Inside a High-Volume Ecommerce Launch with Johnathan Solorzano

Opening discussion

0:00this Warehouse that you see here was built just for Yeezy you see there on the line You'll see the one t-shirt the vultur merchandise the print machines this had to be scaled 100x overnight so we hired hundreds of employees to do three shifts we had morning night and graveyard there was just so much that went wrong with sending the wrong packages some employees were stealing there was just so much that gone wrong but we did what we could with the time frame we had and at the end we we got it done all right well before I start I'd appreciate I hate to be the guy but if you take any photos please don't share this outside of this room a lot of the stuff I'm about to share has never been put public I don't want to end up I don't want some of these images to be on Reddit or some of the the Yeezy Forum so if you guys can just keep any of the stuff to yourself in this room be

0:51awesome I'm going to start with who am I if I see it on Reddit I know it was from this room because a lot of this stuff hasn't hasn't been anywhere deal to that there is a community of hundreds of thousand of kids and maybe adults on Reddit that just worship yay so that was one of my big enemies throughout this whole process all right so in 2017

Understand the starting point

1:11you'll see on the left I started my entrepreneurial career on upwork freelancing and if anyone has either hired or worked with somebody on upwork you guys will know that probably the worst most difficult and cheapest clients I've ever had in my life this will prepare me later for having difficult clients fast forward 7 years later I have a team of of 30 Engineers who focus on systems Integrations inside of Shopify and Shopify development all right so as you can see here me and yay you can see he's really excited to to meet me in person this is important because everything in my career for those 7 years prepared me for the roller coaster that I was about to experience you know we've white labeled for design agencies we've white labeled for SEO agencies we've worked with performance marketers to set up the proper serers side tracking with events so everything everything up until this moment really prepared me for the the Whirlwind roller coaster that was about to happen everyone always asks me I'm sure you

2:10guys are wondering how did yay find me you know some Latino Kid out of New York if you look at the the screenshot here it it is a book call from Bianca sorri it was done through my regular website funnel booked on cenly if you guys don't know and I didn't know at the time Bianca sorri was the head of architecture at Yeezy an extremely intelligent and competent woman who is now y's wife so you might know her as the you know she she she's very provocative in the way she dresses I'm sure that's for PR but that's how you might know her so I ended up on the zoom call on December 18th I thought it was a scam and when she didn't show up on the zoom call it confirmed that it was a scam but me being the sales guy that I am I followed up with a text message a voicemail and an email on December 27th I get a text from Bianca she what you're seeing here is a

3:01screenshot from Bianca to yay saying why don't you just cold call this Shopify guy I'm glad that I texted her I'm glad I left the message because she was able to save my number to her phone and when the emergency hit she just sent it to yay and the text I received was hey my husband would like to speak to you and from one day right in a couple minutes I was on FaceTime with yay formally known as Kanye West and he was really frustrated that the launch of his website didn't generate the revenue he wanted he felt that everyone that had launched the website was really not an expert at what they were doing he asked me if I can help I said if I had access to the back end of Shopify I'd be able to come up with some sort of plan in 30 minutes I found a ton of low hanging fruit which I'll go through later and I told him I had a plan if I can present it to him he said why don't

3:50you fly out to LA so that call was around 7:00 p.m. my time if you look at this ticket it's 5:45 a.m. just a couple of hours later I told my wife I was heading to LA to meet Kanye West and I really wasn't sure what to expect all right so in this on the flight I prepared a 90-day plan and I'll go through that later but most importantly I think what I was hired to do was be the e-com Ecom manager for Yeezy later on my my job metastasized into a lot a lot more managing external vendors managing proposals managing you know there was there's always some sort of project that yay has going on and I was reviewing the code with my team and looking through the stuff on the right hand side what you'll see is the the Yeezy pod which was the hero product after the launch with Adidas this was his first sneaker along with what was on the website was vultures one

4:45merchandise which is his new album that's coming out John is this how we would text all the time so there's a couple things if you guys if you let me go on a on a sidebar so all business with yay is

Prepare the assets you already have

4:59condu ed through text you can imagine how much of a nightmare that is being put in a group chat with people like the CEO of Grail the CE I was put in group chats with people that I I can't believe that I was talking to but everything is done through text and you got to figure out how to get everything done and organized from there dude he would crush it on LinkedIn like this I actually used and I'll go through it later chat GPT to format my text to ways that yay likeed to read because he since did so much business on text so while I had the immens like I you know I I wasn't really sure what was going on but I spoke to some some friends and mentors on the plane and they said look you you only you know short attention span get it done make a one-page plan and how you're going to get him to the next level so on the right hand side was me typing up the

5:50plan and trying to keep it concise the plan I I'll get into throughout but I just thought it was really cool to look back and see that this is what I was typing on a plane before I met Kanye West so here on the right hand side you'll see my first meeting with yay he's he is paying attention to me but because he conducts so much of his business on his phone he is actually texting people there while while we're going through the proposal and then if you look at that little tablet we're also playing Monopoly so really multitasking here so what is that thing though so it's a virtual egame board game thing and quick story the the M the the second I met him he hands me this tablet and he says we're going to play Monopoly and talk business John can you set this up for me and I said yeah you know I usually set up the TVs and stuff for my family I'm The Tech Guy

6:43of my family and he looked me straight in the eye and he said you're The Tech Guy for my family now so all right with that being said on the left hand side was the actual plan that I drew up so the slide is going to show it a lot more simplified but it's just really organizing all the all the whole TCH stack and actually having so what I had to start with was a Shopify site easy.com I had millions of emails these emails came from his partnership with Adidas his partnership with gap they came from you know concerts one thing to note is that these emails were not warmed up not not one ever email was ever sent from yeezy.com so that was something that would come to something that I had to solve I had a manufacturer which was Los Angeles apparel based out of based out of Los Angeles for those of you that don't know Los Angeles apparel is run by the ex-f founder of

7:38American Apparel dub shney that will come in later on I had an Outlook inbox for customer service and of course the incredible brand that is Yeezy that yay built over the course of his career so part of my plan was really to just set up the infastructure now for a lot of the people here I'm sure this is obvious right it's like well of course you need a a Tik Tok ad account you need a meta ad account but when you're navigating a Superstar's social medias with his team his lawyers his accountants figuring out the entities and getting that through and then also navigating the corporate teams at each respective company Tik Tok and meta you know there's there was fights for who's going to take for this account who's going to you know is yay going to do anything crazy on Tik Tok can we let him back on there was it was quite the kabuki dance to actually get these ad accounts up and then after getting the ad accounts up linking the proper

8:33social media accounts to those ad accounts then setting up the pixels properly on the website so that when we do start cranking ads all the ads are are being sent with Rich data right now email and SMS as I mentioned none of the emails were warmed up so later on you'll see a slide I called Jimmy the day I met and by the way I I spoke to Jimmy once or twice before but I got his email from my partner manager at sendlane and he told me that he'd be he he'd work with us to get the emails warmed up so sendlane was our email and SMS provider and then tracking and Reporting we needed to set up proper customer service infrastructure we set up server side tracking and like I said chat GPT for the text messages and we would get data every day in I'd have a report exported sent to chat GPT transcribed into what we call easy messaging and yeah we're in the

9:32first 30 days so in tandem of getting

Make the launch work under changing conditions

9:34the full infrastructure up we started working on designs now I'm by no mean a designer as I mentioned my team is full of Engineers I hired a designer out of Brooklyn her name was Malo she she possess the the calmness to be able to work at an extreme pressure and what was really interesting about the design process with yay and Yeezy is he would put us with people that are not web focused so that in itself was hard to work with but but also interesting it was different sorts of Photography Architects AI artists famous AI artist so just working with these different people in their fields to come up with something unique that at one some point he would just feel is the right thing and I put this I put this figma board there because it's just a small if you scroll for 10 seconds you probably wouldn't get through all the designs and Concepts we made so yay being a designer along with building the infrastructure this was definitely one

10:32of the more stressful Parts 30 days passed you know we're we're going through this and then on February 7th I get a call from Bianca and yay and they say you need to come back out to LA ASAP we're thinking about launching vultures 1 February 10th and we have a Super Bowl ad lined up for February 11th we need the site launched ready and shot for February 11th so this was my face realizing I had 3 days to get a full website up with shooting the product shooting the models design done and developed into a Shopify theme some of you guys run agencies you know this can be a six-month process a year process but I had 3 days there was two sets of designs there was really Avant guard design Focus designs and then there was Ecom Focus designs and while yay really loves design focused we had come he came to the conclusion that he wanted to try the Ecom Focus to see if it would increase sales and increase conversion

11:32rates so what we landed on is a rendition of what you see on the screen here and if you were to hover over any of these models they would do a complete 360 and I think you know maybe three to four clicks to get to check out so it was really minimalist the way yay likes it some of the things like believe it or not the size guide the cart all those things we really had to fight to get on there because if if if this could have been almost nothing on the page yay would have preferred it so here just to to share the full process so I'm nailing in how difficult this is we're shooting the models in this 360 machine and this 360 machine made 16 Stills while the model sat in there and right next to this machine was an editor the editor would as soon as this shot would done take the editing to the 16 Stills and right next to that was Malu the designer designing taking

12:32the pieces from the from the photographer and then right next to that was myself working with three of my developers building the theme and then on the right hand side is stylists and a bunch of other stuff so we get the site up and this this screenshot I'm going to frame it I still I haven't framed I I promised yay I would frame it and send it to him as well this was as if we looked at this like a roller coaster this was the top of the roller coaster and I launched the site and he told me who who told you to put that product with the number one this was like his hero product for the concert who told you to put that product up for $80 the truth is I just put put it up because everything else on the website was $80 well the t-shirts and he was really frustrated by that he said I'd call you right back hung up sent me a text and said send me every product on

13:21the website and the cost and what you see here is the copy paste of what I sent him at midnight at 5: in the morning saying everything is $20 and like I said everything is really militaristic you see my response understood couple seconds later everything is $20 on the website I go to sleep because I'm exhausted I Wake Up 3 hours later and the site is absolutely

Distinguish the spike from the longer effect

13:43ripping we're at $200,000 at 8: a.m. when I tell you that you could not the the orders just were coming in so fast that you you couldn't click in the order button on Shopify you couldn't actually this this data was not even accessible to much hours to hours later all the reporting tools I built into chat gbt were broken it was it was an incredible down of of this roller coaster what I wanted to note is the Super Bowl commercial aired later on that day many hours later while I don't attribute the Super Bowl commercial to the $19 million day I'm about to show you I attribute the Super Bowl to this longtail effect of what became $80 million of sales over the course of 5 months and because we had the right infrastructure actually let me not skip ahead but the Super Bowl commercial was not the main reason of the $19 million day but it did have this incredible effect of PR people talking about it marketers talking about it after but

14:40that wasn't the OG back here that wasn't the OG ad that wasn't going to go live if anybody is a ye a Kanye fan you know what actual went viral on Twitter right does anybody not know if this was actually a an individual woman running on a treadmill in slow motion in the wet tea in the wet tank top which was you know if you put it on as practically see- through you can see nipples and I I don't know for sure but I have I imagin that the network didn't want to air that so I imagine he took this phone and just recorded a Super Bowl commercial on the spot which if you guys haven't seen the commercial after this go look it up on YouTube it's literally yay just saying go to my site I have some shoes yeezy.com and that's that went viral so there it is the $19 million day the screenshot has it been shared anywhere what you will see in the media is the text from Milo yannopoulos another very

15:35controversial figure the reason he sent this text which is a text I usually sent is cuz I was so exhausted I told everyone I was going to go to sleep and he said that he would take take the text if I would have known this would have hit the media maybe I would have waited State up to to send that text message okay so you know after this there's so many articles I just pulled one up quickly of Kanye's Genius of bringing the product down to $20 being able to set up this retargeting sending getting all this customer data on what clothing actually what people are buying you know there was just so many things that if you look up after this was really a marketing masterclass and really lucky to be a part of it and and setting the the foundation for for what was and what is $80 million over five five months back to reality the roller Coaster's down we made this money now we got to fulfill this stuff and for

Plan for what happens after checkout

16:30those of you that don't know a lot of this stuff was made to order well all of it was made to order you can only imagine what 20 million in one day and then maybe 15 the next 10 the next how many orders that is to fulfill but not just by fulfilling we also have to create the products etc etc because I was in charge of e.com this was all my responsibility so I'll start off with the customer service you can imagine if you paid $200 for the Yeezy pods and then it was $20 you'd be pretty pissed and yay and us we spoke about it and the goal was to refund everyone that paid $200 the 880 so that they will be at the $20 price point at its peak we easily had 150,000 customer tickets we hired eight people full-time in La had to Los Angeles apparel really had somewhat of a customer service base so they helped hire and then we hired eight people in the Philippines to do the

17:26graveyard shift I wish went perfect but you know retrospect we could have fixed a lot of things but we did what we could trying to communicate the the between the two parties and getting all done was was was was quite a dance now producing the clothing I love this photo because this photo was taken at 3:00 a.m. in the Los Angeles apparel Los Angeles apparel print shop on the right hand side is Dub shney like I mentioned the exf founder of American Apparel for a lot of this time I was sleeping on the factories compound because it was my responsibility to make sure that the products were not only being made but also being shipped so having a pulse on what was going on to report back to yay and the Yeezy team was was why I stayed there for so long not only did Dove you know Dove what he did was incredible hired hundreds of people to work in if for you guys that don't know it's a full

18:20manufacturer he does he creates the fabric cuts the fabric sews the Garment dyes the Garment and then for yay he even prints the Garment so everything was done there he hired hundreds of people over the course of of a week two weeks all over South Central to get this stuff done and it was incredible to see and be a part of I was looking at him and I it was a moment when I said Dove do you really think we're going to be able to get this done and he looked me in the eye and he said John as long as the sun rises and I'm alive I promise you every Yeezy customer will get their product and I believed him I I saw the look in his eyes and for you you know the guy is so crazy there's no way somebody could beat him he sleeps in his office what you're looking at here is the bed into his office if you guys don't believe me you can look up this vice interview of do shney on

19:11YouTube that bed is still there if you guys ever want to go visit the manufacturer let me know I'll give you his information he's yeah next is building the Fulfillment now this full this Warehouse that you see here was built just for Yeezy if you see there on the on the on the line you you'll see the one t-shirt the vultures merchandise the print machines this had to be scaled 100x overnight so we hired hundreds of employees to do three shifts we had morning night and graveyard there was just so much that went wrong with sending the wrong packages sending you know employees some employees were stealing there was just so much that gone wrong but we did what we could with the time frame we had and at the end we we got it done so I know that I'm not a marketer I don't pretend to be but this is the longtail effect of what I was talking about with having the proper infrastructure set up and having a brand

20:07like ezy and the rich data that we got from server side tracking so these two ads are two were the mo of the most popular ads the bottom one is yay on a podcast saying that he's something of a Robin Hood he wanted to take the luxury designs from Balenciaga and all these luxury Brands and bring it down to the price point that everyone could afford so this ad performed ridiculously well and then the top was Joe Buon on his podcast organically saying that Kanye was a quote genius for having these most comfortable shoes that he's just wearing all over the place in a month we spent 327,000 across Google Tik Tok and meta and the customer acquisition costs from the calculations I saw were about a11 so that's what I mean by that longtail effect that really really help and then email and SMS I told you guys I called Jimmy the day of you look at that date it's December 29th I introduced Jimmy to yay and Bianca while they didn't really

21:03they wanted me to manage everything I figured I'd make the introduction anyway Jimmy and the s lane team really helped once the email was warmed up incorporate the millions of emails we had from Adidas and whatever for our campaigns at the peak if we launched a new product and send an email campaign it easily generated seven figures we had seven figures being generated from just our shipment text which is you know hey your package is on its way hey your package is delivered and yeah that that was the email and that's it guys I still have a good workin relationship with yay the website if you go up is closed but who knows what's to come of me of me yay there's been some interesting opportunities I just heard I just got off a phone call with Lil Dirk asking to manage and manufacture his clothing with Dove the photo you see here is with of my key card along with two of the most controversial figures in the in the world Milo and dub

21:58so yeah I'll open it up to any questions and if I can't answer it I'll tell you guys I can't but I'm I'm an open book hell of a story brother well done F first question right here dude that's amazing congratulations anybody who's operating is like mind is blown right now is an organizing principle like when yay approaches you know business right so you're talking about how he wanted a white box on the page with nothing else you're pushing for conversion focused elements like he's obvious successful guy how much of how much nudging did you have to do to be like Yo dude like this is what works in e-commerce and like how much of it was like Artistic integrity versus just his vision for like you know I want to make some money here yay Works in proxies and what I mean by that is he takes the advice of really successful or smart people around him and and so if I wanted to nudge towards a way I could

23:01never do it myself it would have to be through the proxies and one of the big proxies that I had on my side was Bianca his wife so yeah I think I realized and even working with Dove a lot and people at this level I realized proxies is a strong way to to get things done you almost have to play you know I call it a dance but just working around and and if your point is what it is and it's true work it through the people and it'll get to the the center if that makes sense and do you think he had an intuition for like what's going to drive the most Revenue here or was it really just like you know crowd sourcing if you will a lot of a lot of different insights this is my opinion I think that a lot of y's genius is done through through his sporadic and and unique way of delivering things so I think that I think that it is his

24:02intuition and he knows what works deep down inside and he knows when things are right and then he releases it to the world I'm good to go yeah hey John thanks a lot super cool story not sure if you could share it but I mean the revenue numbers really great super fat growth but I mean there's a lot of operational efficiencies through that process do you profit yeah okay that's good yeah so I mean the margins you'd be surprised they were you know in the high 30s because well at that volume you can really get products down low I wasn't I was in charge of managing the the cogs and and reporting that information but I can tell you that yay doesn't care about money he cares about he cares about making a splash he cares about making cultural shifts and cultural movements so for him this wasn't about the money this was about you know what everyone said after when he did the product nice nice thanks really great I think after he did the

25:03Super Bowl out he was like it like it is what it is he it's like Drop mic drop figure it out John that's pretty that's it yeah it's well done one it coming into the front make it good I mean I'm sure we can all like someone said earlier appreciate the operational effort that you had to kind of go through to get this to work but but at the time that Bianca had contacted you at the beginning of the story that you told what was your operational efficiency what kind of team did you already have ready to tackle the the job that you got approached with yeah and I think which is why I credit a lot to Dove you don't for those of you that don't know American Apparel was a Zara one at its Heyday Dove had he had the experience to scale that fast and that quick did we have a warehouse worker yes did we have some people shipping yes did we you know but I had to credit it I had to

26:01credit to Dove to being able to say okay let's take this we need to hire here we need to hire here we need to hire here John I need you to make sure that this is going on so I don't know if that answers your question but the Lo the base of Los Angeles apparel and the mind of dub shney was really all the operational thing we needed to to to scale I think sorry a followup would be to even narrow down into the more the Shopify side the marketing side the we had nothing we we didn't have we didn't have a performance marketer we didn't have email SMS we didn't have any softwares that was all my my job and one of the things that the hard one of the harder things about this this role and working with people at this level is everyone's trying to take your job everyone is waiting for you to up making sure that if I was betting vendors I was really giving the best that I can get Amazing Story I'm

26:56Blown Away by how much you can get done so quickly and in my business takes forever and it's so frustrating and I'm sure like with a lot of people how can we apply the way that Kanye and you guys executed something like that in just 3 days in our day-to-day how do you just launch something and like actually get done more effectively I think you know so aside from you know yay paying exorbitant amounts of money to people I think that when when you're fighting for cause you know this is something that dub taught me he said read the 48 Laws of Power I've read this many times but you know you read it it's like ah this is kind of douchy but when you're fighting for a cause it feels like you can really rally behind and get things done and yay and dub always made it feel like we were rallying For A Cause whether it's let's go beat Adidas let's get them at their game or let's get all this stuff done

27:55like rallying behind the cause really fired up the team to be like what are we waiting for let's get it done and of course you know I I I took this and I started implementing it my own business how do we rally behind the cause how do we become the best Shopify agency out there like these things I learned from incredible leaders like Dove and yay one more question anybody want to take this final one and sorry for cursing guys I now we'll forgive you this time BR don't worry about it last one right here how do you talk budget with him about what about the project did you come in saying this is the the budget we're going to get it out the door in 30 days did you say this is hourly rate how'd you work it yeah good question yeah he's a creative so you get a few seconds of attention and time and if he feels that you're a trustworthy person then you not got to navigate the rest of the

28:48organization so the rest of the organization was the attorneys the CFO you know Dove was head of production all of that I had to navigate and try to understand and so to answer your question all he needed to know on that meeting was if I was trustworthy and if I had a plan worth talking about and then he he threw me into the pool go talk to my people and figure it out brother thank you very much for the hell of a story thank you guys