Uncharted Entrepreneurship

Summary

Greg Kerr, owner of Alchemy Merch, discusses his role in creating fully custom merchandise for independent artists, brands, and licensed properties. He emphasizes the importance of creating intentional and high-quality products that align with a brand's vision and values. Greg shares his experience in hiring and managing a team, implementing EOS principles, and setting quarterly goals. He also highlights the value of enamel pins as a versatile and customizable product. Greg's elevator pitch is to stop making terrible products and make better merch.
Keywords

custom merchandise, independent artists, brands, licensed properties, intentional products, high-quality, hiring, managing, EOS, quarterly goals, enamel pins
Takeaways

  • Create intentional and high-quality merchandise that aligns with a brand's vision and values.
  • Hiring and managing a team is essential for business growth and sustainability.
  • Implementing EOS principles can help structure processes and improve team collaboration.
  • Enamel pins are a versatile and customizable product that can be used for branding and personal expression.
  • Stop making terrible products and make better merch.


Sound Bites

  • "Stop making terrible products, make better merch."
Chapters

00:00
Introduction and Passion for Music
03:23
Starting Alchemy Merch and the Journey
09:28
The Challenge of Hiring and Delegating
12:24
Implementing EOS and Scaling the Business
15:59
Structuring Processes and Using Rocks
24:00
Creating Unique and Intentional Products
32:02
Contacting Alchemy Merch and Elevator Pitch

What is Uncharted Entrepreneurship?

Uncharted Entrepreneurship - hosted by Brent Peterson out of the Minnesota chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization – brings you daring stories straight from the trailblazing entrepreneurs who are unmapping business frontiers across every industry. Settle in around our virtual campfire as Brent sits down to pick the brains of startup pioneers, visionary founders, and intrepid CEOs whose origin stories - marked by unexpected twists, lessons, and stumbles along unpaved paths - will inspire your own trek in launching a boundary-pushing venture. Trading war stories, strategies, and even warnings, these audacious guests invite fellow founders and future leaders into their confidential circles in a uniquely transparent, wise, and motivational way. So join us off the beaten business trails to light your entrepreneurial fire!

Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneurship. Today I have Greg Kerr with Alchemy Merch. Greg, why don't you go ahead, do an introduction, tell us your day -to -day role and one of your passions in life.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (00:21.646)
Sure. My name is Greg and I'm the owner of Alchemy Merch. And on a day -to -day basis, I'm handling all aspects of the business. We're a small team of six. So I'm still probably doing head of sales, dealing with customers and managing all the back end of everything. And what we do as a company is we create fully custom merchandise for independent artists, brands, licensed properties, everything in between.

And just to give an idea a little bit, instead of making promotional products, a lot of our customers are coming to us focusing on products that they want to make to resell for the brand.

Brent Peterson (01:01.536)
Okay, very cool. Passions, do you have any passions?

greg kerr / alchemy merch (01:06.222)
passion, music, absolutely music. I still sing in a hardcore rock band and I got my start playing in punk groups growing up and going to school for jazz performance. And I still play music and that and constant learning, I think would be another passion. Listening to books, books, even my shirt right now says without literature life is hell. Charles Pukowski quotes. So that's a book, literature and music.

Brent Peterson (01:26.656)
Yes.

Brent Peterson (01:31.424)
That's awesome.

Brent Peterson (01:36.256)
That's awesome. Yeah, good. So I'm in a musical family. My daughter had a musical scholarship. My son is in a band. I play piano. My wife was in the choir. Anyways, we won't get into music, but I think actually music and business and music and math, especially, I think have a lot of correlations to that. So Greg, before we get started, though, talking about this whole podcast on music, I'm joking about that part. We won't talk. Yeah.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (01:47.822)
Hahaha.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (01:54.67)
Mm -hmm.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (02:01.198)
We can if you want.

Brent Peterson (02:03.776)
But I'm we're gonna do the free joke and since you are an EO member, we're gonna do this a little differently We're gonna do is this an accelerator joke meaning do you think that some point this joke could get better or is this a proper EO joke? Meaning it's worth more than a million dollars in revenue a year Yeah, that's pretty high bar Yes, is there a pre accelerator we'll find out in a minute. So, I mean, this is a good one too. You're gonna really appreciate it. Here we go. I

greg kerr / alchemy merch (02:22.798)
Okay. Alright, that's a pretty solid joke, right? Yeah.

Brent Peterson (02:33.504)
I just bought a thought controlled air freshener. My wife thinks it's dumb, but it makes sense when you think about it.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (02:44.526)
Okay, how do I rate this? I'm gonna go with cusp of EO. So this is accelerator that can probably push into EO.

Brent Peterson (02:56.256)
Yeah, maybe with the 12 month or maybe 24 month projections on revenue. There you go. All right. Good. Well, Greg, I know we had some really good conversations in the green room and we should have been recording all that. So tell us a little bit about Alchemy Merch.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (03:02.99)
Yeah, I'm gonna give it I'm gonna give it rolling 12 is my is my response. Yeah.

Brent Peterson (03:20.513)
Tell us some of the struggles you had and I know you started in accelerator. So people that are our EO members know that already what that means. But and it is quite the achievement, I think. And I went through accelerator and graduated. So tell us a little bit about that journey and some of the struggles you had.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (03:39.63)
Yeah, when we first, the business started as a side hustle. Basically, I had an apparel brand I'd been running for about 10 years. And that provided enough income for my small new family, just my wife and I, but it had never got past 250 ,000 year in sales. And we decided we want to have a baby. And I'd been helping people on the side make enamel pins.

And I thought, well, here's something I could do on the side and I'll put a couple hundred dollars into our soon to be child's 529. Perfect. Well, then things just skyrocketed. Once I made a website, I got it out there. I didn't realize people needed help so badly because a lot of what we do is we're helping with overseas manufacturing a lot. So in essence, we're a consultant.

We deal with all of the art side of things to get stuff prepared for manufacturing, but there's a lot of challenges. If you've never dealt with something overseas, you don't already have a connection to somebody. And we went originally the company was called Pin Game Strong because I was just offering metal lapel pins. And it went from zero to a million dollars in sales in 18 months. And around that time,

My wife was a personal assistant for a member of EO in the Arizona chapter. And they said, you know, I think Greg should look into EO, look into Accelerator. I think it could be good. And I'm one of those people, I grew up a little kind of anti -establishment punk rocker.

Joining business groups was just not something that I'm used to. And I went and checked it out and so nervous and thought, they're not gonna want me to be in it. Not understanding anything. I joined Accelerator, did that and then that got me my first mentor. And that was a huge, just my mind exploded because I was working 18 hours a day. At that point, we had a newborn.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (05:47.214)
And he said, congratulations. You're doing well. You've got great cashflow. You realize this is not sustainable at all because you can't grow. You are completely maxed out. And it was true. My pain point, I was, I was doing everything. I was dealing with customer emails, doing sales. I was dealing with the factories. I was dealing with artwork preparation, everything. And he suggested I start looking to hire somebody.

I had never been through that process before. The clothing company was myself and my wife that we did. And that's a different dynamic than hiring somebody. So that was interesting. Thankfully, it went well. But it was a huge learning experience for me as a business owner and how to start to shift. I need to teach somebody how to do everything I do. I need to.

figure all this out, I need to document things. All of that was completely new to me. And then we did, the company just kept on growing. We didn't spend a dime on advertising, I think in the first maybe two to three years, everything was just word of mouth, which was great. So within the artist community, our name was just getting sent around a lot. And then,

At perfect timing, I think February of 2020 or whatever the month before the pandemic started, we decided to rebrand as Alchemy Merch because at that point we had, I think, six different kinds of products. It wasn't just pins anymore. And so we decided we want to start offering a lot of different products. Pin Game Strong is too limiting of a name. And we moved into Alchemy Merch with the idea that your art and our expertise creates something new.

So that's where we came out, decided to use Alchemy for that.

Brent Peterson (07:43.616)
That's awesome. I think I mean I can I can resonate with a lot of the things that you just said That's an inside EO joke right now if you've gone if you've gone through the new training that especially on on on the Employee management side. I think a lot of people when they become an entrepreneur and especially a solo entrepreneur that jump to hiring

is sometimes the deciding step on whether they're going to go. And I don't even want to say the next level because I just last week I spent a week at a content entrepreneurs conference and it's all about solo entrepreneurship, right? And really there's no focus at all on what does it mean to go to the next level. And I think one thing you do learn in accelerator is that ability to manage people. And I am

I'll throw it out there that there is a necessity to manage people. I'm not going to say to be successful, but you're going to have to get a hire who then could manage people. Like that is one of the, the, the pins or the keys in getting to the next level is you have to be able to scale. And it's not necessarily always by people, but people are really what makes businesses run. And.

You know, it's AI, everything is AI nowadays and you can do a lot of things with less people. But hey, you know, at the end of the day, there isn't an AI purchasing person out there who's going to give you money, right? It's usually a person that's going to give person or a company that gives you money anyways. So talk a little bit about that challenge to hire that first person and, and how that challenge, you know, how you've become successful in doing that.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (09:36.686)
Yeah, I tried to think of what is...

the most like causing me the most amount of, I don't want to say wasted time, but what was, what can I pass off to somebody that will get me back to selling? And for our company, that was all the artwork preparation. Sometimes it takes 10 minutes. Sometimes it takes two hours. It depends on what it is, but I would be spending a lot of time doing that to prepare things. And then I wasn't responding to emails. I wasn't selling. And so I went out and I ended up talking to a customer that we'd been working with.

And they could send their files well and do things. And I said, Hey, is there any chance you're looking for a part -time job? And hired them on initially as a contract worker and had to go through teaching. This is how I do things. This is how there wasn't really, you know, now we've got core values and all those things, and this is the way that Alchemy does things. But back then it was, this is how I do it. And this is how I would like to get it done and managing.

I'm so used to doing everything myself and having my own timeline and my own in my head how I'm going to attack everything. And I needed to stop and also delegate. And that was a new thing for me to legitimately delegate things. And having employees has been the most challenging and interesting experience, but has also led to, I think, the most growth and personal growth.

because I've had to learn how to try to be a leader, how to try and be there and do things and be a good example for our employees the best I can. But it's, it's been interesting and I'm thankful everybody that's on our team right now is, is absolutely amazing. And we're kind of our little family, but hiring people, you have to do it at some point because you max out on what you can do in a day. There's just, yeah, there's some things you can automate. We use a lot of automations.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (11:37.198)
mostly for within our production board to kind of let the art team know something needs to be done or the salesperson knows something's ready, things like that. But not everything can be done by a computer. And I was maxed out. I was working 18 hours a day. The business could not grow. It was impossible without me bumping to 20 hours a day. And you're just going to burn out at that point. And I wanted...

to turn it into a real business. It's fine if you've got a business that's making a good income, whatever you consider that to be, you're making a hundred thousand, 200 ,000, whatever it is, if it's in a way that you can manage and you're okay keeping it there. But if you want to change your lifestyle to not be working a million hours eventually or do anything else, you have to bring on other people and you have to get help.

Brent Peterson (12:27.777)
Yeah, I think that lifestyle piece that you just mentioned is one of the most important and I I've met so many people now in EO and especially ones that have introduced EOS into their business or some kind of framework It doesn't have to be EOS, but I think that we all seem to prescribe to EOS as EO -ers that That that that's what really drives a lot of that and and having a better life, right? And at some point

greg kerr / alchemy merch (12:42.99)
Yeah.

Brent Peterson (12:55.264)
We, a lot of us, and I'm going to say the majority of us as entrepreneurs do work those 18 hour days and sometimes seven or eight, you know, seven, even eight days a week. but that, that, that's not sustainable. And I think your coach was right in saying, Hey, this, you, you, we also have to then think of new ways to get through those. Right. And hiring is, is that first part.

I did just mention EOS. Have you instituted something like that to help you organize things?

greg kerr / alchemy merch (13:27.278)
Yeah, we do a version of EOS that would make anybody that legitimately does EOS get annoyed, but we do our, we do rocks and things like that. We do our quarterly meetings. We have our weekly meetings and run them. Not quite a level 10, straight up level 10 thing with such a small team. I tried to implement EOS a little bit more strict initially and.

I was finding that for us, it was a little bit more challenging to really go completely the full EOS method, but I've taken a lot of things from it that help us. And like I said, everybody gets a side to rock each quarter. We do the yearly planning. I've done a lot of the things involved with that, but anybody that actually properly does it would say we're doing it wrong, but it works for us.

Brent Peterson (14:17.12)
Yeah, I don't think necessarily there's a wrong, but I do agree. Like there is a spot, there's a point when you're at, you know, two to five people, it's much more difficult because you don't really have a leadership team unless everybody's a leader. and then, it, it does at some point become harder to scale unless everybody's on board. If you have say a hundred people.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (14:31.726)
Right.

Brent Peterson (14:43.904)
I think it's ideal for 100 people, but if you don't go with an implementer, it's harder to get to that point. And that's where I think the implementers pay off. And we did go through that. We hired somebody and it was a great experience. I think at the time, this is five or six years ago at the time, they said, budget $50 ,000 over two years. And now it's significantly more than that. But.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (15:08.654)
Yeah.

Brent Peterson (15:11.616)
We did go through the two years and then we self implemented after that, but it gave us a framework to go on. Talk a little bit about how, I mean, at least borrowing something from that. And I guess the nice thing about it, it's open source and everything is there for you to use. Every single tool is there. Talk a little bit about how you've been able to help structure some of the processes within your team to make things run.

a little, maybe a little smoother. I don't know if that's the right word. I'll let you pick a word to see how it's changed it.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (15:45.614)
I think one of the biggest things that's come in is with the quarterly goals and with the rocks that we're giving everybody and when we're doing our quarterly meetings and the concept of, and I believe this was from EOS, if not, let me know, but we'll kind of throw all the ideas on the board, all the pain points, all the different things that are happening. And then we go through as a team and decide, is that needed right now? And if not, push it.

because there's only so many things that we can do within a quarter, within a year. And that's been really helpful because without having any kind of a system, everything is a pants on fire emergency or everything needs to get done. And that's just not, you can't get through everything. So that's been helpful for us is, should we try and look into implementing a loyalty program? Is that something that's really important right now?

We discuss it, no, it gets bumped. And next quarter that'll stay. We use monday .com for us, mostly as a production board, but we also keep track of all of our rocks and our goals and things like that on there. But also getting people on projects, teaching them how to break that down into smaller steps. And with the idea and understanding that this is a quarterly goal, it's not meant to be done by the end of the week.

And one thing that we've instituted, which has been fantastic for our team. And I don't think it's an EOS specific thing, but we call them our rock blocks. So everybody has an assigned day that they take a rock block and it's four hours during the day on their day where they get to shut off everything and work only on the rock. And that has helped us move forward a ton because somebody can just shut out Slack email, whatever it is they.

They can prepare for it. So get your stuff done you need to do. And they usually do it in the middle of the day. So hop on, take care of things. Enter your rock block. Come out. You've got two hours at the end of the day. And you can finish up some stuff if you need to. So a really helpful thing.

Brent Peterson (18:03.36)
Yeah, no, I love that. And so for people that aren't familiar with EOS, a rock block or a rock, I should say, is a 90 day goal that you set every quarter. And everybody's assigned that. And as a visionary, you theoretically shouldn't get any 90 day goals because you have a team that can implement them. And in EOS, there's a visionary and an integrator. So that's why I guess that's also why it's a little more difficult with a team of two or a team of five or a team of

Less than 10, it's a little harder to implement it the way it should be. And I'm just going to argue that there is no should be. We shouldn't be shitting on people.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (18:40.334)
Yeah. Yeah. And I take, I tend to have a lot of tasks or pebbles or things like that. I usually will have a quarterly project, but I also make myself available to the team at all times during the rocks if they need to come to me and talk to me about something to figure something out. So I'm the only one on the team that doesn't have a set.

rock block kind of thing, but a lot of what I'm doing is handling, running the business side of things too. And we're, we're delegating out everybody to do these projects. And the goal is that this project needs to move us forward. That if we can accomplish that, that takes a step in the right direction.

Brent Peterson (19:23.008)
Yeah, good. All right, so I want to shift gears a little bit. One of the concepts I loved out of being in the quarterly days for EO Accelerator was that you left that quarterly day with something actionable. So in your, let's just say that I'm your client and I don't want you to overtly sell me, but tell us an action that somebody can take to help.

with the promotion of their business and maybe at a smaller scale or something other than what you'd see online for your typical. Well, first tell us the differentiator you are outside of the typical promotional space.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (20:05.037)
Sure, everybody's used to promotional products. We've all gotten a million lanyards, pens, things you go to an event. It probably gets thrown in the trash on the way out. And a lot of the promotional products industry is really geared towards a giveaway item. Yeah, there's plenty of products you can make, like a nice zip up or something that's for your team. So outside of that, just products that are churn and burn.

And we focus specifically more on merchandise. Something whether that a brand can come to us and make items that they do want to give away, but our focus is on quality, higher end kind of quality products that a brand or an artist is going to be proud to put in their stores and item for sale that represents who they are. And that's been a big differentiator with us is you come in and we consult with you.

What's the goal of the project? What are we trying to accomplish with this? You can send over your art. It's not ready for anything, but you say, I want to get some pins done or some tote bags or whatever it is. And we help to kind of take it to the next level. If an item like a tote bag, if you go through a promotional company, you've got the tan bag or maybe a black bag. You can fit your logo on one side and it's a one color thing and it's pretty simple.

If you come to us and make a tote bag, you can do all over printing. You can customize the handles. You can add a woven tag with your branding on it. And the price is pretty much the same. So you can get something that's fully custom. And I think one of the big things that people can do is be intentional about what they create because...

You can go spend a couple thousand dollars or a couple hundred dollars on a cheap promotional product that's going to end up in the trash. Or you can put a little bit more time into and think about who am I trying to reach? What do our customers actually use?

greg kerr / alchemy merch (22:02.382)
and create something that's better, higher quality, or has more intention behind it, has a goal behind it, that'll actually get used because you're going to get a whole lot more value out of that money that you're spending on it if somebody actually wants to use the product. And I think too much of the promotional space, you send something in, barely anybody talks to you about it, it shows up, you give it away, and nobody cares.

you know, instead of even printing on a cheap quality t -shirt because it's the cheapest one you can get, you can spend an extra dollar or 50 and get a shirt that's actually nice. At the same point, not everybody wants to wear your logo on a t -shirt.

So think of a way to incorporate your branding, your vision, your core values, whatever that is that represent your company onto that product instead. And you're going to get more value out of that. And so a lot of what we're doing is trying to provide more value for the people that are coming to us for the products that they want to make and helping them to make something that's better than just throw away promotional garbage.

Brent Peterson (23:11.968)
Yeah, so I see it as at least two avenues. One is the promotional space, but the other one is just the artist who wants to start producing some of their wares in more of a larger scale, right? You can paint a painting and then sell it, but you can also create prints from that painting and resell it at scale and then at some point start putting it onto different pieces like t -shirts or mugs or pins or whatever that is. Is that correct?

greg kerr / alchemy merch (23:40.334)
Yeah. And we do things too. Even we make pins for Shopify, the e -commerce platform, and they make them for their team. So they've had people that have been there a long time. So we'll make pins. That's a 10 year celebration, 15, five, two, one, all that kind of stuff. But we make, we go through and they're really well designed, really made, really well made pins and they give those to their team. So even on an internal side, or we just did some pins for Apple, for CarPlay, for their team.

It's a bunch of little different icons that have to do with CarPlay and can be used. And in a sense, that's promotional internal products that aren't going to be resold, but you can still make a better quality, a more intentional product that even your employees are interested in using, interested in wearing, whatever that is. If you make a cheap tote bag, people aren't going to carry it around. If you make something interesting, a witty design, something graphically interesting,

Somebody that picked that up for free or whatever is going to carry it around and you're getting a whole lot more impressions for the money that you spent. And I think that's where we differentiate ourselves is let's be intentional. Let's make real good quality stuff that people actually want to use.

Brent Peterson (24:58.184)
yeah, and also I guess it reflects the image and the brand of the company on what you're giving away. And I suppose at a trade show, people are expecting to get the little spinner that's made in China. And, you know, I don't know who uses spinners or how long they stick around for. I will say that the Yeti mugs that they give away and at the end when you go to the LinkedIn booth and they, all they're trying to do is give away these.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (25:16.142)
Break that shit.

Brent Peterson (25:27.808)
20 or $40 Yeti mugs. I usually grab them because they're pretty good value.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (25:29.742)
Right. Yeah, a Yeti mug, that's a good quality water bottle. You can also make a really cheap water bottle just because you're trying to save on cost. But the spinners, you know, our team are all artists. We all have ADD or ADHD. It's just kind of part of how we operate. I don't need a million fidget spinners. And...

To me, I look at that as, is that a good value? Is that worth your money? And a lot of promotional products are set up that here is an existing item, put your logo on it. And that's where it ends. And it's not, there's ways that you can fully customize something that make it more unique and help tell your brand story in a clear way that aligns better with what you're trying to do and what you're trying to represent for your company. And I think that's a missed opportunity that a lot of people just...

we're doing an event. We need to have promotional items. What should we have? A lanyard, nothing against lanyards, but we need a fidget spinner. We need a pen. We need whatever this garbage. And of course, LinkedIn has the Yeti bottles because they've got LinkedIn money. But there's other inexpensive things that you can do that are unique. You could do a motel key chain or something, just something a little bit more unique that could actually get some use.

Brent Peterson (26:51.488)
Alright, so we still have a little bit of time. I want you to tell us what is your favorite unique item that you've made for people.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (27:01.134)
That's challenging. I think my favorite item, which is still our top seller, are the metal lapel pins, enamel pins, because just the range of things that come in, we've had people make pins that are four inches, crazy glitter, nutto stuff. It's basically a dinner plate. And an artist is doing a limited run of them and selling them for $80 each.

And at the same point, another person sending in a design that's a small icon and they're making 50 of them and they're a high school kid that has an Etsy store. And I think the pins for me, there's such a range of what people can do with them. And it comes in. It's always interesting to me, even though it's such a simple item.

And I love that they can be interchangeable if you have a collection of pins, which is how the original name pin game strong came up is people would post their pin collections and say, my pin game is strong. So that was the original, how the original name came up and you can collect them. And depending on your mood, you can swap it out in 30 seconds. And so I think that's probably still one of my favorite products. And we make about 500 ,000, 600 ,000 pins a year at about a million total products a year.

And it's still 65, 70 % pins.

Brent Peterson (28:27.328)
So the challenge to any store owner would be to get a product that they, like let's just say they're selling a product or they're selling a service at a product to a store that is their own brand that people buy. Like people buy Tesla stuff, right?

greg kerr / alchemy merch (28:44.59)
Right. That supports the brands. Right. You need to do stuff. If you are going to make products, they should properly support the brand's vision, properly support everything that you want. And by going into fully custom versus a promo item, you can take it to that next level so that you can stand out with the products that you're offering and offer a better quality, a more interesting item.

Obviously a t -shirt, really the design that's going on it is what's going to make or break if somebody is interested in it. But except a tote bag, we make so many tote bags for coffee shops and things like that. Well, you can make a really interesting tote. We just did one for called Peak Skill Coffee out in New York and they had really great graphics on it. And then on the handle, it had their logo going on. There's a little sewn on tag and that is a unique product.

that they can have. Nobody else has that. It's not the stock tan tote. It's something that's interesting. And I think there's a lot of value in taking the time to create something interesting that represents you properly.

Brent Peterson (29:52.32)
Do you feel as though NPR should get better tote bags?

greg kerr / alchemy merch (29:56.654)
Probably. You know, I wish that NPR and some of those things would physically mail me things less. You know, because they probably got more in postage than I've than I've donated at times. So but NPR has some pretty good, some pretty decent products. The NPR Toad is a classic, you know, or the mugs. But yeah, they don't fully customize it as much as they can, too. I'm sure they're making them overseas, but they're not taking advantage.

of all the things they can do. It's still basically a screen printed tote bag, or maybe sublimated at this point.

Brent Peterson (30:32.32)
Right. So Greg, we have a few minutes left now. At the end of the podcast, I gave everybody a chance to do their elevator pitch and it doesn't have to be 30 seconds. But in EO, we have a, we have a mantra that there's no solicitation. It's one of the main rules. We can't solicit, I can't solicit, I can't solicit Greg as another EO member. We can talk about us doing business together, but you know, we shouldn't be.

spamming him with all kinds of stuff. But this is an opportunity we have to sell your wares, let's say. So tell us, you know, how do people get in touch with you and then give us the reasoning why somebody should be coming to you for your solution to their problem.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (31:17.582)
Sure, the easiest way to find us is alchemymerch .com. We've got a contact form on the site or we can be emailed at orders at alchemymerch .com and you can send something in and get a consultation from us. We don't charge anything for that. And my elevator pitch is just flat out, stop making terrible products, make better merch.

Brent Peterson (31:42.304)
That's awesome.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (31:45.646)
You know, at the end of the day, stop wasting your money. Make something intentional, make something good, make something that somebody wants. And what we do all day long is help people create. If you boil it down to what we do, that's what we are. We're a sidecar on their adventure. Whether that's an independent artist or for the Arizona chapter, we make pins for EO. I didn't solicit it, you know, I was asked.

But we've done on and it's got the years on it. So members that have been, as you know, 10 years, 15 years, these are some pretty big landmark things and to celebrate too. And so we'll make pins that will celebrate those different landmarks. Kind of like said that we do for Shopify. And I think there's a lot of value in doing something that's good. That's more interesting. Make life look more interesting, you know?

Brent Peterson (32:40.096)
Yeah, there's a lot of good nuggets in this podcast. I'm going to have to go back and listen to it. But I will make sure we get all those, all the contact details and the show notes. It's been a great conversation. I've really enjoyed it. For, for anybody that wants to, wants to get in touch with Greg, I'm assuming you're on LinkedIn as well. That you orders at alchemymerch .com, right? And I will also put the links in there. And EONetwork .org is the.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (32:46.67)
Hehehehe

Brent Peterson (33:09.888)
organization website and for Minnesota we do we just had our EO rally so we do this it's kind of unique but we had about 500 people in our at our at our rally this year and it's it's it's a an event that we put on that that talked that we had Johnny cupcakes as one of our keynotes this year so he's also in that space.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (33:30.062)
He was one of my first ever clients for my first business when I was 20. I made belts for giant cupcakes when he was selling out of the trunk of his car. So yeah. Yeah.

Brent Peterson (33:40.608)
That's awesome. So Greg, thank you so much for being here. It's been such a pleasure.

greg kerr / alchemy merch (33:46.51)
I really appreciate you having me on. Thank you.