E057: Inside Tecovas: Reporting, Merchandising & Growing the Brand with CMO Krista Dalton

Summary

Marketing Operators Podcast Episode E057: Inside Tecovas: Reporting, Merchandising & Growing the Brand with CMO Krista Dalton

Release Date: April 29, 2025

In Episode E057 of the Marketing Operators podcast, hosts Connor Rolain, Connor McDonald, and Cody Plofker engage in a comprehensive discussion with Krista Dalton, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Senior Vice President of Digital at Tokovos. The episode delves into Krista's strategic approach to reporting, merchandising, and brand growth, offering valuable insights for marketing professionals and brand managers.

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1. Introduction and Background

The episode kicks off with light-hearted banter among the hosts and Krista Dalton, establishing a friendly rapport. Krista shares her extensive experience in the retail and e-commerce sectors, including her tenure at Target and Overstock, before joining Tokovos, a brand specializing in cowboy boots and western apparel with 36 stores across 22 states.

Notable Quote:

Connor McDonald [00:00]: "Julie, I have a quick question for Krista. Just a friendly thing. I heard you lived in Utah for seven years or something."

2. Krista's Role as CMO

Krista provides an in-depth overview of her responsibilities as CMO at Tokovos. Her role encompasses overseeing all marketing and e-commerce teams, long-range planning, and strategic problem-solving. She emphasizes the importance of setting clear objectives and key results (OKRs) to align her team with the company's growth goals.

Notable Quote:

Krista Dalton [12:11]: "My day starts with an executive KPI dashboard on Monday... I spend about 60% of my week meeting with my team and setting long-term priorities."

3. Reporting Practices and the Role of AI

A significant portion of the conversation focuses on Krista's approach to reporting. She details her meticulous process of preparing weekly reports that analyze performance across various channels using pivot tables and AI-driven tools like Zapier. Krista discusses the balance between leveraging AI for efficiency and maintaining hands-on involvement to ensure data accuracy and contextual understanding.

Notable Quotes:

Krista Dalton [16:34]: "I pull the report for the last trailing two years... Now with AI, I'm building an agent that is doing this for me and just popping out, 'Hey, this is really working for you.'"

Krista Dalton [24:32]: "I'm very worried that like it's, it's part of who I am with, businesses. I know my numbers, I love data... It's gonna be hard to remember the numbers as well."

4. Merchandising Strategy and Category Growth

Krista elaborates on Tokovos' merchandising strategy, emphasizing the importance of aligning new product categories with the brand's core identity. She explains how the company expands its offerings—such as entering the women's boot market and introducing accessories—by ensuring each new product reinforces their commitment to quality and the western lifestyle.

Notable Quote:

Krista Dalton [52:36]: "Every item that adds to it needs to be true to 'Honor the West, Craft Its Future,' which is our vision of who we are."

5. Overcoming Challenges in Product Expansion

The discussion highlights the challenges Tokovos faced when launching new product lines, such as women's boots and additional accessories. Krista shares lessons learned from past missteps, including the unsuccessful launch of watches, and underscores the necessity of understanding customer needs and maintaining brand integrity during expansion.

Notable Quotes:

Krista Dalton [62:14]: "The watches didn't land on a lot of fronts... It's a matter of quality and ensuring that new products align with what our customers expect from us."

Connor McDonald [69:00]: "The EDC space is like that too... Or the watch was like trash by the EDC community because they were like, this is a $400 quartz movement watch from a wallet company."

6. Integrated Marketing and Campaign Strategies

Krista discusses the significance of integrated marketing campaigns in driving brand growth. She emphasizes the need for coordinated efforts across all marketing channels to create cohesive and impactful campaigns that resonate with target audiences.

Notable Quote:

Krista Dalton [85:04]: "Integrated marketing planning and buying is really important. Launching something that doesn't need paid ads? Phenomenal. Bank that money, give it to CRM."

7. The Future of AI in Marketing

Both hosts and Krista explore the evolving role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in marketing. Krista expresses excitement about AI's potential to enhance backend efficiencies without compromising the personal touch in customer interactions. She advocates for leveraging AI to automate routine tasks, allowing her team to focus on strategic initiatives and creative problem-solving.

Notable Quotes:

Krista Dalton [78:25]: "I have never seen someone succeed by disrespecting what it took to get the company where it is today."

Krista Dalton [91:31]: "At checkout, we built an ML to suggest related products, but it created customer confusion. It shows that while AI can process data, the human touch is essential for optimal customer experience."

8. Strategic Priorities and Growth Tactics

Towards the end of the episode, Krista outlines Tokovos' strategic priorities to scale effectively. She highlights four key areas:

1. Role Clarity: Ensuring team members focus on their primary responsibilities without overextension.
2. Integrated Marketing: Coordinating marketing efforts across all channels with a unified calendar.
3. Capitalizing on Key Moments: Focusing resources on impactful opportunities that align with the brand's goals.
4. Omnichannel Expansion: Enhancing the customer experience across both online and offline platforms.

Notable Quote:

Krista Dalton [84:58]: "Role clarity, integrated marketing planning, capitalizing on key moments, and meeting the customer where they are through omnichannel strategies."

9. Closing Thoughts

The episode concludes with Krista emphasizing the importance of continuous learning and adaptation in the rapidly changing marketing landscape. She encourages her team and fellow marketers to embrace AI tools thoughtfully, ensuring they complement rather than replace the essential human elements of strategy and creativity.

Notable Quote:

Krista Dalton [90:25]: "Play with AI, explore what's out there... but always keep the customer experience at the forefront."

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Key Takeaways:

• Balanced AI Integration: Utilize AI for efficiency in reporting and data analysis while maintaining human oversight to ensure contextual accuracy and customer-centric strategies.

• Strategic Merchandising: Expand product lines thoughtfully, ensuring each new category aligns with the brand’s core identity and meets customer needs.

• Integrated Marketing Campaigns: Coordinate efforts across all marketing channels to create cohesive and impactful campaigns that drive brand growth.

• Role Clarity and Team Focus: Clearly define team roles to enhance productivity and focus on strategic objectives without overextending resources.

• Continuous Adaptation: Stay abreast of technological advancements and market trends, adapting strategies to leverage new tools and insights effectively.

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This episode provides a rich exploration of modern marketing strategies, emphasizing the harmonious blend of data-driven decision-making and creative leadership. Krista Dalton's experiences and insights offer valuable lessons for brands aiming to scale effectively while staying true to their core values and customer expectations.

Transcript

[Connor McDonald]

Julie, I have a quick question for Krista. Just a friendly thing. I heard you lived in Utah for seven years or something.

[Krista Dalton]

I did, yeah.

[Connor McDonald]

What part?

[Krista Dalton]

Park City.

[Connor McDonald]

Oh, okay, cool. Awesome. I've been in Salt Lake for the last two years, so I've recently become a Utah maxi. A proponent.

[Krista Dalton]

Love it. You like? I don't think people realize how much Salt Lake is, like, immigrant's not the right word. I don't know. It's full of people who, like, weren't born there.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally.

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah.

[Connor McDonald]

100%. Salt Lake is highly underrated.

[Krista Dalton]

I think this is Mount Tippanoga, actually. I think.

[Connor McDonald]

All right.

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah. So, yeah, we missed it. We loved it. And now I'm sitting here in 85 degree Texas weather.

[Connor McDonald]

Dude, I'll be there tomorrow. No, sorry, Thursday. I'm going out to Austin. Yeah, Little impromptu trip.

[Krista Dalton]

If you want to grab drink, let me know. Also, if you're in Salt Lake, you should go to the City Creek store. We can get you some boots.

[Connor McDonald]

You know, I just talked to. I met Kevin the cto, like, just a couple weeks ago, and I didn't realize you guys had a store in Salt Lake. So I told him I'd go. So I'll definitely. I'll get it on the calendar.

[Krista Dalton]

Meet him at Shop Talk.

[Connor McDonald]

We talked about post script because he met the Postscript guys at Shop Talk, and then they connected us. So a little bit of a roundabout thing.

[Krista Dalton]

I was talking to Kiara.

[Connor McDonald]

Kiara's the best.

[Krista Dalton]

Before this. She's phenomenal.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah.

[Krista Dalton]

So, yeah. Oh, yeah. They sponsor your podcast. I have listened now to 21 episodes. I didn't make it through all of them.

[Cody]

Okay, that's impressive.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, that's. That's. That's solid listenership. Appreciate it.

[Krista Dalton]

You guys never address the fact that all of your names are C names.

[Connor McDonald]

And did you start at episode one?

[Krista Dalton]

No, I didn't.

[Connor McDonald]

Okay.

[Krista Dalton]

Because it took us, like, backwards.

[Connor McDonald]

No, that. And that's the better way to do it, frankly. But we spent the first three or four episodes, like Cody's trying to figure out how to refer to each of the Connors. It was nice.

[Krista Dalton]

So I should have started.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, yeah, we worked through the whole naming thing, but after episode 30 or 40, I think people were tired of hearing about it.

[Krista Dalton]

Okay. Sorry. Yes, that's us.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, perfect. All right, Connor, I'll let you. I'll let you take it from here.

[Cody]

Let's let it rip.

[Connor McDonald]

Cool.

[E]

So if you've been doing scrolling DTC, Twitter, or LinkedIn like me, then it's impossible to escape all the conversations that are happening right now. There's obviously a lot going on with AI image generation, ChatGPT 4.0, but there's also a lot of financial pressure. Tariffs, economic, consumer spending, not looking great. So a lot going on right now at Jones Road. We're definitely feeling, you know, a lot of pressure. Pressure? Well, we try to keep our team very lean. So try to enable our team to get more done with the amount of creative volume that we need to output. You know, to be honest, do as as little hiring as possible. And you know, again, I think there's going to be a lot more teams looking to do that and I really think AI is starting to get at a place where it can really start to automate and take over some workflows that you're seeing. So if you've been wondering about how you can make all of this non stop talk about to seem more practical, I highly recommend you book some time with the team over at Motion. I just got off a call with Reza, their CEO to go over their agents, what they' building. He showed me behind the hood and it's awesome. I honestly think it's going to change how DTC teams are going to use AI and agentic workflows to systemize ad processes. If there's a thing that your team is doing and they have it in their head and it's a process that they're doing, it involves data or creative strategy and they can write down what the steps are. It can be automated with emotion agents. So you might have seen their release of the expert agents which are the AR workflows created by some of the world's best creative strategists. People like Barry Hot, Dara, Denny Marella Crespi, Alex Cooper, on and on. These are the AI agents that analyze your own Facebook ad data right inside Motion. And they can, they can help you understand like Jess Backman's where in the funnel you're probably putting your spend and have an opportunity what iterations you can make. Is your creative diverse enough? There's some customer research stuff, it's just awesome. But, but these are all again super specific, built on your own data. But Motion has a lot more on their AI product roadmap that we've been lucky enough to get a sneak peek of. So whether you're a seven, eight or nine figure brand and you want an edge on this stuff, I high recommend you go book a call with their team so you can get a private tour of what's coming next with their AI. You can get a first look at their next batch of expert agents and also see how they're going to help brands like Jones Road, Hexclad and Ridge to automate a lot of the creative processes with their AI agents. Also, if you mention you came from here, the marketing operators podcast, you'll get 50% off your first month and it's all monthly contracts, so very little risk. They won't make you sign an annual thing. I'm excited. I think you'll be excited. Go to motionapp.com and again mention the marketing operator sent you.

[Krista Dalton]

Foreign.

[Cody]

We have another Marketing operators episode, episode 57. Based on the pre call banter, I think that Connor McDonald and maybe myself might, might end up being cowboy boot wearers by the end of this call. Which, you know, I throw them on every now and again. It's not the. I wouldn't, I wouldn't hate that. But Krista, welcome to the show. We're excited to have you here.

[Krista Dalton]

Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

[Cody]

Yeah, we got Cody's. Cody's gone today. Cody's not feeling well but I think I'm confident you'll hold down the for so got a jam packed episode. I'm really excited to dig into like kind of what strategies and tactics that you're really focused on and you have the team marching towards right now. I think it's going to be really fun to dig into that. Before we do that, I think we need to give the, the good people of dtc, Ecom, Twitter what they really want to know which is are you a manual bids person or a lowest cost person over at Taco. What's, what's the, what's the paid social ad account looking like these.

[Krista Dalton]

I actually knew this was your icebreaker. So I asked my team, I was like, guys, we need this to be a consensus. Where are we going? And the immediate response was so passionate about lowest bid. They just never found something more efficient. The testing parameters and what we're able to do with the breadth of creative that we have is unparalleled and strong opinions. So I'm voting with my team.

[Connor McDonald]

All right, perfect. Well, that's a wrap on episode 57. Thank you so much, Kristen.

[Cody]

We'll call it there. We'll call it there. I'm not surprised you said that. We've had the same experience. I bet we share maybe somewhat of a similar AOV and it's always been so hard for us to get volume through manual bids and I think it has something to do with the average order value of Our product. So I wonder if it's something similar with Yalls account.

[Krista Dalton]

I would bet because I was I over prepare for these things. So as you can tell I like looked up Hexclad and I was like tell them like what is this? And I might have a set on the way to my house. I think 399 looked like it was about your price point. So excited to talk to someone who's kind of in that range.

[Cody]

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Our hero products, the 12 piece set. But yeah, six piece sets number two and then you know, as you can imagine we got a bunch of people coming in and buying the one off so it blends somewhere in between those two but sweet.

[Krista Dalton]

Well, a high wedding season spike. Now I'm like picking your brand like hi podcast. I'm taking over actually.

[Cody]

Actually not as much as you would think. I mean we're super. We're super gifting at the end of the year. Q1 is also very big for us and then may but I think that's more so related just like our offer period and how we kind of merchandise our big moments during the year. We don't necessarily see like that like I don't know when would you say wedding season is like summer and early fall?

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah.

[Cody]

Yeah. I mean nothing really that I could pinpoint around that. We are making pushes though on the wedding registee affiliate game. Like that's a big, A big priority for our team and I think that's actually one of our less tapped into levers. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there.

[Connor McDonald]

Is wedding season important for to covas it's so.

[Krista Dalton]

It's so interesting. Yes. But the ads that explicitly play to it are a total fail.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally.

[Krista Dalton]

So.

[Cody]

Oh really?

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah. So if we're like, oh bride this is for you or groom, this is for you. Those don't work. But day in and day out people say oh, I bought this for all my groomsmen. I bought this for my wedding. This is what I'm wearing to the wedding. But the ads that cater to that less so I think because the need state is so narrow that it's not like oh here's an ad. I do have that wedding. Like you're actively thinking about what you're going to wear to it. And so it's a need we fulfill but not one that marketing really plays up because it just doesn't work that well.

[Cody]

Just takes care of itself.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, we have the exact same experience. The wallets are like super popular with groomsmen. We do like bulk Engraving stuff like that comes in all the time. But like scaling the acquisition of that customer is like we've had zero success with.

[Krista Dalton]

Isn't that actually the fun part for us is we really enjoy our in store experiences. So like you can rent out the store for your bachelorette party or groom's party and we'll. We do branding so you can brand it with the day of the wedding or your groomsman's initials. It can do a cr like your hat but like with a cattle brand on the boot. And the groomsman will give those away to the. To all his groomsmen, so. Or the groom. Well, but it's. It's been really fun to watch people find a way to personalize it.

[Cody]

That's awesome. So people are really renting out a whole store for bridal or grooms party.

[Krista Dalton]

Oh yeah. Well, we have free drinks.

[Connor McDonald]

Right. So I just learned this. Yeah, I. I want to be at the Tokova store for. Oh, you don't. Not a city.

[Cody]

You live in Utah.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah. Not Salt Lake City, Utah.

[Cody]

Wrong place.

[Connor McDonald]

Fair enough. I'll have to hit the Austin one this weekend.

[Krista Dalton]

You should. It's SoCo. It's so fun and it's during the weekends. There's a line out the door. It's called Boot Alley. There's other boot sellers on there and it's just like a very fun energy. So yeah, you should absolutely check it out.

[Cody]

Amazing. You guys have a bar in your store. Is that the setup every store except.

[Krista Dalton]

For Salt Lake City. Because of licensing reasons in Utah, you're not allowed to pour alcohol in front of any area where a child can see you. So I found this out from like a random person that I met at Chili's. They had to create entire Chili's like new floor pads so that the bar was hidden away with walls all around it for the only footprint like that. And it's in Utah because they had to stop the pouring. And I might be wrong about that because now that I say it so confidently like the law. But that's what people told me.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, 100%. That's exactly what it is.

[Cody]

This is. I'm writing notes how to do experiential. Put a bar in your owned retail store. That's. That's brilliant. I love it.

[Krista Dalton]

That cheap.

[Cody]

I can imagine.

[Krista Dalton]

We're actually in the determining whether or not it should be alcohol cost should go into our CAC calculation and I'm arguing for yes, I think so. We're going to talk it through.

[Cody]

I think that. I think that's the that's the most fully baked cost so I think that makes sense. Amazing.

[Krista Dalton]

It acquires a single customer that ranch water. We need to make sure that it's accounted for.

[Cody]

Yep, exactly. Exactly. Cool. Well let's get into it. Before we do that we're going to thank the sponsors. Our premier sponsor motion prescient after style rich panel in house tools that everyone here. Well I don't know about you Krista but at least everyone me, Connor and Cody use every day and we're very thankful for your sponsors sponsorship. All right, let's get into it. So Krista, the first question I wanted to ask you so to cova is like has become you know a very well known brand across the US Distribution across DTC owned retail and third party retail. You're the cmo. Very curious. Like what is, what is the CMO with that type of business like spending their day to day doing. How would you describe your role and just kind of what what the day in day out looks like.

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah, thanks. I should have introduced myself. Hi, I'm Krista Dalton. I work for a company called Tokovis. We sell cowboy boots and western apparel and accessories as we go. We have 36 stores across 22 states right now and are 10 years old. We're celebrating our 10th year this year and as you said I am the CMO and the SVP of digital. So the teams reporting to me include all marketing and then E Com including. I spend a lot of time with E Comm long range planning and my day, my average day starts with an executive KPI dashboard on Monday. Typically it's looking at a lot of reports. It's so funny because Sunday night I prep for about four hours for the week which I'd feel bad about but I've seen this podcast enough to know that you guys similarly have absolutely no work life balance. So I'm feeling fine. I prep for the week and just make sure I have all my numbers. And then with AI now I pull all my reports, we use Zapier and they consolidate into key takeaways. I go in and I dig into the reports that have anomalous ups or downs. I check roas by each channel, kind of set out my priorities for the week and then about 60% of my week is meeting with my team and making sure like in group meetings. And then once a month I have my OKR meeting with the team. That's about two hours long. But a lot of my time is spent solving problems, dealing with one off issues and then setting long term priorities I've probably spent 20 hours in the last week working on long range plan with the finance team and with my internal team. So it varies, but a lot of it has to do with like leading the team, setting strategy and yeah. Checking goals.

[Cody]

So is your. In terms of like the time you're spending, like what I'm taking away from that is you're not actually spending a ton of time working on like the, the projects that are being executed on right now. I would imagine you're spending a lot of time. Well, let me step back for a second. Are your okrs on a quarterly tempo?

[Krista Dalton]

Yes, ish. We do a full company check in quarterly and we do that with marketing. But the goals can be anywhere from two years to one year. The objectives, the overarching ones, and then the goals underneath them. The krs are typically quarterly. So we can see progress against, so we can see leading indicators.

[Cody]

Got it. Okay. So you're basically spending, I don't know, however long it takes you to like set those, those okrs. But after that you're kind of like, you know, you're aligned on the strategy, your team's with you, they agree what the things to do are. You have the goal set for everyone. You're kind of getting out of the way, letting the team execute and then problem solving, slash, collaborating around the way along the way. Is that kind of like what the, what the one on one cadences or the team meeting cadences? Just like collaborating on those things that you've set at the beginning of the quarter, the beginning of the year or halfway through the year?

[Krista Dalton]

Yes. Yeah, it's a good description. The only caveat I would make is I don't set the KPIs. I actually ask my team to and it's a collaborative. They come up with them and sometimes I push them and sometimes I'm like, is this really realistic? But at the end of the day, part of the goal is to check in with them and say what's on your plate? Are you still working towards these things? What are you doing that's not going towards those goals and helping them say no is probably one of the biggest things I have to do as a leader is, hey guys, this is not important, say no. Like, stop working on this. And then the other half of my job is communicating what the team's working on to both my peers who are the other C suites. So chief merchandising officer, retail officer, legal tech, and obviously the CEO. And so a lot of it is like the distillation of the work Communicating it. Making sure my team gets credit. Not credit, that's not a fair way to put it. Making sure my team gets recognition for what they're doing and how hard they're working.

[Connor McDonald]

Can I ask another quick question that I would love to hear more about? Is the report that you're reviewing Sunday, like what time period is at the previous week and then like what are some of those key KPIs that AI is like drawing the takeaways from?

[Krista Dalton]

This is such a good question and actually I would love your guys advice on this. I was going to submit it to your new submit a question thing, the hotline. So the the way that I've done I'm going to talk about it pre AI because my question has to do with like how much of an old man I'm being versus how forward thinking I need to be. But I would pull the report for the last the trailing two years. So the past like 700 days I turned it into a pivot table. It looks at by channel roas spend visits, new customer acquisition, gross sales, net sales returns and then the channels there's about 15 of them. We break down CRM into back in stocks and then regular campaign ads and things like that. And I look for anomalous trends and I put it into a pivot table that then tells me year over year how are we doing and how are we trending year to date. So like if something spiked or didn't I I typically know why. But I also have to ask my team for context like hey, what happened? And sometimes they're like oh, last year we released for instance this week we released this really wonderful dusty pink limited edition exotic women's boot. That's the comp year over year. And so checking that calendarization and things like that. And then also like hey, your ROAS dropped. Oh right. We've launched this new campaign and those are things I should know. But I really feel grounded when I know the data. And so yeah, I check trend. I do it by month, I do it by quarter and year over year which sounds like a lot to do every week but it helps kind of ground me. And then now with AI, I'm building an agent that is doing this for me and just popping out, hey, this is really working for you. Or like hey, you should look into your socials are popping like why? And I loved it the first week I did it where I'm like oh my gosh, look it agreed with me because that's what I'm looking for is validation. But I find Myself missing kind of like putting my hands in the numbers. And I'm trying to decide if. And I'm still trying to adapt to the AI cause it's faster, it's easier. It frees my time up to do other things. Hallucinations are still a thing, so I still have to watch it really closely. But I don't know. Taking myself completely out of, like, turning it into a pivot and making it into the numbers and playing with it and looking for those things that I can identify are weird. Even if maybe the AI doesn't. I'm. I'm, I'm gonna miss that part if AI fully took this over.

[Connor McDonald]

Oh, I totally. I totally agree with you. You know, I've heard some people say the one. It sounds like even the, the pivot table workflow sounds like super efficient. I've heard other people argue for manually inputting the numbers every day because that's how close to the numbers they want to be that I, I don't believe in at all. I'm like, you're not, I don't think you're tracking enough if you're like manually placing them in the spreadsheet every day.

[Krista Dalton]

So you're gonna start like, graying out at some point with excel face.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, 100%. So I think it's a nice balance. I'm, I'm totally with you. I have a similar workflow of that is like, pretty involved. Every Monday, I spend putting together like a retrospective on the previous week, starting from like a super high level. Just like, what's year over year growth. And then we're looking by geo, by category, by channel, across all these different dimensions. That's all top down. And then at the same time, the retention team or the, you know, acquisition team or the search team are putting together reports. It's more bottoms up, where I might say, hey, our EDC business was up last week 15%. We're actually more efficient. Why is that? And now the, the paid social reporting can help explain that. So a very similar process. Maybe it's a little bit more of a. I don't have access to pull, or at least I don't go through the process of pulling all that data myself. But it's more of a team effort, but exact same sort of outcome, which I think is really valuable.

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah. You know, it's so funny you mentioned that, because the report is. That's the main report that I do on Sunday because that's my, like, ground to myself. Target got me into that when I was at Target for nine years because they shifted their work week or their reporting week. So it was Sunday to Saturday. So everybody did their reporting typically at least Sunday night, which was actually really helpful. But it was also like 20 years ago. So.

[Connor McDonald]

Oh, I'm. I'm really passionate that Sunday through Saturday is the best way to measure weeks. So I'm on. I'm on target team here.

[Krista Dalton]

Well, right. But I haven't got. I haven't changed that this coming but. But that. So I look at by MSA across the country as well. Like hey, did we pop somewhere? Did we not? I tend to find the regional stuff is better to look at in a larger swath like monthly or quarterly because sometimes weekly stuff, you know, Morgan Wallen was in town, so there was a concert. So it's like it pops. And that's good to know but like not as much for strategy setting for the whole time. So yeah, I spliced it also by E Comm and then I looked by product. Cause I don't know how many products you guys have. I think we have about the same, but I have about, I have a few hundred and so I want to know like, hey, did something fall off a cliff? Did something pop? Why? I don't want to be the Saratoga people who are just blindsided. Yeah, see I listen to you guys.

[Unknown]

We have zero customer support ticket backlog right now, which is awesome. And it's all because we switched to Rich panel at the start of Q4. Q1 is usually when we're absolutely drowning in customer support tickets from Black Friday and holiday season, but right now we have none. So was it risky switching our tech stack right before peak season? Sure, but I couldn't be happier with the decision. Since switching to Rich panel, we've gone from overwhelmed to having an empty inbox, which is the place we want to be. Here are three of my favorite things with Richmondt so far. Number one, if you know me, you know I, I love saving costs. So we save costs on the actual software by 50% right away. Much better deal. We also I, I love it. The features. We have better features, better support. I see our team going back and forth with Rich panel. Even the CEO Amit is in there all the time. Given our team support building out new features for us, Immediate impact. The analytics are great as the. You know, the automations are amazing. The AI social media moderator as well, you name it. There's just been so many features that have we've been able to add on to either reduce our tickets or increase our efficiency. Which is the name of the game. Second thing is we've actually had 1.26 million in revenue generated from our CX team in the last four months, literally turning 6 from a cost center to a profit center. And third is getting early access to all their new features that are being released, like updated analytics, dashboard, a bunch of AI stuff, AI Social media manager, you name it. It's been super helpful for us. You probably have a backlog of meta ad comments if you're one of the operators and spending heavily. And that's where I love the AI social media manager. You're able to set everything up, automate it. It's able to learn from your best agents, your best replies. People think it's, it's a human, it's amazing and it's allowing us just to get back to everybody, offer a better customer experience, answer questions to get our ads performing better. So I love it. If you want to join the 2000 plus, 7, 8 and 9 figure brands that switch to rich to save money, save time and keep your customer service team happy, I highly recommend it. We switched at a really important time and they came through for us. So if you want to slash your customer support expenses by at least 30% overnight while reducing tickets, go to richpanel.comdemo to book a call and learn more. That's richpanel.comdemo.

[Cody]

So are you worried, Krista, that if you were to automate all of it that it wouldn't like, like because you. All right, so you use this word called. You said grounding. Right. Which I, I fully resonate with that because like when you, when you feel like you know where the data is and like how you're pacing to the monthly target, how you're pacing year over year, it's like that kind of tells you if, slash. When you need to maybe go like address something immediately versus if you just need to stay the course and continue on like the long term plan you've built out. So is your, is your worry that if it's all automated that it's like just not going to register with you the same way as it would if you're like putting in like you're manipulating it on your own a little bit?

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah, I think that's a really good distillation of it. I'm very worried that like it's, it's part of who I am with, with businesses. I know my numbers, I, I love data and, and you can challenge me on a lot of my ideas and we can kind of hash it out, but it's going to be based in numbers. And I know the numbers in my head and when I just get the outputs of what the AI thinks I should look at, I don't remember the numbers as well. I don't remember the comp. And I can't spit it off the way I can when I do the stuff myself. And it's not always four hours, by the way. That's typically when I see an anomaly. Like this is like an hour of work on Sunday just to make sure when my team comes in and says, oh, this is what we're seeing, I'm not blindsided and I know what to ask and I can kind of guide them towards sometimes what I know or I can ask the question that I need to ask.

[Cody]

Okay, and do you have your team contributing to that report on a, On a weekly basis? Yeah, like, and like, what is. So are you also getting like channel level reports from all your channel leads on a weekly basis to contribute to like the, maybe the more executive summaries type stuff that you're pulling?

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah, I actually fully outsource that to my head of paid. She has to work with all of the channels to combine into a single email that she sends to myself and all of the executive team and summarize. She starts it with a bottom line up front, one paragraph that says, this is what we're seeing. Main cause is this, this is what we're doing about it. And then underneath is here's some channel level, here's our top items. We add pictures because people love pictures of product. And then we go channel by channel all the way down. And typically it's against okrs. Hey, we're on track for this one. This one fell off. We're meeting about it and here's where we're going. And that helps make sure. And she sends that to the entire C suite, all of her peers, all of marketing and all of E Comm. So that everybody can understand, hey, what are the key things? And she makes sure everybody's on the same page. I purposefully don't do that myself, number one, because I think it's good for peers to have the expectation to discuss this with each other. And I want to see where they prioritize. And if I have questions or if I see something, then it's probably a coaching opportunity of a gap between what they care about, what I care about.

[Cody]

I love it. Wow, that's, that's very robust weekly reporting. I love it. I mean, we're doing, we're doing something similar. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say to that. It is. I mean I like, I like it though and I like that, that level of like rigor that you hold your team accountable to and how you, you know, you're taking this data first approach to finding problems versus the ad is feel like our ads aren't hi fi enough or whatever. The thing is that, you know, you get from the, the CEO who's super far removed from the business that like I used to hear all the time in my agency days. I'm like, come on, like you're giving me some sort of feedback here that is just couldn't be more gut, visceral feeling and not rooted in the data at all. But we don't do, we do like the channel level monthly like a very robust whole on channel report along with like the executive summary. And that's looking at like the previous month or the previous quarter depending on the time, like the month that it follows after. And then we're doing like the executive report, you know, month to date, period over period and year over year every month, which is like kind of same as you like it grounds me and how we're pacing and if I like need to go put out a fire anywhere or go give like some feedback on how much we are or aren't spending or how much we are not pushing in a certain category. But I like that level of detail you guys go into every single week.

[Krista Dalton]

Well, you know what's interesting about it and what you say. And boy, like, boy have I had those conversations where I get texts at like 5am actually not at my current company. Thank you. But at my last one my CEO would be like, I got this paid ad on this site. Why? And I'm like, I don't know how to explain algorithms better to you. And that sounds so rude to say out loud. But it's like I didn't pick that one for you. We didn't bid on it for you. And he's like, well how much are you spending on it? And I'm like, well there's a bidding cap and it's working so it's showing more. He's like, why? Why would you choose this one? I'm like, I didn't. And it was just so I'm very thankful to be past that. But yeah, the one thing I would say is the, the email replaces a WBR we. What I have found in the past WBRs is sometimes they get too large because a lot of the company feels like they're being left out. So the meeting grows no matter how small you want it to be. Especially because if you're at a small company where they're very used to transparency. And then once you hit that tipping point, probably when you reach a hundred, a hundred million dollars, suddenly you're not so much a startup and you need to build to be something bigger and people want to be part of it. So it just keeps growing. But it became a grilling session and everybody spent too much time prepping.

[Cody]

Yep.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Krista Dalton]

Like, their whole Monday was like, gotta be prepped so I can answer all the questions that are gonna be thrown at me versus being able to have a point of view to say, this is the key story, put it in an email and go do work to drive it towards the larger goals.

[Cody]

That's. That's honestly what we were really, really worried about. And that's ultimately why we decided to make the channel review a monthly one as opposed to a weekly one, because I was worried that we were going to be pulling the report for the sake of pulling the report, and that a weekly look is just a little bit too granular to measure any major channel trends. I mean, we still have, you know, all the teams still have their. Their level of a weekly report. That's just not. It's just not part of this, like, more coordinated report that we do on a monthly basis. So that is kind of our hedge against if anything's really wrong, it's going to show up there and it's going to get bubbled up. Like, if CPMs triple overnight, it's going to get bubbled up in that report. But that's exactly the reason, Krista, we were like, we should do this monthly because I think it's going to lead to some false precision and, like, not enough focus on the work that's actually driving these numbers. Like, I don't want the entire thing every single Monday for the entire day on. On.

[Krista Dalton]

Totally. I want you to go coordinate cross functionally. I don't want you to. Yeah, it's. It's so true. And the other thing is that, like, I can look at my stuff, but typically the cascading failures, that's such a. Okay, whatever. So I'm going to describe it, but, like, the moments when it's like, oh, my bidding went off the rails. It's typically siloed into one channel and that channel owner's gonna catch it.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Krista Dalton]

Like, they don't need a WBR to be like, oh, oh, I have overspent by seven times. I should go look at this. Like, they're gonna go look at it.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. And that, I think that, that, I mean, that's also built into your, like, you know, these being a data driven org, I think just compounds and every, like, it comes through in every single and to the point where, you know, your team knows to also have that approach in every single thing they do and every single kind of like standard check in they have. So it totally bubbles up. And those things rarely get missed when it has that big of an impact on the business.

[Krista Dalton]

The thing I found. Have you guys had a. Okay. Have you taken over for a team? I didn't realize how data driven I was until, like my third or fourth time as a manager. I think my team came to me and we were six months in and she came and she had this great one on one where she's like, this happened. Here's the results. The risk is this. And I fixed it. I was like, this is wonderful. Thank you. And she goes, oh, it was really easy to figure you out. You want to know, like, scale, give a comparative and then like, give the data and then the fix. And I'm like, yes, these are all the things that I want. Thank you. Because before she even giving me the whole story and like, and then I was driving to work and I had a feeling that my ad wasn't working. And then my mom told me that, you know, and I'm like, I don't. And then she's like, no, no, you just care about the end result. I'm like, yes, yes. Very sorry, but yes.

[Cody]

Yeah, I've definitely had that in. You know, every once in a while, like, talk, you know, talk to founders and like, hey, do you mind, like, giving me some advice? And, you know, you start to ask some poking questions and you just, you know, not every certain founders are like very brand people or they're very much product people and there's nothing wrong with that. But, you know, often a brand and a product person is not someone that like, really knows their business from a super robust financial perspective. So those things have kind of come through a little bit. Not necessarily from like a team that I, like, came into and was like, all right, now I'm internal here and we have to like, shift this culture as much as it's just been like, oh, okay, you don't, you don't track. Like, you don't know what your 12 month LTV is and exactly. Okay, maybe you just need to find someone that, that will track that and knows how to manipulate it well.

[Krista Dalton]

And though you need. And sorry, Connor, I think you're returning this, but I have to add this. I have never seen someone succeed by disrespecting what it took to get the company where it is today. That founder, what they created, what they built is incredible. And you have to have respect for that. And you can't throw it away, you can't disregard it and you shouldn't. And the team learned behaviors that you need to add to rather than like strip out is typically how I see.

[Cody]

It go down totally. And I mean Connor, you probably have this experience from your background, but I, I remember when I was at the, at the agency that I was at and I was towards the end of it, like I knew my path was to go in house somewhere. I very specifically had it in my head that I will not go anywhere that does not have a founder, a president or some executive that really, that I will report into that is a finance leader. Because I've just, you know, I beat my head against the wall trying to like, like talk like unit economics and, and financial trend and data trends with a founder that maybe doesn't get that but also didn't put the person in like you know, like, like at Hexclad, Danny Whiner's our co founder. Amazing product in brand person. He's not, he doesn't have a finance background. I think he's the first person to tell you that. But he put someone in place. Jason, who that's, that's his bread and butter and like it's either got to be the person or put the person in place. And I think it's hard in our role at a very like a data driven e comm brand to like operate successfully in a, in a company that doesn't have that person.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, I would totally agree. What I've said about our fan founder Daniel is that one of the reasons it's, it's been so easy to work with him for eight years now is he just, he changes his opinion with new information which I think is like, like surprisingly unique in founders which like I would just, I couldn't be at a brand for eight years where I'm, I'm, what I'm doing is dictated by his gut feel like I like this, I don't like this. I have no reason other than that's how I feel about it could not have been here for you know, the much better part of a decade if that were the case. So I think there's just certain attributes and leaders that like attract good talent and can retain good talent.

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah. And to be honest with you the part that I always joke that people never think I'm gonna out of all of, like, you know how you have work buddies? My buddies always end up kind of being the finance guy and the tech guy. Tech guy makes sense, right? It's my. I'm E. Comm. We gotta be on the same page, speak the same language, prioritize the same things. Otherwise it's just gonna be not a great relationship. So that's probably less of a surprise. But the finance guy typically is the guy who I'm like, I have a million ideas. And he's like, me, 99 of them aren't going to work. I'm like, that's really helpful. Thank you. Now I can focus on these five and let's go. And so the practical balance of like the idea person with somebody who's willing to say, hey, that doesn't make sense is a pretty good work mix.

[Connor McDonald]

Absolutely. That's the secret sauce.

[Cody]

So take takeaway is if you're a marketing leader at a brand, you need to be buddies with with the finance lead, hey, they're the one giving you your budget. You need to be buddies with the engineering lead. Hey, they're the one that can help make all your wacky digital product ideas come to life. That is. That is wisdom.

[Krista Dalton]

Well, it's so true. And then like with the budget stuff, if you. Because I. I keep track of the budget. That's a huge part of my life as well. Like, hey, where can I can't I. And picking up the phone and calling the CFO and saying, hey, I really think that we can do this if I can spend this. And it's not. It's speaking his language. It's saying, I understand profitability, I understand fixed cost, I understand the bottom line. And then coupling that with. I have to be honest with you, who I think is one of the greatest creative minds, maybe in retail, as my VP of creatives. And his mind is. Is building beautiful things and beautiful, unique, on trend, cut through the noise images that bring the west to life, like, in a way that he can articulate wonderfully. And empowering him means that he should never have to look at his own budget. He's like, this is gonna cost about this. And I'm like, great, I'll go find you the budget. And that can be my burden to bear. And it's not a burden. It's like, I love that my job, he doesn't it. So getting the team in place too, that supplements my skill set. It makes everything easier as well.

[Cody]

Yeah. And it's the and it's the awareness to keep that VP of I forget the role creative maybe in his own as you know their zone of genius right? Like you don't want that person being bogged down with something that you know makes them sweat and shiver and whatever. Like you want them to go make amazing things. That's I love that.

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[Krista Dalton]

I have a question for both of you because your product is really different than mine. So when I was at Target, I did plus size women's clothing and maternity wear and books and all of apparel. So basically I stuck in apparel for a long time. At Overstock, we were mainly a furniture brand. How much of your brand is like, see yourself in the kitchen with these goods, see yourself in this wallet living a life you want to like. Is it at all fitting into your customer's lifestyle or is it more function that you kind of lean into?

[Cody]

Yeah, we've, we've leaned in super function. I mean if you go into, to our ad accounts, it's, it's very like, here are the things you can do with our product, here are the problems of other products, here's why our product's a solution, here are the value props. That's something we're actually trying to do more of though, is like create that lifestyle content and we have some organic social strategies that I think are going to bring that to life. And it'll be interesting to see like how we can bring that into a paid environment. But right now it's very much like function, outcome, problem, solution, you know, three pans in one. It's the best parts of these three pans without the bad parts of those three pans and like, like, you know, cta, you know, whatever. So very, very much function right now.

[Connor McDonald]

I would say the same thing. I, it depends a little bit on maturity for us. So like our wallet business, the first couple hundred million in revenue was like very much problem and solution. We went the first five and a half years I was here, we like barely launched new colors. We could sell black and gunmetal wallets like all day. It was just like a matter of articulating the problem and solution, doing great performance, marketing and, and scaling that way. One, the wallet business specifically has grown more mature. So now it's more, I wouldn't even call it lifestyle yet, but it's more like fashion oriented. Like the absolute best thing we can do for the wallet business is launch new colors and styles. We launched this like Kintsugi collection that looks, we call it like broken porcelain. Internally it looks like a cracked wallet with like gold oil fill. It's kind of got like the Eastern Asian inspired a little bit. There's this like history of the Kintsugi practice. It's super cool. By far best launch ever. Incredibly incremental. And that is not problem solution at all. It benefits from like people understand the problem solution of the Ridge wallet, but what's actually getting them to convert at that point is the story. So That's a matter of maturity. The way we're thinking about the business more broadly is we've expanded categories. Wallets, wedding bands, luggage, all of those, I think initially are going to be problem and solution oriented, at least. Like our team's really built out around being doctor marketers. So let's build like acquisition machines within each of those. But at the same time, as we expand categories, we need to be like wrapping that in a larger brand mission or that ends up feeling a bit more lifestyle over time. So kind of while we're building out these acquisition engines from a doctor perspective, we're also trying to build out the lifestyle of Ridge and that will also help as we expand into retail and new channels and things like that. How are we carrying through like, like similar values and aesthetics and things like that. So for me, it's a bit of both, I guess, depending on, you know, the, the. The maturity of the. The brand or the category.

[Cody]

And we know you, Krista, from the. This is growth marketing that y'all are very, very lifestyle and like we are now.

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah, yeah, we, we wanted to, like, we purposefully wanted to be. We wanted. We were performance based for a while. We said, hey, we are get your cowboy boots online. We were the first online boot seller. Like, and that was our story. We're like, we're a solution. But now, you know, we talked about, we have bars in our stores. We have associates who know bovine care versus Peruku, care versus exotics. What does it take? How long do you have to condition them? What does an issue with a split seam look like and how do you fix it? And everyone from our associates to our creative needs to feel like, hey, this is a world that you want to be a part of and aspirational in some ways, but achievable. That sounds like every. Yeah, every one of those, like words that you want in marketing. But when you come into Austin next week, we have, we'll have the airport billboard. We actually have that for a year starting next week. And then two different billboards on the way in. And it's a model named Ronnie who is reclining on a chair in a bar. His boots are in the air. He kind of covers our Tonkovis brand, but it's just cool looking. And we have found like, upper funnel has just lit our lower funnel on fire. And it's been so fun to watch because it's every case study that you ever want to see brought to life. Like, Tatari, I think is going to come out with a case study about us from last year. And so it's, it's so it's such a fun place to be. I purposefully so I, I, whatever. Here you get to learn about me. I was at Target for nine years. I was in merchandising, special projects, E Comm and then I went to Overstock because I really wanted e commerce expertise and they were around for 20 years as an E commerce expertise. You learn learn so much about margin, EBITDA, P&L. We had over FIF over 5000 partners and over 9 million items on site. So talk about learning about scale. And a team of less than 600 for a $2 billion business. Like you just had to know it. And then I went to, to Covis which obviously is less than a billion dollars and but I wanted an omnichannel opportunity to build a brand that had a bunch of people who just loved the product. My whole career people are like what do you love about where you work? And I'm always like the people. And at Tacoma was the first time I answered the product and then I went to the people. I still love the people to be clear. But I'm so proud of these boots. And like people say when they walk into our office it smells like leather and it's just smells nice. And so it's been a very, very fun journey in that way to show people something that kind of inspires them.

[Connor McDonald]

I have a, I have a question on this. We have it. Connor put it in the dock here. To is built around the mission to make handcrafted, high quality boots and apparel accessible to all. Is that like the mission of the company? Is that what you guys talk about internally?

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah, yeah. The tag phrase we have which is in a new brand spot that just launched for us on Linear tv. Linear all tv Connecting TV as well, is the west doesn't need more people, but maybe more people need the west and we can bring that to them and it's incredibly important to us. We just launched last week wide calf boots. Take this. You know this is growth marketing. But truly it was a white space opportunity where women, the number one thing that they were frustrated by was they're like my calves are too athletic. I can't, I don't know if this is going to fit or if it's going to look good. So they were wearing booties and they didn't want to commit to the cowboy look. And immediately these wide calf boots caught on and people got them. And so the opportunity to have product that fits and makes everybody feel beautiful and feel confident. So Western confidence. I say beautiful because I was referring to women. But to be honest with you, this is my first male brand. Obviously, Target and to Covid, or Target and Overstock were both, like, 70% women, and we're the opposite here. And it's been really fun to figure out kind of what resonates with men as well. Well, as to learn that, you know, the more you, like, aim for men, women will never be alienated, which is, like, a really fun fact.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Krista Dalton]

When they're like, oh, I also want that.

[Cody]

So I. I think this is a good. A good transition into this, like, this, like, category growth conversation and how you're thinking about the, you know, merchandising of different categories. Because, I mean, you know, to Cova's really scaled on. On the hero product, which is the men's cowboy boots. And now I know you have, like, multiple. Multiple variants of this, but you mentioned. You just mentioned women as this, like, what I presume is a growing category for you guys and probably has a much higher growth rate than your men's cowboy boots just because of the. The scale it's at. And then you mentioned apparel early in the call. So how are you thinking about. And selfishly, I'm curious because we're. I also think about this in terms of knives and hex mills and aprons and. And we're trying to wrap our heads around as we really start to put acquisition money and retention efforts in an increasing amount behind these. Like, how do we think about these categories and the growth potential of each and how we dedicate resources to each and how we measure each and all these different things that you need to, like, cut up your business into smaller business units. And I've learned a lot from Connor about this across EDC and rings and all the cat and luggage. So I want to just, like, take it however you want. But, like, how are you thinking about the category, like, like, growth opportunity? And how do you, like, divvy up the resource and just, like, wrap your head around that and. And what's your approach?

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah, I. I was actually. That was one of the things that when Connor said that, I was like, tell me about how you went to Luggage. Luggage is the one leap that I was like, because for us, it starts with customer. So with the first thing we had to do first, we were talking about founders and our founder. So passion about cowboy boots can, like, literally spot a millimeter difference in a heel at a distance. And our CEO is a shoe guru. Like, it just knows everything about the process, the molds, the Industry. So that's a great basis. And everybody at our company knows protect the hero item. So the Cartwright is our round hoe cowboy boot number one. Day in and day out. Just. You'll see it all over our ads. And we can't disrespect the hero like the, the primary thing that we're known for. We never want people to feel like, oh, well, now they no longer care about men's. They care about women. So we. If you're going to tier out a merchandising strategy, you just have to make sure what is the. What is the primary of who you are and who you're known for. We had every right to enter women's. It. It made sense to us. Customers understood it. Natural extension work. I talked about this with Taylor, but work is a really natural fit too. Like, this is something our customers told us they were interested in. Something that made a ton of sense. We had expertise in it and we could do it apparel a little bit harder. Nut to crack. Because at first we were. We wanted jeans. Because you want jeans that make your boots look good was how we felt. We had the natural reason to go there. And then it turns out you can't just do any jeans. And so our head of merchandising and her team were like, no, we're going to make the best high quality jeans that men love. So I'll tell you, my husband can't walk out of a Tacoma store without a pair of these jeans. Typically he buys like three or four at a time. He's like, nope, they're my size. Gotta go. Like, doesn't try. He's like, nope, these are them. And I'm like, all right. But now we have outfitting and we have the different rights. And so we have. Because we now have established ourselves as the cowboy boot. Now that we're working more and more on Western lifestyle, we're saying, okay, the categories that our customer buys, guys, why should we sell them? And so we have an exotic women's purse that's doing, you know, new to us. It's doing really well for us. But just a bland purse that just looks like any other purse. Why would we sell that? Yeah, because I don't want to get dollars just for dollars. I want it to make sense to our assortment and who we are. And the example I use on this. Sorry, I'm going to just say, but Costco, Kirkland. Kirkland reinforces who Costco is naturally. It fulfills their promise. Everybody knows what they're going to get with it. And it aligns with their business North Star. And that's what I want out of our entire assortment. Every item that adds to it needs to be true to honor the west, craft its future, which is our vision of who we are. So honor what came before. Innovate on it. If we're not innovating on it, it doesn't belong in our assortment. If we're not being thoughtful about why we want the Western United item shouldn't be there. So that's sort of our approach to it. But yeah, we've, we've tested things like candles did really candles and gifting. And we have a tiny boot ornament that if you don't have, even if you're not cowboy boot people, by the end of this call, get an ornament. It's made out of the leftover leather because they're handmade and the leftover leather, the factory workers can make them into these ornaments. We pay them for those directly. And so it's a really great program that goes back to the community where they build the rest of our boots. And it's very hot on Instagram. They have a tiny boot box.

[Connor McDonald]

It sounds adorable. It is.

[Krista Dalton]

I own five.

[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 incrementality testing tool. And that's exactly what House is. That is exactly why all three of us use House. 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's 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 the test for you, but they also 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. 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 insight that come from that information is insane. It helps us inform where we develop creative, it helps us inform where we scale up budgets and 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 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 dot IO operators. To start your incrementality practice today.

[Connor McDonald]

I'd love to talk to a couple things you guys. Let me know if any of these resonate our. I think one of the best things we ever did came from our biggest failure. Well, I say the best things we ever did was our biggest failure because we learned a lot really quickly and that was launching watches end of 2022 I guess, or 2023. The last five years have been a total blur, but it's like our first like new Silhouette basically. We're basically just a wallet brand. We, we go to launch a new Silhouette and we're like so excited. We have this watch that we're coming out with Quartz movement which is like, like the more affordable option. It's priced pretty high because we, we have relatively expensive wallets. We were like, we think we could command a high price point in watches. And then it had like a little feature where you could like switch out the bezel so you could have a different, a couple different colors and things like that. We're talking before the launch and we're like, we're gonna sell out day one. We're gonna take two days. We have like, would have been like $2 million in revenue or something. We were like extremely bullish and we launched to like crickets essentially. It was, it was not good.

[Krista Dalton]

I so much guys. We've all been there.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, totally. And it was, it was just such, such a wake up call and A couple like, like I said, a couple very valuable conversations came from that. I was having a conversation of the founder of everyday carry.com really big everyday carry brand. And I was like, why don't you think watches work? And he goes, well, I don't think Ridge is necessarily an EDC brand. It's like an EDC brand for noobs. And he said that very lovingly. Like, your customers are buying EDC products for the first time. They're not not scrolling the forums getting the very best knife or like caring deeply about the watch features. They are like your standard everyday guy who's like now investing in a wallet for the first time. And that insight alone can inform product so much. So we've said a couple things like what always resonates is small metal items that you carry every day. That's just like pretty simple rule of thumb where if it checks those boxes like, like we could sell quite a bit of it. That's what our customers expect and appreciate us for. The other thing is price point, where I'm like, oh, we actually, we can't look at the margin or the relative price point of our wallets and apply that across categories. We have people who are willing to invest in quality products, but it doesn't translate to being the most premium watch option. So as we've expanded into wedding bands, for instance, or we just came out with a power bank a couple weeks ago, go, we know we can be towards the top, but we're not going to try to be a 25% premium against competitors. We just can't command that. So it's like, so when we think about. I just love how you've phrased it, Chris, about like what your customers expect from you. It is a matter of quality. There's a, there's a matter of like, what products can you sell. There's a matter of what price can you command in those new products. And like really fine tuning that has been extremely valuable. And it's come with some really big misses on our end. And then the last thing that I'll say, and this is why I asked earlier about like the mission of Toba's, because we've adopted this like our mission internally is to create innovative, functional products designed for life, which is like very broad but aspirational.

[Krista Dalton]

Go for it.

[Connor McDonald]

Totally. And it's like, and I think it is a good guiding principle where it's like, there's nothing about price in there, but like the watches don't fit that. Like, if that's what we're Trying to do the watches don't. They're not really designed for life. They're not. Not really functional or innovative power banks for sure. Five in one charging. We've got all this cool stuff, the luggage a lot more functional. We've got this weatherproof feature. We've got this lifetime warranty. It's just like we end up trying to reinforce that mission. And when we can do that, things team seem to succeed a little bit better. So like that, that's been our like big unlock over the last. That's a three or four year learning plan.

[Krista Dalton]

Okay. I love this so much for several reasons. One is I'm consulting with a couple of smaller guys who saw me on Taylor's podcast and like just asked me to talk about their businesses. And one of the things I find is very few of them know. Like, I was like, what are the three key promises that you've made to your customer? And I. And I give them three. I'm like, you can have three. Like if you have one, that's fine. And then if your product doesn't meet that promise promise, why are you expanding into it? And that's the question I keep coming back to with like, if your promise isn't being kept, what? And they're like, oh, well, our customer also buys this. So we want share of wallet. Okay. Selfish. You're not the solution for your customer, then you're not. It would be. It's so funny because again, at Target we had this limited edition or limited time offer so we would partner with, with very famous designers, have a limited offer in like 50 stores. Like, this was an incredibly small amount of our 1800 stores. But the brand heat was there. And it was really to give us access to having the ability to sell something at a price point that didn't necessarily match what the rest of Target was. And it would be more accessible than like buying a ball gown off of a, like a Runway. But it wasn't exactly a normal inline Target thing. And so we needed to find an entry point into it. And if you don't know who you're. You're what your customer wants from you, you're like, well, we can do this because we have the. We. We have the knowledge. Your customer doesn't know that about you. And so I love that you're like small metal things. We can do any of them. You know what I think is like the product I'm like most in retrospect, like whoever thought to put. And it was definitely a dude. I'm sorry, but it Wasn't a beer opener. A beer bottle opener on the bottom of a flip flop.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah.

[Krista Dalton]

Just like, nailed it. I was like, this is the dumbest thing. You have a rock stuck in it. And then it just went gangbuster. And I was like, ah, I misunderstood this customer need, honestly.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah. A great. A great, great tip for marketing guys is if you just put a beel. A beer bottle opener anyway, it becomes like 20% more enticing.

[Krista Dalton]

Put the middle of your golf club or. Or the example of a brand who knows themselves really well. As we're expanding tv, we're expl. We're exploring all, you know, what's out there, man. The Masters knows who they are and they know their worth. The golf tournament, they have, like a set amount of sponsors. They guarantee almost nothing to them. There's a wait list to be one of them. You're welcome if you're chosen. And they deserve it. They earn it. And they do it by being. They don't have cell phones in their course, but it's every detail from the top to the bottom. It's like their marketing is reinforced by the pristine nature of the soil composition that they go into for the greens and the placement and. And the fact that they have people who've been greens keepers for their entire life. And the food they serve is just every bit of detail.

[Connor McDonald]

It's the same. The food they serve has been the same price for, like, 50 years or something.

[Cody]

Right.

[Krista Dalton]

Have you seen the Costco documentary about that guy saying the hardest thing he's ever done is keep the hot dog a dollar fifty?

[Connor McDonald]

Of course. Yeah, yeah. It goes viral like a couple times a year. Yeah.

[Krista Dalton]

As it should.

[Connor McDonald]

100%.

[Cody]

What are they serving at the Masters? I. This is news to me.

[Krista Dalton]

I want to say Pimento sandwiches. I don't know what that means exactly.

[Connor McDonald]

But it sounds on brand. It sounds on brand.

[Krista Dalton]

The Fyre Festival guy was an incredible marketer.

[Connor McDonald]

Absolutely.

[Krista Dalton]

Like, my takeaway after watching both those documentaries, I was like, man, if this guy had actually had a good product, he would have crushed it. He just didn't have the product.

[Cody]

He's out now. He's doing things right. I mean, isn't he?

[Krista Dalton]

Background fuck. Indefinitely delayed, I think, right?

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Krista Dalton]

But you can be a good marketer. But if you. If you're not working a company where you're proud of the product and you know what the product is and you know who you are, it's not going to succeed you. You have to be in line with your merchandising team.

[Cody]

Did you, did you have any. I'm, I'm so curious about your, the roll out of your women's line because I, you know, presumably before you ever sold anything to, to women and this is actually, you know, something we think about a lot because like we are, we're a blacked out theme, we're very masculine feeling and we actually have a, A, a stronger split, men, women, as buyers. And you would think based on our like front end brand. Although I'm sure a lot of it is just like the, the woman of the household is the person who buys the things. And I do wonder if it's like, you know, maybe it is a female doing the transaction, but it maybe is like the guy in the household maybe like driving the transaction just because of we present so masculine. But knowing that you got like, you guys have crossed that chasm and like I think you have like a probably a pretty solid women's line. Like what, what was the approach or like what gave you the confidence to be like, we can sell to women and we don't have to just be a men's brand. Like I'm so curious what that approach was and like when and how that happened.

[Krista Dalton]

It, it was years and years ago and it started with the customers. The customers were coming in and the women were saying, do you have anything for me? And our answer being no, you know, and that's online and in stores, right. So like they're saying to us, hey, I want this item them what you have, and then stepping into it with a classic boot type. And I'll tell you, it's the Annie. Like the Annie is our, it's, it's the calf height, it's, it's just the classic boot. When you think of a cowboy boot for women and making it really well and not saying, hey, we're going to cut any corners. Why should we when we're entering a brand new space? We wanted it to be just as special, just as detailed and just as comfortable. Those are our brand promise. Those three pillars I was talking about, right. Great craftsmanship, comfort from the day and so they don't need to be broken in the way cowboy boots do elsewhere. And then making it available at a price point that was achievable were incredibly important and the customer really naturally came. But previous to me we overcorrected. Oh the way as you said, right. It's a smaller thing and so the growth rate was higher. So we over corrected and said, oh, let's really market to women. And that alienates men. And so Going after that customer explicitly was bad for business. But going after her as a, we have what she wants. We can CRM her to death. We can Instagram her and influence her. And I use the channels that really hit her personally. But for a larger brand, we will be more masculine facing for our stores. We will be, because that's who we are at our heart. And we don't want to alienate that core customer. So when we talk about entering a new space and thinking about the product expansion, we want things that make you look beautiful, that feel comfortable, make you feel confident. And we want to be the store where, if we're your first pair of boots or your 50th pair of boots, you love coming to us. Because it can be intimidating entering into a new space. I can tell you the from luggage to wedding rings is, like, wild to me. I actually opened your site while you were chatting, because I was like, how did I miss this? When I was doing my research? But, like, wedding ring shopping is really intimidating. We had. We had a 29 or 30 return rate on overstock in rings, because men would just buy three different sizes when they were buying it and then return the two that didn't fit their girlfriend or wife, like, and that. It's a really intimidating space. And going into a jewelry store is really intimidating. And that feeling of wanting to shop someplace but not feeling welcome is terrible. So at Tokovis, come on in. We'll get you a koozie and a drink. You can walk around, you can leave without buying anything. No one's gonna be mad at you. You can just enjoy your drink and go. You can enjoy live music and the smell of our leather and come back later and enjoy your boots later. But that is really important to us, to be a place where, no matter your knowledge of the west, our knowledge will supplement you and it won't alienate you.

[Connor McDonald]

Do you have. Do you have. So I don't know if you guys would have this statistic, but what percentage of cowboy boot buyers is it? Their first cowboy boot?

[Krista Dalton]

Overall, pretty low three years ago. A little bit higher in the past year and a half. But for us, less than 30% of our customers are brand new.

[Connor McDonald]

Got it.

[Krista Dalton]

So it is. It is one where, to be honest with you, we had to show people who were pretty protective of their space that we knew what we were talking about, and we had to show them again. Our founder sold these out of the back of his car and went to Mexico, to Leon, where they make cowboy boots and have for hundreds of years. We had to show people we know what we're doing and we know how to do it really well, and we know how to make you something that's going to last dozens of years, if not your whole life. And so breaking into that, that credibility was incredibly important.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, no, and it sounds really difficult. It's kind of like the. The EDC space is like that, too. It's like a much. Probably a much smaller audience, but people really care about the specs of the knife or whatever. And it's like. Or the watch was like trash by the EDC community because they were like, this is a $400 quartz movement watch from a wallet company. They were like. It just didn't land on a lot of fronts. So I think that's. Anyway, yeah, I think that's a really important thing to consider. I was curious. I told you. I talked to Kevin a couple weeks ago, the CTO at Tacova's, and he was trying to pitch me on buying the Dean. And so then I was thinking about it. I'm like, I've been. I've never even considered buying a cowboy boot, but I was like, it's an inviting brand. And that. He was like, the Dean's like a good, almost like, transition boot. He has your first booty. He's like, I think you could pull it off. So it's. It's interesting, especially as you guys continue to grow. I mean, you'll have to be cracking more and more novice cowboy boot wearers.

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah. Nadine has a zip, which is so like.

[Connor McDonald]

It's like a Chelsea boot almost.

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah, it is the. I'll tell you the other thing that I know, my cut. So I was the chief customer officer at Overstock, which was such a great foundational thing after being a merchant, because it really starts with, like, who is your customer? What are they all about? And who do you want them to be and who you aim for and. And what's preventing them from buying with you? And the example I give with COVID is Covid was a game changer because it got. My grandmother turned 100 on Friday last week. She'll be very mad I said that out loud. Let's all pretend she turned 21, but she bought something online in 2020. And we thought that the integration into online shopping was going to take 10 years was what we were kind of predicting for the home market market. And the whole market went from, I think, 18 online over to over 43% in 2021. And so it just exploded, this online space and what we knew At Overstock was the problem we were trying to overcome was people's fear of buying furniture online, buying a mattress, buying a couch, because then you have to return it if it doesn't work. And was that. What. What does that even look like? And so that was a barrier to entry. With Western. It's how to. This is such a funny thing. Men don't know how to style a cowboy boot, but they really don't want to be told, here's how you style something, because that feels alienating to them. So instead we have. We have to find a way to show them a man who's wearing pieces from Tokovis that are easy to mix and match. Not alienating, but also not explicitly saying, style your boots, because that also alienates. So it's been a tricky thing to thread as we've walked through it.

[Cody]

How did you learn that? That was. You know, because I see, like, I'm a big. I've talked about Huckberry a bunch. I think they do so much well, but that is something they do, right? Like, they have, like, here's the fall style guide. I think their customer does want that. Like, how did you learn that? Your customer actually thought that that was like, oh, you don't need to tell me how to dress, like, because that's kind of what the reaction I'm getting in my head. Like, how'd you learn that? Was that just like, were you getting, like, CS tickets of like, I hate that that you're. That you're doing this.

[Krista Dalton]

We weren't. Although now with AI, we do. I have every intention of, like, scrubbing every conversation and transcribing it and getting it all. I'm so excited about what AI is going to unlock for us. But anyway, it was AB testing on paid channels and AB test. So I believe each channel has a different role to play. And so what I hate is when people make a general rule off of a single AB test. Test was also the connected experience. So what we found is when we said, hey, look at your style for rodeo. Less clicks, less conversion, less interest. When we changed it to get rodeo ready, I can't remember the exact wording, doubled the clicks and click through. And so it's actually the word styles that we found women were attached to and men weren't. And so what we needed to do was make it like, like, rodeo ready or something that implied there was an outfit without explicitly saying, like, we will style you.

[Cody]

Yeah. Wow.

[Connor McDonald]

It's like, guys want preparedness.

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah. There was. There was a very. Also, there's A weird thing about a. So I rolled out mannequins at Target. I was part of the team. Anytime I say I did something at Target, understand that there were 50 other people doing it with me. And mannequins were so costly and expensive for stores, but they increased sales. I want to say 53% on the items that were on them because people would see themselves in it. So they were a huge win. And it was completely inspiring. We loved it. So we're like, oh, great, then let's Translate this to Target.com and say you can buy this whole outfit with one click. That failed. Every time I go to a new store or a new e Comm in apparel, everybody's like, well, what if we sold the whole outfit as a bunch? Kindle Never do they want that. Never has that ever worked. In my experience, people love mixing and matching and making it their own and feeling like they created it themselves, even if they're buying the same stuff as 12 other people. And so it's, it's been an interesting journey to figure out channel by channel, because online, the style guide works when you're actually on site, but off site it didn't work. And then in CRM, it just has to run down. Like, you could buy a shirt, you could buy a pant, and they look good together. But we don't say buy these together other, because the explicitness of it is alienating.

[Cody]

And you didn't take. I love that you didn't take a test from a channel that's speaking to people that presumably haven't bought from you yet for the most part, and take that and like, be like, oh, that is just the, the. The rule across the entire mix now, because that would be a huge mistake. Like, chances are once you have acquired someone and they're a fan of the brand, that maybe they're not going to be like, you don't tell me how to dress anymore. Maybe they're gonna be like, actually, now you've gained my trust and I do want you to. To. To help me style this thing. So I think that's, that's a really good takeaway from that. Like, you can't take all these learnings. And like, I think a lot of time you can. I think there's a, a time and place where it's like, hey, this CRO test maybe will apply to paid. Like, we've done some stuff recently, and in terms of how we're, like, messaging the coding on our pan, where it's like, oh, that's a really insightful finding. And it's just like a. A split test between two different ways to verb. Like say something that should spill into paid. But it's like you got to have the, you got to know when, when and when not to like connect that dot versus not connect that dot as.

[Krista Dalton]

Opposed to saying like let's cut the watch. The watch didn't work.

[Cody]

Right. Right.

[Krista Dalton]

But I do think it's. You guys have talked about testing a lot and the two really unique things that I learned about a B testing. One is don't treat it as universal. Don't treat it as a golden goose. Because my. The one thing I find about a B testing is sometimes it can get into the like the, the collective company. I don't even know how to say it. Like rule book. Like an unspoken golden rule. Like, oh no, we a B tested that years ago. Don't we don't do that.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Krista Dalton]

And it's like can we readdress that could do like even an AA test and see if it's still true. And then the other piece is I've a B testing. Unless you're very thoughtful about it, should. It should never be treated as okay, sorry, how am I going to word this channel specific AB testing scares me because the connected experience is how customers experience it, not in a vacuum. And so I am pushing. My paid person is doing a test on landing experience. So she isn't changing her creative, she's changing where it lands. And that's something that we hadn't done before. And I really wanted her to do this because I'd seen success elsewhere where and it's driving great results. But the now she can play with the creative. But now there's two aspects that we need to consider. Okay, when they land from this, what should they land on? When they land from an upper funnel looking should it be different? Should it be. And we've tested landing on the PDP versus on blog pages versus on homepage versus like anywhere. And even like cohort testing within that. Some cohorts are like, just get me to that search page. Just get me here. And so that is the stuff that previous to AI, I think the scalability of actually doing the math on it is what limited us. And now what I'm most excited about is that we. We're using a company right now that does 33 different variants with like 10 different sub variants. And if it wins in every variation, then it becomes a win. But if it only wins in combination with seven others, then we try it in that combination and change up different things with it in it. We could never do that with a human at scale. AI is the only way for that to happen. That's what I love about AI.

[Cody]

I love it. Amazing.

[Unknown]

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[Cody]

All right, so we chatted about like your day to day, how you set goals, like some future planning stuff. A lot of awesome bits on merchandising there. I'm really excited to ask you about more, more related to like the right now as the near bound and like the next six, the rest of the year call it being the far bound. Like what is, what is to Cova's doing strategically and tactically in their growth marketing, like right now and through the end of the year that, that you think is providing like the biggest impact to like you hitting your goals or growing revenue or growing efficiency. Like what are, what are the tack. Like this is the thing I think the people that listen to the show love. Like, what are the tactics that, that y'all are working on right now that the team is working on?

[Connor McDonald]

They're 75 minutes in. They deserve the juicy details.

[Krista Dalton]

I know, I'm so sick. Like, no, no way will my team listen to this. They will, but it'll be fine.

[Cody]

I know there's probably a lot. So if you want to choose like, like two of the three big ones.

[Krista Dalton]

Well, no, to be honest with you, I'm gonna answer it in two different ways and let me know if you want to double click on any of them. But yeah, when I came in as cmo, I set four key strategies in place. I wanted to make sure, because we were at the tipping point, right? We had a lot of people who. I have employee number seven on my team. She has only her first [e-mail]. you know what I mean? Like we have people who grew up at this company and who've been here for the 10 years. And I knew coming in that the company was at a tipping point of growth with, you know, large double digit growth that we needed to set ourselves up to scale. So the four priorities ahead, number one, role clarity in a startup. Pick up a paddle. Do other people's jobs. Like, oh, you don't know how to do that. I'll step in and help. Is really helpful. As you scale, you need to have your expertise and your knowledge in your lane. Be really clear. Not because we don't want people to like feel integrated and work as a team, but because you're not doing your job to 100% if you're also doing three other jobs jobs. So came in and did a lot of role clarity and that really helped with hey, who owns what KPIs. And that helped like the marketing team knowing your job is traffic retail's job is to convert them, get the traffic there and they'll sell them. And they didn't have that clarity before because they felt ownership of the whole company. Number two, integrated marketing. We have a calendar of every channel, what turns on when, why, which products and how. And it sounds really nuanced and detailed and it is. But hey, we are launching something that doesn't need paid ads. Phenomenal. Bank that money, give it to CRM because the repeat customers are the only ones going to buy it and they're going to buy it same day. So that type of integrated marketing planning and buying is really important. And then third is capitalizing on key moments. So saying no to things means we also have to get creative about what we say yes to. So Kelsey Ballerini decided to gift her entire team on the Voice to Kovis Boots. And we were so excited. We're like phenomenal. We'll brand them for you. We'll go for it. We weren't a commercial sponsor of the Voice. We weren't doing any other thing there. But I don't know if. Well, whatever. But like her team, we want to offer, if they win, come into the store and we'll throw a party for you. And so that type of connected moments. And then the last one for me is bulbous. And I say bulbous as an example. Buy online pickup and start omnichannel. You got to meet the customer where they are. So if they're a work world customer, if they're at Howells Western Wear in Michigan, which is a one store family owned, amazing wholesaler that we work with, we want to have them to have the same experience there as they do in any one of our stores or online. But that means we need to be pretty strict about brand guidelines, who we are. And everybody at the company needs to know who we are. So role, clarity, connected experience with marketing, planning, ensuring that moments matter across everyone and making sure that wherever we show up, we meet the customer where they are.

[Cody]

And that. And that infiltrates everything you guys do at. At Tokova's and like spills down.

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah. And so those are my like, those are my like really high level CMO goals. Tactically what I'm most excited about. We're launching some really cool new products that I can't share with you that we have really great go to markets on. We are doing another 12 days of giving. That is great. We're doing a great. There's so many things I can't talk about, so I'm thinking of the things that I can. We're rolling out a couple of a B tests. We work with a company called Evolve AI. They're just our AB test platform and they're phenomenal. They're driving a lot of results, a lot of AOV growth and opening new stores. We're opening New York in early September and pretty excited about breaking into that market, which again traditionally not a western space. So we got to show them some Western courtesy.

[Cody]

Awesome. Well, I love, I think, I think a few things you mentioned. There are something that we've been talking a lot about which is like you gotta create these like large campaigns are really what, what make. And you've actually mentioned this a few times. Like you, you talked about it when you were talking about the, the on site split testing. Like consumers aren't experiencing your brand in a vacuum. They're experiencing the web and the email and the, and the ads and all these different things all at a, at a variety of different points in time. And at least in hexclad in the last year, some of our biggest moments and, and best performance has come from these like super integrated campaigns. Like you know, the sweepstakes are our super bowl campaign. And like this whole like campaign thinking I think is like really where we're trending with everything we do. And if we can't create like a full, full on campaign around it, it's often not worth doing. And that's not to say we shouldn't do like some preliminary testing that then leads into the campaign. That's that we absolutely will and, and do that. But, but like you talked about like the 12 days of giving. You talked about some new product launches. Like I think I, I assume we're going to see like huge campaigns across all your channels to like really maximize that moment. And, and you also talked about like integrated marketing. Right. Which is also kind of like that ethos is basically saying like let's build real robust campaigns around these things. So that's something where it's, it's cool to hear that. That's actually we're trying to think through like what's the more evergreen campaign ification of like I think our competitor Caraway does a really nice job of this actually. They just rolled out this microplastics campaign evergreen moment. Nothing, there's nothing like seasonal about that message. But they had the landing page dial, they had the ad creative dial, the email was dialed, the homepage takeover was dialed. And it's just like it builds this emphasis around this evergreen value prop that their customer clearly cares about. And like that's something I think think we are training to and want to do more of. So it's cool to hear like some of the biggest levers you have are these like robust connected campaigns that are going to like all drive towards this center goal but from a different, you know, every channel is contributing its, its respective piece.

[Krista Dalton]

Yeah, I think trying to do all this what while doing all our creative internally and not driving that team Y and so one of the things I'm also trying to instill in my team that if I could give one piece of advice to every person out there, there it's play with AI, play with what's out there. Because I was in retail in 2013 when frankly people didn't see Amazon coming and it was 2013. And so as a consumer we all saw it coming but they weren't ready and they said oh this is a seismic shift like you haven't seen since 19, I think it was 53 when they launched the first shopping list mall in Minnesota and they're like nothing like this will happen again in your lifetime. And then AI stood up and with all of my vendors I'm saying, listen, I need you to sit down and tell me what your AI plan is because I don't know in a year if you're still going to be the perfect fit for me because what are you doing? How are you innovating? How are you making sure that we're a part of taking advantage of what this is and that's all back end infrastructure like our customers. Customers shouldn't ever care how much AI we have. AI is never going to design a boot for you. It's never going to design my ad campaign, it's never going to choose my copywriting. I say that all really confidently but I just can't see a path for it to because of who we are. But I do think the backend efficiencies that my team can see so that they can spend time creating a B testing, thinking about that customer journey, making sure it's as seamless as possible. And the website should be able to have maybe API calls that call from all the different like I'm not gonna lie to you, I'm not entirely sure CDPs are gonna be a thing of the future because if you have a flat data source, you might be able to get it all from an AI collective collecting it like automatically within the next three months, personalizing your journey across it. That's all stuff that is about to be unlocked for us. And I'm so excited about what it means for this industry. But I don't want my team to go down a rabbit hole of like being the alpha test of everything. They just need to be aware and pulse and learn what they can today so that in a year they're not a dinosaur.

[Cody]

Totally. I mean I'm. We're starting to see it with the tools, right? I mean Motion's doing some really incredible, you know, AI powered tools that are, that are basically automating a lot of these creative workflows that people have or that brands have. A lot of people and a lot of systems built around and they're building these AI agents to like automate that stuff. I'm, I'm really excited about what Klaviyo is building. They're building some, you know, like AI powered, you know, personalized life cycle marketing, you know, based on like consumer behavior and market basket analyses. And I think for brands, like, I mean really all of our brands, honestly, where we have, you know, our hero products and then we're trying to, you know, drive as much LTV as possible. And, and it's impossible for us without some of those data driven, AI driven tools to really know, like at any point in time should I show up with them product A, B or C. So we're actually testing some of that with Klaviyo right now. I'm very excited to see how that'll scale out to the entire business.

[Krista Dalton]

I'm so excited about what they're doing and I also think ML was a huge part of what we did at Overstock. But the thing I learned about ML is bad data and bad data out.

[Cody]

Yep.

[Krista Dalton]

But also where the human exists. So at checkout we built an ML to say, hey, you know, Connor, you bought this, have you thought about this thing? And the idea was easy click ad. So if you're selling a Christmas tree, Christmas skirt, phenomenal. Go so easy. Easy ad. AOV growth, UPT growth, phenomenal. The originally it was built by merchants who literally said, okay, here's what people buy together in this makes sense. And we're like, we can build this better. We have 9 million items. We can do an ML. The ML took all of the data and then the example I always give people is queen mattresses. The suggested purchase with a Queen mattress was another queen mattress. And I went back to the ML team who had built this thing forever, right? And I'm like, hey guys, what is happening? And they showed me and they're like, this is 90% of people who buy a queen mattress. The next thing they buy is a queen mattress. All of the secondary data doesn't matter because 90% is so many. This is the right thing to do. And I had to like talk to them about like what it's doing is creating customer confusion because you're giving them a second price point that's different than the item. They've already chosen another brand in some cases and they're just cycling and not converting because we've now confused them. Suggest a sheet set and they're like, but that's not what they buy. Again, I hear you. And so those are the things that I think we'll still need like a human thumb on the scale or some kind of thought about like, yes, the data directs you, but like keep caching those moments, keep the customer in mind and remember that like as good as the data is and as right as the data is, it doesn't always mean it's the right customer experience. And you need to have a user experience expert, have an eye on things, things.

[Connor McDonald]

I think that's great advice. And it also feels incredibly accurate for the AI tools we have available today, which are like far from perfect. Like I, I talk to a lot of people who are, are still expecting like out of the box ads or something which like, okay, maybe someone can tell me that's like kind of working for them when in reality it's like you, you just need, it's either serving a purpose like further upstream, like in the case of the AI ads. I like it from a concepting perspective. We have our founder, Daniel Will like drop in an idea he had every once in a while. He used to just type it out. Now he just puts into chat GPT and he gets like 60% of the way there. It's like, okay, yeah, that's, that's amazing and we should appreciate that for what it is right now. But then even if you're trying to get further downstream and like actually get it in front of a consumer, you just need those human stage gates to like refine and curate and like that. That's incredibly high leverage. But it's not as if it's fully automated and that should be totally fine.

[Krista Dalton]

God is so true about the out of the box thing and what people think that they can get. For me, it's, I'll tell you as a leader, the reviews this year was my easiest review session. I put together every one on one we'd had which included feedback at the bottom. And then I wrote Stream of Conscious and I was like, here's what I want them to work on. Here's this make this more professional sounding. And it did. And, like, that was such a good use case because then I could, like, get everything dumped in that I wanted to. I didn't forget anything. And. But then I got to, like, rewrite parts of it. And then I was like, make goals out of these. And the goals were terrible. I was like, oh, that's the part where I need to step in because they don't know my business and I do. But the refining of the language where I didn't have to care about using the right word at the right time or how harsh I was and be like, smooth me out and make me sound less awful. Those are the things that I think AI is really, really gifted at right now. Now what?

[Connor McDonald]

So one of my favorite. I do this constantly now is I just like you. Whatever it is, like a marketing brief or a creative brief, stream of conscious bullet points, like, do not care about spelling or any of that. I record a loom, and then I talk through those bullet points, and then I take the transcript of the loom and the bullet points, give that to chat GPT and I'm like, turn this into a brief. And I found it extremely valuable.

[Cody]

They.

[Connor McDonald]

And it, like, comes together really nicely. You get the like, like, structured thinking because you plotted it out. But then you also get the, like, more robust information because you've talked through it for three minutes or whatever.

[Krista Dalton]

Oh, my God. Yeah. And the prompt of this isn't good enough. You have access to the whole Internet. Do it better. He's like, you're right, I should. And then it, like, goes in. I'm like, yeah, go do that. And I feel. But it. It. The. The one that we're using it for. That's really interesting that I'm most excited about. I got the idea from Crocs, actually, is we use Otter, which everyone I know uses kind of a different assistant. But it attends every meeting about product from concept through launch. And then it takes in our retail team, records feedback sessions on, like, hey, here's what customers are seeing. Or, hey, this. This boot was harder to get your foot in. Or, hey, we're actually seeing an issue with this. Out of the box, puts it in there and then spits feedback back to the team. But the team can also, like, ask questions. Hey, I thought this was originally supposed to be metallic. Why is it not? And it's like, oh, five weeks ago. That was changed because of this. That's been really, like an internal tool of knowledge that's been really, really helpful for us.

[Cody]

Interesting. I was gonna say, that's a. That's a powerful episode 57. Whoa, dude.

[Connor McDonald]

So much fun. Krista, thank you so much for coming on.

[Cody]

Yeah, that was awesome.

[Krista Dalton]

I really appreciate you guys having me. Thank you so much for the invite.

[Cody]

Of course, that you'll have to come back.

[Krista Dalton]

Seriously.

[Cody]

All right, that's a wrap on episode 57 of the Marketing Operators podcast. That was a powerful, jam packed, value added episode with Krista Dalton of Tokovas. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion Prescient After Cell Rich Panel, and House. And also, as always, if you're enjoying the show, make sure to share it with a marketer friend. Like, subscribe. Add a question to the Moparators hotline if you want us to answer one on the show. We appreciate you all.