How Ridge’s Annual Revenue Hit +$250M & Sean Became a Dad

Summary

Operators Podcast – June 17, 2026

Episode: “How Ridge’s Annual Revenue Hit +$250M & Sean Became a Dad”

Hosts: Sean Frank (Ridge CEO), Mike Beckham (Simple Modern CEO), Matt Bertulli (Pela Case/Lomi Founder), Jason Panzer (HexClad President)
Theme: An inside look at how Sean Frank balanced explosive business growth at Ridge with his new role as a father—covering personal evolution, product innovation, and changing e-commerce landscapes.

---

1. Episode Overview

This episode flips the usual script: Sean Frank, usually the interviewer, becomes the focus as his co-hosts put him in the hot seat to dissect how Ridge scaled to over $250 million in annual revenue and how Sean’s life transformed after becoming a dad. The discussion blends candid talk about family pressures, product strategy, the realities behind “brand magic,” lessons from market titans like Shark Ninja, and granular tactical insights for scaling e-commerce businesses.

---

2. Sean Frank on Growth—At Home and at Ridge

(00:00–07:48)

Family Life & The True Cost of Parenthood

• Financial Realities: “My number one tip for having kids is make sure you have lots of money... having a kid, you’re easily over the course of your life, it’s $500,000 to a million dollars.” – Sean Frank (01:20)
• Real-time Impact: The hosts highlight Sean’s need to change podcast schedules for his son's weekly doctor appointments—an honest nod to the unpredictable nature of parenting.
• Work-Life Adaptation: “I’ve tried to keep it as status quo as possible. I probably missed a good, like, 10 days of actual work… but there’s less meetings I have to be involved in. I just told everyone I’m going to skip... I don’t work Wednesdays because it’s cast day.” – Sean Frank (06:54)
• Reflections on Timing: Sean originally wanted to sell Ridge before having a family but realized “you can’t wait for external factors to dictate how you live your life.” (03:52)
• Leverage and Constraints:
  “Figuring out how to have leverage in your life… the only way you develop the ability to really have leverage is by imposing constraints… It helps you to be sharper in your decision making and there’s a lot less wasted motion.” – Mike Beckham (06:57)

---

3. Time Management & The CEO's True Role

(09:29–14:13)

Schedules of Scale

• Sean’s Calendar: Sean prefers open-ended hours, standing meetings only for key activities, creating blocks for deep work and ideation (09:50).
• Busy ≠ Productive: “It just depends on what type of CEO you want to be… I’m more of a firefighter … bringing in tools to make the business better, new product categories, celebrity partnerships, new promo ideas.” – Sean Frank (12:00)
• Pioneering Mindset:
  • “All of the pioneering is directly driven by me.” – Sean Frank (13:15)
  • “As quickly as you can, you get out of like the repeatable processes and you’re just on the frontier and you’re just checking back with home base.” – Mike Beckham (13:20)

---

4. Product Innovation & Launches: The Ridge Playbook

(15:18–24:01)

Celebrity Collaborations & Product Expansion

• Case Study—Marques Brownlee:
  • Ridge’s YouTuber partnership led to new tech products: “12 months after you’re hearing this, we’ll do nine figures in tech revenue that did not exist 18 months ago.” – Sean Frank (16:19)
  • The Marquis deal is “way more symbiotic” versus classic celebrity endorsements: “He wants to make products, will help him do that…he films himself…in the 12 months after you’re hearing this, we'll do nine figures in tech revenue that did not exist 18 months ago.” (17:20)

Chasing Market Pull

• Rings & Chains: “We have something like 14% of all men’s engagement rings… Now we’re going after the heartland market… cowboy chains… very rarely do you come out with a new product category, and day one, you’re doing tens of thousands of dollars.” (18:40)
• Drinkware & Future Bets: “We’re pairing it with a celebrity… backyard barbecue type stuff… all on the roadmap right now.” (20:03)
• Learning from Misses:
  • “Here’s the problem with watches. Nobody buys them.”
  • “We did T-shirts. T-shirts suck, too. True Classic makes amazing T-shirts for $8. The average consumer just simply doesn’t care.” – Sean Frank (22:08)

Internal Culture & Conflict

• “They push back. Then do they actually tell you, like, that’s a terrible idea, Sean?” – Matt Bertulli (24:01)
• “Yeah… I wanted to sell soap. I’m like, look, people buy soap. He’s like, dude, we sell wallets. Why are people going to want to buy soap here? …” – Sean Frank

---

5. Brand vs. Product—What Actually Wins?

(24:39–34:36)

Brand “Moats” vs. Shark Ninja Mentality

• Multiples & M&A Landscape: Brands with high LTV, especially in supplements/health/wellness, are trading at 12-19x EBITDA, but “over 70% of deals since 2022 have not got a bidder.” (25:19)
• “There’s a bunch of bad businesses out there and they all believed that brand was special… Shark Ninja has drinkware…phone cases … If people will buy it, they will try to sell it.” (26:59)
• “Want to be Shark Ninja? Try a bunch of stuff. Brand is shorthand for very good earnings, very good growth, very good EBITDA.” – Sean Frank (30:19)

Retail Power & The Unilever/PN&G Model

• “The more shelf space [Shark Ninja] take up, the more important they become…” – Mike Beckham (32:26)
• “They’re a fast follower of products… what Shark Ninja promises is, hey, we’ll have a new thing every six months that customers are going to want…” – Sean Frank (41:16)

---

6. LTV, Subscription as a “Hedge”, and Gut Culture

(35:08–41:16)

Ridge’s LTV Challenge & the Gut Culture Story

• “Our 12 month repeat rate is like 1.2. Yeti… is 1.3… Nobody’s coming back and buying wallets from us.” – Sean Frank (36:14)
• Ridge launched Gut Culture—a direct-to-consumer fiber supplement—as “a good hedge to make at the time, understanding the challenges to the core business.” (37:31)
• “It’s been fun to learn how subscriptions work … I just told you chains might do $80 million, so powder doing a couple million is less exciting. But it was a good hedge.” (37:54)

Internal Debate: Brand Extension Limits

• “Why not put Gut Culture in Ridge? That is me losing debates internally.” (39:41)
• On supplement branding: “Maybe that’s one you don’t want to mess up… If we make a supplement and it tastes disgusting, maybe people aren’t going to buy a second one from us.”

---

7. Product Validation, Sizing Bets & Editing Down

(42:44–54:51)

Product Launch Discipline

• “You have to validate two things…product quality and is there organic demand.” – Mike Beckham (42:44)
• “We size our bets based on units. ... Every new thing we launch is basically $350,000. Chains…was probably $100,000 or $150,000 bet.” – Sean Frank (45:45)
• Lessons from mistakes: “I’m usually overly enthusiastic about everything we put on the board… It’s got us into problems in the past where I buy way too much.”

Editing Product Catalog

• “You have to constantly be adding things to your company and editing things away… If all you’re doing is launching new things… you get the equivalent of scope creep.” – Mike Beckham (50:37)
• Ridge is moving toward “cutting stuff sooner that is underperforming or just isn’t living up to the potential.”

The Mindset Shift

• “Every time you launch a business, every time you launch a product, the most likely outcome is that it’s going to die.” – Mike Beckham (53:56)

---

8. DTC vs. Wholesale and the Realities of Physical Retail

(56:20–64:38)

Channel Fit & Constraints

• “Our wallet business does eight figures, but barely. It’s a pathetic eight figures in wholesale. Because our wallet’s too expensive to sell in [places like] Target.” – Sean Frank (56:44)
• Jewelry: “No wholesale opportunity for my jewelry business… Tech is the exception where I’ll be in 4,000 doors by end of 2027.” (58:03)

Retail Strategy

• “If you’re non-consumable, you’re already in a small part of the store… That’s why it’s like, okay, they’re not going to buy my wallets. There is the back tech section… maybe you’ll see us there soon.” – Sean Frank (63:28)
• Retailers are turning back to brands “that have a lot of heat on the Internet and specifically social media… it’s creating some real opportunities for some brands that we’re close to.” – Mike Beckham (61:50)

---

9. Exit Multiples & Market Realities

(64:38–67:47)

• “If you’re distressed by any measure of that word—your revenue’s not growing or you’re not profitable—you are not going to get a bid. There’s literally no buyer.” – Sean Frank (65:12)
• If you’re growing 20%+ and have 5%+ EBITDA: “You’re probably going to get a bid for 5 to 7x that EBITDA number… A business like Ridge would get bids for 10x EBITDA.” (65:12)
• Health/wellness/beauty can push multiples even higher, but most businesses should expect lower valuations.

---

10. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “All of the pioneering is directly driven by me.” – Sean Frank (13:15)
• “Having a kid, you’re easily over the course of your life, it’s $500,000 to a million dollars.” – Sean Frank (01:20)
• “Shark Ninja is opportunistic in a way that… if people will buy it, they will try to sell it. And if it fails… they’re going to try something else.” – Sean Frank (27:02)
• “If you want something done, you give it to somebody busy.” – Matt Bertulli (08:18)
• “Brand is shorthand for very good earnings, very good growth, very, very good EBITDA.” – Sean Frank (30:19)
• “The more shelf space [a brand] takes up, the more important they become…” – Mike Beckham (32:26)
• “You launch a product, [and] most likely it will fail. That’s okay. The ones that work, 10x, 100x.” – Mike Beckham (53:56)

---

Summary Takeaways

This episode is a masterclass in honest, high-stakes e-commerce operations. Sean Frank shares not just the mechanics but the mindset behind Ridge’s growth and his own personal evolution as a founder-turned-dad. The frank talk about product experimentation, the limits of brand, learning from mistakes, and confronting the real M&A landscape is invaluable for operators aiming to build businesses that endure—not just brands that trend.

Ideal For:

• Founders/operators scaling DTC or omnichannel brands
• Teams working on product launch, brand strategy, and retail expansion
• Anyone wrestling with personal/work/life balance at the helm of a fast-growing company

---

For more from the Operators, visit [their site] or subscribe for upcoming episodes featuring deep-dive case studies from other e-commerce titans.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the operators podcast. Today you have Matt, Sean, and myself, and we are going to be talking about the life of Sean Frank. A few weeks ago, Shawn put me on the hot seat and asked me a bunch of questions about my business, my dreams for the future. Today we're turning it around and we're doing the same exact thing with Sean. This will be a great episode. We're going to talk about new products, how you grow a company that's already pretty big, and. And then how you do all that while your family's growing. I think you're going to really enjoy it. So without further ado onto the show, Sean, I'm going to kick off here. It seems like a huge theme of your life over the last few months has been growth. Your family's grown, Ridge is growing. You're growing into other product verticals. What. What's been your experience over the last few months?

[B]

Well, you know, I just got a. I got a pool, so I'm just finishing that right now. So that's been a big. Has been a big update. No overhead's growing.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I haven't thought about growth as the central theme, but I think it makes a ton of sense. Look, me, I've been with my wife like 10 years, and we knew we were going to have kids. So glad we started that and got out of the way. We had a great time before kids. We're having a great time with kids. My son's a couple months old now. You know my tips and, like, I think I tweet some of these out and people are going to hate hearing it. And I'm sorry if it comes off as pretentious or makes me look like an. My number one tip for having kids is make sure you have lots of money. So, like, I totally get why there's a fertility crisis. It's just expensive. Like, you know, not only is giving birth expensive, like, all of the medical care around is expensive. And then if you want to have a job, like, I have a nanny now, that's expensive. Have a night nurse to take care of him when he's sleeping. That's expensive. Like, all these things just add up to just be incredibly expensive. So I think, dude, if you're having a kid, you're easily over the course of your life. It's 500,000 to a million dollars. So just you. If you're listening to this, you probably have no problem making money. That's why you listen to the operators podcast. You're in. You're in it. You're grinding but, yeah, like, luckily, we have resources. It's made a lot easier. My son. My son had to have surgery. So, like, all those things just add up. Like, oh, it's expensive.

[A]

That's worth adding that.

[D]

Like, we.

[A]

We've moved our recordings of this, and Sean's moved his schedule around because his son's having to get a cast on every Wednesday. And that's just the reality with kids is that, like, things happen. And it seems like you've been really transparent in sharing that in some of our groups.

[C]

Sean, have you. Have you changed your schedule a lot with the arrival of the baby? Like, and, like, your involvement in the company? Has any of that changed, or is it just sort of status quo because you have the help?

[B]

I've tried to keep it as status quo as possible. I probably missed a good, like, 10 days of actual work. But my wife would mind sharing this. Like, yes, my son had to have surgery. He's. He's healthy now. He's going to be totally fine. But, like, it is. He's going to have casts for, like, four months or whatever. And when you're a baby, you're grown so much, you need to change your cast all the time. So just. He's going to the doctor at least once a week, usually twice or three times a week. But then on top of that, my wife had a really hard postpartum on her body. So, like, while dealing with the baby, the reason why I need so much help is my wife had to go to the ER like, twice. And I have, like, a concierge doctor for my wife. So, like, there's just that goes on in your life that you don't expect to happen. It's a miracle. There's so many people walking around healthy. You know what I mean? Like, so many things can just go wrong. So it's a miracle it's all working out.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, it would have been tough to live a hundred or several hundred years ago when we didn't have any of this stuff because, like, your bodies are just fragile, so. Okay, be. Before we go forward, I actually want to ask another question about having a kid. How did you decide that for your. Your marriage, for you and your wife, that this was the right time in your career to have kids? How did that conversation go?

[B]

Oh, well, for a lot. For years, I wanted to sell Ridge first. Like, I just knew Rich is, like a. It's a very busy job. Um, and I like to give more time to, like, having a kid and, like, all the attention it takes. But it did the cards didn't work out like that. And you can't wait for external factors to dictate how you're gonna live your life. And what it comes down to is other people have kids. Like, I'm not the first CEO of a mid, of a mid sized E Commerce brand to have a kid. All you guys have kids, right? So it's like, oh, like I'm not saying oh, I have to wait till I can go to space or something. I'm not waiting for like some technology to come out to make my life easier. It's like, oh, I should just have the kid. So, you know, we ended up, we got married at a courthouse. But we always wanted to like do something, get everybody together. Her grandparents are like in their 80s, like they're not going to be around forever. So we wanted to fly everybody down to Mexico. We did that last year. And then sooner resided and I was like, okay, let's not. We're going to have a kid this year. So that wrapped up like May 2025. And then we probably got pregnant like July 2025.

[A]

Wow, that's pretty fast. That's the thing about getting pregnant is you just have no idea like what the timeline it's going to be.

[B]

Well, yeah, and we, we'll probably cut. This has nothing to do with E Commerce. I don't people care that much about my life.

[A]

But I actually think that's partially what makes it interesting though, Sean, is that it is like a departure a lot of times. I mean, I don't know, we can let Aaron and others weigh in. But like, I think, I think like the idea of like winning your career, was it the right time to have a kid? And you're like, well, I wanted to sell the company first, but that's not how life works. I think that stuff's super interesting to the people that, that listen to the pod. Or at very least it's interesting to me.

[C]

Sean, there's 100% somebody who wants to know what underwear brand you wear.

[A]

Dude, so do not answer. Sure. It's interesting.

[B]

Yeah, so we, we had a very easy time conceiving and then we had a very easy pregnancy. Like my wife, there was no cravings, there was no hospital trips. Like, there was like, it was super, super easy. And so I was telling everybody, I'm like, dude, this having a kid thing is going to be a slam dunk, bro. It's like it's, it's so easy. You know, like even, you know, the week before we were giving birth, me and my Wife were at a party, just hanging out. Like, she, she had a. One of the most seamless pregnancies you can have. But then giving birth, which is really hard on her. She's. She's a small woman. She's like five feet tall. She lost a ton of blood, so she just had like a really hard time coming out of that. And then obviously my son had his ankles messed up, so she had like cast and surgeries and all this type of stuff. So post I was boost. It was definitely more difficult. But, you know, I think I was able to be as supportive as possible if I was here or if I sold the business. Like, it didn't really. It didn't really matter. Like, you're as busy as you make yourself, right? So there's just a lot. There's less meetings have to be involved in. I just told everyone I'm going to skip. Basically, I don't work Wednesdays because it's like cast day. And yeah, it's all worked out.

[A]

So I've got a theory about this, that most things in life, the way that you get better at them is by doing more of them. But that figuring out how to have leverage in your life is the one thing that doesn't work that way. That the only way you develop the ability to really have leverage in your life is by implying imposing constraints, which where you just don't allow yourself to put more than X amount of money or X amount of time towards something. And what's interesting, when you do that, in this case, you're saying it's. It's because of being a father. What you find is that it actually helps you to be sharper in your decision making and there's a lot less wasted motion and you're just able to make your hours be a lot more effective, I guess is the word. Uh, like, I've been told that they've done studies where the most effective people are the people that have had multiple kids. And then when the kids are older and it's like, wow, that totally makes sense because it just kind of forces you to think about how to get the most out of the hours you do have to put towards stuff.

[C]

Yeah, the classic sort. Go ahead, Sean.

[B]

I was gonna say I was listening to a podcast with Mark Rober, who's like a famous YouTuber, and he was talking about how he thought it was so cool Jeff Bezos got jacked at 50. And he's like, damn, I hope I can get jacked one day when I'm 50 years old. And he Was like, I should do it now. And that's kind of like the having kids thing. And it's like, yeah, what? What are we waiting on? It's like some mythical thing that could happen. Your life would be so much better if this. This random thing happens. Not in your control. Just do it now. Matt, what were you gonna say?

[C]

Say, we all have people in our company. It's the classic if you want something done, you give it to somebody busy, right? Like, that's usually the person who is the most, you know, capable.

[D]

Am I the guy? Fingers on keyboard. Building software with Claude code? No, and I hate when people ask me that, but I love that my team is now able to use Claude and Claude code with Fulfillment. They're doing some incredible things that just weren't possible six months ago. I don't know if any other ERP is doing this too, but Fulfill has a new CLI tool and an mcp. So my team can open up Claude on their phone and ask for information out of Fulfill. They can I code custom dashboards right in Fulfill. We can hook open claw up to Fulfill now to do work for us. If you're excited about the future of AI in your brand, this is such an obvious place to leverage it. All of our supply chains are complicated beasts. Fulfillment and Fulfill has just made it even easier to improve yours. This is real money stuff.

[C]

I'm actually curious, like, do you guys keep John, do you keep your calendar? Are you. I think you're more like me. You're a big, like, lots of free time in the calendar person versus, like, everything is, like, scheduled that I'm constantly getting everything sort of like I'm filling every slot. Just from a time management perspective. Like, would you call yourself busy or.

[B]

No, I have. I have lots of free hours in the day. Me and Connor are the opposite that way. Connor's in a lot of meetings, right? He's in. You know, he. He manages a huge team on his side and he's doing it weekly touch bases with, like, every single one of them, right? I'm in standup five days a week that everyone's in, and then I'm in. You know, Thursdays we do all of our product stuff, so it's probably three hours of meetings. Friday, I have one touch base with my COO Wednesday. I don't remember what we used to do on Wednesdays, and I don't do that stuff anymore either. But yeah, I would say, like, at least five hours every day. I have open blocks to do work or think or talk to Connor. Or whatever else I want to do.

[C]

Mike, what's yours? Like, are you like, super structured and like, you know, would you, if I looked at your calendar, would. I think that that's a busy person.

[A]

You definitely would have. For most of my adult life, just bordering on kind of insanity, you know, from the moment I wake up till when I go to bed, like I am, I'm on. It's been in the last year that I've started to kind of run a different. Run a different course. And I basically have Mondays and Fridays totally free on my calendar to work on, whatever. And oftentimes I'll work on, you know, company related stuff, but not always. Sometimes I'll do calls with some of the companies that I advise or I'm on the cap table. Sometimes I'll just do something personal. So I end up having kind of a four day block where I'm really, I really have a ton of freedom from Friday to Monday and then Tuesday as a result, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, like, you know, it's pretty tight. Like I'm, I'm doing a lot of stuff, but I've really, I think it's part of my transition to multiple companies, simple holdings, all of this stuff is that I actually want to have more freedom of movement. Because I think what I found was there's, there's just a, some of the best ideas really require space to kind of germinate. And there would be so many times where I'm like, ah, I do that if I had time or if I had flexibility and I just didn't. And so I wanted to create more of that. Sean, why do, why do you think you've created your schedule that way?

[B]

It just depends on what type of CEO you want to be. It's like, do you want to be a CEO who's actually like doing and driving work or, you know, I'm more of a firefighter. So it's like if there's a problem, I'm going to come in and try to fix it the best I can or I'll apply resources. But most of my job is bringing in tools to make the business better. So if it's a new product category or, or if it's a celebrity partnership or if it's, you know, a new promo idea or whatever, like that's the types of stuff I'm bringing in. Right? Like we, you know, by the time this is out, it probably won't be released. So we're doing a big summer event with a celebrity. Right? So I had to like, I had to Come up with the idea. Then I had to put somebody on it. Then I had to like, look at all the pitches. I had to approve the budgets. And like, that is something that it's not normal course of business. It's a new toy being brought to like the, the sandbox or like, it's a new avenue that, like, there's no one actually to. To run with that until you invented and bring it in. That's what I do with CEO.

[C]

How much of Ridge, like the, the new comes from you? I don't know what else to call it. Let's just call it the new.

[A]

The pioneer. I would call it pioneering.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

How much of that is you versus and other. And are there other people who, if it's not just you, like, who are the other people that do a lot of that work for you guys?

[B]

I, I do not want to sound arrogant. All of the pioneering is directly driven by me.

[A]

I, I don't think that's arrogant at all. I, I'm coming to the conclusion that that's actually like what a founder should do. That, like, as quickly as you can, you get out of like the repeatable processes and you're just on the frontier and you're just checking back with home base. You know, like, that's the way that I think about it is like I leave camp and I'm on the frontier and I'm out there gathering knowledge, starting new things, doing, settling, you know, the frontier so that settlements and that, you know, there's probably less than, less than 10, probably less than five people in the company that are truly pioneers and that you can replicate a lot of the things I do. But I don't think you can create the ability to go 0 to 1. I think that's a really rare skill set that people have.

[C]

Would you also count product in that, Sean, in pioneering, like new product categories, new product ideas, is that largely you?

[B]

Yeah, and so I'm not doing any of the actual work, but I'm showing up. I'm showing up and being like, I want to do this. You guys need to do this. Right? And then they'll take that kernel of an idea and they'll build on it and they'll shape some away and like, you know, they'll turn it into a masterpiece. But all of the pioneering, I think, starts with me pushing, pushing them to do something. If you're a founder using AI for analytics, you know, the trap. Claude plus BigQuery gets you answers that are fast and wrong or slow and right, never both. The problem isn't your analyst, your data or your tools. It's your business context gap. Sarah's IQ fixes that. Connor, who runs my marketing, cut his reporting time from 10 days to 45 minutes. IQ answers in plain English, built on your business logic, consistent, deterministic and fully transparent with the assumptions in SQL behind every answer. Same answer whether you ask, your CFO asks, or your board asks. And if you're a Cloud user, the IQ MCP is ready to plug in today. Claude. Plus, BigQuery isn't enough. It needs your context. Get it at the Lincoln Show Notes or go to sarisanalytics.com to learn more.

[A]

I want to push you towards talking about all the new products. Gutsy. All this new stuff you're doing. Because I think from the outside looking in, I think that's the most interesting.

[B]

Yeah, A perfect example of, like, the pioneering is the deal with Marques. So, like, I'm like, Yeah, I like YouTube. We should be celebrity owned. Let's get a YouTuber in here. You know, we talked to a bunch of different people. It didn't have to be a YouTuber, but like, in the past we talked to Pedro Pascal. I think I've talked about that publicly. And like, he wanted, I think it was $3 million, or maybe it was $4 million over two years. It was like, it was millions of dollars. And I'm like, cool, what do we get for that? They're like, well, you get to use him in your ads. And I'm like, okay, well, how can we film the ads? They're like, you get one day, one every year, and you have to show up and you have to work around his filming schedul. I'm like, you know, maybe in retrospect, that would have been a good deal for somebody out there, but it just, it didn't make sense for us where the deal with Marques is like, way more symbiotic. Like, he wants to make products will help him do that. He gets, you know, a lot of upside in this business and we can go out there and build something special together. So that was like me pioneering that. I pushed that forward, Right? I'm like, cool. We did Marques. And then a year into it, I'm like, now I want to do tech products. Now we put out, you know, power banks and everything else. That's me telling the product team, hey, build a whole tech suite around Marques. It just makes a ton of sense. And then telling wholesale to go sell it into Walmart, Target and Best Buy. And now in the 12 months after you're hearing this, we'll do nine figures in tech revenue that did not exist 18 months ago. And now it's a hundred million dollars. Right.

[C]

Hold on. Did you do the deal with Marques not knowing that you would go and do tech products?

[B]

No, I mean, we knew we would do some products, but like, it wasn't, you know, we didn't think, hey, we're going to do power banks and phone cases and all this other stuff. Yeah, he wanted to make a backpack. We made wallets together or whatever. I mean, obviously it makes sense to like go into these tech products, but, like, it was very much. There was market pull in that direction after we did it.

[C]

How much time do you get out of Marquez to, to film? Contrast him with, like, Pedro Pascal.

[B]

Yeah. The reason why it's so much better to work with Marquez is we don't have to film him. He films himself all the time.

[C]

He does it all on his own.

[A]

And he's, and he's a pro at it. Like, he's a, he's a pro. He has the credibility. He's a pro at talking about tech gadgets.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

So we get 12 videos a year, 12 social posts a year, and we get four film days a year. But typically he just films himself on those days. We, we've done a couple production shoots where we go out there and film with him. But like, he, he has a team. He can run a sound studio, he can run commercials. Like, he, he typically just does it for us and sent us the footage.

[A]

Okay, so I want to dig deeper here. I mean, it's amazing, by the way, Sean, like, I think really admire it from my point of view that I think when you originally did the deal with Marques, it wasn't exactly as obvious to me that it was worth the, the price that it cost. And I think you've proven that it was worth much, much more than the price. Because you really built a business around Marques. I guess almost like in a way that I didn't necessarily anticipate Ridge going. And one of the things that I hear from you is like just an eagerness to explore a lot of product categories which I share. Let's, let's start here. What are some of the product categories that you're getting into or that you're interested in, but maybe haven't gotten into yet.

[B]

Yeah. So we just dropped chains and, you know, we have a big ring business. It's, it's tens of millions of dollars a year. We have something like 4% of all men's engagement rings or something. Like, it's like a really large percentage of the men's engagement rings market. You know what? Actually, I said four. I think. I think it's actually 14. We sell, like, over 100,000 of these bands. I think there's a million weddings. Like, I think we have a huge percentage of the actual market when it comes to men's engagement rings. And so that's obviously been a big hit. And it's like, okay, for a long time, we didn't want to do jewelry because we thought it was too feminine. It's like, oh, do. Do guys want to wear jewelry? Am I going to have a. Am I going to have a bracelet section of my website? I'm like, that doesn't sound right. But what we've seen recently is, like, men are just wearing more accessories. There's great brands out there, like, crafted and whoever else that are, like, doing really cool men's accessories. So we ended up going into it. Our whole approach is, like, what we call cowboy chains. Like, if you look at all of our photography, it's like, it's like guys in Utah who have horses and cowboy hats, like, wearing cool chains, and nobody's really making men's accessories for them. Like, the glds of the world are, like, way more focused on, like, younger crowds. Gen Z crowds, whatever. Um, so going after, like, the heartland market, dude, it's ripping. Like, very, very rarely do you come out with a new product category. And, like, day one, you're doing tens of thousands of dollars, right? So, like, yeah, it's. It's.

[C]

I mean, existing customer or new, Sean?

[B]

A little bit of both. I mean, a lot of the customers are coming back and purchasing, but it's working on acquisition. So it's like, oh, yeah, this could. This could be a standalone business doing $80 million a year within two years. So that's. We're super excited about that. On the celebrity piece, we're doing a new product category. We're going to see a glimmer of it in this summer, but then more of it comes out next summer, and we're going to do drinkware, just like my good friend Mike here. And we're pairing it with a celebrity. So you guys are going to see that deal come out? Probably not this summer. Probably next summer is when we actually start announcing it. But there's going to be another celebrity who we think represents the rich guy, and he's going to be him. Think about backyard barbecue type stuff. We're gonna be doing that type of stuff. So that's what we have like on, on the roadmap right now. And yeah, I think, I think all of them are going to be, are going to be hits. I think we really nailed product expansion, pairing it with a celebrity going after a core demo and we have like a bunch of bangers coming out. What's up operators? Welcome to the Rich Panel ad read. Rich Panel has been a sponsor for over 12 months. I've been a paying customer for over 12 months and guess what, I just renewed to pay again for another year. We have cut our SaaS bill in half and automation dropped our cost per ticket by 70%. Our CSAT has also improved from 88% which is still really good to 96% best in class. All powered by Rich Panel. I told them last year, hey, you guys need to do the same thing with returns. And now Rich Panel has a returns portal. It's built to cut down your tickets and convert more refunds into exchanges. They do the heavy lifting, data import, self service retention flows, team training, all of it. And they'll be live in two weeks. If you want to save 30% guaranteed on help desk and now returns, book a demo.

[C]

What, what has changed, Sean? Like so you've in the past talked about product misses. You guys did watches that did not go well. There was some knife thing at some point for some, I don't know, there was like something, what has shifted? So like the celebrity thing. That's. I haven't heard you say that before. It's like launch, pair it with celebrity. But what else? Like what's making you guys so good at this?

[B]

Now we just understand what makes products good for acquisition. Like the pro. Here's the problem with watches. Nobody buys them. So like go try to sell stuff nobody buys, right? And people are like oh you know there's Rolex and there's AP and like you people start to the Swatch collab. I'm like dude, it is, that's a different thing, you know what I mean? Like that's like, that's like, that's like you're trying to sell horses right now and you're like well there's a huge market. People are buying thoroughbred horses for racing. And it's like yeah, but you got to pony. It's like nobody wants this thing. And like that's, that's like the reality of watches. It's like there's, there is a market, it's incredibly high end, it's incredibly limited. It's a very, very big tam because the dollar values are so high and what they trade for, but it's like there's no market for it. The same thing with knives. The average guy buys probably.01 knives, right? There's a huge collector community of people who buy knives and love it and they're rugged or whatever, but it's. It's just like. It's not a growing market. It's hard to serve. We did. We did T shirts. T shirts suck, too. Why did T shirts suck? It's because True Classic makes amazing t shirts for $8. Right. Cuts buck Mason. They make great t shirts for 35 bucks. James purse makes great t shirts for $85. With that being said, all those shirts are basically the same. It's like, it's like the smallest differences between them, right? Like, is what makes those. Those shirts what they are. And the average consumer just simply doesn't care. They just buy whatever shirt that they got introduced to and it's. It's a knife fight market. Like, it's so hard to stand out. There's no value props you can really have. So we made no money selling T shirts. So we've tried a bunch of stuff. There's a bunch of more stuff I've pitched you. Talk about, like, me being the driver of pioneering in the business of progress. I pitch a lot. The team picks up what they're comfortable with, and then they run as far as they can with it. I do.

[C]

They push back. Then do they actually tell you, like, that's a terrible idea, Sean?

[B]

Yeah, Me and Connor got into a huge fight about, I wanted to sell soap. I'm like, look, people buy soap. He's like, dude, we sell wallets. Why are people going to want to buy soap here? I'm like, people buy soap, people buy wallets. Who knows? Maybe we'll figure it out. But, like, I'm not dropping that. I think, well, I think at some point I'll be selling soap too, so.

[A]

Well, and this, I want to dig on this, Sean, because I think it's one of the most interesting things that I've seen you talk about is the influence that maybe Shark Ninjas had on you and the way that you think about brand when it comes to product launches.

[B]

This is going to pair with a really good second point I'm going to make. I've been talking to a ton of bankers, okay, because, you know, I wanted to sell my business before I had my kid. I just had my kid. I'm like, maybe I should talk to bankers. What's the market looking like right now? And the market is bad. You know, there's, it's very much a tale of two cities. One, one city is shining bright on top of a hill, but very tiny. Okay? These are brands that are subscription, that are in supplements, that are in health and Wellness, that have LTV. They're trading at, you know, 12x15x. Today in chat, our friend Bill said that he got outbid, he bid 15, somebody bid 19. Okay, so there is that world for

[A]

a 4 million EBITDA company. Not even like a huge company. That's a crazy multiple for, for only four. And EBITDA.

[B]

Yeah, I would kill for 19x EBITDA. Okay? Like, it's not, it's not happening for me. So. Yeah, and I have a lot more than $4 million in EBITDA. So that world does exist. But I'm telling you guys, it is, it is a very small percentage of brands. I talk to a very, very large banking institution who has a private equity arm, who has a investment banking arm, and they said over 70% of deals since 2022 have not got a bidder. So that means they put together a sim, they went to market, they signed a banker, they did the meetings, they did all the fireside chats, and they got zero bids. Okay? That, like, there's just a lot of junk out there to tie those two points together. There's a bunch of bad businesses out there and they all believed that brand was special. That, you know, you have to build a tribe of customers. Like, you have to have this avatar. You have to build loyalty with them. Like, never sell a second product. Like, that is like, like allbirds. That is, you know, Casper, that is like all these companies are influenced by that. Those companies aren't selling right now. You know what's trading at 25x EBITDA? Shark Ninja. Shark. What's growing 40 this year? Shark Ninja. What's Shark Ninja's approach? People buy stuff. I'm gonna make stuff. And I know that's very simplistic, but Shark Ninja has drinkware and coolers and whatever, phone cases and blood.

[A]

They're willing to try almost anything that they think they can sell.

[B]

Yeah, they, they are opportunistic in a way that if the people will buy it, they will try to sell it. And if it fails, who the cares they're going to try something else. We live in an asymmetric world. Like, you know, imagine in going back to 2012 or whatever, and I launched the wallet and it, it didn't work or I lost some other product and it didn't work and like, oh, well, my life's over. No, you would keep launching stuff, and then you find the wallet and on the wall, it's done. A billion in lifetime sales. Okay? So it's like, it's. That's an asymmetric world. Tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in EBITDA from this one product, silhouette, over 10 years. Anybody can do that, right? Because it's an asymmetric world. So want to be Shark Ninja? Try a bunch of stuff. The people who are born and bred, brand is everything. Have brands that nobody will buy right now. So you're better off just being Shark Ninja and being the whorehouse of products. Whatever it takes. Just bastardization of products.

[C]

I mean, Shark Ninja is even like two brands. They just stuck them together.

[A]

Well, think about it. It was vacuum cleaners and blenders, which is like, in what world is their natural synergy there? It's like we've talked about Bic before where it's like, what if we did pins and razors? That would be a great idea. But I think it's true that the customer doesn't care. The customer's just like, is it a great product? Is it a price I like, done, you know, like, I. And, and I, I. It's not to say that brand doesn't matter, because I think that brand really does matter. But I think what matters more is do you have something that people find compelling?

[C]

Can I drill into that? Sean, what do you. What, 25 times? Like, it's a 25 pe, right? Is what you're referencing. Because they're public. So what else is there? I mean, yes, they sell everything and anything. But, like, how. How do investors. Or how do you think they're looking at, like, quality of revenue? Because they're still selling, like, steam mops and rice cookers and waffle makers. And I'm reading fire pits, knife sets, bakeware, air fryers, juicers. Like, they're all over the dim. But, like, none of these on their own would fetch any multiple near 25 times. Like, these are all categories on paper. This is like low quality revenue.

[D]

All of them.

[C]

Doesn't matter where Shark Ninja sells them.

[B]

So what?

[C]

Why together are they worth so much?

[B]

Because I. Look, this is not a stock show. This is not stock advice. But our good friend Roman told me this about Applovin. He's like, it doesn't matter what you think about Applovin because he and I don't trade Applovin stock. He's like, it's just an expectation around what you think earnings are going to be, he's like, applovin is a 6 billion EBITDA business. I think it can be a 10 billion EBITDA business. I don't give a what they do if you have a 10 billion EBITDA business, something like that. Right. And it's the same thing with Shark Ninja. It's like, look, people are not falling in love with this, with the brand of Shark Ninja, with the investors. What they're falling in love with is growing 40% year over year. Earnings are growing faster than that. And earnings are a billion dollars a year. Right. Like that's just an attractive business no matter what you say. Compare that with Lululemon, which has this brand story and it is at 10 year lows right now. Like the stock just got destroyed. Right? Nike, the same thing. Stock got destroyed. There's no stronger brands than Lululemon and Nike. They, they, they're the best of the best. They're going to rebound. But strong brand is just shorthand for very good earnings, very good growth, very, very good ebitda. And now we're in a world where we have abstracted brand and now I'm just talking about what gets you good growth. What, what gets you good Eida and for me, new product expansion. Does that.

[C]

Call me a nerd if you want, but one of my favorite things is when one of my existing software partners, in this case North Beam, adds something that I would have had to have normally paid more and separately for incrementality, was broken in North Beam decided to fix it.

[D]

Matt, you're not just a nerd, you're also cheap. Yeah. And one of the things my team and I are looking forward to with this is now having MTA and incrementality cleanly tied together. It's really nice having multiple views of a test totally integrated from design to monitoring. We can just focus on the insights and not the logistics. So now your incrementality test results, they just feed right into your North Beam MTA dashboards that we're just used to looking at every day.

[C]

Yeah, I don't think any of us are going to say no to less work and making life easier for all of our teams. If this is interesting to you, go to NorthBeam IO and ask for a demo and feel free to tell them that the operator sent you.

[A]

I'm going to make an argument actually that the reason why Sharkninja has been so successful and also while they're getting the premium is actually because of scale economies when it comes to distribution. If you look at the way that they've expanded, what they've done is they've gotten in a section of Target and Walmart and these mass retailers. And so you'll be in a section that one buyer buys, you know, whatever, three roads in a row of stuff like household appliances. And they've just been like, we're just going to sell everything in this section. And the more of those categories they get into, the more shelf space they take up. And the more shelf space they take up, the more important they become to that category success, and the more ability they have to box other people out. And they've just kind of functionally started to own entire sections of mass retail.

[C]

That's the same argument as Unilever or PNG then, right, Mike?

[A]

Yes, I. I think, I think they're an interesting approach. Whereas a lot of times with Unilever or with Unilever, what they'll do is they'll just go out and buy it. They'll wait till somebody gets to scale economies and then they'll buy it. But then they have tremendous negotiating power with the mass retailers because the mass retailers absolutely have to have them. They just have some essential brands. And PNG is probably the most extreme example of that. Is that like, in fact, Doug McMillan, I saw him talking once and he was talking about how people will accuse Walmart of kind of being really hard on his suppliers. And he's like, look at the stock price of P and G versus Walmart. Over the last 30 years. They've. They've gone up even more than we have. It's been even better for them than it has been for us. And so I, I do think there's a model out there that becoming a conglomerate can really help on the distribution side. I think Sean's actually an example of that because they've really built a. A strong hub of a brand and a type of Target customer that they can add. I mean, like, the way that I think about your brand, Sean, is like, if I'm a woman that needs to buy a Father's Day gift or needs to buy a gift for Christmas or my guy's birthday, I'm just going to go to Ridge because they are going to be the best place that I can go and shop. And obviously you sell to men as well, but you just have like, a very clear core demographic. And what's interesting is you've shown the ability to expand out in two different ways. One of it is like, zero tech. You know, rings and chains are like, as old as mankind, basically. And then you have this other arm that's going into tech. So I don't know, I think there's got to be. There's something there that you found that's really working, that's allowing this product expansion. And I'll be really curious as you're going through this to find out where you start to find boundaries, where you're like, hey, it doesn't make sense to get into gum. Or maybe it does, I don't know. But at least right now I've been pretty amazed you've made some ca. I mean, like to say we're going to be going big in power banks and, you know, metal chains at the same time is not necessarily something I would guess would work.

[C]

If brand matters less, then why not put Gult culture in Ridge?

[A]

Yeah, so we need to actually introduce gut culture before that. So, like, let me ask a question so that Sean can talk about that and then we'll come back to it because. Okay, so Sean, we've, we've talked about, you've done chains, you're doing all of this tech based stuff, but you're also. I helped connect you to our command that we use for Trevi. And you've got a product in the kind of hydration, you know, fiber space. Can you tell us about that?

[B]

Yeah, before I do. Mike, thanks for setting me up. Dude, you've been, you've been my Evan Spiegel. If I'm Mark Zuckerberg, I'm doing powder like you. I'm gonna do water bottles like you. So, dude, these. Jason better watch out. I might do pans pretty soon. Dude, I'm coming. Coming for everybody.

[A]

Just wait till you see my rings collection. It's gonna be awesome.

[C]

Mike's wallet's coming too.

[B]

Oh, man. I think Mike's too smart to launch a wallet. So, yeah, we, last year, growth wasn't awesome. Okay. We, we, we had our slowest growth year in, I don't know, a long time. Right. And a lot of it was meta issues. A lot of that was like this was, this was before we had a smash hit in tech products. Like, it was right before it came out. I'm like, okay, we should diversify this business. The weakest part of my business is ltv. To this day, it's the biggest part of my business. You know, our, so, you know, talking to bankers. I did a bunch of research. If we went public, we would have the worst customer retention rate out of any public company in the, in the consumable space or the durable space. Like, if I. IF I. Our 12 month repeat rate is like 1.2.

[D]

Okay.

[B]

Yeti, which sells coolers that bears can eat is 1.3. Right. Figs is like a 3. Nobody's coming back and buying wallets from us. It's. It's like I always tell people this. People think I'm trying to keep them out of the wallet space. I'm like, I'm telling you, man, it is the worst product category to possibly be in. Like, it is, has no LTV tied to it. So we've always done. That was an issue.

[A]

You're basically selling caskets at this point. And Sean, where it's like you're buying one and then you're. You're done.

[B]

Yeah, dude. At least, at least caskets might have like, you know, maybe extra pillows or something. Like, I got. I got nothing to sell these people. So we ended up like, okay, we've always done this as an issue. I wanted to solve it. And the easiest way to solve ltv, something on subscription. How do you get something on subscription? You make people eat it. So that's why, like, we gotta get into. We gotta get into powders, right? There was a lot of debate internally. I was like, let's just do Ridge supplements. Let's just. We'll make supplements for the same guy. We know we're talking about a guy who would buy a chain from us, a wallet from us. There's a lot of debate internally. It's like, let's spit it out. Let's do a separate thing. So we launched Gut Culture. It is a fiber powder. It's probably been cooking for. It's been out to the public, you know, eight months, nine months with him. This is out. It is a decently successful business. It'll be a million, maybe a multimillion dollar product in the first year. And it also created a playground where we could actually learn how subscriptions work. With that being said, I just told you that chains might do $80 million. So by powder, doing a couple million is less exciting. But it was a good hedge because if I did, if, let's say chains failed and techs failed and my business was flat year over year, I'd be super excited about the $2 million I'm going to make off Gut Culture. I'd be going all in on that product. Right. It was just a good hedge to make at the time. Understanding the challenges to the core business. Now, anytime there's a problem, I'm going to look for a bunch of different solutions. So the problem in Ridge is like hey, growth is slowing down, right? So we launched a bunch of products. We found growth, and now in May 2026, I'm growing like, 90 year over year. So I'm like, okay, I've solved the

[A]

growth, which is wild, by the way. At your size, that's. That's a wild number.

[B]

Yeah, Yeah. I feel like Jason Panzer over here. Okay.

[A]

I never noticed that his last name is Panzer. That's so appropriate. How does that not come up before? Now I'm like, I got so.

[C]

There's so many jokes here.

[B]

Keep going, Sean. We solved the growth problem, and now we still have a culture. As a good hedge. It's been fun to learn how subscriptions work, right? Like, as much as I know about E Commerce, they don't know about anything about recharge or know anything about rebilling. Like, I've never done this stuff before, so it's been good to go in there and actually learn that. And that's why we, you know, we have great mentors like Zach and Jordan from Instant Hydration, who, like, the business model is so different because everyone loses so much money acquiring customers, and then it's just like a prey that they stick around for four to six months and, like, optimizing that actual retention. And how do you get your cacs as low as possible so that, like, you can break even at three months instead? Anyway, and we've been learning that whole game, which is. It's very rare you get to get paid to learn stuff. So that's the beauty of gut culture.

[C]

Why not? Okay, so, like, you kind of like, why not put gut culture in Ridge? If it's about learning and it's about all that stuff, like, if brand doesn't matter and Shark Ninja can make everything, I mean, they'll probably launch supplements at some point. You know, why not put it in. Why not put it in, Rich?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, that. That is me losing debates internally. Like, like I said, I'm the. I'm the driver. I'm the driver of progress. But there's other people who get a vote. I'm like, dude, it's just going to be called Ridge gummies, and we're going to launch them tomorrow internally at Ridge. People are less enthusiastic about the Ridge gummies of the world.

[C]

So is that now, is that their defense or their argument? Is their argument brand and customer?

[B]

And, like, we'll have. We'll have Connor on the podcast. We've. We have fought about this for five years. If, like, if the wall branch can sell soap and sell gummies and sell gut fiber or whatever else. So look, a good, a good compromise. It's the same team working on the same stuff and we just spin up a new LLC and we just do a new website and Rich can loan the money to it and we can buy inventory through it. That's what we ended up doing. So I'm not complaining. I think it's totally fine. I love having on a separate thing. But yeah, in the future, maybe we do root supplements independently also for the first one. Good chance we could have it up. So maybe, maybe that's one that, like, if you think there's gonna be a second shot on goal, maybe that's the one you don't want to mess up. Nobody cares if we do shirts and take them away. But you know, if we make a supplement and it tastes disgusting, maybe people are going to buy a second one from us.

[A]

Or if you create something and you get 20,000 subs and then decide to kill it, you know, I mean, it's just a little bit messier because you're kind of creating an ongoing expectation with people. My observation of your team, Sean, would be that you have a team that's elite at digitally acquiring new customers and that that cross applies to almost to many product categories.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, you know, let's go back to the Shark Ninja owning aisles. I, I think that's kind of. Yes, they own aisles, but it's because they're willing to risk R and D, like Target and Walmart do not do R and D. They are fast followers of products. They will make knockoffs of your products, but it takes them 12 months to do that, right? 18 months. And that's them acting very, very fast. What Shark Ninja promises is, hey, we'll have a new thing every six months that customers are going to want and we'll go into your store and buy. If it's the slushy machine or the Ninja Freezy or the glass air fryer, we're going to make new stuff and put it on your shelves faster than you even know what hit you. Right. So there's no way for Target to launch a knockoff brand of a Shark Ninja. Right. Because Shark Ninja is doing all of the testing for them and doing all the new product development and releasing out into the world. And that's why you go to a Target and there's knockoff microwaves, but there's no knockoff Ninja Freezing because the Ninja Freezy. It's too new to have a knockoff out. And that's part of their superpower is that they're driving people in store and they're doing R and D. Ridge's Superpower is, we have a very good product team. We're able to make products very fast in terms of the DTC world, but also we could put it on digital the next day and start selling it immediately. Right. So, like, our Superpower is, you know, instead of owning the aisles, we can own the ad channels, which is just spending a ton of money very effectively on Facebook or Google or YouTube or whatever, whatever else. And I think we'll get new superpowers by putting in celebrities to it or whatever other thing.

[A]

So internally, we've started to talk about just rethinking certain parts of how we bring new products to market. And we. We would always talk about it like a product launch. And I've suggested that we change up our terminology and that we add what I call a validation stage, because it seems to me that with any new product launch, you really have to validate two things before it really becomes a product launch. And one is you have to validate the product quality. And I'd like to think we're pretty good at this. You know, we've done a lot of it over the years. But I think the reality is you. You never can totally tell how customers are going to respond to something and things that they're going to. Maybe not like when you're just playing with it internally. So you have to. You just have to sell a certain number into the wild and hear people's feedback before you know if this is something that you want to go big with. And then I think the second thing is you have to get a feel for is there organic demand? Like, even you mentioned it, Sean, it's interesting. For as long as we've been in the game, we'll still get caught off guard by things. Like, it sounds like you were caught off guard by how well chains is going. Like, you probably. I mean, you obviously thought it could be successful, but maybe you didn't think it could be. You would have this much kind of natural, organic demand from. From your customers. And to me, that's the hallmark of products that end up turning into winners. It's interesting how there's so little correlation between how much you buy in the initial PO and whether or not they're likely to be successful. I think the things that I've seen as the predictors of success is that your. Your ratings and customer feedback about the product quality come back extremely high, and you see natural organic demand of not having to sell it to anybody. They just kind of see it and get it and want to buy it. And those are the ones that usually rip for us.

[C]

Most AI tools and software don't give you direct ROI every month, but postscript does. I run two postscript AI products at Ridge. Both show up on our P and L Infinity testing runs continuous A B tests on our SMS automations. Completely in the background. It's driven $446,000 in incremental revenue. Not just attributed incremental, that's a 32x incremental ROAS with click through rates up 43%. Then there's Shopper, an AI sales agent that answers every inbound text in under 40 seconds. We're running 23x ROI on messaging costs alone. If you want SMS software that gives a proven ROI, go to Postscript IO and book a free demo. Can I ask you both this question then on that Mike? How, Sean, how do you size the bet for a new product? So like you're going to launch chains. There's an R and D cost, so there's a product development cost, there's an initial inventory cost. Are all the bets the same when it comes to new product? Like, you basically say, like, hey, we're committing, like this is the max we'll spend on a shot on goal. Goal. Or do you, do you have ways where you come up with higher conviction on some versus others and then like you're going to put more money into some versus others? I, I just, I've never really thought about like, how do you size the bet?

[B]

You never really know what's going to be a hit. The big problem at Rich is I am usually overly enthusiastic about everything we put on the board.

[C]

Oh, you're an entrepreneur.

[B]

Shocker. Yeah, I'm like, oh, we're gonna, that's actually gonna make us billionaires. And like I put that for every single product on there. And it's got us into problems in the past where I buy way too much. That sucks. So we, we've standardized it to, you know, if you're a professional gambler, it's called units. So like typically it doesn't matter how much money you spend, you break that much money into either 10 or 20 units. And depending on what you think your advantage is, you bet more units. So if you like don't really have an advantage and you're just trying to like, just stay in the game, you bet one unit. Okay. And if you really think you have like a guaranteed chance to win, you bet 100% of your units. 10 units or 20 units or whatever. So that's like, you should learn how professional gamblers play because we're basically gambling and you bring it over here. So we size our bets based on units. And you know, if we're, if we're doing a product that like we're just going to give away for free or we don't care about, it's $50,000, it's one unit. The average buy for a product ends up being $350,000. So like every new thing we launch is basically $350,000. Chains is a little bit less. Chains is probably two or three units, like 100 or $150,000 bet. And now we have to go and crank that up because we, it's, it's going to be a big hit. So we're going to buy more of them. And you have a supply chain that's nimble enough that you can chase stuff in three months or six months and

[D]

get it here again.

[C]

And batteries is probably more expensive because there, there's like a bunch of stuff around. Batteries, from what I understand that, that just make it harder to order.

[A]

I, I think that one of the things that we've learned in this area is that the times where we've gotten ourselves into trouble has been when we've been greedy for growth. Right? Now I, I remember years ago reading, I think it was Bezos said something about how at Amazon they, they think about their bets as like planting trees and trees take a while to grow and so they'll, they'll plant things that they don't expect to really be able to eat the apples off of for, you know, three, four, five years. And in the early years of simple modern, it was like, hey, you launch it and it, it's going to rip immediately. If it's, it's a winner, it's going to like dramatically impact your, your top line, you know, from go and now, the scale of company that we're at, that's harder to do, especially because we're more wholesale Amazon than D2C. So I've just really kind of been drilling it into my team. Like, you don't have to be in a hurry to kind of get this thing to full scale like we have been in the past. Like you can launch it in limited quantities and see if we've got something. And then, and, and this is what companies do as they mature and they get bigger is they start to have roadmaps that are, you know, one, two, three years out. It sounds like that's where you guys are going as well, Sean, where you, like, you're really starting to build a roadmap where you've got good ideas that'll hit next year and next fall and maybe in 28. And that, that's, I think that that's just a necessary discipline as you get bigger.

[B]

Yeah. And my biggest advice to people watching this is like, you need their roadmap, but don't get too rigid because I talked to YETI once and they had a five year product roadmap. And I'm like, that means if they have a good idea today, it's not coming out till the end of a decade. Right. And like that's, that's not, that's not good. And you've seen them get caught flat footed. You've seen them become stagnant because of that. They totally missed the, the Tumblr trend. They totally missed, you know, Prince patterns. Like everything Mike's doing that's making him a ton of money. They've totally missed that because they have a five year product roadmap. So it's like we used to have a two day product roadmap where as soon as stuff showed up, we'd, we'd start selling it. And we've moved to this like in between where like we have next year totally planned out and it's the best stuff we've ever launch. And I'm bummed because I want to launch it right now. Right. And it's like that's the perfect place to be.

[C]

So if you are sizing the bets in units, so it's like, you know, 100 to 300, $400,000. What is the minimum amount you need to see in like year one from a new product to keep it like a new category?

[B]

Yeah. So we unfortunately keep categories too long. This something we talk about internally is that like, you know, we have pens. Pens are fine. We do a couple million dollars in pens. I've wanted to shut pens off forever, but we don't do it because, oh, what about the revenue? Right? And at a certain point it's like you have all this baggage. We have to have meetings about ordering pen colors. And it's like, look, we have, we have rocket ships in the business right now. We should make sure that they're taken care of before we have this sink about, you know, pens or whatever else. So I wish we could cut them sooner. I think the next phase of Ridge is cutting stuff sooner that is underperforming or just like isn't living up the potential. Isn't worth the dollars going into it. So yeah, I think, I think we should cut them sooner. And then in terms of successes, we just know kind of the first week if it's working in ads, we have something there. If there's market pull towards it, it's like, okay, like this bet wasn't wasted. We can, we can double down and order it and chase into it.

[A]

No, Tom, that totally want to emphasize what Sean just said because the way that the thought process from people will go is you launch a category and maybe it's great at one point or maybe it's never great, but it's, it's fine. And then it's kind of like, well, we've done all the work, we should just leave it up. Like, why wouldn't we reorder it? Like people are buying some of it and we've done all the work. But I think it's about editing what, what I'm kind of coming to believe is that you have to constantly be adding things to your company and editing things away. And so that over time the very shape of your company does start to change. And sometimes you have a, hopefully you have a real core, like Sean has a real core around wallets. I don't think they'll ever edit wallets out of Ridge, although they could. Who knows, you know, if tech stuff took off to a certain point, there might be a point where it's like, hey, we're going to edit out all the non tech stuff, but if you're going to keep adding, you have to be willing to edit. When we were, we moved recently and when we moved, we had just a really bad experience having to move all the stuff out of our old house. And the reason why was for 10 years all that happened was stuff flowed in. You know, we had kids. Every day 10Amazon boxes showed up and it's just like a math problem. And eventually we had stuck stuff everywhere you could. I mean, we moved out of that place. We had, we had stuff stuck in parts of the house I didn't even remember existed. And, and your company can get that way, right? Where it's like if all you're doing is launching new things and adding things, then you get the equivalent of scope creep. And so if you want to add the skill set of new products, then what you have to do is pair it with the skill set of being willing to put things in the ground. If you're scaling an E commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough. Aftercell focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns after checkout and turns the post purchase moment into more profit. Monetize every order with post purchase offers and thank you page experiences without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion. Enterprise grade tech used by Gap, Ticketmaster, Macy's and Target. Now driving results for brands like True Classic, hexclad, Ridge and Jones Road. I would know. This is the reason I ended up buying three pans from Hexclad instead of two. Aftercell has already generated over 1 billion in additional revenue for e commerce brands. Revenue that doesn't require more traffic or higher cac. So check out after sell and tell them that the operator sent you.

[C]

Would it be fair to say there is. There are exceptions to that, Mike. Like the guy that jumps to mind for me is who we had on the Titans, Gibran from Was it Utopia, Right? Like he's in 500 categories. They're doing 780 million or $800 million a year. And I'm like 500 categories. I'm like, I'm just doing the math. I'm like. So you have categories that might do like a million bucks.

[A]

Well, I think it depends on your distribution channel. I mean Javon has an amazing Amazon business. So like, I mean it's, it's the best one in the world. So for them getting into more things. But you know what? I bet if we asked him, I bet he would say they've probably killed 40 to 50% of the SKUs they've ever right. And that's.

[C]

They're left with the 500 they shot, you know, 300 other ones.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Well, because, well, you're just not going to like, I mean like when we launch a product, it's an asymmetric exercise and I'm really having to, to drill it in my team's head constantly. This most likely will fail. The odds are that this will die, that this will fail. And every time you launch a business, just like every time, every time you start a business, every time you launch a product, the most likely outcome is that it's going to die. And so like if you can kind of institutionalize that where everybody understands that, that what we're searching for is the 10x100x, then you don't get. Because, because here's the problem is that everything in your business takes mind share and somebody's got to manage it. It adds the complexity and it drags you away from the thing that's the most important. Like Sean was just saying that, you know, you end up having another meeting about pins instead of Having another meeting about power banks. And that's a net, you know, negative for the organization.

[B]

Look, I'm not going to tell Utopia Brands how to, how to run their stuff because they're obviously killing it. But I bet they could do, if they're going to do 800 this year on 500 categories, I bet they could do 700 categories. And then it just comes down to is $100 million worth the effort? And if you're Amazon probably is, right? Like there's, it's very easy to run a new category on Amazon if there's organic demand there. It's very hard to do it on D2C where you're launching 500 ads a week or whatever.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Your paid machine is more. Is, is the level of difficulty is higher. Right. Like there's a lot more effort.

[B]

There might, there might be no other channel as easy to have product categories as Amazon because if you're in wholesale, you're meeting with suppliers, you have to meet with that buyer, you have to take them to dinner. Right. To have a category that does a million dollars a year, right. Like this is not, that's worth nobody's business. But on Amazon and kind of like infinite shelf, infinite brain space.

[A]

It's funny because Brian, the, the new thing that Brian's working on has a more D2C element of it. And he's just like, man, I'd taken for granted how easy a lot of this stuff is with Amazon, you know, because his role had had over time kind of morphed at Simple Monitor where he was primarily managing Amazon even though he was over all the E commerce stuff. And once you have, have kind of been on the juice of Amazon for a while and then you're like, oh wait, I've got to do all, all of this stuff. Like it's just way more complexity than sending orders into Amazon and saying you guys figure out, you know, storage and shipping it to the customer and refunds and whatever else.

[C]

I would love to expand on the wholesale thing that you just mentioned, Sean, because like dealing with suppliers, you know, Amazon just to buyer, right. Their vendor, how does. So you've gone from purity to see you guys actually have like pretty sizable retail business now, right. Like you're in Best Buy, you're probably expanding that. How does that factor into the product development now or does it at all?

[B]

You know, chains doesn't have a wholesale element to it. And like, you know, we just, I wish people would be more realistic about what, what's available in wholesale to them and that's like the big problem we've had with wallets. Another thing I've had about with Connor, our wallet business does eight figures, but barely. It's a pathetic eight figures in wholesale. And it's because name places you can buy a wallet in in the real life, right? And it's like, you could buy them at Target. That's true. You could buy them at Walmart. You could probably buy them at Costco. Our wallet's too expensive to sell in any of those places. Right. So it's like, where else can you buy a wallet? You can go to Nordstrom's. We're there. Okay. We've exhausted the list. Like, look, there's, there's. And I do sell them at Shields, right? I sell them at, you know, Dillards. Okay. There's regional places. I end up selling them. But if you're not in those three mass markets, which you can't because of price point, there's just, there's. Where else am I going to sell these things? Right. That's why you have to end up opening your own stores. Right. Chains is the same way.

[A]

Which is also what made jewelry work. Jewelry in general. You're never getting into anything wholesale with your jewelry, but if you can create your own demand and your own kind of storefront, then it's a huge market. So you guys have made that work again, going back to being elite at being able to generate traffic and. And generate demand.

[B]

Yeah. It's just, it's understanding from the rip that it's not going to be a wholesale category. So, like, I'm never. Look, if Shields. You want to buy the chains, I'm happy to supply them to you. Right? But like, you know, there's. Zales is like the only chain and you know, they sell their own stuff. So it's like, I'm not. There's no wholesale opportunity for. For my jewelry business. Business tech is the exception where I'm going to be in all of those. I'll probably by the end of 20, 27, be in 4,000 doors with tech because there is a market for tech

[A]

in those and because there's nothing intimidating about those price points in those parts of the store, like the price points you guys are at. It's interesting, Sean, one of the things, like, to the point that you just said, I think this is where when you do launch a product, you should have some vision of like, hey, what is our best day with this? Like, how could this play out?

[B]

And.

[A]

And actually, now that I've finally gotten to like, we are Totally in the flow with Trevi. We're having, you know, we're on a very profitable trajectory now. Like I think it could get maybe to eight figures of profit next year. We'll see. But the of contribution profit, not even gross profit, but contribution profit. But what I realized is I would have gone back through the process differently even now than I did. I would have started like five first principles and said, well, what's my best day? And my best day is with my skill set is I'm selling a lot on Amazon and I'm selling a lot in physical retail. Okay. If I'm going to go into physical retail and I expect this to be able to work for a multi year period, what's the price point that, that really works in physical retail? Well, it's Gatorade. What is Gatorade's price point? 50 cents a serving. So that's the bar that I need to kind of think backwards from, is that if I'm going to sell a lot of this the way that I want to sell a of lot lot of this, which is different than the way you want to sell a lot of things, then I need to start thinking in terms of 50 cents a serving. And then I need to think, okay, at 50 cents a serving, where is my first channel where I can profitably acquire customers? All right, I figure that out and how am I going to be able to get affordable CPAs but then still make good enough nominal profit to make this work? And that's how we ended up getting to the right answer. But I could have gotten there a lot quicker if I'd just known to go through that, that flowchart. And so like you said, when you got in change, you knew wholesale's off the table. That's not our best day. Our best day is selling a lot of chains through the website. And it helps you to launch that product.

[B]

Well, yeah, and like, you know, we have a good wholesale team. They're working really hard to try to sell a lot of stuff to a lot of people who, who don't necessarily want it or is hard to sell to. And when we get into a product category like drinkware, I, you have to sell those in store. It's like, I, how do I get, you know, and I'm not going to take shelf space away from Mike, right? Because I think Mike has a different customer. But there is a men's focused water bottle in Target right now and how do I replace them? It's like that's, that's the conversation we have to Be having is is like that's the, the best business for drinkware is Yeti. And it is all over dsg. It is all over, you know rei. It is any hook and bullet store in America has an entire shelf. If you go to a shields they have not only a shelf, they have like four walls dedicated to yeti. And it's like okay, how do I make an impact here? Because this is where this, this is what winning looks like in these businesses.

[C]

Is it fair to say Sean, that like a product that is priced I guess like a non consumable priced for D2C probably doesn't work at retail because the price point needs to be higher. Like you just need more because you need enough contribution dollars to earn us enough gross margin dollars to actually run a proper acquisition machine in D2C which means your price points are probably too high for most of the mass market retailers.

[B]

Yeah. And so what you describe because durables in Target it's like yeah, walk around. What the fuck, who's, who are they selling? If you go to the fashion aisle, target is now 95% owned. So like they, that those are all in house brands.

[A]

This is also why they're going and they're like they, we need the ridges on our shelf. We need the hex clads, we need the baseball lifestyles. We need these brands, you know, like that instant hydration. We need, we need people that are generating buzz online because. Well, I mean, I mean specifically, I mean specifically they want to see brands that have a lot of heat on the Internet and specifically social media because they, they're trying to like if you think about it as a retailer, your, your job is to produce EBITDA growth. Well you can't build more stores. You've already got a huge store footprint print. If, if at most you're going to build your store count by like 2 or 3% if it doesn't go down. Because there's some places in the United States you have to put everything behind, you know, key and chain, you know to, to keep it safe anymore. But so you can't grow grow stores. So what these retailers basically did for like I don't know, a decade or two is they were like well we're just going to gradually make it where we sell everything in the store and our margins will be better on that and we'll grow ebitda. And they went all the way, you know, like in clothing, Target went all the way as far as you could go. And eventually people are like wait a second. You know, I think I'm just buying, you know, Target's brand. Target brand version of everything, and it starts to hurt your foot traffic. And that's, that's kind of where Target finds itself. And so now they're swinging back towards like, we need brands that'll independently bring people to stores that are going to delight people when they find them in stores. And that's creating some real opportunities for some brands that we're close to. We know several brands that are going into Target right now and getting opportunities that have been purely digital up until this point.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, huge store rollouts too. I mean, full chain, but, you know, so the reason I bring that up is like, yes, if you're non consumable, you're already in a very small part of the store. Because take out the whole middle, which is the fashion, you take out 2/3, which is 2/3 of an aisle, which is beauty. The back is all food. So you got to take all that stuff out too. And then it's like you have stationary and then you have like hearth and home, like all of their home goods or whatever. Like, there's just, there's not a lot of places to go in a Target. And that's why it's like, okay, they're not gonna buy my wallets. It's like they, they do sell men's wallets for 499. So it's like, it's like I can't go in there. There is the back tech section and that's the session, the section of the store that, you know, it has the highest ASP. So you know, they, they're typically selling stuff for 200, $300. So I can go back there. But also it has like, it' space in the entire store. So like, you know, the average sell through is really, really low. Everything's locked up. Like, I'm actually surprised that all targets still have TV sections, to be honest. Like, you know, so much of the world has been eaten by Amazon. But anyway, maybe you'll see us there soon.

[C]

Can we circle back, Sean? So all this to say, right? All these product categories, wholesale, you started off talking about talking to bankers and multiples in sort of like a company like yours versus, you know, the one that Bill was talking about where there was a 19x on 4 million in EBITDA. If you had to guess, what is the multiple for a business of Ridge's profile? Like, or, or like, similar to Ridge, like, like smaller, larger, like where do you think the market is right now? Because that people are gonna, we're gonna get a message man, so we may as well just answer it.

[B]

And look, if there's anybody listening, you can email me Seanridge.com and I'm happy to make intros to either bankers or PE groups just depending on your size. The reality is half of things just won't get a bid. So like if you're distressed by any measure of that word, so if your revenue is not growing or you're not profitable, you are not going to get a bid. Like nobody, nobody wants to buy you. And that's really sucks to say. Like even if you're like, well we are going to be profitable this year, dude, no one's going to buy you. There's just, and like it's so painful. There's literally no buyer. Private equity groups do not want to buy you. And if you, if you did get an offer, it would be for such a low amount of money, you would be so mad. Right? Like I'm talking, I got pitched a business that is, they're going to do $30 million this year. They're in a good category. They did, their peak was 50. They've never made a profit. What would you bid on that business? Like, like my, my bid might be $500,000, right? It might be a million. And that might not cover assets like this. They owned a building, they had inventory. It's like, look, so much of this business is a liability I just don't want to take on. Right? That's just the reality of, of, of, of what's ahead of us right now. If you're growing decent 30%, even 20%, something like that, if you have EBITDA, you know, a 5% EBITDA and above. Let's, let's, let's say that's your business. You have 5% EBITDA, you're growing 20%. You're probably going to get a bid for 5x that EBITDA number, 7x that EBITDA number. If you're not in a really, really hot category like health and wellness or beauty, a business like Ridge would get bids for 10, 10 x EBITDA. And you know, we're growing, we'll call it 50% this year with you know, double digit EBITDA percentages and like I'm still getting like a 10x because my categories, people just don't really believe in them right now. Now if you want to buy my business, I'll happily take that 19x that we were talking about earlier or whatever else because you have to think like I just, you know, it's I'm not at a place in my life where I have to sell the thing. I could run this thing. You know we have a great leadership team. We have awesome growth coming out. We'll distribute $20 million or more this year. I'm like I don't know. I'm having a great life so I'm going to keep doing that. But if yeti you want to buy me dude so it's 20x e but I'll send my wire information over to you.

[C]

This is Sean sell his business pod he's another nanny. That's what we also confirmed.

[B]

Look and I know it sounds prestigious. I know I never, I never had a nanny. I grew up very poor. I didn't think about getting a nanny. Dude. It, it has made my life so much happier.

[C]

100 no so 100 you're also running a company dude like I, it.