E031: One month countdown to BFCM: What We're Working On Right Now To Maximise Success

Summary

Marketing Operators Podcast - Episode 31 Summary

Title: One Month Countdown to BFCM: What We're Working On Right Now To Maximize Success
Release Date: October 30, 2024
Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker

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1. Introduction

In Episode 31 of the Marketing Operators podcast, hosts Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, and Cody Plofker delve into strategic preparations for the upcoming Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) season. The episode emphasizes the importance of meticulous planning, inventory management, and leveraging advanced marketing tools to ensure a successful BFCM across their e-commerce brands—Hexclad, Jones Road Beauty, and Ridge.

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2. Sponsor Segment

Motion App:
[00:56] Connor MacDonald highlights Motion, a long-time ally of the hosts, which recently secured a $30 million Series B funding round. Motion offers innovative features like Creative Research, a free tool for building swipe files from favorite brands, and Winning Combinations, an advanced analytics feature that swiftly identifies effective ad concepts and messaging themes across various influencers and formats.

Connor MacDonald: "Winning Combinations helps you instantly answer complex business questions... it takes seconds to pull insights."

Call to Action: Experience Motion's new features by booking a demo at motionapp.com and receive 50% off the first month using the promo code "Marketing Operators."

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3. Personal Banter and Product Discussions

The hosts engage in light-hearted conversations, sharing personal updates and preferences. Connor mentions finding his favorite Olipop flavor—cream soda—which leads to discussions about healthy beverage alternatives and the challenges of maintaining a low-sugar diet.

Host 1 (Connor Rolain): "I don't know beer, so I gotta give it that one in the queue."

Cody shares insights from his recent trip to LA, where he explored Erewhon grocery stores, praising their extensive selection of trendy CPG products and unique prepared foods.

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4. Product Launches and Q4 Planning

Cody Discusses Jones Road Beauty's Anniversary Kit:
[11:33] Cody provides an in-depth overview of Jones Road Beauty's successful launch of their limited-edition anniversary kit, surpassing last year's sales with over 32,000 units sold in the first five days. The kit includes exclusive products like a gel eyeliner and a yet-to-be-released brush, aimed at both retention and acquisition through high average order values (AOV).

Cody Plofker: "I'm pumped, I'm thrilled. Seems like everything has gone very well so far for this launch."

Strategy for Limited Edition Products:
Cody emphasizes the value of launching limited-edition items to test market reception before deciding on making them evergreen products. This approach allows for flexibility and scalability based on consumer demand.

Cody Plofker: "I do think there's a lot of value in launching some type of limited thing, you know, testing, seeding the market and if people loving it, then kind of going big and making it evergreen."

Connor and Host 2's Insights on Scaling and International Marketing:
Connor MacDonald shares Ridge's strategy to refine their international campaigns, particularly targeting markets like Australia and the UK with localized messaging and launch timelines tailored to regional shopping behaviors.

Host 2 (Connor MacDonald): "We're just trying to serve the most relevant messaging throughout a period that has a lot of different messaging across different markets."

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5. Advanced Analytics and Media Mix Modeling

Introduction to Prussian AI for Media Mix Modeling (MMM):
Cody introduces Prussian AI, Jones Road Beauty’s new MMM tool, which has proven instrumental in quantifying the effectiveness of various marketing channels, including traditionally hard-to-measure avenues like TV advertising.

Cody Plofker: "Prussian AI has been super impressive... It's really going to help us leaning into Q4."

Prussian AI allows brands to measure the direct and organic impact of their advertising efforts, offering insights into halo effects and cross-channel attribution. This tool enables more confident and data-driven decisions, especially crucial during volatile Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) periods.

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6. BFCM Plans and Tactical Preparations

Connor and Host 2 Outline Ridge's BFCM Strategy:
[27:21] Connor MacDonald details Ridge's comprehensive BFCM plan, which includes early bird sales, singles day promotions across international markets, and extended holiday sales spanning Cyber Monday and Boxing Day. The strategy focuses on segmented marketing efforts tailored to each region's unique shopping patterns.

Connor MacDonald: "We're trying to squeeze more juice out of all these markets... it's just how do we act more natively in all these different regions where our products are available."

Cody Plofker on Jones Road Beauty's BFCM Initiatives:
Cody discusses the development of a new "bundle builder" UX for better customer experience and higher AOV. The team has also invested in a director of e-commerce and a UX designer to enhance website functionalities and optimize for conversions.

Cody Plofker: "We've created a 16-page mini catalog going out with Postpilot... it'll house our whole holiday collection."

Inventory Management and Marketing Alignment:
Both brands emphasize the critical role of inventory reports and cross-departmental collaboration in aligning marketing campaigns with available stock, ensuring timely adjustments to promotional strategies based on real-time sales data.

Host 2 (Connor MacDonald): "We have our call tomorrow morning with merchandising as well, where it's like, okay, what's the plan from there we're going to have to rekit some things."

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7. Media Buying Optimization and Incrementality Measurement

Discussion on Platform Attribution vs. Incrementality:
The hosts explore the limitations of platform attribution, noting that platforms often misreport performance metrics. They advocate for incrementality measurement to truly understand the ROI of marketing channels. House, a self-serve experimentation platform, is highlighted as a valuable tool for configuring regional tests and control experiments to measure true marketing impact.

Host 2 (Connor MacDonald): "82% of incrementality experiments showed that platform reporting was either under reporting or over reporting by more than 25%."

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8. Moperators Hotline: Listener Question

Question from Rohan:
Rohan inquires about strategies for advertising a service-based business, particularly translating e-commerce direct response tactics to a B2B roofing company. He seeks advice on ad creative, attribution channels, and general strategies applicable across different business models.

Hosts' Response:
Connor and Cody provide actionable insights:

• Optimizing for High-Quality Leads:
  Focus on setting up custom conversions that track leads through the sales funnel to ensure lead quality.

  Cody Plofker: "The most important thing is I would say follow up... you can be really aggressive with follow up."

• Content Marketing:
  Utilize educational content like whitepapers or case studies to provide value and attract qualified leads.

  Connor Rolain: "If you can get screen sharing of my Facebook ads manager and be like, look, here's all build out the ads... you are actually technical with whatever service or product that you're offering."

• Localized Campaigns and Creative Strategies:
  Tailor content and advertising strategies to the specific nuances of the service-based industry, leveraging platforms like TikTok for engaging, viral content.

  Cody Plofker: "You get the roofing version of that... something like that."

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9. Closing Remarks

As the episode concludes, the hosts reiterate the importance of strategic planning, cross-functional collaboration, and leveraging advanced marketing tools to navigate the complexities of high-stakes sales periods like BFCM. They encourage listeners to submit questions for future hotline segments and express gratitude towards their sponsors.

Host 1 (Connor Rolain): "Thank you for tuning in to episode 31 of the Marketing Operators podcast... We're taking your questions we're answering them live."

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Key Takeaways:

• Early and Granular Planning: Initiating BFCM strategies early with region-specific campaigns can significantly enhance performance.

• Advanced Analytics Tools: Implementing tools like Prussian AI and House for media mix modeling and incrementality measurement provides deeper insights into marketing effectiveness.

• Inventory and Marketing Alignment: Regular inventory assessments and cross-departmental collaboration ensure that marketing campaigns are scalable and responsive to real-time sales data.

• Customized Marketing Approaches: Tailoring marketing strategies to the specific needs and behaviors of different regions and business models is crucial for maximizing ROI.

• Leveraging Limited Editions: Utilizing limited-edition product launches can serve dual purposes of testing market reception and driving both retention and acquisition through higher AOV.

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Notable Quotes:

• Cody Plofker [11:33]: "I'm pumped, I'm thrilled. Seems like everything has gone very well so far for this launch."

• Connor MacDonald [00:56]: "Winning Combinations helps you instantly answer complex business questions... it takes seconds to pull insights."

• Cody Plofker [15:59]: "We're super lucky so far. I wouldn't say we're good at it, but we're starting from a very conservative spot."

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the critical discussions and insights from Episode 31 of the Marketing Operators podcast, providing listeners with a clear understanding of the strategies and tools essential for achieving BFCM success.

Transcript

[Host 1]

Welcome to episode 31 of the Marketing Operators Podcast. We have a great one today. We are talking about Cody's and Jones Road Beauty's new product launch that's going very well and all the tactics and thinking that goes into that. We are talking about Q4 production and what we are working on right now to get ready for the biggest time of the year for all three of our brands and most e commerce brands out there. And last but certainly not least, we have our first moperators Hotline question. For those of you who don't know, the moperators Hotline is us taking questions from the audience and addressing them live live on the podcast. If you have a question you want to submit, go to the Show Notes and you can submit it there. You'll find a URL to take you to a submission form. And last but not least, thank you again to the sponsors Motion Rich Panel House Impression AI. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe and share with your friends.

[Host 2]

Motion is a company that we've all been using forever. Hexclad Jones Road Ridge. We were all early adopters and now they're really gaining momentum. Motion just raised $30 million in their series B and a ton of new stuff is coming along with that. They've been pushing out new features. If you haven't checked them out in a while you can book a demo and see all the new stuff that they've been shipping. But a few of the ones that really stood out to me 1. Creative research and Reza was on our podcast so he talks about this a bit. They want to improve the input into the creative strategist role so 1 you have creative analytics and 2 their new tool Creative Research completely free where you can build swipe files from all your favorite brands. Connor, Cody and myself put together our own so you can start there and then add some creative from your favorite brands. 2. Motion released a new advanced analytics feature called Winning Combinations. Winning Combinations helps you instantly answer complex business questions like what ad concepts work best for specific product lines, what messaging themes are working across different influencers, what angles, hooks and concepts are working best across all ad formats. This will help you get real clarity from all your testing variables and it takes seconds to pull insights. Plus they have even bigger features cooking that they'll be releasing soon. So head to motionapp.com to book a demo and when you mention the Marketing operators, you'll get 50% off your first month. Or just start using the Creative Research tool as they are free. So an easy win for you and your Team.

[Host 1]

All right. How we doing guys? What's going on? I feel like I was off last week, so it feels like it's been a long time since I've seen you. So. I miss you all. It's good to see you. Cody. I need to say in, in our, in my downtime, I found my favorite Ollie Pop flavor. Do you want to guess what it is?

[Cody]

Root beer.

[Host 1]

Close. Close. Cream soda.

[Cody]

Cream soda.

[Host 1]

So good.

[Cody]

Interesting.

[Host 1]

What, what are your thoughts on that one?

[Cody]

I would not have guessed that one. I think I pretty much just drink the root beer one occasionally the cola, I like the other ones but I feel like root beer is my fave by far.

[Host 1]

I don't know beer, so I gotta give it that one in the queue. I'm, I'm, I'm on the whole 30 right now, so I can't have any, anything with added sugar, but. Oh, maybe that'll be my, that'll be my post hole 30 treat that I, that I set up for myself.

[Cody]

Oh, I love that, dude. I was at a, I was in like LA area this past week and of course we had to get hit up. A few erewhon trips and there was always trying to get the new bevs. I forgot there was one. But there's I guess a new try to find it. There's a new like probiotic soda with, with zero calories. Because I know Connor had had that critique of Olipop that it, you know. Yeah, too many calories. But it was pretty good. It didn't taste as good, but I'll try to find what it was.

[Host 2]

You said it didn't taste as good, which for sure, yeah, like sugar's good. It tastes better. Yeah, but zero calorie, you know, I was thinking about it earlier. I don't know, we somehow ended up with like sugar, normal sugar. Ginger ale at my house, which is like 150 calories. It's absurd. And the problem is I just like to crush those sodas. Lacroix diet ginger ale. I, I like to be, you know, unencumbered by calories. So I could have four or five or whatever. So even the 50 calories from, from poppy or whatever, I'm like, yeah, it adds up. I'm trying to, I'm trying to.

[Cody]

I agree, I agree. I gotta watch that. I gotta start watching that. But I found this new zero calorie one. So we'll see. Or we'll just, we'll just go some, some spindrift like you do.

[Host 1]

Spin, drift, bang.

[Host 2]

Connor, you've never Been to an air one.

[Host 1]

So I love like I've turned into this, this the newest version of myself. Like I love going to the grocery store. I love just walking slowly through the aisles, checking everything out, taking my time. It's very fun. You know, it's this like this transition from like my late 20s into my early 30s, I think like I'm enjoying cooking more. Like I eat like most of the food I eat now I cook on my own more than, more than ever. I love going to the grocery store. We have this amazing grocery store three blocks from where I live called Leavers Locavore. Super expensive, but like amazing products. Like a CPG marketers paradise. Like Nate, Nate Rosen or Rosin. I'm probably butchering. His last name would be in heaven there. They have like flower shop, they have pizza sub sub sandwiches. They have a coffee shop that's also a bar. They have like a little loft area that you can go hang out and work in. It's amazing. It's like the coolest experience. But I've never been to an era, so I'm curious, what's the, what's the Erewhon experience all about? Cody?

[Cody]

It's pretty incredible. We went twice. I will say that this trip we made one first stop. Well, the first stop off the plane was in and out and we always got to get one in and out at least in one. One air one.

[Host 1]

But usually it's.

[Cody]

Yeah, it was, it was. It's incredible. They just have like everything. They have this. I'm. I'm big into the beverages if you can't tell. So it's like this entire fridge, probably like 30ft long. Beverages. They've got, you know, ollie pop, poppy, you know, the leisure projects. Just like every like new trendy CPG thing. All kombucha, which I don't drink, but a lot of really cool stuff. Really good prepared food. Like you can get food there. The smoothies are great. I think they're like 24 smoothies with boatloads of sugar. You got the Haliber one? I didn't see it. They used to have a vacations one. So yeah, they're known for these like collab smoothies which are, which are awesome.

[Host 1]

Wait, like vacation the sunshine.

[Cody]

The brand? Yeah, yeah, they do a lot of collabs, a lot of like influencer clubs and yeah, they've just got, you know, just every healthy snack, you know, paleo, gluten free, whatever it is, you name it. A lot of prepared stuff, tons of supplements. It's a. It's a, it's a vibe. It's a scene for, for a grocery store. It is not cheap. So I can't imagine actually like shopping there for all of your groceries. But. But it's great. A lot of like prepared food. Like add like a, like a sugar free, like gluten free, like raspberry cheesecake. Like stuff like that is just. It's just awesome there. So definitely next time you're in la. Gotta, gotta go.

[Host 1]

I'm headed out next week, so I gotta go.

[Host 2]

I talked to the person who like introduced me to Erewhon I spoke to a couple weeks ago. He'll remain nameless, but they have a. They have a loyalty program and you get. You get points for every dollar that you spend or whatever. Sean is a huge Erewhon fan, but this is not Sean. But this person told me he's got enough points so he knows exactly how much he spent. And over. I've met him six or seven years ago. Over the last six or seven years, he spent over $150,000 at Air1.

[Cody]

Oh my God.

[Host 1]

Whoa. That's insane.

[Host 2]

Yeah. Balling out.

[Host 1]

I mean, I've probably. I've definitely spent thousands at levers since I moved into my new house in the. In the beginning of May. I've. I know I've spent over a thousand dollars at that grocery store. There's no doubt.

[Host 2]

That's the beauty of consumables. 1. Another thought that I had recently and then we could talk about Q4 said 150,000. That's what he told me.

[Host 1]

In six years. Six, seven years.

[Host 2]

Yeah, probably like. Yeah, probably closer to seven years. Something like that.

[Host 1]

21K a year.

[Cody]

He must be going for like lunch all the time and stuff if you're.

[Host 2]

Yeah, totally. That's the other. The other key thing about Erewhon is like the hot bar is great. And yeah, they have. For a while I thought they had the best breakfast burrito in LA. So.

[Host 1]

Wow.

[Host 2]

And it's like. And it's like 17 bucks or something crazy. So yeah, it can add up. But the point that I was going to make David protein. Did you guys see that launch recently? So the RX Bar founder who like, it's an awesome lunch. For those not familiar, RX Bar was famous for like really transparent ingredients. They had the packages that just had like the four ingredients. His new brand is a protein bar called David and it's super straightforward. It's 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, 0 grams of sugar. So it's really Just it's all this unnatural ingredients and stuff. It is like utility. It's a utility bar. And you know, I'm trying to bulk up, you know, so I bought a few and they like taste pretty decent and I told you I'm. Yeah, yeah, I like them too. I bought a bunch and the point that I was going to make was I just spent another like 120 bucks. I just loaded up for the next couple months or whatever. My LTV for David, over two purchases is over 200 and like, yeah, my LTV at that brand could very well be doubt in the thousands if we like extrapolate this buying behavior out. So yes, selling high priced consumables, good business.

[Cody]

What brand do you think you guys have like the highest LTV at?

[Host 1]

I was just about not counting like.

[Cody]

A car or something like that.

[Host 1]

Mine's. Mine's my ski like icon or epic. Does that count or is that, is that cheating? I buy that service. That's like a. Yeah. I mean that's a thousand bucks for each every year basically, which is brutal. But I've done it for the last five probably. But, but yeah, like, yeah, Apple's.

[Host 2]

It doesn't even have to be Apple's, obviously. Massive.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Host 1]

Yeah.

[Cody]

Maybe, maybe consumables is it. But we can, we can do that one another day. I'm sure we got some serious stuff to get to.

[Host 1]

Wait, what I missed. I missed the first part. Connor, what did you say the, the guy who founded David Barr, what was his previous brand or their previous brand?

[Host 2]

RX bar.

[Host 1]

Oh. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay, well, he knows what he's doing. Interesting.

[Host 2]

He knows what he's doing. Yeah. And both like really unique. They have like a marketing angle baked in. Right. There's such like a point of view for that business. Hey, we're going to be super transparent. We're going to put right on the packaging. This is like very transparent in the same. Every bar says 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, 0 grams of sugar. It's like that's, that's super cool.

[Cody]

Yeah, but the RX bar was like nothing unnatural. Six ingredients. This one's like, it's clearly unnatural because it's got macros that are too good to be true.

[Host 2]

Yeah, totally. I love it. I think it's, I think it's, it's super interesting.

[Cody]

What's in it seems like it went well though. Like there was a ton of hype. I think it's just David, I don't know what the URL Is. But there was a. You know, I think even like for months, just like a lot of anticipation about it because the macros got people talking. It's like, how is it so good? They gifted to a lot of people. So. So a lot of seating, a lot of people talking about it on the timeline and then like I'm even seeing them all over TikTok shop already. So like they hit it pretty hard at the gate, it seems like. Oh, I think it was a really, really good launch.

[Host 1]

Do you think they were able to lean into their RX bar CRM and do you think if so do you think? No, totally, totally net. New Separate.

[Cody]

Yeah, they sold that to like a big cpg.

[Host 1]

Oh, got it, got it. Okay. All right. Well, I did want to. Before we get into the meat of the episode, we're going to talk about Q4 planning in a little bit, but Cody Jones Row Beauty just dropped a new product. Sounds like it's going really well. Very, very curious to hear any details you can share about, about the new product, the performance, any like USPs of the new product. I'm very curious.

[Cody]

Yeah. So sorry to be blowing you guys up with screenshots. Just didn't have anyone else to tell. It was. Was proud of it. So apologies about that. So we launched every year we launched our anniversary kit. We are coming up on our four year anniversary. We call it the Bobby kit and it's. It's essentially a kit with. That has some limited edition products that Bobby's really excited about. Usually what we will do is we'll take one skew. So one shade from a product that we are launching next year. This one is a gel eyeliner that she's actually known for creating. So we have the gel eyeliner in it. Then we also have a brush that hasn't come out yet that'll come out next year. So those are exclusive. And then you can choose between two Mini Miracle bomb shades and Minis always do well. So got some exclusive stuff in there. It's great for retention but pretty good for acquisition as well. Got the Mini in there which people love high aov. So it's great for acquisition. So overall those always do really well. Last year we had 25,000 of them. We sold out in maybe two weeks, first five days, I think we sold 32,000 of them. So already more than last year. But what's exciting is we've got. I think we had like 100k of them. Don't quote me on it. So we've got a lot of inventory to push and we moved it up this year our anniversary was actually on the 26th of October, which is when we always did it. But we were like let's, let's move our holiday up. Like it's crazy in beauty. Like most beauty brands launch holiday like in retail in like September. So we're actually like pretty late on it. So we moved our holiday launch till end of, end of November, sorry, end of October. And we moved this launch up just to be able to, you know, have more time to sell more units especially because we were placing some pretty big pos. I think we felt like there was a little bit more margin for error if we had more time to space that out over. So yeah, it's been, it's been great. Very happy with how many we've sold, going well in all regions. Very happy with, with the number of inventory. You know, it's, it's so tough on these limited edition things because you want to buy enough to, to move units and really impact sales but you obviously don't want to buy too much. So it is a little nerve wracking. So I'm, I'm just really happy it's doing well. We're well above forecast and I didn't even think. We forecasted super conservatively this month. I, it was, it was a pretty big number. So I'm, I'm pumped, I'm thrilled. Seems like everything has gone very well so far for this launch.

[Host 1]

So do all of your. So are all products that are at some point in time or like the first point in time exclusive? Will those ultimately become an evergreen product the next year? Is that the idea? So like the exclusive gel liner which is part of this bundle that's going to be its standalone product next year.

[Cody]

Yeah, that will be any. With the Bobby kit specifically. Every year, this anniversary kit, we do that. We always pull forward one thing in one shade. But we don't launch every new product like that. Like some products will just launch.

[Host 1]

Got it.

[Cody]

If it's bigger and then we have actually done it before. Like we had a kit in the summer, like a summer skincare kit and we put a new product in there. Didn't do so well. So we're not going to launch it. So that was kind of a good one.

[Host 1]

Okay.

[Cody]

To get some feedback on testing on.

[Host 2]

Yeah.

[Cody]

So we've got like another one next year. Like there's like a product that we just like our product team and Bobby have been working on for a year and they're like not completely sold on. If they want it. To bring it out or not. So that's what we're going to do is just bring it out in a kit and see what. See if people like it or not and can always bring it out. We'll do that for like, miracle bomb shades. Like last year, I believe it was in the Bobby kit. We launched a new shade of Miracle Balm in a Mini. That was the only way to get it. We did not know if we were going to bring it out, but we sold through these Bobby kits and people were just, you know, begging for it. So we pretty much made the call within like a week and we launched it in September and it was the best first four weeks of a, of a Miracle Balm shade launch. So that was called Pinky Bronze. This is the, the fifth edition of Marketing Bros. Learning Makeup.

[Host 1]

I love, I love when Cody starts talking makeup.

[Cody]

It's great.

[Host 1]

It's great.

[Cody]

Kind of just like, just like leading.

[Host 2]

I'm putting a Pinky bronze Ridge wallet on the merch cow right now, so.

[Cody]

Love it. Love it.

[Host 2]

Yeah.

[Cody]

I do think, like, I do think if, if anybody can learn from that. Like, I do think there's a lot of value in launching some type of limited thing, you know, testing, seeding the market and if people loving it, then kind of going big and making it evergreen. So I think if it works for your business, um, it's certainly a good strategy.

[Host 2]

Yeah, that's, that's one thing we've been taught. We've. We have. You know, I've been at Ridge for almost eight years, and for a long time, we, we launched very little. We were like completely driven by new marketing channels, new marketing strategies, et cetera. Over the last two, two years, we've dramatically expanded the amount of newness that we've had. And it's super difficult to forecast. So there's been a number of instances where we just have stuff for a long time. We've got a product right now. We've have like 3,000 weeks on hand, something like that, like just some absurd amount. So we're talking about how to better do that in the future. I think that's a great example that you just laid out, like pulling it up for an exclusive period, measuring reception, maybe bringing it back. What we're talking about doing is launching more frequently with smaller amounts and then just having a more formal function around bringing back the things that win. Exact same idea, but just like buying lighter at first, not expecting to hit home runs off the gate or out of the gate on every product, and then the ones that do win, we know we can bring back. We could better plan for that in the future. So these are all bring back stuff.

[Cody]

That doesn't do super well. Like, like, let's say you do something and you think it'll sell through and you have extra of it. Do you just leave it on site or do you ever like take it off and then bring it back during like a Labor Day or Memorial Day or anything?

[Host 2]

So yeah, good question. We actually just did that. So there were a handful of like our hyper lime. It's not that it did bad but we wanted to keep it seasonal so we like sunset it at the end of Q2 and we just brought it back. We're going to get into Q4 tactics, but we launched our early bird holiday sale today, October 18th and we had like a couple hundred hyperlime products that are included. And it's a really like, it's a really limited sale. It's just kind of like an expanded sales section, some of the over inventoried stuff as well as bringing back some of a few of the things that we've sunset. So but it's, it's coming back on promo is how we're doing it.

[Cody]

Okay, I like that. Yeah, we, we had a bunch of like eyeshadow palettes from holiday last year. We brought back, I think we had like 5k. We brought them back for Labor Day this year and it did really well. And I don't think it was perceived as like they didn't sell these. Like I've seen other brands that have like holiday kits in January and they're selling them on, on Sephora for half off and like it's clear what happened and I think consumers know that.

[Host 2]

Right.

[Cody]

But I think there's a way to do it where you're bringing it back and maybe you're doing it on at a discount, maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's part of a discount where you can kind of offload some inventory and not have it look, you know, super dilutive.

[Host 2]

Yeah, totally. So I actually to backtrack a little bit. You said last year you launched these bobby kits, you had 25,000 units. This year you've got a hundred thousand. You're having these big days. We've seen all the screenshots. Why is the product significantly better or did you guys just have the success that you felt was scalable from a paid perspective? I think you're spending more now or are there new tactics like is it on TV and that's benefiting. I'm just what pencils to like forex growth in the Bobby kit year over year.

[Cody]

Great question. So a limited, limited by inventory. So we obviously pull down spend, you know, when it looks like we're going to be selling out. So that was one, I think we just never fully, you know, last year maximize what we could do. So that was definitely.

[Host 1]

Do you lean into the scarcity messaging? Like is that like a peak or. Yeah, just a heavy limited edition.

[Host 2]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Cody]

Limited edition stuff that's exclusive to the kit. Yeah. So number one is just, you know, is we can put more spend behind it than we did if we didn't run out of inventory. Number two is we, you know, sold out in two weeks. We decided to launch it earlier. We sold out in two weeks and we'd be okay to have this on site maybe till like shipping cutoff. We wouldn't want it past, you know, the 31st of December and so a just more time. Even if we weren't necessarily selling that many more per day. More time. But then plus more spend is number two and then number three is obviously we're a bigger business, we're in EU now. You know, we're just up 50% on the year so there's just additional growth with it.

[Host 2]

So on. On that timing point, you said you guys would have it up until the shipping cutoff for Christmas. Is it going to take that long or are you seeing the success where you probably sell through this, you know, by mid November or something.

[Cody]

It changes daily. So we've got a demand planning team that kind of shares every day after the first day. And we were like crushed forecast by 30% the first day. She was like, yeah, we'll have 22,000 left over. And I'm like, what the fuck? Like we just beat our so much. And what it is is she kind of just looks at benchmark and no, no fault of her own. But it's just one side of it she looks at, you know, she benchmarks it off what we sold last year. So let's say like you sell a hundred percent on the first day and then 20% less that day and then five days later you're selling 40% less because that's what we did last year. Well, one of the reasons sales did come down to 40 after five days is because we dropped spend so we didn't run through inventory too quickly this year we kept spend pretty elevated. We actually spent more on day two and day three compared to launch day once we kind of, you know, saw the demand. So we're not seeing that same trajectory so we went from looking like we were, you know, maybe forecasted to sell 5,000 units on day three, and then, you know, she thought we'd sell 800 units on day four, but we sold 4,000 units again. So it kind of like fluctuates, so it's kind of hard to tell. And it's a. It feels like a moving target. But we will kind of try to modify spend. But we also have holiday kits coming up, so we do want to move as many as we can, you know, before then. So. Yeah, I'm pretty confident and well, we have this whole. You and I were talking about it, but we have this whole hierarchy of like media buying optimization decisions. And like before we even look at like an in platform where like what's. What's revenue, what's contribution margin, what's Amir, what's AMER by region? And then what's inventory? It's like another thing on top of like that our media buyers have to do, you know, what's inventory and how are we going to allocate, you know, the spend between EU and UK just based on inventory and like, are we, what are we optimizing for? Are we optimizing towards most profit or are we optimizing towards moving as many units as possible? And like trying to find that balance is like a decision that we try to make every day.

[Host 2]

Totally.

[Host 1]

So Cody, are you seeing. It sounds like you're seeing just like great blended performance, right? Like you're moving a lot of units. The am mer on like total revenue divided by total spend into this, this bundle specifically is great. Are you also seeing that your in platform metrics are marginally better than other top of funnel prospecting ads? Is that another data point that's looking good for this product?

[Host 2]

Yeah.

[Cody]

And same with like our Northbeam and mta. Yeah, we'll see it be, you know, quite a bit more efficient.

[Host 1]

Got it. And then follow up on that. Do you guys do any custom event setup to understand like you get 200 purchases attributed in Facebook to a campaign? Like, I know that 150 were on the product I was promoting, 25 were on this product category, 30 were on this. Do you guys do any stuff?

[Cody]

No. Do you do that?

[Host 1]

We do, yeah.

[Cody]

No. That's super interesting. No, I know.

[Host 2]

Yeah. How do you have that set up?

[Host 1]

So it's a custom event with Elevar and then. Yeah, you create a. It's some. I don't, I didn't set it up myself, but it's basically using Elevar to create a custom event within Facebook. And then basically, then when you go into your Facebook account, you have to pull up the results column. It won't just show up in your purchases column. And then if you hover over the results column, it'll show you the breakdown based on all custom purchase events that you have. And it's been really helpful for us because we're, we're building out non cookware. So like, you know, I'm trying to create the argument right now. It's like, no, we are, we are driving incremental, not the argument, but like just understanding if we're driving incremental first time order revenue on these product categories from these ads. And if I can go into North Beam and see that A, the net new visit rate on these campaigns and ads are super high and B, that like you know, 60, 75, 85% of the orders are actually coming from, are coming on the product we're promoting. Well then it's like, okay, that's a, those are two good, strong data points to prove that like these first time orders on these products wouldn't be happening if we weren't running ads for them. And we also see very different distribution, you know, between knives, hex mills, aprons. So yeah, it's pretty cool to see. It's definitely been helpful for us in our decision making.

[Cody]

That's so cool.

[Host 1]

I'll send you a, I'll send you a screenshot after the episode and I'll show you like how we have it set up.

[Host 2]

Yeah, please do.

[Host 1]

All right, well, that, I guess we might have to change the title of this, of this episode because that was a fun little jam session on Cody's product drop strategy.

[Cody]

But I promise no more screenshots for at least two days. So one thing we talk about a lot on this podcast is upper Funnel investment measuring, YouTube, measuring, TV measuring, you know, out of home, all that kind of good stuff. It's something that's top of mind, but it's not very easy to do. Recently Jones Road turned to Prussian AI to help us as our new MMM media mix modeling tool. And we have been super impressed, no joke. It's really helped to quantify some of the things that we thought were true, some of the things that some of our tests, you know, showed us, but especially TV was very hard to measure. We were spending about 10% of budget on TV and we just weren't really sure how it was doing. Boiler Alert test of the week is actually looking great. It's actually looking like our most efficient channel thanks to Prussian AI. So we are in the midst of scaling it up and results look good. We are very happy with a YouTube looks great as well. You know, been been spending and scaling up YouTube a lot based on this data. So we are very happy with it. It's actually not something that we were getting. We didn't feel like we had confident data back from other MMM providers that we worked with before. And so we are thrilled with some of the prescient data that we are getting. We're getting halo effects. We're actually able to see, you know, how much value are we driving directly from clicks on channel versus how much is coming through organic direct and it's quite a bit. Being able to measure TV has been really difficult until now, but it feels very accurate and it's giving us a lot of confidence. Things are volatile in D2C. We're able to build these new optimizations, these new scenarios, you know, within days. Setup was super easy, unbiased cross channel, you know, measurement. We're not on Amazon but I know brands like hexcloud will use it to also measure and validate, you know, spend going to Amazon and so we're thrilled, we're super happy with it. Couldn't believe how easy it was. And the team is getting a lot of value out of there. There's reason used by top brands like of course, Jones Road, none other than Hexcloud, Good American Symbiotica, Timbuktu and many, many more. Mike, the co founder hits me and Connor up pretty much every day just telling them about some of the new brands assigned a lot of them from, from listening to this. So we are thrilled with Prescient. It's made a huge difference so far and it's really going to help us leaning into Q4. So if you want to be like us, like Hexcloud, like Jones Road and many more, go to prussian.com operators to book a demo and see for yourself.

[Host 1]

All right, let's dig into the meat of the episode here. We wanted to talk, you know, I think we talked about BFCM planning, what, a month ago maybe. Now that we're, you know, staring down the gun barrel of bfcm, you know, we're launching in about, about a month. You know, generally speaking, I'm just, I think it's interesting to hear about the, the evolution of the work that you're putting into BFCM as you get closer and closer and closer. Like, you know, basically the moment our sweepstakes launched, my top priorities right away shifted to, you know, BFCM production. And making sure all things are, are happening smoothly there. So I'm just very curious like generally speaking what are you all working on like right now in your day to day to get ready for bfcm? Connor, you wanna, you wanna start it off?

[Host 2]

Yeah. And this was something we just kind of finalized which frankly we were probably behind on. But we've never done it with such granularity. But we just nailed down like all the campaign planning across all markets so what that looks like for us. I mentioned earlier we launched early bird holiday sale today. That's like a discount on the over inventory or some bring backs that I mentioned. We're also doing a gift with purchase on ridge wallet orders. Uh so we've got that going for a couple weeks. Um and our, our thinking was let's just appeal to those holiday shoppers or more price conscious consumers a little bit earlier than we've had than we have previously. But then it gets like super interesting. So we're gonna do singles day Australia UK and our global store that's not gonna be in the us so this will be one of the first times where we have a purely international moment. That becomes Black Friday. Then we'll have Cyber Monday. Those are across all geos holiday sale after that. So we're doing Cyber Monday up until the 8th holiday sale from the 9th through the shipping cutoff we'll kind of just inventory dependent like roll out slightly different promos across these periods. Then we're doing Boxing Day in the markets that do that. So that's I think UK and Canada and then New Year's in EU and US and then the Boxing Day sale will become New Year. So we're just trying to serve the most relevant messaging throughout a period that has a lot of different messaging across different markets. So we just nailed all that down. Prices won't significantly change. It's largely, largely just copy and a campaign messaging. But we just nailed that down over the last couple of weeks. So we're going to finalize all that, all the emails and web designs that go into that. Are you guys doing anything that nuanced? I'm not sure if we're overdoing it.

[Host 1]

We definitely have a different offer cadence like especially like if you look at our EU uk we're launching that much earlier based on some like buyer trends, search intent trends like and nuances between how EU UK does their fourth quarter shopping versus the us. The offer stack is very similar, different, not, not exactly the same. And that's very much based on just historical trends. And in like the Bundles people build and like their, you know, desire or intent for sets versus individual products. So there's a little bit of that pro. I don't think it's happening to the extent that, that you just described though. That sounds like it's pretty, pretty different across your markets.

[Host 2]

Yeah, it's really just like I said, just a messaging thing and like slightly different timelines and for instance, you know, Boxing Day in the UK then becoming New Year's sale. EU doesn't have Boxing Day so we're just going straight from holiday sale to a new year sale. So a lot of like moving pieces there but we just finalized that. So those, those, that's what, that's what's been top of mind for us over here at Ridge.

[Host 1]

So really the, the, the cross market calendar and like the, the exact dates and like the messaging to associate with those different clips of time is really where you've been crossing some T's and dotting some eyes.

[Host 2]

Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's really just like how do we squeeze more juice out of all these markets? Like all this. We have like, you know, a certain amount of opportunity available to us. These products in these markets. It's never been like more expensive, expansive. So how do we squeeze more juice out of that? And you know, the approach this year is leaning into a singles day in the markets that matter, leaning into a Boxing Day. I think we'll ultimately make like hundreds of thousands dollar difference, something like that. It's not like it's not going to make our year or anything, but we have the, the foresight to do it. We have the bandwidth to do, we have the team to do it. So we're just going to execute far more granularly than we ever have.

[Host 1]

Yeah. And do you.

[Cody]

Seems like you guys are trying to do that in general, right? Like I saw Sean's, Sean's tweet about like the ads you guys are making specifically for uk. Is that something you feel like now you're like mature enough and trying to pull every lever you can there?

[Host 2]

Yeah. Sean's mantra this year is more products for more people, more places, which is for the marketing team, way more work.

[Host 1]

Yeah, that's a hell of a strategy filter for you guys.

[Host 2]

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so that comes down to like, yeah, how do we. And also we've had some difficulty. We've, we've resolved it over the last like six weeks, growing internationally. So we really were just pulling out all the stops. I think we talked about it on a previous episode, but we Brought in an international marketing agency. We're bringing on an agency for local UK content to see how that works. We're going to do localized campaigns. That's basically what this is. So just like how do we act more natively in all these different regions where our products are available? So yeah, not the only thing we're doing, but like a net new thing that we've been trying to get dialed in. Nice.

[Host 1]

Connor, I've been, I've been getting this question a lot in the last few weeks of how much, if any, are you guys planning to manipulate your offer like intra bfcm? Are you doing a lot of, you know, for, for the markets where it's like there's this sale period that has its own like message and then another sale period that's like separate but you know, back to back basically like, like Boxing Day. That's then transitioning into like your New Year sale. Is there also like, are you doing very big differences in offers between those two periods? Are they very similar and you're just changing the messaging and like messaging to the moment differently?

[Host 2]

It is. I mean it's a combination of discounts on individual items and discounts on kits and the makeup of those kits and then those all change depending on inventory. So how deep are we going or what makes up a given kit and what is that all priced at changes over time. So it's like a very simple offer in that sense that we'll have up to 30% off messaging for the new year sale and drive to different products between our wallet business, our ring business, our travel business, things like that.

[Host 1]

Oh, and then you'll. And then you'll just flip, flip flop. So the general like structure of the offer is the same, but like the actual products that you're putting that structure on to change based on. Ooh, that's interesting. That was like the bane of my existence last year because you know, any fast, fast growing maturing company knows the pain of like trying to nail inventory and ordering. So we were doing a lot of this, A lot of the dance last year was like, okay, we're going to do the like the 12 inch walk upsell and 12 piece set, but we're probably going to sell out right around this date. So we need to have this backup upsell ready to go, but that's probably going to sell out on this date. So then we need to have this backup, backup upsell ready. I'm. What's. Do you have any like thoughts or notes or like guidelines on how you prepare for that? Because that's really. You basically have to prepare like tons of different marketing assets that you're not planning to launch with that you're just being reactive with during the sale. And it's really hard. Like, there's a lot of extra planning and like forward thinking that goes into that. And I know I. That was like, definitely something I overlooked, I guess. And we did a bunch last year and it's just like, maybe I want to pull my hair out, but it's important. You need to do it. So what are your. How do you guys approach that? What's the. What's the thought? Is it. Do you have systems for it? What's that look like?

[Host 2]

Yeah, so what we have, for instance, like our early bird sale right now is like a bunch of different products. And you know, I think we're different just because we have like, let's call it a single ridge wallet silhouette. And then that's available right now across over a hundred different colorways and designs. So it's like we have one product just available in an. In a ton of different colorways. So then we're just saying, hey, where are we over inventoried? What do we have to sell through? What can we mark down for this period? That's what becomes early. Early bird sale. How do we prep our assets from that? We typically try to lean into things that we know are over inventoried. So we reduce the chance that we have to like quickly pivot between colors or something like that. So for us right now that is like brass and leather. We have quite a bit of. We're super confident for the next couple weeks we can lean into those and we'll have no issues. Some of the other things like the bring backs that, that Cody had asked about, those are much smaller numbers. It would be silly to plan any marketing assets like they're getting, they're like highlighted in the first email. But then it's like, look, these things are going to be gone within maybe three days or six days. So just like understanding that. And then that all comes back to we hired a director of planning this year and a director of merchandising and just marketing. Being as interconnected with them as possible, I think has been better. Like we're really just figuring it out like this level of nuance. What does it take from an operations and planning perspective and a marketing perspective to support more products for more people, more places, and it's just like more communication and aligning around how are we setting up sales and what are we like really putting our time and energy.

[Host 1]

Into Got it, got it. So you guys have, you've gotten better at. Understand. Yes. You don't have to create as many backup assets because you've just gotten better at like. No, you know what, you have mapped out like inventory to marketing campaign pushes. And because you're better at that, you don't necessarily have to prepare for like a hundred different out of stock restock scenarios.

[Host 2]

That's the goal. Yeah, totally. I mean we, we've been lucky so far. I wouldn't go, I wouldn't say we're like good at it, that it's a science but to you know, by any means. But we're starting from a very conservative spot. Like we know that we have plenty of inventory and then if we're checking in every week or whatever, what is sell through, how many weeks on hand do we have? Do we need to adjust strategy? Like this just came up today. We have two weeks on hand of a key product that's in like a bunch of kits. So it's like, okay, we can get in front of that now and we know that by the end of October we're probably going to have to make a bunch of adjustments here and we could start like it's not, we don't have to like scramble the jets as much.

[Host 1]

Right.

[Host 2]

Like we can. We have a little bit more Runway available to us.

[Host 1]

Got it. All right, I have one more question then I'm going to transition to Cody. This is very interesting. So, so you're just like to dig into your like offer strategy a little bit. So early bird sale is really about liquidating like kind of over inventoried SKUs. They're probably not the most popular. They're kind of like the, you know, call them the ugly ducklings, whatever you want to call them. At what point will you transition into? Okay, this is now our best offer of the year. These are on our top selling SKUs. Like this is when we're going to make our big, big, big, big push. Like when does that change happen and like how does that change happen?

[Host 2]

So, so the plan, right, what started today was yeah, discounting over inventory items. So it's like there's some solid stuff there. Especially with the bring backs. It's cool. I think we'll be able to drive volume. We always have. We can speak to that more price conscious consumer. We're also doing the gift with purchase. So we're doing our coin tray, which is one of our more popular accessories, free with all Ridge wallet orders. So that's our kind of chance to drive demand and Interest in core products that are full price with a gift with purchase. So that's kind of the two pronged approach to how do we sell through full price core inventory more efficiently as well as this older inventory that we have too much of. So that's a strategy right now up until 11:12. That's when we're rolling out full Black Friday messaging.

[Host 1]

Got it. Okay, interesting.

[Host 2]

When are you guys doing Black Friday?

[Host 1]

We are doing Black Friday, November 15th.

[Host 2]

All right, same week, Cody, or. Yeah, Cody. You guys do it like week of usually.

[Cody]

Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna do a little bit longer just. Cause we have a lot of inventory and just wanna maximize it. So we're gonna go live eight days before it. So it'll be an eight day, eight day long thing. But. But yeah, we got obviously holiday leading up. So kind of questions for you. Number one, when you guys have, you know, inventory and you know it's running low and like you said, somebody's monitoring like, you know, how many days you have left and stuff like that. Who's that and what's the process for that? And like how does that get to your marketing team? Like who's, who's responsible for kind of communicating, you know, how inventory is pacing and if you need to make any adjustments on your plans.

[Host 2]

Yeah. So our director of planning is putting together like a weekly inventory report where she's looking at the last week sales, the last couple weeks sales putting together like that, sell through rate calculating weeks on hand. And then it just came through today. Usually comes through like later on Mondays where she's highlighting all of the things that we either just received or are back in stock or we can expect to be back in stock as well as things that we should be concerned about going out of stock. And that's where it's. It's our royal Black Key case, which is in a bunch of different kits for us that was on the radar today. Two weeks on hand. She'll say we have receipts coming in late October, but it's a small amount. There are some available to air end of November, so we could have them back in stock completely mid December. So next step there is, then we're just collaborating together. We have our call tomorrow morning with merchandising as well, where it's like, okay, what's the plan from there we're going to have to rekit some things. We have to find some alternatives. And that's like the biggest thing in that case. But. But that could be anything. Hey, we're going to pull Back ads. We're going to launch ads because things are back in stock. We're going to build more kits. It's just kind of. There's all sorts of solutions that can come from that level of understanding of inventory. So it comes from that report. And then we do a weekly meeting with marketing where we're actually actioning on those items.

[Cody]

For sure. Makes sense. Pretty similar over here. Makes sense. And then one more. Is that something that happens often where Sean will come up with a plan or come up with a vision and not understand how much work it takes?

[Host 2]

No, no.

[Cody]

Because I do that. No, I get feedback on that all the time.

[Host 2]

Not understand how much work it takes. No, I think he knows how much work it is. Yeah, yeah. No, look, I mean, so much of our growth has come over the last two years, has come from, like, really aggressively trying new things. He told me years ago, he was like. When he first became CEO, he goes, yeah, I really want to be known for bringing experimentation. It was something like that. Like, he's like, I don't want us to be in, like, a comfort zone. So, yeah, a lot of his. More. More products for more people, more places is a perfect example of that. But it's the same with, like, hey, we're gonna launch rings, we're gonna launch travel. We took a bunch of shots on goal last year with what we called skunk works. Just rapidly. We were, like, white labeling products from manufacturers and rapidly launching products just to assess if there was demand in categories that we might not otherwise have expected. That took a ton of work that drove very little revenue, but the couple data points that we got could be really valuable. Um, so, yeah, a lot of work. But, like, we talk about local and absolute maxima. It's just like.

[Cody]

Or.

[Host 2]

Or I say sometimes, Sean, I both feel this. Like, you could solve a lot of problems just through volume, and that's just another example of it.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, no, I'll get that feedback. Like, I did a meeting with, like, my senior marketing team last week. I was like, guys, this is our plan and strategy for next year. Like, we need it. We need to scale to a younger audience. We got to tap into them. Here's how I think we should do it. How does everyone think we should do it? And they're like, great. Like, any additional work is going to require, like, more people. I'm like, you guys will be fine. Like, it's not going to be that much. I could tell they're, like, sweating and, like, freaking out about it.

[Host 2]

Yeah, I think I can. I Go on a little tangent here.

[Cody]

Please do.

[Host 2]

I've been getting a lot of questions, but we were planning because I think this is really interesting. I mean, I think we always get it. We all get it, because it, like we're. We're on the marketing side of things. But, like, we had this question recently. I can't share too many details here, but we have a new product that we want to launch that would appeal to a new demo, and then we have another product that would be sold alongside something we already sell. And I think it was really. We were talking about this, it was a planning call, so we were like, figuring out what markets it was going to go to, how much to order, et cetera, et cetera. And it was really easy for that conversation to be disconnected from, like, the plan to distribute those products. And I was like, hey, guys, like, these are actually categorically different. I'm like, this product here that's going to be sold alongside stuff we already sell. Minimal effort. We'll put that on the site every single day. We'll sell a couple dozen of these. It is easy. And so I was like, we could put these everywhere, frankly. Like, it's not going to require new content, new funnels, new emails, none of that. This over here, new product to a new demo. I was like, we should actually start this just in the US Figure out what we need to do here so then we can expand to these new markets. Because if it's a new product to a new demo and we want to put it in all these places, that is like every amount of work you could do at once. And it was just really easy for us to not understand the amount of work associated with each of these because we weren't, like, adjusting for the different distribution plans. And I thought that that was interesting and, like, we're going to try to better integrate that into some of our conversations. But I thought it was like a really stark example or a stark difference in how someone might operationally approach product buying decisions versus how a marketer might.

[Host 1]

I mean, we definitely have that friction internally. It's like, hey, you know, we're, you know, we have some products that, you know, check those boxes coming in 2025. And yeah, same, same stuff. It's like, you know, one team is like, all right, so here's the, here's the plan, launch date, and then, you know, the marketing team in the back of our head, knowing that this is like a tier A plus product launch acquisition, full onslaught, retention, full onslaught. Totally net new content required, totally net new Website functionality require. We're like, wait, hold on, that's three months from today. Nah, I don't, I don't, I don't think that's going to happen. Not if we want to, not if we want to do it how we all want to do it. So I think that is an age old friction point, you know, between like product and marketing and like what goes into each, each team's work. Which is why it's so important for like I'm realizing more and more and more that like part of my job needs to be like educating product team and like vice versa. So we can, you know, they can be empowered to do things on their own autonomously. That'll help like, that are like technically marketing activations. I just realized the other day I was talking to someone on our product team and I forget what we were talking about but like I pulled up the ad, I was like, screen sharing. I'm like, oh, let's just go take a look real quick. And I pulled up the ad library and they're like, oh wow, this is cool. Like you can see anyone's brands like. And I'm like. My initial reaction was like, what? Are you serious? But then I sat, I sat there and thought about it for a while. I'm like, no, that's actually my fault. Like in as me and my role. Like I need to like educate and empower people to like be able to do these things. And it's kind of a miss on my part that you know, this person didn't know about the Facebook ad library. So anyways, probably an episode topic for the future to chat about expectations and level setting between teams.

[Cody]

Who switches a massive software that their company uses right before Black Friday. Well, we did. Jonesboro just switched to rich panel and we are thrilled about it. Why did we make the switch? Well, first of all, we recently learned that Ridge did it. Connor told me how much they're loving it. And we also just wanted to make sure that our customer support team had everything they needed to have a successful Black Friday. We had a lot of issues last year just overall with cx and so I wanted wanted our team to be ready beforehand because we're gonna have crazy volumes. But I also didn't want to have to hire extra help with rich panels. AI, it's a game changer. Since switching, our team has been way more productive, way more efficient. Our ticket volumes are up, but we're getting through tickets a lot quicker. So our response times are actually way down, ultimately improving our CSAT scores and so, you know, I normally wouldn't recommend switching to a new sophomore right before Black Friday, but it worked out for us. The Rich Panel team made it super easy, held our hands every step of the way, and it just couldn't have been an easier transition. So bottom line, your team will be faster, your customers will be happier, and you'll also save a lot on SaaS costs. Now if you are considering switching your help desk, Rich Panel, they offer free weekly 40 minute webinars that are designed to help your CX team and your CX lead understand the platform, see how it's different, understand what migration looks like, and get support during and after migration. So head over to richpanel.com, check out their weekly webinar schedule and get your team in on a session so you can get ready before Black Friday.

[Host 1]

Cody, what do you got? What do you got cooking for your BFCM plans right now? What are you working on like this week? Next week, like right now, man.

[Cody]

Lots going on. So we do the minis. We're going to do a little bit different this year. Like I said, a little bit longer. We're actually building a new page. We finalized design today. I'm pumped about it. It's like a bundle builder. So we've done it two ways. We've done it as like a, we'll call it a custom set, like a bundle where people can pick their set, but it kind of just looks like a PDP and people can pick between four miracle bomb shades, mini miracle bomb shades. Then we've also done it as like a pre kit comes in a bag and you can get, I think for Memorial Day we did it. It was 4, 8 and 13 maybe. Um, and we got a lot of feedback that people were not happy that they couldn't pick their own shades. So we're just gonna do that. But what we liked about the Memorial Day offers, AOV is super high. You know, I think, you know, the average people are always gonna get the middle one and I think that was like 120 bucks. So we love that high AOV to be able to scale into. So what we're gonna do is have an option of 4, 6 and 8 and that'll kind of be like the first choice you make on the page. Pretty slick. Ux. We actually hired a UX designer. Freelance. We, you know, in internally we just have graphic designers. So we wanted a UX designer for this and we've got. It's really cool. It's like if you go and you hit six, not only do you show the discount but it also you get a little tag that, that pops up that says like qualifies for free shipping. So I'm pumped about this page. It took a lot of work, took a few weeks to get the just the design done and now we've got to get it dev. But I'm very excited about that. So that's for Black Friday but again we've got, you know, I'll consider Bobby Kit like the official launch of this Q4 season for us. So we're scaling it into hard putting the finishing touches on holiday kit which is end of the holiday kits. We have a lot. We probably have like six or eight different SKUs as part of our holiday collection. We have a mini catalog, a 16 page mini catalog going out with post pilot. 80,000 units of. Of that going out across retention. I call it retargeting like people on our list but haven't purchased. And then about half of it is net new prospecting as well. So that'll be our largest direct mail test. So I'm pretty pumped about that. It turned out beautifully. It's got our whole holiday collection in it. So that'll be end of this month we've got a new, I guess you call it like a landing page. It's like a, it's not a collections page but it'll be like page on our site that'll have our whole holiday collection and it'll be able to house it. So pretty pumped about that. So yeah, lots of, lots of site stuff going on because we have a director of Ecom now so she's able to actually you know, put the time in and work on a lot of this stuff ahead of time. So.

[Host 1]

Amazing.

[Cody]

Yeah there, there's a lot, a lot of holiday stuff. We'll do a little bit of direct mail for, for, for Black Friday. It'll, it'll, it'll definitely crush. Won't be a ton. We're. We're scaling tv. We actually launched two tests today. Ctv so, so streaming. We've only done linear till now. So we're launching a house test. We're actually running a holdout with ctv. It'll be a four week test with a four week look back period which will take us right through Black Friday Cyber Monday. Also today technically yesterday we launched, we talked about it on the pod as well a quiz complete test. So it's a custom conversion on meta optimizing for quiz completions. We've been able to get I think like we, we've been running it just like before doing A test I think we're getting like $2 quiz completes. That's an email with somebody that's taken the quiz. So we're going to run a four week test with a four week look back to see if that strategy is incremental as well. So yeah there's a lot, there's a lot going on but, but definitely very excited about it and I'm very bullish about it.

[Host 2]

I am super bullish here in the plan. Oh my God. Damn it.

[Host 1]

I can't wait to see that bundle builder ux. I've been, I'll.

[Cody]

It's sick.

[Host 1]

Yeah, we've been also I've been spending a lot of our time thinking about new web UX for bfcm. So I've been putting a lot of time there. We have a lot of fun like what I would call like not they're not conversion first pages that we're working on just like content destinations. Like the whole point is like you're consuming the content and using that content and then it's just like a very, very branded moment between hexclad and whatever that holiday that I'm very excited about. We're also doing that 16 page catalog, that post pilot catalog. Let's go for Black Friday. Yeah, we're gonna, well we're making, we're gonna make it work for Black Friday and holiday. So like the way that we're messaging it and like so we'll basically like we'll update the QR code redirects. We'll have like both Thanksgiving and kind of Christmassy type content in there and then like all the offer messaging will basically be general enough where it'll work for the entire offer period. But yeah, we're really excited about that. That's definitely the most involved like biggest piece of content we've ever sent out through direct mail. And we're also, yeah we're also doing a big retention and remarketing and acquisition push on that. You know I think we'll probably have hundreds of thousands of that of that piece of content get distribute it. So we're pretty excited and we're going to do like the you know, post pilot user holdout test to you know, measure how incremental it is and all that jazz. So yeah, I want to, I want to see your creative when you have it pumped about.

[Cody]

I actually just, I just send it to you guys but we'll definitely share that. I'm going to find you this, this bundle builder. I'll share that when we got it. I'm pumped about that. But yeah, no, that makes especially your guys AOV and everything. And I'm sure you guys have a huge customer file, so are you doing that same thing across retention and acquisition?

[Host 1]

Yep, exactly. And we, we honestly don't do a ton. This is actually kind of an unexplored channel for us that I think will be more of a focus in 2025. But like historically we've, we've done some direct mail prospect and we haven't done a ton mainly because we haven't like found a vendor that we were like working with and we just felt like our time was better spent scaling other validated channels. But I love Postpilot and, and their team's awesome and like uh, you know, we've been using them for retention direct mail for a while so we thought it made sense to, to jump into their, their prospecting offering. Which is exciting. How, how, how fun is it having a. I don't know about you, but like we have been working with a freelance web UX designer for like, I don't know, three months actually are about to hire him, I think full time. I love working with web UX designers. It's awesome. Like it's. We were, we were the same scenario where like we had a bunch of graphic designers and external resources and like they did good work. Um, but it's just like such a unique medium to design for and like the velocity and the quality that we're producing new web experiences now is just night and day difference. And I, we also just hired the director of CRO to you know, provide that like performance conversion rate lens on everything. So like we're you know, sort of building out the core pillars now between like our head of web in our UX designer and our CRO lead. It's just all coming together and like I'm seeing in real time the change in quality and efficiency and it's like it feels so good.

[Cody]

It's so great to have and to have specialists who are, who are just like subject matter experts at these things and then to also have the bandwidth like kind of to like what I was joking about like Sean earlier about like coming up with ideas and not having like the team for it or like knowing what it tastes like. I'm totally the same way. So it's just so nice to like have had these things that I've wanted to do and have the team to actually be able to implement and carry them out just to kind of that level. So yeah, like some of these things wouldn't be possible. We would not be able to do this bundle builder and we wouldn't be able to, you know, to get some of this stuff off the ground without this team. So it's a great feeling for sure. Same thing with, same thing with direct mail. We wouldn't be doing a 16 page direct mail with direct director retention as well.

[Host 1]

Right, right.

[Host 2]

Yeah.

[Host 1]

Connor, what's your web design resourcing? Cause I always look at your website as a muse for user experience. Do you guys have Web UX internal?

[Host 2]

No, they're technically like graphic designers by trade. We engaged with a. But it's also, right now it's a lot of just like iterating on existing elements. Right. So like the transition that we did like towards the end of last year was, I heard it in an interview and I was like, I really like that we were interviewing for a director of product. We didn't end up hiring for the role, but this woman had talked about building tools for marketers. Like that was a, that was a function and that's kind of the lens that we've put things through. So we went through a period of time last year and then earlier this year we had a, we did some of it internal and then we had like a UX designer external who would help contribute. But just the idea of like let's build web components and then now we're using those web components. Those are now tools for marketers. So now a graphic designer or our ecom ops manager has tools available to them to put together really beautiful pages and that like, you know, serve the purpose of building brand affinity as well as checking all the boxes we need to from a commercial standpoint. So that's like the two lanes that we've thought about it in had the consultant for building tools. Now we've largely just been utilizing those tools to put together all these launches because our, we've just kind of been maxed out I think with all of the launches currently like our focus is almost completely on in market optimizations and then just bringing new things to market. We've got like weekly launches going for the next month or six weeks or something.

[Host 1]

But that's the beauty of, that's the beauty of these like web UX components is you do it once for most, for a lot of things. Right. You do it once. And that's what I've been telling our team the whole year. I'm like not the whole year, but in the last few months like yo, 75% of what we're going to do on the website is from what we did last year and what we've, you know, tested into this year. Right. And then the additional 25% is where we're going to have a lot of fun and like really innovate and kind of elevate the experience. But yeah, that's been my, you know, you create these like repeatable sections on ux and so you're saying you're at a point now where like you feel like for the most part you've checked a lot of those boxes. So you're not doing a ton of. Net new web UX builds right now?

[Host 2]

No, and actually I went through like in March of this year. I was like, look, we are, we are just locking in what we've got. I'm like, we were actually spending too much time developing. Net new elements. We were sending way too much stuff through development. Just like slowed down timelines, created bugs, created inconsistencies. So let's just build the component library. It all lives in figma. They're custom coded elements that live in Shogun so that we know that matches one for one. So now like even someone who's not a designer like me, I can go in and screw around with the component library in figma, drag things around and I'm like, guys, I think this would work well. And like we could lay out these images, highlight these value props. This is like a nice intuitive flow. We've got a couple different buy box options and then designers can make that actually look really good. And then that is just an E comm ops task where we can transition all of those FIGMA components into Shogun components. So from that perspective, we're in a really good spot. We are probably like limited, but from like a basic blocking and tackling of can we put together great launches consistently without like breaking our backs? We're at an infinitely better spot than we've ever been before. So we're in our, we're in our groove there. And then I am getting jealous hearing you guys talk about all the new stuff. We could probably get back into that. I think we've set a good foundation. We could get back into more experimentation.

[Cody]

There's phases though. I, I, I think that's fair. And a good way to think about it is when you've got launches like you, you've got to have your team focused on that. And there's so much that goes into that. You know, as we've talked about, you can't be testing that much Net new. We're definitely not, we're, we're building new stuff for, for these launches we're not necessarily doing like a ton of Evergreen testing as much as I would maybe like us to do, which we'll do more in January when we don't have as many launches. But when you've got like product requests that you have to design to have a new page to able to carry out this launch successfully, like you got to prioritize that over testing a new nav and Deving out a new nav, you know.

[Host 2]

Totally.

[Host 1]

I spent some time with the. I was in Austin a couple weeks ago and I spent some time talking with the Huckberry team a little bit. These guys, I think their director of digital products name is Brandon Cohen. They have a very built out team and a very impressive just ux, I mean front end ux. But also then I was picking his brain about their process and God damn, they're so dialed in from like planning to briefing to like V1 versus future iterations and how they map it over time and work with like their engineers. And they got like four or five devs on their team because they're all custom. But you look at a brand like Huckberry 8000 SKUs, probably across a million different categories like they are, they're a great muse for anyone like trying to understand how to like scale out, you know, web UX in a, in a really beautiful, amazing, high converting way.

[Host 2]

Dude, totally. And that, that's the sort of stuff I like geek out on. I was just talking about it with our E commerce manager because there are examples of us like being in a really good spot. I talked a while back. We like simple stuff, right? Like we had, we created a naming convention for our product types so we can more easily create collections. We have more automated collections and when we're launching new products, the long tail of things that we want updated, get updated, that feeds into like different upsells that we have. It's like, it's great. So there are certain examples of like a back end from a backend product perspective. How are you setting up and naming things and labeling things and how are you using product tags and metafields and things like that to make the front end actually look good in a scalable way. And then there are other examples where we're just like struggling. So it's a, it's an iterative process, dude.

[Host 1]

We're very much closer on the struggle than we are on like the Huckberry excelling end. But, but I, but I see ourselves moving towards the, away from the struggling end of the spectrum which is all I really care about.

[Host 2]

Did you know that platforms over report performance 65% of the time? In a recent study, house found that 82% of incrementality experiments showed that platform reporting was either under reporting or over reporting by more than 25% and 60% of the experiments showed discrepancies of more than 50%. Is why marketers are moving away from platform attribution towards incrementality measurement in order to maximize their growth and efficiency. This is one of the many reasons that three of us, Connor, Cody and I all work with House. So what is House? It's a self serve experimentation platform that allows you to configure regional tests and control experiments to measure incrementality and identify points of diminishing returns. What does that really mean? They tell you, hey, These are the 40 zip codes you need to exclude from this campaign and we can look at what results did you drive in the targeted regions compared to that holdout group? Really awesome. We use it all the time. As an example, we just identified a lot of our non branded ring search and shopping campaigns were not nearly as incremental as Google as was reporting. So we've been growing a ring business over 100% year over year and spending less on Google so we've been able to be more efficient with every dollar spent. House is built with cutting edge methods by PhD economists and data scientists who have built these solutions before at companies like Amazon and Google. The Houzz platform allows you to test all your marketing channels both online and offline, measure the impact across all your sales channels, D2C retail, Amazon and calibrate your platform reporting for incrementality with Houzz. Discover your marketing's true ROI and unlock new growth with Houzz. Go to Hause IO operators spelled H A U S IOO operators to start your incre mentality practice today.

[Host 1]

All right, so we're going to transition into a little Mo Raiders hotline segment of the episode. We are are starting this hotline. We are taking questions from, you know, all the listeners and addressing them live on the podcast to kind of basically, you know, take some of the concepts that we talk about on Ridge, on Hexclad, on Jones Road Beauty and just show that these are like not unique to our brands. Like these are very, you know, all encompassing practices that can be applied to a variety of businesses in a variety of verticals, e commerce and not. And I think this is the first question we're fielding from the Moperators hotline intake form. All right, so we Got our first question from Rohan. Question is, I was wondering your thoughts on advertising, a service based business overall and translating everything you've learned from e commerce, direct response to service based businesses and how you would strategize that, keeping it broad to try to help other people in the audience. Opposed to my exact slash, my client's exact business model. If you can expand on ad creative attribution channels, et cetera. So is he saying, I think he.

[Host 2]

Is a roofing company and it's B2B in the sense that he's trying to do roofing for businesses.

[Host 1]

I see, I see. Okay, Connor, Cody, either of you want to, you want to kick this one off? Any, any thoughts?

[Host 2]

I'll take it first. I'll take a pass at it. One is, I mean I think actually I have two, two quick thoughts here. One is you just have to figure out what you want to optimize for, right? And I think that's really tricky with like higher ticket items, longer consideration periods. Like, like I think if you just show up to meta, let's say meta should work for you and if you show up to meta, it's hard to say, hey, let's just optimize for people, you know, getting $10,000 roofing services or something. So you have to know what to optimize for, whether that's leads or some sort of like content that you're getting people to download. So setting up those custom conversions, optimizing for something that's scalable and then you also have to back into. Because I've done this before, I was, I many years ago was working with a delivery service who was trying to acquire drivers. So we had to optimize for drivers to sign up that were interested and we had to track those people through the funnel of whether they were qualified. So we had to by channel figure out, well, who was, who was not only driving signups at the most effective rate, but who was driving qualified enough signups that became drivers at a cost effective rate. So I think that all becomes really interesting. So just setting up custom conversion so you can optimize for something that is way further up funnel than truly signing up for a roofing service and then having whether it's, you know, HubSpot or something else so you could track them through the sales funnel and ensure that you're driving high quality leads. That would be one my second one. I kind of teased it earlier but like thinking about it from a content perspective. The founder of Jolie was on Nick Sharma's podcast a couple weeks ago. Fantastic episode. And that's obviously like a direct to consumer business, but they had this really cool content funnel where people would sign up to figure out how dirty their water was. Jolie is a filtered showerhead. It's like a, it's like an infamous case study at this point. And I think figuring out how you can offer value to business owners, understanding the way, you know, their buildings are becoming run down over time could be really valuable and something to learn from that. And then maybe you're optimizing for people downloading that white paper or whatever it is. So those are my two thoughts. Like providing value further up funnel and then optimizing for that event and then tracking him through the sales process.

[Host 1]

So offer, offer, offer. That offer is going to look super, super different. But like it's offer, right? It's, it's like how do you provide value to the owner of a roofing company versus how do you provide offer to a consumer? Like obviously that'll be very different totally. But the actual fundamentals are there. I. Your first point I fully agree on and passionate about. I've been chatting a bunch with my friend Caleb Polly, who owns a really interesting business called Cubby Beds. Direct to consumer beds for parents that have children with autism because they have to have like super sensory controlled beds. These are like 8,000, 10,000, $12,000 beds covered by insurance. My big thing that I've been chatting with him about, like, you need to figure out like how to attach your leads to your like best, most qualified event. Because I'm, I, I basically was telling him, like, I think you should be creating a lot more like long form educational videos.

[Host 2]

Totally.

[Host 1]

And I'm also hypothesizing that your cost per lead is going to be actually a lot higher than these like static ads you're running right now. But I would also guess that the overall CPA or conversion rate or whatever is going to be much better even though the cost per lead is way higher on this like long form video. And I'm like, you like, if you can figure out how to attach like, or track that person all the way to like their doctor's appointment or whatever that like most qualified event is like you are gonna have so many creative insights and really be able to optimize well. Because I, I told him I'm straight up, I'm like, I think this cost per lead metric you're currently optimizing to 4 is probably a vanity metric that is probably more misleading than anything else, which is basically what you're saying, like being able to track the lead submission to some sort of qualified event over time. And yeah, there's probably some sort of CRM tooling to do that, right?

[Host 2]

Totally. Yeah, that's exactly what we found. And we had to like export it all and you'd have UTMs from their profile and HubSpot and like track all. It was like, it was kind of a nightmare but I think that's what you'd have to do. And then to your point like you figure out offer, you figure out tracking and then you run that just like a directing consumer business. I also think you would probably get some awesome roofing content. Like I, I feel like it's one of those things that could crush on TikTok or something, you know.

[Host 1]

Yeah, get, go hire, go hire like a college creator to kind of be the face of your Instagram page or something like that.

[Host 2]

Yeah, could be cool. Those like time lapses and things like that. Or you get the viral videos of people like scrubbing horse hooves. Like I feel like you get the, you get the roofing version of that.

[Host 1]

Yeah. And the, and the bar is much lower and like you know, consumer is where all the innovations happening and like E commerce and marketing. It feels like go look at these unsexy businesses where like you can still drive growth with marketing. You go and do something like that, like that's really punchy and top of mind and you're gonna stand out even more. The one I've been thinking about recently a lot is Nutter Butter. I don't know if you guys follow the Nutter Butter Tick Tock page but they are doing some just like way out there content and like getting a bit of a revival from it. It's kind of funny how they stand out because they're like this legacy CPG food treat and now they're doing this very Gen Z like kind of out there marketing. So they're just standing out in an insane way. Cody, you got anything you'd add on?

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, I'll add. I agree with you guys. Sounds like you guys got some service lead gen experience. I do too actually used to. That was definitely how I got my start. So definitely offers like I would like. Honestly I would just read Hormones these books like Alex Hormones books like definitely about offer. I think you can get really creative with the offer of service based businesses especially if it is B2B but also B2C versus like E commerce. Like hey here's a gift with purchase. Here's a discount, here's a bundle like that's kind of all you can do, you can get very creative with offer. I think content around stories, whether it's testimonials, case studies showing the results that you've gotten for people. Again whether that's B2C or B2B is really powerful. Have that in your ads, run that to some type of lead event. Opt in whether that's you know, a gated PDF, right. Whether you know, ebook, whether that is a video, kind of like a vsl. You know, we, we back here used to do like an automated, you know, webinar, have that go to a call, see if you're spending. The challenge is if you're spend not spending that much and it's a local business and you need 50 events per week, you probably have to optimize per lead and then the quality is not going to be great. The math can still back out. And even if the lead quality is not as good, you might just not have enough, enough data if it's, you know, local to optimize for a phone call or a more qualified event like Connor was saying. But if you can definitely go for that, if not, it can, it can totally still work. Um, you've just got it, you just work it. And then the, the most important thing is I would say follow up. And this is kind of, kind of what, what Connor R was saying about you know, these unsexy businesses. Like if you can get leads that's great. You're, you're way above most local or service based businesses. But, but the fortune is made in the follow up and you know there's not, there's only so much we can do in E Com to try to improve, you know, the conversion rate of a welcome flow. I just think it's so much more malleable in services and you can be really aggressive with follow up obviously don't be annoying but get on the phone, call multiple times, have you know, text, get people you know on the phone. So a with the quality of that but also the, you know, the quality of your sales skills over time you can get a lot of alpha because it's one of those things where it's like whoever can spend the most to acquire customer wins. And so if you can convert better on the phone, you know, close more of the appointments you get but also get more leads to actually book a call like you want to dial in that funnel before you really scale. And those would be I think few of the most important things. And then also I don't know if you guys ever did this but like Google search Like you can get oddly specific with landing pages. So like roofer near me and you can just like duplicate a page and unbounce and like create a new. A new. And I don't know if Google still works this way, but it's how we used to do it where it's like you literally just put that headline, whatever is the query in the, in the ad. You just put that headline on the landing page and then you just duplicate it for a different ad group. So it's like you know, roofer near me. A roofer in this town. And you could just have like a different ad group running for each town with a different landing page. It's the same exact page. Just one thing is is different about it. Those always did pretty well as well.

[Host 1]

Cody. The I think the case study, it's a, it's a good call out but like you have to be now everyone's like got a sexy beautiful case study. I actually found that like the case study this is, I'm going back to my college days now but like when I would just put together these like stats in a ugly ass Google Doc and like send that out, my hit rate was like way better than any sort of like highly produced canva designed document which was interesting. I don't know why. It felt more believable I guess. And then I used to have this motto in college when I was like trying to bring on we I was working with these like local tourism companies that the Facebook ad like just worked really well for. And I had this motto is like let me drive. Cause I knew if I could get on a call with them and screen share my Facebook ads manager account and like talk about like show them what I was talking about in real time that I could build my my like expertise with them and my trust with them. Like it was probably an 85% close rate if I could get on a call and I screen shared my Facebook ads manager. I think anytime you can do something like that and actually show a prospect behind the, behind the curtain a little bit. It's not just like the moment you do that, their perception of you is just like some sleazy salesperson is gone. It vanishes immediately because you've just showed them that you're actually technical with whatever service or product that you're offering. And for me I knew if I could get screen sharing of my Facebook ads manager and be like, look, here's all build out the ads. Here's how we can locally target. We can manipulate the budget up or down just kind of things that us three take for granted with our experience. But from you know you selling this to someone that is very foreign it's like oh yeah they actually do know what they're talking about and they're proving it right now. I think to the extent that you can do that with whatever you're selling to another business owner is always going to be a really good like if you can get there like as like a pre benchmark or a pre you know qualifying event that's, that's a good thing to shoot for. Totally cool.

[Host 2]

Boom. Another banger episode.

[Host 1]

Thank you for tuning in to episode 31 of the Marketing Operators podcast. Like I said earlier if you have a question that you would like us to address on the show go through the submission form in the show notes the moderators hotline. We are taking your questions we're answering them live. Thank you again to our sponsors Motion Rich Panel House Impression AI.