Sam (1:48)

I was gonna say, did they lose all your stuff? Like, is your. Is your entire load of things to fill out your house? Like Mia right now?

Connor (1:56)

It's, it's, it's everything that I put in the truck, so everything that I couldn't drive out with me. Yeah. Which is like. Yeah, that's most of my stuff. And it's not quite lost. They just. They, for whatever reason, can't find a driver to get it out of Salt Lake, so.

Sam (2:09)

Okay, so it's just delayed. We know exactly where it is, dude.

Connor (2:13)

That's what they say. But it's one of those things where it's like, if they told me today they've lost track of it, I would not be at all surprised. It's been over two weeks.

Cody (2:22)

Oh, geez. How is that even possible?

Connor (2:26)

But anyway, we're not here to talk about my moving woes. We're also not really here to talk about this, but I feel like the bar for CEO Twitter crash outs has been set extremely high with the Liquid Death fallout. So, Cody, does it inspire you at all to get crazier on the Jones Road Twitter account?

Cody (2:44)

I'm actually looking to Sean for. See what he's gonna do. I think I'm gonna follow his lead.

Connor (2:50)

Yeah, totally. One of.

Cody (2:52)

The.

Connor (2:53)

One of the more epic crash outs I've seen in a long time. And it's. It's just unfortunate. You know, they're like. They've been trying to go public for so long. This has to be a pretty big setback.

Cody (3:02)

He went very public, very public very quickly.

Connor (3:06)

What do you think, Connor?

Sam (3:07)

I just don't know why these people, like, have Twitter. Like, what are you. Like, what are you doing?

Connor (3:13)

Oh, and you know it was from the Liquid Death Twitter.

Cody (3:15)

Yeah, that's. Yeah.

Sam (3:16)

Oh, from those. See, this is perfect, because this is great. This is, like, me not not knowing as much as you guys what's going on in the Internet.

Connor (3:25)

Yeah. I was actually going to be kind of surprised that you were, like, up to date on.

Sam (3:29)

On. On.

Connor (3:29)

On this little Twitter drama.

Sam (3:31)

Tweet. Does anyone have the tweet? Is it. I mean, I'm assuming they took it down.

Cody (3:35)

Dude, it's been like. It's been like threads and threads, like, very long. Like, multiple threads with different quote tweets. I saw a little bit of it this morning. Yeah.

Connor (3:45)

And he was fighting with Tim pool, who's a YouTuber.

Sam (3:48)

I'm going to their Twitter right now. Are these still on? Are they up?

Connor (3:52)

I'm not sure.

Sam (3:54)

Do we know the backstory and, like. Like, is there any why that that has been surfaced?

Cody (4:01)

Well, the.

Connor (4:03)

The gist of it is, is that it came out that Liquid Death had plastic lining in their cans and that for a long time they'd been marketing that 10% of profits would go back to Clear the oceans of plastic. Something like that. Like a sort of philanthropic effort as a percentage of profit. And they're fighting about it on Twitter. And then the CEO came out very clearly and said, we've never donated because we've never been profitable. So it turns out not only were they like trying to fight the fight against plastic with their, with their metal cans, but they had plastic within them. And then, and then it turns out that they'd never donated either. And it has just kind of spiraled from there. There's a lot of other like, small points. There's another one where he was talking about the. This is actually a very funny one talk. Talking about the unit economics of selling like ready to drink beverages online. He's like, look, it's super expensive to ship. We can't ship it direct to consumers. And he goes, then distributors want 40 and retailers want another 40 and we want 30. Like gross margins at the end of the day or net margins. And that is from the 1.5 million follower Liquid Death Twitter account. Then like going in depth about why. Why the water is really expensive.

Sam (5:14)

We should have him on honestly, we should have him on the. The marketing operators. That sounds like the perfect topic to talk about.

Connor (5:19)

And honestly, he was totally right. Ready to drink beverage is. Is a crappy category for direct to consumer.

Sam (5:25)

I'll tell you what, their product is still number one in, in my sparkling water book. They're like cherry flavored is unbelievable. You guys, do you guys go down the liquid death like sparkling water rabbit hole? They got a lot of good flavors.

Connor (5:38)

I've experimented with a couple. I think the dark cola is surprisingly good.

Sam (5:45)

Cody, you can't. You're sitting over there quietly. You're the drink guy of the show.

Cody (5:48)

I'm a. Yeah, I've tried it a lot. I think it's. I haven't tried all of them. I think it's all marketing. I have not loved any of them. I think they're.

Sam (5:55)

So what's your go to?

Cody (5:56)

I feel like I've been off sparkling water. I've been just crushing element lately trying to stay hydrated.

Sam (6:01)

Okay. The, the cherry obituary Liquid death is my. That's one of my favorite sparkling waters in the game.

Cody (6:07)

You know, I would try it if they were going to donate to charity if I bought them, but not probably, you know, margin. Margin pressure gets us all guys. Whether you know, make some people cut some agencies lay off their teams or makes you go crash out on Twitter. It's. It's coming for everyone.

Sam (6:21)

Eats up your philanthropic efforts.

Connor (6:25)

All Right. We can get into it here. But before we begin, I want to thank our sponsors, Motion Rich panel, Prescient After Sell and Revo.

Sam (6:34)

So I don't know about you guys, but we are fully locked in on Black Friday Cyber Monday and holiday sale at hexclad. Motion is, as always, a very big part of this. We do a ton of just iterations on evergreen ads with like Black Friday sale banners. So we're just taking literally our top performing ads for the entire year, slapping a banner on them. And that's at least one part of our content stack for bfcm. So easy just to use motion to look at like last 90, last six months, year to date, which ads are getting us the best efficiency, which ads are getting us the best scale. It's like a really quick and easy way to pull that report in motion and then come up with just a bunch of overlays onto your evergreen ads. That's one way we're using motion as we head into the peak season for us, the other way we're using it is for more like instantaneous feedback. So we're saying, hey, we did that. We also shot and produced all these seasonal ads, so which ones are performing best? And then we'll iterate on those like during bfcm. So all of this is getting powered by motion reports. It's just the quickest, the easiest way to see what's working, what's not. Connor, how are you guys using Motion at Ridge to inform your Black Friday Cyber Monday and holiday ad decisions?

Connor (7:46)

We're in a similar headspace. We did a, an exercise that I was calling a Bottoms up planning this year where we granularly looked at what worked at what times throughout, you know, late October, November, December last year. That all comes from analyzing our creative. So we got that foundational approach of what are the things we want to be prioritizing. And then we can get into the fact of what are the new things that we want to be trying this year. And Motion really kind of led point on a lot of that analysis.

Sam (8:11)

Cody, how about you?

Cody (8:12)

Yeah, same thing. Like we'll have everybody propose their strategy and their plan, but like, there should be no reason to start from scratch. Like there's no, you know, blank page. I think you got to hit that like 80, 20 of explore and exploit. But I think for, for exploiting, like you gotta look at what's performed well. And you know, we try to have a lot of warmup points. Like we will have like a holiday kits launch soon. We have Labor Day, we have last Black Friday. So we just build a report of all of them. We just see what traits perform well. Anything that you can filter by naming convention so we don't have to start with a blank screen. And then we're able to just get more pinpointed in our strategy, hopefully each launch.

Sam (8:41)

And lastly, one thing I really, really appreciate about Motion is you don't need to like be this expert in how to use the tool. Like, like, they're very good at getting you onboarded, getting your data ingested and connected, and then training you on exactly how to use the tool. So if you've been dragging your feet, it's time to get going with Motion. Head over to motion app.com.

Connor (9:03)

So this episode's coming out early November, so let's all get in that headspace. Right now it's, let's say November 4th, November 5th. I've got my Black Friday sale starting November 6th. So I'm on the eve of Black Friday. How are you guys feeling right now?

Sam (9:18)

Dude, I feel, I feel good. I feel like we're as good as planned and prepped. This is our third year as a full team going through Black Friday. So we, we, we've just been compounding each year. I feel good, I feel planned and, and I think we're right where we should be right now. We launch on, we launch a little early sale and then we launch our like true, true offer on mid month. So we are still a few weeks out.

Cody (9:42)

I feel tired, man. I'm tired. Yeah, no, we're good. We, we launched our holiday collection on, on November 6th.

Connor (9:51)

Okay.

Cody (9:52)

And then we launch our sale on the 21st. So excited about it. We've been dialed. Our creative for holiday is I think the best we've done yet. The offering we're really excited about. So, so yeah, we're, we're, we're. Right now it is the 22nd one of recording. We've sold about 80,000 of our Bobby kits. And so it is a lot of kits to kind of go and we still have like 20k more. So it is like a lot of kits to expect people to buy. So if there's, you know, anything we're, we're concerned about, it's, it's that and potentially changing up the calendar for next year. But overall ready, ready for it. Really excited about the, the launch we have upcoming.

Connor (10:29)

So the takeaway there. Sorry because we've talked about the Bobby kids launching. You had a couple massive days so big you were posting screenshots in the group chat just for everybody. We Were so back screenshots, you had 100,000 kids. You're 80% sell through. Are you saying you've got now basically two weeks to sell through the remaining 20k before the next, the next kit launch?

Cody (10:51)

Yeah, yeah. And then we're, we're going to the same people who just bought a 90 kit and saying, hey, you want to buy? Here's five more kits you have the option of getting. You know, might be a lot in this economy. Obviously there's a lot of acquisition play and stuff like that and we have as much newness as possible. But I think last year our holiday collection wasn't great and I think it was. Our offering was. It was a mess. I think we learned from it. We did a lot of surveys and we feel really good about it. And so if we don't have, if we still have that problem this year, we think it's just, it's just an overload of kids. We're just too, too reliant on it.

Connor (11:24)

Totally. Yeah, I think that makes sense. So both of you guys described having like miniature sales launching. Connor, have you guys always done that or is that a new addition this year or in recent years?

Sam (11:34)

It's a new addition this year. I felt like in the previous years we weren't giving our like Thanksgiving like our, I mean all of our product you could use to like prep your Thanksgiving meals. But we have a certain category of products that are like roasting pan, you know, your carving board, your like carving knife and fork. So I just feel like in the past our calendar, we haven't given those products enough love because it's like once we launch the core, the core offer, it's like we really want to focus on a lot of our top sellers right away. So we're launching it a week early just to have like a full week to really focus on those. They're more niche products but they're obviously like this is the most relevant time of year. So that's why we're doing it this year is just to have a bit of a, of a moment for those products. So we actually have a new product going live in a week from today and that is also a Thanksgiving oriented product. So that'll be like we'll have seven days to really give that its own moment. Then we'll launch the like collection that has like 12 SKUs or so and then we'll give all those products their moment. That new product will also be in that collection. But then we'll really focus on like the roasting pans. And some bundles around that. And then we'll launch everything on. On the 14th. And we'll still have the. The Thanksgiving products in that collection, but we'll just. We won't focus on them as much in our calendar because we've focused on them for the previous, like, week and a half.

Connor (13:00)

Totally. Yeah. It makes total sense. I don't know how you guys feel, but I feel at Bridge, we're almost constantly adding new layers to the sale. I mean, just like it feels like every year the saturation point has to be increased one way or another. It's hard to spend more dollars. It's easy to intensify the sale or extend the sale because we're doing. It's a little bit different than you guys. Black Friday going live on the 6th. It'll be earlier than it ever has been. And then new dedicated, exclusive offers. Kind of like Turkey 5 weekend starting the Wednesday of that week. So then we'll have exclusive inventory. Exclusive deal. We bought inventory into, which I'm excited about. So it's like we weren't just kind of like scrounging around for what sort of deal we could offer. It was like something we intentionally did months ago. So I think it'll be good. And I think for.

Cody (13:46)

For.

Connor (13:46)

For those listening, I just think there's a lot of big unlocks to have there. Obviously, if you can extend the sale, but if you can figure out how to pace it out in a new way, I'm super excited for you guys. Connor, I think getting anything live earlier in the month will be meaningfully beneficial.

Sam (14:00)

Yeah, that's. Yeah. So we don't do. I was actually gonna ask you this, Cody, what the difference was in your, like, your holiday kits going live, then your actual offer for Black Friday going live? Because we don't have any. We just have a very large. I mean, same with you. I guess probably all of us, we just have a very large breadth of products on sale, so we don't necessarily layer in any newness to the offer until we hit our holiday sale because we just. We haven't felt like we've had to in the past. Like, we don't see, like, a ton of fatigue in November. So for us, we're. We have that early sale, then we have our core sale, but we're not layering any. Any newness that actual Turkey 5 weekend. So what can you share about, like, or. Or not. Can you not share much about it because you want it to be a surprise? Connor, what's like, the newness piece look like?

Connor (14:47)

Yeah, we're doing. So we've had a ton of success with. This is not a particularly novel strategy but we've got some very expensive wallets, 24 karat gold, we have a platinum wallet that comes out today, things like that. And for at times in the past we'll do daily deals on those largely email and SMS focused where we'll take a $295 wallet down to $99. We still have great margins on that. It's super urgency driven because it's just for 24 hours. So we're just going to extend that for like the four day period because that's, that's arguably it's the biggest percentage off we ever do. It's on the most limited amount of SKUs. Also we've never really done anything like that for a Black Friday weekend and it's like the closest we're going to get to a quote unquote door buster. So that's how we're, that's how we're rolling it out. This year we bought thousands of those units. So I think we will be able to do hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales over the course of four or five days.

Sam (15:45)

And then will you basically have like how, how, what's the word? How like streamlined is that funnel? Like are you basically using that small number of SKUs and like the increase in discount to message like broad, broadly, like all right this weekend like up to this percent. It's the best we've done in the like all sale. And then it's going to a collection page where those, those anchor skews are there. But it's also a bunch of your other like probably more popular SKUs that are at the same price.

Connor (16:15)

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question because when we were doing the inventory projection it's like this is something that we want to highlight via email, sms. It's something that we want to test in paid I think I don't know how much we'll be able to scale the budget in this like four or five day period but we'll, we'll give it a shot. So we were looking at, we did do something somewhat similar like 3 years ago in a very limited capacity and that was more like scrounging around. We had a wallet that we could do at a relatively large discount and so we were looking at okay, we can launch this as new messaging this period and then what percentage of people actually coming to convert will be purchasing that product? And it's relatively low. I want to say it was, we were Just looking at ads that drove traffic about this very certain offer. 40% of people were purchasing that product. So it's like we are well aware that like we can get them in the door with this big thing. That's the point of the door busters. We're going to get them in the door and then they're going to come in and they're going to buy many other things. So we tried to bake that into the inventory forecast. It's a part of the marketing strategy. It's something that we anticipate to see. And yeah, I think that's a, that's, that's one of the larger differences that we'll see year over year.

Sam (17:24)

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I, I think that I've really changed the way I think about that whole, I guess, concept in the last few years. Like running ads, even if they're not like we have this apron ad that we run in CTV and it's always one of our best CTV ads. It's like a very engaging, Gordon driven apron ad. It's not like it's selling a ton and you don't get as much of the granularity that you get in like meta where you can like be like, all right, like 50 of the purchases on this ad were actually on the product it's promoting. But you know, we're running this ad in CTV and it's like one of the better efficiency ads we ran all year. But it's not like it's, you know, driving tons of Abrams orders. But we still keep it going because it's, it's clearly getting people to the site and buying something. So it's interesting to hear that you're, you have that same thought just with like a specific offer that you're using to like anchor the ad.

Connor (18:15)

Yeah, 100. And we see that a lot. Like so much of it comes down to like just driving the click through rate or the response rate that gets someone to your site in an affordable way. I think I mentioned this months ago. We saw a weird period of time where we saw pen ads working and it was like, yeah, well, we've just spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting wallets. We have like clearly more saturated the audience with wallet ads. We show them the pen ads are clicking through it at 2.3x higher rate and it's like they only have to buy wallets at 40% or 30% of the rate. And it's like you're almost netting out the same. So this is kind of a similar sort of strategy. I Do want to talk. So we want to jump into forecast. I want to talk forecasting, I want to talk pacing. And then if we have time, talk a little bit about shipping cutoff strategies in Q5. All right. I have the pleasure of telling you about our sponsor Revo, which is a retention platform for Shopify plus brands. They cover everything from accounts to loyalty referrals, memberships, store credit, wallet passes and more. Ridge is a loyal user as well as hexclad, Dr. Squatch, true classic, Portland Leather Goods, Kitsch, lskd, Princess, Polly Pit Viper, Graza and hundreds more brands. There's some really big brands relying on Revo to power their retention platform every single day. I am a firm believer in signed in shopping. One of our strategies to generating more lifetime value to simply make it a better experience to be a customer of ridge.com and Revo plays a key role in that. Stuart, the founder there, one of my favorite people to work with. The platform's fantastic. They're fully bootstrapped. They are shipping features extremely fast with very cool agentic workflows. And lucky for you, they just launched Revo editions with over 30 plus updates, including unified Store Credit and Revo Discount functions that give you more flexibility over how you're giving credit balances and discounts to all of your customers. And my favorite update of all, they are launching Wallet Passes. So you'll be able to get your customers downloading wallet passes and sending them messages via push notifications. And it is totally free for all Shopify plus stores. Go to Revo IO today to check it out. Cody, you mentioned a couple of weeks ago you're reforecasting revenue at the beginning of every month to be as accurate as possible. Can you talk through? You should be doing that probably just about now. What data are you looking at going into November and December to get the most accurate revenue forecast?

Cody (20:33)

Yeah, always looking at combo of, you know, recent months. So we'll kind of estimate where we think the month will end. So usually I'll start like 25th, 27th and we'll kind of just like estimate, you know, based on pacing how I think this month is going to land. What's AMR look like, what's repeat look like. Then we'll obviously we have our calendar stack but if you know, if there's any changes that we have to it, we'll like make those changes to it and then historicals as well which like should be taken into consideration, you know, ahead of time like far earlier. So it's really just updating it Based on how we've been, how we've been pacing, how we've been doing, are there any big changes that we think are going to happen from, like, what we originally had or what we've had recently? So is it, you know, is our AOV significantly higher? Is our ame, our higher? Is it lower? Or do we think we're going to spend more or less? You know, take. Taking that into account definitely gives us, like, a good indication. Unless there's any, like, giant changes or seasonal swings, which would be covered in the historical, um, we're able to get a lot more accurate on it and just like, go into it with a better game plan.

Connor (21:37)

Awesome. I have two questions on this. The first one is, I know September was a really strong month with the launch of the Bobby Kit. So did you reforecast up October and then are you going to do that again in November? Like, are you guys trending above your expectations?

Cody (21:52)

September was actually. So we actually brought it down. Bobby Kit launched in early October. Oh, okay. So I kind of, like, sandbagged it. I, like, brought it down and we're like, well above.

Connor (22:02)

Yeah.

Cody (22:02)

And. And I have to tell my team. I'm like, like, it's good. We're above, but like, this was. This was a sandbag. So we're. We're like, we're like, good above now. We're not like, crazy above.

Connor (22:12)

Got it. Okay. So going into November.

Cody (22:16)

Well, okay.

Connor (22:17)

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So. So October sandbag forecast. You're beaten results. That's fantastic. You're thinking about that going into November. I know the other thing you guys are thinking about is filling the funnel. Right? You're doing. You've got waste not live. You're excluding customers better than you've ever have. You're spending more on podcasts.

Cody (22:32)

We're spending like 30k day on YouTube right now, which is, like, big for us.

Sam (22:36)

Totally.

Connor (22:37)

How are you. How are you factoring that into the November forecast? I mean, just. But gut feel more than anything, I would bet. But, like, is there any. Anything more scientific hope?

Cody (22:46)

No, hopefully. We're normally doing it. I think that's where, like, we'd rather be because, like, you can't. I don't think you can, like, fully count on it, but I think that was partly what happened is like, September, we filled funnel. Well, we, like, unlock some stuff with new audiences and, like, that showed. So definitely, I think, I think because we. We had some success this month from, from doing that from your previous month, earliest month. I think it'll just kind of like give us a little bit more confidence in bumping up our numbers a little bit for November. Yeah, but yeah, we're, we're trying to, but I think it's hard, it's very hard to get an actual like data read on that. You know, it's like, like what metric? Like there's not really a metric to look at and be like, okay, this is what I think I'm going to get. One of the things is acquisition, right. So like we're ac ton of new customers right now in our cohort based forecast for every customer we acquire now we're getting, you know, we're getting you know, a fraction of a purchase next month. So like that does get reflected. But of all of like the prospects that are joining our list and hitting our site, like there's really no way to know to be like, okay, this is how I'm going to collect revenue from them. So it's a little bit more of subjective.

Connor (23:48)

Totally.

Cody (23:48)

Yeah.

Connor (23:49)

So we're doing a similar thing. We're also spending a ton on YouTube. We're at like roughly 30, $40,000 a day as well. I was going to ask how you guys were thinking about measuring it because more or less for us it's just some level of intuition, right? We're going to spend more on YouTube. It's lower CPMs, it's longer video views. I think it's building more brand awareness. We're doing the same thing with podcasting. One way we're measuring is that we're seeing queries for Ridge Wallet and we're seeing it across other categories as well. But queries for ridge wallet up 20% year over year. And it's like whenever I'm going into a sale period, that's a really, I think that's a pretty good leading indicator as far as like interest, awareness, intent that's built up that ideally you're then you know, closing out on once you get into that sale period.

Cody (24:32)

Yeah, I think that's a good one. That's probably the best one. It's still hard to take that number unless you're like, oh, we think we're going to get 20% more revenue because we're totally. Searches are up 20%. It's hard to give it a number but I think directionally that's probably the best thing you could do.

Connor (24:44)

Totally.

Cody (24:46)

No, we're. So YouTube is looking really good. We ran a holdout in probably September or August at like low level spend it look great. We're spending, you know, probably five times that now so like we're, we're about to launch a holdout. Normally you would, you would probably do it again before scaling it that hard. But if we go off of like every signal so like post purchase has picked up in platform. Right. If we like developed an incrementality factor based on that holdout. Like YouTube looks the best as, as a channel. Like we're, we're like, we're like almost double are in platform roas compared to like when we ran that test and we were very happy with the, with the incrementality at that time, you know.

Connor (25:27)

Totally.

Cody (25:28)

So it's like probably crushing we're able to scale it. We've had some on some like Bobbykid ads where like similar meta one day click compared to you know, crazy which is like. So it's like it's probably double triple the return. Um and then the other thing when a few years ago we looked at our North Beam data and we compared two things. Tyler who used to be at North Beam helped us with this, um, who's at house now. He we compared. I always forget what we call this metric but, but the revenue lag, right from like a one to a seven to a 30 day, you know, revenue of different time periods leading up to it and you know October has pretty much your highest increase of your of revenue from like a one day to a seven to a 30 and then YouTube also had the highest. So like combine that like I'm really happy that YouTube is looking good for you know, today's rep performance because we know it's also going to drive a longer tail and so it's, it's that kind of sweet spot of like you know, performance and upper funnel that like feel really good about. It's not like we're just like having reach campaigns and brand span that we hope is going to translate to something 100%.

Connor (26:33)

And that's one of my favorite stats. I, I bring this one up all the time but at ridge in throughout different parts of the year the difference between our one day click and 30 day click is about 40%. And then once you get into these like late October, early November periods it's over 80% so it's more than twice as much value as getting accrued after the one day click. So that means two things. It means one, you can spend more at the same results or you could even tolerate in theoretically lower results early on knowing that more of that, you know, value is backloaded.

Cody (27:02)

Absolutely. And then I love to see the spend. I remember we looked once Seeing the spend of like your Black Friday spend. Like as soon as Black Friday is over Cyber Monday, there's like, it's like whatever. If you were at a 1, you're at like a 1.01. There's like no, no lift on that after Black Friday.

Sam (27:17)

Yeah.

Connor (27:18)

100. Yeah.

Cody (27:19)

We should almost like, I, I almost ponder like, if we should be significantly more aggressive leading up to it and actually like not spend that much Black Friday or Black Friday weekend.

Sam (27:28)

And that's what we're doing. I mean, we're, we're, we have the same spreadsheet from our North Bean reps and we're, and we're really leaning into I, I, we call it ROAS lift at Hex. I think that's like the variable that North Bean, that's like what they labeled as. Dude. We're seeing on like last year on like the 12th and the 13th, our ROAS lift was over. It was it like it's 300. So like we grew from like, if we were at a 1, it grew to like a 3x over the course of like three days a year. So like, we're not as much for like revenue forecasting, but absolutely. With how we're looking at our ad spend strategy this year and how we're manipulating it against last year, we're, we're leaning into this like, ROAS lift metric a lot to decide. Like, hey, let's pull up like, let's have a disproportionate amount of year over year spend growth on like the 10th through the 3rd, 14th. Because yeah, we see the same thing on like actual Black Friday. It's, it's, it's like a full 100% lower than it was on like the 11th or 12th of Black Friday. So I think that's like, I think we'll probably get into spend pacing later on in the episode, but we're leaning into that a lot right now.

Connor (28:40)

Yeah, perfect. I actually think that's a fantastic segue if you guys want to talk.

Cody (28:44)

That's a crazy lag though. That's awesome.

Connor (28:46)

300.

Sam (28:47)

Yeah. Yeah, it is. But it's like, it's, it makes sense, right? Especially with like the survey data we see. Because that's when I wanted to ask you, Cody, about your launch date and like what you guys see for conversion lag and like what percentages y' all are seeing. Because like, yeah, that's a massive percent. And granted this is like through. It's not just through Black Friday. It's actually through like our holiday sale too. Which is why I'm even more comfortable spending up in mid month aggressively because it's going to turn into revenue for the last 45 days of the month. But yeah, it's like I was, I was pretty sure I knew these percentages were going to be like high. I didn't think they were going to be like 3x high.

Cody (29:25)

Do you guys have any house tests running this time of year that are, you know, specifically planned for this time of year? Like Connor, I know you ran Meta last year to try to understand like how it's performing ahead of it. Just we're running CTV right now. We're running a Pinterest like six week test and then we're also about to launch YouTube once CTV ends. So like purposely trying to get channels that we think are higher funnel and then have like a post treatment window that'll hopefully go into these periods.

Connor (29:53)

So, so are you, in the case of those you're measuring what you think are top of funnel channels. So then at the end of the period you'll say hey, this either worked or didn't. And then you'll basically just anniversary it for next year, I think.

Cody (30:07)

So I think we'll probably loosely generalize a little bit throughout the year. It's obviously hard to, but I think it's like there's more value because if it does work, it's probably the best time to have the experiment kind of lines up with where our media mix should be right now. So it just feels like it's a little bit more effective. Like you kill a few birds versus testing a brand search right now. You know, there's no like delayed that.

Connor (30:34)

Well, I. Yeah, yeah. So I think there's like a bunch of. I think there's a couple interesting ways to set objectives for geo lift studies right now. I like yours. It's a little different. Well, here I'll talk about mine first. What we're doing, because we did this last year too, we are not, we're, we are prioritizing our two biggest spending channels. We're prioritizing Meta, YouTube. We think AppLovin's probably going to be our third. So that's like kind of on the radar as well. But basically we're running incrementality tests to 1, set budgets as optimally as possible at the start of our sale. And then we're going to get another readout just before Black Friday. So as we go into that week we can hopefully put more dollars behind whatever is more incremental. Those results are harder from my perspective to like anniversary where like we're not necessarily, we'll, I guess we'll understand. Hey, maybe YouTube is, is more incremental than meta and we'll go into next year thinking it'd be a larger percentage of our budget. But we're largely thinking like in this period, what information do we need to make slightly better decisions? Whereas what you're saying, Cody feels a little bit less actionable when you get that readout. Except for next year it'll be extremely actionable if you say hey this worked or didn't and you could start like iterating over yearly cycles where like we're more thinking about optimizing within, you know, this like four or five week period.

Cody (31:47)

Yeah. So you're like what's working now? Where can I like really ramp up ahead of it?

Connor (31:51)

Exactly. Yeah. And then, and then the brand search one's a great example of some sort of third bucket where it's like those are nice to have at different times of the year but that's not the learning that you want. That's not going to be the most impactful, actionable data in, in November or December.

Cody (32:06)

Yeah, for sure. Definitely.

Sam (32:09)

We're, we're doing exactly what Cody's doing by the way. We have two like pretty aggressive scale up tests on YouTube and CTV that are simulating like 75 increase in spend and they're like pretty long tasks. We launched them about a month ago and they'll, they'll end right on the day that before we launch Black Friday and then we'll do a observation window through Black Friday. I also like all the reasons Cody mentioned. I think like that's the best time for us to get the most accurate read on these channels and we've, we've done like channel level holdouts. So now it's like one we want to see. Like now it's the diminishing return. Also though, we think that's gonna be really valuable for us as we go into next year and we start to think about like total media mix for the entire year, I think it will be super action. Obviously it'll help us for next year when we get into this time of the year. But it's like if we can prove out that that like 75 scale up is still driving a profitable cost per incremental order, like that's going to have you know, huge downstream 2026 implications for like the total media mix. We're comfy putting into YouTube and Neon Pixel. So yeah, I'm, I'm really excited about these tests. I'M I'm nervous but, but excited. 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 pressing 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 Preston 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 SPE 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 slash operators.

Connor (35:41)

So just for those listening, we just talked about how you might forecast revenue going into November and December. You can think about investing in top of funnel and if you're doing more or less of that year over year, that might affect your forecast. If you're looking at more recent performance, you'll be reforecasting your month. You get to the point where and I'll, I'll jump around a little bit here and I'll talk through as much as possible for just those listening. Also, this will be included in the operator's newsletter so you could subscribe there. We'll leave it in the show notes too so you, you'll. We'll make it as easy as possible for you to get this key is very simple. Cyber Monday 2024 Cyber Monday 2025. You throw those dates in here, then you have a 30 day revenue target and a 30 day spend target for the 30 days leading into Cyber Monday. One of the reasons I'll say this and then, and then I don't know if you guys have thought about this at all. This is very in the, in the spirit of my nerdiness, but you know, last year Black Friday forecasting was such a pain because it fell an entire calendar week later in November and luckily year over year comps much, much simpler. I don't know if you guys have really taken that like internalized yet, but I'm going to feel at peace trying to plan out day to day forecasts in November.

Sam (36:52)

We're, I mean we've just taken it and like broken it into different like we don't even forecast November December separately now. We just have like a November December forecast. And basically the, we have like different periods that we're looking at. So it's like, and that's independent of like whether it falls in, you know, the end of November or early December. So we're like Evergreen lead up. We have BFCM launch, we have the actual BFCM sale sale period. Then we have Cyber five, then we have holiday sales. So we're just looking at it like what's the period of time that's like independent of of the month?

Connor (37:26)

Yeah, but, but even last year it was super weird and I remember asking this question where it was like do people start shopping on November 15th or do they start shopping five days before black Friday, because those were extremely different days year over year. Like right, five days out from Black Friday was almost a week different year over year last year. So we just anyway, this year much simpler. So You've got Cyber Monday 2025, fallen 12 1. Last year was 12 2. You can plug in last year, Shopify Export. So also, if you guys do anything different, I, I'd love any feedback. This is more or less how we do it internally. This is all dummy data as well. Shopify Export in here. Put in your daily spend. So you've got daily revenue and daily spend from last year. Then we've got a fourth tab here for this year's daily data that you'll have to manually input. Or you can add super metrics to like auto plug in all the data that you need. I've got the dummy data up through 12 6. So again, a lot of this is faked, but you can imagine only having 14 days worth of data if you're 14 days into the period. And then this gets united in the pacing data sheet. So we look at 30 days until cyber Monday and then you're counting down to zero. That's obviously a day difference year over year. You're looking at last year's sales and then how they accrued throughout that period. So you're adding them up over time, like period to date on a daily basis. And then you're looking at what is that as a percentage of the total revenue that you would do or the total spend that you would do. So we have accrual percentage of sales and accrual percentage of spend. The second half of this sheet is then doing that with this year's daily data. But instead of looking at it as a percentage of total revenue, because obviously you don't have it yet, you're only halfway through the period, you're doing it as a percentage of your goal. And then we're just looking at whether we're looking at as a percentage of last year's revenue or as a percentage of this year's goal. What is the difference? And then that delta is actually really, really interesting. So we have accrue accrual percentage of sales delta at the far right here. And we could say, hey, last year at this point we did 15% of the revenue that we would do in the entire period. This year we're only at 14% of our goal. So we're actually behind on our pacing. And it helps just explain and helps people kind of set targets for revenue throughout a very unevenly distributed period. Because what we can see here is, you know, Black Friday for us was 17% of total sales for the 30 days leading into the period. And it's like, okay, if you're six days into the period, how can you possibly know if you're pacing above or below projections for your target if you're not thinking about this sort of uneven distribution? So it's the underlying data. I like geeking out on this all the time. Would you guys add or subtract anything from this?

Sam (40:19)

This, this is very similar to how we do it too. Like our sheets All London, who, who is our director of paid media and he like owns the operations of this sheet. Him and I have been spending a lot of time in here the last few weeks. But like very similar. We're looking at like percent of revenue and spend by period for, from last year first. Yep. And then we'll come in and we'll fudge it up or down for this year. It's like, oh, we're, we're doing this pre sale earlier this year. We didn't do that last year. Totally. Like, let's, let's bump up that first period. Like, oh, the, the ROAS lift was like way higher from the 10th through the 14th than it was in any other day. Okay. Like, let's have a, let's have a little bit more spend growth on those days this year. But we just put 2024 right in front of us to start and then we, we go from there. So I think it's very similar and we'll just like, depending on what variables are different, we'll, we'll fudge spend up or down. And generally though, I just want to like quadruple click on the point you mentioned of like pacing expectations. Because we're the same way. We're like, you know, 5% of our revenue might come in the first 14 days of the month and then 25 might come in the next like 10 days of the month. And you just have to know how you're pacing against that, that very, very unevenly distributed revenue and ad spend curve. So I think it's like the general, the sheet looks a little different, but I think the general goal that we're trying to understand, which is like, how are we pacing against projections is, is spot on with, with exactly what we're doing.

Connor (41:48)

Yeah. Okay. So I like what you said. Also what this sheet assumes is that your revenue will be distributed in a very similar way year over year. But you bring up the point that if you plan on deploying spend differently or you have for us, we've moved our sale up, then we should actually have an adjusted forecast. And that's what you called fudging. But like you could take last year's revenue data and the distribution of it and then kind of adjust it in the way that you see fit depending on the changes that you're making year over year and you might get to more accurate like net daily sale projections. Cody, do you look at. So I was trying to think about what other people might find valuable in terms of like setting projections for on a daily basis. Do you guys look at new and I imagine you look at new and returning customers since you have such a retention heavy business.

Cody (42:37)

Yeah, I wish I, I wish I should have prepared better. I wish I could share mine. I just don't have dummy data so can't share it. But yeah, essentially what, what I do is I do the cohort forecast for the month, right? And that's where I'm gonna, you know, update it. And really the main, the main drivers, the main input is going to be aov. So again that'll be changed based on seasonal. But of course if we have different offers that we expect to be different. So we have new and repeat aov, we have you know, spend and amer. So those are all inputs and then the outputs will, will be obviously new customer revenue, number of new customers. We have like our cohort tables and so we'll do a seasonality multiplier on a cohort table. Like let's say like average 30 day retention is 20%. Well in some periods it's going to be much higher, some lower. So that's the seasonality multiplier and really the number. And then we have repeat customer aov. So that'll give us our core metrics across all of them. And then what we'll do is I'll then put that into a daily and I'll break it down daily. I'm not doing it as scientific. Like I'm really eyeballing last year, but I'm not like okay, this was this percentage so it's probably less scientific. And then same thing, fudging the numbers based on how did you know did we move a sale is is cyber Monday in November versus December, things like that. Are we moving the sale earlier? So definitely some subjectivity that goes into it. And then we just have a daily forecast for each of them. There's just a daily spend revenue, new customer revenue, repeat customer revenue contribution margin, AME r stuff like that. So kind of like the, you know, like the Accrual stuff and having, you know, spend come earlier but revenue come later, whatever it is. Like I'm, I could probably have like calculate that based off of mine, which I, I might do it, which is interesting. So I think we like, we arrive at like the same strategy. I think we do it a little differently tactically, but it gives us, it gives us like the goal and, and where we should be at in terms of pacing for the month.

Connor (44:37)

Yeah. Makes total sense, would you say? So do you guys get down to the daily data or is it, is it more like the weekly or monthly level?

Cody (44:46)

Oh yeah, daily for sure.

Connor (44:48)

Daily. Daily for sure.

Cody (44:49)

It lad. It ladders in. I mean every day, first thing, like this is our, where our team is checking and our growth team is checking.

Sam (44:54)

And that's on the cohort basis, Cody, that you're doing daily. Like, you're doing like repeat and first order revenue daily.

Cody (45:02)

It's, it's across all of our core metrics. So we have a daily, we have a daily revenue daily spend daily mer, daily am, daily contribution margin daily cac, daily aov, daily number new customers daily new customer revenue, daily repeat customer revenue.

Sam (45:16)

Got it. That's.

Connor (45:18)

Yeah. So if you have like, you know, a week where you are able to acquire way more new customers than you were expecting, does your returning customer forecast automatically adjust for that because you have the cohort projections and then happens on a daily basis. Yeah. That's cool.

Cody (45:32)

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And it'll be, I mean it's not going to be like a huge impact, but like if we have, you know, if we, if we think we're going to acquire a hundred thousand customers and we acquire 120,000, like, you know, that will ladder down over, over the year. It's not going to be like a giant impact, but. Yeah, yeah, it'll automatically go through and.

Connor (45:50)

Then, and then another big difference that you're describing is where I have net sales here, this is all revenue and spend driven. You would go as far as new and returning customers and their average order values. And so therefore you have this spend, but you just have it at such a more granular level that you're able to do the, the returning customer revenue cohort forecast as well.

Cody (46:10)

Yeah, yeah. And then, and then one thing. So like we have like a hierarchy where like, so a contribution margin is most important. So like right now, for example, like we're, we're above revenue. We are above contribution margin. We're, we're above, we're like right on. Amy R. But like been like above it and we're below mer. And so we've been pushing hard and we're like, hey, we're willing to kind of give up some of that contribution margin because we're already above it. Right? That means we'll hit our profit goals for the month and then we can then prioritize growth and just continue to acquire people. So, like, that's like the conversations we'll have, like weekly or a few times a week.

Connor (46:43)

That makes total sense.

Sam (46:44)

Connor, do you do. I'm curious what you guys do on like, the Bottoms up cohort base, because we'll do like, I'll run a quick and dirty Bottoms up forecast just to like, pressure test our.com, like revenue targets. And like Cody, I'm also curious how you, like, make certain assumptions. We're not doing it on a daily basis. It's more like, all right, for the ent, here's our target based on our repeat revenue forecast and our, you know, basically making the same assumptions that Cody's making, like CAC assumptions, NAOV assumptions, and then applying our total media budget to that. Like, are we going to land, like, are we going to hit our budget that we've set based on that? And it's, that's how we're like, just making sure that what we have allocated is in. It's. It's. In reality. It's not like some budget that we, we never had the opportunity to hit. We're not doing it on a daily basis. But do you guys do any, any sort of cohort base like that?

Connor (47:43)

We don't. We have such low cohort values. And, and I think the way that we reactivate customers is just different. It would be. There would be value for us in maybe forecasting out the first handful of months where someone's most likely to, to repeat purchase, but it's still a really low percentage. And then the biggest thing for projecting returning customer revenues is hard because for us, it's basically, you know, predicting the success of new launches. Like, that's how we're reactivating a lot of these people. It's a little bit different. We could be far more nuanced here than we currently are. I also believe. And, and this is. Cody and I haven't had a real fight about this, but we won't do it now. I don't really care about cac. Like, I think, I think, I think we can spend a lot of dollars driving incremental returning customer revenue. So therefore, CAC's a little bit less, especially as we've expanded categories where it's like we just have to pay something to reacquire a four year old wallet customer when they're trying to buy a 400 piece of luggage. So we are, we are really just mer focused. We're really revenue focused and we don't do a lot of cohort forecasting.

Cody (48:53)

That'll be a good debate one day. We should, we should, we should do that. Yeah, for sure.

Connor (48:57)

Next debate, we need more fights.

Cody (49:02)

So I remember like right around Christmas time when most people should probably normal people were like off taking that, taking their time, chilling with family. I was like looking through our P and L, our budget for next year and I was like, how are we going to save money? And one of the things I did is I leaned on a lot of our partners and I remember slacking a meet from Rich panel and I was like, what can you do? How can you help us? We had just switched to Rich Panel a few months before, went really well. And I told him jokingly, by the way, I want to throw it out there jokingly, that if he could help cut about 500k from our customer service cost, I'd get a Rich Panel tattoo. Well, we did that. You've probably seen a tweet. He did some AI thing of me with a neck, neck tattoo. I'm not going to do it. Sorry to meet, but I will talk about how much I love Rich Panel, how much Amit has helped us. So we had 18 support agents before. It was a lot and it just was not scalable. We had so many people. We had this like old legacy software. It was slow, it was broken, it was expensive and it just took too many people to operate. So we not only made the switch, but Amit and his team really helped us. Now we have eight people and we have a much better CSAT score. Our numbers are way better, our response times are way quicker. We're leveraging a lot of automation, a lot of AI, but again, it has not hurt customer experience. We track and I get a weekly report of our csat, of all of our stuff, of our nps and it's going up because we're actually able to get back to people, give people better answers. The automation learns from our best agents. So it's just continually, it's getting better. We switched to Rich Panel about two weeks before Black Friday might be a crazy thing to do, but it was super easy. We came out of Black Friday for the first time in three years with no ticket backlog. The software and support has blown us away. I highly recommend you Switch. If you do it and they save you a lot of money, you should probably get a tattoo. But it's not something my wife would let me get away with. But yeah, if you're running an E commerce brand, I highly recommend you switch to Rich Panel. You'll be able to leverage their software, save money on software costs, which is great, while saving a significant amount of money on personal costs. So if you want to go into Q4 with a leaner, smarter support setup and come out of there without this crazy tech backlog, just make your team happier. Go to richpanel.com demo. Tell them Cody from our credit operator you and tell me you're ready to get a tattoo. Okay.

Connor (50:58)

The last thing that I'll highlight here and again this will be in the show notes, but it becomes pretty charts. So you can see like revenue pacing here. I always joke is like, could be thought of as like my, my sentiment throughout the period trends perfectly with this chart where it's like, okay, you're right on your revenue pacing. Fantastic. You feel great. 119, you're 7% below your goal come 11 24, but you made it all back by the end of Cyber Monday. For those listening, check it out. Plug in your data if helpful. It's very much like a V0, I would say. And then I think Connor and Cody just gave a lot of good examples how you can adjust it for your business and your different objectives. So that's what I got on pacing.

Cody (51:41)

I'm, I'm a big fan of the, the graphs. Just like line graphs and stuff. Yeah, I, I could try to share some of our charts again. I wish I could share them but like where we'll just have like our, our daily cumulative like for all of our KPIs revenue and like a red and then a line of, of pacing so you can just quickly wake up in the morning and look at it and be like, oh, we're above here, we're below here. So I think anytime you could add those charts that you had like a big fan.

Sam (52:04)

Totally. Yeah. We also don't do any like charting, but I'm, I'm realizing that would be. We're actually presenting this plan to like our leadership outside of the growth team next week and I'm like, that is going to resonate way more than me sharing this like row. There's like 60 rows of like ad spend and revenue and efficiency just like in a table. So I think we're gonna. After seeing that, I'm like, let's just make this into A table and have a separate chart for, like, the, you know, the exec team to be like, all right, like, I can see the curve of that. And like, it's spend and revenue overlaid right on top of each other. Like, that's. That's easy enough. They don't need to see probably the. The exact numbers.

Cody (52:43)

Yeah, I'm a. I'm a big visual guy, pretty much. Like, obviously you need the data and spreadsheets and stuff like that, but if you can just, like, build a dash or a spreadsheet, you know, that just has like a quick visual you can look at for. For the, you know, the, The. The. The executives that are less connected to marketing these days, like me. It's helpful to get. Get the data quickly. We don't really understand the numbers of platforms, but you need few number.

Connor (53:07)

Big picture.

Cody (53:09)

Yeah.

Sam (53:11)

Can I ask you guys. I want to ask you a question, and if you. If you don't feel comfortable answering, don't answer. That's totally fine. What percentage? All right, so from November 1st to December 31st, what percent of your revenue is coming on actual Black Friday? Which is, you know, the peak. The peak moment for most brands.

Connor (53:30)

I can pull it up here. I can tell you. Do you know yours?

Sam (53:34)

I do. Yeah. We're like. It's like 12% of our revenue comes on Jesus. Action one day. Yep.

Connor (53:42)

Cause I just said.

Sam (53:42)

I.

Cody (53:43)

The.

Connor (53:43)

The percentages are relatively accurate. I think I forget how much I adjusted the dummy data, but the Dummy Data said 17 of the 30 days lead into Cyber Monday came on Black Friday. So if you just. All you're doing is adding another 29 days. 20 of them are going to be pretty big. It's probably similar for us.

Sam (53:59)

Yeah. Which is. Which is honestly, like, it's. It's a ton of net revenue, but the. I mean, the bulk of our. The bulk of our revenue is coming, you know, in the. In the period leading up to Thanksgiving and then the period following Cyber Monday headed into the shipping cutoff for holiday.

Connor (54:19)

Totally.

Cody (54:20)

That's crazy. That's a crazy percentage. Ours was one last year. I mean, we. We also didn't do a sale, so this will be our first sale, so I'll see if it changes.

Connor (54:27)

But, dude, 1%.

Sam (54:31)

That's lower than of all of.

Connor (54:33)

Wait, it's Black Friday over November and December.

Cody (54:35)

Oh, no, I thought you were talking annual.

Connor (54:38)

Yeah, okay.

Sam (54:39)

Oh, yeah, yeah. November, December.

Cody (54:41)

Oh, okay. I mean, the thing that tricked me is I've seen the hexcloud screenshots on Black Friday, and they're I wouldn't be surprised.

Connor (54:48)

But yeah, we are like we're under. We're right around 10.

Sam (54:54)

Okay. So we're pretty similar.

Cody (54:55)

We'll. We'll say 10, just under 10.

Sam (54:57)

But we're really starting to like. All right, so I don't want the, I don't want this to. This is like not that we're not spending on Black Friday. Like Black Friday is the day that we will spend the most without a doubt and, and buy a pretty big margin. But it's also like that weekend has some of the lowest roas lift. So worse if you look at like how we're manipulating spend year over year, like the, the year over year change on the actual Cyber5 weekend is going to be even negative some days because of that insight and the most of the. So the net dollars will still be the biggest there but like the growth year over year will be. Will be the smallest based on some of that like roas lift insights that we've been uncovering with with North Beam.

Cody (55:42)

Yeah, no, I agree. It's like, it's like the same way that we'll apply like media buying targets based on like an incrementality factor. You can kind of have like a row s lift factor. Totally, totally agree with you. So it's not like a binary. It's just like, hey, if we, you know, we normally run out of one on this channel and we normally get a 1.1 lift. Well now if we're at 1.4, like I can go 30% more aggressive right now.

Sam (56:03)

Yep. Yeah. I also, I also think there's this like urge to be hyper perfect with these sheets and like that's not the goal. I, I've like, I told that to my, to my team a little bit. Like, you know, London is our, the guy who like I said, who's the one like operating the sheet and then him and I will like review it a handful of times until we feel like it's, it's like accurate representation of what the month's gonna play out to be. And it's like we just are trying to get the general curve down. Like we don't need to like spend an additional 20 hours in here trying to get it like, like perfect to the hundred dollars. Like just get the general curve down and like that's 95 of what you need this pacing sheet to do for you.

Connor (56:45)

What we found to be really accurate last year and again last year was difficult because Black Friday was falling so much later in the month. But what ended trend what Ended up trending pretty similarly was the day over day changes, especially leading into Black Friday where it's like, hey, we can expect, we have a certain expectation for Monday of that week and then we expect Tuesday to be 15 bigger and then it's 20 bigger and whatever else. And those, those day over day percent changes ended up being like the most accurate way for us to forecast. So that might be helpful as well. And, and I guess my point there being, Connor, like you could do all, you know, whatever, what is it? The best laid plans of mice and men. Sort of like you could do as much as you want in late October, early November, trying to perfect it weeks in advance when in reality a lot of the values just like, like you just need the data in place and the systems in place to understand what's going on right now. So that when you go to spend $500,000 the next day or whatever that you can do that like a little bit more efficiently. Okay, cool. Do you guys. I'd love to talk shipping cutoffs. Oh, here's another stat that we have at Ridge and I don't know if you guys have it. Maybe you could pull it up, Connor. We see a really big. We end up driving like really a lot of volume. And this is because I think we are at a hundred dollars. We're a great gift for men. So we start our Black Friday sale earlier the week of Black Friday. That Turkey 5 is like a meaningful period for us, obviously. But then we really see a lot of volume come in from like December 3rd or December 4th through December 14th and 15th up until that shipping cutoff when people are confident that they can get their orders delivered. We basically see 20 to 25% of Black Friday sales on each of those days. That seems, I looked at that last night. I'm like, that's a lot. That's a lot of revenue. Every four days we're having the equivalent of another Black Friday.

Sam (58:32)

Yeah.

Connor (58:33)

Do you guys see similar sorts of volume and how do you plan your sale and shipping cutoff around them?

Sam (58:40)

Yeah, we do. Let me see here. Yeah, it's about, yeah, like, so we'll do about, we'll do about double the revenue in that period from like basically when we launch our holiday sale until that, that shipping cutoff that we do on Black Friday, is that like, is.

Connor (59:00)

That 10 days and that's like a.

Sam (59:03)

12 day, 12ish day window of time?

Connor (59:07)

Okay. Yeah, so that's, that's about the same. I think we're slightly above that. I just feel like it kind of every. There's so much celebration around Black Friday. You know, people Shopify comes out with the custom dashboards. They're sponsoring the sphere. I mean it's a big thing obviously and it's fun to like celebrate ecom on that day.

Sam (59:23)

But.

Connor (59:25)

But I'm like early, early December up until mid December is almost just as make or break as anything else.

Sam (59:30)

Oh my God. Yeah.

Cody (59:32)

100 and like. Yeah. I mean even for us, we even pass the cutoffs. Like there's a peak then but like we, we stay pretty strong until like right around Christmas. Yeah. And we get like a few soft days but like we've had some like really good performance where it's kind of like shocked me. It's, it's I guess the whole Q5 thing, you know. But yeah, I think for us it's just like how do we. And we're trying to do this because it is a longer period in sale and holiday kits like we're gonna have these holiday kits for two months. So it's like how them feel cool and, and different and like speak to them differently. So really like gifting messaging will go right after Black Friday is going to go live and then we'll have, we'll have a gift we'll purchase then. So we'll have an additional offer which we did last year which definitely helps. So just trying to roll it into a new thing. Try to make it look a little different. Look a little bit different visually taking a, a big page out of the Hex hexclad toolbook with the like the different kind of like branding elements for. For. For launches. So it'll look pretty sick where like all of our tags on the site and everything will like match and we'll just be able to like roll that.

Sam (60:29)

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Connor (62:40)

In the sense of like maximizing the value that you can capture in this period. Are you guys leveraging your stores at all? Cody?

Cody (62:48)

Yeah, I mean we'll do just like all of all of our offers will be there. We don't have any like specific additional offers will will be there. But you know E Comm will definitely scale faster because we're just like spending way more in those days. But overall business will be pretty good. And then especially like right after shipping cutoff, anyone who lives near a store is getting an email. Okay, totally last minute, you know, get your stuff.

Connor (63:11)

Connor do you guys do that sort of thing with retail partners like Costco? Like are you ever trying to drive awareness to hexclad being available at Costco post DDC shipping cutoff?

Sam (63:22)

We haven't yet, but that's Just because we see like performance stays really strong for us throughout the, throughout the end of the year. Like and I think it's, I think it's definitely up headed into shipping but like people are strapped with cash, you know, after Christmas. So it's like why would we not be on sale? And it makes sense like if you're strapped with cash, like all right, I'm not going to get this in time for the holiday but like I'm still going to buy it when this offer is going live and then I'll have it for the new year when also people are starting to like start new habits. Like it's kind of like Q5 for our category is just like kind of the perfect storm. We actually don't do any retail media yet. We really just rely on, you know we did run some, we talked about this like 10 or 15 episodes ago. Like we ran that our retail halo model with pressure and like we did. You know, their model thinks that we're driving like a pretty good big chunk of like not, not over 50 but like a decent percent like double digit percent of our dot com efforts driving revenue to Costco. So we felt like for now we don't need to like do any specific retail pushes. We're starting to explore with Costco though because they do have some interesting ways that we can do both like advertising on their own channels to drive more revenue on Costco.com and then also do some retail media pushes. And like I'm sure at some point we will maybe we'll do something out of home around like a Costco location. Like with the 10 days leading into the roadshow location and 10 days during it it. But no, for now it's just we haven't felt the need to because our, our.com and just online in general stays up pretty much until we decide to turn off our sale. Like we'll do like, we'll do just as much revenue on like Wednesday, Christmas Eve as we will on like I don't know, like the, the, the Friday before Christmas. It like stays pretty elevated.

Connor (65:17)

Totally. Yeah. I, I was just thinking about it. We've tried to continue refining this strategy at Ridge and some of it is like we see a lot of benefit from like we do drive to Amazon. We have our, I, I've got the like our general order of operations.

Sam (65:34)

Right.

Connor (65:34)

We can drive a ton of volume as we're offering free standard shipping which we do all the time. Fantastic. We move to free express shipping and we begin reducing spend running at a higher mar. Because that Express shipping does cost quite a bit more but we do it for free so that we can get the majority of orders to customers before Christmas. So we're able to extend that period a little bit longer. Then we hit Amazon. Then we, then we, this, we. Last year we did it for Best Buy but this year we'll do Best Buy and Verizon that were available on those stores. And it's just trying to like eke out all this value at the very end that like I said some of it, the Amazon stuff in particular with attribution link clearly really good people like shopping with prime and trust that as a, as a, you know, as a form of delivery Best Buy stuff a little bit tbd. But I also think it makes Best Buy feel good which I think has long term value as well.

Cody (66:28)

Do you guys do any like like shipping promotions or like will you like discount shipping? Like I've wondered that where like maybe we like give free like express shipping. I don't, I'd have to like calculate the margin impact of that but like try to like have another offer that's not just a you know, site wide sale but like as you get closer to cut off.

Connor (66:47)

So we leave our sale running and do free express shipping for like two days and then that's when we're cutting back spend running at a higher mer and it's really just email and SMS oriented and we're like driving urgency around that just to again like extend the period of time that we can capture some of that volume. And the free express shipping. Totally. I mean we're able to do another, it's like an extra a hundred thousand dollars a day for another two and a half days or whatever.

Cody (67:12)

Is that, is that when, is that relative to your like shipping cutoff? Is that like you have a standard shipping cutoff and then, then is that like hey you missed it but here's free express shipping.

Connor (67:23)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So standard shipping cutoff. I don't have the exact dates this year. We're Also, we switched 3 PLs year over year so the dates always change because we're looking at shipping SLAs and what we can offer while getting the vast majority of orders there by Christmas. But, but the rough timeline is we have free standard shipping up until the 15th and that's when we're driving as much volume as we can. And then that's also kind of a natural shipping cut off in people's minds. I think a lot of people become way more skeptical that they'll receive their gifts on time. So, like, intent drops, we drop spend, we move to free express shipping. So that's an additional offer, additional value. We hit that via email and SMS for another three days. And then DTC shipping cutoffs, like the 18th, 19th, something like that is how it's worked in the past.

Cody (68:07)

I love that. That's awesome. I might steal that for the same.

Connor (68:10)

And that's what I mean. That's what I said earlier where, like, it just feels like a lot of growth. Each year is just figuring out, like, tiny new things that you can layer into. Like, like, just eke out a little bit more value.

Sam (68:21)

We'll lean heavy into. Just like we're not doing free express shipping, but we will lean heavy into last shipping emails. We'll have variants of our top ads that are like, order by this date. And those always perform really well. We'll even adjust our ground shipping copy at checkout to be like, basically up until the last day at ship date. It's like, order by, you know, date to ensure Christmas delivery. And then we'll change it back to just like the evergreen message after that day because we don't want to, like, hurt conversion rate by people being like, oh, it's the 19th, and this says the 18th. So those are, like, the three main tactics we'll do. Leaning into shipping. We thought about doing, like, the free express shipping, but have just. Just haven't felt the need to, like, I think if we were, like, missing targets one year and we thought there was room to be made in those, like, three days, it's like, all right, well, maybe we. Maybe we would do that, but we just haven't felt the need to yet.

Connor (69:13)

You guys, Revan is just so big already. Why. Why beat targets when you. When you could just meet them?

Sam (69:20)

I guess so.

Cody (69:21)

I guess so.

Connor (69:22)

All right, I got. I got one more quick one for you guys. Q5. So we've walked our way up shipping cut off. We've maximized value there. You know, everybody talks about this Q5 Halo period. CPMs drop because nobody's spending budgets anymore. Do you guys have any interesting plans for that? And when do you kind of pivot into New Year's related messaging? I imagine beauty and, you know, health and cooking. That's like a. A good, you know, period of time for you guys.

Sam (69:51)

Yeah, we're not. We're not doing anything different, you know, in the. In the last. What do you call Q5? Is that like Christmas through the last day of the year?

Connor (70:00)

Yeah, I think people. I don't know. I. I think we were Considering, like, that. I was just looking at the CPMs. I think they started dropping the 23rd or something. 24th. So it's like, just before Christmas. Definitely just after Christmas. Up until early January.

Sam (70:13)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we'll just keep. We're just running our same holiday offer through the end of the year, and then we'll shift into, like. Like, Evergreen, kind of like New Year. New. You type messages starting in January?

Cody (70:23)

Yeah. You know, consumers don't really know Q5, so we're not, like, calling it a Q5 promo or anything like that. But we'll. We'll have. I mean, it's all pending inventory. We'll have our holiday stuff through December 31st.

Connor (70:36)

Okay.

Cody (70:37)

You know, if. If we run out earlier, that's great. If we have a little extra, maybe we'll just keep them on site, but just, like, don't want to, you know, promote it super hard. I think it's probably more just like, being ready with. With, you know, inventory and spend. Like, there's not really much you can do to kind of specifically call out. You can do offers if you want. But for me, it's just like being ready and kind of taking advantage of it. And if performance looks good, just like, being. Being prepared, don't let it catch you by surprise. And hopefully you've got, you know, some historical data that. That. That shows that. And then for us, it's like, yeah, like, beauty's big, and January, you know, New year reset. Like, not as big as health, but definitely big. So we. We just always try to plan a launch, like, pretty early and have it be something that we think is, like, related to that. So we have, like. Like, yeah, but definitely, I think just getting into that messaging starting, you know, like, first is slow. Like, I feel like a lot of these periods where it's like, back to school, back to work. Like, first few days are a little slow because people are busy getting back into new routine. But then definitely, there's a lot of, like, buyer intent.

Connor (71:31)

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I. We don't have anything super big planned. One thing that's interesting. So we're obviously expanding categories. We launched the iPhone, 17 phone cases. We did the 16 phone cases, too, last year. And what's interesting about phone cases is peak demand is like, like, September, when the iPhone launches, then you have a big spike around Black Friday, which makes total sense, as with, like, anything anybody buys. But then you also see a really big period right around Christmas because people are presumably opening up their new iPhones and then need a case So I think we're getting the opportunity to do some more like category specific messaging that is more seasonally relevant. And then the other thing that I'm keeping top of mind, I do think there are certain channels that are less efficient than others. Like we're gonna, we've got you know, a decent chunk of linear TV budget for like a slush fund in that Q5 because I think that's where a lot of advertising pulls back and then you can get like very affordable rates through that period. And I just think there's probably more, like I said, more inefficiencies there than something like a meta.

Cody (72:33)

Potentially interesting. Okay, that's. Yeah, I mean that I gotta pay attention. We're really not spending as much on linear now. But you've seen like good performance around that.

Connor (72:42)

Yeah, totally. I mean just when we can get those super affordable rates. We had a great spot go live. We got a non guaranteed spot in the nl, nl, ds, Brewers, Dodgers. And we got it at such a cheap rate because it was non guaranteed. It was in game five and nobody, people weren't sure if it was going to go to game five. No, sorry. It was Brewers, Cubs. I don't even know, dude. I don't care about baseball at all. It was one of, it was one of the series. We did game five because, because it's non guaranteed and therefore it came at a really low cpm. So it happened to land and we ended up getting like a really big spike from it. Great cost per visitor. So that's how we're approaching TV is just like, just where are some of those undervalued placements?

Cody (73:26)

And the, the other thing, I don't think this is baked into CPMs but like you have family sitting around watching together. So you're reaching, you're reaching more people where like you're not getting that on an iPhone.

Connor (73:35)

You're also buying it at a fixed rate and then it can easily like it can over deliver like Game five. It's like they're projecting a certain amount of viewership and they're going to charge you a certain amount. But if, if more people care about game five than you were expecting, then you could actually overserve. So like we've seen a number of stuff like that. A lot of sports happens like that. We could, we could buy agnostic college football games and land in like a big ten game and it ends up being a great value.

Cody (74:02)

Yeah, I got to figure out what our sports is. I don't think sports totally makes makes sense for us. But yeah, I got to figure out what the. What the events are that could go to a game five. For sure.

Connor (74:10)

For sure. Well, cool, guys. Anything else you want to hit on?

Sam (74:15)

That was great.

Connor (74:16)

All right. We'll call it an episode. All right. Thank you for listening to another episode of marketing operators. As always, make sure to like and subscribe. Leave us a comment on YouTube, a comment on X. As always, thank you to our sponsors, motion rich panel, pression after sell and revo. We will see you again next week. Thank you, Sam.