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Marketing Operators
E61: Quick Hits – Campaign Wins, Team Structure & AI Tools We’re Testing
01:21:13
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- [00:01]
Connor Rowling
All right, we are back. Another episode of Marketing Operators. We've got a lot on the agenda. I was hoping today we could save the state of E Commerce. Are you guys prepped for that?
- [00:11]
Cody
I don't think there is any saving the state of E Commerce. Nothing we can do.
- [00:15]
Sophie
It's over.
- [00:15]
Connor Rowling
Well, it'll be worth a shot. And I think that's a good goal for all podcasts moving forward. Is. Is. Is. We'll continue to save Ecom. Awesome. Cody, you just got from. Back from Portugal. Any. Any updates? Learnings. What'd you learn about CRO?
- [00:32]
Cody
Didn't learn much about CRO in Portugal. Unfortunately not. Not sure how the two of those tied together, but. No, it was good. Good trip. Cousin. Cousin got married out there. Brought both kids. Fortunately had a lot of family help. Otherwise, I don't think there's a chance I could have done it. But it's probably like one in the morning. You know, they're still on that time zone, so ignore me if I fall asleep halfway through this. I promise I'm not bored.
- [00:58]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, yeah, Per. Right. I. I appreciate the heads up. No, glad to have you back. We've got a relatively big announcement. Do you guys. Do you guys see it in the docket? I think I discussed it with Sophie before you guys jumped on.
- [01:10]
Cody
Is this us moving to daily three hour episodes?
- [01:14]
Sophie
No, we're just live. We're just live streaming our work. Moving forward all day, 24 hours a day.
- [01:20]
Connor Rowling
No, we've got the go ahead from the Meta team.
- [01:22]
Sophie
Let's make the. Make the announcement.
- [01:24]
Connor Rowling
We'll be doing the first ever live marketing operators at the. At the Meta Performance Summit in early June. So for all the fellow E Com operators, the marketing operators of the world, we'll be there Wednesday, Thursday in a couple weeks. And it'll be my first time meeting Cody in person.
- [01:42]
Cody
I was gonna say me. Me too, actually. For. For Connor.
- [01:45]
Sophie
Big bear hugs in order, Cody. I expect Nothing else.
- [01:48]
Connor Rowling
Yeah. 60 plus episodes in and. And we finally get to hang in person.
- [01:53]
Cody
Love it.
- [01:54]
Sophie
The quality of the quality of the pod. Post post Cody meeting is just about to skyrocket 100%.
- [02:01]
Connor Rowling
All right, cool, guys. Well, we've got a bit of a packed agenda. We can get right into it. Before we begin, I want to thank our sponsors Motion Rich panel after cell prescient in house.
- [02:44]
Sophie
Okay, I just sent my entire team an email about this training that Motion's putting on. And you guys are going to block your calendars for this. Every operator I talk to is thinking about how to Build lean teams and become more efficient and AI is an obvious part of this. We talk about it on the marketing operators all the time because it can automate time consuming parts of the creative strategy process. In motion. Our sponsor they're doing a live virtual event series with five sessions on how to adapt timeless advertising principles to the new era of AI first ad production. This is their legendary virtual event series make ads that convert. Last year over 11,000 DTC marketers registered for it and it is going to be a banger. Listen to these topics and just an elite cast of the best of the best experts. You'll hear from names like Alex Cooper, Jimmy Slagel, Jacob Pacell, Dara Denny, Kelly Rocklin, Mirella Crespi and Barry Hot a few of the topics that they're going to go over. Using AI for deep customer research. Advanced prompting techniques for ads that don't look AI generated. Making sure your AI ads actually sell physical products using AI actors and voice models for scalable UGC building a lean AI augmented team of 2025. Here's one session that really caught my eye. It features Kelly Rocklin and she is going deep into using AI to make scalable UGC with AI actors and voiceovers without it sounding cringe. How to spin up high volume messaging tests using AI agents. Super interested in what she's learned here. Expand on what already works without replacing the human spark that makes it work in the first place. How to test creative like a craftsperson, not a chaos agent. How to build internal creative testing systems for your AI creative. Just to name a few. It's going to be really, really good. Highly recommend registering if you want to check it out. Go register for this. It's free and it's five total sessions. You can register at motionapp.com make-ads-that-convert that is motionapp.com forward/make-ads-that-convert.
- [04:47]
Connor Rowling
So it is. We're recording May 21st. I think this comes out next week. So it'll be a couple days. We're going into Memorial Day weekend. Connor Rowling, I know you guys won. Mother's Day is a pretty big period for you, so I'd love an update on how all that went. Any learnings? And then I think you guys just kicked off Memorial Day. We talked about it a bit last week. So give us the, the. The TLDR on the state of xCloud.
- [05:11]
Sophie
Yeah, things are. Things are good. Yeah, like you said, we had a good Memorial Day. Or excuse me, we. We're having a good Memorial Day. We had a good Mother's Day. You know, Mother's Day is always, always big for us because A, it's a super giftable moment and we are, you know, we do skew gift heavy not, not just during sale periods and during holidays, but all year long and, and B, we have a lot of evergreen time in between Mother's Day and our previous sale. So yeah, for us Mother's Day was really good. Actually one of our best growth months of the year to date so far. I'd say I've been preaching about this but I'll, I'll rehit it again because it was absolutely the biggest learning and it just continued to hammer this point home that just like campaign ifying and branding different activations continues to pay off for us. Like I think Mother's Day was one of the first times outside of, aside from our big game sale, which that was kind of like a no brainer. Like obviously you have to brand it with the super bowl campaign. Outside of that, the only other like sale moment we usually do this for or have done it for is holiday and Black Friday. So this is the first moment outside of those two moments that we did it. And pretty much across the board we saw way better performance, we saw better efficiency from our Mother's Day ads, we saw better click rates, better revenue per users on our emails, we saw better conversion rate, better view product rate on our, on our website. So we are just getting a lot better at branding these, these tent pole moments and making them very like just feel different. Like we could do nothing different from Mother's Day to Memorial Day. But if you hit our website and you went to our ad library, you got our emails, they're going to feel very different. I think there's a lot of value in doing that. Um, and I was super bullish on it and it was pretty easy to see just from the blended metrics during the sale that we were like hitting projections and our year over year comps look good. But we just did a postmortem last week where we really drilled down into each channel and, and we're seeing the numbers that, that I just mentioned. So yeah, we're getting better at that. That's the biggest learning we're trying to do that for. You know, really every single, every single like offer moment and just like big campaign moment we have moving forward and we have the, we have the team to do it now. We hired a, a director of design who is really running lead with our head of content on creating these, these campaign toolkits. That we also talked about in a few episodes ago, and we're really just seeing that payoff. So I'm very excited to continue to build that muscle and see how we can expand it. So. Yeah. Unification of. Of channels and branding.
- [07:43]
Connor Rowling
Are there any brands that do it really well that you guys took inspiration from? Brand, like, branding? Some of these sale moments, honestly, like.
- [07:50]
Sophie
I think where you guys do it well, I think, like, like with your sweepstakes, I really like how your sweepstakes had its own unique branding that you did not use anywhere else. It's very clear to go to your website during the sweepstakes without even reading anything. Just like, knee jerk reaction. Something different is going on. So, like, you guys do it well. Huckberry does it well. Like, they have. Yeah, they crush it. They crush it.
- [08:14]
Connor Rowling
And.
- [08:16]
Sophie
Yeah. So those are two that I think of. I know there's probably a bunch more out there, and it's something that we had not been very good at until really Q4 of last year. We started to get better at it, and we're trying to build that momentum.
- [08:27]
Connor Rowling
Did I, when we talked about this a couple weeks ago, did I show. I look at the Huckberry examples all the time. I've got a board of, like, their graphic treatments. Did we talk about that last time?
- [08:36]
Sophie
Yeah, we talked about it. We talked about it in the sweepstakes episode. I think that hasn't gone out yet.
- [08:41]
Connor Rowling
Got it. Yeah. All the days are, like, totally blending together.
- [08:44]
Sophie
I know. Yeah, I know it's. It's crazy. But yeah, this director design has been super fun to work with. And basically, like, once this brand, this. This campaign toolkit's put together, that's where all the channel designers kind of start their. Their designs. Right. And it just ensures this level of consistency that you can't have if. Unless you have, like, a good starting point like that.
- [09:07]
Connor Rowling
Yeah. I also think it relieves. We're. We're doing it way more. Sweepstakes is the best example of how we've done it, but I'm trying to do it way more. It also relieves pressure on the studio. Like, you have to produce less content if you're expecting your. We. We're trying to be leaner across the entire organization. One of those is like, the team that produces content or the budget that it takes to produce content. So if you could just like, we have thousands of images, and whether it's like getting creative with those images or prompting new images or applying some sort of standard color treatment and fonts, like, it could just Go way further. So I'm super on the same page. Is that probably the biggest difference in Mother's Day year over year?
- [09:44]
Sophie
100%. The offer stack was very, very similar. So yeah, definitely just the branding was the biggest, the biggest change. Also important to mention, we're not necessarily, we are exploring new asset types when we do this, right. We're not just saying to this design director, like, go make the branding toolkit. We're also saying, hey, if you have a, like a fun static ad idea, run with it and we'll, and we'll roll that out and test it. But also we're not, it's not like we're totally throwing away all the things that we've learned from all of the winning static ads we've launched in the last few years. Like, we're taking all of the elements about how we use headlines and how we use, you know, product shots and how we use value prop call outs and offer call outs and just infusing it into this more branded experience. So it's a good mix of like, hey, here's what's worked and now let's make it more branded and you know, hey, hey, like design director, go to go, like go off into your lab and if you have a cool concept, like, let's do it, let's run it. So we're finding, we're taking winners and infusing it into the branding. We're also finding new winners that now we can take and create like an evergreen version of. So it's, it's also like scaling up our just kind of baseline evergreen stack, which is fun to see.
- [10:56]
Connor Rowling
Awesome. All right, cool. So Mother's Day off to or Mother's. Mother's Day went well. Cody, you guys just, do. You guys do Mother's Day and then I know you just launched Memorial Day.
- [11:07]
Cody
Yeah, we did a few things. We did a Mother's Day gift with purchase. We had a, we had a restock. So we stupidly, we always did for our holiday kits, like a warm and a cool kind of like city inspired thing that has like different kits. And we did this thing called the beach vacation kit for holiday and it didn't do so well. You know, who would have thought launching something in November themed around the beach wouldn't do so well? In the past we did like, we had like a Miami kit the year before that, like sold out. So we were like, hey, why not? Didn't do so well. So we had a lot of inventory, so we brought it back. It's been crushing and actually we, we brought it back a little bit more discounted than normal. So obviously that's got something to do with it. But, but you know, we just wanted to offload that inventory and so that's been crushing it. And then at the same time as that, we did a little Mother's Day gift of purchase. I think it was probably about a week long. Built a little new like GWP feature on the site to actually let people like pick their shade between a few of them. Um, we just, we all, we also have some products where we want to disc that we're going to discontinue. So it just kind of again, worked out that we had inventory and that crushed it. So yeah, that did really well. So it's kind of one of those moments that we're leaning into a little bit more, you know, every year. But yeah, it, it, it crushed it. I know I sent a screenshot in one of the chats. Like we had our first $100,000 like retail only day, which was pretty exciting. I think we hit like 115 or 120. Um, so yeah, Mother's. Mother's Day crushed it. So first half of the month was, was really good. It was, I was telling my team, you know, first time that we've been like ahead of forecast and in quite a while, so it was great. Unfortunately, our, our Memorial Day promo not going exactly how we wanted. We're doing the mini miracle bombs and it's just like probably like the sixth time we've done it now. And so we're just, it's just not the same thing. I think it's a little oversaturated and we've sold now, you know, millions of these things the last few years. So there's just only, you know, a lot of people have them. It's just not as exciting as it used to be. So we're going to have to go back to the drawing board and, and figuring out, you know, how, how we continue to innovate and make some of these promo periods a little bit bigger because we don't like to do like a traditional standard discount. So these have always carried us very well. But becoming clear it's getting oversaturated and not going to be, not going to be, you know, the move going forward.
- [13:22]
Connor Rowling
Totally. Okay, I have two questions. One around the Mother's Day sale and the gifted purchase. One thing we've been, or I've been like trying to better navigate. We have items that we are over inventoried in and some of them work extremely well for Gift with purchase. And then we've got quite a bit of stuff that is just like not all that enticing and doesn't seem to be all that impactful from a gift with purchase perspective. Do you guys often run into that? Like, do you have inventory that you may be over inventoried in, but you don't think it's of value enough to even offer it within a promo like Mother's Day?
- [13:52]
Cody
It could. I mean when we like first launched, like we could do anything for a gift with purchase. It would crush like like a bag. And I think we got to the point where like, you know, that became oversaturated. So now we're starting to do these products. Like we never wanted to give a purchase with products you could buy and now we're doing it. We're also doing like, we have stuff that's like higher cogs. So we're doing like, you know, like True Classic has that like tiered gamified card. We're doing something like that for Labor Day. We'll also build like bundles around them. So like Labor Day we're going to do like essentially like a bid. We're going to call it a set sale, but just like bunch of bundles that we're going to build and, and just based on inventory. So like, let's say we have like a lot of lip products, right? It'll be like three lip products for, you know, 20% off, you know, for like a set of them. So we're going to do that and we're also going to. Do you ever do a mystery box? Oh, we're into our first mystery box.
- [14:41]
Connor Rowling
That's probably going to crush. We do it for sweepstakes every year and it's like the most popular product.
- [14:45]
Cody
And have you do it with GWP or you do it as like it's like its own bundle.
- [14:51]
Connor Rowling
We've done it as its own standalone product. It's like a, it's a mystery wallet for us. And it's like. So it's the lowest price point. It doesn't appear marked down, but it's like $69 and it's between. We'll put 24 karat gold wallets in there which are 200 bucks or whatever. So there's a pretty wide array. And then we try to strike the balance of they are items that we're over inventoried in. But it's not like nobody's going to be like truly disappointed. We could give someone like a really ugly wallet and like we really avoid that.
- [15:19]
Cody
Yeah, yeah. I feel you. You've heard us talk about Prescient AI before, we work with them at Jones Road. But you still might be wondering what is it? What is this MMM thing? At its core, Prescient really helps brands get more out of every marketing dollar that they're spending by showing them what's working, what's not, and where to spend their money next. The Prescient team knows modern marketing is a sum of many things. Your media spend seasonality, other marketing campaigns, consumer sentiment and so much more. That's why they don't rely on pixels, bias, platform measurement or old research models to help you make the most confident decisions. They truly built their MMM from the ground up based on models that adapt to your data and evolve over time, not the other way around. If you want to measure the halo effect that your campaigns are having on all of your channels, yep, talking about E commerce, Amazon and even retail depression can help you out. You can test new channels, predict future performance of those channels, know how much you should be spending on each of them, and continuously optimize how you spend your budget to make it as efficient as possible. Which listen we all need right now. You can do this all without sacrificing your upper funnel budget or bottom line. KPI's prescient has proven to us how truly incremental and efficient some of our upper funnel channels like tvr, that was very hard to measure prior to it. So if you've been wanting to try Prescient, they just upgraded their model and their vision across measurement and retail is truly next level they marketing decision making where it's never been able to go to before. If you want to learn more and gain insights into how you can optimize your entire media mix in as little as 48 hours, then go to preshen AI.com operators and book a demo today. Would you ever do it for a gift with purchase? Like a mystery gift, mystery box gift with purchase? Yeah, not even a box but like mystery wallet or something or mixed mystery, whatever.
- [17:05]
Connor Rowling
I wouldn't do a mystery. I'd be, I think we'd be devaluing the wallet too much if we gave it away as a gift with purchase. But mystery gift with purchase, mystery box, it comes with your wallet or whatever is the sort of thinking that we would need to move through some of the stuff that I was talking about. Like I'll give an example. Like we launched some belts just like an experimental thing in November and just like it's going to take a lot of time and energy to sell the Belts unless we were to roll them up in some sort of like mystery box. So there's all sorts of like creative ways, ways to move through that inventory. But some of it, unless it's like obfuscated with like it being a mystery, just feels like it's almost. We're, we could just give it away, but like we've measured it a couple times and it's like it's not. We'll use intelligence. We'll like understand the incremental impact of that gift and it's like nothing. So it's like we are just giving it away, which is fine, but we're not really generating much value.
- [17:57]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, I, I feel you. We've got some stuff like that, but that's where. So either, I think for us it's either can we put it in a set? Can we put it in a.
- [18:05]
Connor Rowling
Right.
- [18:05]
Cody
A gift of purchase and then if not, we'll try the mystery thing. And if not, you're going to. We'll give it away. We'll donate it.
- [18:12]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, totally.
- [18:12]
Sophie
Do you choose your own at all, Cody? Have you guys ever done that? Like this or that or, or you have three options or like. Yeah. Have you experimented there?
- [18:20]
Cody
That was what we did for. Yeah, I just saw it on your, I was just on your site checking it out. See you guys are doing that with some gdp. Yeah, we did that for the first time. So we had, we had a new thing built in our cart. We did it, I guess we could have done it with multiple products. Like we had like a lip tint, like a lip product. And, and we had multiple skus of it, multiple shades. So we let people pick three of them.
- [18:42]
Sophie
Got it.
- [18:42]
Cody
So that was like the first. So it wasn't like pick your own product, but it was like of this product, pick what shade you want.
- [18:48]
Sophie
Yeah, we're, we're actually gonna, we're gonna do a big like we did, we did just static 13 inch griddle gift with purchase on, on Mother's Day. And now we're doing choose static. Choose 13 inch or 4.5 quart for Memorial Day size. The 4.5 quart is way out out outweighing the 13 inch griddle, which I think is, it's definitely in part just to like we just offered that gift in the previous three weeks. Also. The 4.5 quart has more value. So both of those are definitely supporting the 4.5 quart. But like I, I, we're going to CRO test this so we can get a true read on it. I really believe that like I as a consumer would opt for the $150 product if I already own the 200 product. And I think that there's probably a point where there's too many options, but I think like, I bet like three very different options for us at least is probably that sweet spot. And we're going to, we're going to test it. So maybe that can be a test of the week after.
- [19:43]
Cody
Yeah, I wonder just giving them, giving them an option in general like lifts it.
- [19:48]
Sophie
Yeah, definitely. I think so. We'll find out.
- [19:50]
Cody
Connor, I see on your pdp, I don't know if this is a test or just a full deployment. Like on, on wallet pdp you guys are testing like wallet only versus a kit. Kind of like bundling it. Is that something you guys are testing.
- [20:01]
Connor Rowling
The, the tab selector that you can.
- [20:04]
Cody
Yeah.
- [20:05]
Connor Rowling
Toggle back and forth. Yeah. So we've always had those kits and then that's something that we rolled out earlier this year because we didn't have a easy way to navigate between the individual product and the kit. This is also kind of inspired by True Classic who does a fantastic job. Like they are constantly just trying to get you to buy like 4, 5, 6 T shirts at a time. So their PDP is crazy. The way you can navigate between single kits, between different color sets of kits. You could build your own kit. It all happens within one unified experience. So that was our example of doing that. We're driving more kit views, we sold more kits, we drove up revenue. I think we drove up conversion rate in that test too. It was very successful.
- [20:43]
Cody
Awesome. Great. And, and any. So any increases, any lifts you get there outweighs any like margin Hit totally awesome. Cool. That's great.
- [20:50]
Connor Rowling
Yeah. 100. My second question for you, Cody, was Memorial Day sale, you know, a softer start than you'd expect? Typically you guys use Memorial Day to then plan Q4. So like do you have any thoughts on what's the strategy given these early results and how will that affect the. The plan for bfcm?
- [21:08]
Cody
I mean, I think we knew that this was going to happen. I think it's definitely even softer than I wanted. We are planning our first ever actual discount. Even prior to this.
- [21:18]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [21:19]
Cody
Because last, last Black Friday, what wasn't really what we wanted. I think we kind of knew it then, you know, like what was it? It was probably two years, so 2023. That was when we had like a record one and we had like a six million dollar day and we were like the top product on Shopify. Like I just don't think we're ever going to do that again. Like maybe we will, but not, not just from the Minis. And I just think there were so, there was so much pent up demand and we had so much scarcity of these Minis before them and we always, always sold out and now it's just, you know, we've leaned into it more and it's more saturated. So yeah, we have to get a lot more creative. I don't know if there's like other products that the menus of will have the same appeal. We'll, we'll definitely test some things but, but yeah, definitely changing forecasts and then also changing plans. And you know, the biggest thing really where a lot of my focus is going and the team's focus is going is like more just product roadmap innovation for next year.
- [22:14]
Connor Rowling
Right? Yeah, it makes total sense. I think it's, I think it's, it's an interesting point to just acknowledge how good, yeah, that BFCM where Harley shouted you guys out, like top product, I'm sure. Totally. I was talking to Taylor Holiday last week. We're in the middle of May, June, which is like for us a big Father's Day period. And we had an Insanely Good May, June 2023, like just unbelievably good. And I think it will have screwed up our projections like basically last year and this year too because we didn't properly recognize how abnormally good it was and how it'll just be like it's, it's hard to recreate those much less like grow 40% or whatever, you know what I mean? And, and you'll end up just shooting yourself in the foot, like continuing to chase that growth and not just acknowledging, hey, we almost have to like caveat that period, those couple months in the, in the, the spreadsheet, like we'll just have to realize that we're not going to be able to grow at the same rate that we will other months. And that at least from my perspective, has been a little bit of a learning lesson for us.
- [23:18]
Cody
Oh yeah. I mean I remember you talking about that in the, in the past like a bunch of episodes back. And, and I've realized that we've had that like January, we were, we were down year over year, was our first ever down, you know, and I was like, oh like are we gonna be down the whole year, year over year? But like January was here, we were, you know, 15 million and then just like dropped down like prior years to like More of a normal level. And then this year, like we missed January by a little bit. February was like pretty flat. But then we've been up since then, like year over year. So we're. We're up for the year. Like not crazy, but we, we are up for the year. But it's just such a different curve because January was just like such an outlier month for us. And so same thing, like May was such an outlier too. We like, we probably had like 150% growth year over year last May. And like, we're just not going to comp that.
- [24:04]
Connor Rowling
Right.
- [24:05]
Cody
It might take like a, you know. So yeah, the, the. The curve looks totally different.
- [24:09]
Connor Rowling
And what was that January being so strong? January 2024, is that just kind of. That is the January after that huge bfcm, you think? There's just like a really long tail to all of that success.
- [24:20]
Cody
That was when we launched tv. I really think it was tv.
- [24:23]
Connor Rowling
Oh, interesting.
- [24:23]
Cody
That did it. Nothing else we did differently or changed?
- [24:27]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, yeah. Yes.
- [24:29]
Sophie
And what about you, Connor? For. For. I was gonna ask you the same thing about that. You said your 2023, May and June were monsters. What. Can you pinpoint that to any tactics.
- [24:39]
Connor Rowling
You did or is that just, uh. Yeah, totally. Well, it was our first. We started hitting million dollar months in rings. So we had this new category growth that was like really, really meaningful. That like even rings even now is seeing super solid growth, but it's not infinite growth. This was just like net million dollar plus in each of those months. Do you get something like that looking back at the Facebook ads? Dude, I don't know. We just had. We had like this one piece of creative that just. It. We spent like a million dollars. It was above like a 1x in north beam which like, with the data we have now, we're probably talking about like a 3x Iroas or just something absurd. We had our best ever. Literally our best ever YouTube integration was with Smarter. Every day he was doing a video on bullets colliding and the video goes viral. So it gets like 20 million views and he doesn't get the bullets to collide during the video. And then at the end, towards the end, he does the ad integration and he's shooting the wallet from both sides and that's when he gets the bullets to collide. So like the climax of the video was our ad integration. It was just like. And it absolutely crushed it. There was like. It probably drove another like $800,000 in sales or something. So it's just kind of Perfect storm.
- [25:55]
Cody
You just had, like, everything. Awesome.
- [25:56]
Connor Rowling
Yeah. 100% interesting.
- [26:00]
Cody
I don't know how you can't beat that. I don't know how you're not comping that year over year.
- [26:05]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So, anyway, point being, like, understanding when you're having. What is it, like, unrepeatable success to some degree, Outlier success, definitely. You know, our. So we're in the middle of Memorial Day. It's going well. Frankly, like, sale to date looks solid. Our big thing is it's our first ever Memorial Day sale, so I kind of pulled the page out of your guys's book. We historically have started Father's Day, like, 30 days early, and we'll just. We would call it right now our Father's Day sale. We're gonna go Memorial Day sale, end that sale, roll into Father's Day soon after, and I think, you know, knock on wood a little bit. This is. This is by far the biggest change that we made going into this sale period. But I think we could really crush Memorial Day weekend and then still captured most of the value of Father's Day as well. So that's what I'm hoping for. So, yes, Wednesday, May 21st. I'm hoping we're heading into, like, a by far biggest Memorial Day weekend ever.
- [27:03]
Cody
Well, you have different offers for them.
- [27:06]
Connor Rowling
The sale will change quite a bit. Yeah, but not like we. We do. We do, like, promos across different parts of our line. So, like, something like NFL hasn't been on promo. That'll go on promo. There will be certain rings that will be added to the promo, things like that.
- [27:20]
Sophie
And will you brand it differently? Like, going back differently?
- [27:23]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, I'll say it now. We got. We got John Daly and John Daly II as a part of the Father's Day campaign, which is pretty tight.
- [27:34]
Sophie
That's awesome. That is so cool.
- [27:36]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So it'll feel. It'll feel quite a bit different.
- [27:40]
Cody
Can we talk about that on another pod? Like, more in depth?
- [27:43]
Connor Rowling
Totally. Yeah. And I'll let you. Well, here I'll. I'll quickly give you the premise of why I thought it was a great partnership. One father, son, team. Awesome. So it rolls out for Father's Day. That'll be great. We're launching a Stars and Stripes wallet in June. So I typically don't leak information early, but, like, Stars and Stripe wallet is going to be sick. And John Daly, famous for wearing the stars and Stripe, just, like, extremely Americana. So I'm like, I think he'll play a great role in that launch. And then we have rights for all of that content through early August. And he's going to be in Happy Gilmore 2. So I'm like, oh, I just think like John Daly will also increase in relevance in this whole time. Not only is he a great fit for both these, the sale launch and the product launch, but also I think people might be really paying attention to who John Daly is in July. So this seemed like a no brainer.
- [28:33]
Cody
Also, Hooters just went bankrupt, so he's probably, you know, he probably needed a little extra cash, so he was probably a little cheaper than normal.
- [28:39]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was, it was. No, it was super affordable. I don't think he gets a ton of ad interest either, dude.
- [28:45]
Cody
I mean, he used to, he used to be, used to be a big deal. Was, did you meet him? Like, were you at the shoot with him?
- [28:51]
Connor Rowling
I didn't make it to the shoot. The team went out and shot with him in Nashville, but I just gotten back from Mexico or something. I wasn't able to make it happen. So he had unfortunately did not get to meet him.
- [29:03]
Sophie
Did you guys shoot some crazy ads or is that like the, the peak use of him? I mean, I'm sure you got stuff for all parts of the funnel, but.
- [29:09]
Connor Rowling
Like there's some good stuff. I'm happy with it. We did it on like a really minimal budget, very scrappy shoot. There's some great content. We have some great interview content. We wanted him to hit golf balls off of a Ridge wallet, but he didn't want to do that. So unfortunately didn't get that shot.
- [29:26]
Sophie
That's the, that's the thing he didn't want to do, apparently.
- [29:31]
Connor Rowling
Laughs it's been a year since we migrated to rich panel and I had no idea how impactful the right customer service tool could be. Here's what our customer service team has achieved since making the move. 1. Our order volume continues to rise, but our support tickets, if not our self Service Portal, helps 47% of website visitors help themselves immediately without having to contact their agents. 2. Their AI powered social media moderator is awesome. We continue to spend a ton on meta as a part of our marketing mix and it flags and replies to thousands of comments automatically to help us make the most of our ad spend. Like many of you, I've been cautiously skeptical about certain automation and AI use cases, but our support quality hasn't dipped at all. It's actually gone up. We're at an all time high of 96% customer satisfaction score. All this and it's still 50% cheaper than other platforms. No limits on AI usage or tickets, and fair, predictable pricing each month. With market and tariff uncertainty, consumer confidence is in the gutter. You cannot afford bad customer experience or overpaying for older software tools. And migration is super simple. They handle your data import, agent training and automation setup. You only need two or three calls and you're live in 14 days. They guarantee a 30% ticket reduction in the first 60 days or your money back. So it's a no brainer. If you want happier customers and a happier finance team, head over to richpanel.comdemo to book a demo today. This is, this is. We were joking. This is like an internal operator hotline question. Connor Rolling texted me this week about structuring ecom teams and I didn't respond. So I was like, let's talk about it on the pod. Connor, you want to tee up like kind of what you asked me and where your head's at in terms of what you guys are doing at Hex?
- [31:15]
Sophie
Yeah, yeah. So I mean it's just, it's just smart of you. You're right. You're like, I can answer this via text or we can, we can have some content for the podcast. So I apprec you ignoring me. So just talk about it now. But my question was I'm curious about web team structure and how you have it built. And I've talked to a lot of brands about this. It's been a while so I wanted to revisit it. But yeah, we are just thinking through how to best structure our web team. We are, you know, part internal, part external. And I think I've talked about this pretty openly. But like, I think generally for most brands, as they scale, it makes sense to internalize more and more of their, of their core functions. And you know, being an e commerce brand, like if you're not good at, you know, building and running and manipulating a website, like that's a huge hole. And I'd say we're, we're pretty good at it right now, but we want to keep improving. So we have a lot of folks internal, we have a head website internal, we have a director of E commerce internal, we have a director of CRO internal V designer internal. We work with a super talented development agency that we really like working with, but we're like, what would the value be of bringing some engineers in house? And maybe we do some things internal engineering, we keep working with this agency for other things external engineering. So that's our current stack and kind of what we're thinking about. And I know that a lot of us five different brands or ten different brands, I feel like you'll get five or ten different answers. Totally just the structure of like where the CRO lead lives and where the devs live and where the UX designer lives. So I think it's a very interesting thing to dig into how these teams are structured. So yeah, that's what I was curious about.
- [32:56]
Cody
Yeah.
- [32:56]
Connor Rowling
Awesome. And I'm curious what's the difference between head of website and director of E Commerce?
- [33:02]
Sophie
Director of E Commerce is more in the weeds on website manipulation. So she's actually there directing change, making change herself. She's across all the websites actually pulling levers and updating things and making changes. The the head of E Commerce is a. Is a developer that can get in code and actually develop new things. He is also managing like our development agency, but not, you know, he was doing a lot of the same things the director of E Comm did, but just like was neglecting other things that he just shouldn't have been like in the actual manipulation of the website as much as he was.
- [33:37]
Connor Rowling
Yeah. Okay, got it. So I'll give you my quick thoughts and I'll start with the reason I've been thinking about it is because we're hiring for a Director of E Commerce. So if anybody's looking for work, you apply@ridge.com I'm sure you could get there somehow. What Director of E Commerce is going to oversee at Ridge is kind of three main functions. One is the one that we're best at right now, which is literally just like E Comm ops and that is like how are we launching products, how are we launching website updates, how are we launching new sales price changes? Site merchandising I would put in this bucket where I think that's kind of what you mean by like manipulating the site. When they are receiving Figma files from the design team, they can translate that into shogun elements that make it onto the site. They'll schedule those changes, things like that. They are, yeah. I want to say it's like purely operational. They are receiving information and designs and they're able to implement those on the site. That's what we're like really strong in right now. I think there's this like E Comm marketing component that I think we can improve at, which is we're delivering marketing summaries for a new campaign or a new product launch. And whoever's owning this function of, you know, the E Comm program has to Interpret that summary, understand the objectives, and then ultimately brief the creative team to say, hey, I need a new web page that does xyz. These are like our commercial goals. And then they're delivering something that does that and that would move on to E Comm ops to then be implemented. So it's like, how are we putting our different, you know, company objectives through the lens of E Comm marketing? That would be one. And then the third one is ecom product. And that's where like you're actually someone is dealing with engineers and designers to, you know, they're looking at data, they're identifying opportunities to build new features, they're testing those features, they're launching those features. And that is like what's people call that digital product or that's what like a product manager would do at a software company. And I think that's where we can also get much stronger. So the director of E Commerce we're looking for, really the main skills I'm looking for is his experience working with engineers and UX designers to, to like build out bridge.com from a digital product perspective. Put together the roadmap and making sure we're, we're kind of working towards that future. So there's three main functions and. Yeah. Does that help at all?
- [36:01]
Sophie
Absolutely. I mean, so, so what, what's your current. So that's the person you're trying to put into place? Like. Yeah, I think you have, you have some web team in internal right now, right?
- [36:14]
Connor Rowling
We have, we have. Okay, so we have engineers in house and we have designers in house. We have a. The way that the like quote unquote digital product team is working right now, like, let's just call it a pm. An engineer and a designer is. They are like, they're like dotted lines between them. We have a lead developer, the designer reports into the creative director and the person managing like the PMing part of that, the product management part of that is rolling up into me. Then they're all just collaborating in a more like horizontal format to like accomplish goals together. It's not as if the developer reports into that PM person, just that we have that structured. And same with E Comm marketing where it's like that marketing manager is making briefs to the creative team. That designer doesn't roll up into them, that designer rolls up into the creative director. They are just working cross departmentally at that point to launch new landing pages or sales pages or PDPs or whatever.
- [37:13]
Sophie
Okay, so is the idea that this director of E Commerce then you'll Reorg and the engineers, designers, and like the digital product PMs will all report into this person and they'll work all together.
- [37:25]
Connor Rowling
No. So the dotted lines will basically stay the same. The director of E Commerce will oversee the E Comm Ops people. And if we hire a dedicated like E Comm marketing manager at some point, like I could see us filling in some of those roles beneath them. But right now they're mostly just overseeing those workflows.
- [37:42]
Sophie
Got it. Okay. And what's the. So the E Comm Ops people are those like right now your project managers basically that are focused on e comm.
- [37:50]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, 100%. And we have one junior person, then we have one overseas person.
- [37:55]
Sophie
Got. Oh, so you have two E Commerce.
- [37:58]
Connor Rowling
Basically E Comm Ops managers. Yeah. And that's. Yeah. You know, really, it's just because we've been launching so many products. Like we've had like basically twice weekly launches for a year now across five markets. So that team has had to be around to just like make all those. Make all those adjustments all the time.
- [38:17]
Sophie
Got it. And then how many, how many engineers and designers do you have?
- [38:22]
Connor Rowling
We have two engineers, we have one lead designer and then we have a junior designer beneath them.
- [38:30]
Sophie
And the engineers, would you say they're pretty equal seniority?
- [38:35]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, they're pretty close.
- [38:37]
Sophie
Got it. Super helpful. Yeah, you guys are, you guys are pretty robust on the, on the. I mean that's definitely bigger than our. I mean we're like, we've had a website, so he's one engineer, we have one in house UX designer. And then we have the director of E Comm is our. And then we have our CRL lead. So I guess we're like four deep on internal.
- [39:01]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now the only like couple caveats would be like the lead designer and the junior designer below them will do other things too. Like they're doing wholesale catalogs at times or Amazon designs. I'm just talking about the people that service the workflows that I just described. It's not everybody's, it's not a hundred percent of everybody's time.
- [39:20]
Sophie
Got it. That makes sense.
- [39:21]
Connor Rowling
Aside from the Ops people. The ops people are like full time making those, making those updates and they're looking at data and they're like, you know, they're like working with the operations team and the product team to making sure we're getting all the information we need to like make the changes or launch the products that we need to.
- [39:36]
Sophie
Got it. That makes sense.
- [39:38]
Connor Rowling
Awesome. Cody, have you been thinking all about ECOM teams.
- [39:41]
Cody
We no longer have any kind team so trying to figure out what we're going to do a little bit.
- [39:45]
Connor Rowling
Yeah. Well, what is the plan? You guys, you guys mostly, you know, I don't know if just you guys mostly sell stuff on, on your website.
- [39:54]
Cody
Yeah.
- [39:54]
Connor Rowling
You're mostly an E commerce company.
- [39:56]
Cody
Yeah, you know we pitch. Pitch it and we did, we did a little bit of. Don't know how much I want to talk about unpop, but did a little bit of a restructure. So just trying to kind of figure out, take. Take note of where we are. So I'm, I'm pulling a few shifts right now. We have like our. A few people on the team who kind of pitch it in. Like we honestly we, we didn't have an econ person for the longest time until probably a little bit less than a year ago. So it was kind of always me plus like somebody on like the just like a general marketing kind of coordinator as a manager now more on like the project management team to do kind of like the E Comm Ops portion. And then I always just like oversaw like zero testing and like occasionally would have like an agency who pitched in with that. So that's kind of what, that's kind of what we're doing and just trying to see where things shake out and see how the year is going to go and kind of figure out what we need. What, what I'll say is we had you know, person we had director at Ecom. Like it's a very, we didn't, you know, we don't have budget to have like multiple people in this role, especially director level. But I think there's a very different skill set in terms of like the E Comm Ops portion and then like CRO testing. And I was, I was naive and hoping, you know, one person could do it all. Maybe a superstar could. But I think that's, that's a little bit the challenge. So I think that's where I'm trying to figure out and like maybe you go a little bit more junior. Like maybe they don't have to be a senior for the E Comm Ops portion and then go with like a really good CRO agency to manage like the digital product. Roadmap testing.
- [41:22]
Connor Rowling
Totally. Yeah. So I'm like, I'm trying to get us to, to kind of the scenario you just described. E Comm Ops we've got buttoned up with like a. A manager level and then the overseas person. I'd like this director of ECOM to oversee that which is totally possible. They won't need to be like building PDPs in Shopify though and then really just spend more of their time on that digital product piece. And maybe, maybe the execution of that will be more outsourcing, but we'll figure it out for sure.
- [41:51]
Cody
Yeah, we have an agency, so we have an agency who does dev and design. So they have like UX designer and then we have a few designers internally who will, will collaborate with them. Just you know, make sure things look good obviously from a brand standpoint and stuff. And, and it's very collaborative with like their UX team as well.
- [42:08]
Connor Rowling
Yeah. Awesome.
- [42:09]
Sophie
Are they like how technical, like what technical skills, if any, do do your E Comm Ops managers have or are they just like the people that are going between the UX designers and the engineers making sure that the project's moving along until it finally gets published or are they actually doing some hands on keyboard work with web?
- [42:30]
Connor Rowling
Our Ecom Ops people. I'll, I'll take that. First, are they're mostly, they're not working with the designers all that much or like if the, if the, if everybody's working in the way that I intend them to. They're not working with designers that much. They're really just focused on working with ops to make sure like they're paying attention to inventory levels or working with ops to make sure that if things are going in and out of stock that we're switching SKUs or prioritizing or deprioritizing those products. There's like some basic stuff there. They'll work further upstream so they'll be getting information from the product team that will need to ultimately launch a product or relaunch a product or whatever else. So it's like you're kind of in this trifecta between Ops product and E Comm in terms of getting products live. And then there's a lot operationally for just like launching any new product or any new sale price updates, things like that. That's like a lot of at least for us right now the way our website's built. And again it's like five website sites across all of our different markets and they're managing a wholesale store. So it's like six different Shopify instances. There's just a lot of like coordination involved in keeping those things up to date in the way that we need.
- [43:40]
Cody
Right? Yeah, I would say it's like, it's, it's kind of like kind of described. It's like a product manager. So they're not they're probably not technical, they're not designing, they're not you know, writing code. They probably understand more of the technical stuff than like you or I do hopefully. And then they can probably like do some stuff in Figma, but they're not going to like do the whole process. Now theoretically with like AI like they can probably build a repo page or at least like make edits to a repo page, you know totally. And then hopefully with AI that person can be way more empowered and can can play around and do some cool dev stuff if needed. Most brands are optimizing their transaction journey but stopping short of the thank you page and I think that's a huge mistake. Listen, you work hard to drive results with upsells, but if you're not monetizing your post purchase flow then you're leaving easy profit on the table. After sell is changing that. We've been using their Rock thanks which is formerly network offers at Jones Road for a while now and it's been a no brainer for us. Here's how it works. On your post purchase page you can show premium non competing offers from mega brands like Disney Plus, HelloFresh and a lot more just on your order confirmation page after somebody makes a purchase. So it's guaranteed to not affect your conversion rate at all. Just adds incremental profit. Their AI driven personalization picks from the best offer based on the data for hundreds of reputable advertisers and you can earn 20 to 40 cents in profit every time a customer clicks. Yes please. Again this is just post purchase after people have already purchased. But do the math. 20 to 40 cents per order that adds up over time and can get you something really good. The numbers speak for themselves. After sale customers generate 20 to 30k in pure profit per 100,000 orders. I can verify that that's that's true and that's what we're seeing on the low end for us there's a 16% average engagement rate which is seven times better than traditional ads. And again it's a net new revenue stream without disrupting anything pre purchase. We've seen this work firsthand at Jones Road. It's an easy win and it's completely free to try. Plus aftercell is hooking up marketing operators listeners. If you sign up today you can get their entire upselling suite free for a year. That's post purchase free purchase. Check out all that stuff all included. If you sign up today for being a marketing operators listener, just go visit aftercell.com operators to try rock thanks and see the money start rolling in. So stop leaving money on the table. Turn your thank you page into a profit center with after sale today.
- [46:19]
Connor Rowling
So, Cody, you kind of hinted at it earlier. AI in the E Comm workflow. You had a tweet I was geeking out on. I read the whole thing only defined. Not only defined to be pleasantly surprised that it was a sponsored post from our beloved premier sponsor, Motion, but it was all about how you guys are approaching AI at Jones Road Beauty. Can you give the quick run through?
- [46:41]
Cody
Yeah, let me remember what I said. Yeah, I mean, we're going all in. I think I was, I was like, has anybody else pulled a Toby? So Toby from Shopify and forced their team to go all in. So Toby, maybe it was like three weeks a month back was like he wrote a memo. I guess it got leaked. So he just like tweeted it, which was a boss move, but was like, we're going all in on A.I. we're a software company. Like, A.I. is changing everything. You're expected to be A.I. first now, which means, like, when you need to do it, new task or function, like, your first thing should be, how do we solve this with AI? And then also, like, if you're asking for head count, you have to first prove that AI cannot do it. And again, these guys, I'm sure, have way more access to AI and technical tools than we do being, you know, a legit software company. But I think since then I've seen a bunch of other companies come out and kind of say similar things, trying to think who else did it. I think I saw like upwork. Maybe it was either upwork or fiverr, like somebody like that. So I've just been thinking about work.
- [47:45]
Connor Rowling
He was like, he was like pro, like, prepare to be replaced almost.
- [47:50]
Cody
Yeah. So I've just been thinking about it and, and, and, and I think we're, we're going to do the same. Now I want to be super clear. Like, I don't think we're a tech company. Like, we are a physical product company. Like, we, if anything, we're trying to expand our retail store footprint. Like, not at all a tech company by any means. We make our money selling physical products and that's like the most important thing. But that being said, I think just in terms of improving operating leverage, allowing teams to get more done, automate busy work. Like, there's just. You just have to go all in. I think it's, it's too big of an opportunity and too exciting and changing too Fast that like you have to get good at it. So my plan, what I'm going to do is first write like an email memo to my team. I'm going to do a and just kind of explain our expectations of what we're using, how to use it, how to justify roles, things like that, how, you know, just how I think we, we should be looking at it overall, which happy to kind of go into. Then I'm going to teach just like a basic, kind of like lunch and learn just like basic. Because what I realized, I don't know about you guys but like not everyone is using AI even just like chatgpt as often as they should or as much as they should. And I think just like not everyone is super up to date or aware on like the best practices what, what it is even capable of. So I just want to show the team and I know like Sean's talked about it and like has shown some stuff in all hands of like building stuff with Claude or whatever. Like I think just opening people's minds to it and getting them excited about it. And then I'm going to bring in a few speakers, I think like three to four just to teach again some of these things. You know, I think I'm going to have like Alex Cooper come in and teach some just like prompt engineering stuff or different things like that just to again like I don't know which of the speakers is going to resonate and just to get my team exposure and access to these things. And then we're going to, I'm going to do a bounty. I don't know how much, I'm thinking like 10k end of the year when we pay out bonuses. Whoever makes the biggest impact with AI in the organization is going to get a pool.
- [49:58]
Connor Rowling
You know. One thing I'll say quickly, I give Sean a ton of credit in this. Just this past Friday we had like, it was almost like a little hackathon. He had everybody, he made sure everybody had Claude subscriptions going into it and we, we do an hour long standup, broke out into little breakout groups and then everybody was expected to create a game. And like the point being like just get your hands on the keyboard playing around with it so you can understand like how powerful it is. So I. That's what, that's one thing that really stuck out to me. Like just stimulating curiosity. Whether that's through speakers or the bounty or whatever else I think is really cool.
- [50:32]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. Just get them excited about it because Yeah, I, I think there's so many things like I'm sure you guys are probably the same but like just using it for so much day to day but, but I really want the whole team to do that and just getting them excited about it, not and not forcing them to have to do it. So there's that and we'll see where that goes. And then definitely like bringing on a bunch of tools. Like we're definitely, especially as our team is leaner, like, like really tapping into things to really help us get a lot done. Like one I'm super excited about right now. There's this thing called. I think it's Listen AI. So it's, it's just like customer written or not in Customer, but like audience research tool where you can run surveys, you can run essentially like, like customer. I keep saying customer but like user interviews. But you essentially do it with AI that, that automates the whole interview so you don't have to actually talk to people. It recruits and sources people and then it does all of the analysis. I can share with you. Like one of them that we did. So we're about to sign up, but we did like one project and it's like the, the, the most helpful thing, like the craziest thing. So there's, there's a bunch of things that we are bringing on that and we're kind of like replacing our tech stack. We like negotiated or like cut a lot of other softwares just to go to some of these like AI first softwares. That, that has made a huge difference for us, dude.
- [51:51]
Connor Rowling
Extremely cool. The. Listen AI. So it, it just to clarify, you're like sending it to candidates, people are applying for the role, you're sending them a link, they're doing an interview like almost asynchronously with the AI and then you're just getting the information back.
- [52:07]
Cody
No, no, sorry. This is like, like market research. So like you could you ever do like user research in terms of like you'll show somebody a landing page and you're like, what do you think of this? What is it missing? You can do stuff like that. Or if you ever done like a customer interview where like we used to have somebody on our CX team talk to customers and be like, what do you think about this product? Why did you like it? Why didn't you like what are you looking for? All that kind of stuff, right? And like again it takes half an hour to talk to, to somebody of your team's time, you know, so it just takes a lot of manpower to be able to like scale a thing like that. Or you can do like a type form, you know, where you send it out to a hundred people, thousands of people, and get responses. And then. Yeah, you could. I've done it a year ago where you take that type form, download a CSV, put it into chat, GPT. This kind of combines and. And I can show you a survey, like they have demos on their website. I think it's like listen labs, AI, but where you can do that, you actually turn your camera on, you do a video. And let's say the question is like, hey, what do you. What do you think of this landing page? And I say, hey, I think this landing page is a little confusing as part of the video. Then it'll say, what about that landing page is confusing? So it'll like use what you said.
- [53:16]
Connor Rowling
Right, right.
- [53:17]
Cody
And like follow up. And then so let's say you get 50 people to do this. It'll transcribe those, clip it for you, do analysis and give you just this like, entire breakdown that like, you would. I think I would pay, you know, an analyst or I would pay a consultant, like a good amount of money to like provide us with these insights.
- [53:36]
Connor Rowling
Totally. Yeah, that makes sense. And sorry, that is what you described and it reminded me, I thought there was. For a while I was like working on a side project that would do that for interviews, because that sort of thing, that's exactly how an interview works too. You could screen so many more candidates in that exact same flow, so.
- [53:50]
Cody
Oh, for sure, for sure. You definitely could.
- [53:52]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, no, it seems awesome for, for users. All right, cool. So is that the, Is that the biggest. Those are the big takeaways and how AI is getting implemented at jrb?
- [54:02]
Cody
Yeah, I think so. Just, just, just trying to get more done. Trying to free people up from the busy work, you know, and then just trying to get people doing way more. So, yeah, I mean, I've talked about before, but like customer service, customer experience, like automating, a ton of it. And it's made a huge impact. You know, influencer, affiliate stuff. We're using a new thing that's really scaling into that I am excited about. We can talk about Shopify Editions, but I am excited about the potential for dev because obviously that's a huge component of E Comm as we're talking about in testing, is designing and then developing these new features. Have you guys seen Shop Dev at all? Have you seen that one?
- [54:51]
Connor Rowling
We. I think you've mentioned it before. I remember I responded to the, The Founder who was, like, promoting it on Twitter. So I have access, but we haven't really dove in.
- [54:59]
Cody
That one's cool. Or I was telling, like, Drew from intelligems. Like, I wish there was something in intelligems, and I really think they should build it almost like a. Like a cursor of, like, a shop dev in intelligence. So you could like, be like, hey, like, duplicate this theme. And then you could just, like, vibe code, you know, a test essentially, and be like, hey, add review stars here and like, have that be the test. And I feel like that's just months away, dude.
- [55:23]
Connor Rowling
100%. I. I'm super curious to see how it gets implemented. I had this conversation with our lead developer because it almost feels like we're at the point where. Okay, so this is actually what I would say. Do you guys follow Stuart Chaney on Twitter from Revo?
- [55:43]
Sophie
Yep.
- [55:43]
Cody
Yep.
- [55:44]
Connor Rowling
Because I think he. He's probably. I mean, other developers are doing it for sure, but he's. So he's like, building in public in the way that they're embracing AI at Revo. And he said, like, he was really big on cursor for a bit. But what he says he's doing now is they're using Devin, which is like, fully automated coding, and most of what they do is build documentation for. This is how our web app is built. This is what all these things do, the documentation around it. So Devin has the context to now, like, submit code that is functional. And it seems, he says it sped up their development process, like 10 or 20x or whatever. Something insane. And I think that. That we'll just see that whatever you want to call that, like, that. That framework get applied to, like, more of our workflows. Right. So it's like. So I was having a conversation with our lead developer. I was like, yeah, we might be at the point where we should actually rebuild our entire theme in a way that's way more AI friendly and almost like, clean slate it a little bit and make sure that the way we've built things is extremely well documented so that web development from there can be extremely quick and easy, which is, I guess, kind of like what you're describing. It's just. It almost feels like we have to do more foundational work. And that's actually. This is something actually, that really stood out to me about your. Your tweet to like, tie it back to that quickly is you say how it'll actually cost more in the short term.
- [57:09]
Cody
Oh, well, I think I got to remember what I said I think I was just saying, like, I, I expect us maybe to spend more on software because like we're trying to go lean and cut a lot overall. But I expect that we're going to spend more on software this year than we did last year and probably more than we're budgeted for. We might spend 20% more on software, but we're going to spend way less on people. Like I'll give you the survey that we just ran where essentially we had 50 people complete it, right? Like that would have taken 50 hours of my team's time, right? So like multiple weeks to be able to get this data. I did this it while I was in Portugal, like literally set it up for an hour, got the responses in within a day. AI automated all of them. So like I am totally willing to spend more on this thing and it might be, you know, it might be whatever it is, like 10, 20 grand for, for to do this, but it's not $180,000 person a year, you know, or two people doing it. So I definitely think with some of these AI things like we're going to be spending more on, or maybe there's a CX software that, you know, is, is automating a lot of your customer service or this influencer thing. Like whatever it is, I'm happy to have my software cost go, go up if my people cost goes way down.
- [58:26]
Connor Rowling
Totally. Okay, so I completely understand that point. Very similar idea that I was just mentioning. But like we are investing in our data warehouse right now and I think that's an example of like we have to invest in the infrastructure a bit more to then benefit from AI getting all of our data clean and in like a big data warehouse so that we can have, we can plug in some sort of LLM and like just query it for the data that we need will ultimately save us time, but will cost more in the short term. And rebuilding the site or, you know, whatever is another example of that, that we need two developers today. Five years from now we might need five. But if we spend a quarter million dollars rebuilding the site from the ground up in a very AI friendly way, we can have two forever or whatever. And I think that's like some of the calculus that we're doing is like how do we invest strategically to like benefit from AI as much as possible.
- [59:17]
Cody
Yeah, I'm with you. What, what are some of the areas? So like I feel like code is obvious and like in like software, like code is the biggest one and there's vibe coding. Like I feel like it hasn't made as big of an impact in marketing. Like again I've talked about cx. Like what are some of the areas where you are more bullish on? Like you think data analysis is like one of the big next ones up because that's kind of code. Are there other areas? Like you think it's like design gets disrupted, editing, like there's a lot of.
- [59:45]
Connor Rowling
A lot of the creative stuff right now and then. Connor, I'd love to hear your take too. When I think about where is it affecting marketing most, it's in for us, the like campaign creation process. All of this is kind of creative work. Like how are we going from marketing summary to copy to E com brief and like how quickly can we do that and how long does it take? It's like getting dramatically sped up and becoming kind of more robust with AI. And then you could see the same sorts of things on like the performance creative level where, where they're just able to ideate more and quicker and write more briefs and maybe generate B roll or like some like light actual content generation. But I was gonna, I was gonna mention this earlier. What's his handle? Ron. Ron Underscore Ecom. I don't know his last name. Great Twitter follow though. But he says, he said this and I was like, yeah, this makes total sense. He thought right now for D2C implementation of AI the opportunity lies in the open the org remaining lean versus like being growth oriented. I don't know a lot of AI tools today that can plug in and significantly help us get to 20% more or 20% higher growth. It's more about how does AI plug in today to help our creative team iterate faster and me create more campaign briefs and do that with fewer people. That ultimately leads to growth. But in the short term it's really just about the leanness and like the, the volume output. It.
- [61:10]
Cody
Totally agree. I'm with you there. I do think media buying like I know Taylor talked about this when he was on about like how AI is just probably gonna do a lot of these things better. Like I know motion is doing some really cool stuff with their agents and like creative analysis but like I do think a lot of the media buying stuff or the analysis that people are doing, you know where they're like hey this is what we're pacing. This is, this is percent new visits on this campaign. This is a one day click. This is what's performing best. Like a lot of that analysis is, could be so easily replicated and then it's probably not that hard if somebody can build it for an agent to go into meta and actually like be like, hey, I'm actually going to adjust that up, I'm going to adjust it down. So I see that one. I mean obviously ASC has done a lot of it, but I see that being another one that can probably get done soon.
- [61:59]
Connor Rowling
Totally. I would, I would love that. He, he Taylor talks about the hedge fundification of media buying. Like you just like D in all your channels in your budget and you just let it allocate the dollars as efficiently as possible. That for sure happens at some point. I just, it's not happening right now. I don't know if it happens over the next six months. I'd even give that. That might be something that's on like the two year time frame or something. Connor, any, any, any notes you want to add?
- [62:26]
Sophie
I, I think, I think your note about like putting an LLM on top of a, of any data source and just like I think I mentioned this a while back, like in the context of a customer data platform. I'm starting to see it show up like in one of the analytics tools that we have now. Like it's exactly what it is. They have a bot. You can go in and say hey, like I want to know the conversion rate, the add to cart rate, the product view rate on our Mother's day collection from 2025 versus 2024. It'll go and like pull all that. It's even as smart as being able to like, like try fail, try fail. And it'll get closer and closer. And like I didn't have to put in the Mother's Day collection URLs. It just like it kept trying things and eventually it was like well let me look for a collection page that has mothers in the name. And then I'm like bang, they got it. And then it showed me all that data. Whereas I mean how much time. First off, it saves you like a data analyst. It saves you the training of that data analyst. Now that person doesn't even even know how to navigate that platform. They don't have to know how to like go and click the 10 buttons they need to click to get there. I'm really excited about that. I hadn't thought about your note Connor, about like making that plug in really well with your data warehouse. I think that's, that's really smart to build it that way. I'm just starting to see it show up in, in like some of these server side analytics tools that we're using and it makes it so much easier and just like it makes data so much more accessible to anyone on your team. I mean how, how much easier is it to train someone on that versus the manual process I just described? Like all of a sudden your, your product team and your marketers and literally every team member can become a data person, which is so empowering. So I'm really excited about that. That's actually, you know, one of the things I think would be really cool for Shopify to pull. I mean there's so much data in Shopify. I was just in the analytics tool I was talking about today, looking up like tell me about the performance opportunity in the Netherlands and it went in, it was like giving me all sorts of data on like the, the RPU and the total revenue and like what that is compared to other control metrics. If you could do stuff like that in Shopify, that would be amazing because I'm sure that most people are barely tapping into all the analytics Shopify has. But if you can just type in the prompt and it brings it right to you. Oh, that's so actionable. It's so quick and it's just going to make your, your team way more powerful.
- [64:46]
Connor Rowling
100%. Yeah, I think I agree. The platforms that have data are really well positioned to like make that data more actionable with AI. Like I think Cody and I talked about this at the beginning of the year. But like I put North Beam in that bucket, motions in that bucket, Shopify's obviously in that bucket. Like they sit on top of so much valuable stuff that there's just a great opportunity. So hopefully we see more of it. I mean all three of those. I know Shopify just came out with summer editions today and they're excited about Sidekick. I didn't get the chance to dive in, so hopefully they're like gonna invest really quickly. I. It'll be cool. A lot of changing pieces.
- [65:21]
Cody
I think investing in like the data warehouse pieces is really important.
- [65:26]
Sophie
If you want to hit next level growth, you need to move away from correlation based measurement and move towards causality. There is no better way to test your channels. Your levels of diminishing return. Certain tactics within a channel than using a geo based incrementality testing tool. And that's exactly what House is. That is exactly why all three of us use House. House is a self serve experimentation platform that allows you to configure regional tests and control experiments to measure incrementality and identify points of diminishing returns. House is really the. It's the most controlled, the most scientifically sound way to do any sort of marketing, testing and experimentation. These things are very, very hard to set up on your own. It's rigorous. If you have one little variable messed up, all of a sudden your data is not trustworthy. That's why House is such a valuable partner. All you need to do is go into your ad ad accounts and ad exclusion or exclusion lists, run the data or run the test. And not only do they set up the test for you, but they also help you interpret all the results. So they're handling experimentation, design and experiment analysis and also even going as far as helping you make sense of what to do based on that data. And we at hexclad have gotten some insane insights this year from all of our household out tests. So our core strategy this year has been doing channel level holdouts to really see which channels are driving the best and most efficient cost per incremental order. So we've tested YouTube, Meta, Google, PMax, TikTok. We're now testing AppLovin. We are getting a sense of which channels are driving the most incrementally efficient first time orders right now. And the amount of insights that come from that information is insane. It helps us inform where we develop creative. It helps us inform where we scale up budgets in certain channels and bring certain budgets down. Plus we are now able to use our incrementality results and actually plug it right into Prescient. So not only are we getting causal data, that is actual data that we can trust to make decisions off of, but now the media mix models and the probabilistic data from Prescient is even more accurate because they're using actual data to inform their models and the readouts that they're giving us. House is an essential addition to your measurement stack. Go to house IO forward/formators that is spelled h a u s IO operators to start your incrementality practice today.
- [67:49]
Cody
Connor, do you guys still average. You guys still have like VAs who are like on every call or like take notes or is that gone to like note takers?
- [67:57]
Connor Rowling
That's mostly gone to note takers now.
- [67:59]
Cody
Because I was thinking about that, like that's another data. It's qualitative data. Like that is another data source that like it's like, it's one of those things where it's like, I don't know exactly how this is going to get used in the future, but it's probably really helpful to have in this world, this new AI world to just have these repositories and just documents of any meeting that has happened or things like that.
- [68:20]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, yeah. Krista from Tokova's talked about that a bit. I believe she did. AI note takers in every meeting and then you just get this massive repository of everything ever said on the calls that you've recorded. I've said that before too. I mean for me it's like 99 of it never gets listened to again until that one time where I'm like, damn, what did I say? Like six months ago or whatever. And then I could just pull it up and it's like extremely valuable.
- [68:47]
Cody
Yeah.
- [68:48]
Sophie
Hard time finding it. Like you're like, I know I, I said this thing about this thing six months ago for sure.
- [68:54]
Connor Rowling
Like yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Like which, which one on one was it? Which one on one?
- [68:58]
Sophie
Yeah, exactly.
- [68:59]
Connor Rowling
Q3 was it. You know, I mean do you think.
- [69:01]
Sophie
People are going to start selling their grain recorders as digital products? Like, oh, I had this awesome conversation with so and so and there's a lot of value provided. Like what if I just package that up into a digital product and sold it for, I don't know, you. Here, here's a thousand dollar product and you get access to these grand recordings. They weren't maybe initially like those conversations probably didn't happen with like a commercialization plan in place, but retroactively, like I could actually button up all the CRO conversations I've had with my like CRO lead in the last two years and we could just bleep out sensitive information and holy moly. You have like with some organization. Of course you're like a really cool CRO like course almost, I guess. Or digital products, dude.
- [69:46]
Connor Rowling
Well, you know what's funny is I've, I've been telling Sean we're talking about marketing operators, operators, finance operators. I'm like, we have, we're on episode like 61 or whatever. So we have a hundred hours of like of audio content. They have even more. Finance operators is a couple in now. I mean you just. I would love. It would be so cool to have an operator site that just pulls all that information. And then if I'm like, hey what, what linear TV provider do the marketing operators like and I could just query that and it'd be like, oh yeah, Connor's talked about Neon Pixel And Connor like McDonald's talked about Tatari or whatever. Like that would be super cool. We have all of this content now that is like so inaccessible for the most part. That would, that just becomes way more accessible with like A little bit of AI work.
- [70:38]
Sophie
How quick. How quick are we from. So we talked about. Because, Cody, this. You. You asked about, like, the marketing component. Like, we're starting to. We're not using. Let me rephrase that. We haven't, like, launched any ads that were purely AI powered. Like, but we are starting to play around with like, hey, if you just give us a library of B roll and like a prompt, we can cut together some video ads. So we're going to start playing around with those and seeing if we can get to a point where, like, those are ready to go in the ad account. I'm also very interested in the. In the, like the. What do you call it? Vibe coding. So you talked more about, like, giving it a prompt with words and then having it develop that. But what about just like a fully buttoned up figma file that's like, this is really polished. This. This is ready to go. We just need to turn into code. What about just passing that into some sort of AI tool that can just turn it into code? Like, we cannot be that far away from that if we're not there already.
- [71:34]
Cody
No. So you're saying like human does a figma file, but just once you have figma go from figma to code, right? Yeah, there are things that do it. I just haven't seen them do it amazingly well yet. But yes, I agree. I think design is harder because design is more subjective. So it's harder to like, do reinforcement learning. But code is a little bit more objective and better to get feedback of, like, do this, don't do this. So, yeah, I think that should be done pretty easily. And I think that would be killer to be able to do that and just like removes a step from it. I think that should be a big one. I think video editing, I could see being like a text to video, like a. Yeah, text to video editing, like, vibe editing thing. I've seen a few things trying. I haven't used them, but I feel like that could be another really good one. But I find design to be further behind and a little bit more challenging.
- [72:20]
Connor Rowling
Yeah, okay. Yeah, I could. Okay, so what I'll say quickly, this is a. This could be a totally different rabbit hole. So we could touch back on it. I forget what the app is called. It was by the guy who started Groupon and then he did Detour and then he realized like the best business was kind of like what you described, Cody, that you would. You'd upload video files and then you would edit it via text. So you'd say, because that's basically what is. What you're doing is like, I want Cody's. If I'm editing the podcast, I'm like, I want Cody saying this and then I want him saying this. You could imagine that just being more like a text editor.
- [72:54]
Cody
And they descript. Or. Or not.
- [72:56]
Connor Rowling
It's descript. Yeah, yeah. So the guy started Groupon and then Detour and then they built this internal software so that they could more quickly edit the, the, the audio tours on the Detour app. And then he realized that was just a good standalone business. So kind of a random way about it. So I think that's kind of here now. That's like, like, that's like video editing, like 1.0. It's like the most basic stuff. And where I was gonna go is I've been watching, I don't know, I've been spending more time on Instagram and I've been getting the most insane content because I think like, as video editing becomes more accessible, the people who are truly good are just like 10xing and it's like, I think AI is frankly pretty far from like truly great like video editing. So it just depends on what you're looking for, I guess.
- [73:42]
Sophie
I've seen some. This is kind of marketing because it is a CRO play for sure, but it's more customer service. But I've seen some like, high end, I'm trying to, I'm blanking on the brand I saw it on, but some high end physical product brands right at the point of conversion on the product page have this kind of like, you know, type in your question. It could be any question. And instead of having to go like an FAQ that are all static, obviously it's like any, any level of complication to your question. You type it in and then like within seconds you have an answer to that. Like, that is so cool. Especially if you're selling like a $2,000 espresso machine or, or something that like, is complicated maybe. Or even like a stroller. Like where you want to know, like, how many like bad incidents have there been with the stroller? I don't know, stuff like that. I think that could be a, a really nice conversion rate lift right on the product page.
- [74:32]
Cody
Yeah, so we're, we, we do shade matching. So we have like a team of probably four people right now. And if you send us a selfie in plain, natural light, we'll reply within a day or two and say, hey, this is a shade that we recommend for you and perform super well, high LTV of those customers, high aov, high customer satisfaction. But we don't push it that much because it slows down the purchase journey. So obviously we're working with a partner right now on how do we get AI doing this, because theoretically, if we can train a model on all of these images and conversations, we can say, you know, we can do it, and then. And then plug that into social DMS or even put that on the site so people don't have to wait for an email. So I don't think that's that far off. I think we're probably a few. A few months. I think it'll happen within this year where we're able to accurately do like AI shade matching. And I think that'll be a pretty big. For us.
- [75:29]
Connor Rowling
Rad. Yeah. Yeah. That's super, super cool. All right, I've got a test of the week we want to close out there. Yeah, I don't know if we can call it test of the week anymore. I think this is the first one in. In like a quarter. So.
- [75:41]
Cody
Test of the month.
- [75:42]
Connor Rowling
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. So we ran a test that I was super excited about, mentioned the ring business earlier. High growth category for us. Super profitable. We've got a lot to learn and we're like, it's a much more mature business. So we're trying to find the more kind of nuanced learnings to help us scale further. So we ran two tests in house over the last couple weeks. Two, two cell tests. One was just targeting men and then one was targeting women. With the idea being there's a lot of weird stuff around rings. And like, one example I'll give is like rings compared to travel or wallets have really big weekends, particularly really big Sundays. Do you guys have any. Do you see behavior like that?
- [76:22]
Sophie
Not. Not a. Not category specific. I mean, our. Our Friday, Saturday, Sundays are always just way bigger, better.
- [76:28]
Connor Rowling
For sure. Y. Yeah. I don't have exact data, but like, we see a lot of concentration around the weekend's four rings. And one of my. One of my hypothesis. I'll be a little long winded here. One of my hypotheses is that, you know, engaged couples are getting together, they're planning their wedding Sunday night or whatever, and it's like, hey, we gotta like check off the, like, let's get a wedding band or whatever. The only other thing that I can corroborate that with is I met a wedding planner recently who said she always gets emails from her clients Monday morning because they're planning Sunday and they're getting Monday morning. So there's clearly conversations happening. Part of that was like yeah, it, the rings are this weird kind of group buying activity or at least more than other things. I don't think I'm getting together with, I don't think guys are getting together with their fiance talking about buying ridge wallets, but ridge rings, I think it's more likely. So we broke them out. Two two cell tests. So two holdouts targeting men, targeting women. And what we found was that the incrementality factor for Women was a 4.2x. So Facebook is reporting a, let's just call it a 1x. It's truly a 4.2x incremental ROI. That's like the multiple that it gets men was just 2.2 which is, I thought that was really interesting. The, the incrementality factor for women was a hundred percent higher. So one, we theoretically, and this is what we're doing now, it's. So it's not theoretically but we're going to adjust our ROAS targets when targeting women. And then two, I think it like is an interesting example of how different buying behaviors can, can cause different incrementality factors that like maybe it's women are buying it for their fiance or they're recommending it to their fiance's and so some since someone else is buying it that's not getting reported as roas, but we're tracking it in the, the, the geolift holdout. So anyway, thought it was an interesting learning. What do you guys think?
- [78:24]
Cody
Like that's so interesting. It's, it's funny because when we talked about like Conversion Lift versus Geo Lift, you're talking about how like Conversion Lift doesn't capture all of the buying behavior. And I think that's like a perfect example.
- [78:36]
Connor Rowling
Totally. And that's, I don't, I don't have anything to prove that that's what's going on in terms of women having a higher incrementality factor. But like everybody you can, everybody knows that's kind of what happens. Right. Like, and, and that's with. When Facebook splits it at like the profile level. They're not tracking it. When my brother buys me a book that you know, I told him I really want it like that never gets tracked there. But my brother and I are usually in the same city or whatever and that would get tracked in a, in a geolift study.
- [79:06]
Sophie
So you're saying the woman's getting the ad telling her husband she wants it and then the husband's going and buying it.
- [79:12]
Connor Rowling
That would be part of my. That would be part of my theory as to why it would have a hundred percent higher incrementality factor.
- [79:18]
Sophie
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Wow.
- [79:20]
Cody
And this was on Ring specifically.
- [79:22]
Connor Rowling
This was ring specifically.
- [79:23]
Cody
Got it.
- [79:23]
Connor Rowling
We could maybe try the same thing. I mean, there's probably a difference in incrementality between, like, men and women across other categories, too. I just think it's probably not as exaggerated as it is in this case, just because we see such interesting behavior as it is.
- [79:39]
Sophie
Yeah. Like, what's another one that she would. I mean, because it's. It's a product for him. Like, female's not gonna buy that and then wear it herself. You probably don't have another product category that's like that. Right. It's like luggage is like. It would make just as much sense for her to buy it as it would for him to buy it.
- [79:55]
Connor Rowling
Right. So I don't know, but I think it will lead to. We like that readout a lot. Just because it was. It was so actionable. You know, I think everybody's gone through the experience. You could run experiments, and it's like, maybe there's a learning there, but how actionable is it, truly? Like, sometimes feels more often than not you just have to test something else. Where this one, it felt like it was a little bit more. More direct in terms of next steps.
- [80:16]
Sophie
So how much in terms of action then? Like, what. What is your main action? Been a scale spend on female targeted ad sets, really.
- [80:24]
Connor Rowling
Just adjusting row as targets between men and women. So we're going to keep things broken out, and then we're going to adjust the rose targets between them.
- [80:31]
Sophie
Yep, yep.
- [80:32]
Connor Rowling
And then. And then it just depends on that almost immediately leads to scaling the women's campaigns, but then it also means at some point, like, will you be scaling men's? It just. We just have different targets. All right, guys. You guys want to call That a show? 75 minutes.
- [80:45]
Sophie
Oh, yeah. Good show.
- [80:48]
Connor Rowling
Cody's looking a little sleepy.
- [80:49]
Sophie
Getting there, but he's got that.
- [80:51]
Cody
That's the latest I've been up since I've been back.
- [80:55]
Connor Rowling
All right, thank you again for listening as always. Thank you. To our sponsors. Motion rich panel after cell. Prescient in house, as always. Share this with your friends, your colleagues, your families, and we'll see you next week. All right, bye.