E049: How Digital Product Fuels DTC Growth with Connor Dault

Summary

Podcast Title: Marketing Operators
Episode: E049: How Digital Product Fuels DTC Growth with Connor Dault
Release Date: March 4, 2025
Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Special Guest: Connor Dault

---

Introduction

In this special episode of Marketing Operators, the hosts Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, and Cody Plofker welcome Connor Dault as their guest. The episode delves deep into how digital product strategies drive Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) growth, with a particular focus on experiences surrounding Super Bowl advertising and team structuring in digital product roles.

---

Super Bowl Ad Strategies and Insights

Discussion Highlights: The conversation kicks off with a discussion about leveraging major events like the Super Bowl for impactful advertising campaigns. The hosts share their recent experiences with Super Bowl ads, emphasizing the importance of a comprehensive, full-funnel approach rather than isolated, siloed efforts.

Notable Insights:

• Full-Funnel Omnichannel Campaigns:
  Connor McDonald [06:55]:
  "We really kind of are out of this place where we're just trying things in a very siloed one-off way. Some of our biggest performance moments have been through these full-funnel thorough campaigns."

• Lessons from Past Campaigns:
  Connor Dault shares his experience with Quibi's Super Bowl ad strategy, highlighting the challenges of aligning high-impact media buys with product availability and market readiness.

Key Takeaways:

• The necessity of synchronizing advertising efforts across multiple channels to sustain momentum.
• The importance of integrating digital extensions to maximize the impact of high-budget media buys.

---

Building and Structuring Digital Product Teams

Discussion Highlights: The episode transitions into the intricacies of building digital product teams within DTC brands. Connor Dault elaborates on his role as VP of Growth and Digital Product at Caraway, discussing the centralized approach to managing customer-facing and revenue-driving functions.

Notable Insights:

• Centralizing Customer-Facing Functions:
  Connor Dault [38:26]:
  "Jordan was really intentional when I was brought over to Caraway. He wanted everything that's customer-facing and revenue-driving to be centralized to ensure consistency and cohesion across all touchpoints."

• Integrating Growth and Product Management:
  Connor Rowland [39:16]:
  "I feel like when you study growth and how customers engage with different mediums, you develop a perspective on what needs to be done across all interactions with your brand."

Key Takeaways:

• A unified team structure enhances the coherence of the customer journey from discovery to purchase.
• Combining growth strategies with product management fosters a more holistic approach to digital product development.

---

Product Merchandising and Site Navigation

Discussion Highlights: The conversation delves into the challenges of expanding product lines and maintaining an intuitive site navigation system. Both Connors discuss strategies to enhance product discoverability without adding unnecessary friction to the purchasing process.

Notable Insights:

• Balancing Discovery and Conversion:
  Connor Rowland [52:16]:
  "We think about our site in terms of discovery touchpoints and conversion touchpoints, striving to balance ease of navigation with opportunities for product discovery."

• Avoiding Overcomplication:
  Connor McDonald [55:41]:
  "If the revenue per user is going up, we've created an experience that makes it easier for the website visitor to find the products they want."

Key Takeaways:

• Effective product merchandising requires a delicate balance between simplifying navigation and encouraging exploration.
• Continuous testing and optimization are essential to ensure that site changes positively impact key metrics like Revenue Per User (RPU) and Conversion Rates (CVR).

---

Common Mistakes in Digital Product Strategy

Discussion Highlights: The hosts explore common pitfalls that brands encounter when implementing digital product strategies. Connor Dault emphasizes the variability of what works for different brands, cautioning against a one-size-fits-all approach.

Notable Insights:

• Skepticism of Universal Best Practices:
  Connor Rowland [62:22]:
  "There's no such thing as a no-brainer best practice. Your audience, your product, your brand are all so different that you can't assume a rinse-and-repeat approach will work."

• Importance of Testing and Customization:
  Connor Dault [62:12]:
  "We make sure to introduce every little touchpoint as an A/B test because I've seen the flip side of the coin hit so many times."

Key Takeaways:

• Brands must tailor their digital product strategies to their unique audience and product offerings.
• Rigorous testing is crucial to validate assumptions and avoid unintended negative consequences.

---

Inspirational Brands and Best Practices

Discussion Highlights: The Connors share examples of brands that excel in digital product strategies, drawing inspiration from their approaches to site design and user experience.

Notable Insights:

• Simplicity and Functionality:
  Connor Dalt [66:23]:
  "Nectar Mattress is my favorite because it's an incredibly simple site. Every single touchpoint from homepage to PDP to the cart is just so dialed in."

• Effective Navigation and Merchandising:
  Connor McDonald [65:24]:
  "We love how brands like Caraway and Dorf's Avenue handle multiple product categories, making them easily navigable and discoverable."

Key Takeaways:

• Successful brands prioritize simplicity and clarity in their website design to enhance user experience.
• Effective navigation and product categorization are pivotal for managing expansive product lines without overwhelming customers.

---

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

In wrapping up, the hosts and guest reflect on the importance of adapting digital product strategies to align with evolving consumer behaviors and market trends. They emphasize the need for flexibility, continuous learning, and data-driven decision-making to foster sustained DTC growth.

Final Insights:

• Adaptability is Key:
  Connor Rolain [37:23]:
  "It's hard to strike the right balance between maintaining an evergreen business and seizing spontaneous marketing opportunities."

• Future Directions:
  Connor Dault [38:48]:
  "As we scale, it’ll be interesting to see how our split between engineering and CRO strategies evolves."

---

Notable Quotes

1. On Full-Funnel Campaigns:
   Connor McDonald [06:55]:
   "We're past the days of doing something in a siloed way. Full-funnel omnichannel campaigns are driving the biggest impact for us right now."

2. On Centralized Team Structures:
   Connor Dault [38:26]:
   "Centralizing customer-facing and revenue-driving functions ensures consistency and cohesion across all touchpoints."

3. On Merchandising Balance:
   Connor Rowland [52:16]:
   "Finding the right blend between discovery and conversion touchpoints is essential for a seamless customer journey."

4. On Avoiding Best Practice Pitfalls:
   Connor Rowland [62:22]:
   "There's no such thing as a no-brainer best practice. Your audience, your product, your brand are all so different that you can't assume a rinse-and-repeat approach will work."

5. On Inspirational Brand Simplicity:
   Connor Dault [66:23]:
   "Nectar Mattress is my favorite because it's an incredibly simple site. Every single touchpoint from homepage to PDP to the cart is just so dialed in."

---

Conclusion

This episode of Marketing Operators offers invaluable insights into the role of digital product strategies in driving DTC growth. Through candid discussions and real-world examples, the hosts and guest highlight the importance of comprehensive campaign planning, effective team structuring, and adaptive merchandising strategies. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or new to the DTC space, the lessons shared in this episode are sure to inform and inspire your marketing endeavors.

Transcript

[Connor Dalt]

All right, welcome back. Another episode of Marketing Operators. We've got a special one today. It's the. It's the Connor special.

[Connor Rowland]

We.

[Connor Dalt]

We teased it on last week's episode. For those unfamiliar who. Who. For those who aren't chronically on D2C Twitter, it's been a running joke that Connor Dalt of Caraway, Connor Rowland of Hexclyde, and Connor McDonald of Ridge are. Are randomly three pretty decent marketers all sharing the same name. So we figured, what. What better premise for a podcast than this? O'connor Dalt, welcome to the show.

[Connor Rowland]

Good to see you guys. I wonder what convention our moms were at in the 90s that sparked the. The Connor adoption. But it's good to. Good to see you both. And, you know, wanted to say shout out to Cody for new baby. Huh? Hope he's doing all right at home. But the Connors, this is. This is a good take right now.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah. Cody was worried that we would decide that it actually should just be a Conor podcast. We assured him that. No, we. We love him. We're. We're excited to have him back. That this maybe just kind of a quarterly or. Or a biannual Conor Connor Pod might be friend of the pod.

[Connor McDonald]

The.

[Connor Dalt]

Go to strategy.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah.

[Connor Rowland]

Cody honors. It's a nice. It's a nice band name too, so we can workshop it.

[Connor McDonald]

You play any instruments? I don't play any instruments, but I can sing a little. That's. I like that.

[Connor Rowland]

Those turtle shells, that sound really nice. And you hit them.

[Connor Dalt]

That's.

[Connor Rowland]

That's my move.

[Connor McDonald]

All right, all right. We got some. We got some ideas. Some seeds planted here.

[Connor Dalt]

Sick. So. So Connor Dalt, for those unfamiliar, can you give the. The brief background of. Of what you do?

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, yeah. My name's Connor Dalt. Connor number three. Everyone's third favorite. Connor, you pick your name. But, yeah, I'm over at Caraway right now working as VP of Growth and Digital Product. And I'm sure we'll get into what that title means and what that determines in terms of scope. But, yeah, I've been at Caraway for about three years and came up to the agency ranks like both of you guys did. So it's been a. Been a good run selling cookware, just like my boy Connor Olaine here at Hex.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, Fun space to be in.

[Connor Rowland]

Everyone cooks.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah, everyone cooks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to get to it later. But cookware and what you had. You had a. A comment about it being a cook war. You dropped one letter there and it had a completely different meaning. So we're gonna get into it in a bit. Before we get into the episode, I want to thank our sponsors, Motion Pression Rich panel after Sell in the House.

[Cody]

So Motion just sent us their latest research on how our e commerce brands can make incredible meta ads in 2025. I've shared it with my team at Hexclad as this report is basically the jumping off point to guiding our 2025 paid media production roadmap. Motion, as you know, is the creative analytics and research platform used by brands like hexclad, True Classic, Ridge Wallet, Jones Road Beauty, Viori and many, many more. And they actually dug into over $100 million in ad spend, surveyed 500 DTC advertisers, and a deep dive with 12 legendary DTC experts to guide this report. Some of the people that contributed are Dara Denny, Savannah Sanchez, Barry Hot, Nick Sharma, Aaron Orendorf, Sarah Levenger, Joanna Wallace, Shadow Hexclad, Hannah Ho, and Gil Chamofsky. This is an amazing resource to help guide your 2025 paid media production roadmap. So generally a lot of creative strategists, a lot of teams, they come up with a lot of hypotheses about what isn't or is not going to work and then they build ads around it and then they launch it and they use the data to inform whether or not that's working well. What this report allows you to do is instead of starting at ground zero, you're actually able to start at ground level 5 because this report is looking at a bunch of advertisers data and consolidating information about what has and has not performed well in 2024. So as an example, this report concludes that ads are getting longer and longer and longer in 2024. And what does that mean? It means that education is becoming more and more prevalent in ads. There's some very, very natural next steps that you can action on for your brand based on this information. Another finding that generally ads as a whole under index on taking a comedic angle. But some of the top performing ads, 25% of them had some sort of comedic element in 2024. So what does that mean? Maybe you should introduce more humor into your into your paid media creator strategy this year. Maybe you should introduce more long form educational content into your paid media creator strategy this year. This is a great jumping off point. This is a great document to have pulled up as you're working out your production roadmap for 2025. By referencing this report, you're going to have a much better chance of having higher hit rates because you are leaning on 2024 actual data instead of just your gut instinct about what will or will not perform well. So this is a super tangible piece of research. It is based on over $100 million in ad spend and the surveys of 500 DTC advertisers. If you have not read it yet, this is going to be super valuable for you. I highly recommend reading this or having it open as you're building out your 2025 paid media creative production roadmap. It's just going to give you a much better jumping off point than not having a piece of research like this. So if you want to check it out, go to motion app.com forward/creative trends. That is motion app.com forward/creatual-trends.

[Connor Dalt]

Today is February 11th, Tuesday. We're coming off super bowl weekend. So Connor Rowland. The, the. The last episode we had, we broke down the The Playbook. You're 48 hours post airing. What are some of the takeaways?

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, first off, like the most fun live Shopify view I've ever had. That was pretty cool to be like, my brother's in town skiing right now and we had some. We were just hanging out on Sunday at my house with. And I had my computer pulled up and like, what are you doing? So it was fun to. Fun to show them behind the scenes a little bit. I think our work is, I don't know, like, when I tell my mom what I do, she has no clue. So it was kind of cool to like actually be able to like, no, this is, this is like what's happening. And like that happened and you're very aware of like, what that thing is and here's how it's translating into like something for our business. So it's kind of cool to, to be able to make that connection. But yeah, man, it was. It's been good. Like, first off, qualitatively, you know, we're getting really good feedback on, on the, the actual creative that we put out there. You know, obviously there's like a million and one, you know, publishers out there that are, you know, experts on super bowl creative. And I think generally we're getting pretty good feedback and like, rankings of where we stacked up against all the other creative.

[Connor Dalt]

Totally. Yeah. Awesome dude. And, and I was talking to Sean, the CEO of Ridge last night, and we just said it's cool for us too. Like, we get to tell people that our buddy ran a Super bowl ad.

[Connor Rowland]

So it's kind of kind of cool for me, I would say it's not like incredibly cool, but very happy for you. It's good for the DDC space as a whole.

[Connor McDonald]

It's great. It's great for the DTC space. And like also just like home goods category, I think as a whole, you know, there's a lot of people talking of like I saw Oren and Ashwin. The, the language they use was like punching up. I hope this opens up, you know, more. Just thinking around what it means for like a direct to consumer product to like buy a spot like this. I think it went pretty well. It's gone pretty well so far and maybe it's made it more approachable for other brands, I guess. I don't know. I think it's probably generally good for, for our space.

[Connor Dalt]

Totally. Particularly, you know, last week's episode I thought was fantastic. Like hearing there's always an influencer component. You have the commercial, you have the pr, you have the seating. Like it was very well rounded from my perspective. It does sound, I think we're a couple years off from, from dropping, dropping that type of money. But like I'm like, oh yeah, I get it. Like that's, I mean just like massive, massive awareness play.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna, I was gonna add something to that. I can't. Oh. Oh. It's honestly another thing that we're finding and this is not just from the, the super bowl, but honestly stacking like a bunch of initiatives on top of one another over the last like six months. Like we're really kind of out of this, this place where we're kind of doing things or like trying things in a very siloed one off way. Like some of our biggest like moments and like biggest performance moments specifically have been these full funnel thorough campaigns. Like I think generally we're past the days of like doing something in a siloed way or it's like a single ad with a unique angle. It's like no, like these things. Like there's really no reason to do something unless it's full funnel omnichannel. It's thought through across, you know, every touch point because that's clearly what are, what's driving the biggest impact for us right now. It's not really like, you know, this one off ad with a niche angle that is, you know, the only thing that's unique to the, to the activation is that ad. Everything else is just evergreen. Like yeah, you might find a little win, but like it's not worth it unless you're going to do like a very full funnel omnichannel and think about every touch point and like, saw that with the super bowl, you know, we saw that with BFCM and Holiday. We saw that with the sweepstakes. It's totally clear that that's what we need to be thinking about as like full campaigns.

[Connor Dalt]

Totally. Totally. Yeah. So cool. Awesome. So. Oh, last question for you. For you, Hex Connor, on Super bowl, any other like, surprises from the weekend?

[Connor McDonald]

The surprise, I would say in that context is like what we saw performance, you know, Friday, Saturday leading into Super Bowl Sunday. It's not like we. Right. We didn't, we didn't grow our revenue like 3x day over day on Super Bowl Sunday. Which is a, is a good thing because our Friday Saturday performance has been strong. But again, I think that that's all relayed back to the, to the initial strategy we had of like really kicking the campaign off on January 23rd and not waiting until February 9th, actually like launch the entire campaign. I think if we would have waited until Fab 9, we would not have seen anywhere near the revenue and like efficiency performance that we're seeing in February. So, yeah, I guess that's been like a pleasant surprise, you could say.

[Connor Dalt]

Love to hear it. Awesome. Connor Dalt, you have been a part of a Super bowl commercial campaign before.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah. But this was a different era. I think that the way that you guys did it with Hex, I think the, the focus of brands try to be create, you know, continued rippled waves. Right. You make the, the big splash with the, with the spot itself on Sunday, but you need to keep some of the sustained momentum. So you guys pulled, you know, releasing refreshed content and tons of remixes and continuing the story. That's, that's amazing. Right. And I think that maybe a couple of years ago people started to do the pre releases of their spots and that was the initial teaser. So the strategy has been evolving and I think you guys just, you really released one of the Most like incredible V2, V3s of how a Super bowl campaign can play out. Because my take on super bowl is that it's, it's a vanity buy for most brands.

[Connor McDonald]

Right.

[Connor Rowland]

You want to feel really good and legitimize your brand and you're doing it for other marketers and you're trying to make the spot that plays at can, you know. And I think for you guys it was a, it was a very different approach. So. Mad respect. Yeah, we, I was working at a company called Quibi in 2019, 20. Legendary RIP. Incredible. Incredible. Experience there. For those that don't know, Quibi was a short form content app that was trying to basically take the Netflix and TikTok model and slam them together. Didn't work out, but an incredible place and a learning ground for me. And we did run a Super bowl spot. I wasn't part of the creative design or anything like that, but I think what was interesting is that we bought basically any high impact, high reach placement in 2019 that you could have with the amount of money that the company raised. We bought YouTube mastheads, we bought TikTok top views back when those were a thing. And that was the forced autoplay across every single user who was opening the TikTok app. It was basically us and Michael Bloomberg, if anybody remembers his presidential campaign in 2019. So it was, it was Quibi and Michael Bloomberg buying any high reach spot that you could possibly see. And we also had a great ad slot. It was the second commercial right after the. I think the coin toss. It was, you know, right pre game. It was, it was a one of those spots that everybody should be tuned in for. But our experience was different con. I think we, we saw a pretty marginal lift to the website and there's a lot to be said about why that might have been maybe a mismatch between the product itself and the placement and the irony of it being linear tv. But my learnings were that those splashy efforts don't always pay off. And so it's cool to see you guys making it a bit more of a 360 effort. And I think the goal of those efforts should be really the digital extensions. Right. Get the people talking on social. It's the same way that I feel about a lot of offline media buys these days. You can't expect the billboard on Sunset to do the work. But if people are buying the billboard on Sunset and having it shared across socials and extending that reach, that's when it becomes a lot more worthwhile.

[Connor Dalt]

Totally. So I'm actually curious about the, the, the Quibi example. What was your title while you were at Quibi?

[Connor Rowland]

I was a growth manager. So I actually, Olivia Corey, who's a friend of the pod, friend of the guys here, hired me while we were working at Quibi and so we had a brand team that was working on the, you know, the super bowl efforts and our jobs on the digital front, we cut it into a million pieces and plastered it out across YouTube and other channels like that. But you guys all know this too. You can't just make cut downs and push them out across digital channels and expect the same impact. So I would say that, you know, amidst all the other things that we had going on, it wasn't one of the standout efforts that we saw drive the cost efficient reach. I saw Sean do the breakdown on Twitter of what, you know, the CPM the Super bowl could back into. I think that's a, that's a fair breakdown, but you got to think about the quality of those impressions and the effective reach and the audience that you are reaching to make sure it's one that's interested in your brand. You know what I mean? So I think the Quibi example didn't pan out. But, but I think the, the hexclad one seems to. So I'm happy for you guys.

[Connor McDonald]

We'll see. It's still early, you know, I think, well, it's the big win will be, you know, long term impact and just overall raising our baseline revenue. So that's just going to take time to see how that, how that pans out. What, what was your. Did Connor miss the. I think Connor missed your. Your.

[Connor Rowland]

I can't believe that. That's the story of my life. Here is Connor number three.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah. Sorry, did you just do the same thing? Yeah. All right. These guys just throwing around cookware. Cookware. Insider jokes.

[Connor McDonald]

One, one question I'm curious about with the Quibi. Like, you know, I love. I was talking to Connor Mack about this last episode where, you know, we really were thinking a lot about what's that like, perfect balance of brand marketing and performance marketing because we, you know, it is a physical product that you buy. It's not like something that's kind of abstract like insurance or like coinbase, I think was the example I use. So, you know, Quibi kind of somewhere in between the two. Like, what was your KPI at Quibi? Are you looking to get people to like sign up and like ultimately start a subscription? Like, was that, was that your goal at Quibi? And like, was that what you were hoping to see a spike in after that spot aired?

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah. So this is right before the app launched. So that was also a bit of a funky experience. The app hadn't yet been released, so we had a website and what we were aiming for was website traffic and driving email signups that we'd then try to convert into downloads and subscribers once the app had launched. So at this point, the main KPI was generating awareness amongst a target audience. So we had an identified target audience and driving website traffic and driving email lead volume. So all of those had KPIs and efficiency attached to it. So different. Right. We couldn't imagine in our businesses ever trying to sell something that's unavailable. If anything, you got a little bit of a backorder. Maybe you get the prelaunch wait list going for a yet to be dropped product. But this was months in advance of, of the Quibi offering. So it was a playbook and we were, we were bullish on the strategy, obviously. Tons of learnings and if I ever get the chance to run it back on a. On a content app or business, I'd have a lot more insight now. But yeah, it was just a different world versus you guys. Obviously you've got a little bit different opportunities to monetize.

[Connor Dalt]

I was a Quibi user. You. You acquired me back in 2019.

[Connor Rowland]

Let's go. The J. The JLo show.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah, I was doing the. It was Chance the Rapper hosting Punk'd.

[Connor Rowland]

I think that's right. Something like that.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, I should bring that back.

[Connor Rowland]

It was cool. It was cool. Some great, great war stories of Quibi. I think one of my, one of my favorites is Tyler, the creator was in the office and him and I were both going for the candy bowl and I think I took the last like Reese's that was in these big candy bowls that they had at the front of the office. So that's my, that's my claim.

[Connor Dalt]

You big bro him.

[Connor McDonald]

What kind of cash was. Did. This is probably public, so maybe you can share it, maybe not. What kind of money did Quibi raise that they're doing a pre launch super bowl spot. And was it a 30 or a 60? Because that's insane.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was crazy. It was. I think it was a 30. The business raised almost $2 billion. Yeah.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah.

[Connor Rowland]

And it's.

[Connor Dalt]

It was like, it was like a part of the thing. It was like you had Marissa Mayer and then who was the other co founder?

[Connor Rowland]

No, it was Meg Whitman and, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. And Meg was. I'd written a paper on her in college. Right?

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah, yeah.

[Connor Rowland]

Story at eBay and HP. And Jeffrey was obviously a legend of Hollywood working at Disney for so long. So I mean, you could not have found a more excited person to have joined that company. And it was, it was such a cool experience and we learned so much. But yeah, with that much cash. Right. We had, you know, a stated marketing budget of 300 million. The business shut down a couple of months into its existence. But a lot of that had been deployed in our team specifically on the growth side also just you know, such an interesting perspective that Olivia and Juan had brought. It was like, we're going to buy four channels with all of this budget. You don't need to spread yourselves incredibly thin. Google meta, snap, TikTok can basically reach an incredibly high majority of Americans and that's, that's where we spent all of our efforts. And that was, that was a really good, you know, fundamental lesson that has stuck with me today. I'm not always trying to find the next new arbitrage marketing channel, you know, but from a Super bowl perspective it was, it was one of the myriad places that we had spent just an unbelievable amount of money. It like desensitized me to, to how big a number should be on an issued IO. It took me a little while to like come down from that high. When I went to like a more bootstrapped company next, I was like, wait, wait, wait. We're not allowed to buy a $350,000 masthead just because it's a Wednesday and we're feeling like we need to try to drum up some new attention.

[Unnamed Speaker]

So we switched CX software right before Black Friday. Normally wouldn't be the best decision, but we were looking at Rich Panel and it was just so much better than what we were using. Our contract was up and honestly it was, I'm so happy we did. It was the first time ever that we made it through Black Friday and holiday period with no ticket backlog. And I really owe that to Rich Panel. First of all, it's cheaper, it's, it's way less work. We cut our cost compared to what we were paying before by 50%. It's the first AI platform I've seen that's really built with AI in mind. We're not even fully maximizing what we can do with AI yet, so I can't wait to see how much more efficient we can be. But it's really the first one I've seen that's built in this new era of, of commerce and AI tech. It's, you know, already being used by over 2,000 brands like us, like Ridge as well. One thing that's been really cool, we were able to leverage a lot of their automations and routing. So our average response time went way down when we switched them. Our efficiency with AI went way up. We also just implemented their, like their self serve help desk reduced our tickets by 30% without affecting anything. We're able to take care of 60% of those interactions without actually having to route them to a person. So obviously there's financial components to that that have been really helpful. The team is great. I see our team going back and forth with the Rich Panel team all the time in Slack. They all they want feedback, they want feature requests. You're just not going to get that from some of the old legacy players. So it's going to be cheaper. You're going to have better use of AI that everyone's trying to catch up on. The UX is way better. The tagging is better. It has the best analytics suite of any of the six tools I've used. So we're super happy. So if your help desk costs are too high, if you're not thrilled with your outdated software that is, you know, you feel like is robbing you, I highly recommend you switch to Rich Panel. You can reduce cost, reduce ticket volume by 30% and honestly that's pretty conservative. Highly recommend you get a demo and see for yourself. Go to richpanel.com to check it out.

[Connor Dalt]

I want to Quibi is I think a good segue into digital product. But before we get there we have to address the cook war of the, of the super bowl ad.

[Connor Rowland]

One more side, not on the Super Bowl. Before we talk about our clapback, how terrible would you have felt if you were the two respective creative agencies that both made like flying facial hair commercials?

[Connor Dalt]

Oh my goodness, dude, brutal.

[Connor Rowland]

Like that is the risk you run with the super bowl too is you invest, you know, millions of dollars, let alone on the media buy on the production side. And if that, if that idea has any sort of lack of novelty, I mean I can't even tell you the two brands that ran those now. I just know that there was eyebrows and mustaches flying across. Yeah, you know what I mean? Even like the extraterrestrial theme. I feel like that was persistent across a couple of spots and thankfully you guys had a lot of other elements that made yours stand out. But I think that's just, it's such a big, big bet to make on so many fronts. So I think that's why I continue to carry some apprehension into the Super Bowl. But yes, you guys pre releasing it to the fans on Twitter allowed me the lurker to take the spot as soon as I saw it. I'll give, I'll give the little behind the scenes it was a ton of fun and hopefully all in good jest.

[Connor Dalt]

Let's also also briefly describe, just maybe cover what the commercial is like what was xclad premise and then your guys's clap back to that.

[Connor McDonald]

Or do you want to hear it from Connor Connor.

[Connor Dalt]

I want to hear from Connor. Yeah, his interpretation. He watched. He watches the spot.

[Connor Rowland]

Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So I. I saw you guys. I don't know if it was you or Jason that tweeted it out first. And so it was definitely not me. Yeah, I think I might have seen somebody's Twitter or LinkedIn breakdown of, like, here's the master.

[Connor McDonald]

We released it on February 1st, publicly on to. On our YouTube. And then from there, everyone was like, you end up engaging with it.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah. And I hadn't seen all of the influencer seeding and a lot of that geo finder like that. That was incredible. And that's a very cool way to attack modern creepy TikTok world. But, yeah, so we. I saw the video. I watched it through I premise being Gordon in Area 51, discovering alien technology that had been commandeered eight years prior that allowed the creation of a hexclad pan. He's talking about how, you know, I'm cooking my morning eggs on stolen alien technology. You know, lots of funny Gordon quips in there, you know, and then the. The woman says, you know, something about the. The alien commanders here. And it flashes to gobbledygook alien. And then in walks Pete Davidson. Hilarious. And then him and Gordon have a little bit of banter. Right? And then I. I think the. The money line is actually famous. It was. It was really well delivered. And I thought Gordon and. And Pete had a really nice dynamic. I liked the spot. I think that the. The Doctor in me, the Doctor guy, I was like, ooh, not very features and benefits forward. Right. But then I had to back up and think to myself, well, you've gotta make this about something that can be remembered and something that resonates beyond just hexclad. You know, the stuff that's rinsed and repeated across all of your other ad touch points. This is a new audience and a new medium. So, yeah, I sent it around to the team and we spent some time talking about it. We really love to flatter our frenemies. And so lots of takes, but overall everyone was like, wow, that's a great spot. We can see this one standing out. Good for them, making this happen. And that kind of kicked us into gear to be like, all right, well, if they're going to spend all this money, how do we capitalize on the moment? Maybe, you know, catch a little bit of the strays that fly off the table. And so it was fun. So at first, I was just talking with Jordan, the Caraway founder, and we were workshopping Some ideas about how to sort of play off of the Area 51 premise. And the first thing that came to mind for us was just you know, space materials, earth materials. Everybody knows Caraway tries to really lean into the natural non toxic. That's really the play that we're making. And so yeah it, it manifested into an internal Slack channel. We brought a bunch of people into it and we started just brainstorming on different ideas and mediums that we wanted to, to address. So obviously the email and SMS got programmed in times to go out right after the spot dropped and you know the, the focus of our messaging was you know, who cares about extraterrestrial cook with materials made here on Earth. And we released, we made a bunch of ads so we had a ton of fun workshopping a lot of ads and then we have a bunch of non brand search going on your, on your queries right now which was, which was fun and so yeah it's not, it's not like incredibly high spend. I think that it was just a really fun exercise to try to be creative to take advantage of a, of a moment as it's happening without feeling so tongue in cheek. Also we're not trying to be incredibly slanderous of other brands. That's not rmo. We don't do like the, our, our enemy is big Teflon. Right. Like our enemy is not all of the other players in the space and that's not the, that's not the play we make in our advertising.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah, 100%. I mean I, I think one, I love the, the extraterrestrial them Hexcloud ad. Not quite as features and benefits focused but like the takeaway of like oh this is like great technology is like I think a fantastic sort of thing and you guys, you guys can like yeah put yourselves in in opposition to that but in a kind of kosher way. It's like no harm, no foul. It's definitely not mean or hateful in any way. It's just kind of like positioning yourselves against this like Hexclad's cultural moment. So I thought it was, I thought it was well done. I also didn't get the sense it was like your top spender over the weekend or something. Like I, I, I might be, yeah projecting there a little bit but no, yeah more like a thoughtful creative exercise I think is an interesting way to put it.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, it was a good performing SMS and a good performing email, you know like those, yeah it was exciting and just, just like Yukon with assessing it from the qualitative you know, I think it was just, it was a really good exercise for our team. I would not call Caraway as being incredibly culturally on the nose. We're not always trying to be, you know, like skims will immediately release a partnership with the cast from White Lotus. You know, there's, there's brands that are trying to be incredibly online and current and I would, I would call that borderline trendy. Although trendy I think has a little bit of a, of a negative connotation to it. But I don't mean that in this sense. We just don't, I wouldn't say that that's been our core muscle nor our core strategy as a business. And so to try to do that in this moment I thought was just a really good, you know, working out of a muscle for the, for the brand and getting a lot of people excited to try to chime in and come up with cool ideas. Obviously Hexclad, you guys, you know, made the initial splash and we got to ride a little bit of the wave.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, I was curious what, what is like, what is your analysis of, of the, of like the response campaign look like? Are you basically looking at like just relative metrics? Like what's like the UTM based revenue on these email SMS campaigns compared to like other campaigns? Like what's the like one day click row as compared to other ads and just like doing like a comparison on that?

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, pretty much. I mean revpar recipient and some of those efficiency metrics for the sends we did, we did go wide on the email. Right. And under the assumption that so many had been exposed to it so and then sms, same thing. And for the ads, yeah we, we really for the most part from an ads perspective pay attention to percent of spend gobbled up by the account. You know what I mean? Efficiency is just one of those metrics and we all know platforms have their ways about them and you gotta take those numbers with a little bit of a discount. So for us it was kind of just spend and then efficiency of the, the emails and SMS and we're spending very little dollars on those non brand search campaigns. You know, it's not incredibly CPC efficient for us.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, well I thought it was very tastefully done. I, I, I'm opted into Caraway. I got the text and I, I immediately screenshot it to Connor and said Touche. I was, I also like I said I was expecting it to happen so it was just a matter of who was, who was going to go and do the response campaign. But what was I going to ask, oh, did you get from like a engagement standpoint? Because I was, that was the, you know, we were chatting about it a little internally and we said the same thing you did. Right. Like it's definitely, you know, rises, all tides scenario. And obviously there's always going to be people that are like, wait, what does this mean? Did you get any like engagement from like on ads or responses to the email, sms? Because obviously, you know, you guys are, you know, some, at least some of your audience watched the super bowl, saw the spot and it's going to resonate. Obviously there's always, there's going to be another crew that either did watch the super bowl and didn't see the spot or didn't watch the super bowl at all. Did you, have you seen much engagement that was like, what do you, what do you mean by this that it didn't land with?

[Connor Rowland]

I, I don't, I don't know. And I, I think that was partially why we wanted to keep it a little bit more. Not vague. But even in the absence of having seen the hexclad spot, you could reasonably assume that, hey, they're referencing space materials, maybe those are, you know, inferior to earth materials and that's what Caraway is posturing the pans to be made out of. You know, so we knew that it was going to be a little bit more broadly applicable to a general audience. So I haven't like scrolled through the Instagrams that we posted or anything like that to see, but I think that was, that was part of, you know, the design for how we wanted messaging.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, your guys, your guys stuff comes back to your core value prop quickly. So even if they didn't see the like, obviously it makes more sense if they saw the spot and that and, but even if, even if they didn't, it's like, okay, I still understand that this is, you know, eco friendly, non toxic cookware. Great call to action. Now they're on your site and you're kind of Evergreen funnel.

[Connor Rowland]

Yep, yep. You know, we, we always try to distinguish. You make stuff for marketers sometimes and you make stuff for your customers sometimes. Right. Had we, had we leaned in too hard into the spot, to me, that's. You're making it for marketers.

[Connor McDonald]

Right.

[Connor Dalt]

And it would, I mean, look, hey, if you'd gone that route, it's great Twitter fodder, great podcast fodder. So I wouldn't have blamed you.

[Connor Rowland]

It was fun. I couldn't wait to tee up the tweet though. I was just, I was just laughing talking about posting all those things right after we had chatting about it. So it was a good, it was a good time.

[Connor Dalt]

If you're running an ecom brand, you know the game of maximizing AOV and that's exactly what Aftercell does. Over 35,000 E commerce brands including all of us at Marketing operators trust Aftercell to power their upsells and increase their AOV by 30% on average. Their upselling suite works from checkout all the way to the thank you page. Here's a few things that help after sales stand out. One, you've got one click post purchase upsells which we talked about on episode 40 with Shane and 33 with Zack stuck. It's a great way to drive revenue without adding friction or expecting the customer to re enter payment. Two is you get checkout upsells which we use heavily at Ridge and they have the ability to monetize your thank you page with their free Rocked thanks formerly known as network offers some real numbers from after sale users up to 35% increase in conversions and over a 16% average conversion rate. If you're not optimizing your upsells with after sale, you're leaving easy money on the table. Book your free demo today and get after sale for 60 days free. Go to aftercell.com operators to claim the offer. One thing you mentioned which I think is really cool. So we launched a limited edition Super Bowl Champions wallet for the Philadelphia Eagles and we don't do a lot of like there are very few instances where, where we're able to like tap into the zeitgeist at all. Like we, we can like respond to something that people are talking about online. Our sports licensing has been a really cool example of that. It's also really fun getting on with the team at like 10 o'clock or whatever after the game. Like quick Google me Tuttle. In this case World Series was interesting back in October because we knew if the Dodgers won we'd be launching that one. So it was like we were teed up. They'd won three games. It's a four game series. Like it's a little bit more decided Super Bowl. It's like we prepared both two homepages, two emails, two SMS's, like two sets of ads, the whole thing and then seeing how the game plays out. Luckily we was pretty clear by halftime or whatever that that the Eagles were probably going to run away with it. But then we're able to jump all jump on and do that. Do either of you guys have goals to do more of that with your team. Maybe not like product specific in, in, in the case of the super bowl wallet, but like I've been thinking more about how can our marketing better reflect current conversations online or in the zeitgeist. And then one thought that I've had is how it feels to a certain degree like email and SMS should feel more like organic social. We don't treat it that way. We plan like a month in advance. We have no idea what's going to be like the trendy thing three weeks from now. And I'd kind of like to move away from that and give ourselves a flexibility of like better responding and making, you know, more relevant subject lines and concepts and things like that do. Is that, is that a thought or goal for either of you guys?

[Connor McDonald]

Not, not. I mean it's not something we're at. Like we will use email, SMS as a, how do I call it? Like we use it in a non direct response way often. Like, hey, we have this really exciting social post and like we'll send our traffic to it. He we have this fun like AMA going on in our Reddit subreddit. Like, well, let's drive traffic to it. But even that, it's like planned out. We're not doing a ton of stuff that is, you know, responding to something that culturally happens. You know, we're not like, you know, Ryan Reynolds Agency where they like specialize in that stuff. But like, yeah, but like non, like non evergreen seasonal stuff that's more brand oriented. Absolutely.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah. We're, I would say they, we'll do it in service of furthering the Caraway mission and what we think is most important to put out there about our brand. So for example, we're very on the pulse with trends that are happening in terms of PFAS bans happening in certain states and things like that and sort of developments of, of news about toxins and microplastics and all of that stuff. So we, we stay very at the ready to be able to jump on those types of moments. But cultural zeitgeist con, it's, it's a little harder. And that's what I was saying. There's brands like Skims and probably a few others we can think of that I think are so good at anticipating who's going to be the next sort of IT person. And it's so much harder now. Right. We talk a lot at Caraway about the, the evolution of celebrity and the evolution of influence and what that means and look at how actors and movies do their junkets now. They're not going and talking to Vanity Fairs and Hollywood reporters and doing the typical press circuits anymore. They're going on chicken shop and Hot ones doing all these TikTok interviews. And so we talk a lot about just the evolution of, of what it means to be a, you know, a celebrity in, in, in this day and age. And I think that's what we try as a brand to figure out what our play is within that. Right. And that pertains to partnerships and collabs and any sort of branded effort. So I, I would say you can expect to see more of, of that from us. But we're trying to really make sure it's not just, you know, attaching ourselves to maybe celebrities that are seeing a little bit totally diminishing return on Google trends.

[Connor Dalt]

Totally. Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thinking of it, how do you do it in a way that advances the mission is, is obviously like a really nice way of, of stating the goal. We, I've been saying we're hiring a VP of marketing. She starts in a month. But my one, one of my goals for the role is organic social retention. Partnerships should all be collaborating more to like basically I, I think we can be responding to cultural trends better. I think we could be like inserting ourselves into those trends just as much. And then how do we do that across channels? Which is kind of like what you're talking about. If you're a celebrity doing a PR push. It's like, yeah, you're telling this very like you were engaging with the online discourse in a very decentralized way. Timothy Chalamet has been on a crusher.

[Connor Rowland]

Run for the example right now. Right.

[Connor Dalt]

100%.

[Connor Rowland]

He did it. He's going on Theo Bond, he's going on all these pods. That is the modern day way of doing the decentralized attention grabbing.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah. 100 and I think. Yeah. And I would love to encapsulate more of that. And right now we just were, we, we operate in a very like rigid way and I think it could become a little bit more fluid, a little bit more socially native and then doing that across channels. So I think the super bowl is a small example of it because you're forced into it. You've got everybody watching the game. But it reminded me that like, I think there's opportunity for us to adopt that on a more evergreen basis.

[Connor Rowland]

Yep. It's hard to operationalize. So I'm keen to listen to upcoming pods about how that's actually going to be integrated into work streams. And how do you set up focuses and you know, okrs, if that's the, if that's the culture that you guys ride across because it's. You've got an evergreen business to keep afloat as well. Right. And then you know when these moments are going to spark. So it's very hard to strike that. Right. Balance between the two.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah, yeah, 100%. All right, cool. I think we covered the Super Bowl. I want to talk digital product. So Connor Rowland and I are both on similar pages. I think, like building out internal teams. Connor, you guys hired a director of CRO over the last couple months.

[Connor McDonald]

Yep, yep. Director CRO also hired a really talented UX designer, hired a director of E Commerce. So three pretty big hires, all in that digital product world. CRO lead is on my team and then the other two roles are on our head of Websites team. So definitely building that team out more.

[Connor Dalt]

So yeah. So we've had numerous conversations about, like, how do you build out the team, what are the approaches? I was reading a book on product management, all sorts of stuff. So you're one of the few people who has digital product. Vp, VP of growth. I think we got that right. Head of growth, VP of Growth and digital product. I think that's a relatively unpopular title in E commerce. You were, I think, like I said, one of the first people I know who has it. So I'd love to hear you talk about what does your team look like, how do you think about it? Like, what does digital product mean for an E comm brand?

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, and the, the functions are by design. Right. Jordan was really intentional when I was brought over to Caraway. He's like, hey, I sort of want anything that's customer facing and revenue driving to be centralized because the cohesion and balancing priorities and making sure there's consistency of that experience and those journeys from first touch to purchase. The hypothesis is that making sure that that has a through line is going to yield better performance for the business. So yeah, for us, the digital product side of the house is awesome and we spend a ton of time thinking about how to break out the teams. But basically it's managing shopify, managing.com. right. Amazon and retail.com are also influenced by our teams, but we've got a suite of developers, a suite of PMs, and then a suite of designers that all work together to create and execute against a digital roadmap. So for us, that's anything from a product launch onto the site, a campaign that we might be running or features that we want to Sort of release into any touch point across the site. Mixed into that would be the more typical CRO AB testing type approach that it sounds like Connor, you guys just hired out for. So what I, what I've seen in other businesses, right, is you kind of have a growth function that's trying to optimize conversion rate across a funnel and then you've got an engineering or a tech department that sort of sits separate and it becomes a little tough to balance priorities and timelines across those two functions. So we decided to just pull it under one roof. And I think it's worked out really well, dude.

[Connor Dalt]

Amazing. And like, what was, what was the path to that? So Quibi's obviously a technology company and then you were at Sunday Lawn Care at some point. Like, I'd love. What was the general progression into the digital product role?

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, I'm a totally untraditional digital product person. I have no coding experience. I came up through the growth world and just like you guys, I feel like when you, when you come up and you study growth and how customers engage with tons of different mediums and websites and how do they actually, you know, become a purchaser, a customer of your business, you just, you develop a perspective on what needs to be done, no matter where they're interacting with your brand. And that's, that's how I've learned digital product now. So I've certainly been taught a lot more and learned a lot more since then. But yeah, at Quibi, I was on the growth team, but I also ran our braze instance that's a klaviyo, but not running all of retention. So that was super cool and got a little bit of an introduction to how technical stuff can help to interact with things like retention and infuse more dynamic placements into emails and SMS and push notifications. At Sunday we had, this is one of those examples, right? We had an engineering function and we had. No, we sort of had 1pm that was a little bit of a floater, more so managing the big technical feasibility roadmap. But nobody was really thinking about optimizing the funnel. And so Sunday was subscription lawn care. You type in your home address, you get a satellite image of your, your lawn. We sketch out how big, you know, square footage, and then recommend an assortment of products based on your lawn and your environment and humidity levels, things like that. So I kind of took a look and just said, hey, how do we start optimizing all of these steps in the funnel and increase conversion rate? And I'll, I'll be held accountable for those metrics. Hey, can you teach me about back end? I would say to Jesse, our head of engineering and make custom bundles and product assortments. And then obviously on the front end, the good old days of Google optimize, you could do so much just at the CSS layer and swapping in content and copy and things to, to optimize. So that's really how I cut my teeth. And then, you know, at, at Caraway absorbed a much larger team who had way deeper expertise than I did. And my job is to kind of help us set the right context, figure out what we need to focus on and build a roadmap to go execute against it.

[Connor Dalt]

Totally. So one distinction you made that, that I want to ask about executing against the roadmap for the digital product versus you, you almost said it like, versus like CRO or on site testing. So that distinction in your mind, it's.

[Connor Rowland]

Like the parallel you just drew with hiring a VP of marketing to figure out what's trending and how to tap into it and be part of the zeitgeist. You can't always anticipate what's going to sort of expose itself, itself as an opportunity for an A B test. You know what I mean? That's, that's a very, it's a very reactive process in many ways for us and it's a response to data and portions of the funnel that we're seeing. Any lagging effects that we want to try to go address versus the roadmap. It's a really nice mix, I would say, of us trying to introduce performant features that we hypothesize will have a positive impact on. Our core metric is RPS revenue per session. So it's a blend of AOV and cvr. So we're trying to hypothesize and anticipate what new features we want to introduce onto the site paired with, you know, things that we think are just accretive to the brand that we want to have rolled out onto the site. And there are tons of those types of bets and assumptions that we make that we don't even formally test. We just know, hey, we want this portion of the founder story to be included on this page or hey, the way that we're talking about our materials, we want that to be written and put onto the page. And we don't necessarily believe in having to roll that out with an A B test. We just have really strong conviction that it's going to educate consumers and build the Caraway brand in the right Way over the long haul versus a B test. Obviously it's hey, let's go swap this copy. Change the ordering of these things and we do those a lot more on the fly, dude.

[Connor Dalt]

Cool. Yeah, I, I hadn't really thought about it from that perspective. So is how does your time get split between those or your team's time? Is it like 80, 20, 85, 15?

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah, it's, it's tough. It's, you know, think about the, the things that are high leverage on site do end up taking a ton of time. And I know you guys both go through this extensively. Product launches, we're trying to make those more and more bespoke and more and more custom and not just rinse and repeat. The same page template with the exact same compone. We don't want the page that's advertising for food storage to look the exact same as the page that's pushing cookware. The penultimate example of this is Apple, right? Whenever Apple releases a new product, it's this like amazing dynamic scrollable experience so unique to the product that you're, you're viewing. Obviously we're not Apple and don't have thousands of engineers on staff, but we're trying to not fall into the, into the habit of just like making every single page a carbon copy of one another. So that at times does float into you know, 80% plus of our attention. But we're trying to get CRO to become a little bit more of our, of our, you know, we want to, we want to replicate the ability of Google optimize to stand up tests really really quickly. And that's, that's been really hard. I don't know what a B testing tools you guys use but the ease of that tool is just unmatched. And so that's you know, 15 to 30% I would say depending on the week.

[Connor Dalt]

Think I miss Google Optimize so much. That was dude, fantastic free tool and Ogga.

[Connor Rowland]

I don't know what I was doing.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah, those were the, those were the salad days.

[Connor Rowland]

The best. The best.

[Cody]

If you want to hit next level growth you need to move away from correlation based measurement and move towards causality. There is no better way to test your channels. Your levels of diminishing return certain tactics within a channel than using a geo based incre mentality testing tool. And that's exactly what House is.

[Connor McDonald]

That is exactly why all three of us use House.

[Cody]

House is a self serve experimentation platform that allows you to configure regional test and control experiments to measure incrementality and Identify points of diminishing returns. House is really the, it's the most controlled, the most scientifically sound way to do any sort of marketing testing and experimentation. These things are very, very hard to set up on your own. It's rigorous. If you have one little variable messed up all of a sudden your data is not trustworthy. That why House is such a valuable partner. All you need to do is go into your ad ad accounts and add exclusion or exclusion list, run the data or run the test. And not only do they set up.

[Connor McDonald]

The test for you, but they also.

[Cody]

Help you interpret all the results. So they're handling experimentation, design and experiment analysis and also even going as far as helping you make sense of what to do based on that data. And we at hexclad have gotten some insane insights this year from all of our household out tests. So our core strategy this year has been doing channel level holdouts to really see which channels are driving the best and most efficient cost per incremental order. So we've tested YouTube, Meta, Google, PMax, TikTok. We're now testing AppLovin. We are getting a sense of which channels are driving the most incrementally efficient first time orders right now. And the amount of insights that come from that information is insane. It helps us inform where we develop creative. It helps us inform where we scale up budgets in certain channels and bring certain budgets down. Plus we are now able to use our incrementality results and actually plug it right into Prescient. So not only are we getting causal data, that is actual data that we can trust to make decisions off of, but now the media mix models and the probabilistic data from Prescient is even more accurate because they're using actual data to inform their models and the readouts that they're giving us. House is an essential addition to your measurement stack. Go to house IO forward/formators that is spelled h a u s IO operators to start your incrementality practice today.

[Connor Dalt]

Connor. Rolling. How's so you've built out the team hearing Connor Dalt talk about digital product here. Like are you guys. Do you guys very much from that? We are at Ridge way more focused on CRO and that is I think it's like a bias of mine is I love being reactive to data. I actually like there are multiple parts of my life where I love being in the position of being able to react to data. That's where I feel the most confident. Totally bleeds into like how we're prioritizing projects at Ridge how are you guys approaching it? Is it more on the CRO side? Do you have a road map from a digital product perspective that you're building for?

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, it's, I think it's similar. You know, we have a lot of experiences that we are just saying what is the absolute, the best version of this we can build? And we're going to roll that out and we're not going to a B test it. Like our, our Area 51 Big Game Sale is a great example of that. We didn't a B test that experience. We just said, what's the absolute best experience we can give to someone after they saw the super bowl ad or one of the social extensions on site? And, and like, what's the blend of direct response and brand and offer and all that? And we rolled that out and we feel really good about that. Whereas, yeah, then we have our like CRO testing roadmap. And a lot of that is like, we basically build out like, I'll work with our director CRO to build out like a quarterly testing roadmap. And then with the caveat that there's always things that we might pepper in as a reactive, like reactive reasoning, I guess, like our, our upsell is a great example. We, we rolled out this upsell and during Black Friday, the take rate on it wasn't as good as we needed it to be. We were going to be left over with way too much inventory in this product. So we kind of said, hey guys, here's our current take rate. We need to improve it. How can we do that? And then we looked at the take right after we said, all right, we're good with this. Cool. Like, that's a big win. That's reactive. We have other tests that are more generative, not reactive to the data. It's like, hey, I think our product organization can be a lot better in this way. Like, let's go test a new whatever it is, mobile nav. Let's do that in Q2. That's not reactive to data that's generative. And then we're going to measure like revenue per. Per user is the same, you know, CRO testing metric we measure. Great, it worked or it didn't work. Let's, you know, let's roll it out site wide. So it's, it's a good mix of like react. I mean we try to be as generative as possible, but like it's a, it's a. As far as the CRO goes, it's a good mix of generative versus reactive to Data and then yeah, you know we have our you know, big like non CRO digital product initiatives like the like our sales collection pages and like our, our Area 51, you know, Super bowl activation. Same thing with like you know we're in this very much the same boat right now with our, with our product pages and our, in our new product experiences from a digital product perspective. Like we have a lot of new products and new product categories coming out and we want to make sure that we are you know, building custom experiences for all of that, not just trying to kind of square peg round hole it. So yeah, I'd say the three buckets are fairly similar. We do currently split up like you know, engineering slash non CRO oriented experiences from like the CRO kind of strategy. And so far it's worked very well. It'll be interesting to see how it, how it continues to go as we scale. But yeah we, that's, that's one difference between I think Connor, you. It sounds like you are like engineering and front end report into you. So we have that, we have that split out right now.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah. How much time are you guys spending? I feel like the, the other thing to mix in alongside a B testing is product merchandising. Right. The, the assortments that both of you guys offer is, has expanded so extensively so that, that's been another. I keep talking about these muscles that we haven't really had to stretch or flex but that's been another one for Caraway where it's now we have so many more skus and we're thinking about the right places to, to put them on site and the right ways to position them and upsell them. How much of your your guys time and attention goes into merchandising these days?

[Connor Dalt]

We're. That's been a big focus for us. So we went from like, I mean we, we had a funny experience because my first five and a half years at Ridge we had like 12 wallets. We never really launched any new ones. Every find what they were looking for because it was like not that hard. And then over the last two years it's like okay, we launched wedding bands, we launched travel. We have hundreds of wallet sk. And I remember, I think it was after we launched maybe NFL or something. But like we didn't have a search bar on the site and nobody ever asked where the search bar was because you didn't need it. You'd hit the wallets collection, you'd find what you needed. Like you were never like I need to type in what I'm looking for as soon as we launch like three collections, everybody's like, where's our search bar? Like, we like, like, how am I, how am I supposed to find the. The Philadelphia Eagles wallet? So we had to like backtrack a little. Very basic search bar, nested menus, better filtering on collections pages, things like it just functionally, how are we like navigating between categories and products and then within products, silhouettes and colorways and things like that. That's been a big focus. And then, I mean, we just ran a relatively large test for our main wallets collections page because we're also trying to figure out with far more SKUs, we're doing more markdowns as we have to like move through inventory. So then you end up having this like, very large collection that is just doing so many different things at once. And it's like, okay, well what is the optimal way to kind of break that down? How do we continue to drive eyeballs towards our core gunmetal black carbon fiber wallets as well as if you're looking for a promo drive and you could find voodoo green, that's at, you know, 76 bucks. So we've, we've spent a lot of time and, and that probably falls in, from my perspective, more in like the digital product realm where it's like we just have features that we know create a experience. We're not testing all of those. Just become way, way, way, way more of a focus.

[Connor Rowland]

Yeah.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, I would, I would say a lot of our testing is around how do we make all of our categories a lot more discoverable. Like, you know, or that's a big, a big example. Like our, you know, we've really updated our sales collection experience in the last, like, I mean, I think the first time we rolled this out was for BFCM and like just same experience as you, Connor. Like, since I've been involved with hexcloud, we rolled out knives, we rolled out aprons, we rolled out grinder, like pepper and salt grinders, like just so many more categories. So we're thinking about, yeah, like, how do we adjust our navigations? Like, how do we adjust our collection pages? How do we add in homepage modules that make all the categories more discoverable? How do we merchandise a collection page to be able to easily jump around categories and have it be clear, like, why certain products are, you know, included in certain versus others? Yeah, that's probably like a third of of our Director CRO's time is spent on tests specifically addressing like product discoverability, basically.

[Connor Dalt]

And Then Connor, you said you guys aren't, you guys aren't testing a lot of these. If you were to roll out. I guess I, I said, Connor, I'm curious and for, for this answer from either of you guys, how are you analyzing? Well, actually, I'll tell you what we do. So we use intelligence, which I think is a great tool. Does a lot of the, they built out a lot of the Google optimized functionality. But what I really appreciate is they just have like a very simple line item export. So if we're doing a big like site navigation test, like this one, we basically tested breaking out on sale wallets from our main wallets collections page. We're able to export on a line item basis. So order IDs and then all the line items within that from both sides of the test. And then we're like loading that in. I mean we should do it in Excel, but you could theoretically do it in some sort of business analytics tool. And then we're able to see like, we're able to do a basket analysis basically. Like, how are people buying things different? What is benefiting from this? What is, what is like losing percentage of revenue in each side? What is it? When you guys talk about site navigation, what are you guys doing for analysis?

[Connor McDonald]

So we, we have been looking at like the classic AOV CVR revenue per user metrics. Like and just, you know, basically concluding that if the revenue per user is going up, we've created an experience that makes it easier for the, for the website visitor to go find the products they want. Which, which is really interesting. Like we did a, like we did, we adjusted our desktop nav a while back and I still have a ton of qualms with our desktop nav, but overall our AOV went up pretty significantly and revenue per user did too. So I, I kind of concluded that people are building larger cards because they're able to find more products. Products. And then we just adjust our mobile nav. Same thing. We just saw a bump in revenue per user. So we concluded, hey, it's, it's a clearer experience for someone to find whatever they want. But I really, like, I think what you're, what you're saying makes a lot of sense. It's just a, it's a more granular view on it. I should, I want to chat with our team about doing like an added layer on all these product merchandising tests. But so far it's just been, you know, kind of the classic RPU RPS metrics.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah. And that's like, that's, that's the best. Like North Star, obviously, like, if those are going up, you're winning. But like, we've, we've seen some crazy behavior where with certain upsells, we will, we'll just see like direct cannibalization. Like, we saw a weird one. I, I talked about it on the podcast months ago when we ran it last year, but we were doing, we were like, aggressively incentivizing this edition of, of this upsell from Wallet pdps. What we saw was like a decline in ring revenue. There's actually, there's a. There was a type of person who was like, who was. Because this thing, because they were adding this thing at such a high rate, they were like no longer browsing the site. So we saw declines across like everything else. It was like, almost like there was like a net neutral change. But in like the strangest way you could imagine what we were upselling, we sold way more of. And then people, because they had that thing were just like checking out without browsing the rest of the site. So we've seen a lot of, like that. And I think it's also why I love being reactive to the data where we can look at things like that, understand how are people making decisions a little bit better. And then maybe we're. We're coming up with a different test to like, better support the preferred buying behavior.

[Connor Rowland]

It's so interesting. Yeah, the, the bystander effects with merchandising, I think, are so incredibly apparent sometimes, other times obviously a bit more opaque. So that, that's such an interesting behavior. It's. You always want to try to strike. We think about our site in terms of discovery touch points. So picture homepage, nav search, we buck that into discovery and then conversion touch points. And so we try to find the right blend of, you know, how to focus on each of those respective buckets. And, and it is, it is so interesting that sometimes you can smooth out the path to purchase, but it prevents a little bit of that aisle wandering. You know what I mean? And there's a reason IKEA only lets you go one way through the entire store. They want you to see everything. You get some meatballs, you get the picture frames, you get the cabinetry. You know, I think that it's like the TJ Maxx effects too, right? You, you go into TJ Maxx, you have no idea what you're going to stumble across. You just go wander a bunch of aisles and look for a product and a price that you're. You're in favor of. So we are constantly trying to think about the right balance of how much friction to introduce into the buying process. Because, Connor, you know, McDonald, what you just mentioned, if we make it so easy to just go in and buy our cookware set, that's great. And there is an argument to be made that we should make it that way. But we also really want you to go find out that we offer all of these other product categories because I don't know if you guys experienced this. We survey our customers or I anecdotally hear all the time, I had no idea caraway sells X and I'm sitting here, I'm like, how could you possibly have missed this? It is the absolute focus of my team. Every email, every ad, the website experience. We're trying to tell you we sell food storage. How are you not discovering that? But, you know, in service of listening to those customer anecdotes, we try to make sure that you get that cross exposure year.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah, totally.

[Unnamed Speaker]

It's been really cool to see prescient this year just emerge as one of the leading, you know, trusting solutions for brands to measure their media mix. You know, now more than ever, you know, triangulation, having no source of truth, but really it's best practice to have multiple methods to be able to figure out, you know, what is performing. And one of the things that we love in our toolbox is Preschamp. But it's been really cool to see a lot of brands onboarding with them and having a lot of success. Onboarding is super quick. It's, it's the quickest I've ever seen from an mmm. It's been great for our upper funnel channels. Things like TV and YouTube has really given us confidence and it's very hard to validate and test tv. So they have great integrations. We use Tatari for all our TV buying and so it's the best way that we're able to understand how our upper funnel channels are working. We're not on Amazon, but if you're on Amazon, you can get really cool halo sales impacts of Amazon as well as retail channels. So it's awesome. You can forecast revenue and acquisition costs across all your channels, optimize your media mix to improve your profitability. They've always got new channels coming, which is, which is really cool. It's, it's really played a really big role in us scaling and having the confidence to, to increase our spend in things like TV, both both linear and streaming and YouTube as well. We wouldn't be able to do it without them. So there's a reason why Prescient is trusted by Jonesboro Beauty, Hexclad, Holo Socks coterie and over 100 more. And so if you want to be like one of us, like Jones Road, like, like Connor from Hexcloud, check out Prescient, which I highly recommend you should go to prescientai.com operators to book a demo and see for yourself.

[Connor Dalt]

So another question for you. Do you see, do you see are there any like common mistakes you see brands making from a digital product perspective?

[Connor Rowland]

I just, I just feel like there's no such thing as a no brainer best practice. Sure, there's some very obvious foundational things. We have a little bit of an MO this year we're calling it elevate the baseline and we're just trying to make sure we're introducing all the kind of proper e commerce features. We don't have filters on our PLPs right now. We don't have a very good quick shop option. So we're going to introduce a lot of that stuff plus up the search experience, things like that. But, but tons of other tests I'll give, I'll give you an example, right Like I'll see on D2C, Twitter or LinkedIn and it's like find what the most common payment method is for your customers and introduce that on PDPs or mini cart to make it easier to go opt into that payment experience. We see an extremely high percent of customers using shop pay. Sure you both use it all the time. It's incredible. So we'll introduce them on pdp. Either nothing changes or we've even seen negative detractions in terms of basket value and rps. My, my partial hypothesis of that to your point Connor, is that it's so easy to land on a PDP and just go straight to purchase and we actually want multiple items in cart and we might be eliminating that possibility introducing like a shop pay cta. But those are those little things that I really think every brand, even if Conor, Elaine and I do the exact same thing in basically the exact same, you know, industry that we're both in. I just think your audience, your product, your brand, all of these things are so different that you just can't assume a rinse and repeat is going to work across yours. So I'm highly skeptical of anything that I read as best practice and those are those little touch points we do make sure to introduce as a, as an a B test because I've just seen the, the flip side of the Coin hit so many times.

[Connor Dalt]

Totally. Are there any brands that you really take inspo from, man?

[Connor Rowland]

I think just as our product collections have expanded so much, when I arrived at Caribbean, we sold cookware and bakeware and since then we've launched, you know, six, seven, eight new categories. So just like you guys, how do you nest those menus and how do you make each product discoverable? So I'm looking a lot at, you know, brands that I think have distinct categories and try to grow them as such. I think Hawkberry does, does such a great job with balancing content and commerce and especially the way that they've got three P and N1P brands. I think that obviously each of those business lines have their own goals. So you can, you can glean a lot about how they're trying to push and promote. Promote each. Yeah, I think that there's also very simple shopping experiences. I, I go to Vori all the time and I just sometimes I'm like, I can't believe this billion dollar brand has such a simple UX for their website in so many ways. But oftentimes there's so much beauty and simplicity, right? Not overcomplicating the amount of stuff you try to slam into a consumer space. And then I love both of your websites, Connor McDonald. You know the, the toggled upsell and the slider that you guys have on your PDPs for adding air tags and things like that was a huge inspiration for us to, to introduce an upsell experience that's proven hugely successful.

[Connor Dalt]

Oh, all right. For the business helps lead to a win.

[Connor Rowland]

That's right. That's right. So mad respect to you guys and Timothy, you guys over at Hex. I think that the way that you guys are doing these new product drop pages and the shoppable components that you had from the Area 51 page. Super cool. Love the like stock and urgency messaging there too. Like I was messaging you about. So really I'm taking inspiration from, from anyone and everyone.

[Connor Dalt]

Totally, totally, totally. How about you guys, Connor? Yeah, so I talk about Nectar Mattress all the time. Nectar Mattress. Nectar Mattress is my favorite because it's an incredibly simple site. You know, they're massive brand, incredibly simple site. They have like a homepage. It's mostly coming from the mattress which is more or less a single pdp. Like it is, it is as distilled of an experience as you could have and then it is jam packed with features and that's kind of who we stole the like the little toggle upsell from. They have like an Incredibly good one.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah.

[Connor Dalt]

And every single touch point from homepage to PDP to the cart to this, like, interstitial before checkout to the checkout is just like so dialed in. I absolutely love it. And then similar vein, but maybe not so dense is I've been looking at True Classic a lot. They've also expanded incredibly quickly. And then I think they've done a really thoughtful job of getting people between single T shirts and bundles and introducing new categories and things like that. They have a great cart and all the upsells available there. So those are the two that, that I'm constantly looking at. And Caraway. That was before we ever met. I thought that you guys have always had, like, a really great shopping experience.

[Connor Rowland]

Let's go. Appreciate that.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, we, I mean, we're. We, you know, we, we look a lot at brands that have, that require like, basically two levels. Right. Like, if you, if you think about hexclad, it's like, all right, you have hybrid cookware, but then you also have pots, pans, griddles, saute, whatever it is. So that a lot of the brands that we've taken Inspo from are doing that. So, you know, Caraway has been a big inspo for us in the digital product front for a while. You know, I love, like, how you're, you know, you click on. I'm just clicking through the site now. Like, you click on the cookware and then it has that nested. Like, we've taken a lot of Inspo from that. Same with Dorf's Avenue. They're a female apparel brand. Same thing. Like, they have just a ton, a ton of like, nesting in their nav, like level one clothing, loungewear, homeware. You click on clothing, then it's like shop all Valentine's Day core collection, wardrobes, you know, T shirts, blazers. So really looking at how have these, like, multiple level, you know, product categories, like how are they built out both on mobile and desktop. And like, those are generally where we're taking a lot of our, our Inspo from. And then generally those brands also have really good product category merchandising outside of the nav, like homepage elements and filters and all that. So, yeah, Caraway and Durfs have been big ones. I think Made in does a really nice job with their, their product category, merchandising and like breadcrumb. So, yeah, a handful of those brands, but we're always like, you know, Huckberry is another one. Like, you know, we've talked, talked with their digital product lead, Brandon. I believe his name is about some stuff they're doing. Like, they're. They're probably maybe even one of the most robust out there because they have the most insane sku count. Like, you can get everything from like a 300 jacket to. To a ruck pack to a sauna on their site. Like, it's great. It's crazy how many products they have. So we spend a lot of time looking at their site as well.

[Connor Rowland]

And you know what, you know what Huckberry does that we've. We've really, I think, been inspired by. You can tell Huckberry is talking to a person, right? They are very mindful of who their consumer is and building experiences that speak thoughtfully to them. And one thing that our team has done that I've just loved is they're talking to our customers or potential customers and just saying, how are you shopping for the stuff that we sell? And it's been so insightful. Some shop by color. Some know that they want something ceramic. Some just want a new fry pan. So silhouettes, materiality, color sets versus singles. Everybody's kind of got a different preference. And it's been so informative for us to just go have some of these kind of casual, qualitative conversations and then take any of those insights and formulate them into hypotheses and be like, who's this customer? What do they want? You know, it's the mom that's, you know, cooking for her kids three times a week is so different than, you know, Connor McDonald trying to cook a steak three times a week. So we're trying to spend a lot of time distinguishing who our customers are and. And building a site experience that speaks to them. And so much of that, again, like, my gut is just wrong all the time. Right. So I try to go back that by data, quantitatively or qualitatively. And it's been so insanely insightful.

[Connor Dalt]

Awesome. So actually, quickly. Connor, thank you for joining. Where can people find you?

[Connor Rowland]

Usually just chirping at one of you on Twitter. I don't even know what my handle is right now, but I'll be sure to. I think I've gone through a couple of brand evolutions. D2C. Dad was in the mix for a.

[Connor Dalt]

While, but that's good.

[Connor Rowland]

I don't want to like, like, yeah. So, yeah, come. Come hang with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Would love to chat. Always love to chum it up with other people working in D2C and trying to figure out this crazy game called E Commerce.

[Connor Dalt]

Beautiful. Awesome. Thank you for coming. On.

[Connor Rowland]

Great to see you guys. Appreciate it.

[Connor Dalt]

All right, thanks again for listening to another great episode of Marketing Operators, if I do say so myself. Thank you as always to our sponsors, Motion, Pression, Rich, Panel, After Sell, and House. As always. Please, please like share, subscribe if you've got comments for us, tweet at us, et cetera. We appreciate all of that. Helps make for great episodes in the future. So thank you again and we'll talk to you next week.