E066: DTC Marketers - Where Are You Wasting Your Time?

Summary

Marketing Operators Podcast Episode E066: DTC Marketers - Where Are You Wasting Your Time?

Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Release Date: July 1, 2025

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In Episode E066 of Marketing Operators, hosts Connor Rolain and guests delve deep into the inefficiencies that Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) marketers often encounter. The conversation offers insightful discussions on optimizing marketing strategies, avoiding common pitfalls, and maximizing the impact of every marketing dollar spent. Below is a comprehensive summary of the key points covered in this episode.

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1. Navigating Prime Day and Fourth of July Promotions

Connor Rolain initiates the discussion by highlighting the challenges surrounding the scheduling of Prime Day, especially its unexpected proximity to the Fourth of July holiday.

Connor [00:40]:
"Prime Day is such a big commercial moment at this point and we don't know when it is until like three weeks before."

The guests express surprise over the shifting dates, noting how this temporal overlap complicates promotional strategies.

Unknown Speaker [02:34]:
"We're just re. We're going right from 4th of July into Prime Day."

Key Insights:

• Synchronizing Promotions: Aligning sales events like Prime Day with major holidays can either amplify sales or create conflicts that dilute marketing efforts.
• Budget Allocation: It's crucial to adjust daily ad spend targets to accommodate extended sales periods, especially when events overlap.

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2. Maximizing Amazon and Direct Sales Synergy

The conversation shifts to the strategy of driving traffic to both Amazon and the brand’s own website. The guests discuss the effectiveness of attribution links and the importance of directing different customer segments to appropriate platforms.

Unknown Speaker [07:02]:
"They're repetitive purchasers to Amazon from email and that worked really well for us last year."

Connor [09:03]:
"Attribution links are a no brainer. You actually get to measure what revenue is being attributed to an email or SMS and you're getting that kickback because Amazon wants you driving traffic to Amazon."

Key Insights:

• Attribution Links: Utilizing unique attribution links for various campaign placements (e.g., email, exit intent pop-ups) allows for precise tracking of revenue sources.
• Balancing Channels: Allocating advertising efforts between Amazon and the brand’s website can optimize overall sales performance, ensuring that promotions on one platform do not cannibalize sales on another.

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3. Identifying and Eliminating Time-Wasting Marketing Practices

A substantial portion of the episode focuses on pinpointing activities that do not substantially contribute to business growth. The hosts share personal experiences and strategies to streamline marketing efforts.

a. Ineffective Ad Production

Creating numerous ads that fail to perform is highlighted as a significant time sink.

Unknown Speaker [18:00]:
"Producing ads that don't win mean you spend so much time ideating, scripting, briefing, producing, launching these ads and then you run it for like seven to 10 days."

Key Insights:

• Quality Over Quantity: Shifting focus from producing a high volume of ads to creating fewer, more impactful campaigns can lead to better performance and resource utilization.
• Iterative Testing: Allocate time and budget for meaningful ad variations rather than minor tweaks, allowing for the discovery of high-performing creatives.

b. Over-Designing Emails

The hosts discuss the trap of over-designing emails and the benefits of simplifying email marketing strategies.

Connor [24:01]:
"We've just been trying to do stuff that are over designed, which wastes time and you don't actually need it."

Unknown Speaker [26:56]:
"If you can just pepper in like 10, 15, 20 plain text emails per year versus not, I can guarantee you're driving more email and repeat revenue by doing the plain text."

Key Insights:

• Plain Text Emails: Embracing plain text emails can enhance deliverability, foster genuine connections, and simplify the email creation process.
• Templatization: Developing standardized email templates can reduce design time, allowing for more frequent and segmented communications.

c. Flopped Product Launches

Launching new products without ensuring they align with current business strengths can lead to wasted resources.

Connor [38:23]:
"It's just the same exact workshop where some launches flop and some work because some are aligned with the brand's strengths."

Key Insights:

• Leverage Existing Strengths: Focus on introducing product variations that complement the brand’s core offerings rather than venturing into entirely new categories.
• Strategic Iterations: Introduce product changes that build upon successful foundations to minimize the risk of failure.

d. Custom Products for Specific Campaigns

Creating tailored products for specific events (e.g., Super Bowl) can yield mixed results.

Unknown Speaker [52:00]:
"It wasn't building leverage in our current business really or effectively didn't do that."

Key Insights:

• Assess Impact: Evaluate whether custom products contribute meaningfully to overall business goals or merely add to the product catalog without substantial returns.
• Strategic Alignment: Ensure that custom campaign products synergize with broader marketing and sales strategies.

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4. Streamlining the Marketing Supply Chain

Addressing bottlenecks within the marketing workflow is essential for maximizing efficiency.

Connor [56:12]:
"If you're going to beef up email designers, do we also have the email coordinators to implement these campaigns and automations?"

Key Insights:

• Balanced Resources: Ensure that all parts of the marketing supply chain (design, development, implementation) are adequately staffed and equipped to handle increased workloads.
• Operational Efficiency: Identify and eliminate workflow bottlenecks to maintain a smooth and responsive marketing operation.

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5. Evaluating the Effectiveness of Marketing Channels

The episode underscores the importance of critically assessing the ROI of various marketing channels like SEO, affiliate marketing, and influencer partnerships.

Unknown Speaker [58:08]:
"We spent a solid year taking a swing at social affiliate, and it never turned into material revenue."

Key Insights:

• Performance Metrics: Set clear, measurable goals for each marketing channel to determine their effectiveness and justify continued investment.
• Channel Relevance: Focus on channels that directly contribute to revenue and align with the brand’s strategic objectives, discontinuing those that do not.

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6. Leveraging Media Mix Modeling with Prescient

Integrating advanced analytics tools like Prescient can provide a holistic view of how different marketing efforts impact various sales channels, including retail.

Unknown Speaker [66:39]:
"They estimated our digital marketing efforts driving incrementally to Costco over the course of a two-year window."

Key Insights:

• Holistic Analytics: Utilize media mix modeling to understand the broader impact of digital marketing on all sales channels, ensuring comprehensive optimization.
• Strategic Allocation: Adjust marketing budgets based on insights from modeling to maximize incremental revenue across both online and retail platforms.

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7. Final Thoughts: Focus on High-Leverage Activities

The hosts conclude by emphasizing the need to prioritize marketing activities that offer the highest returns and align closely with the brand’s core strengths.

Unknown Speaker [80:17]:
"We're constantly looking at the business holistically... especially if you can get into Target and Walmart and Costco."

Key Insights:

• Prioritization: Concentrate efforts on strategies and channels that drive significant revenue and support long-term business growth.
• Continuous Improvement: Regularly review and refine marketing strategies to eliminate inefficiencies and capitalize on new opportunities for growth.

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Conclusion

Episode E066 of Marketing Operators serves as a valuable guide for DTC marketers aiming to streamline their efforts and focus on high-impact strategies. By identifying and eliminating time-wasting practices, leveraging advanced analytics, and maintaining a balanced marketing supply chain, brands can enhance their efficiency and drive substantial growth. The episode underscores the importance of strategic alignment, iterative testing, and holistic evaluation in cultivating successful marketing operations.

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Notable Quotes:

• Connor [00:40]:
  "Prime Day is such a big commercial moment at this point and we don't know when it is until like three weeks before."

• Unknown Speaker [07:02]:
  "They're repetitive purchasers to Amazon from email and that worked really well for us last year."

• Unknown Speaker [24:01]:
  "We've just been trying to do stuff that are over designed, which wastes time and you don't actually need it."

• Connor [38:23]:
  "It's just the same exact workshop where some launches flop and some work because some are aligned with the brand's strengths."

• Unknown Speaker [58:08]:
  "We spent a solid year taking a swing at social affiliate, and it never turned into material revenue."

• Unknown Speaker [66:39]:
  "They estimated our digital marketing efforts driving incrementally to Costco over the course of a two-year window."

• Connor [72:44]:
  "You guys are driving a higher percentage of roadshow revenue. That's extremely cool."

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Sponsors Mentioned (Skipped From Summary):

• Motion Rich Panel
• Prescient
• Revo
• After Sale

For more insights and strategies, tune into future episodes of Marketing Operators, where industry leaders share their experiences and tips to optimize your marketing operations effectively.

Transcript

[Connor]

All right, we're back episode another episode 60 and something of marketing operators. Connor. Rolling. How are you?

[Unknown Speaker]

We're good man. We are, we're moving. We're, we're got a lot of momentum. We're just got saw a new CTV ad come through the, come through the slack ether yesterday. We're getting ready for prime day for 4th of July. Starting to plan some, some big 20, 26 product drops. So yeah, we got a, we got a lot of good stuff going on over here. I'm headed to South America today so I'll be. Yeah, I'm going to ski in the Andes. I've never done that before. So. Yeah. Pray for snow. So yeah, we got a lot, a lot of personal and, and hex cloud stuff going on.

[Connor]

Dude. Amazing dude. Prime day. Did you guys know what, like it's crazy to me that prime day is such a big commercial moment at this point and we don't know when it is until like three weeks before.

[Unknown Speaker]

We thought it was going to be a lot later than it was.

[Connor]

Probably the week, like it really would have made more sense for it to be the next week. What is it? It's the eight. It starts the eighth this year.

[Unknown Speaker]

July 9th, 10th, 11th.

[Connor]

It really should have been like it should have started the 15th last year. Started like the 13th. I don't know why they moved it up five days.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, I mean it's, it's so close to 4th of July and 4th of July is a pretty big moment for us too. So I'm hoping there's not, I don't know, I'm hoping like our 4th of July sale doesn't. I don't think it will because we haven't been on sale on Amazon for a while. So I think we have a lot of pent up demand ready to convert there. But it, but it's been fun like trying to get, I mean really truly guessing because it's the first year they've ever done four days of Prime Day. So you know, we're going back last year and trying to like allocate our, our daily budgets, daily ad spend targets and I think we're doing a good job. But it'll be interesting to see if, if you know, because obviously we're guessing more revenue, more ad spend is going to need to be allocated in that four day clip this year versus last. So yeah, I'm hoping it's a bigger pie this year and that our how we're allocating daily budgets is correct.

[Connor]

Totally. Yeah. Four days this year. That's big it being so much closer to the 4th is really strange. 4th of July is not a big moment for us, but we run a prime time sale on our.com to kind of mirror some of the Amazon prices. And we typically start that a little bit early. So we're going to start it on the 3rd this year and hopefully capture some of like 4th of July shopping demand and then just roll that right into Prime Day. So I could see that being beneficial for us, us being on promo. Fourth of July weekend could be additive, but yeah, dude, hate to be moving around the marketing calendar. They messed up all the year over year comps, dude. It's a different week.

[Unknown Speaker]

I know. It's not going to work at all anymore. Yeah, we do, we do. We do Fourth of July sale. And that's, that's what's interesting. This year is like we're basically going. We're just re. We're going right from 4th of July into Prime Day 4. 4th of July is always a massive moment for us. I mean, it really any. It's kind of, it's kind of sad. I joke about this, but like any of the summer holidays, the summer holidays, like Memorial Day, fourth of July, Labor Day, that people get off of work and they should be out like, I don't know, boating or camping, barbecuing, like those specific days are always some of our largest revenue days of, of the, of the holiday. And like last year, 4th of July is on a Thursday. Like Thursdays aren't that good for us usually, but that Thursday, just like people are off work and huge, huge sales day. So we're, we're like, we kind of have to be on sale for all those, those like peak moments because it's just, I don't know what it is, but like people get. Are off work and they're buying cookware.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. So I have another question for you on that. You said you guys haven't been on promo on Amazon for a while. So do you, did you do Father's Day and Memorial Day and not promote at all on Amazon?

[Unknown Speaker]

We did Mother's Day on Amazon and dot com and then we did not do Memorial Day. We did not do Father's Day because we want Prime Day just to be like the, this huge peak moment.

[Connor]

Yeah, got it, got it. So do you see, like, as a percentage of revenue, does Amazon, Amazon shrink quite a bit when you guys are on promo on hexclad.com but not on Amazon at all?

[Unknown Speaker]

Mm.

[Connor]

What does that swing look like?

[Unknown Speaker]

I don't know off the top of my head it's not like it's not like 20 percentage points. It's probably 5 to 10. I'd have to go low but yeah, def. I mean Amazon's been really strong for us this year. It's coming from a smaller denominator and I think it's really just like a time in market with these upper funnel channels that we've measured with House to really spill into Amazon a lot more than Facebook and Google. So Amazon's as a as like a percentage growth is just really, really strong this year is great to see. I mean there's also a lot of good things happening on Amazon. Like we're, we're way better at PPC this year. We keep improving our storefront and our A content but yeah, that's been like an amaz. I'm really excited to see what it does over prime day because the evergreen growth rate has just with not being on offer at all has been so good. So yeah, fingers crossed. Let me, I'll take this a followup. I can, I can go and look and see what our like what the split was. Mother's Day versus our Evergreen.

[Connor]

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. I've got a couple other prime questions. We've got a lot to talk about today so we'll get into the agenda at some point but are you guys doing any, are you guys going to drive either paid traffic or email SMS traffic to Amazon at any point?

[Unknown Speaker]

Oh yeah, lots. You do that every year. So last year was the first year we did it and it was one of our best year over year growth rates compared like just like compared to other sales and it makes sense like we're on like we're on sale. We've already been on, we've had our big game sale, we had our Mother's Day sale, Memorial Day sale, Father's Day sale. So we've like been pushing and like there's been differences in the offers. There's also been a lot of similarities. So if you haven't converted on a set yet like you're probably not going to convert on a set during, during Prime Day. So we still have those offers. Like that's not, that's more of like I don't actually mean that like we still do have bundle offers and the way that we position.com is if you want to save big and buy a set like go to.com for that. That's where you can get like your best offer in the 12 piece set, six piece set. These are thousand dollar bundles and Then if you want to go and mix and match individual products, go to Amazon. So we set a lot of our repeat purchasers to Amazon from email and that that worked really well for us last year. We'll have on we this year we will, we will actually have more individual offers on our.com but not all of them. Like there's gonna be more on Amazon and, and the thinking there was like if you're going to buy a set, we're probably missing out on revenue by not having individual products. I don't want you have to go buy a set on.com and then go buy an individual product on Amazon. So that's a little bit of a difference this year as we are going to pull some of the individual products onto dot com. But yeah, we, we pushed Amazon a lot. Not through ads, but our site does. So I guess like by way of one note of like removal it. Our ads do. So we have some CTAs.

[Connor]

Oh you have. So CTA is on the site driving to Amazon.

[Unknown Speaker]

Correct. And we just message our way through it. Right. So it's like we'll have a hero section that's like hey, like our, our biggest savings on bundles are here. Like you're in the right spot if you want to go buy some. Like our, our most robust offering of individual products are on Amazon. So if that's what you're really the most interested in, like go buy there. It's merchandise lower on the page. Right. Like we're leading with that. So we'll do that. Like we'll do exit intent pop ups. Like hey, you'd see what you liked here. Go go to Amazon. And yeah, I mean we got like, we got six figures like a decent into the six figures of kickback from Amazon last year through our attribution links. Yeah, totally. Because we drove like seven figures in attributable revenue which is like I don't know what their cookie window. It's like, it's so little. It should probably should have been a lot more. And yeah, that was, that was the first time we did that last year though. I was like really nervous last year because I'm like I think this makes sense strategically. But you know that, that's kind of against the DTC.com conventional wisdom to drive traffic from your.com funnels into Amazon and it worked really well. So we're gonna, we're gonna lean back into that this year.

[Connor]

Totally. Yeah. And it's like the one, you know there's a couple prime days each year now. So once or twice a year.

[Unknown Speaker]

Oh, it didn't work for Prime Day 2. It worked. It worked way better for Prime Day 1 than it did Prime Day 2.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've heard the same thing, that Prime Day 2 in October is just softer for whatever reason. This one in, in the summer is just more of a banger commercial event. But we do the same.

[Unknown Speaker]

It's, it's new or it's. The PD2 is like they peppered that one in later. Right. I mean I don't think consumers are as conditioned for that one.

[Connor]

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. We do this, we do email and SMS, we, we don't drive site traffic. That's interesting. And then the one thing I'll call it for people listening are the attribution links are a no brainer. Right. You actually get to measure what revenue is being attributed to an email or sms and you're getting that kickback because Amazon wants you driving traff traffic to Amazon. So I think it's like the kickback, I forget it's just a couple percentage points.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. But I mean it can be material like it was for us last year.

[Connor]

And if you think about the increase, you're basically gonna, you're earning back some, the higher processing fees that you're gonna pay Amazon.

[Unknown Speaker]

Right.

[Connor]

Like on a, on a variable cost basis you'd prefer someone purchasing on Shopify than Amazon. But if you're driving them there, you're earning that. I think it's maybe 4 or 5% back or something. Then you're at least clawing back a little bit of it. And during Prime Day it's like really, it's pretty easy to paint the picture of it being a net benefit.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. I mean like I would, I would bet that the con, yeah. The conversion rate you're going to see by putting people into Amazon I think infinitely outweighs any drop in margin that you're paying Amazon through that order. I mean that's just like where people want to buy.

[Connor]

Yeah. It reminds me of what Jared from Nectar said, like don't let perfect measurement get in the way of good marketing. Something like that. And it's like, yeah, it's like yeah, people, everybody's fine on, on Amazon prime right now. Don't like mid curve the situation and, and like try to force people onto Shopify.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yep, yep. And, and here's a. I don't know if this is how you guys did it. Here's a little tip. With the attribution links we would create like a different attribution link for each placement. It's like our web collection had a link, our email, our sms, our Exit Intent. And then you get a little bit of dude, Exit Intent.

[Connor]

Exit Intent to Amazon. A big one.

[Unknown Speaker]

Dude, we drove like 25, 30,000 clicks through that exit intent pop up. That is 30, 000 people that hit our Amazon storefront that would have just left our site and got, who knows, done what next. So I think like having the, the you know, one to one like all right, this is for email, this for Exit Intent is really interesting because now it's been able to like there's the. I'm. We're able to see what drove the most traffic and the most revenue and all and all the above. So highly recommend creating like a different link for each marketing push to Amazon. You have.

[Connor]

Yeah, the, the other thing that I am tempted to try this year, I don't know if we're going to get it in the hopper or not, but like actually trying paid traffic because those are all conversions that Met is not going to be able to attribute for. So you can't optimize for purchases and drive Amazon conversions or like you just won't do that effectively.

[Unknown Speaker]

Could you. Would you, would you select a purchase event and just like make the URL Amazon? So it's going after people that are like what Facebook sees as purchase.

[Connor]

I just don't think it would work. I mean you could, you could optimize for purchase and drive people to Amazon but it would just be like Facebook would have no idea what's going on.

[Unknown Speaker]

Right? Yeah. 00 purchases attributed to the campaign.

[Connor]

Okay, so I have two, I have two thoughts here. One is, one is the reason I bring it up is because you and I are both seeing success optimizing for like View Con, like more upper funnel events. And those are people. A lot of those are conversions at Facebook's seemingly not able to attribute to the platform that we're able to measure via something like House. So that's one of the reasons I'd be interested in exploring it at all. And then the second thing that I would consider is like, and this is where I'm. I'm not sure we're going to execute on this in the next two weeks or whatever. I'd be tempted to build a landing page for prime deals on ridge.com that the CTA is driving you to Amazon and then you could optimize for those CTA clicks. So now it's like almost like you're optimizing for an on site behavior which is going to drive up the quality of the traffic significantly versus just optimizing for just general outbound clicks or views or whatever. So now you're actually optimizing for an event. But that event is taking you to Amazon and that I think could be good.

[Unknown Speaker]

So it sounds like, it sounds like you need to, you need to send Nick from House a Slack message after this and, and ask about a holdout test.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, that'd be a good.

[Unknown Speaker]

That'd be a really good holdout test.

[Connor]

Yeah, you're totally right. Because one. Well, if you had the landing page, you could also use the attribution link so you'd get some insight there. But as you mentioned earlier, like the cookie windows garbage, like there's just, you're not going to, there's just so much room for attribution loss. Like it's not going to be helpful. Pairing it with a House test would be essential so that you could see.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Like the, the total impact that you're having on the channel. So we'll see if a listener does it, tell us, we talk about it.

[Unknown Speaker]

Seriously. That'd be awesome. That'd be really. It's a good idea. Especially if you're not going to run. I don't know if I, if we weren't running any dot com offers, we would certainly be running some sort of paid media like play outside of Amazon too. Sorry, we'd be having a non Amazon PPC paid media play redirecting to Amazon if we did not have.com offers going on.

[Connor]

Right.

[Unknown Speaker]

So if, if that's you and you're doing that, let us know what, what you find out. We want to talk about it.

[Connor]

Yeah, totally. All right, cool. Well, we can jump into the episode, but before we begin, I've got two points. One, as always, want to thank our sponsors, Motion Rich panel after Cell, Prescient and Revo. Two, we typically say this at the end. We're going to say it towards the beginning today. Please like and subscribe. I was reading reviews for our podcasts over the weekend on, on Spotify and Apple. So if you guys are leaving reviews there, I'm reading them and it's. We've gotten some great feedback. All right, let's jump into the episode Foreign. I want to talk quickly about Motion's AI Creative strategist. These AI agents are built by best in class DTC marketers including Barry Hot, Jess Bachman, Marella Crest B, Alex Cooper and many others. And what's unique is that you get to use agents to analyze your creative using real data. From your meta ad account. Connor, have you played around with these at all?

[Unknown Speaker]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Our team's deep in there.

[Connor]

I wanted to pull up too. So for those listening, we'll, we'll talk through it quickly. One, I think the implementation beautiful. You could see our top performing ad creative. Last week. What I pulled up was Jess's critique. This ads messaging played that progress ran took maybe two minutes and then this is what we got. And I thought it was great. The good, fast paced messaging, clean product demonstration, smart focus on MagSafe, what we can push. And I thought this was, this was funny. You know me as a marketer. I'm very precious about our ad creator. But he's like, Apple's must have accessory is presumptuous and lacks credibility. The smartest wallet you'll ever own is empty superlative marketing speak. I'm like, okay, Jess, he definitely, he's definitely roasting the ad. And what I thought was really cool were some of the next steps. He says, reframe around the actual problem. This solves the daily friction of wallet phone management. So the AI has generated what this ad is about and actually reframed what the problem could be. And I thought that was really powerful. Two, I ran Motions track this month's winning themes and you see exactly what we're talking about all the time. Durability that lasts a lifetime. Ditching the bulk for minimalist design. Lifetime offers create urgency and cultural partnerships that expand appeal. And I'm like, yeah, look, you basically get what we're trying to do as an advertising business. I think this is really helpful for creative strategy and giving the team actionable insights that we can work on every day.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, this is saving our team tons of time. Motion's also giving teams an AI adoption cheat code. It's not like they're just throwing this new technology at you and saying, go figure it out. They are really giving teams what they need to utilize this and get the most value out of this. And last but not least, you do not need a Motion contract to use this. You can try these agents for free, test them out, see how they fit into your workflows, and start getting value out of them without even needing a Motion contract. So if you want to try out some of these AI agents, go try them@motion app.com.

[Connor]

I wanted to talk about wasting time. And the reason I bring this up, Connor, is because I think everybody's in the same bucket in Ecom in the sense that, you know, acquisitions getting harder, tariffs are going up, costs are getting higher. Everybody's trying to understand how to run leaner teams. And I think people are having the experience of, hey, let's like, we have to cut things that we've done. Whether that's agencies or software tools or, or people generally, like, you have to downsize the, the organization, et cetera, et cetera. People are realizing that a lot of time and energy that's being spent on these things is like, you can stop doing it and it's not going to make a material impact on your business. So it got me in the headspace of like, well, where are people wasting time? And I've got a, I've got a little bit of a list here. I know you do too, and I, I'd love to kick it to you here, but, yeah, that's kind of the goal. And we could jam back and forth on like, lessons learned and maybe give people some ideas on where they can find cost savings in the business. So what are. What's. Like, you've got a long list here, but what are some of the top ones for you?

[Unknown Speaker]

Oh, we waste.

[Connor]

You've wasted a ton of time.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, so much time. I think everyone does. And like, you, you want to do everything. Everything seems fun. It's like, oh, you should build a mobile app for your brand. It's like, oh, that seems fun, but like, is it driving incremental performance? I mean, I'm sure someone out there, brands out there have a mobile app that provides unique value in a way that, that they can't provide elsewhere. But like, personally, I just, I haven't been pitched an idea for a mobile app for Hexclad that we can't just do on our site. So it's like things like that. So one, one that I, I say this with this kind of like tongue in cheek, but like I say ads that don't win mean you spend so much time ideating, scripting, briefing, producing, launching these ads and then you run it for like seven to 10 days. It doesn't have either soft metrics or hard metrics that are like in line with your controls and you turn it off. I can't. I mean, we probably have hundreds of ads over the course of three years that would fall into that bucket. Now that's not really a waste. Like, I think producing paid media ads is actually the best way our growth team can spend our time because we are so paid media driven. So that, that act as a whole is not a waste of time. But, you know, it's funny. It's not funny. It's like Frustrating to see you put all this time on the effort, heart, blood, sweat, tears, whatever, into producing an ad and just doesn't perform where I will say we were. We were wasting our time and we're getting a lot better at this is just like we're, we're. We got kind of in this volume trap where like we almost felt like we were just trying to hit a minimum. Like at least this many ads need to go live this week if we, if we're not doing that. Like we had this sense that we weren't doing our jobs well or we weren't going scale our paid media channels as aggressively. In retrospect, that just led to us making worse ads and taking smaller swings. Because when you're trying to produce 50, 100, however many ads a week, well, you can't really take as many net new swings if you're just focused on that. So I think that was actually somewhere. We were wasting our time a little bit last year and we're doing a lot better this year. Like we are. We're committed to producing less ads, taking bigger swings.

[Connor]

Totally.

[Unknown Speaker]

And then ultimately we're not, not iterating. We're just not. We're leaving slots open so we can iterate when we get data. So it's like maybe half of our paid media creative testing slots are planned swings for the quarter. And then maybe the other half are like, hey, we launched this thing and we're getting this data back. We want to go iterate on it. So I think that's a, that's been a really interesting one for us, which is not, not for everyone. Right. Like, I do think there are brands where like volume, volume, volume is maybe more important than quality, but I think we've like hit that inflection point. So I'll start with that. I think that's an interesting one to, to chew on. That's a great one.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Unknown Speaker]

Maybe we just go back and forth here.

[Connor]

No, because I want to talk about that one a little bit too. Because we went through the. We went through a very similar experience because saying I totally agree with you, producing ads that don't win being a waste of time. I guess that is true. But like, it almost feels like you want to. Producing ads that are not materially different is the waste of time. Because it's like, it's not. You need, you need to be creating ads that don't win in order to find ads that do win. Like, there's no way around that.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. Yes, exactly. That's why I was kind of tongue in cheek, right?

[Connor]

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. No, I'm super with you. And, like, we went through the exact same experience where we were, like, we were producing a ton of ads, but then you'd go in and you'd look at them and you'd be like, well, what is. If this ad doesn't work? Why would this one work? Like, they're the same idea. And, like, and there'd be, like, seven of them. And it's like, okay, yeah, like, what are we. What are we doing here, guys? Now, the, the. I guess the slippery slope is, like, I do hear from other brands that, like, they'll test, like, colors, and that's one of those ones where, like, we've never seen a meaningful, like, oh, this ad was blue and now it's orange and it's like. And it's crushing.

[Unknown Speaker]

Take off. Yeah.

[Connor]

And maybe that was more the case in years past, or maybe it works for some brands or whatever. But, like, that's the sort of, like, variant that we've been moving away from is like, same with, like, headlines where we'd switch out the headline, but the headline would effectively say the same thing. And it's like, yeah, the, the odds that we're going to be going from a loser to a winner by changing the headline, technically, we're changing the words. We're not changing the message. It's just like, odds are extremely low, so we're looking for more materially different. That's what you're talking about. Like, more thoughtful and intentional ads, and that often results in fewer. And then I also think that's just where Meta is going too. Right? Like, that's what Meta says over and over is like, we don't just want random little changes. We don't see that as creative diversity. We want. We want larger, conceptually different ads. And obviously, if two pieces of creative are conceptually very different, the odds that you might be going from a loser to a winner are significantly higher. So 1,000% agree.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, yeah, I think they're. I mean, we. We. We find ourselves back at this topic a lot. But it's the, it's the local maximum. Or like, the, the local maximum and the new maximum. Like, if you're iterating, you have to be confident that you haven't reached that local maximum yet. Like, hey, we just unlocked this new concept, but we've only produced maybe three batches of ads around the idea. Like, all right, that makes sense to me to go and produce more around that. And then if it's not that, if It's a net new swing. Then you're like, is this going to unlock a mountain or molehill? And like, hopefully it's a mountain that you can then optimize against. But like, you should be giving yourself the opportunity to unlock new mountains with your creative swings is, is kind of the approach. And if you're not, like, you're probably wasting time.

[Connor]

Totally. Yeah, yeah. And I think, I think everybody falls into that trap.

[Unknown Speaker]

Totally. Yeah. It's so easy to iterate into oblivion and then like you poke your head out of the ground, you're like, holy crap. We just made 25 variants of like whatever this non stick ad. Like it's crazy.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. All right, I had one. I had this conversation with, with the founder of a brand a couple weeks ago and we were talking about, well, a little bit of backstory. Here she is at a brand, they have a bunch of emails that they haven't tried to activate in a really long time. So all these like former customers or prospects, we were talking about the best way to do that. And I'm like, look, honestly, like plain text, there's no way around plaintext being a really key part of this strategy. I'm like, just, it should come from you. There shouldn't be images, there shouldn't be HTML. It should be super clean. You're going to get better deliverability. And like often all people want to read is like that message, that personal message from the person. I think the email in and of itself, post open, often works better than anything else you're going to do and you're typically getting better deliverability. So it's just like a win, total win, win. And she made the point that she had a retention director that seemed to shy away from wanting to send plain texts because it almost seems too easy. Like we were trying to, like, we were trying to figure out like why, why would retention marketers not embrace plain text emails? And I think there is a sense of like, they're not beautiful, they don't seem strategic. You're not like sharing it on social, you know, you're not getting plain text from like some of the brands we talk about all the time. Like, I don't think Lululemon is saying sending plain text emails.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, they're not branded at all.

[Connor]

They're not branded at all. Yeah, totally. So if you're like, if you're a true brand marketer or at an organization that like heavily values brand, you're not going to be rewarded for sending plain text emails despite them Working better. So I think there's like all sorts of things that lead to this. My point is we waste a lot of time over designing emails. Oh, and I'll actually make two points. One, that we're over designing emails in the sense that a lot of the time you could send an even more impactful email with less work. You could argue the copy is more important, you should spend more time on that, but like, by and large, fewer handoffs, like, be more direct to the message. And then the second kind of sub point here, and I, I, I don't know if you guys have had this experience, but like, we're in the process for last. On the E. Comm side, we've done this for about a year on the email side the last couple months, but just like aggressively templatizing everything. Another form of over designing is like every new email that we sent got like a fresh template. And it was super creative and super awesome and really beautiful. We are spinning our tires on things that are not making a material impact. And what we should do is just define, hey, we've got like a dozen components. When the brief comes in, we're using these FIGMA components, we're dropping in the copy. And now the email's designed and it's not nearly as unique and it's not as maybe beautiful to a certain degree, but like, we got it done way faster. We can send more emails, more segmented more often and like, that's what's going to be best for the business. So I feel like I've been picking away at some of the time wasted on retention. What do you think, dude?

[Unknown Speaker]

Fully agree. That's like one of the, one of the reasons we. Do you have like an art director in house or something of the sort? Yeah, yeah. Okay. That's what, that's one of the things that, you know, one of the many reasons we want we hired a director of design is like, I, I agree. I think we were, we have an amazing, we have multiple amazing designers, but we have this woman in house who is our, you know, our lead retention designer. And she is so good, so talented. If you're on our email list, like, you see her awesome, engaging, beautifully branded emails, but I don't think we were doing enough templatization.

[Connor]

Right.

[Unknown Speaker]

And I think she just ended up like, it's probably designing from scratch too much. And if we can just like not templatize everything, like, there still needs to be freshness and newness. But although I do think there's value in using certain templates for certain types of campaigns because you start to like train your audience, like, oh, this is the recipe. Like, and I'm. And I want that. And like, I know how to consume this. I think there's value there the same way there's value into us. Like repeating the Gordon's golden ticket theme for our stream stakes. But also like, if we can templatize this, then all of a sudden she can not only design for North America, but maybe she can start to pitch in on the UK and some of these other markets as well. So we are like working on that. Like that sales toolkit's like a good example of how like that will probably spill into like email as well, where we have templates for different types of campaigns. I think we're not there yet. We definitely waste time doing that. We do plain text, not a ton. It's not like, it's usually like a last like second type message like, hey, sale ends in 48 hours. But we're also not super precious with the brand. I mean, you see what we do in our, like our Facebook ad account, like where we put whatever out there and see if it works. I think you're totally right. People are super precious about their brands and it will not do that. But I agree, if you can pepper in like 10, 15, 20 plain text emails per year versus not, I can guarantee you're driving more email and repeat revenue by doing the plain text than you're, than you would if you're not. I would, I would assume totally.

[Connor]

And even so, one, I don't know if they do it anymore, but Breeze, Nick Shackelford's THC drink company, they were doing I bought some last year and they just had fantastic plain text emails. It was super personal. It was from Aaron, who's the co founder there. It was on a Friday and it was something like, it was like him reflecting on the week and it was just like awesome and I'm like, especially authentic. They'd really just gotten started basically. This was like probably 18 months ago and it's like, yeah, your zero to one retention strategy, that's all you need. Just start sending emails, like make them a message that's going to resonate and you don't need beautiful designs to do.

[Unknown Speaker]

That when the last thing you want to do as a new brand is like, start building this list. But then you're only sending them stuff once every few weeks, every three weeks because you don't have the, the team or the bandwidth to like. And every email is taking you like, like you Literally could double your email sends if you just pepper in a plain text as well.

[Connor]

Every for a new brand you can like 5x right? Like it's just spend your time making ads or landing pages and then spend your designers time making ads and landing pages and spend your time just writing a nice note on Friday like like Aaron was and sending it out. And frankly it probably was just some sort of automation or something but like it was, it was technically like MVP retention tactics but like was incredibly impactful and well done.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Because the other thing, this is not so much about wasting time but like my appreciation and love for plain text emails is that you can just send messages that you can't otherwise send. Like what ours are. And I think you guys could do a couple that crush. Like this is. We're preparing for our sweepstakes right now and last year plaintext crushed and they would come from our founder and you know, it would be like, hey, we're just arguing. We were just debating at the office, like would you take the Hennessy truck or would you take the cyber truck? Like me, I drive a Rivian at home, so I gotta haul around the family. So like I, I'd go, I'd go Hennessy or whatever. And it's like you literally could not design an email that had that message. So like not only are you saving time, not only are they more impactful, but you've given yourself like a whole new lever in terms of like the way that the brand can speak and people should do that more.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. And I, there's, I think that this is why we talk about upper funnel so much. Like you, you attract what you put out there. Right. So to your point about spending your like spend your time making really good ads, really good landing pages like that get, get attract the right people with that. But once they're in your funnel, like you've already kind of filtered out low quality prospects, assuming you're putting out good, you know, non misleading, you know, informational, fun, engaging upper funnel. So like you don't have to be super, like you don't have to be showered and shaved and in your collared shirt every time you get in front of your customer at that point it's like show them your, your more casual side. Right. Again, as long as you're not like getting people into your funnel with like a super clickbaity meme style of creative that's like probably going to attract low quality people. Like no, you already attracted the right person through your upper funnel. Like now you can show them you Know, kind of relax a little bit, you know, take a button down, show them who you really are as a brand. It doesn't have to be buttoned up all the time.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%.

[C]

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[Connor]

All right, let's hit another one here. We don't have to do it next, but I would love you have new product launches that have flopped. So I'd love to hit that at some point, but we, we could go wherever you want next.

[Unknown Speaker]

Well, I mean listen, we've all had new products that have flopped, right? And like it's no different. It's again, it's, it's kind of a tongue in cheek one again because it's the same as the ad like comment, like you kind of got to work through the losers to find the winners. This is really no different. Like, we've had plenty of new products that have crushed in the last two years. We've had some that we launched, didn't crush. We kind of like peeled it back, reworked the strategy, launched again, and now they're doing well. So you know, we've had products though where we're like, all right, we're going to try to make this an acquisition and retention product. We're going to produce CTV, YouTube, Facebook ads, big email launch, campaign, landing page, pre launch, landing page, post launch, you know, life cycle marketing from the jump. Like the whole thing, right? Affiliates, influencers. And it's just like, you know, it just hasn't gotten there. And then you have like these B plus. Like we have two, we, we have, we have two products that are in our like top 10 by SKU for individual products this year that are like what I would call like a C level launch. Like, we're not really building a ton of net new marketing around them. It's just like plopping products into our existing funnels and like those are in our top 10 units sold all year. So it's, it's just, you kind of learn the things that are going to work and not going to work at the different tiers of launches. But again, like you got to work through them. It's. I, I don't really think it a waste of time because if anything we've just like built, even though the product didn't perform maybe as well as we wanted to, we've built this muscle of like, what does launching an A tier product look like across all of our channels. And like the same way sweepstakes should be 100% easier for us to roll out this year because we did it for the first time last year. Like all these other A product launches should be a lot easier and more streamlined. But that's, that's another one where it's like you got to work through the loser sometime to, to find the winners.

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I, I want to start with this one. It is, it is similar to what we discussed with ads because the best thing you could do is launch products that don't flop, right? And you gotta, you're gonna have some losers in that process. But like exact same sort of idea where, and we definitely, we have examples of like falling into this trap and products are so hard because the merch calendar is so much longer. Right? Like you're, you could have, you could, you could get new information at Some point that leads you to. You get new information that makes you think, man, this product that's coming out next week, like it's maybe gonna flop. This isn't what customers want from us. But you ordered the product six months ago or whatever. So it's like that. Like just the feedback loop is so much slower. It's really hard to avoid losers. But the two things that I would say are one, I, like I said we, we've fallen into the trap for certain instances like in our. We've got a business goal of acquir women women wallet users. We, we, we acquire a ton of like gift givers, the end users male. We'd really like more women to be using Ridge wallets. So we put together like a product plan to do that and we had like a lot of more gender neutral colors and more feminine colors and we paired that with like, you know what I, what I thought were strong creative and go to market strategies and those just did not land like a number of times in a row.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah.

[Connor]

And I mean frankly given the feedback loop, we probably only had the ability to avoid like maybe the last one or two of those. We've learned the lesson now and internalized in 2026 gonna look different. But like it's the exact same idea with ads where if you're not making materially different ads, you're not gonna find winners something you're not gonna go from loser to winner just doing the same sort of thing. And we kind of fell into that trap with, with product and there's two paths. There's like we either need to be doing. This is a perfect example of like let's do less, more intentional, materially different strateg maybe going to become a winner in this new goal or just not do it because it's so cost and time intensive to buy, to design the products, to buy the products, to store the products, to do the creative and the ads and everything else. Because you don't just want to like not launch it anymore or like put no effort into the launch. So you just have to like, you have to be, you have to be ruthless in that like ruthlessly cutting the things that don't work or ruthlessly orient yourself around something materially new new.

[Unknown Speaker]

It's honestly like as you're saying that it the whole the new product launch and the ad launch is actually the same thing. Like you. If I think about our new products that we've launched in the last two years, we either trying to create a new mountain or we're trying to like, like ma. Like hit a local maximum on an existing one. So like I think about our like steamer baskets for example, that are basically just an add on to our pot set or a pot to steam things in. Like that's been really a pleasant surprise on how well that's worked. And the effort that we've had to put into it is. It's not nothing, but it's minimal totally because it existed on a current mountain that we already have. Same with our kitchen utensils. Like that, that's, that's, that's the cookware mountain right there. It's just an accessory for an existing funnel that is already a big mountain. And we have, we've just like climbed up higher on it by rolling out these other new products versus a new mountain which like might take time to build up. Up. So that's the other thing is like reorienting like some of these things might not be great at launch. Right. Like the kitchen utensils we have. I don't know how many people in our database that have bought a 12 piece set that are like prime to buy these. Like we expected a big launch on that, a new category. Like, you know, if we all of a sudden rolled out ovens like, okay, that's probably going to take years to really get momentum and become known as like an oven brand. So I think it's just also reorienting and not like expecting the world when you're, when you're launching a brand new category.

[Connor]

Yeah. 100. Okay, so I'll take two more quick things here because one, the products that truly flop are the ones that don't benefit from your existing business. I get there are going to be like a number of caveats here, I guess, but like in our case, the ones that flop are, are. I've talked about watches before in the past and it's just like at the price point that we launched them, we weren't going to get a meaningful attachment rate of watches to wallet orders. Like it was going to be a new category. Same with something like wedding bands, which has been a very solid business for us. Those required us going out, building funnels, acquiring new people. That has the potential of being like a new maxima or a new mountain in the way that you're describing. But the flip side is it has a potential of totally flopping. Doesn't drive volume. You get stuck with a bunch of product or whatever.

[Unknown Speaker]

Then you got a molehill.

[Connor]

Then you get a molehill. Yeah. The products that I love that I think people underappreciate sometimes. And you said it was like putting it on top of an existing mountain, which I think is a good, a good analogy. I also think about it as like building leverage into your existing business. Like what I talk about all the time for wallets is we sell wallets and then we sell airtag attachments at like almost 20% of all wallets come with an airtag attachment. And then we've got a handful of more expensive everyday carry accessories like, like pens and knives and key cases that get adopted at a lower attachment rate. But those are just, we just put those on the site one day and while a customer start buying them as they check out, that is a normal purchase. That is what people are looking to buy from us. And if we pair it right in the upsells and things like that, like just natural adoption, almost impossible for them to like truly fail.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah.

[Connor]

And like we just launched or we're about to launch tie bars and cufflinks as a compliment to the wedding bands. And I'm like, like it cannot flop. Like some percentage of people every single day are going to buy a tie bar and cufflin because they're getting prepared to get married. And does this go back to wasting time? I guess probably not. This also in the same way I love plain text, I love high leverage unsexy attachments that are just building leverage on your current business. So maybe not spending time on those, spending time outside of those can more often be wasted. If I'm tying it back to the concept of the, the, the show here.

[Unknown Speaker]

I want to, I want to ask you or maybe give an example and, and get your feedback because I, I fully agree with that. And you know, we've one thing I think that we do really well, that in my opinion from the outside looking in can be kind of confusing from, with some of our competitors is like we have a single cookware technology and we roll out variants of that technology, right? It's like, all right, here's the, here's the 12 quart stock pot now and here's the 5.5 quart high side pan and, and you know, all those things and all those products have been great, right? Like those all have become big sellers. You know, we're selling, you know, thousands of units per year, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. And a lot of those new product drops. But it's all in that same, it's in the same technology. Like we, we only sell one type of cookware. It is hybrid cookware. Like if you all of a sudden were like, you Know, we have our hero Ridge wallet, and you guys crush with your, like, iterations on your hero product, right? Like, that's probably where you should be spending a lot of your, you know, any. Any brand if you have traction, like, iterate on your hero product into oblivion. And like, you guys crush with this. And I think that, like, that's where we need to take our knives category probably is like, we have green Pakkawood and we have blackmaster series. Like, there's no reason we shouldn't have have every color, like, ton. Not every color, but tons of like a brown, a blonde or whatever it is. But like, if you guys all of a sudden were like, hey, we now have this new wallet that is like, functionally, technically use case different than our hero wallet. I think, like, that might make sense in someone in like a marketer's head or a product developer's head, but I think that'd be a really bad idea for you guys because all of a sudden you just have like, wait, why would I want Wallet A versus Wallet B? Yeah, and I see that sometimes on some of our competitors diets where I'm like, your guys are offering 4, 5, 6 different types of cookware. There's non stick here, there's multiple types of non stick. They're stainless, there's cast iron, there's copper, there's whatever it is, right? I'm like, I don't understand, like, why I should go for pan A versus Pan B versus pan C. So I think that's something we've done well and we've like, resisted. I want. I don't want to say we've had like, the urge to, but, like, we've just not done that. Like, we've always kept it within. Like, we are a hybrid piece of cookware that is equal parts stainless steel and non stick. And like, that's all we sell. I. I think you need to be careful about introducing friction into. And now we're going down the rabbit hole of like, product development strategy. But, like, this is something I've noticed in. In brands before. I'm like, I don't know why I would go for one or the other. And it's like, I'm just gonna leave because I don't know. Do you like. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. I guess I think that could be a waste of time. Is like, too much variation in your hero category, I think introduces more friction than anything else.

[Connor]

I totally agree. I've got terrible news for you. We did exactly that in November of last year. You did? Yeah, yeah, we launched a billfold and bifold. And I'll tell you the logic, because honestly the logic makes sense is like, like, you know, 98% of people on our website are there because they're somewhat interested in a new wallet. They are to some degree unhappy with their current wallet. So. But then 98% of them decide not to buy the Ridge wallet. So it's like, if you have other options, can you actually like, okay, I'm here for a new wallet, but I'm not going to go classic Ridge wallet. I'm going to go for billfold. Bfold came out to buy Flex. You can. That is like the intellectual argument for like, why it could be really meaningful. And it's like, yeah, maybe we could just capture another like, like 5% of.

[Unknown Speaker]

People or whatever by having an option that does not like that 5%. The ridge wall. It didn't. The hero ridge wall didn't appeal to them and we want to capture them by having like another option.

[Connor]

But it's super. It's super. I think it's super hard to do on D2C. It's not. I think we o. Maybe over projected, like, because the other logic would be like, well, it's someone who wants a billfold W wallet but like wants something from the Ridge brand. And I just don't think what someone wants from the Ridge brand is billfold wallet. Like, it'd be super weird to have a Ridge wallet that's not the Ridge wallet. So. Yeah, anyway, we totally. We totally. That's a perfect example of like, it wasn't building leverage in our current business really or effectively didn't do that. And that was the only path to it being successful. We weren't going to go out and build a whole new marketing funnel for selling a wallet that's been designed for 60 years that way.

[Unknown Speaker]

So did you kill it?

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Unknown Speaker]

Oh, you did. Okay.

[Connor]

And honestly, like, we take swings like that all the time. There's like, there's no problem that it flopped. But like, that is an example of we might have the, the risk reward on it probably wasn't very good in hindsight.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. So what I was going to say is I think it's not inherently bad to like introduce products that are like, so similar that you might need to spend some time explaining the differences to a consumer. But like, you just got to see around those corners and like build assets to do that. Like, we do this with our, our knife sets. Like we have this Pakkawood product and then we also have a master series product and they are different materials and that's like, but you wouldn't inherently know that on the surface. Like we, we've developed like if you go to our six piece knife set page, like you'll see we have like a little, little modal that brings up a chart and just explains the differences and like so we're starting to get, we, we get better at that over time. Like we have some outdoor cooking products that are iterations of, of existing products. It's like, all right, well how do we explain the difference here in the value? Like we want people to go into the higher price point product or the bundle. So it's all right. Let's just create like a comparison chart that lives right on the product page. It's like, all right, great. If we do that, I guarantee if we didn't do that, people would be like, well I have no clue why I would buy product A versus product B. And it would either it would either shrink the pie of like that product category or it would just cut the same size pie into smaller pieces which is like, like that's not what you want. You want to be growing the pie by introducing more product variants. So we've definitely wasted some time to tie it back to the theme by not doing that well enough. And we've learned from our mistake though. And now we are thinking about like how do we differentiate if it's a similar to a new product or an existing product?

[Connor]

Yeah, wasting time not growing the pie. That's, that's catchy. We're looking, we're looking for incremental pie growth in everything that we do.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yes, exactly. Extra large pieces. Foreign.

[Connor]

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[Unknown Speaker]

Products. Yeah, and this is another one where I can't decide if it was a waste or not. Custom products for a specific campaign like what we've what I've seen in the past is like sometimes they've worked at times and other times they've worked. So we created a bunch of custom products for the Super Bowl. Some of them crushed. Others did not do well at all. And I'm like, huh? Was it a waste of time to make those custom products that didn't do well? On the surface, I'd say yes, because, like, you just look at the volume and they didn't move that well.

[Connor]

But.

[Unknown Speaker]

But the campaign as a whole performed. Like, the business isn't as a. Like, in its big picture performed. And it's hard to tell, like, those custom products were a really awesome piece of that whole narrative. And the campaign as a whole performed well, even though the sku, maybe like this. The SKU level didn't do super well. So that's another one where it's like. It's hard to tell how much, like, performance we got in terms of just contribution to the narrative versus, like, the individual product as a whole. But that's one where it's like, yeah, maybe we could have gone without producing those two products and only had the ones that performed well. And we got a lot of learnings from, like, it was pretty clear, like, why certain products did well versus others, at least in our, like, qualitatively. But it's like, could. Maybe we could have only produced those two products and saved 10, 20, 30 hours that it took to produce the other two.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, 100. I think that's a good way to do it. And frankly, a lot of these are like, you'll never know for sure. But I also feel like, like, people. People tend to maybe. Yeah. Exaggerate the importance of things that they like. I mean, that's like. I think that's like, brand marketing to some degree where it's like, look, we just. We feel good about this. It looks good on the site and like, that's awesome. But, like, what was its true impact on it? And it's like, if you're running a sale, it's like, dude, the thing that made the campaign good was the sale.

[Unknown Speaker]

The.

[Connor]

The. The cheaper prices. See. Anyway, I think there's a lot of gut calls to make there. All right, here, I've got one. This was inspired by a Cody. Cody Ploff tweet, who's only with us in spirit here today. But he's been talking a lot about his PDP launch. And we had Dylan Ander on the show from heatmap.com. fantastic episode. We got some great feedback. I'd encourage everyone to check it out, but the way these all tie together is Cody made the point. He's been working on this PDP for months. They launch it, they're seeing a lift, lift. It's not going to, you know, reshape the business by any means. And then he goes and plugs in a new headline on a landing page and saw like a 15 lift or whatever and it's like, oh yeah, we probably spent and Dylan said this, that 80% of CRO is copy and images that that and I'd for sure have been in this trap for 18 months probably is like spending too much time on web development features when in reality the best use of my time is just better copy and better images and existing kind of web templates. So I think I've wasted a lot of time there.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, I agree with that. It's so tempting to build like some sexy interactive modal type thing, you know. On that note, and again, I wouldn't. None of these things I, that I'm saying I feel like are like 100% just close your eyes conclusively, a waste of time. But I've been thinking a lot more about like the marketing supply chain and like we've beefed up certain areas of it which has been good, but then we like haven't maybe beefed up other areas needed to beef up. So for example, like we do pretty good job at launching CRO tests and like optimizing our site through those. But we, we always, it seems like we have a backlog of like tests that are designed, ready to go. But then like we don't have the dev resources always, not, not all the time but like at times it's like, oh well that we'll have tests that sit in the queue for like a month or two months because we just didn't have the, the dev resources. So I think you can, you can kind of, of find yourself even if you feel confident in what you're building, it's like you're kind of wasting time if you can, if you can't get it into market and you like, it gets stopped 60% of the way there. So that's something we're trying to make sure we are thinking about more is like if we're beefing up one part of the business, right? Like, do we have like, if we're going to beef up email designers, do we also have the like email coordinators to implement these campaigns and automations? And like we can't have one without the other. We can't have more web CRO design happening if we don't also have the dev resources to implement those things. So I think we've definitely wasted some time, not just in that area, but throughout the years. Like, oh, we did. We're doing this better now, but we didn't beef up this other part to like, you know, balance it and bring it all through to the finish line.

[Connor]

Yeah, and that's a great. I like how you framed it as marketing supply chain, just like being no bottlenecks or like as few bottlenecks as possible in the marketing supply chain. And that's a common thread between, like, a lot of what we just talked about. I was going to bring that up about ads. There's been scenarios where we'll overproduce ads and we don't have the testing budget to test them. I was like, that's stupid, dude.

[Unknown Speaker]

Say, totally. Yeah, we got, I got like 10 ad sets live each are at like 500 bucks a day. We have a 700 hero product order value. We get to the end of 10 days, it's like, like the ad set with the most conversions at like 5. Like, what are we, what are we doing here? This is not. This is nonsensical.

[Connor]

So that you just brought up web. Being able to develop web features that you've designed is the same sort of thing with email. So. Yeah, I think that's probably. Yeah. Look, I know marketing organization is going to be perfect. Like, everybody's suffering from some sort of imbalance in, in some of those workflows. See, I think that's a good one here. I've got another one. And I'd be curious on your take. I've got. At first I just had SEO. I was like, SEO is a waste of time. Then that's for. I would say that's for us specifically. But then I put SEO, I put affiliate, and then I said largely just the breadth of unimpactful channels. We've definitely fallen into this trap of like, hey, we've had marketing managers on the team who began managing SEO or affiliate, and that just kind of floats along. Our business is not built on either of those channels. Like, and you could even make the argument that they're. They might be ROI positive. I think the measurement of those channels is hard. It might be positive. Is it changing the shape of the business? No. At what point do you justify having or not having that channel? And I think we've kind of turned the page in the sense of like, hey, let's really just cut this stuff that like, has taken up some mind share we know is unimpactful and, and, and just focus on the stuff that we know is moving the needle.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, I, I'd agree with that. I mean we've definitely had like, I think that was social affiliate for us. Like we spent a solid year, year and a half taking a swing at it. It never turned into material revenue. And all the things that were like we were getting pitched is like okay, well it didn't hit your gold, your gold goal but like your silver and bronze goals of like content and impressions. I'm like, well, well we already accomplished that. Like we don't need social affiliate to do those things. Like this was either going to be a revenue driving channel or it wasn't. So like we've definitely, I'd say yeah, learned and cut some of those things because I think we were wasting our time. SEO is interesting. Like I think we actually do, we have a really awesome SEO lead in house and I think we do a pretty good job of like continuing improving your SEO. For us it's actually been really, especially for like our tier C products where we're not building paid around that we're basically just like plopping products in existing funnels. Some of those like products have actually turned into really good SEO like type products because they're like, you know, these keywords are low difficulty because like a lot of people aren't. If you're a kitchenware brand you're probably not like, like optimizing around like scoring high or, or you know, being the highest up on the keywords for like these ancillary products. So actually SEO has been a really interesting one like where we've been able to drop some of these like TIEC products and, and write really keyword rich product pages and blog content and get backlinks and actually now we're like, we are ranking really high for some of these more ancillary products and all the keywords that are like like going to show up first on, on Google. So that's one that I feel pretty good about actually. But yeah, like social affiliate for us was like just didn't really work.

[Connor]

Yeah, totally. And it's, it's super brand dependent. It's super strategy dependent. Right. Like there's what you just described sounds awesome. And maybe there's a form of SEO that would work for Ridge. I don't think what we were doing was impactful. And there's for sure a lot of brands out there that are paying some contractor a couple grand a month for two articles that like don't really rank for anything meaningful. And it's like yeah, that's the sort of thing that also, you know, the, the idea of like, quote unquote, wasting time depends on what is the return and what is the time invested. So, like, if you're spending literally no time, then it's like, hard to waste it. But with, yeah. Whether it's bandwidth or money or whatever, for something that is largely unimpactful, we've been trying to cut more of those things. Yep.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's like whoever's owning these functions, it's like, as, as a marketing leader, you need to set a key result for them. So if it's SEO, it's like, hey, here's five relevant keywords that are really high search volume that we rank like today, here, here, here. And therefore, our goal is to get to rank at these spots six months from now. Here's how we're going to do it. Like, go, go take a swing at it. I think that's where brands sometimes get in a, in a pickle, is like, they don't actually, like, what does improving SEO look like? Like, you can actually measure it if you just like, decide what good looks like and then go take a swing at it and then you can decide if you, if you wasted your time or not. But I feel like sometimes with these functions, like, it's kind of muddy what you're actually working towards and then you're doing these things and then you look up in four months and you're like, I don't actually know if this is working or not. Not. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. But it's mainly just because we didn't have, like, what good looks like in our minds. Like, we, we like, like our SEO lead us very specific things. They're trying, like, they're trying to maintain a certain quality score. They're trying to improve rankings on certain keywords. They're. They're trying to rank for the first time on new keywords. Like, it's very clear what we're marching towards. It's not just like, we do SEO. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and that's, that's why I bring it up. I think, I think there's a lot of channels that, like, I think influencers like this for some brands where it's like, oh, we should do influencer. So we're gonna get eight posts a month from influencers or like, brand director is going to do it or whatever. And it's like, dude. And honestly, that could be the KPI. You could set the KPI, you could measure it, you could be doing it and. But ultimately your time could still be getting wasted. SEO is not an example of that. Sounds like you guys are crushing it. But like anyway that was, it was.

[Unknown Speaker]

Just the goal could be wrong too, right? It's like eight influencer posts a month. Like that might not be the right goal. Maybe that it should probably be like an impressions or a revenue or an efficient, I don't know whatever it is like or eight posts and an impression target like and it's also I think.

[Connor]

There'S some aspect of it being like this is about setting goals now I guess. But it's like relative to the size of the business. Right? Like if, if Ridge were as big as it were today and wanted to do influencers, our goal would never be 8 cool posts a month that we could like somebody could justify it. We're going to post in Slack. We're going to share with the team. The CEO is going to be super excited. Like whatever. Like you can, you can paint the picture however you want to justify it. And I just think maybe brands fall into that trap sometimes.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yep. Yep, totally.

[Connor]

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[Unknown Speaker]

Cool. So to set this, set the a little context here, you know hexclad is primarily an online business but we also have a material Costco Road Show Business which all that means is we have, we are rotating through Costco so we are never always on in Costco. Basically how it works is these road shows are like 10 days. So these road show reps, they go to these Costcos, they set up a little like demo table, they do their demo for 10 days, sell a bunch of hexclad and then they move on to the next place. It's, it's a pretty hard life. Like they are traveling all the time and it's, it's a great channel for us. Like we love Costco, we love being there. I'm a big believer. Like you should, you should, you should not, not sell on a channel just because like your margin's not as good. Like it's the same pie growth conversation. Like yes, our margins worse on Amazon, but I think our, our online business is you know, probably 50 to 100 larger than it would be by being there. So we use Prescient as a media mix modeling tool for a variety of things. You know one of the things we liked about Prescient so much early on was the insights it gave us into how our dot com efforts were spilling into Amazon. We now have a lot of insights both from Prescient and House. So the natural thing is like well what about retail? How, how is our.com digital marketing spend which we do not do any retail media at all. Like it's all direct response marketing or like brand marketing that's geared towards driving revenue on our.com site, redirecting people to our.com site. So we ran this prescient retail model to understand like how is our digital marketing affecting performance on retail? On Costco Roadshow, I don't think it's available in app yet or like in their, their ui but it's coming soon. So. So a few things I'm going to. I got my notes doc pulled up because I have a ton of notes on like what we found. So first off like double digigit percentage points is what they estimated our doom to be driving incrementally to Costco over the course of like a two year window since like April of 2023.

[Connor]

Oh, not only can I quick clarification. Double digigit percentage points your doom efforts driving in in road show. Does that mean seen 10 of roadshow revenue? You saw like a 10 lift in roadshow revenue?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yes, okay, exactly. That's what they were. Yes. It was like I, I won't speak to the exact number but it was like low double digit percentage points that they were saying that they were their model was saying we would not have. Yeah, you would not have driven this without your digital marketing efforts which again like we have a pretty big roadshow business that that's material revenue right there. Other findings. So we found that view based channels or any channel really that has a less direct path to your.com has much higher spillover into Amazon. We saw the same thing with, with Costco like the more view base like the ctvs, the youtubes, even app Lovin actually which was interesting Tik tok those all haloed into retail a lot more than it did into like Facebook or Google that have more direct clickbait based channels. Building off that, the percentage of our attributed paid media has just been steadily growing over time. It's no shock that our media mix has also been expanding to other channels outside of Meta and Google over time. So if you look like in a more recent time window the amount of incremental revenue our digital marketing is driven to to Costco Road show is, is growing over time. Which is interesting thing. Okay, a few notes worth mentioning. So they back test this, right? So they, you know that's how all these media mix models work. They do these like out of sample back testing just to like understand. So they basically right, they exclude some data from the model, right? So it's like if we're sitting here in June 24th it'll basically it'll limit, it'll say hey, we're only going to give the model data through let's say maybe and then it, and then it makes the model guess your revenue and then it overlays your actual revenue. So the back testing on this looked, it was like very much aligned. So it just giving me confidence. I mean that's how you like calibrate a model and like understand if you should trust it or not. It's not just revenue or it's not just ad spend. They're taking in like number of stores, promotions, brand specific seasonality, holidays. And you really get to understand like, like how all these different things, not just your digital marketing spend are contributing to to revenue but obviously like in the context of what your digital marketing is doing as well. Another interesting finding was that paid media drives the most incremental revenue during the holidays. So this seems obvious, right? But like we have a very long consideration period and it's really important for us to fill the funnel and have a very full funnel many, many months and even years ahead of these peak moments. But it's also proving that ad spend during these moments to people that are in the funnel is also incremental. So we have to get them in the funnel but we also have to make sure we're spending at a, at a minimum amount to be in front of these people again and get them to go make that purchase. We found that on our dot com. We're also finding that in Costco. So like there is a lot of like finding that sweet spot of ad spend is super important for us. So yeah, some channel specific stuff. Like I said, Twitter and Applovin were some of the best channels. CTV, YouTube and TikTok were all very solid too at higher scale than Twitter and Applovin. Amazon and Search were the second worst and Facebook was the worst in terms of like the amount of incremental revenue driven towards Costco. Yeah. So all these, all these channels that are like more like click purchase a much cleaner path. We still need to update the linear TV data, but I'm guessing that off a very high retail row at has. So all right, most importantly is like how are we going to operationalize this? Like first off, just knowing that is interesting but like operationalizing it, what does this mean? So probably not here yet, but I think at some point we'll create these views that really model our revenue together knowing that the, the more we get into upper funnel, the more we're going to be haloing into Costco. It there's probably a dashboard that makes sense for us to look at at Costco and online and total media spend completely together for the most holistic view. Like if, if you didn't have that relationship, you probably wouldn't do that. But knowing that there is such a strong relationship, like that's probably going to be something we do at some point. Increased confidence in retail is a future growth lever I think is a, is a major one here. Like we still are in our infancy. I think in terms of media mix and YouTube, CTV, linear TV, Tik Tok and all these other like view based channels. We also have a ton of retail levers to pull. I mean we're only in Costco roadshow. Like everyone knows that's not the only place that like premium kitchenware is sold. I mean William Sonoma did $8 billion in revenue last year. So it just is giving me a lot of like I'm very bullish on the future of, of and the upside that hexclad has in these upper funnel channels as well as our retail levers and how those two will work together. We learned that Meta was not scaling super well as a Discovery Channel right last year so we scaled it down and invested into other view based channels. We're now also learning it doesn't halo well into retail. So again even like more reason for us to just diversify a little bit away from meta and into like we already knew we could do that based on just.com performance and Amazon performance, but now we also know it doesn't perform as well for retail. So it's like kind of stacking reasons on top of one another.

[Connor]

Yeah. And quick. So and quickly on that point, just to clarify because you made the point earlier year more recently you're seeing digital efforts make a larger impact on roadshow and you could probably attribute that back to the change in media mix. That's the point you guys.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yes.

[Connor]

Facebook being a smaller percentage of spend more dollars going to more top of funnel channels. Those have a disproportionate impact on roadshow. Therefore. Yeah. You guys are driving a higher percentage of, of roadshow revenue. Yeah. That's extremely cool.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. Yeah. And you just see like the trend, like what they, what Prussian calls trend which is that's like their natural growth. Right. That they cannot attribute to any of the other variables like ad spend, store count, seasonality. That's also growing over time which is obvious. Right. Like it's, that's just the word of mouth flywheel happening. So it's that growing and then also our media mix diversifying more into channels that, so it's a, it's like stacking those things. And then the last like operational thing here is, is I already mentioned this but in spite of having a long consideration we are learning that this from this model and channel level GEO holdouts rendering sales that again our paid media dollars served during these moments are. They are driving incremental revenue immediately both online and retail. So again just like need to make sure we're not pulling too much budget from the tent pole moments into evergreen moments to build the funnel. Like we gotta have that balance. Again. It just, we knew that that was the case online but now we know that that's also the case in retail which is even. And it's again it's just like stacking like re. Like the same inputs are now having benefits in multiple distribution channels that were. That we know is happening versus just like just on our dot com or just on our Amazon. So it's kind of reinforcing some of these things that maybe we've started to do and it just gives us more confidence in them.

[Connor]

So do you think you said two things? The, the, the one of the first points that you made was like views that will look at revenue more holistically now that you've measured that digital efforts are making an impact across all channels. Will at some point you guys adjust.com cac targets and be like, hey, we actually, we actually, if we really want to grow this business, we're going to do it more holistically and therefore a.comCAC is going to get higher.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. Yes. I think that's, that would be. The idea is like you have a, a, you have a holistic view. Right? And it's like our total MER target is X. With retail.com and Amazon included, it is X. Because we know with all of our costs, like we're going to net out at this EBITDA margin. And if we do that. Yes, absolutely. Like, that would mean our, our online business target could be much, much lower.

[Connor]

Right.

[Unknown Speaker]

Because I would assume right now if we, if you made that dashboard and you built that calculator, like, we'd be like, holy crap, we are so efficient across the entire mix here year. Because now we're adding in, you know, however many tens of millions of dollars in Costco retail revenue. So yeah, we could probably really push on that at a lower efficiency, grow top line a bunch. And, and that would mean online business is a little less efficient. But holistically, it, it makes sense.

[Connor]

Totally.

[Unknown Speaker]

Which is what we did that, I mean, it's basically what we did with Amazon last year. Like, right. In 2022 and 2023, we really looked at Amazon and dot com as independent business units. Then last year we started combining them, which allowed us to scale more aggressively across the entire mix, even if.commer alone didn't look as good. So it really would just be the same recalibration by adding in, you know, retail as another number in the numerator.

[Connor]

You know, I was gonna, I was gonna make this point earlier just as an example of how interconnected Amazon and dot com revenue is. I was gonna mention this about prime, but, but we saw, we saw slower Amazon growth in Father's day than we expected.com was growing faster than, than Amazon was growing. And like, one of the things that we always look at, which I think maybe goes underappreciated as well, is Amazon was bidding on our brand terms at half the rate they were year over year. Last year they were, they had 80% impression share. This year they were down closer to 40. And I'm like, yeah, look, when people Google, we've got hundreds of thousands of people looking for Ridge Wallet on Google. When Amazon is aggress showing up towards the top of search results, more traffic is going to go to Amazon, more purchases are going to go there, more of your revenue is going to Amazon. So I think people forget, like even Amazon itself is bidding on your terms and is going to help shift where revenue goes. So it's like, it's just another reason why it's so silly to think of it as a separate P L when it's like, yeah, from a brand perspective, they're, they're siphoning off the same intent that's otherwise going to, to your Shopify store.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, yeah. I mean we're, we had some talks with Amazon because we're like, guys, come on. Like, we're, we're spending so much with you, driving so much revenue through you, spending more on channels that are haloing into you. Like, can you relax on like the, the branded bidding here a little bit? Like, you shouldn't be showing up ahead of, ahead of us. And they still, they still bid on it, but like we, we generally show up ahead of them now on the, on the branded search stuff.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, totally.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah.

[Connor]

I was also going to say, I mean this is just an, you know, a part of maturing as a brand. We also, we don't measure digital impact on retail right now. At some point we should, and we should be more scientific about it. We assume that our digital efforts are making an impact on the retail business. So like, we don't mind. We haven't gotten to the point of like really adjusting CAC or MER targets, but we're constantly looking at the business holistically. I've talked to two brands, I won't name them specifically. Really big D2C brands hit nine figures in like 2022. And both, they both had very similar experiences where basically since 2022, their D2C businesses are more or less flat, if not slightly down, but the entire business has almost doubled because they've gotten into retail. And it's like, yeah, especially if you can get into Target and Walmart and Costco and all these other places, like that is where people end up making their purchases. It becomes like harder and harder to like acquire that incremental customer. But you know, your digital efforts are making an impact across the business. So like their CAC probably more than doubled, but it's probably best for the business because they're growing brand awareness and they're driving sell through a Target and whatever else. So I think it's just kind of a. Inevitable for a lot of brands.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, I I think, I think about like retail as a distribution channel similar to how I think about like pre purchase lifecycle marketing. Like you shouldn't be running Facebook ads or any top of funnel traffic tactic without like a way for people to opt in and then get into like a pre purchase welcome flow. Like it's kind of the same with, with retail. Like if you're not exactly the same but like if you're not running, if you're not in retail or you're not an Amazon, like chances are you're just missing out on incremental conversions you would have gotten otherwise. And like saying like not if you're, if you're running ads but you don't have a popup offer, you don't have a welcome flow, you don't have any like you know, life cycle pre purchase stuff going on. Like you're just not getting in front of people enough and you're not going to be driving as much revenue and orders as you would otherwise. So I mean that's, I'm curious if we'll ever be in retail full time in Costco. I think, I don't, I don't know if we would or should because there's so much value into having the rep there like doing the demo and, and like training people. But I've also, I've, I've often wondered like, like if if having the rep there and having urgency baked into the road show is a net positive on being there. Like Evergreen always on. I don't know because you can't, I.

[Connor]

Don'T know anything about the Costco business. But you can't have both.

[Unknown Speaker]

You cannot have both. If you are on shelf all the time, you do not get the rep. But I guess the question I'm noodling on is do we do a good enough job in our marketing that being in, in the store all the time would, would benefit more than only being there part time and having the rep. Like yeah.

[Connor]

And you know, it's funny, I don't know if prescient could do this but like you could do the reverse. Also I'm sure the road shows driving Amazon revenue or driving.com revenue. We see that in our post purchase. We see people. What'd you hear about is people are like Best Buy shields and it's like oh that's, that's cool. Like I think it's in terms of where revenue's falling. Like it's for sure. Yeah, yeah, it's for sure. People are buying in shields and saw our YouTube ads or whatever. I think that happens a lot but also a lot of people are like oh I saw you in Shields, I'm go buy on ridge.com I am going.

[Unknown Speaker]

To add that to our post purchase survey today because I we do not have that but that's a really good idea.

[Connor]

Yeah. And I bet, I bet people in stores demoing what's also cool that people probably don't know is that like that's the origin of hexcloud. Right. Danny, the founder was like I need something that I can demo in stores. So it's a super, super, super impactful impression. I mean it's like true education. So I bet it has a really you know I don't like it's a relatively small percentage of your guys total revenue but I bet it's actually a very effective way to drive revenue across non costco channels.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, I mean we have so we have in a retail store as an option here but it's probably not specific enough. I'm gonna have that one today.

[Connor]

All right, we'll circle back to it. Well dude, that was super cool. I think that was a great episode.

[Unknown Speaker]

That was fun. Yeah.

[Connor]

All right, thank you again for listening to another episode of marketing Operators. Thank you to our sponsors Motion Rich panel after sale prescient and revo as always like subscribe we've got the moderators hotline in the show notes shoot us questions. We'll be answering those on future episodes and we'll see you next week weekend.