smaller basket size. And the fact that you're able to maintain AOV means that at some other point you're getting more items attached. And I think that's a really big win. And I think that's. I talk about this all the time at Ridge because I think that's like, it's a massive value. You, you reduce the entry point, you can get that the most price conscious buyer that you're willing to acquire. And then a lot of the time, even the people that would have converted at, you know, 76 instead of 69 are then going and getting for us an airtag cash trap or a tracker card or something, they're spending that money, otherwise you're going to get it a slightly lower margin. But in the, in our case, we're acquiring so many more customers, that's actually extremely valuable. So we've got some work to do to like, like do a, a postmortem on exactly what happened at a basket level year over year. But all signs point to like, that being another big win for us.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, we actually. So Black Friday was flat, but on like leading into the year, our first order AOV has actually been down because of this, but our CAC's been down more than our AOV has been down. So our amer, like the AM is the metric we should be optimizing for, for like acquisition efficiency. It's. And it's the same way you look at rpu, not just conversion rate, not just AOV with CRO testing. So I'm like, all right, I don't, I don't care that our first order AOV is down 10, 15 bucks because our CAC is down proportionately more than that and our AMER is up. So kind of the, kind of the same thing that you're talking about, right, Connor? Totally.

[A]

Can I make a quick point? I think that's something I'm learning right now just listening to you guys talk. And I'm going to take this away for a lot of like the smaller brands that I work with is like, when are you guys talking like these in terms of, in some of these metrics, right? I really like, hey, like, even if conversion rate didn't go up, if it stayed flat, but we increased traffic by 40%, that's a win. Because I think a lot of times, like, a lot of these smaller brands are like, maybe marketers that are like less sophisticated or less expensive. I don't know what the right, the right word is.

Would say, hey, well, like the conversion rate didn't go up, so did we really have CRO wins? But if you look at, in the context of like the whole, if the AOV went up and the conversion rate, the traffic went up in the conversion rate, that's a win. So I think that that's, that's like a really Interesting.

Note that I'm going to take away from this just talking to you guys live.

[C]

Yeah, awesome. I love that I, I had this conversation recently with someone because you can think about it as like being everything's like on a diminishing returns curve and like the, the entire brand is like, okay, yeah, you are spending X amount of dollars at X amount scale and if you are able to find, let's say like a huge conversion rate when you, you, you improve conversion rate by 50 or something, what you're effectively doing is putting yourself way further down on that diminishing returns curve and you can then spend more back up to the point you were at previously and, and, and, but in getting conversion rate back to where it was originally, like, the goal is not necessarily to maintain this higher conversion rate, it's to maximize contribution dollars. And that could very well come with driving conversion rate back down at a higher scale.

[A]

Right, right. You guys are smart.

[C]

Okay, so I can say that, dude, we should 90. 90 episodes in. I hope we've, we've figured out some, some parts of marketing.

[B]

Ninety episodes in a million hours. Working on ecom brands.

Lately every marketer I talk to says the same thing. The pressure's on, budgets are tight, goals are higher than ever, and I have to prove what's working, not just report it. That's the new reality of marketing. You can't afford to rely on guesses or platform reported results. You need clear, unbiased, causal proof of what's actually driving growth. And that's exactly where House comes in. Incrementality testing is the scientific way to measure true impact. It is the most unbiased way to understand true impact, to see what's moving the needle and what's just noise so you can reallocate spend based on fact, not faith. All of the marketing operators use House for their incrementality testing at Hexclad, Jones Road, Beauty and Ridge. And it's becoming a core part of the modern measurement stack. House helps you run real experiments across your channel so you can answer questions that actually matter, like which channels are truly driving incremental revenue and which are just taking credit. How much should I really be spending on Meta, Google and YouTube? What's the Halo effect of ads on Amazon or retail sales? And how should I structure my campaign so every dollar goes towards real measurable impact? What sets House apart is the combination of unbiased, rigorous science and marketer friendly design. The math under the hood is very complex, but the platform itself is very, very simple. You choose your question you launch your test in minutes and you get clear, actionable results you can actually use. Plus, every customer, every brand gets a dedicated measurement strategist. And I will tell you what, the House measurement strategist team is very dialed in. They are very strategic, helping you set these tests up in a way where you're going to get statistically significant results that are actionable. And ultimately there's someone who has lived in the world of growth and they know how to translate data into strategy, interpret the results, and build a repeatable culture of experimentation across your team. In a world where every marketing dollar is under a microscope, you need to know what's real, measure what matters. With House by going to House IO operators, that's H A U S IO slash operators. And start allocating your budget with confidence.

All right, Richie, I wanna, I wanna dig more into kind of like your zone of genius here, because I think I tell this to people all the time. Like, you have a very unique hybrid like finance, FP and a growth marketing skill set. And I, I love how you're like, like very much a growth marketer that leads with forecasting and numbers and then thinking about, like, what are the levers that we can pull to manipulate these. So I guess just to, just to kick things off, like, can you just give us your background and like, explain how you kind of got into this like, FPA for E commerce role?

[A]

Yeah, 100%. So obviously it started.

Got started in Ecom with, with Birdie Connor. You play like a huge role in that. Obviously. Literally started buying, built the first version of the Birdie website, bought the ads. This is at a time where ad buying was probably like the easiest time in the world.

Right in the middle of COVID CPMs were like super low thought. Like we were like geniuses getting like 4 to 5x return in platform, like good old days, and then quickly realized, hey, like, I'm not, not, not necessarily qualified to take this to the next level.

And that's where we brought you guys in. And, and I've always, we all at Birdie always had like a pulse and kind of oversight of like the marketing function. But then it kind of my role there, you know, kind of turned into more like finance and ops. There's only three of us, the two founders and myself from like an internal perspective. And the joke that I like to make is as an Asian, you know, like the spreadsheets make a little bit more sense to me than reviewing ad creatives and, and knowing hooks and all that kind of stuff.

So literally started literally Started, you know, built the, the annual forecast at Birdie, figured out what a weekly cash flow forecast was, did all the demand planning etc, so really like that centered center on that part of like the FPA function at Birdie. And then about, yeah, like over two years ago I started working with brands as like quote unquote like fractional CFO or fractional FP and a resource. And at the beginning of the year we joined Iris Finance to kind of to, to function as like you know, managed service, FPNA managed service.

Piece of piece of their software business. So you have worked with probably over 20 brands at this point in the past couple years in that role. It's been really interesting. Anything as small as like a million dollars, anything as big as, you know, nine figures. I know Connor, we did a really fun project together last year. But yeah, it's been, it's been really interesting and I think, I think there is some value in being able to understand how ads work and, and, and all that and how that ties to, you know, contribution dollars and, and ebitda.

[B]

And I can say the, the forecasting work we, we did last year together was really helpful. We came in pretty, pretty close to what we forecasted, which was, you know, tough. Hexcloud's a tough one because it's just been so much difference year over year for the last like three or four years that it's kind of, there's not a ton of consistency and like, like reliable historical data to model off of. So I was, I was pretty impressed with that. But I want to, I want to dig into your process. So Richie, the way that, that you had like outlined the notes that you sent over was forecasting and making money in an E Comm business, which I love very on the nose and like that's ultimately what everyone's trying to do is like run a profitable business that, that makes money and, and create an asset that has a ton of value that maybe they can sell one day. And you, you broke it down like very simply. And I wanted to like, I'm going to read through the three steps you, you wrote and then I want to kick it over to you because like yes, it's like the process is simple, but there's obviously a lot of complexity and a lot of technical skill that goes into each to be able to do it well. So number one is just start with clear goals. Number two is build a responsible financial forecast. Number three is how do you affect the financial performance as a marketer that's not just better revenue and or better efficiency. So could you just like walk us through each step here and like how you go about it, what goes into it? Like just starting with like the clear goals piece.

[A]

Yeah. 100. So I think.

Where, where this comes from. I think we got maybe Connor, you and I got entered into a market in D2C, E commerce, whatever you want to call our industry, when it was still really sexy to grow top line. There's a lot, I mean this is like a story that's, that's, that's been told many times, right? A lot of venture dollars that you know, we think these businesses could behave, you know, in a certain way similar to like maybe technology, software businesses and, and get high multiples and, and, and figure out how to sell for, you know, hundreds of millions of billions of dollars. I think what I've come to appreciate or come to realize that that is a path and I would say like you know, you two sitting here and Cody and you know, all your, you know, all the, all the operators, right, sit in that, in that cohort of brands, right? But that is a very, very, very, very select small.

Cohort, right? Not all brands could to get good, to get to rich scale, could get to hex clad scale, et cetera.

But I do think, I do think a lot of these businesses can make money from like a cash flow distribution dividend, however whatever you want to call it, perspective. And I think that's really kind of the two fundamental ways that I, I think of, of how do you make money in E commerce business? Are you going to sell your thing at the end, you know, and call it, you know, three, five, 10 years? Or are you gonna, are you gonna harvest and, and take out cash along the way? And I think probably 90 to 95% of brands are, are, are more, more function to take cash out along the way. And that's kind of our, the, our thesis at Birdie, I think we kind of shifted from you know, wanting to sell for a lot of money. You know, we, we experienced growth at a very interesting time in the market.

And obviously that grow taper. But now like kind of the, the idea is how do we, how do we harvest as much cash out along the way? So I think just having that.

Understanding, right, as like the shareholders of the, of the business most of the times, which is the founder.

Makes forecasting the direction of forecasting easier, right? Because forecasting, like if you're like, hey, I want to grow like 300 year on year, I could make you a spreadsheet. I could just click the buttons that, that, you know, make it look like, make it look like you're gonna, you're gonna do that, but like, is that gonna happen? Like, what's like the likelihood of that, that happening, right? So I think the more realistic and concrete you are in terms of like your goals, I'm not saying not to be ambitious, right? But just kind of understanding like what the DNA of the business is. You know, not out, not all people, not all people will play basketball are cut out to be LeBron James and making an NBA, right? Like, maybe having a really good high school varsity career is like where you're capped out, right? But there's no shame in that, right? You could have some, some nice moments. So that's what I, that's what I think. Like part one.

[B]

Give any examples, Richie? Like a business that you're like, this is a business that needs to cash flow and be profitable every year versus this is a business that is gonna break even or maybe even lose money, but they're gonna grow top line aggressively. And like, because of the growth they're they're seeing year over year for like five years, plus the top line, they hit like they could sell this thing for a big chunk of money. Like, do you have any, any examples top of mind where like this is, this is business example A, this is business example B. Yeah.

[A]

So like a lot of the, A lot of is also defined by tam, right? So like right now, like the hot, the hot thing is a lot of the supplement brands, right? Supplement hydration brands. You know, those are businesses where if you get the economics right and you get the ltv, right. Returning customer revenue, right? It may, it might make sense to, you know, acquire customers at a loss, maybe even, even even operate at a loss. Like from a net profit, net income, EBITDA perspective, if you could raise some money and try to, try to blitz scale, right? That, that is a category of business that, that may be able to do that now. Like Birdie, for example.

One of the, I think kind of the, the. There's a lot of good DNA that makes that, that business work, right? Gross. Really good gross margin.

You know, it's. It's a problem that it's a, it's a, it's a product that you could kind of like really demonstrate visually, like pretty easily. So those are some like the good attributes obviously solves a problem.

Challenges like returning customer revenue, right? So we are capped at. There, There is an asymptote at which we could acquire customers profitably, right? And we just can't spend past that, that asymptote. Right. So for us it's about what are the channels that, what are the other channels that we could find that are more high margin? Is it Amazon? Is it, you know, small brick and mortar? One thing that we've been doing is going on GMA for some of the smaller brands. I think it'd be an interesting lift. But yeah, like that's like a business that I think is more suited for cash flow than to get to like a hundred million dollars in two years. So that's, those are a couple examples.

[B]

And for, for the businesses that you're recommending like don't blitz scale and they have cash flow every year and they're profitable every year. Are you saying like, you're not necessarily saying these businesses don't also have the potential to sell. You're just saying like their, their path to selling is different and like they need to lean into their like EBITDA bottom line to drive that, that sale price and that multiplier versus like a blitz scale brand with a massive TAM that could reach a billion in revenue. Like they're going to be more of like a top line base multiplier versus like a bottom line. Is that what you're saying?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And exactly. And it's like being okay with the outcome. Right. Like hexclad. And you guys, you know, if you guys like a good outcome would probably be like multi Bs. Right.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

If, if you know, if there's a brand that could sell for $20 million. Right. Even 10, 15, $20 million. If you're the founder. Right. And you own a majority of that business, that's still life changing money.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And maybe that's like the, what your business could accomplish, you know. So that's, that's, that's kind of the dichotomy. Yeah, you could, you could definitely. There's not saying there's no way to sell a business that, that is cash flowing, but if you cash on then you could sell at the end. That's not, that's not necessarily like a terrible outcome. And I think where a lot of business die is, is kind of going along those trying to ch. Trying to chase the scale and then just like the unit economics break and like the profitability breaks and you can't raise more money and no one wants to debt finance you anymore. So yeah, that's kind of the dichotomy.

[B]

Hey, I'd love to be a, I'd love to own 80 of a company that sells for 20 million. I'd be pumped on that.

Black Friday, you're about to crush it. The real job is keeping that momentum going past Black Friday, past Holiday and all the way into next year. Prescient helps brands turn peak season wins into predictable, profitable velocity. Powered by a suite of proprietary machine learning models and a causality first validation layer, Prescient reveals what actually drove Lyft. It combines surveys, it combines multi touch attribution and incrementality. And then it forecasts where next dollar media will drive real incremental profit. Top brands like Coterie, Guests, Hexclad, Jones Road Beauty, Mary Roos and many more are using Prescient to quantify halo effects across Shopify, Amazon Retail so their teams know exactly where to reinvest. So what actual questions can Prescient help you answer? Let's dig into it a little bit. Question number one, do I need to increase, decrease or reallocate spend for the shopping season? Prescience shows the optimal media mix to drive the strongest Q4 performance whether your budget grows or shrinks. Question number two, where should I put additional Q4 budget? Prescient delivers recommendations based on current BSCM dynamics, your vertical and your optimal admin allocation. Question number three, compression measure cross channel effects, especially between Shopify and Amazon. Yes, Prescient uniquely tracks halo effects and ad impact across both platforms, revealing where to dial back and where to double down. This is actually one of the very first problems that Hexclad Onboarded with pressure to solve is understanding the total impact across both.com and Amazon over ad spend. Prussian's models are benchmarked against $6 billion in ad spend. So the recommendations you are getting aren't just theory, they've actually been tested against billions of real media dollars. And if you are ready to see where your next dollar media will drive the most profit, visit prussianai.com operators to forecast your growth with Prescient.

All right, let's go, let's go into number two. I think this will be really fun for our audience which is like fairly tactical and technical growth marketers. Can you talk about like building a responsible financial forecast? I know you're a big believer in doing bottoms up like cohort based forecasting where you're basically predicting repeat revenue and then you're predicting first order revenue. And I think that's like one way to do bottoms up forecasting. You could also do it bottoms up from like a SKU level. I think the orgs that are doing it the best run multiple models, right? They have like the bottoms up cohort, the bottoms up SKU based. And they have a lot of different ways to model revenue. And then they're kind of comparing and contrasting and deciding on the most reasonable, like stretch reasonable. Maybe a conservative. Can you talk about your process for how you build a responsible financial forecast?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. 100. So I think there, there's two ways to approach it, right? One is like, what do we think we could have. What do we think could happen as like a marketer, really? Right. And then two, what are like the business goals, right? So say like my CEO or a founder came to me and said, hey, I want to generate like $5 million in EBITDA next year, right? Then how I started thinking about that is like, okay, like, what channels are we selling on? What products are we selling on? And essentially what you got to get to is like, what is the contribution, the absolute amount of contribution dollars necessary to be generated on each channel, right? Whether that is like Amazon and your.com business or your wholesale business. You could even get as granular as like particular.

Individual, like retail accounts, right? So that's, that, that, that's one way to kind of, to, to think about it. But I, I think the more traditional way from like an E. Comm perspective is just like this idea of like a cohort forecast. And why I like the cohort forecast is as. And using that as kind of a baseline is it's not just like saying, hey, we want to grow 50% year over year. You know, kind of the. What, what, what this forecast has is like kind of two pieces. New customer revenue and returning customer revenue, right? Kind of the inputs of the returning customer revenue piece are like the key ones are the retention rate, right? The monthly retention rate, you know, how many new customers you acquire on a monthly basis, and the returning customer. Aov, right? So like, if you want to affect those things, like how do you affect the retention rate? That's probably like the biggest lever, right? In, in. In returning. In returning customers, right? Is that new product. Is that. Are we going to do like a subs? Like a sub. Are we going to push like subscription, et cetera, and then from like the new customer per. The new customer revenue forecast. This is where I think people kind of become overly ambitious, right? So how we like to do new customer forecasts. Oh, and then we. The other thing is we. I have templates and we could put this in the notes if you guys want, so people could use them.

So like a payback model and like kind of this revenue forecasting template.

[C]

But.

[A]

It'S really comprised of, you know, what's the AD spend, CAC and new customer aov. Those are kind of the main drivers of how I kind of think about it at a baseline, right? And really like the hard, the hardest thing to measure or to forecast out is what is the relationship of increased AD spend and cac, right? That is kind of like the fundamental, the fundamental struggle. And I feel like a lot of times where people get in trouble from a forecasting perspective is not necessarily being tied into reality in terms of saying, hey, I think I could double my spend. Like, this is something we just talked about, right? Looking at how different metrics work together, if I'm going to double my spend, my CAC probably isn't going to stay the same. If you could do that, then then you should be tripling spend or quadrupling spend, right? So those are, those are kind of the, the, the like the high level way to kind of think about that.

And then, you know, you could kind of say like, hey, like what, what I like about that is like different functions of the organization, right, Are responsible for different KPIs, right? And even like different functions in like growth marketing team are responsible for, for those KPIs, whether it's like increasing the spend or reducing CAC, keeping CAC the same, etc. So it's kind of like a high level of, of, you know, how I think about forecasting revenue.

[C]

I have a, I have a question on returning customer forecasting and if you have a perspective on this, because what makes total sense is there's going to be some sort of natural repurchasing curve, right? Like we talk about this quite a bit. I think for almost every brand, the period of time where someone's most likely to repurchase is within the first 30 days at least. Like that's from. I've discussed with many people. So for Ridge, it's not much. It's like 4% and then it degrades from there over time. So you could forecast returning customer revenue with that like cohort curve, whatever you want to call it. But then the biggest thing for Ridge in terms of driving returning customer revenue is with new product launches. So it almost feels like we should have some sort of hybrid model that says, hey, we're going to predict a certain amount of return in customer revenue based on this cohort model. And then, and this is where I'm curious on your perspective, what do we do from there? Are we saying, hey, we have these launches and we're going to like manually input what we think we'll do, what they Think what we think the launches will do with the returning customers and then add those together or what would you suggest?

[A]

Yeah, 100%. That's exactly like the cohort is the cohort and like the, the new customer revenue are kind of like the foundation, right? Of like what has, has happened and what we think is going to happen as business as usual. Now I do think people kind of get overzealous when they just say hey, like I'm going to launch a new product. Like if you're gonna launch a new SKU at Ridge, right? And say like hey, like I think this is gonna add $10 million to the business next year, right. I still think it's, it's a good exercise to go through. How I would think about that is like, oh, we are going to launch, we are going to our go to market strategy for this. This product is we're going to release it on our.com business in January, we are going to release it on Amazon in March or whatever that time, time frame is and it's eventually rolled to retail. So you still want to like and, and, and within that you still kind of want to. Because I'm going through this with like a brand right now is let's forecast for like the returning customer piece. We think we're going to send this to X number of email subscribers, Y amount of times and on average we think each of those emails is going to generate Z amount of revenue for that product. Right. And then it's just kind of forecasting, forecasting the individual skus out like on, on from a returning customer perspective. And then like how do we think this is going to behave in like an ad account or an acquisition? And then they kind of like stack those, stack those things on top of the like the base forecast.

[C]

Yeah, that makes total sense.

[B]

Richie, how do you, I think this, this is a good, a good piece to end on because you're the hardest part right Is like yeah, creating a relationship between ad spend and CAC is like, all right, we're going to scale ad spend. Like we're starting to do this right now, right? Like we're looking at different top line revenue growth, you know, for our US business and looking in like how much do we need to spend? How much? Like if we hypothetically this is not our target, but hypothetically if we wanted to grow 50% next year, like how much, how much would we need to spend and how much would cat go up? Do you have any like helpful models or ways to.

Guess what CAC's going to do, which is ultimately what we're doing. Like what you have to do, right, is like you're trying to create a model to guess what CAC is going to do. If you spend X, CAC's going to be Y and you have like a aggressive growth in cac, a more conservative, like how do you think about that? How do you, how do you do that?

[A]

I think that's like, honestly that's the hardest question to answer in forecasting, right? Yeah, I think, I think and I think it's different for like, I kind of think of it from like those two cohorts of brands that we kind of talked about earlier, right? The larger brands like yourself and then like on the, on the other end of the spectrum, like call like the sub 20, 30 million dollar brands, right? I think for those, for those smaller brands it's a little bit easier, right? Because kind of the heuristic that I've, that I've been using that's been pretty decent and is like, for every, like call it like 25 to 30% increase in spend just from like a meta perspective, like your cat's gonna probably go up 10 to 15%, right? And that proud that framework probably works until you get to like, you know, maybe low 8 figures in spend or high 7 figures in spend, you're gonna, you might reach an asymptote, right? But, but, but really we're, we're forecasting is also just not like a financial exercise. And I think why marketers like yourself need to be in kind of need to be involved in that, right? Say like, hey, if, if the business goal is to say like we want to double or we want to increase our revenue by 25% or, or whatever the scenario you, you threw out Connor, right? You as a marketer would say, hey, this is what needs to be true, right? In order for us to, to achieve this. This is what our spend and like essentially our customer acquisition would need to be. And then from, from, from your end you're gonna have to go in and say like hey, like well what's my media mix going to be to get there, right? You kind of have to figure out how like your, your like the, that full funnel works within that like that media spend plan, right? And I think that's where marketers definitely and I think that was hopefully like a helpful exercise that we did. Connor was like helping give you guys like marketer giving like the marketing team a seat at the table when it comes to this idea of forecasting, right? Because a lot of like the Finance people and like the ops people could, you know, it's easy to throw numbers around, but just kind of having that growth background, like, you know, you just know some things are, are, are reasonable and, and not reasonable. So I would say, like having, you know, a lot of your audience, I imagine our marketing people.

Empowering them to have kind of like a seat at the forecasting table. Especially like a larger org like yours with a really complex, like media mix is super, super important.

[C]

Because the classic, the classic like, trope of marketing dealing with finance is finance is like, hey, we want to grow 25% next year and we don't want to spend any more money. Or even, even the scenario of like, we want to grow 25% and we only want to spend 25% more. And now let's just like assume we're talking about new customer revenue. So what you're saying is you want to, you want to acquire 25 more customers at the exact same CAC, you're not, you're not accounting for any sort of diminishing return. It's just like extremely hard, like from a marketing perspective. And just like functionally the way ad platforms work and the way scaling businesses work is. That is extremely difficult to do. So what you're advocating for is just marketers playing a larger role there in, in helping inform what's reasonable to expect from a CAC perspective.

[A]

Yeah, a hundred percent. It's like, it's like, and like before digital marketing was a thing, you know, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't just say like, hey, I'm gonna sell X many units in Target this year. Like, you would have a broker and a salesperson and talk to the buyer at Target to kind of understand like, hey, like, what is, what is what is reasonable, right? So I don't know why you wouldn't involve like your CMO or your head of growth, etc in that conversation. And then it just, and I, I think, and I think, and I think where people get in trouble too is like, if you're not in that conversation and you're held to like these like ridiculously like high standard outcomes, like, it's just not, it's just not great. It could cause like a lot of distress in the, in the organization.

[B]

And if you, if you are tasked with the, the tall task of hey, spend the Same but drive 25 more revenue, which again, I don't ever think is like, what the case should be, but you have no other, like the option of just, oh, spend, like, make it, make it work in the Existing channel. Like that's probably not an option. Like you're gonna see your cat go up. Like your only option if that's the case is to switch up your media mix in some way, shape or form and like tap into a new channel that has a marginally lower CAC than what your core channels the year before getting you. Like there's really no. Of course you can like, like try to improve your core channels and you should do that. But like I think that's the reason hexclad has been able to minimize efficiency losses this year and grow. Top line is like we took big media mix swings and it's paid off for us in the long run. But like unless you're, you're willing to do that, you're gonna have a really hard time scaling or like trying to scale revenue on the same amount of spend.

[C]

Totally. I mean but this, it's also why I brought up the new customer point earlier where like there are certain types of businesses that growing 25 year over year and spending the same amount is maybe reasonable. If I have a, a quickly compounding high LTV business.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

Then I can acquire the exact same amount of customers every single day forever and it will just compound over time. So like one thought would be like, just to exemplify if it's not. If the financial forecast is not built thoughtfully like the, the adverse effects it could have is if I was forced to drive 25 increase in revenue without spending anymore. One, I don't think it could actually be done within the ridge business, but I would just try to milk the email and SMS list for like everything there were.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Run bigger promos, you know, just try to like extract as much value as possible like squeeze the sponge, empty the tank and then your business is just going to slowly kind of die from there. Yeah.

[A]

It's not conducive for the long term health of the business. Right.

[C]

Right.

[B]

This is where the most, this is where the most butting of heads happens at an E Comm. Org in my experience is like a revenue number and a spend number just, just gets thrown on a, in a spreadsheet with like no real rationale behind it. It's like this is the, this is the numbers that we want because it, it, it backs into the P and L and the bottom line we want. In my experience, this is where most of the, of the friction between the growth team, the marketing team and like the people who ultimately own the P and L at the end of the year come from. So if you can, if you can create a sense of understanding between the relationship in media spend and revenue growth and efficiency trends. Like you're gonna have a much harder time. I think, like invest in the time it takes to kind of educate the finance department on like the relationship between revenue and media and acquisition costs. Like it is so well worth it to save you hours and hours of like just talking in circles down the line.

[C]

I think at Ridge, it's one of like the main reasons for our success is just like complete alignment. Around the last six years we've been like, look, results are only going to get worse. We have a highly customer acquisition oriented business. It's only going to get more expensive. We're going to forecast that literally every single year MER has gone down, but the business has gotten bigger. And because of that we built the entire organization to. To support a technically less efficient business at the top line level. So just like that sort of singular focus has been extremely valuable.

[A]

Connor, we probably have a really similar business structure to you guys in terms of like that acquisition and designing the P L. We're just like at like 10% of the scale. You know what I mean?

[C]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

So very interesting.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Cause you guys both run your businesses at a very. Just because you have great landed margins. Like you guys both run your businesses at a very low blended mer. Right?

[C]

Yeah. And then I mean, I mean as like, as it relates to Cheeseburdy, one of the other reasons is like frankly, the wallet business has hit in many ways a saturation point in D2C. Like I mentioned earlier in the pod, like we've seen growth, we continue to see growth, but it's a lot smaller than we've seen in the past because we are not at the point where we can spend another 40% and actually be generating more profit. So the way Ridge has grown is actually just launching new businesses and then running those in the same way. Rings looks very similar for the last three years. Same with travel. Same with like all the other things that we've launched. So.

Maybe she's. Birdie has something in the cards there. Just more product launches, more category launches.

[A]

100%.

[B]

All right, that's about. That's about an hour 20. That was. That was one of the longer ones we've done in a while.

[C]

That was super fun. And Richie, thanks for joining and jamming on BFCM too.

[B]

It'd be, it'd be fun even Richie, to like anonymize some numbers at some point and almost have you come on and like screen share and be like, this is how a bottoms up forecast looks and works like and actually talk through it with real numbers. That'd be pretty cool.

[A]

I mean, we could do a birdie forecast unanimized.

[B]

Let's do it, man. I'm down. That'd be fun. I think our audience would love that.

[A]

Yeah, dude. You guys are. You guys are the best. You guys are so smart.

I listen to yours all the time, so it's fun to be on, dude.

[B]

Appreciate it.

[C]

Thanks for coming.

[A]

Awesome.

[B]

All right, that's a wrap on episode with Richie Machiko. Had some really good recap on Black Friday Cyber Monday and had some really thoughtful and helpful advice on how to go about forecasting for an e Commerce brand. Thank you to the sponsors, Motion after sell, prescient rich panel and house. And if you're liking the show, make sure to comment, like subscribe and share with all your marketing friends.