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How do you build a DTC brand that breaks out in a noisy world?
The Uncommon Brands podcast interviews founders of fast-growing DTC, e-commerce, and consumer product brands with unique products and marketing strategies. In each episode, we dive into how these stand out brands built their business by going against the grain.
This podcast is for any DTC brand founder, entrepreneur, and executive looking to build a stand out brand.
Host Parker Nash spent more than a decade working at Nike where he learned first-hand how one of the greatest brands in the world develops product and marketing that turns customers into raving fans.
00:00
Parker Nash
Welcome to the Uncommon Brands podcast. I'm your host, Parker Nash. If you want to know the product and marketing strategies the next wave of up and coming consumer brands are using to achieve uncommon success, you're in the right place. In each episode, we interview founders of fast growing consumer brands that are breaking out by not being afraid to be different. So if you're a DTC founder, entrepreneur or leader that thinks differently and you're trying to build an uncommon brand, this podcast is for you. Okay, onto the show. Okay. Today, excited to have Travis Seera on the show. He's the founder, inventor and designer of the Flickr Fireplace. The first. I'm going to say this probably wrong, but I'm going to try my best isopropyl personal fireplace. Did I say that right?
00:42
Travis Seera
That's it, man. Okay.
00:43
Parker Nash
He invented it, designed everything, created the manufacturing process, then sold half a million of these personal fireplaces. And now he's onto a new venture called Spark Firestarter. Travis, thanks for joining me, man.
00:55
Travis Seera
It's awesome to be here, dude. I love it.
00:58
Parker Nash
All right, so give us a quick little background on Flickr Fireplace. And for those that haven't heard about Flickr, I'll say this. I was going to tell you this before we started recording. It became my standard corp or a client gift. I started buying these in bulk because they're so awesome. But why don't you tell us, what is a flicker fireplace?
01:15
Travis Seera
It's definitely a tongue twister. When I was actually starting the brand, I think at first I called it burn. I was kind of ideating it through the 2000 teens, and at the time, like, one of my favorite restaurants was called Orc. I'm associating this, like, oh, these are like obvious naming conventions. This is cool. And then after about six months of trying to say, heidi, you wanna burn? Hi. Do you want two burns? I was like, wow. Yeah. So, yeah, of course, went to Flickr. I would say, you know, as were just talking, they've had this same progress is made by the discontent. And I could probably add on to that the poor. When I was started, born and raised in Tennessee, but lived in seattle for about nine years, I was a high rise, window cleaner, downtown, cold, kind of gray city.
01:55
Parker Nash
Are you doing the ones where you get on a rope and hang on a little plank of wood and rappel down? Oh, my God.
02:01
Travis Seera
Come in. Yeah, bozos here. Oh, it's fantastic.
02:04
Parker Nash
Okay, so you're also a thrill seeker on top of being.
02:06
Travis Seera
Oh, yes. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I'd go back to my little third floor apartment. And I grew up with a big stack stone fireplace in, like, in my family home. I missed that ambience. I get a candle, and it. It was boring. And I'm a man, so I'm fire. Like proper, not wax candle fire. Yeah. And so I started looking on the market, and this is early 2000 teens, and they were all these, like, glass and steel six, seven $800 units. And you had to buy their proprietary jelly, like, asterno base, gel, ethanol, and of course, as I think a lot of inventory type people will say or will agree with, you just go, oh, I can do that. And then eight years later, in many thousands of dollars in developing, if you're lucky, you kind of do it.
02:50
Travis Seera
If you're unlucky, you realize you, I don't know, kept yourself entertained for eight years. Okay. There's a lot of things out there that burn. There's gotta be a way to make something a little more my aesthetic, which is a little more of the cement, a little more raw, a little more textured. There's gotta be a way to do this. So, I mean, as you do, I went to Lowe's, grabbed a bag of quikrete, and mix it up in my little third floor apartment. I used, like, one of my mixing bowls. I had to throw it away cause it's covered in cement. I use, like, a wooden spoon out of my wooden spoon holder bowl. Like, I grew up in the country.
03:18
Parker Nash
And it's like, product of it now is so well designed and refined looking. It's hilarious and amazing to think that it started with you getting some quikrete in the mixing and a little mixing bowl.
03:28
Travis Seera
And I think it's where, you know, what's the saying? That the best is the enemy of the good.
03:32
Parker Nash
Right? It's like, just perfect is enemy good?
03:34
Travis Seera
Yeah, that's it. You just start it. Just try it. I could have waited for the $20,000 industrial mixers we have now, and I could have waited for that, but obviously it would never would have happened. So I tried it a quick creed. I actually tried denatured alcohol first. It burns blue. You can't see it. There's no kind of industry standard on how to denature alcohol, some producers a little more nasty things than others. So I thought, okay, let's stay away from that. So I was like, my scorpio, alcohol burns, I think. So I picked up a bottle. It does burn. It burns yellow and beautiful, sucks all the moisture out of quikrete, and the stuff crumbles. So I went through a long process of ideating.
04:09
Travis Seera
I was at TJ Maxx one day, saw a mortar and pestle, and I was like, wow, that's inch thick granite that will hold liquid and probably not break. Does actually start to crack after a couple hours. It gets blindingly hot because it's such a dense material. So it really was about eight years of playing around with that. Moved, moved back Tennessee in 2016, and it was my mom, I think, goodness, I'd use some cast iron, like little cast iron bowls to design some of these. At times, I was like, cast iron can take the heat. Never have finished products. Got some, you know, family and friends, and finally came upon kind of a sister to the cement that I'm using now. What I have now, of course, is a lot more fun, but kind of nailed it.
04:44
Travis Seera
And my mom was like, Travis, I think you got something here. Like, this is really cool. And so I think for me, several years later and sell a bunch of these things, and I look back and I think often, one of the things I like about places like Kickstarter, it's often someone who's really passionate about something and really wants it to fill this gap that they found in their life. Maybe because they couldn't afford the thing that's meant to fill a gap. Maybe to get, you know, for me, Flickr ended up kind of filling that desire for a fireplace. But then it went one step further with an inexpensive, readily available fuel. You don't have to order from us. We're not going to put you on a subscription program.
05:18
Travis Seera
I will say that we in the US in this, I did sell the company in 2022, so that's not always applicable, but that it's habit. Many, many years of habit.
05:26
Parker Nash
Just real quick. For people that haven't seen it yet, go to flickerfire.com dot. It's flikr fire.com. And let's describe it a little bit in case people want to see what this, or try to imagine what this looks like as they're listening to this. But they're little mini fireplace that can go on a coffee table, right? Like, you can just put them in your house, right?
05:43
Travis Seera
Yeah. So the magic is the cement we use, and then it's sitting on a powder coated aluminum base with some felt on the bottom. So you put that down. It's five inches in diameter and four inches tall. Little two and a half inch diameter opening. You just put the alcohol on that and give it a light. It's unbelievably simple concept and simple concept hard to execute.
06:03
Parker Nash
Took a decade.
06:04
Travis Seera
Very. Yeah. Like, I think I heard once someone say they were talking about something and they said it's very simple. It is not simplistic. And I think that's this. There's a lot that goes into, we've got this aluminum snuffing lid. But yeah, it's meant to be that conversation piece, dining room table, centerpiece. You just have it going in the corner. It's just your friendly little fire doesn't put out a ton of soot. It's not really meant to be heater, just ambience. It is food safe. You can roast marshmallows for it.
06:26
Parker Nash
What's cool about it, too, even if I have a fire going on, it just looks nice. So it's like a nice little table piece or something like that too. So whether using it actively or not looks great.
06:34
Travis Seera
I like to keep kind of a minimalist home myself, and definitely the goal.
06:37
Parker Nash
So on that, let's talk about that of. So you've got these products you design with Flickr. You're moving on to new company. You're getting going here, spark, fire starter. And I can already see just looking at these two different brands you've built and products you've designed. Like, you have a clearly a good designer. You make really good products and you also make unique products. So I wonder if you have some kind of process or framework you follow or how do you go about making a product that looks great, functions well, and is really just kind of stands out and is different.
07:05
Travis Seera
I'm not trained. My schooling was in liberal arts. I actually have a degree in liberal arts, which is to say I have a degree in everything, which is to say I have a degree. I think for me, I don't like it when I hear people say this. So I don't like to be one that says it, but it comes down in many ways to what do I need, what I like, what do I want in my life? I'm working on a shoe rack right now. It's nowhere near prime time, but it's I'm a shoes off home and people come in and even for me, I can look over at my door and there's like eight pairs of shoes just sitting at my door. And I'm like, some of these are really nice shoes. Why are they just piled on top of each other?
07:38
Travis Seera
And so I'm working on a shoe rack that goes on a wall. That's how it was for Flickr. Spark is stainless steel. Little tri wing guy. You put rubbing alcohol in it lives at the base of a fire, so it can go in a smokeless fire pit. Some of that is because I'm terrible at making a fire. My brother, actually, who lives across the street, he has a solo stove, and solo stoves are incredible designs. They're phenomenally smoke free once they get going.
08:00
Parker Nash
Right.
08:01
Travis Seera
I had watched myself avoid being around him when he starts his solo stove because it gets really smoky. I'm sitting there taking what I already know, and what I already know isopropyl alcohol and how to burn it. I just start applying that, you know, is there something there that they could solve this problem and just kind of naturally goes down that path? I've never done market research. When I started Flickr it, I sold it a local holiday market here in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and sold really well. It got really great response to it. Someone at that show said, hey, you should go to this place called America's Mart in Atlanta. It's a wholesale show. Okay, sure. I remember at the time, I did not know what net 30 terms were. I didn't know what that phrase meant.
08:40
Travis Seera
I have since realized that my net 30, while you're bootstrapping, is called your credit card. That's what paid for me to go to the trade show. I had no print collateral. I had no business cards. But I love designing, so did not pirate Adobe cs five back in 2016. But, yeah, it just started. I got on illustrator and started playing around. I want to make some business cards and whatnot. So, you know, they go to the show and that's kind of another part of the story, I guess. But I think with that process, Flickr was there fulfill a need. And I think when you're a curious person, you can look at something and just say, I mean, I often wonder, like, did Steve Jobs, did he make the iPhone to make Apple a ton of money, or did he make the iPhone?
09:20
Travis Seera
And I haven't even read the biography. This might be answered somewhere. But, like, he made the iPhone, because he was like, I think we can do it better. I'm actually suspicious. I think we can do it better. So he did it better. And I love products. With Flickr, we started to see the demand. People would say, hey, make a new shape. And I'm like, okay, so, like, we have a square, a couple different shapes now. But it took me a long time to do that because for me, our kind of our og, this round fireplace that met my need. That's all I ever wanted. And to come out and make a different shape and push it on into the marketplace, it felt like a lie that was out to just make tons of money. I'm like, no, why do you need a square?
09:58
Travis Seera
You have the round. This doesn't fit. And so I finally came on a square design that I personally liked. I currently like it more than the round design. And I would actually say that's why I put it to market is okay. Now I have something I like better. And, you know, does that honestly convey to the customer? I don't know. When you're a business, you make money. It's your job to make money. So you keep ideating.
10:18
Parker Nash
Well, I think what you're doing, like, to me is a little bit surprising because that was something really good to actually too many brands. Too many brands trying this works. Let's do this, right.
10:26
Travis Seera
Yeah.
10:26
Parker Nash
Try to do a bunch of different little features or like all these different iterations of it, and then all it does is actually gives your customers so many decisions. Now, you made their decision really hard because they have to choose from five different options of what? All five of them are pretty similar. Right? You guys have slowly expanded out into different products, and they're all unique and distinct and have different, there's a reason why you may want a square versus or mini or whatever you have, but your hesitancy to expand out to that is first, too, if you're bootstrapping smart. Also just from, like, resources, you know, the money. Yeah, right. So, but, man, this is where so many companies, I've seen brands do this small and large.
11:01
Parker Nash
Just think, well, if this one thing worked, I can do this next, I can make it even better. But it doesn't work because maybe more confusing for customers. For me, when I was at Nike working on product lines, the first thing I always did was actually generally cut products. I'm like, we're getting rid of 20% of our products. We're doing less every time. And every time it almost ended up working that we ended up making more revenue for the product line. One we get because we had great design, all that kind of stuff, but we limited the options and we made it easier for people to choose. And so, long story going back to what you're saying, I like your products. Don't make it hard for your customers to buy the product.
11:32
Travis Seera
Exactly. And when it comes, I think these are all things I've learned on accident, but I got to interrupt myself. Our first trade show, a lady came up to us and said, could we send over a line sheet? And I said, yes, ma'am, absolutely. Do you have your business card so she gives to me, she walks away. I walked through the booth across from us and I said, what the hell's a line sheet? And the lady looks at me, she goes, oh, bless, honey. Come here.
11:55
Parker Nash
Yeah. Because you're Atlanta's mark. Yeah, correct. Yeah.
11:58
Travis Seera
She's like, I'll send you ours. So I think a lot of what I say here is, has been learned. Not talk. But I'm a truck guy. I like a truck. I've carried a lot of cement in trucks. I've got a motorcycle I carry in my truck. I've almost all my life had a truck. Shockingly enough, I research trucks and I watch, you know, what is Ford doing? I have my grandfather's Ford guy. And in the south, that means me, the grandson is a Ford guy. Ford recently trimmed up their trim levels and their engine offerings. They're slimming everything down to a speed up. And I think to clean up their production lines, speed up production times and again confuse the customer less because there's a million ways you can spec these things.
12:36
Parker Nash
ThAt's, by the way, go back to talking about someone that's done it right. Tesla, where they have three models now, four models, I guess. Was that what they had?
12:43
Travis Seera
Sexy. Yes. Yes.
12:44
Parker Nash
Sexually. That's right. That's right. Four models. And boy, they really make it easy for you to choose which model you want. Whereas, like, man, I'm sure even like Fords, I know if they're still trimming it down, that still means that you could probably have like 100 combinations of one Ford f 150. Like, okay, now it's a fricking job to pick a truck. It's so much work.
13:02
Travis Seera
It really is. And I think for me as a customer, I mean, I got a 2021 that it has this one feature, but you can get that model without that feature. And so now, as I, like, play around, you know, if I want a replacement, I got a buddy who's actually looking for one. So I'm looking for him. You have to select that feature to try to find used trucks or new trucks or whatever that have it, because it's not guaranteed they're going to have it just because it's right. Trim, packaging. We had people a long time say, hey, make these in different colors. Flickr, you know, take Flickr, do the base and the lid, do a little combo this different color. And as soon as we did it a different color, we did three colors, black, white, and just raw silver.
13:36
Travis Seera
Raw aluminum, which obviously ends up being silver. As soon as we did that, we go to a trade show. And some be like, oh, man, I really wish you had, like a nice copper. We had people not make buying decisions because they couldn't decide if they wanted white or black or silver. And I look at that, I'm like, whoa, wait, aren't you part of the general masses that have been saying we need colors? And do you know how hard it was to source this aluminum to powder coat it? And then we ended up in this huge issue because we would powder coat too many black. They want more of that. So now we have dead inventory.
14:06
Parker Nash
This all goes to the, what do they call it? The paradox of choice, which is if you give people too many choices, you'll paralyze them and they won't make a choice 100%.
14:14
Travis Seera
So in a lot of ways, in a design process, I would think, okay, what do I like? Let's even pair away. Don't even make this an altruistic. What is a product I would use every day, only put those products market. Maybe push that idea aside for a second. It's a little like, I got an Instagram ad for these swim trunks and I go to their website. Like, I see these couple cool designs and then I start looking up and they have like a hundred designs. And so in my mind, it's actually not a paradox of choice for me at that point. At that point I'm thinking you just got on Photoshop and click generate and masses like yards and yards of material in China.
14:48
Travis Seera
And I'm like, well, I now don't necessarily know if you're that quality because you're just crapping these things out in this. And so for me, it's like, take what's authentic to you. When you go to design something, does this speak well to me? And if it does, hey, maybe you are the general consumer out there and it'll speak well to them now.
15:09
Parker Nash
Well said. Okay, so on that trailing off, what you've been talking about a little bit there about going to Atlanta's Mart, I've seen this long enough where it's ridden the waves of wholesale, then direct to consumer only businesses, then up. Now the cool term is omnichannel, which means sell it everywhere. Like, okay, cool, I got it. But for Flickr, you guys really grew quickly, primarily through, not primarily, but like in large part through wholesale and retail partners. Yeah, yeah, tell us a little bit about that. And kind of maybe some of the pieces of advice you have for other brands, other founders, in terms of stat you told me was 1000 stores within three years selling these things. So how did you get to that point and then, and maybe also too, man.
15:49
Parker Nash
Its also about finding the right partners who were the right fits. How did you go about finding the right stores to really sell your products for you?
15:56
Travis Seera
Great question. Going the wholesale route again. For us it was because a random lady here in Chattanooga to Market said, hey, you should drive two and a half hours to Atlanta and do this market. There was not a lot of intention behind that per se, but we found that if you do it right, I think at our peak we had about 1200 stores. They were not all active buyers. I'd say between 801,000 at our peak. We're actively buying. If you're providing them with enough content, et cetera. If you're really taking care of them, that's an outside hire. Like you need to bring somebody in to do that. As a owner run business, I failed wildly in that at the time. I had a partner and my then wife. That was not something the two of us could have run.
16:31
Travis Seera
We should have hired an account manager to run that. But I think going into that, everybody's fighting for ad space, for marketing space. I want to win the algorithms at all points and oh crap, they changed the algorithms. Okay, well I hope my ad guys on that change. And the really great thing is these stores, I would say when I say a thousand, it's really mom and pops. You know, some might have had locations in their little hometown and honestly, that's not sexy. It's sexier to be in Nordstrom, in Macy's, and we've been in Bloomingdale's. That's really cool. But they incorporate rules. They can't light this little fireplace and if you don't light it doesn't sell that well because it just ends up looking like a hunk of cement. We actually found these.
17:08
Parker Nash
You totally miss the whole experience. And you're also, you go the big corporate route too. So I think this is also really important to drill in on for brands as don't overlook the little guys and don't overlook retailers or partners that you think may not be big enough or whatever, because they actually may be way better for you because they can do stuff that corporate can do. And also, I'm assuming if they're mom and pops, then a lot of people are in those stores or owners and they have a way higher incentive to help move product and do it well without sacrificing relationships too. And like they're invested in your product too, because they're invested in their store.
17:40
Travis Seera
They'Re going to sell it huge incentive. And it's like when we would step back and try to have the perspective that to the degree that I'm trying to push this product, is the. The same degree that they're trying to push their own store, maybe their net 30 terms or their credit card as well. They're really trying to push it. And so we start talking to them and we talk about where to find them in a minute. But it's like you start sending them in it, get them print collateral, give it to them, give them videos. Don't worry about licensing. Don't, who cares? Just give it to them. Give them ways to sell it. We would suggest, hey, when you have your next sidewalk sale, put one of these out. We'll send you $20 for a bag of marshmallows in a couple yours.
18:13
Travis Seera
Offer the kids that walk by a smart. You've got to help them sell it because they've now got 200 lines they're carrying in their store, and they're not going to sit there and ideate on how to sell every single one of them. So I think receiving some of that from an owner is our feedback was always, hey, wow, thank you. That's a brilliant idea. This random store, Knoxville, Tennessee, north of us. I'll say their name because I love them. Snooty patootie was this store saying, these four women, they were an absolute right every time they would come by the booth at one point, we're selling 60 to 70 of these a month. I visited one time. They're in a strip mall in Knoxville, outside Knoxville.
18:50
Parker Nash
60 to 70 month, then. Retail price on these are like, what, a $100 or something like that.
18:55
Travis Seera
Yeah, back then. That was several years ago. Back then, I think it was 80. And were making them for. Well, I was making them, so it was vastly cheaper. I think our price on them was with me making them not paying me $8. And then so 80, were selling them wholesale at 40.
19:10
Parker Nash
That's a good chunk of change for them. For one product.
19:13
Travis Seera
For one product, yeah, because, I mean, they're making $40 a pot because they're buying a buff. And so that one product pushing 60, 70 ish a month, that was fantastic for them and that huge for us. And that's one store, you know, it's so easy. If you would come to me and said, hey, Travis, do you want to put your product in a store called Snooty Patootie in a strip mall, I would 100% lift my little designer nose at them. Yeah, but you get off your high horse. And you say, yeah, hey, if they'll sell it, let's go. So doing these wholesale markets. Yeah, I did find that buyer. So we did America's market in Atlanta. It's owned by, it's been sold several times, obviously don't know who owns them now. Same company runs a big show in Vegas in High Point, North Carolina.
19:52
Travis Seera
And those are the a home accessory and furniture shows. Zyborn, North Carolina. That is a interesting town. They're really furniture heavy, and we never performed as well in high point because they're furniture heavy. We're not furniture. We're a poor accessory. So that should occlude us in from the very beginning. And I think when you're looking at a trade show, we never went to a boating trade show because you should never have a fire on a boat. Boating and rvs, okay, rvs, you're for camping. You know, rvs could work, but even then, I think you've got to really drill down with the salesman who's trying to sell you a booth at this trade show.
20:25
Travis Seera
Got to really down with them and be like, yo, if I'm going to do the show, we never did a boating in rv show, but a lot of times they're a bit split, so they got a little bit of boating over here. A little bit of rv over here. Don't put me in boating.
20:34
Parker Nash
Yeah, don't.
20:35
Travis Seera
Because I'm not a voting product. So where you're placed, even on a floor at a trade show, I think can be big. So doing some research on these shows, kind of find the right show, reach out to them. Whoever contacts back to you is just going to be a salesman. They're just trying to sell you a floor space. They want you to be successful because they want you to come back, but really they just want to sell it to you. So digging in and saying, hey, who are the boost around me? Yeah, what do they sell? Am I on?
20:57
Parker Nash
This is something that client just dealt with, and they did not do what you're talking about as well. There's a trade show that I still think they should be going to. It's really important, but it's big. And they waited too long to sign up. And so the placement of their booth was, to say the least, and I think it was a missed opportunity because while we waited too long, you got to basically, you got to fight for your space on that kind of stuff. So you do.
21:20
Travis Seera
And actually, it's a little more nitty gritty here, but I think I'm not a huge salesman. I love my product. I believe in my product, but I don't like when someone does a hard sell to me, so I don't do a hard sell to other people. A huge thing for us, we printed off these little. A lot of times at trade shows, people want freebies. You know, swag. We all get. I can't carry a whole bunch of seven pound fireplaces with me with these trade shows. So what we would do, we had these little two inch by two inch little coupon cards. QR code one side to the website, and then discount code on the other. It gave them 40% off, which is a huge discount sales, 50% off. We would do keystone pricing. 50% off. It's typical on the core world.
21:57
Travis Seera
I would use that as a touch point to people walking down the hall. It's like you want their hips to turn, you know, right, like, into the booth, not just the head. But if they didn't, I want to be like, hey, cool. Hey, check it out. It's a little personal fireplace. Runs on Ruby. Alcohol. Check out later. Here's Cuba. 40% off. And it became that little touch point. So I think for sometimes, for people who are a little more awkward in selling, you cannot be sitting on your phone. My then wife and I, we made this little rule between the two of us. One person has to be standing at all times. So, like, if she gets an email you need to respond to, she sits down, does that.
22:23
Travis Seera
I stand up, have some music in our booth, take a little JBL speaker, heap up the energy. It attracts people, and then have that little touch point for people like me, who are a little more shy in the cell, have a little touch point, you hand it to them. We actually did branded slap bracelets that had a usb stick at the end, and we loaded our catalog on the usb stick.
22:42
Parker Nash
Oh, smart.
22:43
Travis Seera
So we walk up and, like, slap the bracelet on someone, and it's like our branding on the bracelet. And then we say, oh, yeah, there's a little, You can check out our catalog on the end. We had some promo on it. It was a great way to actually hand people the video collateral, print collateral and photos that they may need if they did write in order. And it hurts getting selling a product for 50% off. And I think when you look at d to c, we all love d two c, but everyone is fighting for d to C space. You pay a lot to win over that customer. And I think when you go wholesale, let them be posting on their Facebook for you. Let them be posting on their social media for you. So in theory, you got a thousand active stores.
23:20
Travis Seera
If you're pushing them correctly, they should be posting on your behalf. So you've got a thousand accounts now posting about your product tagging new videos when you put new videos out on your social. So I think you just get this groundswell and the quantity and the marketing, they kind of hit this critical mass where, yeah, I'm selling it at half off because it's wholesale, but wow, this actually works.
23:43
Parker Nash
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. And I think DTC and e commerce is fantastic. It's great. It gets a lot of the attention and I think a lot of brands overlook the wholesale piece. Like you said, they're doing the marketing for you. It's a partnership. And man, it's a huge win for brands that are smaller and growing. I take that back, even for huge ones. Nike gotten a lot of trouble recently because they decided, oh, we can do this our own a couple of years ago. And so they pulled out of a lot of wholesale accounts and guess what? They just hired a guy that used to be their head of sales to come back to get wholesale back up and going.
24:11
Travis Seera
Wow.
24:11
Parker Nash
So whether you're small or big, don't sleep on wholesale.
24:14
Travis Seera
Yeah, absolutely.
24:15
Parker Nash
Okay, so a couple more questions here quickly before we head into that high pressure packed lightning around here. But like you said, you're moving on to spark fire starter. Now, you sold Flickr, maybe a piece of advice you have for other founders listening to this that are considering or maybe one day want to sell their business. If you have any advice as you went through that process of how to.
24:35
Travis Seera
Yeah, so, you know, we never went to banks. Our manufacturer bought it. If you've got stateside manufacturing and that you don't own, I think your most synchronous buyer is almost always going to be your manufacturer if they want to get into a retail space because they're the one who stands to make the most from it because they make it. I think for me, we paid way too much money to get a firm to give us our EBItda. And you want all your fancy numbers and are we 2.2 times EBITDA or are we four in the end, it's worth what the market will pay for it. And they gave us a massive valuation, the firm we use, and it was actually laughed at. I get butt hurt. I get a little offended. Oh, this is my baby. I'm selling my.
25:15
Parker Nash
Yeah, yeah, sure.
25:16
Travis Seera
You should pay me way more in the end, it's some of, I think what you gotta answer is why do you want to sell it if you want to sell it? Just to roll in money? Well, if your product's really worth what you're asking for it, then why wouldn't you just keep it and just get the money yourself? If you're doing a 4.8 million in gross sales, let's say you're crushing it and getting 1.8 net, youre making $1.8 million a year. Why are you trying to sell your company? So if youre going to take that 4.8 and say, wow, so and so should buy this for ten, its okay, they probably wont. But lets just say they bought it for ten, youre going to pay. I dont know what short term capital gains on that. Youre going to lose 20% minimally.
25:55
Travis Seera
So maybe youve got eight. Well, you realize if you were netting 1.7 and you just got eight. If you ran your company another six years, five years, you would have had eight. I think it's a little like what are you trying to accomplish by selling it? Because often for me it was my then wife, she was president of the company. I didn't want to run it. That's not my skillset whatsoever. I did not want to go through the hassle of finding someone to run it, training them, bringing up on the product. So in a lot of ways I sold it. Not to just have this massive cash cow, what he'd kind of become a liability and a stress in my life. It wasn't much of the passion anymore. Still very passionate to get it into people's hands and see them enjoy it.
26:30
Travis Seera
But manufacturing I passed off because I personally couldn't keep up. And so my days I was just kind of this rambunctious little angry, bored maker walking around his house angry that he's not in a shop covered in cement selling. For me, you know, I didn't sell it for what I would have liked to see it sold for, but in the end it gave me everything I wanted and more because it passed it on, it put it into some good hands. I did a little contracting with them to get them up to speed. So, you know, that was great. But then it took away from me the pressures of what I would have had to walk through to get through that, because it's not always about the active positive, it's about the, by selling the company, I removed a potential negative.
27:09
Travis Seera
It was not an actual negative of having to hire somebody and go through that process and so I think at times, you know, a year after I sold it, I was like, oh, man, I don't know if I should have sold it. And then I thought, okay, I'm a year out. I would still be trying to hold the hand. I'd be talking to the ex wife daily, trying to hold the hand to this new person I hired to get them trained up. That sale saved me from all of that. And I think when youre kind of a consummate inventory type person, your odds are youre actually not good at running a company. Yeah. So hire somebody to do it, and you go do the next thing.
27:39
Parker Nash
Love it. Good advice. Okay, lightning round. You ready for this?
27:42
Travis Seera
Lets go, man.
27:43
Parker Nash
Theres high pressure stakes here. Okay, best place that youve enjoyed? The flicker fireplace.
27:48
Travis Seera
My coffee table.
27:49
Parker Nash
Okay. You must have a nice home then. I can see it in the background. Your favorite item to roast over a fireplace. A flicker fireplace.
27:58
Travis Seera
Little smokey. Hot dog.
28:00
Parker Nash
Hot dogs.
28:00
Travis Seera
Yeah, little smoke man. If you can stab it on a steak, you can roast it, and those things are amazing.
28:04
Parker Nash
Okay, good. I didn't think about that. I like that.
28:07
Travis Seera
All right.
28:08
Parker Nash
One thing you never thought you'd have to know, but you know now, as a founder of now two fireplace fire.
28:14
Travis Seera
Starter companies, but did you say favorite thing you know?
28:17
Parker Nash
No. One thing you never thought you'd have to know, but you know, as a.
28:20
Travis Seera
Founder of these businesses, the chemical signature of isopropyl alcohol is c three h eight o. Its lower explosive limit is 2% saturation parts per million in any given airspace. Its flash point is 750 degrees fahrenheit. Actually, its flash point is 58 degrees because flash point is not combustion. 750 degrees fahrenheit.
28:40
Parker Nash
That is good. I've asked that question a lot. That might be the best answer I've gotten so far. Our last one here, one piece of advice for other founders.
28:48
Travis Seera
Listening to this dude, love what you do. Love it. And it will be stressful, and it keep you up at nights. And as soon as you let go of it, you'll be bored. At nights. I can't just watch tv. I have to watch tv with my laptop so I can start designing stuff. And the tv is on in the background because tv is now boring. Because I want to make stuff. I want to go. Let's design. Let's get some creativity out there. As soon as you take away the outlet for that, now it's just a tv, and I'm bored, and I don't know what to do.
29:15
Parker Nash
That's a good one to go out on. I love that. All right, so tell us more about Spark Firestarter. Where can we find you this? Give us the details on that.
29:23
Travis Seera
Yeah, man. Quick one on that. So spark firestart is really cool. Kind of. Again, it came out of the desire to fill a need. I saw there's lots of ways to start a fire. You can bang rocks together and try to get sparks. You can get a cigarette lighter and try to light some wadded up newspaper. Tri wing thing. If you drew a circle around it'd be about a 14 inch diameter circle. It's at sparkfirestarter.com dot. We're going to have these available to sell starting in October. It's pre order only right now. Now, but legitimately, any fire you want to start, you got logs in the backyard, you know, smokeless fire pit in the backyard. Go for it. You want to take this camping? Go for it.
29:54
Travis Seera
Car camping you set on the grounds, add some rubbing alcohol to it, build up your logs, light it on fire, and you're containing your isopropyl alcohol. Burns for about ten to 15 minutes on its own. Lights, wet logs. We can't get it to not light a log. It's fantastic. Super easy, 16 gauge, 304 stainless steel so it doesn't melt. Infinitely reusable. You know, if it's in your backyard, it just lives there. Dump out the ash next time. Outdoor use only, obviously, unlike Flickr, we're hoping for the next big thing. We'll see what happens.
30:20
Parker Nash
Amazing. It is going to be the next big thing. Great design. Look at function. I know it's going to work well, man. It's awesome. I'm about to get me one of these two. So it's sparkfirestarter.com and then at Sparkfirestarter on social.
30:32
Travis Seera
That's it, man. We got some rather entertaining videos. I'm in a loincloth in one of them.
30:36
Parker Nash
Yeah, you should check that out. Now that alone. Check that out. All right, Travis, thanks for joining me, man.
30:40
Travis Seera
Parker, thank you so much, man.
30:43
Parker Nash
Thanks for listening to the uncommon Brands podcast. I hope you enjoyed today's episode, gain new insights, and are inspired to take one idea you heard from the episode and implement it into your business. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave us a review. And join us next time as we uncover how the next wave of up and coming consumer brands are building an uncommon brand.