Unlocking Growth Levers with Connor Dault, CMO of Fast-Growth DTC Supplement Brand Gruns

Summary

Podcast Summary: Unlocking Growth Levers with Chad Dault, CMO of Fast-Growth DTC Supplement Brand Gruns

Marketing Operators returns with an insightful episode featuring Chad Dault, the Chief Marketing Officer of Gruns, a rapidly growing Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) supplement brand. Released on August 12, 2025, this episode delves deep into Chad's strategies for scaling marketing operations, leveraging AI tools, fostering team collaboration, and innovating marketing tactics to unlock new growth opportunities.

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I. Product Engagement and Consumer Retention

The conversation kicks off with a light-hearted discussion about the team’s personal use of Gruns' gummies, emphasizing the product's high retention rates.

• Chad Dault ([00:22]): "Where are you over investing time and energy that you don't think is yielding productive outcomes?"

• Connor Dault ([00:42]): "It's 80% of consumers are eating them daily after three months."

This highlights Gruns' strong consumer retention, with 80% of users maintaining daily consumption after three months, showcasing the product's effectiveness and customer satisfaction.

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II. Leveraging AI for Marketing Creative Analysis

The team transitions to discussing Motion's new AI creative strategist, a tool designed to enhance ad performance through data-driven insights.

• Cody Jones ([04:34]): "These are AI agents built by Best in Class D2C operators. They analyze your creative using real data from your Meta ad account."

• Chad Dault ([05:34]): "I don't think that this agent necessarily totally replaces that [a human creative strategist]. But now you're starting at level five instead of level zero."

Chad appreciates how the AI tool accelerates the analysis process, allowing the marketing team to bypass initial hurdles and focus on actionable strategies, thereby significantly saving time and reducing "analysis paralysis."

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III. Transition to Gruns and Leadership Insights

Chad shares his experience transitioning from Caraway to Gruns, emphasizing the differences in joining a thriving brand versus building from scratch.

• Chad Dault ([07:52]): "Most like, people in your role probably wouldn't have jumped ship. You're like, 'I want to keep riding this wave.' You jump ship to Gruns, what, three, four months ago?"

• Chad Dault ([09:22]): "I did a... gave everybody on the team expectations of what I'd want to be talking through over the next couple of weeks."

Chad likens his role to that of Chuck Daly coaching the 1992 Dream Team, focusing on optimizing existing processes and leveraging the strengths of a world-class team without causing disruptions.

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IV. Building Cohesive Marketing Campaigns

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the importance of cohesive messaging across various marketing channels to ensure consistency and scalability.

• Chad Dault ([14:06]): "I think it's very important to see what the operators do and then one up them whenever we can."

• Chad Dault ([28:52]): "We're trying to think about, how do we create ads that speak to these people whether it's behind a new product or an existing product."

Chad underscores the necessity of aligning ad creatives with landing pages and retention flows to create a unified brand experience, which is crucial for scaling effectively.

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V. Strategy and Prioritization in Marketing Operations

Chad elaborates on his strategic approach to marketing operations, focusing on prioritization and empowering his team to drive initiatives.

• Chad Dault ([16:41]): "I want the team to pitch me all the things you think we should do and then I'll give you feedback and I'll add in a few of my own ideas."

• Chad Dault ([25:14]): "The more that I can arm people with the right context, the more that I can entrust them to make the right decisions."

This strategy fosters a collaborative environment where team members are encouraged to propose ideas, leading to more innovative and effective marketing campaigns.

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VI. Tactics for Scaling Marketing Efforts

The discussion delves into persona-based campaigns and the challenges of balancing message cohesion with campaign volume.

• Chad Dault ([26:39]): "What are reviews and social commentary saying? What are some of the kind of trends... that we can lean into?"

• Cody Jones ([33:03]): "One of the creators... focused the hook specifically, like if you're a busy mom and you're expecting your second kid."

Chad explains how Gruns identifies and targets specific consumer personas by analyzing customer reviews and social trends, allowing for more personalized and effective ad campaigns.

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VII. Leveraging Performance Analytics for Budget Allocation

Chad discusses the implementation of Prescient, an advanced Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) tool, to optimize budget allocation across marketing channels.

• Chad Dault ([47:02]): "Prescient plugs into all them and it can actually tell you your base plus your halo."

• Chad Dault ([48:35]): "Prescient... gives me and my team more confidence, know where we should put our budget."

Prescient enables Gruns to understand the broader impact of their marketing spend, including the halo effect of upper-funnel activities, ensuring more informed and effective budget decisions.

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VIII. Measuring and Executing Key Marketing Projects

A highlight of the episode is the discussion around Gruns' "Human Clinical Study" and its strategic rollout to enhance brand credibility.

• Chad Dault ([66:19]): "We hired an outside reputable firm to run that double blind placebo for us."

• Chad Dault ([66:19]): "We put together a rollout plan for how we want to introduce every piece of it... ads and emails that would reference it."

This strategic initiative not only boosts consumer trust but also integrates seamlessly across various marketing channels, reinforcing the brand's scientific backing and effectiveness.

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IX. Leadership and Empowerment

Chad and Connor delve into leadership philosophies, emphasizing the importance of empowering team members and fostering an open feedback culture.

• Chad Dault ([71:20]): "Empowering those ideas and saying, 'Hey, don't just tell me about this thing. Why don't you go try to put a little bit of it into motion.'"

• Cody Jones ([75:32]): "We're trying to get better at that like self-reflection reporting piece that I think is like really, really key."

Both leaders advocate for creating environments where team members feel valued and encouraged to contribute ideas, leading to more innovative and effective marketing strategies.

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X. Conclusion

The episode wraps up with acknowledgments and a recap of the key insights shared by Chad Dault. The team reflects on the successful collaboration and the elevated strategies implemented at Gruns, positioning the brand for continued growth and market leadership.

• Chad Dault ([78:09]): "We're a big no rules rules company at Gruns. If you guys have read the Netflix Culture book and feedback can come from anyone and anywhere within the org."

• Connor Dalt ([78:10]): "I love it."

Chad’s leadership and strategic vision, combined with the team’s collaborative efforts, underscore the potential for Gruns to continue its impressive growth trajectory.

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Notable Quotes

• Chad Dault ([07:52]): "Most like, people in your role probably wouldn't have jumped ship. You're like, 'I want to keep riding this wave.' You jump ship to Gruns."

• Cody Jones ([04:34]): "These are AI agents built by Best in Class D2C operators. They analyze your creative using real data from your Meta ad account."

• Chad Dault ([16:41]): "I want the team to pitch me all the things you think we should do and then I'll give you feedback and I'll add in a few of my own ideas."

• Chad Dault ([66:19]): "We put together a rollout plan for how we want to introduce every piece of it right from Chad's LinkedIn post to what the company was going to be posting."

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This episode of Marketing Operators offers a comprehensive look into Chad Dault’s approach to scaling marketing operations at Gruns. From leveraging AI tools and fostering team collaboration to executing strategic marketing projects and empowering leadership, Chad provides valuable insights for marketers aiming to unlock new growth levers in the DTC space.

Transcript

[Connor Dalt]

Well we got the four Cs. We got Connor Dalt back. CMO of Grunds really the CMO role.

[Cody Jones]

I find is frustratingly different across industries and across organizations.

[Chad]

There are many brands that spend way more on marketing than any of us. But I think the way that you can kind of arbitrage that lack of spend compared to others is just by saying things in consistent ways and building that repetition in the consumer's mind.

[Connor McDonald]

I believe it's my hypothesis that this is going to be the best way for us to reach new people.

[Chad]

Where are you over investing time and energy that you don't think is yielding productive outcomes? And there's a million things that we can dive into for how do you solve that? With resourcing, with AI tools, with just dropping stuff that wasn't priority?

[Cody Jones]

I've been eating my grins daily, dude.

[Connor McDonald]

Same here.

[Cody Jones]

If you've been wondering why I'm like I'm looking so youthful and healthy.

[Chad]

It's 80% of consumers are eating them daily after three months.

[Cody Jones]

That's a retention number.

[Chad]

Yeah. We ran this massive consumer survey and we wanted to get a sense of daily habit. I'm with you dude. I eat em Now I'm eating 24 gummies a day though. Cause we've got two new product lines that are launched. So I'm, I'm like I'm 25% gummy right now, dude.

[Cody Jones]

Honestly like so I was doing the create gummies for a bit but I just switched to the powder because I was getting gummy fatigue quick. I'm like I can't just wake up every day and just like cram my face full of gummies. Like it just, it, it's not scalable.

[Chad]

Yeah, yeah. But most Americans are under fibered so really you should think of it as your ability to catch up on fiber which is feeding the gut microbiome. So you're making Huberman proud.

[Connor McDonald]

Good.

[Connor Dalt]

I'm at 12 gummies today or a day. So I got my eight groons gummies and then I do my three to four create gummies.

[Connor McDonald]

Yep.

[Connor Dalt]

And then I just ordered mud water just launched like a, like a protein powder. Yeah, that's really tasty. They launched a really awesome product. It's like P based protein and then they have a bunch of nootropics and adaptogens in there. Probiotics. It's really good. It's like 180 calories too. So it's got some good, some good satiating ness to it. So that's my current like that's my Current stack. Well, I want to know if Cody's take. Cody, you have any gummies in the mix right now or are you gummies?

[Connor McDonald]

Dude, I'm on the. I'm on the res. I love how we're saying I'm on it. Like it's like a stack. I'm on the raspberry lemonade, the limited edition raspberry lemonade and I got my daughter on the groons cub. So you know.

[Connor Dalt]

Nice.

[Connor McDonald]

How'd she like him holding it down? She's loving it. Did I try to get a video the first time? Cuz you, you sent them to us and she literally tried to open the cabinet to get more after she finished.

[Chad]

The Gosh, we love. We love to ravenous children.

[Connor McDonald]

Yes, yes.

[Chad]

We, we talk a lot about how like how you introduce Cubs to your kids can dictate their experience with them. If you introduce Cubs like the, the grooms Cubs product, we introduce it as like hey, this is like a healthy vitamin but it's a gummy bear. Kids are I think skeptical but if you just introduce it as a treat that they get once a day, put some scarcity into it. It's like basic marketing tactics with your kids. It's.

[Connor McDonald]

It's one of her potty snacks right now. So she's potty training. So this is one of like the high, high currency potty snacks.

[Chad]

Dude, save this for dad operators.

[Connor Dalt]

How do you say what's one more than cubed? How do you say that? Anyone Quatted? Quatted. We got c quanted today. Feels good to have everyone back together. We got Connor Dalt back, friend of the pod officially. I think once you, once you've hit two or more airings. First time Connor was here with Caraway we had some awesome conversations about digital product but now he is here as the CMO of groons. And you know our. One of our like content like strategies with the marketing operators is basically to see what the operators do and then what one up them whenever we can. So like you know we, we think we. They had chat on last week. It was a great podcast but we're pretty confident we can one up. We can one up the the Chad operators podcast. So so that's the goal for today. Setting the bar high. Before we get into it. Thank you to the sponsors, Motion Pression AI after Cell Rich panel and Revo. If you enjoy the show, make sure to like it. Subscribe. Share with your.

[Chad]

Sa.

[Cody Jones]

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

[Connor Dalt]

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

[Cody Jones]

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

[Connor Dalt]

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

[Cody Jones]

100%. That's all to say. Motion is giving teams an AI adoption cheat code, making it accessible to every D2C advertiser. And best yet, you don't need a Motion contract to use this. You can agents for free. Test them out in your Motion account today. So try it out@motion app.com.

[Connor Dalt]

All right, sweet. Let's get into it. So, Connor, I got so many questions for you. Like, you were crushing it at Caraway. Honestly, like, made. Made a move that I think was. Is probably hard for a lot of. Would be hard for a lot of marketers to. To do. Like, Caraway is very much growing at a rapid rate right now.

[Chad]

Most.

[Connor Dalt]

Most like, people in your role probably wouldn't have jumped ship, right? They're like, well, I'm gonna keep riding this. This wave and keep compounding all the work I've done here. You jump shipped to Groons, what, three, four months ago?

[Chad]

Yeah, I was in. In end of February. So what, five months? Five and a half months?

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah. Cool. Cool. And like, obviously, you know, Groons has. You know, I think it's really cool how Chad was so, like, no, no one really knew how well Groons was doing until the. The news came out about the. The raise and the valuation associated with it. And, you know, every other tweet from Sean Frank is about gummies, which I love. But I guess where I wanted to start is, like, what's the most challenging part about coming into a brand as their marketing leader when the brand's already humming? Like, it's. I feel like that's an interesting position to be in. I feel like most of the time you're coming in and like, maybe it's not working as well as it could. And, like, there's some obvious things to. To change but like for my conversation with Chad, it's like, you guys have a great team. You had a great team and like you were like one of the final kind of puzzle pieces to like building out the great marketing stack. So like I guess a few subcomponent questions to that, larger questions like what is getting onboarded and downloaded look like and like your whole process of auditing or like getting up to speed and then like how do you decide kind of like what to focus on and like maybe insert yourself into slash change versus like hey, this is crushing, this is working. Like I'm not gonna not be involved, but like, let's just let this thing ride. Like what, what does that process look like? Over the last six months, I was.

[Chad]

Trying to find a good kind of analogy to help describe what the experience was like. And I kept coming back to Chuck Daly was the coach of the pistons for the 92 dream team and he had to like work with some of the best basketball players on the planet and not teach them how to play basketball, but just help them run a more productive offense, run a better defense and just figure out how to play well together as a team. That's what my experience with Grooms has felt like so far. There's just world class people everywhere inside of this business. So I didn't really, you know, join with the intent of causing immediate disruption. Right. I think with Caraway, I joined a little bit from a different vantage point as coming as head of growth. Like I think within a week I was in ads manager and kind of being like, oh, why is this campaign architecture like this? How do we start to make some tweaks and kind of win from that angle? With Grooms, it's way different. Right. There's so much solid baseline and foundation established. So the first thing I did was I actually did a. I kind of sent out a slack the night before I started and just gave everybody on the team expectations of what I'd want to be talking through over the next couple of weeks. And it's basically just a massive download of everything that you've been working on and trying to point out. I wanted to discover a few things. One is where are you over investing time and energy that you don't think is yielding productive outcomes? And there's a million things that we can dive into for how do you solve that with resourcing with AI tools, with just dropping stuff that wasn't priority and then just starting to, I think, help the teams figure out how to work with one another to compound what they were doing to have bigger effects. So like, you know, the growth team was running all of these funnels and pursuing all of these angles and building out Personas and just making sure that that had connective tissue into the site experience and into the retention flows and into what influencers and brand teams were talking about. So I've spent a ton of my time just kind of diagnosing a couple of those pieces. Right. And it's been awesome to just see what this team's been capable of and it's not easy to grow as quick as Groons had. And yeah, it's been really impressive to see.

[Connor Dalt]

That's interesting. Yeah, that's something I've been talking a lot about on the show and doing a lot of @HEXCLOUD is just like, I call it like branding campaigns and just creating a lot more cohesiveness across the entire marketing stack. And like, I just think it's not even worth doing something if you're not going to think about how it, how it intersects across multiple channels. Because to your point, like, sure, you could do a badass ad with a really unique fun angle, but like, if the, if the landing page destination isn't speaking to that, if the post purchase experience isn't speaking to that, it's, it's not really going to scale. Okay, that's interesting. So I, what about like, so you, you kind of hit on this but like tactically speaking, because I feel like it seems overwhelming, right, to like come into that type of team and, and be like, God, like, how do I learn everything and get downloaded and like, where do I even start? Like, do you have any, any tips or tricks on like, more like tactically speaking, like, so you mentioned the Slack message and like you asked people to kind of like do a brain dump and then you met with them to talk through it. But like, could you even break that out into like steps of like how you got up to speed in such a, you know, a quick, fast growing org?

[Chad]

Yeah, I, I definitely can't. You want to come with a bunch of experience that can kind of guide the initial places that you want to go investigate time. So. But you also want to be cognizant of the fact there is no one size fits all playbook. I've already had a bunch of examples of stuff that was just tried and true and such a difference maker for what we did at Caraway and it just doesn't translate one for one into the world. Yes, yes. So many things. Creative types, you talk about campaigns, you know, at Caraway that was a muscle. We really started building over the last two years, you know, putting a ton of emphasis into Mother's Day and other kind of Ashley furniture holidays. And that yet has yet to prove to be a massive lever for us at Grooms, you know what I mean? And so there's nuance in industry and category in space as far as I, I didn't want to, you know, lead the witness too much with my teams though. I wanted to say like help me understand a lot of those kind of choke points and where you're feeling, you know, stressed out or under resourced. And I really just kind of was on a listening tour for the first couple of weeks and started to find my places to, to begin to plug in. Now there were tons of just kind of like low hanging fruit opportunities. Right. Some of the ways that we were building out a creative process and leveraging ugc that was a place where I was like oh here's what we had had done prior at Caraway with how we were doing a little bit more prescriptive briefing. We were having briefs be reflective of kind of point in year and finding a lot of success with that. Why don't you guys start weaving that into your process and hopefully we can find some quick wins.

[Connor Dalt]

Do you mean like when you say point in year do you mean like, like making more seasonal type in creator led ads where it's like speaking to a certain time of the year in a certain moment.

[Chad]

Exactly, yeah. Valentine's Day it's here's you know, how I settle in for an at home dinner date with my right my person using Caraway, you know, and that, that just proved to be really, really repeatable and successful and helped us kind of always feel on the nose and culturally relevant I think with Caraway. So yeah, I, I tried to just work with the teams to say help me understand where I can help you immediately. And I wanted to see what they kind of led with because what you don't want to do is come in with all of these assumptions about stuff that's going to work with no context and just immediately start throwing ideas at the wall and then be met with a bunch of tried that doesn't work that way. Can't do it for such and such reason. So I promised the team that I would come in and challenge convention. I was like if the answer is this is just how we do things that I'm going to press on and really try to pressure test and make sure that that's still the right decision for the brand. But everything else I did want to kind of let the team lead and say, hey, tell me where you think we can work together and projects to begin to work on and again, knock off some low hanging fruit. And then I started to build my, my kind of game plan for bigger, longer term projects that I wanted to start pursuing across the entire marketing. Org. So a lot of it was that stitching together and cohesion of messaging touch points, leaning into moments a little bit more. How do we think about offer testing and how that sort of proliferates across the entire marketing stack. Some of those kind of like larger lift items, but not ones that were immediately deployable.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah, yeah. Like, I mean I, I've learned that I feel like now because we set, we set all of our targets on a quarterly tempo, but like it's, it's the channel lead's responsibility to pitch me. Basically. It's like I'm not, I'm not the one bringing most of the net new ideas to CRO or paid. It's like, no, I want you to come pitch me. Like, what? You're the retention, like, you're the retention lead. Like, you know this part of our program better than anyone. You know where the opportunity is. Like, so do I. But like, I want you to pitch me all the things you think we should do and then I'll like give you feedback and I'll add in a few of my own ideas. But it's like empowering the team to be the, the driver of the strategy. And like, I think the, the quickest way to probably not get off on the right foot with, with the Grooms team would have been for you to come in and be like, here's all my ideas. I don't have any context from you guys yet, but I'm just going to like dump my ideas on you. But that's not the approach you took at all. It's like you listened, you heard.

[Chad]

Totally, totally. And I want, I want the team to know that I'm not here because any of them are lacking in ability.

[Connor Dalt]

Right.

[Chad]

That's not, that's not why Chad wanted to bring in this role. It's to start to tie these teams together. There's so many incredibly effective people leading all of these functions on the marketing team. It was just kind of missing the head to bring it all. The other area that I really. And as marketers, you guys know this, especially the types of marketers you are. The other person I spent the most time with when I got started was our cfo, which fun fact, also named Connor. So not. Not only, not not only am I not the the go to D2C Connor. I'm also in the halls of grooms. Not even if you say Connor the one that people think of. So no. So Connor Stassny is our CFO and he is just an absolute titan of a cfo. And he him and I just spent so much time getting acquainted and he knows this business from a numbers perspective is an incredibly surgical operator of those numbers. So I spent a lot of time with him just understanding how the model's been built. How do we set a demand plan? What are some of the levers that you've been pressing? What are some of the forecasts and targets that we're trying to hit? Where are you feeling like in the year we might be experiencing some stressors? How do I work with our growth and retention and E comm teams to stack levers to make sure that we're able to hit those targets. So unit economic profiles. We spent just so much time just getting to know the business so I could get the foundation there. And then the other piece that I really wanted to arm the team with was a much cleaner sense of priorities, of metrics that I felt they needed to be held accountable for that. We knew if all of those metrics were being hit and those krs were being hit, it would ladder into the business hitting its overall targets from a revenue but a perspective.

[Cody Jones]

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[Chad]

I did see that.

[Cody Jones]

This is 99 bucks.

[Chad]

That's a good one.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah, it's a no brainer. No brainer at that price point.

[Cody Jones]

And I've wanted to buy that domain for years. And the reason is because one. It's just great the three letters and whatever. But like really the CMO role, I find I've technically been a cmo. I've technically been a CMO for like eight years now or whatever is like is is frustratingly different across industries and across organizations. So Garner, you were VP of Growth and Digital Product at Caraway. We've talked a lot about that and those make sense together. But even that was a very unique title I think and we discussed that when, when we spoke back in February. How different is the role of CMO at Groons? And like what, maybe you could just describe briefly like what you sit over and how that differs from your role at Caraway.

[Chad]

Yeah, it's, it's been really, really interesting to get into a really uncomfortable position of feeling imposter syndrome again and. But I love that feeling so much and losing that is the worst part of a career moment at whatever stop along it that you're in. So I actually I, I lost some remit coming to Grooms and I gained some. So one of the teams that sat with me at Carrie was our data practice. Obviously marketing teams are highly data needy and intensive and so we had the data team kind of built out under my team and then other teams would kind of request in and the, the problem there obviously is that marketing kind of gets the preferential treatment in OPS and CX and finance, everybody's got data needs. So coming to Groons, that was a team that actually now sits with Connor Stassny, cfo. He's got this shared service. Everything that he oversees he views as a service to the rest of the, to the rest of the business. So horizontally shared function. But picking up brand and creative is definitely a new muscle for me. So now I think I love it because it allows for me to kind of see across the full gamut. And at Caraway, thankfully we had really good partners on the brand and creative side. So much trust gets placed in those teams when you've got this idea for a new offer, a new moment campaign that you want to lean into and you've kind of got everything dialed from the growth and retention insight side. But you do have to rely on a different team with a brief that maybe your team's been responsible for to get the visuals and copy and all of those assets and pieces of content. Content back to fuel the levers that you want to deploy as a growth org. So thankfully at Caraway, I didn't really feel like that was ever an issue. The thing that was always challenging was just velocity and prioritization, you know, and it was always, you guys have probably all experienced. It's always a trade off discussion of what gets kind of first and preferential treatment. So with Groons, it's really nice is because you know, Brandon Creative and picking up Influencer and some of those other teams that sit under brand here at Grooms, it's really nice because we now I can sort of take a 30,000 foot view and say, all right, we need to attack this new angle. We need to revamp the Cubs line. We need to think about running a sweepstakes, whatever it might be. Being able to kind of view across the entire spectrum of marketing levers to pull and help the entire team kind of set their priorities against what we believe those biggest business levers to be is really, really cool. And I think what's interesting about brand and creative is like I, I feel like it's, it's a bit less kind of like objective in the assessment of it than growth or retention or there's like hardcore metrics that define the success of it for brands. So much of it is feeling and quote vibes and things like that. And thankfully Grooms already has an awesome, lively, irreverent brand and so just helping that team kind of be tethered into the, to the metrics that we're all striving for has been a really big focus on that side of the house. Dude. Awesome.

[Cody Jones]

Yeah, super cool.

[Chad]

What's been, what's, what's been your experience? Connor, how do you feel about kind of like overseeing the entire marketing stack? What's the, what's that like with where you feel most adequate and most sort of experienced and then how do you interact with the teams that you're like, I am so not the center of excellence, you know, so much more than me in this world. I'm curious how you think about that. That dynamic. Yeah.

[Cody Jones]

So the teams that we have built out right now just for context, we have VP of Marketing which is basically like own channels and go to market. We just brought on a VP of E. Comm. She's eight days in. She's overseeing web development and digital product. We have VP of Paid Media who oversees performance, creative and media buying. And then we have a creative director who oversees like content production, copywriting, design. There are a few of those that I feel like really well versed in where like I can bring a lot to the table and obviously like working with the VP of Marketing or VP of Paid media, it's very much a conversation. They are extremely talented and knowledgeable, but that's where I feel I'm in my wheelhouse the most. We are finally, knock on wood, in like a really solid spot with the creative director and like our general like brand creative processes. That was like the bane of my existence for the last like 18 months. We just like had a lot of turnover on the team. We weren't hitting the right timelines. So like we, we've done a lot of work there over the last like nine months and now that's really good. And I tr. Like that is I am out of my wheelhouse error. Where I feel I'm most effective is just trying to bring like competence transitions nicely across all those different teams. So like, there are certain things when it comes down to process or strategy that I think are beneficial to like work through with that team. But you know, talking about fonts and figma or whatever is like I'm leaving that up to the experts completely. Yeah. So that's where I figured out where to kind of draw the lines.

[Chad]

Yeah. Yeah. It's really nice to bring I think business context to, to a lot of these teams and help kind of people see the bigger picture. My, my whole approach is the more that I can arm people with the right context, the more that I can entrust them to make the right decisions. And I don't want to be somebody that's in the, in the weeds of certain functions. Right. It's so much better for me to spend time in certain places and then spend time in others. So I think just focusing on like non duplicative time spend is a huge, huge point of emphasis for me with running the marketing team here, which is let the experts do the expert work and then my job is to bring them all together and say like, this is the thing that we're going to try to go win against right now. This is a new ham that we're going after and here's how we're going to make that happen. Setting some of that initial vision and then, yes, enlisting the troops to go, to go make it happen with way better ideas than I would ever have.

[Cody Jones]

I've got a question. And Connor, I love your perspective first and then I'd love to hear from Cody too. You brought up bringing cohesion. So like you had, you described the briefing to creators, the running paid media, the, the maybe building landing pages and then uniting that with like the retention efforts and things like that. One thing we've been struggling with is figuring out how much complexity do we want to tolerate there. Right? Because like there's benefits to cohesion, but then you also there's, there's trade offs with volume. Right. You can't, you can't produce as much as maybe you'd want to if you want it to remain as cohesive as you can. So like could you talk through either at Caraway or at Groo, like how you've thought about that?

[Chad]

Caraway, I would say is much more visual. Cohesion was kind of the driver. We wanted you to know that wherever you saw an experienced Caraway, we wanted you to be able to sublimity or opaquely connect it right back to the brand that was messaging that to you. And we had a color story which was huge thing that we leaned into. For Grooms, I would say that the, the bigger focus, I think there's some polishing of kind of like how the brand is visually represented. And we just hired an awesome art director and designer who's coming in and just providing some of that polish and you know, refining some of those edge cases where it probably got a little too loosey goosey on the periphery. For me, it's much more about like what are we saying about this product to a specific audience and being consistent with that. And so that's where I think there's so much power in compounding messaging effects. So if we're going to start talking about the benefits of fiber that can come from grooms, what I was just speaking to you guys about, what I don't think is best is for the way that we talk about the average American being under fibered and that Grooms can help you address those gaps. I don't want that being said in too many disparate ways wherever you encounter us because I think it starts to lose some of its effect. But if we're going to go out into the wild with a new acquisition angle and start talking about this as a reason to try groons and stick with groons, I think having that Consistency, pull through into the landing page experience and into the retention journey that you get brought along is super impactful. And I'm with you. We don't want to, you know, hinder volume or anything like that in service of that mission, but I think just taking a little bit of time to set some foundational docs with a couple of great copy lines to pull from, fueled by research that our creative strategy team puts together. I think that's worth just taking the extra beat to make sure that happens because I've just seen it time and time again. Like there are many brands that spend way more on marketing than any of us. But I think the way that you can kind of arbitrage that lack of spend compared to others is just by saying things in consistent ways and building that repetition in the consumer's mind. Especially for a category and product like Grooms, where you might want to buy it in store, you might want to buy it online or on Amazon, it's a little bit more of like a happenstance kind of flip of the switch in the moment purchase than a lot of Caraway purchases were, which is a far more considered 4, $500 purchase.

[Cody Jones]

So something like the fiber angle, like how often are you guys launching that as a funnel and do you have like five of them running at the same time? Because that's where for more context from Ridge, like we're, we're balancing our three categories and then there's a potential for different messaging within the categories. Now we're talking about like eight or nine different funnels and then that's when I really start seeing the trade offs with cohesion where it's like, yeah, we're not going to be able to have every landing page directly speak to this funnel, much less have different retention flow set up or whatever. So like where, where do you guys land on that?

[Chad]

Totally. And the Caraway experience was way more like the ridge one. Right. Like the collection or the category of the product was way more of the focus. And just speaking to that use case and the utility of that line for grooms, right. It's a, it's a pack of gummy bears. But the benefits that one can realize are so vast. And so, yes, we do have those very specific kind of angles because the whole hypothesis is that somebody's taking groons. Connor, you might be taking groons for a different reason than Cody is, you know what I mean? And what we want to be able to do is find all of the people that might perceive value and benefit from taking Grooms and speak really intentionally to those people. So I talked a little bit earlier about levers. We have so many. I mean our. You can look at our ad libraries. 1200 or so ads live in it and the velocity of output there is insane. And Anthony and Claire who lead growth and performance creative on our team are incredible. And what we try to do now is stack bigger bets and those are kind of the bigger levers that we make an informed kind of collective team. Bet that speaking to this is going to have really big impact to our ad account to unlocking a new user base and Persona. And those. Yeah, we, we can't do those all the time. So that that frequency is more on like a four to six week basis that we try to have those mapped out. And there's certainly a repository now that we're starting to pull from as we build bank.

[Cody Jones]

Totally. So I'm curious Cody, if you have any sort of different take on that because you're kind of halfway in between. You guys are building out different categories. But then also I think Miracle Bomb is one of those things you've talked about appealing to older women as well as millennials and you could go the same path about going wider from a messaging perspective.

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah. So it's definitely like top focus like outside of. Outside of I guess all like product like all the non marketing stuff I'm focused on right now for like growth like this Persona sprint we're calling it is our top focus. I believe it's my hypothesis that this is going to be the best way for us to reach new people on meta is take. Because what we've seen and we've talked about this word like just launching new products has not really driven reach on meta and we have to do new things and how are we speaking to people whether it's behind a new product or an existing product. Very differently. Much more specifically thinking about like personalization at scale. And I think our. You know what got us here, it worked very well to here but it was very broad messaging. Very broad. Miracle Bomb is great for this. WTF is great for this. But it's not very specific. And, and, and this. Some of it comes from just talking to people in the space and obviously being able to see their ad libraries and things like that. But like what seems to be performing really well is what, what Connor is talking about. And you, I know you mentioned like crits doing it or IG1 does some or like there's a bunch of brands who do. It's just like very intentional messaging in the hook of an ad Almost like the hook is a targeting. Like, if you're a busy. Like, I'll give you an example. One of the creators who actually lives in our town we work with, I saw a TikTok from her, and she was like a mom, two kids on a walk. And, like, I think the hook was something like, you know, if you're a mom and you're expecting your second kid, and, like, it's not even just like, if you're a mom, it's, like, very specific. And you look at the comments on it, and everyone is like, target audience reach. Or they're like, FBI agent found me. And, like, all of it was just a very specific hook that. That. That got people exactly where they were at in that life stage. And so I think that's what we're trying to do. And, like, Connor has, you know, given me voice notes and shared a bunch of how they go about it, which I think is great. But, yeah, it's. It's not as simple, I think, for us. So part of it is, like, even tactically in the ad account, like, what does that look like? Like, do we. Do we split them up? And then it's like, all right, if we have a campaign and we're trying to, like, match the creative to the. To the ad account, but if we have a campaign that's like, hey, this mom funnel.

[Chad]

Right.

[Connor McDonald]

This is one we're trying to do. Well, it's like, like, well, then if we have multiple products, like, I don't want to necessarily have, you know, five different Persona campaigns for five different products, like, that just will get so unwieldy. So we're trying to work through that now and trying to figure it out. We'll likely go with, like, campaigns around a Persona. And then actually, Connor McDonald, one of the phrases, you know, it's not just your naming convention phrase that I love. It's also, you said on a few episodes back, like, aggressive templatization.

[Cody Jones]

Yes.

[Connor McDonald]

And how you've kind of been focusing on that on various parts of your marketing department. I love that. And that's something we're really thinking about for currently. For landing pages. Same thing. How do we get these templates dialed that you can just whip up a headline? And that AI tool I showed you, like, that's actually why we're trying to build it. We're trying to get really specific. That whole funnel from ad, we're doing huge partnership ad focus. Right. And what our growth team was doing because our copywriter didn't have bandwidth to just churn out copy for everything. They would just take like past copy from like you know, just like our products and put in there. Even if like it was a partnership ad, talking about being busy and on the go, you know. And so we're trying to have that really dialed where we're actually, you know, built this tool that'll like transcribe, you know, the video, match the headline. Not that it's the most important thing about an ad but like let's get it all dialed so you have the headline, you know, the copy that matches your creative landing page should match that as well. We have not gone as far as personalizing pop up or email flows. I think it's like and Connor Dalton, if you want to speak to us at all. But it's like minimum viable product and you have to get enough traction with something before you're like hey, let's go and do this big production behind this or like make all these net new landing pages. So I think that's what we're trying to figure out right now. But we do have a few Personas that we have like some traction with that maybe we didn't do this full strategy that now we're going like full force ton of partnership ads like a bunch of net new landing pages because we, we believe and we have some data that like this is going to be like a viable lever for us.

[Cody Jones]

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[Connor Dalt]

Connor, I want to, I want to ask you like, and Cody alluded to this, like some of the more tactical thing. Like how do you tactically approach that? Because you mentioned like you're you as a team are collectively making a bet saying, hey, this message, like this angle which, which has this hook and this overall narrative, this messaging arc and the goal is to reach this consumer with like this use case. So like let's go back to the fiber one, right? Like you guys are making a big bet that you can really have a lot of success and performance out of this. Like you need more fiber message for lack of a better term. So like once you guys have aligned on that, that that's a message that you want to do a sprint around. Like, can you actually talk us through like the actual more like, like granular process of like, all right, we're going after this message. So then like do you like map out all the ads you want to make speak into that, all the landing pages you want to make launch with different combinations and like start testing into the best. Like, what does that actually look like from. I like from the moment you agree on the messaging arc you want to go after to actually like, yeah, what's that process look like? How do you actually make funnels out of that?

[Connor McDonald]

Totally.

[Chad]

And this is, this is just a place I've spent a ton of time since arriving. So back to your kind of initial question, it was assessing the landscape. Be like, oh, let's try to make These sort of 360 angular Persona based bets and build that, that bank and repository of those. So the other thing we don't want to do is slow down velocity of typical ad sprints that are a little bit more kind of iterative, kind of unlocking new formats. Still, still pursuing those with full force. But again, what we want to try to do is pair a couple of different signals. So what are reviews and social commentary saying? Like what are some of the kind of trends or repeated things that we're seeing from customers loving groons that we can lean into? And then the other thing that's a little bit harder. And I think I've sent codies and voice notes on this is like connecting it to something that's having a bit of a moment in the ether outside of your brand and pairing those two things together. So at Caraway, Microplastics was that thing, right? We like knew Microplastics was having A massive moment that was such an obvious tie into our brand. And so we put a ton of emphasis around a microplastics campaign in the month of March, which did super well for the brand. So for groons, how fiber emerged was basically that, you know, we started to hypothesize that fiber was going to be the next kind of food stuff thing that had come into attention. Protein super in vogue right now. And our kind of bet is that fiber is going to be one of the next ones that that comes in. So we kind of do a bunch of research. I mean I had chatgpt going to do deep research, trying to go assess how other brands of the space are pursuing that. What is it about fiber that's really good for humans and how does it serve as the foundation for the gut microbiome? What are the benefits that come from that? Shiny hair, better skin, so much stuff that I bet all of your brains are going. Where our started to go is like, wow, how many good hooks can come out of this? If we start to pursue this and we just put this kind of notion strategy doc together and started to populate and we've got a great team of creative strategists that, you know, we, we assigned one of them to this initiative and then they do a lot of that research. They use some of that deep research prompt that I had provided them and others. And then we start to kind of map out what the key assortment of pillars or hooks that we want to go after are going to be. So even within the world of fiber, let's say within the world of microplastics at Caraway, there's still a bunch of Personas that can be carved out from within that overarching kind of like zeitgeist angle to go after. So we start to map out, you know, why somebody at a different life stage or somebody that's in a different situation might want to respond or what we could do to get to arbitrage the attention of somebody and tie it back to that fiber angle. So then we start connecting about that quick.

[Connor Dalt]

So it's like fibers, this overall like narrative arc that you want to hit on and like the benefits of it. But then you're going one level deep, lower and saying, well, if you're on GLP1s, you need fiber. If you, I don't know, like once, if you're like having issues with your hair, you need fiber. If you're a 65 year old man, you need fiber for this reason. If you're a 23 year old man or woman. You need fiber for that reason. So you're saying fiber is like the, the outer layer and then you have a bunch of different sub Personas that you're positioning the need for fiber as like a. Okay, got it.

[Chad]

Exactly. And then we've got all the research and collateral to kind of back that and then it can be applicable at a Persona based level and we use that to map out hooks angles. Start to workshop some ad concepts where you're talking about Connor McDonald and this I totally agree with is there's always a sort of healthy debate of how much to really build into this from a resourcing perspective. Like do we activate specific pop ups and landers and retention flows to speak to that. I think jury's still out on how much we to invest into that. We do try to get a really good read on whether this is going to be something that has a great impact to the business and then kind of figure out what needs to be P0 and attached to the initial rollout and effort and then what's the stuff that can be fast follow when you go add reinforcements to later on if we believe this is going to have a, a longer shelf life for the brand.

[Cody Jones]

There are some examples that I really like of relatively lightweight ways to personalize a funnel. Like one of my favorites I've probably talked about at some point in the past is eight Sleep. They'll do an Andrew Huberman funnel and a Marquez funnel and they just have, they have Marques's face in the pop up, they have it at the top of the landing page and then everything else is basically the same and I'm sure the retention flows the same. But it's like if you're coming from a MKBHD ad, you see the pop up, you see the landing page and now you're just shopping. The typical PDP like that is, that's a pretty high leverage way to do it and feels relatively scalable. So we've been trying to emulate more of like that sort of lightweight approach.

[Chad]

Yeah, yeah, I, I feel like we'll, we'll figure it out and you know, determine our conviction around a bet and then figure out how many of the teams should start to also sort of participate in rolling that out. And yeah, there's just so many different things that we can pursue and there's tons of trade offs on prioritization as you guys experience every single day. So that's another thing that we have to battle.

[Connor Dalt]

So where do you so because going back to Cody, your comment about Connor's verbiage, like Connor McDonald's, like aggressive templatization. Like, so for a new narrative arc, Connor Dahl, like, do you guys have a right? Because I think Nick Shackelford tweeted something about this the other day of like, how do you test into Personas as like a phase one and then you find out what works and then you go deeper with some of the more like high time investment, high resource, high money investment assets. Right. Like you guys going and sourcing a bunch of creators to speak about fiber is going to be a lot higher lift, more expensive, more time than you producing a bunch of statics that just speak to these angles. So like on the ad side of the, on, on the ads and on the destination, like, do you have any sort of like, SOP for how you think about testing into a new angle? You're like, oh, we're only doing statics within these templates and we're only doing this landing page. And then if something hits, we'll go and try to scale it with like creators, brand, video listicle, whatever it is. Like, do you have any, like, thoughts around how to like approach a net new angle? Or are you oftentimes being like, we're so confident in this angle that we're gonna go do like a full, like a full swing at this thing. Like, like, that was our sweepstakes last year. We're like, we don't know if it's gonna work or not, but we're pretty confident, like, we're really gonna go, like, we're gonna go hard on this. We're gonna do everything we can and it worked out. But like, that was a big risk that, that we took. And you can't take total time with any evergreen, you know, ad angle that someone ideates.

[Chad]

Totally. I think that's the, that that's kind of like the distinction between a campaign and these angles. Do you know what I mean? Like what you're talking about, the sweepstakes was an entire campaign, the entire business needed to orient itself around that for these angles. It's a little bit more kind of like it's a very big effort, don't get me wrong. But it's slotted in amongst everything else. And then we kind of rely on the meta algorithm to tell us how big of an opportunity it's going to be versus there are Mother's Day moments when we do a flavor launch. There's stuff that is, no doubt about it, going to be the main emphasis of the business. And everywhere you're going to experience Us, hopefully that's one of the first things that you learn. So I think just trying to look at the calendar and figure out the, the sort of coexistence of those pieces again at Caraway it was like way more about those kind of like brand and femic feature and benefit defining moments on the calendar year. That was what became a really strong performance driver. Plus product launches and these kind of like angles. Sometimes they worked, but we found they worked better when they were paired with a seasonal moment. You know what I mean? Like talking to moms, busy moms with Cody's example, like that worked best around Mother's Day. Did it have evergreen shelf life? Certainly. But we always found pairing it with like a big promotional moment on the calendar year when consumer wallets were open. That was the combo that worked super well. So for grooms it's just I don't know yet what the ideal combination of offer, product marketing activity, calendar, moment, slaver launch. I don't know what the right permutations of those things are going to be, but that's what I'm trying to be very methodical with the team and just being very, very intentional about making sure we develop a learning afterwards. Like hey, what about that made that work? I had an awesome chat with the CMO of Poppy a long time ago and he expressed that he's like we figured out our playbook for how to make Poppy boom. And it was cultural moment plus reputable figure plus flavor launch. That was the three prong approach that they needed to have a really big step change in revenue occur. And so I don't know what Grooms is yet. I've got a bunch of hypotheses. So we're trying to figure out the right mix of like explore kind of like how that would serve out ads, you know, and then exploit where once we kind of get those signals back that this is going to be a big one, we can action on it super, super, super fast.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah, I actually like I think at hexcloud we've done a pretty good job of building campaigns around like offers and seasonal moments. Actually Caraway has been a really awesome inspiration to me about like I think we need to do a better job of peppering it as evergreen campaigns and not, not Every campaign that's a 360 campaign has to be a sale or a new product or a sweepstakes. Like you can just have a campaign that's cohesive across all your channels. That's all about the microplastics or all about how durable your Pan is like that. That is probably just as important than like the sale campaign or the, or the sweepstakes campaign. So that's something we're hoping to do more of in the next couple years. So that's been. It's cool to hear your, your approach with it.

[Chad]

It.

[Connor McDonald]

We're about halfway done through the year. H1 is almost over. We're prepping for the second half of the year. We're also prepping for Q4 which is huge for us. And our budgets are going to be the highest then and when our budgets are the highest we're going to need the most granularity and the most confidence knowing where we should spend our dollars. And that's why we turn to Prescient. Prescient is an MMM and most MMMs they use 60 year old regression models. They're not really built for D to C. Prescient you can get readouts really quickly if something is changing which again DTC is really volatile so you can't rely on an outdated M them that you're only going to get one read out a quarter. One thing I love about pression so much, you're able to see the halo effect. So upper funnel spend, which again is huge. We love to fill the funnel prior to a peak moment prior to Q4 holiday, something like that. We're really able to see the halo effect that has. Because sometimes you're not going to see great attribution from a YouTube campaign or from TV campaigns. Well, prescient plugs into all them and it can actually tell you your base plus your halo. So it's been really helpful for us to understand and actually have confidence to invest in some of these upper funnel channels that are harder to measure with other ways. So I love Prescient. I can't tell you all the technical stuff behind it but I can tell you it gives me and my team more confidence, know where we should put our budget, especially in some of these pesky upper funnel channels that are much harder to measure. And again, don't wait till Q4. It's going to be too late then. We're halfway through the year. But we've really got to all lock in for the rest of the year for Q4. There's a reason we use it. Hexclad, Hollow socks, coterie and 100 more leading brands so highly recommend checking it out. Go to prescientai.com operators to book a demo today.

[Connor Dalt]

Shifting gears a little bit. I want to, I want to stay on like tactics but what I'm What I'm really curious is your thinking about phases of Groons. So we had Zach stuck on and you know, Zach's an awesome, an awesome marketer, awesome operator, has tons of experience right. With his agency and with Hollow. And one of the questions we were asking him are like, like what are the tactics? Got you. What are the tactics that took you through these revenue bands? But like what are the other. What are, what's not going to take you through this next revenue band? So I want to ask you a similar question which is like what are the, what are the differences in strategies when you look at. And I know some of this is going to be speculative because you don't really know, but like in your current opinion, like what, what got groons to where it is strategically and tactically versus what is going to get groons to where you want it to go in the next two years?

[Chad]

Let's say I'll get the obvious thing out of the way which is Chad freaking nailed the form factor in the product. Like just, you can't, can't replicate that marketing. I feel like he could have hired the worst marketing team on the planet and been the worst marketer himself and Groon still would have achieved some level of success just by the novelty of the, of the product and how easily, you know, loved it was and understood by consumers and then how people just come back and buy more Groons. Like we have this hilarious internal joke that one of our copywriters says where he's like, we have an entire business model built on people liking the product. You know, and it's so true. People try Groons and they buy grooms and they like grooms.

[Connor Dalt]

I actually don't know why you guys even have a sugar version because the sugar free is so good. I'm like, wait, what? This isn't the one with sugar. Like why do you even, why do you even have to have one with sugar? Because the sugar free is amazing.

[Chad]

Totally. It's so, it's so good. And 20 calories is no sugar. It's, it's such a no brainer. It's so much better than those messy powders, you know what I mean? But the, yeah, so what, what got greens to this point I think was a let's just get the product foundation. That's, that's obviously the baseline. And then the, I think the business was so intentional about standing up really thoughtful marketing strategies right from the jump, you know what I mean? And having airtight operations and CX and everything else to support it. Chad just had Such good exposure with the brands that he got to interact with and the seats and boards that he got to observe. And so the, the brand had such a head start, you know what I mean? And then some of the early hires that were made here too are just absolute rock stars. You know, like the number of hats and the, the amount of space that they covered is, is out of control. But tons of meta reliance to get the brand off the ground and the way that, but again Groon's attacks. Meta I think is pretty unique with the funnels and the build outs there. And I think that a lot of investment in landing pages and making sure to kind of always find leveled up performance and CRO wins has been super important. And then I think there's lots of thoughtful testing on the retention front and really good team internally here that's just focused on. I think a lot of subscription brands have a hesitancy to talk to their audience because it's like every, every touch point is a reminder that you're paying for this subscription and it creates a lot of fear that it's going to just cause incremental churn. And I think our team's pretty darn good at trying to again leverage our fun, irreverent brand and pair it with the fact that this is a credible and science backed product and reinforce those good habits and tell you that you're doing the right things for your body. So all of those pieces from the start, they feel so much more robust and built out than a brand that is this new. Do you know what I mean? It's just the level of velocity and thoughtful deployment of tactics and strategy here is, is, is truly remarkable. And for a brand that's only two and a half years old, like that's not always the case. So I want to make sure that that's understood, that it's not like this is just happenstance. There's a lot of intentionality across all functions. But now what I'm here to do, I would say I want to try to unlock different marketing levers to drive growth for us. I'm never the guy that says let's stop spending on meta and I think the you know, like reduced dependency on Meta at all costs. I, I don't, I don't subscribe to that train. It's the most successful advertising engine in the history of the planet. Like I want to keep getting the most out of it and I don't really worry about, you know, a high percent of our spend being there, but we're constantly in pursuit of new levers and new channels to pull. So we've launched onto ctv, deployed it through a house test, starting to see some good success there. We obviously do some investment in internal creative and long form YouTube videos, which I think is a great form of arbitrage through longer form assets serving on YouTube. I've seen since my Dollar Shave Club days that long form on YouTube typically sees a little bit of a CPM efficiency and so you can use that and ladder that into some incremental performance. So unlocking new marketing channels has been a really big focus for this next stage of growth. And it's easier to start to unlock new things because it makes meta work better for you as well. You know what I mean? Meta doesn't have to do the introduction and the convincing and the getting you to purchase. Meta can kind of do its thing and not have to be relied on to handle all portions of the funnel. And then I would say that just getting certain teams to work really well together is going to be key to the next stage of growth. Like the influencer team and the paid team and just getting that wiring really, really tight and dialed. I think we're all really excited about what we're seeing from partnerships and whitelisting ads and that the same applies to groon. So just making sure that we have great sops and systems there for build out and then again figuring out some of those strategic bets, right? Is it campaigns, is it flavor launches, is it collabs? I'm trying to figure out ways to prop up the ceiling so that everybody else can start to work on the tactics that can support these bigger bets to unlock new audiences for us.

[Connor Dalt]

I think that's, that's a great answer. I, I always when because I had a tough time like figuring out my role for a long time and like where to zoom in, where to zoom out. And now I feel like I've, I figured it out and I think what you just said I connect with because the way the framework I, I take to my role is like my job and I think really all of our job is to like unlock new high performing marketing strategies, right? Generally speaking. And like I think it often requ. Someone like someone in our role to lead the charge on that, like, hey, what is, what is a better YouTube strategy look like? Like, and it requires that like that marketing leader to kind of come in and at least drive a lot of that rollout and then measure if it works or not. But like if you've measured, if you've tried it and you've Been a leader in rolling that out and it works. It's then your role to like delegate that to the team to run it in an ongoing way and say, all right, like we validated this, but now the team is actually the subject matter experts are the one who are going to go and really make this thing. Hum. Right. Like if, if you, Connor, drove forward this idea of like this unique fiber angle that really hits, but then you're going to be like, well now team, you're, it's your job to make it. You know, maybe it's 80 right now, but you got to get it to 99. So it's like, it's almost like innovate, measure, delegate and then like just repeat that process over and over and over and over again. You're constantly triaging like, where's the, where's the next opportunity? Like my hand, like my involvement in the sweepstakes this year, while it's still a, it's still a good amount, it's like so much less than last year because last year was the first time we built it out and we validated it and now the team knows how to, how to optimize it. But now it's like where's the next, where's the next opportunity to go in and like innovate and roll out something new? Whereas like, you don't need to go and like, like Chad's often talked about Claire, who is your, I think your media buyer and she's, she's a beast. Like, you don't need to go and like insert yourself too much in the day to day of what she's already uniquely like, probably honestly better at you at this point because she lives it and breathes it every day. But if you can go and give her more local maximums to, to optimize towards, like, you're also unlocking her to do even better work, which is kind of what I'm hearing, hearing you say 100.

[Chad]

I'm surrounded by people so much better at their jobs than I am. I think the other, the other thing. I'm curious if your orgs are like this. I've certainly worked at places that are like idea black holes and everybody's got it. Oh, I've got this great idea to unlock scale, performance, step change, wins, whatever and such and such function. And then the ability to translate that into executing is always where I think orgs get tripped up or the ability to prioritize and try to try to light up ideas. And I think that's a major place that I've tried to participate is just like encouraging those ideas and saying, hey, don't just tell me about this thing. Why don't you go try to put a little bit of it into motion, See if there's any signal that comes fact that says this is a good idea for us or not. And then I'll help put resources behind the pursuit of this. So I'm curious for you guys. You know, Cody Jones wrote, I feel like I've heard you say before that, like, you're a big ideas guy and you want a really good team of operators and executors. Have you started to kind of try to surround yourself with people that are also bringing ideas to the table and started to delegate that away from yourself a little bit as well?

[Connor McDonald]

Depends on. On what role? No, probably. Probably on. Yeah, like, creative, definitely. Like, I'm not involved in, you know, I'm involved in like, the new stuff. Like what I'll probably get really involved in like one to two things, like across the org, across marketing that I think are like, top priorities at the time. So, like, this Persona stuff I'm. I'm very involved in and I'll like, come up with ideas of like, guys.

[Connor Dalt]

Like, we need to do this.

[Connor McDonald]

This is what I see other brands doing. Like, let's meet about this weekly. Like, let's all come to the table with it. So I definitely have a good team of like, director growth and senior director creative strategy who will bring those ideas to the table. I'm not doing like, for executing on them them. So I'd say it's like collaborative. Right. I'm not like, telling them what to go execute on, but I'm not. Not involved in it. So yeah, I'll probably be across like 1 to 2 where like, YouTube right now is a really big focus. So definitely trying to like, drive that home. But other parts of the org, like retail, I'm like, cool. What do you need? You know what I mean? I'm like, like. So I think it just depends on, like, knowing your strengths and also knowing, like, where you can get involved and. And where you should be involved. So, yeah, I think it depends. I'm still like, like collaborative and not just like, completely delegating it. I think that's, you know, every. Everyone's got their different. Their different take on the whole founder mode thing. I'm definitely more on the, you know, the founder mode type thing. I think there's pros and cons of each, but, like, I'm not kind of just big. All right, guys, like, here's your budget. What do you need? I'll see you in, in a month. That's just, that's just not me and like that's not our, our culture.

[Chad]

Yeah.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah.

[Chad]

What about you?

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah, I'm curious like how you've, how you've. I agree. Like it can be really hard to get buy in on a new idea if like all the pla. The stakeholders that need to contribute to it aren't aware of it or bought in on it or whatever it is. We've done some things I think internally to, to help with that process. But yeah. Connor, what about, what about you? Because you have a very like I chatted with some of your team at, at Meta like Jimmy and Chris and they're awesome. Like they're super sharp marketers and I'm sure they have loads of good ideas.

[Cody Jones]

No, for sure. I mean where we've been at. Well, actually let me say to.

[Chad]

I'll jump back quickly.

[Cody Jones]

I liked your, your phrase earlier. Connor Rolane. Innovate, measure, delegate. I think one trap that we've fallen into at Ridge is not properly measuring. I think we've got a ton of ideas and we'll be like, that's like innovation. It's like boom, we're doing something new and different and now you guys are doing it and then we don't properly like reflect on whether that was like a net benefit or, or really made any impact at all. So that's one thing we've fallen into that job. We're trying to get better at that like self reflection reporting piece that I think is like really, really key. And when you're moving fast it's very easy to like commit to doing new things and then delegating that and that becomes processized and like you're just doing it and like you, you, you miss the part where you're supposed to be improving the business. So I think that's been a learning lesson for us where I think I'm strong. I. We have, I have a fantastic team. I think we are best. The, the way the team's built now with all of our new categories, with all the newness with things like sweepstakes, with things like Marquez Brownlee. We haven't had like a lack of ideas and I think what, where my time is mostly focused and I think what I'm pretty good at is really executing on it at a high level. Like again there's. Whether it's from own channels to ecom to performance to creative, like we're. There's a lot of moving Pieces there that just have to be marching in the same direction. If you want to get a really cool. We're preparing right now for the iPhone 17 launch where we'll have a new phone case. It's like that's where my time and energy has gone to the most. Just as we've had such massive expansion over the last two years. So I've been less of an ideas guy, more of like a screwing around in notion and spreadsheets and making sure we're hitting the deadlines at the quality that we need.

[Connor McDonald]

Do you think you are like, that is your natural skill set or you think you. You are good at both? Somewhere in between, like, whatever. And you just like, that's what your. Your company needed right now?

[Cody Jones]

I think that's what I think that's. I think that's where I'm best suited to work at Ridge right now. I also really like it. I have talked about, not on this podcast, but Hero Dreams of Sushi, the documentary. Are you guys familiar?

[Connor Dalt]

No. You have talked about this on this podcast.

[Chad]

Oh, okay.

[Cody Jones]

Yeah. It's like my favorite thing. Hero's famous for just showing up 75 years making the same sushi every day, like just incrementally better. And he's not. I guess there are new ideas involved in that, but he's not like reinventing sushi. He's just making incredibly good, relatively simple sushi. And that's what I want to emulate at Ridge. And I've been on that. That beat for like 18 months now.

[Connor Dalt]

But you also have great ideas. I mean, you're always. I feel. I feel like you're always sharing. Interesting, thoughtful. I mean. Yeah. Like, who came up with the idea to like, who does your branding on your sweepstakes? Because that's one of the things I'm like always so impressed with. And I'm always on the edge of my seat. Seat to ac what you're gonna give away. But b, like, you guys just always have such compelling, unique branding with your sweepstakes. It always feels different. There's. It's like viscerally, you go to ridge.com right now and something's happening. Like, you don't even need to read the content to know that something's happening. So, like, whose idea is that? Whose idea is it to do two cars?

[Cody Jones]

Like, yeah, totally. Well, like the.

[Connor McDonald]

The.

[Cody Jones]

The graphic treatment is what we call it. Like, that is a form of what. Like, that's finding the. That's an incremental improvement. That's different. That's like, oh, We've been given the sweepstakes. Now we're going to make it as good as possible where, like Connor Dalt said, propping up the ceiling. Okay, the ceiling's been propped up for us. We're going to make it as good as possible with this awesome graphic treatment, a great partnership plan. We've got this unique retention strategy. That's where my time and energy is going right now. You know, Sean decided we're going to give away 300,000 Lamborghini Stado. So it's like, okay, that's. That is in many ways propping up the ceiling. And then my job's to, like, try to maximize that opportunity.

[Connor Dalt]

Yep. Yep.

[Connor McDonald]

If you know me, you know how cheap I am and how much I love saving money. This year is all about cutting costs and staying lean. You've seen me talk about it on Twitter. I cannot stand watching great D2C brands, even mediocre ones, get ripped off by SaaS vendors in 2025. So many of them are charging way too much over promising and underd delivering. And so I can't stand to see it. So I don't want to see it happen to you. I absolutely won't have it happening to me. You've also seen that I'm all in on AI. And both those reasons are why I love Rich Panel so much. It's about half the price of the beautiful software that we used before it was built specifically with AI in mind. We made the switch to Rich Panel right before Black Friday last year, and I almost regret not switching sooner. We had zero downside. The implementation was pretty immediate, which actually shocked me. I was a little worried about it, not gonna lie. But it just went off without a hitch. We saved money. We leveled up our CX at the same time. So here's our numbers. We cut our CCX team from 18 to 10 agents since. Not before Black Friday, but since onboarding to Rich Panel, with our order volume staying the same or even going up, our CSAT has stayed rock solid at 4.2 out of 5. I'd like it a little bit better, but that's. That's stuff that we can do. AI is handling 70% of the tickets, which is awesome. So our ticket to order ratio has gone way down from about 40% to 14%. So we have fewer full timers. Our revenue employee has gone up. We don't need as many people to get back to people and able to be a little bit more strategic with where we allocate our resources. So if your current CF CX Software needs more people, is more expensive than you want to pay and has some janky AI solution. I highly recommend that you check out Rich Panel. Rich panel guarantees a 30% ticket reduction in the first 60 days or your money back again. It's super easy to switch. They take care of data migration, staff training, all that good stuff. So you can go live in under 14 days. So check out richpanel.com and tell them you heard about them from the Marketing Operators podcast.

[Connor Dalt]

I want to end maybe with this, this question that I think think leads off this last topic. Well, but so you've been at grins for about half a year, a little less I think you said. So what are the, some of the most impactful projects that you've worked on that you've like innovated in and have like driven the team to, to execute on or that you've actually led yourself and then like how have you measured some of these things? And, and are you finding success with some of these new projects? Like I know the, I, I saw the, and we were texting about it and I, I saw it come out publicly now, so I think I can mention it. But like you guys did this massive, this massive study, right? I think that was a huge, a huge project.

[Chad]

The Human Clinical study.

[Connor Dalt]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So like, like, like could you speak to like some of that and any of the other like projects that you felt have, that you've really like driven and, and have had an impact and how you've measured them?

[Chad]

Yeah, I mean I, I think it all starts from trying to set a vision for where we want the brand to go. And to me we want to be an anti supplement supplement brand. There are not many in the space that you feel are fun and you can feel human connection to. So I think we've got such a great opportunity to take playbooks that other industries have been deploying forever. You know, beverage and CPG and suitcases and wallets and I think we're going to try to apply that to the, to the supplement space. And so arbitraging attention through a fun and engaging brand and world class performance and brand and influencer and all of those pieces. But then back it with hey, this is a real product that can do really great things for me. And so that's where the Human Clinical came into, into play. Connor, I didn't lead the Human clinical, right. We, we hired an, an outside reputable firm to, to run that double blind placebo for us.

[Connor Dalt]

But the marketing of it, right, like the front end, like okay, we did this thing. But this thing is nothing if we can't get it in like in front of people.

[Chad]

Exactly. So yeah, my team sits together and we put together a rollout plan for how we want to introd every piece of it right from Chad's LinkedIn post to what the company was going to be posting to how the site experience would be built out to support it, to ads and emails that would reference it, where in the welcome flow we would start to introduce the human clinical. So yes, all of those pieces were, were intentional. I played a, I played a heavy hand there. The other focus of mine is just playbooks and sops for stuff that we believe are going to be repeated business bets. For us it sounds like you guys do it for sweepstakes and things like you want to just remember the little edge cases that tripped you up as soon as you encountered them. So for us, FL flavor launches are going to be a really big one for us as well as collab. So there's more to come from Grooms Grooms throughout the the rest of the year. So I've been really trying to, you know, work with our teams to put together key documents. I, I gleaned so much great intel from you guys on your go to market episode. So much of that resonated. Con McDonald, thank you for all the wisdom you bestowed on me for that but I've spent a lot of time there and so I think for the, the launches that you're going to see coming out of Grins for the rest of the year, that's, that's been a really big endeavor for internal teams. Yeah, I think that those are really big points of emphasis and then some of those channel launches getting CTD off the ground and what are the other ways that we can drive Upper funnel? How do we leverage partnerships and activations and do those thoughtfully to unlock new audiences? Those are some of the bigger cross functional initiatives that I just played a little bit of a stronger role in just because again, it requires prioritization and resourcing from so many teams. So. So that was kind of the missing piece in the team and hopefully the team's felt that way since I've arrived. Just being able to actually keep us all sort of aligned on the same things.

[Cody Jones]

I've. I've got. Can I ask one? It's kind of the reverse of that question. I imagine jumping over to Groons, working with a bunch of world class people. Super interesting. If you were to go back to Hexclad or not Hexclad Caraway tomorrow come to Hexclad.

[Chad]

What was Hexclad? Turn off Shopify by. No.

[Cody Jones]

What would you, what would you take from G.R.

[Chad]

Back to Caraway?

[Cody Jones]

Like, I imagine you just got exposed to so many new strategies and processes and things like that. And is there anything where you're like, oh, I would have loved to have done that at the cookware brand.

[Chad]

It's a good question. I feel that one of the things I'd maybe take back to, to Caraway is I think it's very hard to convince Medical that your products, if they're all sort of housed on the same site, have different buying audiences. And so for Caraway, we spent so much time trying to get stainless steel pan sold and some of those products that maybe have a bit of a masculine tilt and get out of the world of ceramic, but it just felt like we were always sort of circling the same drains of customers and no matter what we tried, it felt very hard to break out of that. I know Connor McDonald, you've spoken a lot about how you guys approach that architecturally within Meta and things like that. So I was always hesitant, hesitant to like fully pull the trigger and make that happen. And I have to give Jordan his flowers from Caraway. He was always the one pushing, like, we need to go, we need to go really, like shake the, shake the bottle over here and switch it up and try New Pixel and all that stuff. I think I would go back with a little bit more of that mindset that's like, make a new IG handle, make a new Pixel, make a new site. Really try to just give Meta all the indication that it needs, that this is a brand new audience as opposed to just sort of like hammering impressions against your existing audience over and over, over.

[Connor Dalt]

And that's from the segmentation of, of brands that you feel that way. Like, nootropes and grooms are totally. I mean there's, there's some overlap and.

[Cody Jones]

Even Groons Kids is a. Is that, that's a different site, I think.

[Chad]

Yeah, same, same domain, just different funnel within the page. But yeah, a lot, a lot of that is, is informed by just what we're discovering with some of those Personas and funnels and how differentiated they can start to feel. And it does feel like sometimes we do unlock an incremental and net new audience and. And that was always a harder thing for us to figure out at Caraway.

[Cody Jones]

Yeah, that's funny. That's a huge can of worms, dude. Meta race.

[Connor McDonald]

You dropped that at the very end.

[Chad]

Yeah, yeah. I wanted to ask you Guys, a question because we've been talking about like being leaders and I think we all have an inclination to be hands on, you know what I mean? I learned a lot. I read the Elon Musk Walter Isaacson book where he would have these moments of surges. I don't know if you guys have ever read where he would find a part of the business that was really needed getting attention and he would go just like full force and help to make sure that that got, you know, those, those wheels got back on the tracks. I do feel like I kind of operate in that way, right, where there's teams or initiatives that I go focus on. And a lot of that was informed by some feedback that I got from Chad. And so I wanted to ask you guys if there's just been impactful feedback that you've received within your orgs or in prior orgs that have been really meaningful to you. Because I've been thinking a lot about feedback, both how to receive it and how to give it. And I'm curious if there's been moments that stick out to you guys in your long and storied careers.

[Connor Dalt]

I remember having a chat with, I think he's the CFO of Huckberry. And I was just asking him because I'm buddies with Richard and Richard was like, you should really chat with our CFO because he's a world class CFO and he was one of the people who really opened up my eyes to this whole like innovate, innovate, like measure, delegate. Because he, his role, he's like, I have all the basic blocking and tackling because he's like CFO slash ops guys, not just cfo. He's like, I have all the basic blocking and tackling of a cfo, right? Like I own the P L, I own budgeting. But he was also a great ops guy. So he would basically, you know, with the team, sort of identify areas of opportunity or areas that really needed to improve. And he would basically, like the terminology of I've heard use is like parachute in to a part of the org and you know, like work on something like whether it's a specific problem or whatever. It was like build out a system, a process to like produce a better outcome than they are currently getting to the extent that they would even like shift reporting into him for like the extent of the project, right? If it was six months or 12 months, like the team would actually report into him and then he would parachute back out and they would actually rewind work who the org shifted into. Or reported into to like continue that going. So that, that was actually like a really impactful conversation. And then I started. I've started like here some overlap with how other people approach that. So that helped me like think about like, hey, where. Where should I be more or less involved at? And like that can change over time. Like it doesn't have to be like I could be more involved in retention for the back half of this year, but then if we do all the things that we think we need to do, like I don't have to be next year. So that, that was a. That's been an impactful conversation that I've like seen repeated and other conversations I've had that was very impactful.

[Cody Jones]

I would, I have one fine example. This would make for a really great episode in the future though, because I'm sure I have way more. We've. I. It's been such a fantastic experience. We've made a number of great hires over the last two years that it's not even via feedback. It's just like absorbing knowledge by like working alongside these people. And the example that I'll give is our CEO who came from Me Undies and was at JP Morgan. So like banking background, like hardcore finance, then was like, basically went like zero to one at Me Undies. So like saw oversaw like really meaningful DTC growth. He does this really great job of like empowering his team to lead and I think I'll over index and like, like I so lead like our weekly. I lead our weekly business review. So I'll like go through a bunch of data and it's like. And that's there's benefits that I'm on the call and I'm the guy and I'm talking about it. And that's the way the organizations work for a really long time. And we're gonna hit this point where I need to be like better empowering and highlighting the team to speak to these things. And I've got a lot of room to grow there, but very much conscious of it and I think that's been a very cool thing to have. Again, not via feedback. Just like I observed it in a call one day. I was like, oh wow, the m. Like the COO sitting back now and like the manager's here running this call and I think I could improve like tenfold in that scenario.

[Chad]

Empowering. So huge. What about you, Cody? No notes. You've never received feedback. Just always like, wow, how we got.

[Connor McDonald]

Like three extra episodes for this to do.

[Chad]

Yeah.

[Connor McDonald]

How long you got? How long Will your wife let you go for.

[Chad]

I hear a little turmoil out in the kitchen?

[Connor McDonald]

Yeah, no, I think along that line, like, similar to Connor, like, I think probably a lot of new leaders will, will do that where like, you know, they have an ego. And I was definitely this way where like, you want to be the one who's speaking and things like that. And I think definitely some feedback I got and also just observing like other leaders and, and other people do it where it's like, I, I try to make a really conscious effort now to ask people on the team, especially junior people like, hey, what do you think? And a lot of this, like, I, I, I've been mentored, hopefully I can say it on a gruin spot, but by Kat Cole, who's CEO of Athletic Greens. And like, she's just like a, a fantastic leader and has like, you know, years and years of like, amazing leadership experience. So like, she, she's done a really good job sharing some stuff with me. But like, the people closest to the action probably have the ideas a lot of the times and just don't have the always like the, the space to speak up and just giving them an opportunity and saying like, what do you think? Like, even if they're pretty junior and they're close to it, I think that's, that's been like, super helpful. So I just try and I think it's become a habit now, but it just took a lot of practice of, of just asking people, like pausing a meeting, especially knowing if you're the most senior person in the room, like, you know, a, you should be speaking less, but also like, you're gonna be the one who can set the, the vibe and the intention of the meeting. And so you're the one who can actually pause and say like, hey, Connor, what do you think about this? Yeah, and I, I found that that is really helpful and has just led to so many more constructive meetings. Like, even I'll give you an example. Like, I'm in like product meetings and Bobby's in them and like, but it's get like, usually a product team is like, okay, whatever you want. Like, they don't say that, but it's kind of like that and I'll pause. And obviously I can do it because I'm her son, but I'm just like, hey, whatever. Like, and I'll even go to our associate because we have this like, associate. It was like Gen Z and it was like all of the beauty products on the market, right? And I'm just like, hey, what do you think and she's like, no, actually I really like this and like it can just like shift the tone of a meeting of the direction of it. So that's been just super simple but really helpful one.

[Cody Jones]

I love that.

[Chad]

Yeah, we're a big no rules rules company at Grunds. If you guys have read the Netflix Culture book and feedback can come from anyone and anywhere within the org and I think that's so important for us as leaders to make sure that that's adopted because otherwise yeah, Cody, people stay silent and we probably have all missed out on million dollar ideas from people lower in the ladder despite being afraid to kind of speak out and change direction.

[Connor Dalt]

Sweet.

[Connor McDonald]

I love like it.

[Connor Dalt]

All right, that was a fun one with Connor D from Groons. I think we successfully leveled up and and one up the the Operators podcast with Chad from last week. Thank you to our sponsors, Motion Pression, AI after Style Rich Panel and Revo. And if you're enjoying the show, make sure to like subscribe and share with your marketing friends.