Cody (2:30)

Yeah, Cody's on an early flight back to Jersey. The CAB event's great. So Postgroup does this customer advisory board. There's 40 brands here, this is the second year and they basically just get everybody together to want to talk about like the future of Postscript. And two, there's a lot of like brainstorming, people talking about bfcm, a lot of talk about compliance, which Ridge has to deal with quite a bit. So super fun combination of like networking and, you know, content and it's an exciting future for sms. I think the two quick ones, the, the highlights so far and they've been very public about this all the time. AI, they're like super bought in on text first medium and like that's great for SMS. And then two RCs, I think it's rich content service, like being able to send more dynamic, functional messages. It's a replacement for sms. So the fact that like you can react to people's green bubble text messages now is like a form of RCS and that's getting rolled out for businesses and a lot of people will have it by the end of the year. So they talked a lot about that. It's been super fun.

Connor (3:27)

So is that just like being able to reach more people that you wouldn't be able to reach with like a traditional SMS end? Is that what.

Cody (3:35)

It's the same subscriber. It's just a more. It's like a more functional chat. So you get to send like, you can send like a little questionnaire so like, you know, you, you might interact with it with like. I'm trying to think of a good example. They had like some insurance providers who are rolling it out now. Do you. Have you guys ever used. This is a little bit different but have you chatt with delta on iMessage or someone like that? Like there are a couple business profiles on iMessage where you just get questions. You can click buttons. They have this like dynamic carousel that they can send through so you can send like multiple links. It's like just a far richer experience.

Ariana Fairworda (4:10)

I think I've done that with United.

Cody (4:12)

Totally.

Connor (4:12)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cody (4:13)

So it's like the really, really big like Fortune 100 companies have like, have had early access and there's an iMessage version that a lot of people do and that's just getting rolled out all the the service providers are on board so they're rolling it out and then they'll have RCs for business. You have to get approved right now. But I think it's like more or less the future of text for brands. It's like it, it's just going to be far more powerful.

Connor (4:36)

Yeah, way more engaging. Right. I mean that's what it sounds like to me. It's less of like just receive and read a calm but like receive, read engage and more of a, more of a two way street and you'll what's going on your head.

Cody (4:48)

You'll get analytics too so like you'll be able to see basically like text message opens, text message clicks. It'll become way more analytical, you'll have more insight there. You could segment around that behavior and then yeah it almost feels like app functionality. Like you get the web view right within the messages and things like that. So they're, they're super, super bullish on it. And then you think long enough term that will merge with AI so you'll have like one to one personalized messaging but in more dynamic formats rather than just kind of the text based medium that SMS is right now.

Connor (5:18)

Yeah, that's something I've, I've struggled with. That I'm hoping like some of these AI updates can solve is like we have so many cross sell categories like our hero products are cookware but then we're trying to get people into knives, aprons, hex mills, kitchen accessories and it's like it's tough to really know like who to put into which flow and like you can do some like if you visited these pages but then your volume drops off, you're not building as much awareness. I'm hoping that there's like so as AI tools can, can create these personalized like hey we know that this person's best suited to go into your like knives, you know, cross sell flow first but person B is best suited to go into aprons and I know Klaviyo is working on some of that stuff. I'm sure postscript's probably thinking about that a lot too.

Cody (6:01)

Yeah, Postgroup's vision for like personalization is basically you know they're really big on SMS sales which is like human beings in Phoenix talking with your customers in order to like figure out what they need, provide them the best offers, get them to convert at a higher rate and then they a like an AI solution called that they call shopper right now. But what they want to be doing is having more conversations with consumers via text and then using the information they get from those conversations to create these like more enriched profiles. So it's like someone can write in because they clicked a hexclad Facebook ad. And then, you know, the, the SMS sales or shopper might say like, yeah, why are you looking for cookware today? It's like, oh, I'm about to move. And it's like, okay, yeah, we know this person's now moving and we might recommend a full kitchen set rather than just the knives because they're getting into some specific sort of, you know, cooking practice.

Connor (6:49)

Right. Or, or like sent or like send them a post purchase text and kind of have them self select which categories are the most interested in. And then we can like segment people that way with like first party data.

Cody (6:59)

So that's, that's the future I'm super excited about. Which is like a little bit less pie in the sky. Right? It's like, yeah, just send them like some buttons that they can click. But then, you know, with, with LLMs, with where they're at, like the future of like more dynamic conversations happening in an automated way seems possible. We're definitely like moving in that direction.

Connor (7:20)

Yeah. I mean also postscript is probably like, maybe the half day is equivalent in SaaS. I feel like they, they really value community, like for sure. Alex Bell is amazing. Adam Turner, also a Colorado local. Was he, is he out there right now?

Cody (7:37)

Did you say Colin?

Connor (7:39)

Adam.

Cody (7:40)

Oh, Adam's here.

Connor (7:41)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that dude's like one of the smartest people I've ever met in E Comm. He's got like a degree in like physics. I don't know exactly how he got into like SaaS, but yeah, they got an awesome team over there and they really know how to facilitate community and like listen to their customers as well.

Cody (7:58)

Totally. And I know we're going to hit that a lot with half days. They crush it from like a B2B perspective. They get a bunch of brands out here, they do a great event. It's extremely cool from a community building perspective. And then SMS like that too, like it rings true through the product. I think that's what everybody's trying to do from a brand perspective is like, how do you have more meaningful interactions with consumers, whether that's via email, text, or like sponsoring cool bars in Jackson Hole.

Connor (8:20)

Right.

Ariana Fairworda (8:22)

We've been testing, I, I'm not going to remember the name of the platform that we're using, but we've been testing something similar on the email personalization front with AI that's basically creating a Persona that's coming from like emma halfdays.com or something of the sort. And pretty much like sending personalized emails out to subsets of customers and using their location and like their interests based on what they've purchased in the past based on activities. So if it's like they've purchased ski wear in the past, but they live in an area where hiking exists, we then would be like, hey, like this, your area is great for hiking and these are the places you potentially go and these are the products that we would recommend. So that's been something we've been testing, which is super, super interest.

Connor (9:08)

That is interesting. Okay, so you're, it's like equal parts market basket. Equal parts. Hey, you're located in whatever this like sunny, hikable area. Let's push hiking gear to you. Oh, cool. What the. I'm gonna have to get connected with your retention team to see how they're cooking that up.

Ariana Fairworda (9:24)

I know, I like don't even know the name of the platform, but I'm like, I know it's happening and it sounds like it's going really well, but.

Connor (9:31)

I feel like you guys gotta be klaviyo. You guys gotta be klaviyo. Folks over there.

Ariana Fairworda (9:34)

We are using klaviyo, but it's, it's like another.

Connor (9:36)

Oh, it's like another tool on top of it. Okay. Yeah, got it, got it, got it. Okay, cool. Well, sweet. Yeah, let's get into it before we do that. Thanking you to the sponsors. Motion Rich panel after cell Pression AI in house. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to like subscribe, share with your marketing friends and yeah, let's do it foreign.

Cody (10:28)

I want to talk to you quickly About Motion's new AI creative strategist. These are AI agents built by Best in Class D2C operators. And what's unique about these is that you are using agents to analyze your creative using real data from your meta ad account. It's like ChatGPT, but way more relevant with way more context. So Connor Rolane, I ran some of these this morning. Let me, let me walk you through them. So a couple quick things here. One, these are, you can see in the top right of your Motion dashboard you have account wide tasks that you can have these AI agents run. But the first one I want to show you actually is Jess Bachman's critique. This ads messaging, which is at the ad level. So this is our best performing creative last week. You can run this task here. I've got it. Open here as well. And what we hear from Jess is that one, he loves a concept, instant differentiation. But what I found interesting and kind of painful, as always, when you realize there's ad creative that you don't absolutely love, we use the headline almost as rare as winning the lottery. These are like one of eight unique designs and just says that is hyperbolic and undermines credibility. And I 100% agree. And I took this to my team and we're taking action on it.

Connor (11:28)

Yeah, I love it. I think this stuff takes a lot of time to manually do like you could your creative strategist, especially at brands that are at the scale of. Of R bridge. Like your creative strategist could sp could spend all day, every day, just like looking through top performing ads and low performing ads and just trying to come up with reasons why they work or don't work and like what the next steps are. So I don't think that this agent necessarily totally replaces that. But now you're starting at level five instead of level zero. So the amount of time it saves you is, is huge. And it just empowers your team to go and action things instead of sitting there and kind of getting stuck in analysis paralysis all day long.

Cody (12:06)

The second task I ran was find new customer Personas by Jimmy Slagle and Alex Cooper. They have an agent called Marvis and this one was cool. I got to upload 500 reviews and then identified people that we might not be speaking to or can better build Persona funnels around, which we talk about on marketing operators all the time. And I thought this was extremely helpful. Traveler with tech, I mean, between our luggage, between our wallets, between our power banks, this is like exactly who we want to speak to. So I felt they nailed identifying some, some new and maybe underserved Personas for us.

Connor (12:35)

I feel like this is so important. I talk to market and brand operators every now and again and they're like, oh, like we're at 10 million, 20 million. We've hit a wall with meta and I ask them some, some kind of pointed questions and they haven't launched new creative in a long time. And I think this right here is like the absolute starting point for brands that have maybe hit a wall or haven't hit a wall are just looking to continue to scale. Because how do you scale meta? Will you reach new people? How do you reach new people? You create ads that speak to those people. And like, this is such an amazing starting point for that and it's based on your real reviews. Like what better, more Trustworthy place to start.

Cody (13:10)

100%. That's all to say. Motion is giving teams an AI adoption cheat code, making it accessible to every DTC advertiser. And best yet, you don't need a Motion contract to use this. You can try these agents for free. Test them out in your Motion account today. So try it out@motionapp.com.

Connor (13:27)

So we want to start off with just a little background. Like I said, I think Half Days is, it's, it just definitely stands out like, in terms of how like, you're just approaching strategy in the econ world. But I'm, I'm, I think you have an interesting background. And to me, like, when I, when I heard what you were doing before Half Day, I was like, oh, this is like no brainer that you ended up launching your own, your own products and your own brand. So I thought that was a, it was a cool story. So I'm curious if you could just give us a, give us a run through like, what was your career path that led you to half days and then like, what were some of the things you maybe learned in your previous roles that you like that A, helped you launch the brand and B, have helped you scale it?

Ariana Fairworda (14:08)

Yeah, totally. So at a high level, I was working for a company called the NPD Group. Prior to starting Half Days, that was my first job out of college. I got a degree in marketing and then a master's in market research. So I went and worked for this like market research data firm. And basically what the NPD Group did, which also they've like since merged and are called Circana now. But basically what they would do is track over $2 trillion worth of retail sales data in the US alone. And they would syndicate that, sell it back to the retailers and brands to leverage, and then work with them to help them utilize that data. So I was working with like Amazon, Target, Walmart, helping them leverage big data to make decisions around pricing, promotion, distribution strategies. And through that, like learned so much about just like Direct to consumer omnichannel, straight brick and mortar and just like the changing dynamics of that landscape. Mind you, this was like 2017 through 2020. So a lot was happening in that short period of time and then obviously Covid shortly after. But it was kind of like the peak of Direct to consumer where you had like, you know, Rothy's and Harry's and outdoor voices and glossier like all at their peak and kind of like at that point then starting to downfall and understand that they needed to go into wholesale and omnichannel so that was like something I got to see firsthand, which is really interesting.

Connor (15:29)

It's like the golden day of Facebook ads and like ECOM, right? Like 2015 or 2020, like golden days. Then iOS 14 hits Covid's over. It's like, all right, this just got way harder.

Ariana Fairworda (15:40)

Totally. That was like a really interesting thing that especially for some of these bigger retailers, they were trying to understand as pertained to some of these, like, independent, direct to consumer brands popping up in all these respective categories. So I learned so much in that job, but at the same time I was like having an itch to do something on my own. But I didn't just want to like, start a company. To start a company, it needed to feel really authentic and also like actually a need in the world. So I'd moved to Colorado, like for that job, was working in the Boulder office where there were like so many outdoor brands coming in. I wasn't actually working on any of the outdoor clients, but would see that these teams come in from all these legacy outdoor brands. And I was like, oh, this makes so much sense that these are like, you know, for the lack of a better term, and forgive me, they're great people, but like 50, 60 year old men coming in and like making decisions for these outdoor brands that are trying to connect with like a younger audience and women in particular. And simultaneously I was going and shopping at all of these brands and rei, trying to shop for ski wear for the first time as an adult and just couldn't find anything I was into. I was like, this is all just so outdated. Nothing fits well, nothing's cool. The brands don't resonate. And especially in the way that like beauty was or ready to wear fashion was. I just felt like there's a huge gap there. And then I met my co founder, Kylie, who's a former Olympic skier. And that's kind of when it all fell into place because I had this.

Connor (17:11)

How did that happen? How did you and Kylie meet?

Ariana Fairworda (17:15)

Yeah, so I became friends with her brother in Denver and then she actually had just retired from a US ski team in like at the end of 2018. And she was visiting her brothers in Denver and he just like introduced us. We kind of became fast friends. And that's when the idea sort of like came out because we just sort of bonded over this, like, idea that I was a very recreational skier. Like, I'm sticking to like the blue groomers, and she's literally competing on the world stage for skiing. And we both had this shared frustration that neither of us resonated with any of these legacy brands in the space, nor could we find product that fit us well. So, yeah, that's how the two of us met. We actually started the brand, like, started working on half days, like, four months after meeting, which is crazy.

Connor (18:01)

Oh, really? So you. And. But you had had this, like, this idea was kind of, like, growing in your head by the time you had met Kylie, right? And then did you kind of, like, not necessarily.

Ariana Fairworda (18:12)

Not necessarily. It almost was the opposite. Like, I had those frustrations, but I wasn't necessarily thinking, like, I'm gonna start a ski brand. Like, I wasn't, like, a huge skier, per se. Like, I grew up skiing, but it wasn't like, I'm, like, setting out to change the ski industry. That wasn't, like, anything that I was. But it more, like, fell into place when I had that frustration, saw the market opportunity through, like, working at NPD and seeing, like, the market research side of it and Kylie, like, coming into the space and being like, oh, I've always thought, like, that there's a huge gap in the women's ski market. And. And then I think a light bulb just went off in both of our minds, and we're like, oh, like, we're the people to do this.

Connor (18:49)

Yeah. Yeah. Did you. I want to ask you about one. A question about mpd. Like, are you through that, like, job and all the data you had access to, are you basically, like, super in the know on, like, all the, like, products and categories that were growing and shrinking? Like, were you, like, getting all that data and understanding, like, holy crap, this, like, new thing is really popping off right now? And. Or is that not really how. How it worked?

Ariana Fairworda (19:16)

Yeah, that's exactly how it worked across, like, the categories that I was working on. They definitely have a lot of, like, rules around, like, what. What data everyone is, like, allowed to have access to? Like, I never even saw outdoor data while I was working there. Which is, like, kind of funny because you'd think I'd be like, oh, this is a clear opportunity. But it was more, like, qualitative and anecdotal for me. But the. Yeah, for all the categories I was working on, like, that's really what our job was as, like, these. The people working with the retailers is to help them understand, like, where to be placing their dollars from a category management perspective. We've worked with a lot of category managers at, like, Target, for example, or Amazon and be like, okay, you really need to double down in, like, I don't know, just Like a random example, but like athletic sneakers are growing triple digits, like that type of thing, all the way down to like color data. So it'd be like blue sneakers are having a moment or so it got really, really granular across different categories. And like they tracked every category you could think of. So as you could imagine like it'd be like corded headphones versus non corded headphones, like that type of thing and seeing like these massive trends. So our job was really to like help them understand how to make sense of all of it and like where to be placing dollars and what's like a trend versus just something that is actually like or a fad versus like something that's actually trending long term.

Connor (20:43)

So you're, you're basically saying, hey, you know, like blue sneakers for men are super hot right now. And like you're giving that information to Target or, or whoever, big, big box retail. Then they're going and saying okay, because that we're gonna like go and focus on getting more brand selling blue sneakers to men on our shelves. And like it's kind of. That's the loop.

Ariana Fairworda (21:03)

Yeah, exactly. I think it's also, I mean that was like a very, very specific example, but it's also just like overarching trends. It could be like there's like, you've probably heard the term like Sephora 12 year olds. Like you have this like thing where all these like middle schoolers are shopping at Sephora and wants skin care and like beauty products in a way that like young people haven't ever wanted in the past. So like that would be a more like broad trend where now maybe Target and Amazon are like building out shops like on their site to Target toward that or whatever it is. So I think that it's like, it's more broad trends but also like all the way down into like very specific like SKU level data.

Connor (21:46)

Okay.

Ariana Fairworda (21:47)

To provide that information to like the brands and retailers.

Connor (21:51)

That's an awesome, that's an awesome experience to have right out of school.

Ariana Fairworda (21:55)

It was cool.

Connor (21:56)

Got it. So, so you meet. Actually I have not heard Sephora 12 before. That was the first.

Cody (22:01)

Connor and I know very little about the, the, the, the, the cosmetic and beauty space right now. It's only what we hear from Cody.

Connor (22:08)

Exactly. We're trying to learn from Cody. Beauty.

Ariana Fairworda (22:12)

Yeah, it's like a like Sephora 12 year old. So Sephora 13 year olds. Like my niece is a Sephora. Sephora 11 year old. So like I, I know it, but yeah, it's like basically all These little girls wanting to purchase, like, retinol for their skin and like super, like intense skin care when, like, they don't need it. But it's just like this massive trend probably driven by TikTok, but yeah, got it.

Connor (22:35)

So, so then you meet. So you're still at this company, you meet Kylie and you guys launch this brand. How, how long later?

Ariana Fairworda (22:44)

So we met in, like May of 2019. We started working on the brand in September and then launched the following November, which was in 2020.

Connor (22:52)

Got it. So you. It. So it took you like what, 12, 15 months to build it out and, and get it into market?

Ariana Fairworda (22:57)

Exactly.

Connor (22:59)

And was it like day one you started seeing orders come in and like, you're like, we got something here, or did it take a little bit to kind of get some? Because, I mean, you guys certainly have product market fit now, a very, like, almost like cult following, I think, and we'll get into that. But, like, did it, did that happen right away or what? What was that, like, evolution like, if it didn't happen right away?

Ariana Fairworda (23:22)

Yeah, the first season we found product market fit. Like, it was just, it was very obvious pretty quickly. I think that we did all the right things from a go to market perspective, especially during that period of time. And it was like middle of COVID early Covid, really, like November 2020, we worked with a publicist, so we got like a Vogue brand feature on our launch day, which was amazing and, like, so cool. And Kylie's background really, like, helped us secure some brand features like that. And then we also worked with a few, like, influencers in that first season. And then also just really lean into social media in a way that you probably were not seeing any outdoor brand utilize social media at that time in the way that we were. So, I mean, you have to think about, like, we're doing partnerships with like, a beauty brand or doing partnerships with like, fashion influencers in a way that, like, you're not seeing Patagonia do things like that. So I think that the way that we approached it just really cut through and I think that's been our competitive advantage all the way up until, you know, today and everything that we're still doing. But I think from the very beginning it was like the feedback we would constantly get from customers was, oh, my God, I've like always been looking for this, like, something that's just better fitting, better looking for ski wear for women. Because we launched the brand with only five styles and it was like two ski jackets, a ski pant and a base layer so it's very, very clear. Like fashion forward, technical ski wear was like the whole thing. So yeah, we, we kind of like took off right away. I would say the first season we of course didn't have like a ton to spend on ads and a ton of inventory or anything like that. But from season one to season two we like grew 10x, which was crazy. So we just were able to like really fuel the fire a little bit with raising some capital and putting more dollars behind the whole thing in season two.

Connor (25:09)

Yeah.

Cody (25:10)

Are you guys public with any of your revenue numbers?

Ariana Fairworda (25:16)

Like I can't remember if we're sharing the current revenue, but we're like, you know, eight figures plus. It's kind of wonderful. Yeah, like approaching like mid.

Cody (25:28)

Yeah, mid eight figures. Boom. We got on the record. If you run a D2C brand and you're still throwing all your budget at Meta and Google, it might be time to add a smarter, more profitable channel to the mix. Let's talk about Rock Dads. Roktads. Put your brands directly on the checkout pages of premium e commerce sites right in front of real buyers who've just completed a purchase. It's not a discovery play, it's not broad targeting. It's high intent, net new traffic with verified identity data and zero creative lift. Here's what makes rokt ads. 1. You only pay for performance. No clicks, no cost. 2. No wasted spend on repeat customers. You upload a suppression list and ROKT only targets net new buyers. 3. Higher AOV, higher LTV. These aren't looky loos, they're real customers. In the buying mindset, roktads is powered by after sell by rokt, which means DTC brands now have access to enterprise grade tech that has powered checkout experiences for giants like Ticketmaster, Macy's and Disney. Brands like Jones Road, True Classic, Mugsy and Ridge are already seeing it work. And now after Shell is opening up early access to the marketing operators community. Here's the deal. Qualified brands can claim $10,000 in free ad credits to test rocked ads and see the results firsthand. Head to After Sale.com to claim your $10,000 offer and start scaling smarter.

Connor (26:44)

Yeah, I mean I think like that's what kind of caught my eye with your, with your, with half days and like your approach. It's like I'm getting, I'm like on Instagram and like half days in Ilia Beauty. It's just so, I mean it makes so much sense now that I understand your audience and like the specific vertical and like niche you're feeling. But I'm like, wait, hold on. Half Days is partnering with, like, a beauty makeup brand. Like, it's just so unique. And you did the activation so well. Like, it was like such a, like, 360, like, campaign with them, but it really does stand out because no one else is doing that. And I want to ask you one more question before we get into like, the. About your. About, like the brand in the background and like, how you got it launched before we get into, like, some of the more tactical community stuff. You know, one of the brands I. And like, I'm curious if you think this is like a parallel or if this is a brand you're aware of. But just. And this is. I just don't know the market that well. But, like, one of the brands I was aware of because I worked with someone who used. Who started their career at this brand was Kari tra. And like, Kari TRA was like one of the first brands. I was like, okay, they're like, really creating this, like, outdoor apparel. I think they're more like base layer focus to like the like, obviously female focus, like, adventure oriented, like, opt outside oriented. You know, probably not too dissimilar from like, the whole out outdoor voices message. So, like, I was aware of them, like, long before I. And then you guys are now, I know, like, very different than them. But did you have any, like, muses where you're like, okay, that's sort of like kind of in the general ballpark of where we want to go and then we're going to go and like, carve out our own specific niche?

Ariana Fairworda (28:21)

Yeah, it's such a good question. I. I would say, like, our inspiration, I think, for the brand and how we were building both like, operationally and product and marketing was across, like, different categories. And not to say that we weren't looking at other brands in the space. Of course we were. But I think what we were very intentional about not hiring anybody from the outdoor industry. The first person that we hired from the outdoor industry was like, within the past 12 months, and we've been operating for five years. So, like, we were so dead set on just like, doing it differently than the outdoor industry had for so long. So the brands that we were taking inspiration from, like, Glossier was one really early. It was like the community, the social approach, just the way that they built, like, something so differentiated in a market that really felt stagnant for a long time. And then Outdoor Voices was absolutely like, if I could pick one apparel brand that was an inspiration to us, from the way that they approach their brand, positioning and like, communication, it would be outdoor voices for sure. And I think that I just loved Ty's vision of like freeing fitness from performance. And I think that that's a similar parallel to skiing that you don't have to be an expert or be super intense about skiing to be able to participate. And that was like. Our big insight is that women felt that there was this huge barrier to entry that if they didn't know how to do it really well or they hadn't been doing it for a long time or they didn't have all the right, like super technical gear, that they wouldn't be taken seriously. And we wanted to just like, totally get rid of that. So. Yeah, back to kind of your initial question. Like, we definitely had a few inspirational brands that we would look to. Karitra, I think is like an amazing brand and I think that they've done something really, really cool in the space with like being by women for women. And that was and is like revolutionary in a space that is so driven by male dominated brands.

Connor (30:12)

Got it. Yeah, that's really interesting. So. And I mean, so it's not, it's no shock that y' all kind of came out in your, your almost like your own new category. Right. Because you weren't, you were following like your muses were like different, different products actually in different categories. So. Okay. I was curious how that, how that kind of came to be, but that makes sense if you weren't really like, it's like you're like really kind of trying to mimic what actual like another apparel brand was, was doing already.

Ariana Fairworda (30:39)

Yeah. And I think that like, is like, we've definitely looked to bigger legacy brands from like a merchandising perspective. Like, we just hired the global head of women's merchandising from the North Face to be our head of product or, sorry, chief product officer. So I think that like, we're now getting more into that of like, how do you now scale like an outdoor apparel brand in a way that makes sense for the retail landscape that exists today? But previously we were just like doing our own thing.

Connor (31:09)

Yeah.

Cody (31:09)

You know, speaking of, speaking of like Half Days relative to the more traditional outdoor industry, you guys came across my radar a couple months ago because I have a friend at Solomon who was like, yeah, Half Days is just doing a fantastic job with this community building thing. And her and another Solomon employee went, went like undercover to one of your guys's events. They were like, we gotta figure out, we gotta figure out the Secret sauce here based in Salt Lake City. So it was up in. It was like a little. It was some sort of ski thing this past winter in Park City. So definitely. Yeah. Making. Making waves in the. In the outdoor space.

Ariana Fairworda (31:47)

You should put us in touch. We love Solomon. I feel like we're.

Connor (31:50)

They're great.

Ariana Fairworda (31:51)

We're buying.

Cody (31:52)

It was very friendly.

Ariana Fairworda (31:53)

It's like so funny. They were undercover.

Connor (31:57)

I think the. I think the coolest. The. I think the moment where I was like, dang Half Days and Ariana and Kylie are badass operators is when so. So there's this area in. Called River North. It's like kind of like one of the like the arts district areas in. In Denver. Bunch of retail. Like all the. A lot of the big outdoor brands. And Half Days stood up. This. This retail store painted it like this kind of really punchy off white that really stands out because everything around it is just this like this kind of like, you know, pretty orange red brick. And it's like. It's like Arterics Half Days. Like, like, whatever. I can't. I'm blanking on. The name is across the street. Like all these big like legacy retail brands. And it's like Half Days is like right there and it's. It's super cool. Like, I think your. Your retail rollout in Denver was. Was really awesome.

Ariana Fairworda (32:49)

Yeah, we just kind of like plopped on the street with all the legacy outdoor brands with like a yellow store and we're like, hello, here we are.

Connor (32:56)

Yeah, so, so awesome. Sweetheart, let's. Let's get into it because, yeah, I think that was one of the first events I went to of yours was actually your retail store launch. And it was super fun. Like, you guys were selling product, you had a dj, you had, you know, drinks and like, was a. It was a pretty cool way to. To launch a retail store. So I mean, you guys do events. A lot of them. You do. You have your private slack community, which I think I haven't seen the inside of that, but I know you've said that's a huge part of like your. Where your community lives. I know you have that Instagram group that I think is really cool. There's like so much community happening in. In. In. In real life in digital spaces. And like, I feel like Half Days is a community first brand. And I think, you know, I have some links here that we can. That we can share in post production to like, kind of show like how some of these things have come to life, like digitally. Like, what's your philosophy? When it comes to community, like, has it always been at the center of your strategy? Do you have any examples that of other brands or consumer or not that you think do community well? And then the lastly before this, but before we started recording, you actually said that you don't think a community first approach is right for every single brand. So I would love to hear like you loop that and like, who is it? Who is it not right for?

Ariana Fairworda (34:10)

Yeah, no, all really good questions. So first and foremost, and this kind of like ties into maybe all elements of your question is we found a really specific insight before launching the brand that informed our decision to build a community first brand. And that basically was us interviewing and surveying like hundreds of women before we started half days. And the overwhelming response from everyone was that skiing is intense. It is very exclusive, it has a really high barrier to entry. And it was this like common quote that we would hear time and time again. That was like, my boyfriend, fiance, husband's family are big skiers and we're going for Christmas to the mountains. And I haven't done it since I was 15 and I don't have any of the gear and I don't really think that I'm gonna be that good at it. I don't wanna look like I don't know what I'm doing. So like, I'm just not gonna ski. And that was just like the saddest thing because I'm like, it's such a fun sport to like really invest in for your life and it's something that you can really do for a long time. And I think so many people are just like afraid to do it because all these barriers to entry. So that was the biggest insight for us was that like skiing, snowboarding, and honestly a lot about other like technical outdoor activities have this connotation of just being like, intense and you have to like be an expert to partake in it. So we decided to build a brand around this insight of just making the outdoors more approachable and more fun for women. So like, bringing more women to the outdoors is our mission. And in doing that, as you can imagine, if that's like the North Star to everything, everything that comes out of the brand is laddering up to that. So the way we talk about the products are more approachable. We're not like using super, super intense outdoor jargony language on our PDPs. We're doing things that feel a little bit more approachable and like, you don't need to know what a, a three layer shell is to Buy our product. But like, we'll explain what that means to you in a more simple, understandable way. So that's like one example. And then of course, hosting events on mountain all over the country that welcome women to come that are like, you know, from beginners to experts, you're allowed to, to come and just show up and have fun with us. So that really I think comes across. And I think that was coming across from day one when we launched the brand. And that's really been the philosophy. And I think what we've kind of like continued to build the community upon. And I think that's also why I say don't think that building a community is for everyone because we have a reason for doing it. I think that there's a lot of brands that like simply don't need to. And I will say, like community is. It is a lot of work. Like, there's so much that goes into us, like managing ambassadors around the country, hosting dozens of events on an ongoing basis, having to manage everything that comes along with that. And yeah, there's just so much that goes into it. And I think that it feels like this additional marketing channel that not every brand needs to invest into if you don't really have something that you're like standing behind for doing it. So yeah, I think that it just has. There has to be a reason behind it. And I also think that it's like if I were to start a brand that's like something that didn't have like as big of a mission or trying to like transform an industry, I probably wouldn't do it again if it wasn't like necessary, if that makes sense.

Connor (37:34)

So yeah, that makes, that makes total sense. I actually hadn't, I hadn't thought about it that way. Like if, if the product has some, or the product slash, the activity that your products like getting used for has some level of friction, then community can like be a way for these people to connect with one another and like hopefully become more confident and reduce that friction, which I think like we're big in. We're very big with like the, the boomer audience. I mean we're pretty split. You know, we're cookware but like the 45 plus audience for us is, is huge. I think cooking can be very similar where like, if you don't know, it's like, oh, I don't know what heat to use, I don't know what ingredients to use. I don't know, like, it can just be a lot and you can become overwhelmed really quick and like when you were saying that I'm like the most, the most common content we see in our Facebook group, which is where that's like our biggest digital space for our community, is just like recipe content. People being like, hey, I tried this out, here's how it turned out. People are even like saying hey, here's what I would do next time differently. And then you have a bunch of people coming in and like engaging with it and it just makes cooking way more accessible. And I think that's probably what's like similar thing that's happening with your groups. I keep hearing the same things from people lately. I'm being asked to do more with less. I have big goals to hit, but my budget is tight and every marketing dollar needs to work harder. I know I'm hearing this at hexclad. I'm sure a lot of operators are hearing this at their brands. Super relevant right now. Incrementality testing is the best way to figure out what's actually moving the needle so you can move around your ad spend in a way that's backed by science. All three of us use House for incrementality testing. We all love it. And House is now working with more than 40 of the top 100 DTC brands, which is pretty insane. I can speak personally for hexclad. The amount of insights that we've gotten, especially on our view based channels and how those are driving impacts in efficiency and revenue for our business is not only super valuable, but only possible through House. You know, channels like Connected TV, YouTube, TikTok, these very view based channels that don't garner a click the same way that Facebook and Google does, have been really only measurable through geo incrementality holdout testing. And the actionable next steps from these tests in terms of deciding to scale up or down or keep spend where it's at is is really amazing. House helps you run experiments on your channels so you can confidently answer the questions you've always wondered about. Things like what channels are actually driving my business? How much should I be spending on each channel? What's the impact of my ads on Amazon or retail sales? How should I structure my Meta and Google accounts to make sure they're spending dollars in the right way? The beauty of House is that it's built for marketers. The science under the hood is rigorous, but the platform itself is simple. So you pick a question, launch a test in minutes and get real results fast. Every customer is paired with a measurement strategist, someone who understands growth and brings a clear strategic point of view. They will get to know your business, help you build a roadmap of impactful tests and guide you as you operationalize incrementality in your day to day. Even if you're brand new to testing, you're not doing it alone. It is very much no in no way like go sign up for the platform and figure it out on your own. You have a partner in these customer success reps from House who's been in your shoes. And now more than ever you need to make every marketing dollar counter up level of your measurement with House by going to House IO forward slash operators. That's H A U S IO slash operators and start allocating your budget with confidence. I mean Connor, you guys aren't necessarily the same, right? Like you don't, there's not like a, you don't have this like massive friction right to using like your pure product or wallet. Maybe you could say like with your travel category there's like maybe some more friction associated with the experience there. But like do you know how do you feel?

Cody (41:21)

I've got a question for you. I've got a question for you first because I love the point around the reason you guys focus on community at half days is because of the mission. And I think a lot of brands and ridges, Ridge was in this position for a long time. Don't like formalize the mission that they're after and then that can't like trickle down into like marketing strategies or product strategies or whatever else. So Connor, do you guys have, I think I've asked this before, but do you guys have like a refined mission statement? At Hexclad.

Connor (41:50)

We don't actually have like a company wide mission statement. Yeah, I've kind of like, you know, we, we work off this. Like I've mentioned this before, like the, the guys from us, the guy that founded Asana, created this like framework for goal setting that like starts at the top with your mission, then that, then, then your strategies ladder into that, objectives ladder into that and then you're like key resulting initiatives ladder into that. So like the mission statement I've like written out for just our growth marketing team to like guide our, our like strategies and objectives is just like make cooking enjoyable for everyone.

Cody (42:22)

Totally.

Connor (42:23)

So we kind of think about it that way and make sure that everything we do is, is laddering into that. Whether it's like how we treat our Facebook group or how we treat our like product use and care content or how we create our ads. It's like we just want to make Cooking fun, because it should be totally. It is a fun experience. Um, so that's like. I don't know if our CEO would say that's the mission, but that's like kind of the pseudo mission for the growth team.

Cody (42:46)

Well, that's what's interesting also, because you could just as easily say Hexclyde's gonna, like, I don't have a succinct way of putting it, but it could be like, prosumer, right? It's like, hey, we're gonna provide best in class hybrid cookware for world class chefs. And it's like that mission would lead to different strategies than getting everybody to enjoy cooking. The other one that. The only one that I know off the top of my head is Fjall Raven, another outdoor brand, and theirs is similar to yours, Ariana. It's to inspire the world to walk with nature. And it's like, oh, yeah, you can, like, you can understand where that goes from, like, an aesthetic perspective. It's like, extremely inviting. It is. I don't think they're super technical. They're not like arcterics. It's like, you know, you're going out and you're hiking and they're, I think Swedish or something. At Ridge, we defined it as. We wanted it to be kind of action oriented, and we just, like, formalized it maybe a year and a half ago, but it's to create innovative, functional products designed to last for life. And it's like that ladders up. It's like, okay, we do want to be technical. We want to be product focused. That mission, I don't think immediately lends itself to community building necessarily. I don't think it's nearly as important for us as it is for. For someone like, half days. So I just love this idea of, like, crystallizing the vision and then letting that inform the strategies, versus a lot of people will just hear, community's working for half days. I should do community without, like, properly reflecting on, like, is it actually laddering up to my goal?

Ariana Fairworda (44:06)

I totally agree. And I think that community is such a buzzword. And it's this thing that, like, you have to build a community. It's the way to scale. And, like, I just don't necessarily think that's entirely true for everyone. Like, if I. If I was launching, like, a phone case brand, for example, like, I would not build a community around it, right? I would probably just get it on a ton of cool people and, like, leverage more direct marketing channels. And, like, I probably wouldn't be hosting events to like come and hang out, to like celebrate using a phone case. Like, that just doesn't make any sense. I think that's obviously a specific example, but like there's so many similar ones. Like one example of one where I absolutely would build a community. I have this founder that I just recently met and she's building, her name is Jess. She's building this company called Theodora and it's actually a wine recommendation app. So I think their Instagram is like Theodora HQ and she's launching later this year. But I think it's such an amazing idea because the whole thing is that like shopping for wine is really difficult if you don't know anything about wine. And even the only way to like really learn about wine is like become a psalm. Like you can like study different types of wine, which I've like tried to do, but I still go into a random wine shop in a, in a place that I've never been and like have no idea what to buy, right? So like I think that it's so smart and it's like, it's like it's really powered by AI and it's an algorithm and it helps you like understand it when you go in like what to purchase. And that is something I would absolutely build a community around because there's ways you could do like wine tasting events or wine education and just different things of that or like partnerships with restaurants. And so like that's a great example of like a reason to build a community because you're trying to democratize shopping for wine to the average person.

Connor (45:46)

And it can exist on a spectrum too, right? It's not like you either do or don't use do community. Like you have half days which is like the most on the, on the far end of the spectrum in terms of like community involvement and strategies and activations. Like, like doesn't mean you don't have to do any of it. Like you can kind of have varying levels of how you activate and create community. Which I want to ask you, like, what are, what are all the spaces? Like, what are all the different like ways that your community manifests? So you have the Slack community, you have a bunch of in real life events. Like you're doing one in Jackson Hole tonight. Like a ladies night at the, at the world famous Jackson Cowboy Bar. What are all the. Can you just speak to? Like, what's the laundry list of digital and real life places you facilitate community?

Ariana Fairworda (46:31)

Yeah, totally. So we started with the Slack Channel. That was like one of the first things we did a few years ago. And that was just a place for us to like, bring everyone into one area, for us to introduce, like, our different communities in different regions. We have different channels for different regions around the country. So it's like Southern California, Northern California, Utah, Colorado, New York, Chicago, so on.

Connor (46:54)

And so interesting. That's. So you decided to keep it segmented by location so people could like, okay, so it's not a single Slack community. It's like the Northwest, the. The Midwest, the.

Ariana Fairworda (47:04)

So it's still like all like one channel, but you. So everyone is in like a future. Everybody's in a few channels. And then like, you join whatever region you're located in. And that gives everyone, like, access to the whole community, but also to their specific, like, ambassador that lives in their city to understand, like, what events are going on and ultimately just bringing people together in their respective places. So that's kind of the approach we've taken on the Slack channel. But to answer your question, like, Slack has been a big one. Social media has been a big one, just like where we end up communicating a lot of our community events. And I think, like, I would say our community has a lot more IRL than it is digital. Like, the Slack Channel exists to bring people together in specific regions to communicate information to them about what events are happening in their region and just like, at large. And then the only thing we're really doing in there that's like, I guess more community driven is like, we have a couple of channels where people can just like, interact with each other, where we're giving them exclusive access to like, early product launches or discounts or giveaways that, like, nobody else is getting access to. And then we also have a private channel that's like our VIP customers that are like top purchasers of half days that we get product insight and recommendations from. So we use them to like, inform our next product lines and things of that nature. So that's like the digital stuff. And then pretty much everything else I would say is happening IRL. So we have ambassadors in several cities across the US and we're hosting anywhere from like 8 to 10 events per month across the country. And we're generally having anywhere. It depends, like, the size of the event and where it's hosted and everything. But we're generally getting somewhere between like 40 and 60 attendees at each of them.

Cody (48:53)

I'm curious, like, how do you operationalize 8 to 10 events per month across the country? Are the ambassadors paid? Like, are you guys just providing support for the events? Like, if you Just talk through that a little bit.

Ariana Fairworda (49:04)

Yeah. So the ambassadors are paid with like a bunch of perks effectively, so lots of half days product. They also have like incentives to, if they host more events than is required of them, they're getting like additional gift cards or like cash, that type of stuff from, from us if they're like reaching those metrics. And then we, we are supporting from like a monetary perspective if they need to like do drinks or whatever, whatever the community event is. And then we have two team members internally, one that's like solely focused on community management and the other is like kind of overseeing a few different brand marketing things. So our community manager manages the day to day with the ambassadors and we help them plan to ensure that like, like they have their dates selected, they know what activities they're doing and that it ladders up to whatever it is that we're doing that month. So. And then we also partner with brands for some of our community events. So this month we're partnered with all trails. So they like basically co host all of our ambassador meetups across the country and then we just do like giveaways with them. And I think everyone that attends the events gets like a membership, so all trials, like that type of thing. So. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's like a little bit about how we do it. But the ambassadors are definitely carrying like a lot of the like execution day of and our team is supporting like up to the event.

Connor (50:31)

And are you finding those people, those ambassadors that you.

Ariana Fairworda (50:35)

Yeah, it's pretty much just like posting on social, like an application. On our Instagram story, we generally like are looking for people that are just really excited about the brand and also are like really bought into what we're trying to do in the outdoor industry. That's kind of been the criteria for who we're bringing on.

Cody (50:53)

Yeah, I was gonna say that's kind of what I was gonna hit on. It almost sounds like a point of pride. People bought into the brand, bought into the mission. They're like excited to participate and be an ambassador. Bring women together in Park City to, you know, go skiing for an afternoon. It's just a cool thing to do.

Ariana Fairworda (51:08)

Yeah, absolutely. And I think for them, like they're getting a ton of free half days products. Like, the value of that is like they're saving so much money on not having to buy any outdoor care for the thing that is like their main activity, whether it's hiking or skiing. But yeah, it's definitely that. I think it's also just like if they're already going and doing these outdoor activities. Like why not kind of get composite compensated in some capacity and like bring a bunch of people together. So yeah, it's definitely like just an alignment of interests and mission.

Cody (51:38)

So I'm curious if I had a brand, I've established the mission. I've said I think community should play a really key role. I don't do any of it today. Where would you suggest I start?

Ariana Fairworda (51:48)

Yeah, it's such a good question. And I feel like I've actually thought about this a lot because if I were starting a brand today, I think it'd be a little different than when we started back in 2020. Things have changed so much as it pertains to influencer marketing, social media. I probably would start a little bit more on social and do like the build in public thing where you're really talking like to camera about what it is that you're doing. You're taking a lot of videos and real content on like founder style. Yeah, founder style. But also like if, if you're already hosted. Well, I guess if you don't have anything, you're probably not already hosting events, but just trying to like show a lot of behind the scenes of what it is that you're doing. So if I was starting something, I would like probably talk to Cameron. Be like, let's just say it's for the sake of half days, but, but probably something around the lens of like I've always felt left out of the outdoor industry. Like I'm building this community to bring more into the mountains or whatever and like just make a ton of content about that. Like even on the brand's channel or the founder's channel and then I think you can just kind of like snowball it from there. So probably that combined with like either a broadcast channel or a Slack community. I think there's other places you can do it depending on like what makes the most sense for your audience. For us, we picked Slack at the time and I still think it's the right channel. We've considered like moving to other platforms, but our customer is like a young professional, like 25 to 34 and like she already has Slack downloaded to her computer and her phone from her job. So like it just made sense that you could have like push notifications coming from that channel versus trying to like have her download a new app that she doesn't already have. So that like made sense for us. So yeah, I probably would start like social, lots of content storytelling around like what, what your community is, why you're building it and then have place for them, like a call to action coming out of that video. So like joining a Slack channel, joining a broadcast channel, signing up over email, text, group, whatever that looks like. And then from there, I think the Ambassador route is definitely like a great one. Whether it's like, let's say you have an app, like beta tester is getting people really excited to partake in it and they'll be like the voices that will ultimately like, be the word of mouth for whatever it is you're building. That's like the approach I think I would take if I was like, starting over today.

Connor (54:09)

Yeah, I love it. I think Slack, the Slack is so brilliant. Like I. But. And at the same time, I think if. If hexcloud was to try to like, put our customers in Slack, it would not work. I don't think they would know how to use it. I feel like it's a small percentage of our customers that probably have it downloaded. So I was gonna actually ask about that because there's. I mean, your, your core demo is probably spending. I mean, Slack's probably the like, communication channel they're spending the most time in throughout the day. So it's so easy for them to like go engage with you and see what you're putting out there. Even if it's 12:35 on a. On a Tuesday and they're working because it's right, like they're getting that notification right next to their whatever work notifications. I think it's brilliant.

Ariana Fairworda (54:50)

Exactly. Yeah. That was, that was the intent and I think it made sense for the core audience that we have. But I don't think SOC makes sense for everyone if you were to build a community like that. I think like, like Broadcast Channel on Instagram is a really interesting place to do it. And then there's. There's like so many other apps you can use for things like that, of course, like Discord and things of that nature. But I only think it makes sense if, like, your customers already there. I think getting someone to download something new is really difficult.

Connor (55:16)

Yep. Yep. So if you are a brand spending, you know, eight figures on media, you have a very diverse channel mix. You definitely do not want to be going into Q4 without pression. Prescient AI is going to help you beat all your goals in this critical quarter. It's going to put you out of the competition. You know, BSM is coming fast and there's still a lot to do to finalize the Q4 strategy. There's a bunch of questions I find marketers asking themselves headed into Q4 and and I I think Prescient can actually help solve and answer a lot of these questions. So I just wanted to run through a few of those. Question number one if you're wondering should you increase, decrease or reallocate spend for the shopping season, Prussian shows you the optimal media mix to Drive the strongest Q4 performance whether your budget grows or shrinks. I think that's one of my favorite parts about Prussian. You can actually say hey, I'm currently at spend levels X but I'm going to bring my spend to to Y in the next X number of days. Where should I put this budget impression is going to actually deliver recommendations based on your current BFCM dynamics, your vertical and your optimal ad spend allocation. And then the next question becomes can I adjust this in real time? You know, Hexclad moves budgets around a lot in Q4 and we really need to know hey, where should we put that budget? So being able to do that, that spend, forecasting exercise and letting pressure know how much you're going to increase your budget and then they're giving you an optimal media mix just makes it really easy and straightforward to allocate your ad dollars efficiently. You might also be wondering and thinking I don't have time to onboard a new tool mid season like how can I get mmm level of visibility? That's one of the best parts about Prescient is it is super easy to onboard. They connect to your data sources in days and has your Shopify brand live in about 10 days. So you're getting granular actionable results really fast. So Q4 it's make or break for Shopify brands and Prescient helps you make more than you're going to break. It give you full funnel visibility and campaign level insights. Not just showing where clicks convert but all channels influence each other across Shopify, Amazon and retail. It is the only media mix modeling tool revealing halo effects on Amazon sales. So again gives you the super holistic look at your total distribution. And finally, Prescient helps marketing leaders make smarter decisions in real time with full funnel visibility and actual insights for the strongest Q4 you can possibly have. So if you're interested in checking out Prescient go to prescient AI.com forward/operators. So can we can we talk about the in real life stuff Because I think everything's like boiling down to IRL and I'm curious like what the ambassadors first like how much? Because I think you could. You guys have such a range of in real life, like, community activations, you do, right? You have, like, this thing you're doing tomorrow at the Cowboy Bar, where, I don't know if you, like, rented out the bar and, like, you're. I know you're providing some drinks, I think, and, like, that's a little bit more involved, requires a little bit more planning. But also for. For your brand, it can be as simple as, hey, I'm, like, the brand ambassador for, you know, Seattle, Washington area. And, like, we're going on a hike on Saturday morning, and, like, you know, now we have 45 people that are. Are showing up to go hike. So I think it's like, varying levels probably of involvement. But are you letting your brand ambassadors lead a lot of the planning on the events with. And, like, what's that relationship like with. I know you said you also support them on, like, the execution, but how much. How much are you letting them kind of lead and, like, map out events that are. As long as they're kind of like, they stack up against your overall mission, you're, like, great. Like, yeah, run that. That's. That's. That's an awesome idea.

Ariana Fairworda (58:42)

Yeah. So I think that to your point, there's, like, a variety of different types of events that we do, and the ones that our ambassadors are managing are really, like, the lowest lift. Like, we're meeting up for a ski day. We're meeting up to go for a hike. We're doing a happy hour. Like, those are, like, the community ambassadors events that they're helping to put on and manage. Everything else that you're seeing come out of the brand is really managed by our, like, brand marketing team internally. So, like, the Cowboy Bar activation, for example, is actually a product collaboration, so we're launching, like, a full merch collection. It's like, like, sweatshirts. We pretty much convinced Cowboy Bar to rebrand to Cowgirl Bar, so we're doing Million Dollar Cowgirl Bar, and then the sweatshirts say half days, Wyoming instead of Jackson, Wyoming. Like, it's just. It's just like a really fun little moment and that, you know, I don't want to go on a whole tangent about that, but, like, that partnership is kind of like the first of what I envisioned to be a series of us celebrating, like, mountain town institutions across the world, really. And I think that's just something that, like, no outdoor brand has really done in a way that, like, an inspiration for us is mad happy. Like, they've done it with different institutions around. They do. They've done it with, like, cats as Delicatessen or like Joe's Stone Crab in Miami, like things, things like that and celebrating like these different institutions that are really in like famous in their respective places. And there's so much such amazing culture around skiing and nobody's really like doing cool partnerships or collaborations. So the Cowboy Bar is like the first of hopefully many for us in that realm. So that was kind of a bit more of like a brand partnership and activation that we're hosting in a bigger way. So that's like. And when we talk about like events, it all kind of like merges together. Of course, like you're seeing hikes and you're seeing like a Cowboy Bar activation and you're seeing like a retail store launch. But it's definitely like being managed by different parts of our team, so depending on what the event or activation is. So yeah, we ultimately like kind of combine the two though, because the, the Jackson event at the Cowboy Bar is still open to our community. So like we put up the invite link and we're probably going to have like a few hundred people there from whether, whether they just live in Jackson and heard about it or if it's members of our community. And then at the same time like we're then doing like a really casual hike like a few days later and things, things like that. So that's kind of how we think about like the stack of all of the different events. Some of them are more like revenue driving and then some naturally are just more like, hey, come out and hang, hang out with us and like become a part of the brand ecosystem.

Cody (61:26)

The. The cowgirl bar sounds like a fantastic activation, kind of like a tent pole moment that I think is cool and kind of compounds with the other smaller community events. How many of those do you try to do a year? Do you guys have like a go to market calendar of like, hey, we're doing four, like really special institution honoring activations?

Ariana Fairworda (61:48)

Yeah, it's a good question. Yes, we definitely have like a lot of events planned out like in our go to market calendar. I think that it's a little bit more like what is happening from a product launch perspective. So we have a few other product collaborations coming out through the end of this year and we generally do like an activation event around a partnership launch. Like no matter what, it is like a good example of it was like the Ilia activation and products collaboration earlier this year where we did like an influencer trip in Whistler surrounding the launch of the collaboration products. So that's kind of how we think about it. This idea around, like celebrating Mountain town institutions is definitely something we want to roll out, but we might only do like one of those per year. Generally though we're likely doing one like, like bigger event, I'd say per quarter.

Connor (62:40)

Yeah, it's also, you know, revenue driving stuff. Like when you're saying like you said a few minutes ago, you said revenue driving event, community activation versus not. So you're basically saying like, hey, we just, we did this whole thing with Ilia. I think if I remember correctly, you guys launched like a new colorway and a bunch of your products and that's what you're saying. All right. This is like a, a revenue oriented, like community brand partnership activation versus hey, we're just gonna go hike on a Saturday. And like, that's not necessarily trying to drive a bunch of revenue, but it is just a way for our members in the community to connect.

Ariana Fairworda (63:13)

Exactly. We kind of think about them like separately, but from the outside it probably just seems like half days of starting an event. Right?

Connor (63:19)

Yep.

Ariana Fairworda (63:19)

Yeah. So yeah, the, the former is really like we're launching a product collaboration like with Ilya, for example. It was a co designed ski set in their brand color, but like a silhouette that we'd already been selling for a long time. We launched that and then in tandem with that, we threw like an influencer trip in Whistler. So that was intended to just like get a ton of eyes on the collaboration and ultimately sold out the collection very quickly. And then that's similar with what we're doing with the Cowboy Bar this week where we'll launch the collection, which is actually tomorrow. And then we'll do this like big activation. We have like this famous DJ helping us host it and doing all these different things around it so that hopefully we just like sell out of the collection really quickly.

Connor (64:05)

Spell the be on who the DJ is.

Ariana Fairworda (64:07)

It's already.

Cody (64:08)

This will come, this will come out like two weeks too. So.

Ariana Fairworda (64:11)

Yeah, okay, that's fair. It's. It's already online. So yeah, it's. It's public, but it's Brandy Cyrus. It's Miley Cyrus's sister and she's like a country dj, which is really fun.

Connor (64:22)

So this is around an apparel line you said.

Ariana Fairworda (64:24)

Right, Exactly.

Connor (64:26)

Yeah, got it.

Cody (64:27)

Okay, I've got a question for you. I'd love. Okay, so also love the point around pairing product or collections with these like tent pole activations. I listened to a great interview with Ty Haney from Outdoor Voices years ago after they. I forget what the product was, but they worked with Lo Michaela do you remember her?

Ariana Fairworda (64:48)

No, I don't.

Cody (64:49)

Okay, so Lil Mikayla, this was like 2019, 2018, something like that was an AI influencer, so, like completely AI generated. And this was like, way before the AI hype or like, you know, whatever, any of the weird, like, avatar trends we're seeing now. And. And it was really cool. And they were like, she had a million followers and she. Little Michaela, this AI influencer who's ran by like a big team in la, would do brand deals with like, Gucci and all these really cool fashion brands and outdoor voices, did a big activation, some sort of. I think it was some sort of leg wear or something. But they sponsored Lo Michaela and what Ty Haney said at the time was like, yeah, we tried to just create. I think she called them light bulb moments. We're coming out with this new thing. She didn't expect the Loma Michaela sponsorship, which I'm sure was really expensive at the time to like, necessarily be a profitable roi, but like, it was their way of illuminating this, like, new thing that they wanted to highlight. So my question to you is, when you guys are pairing these tentpole moments with product or collection launches, is it always community driven or are there times where you're like, working with large influencers or doing, I don't know, maybe you're getting big, flashy out of home advertising in New York or something?

Ariana Fairworda (65:59)

Yeah, that's such a good question. And it's. It's not always community driven. Like, our Ilia collaboration earlier this year was not community led or, or focused. It was, it was fully, like, large influencers that we flew out to Whistler and several of them having like, massive followings and like, it was very, very focused on just trying to get a lot of eyes on the collection and amplifying the fact that we were partnering with this really large beauty brand. And we also leaned on Ilia in a big way to bring in influencers that they had access to that we've never worked with and vice versa. So it really ended up being like, highly mutually beneficial for both brands just to like, introduce our audiences, both to like, the brand audiences, but our influencers audiences as well. So that was like, really awesome. And it's, it's definitely, I would say almost like 50% of what we do from a product launch perspective is like, let's really lean into community. And then like the other half of the time, let's really lean into influencers and like, getting a lot of eyes on the brand. And I think it. We Want to ensure that we're never like leaning too far into the influencer side where it feels now like all of a sudden inaccessible because it just defeats the purpose of the entire like, brand mission to bring more women to the mountains. But I still think it's really important because if you're just only doing community stuff generally, like, it's not really amplifying from a like impressions perspective online.

Cody (67:21)

Okay, I've got one more question on the topic of we're really talking about like driving awareness and product launches and things like that. I'm curious, do you guys do anything that you'd consider performance marketing and if so, like, how do you think about the two working together and like the, the kind of the system as a whole?

Ariana Fairworda (67:39)

Yeah, I. So like, it's interesting because obviously we're diving so deep into community marketing right now and a little bit of brand marketing. But I would say that at half days, like we have really like fully integrated marketing strategy and team. Our marketing team is like the biggest across our entire company and we're doing everything from like, email drives a huge amount of our revenue, affiliate marketing drives a huge amount of our revenue and so does performance. So I would say that like all of those things definitely play into each other. I'm trying to think about like our link between community marketing and like brand marketing. Back to performance. And I, I honestly think those two might be like a little bit siloed in a way. Like, I think performance marketing more so amplifies like the product itself. Like, we're not necessarily leveraging performance marketing to promote events generally because we already have such a strong like organic audience who's attending them and things of that nature. I think if we did a huge push to like expand our community and bring on more ambassadors and launch like 10 new markets across the US where we were hosting events, like perhaps we would break in performance in some capacity. But I just don't think that we're ready to like scale it up to that degree, nor do I necessarily think we need to in the short term. So yeah, I would say that performance marketing definitely like amplifies the products. Like I've been using the Ilia collaboration as an example, but like the product launch which happens across Ilya's channels, our channels on email, sms, Instagram, all of the things, websites, and then you have the influencer activation. So that's getting pushed out to like so many different new eyes through like these influencers channels. And then on the performance front, we're like very exclusively pushing like the collaboration products. So I would say that that's kind of like how we approach pretty much everything we do.

Cody (69:27)

Do you see a crossover of content at all? Like I'd think I'd at least if I was pitching it to, to my team, I'd say like hopefully we can create all this great content with the community and leverage that through paid. Do you see some benefits there or is it largely unique content, Unique funnels? Talking about the product on the performance side.

Ariana Fairworda (69:44)

Yeah, it's, it's a really good question. I would say that we absolutely have a lot of crossover with the content. I think it just comes down to like usage rights with ads, obviously with certain influencers and things of that nature. But my co founder Kylie and I end up like providing a lot of ad content because we're always like attending these events and like both of us are social media girlies and love to take photos. So we're generally like, you know, obviously trying to like use as much, much low cost ad content as we can as a brand. But absolutely we're, we're definitely like utilizing photographers at community events even and like leveraging those assets to bring back to all of the channels. Really Like I would say email and SMS as well.

Cody (70:24)

Totally.

D (70:27)

Two years ago we had a crazy Black Friday. We're actually one of the top selling brands and products on Shopify. It was really cool. Harley shouted us out on TV and everything which was awesome. But it wasn't all good news. With, with unforeseen growth comes some challenges. And one of the challenges we had was we had a crazy backlog of CX tickets. At one point, I'm embarrassed to say, we had a seven day average response time that lasted for longer than it should have. A big part of it was our CX software was just not scalable and couldn't keep up. We were using one of those old legacy slow players. There was no AI involved, there was no automation and just the UX was not great. And so when we came into Black Friday of last year, we knew we needed to prepare better. So we switched to Rich panel. It was pretty close before Black Friday. Onboarding was really quick. Two weeks was all it took. They got all of our macros there, they got all of our tickets, they trained our team, they just took care of everything. We got the self service widget set up. I think now like 40% of people are actually getting responses just by the self service widget. And then we're using obviously a lot of the AI. They have this like social AI moderation tool that us And Ridge are big fans of. Our average response time is now within hours. We've gone from 18 people to 10. We're able to. Our CSAT is higher than it's ever been. And so last Black Friday, no backlog, all of our peak moments, we're able to, you know, without having to fully ramp up our team or like go crazy with it. We're able to get back to people way better, provide a better customer experience. And Rich Panel is a huge part of that. So if you want to get ready before peak season, before Q4 and Black Friday, switch to Rich Panel. You'll save money on software, you won't need as many people and you'll be able to just provide a better service for your customers. So go to richpanel.com demo and tell them Cody from marketing operator sent you.

Connor (72:02)

But I feel like you guys don't need to. I mean, you have such strong funnels guiding like anyone that's come into your ecosystem and like either opted in to your email list or followed you on social or made a purchase. Like, anyone that came in through an ad. Like, you guys just have such strong organic, like owned funnels to get people into your community. So I, I feel like they, they do work really well together. Like, you're, you're driving a lot of traffic from Facebook ads. They're getting into your ecosystem, they're buying. Okay, then they're joining your community. Now they're buying again. Now they're meeting up with people. Like, I just feel like it's such a. I, I feel like you, you are doing everything you should be doing and can be doing to just drive as much sense of like, affiliation with the brand and like, I assume because of that lifetime value, like anyone that comes in through a Facebook ad, I think in the half days world is probably the most likely to buy again because of all the different, like super organic authentic touch points you have with that person that like you probably don't ever need to run paid ads to like drive community signups. Like, it's, it's like just get like direct response performance, like purchase conversion and then they come into the community after that.

Ariana Fairworda (73:13)

Something the goal. And I appreciate you saying that. Something the goal. I think like even at the very beginning my philosophy was just like try to create this feeling of like you're seeing half days everywhere. And I think that's like a really great strategy for anyone launching a brand. Like, it was like you saw it on like a Vogue article and then you saw it on like three influencers over the next few weeks and then you got hit with a couple of Instagram or Facebook ads. Ads. And yeah, I think, I think just like trying to create this feeling that you're seeing it everywhere every time anything is happening with the brand. And like, that's definitely still the strategy that we're trying to take today. Yeah, like, we're. We're trying to do the most. That's. We're doing, we're doing all of the things.

Connor (73:54)

I mean, I love your I love Yalls funnel. I. I want to ask you one more question because I, I think we wouldn't be doing the, the listeners or, or your team. I think we'd be doing everyone a disservice if we didn't speak to. Like, we. We've talked a lot about all the, all the ways you guys activate. But who, like, you hit on it a little bit. But like, what's the team behind this? Because the thing I'm the most impressed with when it comes to your community is the detail and the attention to detail. Like, y' all do not leave any stone unturned. You know, that's the smallest little things that I think really like, really tie all these activations together and it's just so cool. Like, like rebranding cowboy bar to cowgirl bar. Like such a, like a small detail that just. It's just like chef's kiss. So like who's, who's. Like when. When you decide to do a, like an event, like, who's strategizing it, who's executing on it? Who's the one making sure that all these little details are a, that you decide to do that thing? It's like, all right, here's the laundry list of things we're going to do for this particular community event. And then who's executing on that?

Ariana Fairworda (74:58)

Yeah, it's really such like a team effort with so much of it. Like, I think we're still at this. Like, our team is still under 30 full time people across the entire company. So I think we're still at like this scale where everyone kind of has their hands in a lot of things. And I think we're now just getting to a point with the marketing team where things are getting like a little bit more individualized. We have just to kind of speak to like a few of the different people on the team. We have a senior brand marketing manager who, who really drives a lot of this from like a strategy and ideation perspective. And she's been with us for a few, maybe just about three years. So she Just understands the brand so thoroughly like she is the customer and I think that's been so key with a lot of this and. But I would like be rubbish to not like name literally like everyone on the marketing team because I feel like it's. Everyone is like has their hands in so many things. And then we have a community manager that manages the ambassadors on the day to day that's helping them strategize for like what do the events look like, where are they going for a hike, like helping with logistics and things of that nature. And then on the more like creative side, my co founder Kylie is heavily involved in the marketing team like across so many things. She runs all creative and photo shoots but also it has her hands in like a lot of brand focused things as well. So. So she's definitely a big part of like some of those details. And then we also have an art director slash photographer and she's like really involved in some of like those little details of like helping us figure out like who's gonna design this merch. Like what are the little ways we can make it feel really, really special. Like changing it to cowgirl or like Half Days Wyoming, like that type of stuff. And then also making the events feel really, really like personalized or customized more. So like we're always doing cute little like just small touches to every event. Like little matchboxes that say something kind of like cheeky on them that someone is going to like take a photo of and post on Instagram like those types of moments. And then we also have like pretty much a at least an individual contributor across like every other facet of marketing like performance marketing, E Com, email, sms. And our VP of marketing is amazing too and they it's really like such a group effort I think across like all of these different things. But I would say like our core team for what we're speaking about today really is like Cedar Brand marketing manager who oversees a community manager and then our creative team.

Connor (77:28)

Got it, got it. And all all located in, in beautiful Denver, Colorado. Right? Y' all are a 100% in person team.

Ariana Fairworda (77:37)

We are. Yeah, yeah, yeah we are. It's, it's been like so much fun having everyone under one roof. We used to be split between Denver and New York and that has since we brought everybody to Colorado and it's been like the coolest thing having everybody like work together in person.

Connor (77:51)

That's awesome. So I, at this point in the episode I probably know what's happening with our, our audience which is a bunch of like nerdy performance marketers, their, their skin's probably crawling and they're probably like, screaming like, but how do you measure it? How do you measure this community strategy? And I think, like, performance marketers in general often struggle to like, do marketing that's hard to measure. Like, I. You shouldn't not do good marketing just because it's hard to measure. Like, you should always just do good marketing and do your best to, to measure it with whatever data you get. But community is like one of those marketing tactics that I think often just shows up as. Like, if you're in your Google Analytics account, it might show up as direct revenue, it might show up as organic branded search revenue. And I think there are some ways you can track it, but like, you kind of got to do some level of modeling. That can be complicated. It can just be hard. So, yeah. Are you all measuring community in any specific way?

Ariana Fairworda (78:42)

Yeah, it's such a good question. And I feel like it's generally the one that I get around, like community marketing, where we were like, oh, you do so much of this, but, like, are you actually making any money? And typically that's coming from like, my investors or boards.

Connor (78:55)

It's a fair question.

Ariana Fairworda (78:57)

Yeah, no, it totally is. But there's a few different things that we do. I think that like, the general, like, the bottom line to all of it is that, like, community marketing is extremely hard to attribute and there's a lot of different things that we are doing. So like when we do a store event at our retail flagship in Denver, we're oftentimes giving like different little like discount codes and things of that nature, so we can track a lot of the conversion in store. We also can always see a direct, like, spike in revenue for doing like a store event, obviously, so things like that are a little bit more. More directly measurable with our ambassadors. One thing that we've started to do is all of our ambassadors have become affiliates for the brand. So they're actually giving out their, like, shop my links or codes to everybody that attends every event. So basically they'll like come dressed head to toe in half days and then they'll like share that out to everybody that attended the event. So we have like, very directly measurable revenue that's coming, like, from the people that are attending each event. That's like one way that we've implemented it into the events themselves. And then from there we're really just like, trying to monitor really closely, like the email list growth, SMS list growth. Of course, like, everyone that's coming into an RSVP for an event is putting in their information and like signing up for email. So that's definitely been one way that we've also been able to like really look at the just overall growth of our like, lists in general. So yeah, there's like a variety of things that we're trying to do on that front. And I think at the end of the day, like community marketing really is an awareness play and we're still at the stage where awareness is like one of our number one goals as a brand. So as much as we can be doing, especially when it's lower cost, like to us, the ambassadors giving them free product, them hosting events on our behalf, like really is minimal cost. So that's definitely been one of the things that I think has helped us a ton just with like building the list, building awareness, but not spending like a ton on it outside of our team's time. Of course that's certainly a cost. But yeah, we've. Those are like some of the areas that we've been thinking about with measurement.

Connor (81:08)

It's interesting you say that because, you know, we use this term like triangulation a lot where you're basically, you're taking like multiple methods of measurement, like to measure the same thing and then just trying to like, like get a directional read by comparing. And you guys are kind of doing the same, right? You're like, you're looking at discount code usage, you're looking at list growth, you're looking at affiliate sales and you're kind of able to like, all right, say this event like was a really high performer based on all those things. Something we're trying to do is take like those contacts that we get the names, the numbers, the emails and we're, we're uploading them to. We, we use a customer data platform that basically just ingests all of our Shopify data. And like you can make any audience you want and see any variety of metrics, right? You can be like, well, your audience over indexes on like this interest or this age or you know, you can do LTV by certain cohorts. But we're starting to try to like, it's like we have an event, there's some sort of list growth tactic happening at the event. We then take that list from Klaviyo or postscript, upload it into the customer data platform and then over the course of like 30, 60, 90, however long we can actually go and say, all right, like tell me of all the emails in this segment, like, how many of those are also Showing up in our Shopify orders and like that's been an interesting way for us to actually attach like a longer tail revenue look on some of these events where it especially for us and probably you too or I think your hero products like a 400 to 500 price point. Right? So like, and like same with us. Our hero products are 700 sets. Like we got to get people in our funnels, nurture them over time. It's often not going to show up in like, hey, here's a link for 10% off. It's. Well if you're not ready to buy yet, like you might not buy for six to 12 months, but that, that's, we found that to be an interesting way to like measure revenue from those, those like data points over time. And it's, it's not perfect but just like another one to add on to like the stack that you're currently doing. And like you can pretty get a pretty good read at it over time. If you start to stack those, you just have to have an idea of what to measure. Right. It's like some people go into it, they're like, well, I don't even know what to look at, but you have like three different like data points you're looking at and I think you're probably able to make like super smart decisions because of that.

Ariana Fairworda (83:19)

Yeah, no, I think it's exactly right. And I think that that's like the point that you're making also is just that it's a long game. Like I think that there's totally like so much that we're doing that like I don't think we are able to like say tomorrow, oh, this Jackson event like drove this amount, whatever. But like the fact that so many new eyes are on the brand from us activating in this new place and with a new part and the Instagram account growing by X percent, like there's so many things that someone might make a purchase in six to 12 to 18 months from now, but we might not ever like fully track that.

Connor (83:52)

Are you, are you measuring like. So I looked at the Jackson event yesterday when I was writing the notes for the episode, I saw there was like 200 and some odd folks that have signed up. Are you, are you then after the event doing any sort of tracking on, on like which percent is, is new to file and like you're adding net new people to your own media list now vs hey, this person was already in our world and they just signed up again and like are you measuring list growth that way?

Ariana Fairworda (84:18)

Yeah, we're also like we're kind of doing something similar to what you just said around like having to kind of manually upload from our invite like platform for every new email subscriber. So I don't know how they're really tracking against like I'm assuming there's some like, like duplication tool or something like in the email platform for, for like. But we haven't tracked against like how many new versus returning are coming to the events. I think, I think we're doing that for our like more like all the smaller like hike and ski meetups because we can see like how many people are like coming back time and time again and which I think we have like a really high rate of which is interesting. But yeah, that's a really good idea.

Connor (85:04)

Yeah, I mean I would love it. I'd be very curious to understand like how many net new people all of your event sign ups bring every year. It's got to be a ton and that's just through. You guys use Posh for that as your digital platform for event invites.

Ariana Fairworda (85:20)

Yes, exactly. We're using Posh for that. And I think like in general I'm just looking at some of our community stats but yeah, we're, we're I think averaging somewhere between like 10 to 12,000 like posh RSVPs per year right now. So that's been really interesting too just because it's like, it's such a, it really is low hanging fruit for list growth.

Connor (85:45)

Yeah.

Ariana Fairworda (85:45)

As it pertains to just like hosting. Like we're going to meet up in Boulder on Saturday and go for a hike. Like it's, it's just I think if brands can find a way to do that, I think it just like gives this kind of flywheel of like bringing people into the fold in some capacity even if they don't all attend. Like we definitely have like I want to say a 20 to 30% no show rate for RSVPs to the events themselves but like you're still bringing them into the funnel in some capacity.

Connor (86:12)

Yeah. And, and at basically zero cost. Like it's. Yeah, I love it. Wow, that's awesome. Really appreciate you coming on and, and sharing all that. Those, those nuggets is super helpful.

Ariana Fairworda (86:24)

Yeah, definitely. This is super fun. Thanks for having me.

Connor (86:27)

All right, that's a wrap on episode 75 of the Marketing Operators. We had an awesome jam packed just master class on community and brand building with Ariana from half days. Thank you to the sponsors Motion Rich panel after Cell Pressing AI and House and of course, if you're enjoying the show, make sure to like, subscribe and share with all your marketing buddies.

Ariana Fairworda (86:49)

It.