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How Glamnetic Went From $1 Million to $100 Million—And Nearly Lost It All in Between
00:36:57
Glamnetic pivoted from lashes to press-on nails and hit $100 million in revenue. Founder Kevin Gould shares the growth strategy behind it.
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- [00:00]
A
We had a great, innovative product. We were really strong on growth, marketing, and community building and all the things that you need in that flywheel to scale.
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B
What if the thing that made you famous is also the thing that's capping your growth?
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A
Then the next year, the revenue dipped by 25%.
- [00:19]
B
Kevin Gould, alongside Ann McFerrin, built Glamnetic into a brand people loved selling. Never before seen Magnetic Eyelashes, Kevin. And then decided to change it all. The company pivoted and hard launching Press on Nails, a category that at the time had nowhere near the cachet of Glamnetics lash business.
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A
Now we're one of the top brands in the category, doing over 100 million a year.
- [00:42]
B
He's here today to share how to make decisions that scale and what it really takes to turn one category into a $100 million business. I'm your host, Adam Lavinter, and welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. Kevin, welcome to the show.
- [00:57]
A
Adam, Thanks a lot for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
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B
So you guys are now one of the largest press on nail companies in the world, I gather, which is incredible to think about, given the fact that you didn't actually start the brand with nails. So let's rewind back to the origin story.
- [01:16]
A
So funny, right? Because I think it's like a lot of things in life, sometimes where you start is not where you finish. And so I think maybe to rewind a little bit to the origin stories of Glimmetic. We launched the brand in July of 2019, originally as a. As an eyelash business. So we made at the time Magnetic Lashes, and it was a really interesting kind of 12 months from launch. So I think we kind of hit the perfect storm of great innovative product. We were, I think, pretty strong at branding, marketing, the growth side. And then Covid hit in 2020. And so basically when we launched the brand in July 2019, for that half of the year in 2019, we did a million dollars in revenue, and then in 2020 we went to 50 million. So it was like kind of just insane hyper growth, which was cool in some ways and not in others, as I'm sure we'll talk about and find out, because usually anything that goes up like this can. Sometimes it doesn't go up like that forever. But we were pretty much through 2020 primarily a entirely lash business and all D2C. And then I can kind of walk you through the story of. Of where we went after that. But that's really the origin stories and, you know, I partnered up with my co founder, Ann McFerrin, who is really like the creative vision founder face and amazing from a product and innovation standpoint. And we've always been great partners because I take the other side of the business, and then we both kind of meet in the middle on. On marketing and. Yeah. So it's been seven years. Seven. A little over seven years in now. It's been a. Been a fun journey.
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B
Yeah. Was Ann creating these lashes for herself? Like, was she trying to find a solution to a problem that she was having first?
- [03:08]
A
100%. I mean, I think. I think Lash was always something, and she's. She's spoken publicly about this a lot where she, you know, she always felt a little insecure by her own lashes, and she was sort of looking for a solution for herself, and then she didn't love the options that were on the market. So that kind of sent her down the product development rabbit hole and ultimately got us to where we ended up launching our own line. But that's really kind of like the, like, founder problem to starting it into a company is kind of the origin story.
- [03:39]
B
And how do you guys connect? Like, what were you doing at the time?
- [03:41]
A
Yeah, another business that I still own, that's a hair and hair extension business called Inhair. And so I was operating that. And then to kind of give you some background previous to that, about 16, 17 years ago, I started in the MA room at WME, which is a big talent agency, and I was an assistant for three years. So it's kind of like. Have you ever seen the show Entourage?
- [04:02]
B
Yes.
- [04:03]
A
Okay. It's very much like Entourage. So the agency I worked at, wme, the real Ari, ran w me, which was inspired by the character Ari. And, you know, I came with from a heavy entertainment background. I was working with, like, a lot of the young Hollywood actors. And then I ended up leaving for about eight years. I have my own management business managing big YouTubers and influencers. So I was very heavily involved in that ecosystem. I wanted to start building brands, and I had angel invested in a beauty business. Back in the day, I fell in love with beauty. And then, so I started in 2018, this hair brand called INH Hair. And then the next year, I met Anne very serendipitously when she showed up at an event for INH and she told me the idea for Glam Medic. And we decided to partner up.
- [04:48]
B
There's so many directions we can go here, but I'll go in this first direction, which is category. So what Is it about beauty that you fell in love with? Was it the tam? Was it the margins? Like, what was it?
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A
I mean, those are all like the business fundamentals. And I think whatever category you're in, those are really, really important. But I think the thing that really stuck out to me is so this company that I angel invested in around 10 years ago was called Beautycon. And think of it like the super bowl meets Coachella of beauty, where you had all of these brands activating at the space. You had a ton of influencers there, and then you had the community of consumers. What I gravitated towards with beauty, even though I'm not a traditional beauty consumer, was like the community aspect around these beauty brands. And for me, that was really cool. And I think with my background at the time, which was heavy in the entertainment and influencer world, I saw a lot of parallels to that. And so that was what initially intrigued me. And then I think, you know, secondary to that. Obviously, what you mentioned is really important, of course, for running a business that can scale is big tam, high repeatability, consumability, good gross margin. But I think those are all secondary to what drew me to it, which is really the community factor.
- [06:01]
B
I'm just thinking about this, this brand story in beauty around Ipsy. So I don't know if you were following the origin story of Ipsy, but Michelle Phan had that huge following on YouTube before she ever launched the business, and she sort of ported over that community into the world of Ipsy. I mean, were there any early inspirations for the brand that you were watching?
- [06:23]
A
Yeah, I think, you know, what's interesting about Michelle Fan is she was kind of like YouTube 1.0. And we've kind of been through, like, we've been through like three different iterations of influencer over the last, you know, kind of 10 to 15 years. And she was in that kind of cohort of YouTube 1.0. And really at the time, I think was like a pioneer of an influencer co founding or attaching themselves to a brand. I think for us it was, you know, this was probably like seven or eight years after an IPSY or a boxycharm or, you know, one of those businesses launched. We wanted to make sure the brand was, like, bigger than any one person. And I think for me, we wanted to leverage a lot of the relationships and access that I have with influencers, but not. But not partner with like any one influencer specifically when we were building the brand.
- [07:17]
B
Understood. So let's rewind back to those numbers. In July 2019, you do $1 million. The following year you do 50 million in top line. I mean, this is exceptional. So what do you attribute that hyper growth too? I mean, is it really just the world shutting down and everybody going online? What happened?
- [07:41]
A
I think it was so many factors, right? I think that anything you need a little bit of luck, which we definitely had. I think we had a great innovative product. We were really strong on growth, marketing and community building and all the things that you need in that flywheel to scale. But there were also some real tailwinds that were working for us in a big way. One was obviously Covid and everything kind of moving into diy. And so naturally with beauty, there was a huge pull forward in anything at home. DIY beauty. I think that and a lot of brands went through this acquisition, got both marketing and acquisition got really cheap as the larger brands dropped out of advertising during the height of COVID in 2020. And so we were able to scale a lot there. And then I think specific to Lash, when you think about what was happening in 2020, there was masks on and lipstick went down because no one was showing their, their lips. Right. But what was the one thing that you could show your eyes, right? So there was a huge pull forward in the Lash market at that time. And so it was like 10 different factors that contributed to that. And then we can speak to, well, what happened afterwards, which is kind of the, the reverse pullback that happened. But that's, I think really what, what allowed us to, to scale initially at that time so fast.
- [08:58]
B
The reverse pullback being that what the world opens up and just people start consuming differently.
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A
Yeah, a few things, right. So we went, you know, we went one to close to 50, which was like hyperbolic, like crazy growth, right? And then in 2021, and you know, we weren't the only brand to go through this part, but the iOS updates happened on Meta from a acquisition standpoint and all of a sudden CAC and acquisition got super expensive. So that's one thing that was like macro. That happened to everything. Everyone, I think, specific to lashes. You know, if you looked at the Lash category and going back to like what you touched on earlier with Tam, you know, lash pre2019 was growing, you know, nice slow and steady, 3 or 4% a year. And then during COVID it just did what our business did. It went straight up. And in a, in a normal non Covid scenario, that never should have happened. So what naturally happened? There was a huge pullback to where it should have been. And so we were building in a TAM that was hyperinflated during COVID And then post Covid, there was that come down. And so we were really faced with two to two and a half years of a really difficult road and business where the category grew probably more than it should. And then we were fighting these headwinds now of multiple things to kind of try to keep that growth in Lash.
- [10:20]
B
Okay, I do want to talk to you about ad efficiency before we get there, because I think the iOS 14 update is an important piece. Notwithstanding that, you know, the idea of generating efficient ROI from your ads, you know, still remains a fundamental pillar of any business. So we'll talk about that in a moment. But when do you start the pivot into nails?
- [10:42]
A
So to recap, we started the business with Lash in July 2019, and then towards the end of 2020, we actually, you know, started to think about, okay, this, the name Glam Medic. It can be bigger than any one category. We really wanted to lean into DIY beauty, and we thought the press on nail category was kind of an interesting adjacency to la. And so we launched our first nail collection at the end of 2020 on D2C. And then we were already in Ulta, I think, on Lash already. And the next year in 2021, we also launched the nail category in Ulta. And I think we very quickly realized, wow, this is an incredible category. It has high consumability and repeatability. And it's leaning into this shift that has happened post Covid of, you know, of people wanting to do nails DIY at home. But I think the key difference that we started to see was where Lash had this big pull forward and then a reversion nail was just starting. And we were in the infancy of what was happening with the press on category at the time. We very quickly realized that this could be a super interesting category for us.
- [11:55]
B
Do you think you would have come to that realization had it not been for your retail presence like you guys were D2C first? Would you have come to the realization that you should expand the product line horizontally regardless?
- [12:08]
A
Yeah, I think. I think we would have come to that realization. I think it definitely made us realize quicker. One thing that we realized in retail was that the retailers are allocating a lot more space for nail than lashes. So, like, even if you were to look at, you know, our. The breakout of our nail business versus Lash business and retail, today we have full end caps and with Ulta and they're an amazing partner where we have 60 plus SKUs with them and with Lash, the retailers just don't allocate as much space. So we had like six or seven SKUs. And so I think we quickly realized that, you know, from a retail perspective, there was just a lot more emphasis and tam on the nail category, but I totally think we were seeing it on D2C as well. And just the demand from every aspect in that category.
- [12:53]
B
What are the challenges that come with hypergrowth of this nature? Regardless of, of, you know, lashes or, or nails or whatever category you're pursuing, Going from a million to 50 million to 100 million in revenue is insane. Right? What is it that founders don't understand about that experience?
- [13:15]
A
So many things. In hindsight, it was such an amazing experience going from like 1 to 50 at the time. And then Ann and I and our whole team, I think we went through two to three years of pain. If you go 1 to 50, right. The assumption is, wow, if we went 1 to 50, we can probably go 50 to 100 the next year. So what do you do? You buy a lot of inventory against that, right. You're buying into the growth. And then when we started to see the headwinds on the business of lashes, well, now instead of sitting on, you know, four to six months of inventory, well, that timeline of inventory that's sitting extends and it keeps extending and extending. And so I think first off, we never raised outside capital. We were fully self funded and we still still are to this day. And so there was extreme cash flow management that had to come into play as we started to see this kind of like rough patch in the business. I think also just, you know, I would encourage all founders to think of a business over a longer, extended period of time. And sometimes it's not the best to grow that quickly. Right. It's a lot, it's a lot more sustainable when you go from 1 to 5 to 12 to 18. And that still sounds like amazing growth, right? But it allows time for you to build the infrastructure, predictability around the business, the team. Right. Like when you're, you know, a couple people in a room and you're, you're scaling to 50 million, you have to quickly put that infrastructure and team in place. So I think those are all things that were really difficult and a challenge from scaling that quickly.
- [14:55]
B
Which do you tackle first and do you feel like you got the order of things right in hindsight?
- [15:03]
A
Yeah, I think the other important thing to think about when a business is challenged and when I say challenged, I'll just kind of give you the numbers. So everyone can quantify this. So we went kind of one to close to 50. And then that was 2020. Well, 21. We were starting to see those headwinds and we had a flat year, so we thought we were going to 100. And we basically stayed comped at kind of like that 50 million mark. Then the next year, the revenue dipped by 25%. So in 2022, that was by far the hardest year we had. And I think the hard thing about it was there were so many unknowns. Right. And so when I think back to that time, we had a lash business that was in serious decline with insanely high customer acquisition costs. We had this nail business that was super promising, but still a small part of the business. And we had to make a decision. And I think as a founder, the worst thing you can do is be indecisive and make no decision. But the hardest thing is making a decision when there's so many unknowns. And so for us, we had to. I remember writing a letter to the team and just being open and honest to everyone and saying, look, I don't have full answers to the future, but I know what we're doing now is not working. We're gonna have to make a really strategic two year pivot on this business and we're going to pivot this business into what we think is a more sustainable category, which is nail when you
- [16:32]
B
talk about the inventory commits. So you're right to your point, Kevin. Like, I think one of the misconceptions or the misunderstood pieces of hypergrowth is that founders don't understand that with hypergrowth comes a cash flow crunch, like growth sucks cash. Unless you have some sort of, I don't know, VC seed money that's sitting there, right. Your, your protection, your nest egg, and you're making inventory commitments and paying out to your suppliers before you're actually catching up on the top line front. Correct. And so if you think about this, you know, more cash going out to your manufacturers or suppliers, your behind the scenes supply side. Meanwhile, demand has to catch up, but it's not linear. Correct. And so the cash flow problem compounds over time. So how did you dial that in? Like is IT systems, is it analytics? How do you get the sort of inventory planning side?
- [17:33]
A
Right, Yeah, I mean, I think we definitely didn't in the early days. Right. Because we ordered all that inventory and then we got stuck with it. And so what that did was it forced us to, as we were building the nail category, be very tight on the way we were ordering because for most Founders and I know a lot of the early stagers that have gone through this, right. You can't get a bank loan. Maybe you get an investment, maybe you don't, and maybe you put up some of your personal cash or maybe you don't. But that only takes you so far. And then you go. And then for us we had kind of maxed out our facility that we had with at the time. It was like the Clear cos of the world and some of these kind of like mid market inventory financers.
- [18:12]
B
These are, this is debt financing through
- [18:14]
A
Clearco exactly like we had. I mean we've been through them all. We've had Clearco, we've had Amplo, we've had, you know, the typical founder journey where we've had three Wayflyr, we've had three or four of these different vendors over the years and they're great at that period of time. But you, you know, if you buy a bunch of inventory in one category and now have to scale another category, you're going to run into a cash crunch. So I think as we went into Nail, we had to make difficult choices on how much we ordered and when purely from the basis that we didn't have enough cash to do it. And so we actually had to be way more conservative as opposed to when we were scaling Lash, we were a lot more aggressive and we got stuck with a lot of inventory. And so I think it was a great learning lesson for us when that happened to us in Lash because it forced us to be a lot more strategic about picking points of where we see opportunity and then being a little more conservative on, you know, on other SKUs. And nail is a. Nail is a SKU intensive business. Right. We have over 600 SKUs on the site now. Right. So you kind of have to pick and choose where you're gonna lean in and then where you're gonna have to run lean because we're not fortunate enough to have enough cash to buy everything that we want.
- [19:26]
B
What is it about Nail that's attractive? So like, to me it's, it's complicated as a category. It's SKU intensive as you mentioned. I would think it's gotta be pretty damn competitive. That's the other thing. So you're constantly having to be aware of your competitors. I don't know if it's a race to the bottom or not, but how do you differentiate yourself?
- [19:49]
A
Yeah, I think you're totally right. It's a highly, highly, highly competitive category. And it's funny because we, you know, kind of cut to four or five years later after we launched Nail, we're now one of the biggest press on nail brands in the world. It's weird making that transition from. I still still feel like we're a startup in the space, but I know that these other brands that are trying to catch up to us look at us as like the incumbent, right? Like now we're one of the top brands in the category, doing over 100 million a year. And the perception from all these competitors is they're trying to come and eat our lunch. Right. And so I'm very mindful that this is a super competitive category. I think that where we've always stood out is not any one thing. I think that Ann is incredible at quality design of the nails and being on trend. And I think in the nail category, it's really important that you have an evergreen core of nail styles that are always on and they last forever and you infuse with that the other side of it, which is, is infusing newness into the mix. And so we do a lot of seasonal collections, we do a lot of collaborations, we do a lot of limited edition drops, but that supports the long tail of all of the evergreen and core SKUs that we know sell over and over and over again over time. So there's this element of stability through a core collection infused with this fashion like element of trend. And you have to figure out the way to kind of nail both.
- [21:21]
B
Can you point to your social media to assist with this? I mean can it act as a forecasting tool in terms of what is likely to be next, so to speak?
- [21:32]
A
100 like we have a Facebook group called the glam fam with 40,000 members in it that are like our diehards. And I think that, you know, there's, there's proactiveness of us surveying them and then there's just like their proactiveness of them telling us what they want. And it's really like this incubation of ideas that we, we see what they want, what's trending in the market and then we kind of, you know, we do a lot outside of that now from a data and analysis, analysis perspective, but never discount like the qualitative feedback from your die hard customers of what they want to see. And that's been like an amazing source of ideation for us as we think about how we build new collections.
- [22:18]
B
Yeah, that's very cool. Going back to what you were saying earlier about the importance of team as you're scaling you at some point. Bring on A cfo, a coo, so chief financial officer, chief Operating officer, and then a VP of retail. When do you make these hires and do you feel like that was the right time to bring these folks in?
- [22:40]
A
Yeah, different. We have a pretty built out leadership team now and again, like kind of trying to take this back to like early stage founders. The hardest part is at different stages of the business, the hardest part is always going to be you need more people than you can afford at a certain time. So like when you're a $10 million business, you can probably afford like one really good, like high level person and you're having to kind of fill in and wear a lot of hats. And so we, we kind of strategically did it over time. We kind of skipped that 10 million step. We went like 1 to 40 really quickly at the time. We brought on someone to run the retail division, we brought on someone to run growth marketing. And then I've had, you know, with me for the last nine years now, my like right hand guy who's our CFO and coo, so he's been with the business since day one and then over the years we've kind of slowly built out the team more Like I think again, as a founder you have to pick and choose. Probably the areas that you have the least expertise in are the ones that you should try to fill the holes and gaps first with people that are smarter than you and have more experience in those categories. And so that's kind of the, the way we tried to do it in where I didn't have a ton of retail experience at the time and I knew I didn't know what I didn't know and I knew that we needed to bring on someone really strong that could lead the charge on retail and so we brought that person in.
- [23:59]
B
What about on the supply chain side? Have you always maintained the same relationships with your manufacturers?
- [24:06]
A
I think the most interesting part of supply chain was we had to very quickly, I think on both sides, right, because it was Covid and most of our manufacturers are overseas and you know, in China, both sides had to create a trust level very fast because on the last side of the business, we started at this small vendor with them when we started and then imagined for them, like how quickly we're scaling. And so, you know, I think that we had a few trusted suppliers on both lash and nail that we worked with for a while. The challenging part was not being able to get out there and go there during COVID And so like it was really hard for, for Ann and the Product development team trying to develop products all virtually. And it was a huge unlock when we were finally able to get out to see our suppliers and, like, deepen that relationship. And having amazing relationships with your suppliers is super important because there's going to be problems that arise. And like you, the value of relationship equity is real.
- [25:08]
B
Where are you going? Are you going to China?
- [25:10]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [25:12]
B
What can you learn before you meet your, let's say, shortlist of manufacturers in person? Like, how much due diligence can you do upfront locally to shortlist? I don't know, the four or five manufacturers that you think want to produce, you know, X product before you actually get on a plane and travel and meet them in person. Like, how much can a founder learn up front?
- [25:37]
A
I think you can learn a lot up front now. I think that, you know, a lot of these suppliers are willing to send, you know, send samples over and you can kind of heat check and quality check the product from the jump and narrow it down and. And, you know, it's interesting. Every supplier is different, but for us, right. Like, I think one way to kind of shortcut it was there's events like CosmoProf in the beauty space, which is where all suppliers in beauty go to, and you can meet them in person and it's a lot easier to narrow it down there without having to kind of fly over to Asia and meet with them to start. So, like, I'd encourage founders to like, really do that research in the beginning. And I don't want to say it's easy, but it's easy ish to kind of narrow down to five suppliers. I think then it kind of comes to like, product output and what they actually put out from a product perspective to narrow that down farther and then kind of pick the one you're going to go deeper with. And I would say start small with all suppliers. Don't go out the gate, you know, with some huge po. Like, I think you need to earn their trust and they need to earn your trust.
- [26:40]
B
Makes total sense. Let's rewind back and talk marketing and acquisition. So when you guys go from 1 to 50 and then from 50 to 100, what do you feel like were the most important marketing or customer acquisition strategies that were contributing to that kind of growth?
- [27:01]
A
Yeah, at the time, the lion's share of that budget was most likely going to meta. So that first year we probably spent $20 million on marketing. Right. Which in our category is a lot of dollars flowing into. You know, the tam of of lashes is not like a Supplement business or not like an apparel business. Right. It's a, it's a really nice sized ham, but it's nowhere near that. And so $20 million flowing into that. It's just a lot of pure dollars going into, you know, marketing and brand awareness. But the lion's share was going to what at the time was the cheapest source of acquisition, which was growth marketing. But what we did was in the background on the other side of it and was on social every day telling the brand story. Right. She really was the founder face of the brand and was building the community. Because I think what a lot of brands make the mistake of is they try to like growth marketing everything out and then you're left with just like a brand that's running a lot of ads, but that's not a brand and that's not a community. And so I think like we got scale through growth marketing, but then we really built the community, the social following, the founder relationship with Ann and then a plethora of influencer relationships through both larger influencers as well as a lot of micro influencers that I think really fell in love with the brand. And so it's always like a balance. The easiest place for any brand to get to scale, or at least it was back then, was through scaling on the paid acquisition side. The hardest thing, which also just takes time to build, is that brand affinity. Whenever, like I go and just like research a brand and I'm trying to see like, what kind of love do they actually have in the market. I don't just look at their social, I go to all their tagged images and I look at how many people feel so into this brand that they want to tag them on Instagram and tag them on social. And it's a vibe thing, it's a feeling thing. And those are the harder things to build.
- [29:08]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really important point to hammer home. So for those that are listening, if Your business is 100% growth marketing based, you don't have any organic word of mouth, you don't have a robust community. And so eventually, you know, should there be, I don't know, another iOS 14 update or whatever, and your CAC jumps from, you know, 30% of your top line revenue to now 50%, you're kind of screwed. On the flip side, if you've got a really sticky customer base, a community, organic following or whatever, I mean, that alone is a standalone marketing organism that supports your brand because those consumers are now telling their friends about you and their friends who now buy from you, in this case, buy from Glamnetic, have a zero dollar customer acquisition cost associated with them. Right. That is unbelievably powerful at scale and something that I don't think a lot of founders think about when thinking, you know, how do we scale acquisition? Like, they're not hammering home these points. They're not thinking about like, do we have a community, do we have really organic following, etc. So I think it's an excellent point
- [30:28]
A
when it's, it's all these small things that add up, right? It's like the little, it's like doing the little things that compound and they continue to compound over time. And I think that, you know, it became so sexy to launch a brand and you know, try to scale as quickly as possible. And it, you know, I feel like sometimes people don't see the forest from the trees where it's like, it's, you can build an amazing brand in seven to 10 years. It's really hard to build an amazing brand over one to two years. You can scale, you can plug a lot of growth marketing in, but to build that engine, to build all those small things, those touch points, we do these things, for example, called Just Because Gifts, where every month we pick 10 or 20 random customers and send them a gift out of the blue. Well, doing that for one month is great. Well, imagine doing that for seven years and the affinity that audience now has for you and the brand love that builds over time. But those aren't short term things, those are things that just take time, you know.
- [31:30]
B
Yeah, no, totally agreed. Do you think about nails as a high repeat purchase category and how do you generate repeat purchases and can you even move into sort of like auto subscription sorts of business models for something like this?
- [31:49]
A
Yeah, a lot of good questions and things to unpack there. Yes, it's, you know, nail is an amazing category for consumability. So and there's, there's multiple different ways a consumer can do their nails. One is obviously for a long time been the salon and usually when someone's getting their nails done in the salon, they're going every three, maybe four weeks because their nails grow out and you know, they have to get their nails redone. The big, the big macro shift that's been happening is that salon prices in nail salons have risen 50% over the last four years. So there's a real cost issue that's in play for a lot of consumers there, which is one of many reasons that's driven people into the press on category but, you know, press ons, you know, usually last up to two weeks. And I think nail is one of those interesting categories where if you look around, usually you'll see probably at least when I look around, 9 out of 10 women do something to their nails, whether it's polish, whether it's press ons, they're doing something to it. And generally it's highly repeatable. Right. So usually they want to switch designs, they want to switch colors, and that's happening once or twice a month. So just from the nature of. Of the product usage, it's highly consumable. And then to your question on the subscription piece. Subscription is not that big for us, and it's partly because it's not like a skin care product where you buy the same serum over and over again. The consumer loves to switch up their designs and nails in the nail category. So what we actually see a lot more of is bundling. Different collections, different drops that we do. We can have a solids collection for a consumer that loves solids. We have a French tip collection for people that love French tips. It's more like what we see more success with is bundling than subscription. But that doesn't mean there's not high consumability, you know, via the consumer just having to come back again and again because they need new nails.
- [33:45]
B
All right, Kevin, let's do some rapid fire before we close off. Okay. What is the most overrated growth channel right now?
- [33:53]
A
Most overrated growth channel right now? I think it's meta. I think that meta will get you scale, but it goes back to, like, all of those other things. It doesn't build you a brand. So, so. So, like, it's. It's underrated in that, you know, you can get scale out of it, but it's overrated in that it's not gonna, you know, it's not gonna fully build the brand that you want.
- [34:21]
B
All right, other side of the coin, most underrated.
- [34:24]
A
I mean, I don't know. I don't know how underrated this is anymore, but I think, like, most brands still don't understand the opportunity and the arbitrage that's on TikTok right now on TikTok Shop and the brand Halo that funnels over to retail to every other channel of the business. And obviously, there's a lot of brands that are doing a great job on there now and have scaled there, but I see a lot of brands still kind of looking at it as, like, something that's interesting but they haven't jumped into. And that arbitrage gap and that attention gap is going to close quickly. So my advice would be like, that is the one place where you can still get arbitrage.
- [35:04]
B
One hire every founder should make early
- [35:07]
A
on product strategy and innovation. I think like your future pipeline, you're only as good as your future product pipeline. And I think that the strategy that goes behind that a lot of times is, is a little underrated.
- [35:24]
B
All right, last one. One mistake you would never repeat.
- [35:28]
A
So many mistakes I would never repeat. I don't think I ever want to scale that fast again. I think like, like it, it, it honestly sounds amazing. And you know, there is nothing wrong with growth like this that goes up into the, to the right, but in a healthy way. And I think it's scale fast, but not 1 to 50 million overnight was, was, was a lot.
- [35:55]
B
Well, you know, you're now north of a hundred million, so well done. Congrats.
- [35:58]
A
By the way, it took us five more years to get there than we thought. Right. We thought we were going to 100, you know, in 2022. And it, you know, ultimately, again, you always end up in life directionally where you want to be. You just never know when exactly that's going to happen.
- [36:10]
B
Okay, well, you took your own advice because it sounds like going to 50, from, from 50 to 100 was more controlled, even though that still is insane growth. So well done.
- [36:18]
A
Thank you.
- [36:19]
B
Kevin, great to chat with you today, man. Thanks for being here.
- [36:21]
A
You too, Adam. Thanks a lot.
- [36:23]
B
Our show is produced by Schwang Esther, Shan, Gogo Zogar and Alicia Clark. Our engineers are Miku Bedlam and Matt Schwartz. Rachel Reich is our senior content lead. And I'm your host, Adam Lavinter. For more Shopify masters, hit that follow button. We drop every Tuesday and Thursday. Plus be sure to follow and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can catch our video interviews in real time. Thanks so much.