The Brand Operator Playbook: Community, Product, and Growth

Surviving Without Facebook and Google

0:00kind of goes with the question that I think every brand needs to ask themselves is if I got banned from Facebook and Google tomorrow no problem no problem you better have a playbook for it though right there's a company there called Burna they're a less than lethal option for people to protect themselves they got banned from Facebook and Google not here to start a political discussion but they went hard on like truth yeah like they started advertising on all these podcasts and they're up over 100% year over-year and they can't even advertise on Facebook and Google so I think you have ask yourself that question and build Playbook around that cuz you'll have days where you wake up and be like wow we're off Target by 20% what are we going to do now I would recommend planting the seeds of how to execute on that quickly if you need to and at minimum at the start of 2025 start building those opportunities because it's not going to get better on Facebook and Google it's only going to

0:47get more expensive it's only going to get harder we are we are cruising and we are going to keep it on going the next group

Panel Introductions and Roles

0:58is my group already ready 1 2 3 4 You four make your way on up so we can get some introductions in and we'll make sure [Applause] Tech all the way on down make sure you pull the mic up and speak into it a couple [Music] times just five white guys on a stage nothing to see here nothing to see nothing different same same except me I don't look that white who am I speaking to let's start all the way over to this side Hans Harris director of growth at drink wear coolers brand brewmate oversee all of our new customer acquisition paid channels earned channels basically growth by any means necessary I am McCoy Merkley I'm the CMO of port and leather goods I've been with Port Lea goods for 6 years so my roles changed from time to time started when we were just at 1 million we just we're over 100 million now so things have grown have changed I'm mostly focused now on like marketing leadership and alignment on the

2:07executive level and working with all the internal teams to make sure they're shooting at the same Target oh you got some fans got some appr dad the Portland leather goods team travels well what an for jeez put me against that high I sell cookies I do yeah formerly so my name is Greg Dolby formerly SBP of omni Channel Milk Bar about 4 weeks ago I made a transition I'm doing some fractional CMO and head of e-commerce work right now thank you this is wild I'm Chris Lang I'm one of the owners of fresh chili company a number one Hatch scen Chili store in America God [Music] bless quite a variety of individuals up here and I'm going to ask this this is

Challenges and Strategies in 2024

2:54the theme is like 2024 has been interesting personally it's been interesting I've been watching this grow and I'm watching all you guys kind of grow your own businesses and I know way too much about cups leather cookies and chili spicy or nonan and I wanted to just get like a tone because you guys are know intimately like all your revenues varying on on different scales which means we've all been affected positively and negatively across the board from product development from product scaling and from operations so in one sentence I'm going to go down the line starting here with Chris all the way down back there what was 24 2024 like for you and your [Music] team telling our story it's about telling our story why why why does that matter now more than ever so we were up you know quite a bit over you know last fourth quarter and we were rolling that into January and February and then meta all of a sudden February didn't want to work anymore and we just had to really find creative that

4:02work and that was really kind of going through and making sure that the storytelling was at the heart of our messaging and not just branded messaging but that me and my partner were really talking to our audience directly okay for me 2024 is the year of financial literacy and for those of you that were here last year you might have seen Taylor holiday was on stage and he talked about margin expansion and I think he was one of the few people who talked about margin last year in most of the talks and as I watched the talks unfold this year I don't think I've watched any panel where someone wasn't talking about contribution margin and margin expansion and understanding your Opex so for me it's it's been really interesting to watch the industry change in I think a pretty fundamental way from the 2021 2022 game of building a rapidly scaling business with very little discussion about margin and op operational efficiency and fulfillment costs and I I think it's a great thing I

5:04I'm here for it I believe it's needed in our industry but it's heartening to see how many people are just upping their game and building stronger sustainable businesses in the dtoc space and there's been a lot of companies that aren't here anymore through 2024 but the ones that are figuring out how to really understand their margin profile understand the true cost of their business and build a sustainable profitable one it's it's what our industry needs and I'm heartened to see it where do you think people start to get that information like Taylor's one of the few guys I think that's really yelling about it like how are you starting this by yourself or or where are you going to like learn more yeah I mean we went through this at milkbar when I came in late 2022 this was what we had to do we we were saying like this business is not making money we have to figure out how to Pivot and you know it's not easy and I think at the time

5:50not a lot of people were talking about it certainly I don't think there's still enough people that are disseminating the information on how do you build a strong durable D Toc business in in 2024 and it starts with understanding your people it starts with understanding your platforms and your processes that's that's how I always group these things together and I and I think I'll go back to what Taylor said earlier today the the business that you built if you built your business 2021 2022 and you're using the same kind of processes to try and deliver growth and deliver scale you've built the wrong kind of business you have to look at it from a completely different angle and you really have to rebuild the business from zero up and say what kind of roles do we need are the either right people in the right kind of roles do we have the right systems that are that are delivering growth for us I mean first like anecdotally when I got to milkar we were paying more for our clavo bill than

6:39we were for Shopify right massively overpaying on that and so looking at those platforms and saying yeah it may be a great platform but are we overpaying to a significant degree and are we getting the value out of it it is a it is a painful exercise it takes a lot of time and I don't think there's any replacement for just getting into the weeds of how your business Works what everyone on your team is doing and is that delivering the right Roi to deliver a sustainable durable business

Operational Efficiency and Team Alignment

7:06Coy before you get into like what your sentence was you you had some thoughts on this you shared on the background of like operational efficiency and in the team build to build the machine that you want to listen to this individual make things how's that been different for that growth you say how's it been different from traditional growth like correct absolutely it's I mean you you took a lot of the words right out of my mouth which is like when things are in a sentence maybe I'll just start there was like external instability and internal stability right so that was the focus for this year is like when some of this opportunity dries up for whatever reason it's a really good time to focus internally on making sure that like your systems are healthy and it's a big gut check you know growth covers a multitude of sins at least for the short term because you can sort of excuse away some of the the stuff you're really bad at with just the excuse that

7:54like we're growing and that's good enough and then when some of the systems become less stable and you really have to look inside and I I called it inflation earlier and it's not inflation because we're in a you know deflationary business but the inflation is in the compensated man it takes as a baseline just to run a profitable business all the things that it you're no longer all the the slack has been pulled in on the margin of err and so the ship has to be you know squeaky clean and everyone needs to be aligned and making sure that they're aiming at the same Target and so that's where I spent a lot of my time and where I've invested the majority of this year is going from Department to Department especially the ones under my control but across the entire business and like air making sure that we're aiming all of our efforts at the actual goal and even internally we're mostly an internal team we don't use a lot of agencies we

8:42have a few but we're mostly internal when you really start to dig in with a critical eye you'd be shocked at how much misalignment exists in your own business for example for example well you can have I won't get into two two specifics but I recently was working on a problem where four different departments had essentially they had unique problems but were all caused by the same Ro route C the same root thing and the solution was basically that like no one had talked to each other yes so like we had an Overstock and in a material and when we looked back we were missing that core color core variant in eight of our last new bags and so we were fing Overstock on materials and and underproduction in POS and we were also missing out on the opportunity to selling those number one selling variant and the Cure was literally just somebody walking around going what the hell's going on here like let's you talk to him you talk to him you talk to him and that

9:34happens constantly and it's not it's not a condonation of anyone or anyone in those departments but it Precision minimizes effort and so if you can get your whole team like really laser focused on exactly what they need to be aiming at which for the marketing team which is the team I run is the generation of Revenue Andor the efficiency while we generate that revenue and that means talking to the graphic designers about that talking to your e-com Merchant iers talking to everyone top to bottom and making sure like they understand why they are sitting in a chair and what they're here to do for the business and getting them on the same track what do like a brief org structure looks like that you oversee we fit I mean we have three like main compartments I think like most we have an operation side we have a finance and we have a marketing side the operation side because we own the manufacturer it's one of our greatest benefits but it does tend to bend what

10:23people might think of as a traditional like organizational structure for operations so operations by far is the largest Curtis mentioned we have a 240,000 foot factory in Mexico but that's there's 700 people in there so there's a lot more that you know gets under the umbrella of operations and maybe traditionally D Toc companies might be familiar with talking about purchasing and the logistics of those products what's your sentence sir it's been a year of solid significant but profitable growth and I'm happy to report that brewmate has been first purchased profitable for the last like 18 months and so like profitability matters right and but to to everyone's point it's like it does take alignment it takes hard work it takes you know look at yourself in the mirror and saying like we we have to do hard [ __ ] to make this happen but how did you get there we had a conversation at grow and you're like I have I'm about to go into some [ __ ] like I you had to deal with some

11:18stuff how did you get there I mean I before I joined bro8 been there like 2 years I started in a in a d Toc startup that was first purchased profitable from day one from like you know literally the first first paying order and I think if you come from that environment it becomes second nature that like why are we spending money if we're not like earning a profit and and you don't you don't grow up in that space so it's it's not natural to use I think I have a slightly different just you know perspective having having been having that experience but it's hard we got to I mean breade had a huge huge year like covid 2020 massively popular and was turning around and reinvesting that Revenue in inefficient marketing and just kind of throwing [ __ ] at the wall not really knowing what was going on so rigorous measurement and actually like aligning teams on what is our I know I don't like to say source of truth

12:14because I don't think there is like a source of truth but making sure that we all we're marching in the same in the same line but cutting inefficient marketing spend and getting down to what was actually driving incremental results like postp purchase survey is the easiest most low-lift tool ask your customers how did they hear about us that is probably outside of I mean no that's probably like the thing that is going to get you to the point of like what's driving profitable growth fastest without any unnecessary expensive MTA mmm whatever it might be so getting the team aligned to that and then making those decisions of like sorry if this was you know your baby but I I I I don't have a problem with you as a person but like this is not making sense for the business and we've just got to like head in this new direction if you or I want a job or if we want to be a brand that can become a household

13:02name in the next 3 5 seven years and that's where we're headed this is something I love to ask Founders is usually not on stage with microphones in your face so we'll see how this goes what's your actual Tech ACT that you use daily daily okay we'll go daily and then weekly I mean I I need as a chiefly performance marketer I need like hourly data I need I need fresh data all the time I'm a big super metrics user super metrics for Google Sheets again don't over complicate it I think often times ba tools are just way too slow to actually allow you to make quick decisions or get really familiar with your data so super metrics no Commerce for the Post purchase survey again that's a really really valuable tool for us what am I missing that it's more than those two that's for [ __ ] sure yeah I mean there there's a bunch right and I I'll probably you know think it's more as this conversation

14:00goes on but as far as like making business decisions and knowing where our profitable business lines are profitable channels are it's getting good clean data into a place where you are comfortable manipulating it and like doing ad hoc analyses and then something that you trust as far as like what are actually you know driving the attention Impressions that customers can remember where they then eventually converted you know this is going to go down to the rest of us I'm going to go to Greg on this one a lot of customers feedback

Customer Feedback and Product Development

14:29went into like the flavors and the things that you guys were creating what pipeline did you create or what learning mechanism or listening mechanism did you have and anybody else in this panel of I am about to go this product I'm about to launch this flavor how do I know it with some certainty it's going to do well because that's CX that leads into paid media and then it leads into like I need product made yep yeah I mean hold on I actually think a lot of you guys can actually talk about that too so we'll go down the line thank you sure you know flavor is a it can be a choice that depending on how you talk about Flavor in food can drastically impact people's perception of it right if you say something is a blueberry lemon muffin flavor how much is blueberry how much is lemon how much does the muffin shine through so flavor in a food company is very complex and you know it I will say we didn't always

15:20get it right and there were definitely times where we thought a flavor maybe tasted great but also maybe someone wasn't willing to take a risk on a flavor for Mother's Day they want the Home Run product so for instance what didn't go well I'll use blueberry muffin cake as an example Mother's Day 2023 did not do as well as we expected it to we realized that we we we found we were being a little too cute with Innovation everyone's okay with buying the Strawberry Shortcake every year for Mother's Day there's nothing wrong so we moved to an icon menu where we bring back the same flavors for Valentine's Day Mother's Day Thanksgiving and Christmas every year and the times in between are the opportunity for us to really innovate and create incrementality through interesting flavors at a time when people are maybe willing to take a bit more of a risk on something but those giftable moments you had to have a home run that everyone's going to love and pumpkin Milk Bar pie

16:13sells out every single year we should never not have that on the menu and it's okay to do it every single year so what's like the actual like technical implementation of I need to get this feedback and I talked about it earlier on one of the panels I was on is like I launched a product I send it to my VIP my VIPs give me feedback they give me a video testimonial they fill out a Google sheet that goes into an info and then now I send them more messages like did you have a workflow similar yeah so we use three primary data sources that I think anyone here could use and then one that was a bit unique to us but obviously review feedback always be looking at your reviews I think particularly with AI tools today you should be weekly dumping all of your customer reviews at the product level load them up and get the sentiment feedback out of chat GPT super easy to do obviously I think you can do the same thing with your ads look

17:03at your ad comments see what people are talking about and responding to our customers have no problem asking when's this flavor coming back and if we see that sentiment being shared at ad comments we would action on that and then lastly is just looking at our CX team what kind of feedback were they getting were was were people generally happy with the flavors were people asking for flavors to come back on the menu or asking if we're let's use matcha as an interesting flavor that's kind of hot right now should we do anything with matcha our customers asking about that those were all three areas that I think anyone could use to find out what the next level of product is that you should be bringing out we also had our subscription program that I talked about last year and that was very much a test bed for the next level of product so customers could subscribe to essentially a dessert of the Month Club from us we use that club as a way to test out new

17:51flavor offerings get direct feedback from our best customers who were happy to pay to be part of that program and that could help us validate what products we should commercialize and bring to market for either an evergreen or lto option on the menu anybody else have any interesting customer listening to product development workflows I mean you got it well I mean so we we mentioned it before but we have a ridiculous Facebook group it's wildly impractical say the same thing yeah so word right I mean we have 130,000 people in there and so we got to be careful when we take too much direction from that and we really need to be clear about like the product we're trying to create is this you know a hero product that we plan to aage aggressively for new customer acquisition or is this a retention Play We Know new customers come in and they scoop up that but we have this captive audience of 130,000 people now it's a little like getting your fashion report from a football

18:39stadium you know where you go and you're like man people love red and purple and that's just the home team colors so you have to be careful and be really intentional about what you're doing here but for all intents and purposes you can drisk a lot of the launch so God forbid there's a rake you know waiting at the end of that product launch you can at least drisk it to some substantial degree where you can move on and you live another day if in h in fact you happen to you know release a dud and then we also through that same group we're pipelining products we're slowly teasing for months and months and months those products and building anticipation again because we own the manufacturers we're typically like Hands-On prototypes for months and months beforehand so we can drop little sneak peeks and little teasers and they I mean they eat that they eat that up so we're reasonably sure certain by the time it comes out how do they get into the the Facebook group The I'll try to

19:27the the story that's the shortest possible was basically we ran one ad exclusively just all budget one big ad and what we started to notice was people with no exclusions mind you right so returning customers and new customers are seeing the same ad and we started to see a lot of social engagement on that post and it sort sort of slowly turned into like a forum board on an ad and so the direction to our social media team was you watch this the comments on this ads if they can answer a question for themselves so you have customers asking you know questions and customers answering that's the best but if not provide a customer service level experience on a on an ad so that grew and grew and eventually that migrated to its own individual Facebook group we hijacked another Brands it wasn't run

Transition to Dedicated Facebook Group

20:12by us but they it was brand a and port and leather goods and they eventually went see you later brand a and it just became the dedicated group of Port leather goods so we inherited a large list and then eventually that turned into strategy of launching our own Facebook group we have six people Modera

Moderation and Community Engagement

20:28that 18 hours a day 7 days a week and so it's it's our it's our creative space to talk to them and there's just the goal for us is just that the conversation is happening inside of our domain and we can control you know every so often we put something in there but I just checked the stats for last month we had 650,000 likes on posts we had 157,000 comments in that group and we had 10,000 individual unique posts in that group so just the massive

Leveraging Community Feedback

20:55conversation that's happening in that gives us a lot of Leverage to help product iteration and new designs are your moderators employees or are they they customers that you've deployed if you boil it down I think they're Psychopaths they I don't know I could leather I couldn't do it I couldn't do it I tell you what but no they're they're fantastic I I say that with all love in my heart they're an amazing group of people who genuinely really care for the brand we actually wait are they employees or they they're employees sorry yeah I don't know if I missed that

Moderator Profiles and Anonymity

21:24edge to the question we if you are in our groups what you'll notice is the the moderator or the people our team who's posting have essentially we thought it was just burner profiles but they almost became these characters they were a mashup of a lot of the dogs that used to come to our office and in a way of like anonymizing them and we did not plan this I'll give you mine it was like one dog's name another dog's name and then a dog profile we like dogs I don't know don't don't copy the strategy it's just what happened to come about but when we anonymize like the actual like moderator profiles it let them be like Larger than Life and set that bar for the enthusiasm of the brand as Sky High as possible without a certain person person assigning their name to a post where they may take the edge off the enthusiasm to preserve like ego or whatever the word would be I don't think that's the correct word but you get the

22:11idea I think the only new thing I'll add

Founder Involvement in Product Development

22:14to that cuz we have a very very very similar strategy inh house employees manage a Facebook VIP group that I think last time I checked was like 65,000 but the difference is our founder is very involved in that group our founder is also the head of product so when it comes to product pipeline it's like hey guys here's 10 Pantone swatches and like in drink wear other than introducing new product lines it's a lot of seasonal color refreshes and and drop model like collections prints colors and so he'll bring them along in the process of like I'm considering here's 10 color swatches what do you guys like we're thinking about a fall line or we're considering this print Builds an incredible Community you know fanatical repeat purchase Behavior because people feel like they have some ownership in it but it also seems like we cannot miss on these these drops and the color collections we do cuz our customers like an average drop we probably do you know a couple million dollars of

23:08merchandise in an hour and sell out and on to the next one and we will just max that and do two dozen of those a year you know and and it's a huge huge huge source of Revenue and Brian earlier on the panel nude was talking about confirmation bias it's like we also don't want to just go all in on that being the source of our information cuz then it's this maybe negative feedback loop when it comes to acquisition of okay you're just going to get more of what's already there in the group so we also make sure to go out and and Survey folks that aren't really in that group aren't our customer that are new demos that we want to go after and say what is it you would be looking for why haven't you purchased is it different features functionality designs like what is it going to take to to make you a customer and so when you put those things together then you balance a like product road map that can kind of cater to

23:56driving insane LTV and repeat business doing more of what's really worked but then also making sure you've got a healthy mix of trying new Concepts okay role play with me

Q4 Strategy Brainstorming

24:09so I'm not done I'm not done so I have orange glasses okay sometimes I live in Mexico sometimes I don't we're off Target for a Q4 boys all four of you run my division unlimited budget unlimited creative unlimited influencers unlimited anything you want Unlimited product but we're but we're losing how do we win how am I going to win Q4 how am I going to hit my targets I would like to go down the line and see your ideas nothing's off the table what do we do I mean you tell your story first

Importance of Storytelling and Personal Branding

24:43and foremost the story is the heartbeat of everything we do so from you know the type of emails that we send are from the founder text based emails the messaging is live videos from the farm live videos from the kitchen live videos from the shipping Department we are constantly talking to our customers multiple times a day you know through automations and and I I really believe that's what people want to buy they they want to buy from people more than ever you know trust is a new currency personal brands are the new currency so Founders get out there and and you know let people let people invest in you and your community cuz that's what they want to invest in they don't want to necessarily you know invest in some of these bigger Brands they want to invest in a mission in a cause I think that's true I think I

Celebrity Influence and Promotion Strategies

25:29think a lot of the like I think why people love celebrity brand so much where the Yeezy drop did so well is like they are just so fanatical about who this person is and what they kind of live about I think milkbar has a little bit of that story like their their creator she was like very involved and their their Community was extremely loyal do you think that plays a big role especially if you don't hit targets are you going to like Drive deeper into a a message around why this product is incredible ingredient wise or you're going like I'm going to actually Pull A playbook and go or go kind of like offers cuz I'm in this situation potentially right now is like what levers do I have to pull is it the emails that I have to smash is it new product is it actually discounting what is that play that you're thinking through yeah I mean absolutely for us at Milk Bar having a great founder story was a massive acquisition leverage point

26:17for us gave us huge opportunity through her appearances on Netflix or Amazon or Good Morning America there were always great moments for us to create real moments of excitement about the brand and we saw in the results for sales we would see the bump when it happen she goes on Kelly Clarkson Taylor Swift posts her birthday cake it absolutely creates massive acquisition leverage for us and I think kind of goes to the question that I think every brand needs to ask themselves is if I got banned

Navigating Marketing Challenges

26:43from Facebook and Google tomorrow no problem huh no problem no problem you better have a playbook for it though right there there's a company I'm based in Las Vegas there's a company there called Burna they're a less than lethal option for people to protect M themselves they got banned from Facebook and Google and not here to start a political discussion but they went hard on like truth yeah like they they started advertising on all these podcasts and they're up over 100% year-over-year And they can't even advertise on Facebook and Google so I think you have to ask yourself those questions if I got banned tomorrow from this we keep talking about these channels they're getting less efficient they're getting less powerful the rest of the year is going to be tough for all of us ask yourself that question and build day Playbook around that cuz you'll have days where you wake up and be like wow we're off Target by 20% what are we going to do now if you haven't

27:34already built the Playbook at minimum if not started to seed that strategy you may wake up one day to a very tough reality in a more everyone's some kind of forgetting we have a more narrow window this year than last year to sell between Thanksgiving and Christmas you could be in a very painful spot so at least build the Playbook of what do we do outside of those two channels and I would recommend start planting the seeds of how to execute on that quickly if you need to and at minimum at the start of 2025 start building those opportunities because it's not going to get better on Facebook and Google it's only going to get more expensive it's only going to get harder I [ __ ] you not that's why I talked to the ni guys and I was like I don't even know what this is but I know like I'm trying to figure out if things go wrong and I get the call going like we are not hitting Target we have to

28:22because we want to go raise a bunch of money we need to go do that like you you need plays you need things to kind of pull out and it's not a it's not an evergreen approach but you still need to know what to do if it goes red alert yeah I think I mean I one I we've been in this situation before I think everyone kind of has that that little like tickle in the back of their mind they know that like okay I could create this promotion that's like way too good to be true and it's just this giant lever and God forbid I ever have to pull it I can I'm very fortunate because I work with the CEO who's very marketing minded and so that's I never have to call him up and convince him which is great like he's hyper aware of those things too so I I'm basically like we're going to pull the lever and he's like all right sounds good you know like whatever it is everything 20 bucks Yeezy

29:03style like whatever and we've done that in the past before where we just create just absurd promotions to hit those goals it goes back to Taylor saying you know we make guesses because you have to guess cuz you don't know so everything's a guess by Nature even if you model it's a guess and then you're somewhere within the margin of error and then you do whatever it takes to make that the reality so I mean outside of that like one your number one lever to pull is from for us personally is like retention if you're trying to hit goals new customer acquisition is probably not the best way to come up with that money in a very very short term period of time now you always have the option of going to Facebook and typing in a bigger number that option is available to you all right now but there's probably a reason you're not doing that today and it's usually some degreg of efficiency is that's a belief but you have this

29:49massive you know site of Revenue we call retention and they're already loyal devoted customers of your product and if anyone should get the great deal that you need to get over a revenue threshold I'll give it to them first and so we'll send promotions we have loyalty systems which there's a lot of debate on those but we can activate promotional offers based on loyalty tiers so we're literally hitting you know the top 1% and rewarding them first and then going down the line but I the the point being I think everyone has an idea of like what that in case of emergency pull lever is and often times the the barrier might be convincing the right people in the room especially if you're not you know if you start at the art and you go down if you're just like God forbid some poor lonely media buyer in a corner that's going to be a a difficult Hill to climb so you know communicate ahead of time and then do all the things that all

30:34these other smart people said you build stability when you have the chance cuz you're going to need it one day yeah very well said I Tik Tok I mean I

Leveraging TikTok for Customer Acquisition

30:46I'll throw that one out there if meta went away Tik Tok Tik Tok has been our number one paid new customer acquisition source for more than a year now both ads and Creator yeah the combination of organic creators ads and now Tik Tok shop has been a massive massive you know incremental ad to the business and you know if if we're losing like you know we need to make Target to your point like of course retention is the lever and we can juice retention through like I said like limited edition drops and releases and really you know put the the foot on the gas pedal with those to drive people back and play with the scarcity element of like this is is limited you only have a chance to get it now you might not actually like it if you sit on it for a while but you're going to buy it because you don't want the fomo of not having it and also like 30% of our new

31:39customers on a monthly basis come from word of mouth so do everything you can to build Word of Mouth that is resilient new customer acquisition that you can eventually wean yourself off of the really expensive or potentially risky or unreliable you know paid acquisition channels that might evaporate or just might not start you know they might stop working for you the way they once did is I think everybody's probably experienced to some level where your reach tailes off and you're wondering how can I you know trust these channels to to continue to introduce me to new eyeballs and they're just not doing it the way they were and part of that's you know by Design you don't have an infinite market and those platforms despite their massive monthly active user base like they just have their limits so having the Playbook of like okay what's going to be next and running running those playbooks you don't even need to wait for a cataclysmic event like be running those playbooks well done Round of Applause

32:31for this panel real quick any questions from the outside crew all individual IND different people if not we'll boot them off what question for Brew mate for Tik Tok in that channel do you find that it's a good channel for your higher price point items or is it mostly kind of lower yeah so we have two main lines of business it's C coolers High aov $400 cooler $300 cooler and then drink wear which is nice you know this is 35 bucks but we are in the drinkware space pretty premium twice as expensive as some of our competitors similar price to Yeti and so you wouldn't probably think like oh Tik Tok or Tik Tok shop is a great place to go sell super premium drink wear when it's just flooded with like Chinese knockoffs and cheap [ __ ] but with the right strategy I've seen it absolutely work and I think we have parody aov on Tik Tok and Tik Tok shop as we do on our Shopify store but

33:39it's making sure like I was talking to somebody at dinner about this yesterday was like there's a few factors that go into success on Tik Tok and it's it's not just aov it's also your content engine that can you know influence folks where they're not just an Impulse by like there's some more consideration but you know content play i' I've seen it done I haven't yet cracked like I I don't think we could sell a $400 cooler on Tik Tok shop but for being a premium drink wear provider like we're number two and the Tik Tok shop in the drinkware category our other drink Weare competitors in the kitchenware category are lower aov and we're crushing them crushing it so it can be done yeah impressive thanks

Community Engagement Metrics

34:30this is for anybody that runs a community here so I heard two people so far that said it I wasn't sure about you guys but so question for the the people that have the communities what would you guys say that your Northstar metric is for Success when it comes to running the community and if the answer has anything to do with Revenue how do you attribute it what good I mean yeah revenue is an objective for sure and we know that that community that we've built activates on anything that we do like they're the first to respond they we WE Post like if we have a promotion or a new product launch WE Post in that VIP group like an hour or two or sometimes like a day or two before anybody's going to get an email or an SMS of like hey new product or whatever we know that it contributes serious Revenue because people come back to the group and say look what I bought I'm so excited to

35:27receive it but that was not that was a byproduct of it I don't think that was ever the like we never had a commercial intention in driving the community it was really more of a a place where where we could identify like new lines of business continue to stay on Trend like gather that feedback from the customer it's really really hard to control like it it it starts to have a life of its own at some point and so we've like doubled down on our investment in moderation bringing moderation in house having employees that manage it to try and keep the Train on the tracks but our metrics for the group itself we we don't really have any other than our agents that manage its like perspective on on customer satisfaction and engagement and like sometimes things will you know there will start like a ramp thread or something and it's like you know somebody has a problem and it's getting ahead of those things being proactive with the customer experience

36:22so that doesn't get out of hand but I mean huge Revenue driver but it's not something we have really hard kpis on I mean a lot of the same like I I'd say probably the Northstar for us is just like volume of interaction like we we want to have this I mean that's the whole point right is you have this little pool where your best customers are swimming in right and so I if if it gets cringe or whatever like keep in mind it's a social engagement algorithm when you're in a group it's I can't sponsor post or or what have you so if this becomes a place where like they don't want to be and their engagement metrics fall off then like The Meta algorithm is going to devalue showing the group in their feed and I think that like a lot of groups the group mechanisms on Facebook like a lot of them have you know steep bell curves and then they just drop off and so we're fighting that all the time

37:11and fortunately like we see consistent total growth we see consistent reactions growth post growth all of the the metrics so you know it's making sure that it's our own space so as long as the conversation is happening in a place where we can sort of you know observe it and we can drop in what simp important to us new products and things like that that's the kpi it's just volume of Engagement and they it's a community like it I say that again it is a community if it just becomes like a brand talking at each other like you may not be hot one day and that's going to help that's going to accelerate the decline of your group but a community is for the better part self- sustaining so people in our groups are talking about stories about their day and their week and what's happening and then our products are woven into that story and that sort of builds as opposed to just a brand talking about how hot they are cuz again we're going to release some Duds

37:59of a product and we don't want that to be the death of the group because we made a mistake focus on the actual Community side of it yes there's a monetization aspect to it but Community first and foremost question behind me yep this

Managing Stock and Customer Expectations

38:13is for Greg when you got those messages from the customers like when is this coming back in stock or we need this did you try to push them to the actual products in stock or did you ask them to wait or this is coming soon or you know because we had something similar to happen to us this year it's a good question yeah so we we don't do any kind of pre-sale you know we would do preheat and activate up our email list and our SMS list to let them know something's coming and and some of our customers get pretty trained to know what's coming and when based on seasonality but we definitely we we ran a pretty small skew list less than 100 SKS total so it wasn't hard for us to forecast and keep our inventory readily in stock when it came to times that we were out of stock one of our best drivers was to not only obviously collect people's emails collect the back order notify when in

39:02stock stuff but we'd go back and we'd hit up people who had bought in the past and sometimes people come to the page and it's out of stock and they don't leave their email we would make sure to hit up people who had purchased those items that go out of stock for a certain period of time make sure we go hit them directly with that back in stock messaging as well just basically to amplify that signal because we were very rarely out of an evergreen product sometimes there were U like material issues that we would run into and that would happen but try to find the opportunities to really create a splash Moment Like if our gluten-free cakes went went out of stock maybe the people who bought other gluten-free products would like to know like hey we kind of make it a splash moment that this item's back and available and it generally created some nice incrementality for us and we'd see some reactivation of customers who weren't even necessarily opted into the init the official back

39:48in stock messaging gentlemen thank you so much

Closing Remarks and Panel Transition

39:51for your time [Music] Chris Greg McCoy and Hans gentlemen will you please join me the next we have two left two left let's get this going good job Brian Tim Matt and Steve this this these photos must have been 42 years ago God you guys look good w you guys haven't aged a bit [Music]