Category Expansion: When to Launch, What to Test & How to Scale

Summary

Podcast Summary: Marketing Operators

Episode: Category Expansion: When to Launch, What to Test & How to Scale
Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Date: March 3, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the strategic and tactical considerations of expanding product categories within DTC brands. The hosts break down when and how to launch new products, what data and tests to use, and how to scale new category launches—supported with real-life examples from Ridge and Hexcloud’s own experiences. The discussion is granular, data-driven, and highly actionable for marketing operators at scaling brands.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Impact of Product Expansion on Growth

• Product expansion is repeatedly called the biggest growth lever for established DTC brands.
• Incremental growth comes not just from new customers, but by adding new, adjacent product categories or designs that appeal to different audience segments.
• Quote: “More often than not, your biggest growth lever is product expansion.”
  — Connor (00:00)

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2. Organic Marketing Lessons from Influencer Culture

• The team riffs on the rise of influencer “universes” and how content is clipped, shared, and seeded for rapid organic reach (e.g., streamers like Clavicular and the “frame mogging” meme).
• Lessons for brands: building “clippable” moments can drive new audiences and create entire narrative “universes.”
• Quote: “There is a very tried and true process... they have an army of clippers, an army of channels where they’re redistributing all that content over and over and over.”
  — Cody (06:29)

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3. Coaching Services as Scalable Digital Products

• Quick tangent on influencer coaching revenue models, weighing the bottlenecks vs. scalable, productized service offerings driven by back-end agencies and VAs.
• Example of influencer funnels using Typeform and minimal personal labor.

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4. How to Effectively Introduce New Products in Core Channels

• Launching new products isn’t just about better ads, but about reaching genuinely new audiences.
• Holdout testing is critical to determine incrementality (i.e., is new product attracting net new customers or cannibalizing existing demand?).
• Real Ridge example: Launched a niche “tattoo-inspired” wallet, discovered only 40% of attributed revenue came from the promoted product—the rest came from core bestsellers, indicating the ad brought in new-to-brand customers.
• Quote: “The incremental lift was more than the entire revenue of the product… people were clicking these ads, coming through, purchasing a gunmetal, a black, a carbon fiber wallet. That was a really big unlock for us.”
  — Cody (13:53)

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5. Building Funnels for New vs. Existing Categories

• For new categories, comprehensive landing experiences and more education are needed (e.g., cocktail shaker launch with a special brand partnership and custom landing page).
• For extensions (e.g., new colors in existing categories), less educational lift is needed; proven templates and ad strategies can often be repurposed.
• Creators or personas should sometimes be tailored to a new SKU’s DNA, but seasoned creators are usually most effective at driving results.

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6. Testing Structure: Analytics and Measurement

• Robust experimentation is essential. The team discusses using North Beam and geo lift tests, plus breaking down data by ad, product, and demo to ensure real incrementality.
• Caution: “Ad performance” alone can be misleading—it may simply cannibalize existing demand instead of growing the pie.

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7. Cross-Category Buying and MER Analysis

• Ridge created distinct revenue attribution models (line item vs. order-level categorization) to understand cross-category buying.
• Result: Over 97% of orders are single-category dominant, showing very little cross-category purchase behavior at time of purchase. Opportunity exists to intentionally cross-sell post-purchase, not during first-purchase.
• Quote: “There’s extremely little cross-category buying… [this] gives us more conviction... these are extremely different orders and extremely different people...”
  — Cody (31:51)
• Operational implication: Product-category level P&L and paid media optimization can be managed discretely.

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8. Seasonality and Allocation of Ad Spend

• Different categories exhibit clear seasonality (e.g., rings for Valentine’s or weddings, wallets for Father’s Day, travel for summer).
• Teams should plan major pushes for certain categories only during high-conversion windows—not all products require year-round spend.
• Example: Outdoor cooking products have their moment in spring/summer.
• Quote: “I’m not opposed to the idea of like, hey, this is really valuable twice a year... build systems around [that] and scale the hell out of it for six weeks twice a year and that could potentially work.”
  — Cody (50:57)

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9. Decision-Making Framework for Category Expansion

• Teams should regularly evaluate both ad level performance and blended business unit performance to decide whether to add, maintain, or pull back on new product pushes.
• They advocate a matrixed decision process (strong/weak ad performance, strong/weak business metrics) and biweekly data-driven team reviews.
• Quote: “There's nuance to all this... you can almost map out the decision-making matrix on all these non-hero products.”
  — Connor (51:22)

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10. Building for Incrementality and Real Growth

• Beware of launching "newness" that only cannibalizes existing demand. True incremental growth comes from expansions that appeal to genuinely new customer segments.
• Use ad performance for early signals, but blend with deeper metrics and incrementality tests for robust decisions.
• Quote: “If you’re letting the ad performance guide you, then you’re probably making good allocation decisions... but it doesn’t necessarily… a lot of that can just be cannibalizing other revenue.”
  — Cody (57:52)

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11. Practical Advice for Teams of All Sizes

• Don’t overcomplicate: Start with ad performance, then layer in blended and layered analysis as you grow.
• Even for small brands without expensive tools, segmenting audiences and reviewing platform-reported demographics can provide directional insights.
• Quote: “Don’t not do good marketing just because you don’t have the four layers defined. Just start with the first layer and then you’ll get smarter and smarter and stack them on top of each other.”
  — Connor (56:57)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• “More often than not, your biggest growth lever is product expansion.” — Connor (00:00)
• “The incremental lift was more than the entire revenue of the product… That was a really big unlock for us.” — Cody (13:53)
• “There is a very tried and true process...they have an army of clippers...redistributing all that content over and over…” — Cody (06:29)
• “If you’re letting the ad performance guide you, then you’re probably making good allocation decisions…but...that can just be cannibalizing other revenue.” — Cody (57:52)
• “Don’t not do good marketing just because you don’t have the four layers defined. Just start with the first layer…” — Connor (56:57)
• “There's extremely little cross-category buying…these are extremely different orders and extremely different people...” — Cody (31:51)
• “You can almost map out the decision-making matrix on all these non-hero products...” — Connor (51:22)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:00 – Opening on Product Expansion as a Lever
• 04:22 – Influencer Trend Discussion & Marketing Parallels
• 10:59 – On the Evolving Creative Strategy and AI’s Role
• 12:52 – Introducing Products to Core Paid Channels
• 13:53 – Case Study: Ridge Wallet “Tattoo” Launch & Incremental Orders
• 21:23 – Building Funnels/Landing for New Categories vs. Extensions
• 23:31 – Deep Dive: Holdout Testing and Reading North Beam Data
• 31:51 – Analysis: Cross-Category Buying and Attribution Insights
• 41:55 – Roadmap & Mindset on Future Product Expansion and Upsell Tactics
• 49:12 – Seasonality and Timing Category Pushes
• 51:22 – Framing Category Expansion Decisions with a Matrix Approach
• 56:57 – Final Advice for Layered Measurement and Not Overcomplicating
• 60:04 – Wrap-up

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Episode Tone & Style

• Conversational, candid, and insight-dense.
• Data-driven, with frequent reference to live business metrics and testing frameworks.
• Action-oriented, often pausing to offer practical advice suitable for both large and scaling brands.
• Friendly, with on-topic tangents that reinforce big-picture marketing lessons.

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Summary Takeaways

• Structured, data-driven product expansion is essential for DTC growth.
• Start simple (focus on ad performance) and increase sophistication as the organization matures.
• Test for incrementality—aim to grow the pie, not just carve new slices from the same audience.
• Use category and cross-buy analysis to drive smarter merchandising, funnel design, and post-purchase remarketing.
• Embrace seasonality, allocate resources intentionally, and build decision-making rhythms into team processes.

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Ideal For:
Growth leaders, marketing operators, and founders at mid-size and scaling DTC brands looking to responsibly expand product lines and maximize their paid media ROI.

Transcript

[Connor]

More often than not, your biggest growth lever is product expansion.

[Cody]

If you're letting the ad performance guide you, then, like, you're probably making good allocation decisions. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. But a lot of that can just be cannibalizing other revenue. So you get higher click through rates, lower CPCs. I mean, frankly, it almost looked a little bit too good, to the point that I was suspicious about it.

[Connor]

Like, don't not do good marketing just because you don't have the four layers defined. Like, just start with the first layer and then you'll get smarter and smarter and like, stack them on top of each other.

[Cody]

That's why it's important to understand, like, what dimensions of the business do you even want to be measuring? Like, do I want them looking at traditional flash revenue of a traditional spend? No, I don't really care. Are we holding? Are we scaling? Are we pulling back? Is like a very simple sort of decision that we're making that I think is extremely valuable.

[Connor]

I think that's the question you need to be asking yourself. Like, is the juice worth the squeeze? All right, we're back. Another episode of the Marketing Operators podcast. Just the Connors today, episode 101, and we're officially into the triple digits. Connor, how you doing,

[Cody]

dude? Doing fantastic. Stoked to be here mid February. We were, we were both just sort of reflecting on how quickly Q1 is passing.

[Connor]

It's been. Been wild.

[Cody]

It's gonna be, it's gonna be. We're gonna start doing episodes on, you know, Black Friday Strategies soon.

[Connor]

Yeah, probably next month. We're gonna be starting talking Q4, Black Friday. It's coming. It's coming.

[Cody]

All right, I got, I got, I got a question for you here, Connor. In classic marketing operators fashion, we're going to be a couple of weeks behind, like the true online zeitgeist. But for those listening, I'm sure they're all curious. What is your take on Clavicure androgynic and the brutal frame mogging by the ASU frat leader?

[Connor]

The thing is, you know, you know, I have no answer for this. You know, I. This is the first time I've heard of this.

[Cody]

I thought maybe. Yeah, okay. I thought maybe, like, it has just been. It's been such a whirlwind online that you would have, like, it would have seeped a little bit into your, like, into your, your. I don't know, the content that you're consuming, but not the case. None of those words mean anything.

[Connor]

I saw Aaron. I saw Aaron TWEET. Something about it yesterday, and that was my first exposure to it. Can you give me a. Can you. Can you give me a run through?

[Cody]

Dude, I love that. Dude. You must live such a peaceful life. I mean, the rest of us are just in this, this flurry of, like, strange new words and online characters. I'll keep it super, super.

[Connor]

Understand this.

[Cody]

There's a very popular streamer named Clavicular. I've never said it out loud. I think that's the right. Yeah. 20 years old. He's famous for what's called looks maxing. So he's done all these, like, he does all this, like, very deliberate work surgeries, weird supplements. He's like, on testosterone. He's 20 years old to like, make himself look as good as possible. That's like, that's what he's kind of built his brand around. So he's like, he's jacked and so he's streaming. And then basically what happens, actually, to tie it back to, like, some things that we've talked about in the past, what ends up happening is he's streaming for hours a day and then, you know, his, like, army of clip farmers. So we've talked about WAP and we've talked about DTC brands implementing some of this and, like, how organic social sharing can become a part of a marketing campaign. This is honestly a great example where he's streaming, things are happening, and then there's like an entire narrative that's being built in a universe being built online around Clavicular and, like, what he's doing. And it started with this super buff dude at ASU who frame mogged him. So mogging is like. So mogging is like, I don't. Overpowering someone. We could use that as the definition. I don't know if that's proper, but like, and then frame, like his literal physical frame, the guy's got like super broad shoulders and he makes Clavicular look really small. So that's when you had this moment go viral where everybody was just saying Clavicular got Clavicular got brutally frame mogged by an ASU threat leader. And that was like all over the place. And there's just this really brief clip of it, like people were sharing around. And then. And then it's just become like an entire universe and it's like, really picked up. Androgynic is like this Australian streamer who's come now flew to Arizona to. To avenge Clavicular because he's gonna now frame leader. It feels very like, it feels very like the storyline's like Marvel esque and

[Connor]

I'm looking at these guys like I

[Cody]

saw someone else on Instagram.

[Connor]

They look crazy. They look, they look weird.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. I mean the, the whole look smacking thing like taken to an extreme isn't. Is very odd. It's, it's almost like. Yeah, it's like, it's like transhumanist. There's just so much like, like you know, deliberate like changes being made. It doesn't feel natural. So yeah, no it's, it's a super odd thing. I'm happy I got to catch you up on it. Cody's going to be so bored. I don't think we spend too much more time on it because it's not quite what people tune into marketing operators for. But I figure we should be touching on it to some degree and at the very least we can tie it back to clipping campaign so it's somewhat marketing oriented.

[Connor]

Well, I always like to look at these, these like non physical product brands and like what these influencers and creators are doing on social and like everyone is ultimately trying to sell something at some point. So that's what I'm looking at right now is I'm. I'm on @Clavicular0's page. It looks like he has a coaching offer. So he has his one on one coaching. It looks like he has some sort of bookings.

[Cody]

How many followers?

[Connor]

Yeah, 360,000 followers. This guy's got to launch a supplement brand, right? I mean that's got to be his end game. Here is, is like a, a competition brand with like men go to Mars or something.

[Cody]

It is primed for like some sort of brand collaboration. Um, Ridge won't do it but I also. It's not, it's nice because it's not. There are like some odd sort of like I don't know, tangential storylines and topics of the whole looks matching trend. But by and large these guys are like not, they're not political, they're just kind of like buff dudes like going to clubs and like and just like posting on social as they like try to mog one another. It's like it's relatively innocuous and frankly like decently sponsorable content. So yeah, someone, someone's got to get

[Connor]

some, some good brand deals with some sort of like health and wellness supplement brand if, if they're not launching their own at some point.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah. You know just on that topic quickly, two, two quick things. One is you said like everybody selling something. I think that's Totally true. What Clavicular is doing now or what Kai Sonat was doing. This is who we talked about last year around the Super Bowl. Like there is a very tried and true process. I show speed. Another streamer where it's like they're creating content all the time and then they have an army of, they have a big apparatus, an army of clippers, an army of channels where they're like redistributing all that content over and over and over. TVPN does this and now we're getting like more into the sphere of like business and E comm and media. TVPN is creating live shows three hours a day as a podcast and then they are thinking of clips on X as one of their key distribution channels. And that is not all that dissimilar from like you know, ramps super bowl activation last year or ramps live streaming with Kevin from the office turning it into clips that get shared online. So I do think there's like a very much in common thread just in terms of like how content is being created, distributed and consumed and how brands can take advantage of that.

[Connor]

Have you ever done these? Like I'm always very curious about how these coaching services are set up because I've bought like I've definitely bought you know like programming online but that's like, that's like an info product. So that makes sense to me. You know they're selling like an 8 week, 12 week program for you know that it's, it's done, there's no involvement from them. It's the same as selling a physical product brand but even less involved. But a lot of these guys are doing and girls are doing coaching and I'm very curious like how, how that becomes a good business for them because it seems very bottlenecked by them and their attention. I'm sure they've productized it in some way, shape or form. But like how I'm, I'm curious like how much could a guy like Clavicular be earning per year through his coaching services? And like I, I, I'm curious how he scales that without, without having to scale up his time. Like have you ever done any of these coaching services from these like social leading fitness, health and wellness people?

[Cody]

I have not. I would bet it's super productized, it's large, it's probably largely a digital product where it's like yeah, like he has, he has his workouts and his meals like in documents that he's just sharing. I also wouldn't be at all surprised if it weren't like, like if he didn't, I mean he probably has employees on the back end. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's not a sort of like CD agency working with all the dude influence, like dude fitness influencers. Be like, we are going to offer your coaching service as a service, you just put your name on it, get the distribution, get people to sign up.

[Connor]

We're going to white label it.

[Cody]

We're going to have VA's overseas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going to VAs overseas. Like answer.

[Connor]

Right answer.

[Cody]

People questioned on your behalf wouldn't, wouldn't be at all surprised. So that's where I land on that.

[Connor]

I just clicked on clavicular story and it's in the. The copy is looks maxing five people apply below. Apply takes you to a type form. There we go. So there, there's the funnel. There's the funnel right here.

[Cody]

That's the funnel. That's the funnel.

[Connor]

All right, well now, now I'm up to, up to speed on the, on the most new Internet zeitgeist, so thank you for that. That was, that was well overdue. I've been, I've been on the road a little bit. That's why I am probably even less up to speed. I, I've been gone for most of the last three weeks and I'm back in Denver, settling back in, excited to be here and back into my, my daily routine. But I was in, I think Matt's homeland. I was in British Columbia and for the first time and it was absolutely beautiful. So I understand why, why all those guys are hanging out up there in the great Canadian Rockies. But it's good to be back. Good to be back in Denver.

[Cody]

Good.

[Connor]

Locked in. We're going to go through some big objectives that Ridge and Hexcloud are working on this year. What we're working on, why we're working on it, how we're working on it. Before we do that, thank you to the sponsors. Motion, Ridge Panel pression after Style and House. All right, let's get into it. Sam.

[Sam]

One thing that's become really obvious this year is creative strategy is changing. It is no longer just, just about make better ads or even make more ads. You have to have AI in your workflow. You have to understand all the right best practices today. And the leverage point is how you think about the creative.

[Cody]

And that's where a lot of teams are struggling. People are still learning creative strategy the same way they did years ago through trial and error, intuition and there hasn't been a structured way to learn that role properly.

[Sam]

It's also super hard to find great creative strategists these days. It's still a new role, um, and it's one that's extremely important, but there's a lot of self learning. It's. And so that's why the training in the space is so important. And Motion is a huge leader of that. And they're launching a new free course and community launching in March. This is going to be a new way that people can really master creative strategy.

[Connor]

And what I really like that this is, this is all taught live. Things are changing so, so fast, so rapidly right now that courses that were recorded six or eight months ago, like those are all outdated by now. The course won't just be listening to people talk about ads, you will actually be hands on in this course. So you're building concepts, you're actually making creative, you're testing it and you're ultimately learning how to make decisions when things don't work out the first time.

[Cody]

And the instructor lineup is legit. There are creative experts from brands like Caraway Comm, Harry's, Space Goods, Happy Mammoth and agency leaders and founders from Scaled Brands. They're teaching what they're doing right now, not what worked three years ago.

[Sam]

There'll also be some potential, I'm supposed to say internships at least for Jones Road. I'm going to say job opportunities. You'll have the ability to sign up and learn more. But we will be interviewing a few candidates as part of this partnership with Motion, which I am so excited about. The course is live, it's free to register, seats are limited. If creative performance is part of your job in 2026, then this is worth paying attention to. We'll drop the link in the show notes.

[Cody]

I'd love to hear a little bit of the rationale behind and strategies for introducing more products into core channels.

[Connor]

Yeah, so this is one that it was part inspired by. Honestly some of the, some of the conversations we had about how you guys did some holdout testing on some of your new prints and you found a lot of incremental orders, also partially with some of the new products that we have introduced into our funnels in the last three months and then also equal parts introducing like very new ads from creators that we also think have reached new audiences. Ultimately this is a new audience reach play. Like we, I mean you talked about that holdout test that you ran, I don't know, six months ago or however long ago where you introduced A fairly niche new design into your ad account. You ran a holdout test on it and you found that it drove a ton of incremental orders. Even though it wasn't necessarily on that new design, like that audience was clearly reaching new people. They were coming to your site and then they were buying your like hero, your hero, like three colors or whatever. Yeah. Yep.

[Cody]

So I can hit those, those, those. Because we just one, we just comped that launch. So like last week was like a really difficult week from like a growth perspective. I'm like what was going on? And I look back and I'm like, oh yeah. We had this like banger launch that went live mid February. So I just reviewed that data and for those curious it was a tattoo inspired wallet. So just a new wallet and key case design from us. No new silhouettes, just new designs on top of it. From a north in one day click perspective. It was better than our other ads, like probably 40% better. Something like that. From a geolift perspective, we measured at this time over a forex incremental roas and we're very, we talk all the time. Ridges run at like a two to two and a half XML are, we are extremely aggressive. We're not driving super high incremental roses. We're really just trying to drive volume and throughput. But this. So this is like more or less the best result we've ever gotten on quite a bit of spend. And what was interesting about it was the, the, the incremental lift was more than was basically the entire revenue of the product. So that doesn't make any, that doesn't make any sense. Like if the, if these sets of ads drove $500,000 and the product only did 400,000 like where else is that revenue coming from? And that's where we dug in on within North Beam in their like product exploration tool to find that only 40% of revenue attributed to these ads was actually being generated from the products that we were promoting. So the majority of people were clicking on these ads coming through, purchasing a gunmetal, a black, a carbon fiber wallet. And that was like a really big unlock for us. So just to reset the stage, that was our big learning lesson.

[Connor]

So, so that's, that's like piece number one that I was like that kind of got me thinking a lot because historically we've built, I mean we have a lot of products in our funnels now and that really happened in the last two years that we started building funnels around knives and hex mills and some of these other products and and we the second data point is like those funnels worked like we were many times we're able to get those ads I mean depending on the time of the year and what's going on like as good if not better than our cookware ads. And we're able to get the blended blended like NY's business Hex Mills business to A to an AM that's like very profitable. So that's point number two. Point number three. Then we launched a new creator last year that was like a very big swing for us. It was around cookware but like very big swing. Totally different type of creator and it was so clear that she was reaching a totally new different audience than our than our existing ads. Like different age demo, different gender demo, way higher net new visit rate. Also like the ltv like the ROAS lift was like some of the best we've ever seen. If you're still making budget decisions based on platform dashboards, you're not optimizing your gambling. This episode is brought to you by pressing AI, the measurement and forecasting platform built for scaling Omnichannel brands. Because here's the problem. Attribution tells a story that's convenient, but not always the story that's true. Your best campaigns, they don't just drive direct conversions. They create ripple effects. They lift branded search, they drive organic traffic, direct traffic, and ultimately they improve performance across your entire funnel. Preschen is built to capture the full impact of your marketing, including delayed conversions, cross channel effects, and the long tail performance that keeps working even after you stop spending. Repression really changes. The game is forecasting because the real question isn't what worked last month. The real questions are what happens if we scale this campaign by 10%? Are we already saturated or is there still an efficiency pocket we're missing? If we cut spend, will performance hold or will it collapse? And are we balancing top of funnel and bottom of funnel the right way or starving one side of the system with prescient? You can forecast at the campaign level, model different spend scenarios and understand the real relationship between spend and outcomes. So you stop wasting budget on outdated assumptions. Because a dollar in December is not the same as a dollar in August. So instead of defending your numbers in a budget meeting, you can walk in with a plan. And if you're ready to stop guessing and start forecasting, visit prussianai.com operators pression AI like GPS for

[Cody]

okay, the other question that I have for you is I'm just curious how you imagine

[Sam]

the

[Cody]

funnels shaping up over time. So like I think there's like almost a spectrum. There is the like, hey, we're going to build out like performance landing pages, listicles. We're going to have creative. We're going to have like this tip of the spear funnel around cocktail shakers and knives and cookware and all these other things. And then there's the flip side, which, like, I kind of oscillate between, which is you guys have a pretty large catalog and so does Ridge. And it's just like, what is like the minimum viable way to support more products almost from like a product feed perspective. That's something we've been exploring.

[Connor]

More

[Cody]

enriched catalogs, videos, images to support our pens and magsafe card holders and phone cases, like the longer tail of objects, which is maybe not what you're describing, because I wouldn't call that a funnel. But just like, I'm curious where you guys are landing on that and how you see, how you see it shaping up over time.

[Connor]

Well, you know, for, for us now, we, we basically do create a new landing page or any product that is a new category just because we have to. We don't have like, especially with an activation like the one we did for the cocktail shaker that had such a big brand partnership component was still Jen and Dre and Snoop. Like, we had to create a new page to support that story. And I think that's part of the reason that it works so well out of the gate here is because we, we sent our traffic to that page and we weren't just sending it right to a product page, which I think would have been quite jarring to be like, hey, here's this very new innovative cocktail shaker that's innovative compared to what's in the market, but also so different than what hexcloud's ever done. And then it's going right to a product page and it's like, wait, there's, there's a missing link here. So I think part of it was we did produce this net new experience. You know, we're not going to go and create a ton of new experiences for that product because I don't think that's ever going to become, you know, 10, 15% of our, of our ad spend. And I think that's the question you need to be asking yourself, like, is the juice worth the squeeze? With that being said, we are still going to optimize it. You know, we, we are going to take some of our existing formats that we found to work and basically rework those for the cocktail shaker. So we're not necessarily designing a new UX from scratch, but we're saying, hey, you know, we've run these pages in the past for these other products and they've worked. And we think these could work for the cocktail shaker because of X. Right. Like a listicle is a great one. You know, it's a brand new product and we're trying to get awareness and education on what the value props are. Well, like a listicle is probably the best format to, to do that. So we're gonna, we're gonna build that out, we're gonna, we're gonna launch it, we're gonna test it against the existing page and then I'm assuming after that we'll probably let it sit for a while and like be, be comfortable with the level of optimization that we've gotten the cocktail shaker funnel to, whereas with other products, like, we probably won't do that at all. Like if we're, if we're launching an ad on the wok or an add on a 7 quart chicken fryer and add on a griddle, it's still part of our cookware line. And like, obviously at this point people have a ton of education on, on our cookware and what makes it special, what the value props are. And if they don't, like, it's really easy to find that in our existing funnel. So I think it depends on, you know, the further away we're moving from an existing category, I think the more we need to lean into educational, educational content. So I'm hoping a lot of these swings are not requiring a ton of like destination optimization stuff.

[Cody]

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.

[Connor]

Well, I wanted to ask you how, how are you based on your, Sorry, what was the name of it? Tattoo? Traditional.

[Cody]

Traditional.

[Connor]

So like, do you, are you now creating ads around like every new, you know, colorway or design or like.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, every new colorway for sure. Yeah. I, what you're describing is probably closer. It's like some in between of we have new, new CCs, we call them colorways, new CCs within an existing silhouette. And that's like we just launched last week Legends in Bloom Ruins, Sakura kind of Japanese inspired designs on the ridge wallet on key cases. We've sold ridge wallets and key cases for a very long time now. This is just that idea in a new design and it's like, that's relatively straightforward. What you're describing with, with the cocktail shaker is closer to what we, we think of as a new silhouette launch. So Within. Let me think of a good example here. Within like tech. It was one of the categories that we're kind of like exploring. We launched power adapter kits. Not going to be $100 million line of business power adapter kits like a wall charger. But that's a new silhouette. So we have a playbook now for launching new silhouettes and we probably launched I don't know, six of them last year. Seven. We'll do like probably about the same this year. And. And that requires sort of a different playbook. Sometimes it requires a landing page to do education but it requires new variant photos with new value props. We do custom below the fold on the pdp. Like it is just a little bit more of an effort getting a new silhouette off the ground because of all the reasons you mentioned we are further and further away from our core Ridge wallet silhouette product. We're like literally doing something different now. So it just requires a different step. So what you're describing. Yeah, like I said, it's like somewhere, somewhere in between is what I'm hearing versus how we structured.

[Connor]

So going back to the, the product, you're in the holdout on the. Sorry, you said flash. Traditional flash.

[Cody]

Traditional flash, yeah.

[Connor]

Are you like how did that look in north beam? So the, the holdout data look great but like did the north beam data also pan out?

[Cody]

Looks great. Yeah. So the, the big thing was like oh the colorways have historically always done well at launch and one of my concerns was always that we were just cleaning up existing intent. That that actually was just really bottom of funnel traffic that was ready to convert and all they needed was like that they would have converted via the email and SMS and like they would have seen it on the site and they would have seen his post on social and all of a sudden like meta just had the opportunity to like sweep all that up and get like a really good one day click. Roas that was my concern going into the test. I could have seen it going both ways. I'm like we might be like way under investing in promoting newness. We might be over investing. I, I was 5050 on it. And what we found was actually the opposite. It wasn't cleaning up existing intent. It's like basically the most incremental thing.

[Connor]

And what data points were you looking at to confirm that? Was it like you're like first time website visit rate? Were you looking at like demo data from those ads relative to like the rest of your account? Like what data points were giving you the confidence that it was actually reaching and driving a top of funnel audience.

[Cody]

Oh, I mean it was really just the Geo lift test. They gave us the confidence. All the North Beam data said it was like around the same percent new visits, you know, 70, 80% new visits. We get good engagement on them so we get higher click through rates, lower cpc. Like we always felt good about promoting it at a, at a TA ad level. It's like yeah, this, this objectively looks good. I mean frankly it almost looked a little bit too good to the point that I was suspicious about it where I'm like we should actually really test figure out what's going on. So that, that's kind of what, what led us down this path. The, the other thing, just for what it's worth, we also kind of got like went down this rabbit hole because we'd run a channel level holdout and we got a really good readout in January of that year and we realized oh, a pretty large percentage, we'd launched two other colorways in January of last year. A pretty large percentage of our budget was going towards newness during this channel met a channel level holdout. So maybe actually these are extremely incremental. This 30% of the account and the other 70% is closer to what we've typically seen from Metta. So it was like almost a suspiciously good channel level performance readout that led us down the rabbit hole of let's actually figure out what exactly is going on with Newness. We get the big incremental readout and that's totally shifted the way that we deploy dollars behind new. And again this is really colorways. Colorways are more reliably performant whereas new silhouettes or new like general categories like rings as a whole can be extremely incremental but like a little bit more hit or miss just because there's so many more variables. All right, so I've got some interesting numbers to share from Ridge from our beloved sponsor Rich Panel. We switched our support stack at Ridge to rich panel about 15 months ago and our cost per ticket has dropped over 70%. That means same team, same volume and over $500,000 in annual savings. CSATs have not changed. We've been sitting at 96% week after week. So the automations did not come at the cost of customer experience. Our last platform talked a lot about AI, but nothing was really changing under the hood. Rich Panel is genuinely AI. First they came in, they rebuilt our workflows and we were live in under two weeks with basically no lift on our side. And they're about to roll out a returns portal which for us is huge. Because if they can do the same thing for returns as they did for customer service, that would be sick. If you want to cut down your support costs now and save on returns platform with an AI first platform, talk to Rich Panel. Go to richpanel.com demo tell them Connor from marketing operator sent and they'll take

[Connor]

good care of you.

[Cody]

Thank you.

[Connor]

That was my second question is like if you I, I guess I don't know what your your new product go to market looks like for like in terms of variance on your non everyday carry line. But like are you, do you have a similar approach with like luggage and rings? Like if you launch a new, a new colorway on the ring, are you going to launch an ad around that or is that, is it more so the everyday carry that you're like, all right, every new colorway we're building some ads around this.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. So what we've found is the and I think this directionally is very true, but newness is the most important for more mature categories. When we're trying to sell our 10 million and one Ridge wallet, it is just infinitely easier when we have a cool design that somebody hasn't seen before. I also think the current ridge wallet buyer today has just become more of a fashion buyer than they were eight years ago. Where the bulky wallet to slim wallet was a more novel value prop. You had more people modernizing the way they carried cards and cash. I think we're further along that adoption curve and now it's more about yeah, do you have a cool Japanese inspired, you know, flower design that really appeals to me. So, so all the newness for, for the ridge wallet silhouette and the everyday carry category gets ads, gets promotion. We typically see those work. Newness for rings is way different. Like we did when we launched rings, we had, we tried to match some of our popular colors. Like we did an alpine navy wedding band. We did a burnt titanium wedding band. It turns out people really aren't looking for like people didn't, didn't value alpine navy from Ridge. In the, in the wedding band category, we have a much more traditional selection now. It's platinum, it's gold. We have a couple different materials, we have a couple different widths. It's also since it's a new category and we've been able to grow it just from like, you know, taking a larger share of the market we have, we haven't had to rely on newness in the same way. So it's actually a conversation we're having right now is like, what might newness look like for the ring category? And I think it will look significantly different than newness for the wallet category.

[Connor]

Have you had any other colorways really take off? Any others that really stand? Yeah, a bunch.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. We had the one last year that was like, really game changing was kinsugi, which is another. It's kind of Japanese inspired. They do this. This kintsugi is a process where they break porcelain and then they reassemble the pottery with, like, gold, whatever the material that will, like, hold all the pieces together, it's gold. So it's very beautiful. Absolutely.

[Connor]

Crushes like, epoxy.

[Cody]

Total appeal to a new audience. It's like a. It's like an old Japanese traditional process. So, like, I don't think epoxy, but something similar, some glue, like, substance that looks very beautiful, holds the thing together. So it's. It's like I've said for a really long time within the ridge business is that the. The absolute best thing we can do is new wallet designs that, like us trying to beat the drum around Gunmetal black and carbon fiber is an old story to be telling in 2026. So it's really informed a lot of our merchandising strategy. So we have a lot of newnesses here that I feel really good about, and that's where we expect a lot of growth.

[Connor]

Are you then. Are you then kind of like taking it one step further and matching creators to the new colorway? Like, if you have this, like, are you gonna, like, are you gonna go and say, hey, let's go find, like, a Japanese American creator to represent this, like, traditional Japanese design? Or let's go find, you know, mom influencer. Well, I guess you guys don't do female as much. Maybe that's a bad example. But, like, are you trying to, like, mix and match, like, hey, we're gonna match this design with this creator and almost like compound the ability to meet new people or to reach new people by doing that.

[Cody]

Yeah. So we typically bring on. We have, like, different tiers that we've talked about. So we've got a couple this year that we think we've, like, bought a lot of inventory for. We think can be really big. And in that case, then we would bring on new creators and we would activate both. We'd activate our, like, our stable of creators that we work with pretty consistently. And then if we have, like, we did rodeo Red in October and we found sort of like, you know, rough and tumble outdoor rodeo adjacent Style creators to like speak to the product a little bit. That is, that's also a tougher process just because it's really hard to find the right Persona, the right creator to fit the Persona who also creates great ad content. Like it's almost, almost what we see all the time is like our, the typical creators we work with are just better at creating ad content and they're creating the winners more often than someone who might slightly better fit the Persona. Right, right.

[Connor]

That makes sense. Interesting. Yeah, I'm excited to follow.

[Cody]

Yeah, I've got a, I've got a. Let me share my screen here a little bit because I'd love to talk about this a little bit. Okay, so what I'm pulling up, this is, this is a, this is data that we pulled a couple weeks ago that I think is really interesting and goes back to so getting out a little bit of like new colorways within a category and how we structure the go to market around those. What we're beginning to look at is the cross category buying between wallets, rings, tech and travel. The reason why we're down the path of figuring out cross category buying on the initial order is because we structure all of our performance around the MER of these categories. I said earlier I'm not a fan of fully weighting like granular subsets of a category. Like I would never fully weight power adapter kit revenue over power adapter could spend like there are times where I might want that number as like sort of a directional read on something. But we're seeing enough buying happening within the category that like I never want to break it down that granularly. What we do care about quite a bit is separating the, separating our categories out so we can run them as separate lines of business. And what this says, and I found this very interesting, we have two types. So for those listening, we're looking at a grid here. We have two types of categorizing revenue. We have line item revenue. So if I buy a wallet and let me, let me get a good example. Yeah, if I buy a wallet, a hundred dollar wallet and a 200 ring, I have a 300 order on a line item revenue basis, I would attribute a hundred dollars to the EDC business and I would attribute 200 to the ring business. If that order were super common, that would be a problem. If we had ads that were driving revenue that was split into two different categories, like really significantly, that would be an issue just in terms of how we're calculating mer, because all of a sudden if it's A wallet ad driving a $200 ring purchase, then our EDC business MER is like, yeah, far less accurate. So then the other way that we started doing it was order level category. So we say, hey, if the most revenue came from a given product category, then tag that entire order, attribute all that revenue to that category. So in the case of, in the scenario I just laid out, the $200 ring and $100 wallet order would be considered a ring order. All $300 would be, would be categorized there. So then we started looking at, okay, if we tag orders that way, what is the revenue makeup by product category within those? And what it show we're showing here in the chart is there is extremely little cross category buying that if I tag an order, an entire order is EDC. Over 97% of that revenue comes from EDC products. There's a little bit from tech, 1.6%. There's less than a half a percent from travel, 74 basis points from rings. Like nothing you can see. 98 and a half percent of ring order revenue comes from ring products. Tech is a little bit more distributed. And then 99% of travel order revenue comes from travel products. Very few people are buying tech or EDC or rings when they're purchasing travel products. And this was like very eye opening for me because it just shows how different of a buyer it is and how, how like categorically different the orders are that we are driving and give us more conviction in the way that we're thinking about the business. The way that we're like optimizing for custom conversions or using different pixels. It's like these are, these are extremely different orders and extremely different people that we are getting to purchase from us. And anyway, I thought it was, I thought it was just helpful. And as you guys explore like more product funnels, it might be a helpful process to understand a little bit more granularly. Like how are people purchasing across products or across. However you guys are defining categories like within a given order.

[Connor]

Is this saying for like EDC, for example, is this saying that like 10% of all your EDC revenue also contained like some tech revenue? Am I reading this correctly? Like looking at that first, that first line.

[Cody]

Oh, it's the, it's the other way. So like order level, order level category. So like the column of tech is this order gets tagged as a tech order if the majority of the revenue of the order.

[Connor]

Okay, so 10% of that orders have the majority of revenue in tech products is the way to read this.

[Cody]

If something is a is a tech order, then 88% of that revenue came from tech products and 10% right from EDC products.

[Connor]

Oh, I see, I see, I see, yeah.

[Cody]

So, so tech is. Tech is where we're seeing the most cross category buying of the order. If you're getting two power banks, you might also be getting a wallet. That's what that's like, that's what that's saying. And it makes sense because with things like the Mag Safe wallet, we have some very like tech oriented wallets where it's like I can imagine the person coming through and getting a power adapter kit or a power bank as well as a wallet. And the travel revenue here at 1.6% is probably coming from some sort of bag or something. See, it's an interesting tech. Tech is the most interesting one. The other two are much cleaner in the sense that if you're a, if you're a EDC buyer, a wallet buyer today or a ring buyer or a travel buyer, that is what you're getting. There's very little cross category buying after that. Tech is. The tech is a little bit more

[Connor]

of it and then EDC a little bit. So any, any order. So any order that's mainly EDC 1.6 for 5% of that revenue is coming through tech. Got it. Which makes sense, right? I mean they're very complimentary to one another, aren't they? Like, don't you have some tech products that work with.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally, we do. It's still, I was still kind of blown away how small it is. One of my concerns was actually that we were going to see 8% of EDC order revenue coming from tech and that therefore we have this like, way more amorphous like category that we have to be considering. But that's really not the case here. If anything it's that, yeah, it's actually a little bit different where tech orders are driving a little bit lift in EDC revenue. So EDC is actually benefiting from tech. So anyway, I thought it was a very nerdy kind of in the weeds thing. I was blown away by it. And I actually, I just think it's an example of like at least the brands that I speak to, everybody's trying to figure out how to properly and this is why I wanted to bring it up properly, expand categories and products. And like we're constantly trying to figure out, well, like what is the right mix all the way from like how do we look at it financially within the business? Like at what point do you define the line of business that is knives or for us rings all the way to like what am I optimizing for on Meta if I'm trying to generate more revenue in this category And I just thought this was an interesting sort of insight.

[Connor]

It is. I mean I think you look at this graph in it or this like flowchart or not. I don't know what to call it. Like like a two sided table here you see very clearly how these are all incremental to one another. And like this does paint the picture of often not more often than not, your biggest growth lever is product expansion. And this, I think this paints that picture very very cleanly.

[Cody]

1000% yeah

[Connor]

operators, quick gut check here. Q1 is when everyone realizes the same thing at once. Traffic gets more expensive, growth slows down. So the question isn't how do I drive more demand, it's how do I make more money from the demand I already have? That is exactly why we use After Sell by Rocked. Most brands think upsells are about being aggressive, but they really aren't. They are about timing and the best time to upsell someone is when they're already in buying mode, which is when it's right after someone buys. So after sell it lets you put the right offer at the right moment with one click. There's no reentering payment info. There's no extra checkout steps. Brands using after sales see around a 30% lift in AOV and when you're running real volume, that adds up fast. But here's the part most people miss. It's not just upsells that After Sell ads. Once you're live, you unlock the entire Rocked monetization suite. Rock thanks monetizes your thank you page with premium non competing offers. Think Disney plus HelloFresh and brands are saying 30 cents to 50 cents in pure profit per order Rock Pay plus as a clean wallet placement at checkout and kicks back another 10 cents to 15 cents in profit per order without hurting conversion. And in some cases it actually improves conversion. No inventory, no new ads, no operational lift, just margin. This isn't growth hacking, it's just found money. If Q1 is about tightening margins and getting paid more for the traffic you already earned, go to aftercell.com operators activate rock thanks or rock pay plus and you'll get the full after sales suite free for a year or an extended 60 day trial for post purchase upsells. Are there any like products in in the Ridges roadmap? And maybe maybe you're not able to speak about them if they're not live yet, but do you have any products or product lines where you think the, that like revenue. So like again, going off the. So you're saying if, if most of the revenue takes up a certain category then like that's the, that's the category the order gets attributed to. And then you're saying, all right, now let's actually look at the revenue though and see like what's the split in terms of percent. Do you have any that you think would be a higher percent of revenue makeup that are maybe more complementary to an existing category? So like let's say EDC for example. Do you think there's any new categories coming where of all the orders that are mainly EDC there'd be a higher percent of revenue from the new category? Or do you. Are you guys mainly thinking about trying to still make them very incremental and very separate audiences?

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. It's a great question. One of my thoughts looking at the. The chart is actually we probably can, particularly with tech, we probably can drive more tech revenue within EC orders that we should put ourselves in the process of like, hey, what does it look like to upsell a power adapter kit with a wallet being purchased or whatever else? So there's some of that and that's like contradictory to what I just said because it would make the way that we financially look at each of these lines of business more difficult. But like looking at it, it would just make sense to me that that's a good thing for us to do to generate more revenue. So that's one we have. I think we've got enough meat on the bone between the four categories we have laid out to get a lot of growth. So it's really not. There aren't many new categories that we're looking to expand into. There are examples of new silhouettes within one of these categories. So like, you know, like travel for instance, like we have a carry on, we have a check in. Could we get a really. This is. We don't have this plan. But just as an example of like a product within a category that I feel isn't driving cross category sales like within the same order, but can be incremental to the travel line of business. Would be like, oh yeah, let's do a cool like suit carrier bag. Because we think we can build a funnel around that. We could probably get a $250 average order value. Great ad content, like, you know, putting your suits in, rolling it up, like I don't know if you some of these, but they're super cool. That is where we're more in the mindset of that. So not necessarily new categories but like new products within those that we think can drive more incremental.

[Connor]

That makes sense. And then do you have any like, are all for your categories, do you have like paid social acquisition funnels built around them? Or are there any that you've tested it and just found that like, for whatever reason the you know, north beam level performance never stacked up to like wallets or rings or travel or like is tech one of those that.

[Cody]

Yeah, all, all categories are getting ads and funnels built out around them. If, if we had a category that we couldn't justify building ads for it, we'd probably wind down the category. Yeah, like if we had, if we'd launch rings and it wasn't a good business for us, then we would have just gotten out of the business of rings. There's again the way we think about it is like there are products within EDC like pens that don't have paid ads built out around them. So we have like within a category we have things that we ignore from a performance perspective. But that's fine because we're seeing pens get bought along with wallets. Like we see a lot of people building carts.

[Connor]

That makes sense.

[Cody]

Okay, I got one more point here that I thought was interesting also related to cookware. I think I brought it up before, but it also stood out to me. I spoke with a woman we were hiring for a role last year. She worked at a furniture brand and she said something that really stuck out to me. I was talking about this. It's one of our initiatives from a retention perspective. But the category order is like a good segue into it is how they found at the furniture business that people bought by room that like when they're in market for living room stuff, they're buying living room stuff. When they're in market for kitchen stuff, they're buying kitchen stuff, bedroom, etc. And that's like they probably did the same sort of basket analysis and said hey, nobody's literally nobody's buying a bedroom nightstand and a living room couch in the same order. That's like very uncommon. And that's kind of what we're seeing here. And that's why it's like this sort of data that points me towards if we are, and this is maybe leads into your, your point on generating value from non set buyers is we should be thinking about if an EDC customer comes in like pushing them into being in market for tech. And then once they're in market for tech. Like let's sell them on the tech order and let's not try to sell them everything all at once because we just don't see that naturally happening at all. Like that's abundantly clear in the data. So that's another thing that I think kind of plays nicely into this and

[Connor]

that's, you know we talked about this. I think on episode 100 was, was more personalization in your, in your life cycle marketing. And I think you were talking about like we need to have more segmentation in terms of the products we're pushing people into after they've made that first product. So do you see like maybe looking at everyday carry for example, like we were talking I think a lot about the first order. But when you're looking at like overall lifetime value in like 2nd, 3rd, 4th and so on order like do you see like does, does luggage lead into a second order in another category more than others? And does like edc? Like where do you, what are you seeing there?

[Cody]

Yeah, so I have someone pulling that data now because I'm like that's actually I'd be super interested in these order level like these order level categories. And then how does that happen over time? Does a customer go from. And because we do see returning customer revenue come from travel. So like there's no doubt in my mind that someone who comes in from a wallet purchase day one is buying travel on day 360 or whatever. There's not happening at the same time. So I could get back to you on data there. But the short of it is it has to be happening. We're getting returning customer revenue from these different categories. It's just happening in a way that I guess makes sense but we hadn't like proven in any way. And that's becoming a little.

[Connor]

Yeah, because I think the, the like operational move there would be to say okay, we know now that all of our second orders from luggage or not all of them, but like most of them are coming from a first order in this other category. So now you can actually create really intentional segmentation in Klaviyo where it's like hey, if someone buys any of these products, put them into the rings funnel. But if they buy any of these other products, put them into the luggage funnel. And now you have that like super like intentionally segmented post purchase journey which should only ramp up your repeat rate. If you're like leaning into your what's already organically happening and now you're just creating funnels around it totally 100%.

[Cody]

So that's one of the goals for this year. I've got another one for you as it relates to, you know, whether it's supporting categories or new products. Do you guys see? Well, actually, I'll start with, like, what we see, which is helpful when we think about, like, all the categories we have live and supporting them with new landers and ads and content all the time is that there is natural seasonality between them. So, like, we just came out of our Valentine's Day sale and rings are. We found rings to be extremely. It's a very important time to be on wedding bands. Like, we found that we see the same thing in the fall as people prepare for fall weddings, like July, August, September, great for the wedding band business. Whereas EDC is like May and June, Memorial Day, Father's Day. It's really important. Then EDC is really important for holiday sale and Christmas gifting and things. So at least what we've found to be helpful in terms of, like, ally, like, properly allocating resources to all these categories is kind of allowing our time to ebb and flow between them, depending on which is, like, most seasonally relevant. And I'm just curious. Well, I'm curious if you guys have thought about that at all. I could imagine certain types of cookware. Like, I think you guys have a new grill accessory that came out last year where it's like, oh, yeah, the grill accessory in the summer. Like, you might only want to be promoting that in June.

[Connor]

Well, we did that with. Yes, definitely. Like, we had a. You know, we're starting to create more like, brand forward, seasonal, like evergreen, but seasonal evergreen in the sense that it's not like, promoting an offer, right? Like YouTube, CTV, linear TV spots. And like, we created this, like, outdoor cooking spot last year and it performed as good, if not better than a lot of our evergreen ads. But that's only going to run for what, three to four months a year. So I think what we're trying to figure out now is how do. How do we balance, like, performance dropping right now with. But hey, if we continue to, like, keep some level of spend here, we are going to reap the benefits of this. I think that's the hard part. Right? Like, that's the. That's where you need to look at, like, okay, well, what. Where does our overall, like, what's our overall benchmark for this channel? And like, how does a. Below, like, marginally lower than that for a category, like, play into that? And as long as you can, like, do that math, I think you can, you know, still keep spending and not be like, oh, we're going to turn the funnel off. And now we haven't like generated any orders on the product. I think that's the, the tricky part, I guess that we're trying to, you know, kind of math out right now.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. This is, this is a little bit different because at a true like higher level category perspective, like we're spending on all these basically all the time travels probably experiences the most like ebb and flow. Like there's just not all that much demand in like a late January, February for carry ons but then it like really picks up in May and then phone cases are extremely seasonal. So I'm not opposed to the idea of like, hey, this is really valuable. Twice a year cocktail shaker is going to be a holiday thing and like a fourth of July summer barbecue sort of deal.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

And you guys could just, you could build systems around like we were just going to scale the hell out of it for six weeks twice a year and like that, that could potentially work. There's probably some sort of additional value of like keeping it top of mind throughout or like you're building up that brand awareness. But at the same time we've also made the mistake of like trying to get something to work all the time and it just ends up being in that negative where it's like you, you're pushing.

[Connor]

Well, I think for, you know, there's kind of like you can almost map out the decision making matrix on all these like non hero products with like ad performance looks strong and blended business, your performance looks strong, ad performance looks weak. But the blendest business, blended business performance looks good. And then they both look weak. They both look weak. Is the obvious like turn it off, the funnel's not working. But like let's say the ad performance is marginally lower than your account average or whatever control you're looking at. But the blended business unit looks really good. I think you can have more confidence in saying, you know what, it's probably okay that we're going to let this one run at a little bit below average because the blended business unit looks good. And then the flip side which we already talked about is like, well the ad performance looks great but the blended business unit doesn't look as good. Well then it's like, well just let it keep it going like as long as the app performing well, like it's doing its job and it's serving, it's serving what it's meant to do. So there's nuance to all this, right? Like, you got to like, think about it that way. I think if they both look good, that's the easiest decisions. Like, great, let's spend more. Let's keep, let's keep scaling and keep producing, you know, ads and landing pages and offers to optimize the funnel. But I think there's like that, you know, kind of the same way you mapped out. You're like, you got two sides of like the x axis and the Y axis. You'd almost like map it out and create like a decision making matrix based on that.

[Cody]

No, dude, I love that you said that. That's exactly what my team does every single week. And that's why it's important to understand like what dimensions of the business do you even want to be measuring? Like, do I want them looking at traditional flash revenue of a traditional class? No, I don't really care. Like, let's look at edc. There are examples of like we might be over investing in phone cases. If, if we fully wait the phone case mer and it's horrendous, then like, okay, that should be a signal. So just. And it's operationalizing that and we get, we get a report every Friday. Like, we are looking blended. We are looking at the channel level. Exactly what you're saying, are we holding, are we scaling, are we pulling back? Is like a very simple sort of always on.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

Decision that we're making that I think

[Connor]

is, yeah, we're valuable. We got a little bit away from this, but we're starting to like add this back into our, our biweekly paid media sync is every single week we are pulling all like the blended business unit performance and the ad level performance for every category that we're running. And then we make every, every week we're making decisions together based on that. Like, hey, let's what do we want to do here? Spend down, spend up, keep, spend flat. So I think it's just building that muscle, right. And having that recurring like, all right, great, let's. We, we unders. And then over time, like you enable your team to make those decisions kind of, you know, instantaneously. So yeah, that's, it's part of our, our bi weekly, you know, paid media sync that we always do.

[Cody]

Lately every market I talked to says the same thing. Budgets are tight, goals are higher than ever, and I have to prove what's working, not just report it. And that is the new reality of marketing. If you can't afford to rely on guesses or platform reported results, you need clear Causal proof of what's actually driving growth. And that's exactly where House comes in. Incrementality testing is the new scientific way to measure true impact, to see what' moving the needle and what's just noise. So you can reallocate spend based on fact and not faith. Cody, Connor and I all use House for incrementality testing and it's become a core part of the modern measurement stack. They're now working with more than 40 of the top 100 DTC brands, which shows just how quickly this approach is becoming the new standard for serious growth teams. Houzz helps you run real experiments across your channel so you can answer questions that actually matter, like which channels are truly driving incremental revenue? How much should I really be spending on Meta, Google or YouTube? And what's the halo effect of my ads on Amazon or retail sales? What sets House AP is the combination of rigorous science and marketer friendly design. The math under the hood is complex, built on causal inference and experimentation. But the platform itself is simple. You can choose your questions, launch a test in minutes and get clear, actionable results you can actually use. Plus, every customer gets a dedicated measurement strategist, someone who's lived in the world of growth and knows how to translate data into strategy. They'll help you design smart tests, interpret the results, and build a repeatable culture of experimentation across your team. With House, you aren't just buying a tool, you're buying the growth marketing team that can help you make the most of it. In a world where every marketing dollar is under a microscope, you need to know what matters. With House by going to house IO operators, that's H A U S.IO/ operators and start allocating your budget with confidence. Yeah, it's interesting. I because you say, yeah, look everybody, if you've expanded product categories, you've made mistakes, you've wasted money investing things that you shouldn't have, et cetera, et cetera. Just like the. But the motion of expanding it all and figuring it out is where like the actual value has been. I talk with brands like I think it's one of those things where it's like if you're a nine figure brand or a high eight figure brand. I had this conversation with, with a company recently, I was like, I really think the most incremental thing you could do, they have a hero product, they've done product expansion. They don't have like formal funnels built out. They don't have a formal way of thinking about it internally. And I'm like I think one of the, one of the paths to growth here may be just formalizing how you want to think about this tertiary product that you have and like fully fleshing out what is the ceiling on this thing. Because if you're like Ridge, like you need wallet revenue to go from 100% of revenue to 40% of revenue and you have to like, you have to figure out how to do that efficiently and it just requires a lot of buy in internally from like a financial forecasting perspective and an inventory perspective as well as operationalizing on the performance marketing side. So yeah, anyway, that's like, that's why I think it's a really important conversation for people to just continue to have. I think everybody.

[Connor]

And also you don't need to start with like, you obviously have done some super deep analysis like on how, how there's cross pollination across your categories. Like that is great and obviously like you're advanced in that but like you don't need to start there, right? Like if you're launching a new category, just start with the ad performance. Like that's the simplest, most basic way to think about it. Like how are those ads totally performing compared to other ads that are performing well in your account? Like that's the easiest, most simple way. Then you can transition into the one. Now how's the blended business unit looking? Then you can transition into. Okay, now we're looking at like demo differences and the new ads versus existing and like, you know, the elevar events. Like there's layers to it, but I think you need to resist that. Or like don't not do good marketing just because you don't have the four layers defined. Like just start with the first layer and then you'll, you'll get smarter and smarter and like stack them on top of each other.

[Cody]

Yeah, I totally agree. The. I guess the one thing that I would add to that is I think, because I've seen this, this happen too where it's like if, if you're letting the ad performance guide you, then like you're probably making good allocation decisions. Like there's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't necessarily. Like a lot of that, a lot of that can just be cannibalizing other revenue, right? Like, it really does come down to like, how are you driving incremental revenue and if you're able to allocate better and the ads perform better, then theoretically you can spend more money and you'll slowly grow the category. But it's, it's totally an example of like two steps forward, one step back where we saw this with Ridge for a long time where we were launching wallet designs that warrant all that incremental new solid colors, new shades of blue. And it was just like we are not, we're just shifting the dollars around the same pie, maybe getting 5, 10% growth. It wasn't until we got like, oh this is for a net new person that where we really started unlocking that or building out a funnel to say this is going to feel so meaningfully different that we're going to be acquiring new people over here and that's the stuff that ends up being more, more valuable.

[Connor]

And I think. But you don't need to be, you don't need to be like on like we love House. I think they are a great way to validate if it is driving incremental orders. But there are absolutely soft metrics that you can look at to like yeah, maybe it doesn't get you all the way there. But again like one of the ones that we love to look at is you know, we'll go look at a campaign or an ad set or an ad like by the naming convention and then we'll go into the ads reporting and do the age and gender breakdown and then do the same thing for our like existing scaled ads. And like just by like looking at those two side by side you can get most of the way there in deducing that you are reaching a new audience. And if you're reaching a new audience like you're probably driving incremental orders. So like I think that's like a, you know, a quick and dirty, not quick and dirty but like a platform level data point you can pull and report you can pull if you're not, you know, if you're a 10 million dollar brand and you're like we don't have House yet or even if you're a three million dollar brand, you know like any brand running meta ads or really any channel can, can go and pull that report and like get a good bit of the way there which is, which is empowering.

[Cody]

Right?

[Connor]

Right. That's a wrap on this episode of the Marketing Operators had a really fun episode today talking about when, why and how to introduce new products into your your paid media acquisition channels. Thank you to the sponsors Motion Rich panel Prescient after sell in House and if you're liking the Marketing operators, make sure to like subscribe, share with your friends, leave a comment for us, we'd love to address them in the show. Thanks.