Connor McDonald (1:33)

Can I tee up this question, Connor? Because I think this is funny. So you know, Cody, people listen to this episode for cutting edge marketing tactics. What are the smartest marketers in the world doing on the forefront of digital media expansion? You implemented a new strategy this year that you were just telling us about. What, what was it? How's it going?

Cody (1:54)

Yeah, we did this thing, I think it's called a sale.

Connor McDonald (1:58)

A sale? Yeah. Can you, can you, can you expand on that?

Cody (2:01)

Yeah. No, Connor, Connor from Grins was asking me there he was like, are you, do you feel stupid? Like he said next to us, but he's like, are you pissed that you haven't done it until now or like, are you happy you, you hauled out? I'm like, I'm totally happy we held out. Like, um, we, we just have. There's a lot of levers we haven't pulled and I'm happy we haven't had to. And obviously a lot of them were we'll do for the future as growth becomes, you know, more challenging. But no, I'm, I'm, I'm very, I don't, I don't like regret anything and, and look back on it and like we had still really big, you know, Q4s and, and black Friday moments, you know, without having to do this. We just, it's a time, you know, where, where it makes sense. A With just things being softer and slower and consumer sentiment, but also just like where, where we're at for a brand. So no, I'm, I'm pumped about it, but we're, you know, we're not going to get hooked on it for sure.

Ben (2:52)

So can you, can you tell us what you have been doing, Cody? So you, you typically what you're saying is this is the first time you've ever just run like a straight up discount site wide on all your products. Now you've, it's not that you've never ran like an offer or a holiday campaign, but can you explain like what you have been doing historically and then how that's different than what you're doing right now?

Cody (3:13)

Yeah, so our, we do like holiday collection. So usually in October we do, you know, anniversary kit and then we do holiday collection in November and then for like Black Friday period we do a mini miracle bomb set which is, you know, we sell the full size year round but we don't normally sell the mini. And I mean that's been, you know, we've had some crazy, crazy days. Like you know, two years ago we had like a $6 million black Friday day. We were like top selling SKU on Shopify or one of them.

Ben (3:42)

It's all bundles. It's all like seasonal sets that you're doing and are those. So I think there's two things to that. A, they're like unique products. Right. Like you can't get those products unless it's that time of year.

Cody (3:54)

Yeah, probably for shade.

Ben (3:55)

Okay, got it. So the shades are unique, so there's newness there. And then are you, are you adding in any sort of discount to that set as well, yeah, any, any kit that we do.

Cody (4:07)

Yeah, any kit, kit or bundle there's, there's discount in but not a crazy one like that. I don't think that's like the main reason that one did well. But yeah, definitely with, with kits like they're all discounted but are the seasonal.

Ben (4:20)

Ones more discounted than like your ever? Because like we're the same way. Like every evergreen bundle is a little discounted because you're bundling. But like is it a better discount when it's the like holiday kit versus like an Evergreen kit or is it just the newness?

Cody (4:32)

Pretty, pretty similar. Yeah. Yeah. More, more relying on the newness.

Connor McDonald (4:36)

I do think I like your point. Cody around having not run sales basically puts constraints on your business and like forces you to find growth in other places. And it is, it is much easier to become complacent when you're just running promos and then, and then you've begun running promos and you just need to run larger promos. I could give you a. You just have so many. Depending on how quote unquote hooked on sales you want to get. You could be running bigger promos in the future. You could start launching your sale earlier next year. You could run it later next year. It's like boom. You've got, you've got 20, 30% revenue growth just like lined up depending on how, how low hanging of fruit you want to go for.

Cody (5:15)

Yeah, top line growth. Who knows about bottom line though?

Connor McDonald (5:17)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cody (5:19)

No, I mean it's obviously very easy to get hooked on them. I don't think it's like bad for brand or anything like that. And like beauty margins are plenty good to be able to do it. But you know, I do think there's something about you know, training people to do it. Um, and so it's for us with, with our. I don't know if you guys have experienced this. Probably not hexclad. Cause everything you guys do works but maybe Connor or you guys have. It's like some stuff that used to work so well in a certain phase of the business and like was driving growth is just not the thing that's going to drive it in the future. And maybe that's like where you guys obviously got with wallets and then expanded. But it's like these kits have done so well for us and like the mini miracle bombs as well. And like we always knew like we would have these like really big performances from it and, and we always knew that there was going to be a point where it didn't work. And just one of them, just like overnight it was just like boom. Like that's, that's not where our growth is going to come from, you know, for future. But obviously we want to be growing year over year every, every November, every October. So we just have to pull more levers and we're going to try to also get ones that are not purely just discount and I think we'll kind of have a combination of them. But yeah, and I think what I'm trying to do is be a little bit further out ahead of it. And that's partly my job as a CEO is like let's actually pivot because we have to plan like our holiday collection now. You know, we have to start it before we even launch it. We get some data in but it's like how do we, how do we actually pivot and like before it stops working in the future. That's really what I'm trying to do.

Ben (6:42)

We're like, we lean obviously our hero offer not, not right now, but now's the only time it is but is not the case but like we really lean into gift with purchase all year long. But because we have so many different products that we can cycle through that like it, it feels fresh and new. It's like all right, you might have like griddle and 12 inch walk for this sale, but then in three months for the next sale it might be the Hex mill and you know, the 3.3 quart high side. So we're kind of like always layering in newness that way and like keeping. Because we get, we get a lot of like negative engagement about our sales and how they're always the same and it's like, like a lot of it's similar but we actually are constantly cycling a new gift with purchase to keep it fresh and we've been able to like see it continue to perform because of that. And then like kind of the same with you Cody, where it's like bundle assortment. Like well, we're constantly making like new bundles that are comprising all of our top products being sold on first time orders. And just saying, hey, here's a, here's an awesome bundle for a discounted price because you're bundling it. So that's how we keep the same like general backbone of our offer but like also layer of newness. So Cody, your, your sales off to a good start. Hexclad solid start. We're like right at pace. We're pretty happy with what we're seeing against forecast and against our year over year growth, but you know, have still only done like 13, 14% of the total revenue we need to do so. A long way to go, but a good start. Connor, what are you seeing on on Ridge with Black Friday star? How are you guys looking?

Connor McDonald (8:09)

We're very happy with it. We've got the wallet business growing more significant growth in the wallet business than we've seen for the last like 18 months or so. So that makes my job way easier. And then we've got the additional wins of the new categories. International looks strong. So all things good should be. It should be a great rest of the month. Nice.

Ben (8:29)

All right, well, this is. This is what we. We all came here to talk about today was current events on the Internet that I'm not up to speed on, but you two are. So can someone clue me in on the may I meet you? I've been seeing all the memes. I haven't. I haven't taken the time to actually look up what the origin story of the may I meet you meme is all about. So can one of you guys clue me in here?

Connor McDonald (8:52)

Cody, I think. I think you're. You're better suited for this.

Cody (8:54)

I don't think it.

Ben (8:55)

Do you.

Cody (8:55)

So do you know who Bill Ackman is?

Ben (8:58)

I'm. I'm looking him up right now. He's the. Some big billionaire.

Cody (9:02)

Yeah, he's like a billionaire investor, hedge fund guy. Did you ever watch billions?

Ben (9:06)

A little bit. Not. Not like all the way through.

Cody (9:09)

So it's not based on him. Like, it's actually based on like partly Steve Cohen. But imagine like Bobby Axelrod in billions just like this, like, like well known, controversial, like billionaire investor. Right. Like, he also is a prolific tweeter and he's. He does this thing just like on Bill Ackman where he tweets like really long things.

Ben (9:30)

Yeah.

Cody (9:30)

And so sometimes he'll. He'll be like, hey, I'm gonna. I'm gonna like post something tomorrow. And he'll like tease it and people will reply with like, I don't know if you ever seen, but it's that like image of like the super long, like phone and stuff. So he just like, he's like controversial and he gets made fun of. But he did this thing. I don't have it pulled up, Connor. I don't know if you do. But he's essentially like, hey, I've been helping young men with dating advice. And he's like, you know, guys are scared to go up to girls. And so he's like, What I suggest is go up to them and say, may I meet you? It's like his thing. And it's like, it's like, partly so funny because it's him. It's just like. For sure, yeah. It's just like the worst line, but, like, the funniest line ever.

Ben (10:08)

So did he have, like, some long tweet about this and that was, like, part of this tweet? Is that what happened?

Cody (10:14)

Yeah, I, I, I. Let me see if I can pull.

Ben (10:16)

It up while we're trying to find it too.

Cody (10:18)

Yeah.

Ben (10:19)

In a post that has been viewed more than 27 million times since Saturday.

Cody (10:23)

I can't imagine he would have deleted it. He, he was a pretty good sport about everything. Like, I didn't see him, like, bash anyone. Like, he seemed to be kind of in on the joke at some point.

Connor McDonald (10:32)

I mean, the, it. I'm sure it was a long post. It was about, like, you know, almost like liquidity in the dating market that, like, just people aren't meeting. No, no. But, but actually, like, the problem that, like, men and women are not meeting and they're not dating. You see, you see this all the time. Like, people, people are having less sex. People are getting into relationships later. There's, like, a problem with the way that we are, like, building relationships today. So that's the problem that he's looking to solve. And it all comes down to him being like, may I meet you? And, and that being like the, the S Tier icebreaker here.

Cody (11:04)

Can I share my screen real quick? I found it. Yeah, yeah, Here we go. Bill Ackman. I hear from many young men that they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting. In other words, the online culture has destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet strangers. As such, I thought I would share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone that I found compelling. I would ask. I can't even get through this without laughing. I would ask, may I meet you? Before engaging further in a conversation I almost never got to know. And then he goes on and on. But, like, that's essentially it. He's just, like, giving, like, young people advice based on what Connor said, which is just, like, how hard it is to meet people.

Ben (11:40)

I like this bit. I think the combination of proper grammar and politeness was the key to a lot of really interesting people. Proper grammar, that's your. If you're getting turned down, you might want to just turn up your grammar a little bit.

Connor McDonald (11:54)

Dude, that's so funny. It does take me back to, like, second Grade where you would ask like, can I go to the bathroom? And they usually be like, yeah, you can go to the bathroom.

Ben (12:01)

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Connor McDonald (12:02)

Says, may I go to the. May I go to the bathroom?

Ben (12:05)

That's so funny.

Cody (12:06)

36.9 million views.

Ben (12:08)

I'm glad that this one's like, you know, this is some good above brow. Like, you know, this is. No, no scandal here, like the, like the Coldplay concert. Just some good brow poking fun at someone's tweet. You got to love that.

Cody (12:21)

Connor McDonald, you follow like, NBA Sentel and all that stuff. Of course, dude. It's the. I think it's the funniest thing in the world how everybody, like, every tweet now is just like, this is Woj or like, this is FBI or something like that.

Ben (12:34)

So what is this now?

Connor McDonald (12:36)

So you have, you have a. You have a very popular Twitter account called NBA Central that just covers. Okay, no, no, no. Yeah, so I'm giving you the backstory here. NBA Central. Then you have a parody account. NBA Sentel. And NBA Sentel is the best at fake headlines and fake stories, but they're just believable enough that, like, they'll get referenced on espn. Like, the Sports center host will be like, I saw this headline. And they'll reference a NBA Sentel headline. And that's happened, like, a number of times. But what's happening now is that the NBA Sentel headlines are, like, becoming a reality, and it's happening more and more. So people are saying, oh, it's some sort of, like, NBA insider. And that's just a joke. I mean, if you're tweeting as much as they do dozens of times a day, like, you're going to get a handful. Right? But they talked about, like, Steph Curry just left Under Armour. They tweeted about that. They tweeted about a couple coaches getting fired.

Ben (13:27)

These are not. This did not actually, like, did Steph actually leave under.

Connor McDonald (13:30)

These were all parody headlines that they tweeted months ago that are now, like, becoming reality. Oh, so that's why people are now. You know, we. There's a conspiracy brewing on NBA Twitter about. About NBA Sentel being a true NBA insiders and more future predictors than. Than parody.

Cody (13:49)

Yeah. And it's almost like too many coincidences at this point.

Ben (13:53)

Like, it's insider trading for the NBA. Someone's tipping them off ahead of time, potentially.

Connor McDonald (13:58)

The. The. Or the writers room. You know, it's all scripted anyway. And maybe the NBA Sentel guys are the ones actually briefing out what happens each NBA season.

Ben (14:08)

Do you think a page like this is. Is monetizing? Well, NBA Sentel, a page like that.

Connor McDonald (14:15)

You know, the X monetization was probably a game changer for them.

Ben (14:19)

I'm looking at like, like this pin tweet has 39 million views or impressions. The Steph Curry selli5 2. But you think it's purely through X monetization. You think they're like selling ads and stuff like that or. Probably not.

Connor McDonald (14:32)

I don't really see any.

Ben (14:34)

I don't either.

Connor McDonald (14:35)

I don't see any ads. Yeah, no, I think it's just parody and I think they just started making a bunch of money via X monetization.

Ben (14:42)

Yeah. What's. How does that. What's like the model there? Is it like a, like a CPM and is it different for everyone? Like I, I always see Sean every once in a While be like made 198 this month or I think he's actually making more now. But like, is it all based on cpm?

Connor McDonald (14:58)

You know, I don't know enough about the X monetization. I don't think it's that. You know, YouTube is way more. It's based on the CPM. You. You get an RPM as a creator and if you're making content that has a high value audience and your CPMs are getting sold at a high rate, you'll make a much higher RPM. So like, you know, architecture content might have like a $25 RPM where if you're doing Fortnite content, you have a $3 RPM. So there's massive differences. I don't think X monetization has anything like that. I think it's more just based on impressions and engagement.

Cody (15:31)

Nice.

Connor McDonald (15:31)

And for a while they might have been waiting impressions and engagement from verified accounts because they might have thought of those as, as higher quality. But I forget the exact mechanics. I don't think anybody quite knows, frankly.

Ben (15:41)

Okay. Interesting. All right, sweet. Well, we got. We got a bit of a hodgepodge episode today. We got some fun things that, that I'm excited to chat about. Before we do that, want to thank the. The sponsors Motion Aftery, Prescient Rich panel and Revo.

Cody (15:57)

Hey, Connor, I don't know if you know this, but there's a lot of talk about creative diversity right now on all platforms. We've been talking about it a lot. Andromeda. I don't know if you heard about that. It's apparently a, a Greek legend, a Greek myth. But I believe it is something that Meta has done that obviously. Obviously I'm kidding. But everybody's talking about creative diversity. Everybody's talking about and Andromeda and how the game has changed. We are all focus. I think there's not a D2C operator who does not know it at this point and how important it is. And being able to test, measure, do creative diversity, get a. A high volume of diverse assets is really the. The the name of the game. And I'm super excited because Motion has just rolled out AI tagging, which helps to simplify as our volumes go and diversity is going up, we have more different types of styles. You know, I know you're a big naming convention guy. I know that you think they're the heart and soul of DDC brand. But another casualty of the AI era, Motion now has AI tagging, which simplifies all of your reporting. Automatically tags stuff, just makes it easier to splice data. I know you were just saying actually you sent it to your team. I sent it to my team. What are your thoughts on AI tagging so far?

Connor McDonald (16:59)

Yeah, no, totally. And Motion's premier sponsor, we're supposed to say nice things, but legitimately, as soon as I got the video from them, because we got early access, sent it right to my team. I'm like, this is, this is the way to go. It makes the comparative analytics just so much simpler. Uh, I was just looking at it this morning. Bucketing between UGC lifestyle photo with text, product photo with text, all these different breakdowns that we used to have to labor over to tag and automate and then, and then break down the reports by those dimensions. It's all kind of working out of the box. So you got it totally right. We were talking about creative diversity all the time. Producing that I think is a big challenge for brands right now. Analyzing that just as big of an issue. And AI's Motion's AI tagging system is a great solution for it. So if you want to check it out, go to motionapp.com and let them know that the marketing operator sent you.

Ben (17:50)

All right, let's get into it. So I wanted to start off with this, this fellow text to buy that I had I tweeted about yesterday because I was like so jazzed on the experience. I just thought it was like super seamless. I also thought it, it made a lot of sense. So first off, like fellow for anyone that doesn't know is like a, I'd say a pretty high end like coffee hardware brand. Like they now sell espresso machines. They sell like pour over stuff. They sell coffee, they sell all sorts of of coffee machines as well. Not just like pour over, not just the espresso but it's like pretty premium, pretty high price point. I think like if you're in the coffee world you're probably familiar with Fellow and see them as like a leader in, in this space. So they also sell coffee and tea. It's not Fellow branded coffee and tea, it's from other brands. But the experience that I got yesterday was like hey, we just got this new tea or this new coffee rather it gave me a bunch of information about the coffee and then it had a bunch of options. It's like reply one, two or three with how many bags you want? I replied one because I wanted one bag. And then I did have to go and like set up some stuff because this is the first time I did that which was like that took two seconds. I think next time I do this because they have my address, I think they have my payment info now I did do Apple pay so maybe not but I should just be able to respond one and like maybe have to engage my Apple pay and then, and then I'll buy it. So I was like super, super excited about this. I thought it was very cool. I like the, you know, I think this makes sense for a lot of subscription brands like a Groons or Create or really any, any brand with a consumable product. I think it makes sense for. What I really liked about Fellow though is they're actually using it as like an LTV driver to complement their Hero products. Like they're not using it to sell more of their Hero products. So it kind of got me thinking about Hexclad. I'm like well we sell, we have a very similar setup where it's like hey if you, if you buy a pepper grinder for us like we should. We could have text to buy flows on on peppercorns or salt. If you buy a pizza steel from us you could have text to buy on like non branded like dough and pizza sauce and stuff like that. Like we could just make it really seamless to get you all the, all the products you want to use our products and we've even thought about doing like those like Shopify storefront integrations where you can actually sell other brands products like right on your store. I think like Great Jones does a lot of this where they're selling like tons like tons of other brands on their website. I think Uni Pizza Oven does it. So I wanted to ask you guys like have you, have you seen any other brand like what first off, what are your thoughts about the experience? And I'm curious if you, if you know of any other brands where like, oh, this would make tons of. Either they're doing it already or like, oh, this would really make sense for this brand because of A, B or C. Like do you have any, any thoughts on this? Kick it over to you first, Connor.

Connor McDonald (20:41)

Yeah, totally. I think Fellow's using one text to power the experience. Do you know that's right?

Ben (20:47)

I think so. The guy from one text, like quote tweeted me and said that. Yeah, it was not one text. I think Fellow actually built this out custom. But I think that this is like exactly the type of thing that one text does.

Connor McDonald (21:01)

Yeah. Okay. So I had seen. I went through a funnel with Create like sometime last year that was powered by one text. Exact same idea. Like, hey, do you want to get 30 pack of creatine gummies? Respond with yes. You know, they put your card on file. I think it's really cool. I don't know if you guys remember this, but postscript had this feature years ago. So like, I think a little bit of like the insider baseball here is postcript had this feature years ago. I forget what they called it. Probably like postscript Pay or something. Exact same thing. It's technically a sales channel or at the time it was a sales channel within Shopify that you could like make seamless via text. And Shopify wasn't a proponent of it at the time. They really didn't support the features. They didn't drive the volume needed to like roll out the. The feature as a whole and get the like Shopify stamp up approval. So it's interesting to see us come back around now sh. Presumably supporting one text or, or something going on there. So it's interesting just from like a technical perspective. I know Shopify is like kind of wavered on whether they actually want to support people not going through the.

Ben (22:03)

The typical checkout experience and well, it would make sense that they would. I mean when we had Harley on, he was like, yeah, the like. When you asked him like where is Commerce Head? Like where will Commerce be in the next 10 years? His comment was like, majority of, of con of conversions will be happening like on the social apps where people are maybe a little bit different than the text. I would be shocked if they didn't support this because of that comment he made.

Cody (22:26)

Well, especially when things become more conversational and like AI and stuff like that. I mean they're obviously already partnering closely with you know, chat GPT. But if, if that's how things are going here with like postscript Shopper. I could totally see that as, as long as, yeah, it's compliant for them and then obviously they get a cut of it.

Connor McDonald (22:42)

Totally. So yeah, that, that, that's. I just want a quick backstory as to like what we've been seeing recently. One tech seems to be doing some interesting stuff in the space. We saw it years ago. Shopify seems to have wavered on it. I think inevitable to your point that we see more of it and I think it aligns nicely with, you know, we talk about after sell all the time, beloved sponsor. But like there, there seem to be parallels. There's. There seem to be parallels there as well where it's just like you already have cards on file, people are conversing with you via text or they've just checked out and it's like, how do you add additional transactional touch points as seamlessly as possible? This is a great example of doing it via text after sales. A great example of doing it in the post purchase.

Cody (23:24)

Yep.

Ben (23:24)

I've seen Groons doing it with their new flavors. It's like, hey, if you want to swap your flavor for the month, like reply. And I, I've been doing like, I did that with the granny apple. I, I've done it with all three of them. So like I just did it with the Grinch ones like that. I think that's coming in, in the next few days. So it's like a cool. Now that's not like driving incremental revenue for them. I don't think it's just like a swap but like incredible, incredible experience. I want to. God, I'm wondering if, I don't know if great, Great Jones even has this on their website anymore. But like I've still, I want to like, I think hexclad should offer like non, non hex clad branded olive oils and spices and stuff like that. And then like almost use that as a, as a data point to say, hey, we are now selling like 20 products of other brands that are value adds to the products we sell. And then almost use that as a data point to say, hey, maybe we actually should go develop our own olive oil because half of the revenue in this collection of products is on olive oil. And like, clearly it's something people need. So now we can go develop our hexclad branded version. I think like that would be perfect with something like this. Like, oh, you need more olive oil. Like respond one and we'll, we'll send you the Hexcloud branded olive oil and here's all the information on it. Do you guys have any other like use cases in mind for, for like your brands or, or another brand where you're like oh this could totally work for this brand because of that reason?

Cody (24:48)

Yeah, I got some ideas. Hopefully I'm allowed to share this. I know I don't hopefully after, after style doesn't get bad. But I think I, I, I, I'm, I'm all in on the concept. Like I think Shopify Collective is very cool. That's what you know, you're describing. We're actually, we're actually doing, we're doing some like partnerships that we're working on for next year and I'm, and which we might be using it because rather than ship them, you know, a certain number of the units wholesale, like we might just go through Shopify Collective and, and just like us fulfill it and you know, it's a very seamless experience. So I think that's great. After sell is where hopefully I don't get in trouble is beta testing post purchase upsells but for another brand. So it's essentially like affiliate drop shipping. So you order from Jones Road and then once you order instead of getting a Jones Road upsell you're getting a, whatever it is, right? You're getting a Hexcloud upsell after it and then just like Shopify Collective it kind of gets fulfilled. I think that's really cool. I think the one challenge with that is just maybe unit economics are not great on that. My idea, I don't know if this works at all. I think that's very cool and like I'm very excited to see how that performs. So we're testing, we're going to test that right now. There's another brand who's doing it to us and is sending us traffic and so very excited to be testing that. But we'll also, we'll also try it the other way. You know when like you order uber eats or DoorDash and you get like, you get like a little countdown timer after it and it's like you can add stuff from, from other stores, right? And it's obviously like hey, like you're already paying for fulfillment shipping. You got $10 to do it. Like I know that we've talked about, you know, like we're doing that with order editing. We put like an hour delay on it. I almost want to extend the delay because like I then I think that's a great opportunity while you're already getting that Order. Right. To do that one text approach or do like a, I don't know if it's possible to do like a one click checkout in an email. Just like boom. Like do you want this? Yes or no? Maybe it's more of a text thing and maybe it only works. I think that's cool. You'd have to just weigh the pros and cons of delaying that fulfillment or not. But I think you could definitely get some nice incremental margin there while you're already having more of a fixed fulfillment cost happening. But I also think if there's a way, and I think this is just like a pipe dream where that after sell approach, it's upselling stuff that's from the same warehouse. Like I don't think, I don't want to hold their inventory. But maybe if like we work with like a shipbob and it's like upselling like other people that they have in that warehouse that could get put in there just to save on some economies of scale with like the shipping cost. I think that would be a really cool idea. I just don't know if it's logistically possible. Yeah.

Connor McDonald (27:21)

So I think we're talking about like, just to define like the two trends we're talking about, I am super bought in around both of them. We're talking about seamlessness of checkout and that's like the, the one text, the sms, the after sell, the delaying the order so you could build out the basket further post purchase while you have the, the card on file. I think that's super. And then we're talking about fulfillment from complementary brands which is also awesome. And then there's also a future where you're merging the both of those.

Ben (27:47)

Right.

Connor McDonald (27:49)

And that's what Cody's describing. Just to like make that distinction quickly.

Cody (27:53)

Yeah.

Connor McDonald (27:54)

I talked to a brand Cody, to your point, they were, they called it the double dash method. That's the only reason I don't order. I order a lot of food delivery but I don't know enough to like know all the features of it. But she was like you were doing the double dash approach. They delay it like eight hours and then they allow you to. And we've talked about this before because that post purchase, our post purchase offer is just more and more effective. The, the faster we serve it to the customer. They've just bought, they're bought in, they're ready to spend more. If you have additional incentives to purchase more, they're ready to do that. We don't do it in a way that allows them to further build out their basket. But that seems like a very natural kind of extension to it. So yeah, I like all these examples. You know what it reminds me of a little bit is do you guys remember Dirty Lemon?

Cody (28:33)

No, I don't know.

Connor McDonald (28:34)

They were, they were like a. They were like a D2C darling like 2018 probably beverage brand that was completely based on SMS checkout. They were like they barely had a website at all. They were like. And they'd custom built all the. The functionality in order to take orders via sms. Used to be able to walk into a store in New York City and I think just walk out and then they would text you and then you could just pay via text and then like that was their whole thing. It was a very like novel, novel experience around like the, the friction and like the text based transaction.

Ben (29:08)

That's like an earlier version of like I think it's the Amazon powered like I've seen them in airports now where you walk in, swipe your card and then you just walk out and you don't. Or maybe you don't even swipe your card but it charges. Have you seen those where like it's.

Connor McDonald (29:21)

Oh yeah, they. Well they have the little. There's a bunch of cool stuff right now. They have the ones where you can. Yeah you, you swipe your card on the way in, you pick up whatever you want. You could walk out and they know what you have. And they, they called them the Amazon ghost stores for a while. Now they have them in airports. Yeah, there's a bunch of cool stuff like that Dirty Lemon awesome brand is super cool concept. One of those examples where it was like they should have just gotten good at Facebook ads in 2018. They were like innovating in the wrong places.

Ben (29:45)

And I think what I think with Shopify Collective like you I could be wrong. But do you actually like if hexclad selling a bunch of non hex clad branded food products. Like we don't actually hold on to that inventory. Right. Like that's still getting fulfilled through the other brand. So it's like that's a huge benefit. You don't have to like order a bunch of olive oil and be like I hope we sell this or like more maybe better examples. Like you don't have to figure out how to like if we want to sell pizza dough which is like a supply chain, we have no clue how to, how to operate. Like we don't know how to keep pizza dough fresh and all the things like great. We don't have to. The other brand's gonna do it for us, I think. Actually I was doing a little research while we were chatting. Cozy Earth does this a lot with their sister brand. It looks like they have this. The sister brand called Fount Society. And I actually think a brand that they launched, but they have this whole like Fountain Society collection on their product page or on their. On their Cozy Earth website. So that's a good example if you want to go see like what this looks like in practice. But it doesn't look. It's very native to the entire website. It's like, it doesn't look any different. So it's very seamless experience.

Connor McDonald (30:48)

So to go back to the, the. The seamlessness of the checkout in like ways that brands could be implementing that of and Shopify collective aside, because I, I do ecom where we're like more working together collectively to like sell one another's goods.

Ben (31:02)

Y.

Connor McDonald (31:03)

But Connor, you brought up like, how do you think Hexclad doesn't have anything consumable?

Ben (31:09)

Not, not. Not 100%. We do have some. Like if, like, if you go to our pepper and we might have sold out of these. No, we have some. We have like, we do sell like peppercorns. We sell. We sell salt for our hex mills. But like, not through the collective. Like we have a partnership with a brand and we actually have inventory and we're selling those as upsells. But like, for the most part, no. But I think there's a ton of opportunity too.

Connor McDonald (31:31)

And. And I guess it's actually not so much about consumables, but it's just about what is most likely to be repeat bought. Like, what is the easy, like. Oh, yeah, let me just get this again. Like, T shirts are probably like this, right? I just started buying these Bronson T shirts and it's like, look, they have my size. I bought one. I really liked it. I'm ready to go back and you know, I'll be purchasing one or two times a year from now to get like fresh T shirts. So like, that would be a great example of like them texting me and saying, hey, do you need a large T shirt? Something like, um. That's where I feel like these like super seamless checkouts make the most sense. Where there's no friction. You already know what you need. You just need it again.

Cody (32:05)

Have you guys heard of bottomless? I don't know if they still exist, but it was like zer pair. There was a. You know, there was like a coffee company called Bottomless, right?

Connor McDonald (32:13)

Yes.

Cody (32:13)

And they, they essentially did that. It was like auto. It was like a subscription, but rather than shipping every 30 days, it was like you're. You essentially had the coffee on like a scale. And when that got low, the, the premise was it was just, it was just auto ship based on when it got low, which was like a cool idea. It feels like a. And like, I don't know if it's actually, you know, justifiable, but it's like, it's kind of the idea, which is cool.

Connor McDonald (32:36)

Totally. I think that that's a, that's a great example because I think, you know, subscriptions are like, inherently flawed. I'm surprised we don't have more. You're starting to see it now. But like you. There's so little flexibility around subscriptions. Like, people are, either have, they either have too much or they have too little. If it's just getting fulfilled every 30 days, it's just, there's no way you've like perfected the consumption. So bottomless was like, we're actually just going to weigh it and then when we know that you're going to run out in the next six days, we'll ship you a new one. And that's kind of what we're talking about here where it's like, you don't. You can rely less on subscriptions if you have really great retention built out with really seamless checkouts.

Ben (33:11)

And you're starting to see subscription brands use the same functionality, which I think is like, probably a net negative in the short term for the revenue, but it's a way better experience for the customer where they're actually like, like, you know, I don't know if Trevi does tax, but I know I at least get emails. But I'm seeing brands that are like, like they're texting me and saying, hey, your next subscription is going to ship in, you know, four days. Like, reply one to confirm, reply two if you want to skip, you know, and it, I think, like, again, it's probably not helping them short term, but I love that because now when I see that from that brand, I don't worry in the back of my head about going to cancel the subscription. I'm just like, I know, I trust that they're gonna like, let me know when it's coming and if I just don't need it, I'll just skip that one. But I'm not gonna like other brands. I might go cancel the subscription if it's not. Not as upfront about when my next ones because I'm not keeping track of like when my next mud water order is coming in. Like it's, it's gonna come when it comes unless they let me know. So I think that's just like a really nice experience based play.

Connor McDonald (34:12)

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Cody (35:40)

There's maybe this could be a separate topic but I don't know if you guys have seen like one thing that used to happen a lot in like like info product book funnels, stuff like that. Like direct response space was like free plus shipping funnels and it kind of made its way DDC a little bit. It doesn't exist as much but it's like you know you can get like a. A lot of times it would happen with books, right? People that were selling like a course, like a $2,000 course. They're like front end offer is like a free book plus shipping. There's like tons of upsells along the way. You know, they're like negative on that, but then like, you know, they, they book a certain number of people into calls and into course whatever it is for like a thousand bucks and, and that liquidates it. And so there was some in, in ecom. I haven't seen as many, I think just with tax getting higher. But there's one brand recently in Beauty who's. Who's doing this I don't know how successfully and the funding and I'm really considering it with like a sample pack. I was, I was working on the modeling for last night. I still don't think the economics make sense unless like you're just like fantastic at upselling. But essentially what they do is it's like a. It might be like a try before you buy, like charges a card for a dollar, but it's essentially like a 15 sample pack where you get like three shades of one product, right? You pay four bucks per shipping. So say you're paying like 20 bucks per this. Then after either like 14 or 21 days, you either get charged for it. So you, you know, dollar on the first day, if you essentially don't do anything, you get charged. Which is kind of similar what Il Makiage does. You know, you get charged on day 14 or 21. But then if you do buy a full size within the time frame, that 14 turns into a credit and there's another brand in our space that used to do it. I just don't know if the economics can make sense for what I've seen and tried with the sample pack. But theoretically the TAM is so much larger. And I think for a G2C brand, you can reach so many more people who would be willing to try it at a lower price and less risk, which is a lot of feedback. We get the other one, the biggest, most successful D2C beauty brand is Il Makiage. And they've run try before you buy, but they're. You're getting a full size. They charge you for a dollar if you don't do anything within 30 days. And it I think just smashes for them.

Ben (37:47)

So what do you think the conversion rate would be on something like that? Like how many people are gonna take go into the full size? That. Because that's the, that's what the whole like this working or not hinges on, right? Is it 50? Is it 10? Is it 75?

Cody (38:01)

Yeah, I don't, I don't know. I'm. I'm modeling it out right at like, I don't want to maybe bleep out some of the numbers, but I'm modeling out like 25%, right. I'm like, yeah. And if anybody knows and has ran this, like, please let me know because I'm trying to figure out the feasibility of this. But like, even at 25%, we're, we're still, we're losing, you know, you're losing 20, 30 bucks on first order. On day zero, day 30, we're still, you know, you're, we're still negative. And again, like for. We're a bootstrap brand, so usually we want to be at least break even then. So I have a hard time seeing it unless the take rate is much higher or you get, you know, you get upselling really well. And part of the hard thing with this, you can't auto renew. I guess you could, but, but so Il Maquillage auto renews because you're buying a shade, you're just paying a dollar for it. Right. And so they can auto renew on a subscription. With the sample pack, you're essentially getting like three, four shades. You're trying it, and then it's hard to auto renew because you don't know what shade to get. And so that probably hurts it. You know, maybe you could auto renew based on like, like, hey, which one do you think is yours? I don't know. I, I have a hard time seeing it. I'm still very interested. I think what we will do is we'll do the sample pack. We'll do our normal funnel, like quiz funnel, stuff like that. You know, we are already paying to acquire customers. Like, we're already okay with those numbers. And then if we can identify that there's like a segment of people that are very unlikely to buy again.

Ben (39:21)

Right.

Cody (39:21)

That we don't think are going to buy the full size. And there's probably some data modeling we can do. Then we can just downsell them the sample people. It'll have no additional cac. It's probably a large number of people.

Connor McDonald (39:32)

And sorry, these people are. The people that you're describing are. They're prospects who have gone through the funnel and you think are unlikely to purchase.

Cody (39:40)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Connor McDonald (39:41)

So I love that strategy.

Cody (39:43)

Yeah. Because we, we've. We've essentially already paid to acquire them because that acquisition cost has just been going to other people we've acquired.

Connor McDonald (39:50)

Right.

Cody (39:50)

And like, we know we're already like decent numbers on that. So now rather than losing 30 bucks on you know, day zero for this person, we're actually, you know, without paying an additional $40 CAC on them by you know, by running ads to them again like and we're probably now break even on that. And then if 25% of them go on to buy like we're, we're looking pretty good. So I think that's what we'll try.

Connor McDonald (40:16)

Yeah. So that makes total sense. More or less $0 cac that you've already paid to acquire them. Because I hadn't heard about a funnel where at 30 days you get char the $20 for the sample there a dollar up front or it's free up front or whatever there something to get the card on file, $20 at the 30 day mark and then you're going to get some amount of people who will actually upgrade into the full product. It does feel like extremely de risk because I was it just the math of paying to acquire a customer where 80% of them or whatever are only going to give you 20 bucks is just hard. You need low CPCs, you need like, you need like a 15% conversion rate or something like that. Math doesn't work. But if you're just talking about it from a retention perspective, I could totally see it penciling.

Cody (40:58)

Yeah, I think it potentially worked and maybe it even didn't work but like 10 years ago, you know, but it's just, it's just not there now. But yeah, I think the other one. So we'll, we'll test it and we'll report back. But I think that's another one. But I think the reason it's related is kind of going into like the, the seamless checkout is like how do we especially as a non subscription brand, like how do we kind of configure some of the tech and maybe there's a one textile component where like if somebody gets a sample, like I actually am shocked that because I bought from this brand and it's been maybe a week and a half, like I've gotten nothing from them about this and maybe that's their plan. But like I've just got like your order is on the way. But I would expect like a text like hey, how are you liking it? Like do you want to order it? Press Y to get it or press totally the shade. Like that's what I would expect is just trying to make it seamless and if we implemented it I'd probably try to implement something like that.

Ben (41:46)

Cody. What? At what point in the Journey. Do you put someone into this funnel? So it's like because you're trying to get them to a purchase up front, they've opted into your own media. Presumably you're hitting them with emails, texts to try to get them to convert like the hero acquisition products you want and then they still don't do that. So at what point do you say okay, like we'd rather have them do something than nothing and we're now putting them into this like sample $1 down funnel. Like is that 30 days? Is that 90 days? What does that look like? Or like obviously you're still modeling it but like when would you want to put someone into that?

Cody (42:18)

Yeah, I actually haven't. So that's what I would do. It's like I'd have both our data analysts model it and see and like Connor and I have talked about like hey, like people are most buy during them. So I think, I think we'd probably do that. I think we'd probably test a few different ranges, you know.

Ben (42:30)

Yeah.

Cody (42:31)

So I think we'd look at the data and then Zach from House, he's a founder of House, has told me like they have a way to kind of model like promotions and kind of like hypothesize of like who we should be offering promotions to based on like who's incremental, who's likely to buy normally. Right. So you don't send to them. Here's who's likely to buy. And then like that way you can like target your promotions and hopefully like, like save some margin on people that would have bought anyways. So I would be curious to learn more about something like that. But yeah, I think we would probably want to take some data analysis and then try to test a few different ones.

Ben (43:01)

Nice.

Cody (43:02)

And then the same thing with like I also think like how you upsell how you do the tech stuff, timing of it. Well, like there would probably be a lot of test testing in there as well.

Connor McDonald (43:12)

I think there's a lot of data points. Zach, Zach from House saying that they have a way to model out who you don't have to send promotions to. So like therefore like making the promotions more incremental by just targeting the people that need it. I remember talking to the, the, the team at Resident ones and they would use super like interesting on site events to do that. Like they'd see because that's like a thousand dollar purchase. So they'd look at people who would click on you know, the affirm widget, like oh, who's, who's Thinking about doing buy now, pay later. Who's like, they had payment plans, things like that. Like there's on site behavior that they were tagging that they could like slightly personalize a funnel or I bet there's.

Cody (43:50)

Stuff in a quiz that we could predict as well if we like ask certain questions. I think that's something I'm trying to do a lot more of. Is like actually like think about the quiz not just for driving conversion, but like what are data points that you want to capture for for other uses as well. I bet there's probably some that you could predict be like oh, because like I don't, I don't want to like give anybody's business, but I know this guy from Ladder. Greg from Ladder. They run like a, it's like a, it's like really fast growing like training like fitness app and they are really dialed with their quiz and like they know exactly like their LTV based on number of times people say a certain thing or like what they're looking for. And so they even like optimize their ads for something like that. But like they know based on what somebody answers like, all right, cool, we can bucket them as probable high ltv. And I bet you could also potentially do the opposite. It's like, oh, people say this usually worse.

Connor McDonald (44:38)

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Ben (45:59)

Okay, so shifting gears here a little bit. I know we all, we, we often talk about like just get better at meta, just get better at meta, which I think is very, a very valid approach. I think a lot of times you look at brands that have gotten to a certain point in their business and you audit their meta account and you're like there's more you can be doing creatively here. There's more you can be doing offers wise, destinations wise, you know, really pulling those three levers to make improvements. Which I think is, is very valid. And I think we all agree that a lot brands should, should probably focus there first if you feel like you've taken a good swing and you're still seeing you're not getting like the returns you want or you're seeing your efficiency grow or you're not getting the scale you want. I've just been like super excited about all the different media that has kind of been coming across my desk in the last six months. I mean there's a lot of, you know, just make me very bullish on hexclad and the upside and we're just still not in so many places or like not at scale in so many places where I think our customers are. So I'm just really bullish on like media expansion and where we're headed in the next probably five years as we try to continue to like diversify and reach people and get more upper funnel going. And I just think there's like, I think you got to play both sides of the coin. Like yes you should, you should be focusing on meta and improving your funnels there because those are your hero channels. But I also think most brands have tons of customers spending time in different places and there's probably big arbitrage opportunities because if everyone's focused on meta, meta, meta and there's all these other there opportunities over here a lot that have upside. Like there's probably arbitrage there. So I'm, I'm really happy, I'm really bullish on everything that is available right now and all the cool opportunities, it's honestly overwhelming at times. There's also a lot of fun like linear CTV kind of like spin offs that are happening where like certain companies have like, like one I saw recently was like this. This company has inventory on all NFL football games, but only in airports.

Cody (47:55)

So it's like oh yeah, we looked into that.

Ben (47:57)

Yeah. So it's like, it's totally separate than like if you're sitting at a bar watching in Detroit, like watching Thursday Night Football, you're gonna get like the national broadcast ads and those spots can be like, you know, 500 to a million dollars for like a prime time game. But in the airport, it's like there's a lot of people there watching. It's pretty cheap CPMs. It's like just like interesting stuff like that and there's so much of it. Have you guys seen anything? Cody, I'll kick it to you first. Have you seen any like, like interesting media buy opportunities? Just like whether it's for Jones Road or, or for another brand, like just any interesting media buy opportunities and like digital spaces that you can buy ads on that you're bullish on?

Cody (48:36)

I would say no. And maybe it's just like where we're at for the business right now or priorities. Like I'm literally the most bullish on like short form slop content. Like that's like the thing that we're trying to get like the best at is like organic and I would love to do like an ep, like a whole episode on organic social media. It's like literally that and like obviously, you know, earned stuff. But like that's like literally the biggest focus and where I actually think like we're, we are the most behind and like I think we, we. I don't want to say we're early too, but like, you know, for a large part of this year like we had like 20% of our mix on TV. So like we've really been, been playing that game and I think neglecting some of the algorithm updates and that style content, I'm, I'm a big out of home fan. Like I think out of home can crush. I'm really. So we're gonna definitely do more of it. I know you guys are doing a good amount. We're gonna pair that with some experiential stuff. Much more events and stuff like that. We're gonna pair it with like sampling. So it's not necessarily like a media thing, but, but I think that's really cool. A lot of sampling stuff I think is, is, is interesting. Like there are companies that kind of facilitate, I don't want to say mass sampling, but they do facilitate like very targeted sampling things and that. And that's you know, going to be a big focus for us. I've looked into some of the other stuff I think like, like substack is huge. So I do think some of that stuff is interesting, but to me that's just like, like we consider it like an extension of like our influencer efforts.

Ben (50:00)

So can. How does the. Yeah, how does the substack work? Are you, are you like, buying that, like, programmatically or is that part of your. That's part of your influencer deals? Like, that's a placement that you get with them?

Cody (50:12)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's just part of an influencer deal. You know, inclusion and a gift guide. It's usually, you know, an inclusion somewhere rather than like a full dedicated piece. There's, there's some like, there's some that we're considering with like a pretty large substack that's a little more of like a, like a branded advertorial kind of where it's like, as part of the content that they kind of weave in. So I think that's cool. The. The cost can definitely be pretty significant. So, you know, you do like any influencer stuff, you do have to like, negotiate it down pretty hard to make it work. But yeah, I don't know. There's nothing that like, like that I've seen that I'm like, super excited about. But I think out of Home is, is so cool. And I think pairing out of home with some events and some sampling, like, that's going to be a really big focus that you're going to see us do a lot more of.

Ben (50:53)

Yeah, that's. I wanted to ask you about that because we do like, we don't have like an always on out of home strategy. Not yet at least. We usually do like an activation in Q4. So like, what, what's like the out of home? Because I think you guys are really good at this. Cody, like, you've been doing cool, fun, like impressionable out of home for a long time, it seems like. So, like, what's the, what are the out of home activations that you're bullish on that you think can actually like drive results?

Cody (51:16)

Yeah, we haven't done. We definitely haven't done always on. We've kind of done it part of. Part of campaigns and I think just trying to do like these very integrative, integrated campaigns where it's like whether it's a brand campaign and there's no product and there's just a messaging thing or whether it's, you know, product launch campaign, but there's a. It's like a very holistic thing. Like that's kind of what we've been trying. Been doing. And I think we're just trying to kind of continue to get better at making it like very360 having, you know, at a home that we think is like driving social really well, getting you know, earned media behind it, having it message the product stuff and out of home can definitely be very trackable. But obviously as we get into you know, tracksuit and brand tracking, like we'll see. I think we have to do some bigger investments. But yeah, from what we've seen from like measuring like the incrementality of agile trucks and doing some, you know, post purchase, like it's actually, I think we should always have it on, you know, and I think it's so wild to me, I don't know about you guys but like, like, you know, an agile truck might be like 10k a month or something like that, right? It's like we don't even talk about media buckets that are 10k a month. Like, you know what I mean? Like we're not going to test a new channel for less than like 100k a month usually. But it's like, it's just sometimes when it's like digital, just like the scale of digital and real world. But it's like we should actually probably be testing and I think our biggest test has been like 50K. And we, we ran a house will run a, a holdout for you. They call it like a quasi holdout because you're like picking a market but, but literally. And like we found very, very good performance on, on that. So like I, I do think we should kind of double down and do a lot more of it. So I think the agile trucks are really cool. There's also digital trucks that are, you know, digital and printed. But you can like hire them for a day, just like rent them for a day for like a grand or two. So I think that's really cool. And again I'm just. And so if you have like an event you want to pop up at or something like that and yeah, just like sampling stuff. Like we're probably just going to take a page out of the Gruins playbook and like buy a truck and wrap it out and just like show up places and just do sampling, you know, kind of do some gorilla stuff. Hire that guy Josh. He's like my favorite guy on Twitter. You guys know him? Josh? Yeah.

Ben (53:20)

Did you see that video of him like a couple days ago, like walking through the streets of New York? Like he was so jazzed. He's like, it was a really like inspiring video. Did, did you see that this is why we're going to be the best at short form content.

Connor McDonald (53:34)

We love that.

Ben (53:35)

Like, he was like really into it, dude.

Cody (53:37)

One of our, one of our top Black Friday sale ads so far, like of the first day is our, our social person street interviews. Asking customers in store. Like, I do think it can actually be such a great content engine, actually.

Ben (53:52)

Yeah, Yeah. I, I, I just found out this about this guy last week because this video popped up, up.

Cody (53:57)

Okay, dude.

Connor McDonald (53:58)

Oh my God. Last week. Josh Suggs Connor, you're so behind the ball, dude. These guys been crushing street interviews. He's the LeBron James of street interviews.

Ben (54:07)

Honestly, I wanna, I wanna bring him on, I wanna talk to him because, like, I think man on the street for us could be huge. Like, especially set up like a little hot plate in a pan and you have like, there's all sorts of like side by side and like reaction shots you could do. Like, we've already, we've done a little bit with our, our pepper grinder because that is one of those products where like, like the moment you feel it and the moment you crank it, it's like, oh, whoa. Like, the premiumness is very like haptic and like how you interact with it and you can't just like replicate that online. It's like we've started doing it internally there. But I want to scale this, this like content pillar and I think it could be an interesting ad angle. So I need to, need to chat with, with our friend Josh.

Cody (54:44)

I think everybody should have street interviews. Like, I was thinking about this the other day. Like, I do think it's like a content pillar that almost everybody should have. You, you just need good ones that are like authentic. I think almost everybody should have like, we've, we've definitely had some success and some winners. I just think we haven't done enough volume. But I totally agree. Especially like for things that are hard to show for. Like, you know, for makeup, you don't need it as much. But as we have more, you know, we have body launching or we have fragrance or stuff like that. Like you, those, those reactions I think are key.

Connor McDonald (55:12)

I totally agree. Last thing on Josh shout out. His step count is insane. He's putting in like 30,000 step days all the time. I believe he, he posts every once in a while.

Ben (55:22)

Is he scaling his team?

Connor McDonald (55:24)

I don't know.

Cody (55:25)

Yeah, I think he's got a pretty big team now. Yeah. Yeah. But no, he's a grinder. That's why I love it. I just love to see like, I love to see these just like young kids that are just like, because everyone's like oh Gen Z, like they don't work and whatever. Like I'm coming around on that. Like especially with all these like TikTok shop guys and stuff. Like there are like just some kids that are just like that work. I, I feel like you have both ends. You get the Gen Z that are like I know this is totally unrelated to what we're talking about but, but, but I, I, there's Josh and like people like that that I think are just like grinding, working super hard and deserve a shout out.

Ben (55:55)

I see, I see a lot of Cody in his feed right now. What's the polymarket line on how many steps Josh Dogs is gonna have today?

Cody (56:02)

Dude, Connor, do you know what polymarket is?

Ben (56:05)

Poly polymarket I do know. But, but the reason I but the reason I know is because like episode 50 I didn't know and you guys explained it to me and now I learned that you can like like basically bet on anything. And so Black Friday, you're about to crush it. The real job is keeping that momentum going past Black Friday, past Holiday and all the way into next year. Pression helps brands turn peak season wins into predictable profitable velocity. Powered by a suite of proprietary machine learning models and a causality first validation layer, Preshen reveals what actually drove lift. It combines surveys, it combines multi touch attribution and incrementality and then it forecasts for your next dollar of media will drive real incremental profit. Top brands like Coterie, Guess, Hexclad, Jonesboro Beauty, Mary Roos and many more are using Prescient to quantify halo effects across Shopify, Amazon retail so their teams know exactly where to reinvest. So what actual questions can press and help you answer? Let's dig into it a little bit. Question number one Do I need to increase, decrease or reallocate spend for the shopping season? Prussian shows the optimal media mix to drive the strongest Q4 performance whether your budget grows or shrinks. Question number two where should I put additional Q4 budget prescient delivers recommendations based on current BFCM dynamics, your vertical and your optimal ad spend allocation. Question number three Compression measure cross channel effects, especially between Shopify and Amazon. Yes, Prescient uniquely tracks halo effects and ad impact across both platforms, revealing where to dial back and where to double down. This is actually one of the very first problems that hexclad onboarded with Prescient to solve is understanding the total impact across both.com and Amazon over ad spend Precious models are benchmarked against $6 billion in ad spend. So the recommendations you are getting aren't just theory, they've actually been tested against billions of real media dollars. And if you're ready to see where your next dollar media will drive the most profit it visit prussian AI.com operators to forecast your growth with Prussian.

Connor McDonald (58:10)

I've got a question on the the channel piece we were discussing so I'm curious how you guys are thinking about it. Oh one thing I bring this, I bring up this kind of anecdote all the time but I remember a very influential two influential conversations for me back in like 2020. It was with the Brooklyn and CMO and the manscape. CMO and manscapes was like we want to be everywhere. They had like scorched earth mentality. They'll sponsor every YouTuber, sponsor all the newsletters, do all the random display networks, etc. Etc. They're all over the place. Brooklyn and CMO was like I want to be on three channels meta Google influencer. Those were his big three and it was like that was it. He's like those are the only where I'm going to be able to produce a forex row is at scale was like his point as we talk or Connor, I'm curious your take on this as you think about channel diversification. We talked about out of home which is scalable and to Cody's point pretty measurable. So that fits in like a nice bucket of like you can get clarity around it and potentially scale it. You brought up. Excuse me, you brought up Amazon DSP also easy to measure, scalable, lots of inventory. You could spend a lot. So those fit into a nice bucket of like you can prove out roas and you can scale it. Then you talk about some of like the, the real like tertiary stuff like the, the airport lounge, football games and things like that. What is like your thought process around priorit those and the objective of those is airport lounge. Like hey we just think this is good value. We're not going to be able to do a household out. We're not going to be able to prove it out. It's going to be a tiny little percentage of our budget. We're just going to feel good about being there. Like is that ever part of the the justification of some of these channel expansions?

Ben (59:45)

100%. The airport lounge stuff is like way more leaning towards like our influencer seating strategy where it's like an impression CPM arbitrage. Like I think we'll get some performance data out of it. They do some like surveying stuff after that they're going to like, like if we decide to do it that they'll help us with. But I'm not super concerned about like of course I would love to see that. It's also like driving you know orders, incremental orders. But yes, less concerned with that. Whereas like dsp it's like we ran a holdout. We integrated. Integrated with, with Pressian so we can start measuring it better. So we're like have. We're obviously looking at like their in platform reporting as well. So like yeah, very different in, in like we needed that to have like a profitable cost per incremental order for us to keep spending there and to scale up there. Whereas like the, the airport stuff it's like maybe like. But it's at the end of the day like it's a CPM arbitrage for us. I, I'm like negotiating if we like this is kind of what the deal is hinging on is I want a guaranteed impressions. Like oh we, we can get you this many impressions. I'm like well I want that guaranteed so if we don't hit that within the package that we keep getting spots until we hit it because it doesn't really make sense for us unless we're impressing or arbitraging impressions. So. So yeah, I mean I think you. And then like you know you look at email newsletters that's very, that's like hype. So measurable, right? Like we're giving them totally. We're giving them a North Beam utm. We're looking at like net new visit rate one day click, you know LTV based click compared to like our other top social channels. And if we're able to like drive a high net new visit rate and get a comparable or better, you know click based return like I will scale that all day and there's like you know thousands of newsletters. I think it's actually like brilliant what Alex is doing because that's like a very manual process to sign deals with every single newsletter. So like they have an agency that's like making that a little bit more scalable. But yeah, I mean it definitely exists on like you know a spectrum of like need performance data versus need to like arbitrage awareness and impressions. And like with our TAM and our you know just breadth of customer type like we definitely lean more towards the, the manscaped approach where like we are trying to be in a lot of different digital places because we think that we have prospective customers spending time in a lot of digital places. And just with how much we're spending on meta, like, I just don't think we're reaching as many net new people as we once were. And like, we're leaving prospects on the table if we're not also doing all these other channels. So that's, that's been our approach.

Connor McDonald (62:10)

So do you think it'll come down to, like, are you just gonna commit some percentage of total budget for next year to the CPM arbitrage?

Ben (62:19)

I think so, yeah. I think. And that'll probably fall into like, you know, the out of home, the CPM arbitrage channels. Honestly, we should probably even like loop influencer into that total budgeting. But yes, I think at we're kind of getting to that point where like, we just need to say, hey, we're comfy spending this much on these channels this year. And like, as long as the CPMs are good, we're, we're happy with it. And like, we're going to try to measure it as best we can, but we're not going to like, make every decision based on. It's going to be like CPM arbitrage. Arbitrage is the data point impressions related to that. And then like qualitatively, how do we feel about the, the content that we're putting out in. In our out of home? Because, like, right now we need to have a more always on out of home strategy. And yeah, I think that is how we'll look at it.

Connor McDonald (63:01)

Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of the conversation we had with JMO a few weeks ago where he's like, as you get bigger, which like Hexclad's for sure approaching this place where it's. You just want to be thinking about household penetration. Right. Just like get Hexclad in front of people. Cody, where do you guys sit on that? You, you were mostly talking about things that you feel are measurable and scalable. But is there going to be a point where you guys say, hey, we just want to dedicate a couple percentage points of media to things we qualitatively feel good about?

Cody (63:28)

Yeah. And I think this is like us bringing on tracksuit and wanting to get like brand tracking is like, there are ways to measure this stuff that we like, we think we should be doing and maybe it's no longer a household out or obviously at MTA or something like that. So I think there's some level of that, that, that we'll definitely want to be. I don't think we're Quite in the. Like we want to be everywhere, but there's definitely. We need to be more places. I think there's three things right now that I'm thinking about in addition to really letting our brand health metrics drive what we're trying to do. Because I think if we're trying to fix an awareness problem versus a consideration problem, we're going to be, you know, little different strategy. Number one, like, attention is on social, right? Like, I think we've, we've underinvested in organic Social and I think the biggest year over year pivot that we're going to make is really building out organic social for the algorithmic area era. So that'll be a really big one because this is where people are all day. Like just where is the attention? You know, organic social, very high volume, try to go viral, hits game, things like that, right? It's not necessarily, I know you like to talk about like quality of impressions, maybe not, not the highest quality of impressions, but like very high volume, totally on the other end. I think then there's a real value in going on the opposite end. And this is why I'm, I'm bullish on the experimental stuff, right? Without us being, I think this is my learning, like beginning of the year, right? Like, like without us being in Sephora, right, To get the physical touchpoints and things like that. Like if we don't want to do that, but we want to be a $200 million plus brand, like we need to significantly invest in experiences and meeting people in person and actually letting them try things. So that's. And I think, I think it's like, it's almost opposite end of the spectrum where it's like social is like very high volume, very low quality type of impression. Or I want to go the opposite and actually have like a very strong, strong impacted brand feeling. Where we're doing sampling, we have out of home that's paired with an event where you're maybe talking to somebody from the team, you know, and it's, it's more of an experience and there's like a brand, you know, feel and moment. And we're also sampling and trialing products. It's like a little bit higher touch, so it's almost like different ends of the spectrum. And again, that's less scalable. You're not reaching, you know, 100,000 people for per post or something like that, but you're maybe you're reaching 50 people with one event or hopefully more than that, but you're probably making a larger impact on those people. And I think those two sides are really where we're going to try to play and focus the most on.

Connor McDonald (65:46)

Okay, yeah, so, because I really like that description, I, I hadn't thought about it from that perspective, but it feels like as you diversify, feels like everybody nails the middle, right? You're getting, you're getting full screen, short form vertical video on applovin for a 40 cpm. It's like, okay, yeah, that's is that, is that is like I said, like high quality ad inventory and YouTube is like that and linear is like that to some degree. And then what you're describing is like as you scale and that's probably where you find like more arbitrage is actually not the word that I would use there. But like as you diversify, you're just naturally going to move into either lower quality inventory, but higher volume or extremely high value and then like really, really, really low sort of scale or impressions. So I think that's a really interesting way to put it.

Cody (66:34)

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 costs, 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, Amit, 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 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 just continually is getting better. If we switch 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 and just make your CX team happier, go to richpanel.com demo tell them Cody, from our credit Knapper has sent you and tell me you're ready to get a tattoo. And then one more thing before I turn it over to to you because I really want to hear is the other, you know, heuristic is like we got to make sure our media investment is, is, is parallel with the trends of the platform. And one big mistake I made in the past, it's like, you know, we launch obviously linear TV has doing this for years and going down, but we launched and it was great. So we increased it pretty rapidly, which is great because like we went from zero to nothing. So didn't really matter if it was going up or down, you know, for like year over year. It was just a channel that there were a lot of eyeballs on. But we took our eye off that and our linear TV investment went up and viewership went, went way down, you know, which is not a good thing. So I think you just really never want to be scaling a channel where the attention like Gary V. Talks about it all the time, but it's everything is attention and you do want to try to arbitrage attention and you got to be mindful if you're trying to grow a channel where the attention is actually just going down year over year.

Ben (69:17)

So what, what are, what are other channels do you think, Cody, where it's like not worth the squeeze right now because it's like, yeah, you might get. You might get good efficiency when it's 1% of your budget. But, like, you're. You can't get it. You can't scale it above that. Like, do you have any in mind? Like, Snapchat?

Connor McDonald (69:33)

I think newsletters is actually a good one. I don't think there's that many. I think it's real. I've sp. I've spent millions of dollars sponsoring newsletters.

Ben (69:40)

You guys did a lot, right?

Cody (69:42)

Does seem like there was a newsletter bubble.

Connor McDonald (69:44)

There was. Yeah. There was this period of time where whatever they were, they were all scaling. They're. They're. They figure out that they can actually be, like, true businesses, things like that. I think it's hard to spend a lot of money. And then it's one of those things where you just. When you hit morning brew for the first time, absolutely rips. When you hit morning brew for the eighth time, you have, like, saturated that audience. So then it's just. It's naturally. Unless you have like, a very. I don't know, like a business that's more built around newness. But for us, it's like we're trying to sell more or less the same silhouette of wallet we just found. We were saturating these channels. We spent a million dollars there. And then performance, naturally just declined over time because there's not that many more morning brews springing up, and they're not growing their list at that high of a rate. So it's just like, it's a channel that kind of. I feel if you're trying to scale, it naturally declines in performance.

Ben (70:33)

Yep. Our. Like, we have a similar newsletter for. It's. It's not a big chunk of our budget. I mean, it's like less than a percent. But our newsletter and podcast strategy is very similar for that reason. Like, we're constantly cycling through, like, yes, we'll hold on to the ones that. That perform well consistently, but I'd say there's. That's like the bottom 10%. And then other than that, it's like new podcast, always new newsletters, always for that exact reason. It's like, we want new audiences. And, like, it's the same. It's the same reason your cat goes up in meta over time as you spend more. It's like there's only so many people you can acquire at $100, and now you need to spend 120 to reach that next Tron. Like, it's kind of the same thing in all These channels, actually.

Cody (71:12)

Yeah. Connor. Connor. I feel like you guys have actually always been really good at this and seeing trends and, and shifts in like media and platform. Where do you guys see it going? Anything that you can share, want to share of, like how you see different channels kind of rising or grow or, or shrinking.

Connor McDonald (71:29)

Yeah, you know, we, we. There's a great. I'll plug the channel expansion checklist that's getting shared out in the operator's newsletter. It'll be a. It will have come out a couple weeks ago as, as this episode. Harris. Because it really just comes down to like, maturity of the business, the category and category how people buy it and then like maturity of that category as it relates to like your specific business. That's how we're thinking it. So depending on whether we're talking about wallets, power, like wallets, power banks, luggage or rings or something like that, like, our media strategy is going to be different for wallets. It's very similar to what you described. We really are going to air on the side of the. The social stuff versus the, the. I have no plans for like the product seating or getting out. Getting more out in the community. Maybe, maybe small bits, but like, really, I think we can nail social. That's a big opportunity for us. But for something like power banks or for rings even, I think we can go back to like, we're in the phase where we could be sponsoring newsletters and seeing success there. Like, I actually think we've kind of like fleshed out a lot of the spectrum and then now that we've got these new products, we can actually kind of resurface some of them. So I've got very few. I've got very few, like, new channels. It's really just a matter of channel strategy by category.

Cody (72:40)

Is there any that you think that you'll pull back on significantly?

Connor McDonald (72:43)

Not currently.

Cody (72:44)

Like, I feel like a few years ago, like, you've talked about how like YouTube influencer is probably harder than it used to be, right? Like, I think you probably were.

Connor McDonald (72:51)

Yeah, yeah, totally. But it used to be our biggest team. Now it's. We've got one person internal and then we have an outsourced agency.

Cody (72:57)

Now you think it's pretty flatlined at this point?

Connor McDonald (72:59)

Yeah, totally. I'm really happy with where we're at with YouTube partnerships right now. It was a much bigger channel we approached in a very different way, but now we're like, way more cost effective about it. We can flex up and down with where we're seeing performance. So that was Something that, yeah, I would have said 18 months ago, two years ago that, like, that was going to be decline as a percentage of our revenue. And now we just need to find other places to put those dollars. That'll be social and that'll be. I was just talking. I'd love to. I was just talking about this with our TV buying agency, Tatari. We. Because they're like, oh, you guys should try streaming. And I'm like, I just think we. This is actually against the point you made earlier, Cody. I think there's so much more to flesh for linear tv. I'm like, I'd love to crack. We haven't cracked sports. Like, how can we really make college football work? Or, you know, we. We saw some success during the MLB playoffs, and it's like, how do we expand that strategy? We spent maybe $40,000 during the MLB playoffs. I'm like, I think this coming year we spent 200,000. So thinking about linear TV in these different pockets and then how does content and product kind of roll up into that strategy is how we're going to be thinking about it. So it's not a new channel. It's just like, further kind of fleshing out the opportunities there. Cool.

Ben (74:07)

Should we wrap there?

Cody (74:08)

Let's do it.

Connor McDonald (74:09)

Great to see you guys.

Cody (74:10)

See you, man.

Ben (74:12)

All right, that's a wrap on episode 88 of the Marketing Operators podcast. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion After Cell Pressure, Rich Panel, and Revo. And if you're liking the show, make sure to subscribe. Like, comment, leave us a question and share with all of your marketing friends. Thank you. It.