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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Friday, 11/28/2025. We are live from the Commerce Corral.
Speaker 1:The Commerce Corral.
Speaker 2:You might be wondering.
Speaker 1:To be back.
Speaker 2:This show, of course, is sponsored by Ram. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, a whole lot more. But we're doing a crazy Black Friday stream with none other than Shopify.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:That's right. We're in the green suit.
Speaker 1:We have a
Speaker 2:We got tons of guests who are on Shopify.
Speaker 1:And guest host today.
Speaker 2:Guest host Carly Finkelstein from Shopify. He's gonna be calling in throughout the show at multiple periods of time to let us know what's happening in the world of ecommerce, in the world of commerce Look.
Speaker 1:Generally. At this gas line.
Speaker 2:Can we just drop the e at this point? Why do we see why do we keep calling it ecommerce?
Speaker 1:It's just commerce.
Speaker 2:It's just commerce. Don't care about any commerce other than ecommerce, so we should just take it over. The rest should be called t commerce, traditional commerce. T commerce. T commerce.
Speaker 2:And e commerce, we're just calling it commerce from now on. It's just commerce.
Speaker 1:It's over.
Speaker 2:It's over for it's we won. Complete total culture of victory.
Speaker 1:We lost one thing. What did we lose? You used to be able to meet up at your local retailer on a Friday.
Speaker 2:Yes. On Black Friday.
Speaker 1:On on Black Friday.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and fight still nursing a hangover from Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1:Getting a fist fight Yes. Over consumer electronics. Yes. Nobody has replicated that online yet.
Speaker 2:You can't do that online. That is a startup offer. Yeah. Yeah. You can't do that online.
Speaker 1:Request for startup app that lets you Yeah. Fight strangers for consumer electronics deals. Yeah. Nobody's done it yet. Very So
Speaker 2:you get on the waiting list. You'd be able to check out just normally. It would just be a normal Shopify checkout, but then maybe there'd be a Shopify plug in and Exactly. Little boxing post purchase flow. A post a post purchase flow.
Speaker 2:Post purchase flow, would you like to get in a wrestling match for for more for a bigger discount?
Speaker 3:Put the
Speaker 1:gloves on.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It doesn't need to actually be violent. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You've secured you've secured the product. You're good. But Yeah. If you wanna get in a fight, we can bring that experience
Speaker 1:Friendly
Speaker 2:the traditional commerce experience. We're bringing the traditional commerce experience into the modern era, into the e commerce era, into the commerce era.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:That's right. We're doing it here on Restream, of course. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com. Har Harley kicked it off with a video that just hit the timeline.
Speaker 2:He says he's ring the opening ballot NASDAQ this morning alongside Shopify merchants, Grunt, Workwear, Wild One, Swimsuites, Abode. There are a ton of companies that he's going to be taking us on a whirlwind tour of. We're very excited to have him calling in in just a few minutes. Toby Lutke also hit the timeline. He said, it's officially Black Friday in the first time zones, and we're live with this year's live globe globe now inside of a pinball machine that is Pull up
Speaker 1:pull up this video so we can see it.
Speaker 2:Fun to play and live sales trigger surprises. The team went all out on this one. Give it a spin. Yes. Very, fun.
Speaker 2:I feel like there's been this, like, you know, the the Black Friday sales tracker has been, I don't know, a decade in the in in the works, maybe two decades in the works almost. I mean, Shopify is coming up on the twenty year anniversary next year, I believe. I believe they the first sale they process was in Yeah. This one is wild. Nineteen years ago.
Speaker 1:Feels like being inside a video game.
Speaker 2:Yes. And so every year it's become a it's become a race to create an arms race to create an an even more extravagant and an elaborate, sales tracker. But it's a lot of fun. It's gotta be this is like this is like a, like a Manhattan project for front end devs.
Speaker 1:It really it really is.
Speaker 2:It's like AGI for front end developers. Seriously, if you're if you're a front end dev, like This
Speaker 1:is your Super Bowl.
Speaker 2:This is your Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:It really is.
Speaker 2:It is. A lot of folks are doing are doing crazy stuff all over all over the Internet today. It's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Well, I am excited. We should read through the guest lineup. Yeah. Can pull that up again. We have a pretty incredible lineup of guests.
Speaker 1:We Harley joining, of course. We have Noel from Gymshark. We have Sarah Foster
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Cofounder of Favorite Daughter and podcaster. We have Peter Rahal from David Protein, former guest of the show. Excited to have him back on. He has just put on an absolute master class with David this year. It's Yeah.
Speaker 1:Will be a Harvard Business School case study if it's not already.
Speaker 2:And we haven't had him on since the boiled cod thing, have we?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Because we had him on, and then he did the boiled cod stunt where he had a whole bunch of billboards.
Speaker 1:He sold a lot of cod.
Speaker 2:Did they actually I
Speaker 1:I actually were selling cod.
Speaker 2:They were actually sold it. Were actually selling.
Speaker 1:I had to I had to double check on it. Okay. Okay. I I It was a real sale.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:But Oh, yeah. Been been on an absolute tear.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And who else we got? We have Farhan, VP of engineering over at Shopify. We have Torin from Mod Retro. He's got news today. We have Kevin from Takovas.
Speaker 1:We of course, are wearing Tecovus today here in the Corral Of commerce. And we have, my dear friend, Nish, from Array, one of the fastest growing, supplement brands that I've ever been aware of. So very excited to talk with him. Benny from Figs and Brian, of course, my co founder over at Aurora. And then Kat from AG One.
Speaker 1:And then we'll wrap it up with Sean from The Ridge, repeat guest and dear friend of ours. So it'll be a fun fun fun show today trying to get really get a view into how brands are approaching.
Speaker 2:The production team's fired up. They're fired up.
Speaker 1:We got a skeleton crew in here today.
Speaker 2:A lot of people traveling.
Speaker 1:We did let, most of the team, just focus on focus on commerce today. Mhmm. And, but we have are here, of course.
Speaker 2:This is not the biggest lineup yet in terms of total number of guests. It's close, but I believe
Speaker 1:Didn't we almost
Speaker 2:episode was really huge. And then there's been a couple
Speaker 1:Obviously, YC count YC
Speaker 2:demo days. Where we've just gone through just one guest after the next after the next after the next, and, we we sort of lose track at that point because it's so many guests. Let me tell you about Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state
Speaker 4:of the
Speaker 2:art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.
Speaker 1:Well, we have Harley in the waiting room. Let's bring him in.
Speaker 2:Let's bring in Harley. The man. Shop himself. Bring him in. Harley, how are you doing?
Speaker 5:Oh, look at that.
Speaker 2:Oh, Where's your top? Casual Friday over there.
Speaker 6:Wait a second.
Speaker 2:Hey. Throw them up. Throw them up.
Speaker 6:It's a Covis. Let's go.
Speaker 2:Let's get that. It's fantastic.
Speaker 6:I don't I don't know where you guys get these outfits, but I'm in.
Speaker 2:They're fantastic. Yes. They're fantastic. Looking looking great. Some people say we look like the Riddler.
Speaker 2:I think it's very clear that
Speaker 6:I think we look I think we look great. I will tell you. I don't know how many suits you guys have, but I assume you have every color of in your closet.
Speaker 2:Close. Not green. Not green. No. I I I a darker green.
Speaker 2:Oh, you have dark green. Yes. You have dark green. I went with brown.
Speaker 1:But but nothing quite this green. Yes. Nothing quite this green. Shopify green.
Speaker 6:Kevin from Tecovus is coming on later on. Yeah. I just got a text message from him. He sent me a photo of their store in Austin, which I think he's gonna be calling in from. Okay.
Speaker 6:And apparently, they have a fire fire marshal issue there because the store is so insanely packed. No way. So he'll tell you the story of what they're doing there, but it looks really cool.
Speaker 1:Amazing. And what what do you got going on behind you here? Yeah.
Speaker 6:So we're I'm at the I'm at the New York Port, our office here in New York City, the other capital of capital other than, of course, where where you are right now. And I have the Shopify dashboard behind me, and we are doing $4,300,000 per minute. Doing 40,000 per minute. Per
Speaker 2:minute. Ta ching.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We're doing this.
Speaker 6:40,000 orders per minute. And since we started counting last night at around 7PM, EST, about 26,000,000 unique shoppers across Shopify. And then I just posted this just before I got on the show here. Let me tell you guys. You guys want this information.
Speaker 1:Of course, you do.
Speaker 6:12:01PM today, we hit a peak sale of $5,100,000, per minute.
Speaker 1:5,100,000.0. Yeah. Hit the gong for that one, John.
Speaker 6:Which is pretty good.
Speaker 1:Let's gotta warm up the gong. I feel like we're gonna be hitting it a lot today.
Speaker 6:There's gonna be
Speaker 7:a lot of that. Yes. Good.
Speaker 2:A lot
Speaker 1:of that. Excellent. Excellent. Maybe I would love to kinda get your view. I I think people have a good sense of, like, the history of of Black Friday as a sort of, like, the Super Bowl of of shopping for a long time now.
Speaker 1:But I'd I'd love to get a sense of how you've experienced it across the years, specifically at Shopify and and and how it's evolved from your view.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, look, I think I think Black Friday initially, as as the history of it was, Black Friday actually belonged to physical retailers, specifically big box stores. And then kind of Cyber Monday was kind of the time where the direct to consumer startups began to take hold of it. And something sort of flipped over the last, I I guess, eight or nine years or so, where ultimately, these direct to consumer independent brands, not necessarily small ones, large one also, began to kinda take over Black Friday. And so I I think what we've ended up with is sort of Black Friday has become kind of the Super Bowl for entrepreneurs.
Speaker 6:What we've noticed is that they they prepare all year for this weekend, and what we do is we we spend the year building for them. You know, we I think most people, you know, associate Shopify with small businesses, but we also power, you know, the likes of On Running or Mattel or Birkenstock or, you know, Aloe Yogurt or Viori. So what's interesting is that and we'll see this across the show over the next couple of hours that regardless of what size of merchant you're gonna be talking to, they have one thing in common, which is they they identify as entrepreneurs. So whether you're the CEO of a publicly traded direct to consumer business like OnRunning or you've started your business two years ago, you you sort of you you are an entrepreneur. And this weekend and this sort of four days is kinda when we celebrate them.
Speaker 6:I think the cool part about it is that this year in particular, does kinda feel like the first time these first time entrepreneurs are are standing shoulder to shoulder with much larger brands. I think part of the reason is that technology has just gotten so good. So that, you know, the most viral videos that you're seeing from brands today are not these super produced ones. In fact, often, it's like some person in their car with their phone on the way to, like, the gym, and that video ends up getting a ton of virality. I think also, you know, we'll talk about, like, a jented commerce and social commerce, but I think some of these new areas where commerce is happening as opposed to sort of the big stores, physical stores, allows for more of these small businesses to get seen a lot faster.
Speaker 6:And the end result, of course, is that, you know, things are just blowing up. But, yeah, we have the live globe. It's my favorite thing we do every year. You guys pointed out that, you know, it's sort of like nerd heaven here. Anyone at home can watch bfcm.shop.
Speaker 6:And, you know, it's it's as you can see, it's moving. We're at 4,500,000.0 sales excuse me, dollars per minute right now. And, again, we peaked at about 5.1, and it's it's really cool. One of the other things I want to show you is we you guys I don't know if you can see it here, but we also took over the Sphere in Vegas. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I don't if you guys have a shot of that to pull up.
Speaker 1:But There we go.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So we we took over this here in Vegas. We do this we've done this the last two years or so. It is the world's largest LED screen. And the idea here is, like, can we just put entrepreneurship, like, on stage? And so this is a visualization of global sales happening in real time.
Speaker 6:Every arc you see is actually a live order. Yeah. And what's really interesting is that every one of these confetti bursts is a merchant's first sale. Oh. So it's happening right now about every twenty six seconds, a new entrepreneur is making their first sale on Shopify.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 3:And and this is, you
Speaker 6:know, this is people's entrepreneurship journeys starting in real time. I love seeing this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I love I love the sphere just as, like, a, like, a monument, but it's also just I love it when you find, you know, a match for what fits on the screen. Like, the globe obviously works very well.
Speaker 6:It works well. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and there are lots of things that, you know, you they they do marketing campaigns on the on the sphere, and you're kinda like, oh, well, like, that would have worked on a normal billboard. The the the this the Black Friday, Cyber Monday sphere is, like, uniquely
Speaker 1:We were in Vegas for f one, and they were just they just had a bunch of different driver views on the Sphere.
Speaker 2:There were some cool ones where was, like, that helmet, and and you could see Brad Pitt's face. That one was kinda cool. Obviously, if there's, a tennis ball or a basketball, like, that can work really well. But yeah.
Speaker 6:What's interesting actually on the Sphere, when we first went to them two years ago, we told them we wanna we wanna broadcast live. And and actually at that particular point, on the Sphere, it had to be a a recording. You couldn't actually broadcast live. No way. So now you can do it live, but that's that's basically that's the reaction to Shopify actually building it.
Speaker 2:That's really cool.
Speaker 6:And we started to Imagine. They
Speaker 1:have to have a pretty high level of trust with the company that is broadcasting live to the sphere because I imagine they're certainly not gonna make that open Right. Programmatic.
Speaker 6:I think the cool thing about the Sphere also is, you know, the Sphere obviously is is it's located in Las Vegas, but the the vast majority of people that look at it are know, it's it's usually on social, not in Vegas as well. So it's kind of an interesting kind of thing to do because you you're doing something physical in a particular geography, but the actual, like, the distribution of it is global in in in a totally different way. And I think, you know, having these new cool things, and you're building a second sphere Yeah. In London. I think.
Speaker 2:In London. Oh, did the London one I I I know there was a there was proposals to build one in London. I think it hit snags with, with a permitting or something like that. But, mean, Middle East makes a ton of sense. That would be a very logical place to have one.
Speaker 1:I mean, the pressure and the pressure right now right now, it's a big investment to take over one sphere. Yeah. To take eventually, it'll be like, oh, well, if you're gonna do this sphere, you
Speaker 2:gotta You gotta do them all.
Speaker 6:Hey. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Mean, that's like that's that's interesting. But I do I do love these really I mean, you guys this is, like, exactly, you know, right in your wheelhouse. But, like, I I like these really ambitious projects. These projects that, like, in the first meeting, someone proposed it, and and someone else said, like, there's no way we're gonna do this. And then, of course, they end up doing it.
Speaker 6:So I think more of this is good, but it it lends itself really well. But in many ways, like, I I think back to sort of the the original question. I think, like, BFCM is in many ways, it is a celebration of entrepreneurship generally. Even if you're on a retail, it sort of just feel like we all kinda take a moment to kinda celebrate businesses of all sizes. It also feels like consumers are very much, I don't know, there is a different connection that consumers have to their brands they love.
Speaker 6:You know? And, like, if you look at Tocovus, for example, I I know we're gonna we'll see Kevin a little bit later, but, you know, you can't really understand if the store is a retail operation or if it's a saloon. Because a lot of people just go in there to hang out or have their boot shined and have, like and drink bourbon. And that's, like, totally okay with them.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 6:I think this idea that, you know, there isn't this online versus offline kind of, you know, false dichotomy, but rather retail is happening. Agentically, it's happening. Like, the consumer journey starts like a TikTok video, and then eventually goes to an online store. And then maybe they don't buy anything, but they walk into a pop up. And then eventually, they happen to Roblox, and they actually can put the person in Roblox.
Speaker 6:Like, that's kinda what we're seeing in BFCM 2025. And I I don't know. It feels like a little bit it feels like the golden age, a little bit of retail right now.
Speaker 1:Has what does the data look like from your guys' side at a at a kind of global or macro level? Is there a specific moment in the day that that is the most intense from a platform standpoint in terms of demand, or is it kind of smoothed out more than, let's say, in a traditional retail world that, you know, whenever the store opens is like the sort of period of peak intensity?
Speaker 2:There was somebody here on the x saying it was 11AM eastern time is the peak, which is not what I would have expected, but is that
Speaker 6:is that roughly correct? It always is. It always is. Yeah. It's it's always between 11AM and noon eastern time.
Speaker 6:So you kinda think about, like, West Coast is it's 9AM West Coast or so, or nine. Europe is sort of peak, you know, celebration mode. They've already had their pints. Okay. And it but, yeah, that usually is interesting is one of the stores that's on Shop My Way that I love is Supreme, which, you know, is is a legendary, you know, flash sale retailer.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And they have every every Thursday at 11AM Eastern Standard Time, Supreme does this massive flash sale. One of the reasons that we wanted one of the things you guys have probably heard me say this, but the one of the things we love about these millions of merchants on Shopify is that they push the boundaries of the platform. Whereas, know, some companies would say, that's too big or that's too complicated. Like, you know, you kinda fire customers.
Speaker 6:We do the opposite. We kind of embrace the most complicated merchants on the planet because we feel like they kinda stretch us in the right direction. Supreme very much does that. But what's interesting is that, like, on a regular basis, Supreme has the largest flash sale that's ever happened. And then a week later, they then break that record.
Speaker 6:Wow. Crazy. And so Supreme, you know, is obviously, has been doing a lot. They push it. We also have, like, the you know, like, Universal Music does a lot of their drops of this, whether it's for Taylor Swift or it's for Bieber or some of those type of acts.
Speaker 6:So that pulls the platform as well. But generally, like, you know, knock on wood, things have been going really well. We have an incredible team on the infrastructure side. Farhan, who who leads engineering, is gonna be on later to kinda tell exactly what goes on, but, you know, behind the scenes on the infrastructure side.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What happens do you guys get a lot of inbound from bigger brands that are kind of running their own commerce stacks after after this kind of four day stretch because they,
Speaker 2:like It was like, this broke me.
Speaker 1:Like, well, ready move on. It's a time it's probably a time to capitulate. Capitulation.
Speaker 6:You're gonna say capitulation. Well, especially if they've had an issue. Right? Like, every year, I don't do this anymore because, frankly, I've I realized that it pissed off a lot of people. But often what I would do is during Black Friday, when I saw a very large big box retailer go down, I would literally just post something on x saying, like, you know, Nick, like, should have been on Shopify.
Speaker 6:And then sometimes they would call in. It's very aggressive, and it's very passive aggressive. And sometimes they would find that to be, you know, cute. And other times it'd be, like, totally, you know, disrespectful.
Speaker 1:It's like, hey. Our site was down. Our site was down for just
Speaker 2:straight up aggressive. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, if your site goes down for your site goes down for ten minutes, and you could lose out on, I don't know, a million dollars.
Speaker 6:So If you are if you are one of these large sort of electronic big box, like a Best Buy type retailer, and you go down on Black Friday, which, you know, has has happened, it it is a really big deal. There was kind of this era, to be honest, of of enterprises believing that part of their real value was owning their own stack.
Speaker 1:We're a tech company. That's the first time.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Woah. That's a a 100,000 sale milestone just happened there.
Speaker 2:Woah. Very cool.
Speaker 3:Cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 6:So that's right.
Speaker 1:So some
Speaker 6:of these merchants, like, they wanted to be they they they believe they were tech companies.
Speaker 3:And I think
Speaker 6:that era is over, which is at some point, you read about, you know, ChatGPT in embedding commerce. And and in a board meeting, someone says, well, do we have that? And and then someone else says, well, no. But, you
Speaker 3:know, if if we were
Speaker 6:on Shopify, we would be we we'd be in that launch. And that that helps a little bit. The idea also run it's like running your own servers or having your own data center. Like, at some point, it doesn't really make sense to do that. I think that era is over.
Speaker 6:And so one of the I I I on the last earnings call, I talked about Estee Lauder coming to Shopify. One of the reasons I'm talking a lot about the Estee Lauder's of the world and these much larger brands coming to Shopify is that I wanna kind of begin to explain to the world that we also handle the most iconic legendary brands, Mattel or Birkenstock or these brand or, you know, Hunter Douglas. These companies that historically wouldn't have come to Shopify are are now coming, we we love that.
Speaker 1:What what are you seeing what what are some kind of key trends that you're seeing as far as, like, everything from, like, marketing strategy to discounting strategy? Like, what what are you seeing globally this year across across the platform?
Speaker 6:Discounting still is the case, although I don't actually think that discounting is as as as important as people think. I actually think value matters a lot more. I was on CNBC. This I was on Squawk Box this morning, and Steve Leesman was asking about consumer confidence. And I I told him sort of the way that we look at consumer confidence is, we just measure at checkout because you can read all the reports and all the surveys you want, but ultimately, what are people doing?
Speaker 6:And Steve kinda made a joke that often with these surveys, you know, that what people say they're going to do and what they actually do is totally different. They say they're
Speaker 3:not gonna spend as much. And then when
Speaker 6:they see something they love, they just, of course, go and buy it immediately Yeah. Because humans are humans. So one of the things that I I think actually is is happening is consumers are kind of voiding with their wallets to buy from brands that they love. So if they love Viori or they love Aloe, they're waiting for some sort of sale from those brands. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And if those brands if those if the sale isn't what they thought it would be, they're still buying, but they're being a lot more intentional about how they purchase. The second thing is I think this era of, like, online and offline, I kinda mentioned this earlier, but this is, like, it this is totally over. I I think we have Figs coming on. I think this CMO of Figs is gonna be on a little bit later on. One of the things I love about Figs is this is a this was an online business, homegrown story on Shopify.
Speaker 6:Incredible growth. They went public and and pretty much in every hospital, every everyone who's like, you know, who cares about how they look and how they feel is wearing figs. They started opening up physical locations around hospitals.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And what's effectively to make it really simple for health care workers on their lunch break or on their, you know, coffee break to come down and purchase stuff there. So if you were to ask figs, are they an online retailer? They would say, we're, like, that that idea of omnichannel. Where's a retailer? It feels like that is almost this whole like, we're living in, like, an a post omnichannel world, as silly as that sounds, where selling every surface area.
Speaker 6:We have an integration with Roblox. And in some cases, most merchants, most of them don't use that integration. But we have some merchants who do, like, real business using the Shopify integration inside of Roblox. And so the idea from our perspective is, like, every surface area that exists should be a place where you're able to transact, and merchants can choose whatever is most appropriate for them.
Speaker 2:How is the POS side of the business growing? Is that growing faster faster than the overall business or the ecommerce side? Because I
Speaker 1:imagine Or is it more like an add on where somebody starts with Shopify online and they realize, hey, we should probably unify the back end and then the Yeah. The POS system?
Speaker 6:From a from a g m from a GMV perspective, actually, point of sale GMV is actually way faster, but it's on a much smaller base because most merchants on Shopify are using are using ecommerce. Look. Initially, it was it was meant to be if you're on Shopify for online, let us also let us let us also serve you offline as well. Now what we're seeing is merchants are coming to us, like pure play offline retailers are coming to us. Like brick and mortar retailers are coming as first for offline and then expanding online as well.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. So it's it's an area it's one of the most important areas for the business. It's getting really, really good. Initially, it was only, you know, for smaller, you know, a couple stores. Now you have massive brands like Aloe, you know, using it across all of their stores as well.
Speaker 6:We just announced that Aldo is gonna be using it across 400 stores, the shoe the large shoe company. Wow. So more and more, it's becoming a big thing.
Speaker 2:It's a big cut
Speaker 4:off.
Speaker 6:But we look at these as, like, on ramps into Shopify. Like, tell us what channel is your predominant channel. We'll make that really easy and scalable. And then once you're using Shopify, we're gonna introduce you to other channels where we think you can probably find some real success.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 1:How have brand how how have things on the macro, kind of the tariff side settled? Thankfully, we haven't had a crazy anything crazy in the last two weeks or or two months. But
Speaker 6:Is is that your gauge of if it has if, like, two weeks is is is a sigh of relief?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Pretty pretty much. Mean I mean, I I would have been concerned, you know, if if Liberation Day had happened, like, three months ago, it would have been potentially Or a Black Friday.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That would have been bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. It would have been highly disruptive because, I mean, a lot of I mean, a lot of brands today will fully sell out of especially their hero products and be leaving a lot of revenue on the table. And so, like, having a successful Black Friday is comes down to a lot of just, like, high, you know, good demand planning. And earlier this year, you know, it was just really chaotic.
Speaker 6:I mean, we're we're we're we have a good mutual friend in Ryan from Flexport. Ryan's an amazing guy. Think he was on the show yesterday or the day before that.
Speaker 2:We we we were reposting clips, but he
Speaker 6:Oh, that was okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That clip was from, like, a couple weeks ago. But
Speaker 6:Okay. So Ryan I mean, I so Ryan Flexport's an incredible partner of us. So, you know, we we talk we hear from Ryan quite a bit of what's happened in the supply the the supply side
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Of of of just commerce.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:In terms of the tariff side, look. I mean, we've seen merchants go through Shopify is twenty years old. We've seen merchants go through the global, you know, financial crisis, through the pandemic, through a bunch of obviously, Liberation Day. The way that we sort of most of the merchants on Shopify seem to be incredibly resilient. Our job is sort of to make it really easy for them to navigate whatever comes their way.
Speaker 6:On the tariff side of things, we haven't really seen any change in behavior. Certainly, we we did q three, we saw about 91,000,000,000 of GMV through the platform. That was, I think, just over 30% year on year growth. So we haven't seen that yeah. We haven't seen any type of change in behavior.
Speaker 6:And then on the pricing side, I said this on the call also, we haven't seen merchants change their pricing all that much. And so I think that, again, it's not that consumers aren't don't care about it. I just think that they're being more selective, which I think leads to kinda what you'll see what you'll hear a lot over the next couple of hours on the show today, which is that brands really matter. Like, the relationship that like, direct to consumer used to be this thing that effectively was a bit of a fad. Like, oh, this is that kind of business, and this is a different this is a you know, this is Sean at Ridge.
Speaker 6:He runs a direct to consumer wallet company. No one calls Ridge a direct to consumer. It's just a wallet company now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I think the advantage to direct to consumer is because they have a direct relationship, they also have a direct connection, and they're able to cultivate a different type of dynamic with their customer base. And and you'll hear that from across the board, I think, today. So generally, you know, again, that what I said to Steve and I'll say to you guys is we measure consumer confidence at checkout, and people are buying.
Speaker 1:It's a great way to do it. Great way to do it. I was I was I was driving in to the to the the gym this morning before we got to the studio, and there was six people outside of a Target Really? At 6AM 6AM.
Speaker 2:Is that low or high?
Speaker 1:That felt extremely low.
Speaker 2:That felt low. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That feels
Speaker 6:like well, there's there's probably 60 people outside of a Tacovus right now
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:In somewhere in America. So that does feel low. Remember those videos of, like, they open the doors, everyone, like, rushes in
Speaker 1:to get the TV. That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:But I I I never participated in that, so I completely missed that, and I don't I don't
Speaker 6:know if it's like yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, is it completely died off? It seems like it has.
Speaker 6:I never understood why people how many people needed that many TVs. Like, I like, how many TVs does does one mean?
Speaker 2:Thing is crazy. It's crazy. I I I guess it's just, like, one of bigger purchases you make, and so if you can save a couple $100 on it, it's, like, worth it or something. But, yeah, it it was a big a big meme, the the the the
Speaker 1:last I I just I I think what you're saying earlier is true. It's like people have brand everyone at this point, I like, you don't even have to be like that you don't even have to be like into shopping or into the different things. You have a handful of brands that you really love. They're probably independent. And when it comes time for Black Friday, you're like, okay, what what are the brands that I like doing?
Speaker 1:And I'm gonna put my dollars there. And maybe I'm gonna do some Christmas shopping too.
Speaker 6:It feels a little bit like like we're all kind of voting with our wallets to to have more of the brand that we love exist in the world. Like, I I wear a black T shirt almost every day. It's a James Perce black T shirt. I know I've got to know James really well. Like, every time I buy a James Purse T shirt, I buy it because I I think he makes the best T shirts, but it's also a vote of, like, I want more James Purses in the world.
Speaker 6:These, like, kind of quirky guys, in his case, in out of out of California, who is obsessed with making black T shirts. Mhmm. And I like as someone that is an entrepreneur myself, been an entrepreneur my whole life, I just I want more James Purses existing in the world across all different verticals. And so I'm willing to spend a little bit more money. And this is like I've been buying James Purse T shirts before I came and afford them when I was a student.
Speaker 6:Because instead of buying, like, five Gildan T shirts, which were kinda crappy
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I would save my money and buy one James Purse T shirt every six months. And it was because I like the shirt, but I also I like the story behind it. And I think that that matters to consumers.
Speaker 1:What give us the update on AgenTek Commerce and AI. We've obviously spent the last, you know, couple weeks talking about the battle between ChatGPT and and Gemini. And but I'm curious what the
Speaker 8:update is.
Speaker 6:You are definitely the the, you know, ground zero for that battle, it seems. The amount of debate from all each every one of your guests is is amazing.
Speaker 1:Everyone everyone is perfectly conflicted. You know? Ground.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That's right. Look. We are not trying to guess exactly what permutation is going to win. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:What we're trying to do effectively is whatever is the the way that AgenTic is gonna happen, we wanna make shop we wanna make sure Shopify is is is right there. We wanna make sure more importantly that our merchants are there. So part of the reason that we built our AgenTic tools in a way that is more modular, like we built catalog, which is effectively every SKU on Shopify. We and we built, you know, checkout kits so you can actually effectively customize the checkout inside of the app the agentic application. So it looks like it's natively integrated, and and it feels like it's part of the conversation.
Speaker 6:The reason we're building these sort of tools in that way is to effectively give these tools to every single application. And we've we've partnered with ChatGPT. Obviously, they got a lot of attention. We're we partnered with Perplexity. We're working with Microsoft as well.
Speaker 6:So our view is that in a similar way that, you know, when social commerce started to to gain some steam, we didn't really know what platform was going to be the one that ended up being sort of the winner. Obviously, social commerce is a bit different. Now it feels like it's more about discovery, less about the transaction. No one's really checking out on these platforms.
Speaker 1:But the thing I'm super thing I'm super excited about and super bullish on is ChatGPT had some news, I think it was last week, deep research focused on shopping. And feels like it feels like that is the way that people like, that is a better way to do product research discovery, which is just like, hey. Fire off a prompt and then go do something else and then come back Especially
Speaker 6:because it has it has all your context. It knows what you've been searching for. If I've been if if if my particular, you know, chat application knows that I deeply care about, you know, on running, that's my favorite stuff. If I'm looking to get gear for, you know, a camping trip or a hiking trip, it should show first, it should show me on running, you know, boots because it knows that I have a proclivity or some sort of connection to that to that brand. I think actually the coolest part so so one is we think that, like, it it's we think that it's going to change the way consumers shop.
Speaker 6:It may actually remember, ecommerce as a percent of total retails is, like, sub 20% in The US still. It's a 25% in The UK, but it's still pretty small. So one thing that may happen is AgenTic may invite nontraditional online shoppers into the online world, which we think is really good. But whatever permutation ends up being the winner, we wanna make sure that our merchants are best set up. And I also think it creates a little bit of a leveling of the playing field whereby now if I'm using, you know, a search engine to to do my shopping, I'm gonna be, you know first thing I'm gonna be served is gonna be whoever pays the most for an ad.
Speaker 6:Whereas on AgenTic, hopefully, I'm being served is the thing that's more most relevant to me based on everything the chat application knows about my personal interest. So I think it actually may help a lot of smaller businesses get bigger.
Speaker 1:Totally. I'm curious by by this point in the day, do you have a good sense of where the platform will land from a volume standpoint for black Black Friday in total? Like, are
Speaker 6:you No. Guys Not even close.
Speaker 2:Wait. Really? No. It's have you have ten years of data.
Speaker 5:How can
Speaker 6:you not say the players? I have sorry. I should say, I'm not ready to disclose that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. That's okay. But, like mean, I imagine that you have ten years of data.
Speaker 1:I'm asking you to disclose. I'm just saying, like, do you have
Speaker 6:some sense Can you get
Speaker 1:it within, like, five bill you know, like
Speaker 6:Our our data team is legendary.
Speaker 5:I'm sure.
Speaker 9:I'm sure. Legendary. There's no
Speaker 2:way you can't predict it.
Speaker 6:So far, things are going really well. We did nine point so for the weekend, so for four days so Thursday night till, like, Friday so Thursday night when sort of Thanksgiving starts until Monday night, I think we did 9,300,000,000.0 in 2023. Mhmm. We did 11,500,000,000.0 2024.
Speaker 2:Woah.
Speaker 6:We'll see see what happens this year.
Speaker 2:Let's we we gotta take the over on this. Let's go. We're
Speaker 1:taking the over.
Speaker 6:I'm not participating. I'm not participating. But I will say this we didn't I didn't even talk about this. This guest list we have today is stacked.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And what's really cool is it's sort of a mixture of, like, of the people on here I actually haven't met yet. They're they're the Shopify merchants. I don't know them. And some of the people that I that I invited on, I don't think you guys have met yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But it's I mean, I don't know you know, like, favorite daughter's coming on. Sarah Foster. Yeah. I mean, Sarah Foster like, favorite daughter's amazing. What you may not know is, like, she also has a hit Netflix show where everybody on the show wears favorite daughter.
Speaker 6:And she has, like, a hit podcast called
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's so funny. When we when we introduced her earlier, I said podcaster because both of our both of our wives My wife too.
Speaker 2:It's a podcast.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 6:But but a lot of people know, you know, nobody wants this from on from Netflix. Yeah. This like, you talk about the future of retail and how it all fits together, or Kat Cole, who I think you're you're having Kat Cole on as the CEO of AG one. Kat Kat recently, you know, she's said this publicly. Kat does like they sell something like $600,000,000 is what Kat says with one single SKU.
Speaker 6:I mean, that is unbelievable. Like, you talk about this exciting new evolution of commerce and retail. Like, these are the people that are building it. It's it's and they're building on Shopify, which is which we we feel very honored. But these are the people on the show that are are really leading, like, where this whole thing is going.
Speaker 1:Yep. That's incredible. We're having Brian on the CEO of Roar later. New new Shopify merchant. Brian and I started Rora together I know.
Speaker 1:I heard. A while back. And this is the this is Rora's first Black Friday ever. I have the got the I got the Shopify How's he feeling? Oh, he's feeling great.
Speaker 1:He's feeling No. It's been a been an awesome year. And I guess We gotta
Speaker 6:tell Brian to send me all of his feedback and product suggestions and anything else he has there.
Speaker 2:Of
Speaker 6:course. That's really cool there.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 6:Yes. You have Kat. You have Brian. Nishant, you have on wow. I mean, this Peter's
Speaker 1:I do know do you know you know Array yet? Nish's brand?
Speaker 6:No. Mean, I I know the brand. I I I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is a very, very under the radar because they raised one round, like, right right at inception. And then I I won't I won't dox their revenue because I don't know how much is public. But one of one of the biggest one of the biggest companies that's joining the show today, and and hardly anyone, at least in the x world, is even aware of them. So excited
Speaker 7:about that one.
Speaker 6:Incredible. Yeah. I'm just looking here. I mean, okay. So Noel Mac, who who leads with Ben France, they live in Gymshark.
Speaker 6:He's actually calling in from his new store in Dubai. Yeah. Gymshark is the poster child for, like, online, you know, multibillion dollar company.
Speaker 10:It's great.
Speaker 6:And now he's taught Congress from Dubai where he's opening a brand new store. So it'll be interesting to see, like, if you've been to any the Gymshark stores, they only have a couple of them, but they're like gyms and, like, you talk about experiential retail. They're like they're the best at that.
Speaker 1:Well, we're gonna have them we're gonna have them go for we should have them do a one rep one rep max on the shot.
Speaker 2:That's a
Speaker 6:good idea.
Speaker 1:If they have the setup. Incredible. Alright. Well, you'll you'll be back on you'll be back on soon. Where are you headed out to?
Speaker 1:You're gonna be
Speaker 6:running right now to Tacovus in Soho. They have a brand new store they just opened, so I'm gonna be calling in our next next round. I will be at the store in SoHo at their bar. And Little over an hour.
Speaker 2:He'll be back in Yeah. Little over an 12:50. Incredible.
Speaker 6:Thank you for letting me cohost, and thank you for sending me this amazing outfit.
Speaker 2:I feel
Speaker 6:like I'm one of the boys.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 3:And I
Speaker 6:I'm very grateful for you guys doing this with us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's so much
Speaker 2:fun. Fun.
Speaker 1:Awesome. We'll see you in a
Speaker 2:little Talk to you soon.
Speaker 6:See you guys.
Speaker 9:Have a
Speaker 2:good one.
Speaker 6:Alright. Bye.
Speaker 2:We're about to hop on with Noel from Gymshark. Before he does, let me tell you about Cognition. This is a great Christmas present.
Speaker 1:It really is.
Speaker 2:Get someone Cognition. Get them. Get them. Want AI software engineer. Under the Christmas tree.
Speaker 2:Hey. Hey, mom. I want you to crush your backlog with personal AI engineering team. Here's here's a $100,000 of Cognition credits. Thank you so much to Cognition for supporting the show.
Speaker 2:Our next guest is Noel from Gymshark. Let's bring him in from the restroom waiting room. There he doing? Good to see you. Show.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show. Thanks for staying up late. Right? You're you're in Dubai? Is that right?
Speaker 3:I'm in I'm in Dubai, but I'm on British time zone. So this is this is fine for me.
Speaker 1:I'm good, man. I'm really good. You're good. Awesome. How's the day been so far?
Speaker 1:Mello?
Speaker 3:We're we're just wrapping up here now. Right? So it's twenty two midnight right now here in Dubai. And my plan was to do this with the store in the background. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But there's still so many people in the store No wearing t shirts and hangers. You wouldn't have heard a word I was saying. So, yeah, man, it's been wild.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. Wild. When when do you actually close this the the retail store?
Speaker 3:This store closes in twenty minutes.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. So did you do it twenty four hours? Like, did you start did you open at midnight last night, or when did you actually open
Speaker 3:at It it opened you know what? I should know that. Devil's in the details. Don't know what time store actually opened this morning. But I only arrived I only got into Dubai at, 10AM, so I'm not sure.
Speaker 3:So that's gonna be my
Speaker 1:Where did you so did you start start the day back in The UK?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Started the day in The did the red eye last night from The UK and landed here. They call they call Black Friday over here, the Dubai Super Sale, so they do it a little bit differently. It's the way we do at home. And it's, yeah, it's it's it's wild.
Speaker 3:There's there's literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people walking around Dubai Mall outside right now, which is nuts.
Speaker 2:Wow. What's the shape of the business these days? Like, what what what categories do you like, how how do you segment out the business and and sort of understand what you sell?
Speaker 3:Well, the the the the key difference the key differentiator to understand about Gymshark is there's lots of sports brands out there. Right? There's been a few brands in recent years. I think Lulu kicked the door down for the yoga brands,
Speaker 4:and then
Speaker 3:a bunch of other brands came in after that. We're the really unique thing about us is we're not any of those things. We're a gym brand. Right? In the same way Lulu said to people, hey, you shouldn't wear sports clothes to do yoga.
Speaker 3:You should wear specific yoga wear to do yoga. Mhmm. We'll be trying to introduce people to the idea that, actually, you should wear specific gym clothes to the gym. So our brand platform is WeDoGym, and we think we do that better than anybody else out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the what's the what was your interview process like? Did you have to, like, show off your one rep max or anything? What what was the process?
Speaker 3:No. You know what? It's a common misconception that that you have to be some huge lifting person to come and work at Gymshark, but you really don't. However, one thing I would say is a lot of people fall in love with it once they start a Gymshark, and then they find themselves doing all sorts of crazy marathons for charity and lifting events and bodybuilding and all this crazy stuff. So it's a great environment, steel, sharp, and steel and all that.
Speaker 2:Amazing. What about the geographical distribution? I mean, obviously, a global brand, but, like, how global have you focused on any particular markets? Has Middle East been particularly important as a growth area? Where what's growing fastest?
Speaker 2:What's the most interesting thing happening geographically for Gymshark?
Speaker 3:So we ship to, like, a 130 countries, something like that, through several different Shopify stores. The UAE has been a real has been a real new thing
Speaker 1:for us.
Speaker 3:It's been going for about eighteen months.
Speaker 1:Were you guys went international super early. You also worked with, like, I or, like, you you from from my understanding, thinking back, like, a decade ago, you guys, did influencer marketing probably better than any other brand and did it at a scale that no one had really done it before. I'm assuming you were working with like 10,000 plus influencers at any given point. Like, it seemed like you guys were just everywhere. Did that force you guys to go international earlier than a lot of other brands?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I had a really interesting moment once where I was sitting in boardroom doing some work, and an intern knocked on the door. I was on my own, and she said, no. Can I ask you a question? When did Gymshark enter The US?
Speaker 3:And it kinda stumped me for a second. I had to stand there and think about it, and I said, we never sort of entered The US. That seems to be a thing that old old school businesses did.
Speaker 9:Sure.
Speaker 3:We were we shipped to wherever people wanted to buy it from from day one of Gymshark, so we were technically global from the from the rip. But you're right. Were We very, very early to influence the marketing. A lot of people credit us as some of the real early pioneers of that. But, actually, where you were slightly wrong was the point on 10,000 influencers.
Speaker 3:That was kind of the opposite of what we did while a lot of people got into influence marketing early and just spread bet and hit as many people as they could, anybody with a few followers. Yep. We we decided to sort of handcraft this, like, select group of what we call Gymshark athletes who were, like, the the biggest names in the fitness industry, the really, really revered ones. So what might have felt like a bit of a roadblock on social media to you was probably more depth as opposed to width, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just working with the biggest names
Speaker 3:in in
Speaker 1:And the
Speaker 2:in terms of 2025 now, take me, through what's working on the marketing side. What strategy, what area has been the most exciting, this year for Gymshark as a whole?
Speaker 3:To be honest, it's what I said a minute ago. It's it's less about you know, it's not as there's a particular channel that's ripping right now or there's this there's a new version influencer marketing or it's TikTok shop or anything like It's finding our lane and sticking to it, right, and being relentless about the fact. We make gym wear. That's what we do, and we're better than anybody else at it. Right?
Speaker 3:Well, we noticed a little while ago, everybody started to sort of spread really wide and start to try and hit a lot of different lifestyle and golf and surfing and all these different things. And, you know, we there there was a moment there where we were tempted to go that way as well, and then we sort of reminded ourselves who we were. We doubled down on the fact that we were the gym brand. We launched our brand platform WeDoGym, and people have taken to it incredibly, incredibly well. There was a was an article I read on LinkedIn the other day that said the world doesn't need more bland brands.
Speaker 3:It need more brands that stand for something and are willing to have enemies. And I think that is exactly what we did. Not enemies per se, but we're willing to say, hey. If you don't rock with us, that's absolutely fine. There's a million other brands out there that are probably for you.
Speaker 3:But if you want great gym stuff, you should come to Gymshark.
Speaker 1:How how is gym culture evolving? I feel like the story of the last couple years was this, like, hybrid hybrid athlete movement. We don't do a lot of running. We probably should. We hit the we hit the gym as a team every single morning.
Speaker 1:We gotta get get into doing doing some more cardio, but how has that kind of impacted the product strategy, if at all?
Speaker 3:We've got we've got about a 500 people run club this Sunday in Dubai, so get me a green jacket. You boys are happy to I'll happily have you host you down here. We'll all run together. Yeah. You're right.
Speaker 3:So the first thing I'd say is the culture of, like, resistance training and quote, unquote, sort of traditional gym work has really, really grown in the past few years. So you talk to to any of the big equipment providers, and they're telling you that they're going into some of the big gym chains in The US. They're removing steppers. They're removing cross trainers by the ball fort, and they're putting squat racks in. Right?
Speaker 3:A little while ago, squat racks looked like a medieval torture device to some people if they didn't know how to use it, and now people are really learning how useful real resistance training is. But you're absolutely right. The rise of the hybrid athlete is a is it it's a wild it's it's like it's a real step forward in people's understanding of fitness. So previously, you saw a big guy. You're like, he's a he's a big guy.
Speaker 3:He lifts weights, but he can't run. You saw a guy who weighed, you know, a hundred and twenty pounds. You're like, he can probably run, but I doubt he can lift weights. And now the two things are emerging massively. I ran the London Marathon last year, and I had guys coming past me at, like, two hundred and thirty pounds lean with a ton of muscle mass.
Speaker 3:I was just like, man, that is so unfair. Yeah. And they're going past me as well, and they're they've a 100 pounds on me, which I thought was wildly unfair. But, yeah, this hybrid thing, this this this you can still carry muscle, and you can be a runner, and this, and that, and that. Do know what I mean?
Speaker 3:Like, it's a it's a real new development, and we're leaning into that pretty heavily.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about competing with some of the older, more, like, legacy brands in the space, specifically in in becoming, like, that household name breaking through across everything? Are you focused on just owning the next generation, or do you eventually wanna go and and, you know, get to such saturation that you become a household name even with the older folks? How are you thinking about the different demographics that you're going after?
Speaker 3:I'll be honest. Saturation and household names aren't household name isn't something we put at the top of our Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Right? Becoming the best version of us is what we do. If what comes with that is household name status and market saturation and that kind of stuff, amazing.
Speaker 3:If it doesn't, no problem. But we know we're gonna be the best gym brand out there. So we're never gonna beat some of the big players from your country or from Germany. You know who I'm talking about? Being them.
Speaker 3:But what we can do is win it being us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense. What about 2026? Are there any upcoming marketing or growth strategies that you're excited about potentially exploring next year?
Speaker 3:I personally we we don't have a huge plan for this yet. I love streamers right now. I'm like streamers are doing a lot, and I I think that's that and if that feels like influence marketing to me in the early days when it was kind of untapped and we dominated early.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:I like seeing what streamers are doing. There's a there's something that we are doing that we are very good at is these IRL experiences. Like, our last event in London had over 15,000 people come out to it. That was two days. There was there was there was stock for sale, but it was stuff they could buy on the website.
Speaker 3:There was a few exclusives. There was their favorite Gymshark athletes, the group of people I talked to you about on. Yeah. They could hang out and lift together. We've done them in Miami.
Speaker 3:Again, the last Miami one, I think we had 13 and a half thousand people over two days. So those are just wild, and the the the the the it's almost like a it's almost like a rock landing in a lake. The the the the the ripples that sends out across the fitness industry, across all of social media, across TikTok, everything is absolutely nuts. Mhmm. And that's not us.
Speaker 3:That's that's that's consumers coming along, creating their own TikToks, taking selfies with their own fave influencers, athletes, creating their own content, and it's spreading out into the world. So, yeah, that works really, really well for us. We always say that Gymshark is an online brand that we build offline.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. In the chat, they're saying people yearn for IRL events, and I couldn't agree
Speaker 1:with that. How are you guys thinking about the intersection of AI and and commerce? Are people discovering Gymshark in different LLMs yet? It feels like a really tough channel from a brand standpoint. Because right now, you even have the ability to do that great of imagery and just showing off products in the way that you might want to on your personal site.
Speaker 1:But what does that look like today, and how are you kind of forecasting out?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You're right. I think that, like, literally, AI is such a buzzword that absolutely everybody is using. And I tend I tend to try and steer clear of talking about them when everybody else is talking about them. So my my my thinking about stuff like this is a little bit buffet esque.
Speaker 3:Be brave when others are scared. Be scared when others are brave. Yeah. But you're right. AI results, AI search is absolutely huge.
Speaker 3:We already do pretty well on that front because there is such an organic groundswell of information on Gymshark, on TikTok, on Reddit, on, you know, the basis it's scraping for information. Exactly. So we do quite well. But you're right. I'm not gonna give away the secret sauce now, but we are well, it's not my department, but somebody else at Gymshark is working really hard on making sure that we do even better on that front going forwards.
Speaker 1:Yep. Makes sense. Well, thank you for taking the time out of a very, very busy day. Where are you how how long are you gonna be in Dubai? You're doing an event, then you're going back to The UK, are you doing a world tour?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're launch we're launching our second Dubai store on Tuesday, so we've got a bunch of stuff leading up it. Like I said, we have a really big run club in Jumeirah Golf Estates on Sunday morning. We have our conditioning club. We're doing a run club inside the Mall of Emirates, which is another mall because it's that big.
Speaker 6:You can
Speaker 3:do a five k run inside the mall. I know. That's the real that's real Dubai stuff
Speaker 1:there. Stampede.
Speaker 3:And we open our store on Tuesday, and then I get out of here and I'm back to The UK.
Speaker 1:Nice. What when you when you say experiential retail, is it running focused? Do you have full, like, squat racks in there? Like, what is what is experiential mean in the context of Gymshark?
Speaker 3:It it depends on the it depends on the format of the store. Like, we can scale it down and up. Like, sometimes it's just we have a bunch of personal trainers come up. We're doing pull up competitions. We're doing run clubs, know, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3:Our latest store that we've just announced, the date isn't out there yet, but our latest flagship store, our first ever US flagship store is launching real soon in New York on Bond Street opposite Kiff, and that has I mean, can't reveal it yet, but that that has the whole two floors of experiential. So anyway, keep your eyes peeled, you'll see what I mean when I say we can scale it from small stuff to really, really big stuff.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, great great meeting you. Thanks for coming on the show. Fantastic to hear your approach to all of this. It I love I love the focus and and just the intensity.
Speaker 1:Makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 10:Congratulations. Cheers.
Speaker 2:We'll talk
Speaker 3:to you soon. Fellas. Have a good day.
Speaker 2:Have good one. Good day. Me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. I asked ChatGPT. I put the I put the, shopping research mode to the test.
Speaker 2:I said, find me the most expensive elite luxury goods hosted on Shopify sites specifically. Basically, just one item per brand, but pull as many different products as possible. Take me on a full tour of top Shopify products. The best overall, a $28,000,000 yacht. Motor yacht.
Speaker 2:The Mangusta one six five Is it actually is it a yacht
Speaker 1:on Shopify?
Speaker 2:It is. It is. Can, I can put it in the
Speaker 1:They're selling yachts on Shopify?
Speaker 2:They're selling yachts on Shopify. This is not a joke. I'm gonna put this in the the timeline so, we can all pull this up. It's a $28,000,000 yacht. It's 50, 50 feet, maybe 50 oh, 50 meters.
Speaker 2:It's a they call it a superyacht. Few consumer products exceeded, tens of millions of dollars, but this this is a full 50 meter superyacht. It comes from a boutique broker using Shopify. Not a big generic marketplace. Third party yachting press documented the yacht, noting the n one was the first hull in the Mangusta one six five rev series designed in collaboration with Overmarine and Labunov.
Speaker 2:It's listed at €28,000,000. This confirms it's not a speculative or unknown build. It's a real superyacht. You can buy it on Shopify. See if it's available in the shop app.
Speaker 2:Also, we are, of course, sponsored by bezel. Get bezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to shop store, source you any watch on the planet. But I gotta do say, there is somebody on Shopify selling a $5,000,000 Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime. And even though it's a competitor to bezel
Speaker 1:Can you imagine that?
Speaker 2:We gotta talk about it.
Speaker 1:We gotta talk about it.
Speaker 2:Can you It's 5 it's a $5,000,000 you gotta see this watch.
Speaker 1:Can you imagine the credit card fees on that?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. That is wild. Hopefully, you've, negotiated a fantastic rate with Shopify payments. You have the lowest possible payments. Maybe you're doing ACH, at that level.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm pretty sure Shopify offers something like that. Yeah. I'm sure there's something that you can do, but this is a, this is a $5,000,000 Patek Philippe grand complications, grandmaster chime. This is, of course, on Shopify. You save $208,000 when you buy it, this this Black Friday.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:That is so generous.
Speaker 2:$208,000 savings if you go with the Grandmaster Chime. I think this is a
Speaker 1:fantastic why. If somebody out there really wants to stimulate the economy Yes. This is a great option.
Speaker 2:I have another I have another I have another one. So
Speaker 1:You got it.
Speaker 2:Have you ever wanted a a supercar? And if you thought, I couldn't possibly get a supercar on Shopify. That's crazy. I couldn't get a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport on Shopify. No.
Speaker 2:Well, you can't, but you can get the front end because there's someone that's selling just the front end Wait. $400,000.
Speaker 1:An source this for you? Yes. Okay. AGI not achieved internally. This is
Speaker 2:What do you mean? This is a $400,000 Bugatti front end. What more do you want?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I guess this would be cool to use to build out the set here. Yeah. You could use it as, like a
Speaker 2:This is the front of a Bugatti Chiron
Speaker 1:Super And
Speaker 2:where else are you gonna get a front end if you if you smash your Bugatti Chiron because you're tracking it and you and you Yeah. Dig it into the gravel, the kitty litter, and you need a new front end. Where are you gonna go? You're gonna go to a Shopify store, of course, Jordy. Of course.
Speaker 2:You go to Shopify for this. The last one is, there's a Richard mill. There's an RM at a different store on Shopify. $500,000, for the, for the Richard Mill. Let's see which one this is.
Speaker 2:I actually did check to make sure that these sites are actually using Shopify, they are, which is crazy. Good. It's the Richard Mill r m 7201, black ceramic rose gold box and paper. Great. $525,000
Speaker 1:Option.
Speaker 2:On Shopify right there. You'll love to see it. And so
Speaker 1:I would I would encourage these you know, any any venture funds out there, an r m would be a fantastic gift, end of year gift, you know, holiday gift for port co founder.
Speaker 2:I mean, only if the Mangusta one six five REVs motor yacht is out of stock. True. But, yes, I would
Speaker 1:But an RM that's engraved on the back Yes. Would be would be quite a nice holiday gift for
Speaker 2:100%.
Speaker 1:Like a series a stage founder. You'd wanna go maybe with the yacht for series b and beyond. I completely Series a? Yes. Perfect stage for for a holiday.
Speaker 2:Or or you can give them a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport one piece at a time.
Speaker 6:Just say
Speaker 1:One Job's not finished. Job's not finished. But maybe maybe by the time it is, you'll have a full you'll have a full Bugatti.
Speaker 2:No. It's just like, hey. Keep delivering and you'll keep getting pieces of Bugatti Chiron until until you have a full car eventually.
Speaker 1:I wonder if you just buy up all the random pieces if if it'll come in at lower No. It goes way way higher.
Speaker 2:Just the front end was $400,000. That's not a I know. That feels like $50,000,000 car.
Speaker 1:I mean, if it's if if it's that feels like a more expensive part of the car. It's probably fully it's probably fully carbon.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I feel like I feel like what about the motor? What about the what about the, like,
Speaker 1:the That's gonna cost you.
Speaker 2:What about the interior? There's so many expensive parts.
Speaker 1:That'll cost you. Oh. Yeah. Over over on X, saw a post here from Colin Slattery. He runs a digital
Speaker 2:Is he black pilling? What's going on?
Speaker 1:Agency. He's black pilling a little bit.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, before you read this post, let me tell you about linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Continue.
Speaker 1:Colin, Rock Rock, strong name, says super slow start in The US so far, referencing, his Black Friday. He's he's also managing the ad accounts for some Yeah. Brands. Colin says we are seeing the same. But post I have here from Jeremiah says looks like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is perfectly tracking with the last two years expecting a peak around 11AM eastern.
Speaker 1:So, again, I don't think, I'll be interested to see where, where's today where today's volume actually nets out. Obviously, I think Harley had a had some, probably knows to within I feel like do you think they could get it within a $100,000,000 at this point?
Speaker 2:100%. Like, at their scale, they at this point, past the peak, like, it's we're we're three hours past the peak time. Like, there there there's no shot that they, that they don't know exactly what's gonna happen, just from fitting to the previous curves. I mean, look at this look look at this chart. Like, it's very clear that, you know, you can fit a curve to the next to, like, the previous trend and predict that.
Speaker 2:I would be shocked. But, I mean, yes, there there probably is some error bar. And what was he saying? $11,000,000,000. So within a few million is actually extremely precise.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so saying within a 100,000,000.
Speaker 2:Within a 100,000,000, that's, like, within 1%. Like, yeah, they probably can. Yep. But not within, like, single digit millions. Anyway, we gotta we we gotta get to the bottom of how TikTok is performing on this Black Friday.
Speaker 2:Sean Frank is joking around here. He says he has a 7 figure day because he made $711 on TikTok shop, all because of the
Speaker 1:crushing it.
Speaker 2:700. And there's a lot of other there's a lot of other
Speaker 1:It says buy a Ridge Wallet to get my course.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's something, yeah, there's something odd. I I I I was hearing that TikTok shop was scaling like crazy. It sounds like it's, pulled back. We'll have to, we'll have to ask more people about are they getting value out of TikTok shop or or any of the other, vertical video platforms, short form, what's actually working.
Speaker 2:I would also be interested to see just do are people actually timing up influencer marketing to Black Friday sales? Are they ramping on, more programmatic, platforms? I'm I'm not
Speaker 1:Zach Stuck, who runs a number of different brands says, officially Black Friday. Here's the media mix. So he's sharing a breakdown. He's spending $300,000 today. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:220,000 on Meta, 30,000 on Applovin, 25,000 on Google, 20,000 on YouTube, and then a handful of other buckets.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, notable that spending more money on Applovin than on Google or YouTube.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:And then David Herman, who's David also
Speaker 6:Herman.
Speaker 1:Runs an ad agency. He says Applovin too low. So, he's he's bullish on
Speaker 2:Applovin. That are super bearish on Applovin. And but everyone every time I talk to somebody who's, like, actually using it or buying ads on it, they're always like, yeah. It's real. It's it's fine.
Speaker 2:It feels like Apple has a weird disconnect with either maybe it's like retail traders that that are that are bearish or something. Or I've heard from, like, you know, competitors being like, oh, it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1:Well, it's it's it's kind a I I think it's kind of in the balance here bucket of, like, fundamentally, the business is working and scaling really quickly, but it's it's at a 101 a 103 PE ratio right now.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. So it's highly valued.
Speaker 1:So it's highly valued. But Yeah.
Speaker 2:But but, yeah, it it's also something where I I I think because the AppLoven brand and logo doesn't show up everywhere, whereas, like, Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, these ad platforms do. AppLoven's behind the scenes a little bit below the surface. That just confuses people. And they're like, yeah. How how can you possibly make money behind the scenes?
Speaker 1:David Herman says cut ad spend so far for Black Friday, Cyber Monday for one client by 48% year over year, and we're only down 6% year over year.
Speaker 2:So Oh, interesting.
Speaker 1:Interesting strategy there to actually
Speaker 2:I mean, it it is a big question about, like, on Black Friday, it is probably the highest intent shopping day of the year. Very much you your every every person on Black Friday, almost all of them, they're not just sitting there being like, oh, I'm bored. I'm gonna go shopping. It's more like, okay. I need gifts for this type of person, and and let me work backwards.
Speaker 2:What brands do I know? What brands do I like? And so they're much more likely to react to brands that they've been seeing messaging from all year. Oh, yeah. I I remember that brand, that they had a funny Super Bowl ad, and then I saw what they did over the summer.
Speaker 2:And then I stopped by the store here, and I wound up getting retargeted and put some stuff in my cart over here. But now is the time to go buy, and so I'm going back to my favorite brands.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's not necessarily just the day where you're, like, randomly scrolling Instagram, clicking on whatever is coming across your feed.
Speaker 1:High intent.
Speaker 2:It's a high intent day, I I would assume.
Speaker 1:David Herman also says, right now, AppLovin's pacing has been insanely good, essentially reflecting the ad spend change swimmingly. Meta's not so much. We're down 30 to 70% day over day on meta spend despite increasing things four x. So we increased budget four x, but the actual spend that's happening is down. And so, yeah.
Speaker 1:Basically, people are having some issues with ad pacing. As you can expect Yeah. This is like I would love to know how much is actually spent on meta ads on Black Friday. Don't know if they disclosed actually break that out by the day. I doubt it.
Speaker 1:Someone else says, my Black Friday campaign spent 70% of the budget by 9AM eastern. So Mhmm. That can be a problem, and and these things can get unpredictable.
Speaker 2:Other fun fact I love about David. He's obsessed with police chases. Did you know this about him?
Speaker 1:Oh, does he live post them?
Speaker 2:He live post them. He's obsessed with watching them. It's like one of these funny fun facts about him. Anyway, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Fall. Build and deploy AI video and image models.
Speaker 2:They're trusted by millions to power generative media at scale. Our next guest is Sarah from favorite daughter. We might have to change hats. I have a favorite sun hat here.
Speaker 1:There she is.
Speaker 2:Thank you for joining the stream. Thank you for sending these beautiful hats. How are you doing?
Speaker 11:Hi. Guys, I gotta I gotta tell you. A lot of tech pros Yes. Text texting me up this morning being like, this is so cool. I'm like, where are you?
Speaker 11:Well,
Speaker 1:our our wives our wives said the same thing. They're they they listen they listen to the podcast. They're fans. So everybody's Yeah. We're super we're super excited to have you on.
Speaker 11:I love it. Harley wrote me. He was like, you know, he's the he's the e com king. So when he asks, we show up.
Speaker 12:You know
Speaker 1:what I mean?
Speaker 4:We we show up.
Speaker 2:Yes. Well
Speaker 11:My cofounder is probably watching, by the way. My my other known is my my my little sister.
Speaker 8:Little sister.
Speaker 11:She's moving, so she's not joining.
Speaker 1:Moving on Black Friday.
Speaker 2:Well, for the for the tech people that don't know Yeah. Can you introduce the brand? Can you introduce the the, I don't know, yourself? How how do you actually think about yourself? Do you use the term slash?
Speaker 11:I guess, like, we really give, like, a multi hyphenate a run for it, Spidey. We were speaking at a Bloomberg conference the other day, they're like, how what how do you actually describe yourself? It's weird. You know, we talk about our business as an ecosystem. We have all these things that feed each other.
Speaker 11:The same girl or guy who's buying favorite daughter is listening to our podcast. Mhmm. She is probably following us on socials. She's listening to the pod. She you know, Erin created, you know, a global phenomenon, and nobody wants this on Netflix.
Speaker 11:So we got that girl now. It's Yeah. It all it all feeds each other the flywheel.
Speaker 2:And then and then from a product perspective, specifically, with with Baby Daughter, how are you thinking about the shape of the business today? Where do you wanna take it over the next few years? How how big are the ambitions?
Speaker 11:I mean, look. We're growing fast if you hadn't told me that that we'd be where we are right now. I mean, I said it at Bloomberg. I can say it now. We're gonna do, like, 150,000,000 in retail sales next year.
Speaker 11:We were profitable were whoo.
Speaker 1:Woah. Congratulations.
Speaker 11:I don't know. Is that tacky to give numbers? Whatever.
Speaker 2:No. No.
Speaker 1:That's the people the people want gong? We Yeah. Want numbers.
Speaker 2:We have the gong for numbers.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Okay. That's cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so basically, you're saying you made $150,000,000 last year in your bank account.
Speaker 6:It's it's
Speaker 11:it's in my account right now as as we speak. No. I could have never, you know, I could have never imagined. Of course, I didn't even think that there was a customer for my sister and I. We were like, we're not fashion girls.
Speaker 4:Who
Speaker 11:who want clothes from us? I could have never fathomed that this is where we'd be sitting now. And it turns out the girl that's not the fashion girl, but that wants to feel chic and cool, is our customer. She's us. I think that's why you've seen probably a lot of, you know, influencers, celebrity brands maybe not scaling as fast as we have is because we are the girl.
Speaker 11:We're not wearing Dior out in the world, but then telling you to wear favorite daughter. We're wearing favorite daughter out
Speaker 1:in the world. Yeah. It's authentic. Talk talk about this year. We live in LA.
Speaker 1:It's been you know, it was obviously super wild, stressful start to the year. You guys have had a store, right, in in the Palisades. Is that correct? Yeah. And then moving
Speaker 7:in a
Speaker 4:It was yeah.
Speaker 1:A few months later, you're dealing with tariffs. I mean, it's been a really stressful year. But how have you guys been having a
Speaker 11:thing is the tariff thing is interesting. I mean, when it's it hit out of the blue, we were like, I'm sorry. And we kinda knew it was coming, but you don't really think it's gonna actually happen. You know? And it really is us, the the the business paying these tariffs.
Speaker 11:So we had to mitigate real fast. We're looking at, you know, India. We're looking at Turkey. We're looking to move from Mexico. But then it's it's it's changing in real time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 11:So it's been a real challenge, I can't take credit for it. We have an unbelievable team. Jennifer Stender Hawkins, who is, like, our president. She does everything. She's like, the way that our team came together in that moment was was iconic.
Speaker 11:I mean, it was elite. It was elite the way that the team came together and did what they did. And and our profit, you know, our our EBITDA is looking a lot better today than it was about four months ago.
Speaker 1:What categories are you most excited about in the future? Started out with an apparel focus, but I imagine you guys can, in in the fullness of time, do everything for for your customer or at least everything within reason.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I mean, look, our our customer wants it all from us. She does, and we're learning that. You know, we didn't know. Everything's been sort of we didn't we didn't anticipate growing as fast as we did, and we didn't try to.
Speaker 11:We we started sort of testing. Like, would she wanna spend over a thousand dollars for outwear? Would she and we sort of dipped into it, and and now we know she does. We just launched shoes, A license with Caleres because our thing is, like, let's partner with the people who do it best. They do it best.
Speaker 11:Accessories is huge for us. Obviously, like logo. It's a different girl. The girl buying the logo is not always buying the denim. And we always said the logo is gonna pay for the women for the ready to wear.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Very cool.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about AI, specifically in in AI generated content? I feel like you're gonna hear from fans directly if they are not cool with AI generated imagery and marketing materials. At the same time, sometimes people wanna see how it looks on them, and so they might wanna see an AI image do something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Not all AI is created equally. Feel like Totally. I feel like consumers are gonna have a massive aversion to to AI generated ads, specifically of clothing. Because if you buy something and then it fits terribly Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you're like, I've been, like, lied to. Yeah. But then at the same time, AI try on has been Could be really cool. Amazing.
Speaker 11:I mean, look. The thing that we all talk about under the hood, all of us, is how to mitigate returns, how to help returns. That is that is something that we are talking about all day. So I will we will embrace the right AI in certain but, like, when it comes to ecomm models, I don't know. I mean, I think that's where it's going.
Speaker 11:Of course, it is. We spend way too much money and too many days on ecom because we're perfectionists and we want it to look great. But I'm not gonna lie. It's expensive and it's time consuming. And if all of a sudden, they're introducing ways to to change that, but I don't know.
Speaker 11:What do you guys think the customer's gonna we're we're nervous about it.
Speaker 1:I think that customers want will want to try on products and see how they look on themselves. Don't think customers are gonna be thrilled to be like, oh, I'm looking I'm considering buying this item and
Speaker 11:And it's on a robot.
Speaker 1:Completely yeah. It's not it's not real.
Speaker 2:Yeah. At at the same time, like, the line of AI is getting very, very blurry. There's a debate going on in the video game world right now because one of the biggest video game platform, Steam, has a tag, was this game made with AI? But the question is, like, what does that mean? If one of the software developers in the game used AI to write a little bit of code, that's very different than being like, we went to the AI and said, like, make a video game or, like, the entire characters are AI generated.
Speaker 2:Like, there's this huge continuum, and I think there'll be something similar where it's like, yeah. If you're on a photoshoot and there's a light stand in the background and you wanna remove it, like, you go into Photoshop today. You do content aware fill. In the future, you do generative fill. You technically used AI.
Speaker 2:Does the consumer care about that? There's gonna be this, like, back and forth around trust. And as long as you're not abusing the material or abusing the the the trust of the individual of the consumer, I think you'll be okay. But you have to be more open about it. And I think that's probably where you have an advantage because you have such a direct line with the consumer that you can wrestle with these publicly essentially and then set a very clear boundary as opposed to, like, some of the faceless corporations that will, you know, have to issue, like, PR releases when they make mistakes.
Speaker 11:I know. Listen. It's so tempting. Right? Because at the end of the day, your customers' trust in you, your customers' loyalty to you Mhmm.
Speaker 11:It's all you have. Mhmm. So we've we've before AI, we were like, should we start doing headless models? You know? Because it speeds up the a lot of brands do it.
Speaker 11:Moda does it, and they do beautiful, you know, everything they do. I'm like, I want it. I want Sure. So we've wrestled with all the ways to, of course, spend a little bit less. But at the it's tough.
Speaker 11:I mean, product, number one. At the end of the day, none of this matters if the product is not good.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So that is, like, first and foremost, that is our focus. How can we do better? How can we source better fabrics? How can we do better quality?
Speaker 11:How can we do better fit? But when it comes, you know, to your question about the AI, it's like, our customer doesn't always even wanna see the clothes on me. Yeah. You know? We and that's the thing.
Speaker 9:Like Sure.
Speaker 11:Of course, when I post something or when I push something, it sells, but it sells just as well on girls that work in our office who are different shapes, different sizes, different ages. That's what we've really leaned into in the video. I mean, video is crushing for us.
Speaker 1:Interesting. It is crushing us. On on the on the page, you're saying? Like, on the
Speaker 11:The video the page and and and in paid.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 11:Or or or yeah. All of it. I mean, video is video is crushing.
Speaker 2:I yeah. Is that the marketing strategy that you think worked best for you in 2025, or is there another sort of growth initiative that as you look back on the year, you're really, really happy with how it panned out?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I mean, I think it's a it's a combination of so many things, but I do think that we hit this sort of this wide open white space for the working woman. You know? Like, the biggest compliment, most, that the people that come up to me the most are are career women. They're women who go, oh my gosh.
Speaker 11:My whole law firm, all we wear is favorite daughter because we're offering you chic, elevated, tailored suiting, good quality, but that's not, you know, $1,500. Mhmm. You don't have to spend $1,500 on a blazer to look great, to show up to work feeling like you look fashionable, like you belong, like you feel good. You don't have to spend that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yep. So How how do you think about working with influencers? I feel like you're probably extra sensitive to this given that you guys are creators and personalities yourself, and you're probably like Yeah. Know that like you guys represent the brand.
Speaker 1:So if you're working with another creator, they're representing the brand. And I feel like in apparel, it can be way more sensitive than a supplement brand that just says like, hey, if you like share our values at all, like we'll we'll work with you.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I mean, we've really leaned into ShopMy, which is a fantastic company, which I actually looked at as an investment, which I big mistake on my part Yeah. I
Speaker 1:talking with my wife, and she was telling me about ShopMy, and I was like, I I I haven't I was like, I haven't heard of it. And we we've interviewed a thousand companies this year, and and I looked it up, and I was like, oh, this is interesting. And then the next week, they announced, like, a I think a billion dollar round. It wasn't on wasn't on my radar, but they're ripping.
Speaker 11:It's genius, and it's, like, it's made the whole process so much more seamless, to be honest with you. And it gives, you know, moms at home an opportunity to move product, to make a little cash, to build some sort of audience. I mean, the celebrities with millions and millions and millions of fans have or followers have not sold as much for us as, like, a Dallas mom who has, like, the micro influencer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. Very cool. How much you like, how much time are you spending on the investing side? And you guys have a fund that you run.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what's kind of the focus of the fund, and and what kind of companies are you really looking to meet?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I mean, we're a consumer focused fund. It's me, my sister Erin, and Phil Schwartz is our partner. It's it's kind of a different kind of model. He well, I could go into the weeds, but we probably don't have time.
Speaker 11:We're looking at companies that we are the customer for.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:That's it. It's very simple. That's the thesis. It's not only female founders or only, you know, female it's it that's not what it is. It's are we the customer?
Speaker 11:Can is our audience gonna resonate with this product? And it's that simple.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Taste smart. That's Makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining on on such a busy day. Really, really fun to have you on. We'll have to have Aaron on sometime soon. And congrats to the whole team on on all the progress.
Speaker 1:It's incredibly We'll
Speaker 2:talk to
Speaker 11:you soon. Congrats to you guys. Congrats. Everybody loves your show. Alright.
Speaker 4:Bye. Bye.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about graphite dot dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster, and we're back in the cowboy hats. And we got a cowboy in the studio, Peter Rahal from David Protein.
Speaker 1:Protein cowboy.
Speaker 2:Cowboys cowboy. How you doing?
Speaker 1:What's happening?
Speaker 2:How are you?
Speaker 1:It's great to have you back.
Speaker 2:Good to have you back.
Speaker 1:The cod king.
Speaker 2:The cod king. Yeah. We haven't talked to
Speaker 5:you since
Speaker 2:you did the cod. I was talking to Jordy, but I thought I didn't know it was real. It was real. You actually sold cod. Is that correct?
Speaker 7:Yep. And we still are selling it.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:Wait. So so are people just cooking up
Speaker 5:What is yeah.
Speaker 1:Tacos at home? Weirdest way.
Speaker 2:What if it's actually successful, and then you just have to sell cod only?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1:Hard to outsell David Protein bars.
Speaker 7:We don't have the same product market fit Okay. With with frozen glaze of cod.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Amazing. How's how's it been since we last caught up? I know I know, like, the it sounds like the number one challenge for David is just keeping the product in stock. Is that true?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I would say building foundation for for a big big 26, getting the supply chain set up. Yeah. So mostly on the supply side. And, you know, this business is a little seasonal.
Speaker 7:So q
Speaker 2:Seasonal?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Q four is pretty slow.
Speaker 2:Pretty slow. New year, new you. You go on a diet. Is that the idea?
Speaker 7:Well, q four, you're just really eating turkeys.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Drinking alcohol. And then, yeah, January, all the shame comes and you just
Speaker 2:Start getting on the ground.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's it's like it's like 50% month over month from January or December to January.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How, how is now that you're what how how is it two years into David or around there?
Speaker 7:One one year and three months.
Speaker 5:One year
Speaker 2:and three months. Yeah. How is it different than, the journey, from our X BAR, like, like, in the first year? It's it's obviously been accelerated on the capital side, but what what are the big learnings? Like, what's what what's the what's the biggest difference?
Speaker 7:So RXBAR for the first two and a half, three years was finding product market fit. Like
Speaker 9:Sure.
Speaker 7:And then, yeah, once we hit it it's pretty similar, actually, once we hit it. It was in 2016. David was, like, right off the get go. So Yeah. Year three of RxBAR is, like, year one of David.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And then I'm trying to think. Like, markets have changed. Like, marketing tactics have changed. Like, influencer marketing was
Speaker 2:more about the the what what was the biggest, tactic then? And then what was the biggest tactic of 2025 for you?
Speaker 7:So Instagram and influencer marketing was sort of the arbitrage. Mhmm. And it was more that the influencers weren't aware of their influence. Mhmm. So that was, like, a big mispriced opportunity.
Speaker 2:So so so there were opportunities. Like, if you
Speaker 4:just
Speaker 2:showed if you just, like, shared someone, like, sent like, sent them the product and they would just post about it for free almost or or just small little, little, like, checks here and there as opposed to now there's, like, whole companies that intermediate, you know, oh, this person has this many followers. It's gonna cost this much. It's a whole machine now.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Totally. Like, this is pre stories, but, like, if Kim Kardashian posted a story of RxBar, you we would see it right in our sales.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:Today, I don't think you see it in your sales. I So think there's, like, fatigue.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting. Fatigue. So so so it's actually becoming less effective as well as back then, it was potentially underpriced. Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Because there's, like, novelty of, like, oh, these people, they they like, I haven't seen them promote products.
Speaker 2:So so what is working on the growth side in 2025?
Speaker 7:That's a good question. I mean, it's it's it's hard to attribute to, like, one thing. You know? I I I think the if you're in the health and wellness space, the health and wellness podcast are great. Huberman, of course, is really powerful.
Speaker 7:Meta ads are working really well for us. And then, like, I I'm kind of old school. Like, just trial, like, sending product out, sampling. Like, the business is really simple. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We have a we have
Speaker 7:a bar. It's really easy to sample it. And if you do that at scale, it really works.
Speaker 1:And so at scale, sampling means you have hundreds hundreds of people out in the real world that are going to retail stores and maybe fitness studios and just physically sampling? Or are you saying more like sending out sample bars to individual consumers or both?
Speaker 7:Both. Sending up we don't have much retail, so sending out individual sample packs to to consumers and influencers and people to influence and then events, doing good good events and micro influencers. I heard your previous guest talk about that. They're, like, really powerful because they have credibility. But from a grow like, tactically speaking, like, everything's working for us, and it's not to be arrogant.
Speaker 7:It's just that the product's just really differentiated. Like
Speaker 1:No. That's the key that's the key in CPG. I've every time I've invested in a company where I try the product and I go, this product is 10 out of 10. It's the best in its category. The business just crushes, and the founders Yeah.
Speaker 1:Can You can still make a bunch of mistakes. You can you can not have You the best cannot have the best website. You cannot even have the best team. But if you have the best product, it just it just works. People people come back.
Speaker 1:And so if you have the best product and the best execution, you're pretty much unstoppable, and you just see this lift across the board.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And so it's it's what's really hard to attribute to working because it just kind of works everywhere. I know where it doesn't work, and it's usually, like, a price thing. But because our product is expensive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about so what is the plan on the retail side? Like, I I'm assuming as soon as you have the inventory, you'll flip a switch and see it. And try to be everywhere, or is there a more specific rollout?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. So in January, rolling out in Target and Walmart. So that's a huge, huge lift. And then we'll be building the majority of we'll get majority of the major distribution with great retail partners throughout '26.
Speaker 1:Yep. And what about new new product? Like, stuff on the new product side? You've Yeah. Talked before about being a being a house of brands and that being the way that you get to the multibillion dollar scale.
Speaker 1:Any any rough timelines you're thinking about?
Speaker 7:Yeah. We have a new product we're launching in, January.
Speaker 2:Is that fish based?
Speaker 7:It's no. No. It's it's legit.
Speaker 2:That another fish product?
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's not a It's anybody.
Speaker 2:It's boiled trout now, John. That should that
Speaker 1:should be how you haze new employees, like how you ramp them up. It's like to earn a to earn a spot on like the core David team, you have to be able to sell fish online. Like, frozen fish
Speaker 2:on On like
Speaker 7:TikTok shop, you
Speaker 2:have to.
Speaker 1:That'd gotta hit a million dollars of sales on TikTok shop. What so this a new product under David, or it'll be in a new brand?
Speaker 7:Under David, it's a new bar. I'll flash it right here.
Speaker 2:Oh. Woah. Leaking alpha right here. First time we've ever seen it. I was hoping you were gonna pick it up with, like, two massive arms.
Speaker 2:Like, it was a Duraflame filled, like like, a quart of firewood. It's like, yes. This has enough protein for an entire year. You can just slice off slice off a a chunk as you need.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So no, no stunts. That's a real product. Yeah. Let me put on do not disturb.
Speaker 2:Chad is asking if it's a collab with Nature's Valley granola. You know, the crumb one that, like, you eat it and the crumbs go everywhere. That one's so funny.
Speaker 13:It's one funny bars.
Speaker 2:It's like
Speaker 5:a it's
Speaker 7:a funny it's like a negative trait became a meme that actually benefit the brand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A 100%. And you have to imagine that those bars are, like, 100% carbs, basically.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Like, energy bombs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, you know type of place.
Speaker 1:What are you seeing I know you have a big CPG portfolio. What what are you seeing on on the portfolio side? What's working? Where are brands doing well? Where are they struggling?
Speaker 1:Not everybody can have a product that has as much product market fit as David. So it's not always
Speaker 7:I mean, I don't spend any time on my portfolio. And I don't so I don't know. I put quickly focused on David. Yeah. So I actually have no idea.
Speaker 7:The one that is sticking out is this THC boom, the Willy's.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. What is that?
Speaker 7:Yeah. They're crushing it.
Speaker 1:That was the Kombucha the Kombucha brand. They didn't they, like, spend
Speaker 7:that June Shine, and it's like a historic pivot because, like, the June Shine or the is, like, 200,000,000. Yeah. They pivot this, and it's, like, really, really strong numbers.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And I think it's, you know, the macro trend is known. People wanna get high, but they don't want alcohol. And they're seeing all that demand.
Speaker 2:That is crazy.
Speaker 1:What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?
Speaker 7:A, 33 inch, lake trout.
Speaker 1:Lake trout. Lake trout.
Speaker 2:Let's hit the gong.
Speaker 1:We're gonna hit the gong for the lake trout. Last question. What's the what's your prediction around 2026 revenue? Are you sharing any of those numbers?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I'll share it. Moving target. We should do north of 300,000,000.
Speaker 2:There we go. Wow. Masterclass. Crazy growth. A lot of bars.
Speaker 2:That's a lot of protein. That's lot of protein.
Speaker 7:A lot of protein. We we have a great team. Sort of trying to we're striking on all cylinders. So
Speaker 1:How many how many millions of grands in the team. What what will the team look like next year?
Speaker 7:Next year, I mean, we're we shoot for 2,000,000 per head. Mhmm. So that will be north of a 150.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:We're about $80.80 right now. I try not to comp these things because I find they're really bad. Yeah. But, yeah, we have a great we have a great team and super productive, group.
Speaker 1:2,000,000 ahead. It's good. It's a good good benchmark. Keeps you honest. Love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you. Thank you for joining. Always always good to have you, and, incredible to get the update on the business.
Speaker 7:No Black Friday talk?
Speaker 2:How's it going?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean How's your mean Yeah.
Speaker 2:You mentioned that it's not the biggest day for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what's your strategy going into this? I mean and what's your philosophy even around, like, discounting? I've I I I I'm we're hearing different things from different people today. I know brands that that their max discount ever is 15%, and they're super religious about that.
Speaker 1:They don't wanna train their audience to kind of wait and buy a ton on a specific day because it it hurts the rest of the year. But what's your approach?
Speaker 7:Well, we I we did this at Rx. We basically condition our customers to a quarterly clearance of some sort. So with David, we don't we don't do discounts. And then, yes, we don't do discounts. We just do a buy four, get the fifth free.
Speaker 7:And then Nice. Yeah. So as a I think it's important for us as a brand. I think it's a I think it hurts the brand to be discounting. And then we just bring we do bring a lot of value, like, a dollars per protein perspective.
Speaker 7:So and then with Black Friday, it's just too competitive. And then
Speaker 6:yeah, it's
Speaker 1:just So is it even worth it to ramp do you ramp ad budgets at all or do you
Speaker 2:just let people not a gift?
Speaker 7:Yeah. We base we basically just run steady state. Yeah. And we basically kind of hibernate Yeah. Or November, December.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:And, you know, like, our sales are today are only gonna be down 20% from an average.
Speaker 1:Wait. So you're gonna have 20% less sales today, but but you but less sorry. Explain. So you're just, you're So turning off
Speaker 7:so we're not say ads are ads are consistent at 15 k.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:We're not like, you would think that all the consumer attention is going to Black Friday and our sales would be hurt pretty pretty materially, but they're actually like, they're only down 20% to a normal
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Got it. Got it. Got it.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Which I think is interesting because, like, we're not participating, and it's actually not that I thought it'd be more impactful because
Speaker 1:people are taking all their dollars to somewhere where they can save 30% on their favorite apparel brand
Speaker 2:or
Speaker 1:something
Speaker 2:like But it makes sense. I mean, people need to order consumer staples on Fridays. Wow. And then they they almost see it they probably see it as, a different thing. It's like, yeah.
Speaker 2:I gotta order groceries. I gotta order protein bars. I gotta order whatever my health products are. And then I also gotta get that new TV. And then I also gotta get the gift for grandma, but I'm not gonna forget to get food for myself as well.
Speaker 2:So I show up and I get food, and then I go and get the TV. And then I go and get the gift for grandma or whatever. That that'd be my mental model. I don't know.
Speaker 1:From a Yeah. As you think about next year, from a like, how how do you think about, like, just getting enough inventory to support that kind of revenue? And how far how far in advance are you kind of doing demand planning given that you're you're on a rocket ship? And I know that you guys have a unique unique supply chain and some unique advantages, but how are you thinking of scaling that up?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So so since August, we've been preparing more or less for '26.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So we've we've actually had a throttle back demand to build safety stock to prepare for to prepare for '26. So I always think, like, in growth comp like, we don't have you kinda wanna oscillate between chaos and just, like, crazy growth, and we had to intentionally do that just to make sure we service and don't have service failures in '26.
Speaker 1:And service failures are like somebody's a subscriber on on ecom, and you actually cannot deliver the product.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And and that's a failure. And then what and then it's unacceptable, but it's more on retailers. Mhmm. Like, when you open up retailers, it's a deal, and you cannot you can't ship your p o if you can't fulfill POs, it's a huge problem.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And so there's just not a tolerance for that.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about the long term of the business? Like, you've sold RXBAR. I'm sure you know all the potential buyers in the category already. They kinda know that you're tried. They know you're a known quantity.
Speaker 2:I'm sure they can DD this really quickly. But do you wanna IPO the company? Do you wanna own it privately forever? Do you see yourself working on this in twenty, thirty years? Is this like your life's work?
Speaker 2:It seems like to pull back from all the investing stuff, like, you're pretty into it. Like, you you you're enjoying what you're doing. But do you think you'll can do do you think that'll be the case forever?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, speaking personally, yeah. I mean, this is basically a platform for me to create new businesses and brands. And if I were to sell it, I would just do it.
Speaker 1:Another. You can start
Speaker 6:another platform.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're, like, the ultimate, like, I know one thing guy.
Speaker 1:Mark Zuckerberg at bars.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg was like, if I sell Facebook, I'm just gonna start another social networking. Yeah.
Speaker 7:That's new. Starting is the hard part. Like yeah. Starting is really hard, so I never wanna do that. And, like, the asset the asset becomes the organization.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And that's the hard part. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, our vision is to create multiple brands
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:To address different consumer needs and help remove a ton of excess calories from American diet.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And I I think I I've like, I think going public is something that's, like, a notch on the belt thing. Mhmm. But I would try to just be objective about it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What about, what about, like, reference points throughout CPG or or consumer brand history? Are you like, oh, I love the Red Bull model of, like, all this crazy marketing for a very narrow product? Do you like the Budweiser model where, you know, the Clydesdales come out every every Super Bowl. Like, are there certain brands or founders that you look up to throughout history and draw, like, inspiration from?
Speaker 7:I look at Mars. Yeah. Like, we're going we're going for Mars.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a fantastic one. There's that book, The Chocolate Wars, right, about Mars versus Hershey. I I'm I'm blanking on the name, but it's fantastic. All about the development of the M and M, how that was Mars and another company that was, like, the offspring, and they did some joint ventures.
Speaker 2:Crazy business.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. I think we're we're we're trying to build a, like, a house of brands and
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 7:I I think Mars is a great role model.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 1:Do you think there's a finite amount of good consumer brand ideas? Like, do they come do they come in, like, based on consumer preferences and then innovation, like, innovation on the ingredient side? Like, what are the because because David was coming into a category that people thought was noisy and and and had a number of of winners. Everybody could name, like, a protein bar company. But clearly, you came in innovative product and have just very quickly dominated.
Speaker 1:So I'm assuming whatever the next brand is, it kinda has to fit within that same criteria of, like, it doesn't matter if the category is noisy, but there needs to be something that is, like, durable and differentiated about about the product.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And I think the the both good thing and bad thing about food, and it's similar to fashion. Like, there's always a need for novelty with humans. And both food and fashion, there's always gonna be re room for for something new. The the ugly side of that is there's, like, product fatigue, and so you have staying relevant and innovating is is the challenge.
Speaker 7:But there's always room. And then there will be different sort of waves or opportunities that come, whether it's a trend or a new ingredient or something like that you have to spot. But in general, my my approach to something new like, we're planting a seed now for something to launch next year. And the I would say, like, the product has to be 30% better, like, measurably better. Brand cannot be a differentiation.
Speaker 7:If I'm sitting here telling you how our brand is differentiated, like, it's just, like, so abstract and doesn't mean anything. So Yep. It has to be, yeah, materially better than what's on the market. And and I I personally, I like categories that are sort of boring and what what appear to me on the surface, like, really competitive.
Speaker 1:Yep. Do you spend any time at all thinking about the kind of strength of the consumer? Obviously, David customers are all strong because they're consuming a lot of protein. But more abstract, I think if you are a Mars and the strength that consumers aren't doing well, you're going to see contraction just because you basically are the TAM. And so if the economy is if demand is falling, you're just gonna see lower sales.
Speaker 1:You guys are growing rapidly in in a big category, and so you're not necessarily gonna notice the fluctuations. But any any, like, feelings around sentiment and and overall strength?
Speaker 7:Yeah. And I so, like, our in our life cycle, yeah, we're not we're not feeling the pricing issue, but you can tell by the retail the retailers are constantly talking about it, which is a reflection. And then I always I tell our team internally, like, our product needs to get less expensive and crunchier. Like, our portfolio needs to get less expensive and crunchier over time. And that is to address a larger group of customers because price really, really matters.
Speaker 7:Like, the the TAM for a bar will be really set on, like, on price. Like, you need to get to the 10 for 10 promotion spot to get to a billion revenue. And and it could it's it's at Nature Valley angle. Right? Like Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You're not gonna be buying for your family $3 protein bars for the for everyone to eat. You're gonna be buying this 49¢ snack bar. Yeah. And so for sure, we think about it, and and it's becomes as our as we go down our our adventure and and and our life cycle, it becomes more and more and more important for sure.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for taking the time to chat with us. Jason Fried says hello, by the way, to you.
Speaker 7:Oh, nice.
Speaker 2:He says hi. Hey, Peter. Hey,
Speaker 1:Jason. Legend.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to catch
Speaker 2:up, Ben.
Speaker 1:Congrats on all the products.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for coming on. Give us the update.
Speaker 1:We'll talk again soon. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Fin dot ai. It's AI that handles your customer support. It's the number one AI agent for customer service from Intercom.
Speaker 1:Up next, we have, Farhunt. Farhunt.
Speaker 2:From Shopify in the restream waiting room.
Speaker 1:Now What's happening?
Speaker 2:Tvp and ultra dumb. How you doing? Congratulations.
Speaker 4:I'm trying
Speaker 2:If you're here
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Who's keeping the servers online? I don't know. We stole it. I thought you had to per personally fan the GPUs.
Speaker 1:Wait. Is this is this shot on fire? Like, advantage is the the the infra team is in Canada, so it's just a regular It's cold. You guys don't do So
Speaker 2:the so the servers don't go on fire.
Speaker 1:You guys don't do normal. You don't do, like, American Thanksgiving. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Like
Speaker 12:It's true that we are not on vacation today. I mean, we would not be on I mean, a lot of our American
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Employees are not on vacation today either. But this is The biggest thing is
Speaker 2:why they won. Because they're in Canada. It's cold up there, the servers don't mess.
Speaker 1:The Super Bowl
Speaker 2:The servers
Speaker 1:don't mess. They're locked in. Yes.
Speaker 12:And I'm trying I'm trying to match you guys with my green sweatshirt.
Speaker 2:Look fantastic. You look fantastic. Thanks for taking the time out of a busy day to come talk to What what what are the biggest learnings changes to how Shopify is doing Black Friday or just infrastructure or technology Yeah. This year? Has it been the diffusion of AI or or other stuff?
Speaker 2:What what are the big macro trends in your world?
Speaker 12:Yeah. So a couple amazing things. One is, like, we don't just, like roll into Black Friday. Right? It's an all year round thing.
Speaker 12:We start planning like tomorrow. We'll start thinking about or I mean after the weekend, we'll start thinking about Black Friday twenty twenty six. And what's crazy about how Shopify's growth is, and really it's all about our merchants, it all comes from the fact that they are doing such an amazing job for by creating great products for all of their buyers. And so what happens is there's Black Friday, it's crazy, you see our sphere, you see the globe, we're showing you all the crazy sales, And then by April, May next year, it's just gonna be a regular day at Shopify because that's how fast our brands are growing. Yep.
Speaker 12:And the yeah. The way we handle it is we do lots and lots of scale tests, man. Like, it's crazy. We can we build up our infrastructure so that if an entire region goes down, we can just shift it to a completely new region and have no impact to buyers' emergence.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Talk yeah. I guess talk more specifically about, like, what what part of the business at Shopify is getting less attention than it should right now? Obviously, are focused on big headline numbers. They're focused on the sphere and some visuals.
Speaker 1:But, like, how much of a role is, like, the shop app and just, like, Shop Pay playing this Black Friday as a product that's now been in the been in the wild for a while now. I think everybody listening to this will have used it probably multiple times at this point. But how big of a role is that or kind of other parts of the business playing?
Speaker 12:Yeah. I would not sleep on the Shop app. It's amazing. Started off as just package tracking, and now I know lots and lots of folks, including myself, where I just start that shop app to search for something from an amazing brand that is building something specifically for you. I mean, one of my favorite brands right now is this weights company called Motivate, m o t v eight, number eight.
Speaker 12:Nice. And it's got these adjustable dumbbells from, like, five to 80 pounds. Beautiful. Matches my gym. Doesn't roll away.
Speaker 12:And I found it on shop. I would not have found these adjustable dumbbells any other way. And so, yeah, you should you should
Speaker 6:look it up right now.
Speaker 2:I wanna I wanna see so so we we we hunted around, and we found a yacht for sale on a Shopify store. A €28,000,000 super yacht, mega yacht. Somebody set up a Shopify site, and they are trying to sell this yacht on
Speaker 4:I love it.
Speaker 2:On on Shopify. And I wanna see if the shop app has it. We're gonna dig in there. We're gonna check.
Speaker 6:And then I
Speaker 12:mean, you mentioned Shop Pay. You mentioned Shop Pay. Right? I mean, Shop Pay is the, you know, the fastest way to check out, and we see, for example, if you just have the Shop Pay logo, even if you don't click it, conversion goes up because people trust the merchant.
Speaker 2:Is does that give me some buy now, later opportunities potentially?
Speaker 12:You can yeah. I mean, obviously, as you know, we have lots of buyers who wanna do a buy now, pay later. We have shop pay installments which allows you I'd love to do
Speaker 2:just pay €1,000,000 a month for twenty eight months to pay for my €28,000,000. Yeah. That would be fantastic. This is this is the future.
Speaker 7:I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What yes. Shop Pay, I still notice even though it's I've been using it for
Speaker 5:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Years at this point. Like the multiple times probably a month that I'll I'm willing to actually just buy something on my phone because I know it's gonna be so fast Yeah. When historically Yeah. I'm like, if store is not on Shopify, I'm just not gonna buy I'm not pulling out my credit card to buy your thing.
Speaker 2:Oh, so
Speaker 1:don't wanna do it anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just it's made really, really anything that speeds up that you know, there's always those famous studies about, like, you know, if you cut down the time it takes to do something on the Internet, you'll see massive conversion. We look at it in very, like, abstract kind of quantitative, 3% gains for one per one millisecond over here, whatever. Yeah. But just the pain of actually having to, you know, go and find your credit card and stuff, it's it's it just brings actual delight to the entire process.
Speaker 2:And you have an entrepreneur who's focused on, like, building a cool brand, promoting it with cool people, and, like, the customer's feeling cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, and then miserable. And so if you can pull that out, like, it's a it's a huge huge advantage.
Speaker 12:Yeah. And we see and we see, for example, especially on your phone. Right? Yeah. It's like over three quarters of those checkouts happen on the phone, and you just wanna be able to quickly check out.
Speaker 12:It's a trust builder. And by the way, imagine buying from a site that's not in your region. Right? You're buying from Europe. You're in Europe and buying from The US.
Speaker 12:You wanna make sure that's a seamless experience, and Shop Pay will do that for you. It'll show you your shipping rates. You can feel like it's trustworthy. You can see the delivery times. You click.
Speaker 12:You get the package tracking right away. You get the order confirmation. You get the little cha ching in the shop app, and everybody's feeling good.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, giving us the update. Cha ching.
Speaker 1:Nice and nice.
Speaker 2:Alright. Congratulations for the progress.
Speaker 1:Thanks for yeah. Thanks for keeping everybody online We appreciate it. Keeping the the orders coming in.
Speaker 2:It's not easy what you do, and we appreciate you.
Speaker 1:No one sung here.
Speaker 2:One. We'll talk to
Speaker 12:on and back back to the war room.
Speaker 2:Back to the
Speaker 1:war room. Love it.
Speaker 2:We'll talk you soon. How are doing? Hi. Let me tell you about ProFound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands no better day than today to check out ProFound. Up next, we have Torin from Mod Retro. Of course, the makers
Speaker 1:of There he is. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:We've we yeah. Good to have you.
Speaker 1:First time. First time.
Speaker 2:First time on the show. Thanks so much for taking the time. How is Black Friday for you? You're obviously focused on the Chromatic this year. Are there other ways that you're, merchandising the product?
Speaker 2:How are you
Speaker 1:Is this the best Christmas present ever? Be. Like, is this like it feels like it feels like you kinda made the perfect Christmas present.
Speaker 10:It's it's this thing that we it you know, we on our checkout flow, we have the post checkout survey, and I think the the biggest thing that we've been learning on this Black Friday is that it's just it's such a unique and perfect gift no matter if it's for a child or for somebody who is much, much, much older because everybody can just appreciate that that I have one right here. That simple idea of just Turn it on. Turning it on. No. You're in the game.
Speaker 10:No.
Speaker 2:I I I was I was experiencing this. I mean, like, there's so many tech products today. We talked to Palmer about this, where just going from unwrapping it to setting it up to logging in with your create an account, add two factor, like, upload your DNA and all this other stuff. And it's like, can we just turn it on and have fun with it? And it's like, you can.
Speaker 2:We know we have the technology, but we've forgotten how to do it. And we and and fortunately, we can make things that just turn on and are fun in this country.
Speaker 1:Powerful
Speaker 2:stuff. So so, yeah, how is it going? Is are are you is it surpassing your expectations just financially? Are are you happy with how things are going today?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's it's been amazing. I I don't know if you guys have been keeping up with this, but we also, just unveiled the design of the m 64
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 10:Today. Yeah. And so, we've seen a a pretty massive spike in traffic. And, inevitably, people will come in to look at the design of m 64 Yep. Are the exact same types of people who want to play chromatic.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. Give me give me the rundown, the best practices for m 64. I want it on day one. What do I have to do?
Speaker 2:And then my, I I I obviously I I I want one as soon as I can get one. How do I do that? And then also, should I be digging through old, old crates of n 64 cartridges and making sure that I have those ready to go on day one?
Speaker 10:Yes. You definitely should be doing that, but we will also be announcing our biggest launch lineup of games that are going to be published in house. And, again Okay. Just like with Chromatic, we re release classic games, remaster classic games, and we also make, brand new games that are
Speaker 1:that are made by
Speaker 10:indie devs and things like that.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. And then what is the what is the value prop? Like like, why m 64? Why not just go on eBay, get something, get a bunch of adapters? Like like, how are you positioning?
Speaker 2:I I, you know, I I've talked to Palmer about the the the mod retrochromatic many times, and he talks about the materials, and the the screen is all as one sapphire glass. I don't understand how it works, but, it seems very impressive, and I certainly enjoy it when I look at it. But what what what are you most excited about with regards to the m 64?
Speaker 10:M 64 is it it's just like the chromatic. Like, with the chromatic, it is it is the only way to play one of these games the exact way that the game artist intended for it to be seen and for it to be played. That's because, as you said, it has the only pixel perfect resolution display that's ever been made for a Game Boy clone. Mhmm. Whether that's software emulation or hardware devices, it's the only one in the world that has a pixel accurate display, but it's a confluence of different factors that make it feel like this very authentically nostalgic experience.
Speaker 10:It's the exact same way with the m 64. It's from the translucent colorways and and the way that the design is is made for the actual physical console itself, but also for the video output. We're doing a few things that that add to the authenticity of of the actual video out and what the game artists intend for you to see in those games that won't exist in any other piece of hardware.
Speaker 1:Is that because when the n 64 was created, there was we were using much different televisions, and now everybody has flat screens. And so you need to actually like, the video out needs to have a better understanding of, like, the final kind of, like, screen form factor.
Speaker 10:That's exactly right. The funny thing is that upscaling the video out to four k, which the m 64 will do, is actually the really easy problem. The hard problem is how are you going to have a modern n 64 console video out to a CRT and to see the game exactly as in the way that you used to see it. And that's something that the m 64 is going to accomplish with a lagless analog video out as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When we talk to Palmer, he talks a lot about the, like, pixel perfect jumps that, like, speedrunners do. It's a niche consumer in my at least I it feels like it is, but it gives me a lot of, it gives me a lot of, confidence in the quality of the product. If it's good enough for the speedrunner like, I can't speedrun Mario 64. But if it's good enough for them, it's probably good enough for me.
Speaker 2:It's probably gonna be a good, experience. Do you think that there's actually a benchmark where you would like to see, the m 64 in in circulation at something like games done quick, GDC, these, like, different, speedrunning competitions, is that sort of your internal benchmark? If it's actually good enough for the speedrunners, then it's good enough for, for for everyone?
Speaker 10:The only benchmark is that it is at feature parity in terms of video out and lag and things like that with original consoles. That's the only that's the only benchmark that makes any sense to compare against. Mhmm. And so that's what we compare against. I yeah.
Speaker 10:Palmer talked about that pixel perfect jump, and we have slow motion cameras that capture the chromatic versus the Game Boy Color and make sure that that is frame by frame accurate.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 10:It's the exact same thing with m 64. In fact, we will be at GameStop quick Cool. With chromatics Okay. And m 64.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Yeah. So it's already in process. We have Chat wants
Speaker 1:to know any plans to do a clear case chromatic? Is that you keeping that the chamber?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It we get a lot of requests for it.
Speaker 2:That's what
Speaker 7:I'll say.
Speaker 2:What about, reaction to, more modern hardware? Valve just released the the Steambox, the Steamframe. What was your initial reaction? Are you chomping at the bit? Twenty five years, you're gonna be making one, or, are there any other, kind of, takes or opinions or thoughts that you can share about what that maybe means for the gaming ecosystem broadly?
Speaker 10:I'm I'm a huge fan. I'm a I'm honestly a fan of all gaming hardware, and I think Palmer would say the same thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:For mod retro specifically, what we try to do is is kind of dig into the past for these threads that are still relevant today. So, like, in the case of Chromatic, it's this idea that you can pick up a game and play it, and the game doesn't ask anything of you after you're playing it. Most modern games, they're constantly trying to get you to to pay more money after you've already bought the game, for example. This it you know, this it's the same reason that you can pick up a Game Boy game was left in your parents' closet today, stick it into a chromatic, and have the exact same experience. That that is the thread that we wanted to pull on for chromatic.
Speaker 10:So I think with modern retro, a lot of the hardware that we're going to make is have these these elements of the past that are still valuable today that have just been kind of steamrolled by by by modern times. It's not to say that the devices aren't modern in their technology stack. It's just that it gives you an experience that isn't common in in modern hardware ecosystems. And so Yeah. You know, all of the stuff by Valve.
Speaker 10:I'm I'm obsessed with it. I love it. I'm a customer of it. But the types of experiences that ModRetro creates live alongside that for somebody who is interested in gaming. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And they're also better for people who actually just don't consider themselves to be a hardcore gamer. But Sure. Go play a round of Tetris on an airplane or
Speaker 7:something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What, obviously, with Palmer, he can draw a ton of attention to the company, to the category. What's what else is working on the growth side in 2025? Have you gotten into performance marketing, doing, paid partnerships with other influencers? Like, what what does the growth engine at the company look like these days?
Speaker 10:Yeah. We're we're just starting to scratch the surface of that stuff because the product with no growth engine behind it at all does pretty well. And what we find is that the biggest thing for Chromatic, for example, is to get it into somebody's hands. And when you have it in your hands, it's it it creates a network effect of other other people buying it, especially just yeah. You can't fully communicate that feel, that click of the cartridge.
Speaker 10:The
Speaker 2:And it's also a forgotten it's like a forgotten feel. Like, I think that people remember abstractly liking the Game Boy, liking, you know, physical handheld gaming, but they don't quite remember what it actually felt like to feel it.
Speaker 1:So It's too good. Last question. Anything you can share around the time horizon for the m 64 preorder? They can preorder? They're excited.
Speaker 2:Chad is going crazy. I
Speaker 10:I know. I'm sorry, but not right at this moment, but very, very soon.
Speaker 2:Very But but there is something that you can do today, which is drop your email and you'll be the first to know if you're on that email list. Correct?
Speaker 10:Drop your email on the wait list, which is on autoretro.com/m60four. Correct. You will will be prioritized in terms of shipping timelines. And you'll know the second that the that the preorder is ready.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:It you know, we're we're in the early stages of production on m 64. It's just that we we don't like to jump the gun too much with taking your money ahead of being able to ship the product. And so that's
Speaker 2:Palmer lived that with the first Oculus. I you know? Mhmm. He he delayed he was probably the most successful Kickstarter campaign in history. And still, months of delays, of course.
Speaker 2:It's heart it's heart wrenching going through that. And yeah. Yeah. I think a lot a
Speaker 1:lot of other companies sort of launched the preorder today, and I it's very mature to say we'll take
Speaker 2:They wouldn't even call it a preorder. Have a 36 timeline. Yeah. It's gonna ship next week. Who knows?
Speaker 2:But subject to delays. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. We we don't have the need to take your money ahead of time. We can shoulder the burden of the development and be confident that that, that you're gonna love the m 64.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for joining the stream. Congratulations on all the progress.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great. Great to have you on finally.
Speaker 2:Have a good one, Tori. Guys. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector in full text search built from first principles on object storage fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Speaker 2:You're right. Built by Shopify alum, and we have a current Shopify, not an alum. We have Harley back with Back. Kevin from Tacovas in the restroom waiting room. Now they're here There
Speaker 1:he is.
Speaker 2:In the TVP at Ultradome.
Speaker 1:Sorry. Don't mind if I don't mind if I kick
Speaker 2:my put my
Speaker 1:boots up on the table.
Speaker 2:Don't mind if I do, partner.
Speaker 9:I don't if I can reach that
Speaker 2:high.
Speaker 5:This is
Speaker 2:actually the second pair of Tacovas I have. I somebody, a a very nice, enterprising, young man who now works for us came all the way to Los Angeles to interview me, and I think he'd interviewed you or someone from Tecovas because he brought me a pair of Tecovas. And I was like, are you guys sponsored by Tecovas? He's like, no. I just like giving them as gifts to people, and it made a really big impression.
Speaker 2:I wore them at a wedding in Mexico. It was fantastic.
Speaker 1:And we gave some Tecovas to a to a guest and and friend of the show recently, Dylan Patel. Oh, yeah. A friend of ours is one of the top analysts in the semiconductor space. So he's always going around always going around to different data centers Spreading
Speaker 5:the word.
Speaker 1:In the back of pickup trucks. And so we said, you should be wearing Tecovas when you're out on the road.
Speaker 6:Kevin, your work is done here.
Speaker 3:You should
Speaker 6:just you should just Great. Log off now.
Speaker 9:At this point. That's great.
Speaker 2:No. I just actually love it. But, yes, how how is the day going? Give us the update on your side. What's the latest?
Speaker 1:And you guys in the Austin store. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:1PM Pacific. Yeah. 4PM eastern.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I'm here in Austin South Congress, which is one of our flagship stores, Holly's actually in New York, and our SoHo store.
Speaker 6:So the SoHo store right now is packed.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:It's insane, Kevin. You'd be so impressed. It's amazing here.
Speaker 9:I I was actually looking around going, I don't know if we can do a live interview in here with how crowded it actually is. So Yeah. Hopefully, it sounds okay. But, yeah, we've been doing great. We've actually got a line of about 50 people still outside the door.
Speaker 9:We've had that since we've opened this morning. Just a constant stream of traffic, and things have been going just fantastic for us. We're having great sales online, great selling on all our stores. It's a it's a great Black Friday so far.
Speaker 6:You'll be happy to know that Chanel is right across the street, and your line here at the Tacovas in Soho is longer than the Chanel line across the street. I don't know what that means. I don't know if Harley. But I just like just to say, like, Chanel is not on Shopify.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I knew you were gonna say this.
Speaker 1:Yes. Correlation causation, guys.
Speaker 2:Ridiculous. That is ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Well, Kevin Kevin, it's it's great. How how did you guys did how did you guys first meet? Did was was Har were you guys were born on Shopify, or did Harley bang down your door and
Speaker 2:shame you publicly in getting on?
Speaker 9:So it's been I've been on Shopify for almost ten years now. Wow. And I've definitely, I guess, grown up grown up on Shopify. But actually, the first time that Harley and I did something together, don't know if you remember, but he he basically said that he he wanted me to do a little fireside chat with him in front of a top 100 Shopify employees on a retreat they were having. And he wanted me to sit tell them, how Shopify sucks.
Speaker 12:And I
Speaker 9:I told Harley, I'm in. Do I only get an hour?
Speaker 2:You know? This is, I don't know,
Speaker 9:four or five years ago. And so it was great. It was a great opportunity to get close with all the product leaders at Shopify and really talk about some things, you know, that we have on the outside. And just was an awesome experience to to get more embedded with that too.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. You know, I I'm sure you guys have this also. I'm sure there's some, like, advertiser partners that you guys have that they're constantly just giving you great feedback. That's Kevin for Shopify. Kevin will text me at, like, Saturday night at 11:00 and say, I have an idea about subscriptions.
Speaker 6:It may have nothing to do with Takovas, but there's constantly this, like, incredible, you know, feedback loop. The one thing I will say that Kevin's quite modest, so I'm gonna say it for him. You guys remember that era of, like, retail where, for some reason, every store for a while had, like, a cafe and then eventually had, like, a DJ booth?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, every store had it. And you kinda went in there and you're like, this doesn't feel right. It feels inauthentic. Mhmm. Takobis is kinda the opposite of that.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. For some reason, and I I think, like, they're very intentional about it. Like, I'm sitting at the bar right now where there's, like, literally bourbon beer being served to all these people to get them drunk so they buy more boots and cowboy hats. It it feels so authentic here. There is this, like, about the brand that makes makes them Yeah.
Speaker 6:The way that they handle themselves, the way that they build their stores, there is a certain thing that they do that I think is exceptional. Actually, I think, like, I and we're joking about Chanel, but, like, I think Chanel, like, lost a little bit of that. I think, you know, a lot of the luxury retailers wanted to, you know, try to expand that.
Speaker 2:I don't know how hard you go on Chanel because they're gonna come on Shopify. Next year, you're gonna be here being like, Chanel is is back.
Speaker 1:They are
Speaker 2:They they never met had a made a misstep in their life. Alright. Stop with Chanel.
Speaker 9:Right. And and just to piggyback on that, that's that's a mindset we have here called Radical Hospitality.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 9:we are always looking for ways to kinda better serve our customers. We do have open bars in all of our retail stores. I'm also sitting here at the Austin bar
Speaker 6:That's great.
Speaker 9:Drinking the last of this.
Speaker 2:How we
Speaker 9:do branding and customizations is actually we have branding irons
Speaker 2:Branding irons.
Speaker 9:In the store with blow torches. Yeah. And we will heat those branding irons up and kinda stamp the boots right there. We've got a boot shine station as well. And so really trying to create moments for people to come into the store even if they're not looking to buy and just hang out Yeah.
Speaker 9:And just create kind of an awesome experience from there.
Speaker 1:Thing I'm most curious about is, like, how, like, how do you how do you view your role as CTO of a of a retail brand when you're powered by infrastructure like Shopify? We were talking with Harley earlier. I think a lot of CTOs of some legacy brands would say like, no. I'm gonna own the full stack. That's my job.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna let it go.
Speaker 6:Kevin, how much mean, is Kevin's favorite topic. Let's go. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I figured because there's so much there's so much more that you can do as a technical leader that's not just like the core, like, commerce engine. You there's so much more that sits on top of that when he thinks that he can optimize, marketing, etcetera. So but I'm curious how you you view it.
Speaker 9:Yeah. There's no reason at this point, certainly, you need to have a completely custom from the ground up built tech stack. I am I'm almost looking at it as a I'm like the conductor of a symphony or an orchestra, you know, trying to bring together a bunch of different puzzle pieces and, you know, operate at a at a higher level. You know, we have obviously Shopify as our commerce platform. We have RFID deployed in all of our stores.
Speaker 9:We have email and text messaging and advertising and data feeds and AI now that we need to plug into different parts of the organization. Our retail business is absolutely taking off, and so there's a bunch of interesting kind of retail physical tech technology challenges that are out there to solve. So I'm certainly thinking bigger picture. I don't wanna be standing at my own commerce stack and I'd be Farhan handle all of those problems, and I stand on top of his shoulders on days like today and make sure that we're operating at, you know, the best efficiency possible.
Speaker 1:How much just how much
Speaker 2:oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:Sorry. I gonna say, can you tell us how today's going for you?
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's going great. We have set multiple records in terms of orders per hour. I think we're on our sixth straight hour of breaking that record there.
Speaker 1:Six straight hours.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Which is fantastic. Obviously, Black Friday is always our biggest day of the year, and we're seeing some fantastic growth year over year. And everything's running great for Honda. Great job with systems on his side.
Speaker 1:You don't keep the the notifications on the push notifications on the Shopify app anymore? When did you
Speaker 9:I mean,
Speaker 2:I had
Speaker 9:to turn those off, like, nine and a half years ago. Just It's been a long time since I had the little the bell on my phone going off there.
Speaker 1:Where where are you getting leverage from AI on the engineering side? Are you using to spin up landing pages faster? Like, where where is the where are you getting an edge there? How Yeah.
Speaker 9:We're we're actually we're actually doing exactly that. My entire engineering team also is using Cursor and Clod and a few different tools to to be more efficient on that front. We also just deployed a tool here in retail called Invent AI, and it's designed to optimize all of our retail inventory for all of our weekly transfer orders and replenishments that we need to do to all of our retail stores. So we're stealing a bunch of things for us that used to take three or four people a couple of days to bring together in spreadsheets now at our scale, and we've completely optimized that now with an AI system that we've been seeing some great leverage on here as we went at the holidays.
Speaker 1:So What about
Speaker 9:customer service? What what yeah.
Speaker 2:What about customer service? Have you because I feel like there's the natural progression of, you know, you have some knowledge base, then you have a whole bunch of back and forth in emails, like smart email responses. What are you doing there?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Our CX team our CX team has been working hard on our AI assistant agent on the website. Our ticket volume that actually is making to humans is down significantly year over year. Our CX team and our Black Friday channel is actually, hey. Things are going really smooth
Speaker 2:this year.
Speaker 4:That's great.
Speaker 9:And part of that's just because we've able to offload a bunch of those requests directly to that agent. And so that's been super valuable for that team to be lean and efficient during our biggest time of year here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:What's your if if you can share this, what's your what's your biggest store by volume?
Speaker 9:I'm sitting in it. Here also, South Congress is definitely our biggest store. Nashville will give it a run for its money depending on the day, depending on the country music concert that might be going on. But And, yeah, our flagship here in Austin is is our is our largest store.
Speaker 1:And is it is it twice is it, like, twice as much from a gross revenue standpoint to say, like, Manhattan, or or is it is it closer to
Speaker 9:That's a good question. Yeah. So SoHo, we've been we've only been open for about three months now Okay. In SoHo. So that's still a relatively new market for us as we're growing and investing kind of up into the Northeast here of the country, and we're super excited about that SoHo store.
Speaker 9:It's an incredible and honestly, I think it's probably our our our best store we ever built. And we've had taken the the best store.
Speaker 6:In here. Like, the deep floorboards, for example, Lee, like, it is really spectacular. Can you actually talk about what your issue with opening these stores and, like, the free bar issue? Because I I think I think the boys would love to hear, like, that issue.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I can't actually say that we have alcohol in every store, and there are some menus that are slightly curated in certain markets because we actually run into issues with certain city councils and kinda legalities in that area where they don't really have, like, a license for a retail store to offer hospitality, liquor, and a shopping experience without food also being served. And so we've had to, like, get creative in some cases. We've had to actually spend some time with different city councils in other cases. And it's just
Speaker 1:Let me explain how we do things around this retail store.
Speaker 3:Well, it's
Speaker 6:just the reason I love that story is because the, like, the the the genius of of Tacos and and business models like this is that the traditional kind of city councils, they can't put them into any box. They don't know what to call them. Like, the traditional, like, it's a store or it's a place to hang or it's a saloon or it's a place to come and just, like, you know, get get your, get your boot shine. Like, they can figure out what they are, and I think that's I think business models that are difficult to explain in that way, usually the ones that are most interesting.
Speaker 9:Yep.
Speaker 1:What's what's been your guys' policy around using AI on the on the content side? Any any strong opinions or kind of guidelines that you've been following? We've been asking some other other founders like That's
Speaker 9:a good question. We we have not gotten to the point where we have deployed any AI produced content into any of our ads for free. And we certainly used it to help brainstorm and come up with ideas of how
Speaker 1:things would
Speaker 9:look or, you know, get some some storyboards or things like that. We haven't gone all the way off, like, the Coca Cola whales here, and we have, a weird AI ad. That's that's not that's not something that we we wanna get to right now. We think the ads that we have right now are fantastic. We've actually got an ad that's probably airing right now in the jewelry during tech game.
Speaker 9:We've got an ad tonight in the Texas Tech event end games. And those ads, like, have storytelling elements to them. They're super gritty. They fit real naturally into, like, Landman and Yellowstone and some of the other big commercial brands that we're sponsoring and being a part of. And we we are we couldn't be more happier with what we're doing right now from a creative perspective.
Speaker 1:I'm curious. How how much is counterfeiting an issue for you guys? Because we are now dealing with counterfeiting. We just saw this morning somebody included a TBPN merch in a gift guide that they were doing that's not we don't we haven't sold we haven't sold any merch ourselves, but people are making counterfeit goods. I'm sure you guys have have a bunch of issues with that, but I wonder what the approach is.
Speaker 9:I mean, I feel like I need to knock on wood right now. It's not a huge problem we're dealing with physically. We do see it more digitally with, rip off sites and scam sites that kinda pop up around the web and even the dark web. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And so we've got a partner named Bolster who helps monitor those kinda site developments in real time. They also help issue takedown notices and bring those things down as fast as possible. And, really, since we we probably start using that tool now three years ago, and it's something that I I don't really even have to think about too much now because it's just kinda up and running and and and serving as our frontline defense.
Speaker 1:That's great. We we probably need to sign up for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We need to
Speaker 6:sign talk a little bit about sort of this beat like, you guys are how many stores do you have now?
Speaker 9:45? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:See, the
Speaker 6:the the pace the pay I mean, that's unbelievable. The pace you guys are opening right now is kind of unbelievable. Can you talk a bit about how you the relationship you have? Like, I I think it'd be valuable for for, those listening and watching. Just just how you think about, like, channels and channel like, you know, traditionally, you think of channel conflict.
Speaker 6:Online's hurting offline. With cowboy boots, you kinda wanna go into the store first to try it on, but subsequent purchases maybe can be done online. You have a very I I think a really great way to kinda think about that and how you think about expansion. Can you talk about how when you sit around and you think about where to go, how to expand, what what channels are producing, how you guys look at all that?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Totally. So, know, we started only as d two c. So we're website only for five or six years. And we got into retail, I think, like, it was December before COVID, which is a terrible time to start retail business.
Speaker 9:And basically, opened eight stores and immediately closed them. Wow. But we kinda survived. We survived, obviously, that year and it it came back super super strong from that. You you mentioned cowboy boots.
Speaker 9:It's a very unique first time purchase for someone who has never purchased a cowboy boots before and can even be slightly intimidating. And so having a brick and mortar retail store to come in and get that experience, get that footing, kinda understand how that boot is supposed to feel when you're wearing it is a massive unlock for us as a brand. Today, our retail business is larger than our ecom business. Both are super healthy, but retail is actually scaling even faster. So we're seeing fantastic results here.
Speaker 9:We actually see when we open a new retail store in a new market, we may actually see ecom dip just slightly when that store opens because there's so many customers who wanted to go to the store because they've been waiting so long to actually have that experience in real life, which is, I think, a unique attribute of ours. Obviously, the whole the whole market lifts over time, which is great. And then we've also just recently started partnering with with specific wholesalers. So we see a a great opportunity to go outside just of our direct channels and meet the customer where they're at. Cowboy Boots has been around for a hundred and fifty years, and there's lots of great independent Western dealers out there that we're excited to get our product into.
Speaker 9:And we certainly don't look at it as as channel conflict. But if we can get someone in a cowboy boot, we don't care what channel it comes from, and we know over time we're gonna lift the whole market. So
Speaker 6:And are are taking market share from anyone? Are you taking market share from a different company, or is it, like, non consumption you're competing with?
Speaker 9:I mean, I don't wanna talk bad about anybody, Harley, but there's only one line here today on South Congress. But there are multiple boot shops here the street.
Speaker 6:Shockingly in SoHo, there's not that many boot shops. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Our store Outstar is the most crowded.
Speaker 1:What about what about international? Are are you guys thinking about like, what country do you think will buy more cow or could could come close to buying cowboy boots at at the level that Americans can't?
Speaker 9:That's a good question. We still have not tapped international at all. So we are still United States only, and still we think we have a a very large greenfield internationally. If you look at markets like Canada and Australia and Brazil and Mexico and Spain, there's Germany even has a has a has a pretty big TAM there. So we think there's a great opportunity for us to continue to expand internationally, but we also wanna do it in a thoughtful way.
Speaker 9:We wanna do it a profitable way and make sure that, you know, it's the right decision for us to go that direction on the weekends.
Speaker 1:Makes a lot of sense. Got anything else?
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for
Speaker 1:taking the time. You you seem like you're just cruising through.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's carrying the world.
Speaker 6:Is like he's steady Eddie. He you know,
Speaker 1:seems like the dude
Speaker 6:is getting things crazy. But Throw
Speaker 1:the boots on the desk and just enjoy the rest of
Speaker 5:the day.
Speaker 2:CTO who's on Shopify. Like, it's not going fast.
Speaker 9:It's this is my Harley, this is my tenth Black Friday on Shopify. Wow. It's you know, we've come a long way, and things are going really well.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. This is my
Speaker 6:sixteenth Black Friday. Know. I know. Almost half my life. This is great.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Honestly, I'm not just saying this, Kevin, because you're on the call, but, like, you'd be so proud of the store. The staff here are doing amazing. You can feel the energy. People are just hanging out in the front.
Speaker 6:There are people that are having, you know, their their their shoes, purse their boots personalized. You got a lineup of people drinking bourbon here. You'd like as from one entrepreneur to another, man, like, you should be really proud of this.
Speaker 9:K. Last question. I got
Speaker 1:one more question for you. You gotta ask. What's the biggest fish you've ever caught, Kevin?
Speaker 9:You know, I I I heard the last question here if you asked that. I mean, I think I probably caught maybe, like, a five pound catfish.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. Catfish. Nothing wrong with that. That's on brand catfish. We actually
Speaker 4:Did you
Speaker 5:eat the
Speaker 2:catfish? I feel like you could catch it.
Speaker 9:It it was a catch and release Catch and release. Situation. Okay.
Speaker 1:There you go. First cut of fish.
Speaker 9:It and put it back.
Speaker 2:That was the
Speaker 1:first half of this. VPN. Need stop putting
Speaker 2:them up on the wall when we Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're, man. The fishing wall
Speaker 2:over here. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us on such a busy day. Happy Black Friday. I Yeah. Appreciate you.
Speaker 2:I appreciate your wonderful boots. Cheers. See you soon. Cheers.
Speaker 9:See you, Malcolm. Cheers.
Speaker 2:See you soon. Look at that.
Speaker 1:Look that. A new record.
Speaker 2:$4,200,000 in sales every minute. Right? Isn't that it?
Speaker 1:It's every minute.
Speaker 2:Millions per minute. Wow. That is a a fantastic amount. Well, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing and they're trusted by millions.
Speaker 2:Apparently, someone found a company that might be slightly worse at naming than OpenAI. I believe this is Samsung. Have you seen this? So they have a q five max plus, q five pro plus, q five pro, q seven max, max plus, max pro ultra. Have you seen these?
Speaker 2:I think these are different phones. It really makes you appreciate how how hard Apple works to create, like, a logical flow between all of the different phones. Like like, it really shows you that when you're like a massive company, it's so easy for it to get away from you. Because you're like, oh, yeah. There'd be like massive demand for like a mini pro version.
Speaker 2:And you're like, okay. Yeah. Let's do it. Whatever. Let's green light it.
Speaker 2:And then you wake up and you realize you have 75 different, permutations. And that's what's, that's what people
Speaker 1:Scale.
Speaker 2:Going. Alright. This, Hermes versus gap.com. I thought it was somewhat relevant to Black Friday. Hermes is pulling 25,000,000 visits, I guess, per month or, I guess, from August to October.
Speaker 2:So for that quarter, 25,000,000. Gap, 200,000,000. So Gap, 10 times the viewership, basically, or the visits than Hermes. And, of course, people are are this is in reaction to the difference between Claude and Perplexity in the App Store. Claude has 33,005 star reviews.
Speaker 2:Perplexity has 370,005 star reviews. He's number 14 in productivity. Pretty remarkable results from Perplexity. I think a lot of this has to do with the pricing strategy. I think there's much there's a lot more to the free tier of Perplexity, whereas I was even just trying to, like, randomly pull up Claude just to run a quick test.
Speaker 2:And, like, it immediately before it it hit me with a with a, like, a sign in page before you could even fire off a single prompt. Like, they mean business.
Speaker 1:A lot of people use Perplexity. A lot of
Speaker 2:people use Perplexity, and there's a lot of channel partnerships. Credit
Speaker 1:to Perplexity as much as ChatGBT as ChatGBT is much AI to most people out there, there's a lot of people where Perplexity is AI to them.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 1:They've done a really good job. Yeah. We'll see we'll see how how they can, continue to to hold on and and scale that user base
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Over time.
Speaker 2:Well, let before we move on, let me tell you about numeral.com. Let numeral worry about sales tax and BAT compliance. Compliance is handled so you can focus on growth. I wanted to share a potential gift for the AI lover in your life. The Welch Labs illustrated guide to AI, if you preorder on or before December 15, it'll ship.
Speaker 1:Lot of graphs in here.
Speaker 2:Lot of graphs. I I thought this was interesting. I I've seen this person on on YouTube and just seems like a fun, like, interesting book. I like these types of books. It's like almost a textbook, but a lot of interesting graphs just documenting some of the AI things.
Speaker 2:Also, I mean, if you need if you need books, Stripe Press. I mean, you really can't go wrong. There's so many beautiful books there. So many interesting books about technology.
Speaker 1:Put some Stripe Press under the Christmas tree.
Speaker 2:I would agree. I think that's that's the way to do it. Else? What else is
Speaker 1:We have this this was crazy. You know, we covered Giant Slalom, the FBI operation, to find Ryan Wedding. Yeah. They they they were able to capture his Mercedes a 2002 Mercedes CLK Yeah. GTR.
Speaker 2:And I put this in here because I thought it was a good gift idea.
Speaker 1:I know. Are they gonna auction this off? Just get a
Speaker 2:2002 The
Speaker 1:trouble is if if you're one the world's most wanted men, it's kinda hard to be whipping around a Mercedes CLK GTR.
Speaker 2:It's gonna
Speaker 1:turn some heads. You could you could make your own track. Wound up turning Track it.
Speaker 2:Police heads. It is a massive, massive car. The back of this car is just remarkably long. Just what what an exquisite exquisite vehicle. I love it.
Speaker 2:I this this feels like an under discussed you know, the the Carrera GT gets a lot of a lot of love. The f 40, LaFerrari Enzo, like the the those get a lot. This is, it blends in almost like too much. But, I mean, obviously, there are some people that, you know, has a ton of fans. But very, very, very cool.
Speaker 2:Well, if you, you know, if you're not living a life of crime, you gotta automate compliance and security on Vanta. It's a leading AI trust management platform. Look at that stinger proof Vanta.
Speaker 1:Stinger. New Vanta stinger.
Speaker 2:Cath Koravec says, when my husband asks How Many Amazon Packages Are Still On The Way. It's a quick clip from meme from Ilya.
Speaker 1:There were so many good moments in this.
Speaker 2:Because the answer to that question will reveal itself. I think there will be lots of possible answers. You know, people were kind of dunking on Ilya for for having this, like, vague response to Dwarkesh asking him how will SSI make money. And I was just like, this is the most like, this is this is not a bad answer. This is the perfect answer because he literally did this.
Speaker 2:He went to OpenAI. For ten years, they just worked on research and then wound up with a massive consumer business. They wound up with a consumer tech company that that makes $20,000,000,000 a year in revenue.
Speaker 1:Did you did you And so his answers, though, is he they will likely release a product before
Speaker 2:People were saying that. I don't know. I no. I don't think so. I think he's actually just gonna do the OpenAI thing again.
Speaker 2:He did it in OpenAI. People are like, how could he possibly be so vague that, like, you know, he's he's vague posting, vague podcasting thinking that, like, the answer will reveal itself. It's like, well, that's exactly what happened the last time he was in this in this role. He was in the role of, hey. Go research.
Speaker 2:You have basically an unlimited budget more or less because there's just
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Nonprofit dollars coming in. You can pay the bills. You're gonna keep scaling up, doing experiments, do whatever. And then it's and and the last possible second, once he'd done a lot of good AI research, you know, someone came in and said, hey. Why don't we, like, wrap a chat box around that and put it on the Internet?
Speaker 2:And then boom. $20,000,000,000 business. And so, like, for him to to be saying, like, yeah. We're gonna run it back. It seems very logical to me.
Speaker 2:It seems like, yeah, that's a great plan. Although, you know, $36,000,000,000 valuation, I'm sure that there is there are some reasons why people are like, oh, this is capital incineration, blah blah blah. But I don't think it's that crazy given that he literally just did this.
Speaker 1:If you need a place to park $3,000,000,000
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 1:In AI, I think it's a I think it's a as part of a basket
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Of companies. I think it's a
Speaker 2:I mean, it's certainly like a venture style risk. Like, it's like, it's it could be a zero. But just like, if anyone else was giving that pitch of like, the oh, we don't know how we'll make money, blah blah blah, I'd be like, red flag. But, like, not with Ilya. Like, Ilya is the one person who's extremely qualified to say, we do a bunch of research, and then we figure out how to monetize it later, and it actually works because it worked the last time.
Speaker 1:Yep. Well Did you know about this movie Battle Royale from Japan? Tim Sweeney is posting about it.
Speaker 2:I yes. I I I haven't seen it, but I'm familiar.
Speaker 1:Battle Royale movie from Japan. Yes. It inspired movies like Hunger Games and games like PUBG and Fort
Speaker 2:I've played PUBG. I've played a little bit of Fortnite. Player unknown. Yeah. Battle royale.
Speaker 2:And then and then it was adapted into, the Hunger Games, of course. And and, but I like that Quentin Tarantino, this post from variety says Quentin Tarantino starts to reveal his 20 best movies of the twenty first century. This is how you reveal a list. This is what they should do with the Midas list. It should be like, they're starting to reveal it.
Speaker 2:He's he didn't tell the top 20. He just said, here's nine here's 11 through 20. You'll have to tune in next time to my next variety article.
Speaker 1:I like it.
Speaker 2:It's really good. It's a
Speaker 1:good point.
Speaker 2:Because now I'm like, well, what's his number one? I gotta know. And he'll be like, okay. Number 10. Number nine.
Speaker 2:It's a it it's a great way of keeping somebody on the hook. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together. Our next guest is already in the restroom waiting room.
Speaker 2:We have Nish. Right? My dear friend. Your dear friend. I think we ran into each other.
Speaker 2:Did we run into each other in Nobu? How you doing?
Speaker 1:Yes. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 2:What's up?
Speaker 13:What's up, guys?
Speaker 1:How you doing?
Speaker 13:Dude, good. Good.
Speaker 1:How locked in are you how locked in are you right now? The last twenty four hours?
Speaker 13:This is it, man. This is the Super Bowl, dude. So, like, you know, it's like, no sleep. It really is.
Speaker 1:Okay. You did did did you really not sleep last night? Did you get a couple hours
Speaker 13:at least? Joking. Thankfully, we have a team that does this kind of stuff now, so it's not that bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, I I mean, some companies, it's like January 1 is their Super Bowl because it's like people are getting in shape, new year, new you. Other stuff heavily gift driven. So We have really some big, heavy discount driven. Like, where where
Speaker 1:do you sit on the How much bigger is q one than q four for you guys? Yeah.
Speaker 13:Q one is always bigger than q four. It's the health and wellness space. So, like, they call Q 1 really Q five. And so everyone's, like, you know, ramping up towards q one January to watch the easier Super Bowl for sure. But this weekend is still gonna be a really, really large weekend.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:And, like, like, the the these next four days, people are gonna be like, the buying intent is just so high. So everyone is just really excited to purchase regardless. But even even after this, December is usually a little bit of a lull in the health and wellness space, but you're still spending and building awareness. And then q one is just like, you know, that's where you're making as much money as possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Take us through the product set for
Speaker 1:this Yeah. Before before give an give an intro on yourself and the company. I I we're we're close friends. I don't wanna I don't wanna skip over it for the for the audience. So, yeah, introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Hey, guys. My name is Nish. I'm one of the cofounders of a company called Array. I started the company with my wife, and we're basically a targeted supplements for unsexy problems.
Speaker 13:So we started the company five years ago. Our hero product is bloat in the digestive health kind of category. And since then, we have expanded across multiple women's health problems, so metabolic health, sports performance, digestive health. And we we have very few SKUs, but we do, you know, 9 figures of revenue of as a business, and we are five years old. So That's fair.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Let's do it.
Speaker 1:Oh, well, there we go. You guys have you raised one one round back in the day.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Raised like a really small, like, couple million dollars, super small seed round maybe four three years ago, something like that. Yeah. We've been profitable since.
Speaker 1:Insane. What's been the what's been the strategy this year? I feel like other categories in in e comm have had, like, more volatility this year just, like, given the the trade war and all that stuff. But but how's it been so far?
Speaker 13:No. Okay. So the first half of this year was completely different than the second half of the year. So the first half, something about just buying sentiment was a lot better. And so the way you're able to grow these consumer businesses and just marketing in general was really efficient, really strong growth.
Speaker 13:Second half of the year has been really interesting. Something has changed in just, like, macro environment where people are not spending as much money just buying things online anymore. And so I've noticed this across the board. If you look at, like, macro 10 data, look at even retail category data, just customer acquisition costs have really, really gone up. Med acquisition costs have really gone up.
Speaker 13:Brand is still growing, but it's just harder than it was in the first part of the year. That's for sure, Jordy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so to counteract that, you guys are launching new products. You launched Target. Walk us through that.
Speaker 13:Yeah. So for us, you know, launching new products has always been a really big part of the strategy. I think innovation is so important because without innovation, you just can't really build the company, and you you you just kind of die. So we're always launching new products, but we try to launch very few products that have a really large TAM. And so this year, we launched a tone tone gummy, which is basically creatine that was built in a form factor and has certain additional ingredients that is, like, really geared towards women.
Speaker 13:And so a lot of women are, like, so scared of taking creatine and so scared of bulking up. And so we're like, let's make this more approachable for them. That was, like, a really strong product for us. We have another clear protein product in the protein category. Protein's been, like, going crazy this year.
Speaker 13:So that was, like, that was another really big launch. We have a clear clear protein with the last flight sentence, so that did really well. And and then more recently, it was a product line extension. We have a really strong m b one metabolic health product, and so we did that as well. But the biggest thing for us is we've been expanding heavily into retail just because that's where the next kind of phase of growth comes from.
Speaker 13:So we've went nationwide through Target, nationwide as Sprouts. Those two are really, really
Speaker 7:big, yeah,
Speaker 13:big, big launches. No. It's been it's been a crazy year, man. Crazy year.
Speaker 1:Really good. What about what about online channels? How are things on TikTok Shop? I know we were in The Alps in December, January. And you said it was insane at that point.
Speaker 1:Has it kept up? I know that they kind of, subsidized demand on TikTok shop, or that's that's been my understanding of it. Has that continued? How are you thinking about it as part of this acquisition that's going on, all that stuff?
Speaker 13:TikTok is actually pretty insane. So TikTok Shop is this crazy platform where you can go from doing nothing to doing, you know, multimillion dollars in a month in, like, three months. And so that's what that's what happened to us. When we're in the Alps Jewelry, like, we were just ramping up, by March, we were doing 7 figures per month per month just on TikTok shop. Wow.
Speaker 13:And so that was like a it it was really, really cool, really fun. But what's crazy about it is the amount of investment that you need to get that going is just a lot. So TikTok is interesting because you get this virality. You get this insane amount of impression share, and you're really banking on the halo effect it has on other channels. So when TikTok goes viral, you're not really making any money in TikTok, but you're making money in Amazon, in retail, and even a spillover effect on B2C, and that's where you're seeing the results.
Speaker 13:So the thing about that is you do it, you know you're not gonna make a lot of money, but you gotta, like, staff up and get really complex on, like, incrementality and just your overall marketing strategy and just getting really good at measurement so you know where you're making money. But TikTok shop is really interesting because it's actually changed Black Friday behavior quite a bit. It's in a it's in a position where it's a constant deal seeking, like, throughout the twelve months of the year because they have so many sales and so many promos happening all the time. And so consumers on TikTok shop are like, okay. I'm just gonna go look for the best deal, and I'm just gonna go look for whatever creators are telling me are the best product but also the best value.
Speaker 13:And so it's, like, really changed things because, you know, you really don't wanna be on sale all the time, but you kind of have to be if you wanna play competitively on that platform. But it's still really interesting because you can you you you can have certain products that are, like, really meant for TikTok shop, other products that you're kind of on your DTC, and you're cross selling, upselling. But it's a it's a strong platform. Like, it won't once it gets going, you there's no denying the halo effect it has on everything else. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Makes a lot of sense. How are you navigating growth and and profitability? I know you've been generally profitable for a while now, but you still have your foot on the gas from a from a growth standpoint.
Speaker 13:What's that like? I I think, like, right now, we've been profitability first more than more than growth. And so we've just been like, okay. No matter what, even on the BSCM, even we're doing, like, these large sales and whatnot, like, we're not gonna go above a number if you're gonna become unprofitable. Now, obviously, that profitability takes into account a lot of, like, LTV and as the mechanics on, okay, we don't mind losing money as long as you're sure that we'll make money back within whatever, you know, one, two, three month payback period.
Speaker 13:So we'll have that type of mass and give the best possible kind of value to the consumer. So we've still been very healthy, like, LTV on that note, but it's interesting. I mean, we've been expanding so much in retail and all that kind of stuff. You just need money to grow that machine, and you just need to market a lot more. So there's a world where regardless of how profitable you are, just the pure dollars needed to, you know, market
Speaker 1:Scale and the retail.
Speaker 7:Target. You just
Speaker 13:you just really money for that. So we're we're considering, okay, you know, how much do we need increase that marketing budget by maybe reducing profitability even more and just, like, spending more because it's what you need to get successful. There's a flywheel effect that will take in later, so I'm sure this might be made later on that. But right now, we have profitability first, but I think we'll maybe be more lenient on that even going into next year just because you wanna grow the business more, especially with the channel increasing.
Speaker 1:Do you do you track revenue revenue per employee? We had we had David, not David. We had Peter. Peter Peter
Speaker 2:from David.
Speaker 1:Peter Protein.
Speaker 6:Peter Protein. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:From David. He he was saying, you know, he looks to keep, like, a couple couple million of revenue per employee. Is that something that you think about at all or just kind of a vanity metric?
Speaker 13:Yeah. We do, actually. We do. We're probably, like, one of the leanest. I think we're sitting anywhere at, like, somewhere in the 2 to $3,000,000 range on revenue per employee.
Speaker 13:So, like, that's really yeah. It's been it's been really good. Yeah. Maybe a bit of fueling though, but yeah.
Speaker 1:It's incredible. I've I've had a front row seat to to watching, Sif and Nish build a ray and and, just absolute absolute monsters. Some someday you'll go on, like, a nice podcast tour victory lap when when it's all when it's all over. But
Speaker 7:Once the once
Speaker 9:the company's sold.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Awesome, dude. Well, thank you thank you for taking the time out of the day. Say hi to Sif and the whole team. And I will.
Speaker 1:I'll see you soon.
Speaker 13:Thanks, guys. See you soon, Gavin.
Speaker 2:Have one. Cheers. Next guest is already in the newsroom waiting room. What what you got
Speaker 1:for me? I was just gonna say, Nish is just the the epitome of golden retriever matching. He's he's an absolute animal.
Speaker 2:Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. We will
Speaker 1:Next up.
Speaker 2:Take it over to Figs. I believe we are inside of a store.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:Is this a virtual backdrop, or are you actually in the store right
Speaker 6:now?
Speaker 2:I'm so confused.
Speaker 4:I am actually in the store.
Speaker 2:Okay. Amazing.
Speaker 4:We're at our brand new store, on Upper East Side here in New York City, and we just opened. Congratulations. Amazing.
Speaker 1:Good timing. Hit the gong for the story of there we go.
Speaker 4:Love it.
Speaker 1:What what is, like, what is Black Friday like in your category? I'm assuming a lot of your a lot of your consumers are like it's a normal workday. Is that true? How how do you guys approach the holiday?
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's exactly right. At FIG's, you know, we are building a brand exclusively for healthcare professionals. And many healthcare professionals, they're working the holidays. They were working all day yesterday, through Thanksgiving, and they're working, nights and weekends all the way through the New Year.
Speaker 4:And so for us, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, it's really a moment for us to show up for them. These are the people that are showing up for all of us. And so we really approach this moment as a moment of gratitude and a moment to give back to, our community.
Speaker 2:How are you positioning gifting the product? I can see, you know, it is a professional, outfit and but it's also a product that people love. And so if your family member gives it to you, they're kind of giving you more work, but, also, it's a very nice thing to give. So how are you positioning, like, the the the marketing around who who should be participating in Black Friday? The gift giver or the or just the person who's shopping for themselves?
Speaker 4:Well, it's all of the above. I think, you know, everyone wants to thank all of the incredible health professionals in their life for for, you know, people that are being treated and cared for by health care professionals. And so it goes both ways. I think, you know, health care professionals are able to use this as a moment to stock up on their essentials and the uniforms that they need to wear every single day. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:But at the same time, things is a really premium brand. It's completely revolutionized the way health care professionals get dressed for work and the uniforms that they're wearing. And so it also is a really nice gift for, you know, someone to get another health care professional or, you know, to get the health care professional loved ones in your life. And so it really is all of the above, and I think it ties back to this, feeling of gratitude giving thanks to, you know, the most incredible people on this earth that are saving lives and carrying diseases. And so we position it both ways, both as a moment to stock up for yourself, but also as a moment to give back.
Speaker 2:What's the biggest, what was the biggest unlock this year from a marketing perspective? What was one campaign or strategy that you feel, like, as you look back on 2025, you feel like it went particularly well?
Speaker 4:Oh my gosh. We've had an epic year. It's been so awesome. And I think one of the things that I was reflecting on it with a moment like today, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, for us, it's not just about these moments. It's about how we show up twenty four seven, three six five for our health care community, who we call awesome humans.
Speaker 4:This year, we launched a year long campaign called Where Do You Wear Figs? And it talks about all of the places that health care professionals wear figs, which is literally everywhere. It's before their shift, after their shift. It's to work every day. And so we've had a series of chapters throughout the year celebrating women's month, celebrating nurses' week, most recently celebrating the holidays.
Speaker 4:And we've really shown the insights of what it's like to, you know, work within this industry and the space and all the different places where our brand shows up. And so I think what's so important on a moment like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is that, you know, you're building this brand equity and you're building this connection with your community throughout the year, and then that pays off in these in these big moments. And so showing up for them, listening to them, telling their stories throughout the year, which we've done with with our Where Do You Work? Big campaign has been really incredible for us, and this is just another moment to celebrate that.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations on all the progress on the epic year, and thank you so much for taking the time to Yeah.
Speaker 1:Thanks for bringing us bringing us into your new space.
Speaker 2:It looks amazing.
Speaker 1:Quite busy in there.
Speaker 4:Yes. It's packed. It's packed. We have nurses coming for hot cocoa and it's It's fun. It's been a really fun, really good day.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 4:Very cool.
Speaker 2:Well, good to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 4:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 9:Have a
Speaker 2:good rest of your day. Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. And let's go back to the timeline. The folks over at Deal were having some fun.
Speaker 2:Have you seen this? This is an interesting trend. Yeah. Have Karen Resource.
Speaker 1:HR on this strategy very well. They say, I noticed one employee wearing noise cancelling headphones, not earbuds. The big cushioned over ear kind that create a tiny personal universe. I asked if everything was alright. He said, yes.
Speaker 1:He's just trying to focus. You do this in the morning.
Speaker 2:I do. Block
Speaker 1:in. Your big earbuds. I told him we value focus, but isolation can misread as resistance to collaboration. He said he's literally sitting at his desk doing his job. I told him we track human presence, not just output.
Speaker 1:I he asked how presence is measured. I said imperfectly, which is why it's so important. Then I logged, quote, avoiding spontaneous culture building opportunities in his engagement profile. Ten ten million views.
Speaker 2:50,000 likes, and it's an ad for deal. And it's so interesting because it feels like it's part of this new trend. Like, there's that
Speaker 1:The European
Speaker 2:There's European VC guy who's really funny, who I believe is owned or or partnered with, like, a SOC two compliance competitor or or a company out there that does that, like a Vanta competitor. And they and it's just a very funny positioning of, like, these, like, owning these accounts. We also saw I think Polymarket bought Roz Alert for $500,000 that was leaked on the timeline today. And so there's, like, a whole bunch of interesting ways that companies are engaging with, like, different accounts, whether they're buying ones that are already existing or they're spinning up new ones. It just it it it feels like it's, like, part of the go direct story, but not entirely.
Speaker 2:You have to do it all on the founder's profile, but it's definitely blurring this line between, like, what's in house and outs and outsourced media, are they getting attention, what's marketing. I have a friend who has a has is a ad agency where he just buys, you know, ads for companies, and he set up an an AI based profile, like, years ago. Like, as soon as as soon as the AI dropped, like, it was not particularly good. It just has, an anonymous picture, like an AI generated image. And he posts just, like, here are the greatest ads in history every day.
Speaker 2:And so it's just, like, great ads. Yeah. And people will just they go viral all the time because they're just interesting ads, funny ads. And then it's just a funnel to do be top of funnel to just do lead gen on. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so there's all these different ways that that that companies are, like, plugging into, like, you know, social media these days. Very fascinating.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Another way to advertise is of course with adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. Our next guest is Brian from Aurora, your co founder. No way.
Speaker 2:Brian, how are doing? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 8:I'm doing great. How are you guys?
Speaker 2:We're doing fantastically.
Speaker 1:So great to have you. So great to see you. Do you get any sleep last night?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Got a little bit.
Speaker 2:America is not. Is a big
Speaker 1:day for
Speaker 2:Roar. Right? Introduce the product. Introduce the the progress, and then take us through what some of the expectations are for Black Friday.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So Aurora is a premium water filtration brand, primarily trying to build products that, you know, will extend people's lives and help people, get access to cleaner cleaner water. So we're effectively trying to build, like, the Dyson of water water filtration. So an entire ecosystem of products that, helps, you know, people get access to clean water wherever they are.
Speaker 1:And, first Black Friday, but not not, not your first Black Friday. Went through a ton of them. Maybe it'd be kind of interesting to hear, like, how how how Black Friday has changed even while you've been an ecommerce operator. You had a company, Love Your Melon, that that did many, many millions of dollars of revenue and and scaled profitably over close to a decade, I believe. So, yeah, I'd love to get a sense of, like, how how this day and and these kind of four days have changed, and then we can talk about Aurora.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Definitely. I think it's definitely changed quite a bit. I mean, I think this is, like, my twelfth Black Friday. But it used to be that Cyber Monday was really the day, and you kinda build everything up to that.
Speaker 8:And, you know, you could set budgets at 10x and things like that on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and you could just, you know, rip a ton of sales. Print. Yeah. But in today's day and age, you really have to build up the learning on those ads and you have to build a lot of that forward momentum really to maximize the potential of it. So I think now in today's day and age, it's really about obviously capturing the moment momentum.
Speaker 8:And so, you know, we did a couple of key things like, you know, having a product release, about two weeks ago and really using that as an opportunity to build a lot of lead gen and a lot of interest, around that leading up to up to this. So, yeah, we did a lot of things focused on the top of the funnel leading into this. It was our first, you know, first Black Friday, but it's a lot cheaper, obviously, to get eyeballs on your product when, you know, it's a month before. So we did a lot to to fill the funnel, then, you know,
Speaker 1:this And this is not a product, but it's it's less of, an impulse buy. I feel like is that correct? Like, if you're if you're buying a product to that you're gonna rely on for clean water for your family, like, you might just see an ad and immediately click through and buy, but you also might wanna learn about it over time. And I think top of funnel is, like, really important because of that.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So, you know, we allow people to find out what's in their water. They can go to our website. They can find out what's in their water, then they go through a whole series of, you know, emails and informational aspects, then to learn more about the aspects about our product. And so we pushed a lot of that leading up to this.
Speaker 8:But we also know that a lot of people have been looking at our products for quite a long time, and so we felt that it was important to do, you know, a discount for Black Friday just to allow more people to have access to cleaner water. And so that was, you know, ultimately the biggest decision behind it. And we've seen a lot of, you know, great response from from our customers and driven quite a bit of sales from it.
Speaker 1:What tactically on on Meta, what are what are kind of the risks? We were talking earlier about how, like, brands are setting budgets and then blowing through them either way faster than they intended or not as fast as they wanted to. What's been your approach there? And how how are you kind of where are you finding success?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think for us being, you know, as young of a brand as we are, you know, we've only we launched about a year ago. It was really focusing on just top of the funnel, and so really keeping a lot of that budget on prospecting and, you know, continuing to funnel in your best best ads into, the prospecting side of it, but, also making sure that we can come out of this and keep consistent, you know, consistent sales for the brand. And so really building up the learning earlier than we typically would instead of saving all of our best assets and pushing it out, you know, waiting for Black Friday or right when we start the sale. So I think we've done that, you know, fairly effectively so far.
Speaker 1:What what are you seeing other brands do in terms of just approaching this four days from Black Friday through Cyber Monday? Is it all just one continuous sale now, or does it make sense to be launching, like, different sales at different points? Like, what's best practices that you're seeing?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think consistency, definitely is best practice. I've done so many different ways over the over the past, whether it's free gifts with purchase, whether you've got different products releasing, whether you've got a better deal on Cyber Monday. And I think a lot of those things worked well in the past, but I think, in today's day and age, it's better to stay consistent with one sale. I think starting that a little bit before you know, a couple days before Black Friday so that you can build up the momentum, with those ads tactically, and then you don't have to decrease that spend because you don't have a big dip in overall volume.
Speaker 8:So you can kinda just consistently then scale that up, throughout, you know, Black Friday into Cyber Monday. And then, also, you get the lower CPMs starting that, you know, a couple days before Black Friday, then try to start it on Black Friday and experiencing those high CPMs out of the gate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then what about from a like, this is this is the first, like, real holiday season for Aurora and then the first kind of, like, new year cycle that a lot of health brands go through where the business is starting to be at a pretty meaningful scale, how do you do you think this is kind of like a lot of brands get the benefit of, they're either a gifting brand
Speaker 2:and Yeah.
Speaker 1:And or Or like, it feels like Roar
Speaker 2:a new health brand.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Roar feels like it's
Speaker 2:like Everyone's being split as we've talked to all the entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you're doing supplements, it's like people might buy this week
Speaker 2:This is gonna be the biggest thing for you.
Speaker 1:But January will be a lot bigger, whereas I feel like Exactly. I expect January to be be significantly bigger for Aurora, but really because the business is scaling so quickly, but it should be a big gifting product.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think, you know, we saw on, yesterday, like, a a large amount of organic sales of being Thanksgiving, and I think people go, oh, you know, wherever they go for Thanksgiving, and a lot of people tried out, you know, Aurora system at somebody else's house. I think we'll see something similar around, you know, Christmas, and the holidays. But I think going into, going into January, there's gonna be an entirely new demographic that kinda comes into the funnel that's focusing on their health again, and, I think it'll be a a big opportunity for us to capture that demand. We've also got some big partnerships that we're gonna be launching right at the beginning of the year around that as well.
Speaker 8:So, I think it'll all it'll all tie together, but I think, you know, there's an opportunity for both from a gifting perspective and, you know, the health and wellness forest leading in January.
Speaker 2:We'll close us out with a big number, which it is with a big number. What what can you share?
Speaker 8:This Black Friday, this Saturday, Monday, we should go over 20,000 systems sold for the year.
Speaker 1:There we go. We'll let people at home do
Speaker 2:the math. Lot of systems.
Speaker 1:Let thank you so much for taking
Speaker 2:the time
Speaker 1:to come head
Speaker 2:out on a busy day.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, watching you put on you and Charlie put on just an absolute, execution masterclass this year has been, been an honor. And, yeah, excited excited to see how the rest of today nets out.
Speaker 8:Well, we've got a great team, a lot of people around us. Thanks so much for having me on.
Speaker 2:Great. We'll talk to soon. Talk to one. 8sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception.
Speaker 2:Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. I got an 81. Quality was not quite right.
Speaker 1:How did
Speaker 2:I do? Thanksgiving. I feel like I did okay. But
Speaker 1:83.
Speaker 2:Oh, are you back in the house?
Speaker 1:I'm back.
Speaker 2:You're back. Okay. I wasn't sure how long the renovation was gonna happen. Congratulations. I'm glad it's over.
Speaker 2:Wait. What'd you get? 83?
Speaker 1:83.
Speaker 2:Oh. Wow. Came back with some With some authority. Well, we have we have Kat from AG one in the rooster. Welcome.
Speaker 2:Former guest. She's back. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It's such a busy busy day right after Thanksgiving. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 14:Great to see you.
Speaker 2:Since we last talked, what's new in your world? I I we've we've been we've been sort of bucketing brands. Okay. Someone's more of a you know, this is Black Friday. It's the most giftable Game Boy possible.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be under the Christmas tree. And then, David Protein. You know, sales are down 20% today. Gearing up for January New Year. Black
Speaker 1:Friday is not a huge focus
Speaker 12:for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you thinking about making the most out of today, Monday, the rest of the year, generally, at AG one?
Speaker 14:You know, I think of today twofold. One is today is a day to capture demand we've been building throughout the year. When I was hanging out with you guys, I think it was in June Yeah. We had just launched in Costco.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:We had not even launched our new flavors.
Speaker 2:That was the number one tip we learned from you. If you're in consumer packaged goods, just launch in Costco, win in Costco, and then you're good. That's the tip.
Speaker 14:It's been incredible. Yeah. Sure. But after that, we launched flavors for AG one. Mhmm.
Speaker 14:And we launched our first ever truly second brand and product with AGZ. So we went from one product to AGZ.
Speaker 2:I have it.
Speaker 14:And so today is about capturing the demand we've been building throughout the year with these product launches, investments in upgrading the formula, multiple human clinical trials, really bridging into retail and having multiple products. So as we market, as we invest, as people flood into market for what are typically offers, but still to shop, to make purchases, it is absolutely a demand capture moment. That being said, much like some of the other premium brands you've spoken to, it's also a day just to be in front of people and build future demand for when more are in market at the December and in January. But we are we're up almost 40% Black Friday to Black Friday.
Speaker 5:Wow.
Speaker 14:And Wow. Yes. And I think a big part of that is bring on the gong.
Speaker 2:It's the gong.
Speaker 14:You know what? I I shared this on x a little earlier that this is a brave new world for us having multiple products so we can create bundles. We don't discount per se, but we can add value with multiple products allowing people to bundle, and that is absolutely what's driving that year over year growth on Black Friday. People are adding AGZ to their AG one orders. They're adding a flavor sampler to their order.
Speaker 14:They're bundling our omegas and d three k two. We just we didn't have that portfolio
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:A year ago. You guys were playing on expert mode, just single SKU
Speaker 2:So so up 40% year over year, Black Friday to Black Friday. Obviously, that's driven by products, new products, expansion. But if there's one marketing or growth strategy that really stuck out over 2025 as particularly effective, what what can you share about a a strategy or a channel that that that you you think you executed particularly well on this year?
Speaker 14:I'll share one strategy and one channel Sure. That stood out for us this year. One strategy was shifting the marketing focus Mhmm. From as influencer and creator forward to more science forward. We invested over $10,000,000 in four double blind randomized placebo controlled human trials and it makes a lot of sense to try to get credit for that and help to stand out in the crowd.
Speaker 14:So for the first half of the year, we pulled back marketing investment 40% to focus on executing product launches, executing channel launches, and building the story around the real work of quality, science and research. So that strategy, that approach, which colored everything we did from the actual marketing where we put up huge billboards, we invested millions in out of home advertising that said something like, please enjoy your randomized double blind placebo controlled daily health drink. You know what it Beautiful.
Speaker 4:Know,
Speaker 1:would say maybe like literally like point one point o 1% of supplement companies Mhmm. Actually do like studies on their products and they're just like, hey, this study happened over here with this one ingredient and so we're just gonna apply that
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Over here.
Speaker 14:Yeah. It's, you know, an it that strategy even colored our partnership approach. We, instead of partnering with athletes this fall, did NIL deals with nutrition students
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 14:College students. So we just and we had them put on the hat, the jersey, everything, and sign up. So the science strategy pulled through the year. The channel strategy that we are really starting to see the value of is actually TV, linear and CTV. We were on game seven of the World Series with our Good Morning Moon campaign Yeah.
Speaker 14:Narrated by the ever epic and a longtime AG one drinker, Rick Rubin.
Speaker 1:No way. Nice.
Speaker 14:And it was much more brand, top of funnel, Like, who are our people and what do they do when they get up early in the morning? And then we created fifteen and thirty sub cuts of that for parents, for runners, for athletes. And so that's pulling through to the high season as we get into December and January, and we're starting to see again, it's tougher to track those types of things, but there's incredible AI and technology out there to help with that. We're starting to see that channel contribute meaningfully, and especially now that we're in retail. And we're in Costco today, we'll launch additional national retailers next year thoughtfully going direct to national.
Speaker 14:And so, you know, as many others have said today, when you have multiple channels, make those top of funnel marketing investments, they have more places to contribute.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we can expect to see a Super Bowl ad?
Speaker 14:Let's day. Do
Speaker 2:One day. One day.
Speaker 3:Do you You
Speaker 14:can do expect to see more human clinical trials. I got another 20,000,000 going into research. Wow.
Speaker 1:Oh, 20,000,000. Yeah. How do you rate the overall health of the consumer and just kind of the macro over the last had a friend of ours, Nish, from Rayon. He said the first six months of this year felt wildly different from a from a macro standpoint than than than the last five or so months. But what's been your view?
Speaker 14:You know, certainly if you look at the economic data, it says there's a tale of two cities in the world of consumer, with, you know, people who have higher income propping up spending versus those who don't. For us and our business, because about, you know, into the first quarter, but halfway through the calendar year, we had so many back to back launches of products, channels, and innovation. It masked what might have otherwise been bumpiness Yeah. With a more mature model, and it gave some variety against some value creation for that consumer. What hasn't changed, and I've heard a few others on with you today reference this, is how deeply considered these premium purchases are.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 14:And so the investments we made a year ago in top of funnel marketing, six months ago in clinical trials, two months ago in launching AGZ, leaning in still to our podcast partners and the creator economy where we were early movers, it's still a key part of our strategy today, but nowhere near the largest channel from a marketing perspective. All of that brings people to, for us, what on average is eight to 10 touch points before they purchase. I mean it is a long consideration journey and we're seeing it play out in multiple markets. In our partnership with Shopify, we launched Australia, we launched Japan, we are launching more of these products in our European business now and we see very similar behaviours. So we are a premium price point, but it's also an incredible value because we consolidate an otherwise very expensive supplement stack in both AG1 and AGZ.
Speaker 1:Yep. Got anything else? I I we'd love to have you back on in January when we kick off the new year. That that would be a massive, massive period for for you guys. But, wish we had more time.
Speaker 1:But And
Speaker 2:and just to clarify, there's there's a question in the chat about AGZ. It's for sleep. Correct?
Speaker 14:Yeah. AGZ. Where's my little AGZ? AGZ.
Speaker 2:I have it here.
Speaker 14:So it's a melatonin free
Speaker 9:Okay.
Speaker 14:Nighttime rest and restore products. So we just like we did for AG one, we consolidated a multivitamin, a probiotic, and greens. For AGZ, we consolidated what most people are making their sleepy girl, sleepy boy mocktails with ashwagandha and magnesium, two types of magnesium and an incredible research backed herbal blend. So a g one for the morning, a g z for the night to calm and develop a
Speaker 1:restored sleep. Fantastic.
Speaker 14:247.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 1:Great to get out there.
Speaker 2:Great rest of your day. Congrats on the product.
Speaker 14:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:You soon. Cheers.
Speaker 14:Happy Black Friday.
Speaker 2:Happy Black Friday. Before we bring in our first in person guest of the stream, let me tell you about wander.com. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. We have Sean Frank in the TV panel. He's been on the show multiple times.
Speaker 2:This is the first time him
Speaker 7:What up?
Speaker 2:Seeing him in person. How are you doing, Sean?
Speaker 4:Good to see you.
Speaker 2:He is the world's number one wallet salesman. Good to see you. How you doing?
Speaker 1:And dominating every other category now.
Speaker 2:Yes. Dominating. Dominating luggage, dominating knives, dominating
Speaker 1:Consumer electronics.
Speaker 2:Consumer electronics, batteries, battery packs. Correct?
Speaker 5:Yeah, man. It's game day, dude. Got the jersey on. It's game day. I love it.
Speaker 3:It's game day.
Speaker 2:Have Have you guys
Speaker 5:been on Shopify the entire time? Dude, since 2012.
Speaker 2:There was never like a never you never
Speaker 1:you played. You
Speaker 2:never like Let's just set up Let's just set up another little landing page over here. Maybe let's just, you know, have a side side hustle page now.
Speaker 5:Shopify till I die, man. Wow. The best payment processing Okay. All the perfect apps inside the app store. I'm a big Shopify fan.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's great to see you. Thank you for taking time out of Is your day this the most mellow Black Friday? Hopefully, like, you've been building the company, building the team. Guys are so dialed in so many different ways now.
Speaker 1:I would hope that every year is slightly less stressful than the last.
Speaker 5:Yeah. This has been the chillest Black Friday by far. It's the biggest Black Friday ever. But team's bigger, processor dialed in, and like the world's not on fire.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When something does go wrong on Black Friday, like how how did it manifest in years past? Because it's obviously not like, okay, the website is down because that you're on Shopify if
Speaker 5:It's never gone down before.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's never gone down. But there are things where it's like, okay, we gotta be a little bit more dialed as a team today. What are you actually monitoring? Like, what is just like inbound requests.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What situations are you monitoring?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What situations have you monitored in the past, or do you need to monitor
Speaker 5:on the The most common problems would be credit cards going down.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:Right? So
Speaker 1:What does that mean? So Like payment processing or like Visa network?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like hitting limits on your credit card. Mhmm. Because like, in a typical day, brand might spend $50 on Facebook ads. And then you go to spend $500,000
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. So your corporate card's going
Speaker 12:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just turn off and somebody's like not at their desk that moment and they
Speaker 5:Yeah. Or your account gets frozen. Okay. So like your actual Met account gets locked up. And they're taking the week off.
Speaker 5:I love meta. I love my reps. But if you have a junior level of service, there's no way to escalate that. And then your whole weekend's screwed if you can't spend money on meta. So that's the most common thing.
Speaker 5:Inventory issues always. How do you make sure things are staying in stock? How do you make sure your warehouse is actually working? Warehouses are in person businesses. So it's kind of like retail stores.
Speaker 2:We have
Speaker 5:to staff up for it. But today, our store will do 10x normal volume.
Speaker 7:How do
Speaker 5:you make sure those customers get their stuff when the whole three week period is going be huge?
Speaker 2:So What percentage of a brand's Black Friday should come from advertising versus just, hey, there's a of email addresses. Their customers are coming back. We return by default. So, yeah, if if Meta goes down, that's maybe 5% of Black Friday. But it sounds like it could be a
Speaker 7:lot more. What do you think of it?
Speaker 5:It should be your biggest spend day by far.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:But it should be one of your most efficient days of the year. Sure. So
Speaker 1:Just because the intent is so high.
Speaker 5:The intent
Speaker 2:is so high. Yeah.
Speaker 5:We'll spend, you know, in a typical day, we might be at a two x MER. Half of our money going to marketing for digital channels. But a day like Black Friday could be like a four x MER. Okay. But we're still going to spend multimillion dollars today, right?
Speaker 5:So conversion rates shoot up. You can spend more money. CPMs are higher. And it varies by brand, right? If you're Tacovas, you might have a bigger spike because the boots that everybody wants are actually on sale right now.
Speaker 5:But if you're AG one, they're not gonna have any spike at all. Like nobody's like rushing out to get their supplements.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And I think we heard that from the David's Pro team.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He was saying he was actually down a little bit because it's like it's a January product and that makes a ton of sense. What on on the digital ads thing like what I'm trying to think of where where to actually dig in there. Yeah. Take me through tick tock shop.
Speaker 2:You were saying that you made a 7 figure day. Yes. Take me through that.
Speaker 1:$700.
Speaker 2:What's actually going on? Because reading behind that tweet, I was I was thinking like, okay, he's extremely bearish on TikTok shop, maybe TikTok broadly. Like, how much should I read into that? Okay. Explain what happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:The general thesis on TikTok shop is it's really, really good for a certain type of brand. Yeah. If you're female focused, if you are a supplement, if you can make pretty, you know, bold claims Okay. TikTok shop's gonna print for you.
Speaker 1:Bold claims. That means people are like, you
Speaker 2:Restores all your hair for $5. Something like that.
Speaker 5:Because the brand doesn't make the claims, the affiliates make the claims. Yep. The affiliates are incentivized to say crazy stuff to try to get the affiliate commission. Yeah. So if you
Speaker 1:This wallet will turn you into a millionaire.
Speaker 5:You put a
Speaker 2:$100 bill in here, gonna You're gonna get $200 out. You can get $200 out.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And there's a whole cohort of like Gen Z brands that are doing 9 figures in like six months off of TikTok shop. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You guys What are the categories?
Speaker 5:It's supplements, for For sure.
Speaker 2:Like get jacked, look hot.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Like testosterone gummies.
Speaker 2:Testosterone gummies? Yes. No way. Gummied everything. Dude, Test gummies?
Speaker 5:The biggest brand no one's ever heard
Speaker 2:of is is Comfort. Okay.
Speaker 5:You guys should just go on TikTok shop
Speaker 2:and just
Speaker 5:check out what Comfort's doing.
Speaker 1:Okay. Is
Speaker 5:Publicly, so it's hoodies. Okay. And it's like, know, priced at $120 marked down to $35 And they'll do
Speaker 1:So they're like eating into Mad Happy. They're like a Mad Happy clone,
Speaker 3:is that?
Speaker 5:Or really like a fast fashion clone, like a a Timu,
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:Sheen like Zara type clone. But like really high quality anxiety reducing hoodies. They'll
Speaker 1:do reducing.
Speaker 5:That's that's the claims, man. The claims. But they'll do over 700,000,000 this year. 700,000,000.
Speaker 2:Third year in business.
Speaker 5:Yeah. They're killing it. Wow. So TikTok shop can totally work. Yeah.
Speaker 5:The joke there is that for a men's, like, almost luxury good brand,
Speaker 2:it will not work at all.
Speaker 5:No. We did multimillion dollars yesterday. We did $700 TikTok stuff. But I'm working, dude. I'm grinding now.
Speaker 1:Right? Bigger, bolder claims.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So do you do you think there's just like, there's no way for you to to get it to work? Like, you've you've tested everything. You've, like, done a bunch of specific TikTok creative and hired people who have gotten it to work in other categories. Sure.
Speaker 2:Like, at this point, you know it's not you.
Speaker 5:The shops pro program is way different than the ad program. Okay. I'll I'll spend $50 on TikTok trap today or sorry, TikTok ads But that's driving my website.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:To make TikTok shop work, it has to be an impulse purchase. Sure. But I haven't given it my all. In January, we're giving it our all. You are.
Speaker 5:Yeah, we're going throw everything
Speaker 2:at it. Is it your number one big opportunity for 2026? Or are you thinking AI agent to commerce?
Speaker 5:I would say that there's probably six things a brand should be focused on in '20 '20 I'll see if I can rattle them off. So Six
Speaker 1:is a lot.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. But I think social commerce is for sure one of them. But then that ties into point two, which is just getting way better short form organic video. Right?
Speaker 5:You guys post clips, like more brands need to be clipping. Yep. And it's just because watch time on social media apps is continuing to be dominated by short form video. Okay. Nobody's scrolling feeds anymore.
Speaker 5:And it's just gonna continue to take over long form YouTube and Twitch streams and everything else. It's just all for the clips.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. No. It feels like the the Instagram feed is just a catalog now. And you I don't even know if you should care about engagement as a brand.
Speaker 5:Well, dude, and also, like, the idea of a brand has also been like disimmediated, because it's not about the brand page anymore. Like, the best TikTok shop brands have 50 TikTok accounts Mhmm. Because it's just volume. And if you pull up the number one TikTok shop affiliates, there's people making $1,000,000 a year. And they'll post 70 videos a day.
Speaker 5:And so many of those videos get 20 views, but then one will get 28,000,000, and it will
Speaker 2:just print Yeah. For Yeah. Yeah. Do do you think there's any do you think that takes you out of, like, building an enduring brand? Like, like, will like, the next Hermes really be doing that?
Speaker 2:You know? Will will will the next, like, iconic, like, the Louis Vuitton or the Ferrari be, like, slopping it up on the short form?
Speaker 5:Well, no. I think they're gonna be sponsoring, like, you know, DJ tables at, like, f one stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But, like, the rest of us are gonna be slopping it up too.
Speaker 2:And then even slop comes for us all. Yeah. And I know
Speaker 5:you guys love luxury. The luxury space is super interesting because Richmont's actually the only brand dominating right now because they have Cartier. They have Van Cleef. Yep. Jewelry is taking over everything.
Speaker 5:And LVMH and really curing has been wrecked for like two years. So the world of luxury is undergoing a lot of changes right now as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sure they're still having a big Black Friday since people just go out and shop physically. But so much of that is is dependent on, like, the health of the economy.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:What you got, Jordy?
Speaker 1:Carrying is up 41% year to date, but they've been struggling.
Speaker 5:Well, look at the five year chart.
Speaker 6:Okay. This is always the one.
Speaker 1:Zoom out. Zoom out. We're zooming out. It's down 50%.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. 50%. Rough.
Speaker 1:Rough. What, what's what's a white pill? Where is there opportunity? Peter Peter Protein earlier. Peter Rahal was saying consumers will always want novelty.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so specifically in like supplements and CPG, there's always going to be an incremental opportunity because people just want to have even the same things delivered to them differently. But where are you seeing opportunity?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think David Protein proved. And he said that there's white space in everything, right? Nobody thought you could build a hoodie brand like Comfort and just dominate a new channel like TikTok, Shop and Affiliate, and get to $700,000,000 think it's the fastest growing apparel brand of all time, And yeah, David Sprottine, two years in, 300,000,000. Groons, two years in, 300,000,000.
Speaker 5:So I think the standards are way higher. You have to be really good at operating, right? You can't just have a good website. You can't just have a good product. You actually also have to understand the ecosystem.
Speaker 5:But our fastest growing channel this year is consumer electronics. Right? Like doing phone cases. Everyone told me phone cases were a stupid business to get into. Right?
Speaker 5:Like, we bumbled along for four or five years doing it. And now it's an 8 figure business for us in six months or whatever. That's amazing. There's white space everywhere, man.
Speaker 1:As long as you're gonna bring your name. Idea, post purchase flow, we were working this out where you buy a product and then you have an opportunity to get to to box somebody for a discount.
Speaker 2:You match locally Kind
Speaker 1:of like
Speaker 2:to recreate the original of like recreate
Speaker 1:the original Black Friday
Speaker 2:Friday experience.
Speaker 5:So do both people want a discount and only the winner gets in? Yes. Or you guys Wait.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. I think it's like it's like I I'm on, ridge.com.
Speaker 2:I check out with a bunch of stuff. Jordy is my next door neighbor. He checks out with a bunch of stuff. We're both happy. We're having the modern e commerce Black Friday experience, except there's one thing missing.
Speaker 2:We didn't get to fight each other. So then in the post purchase flow, it says, hey. There's someone that's opted in to a fist fight. In your area. In your area.
Speaker 2:Walk outside, meet at this address. You can scrap it up.
Speaker 5:It sounds asset light. So I don't I don't have to as a brand, I don't put up any boxers. No. You guys are fighting each other. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. It's purely peer to peer amongst your
Speaker 1:You do have to give some of the margin back to the winner though. That's the only thing.
Speaker 2:Oh, so the winner does get a Yeah. Little incentive.
Speaker 1:You get like a gift card or something.
Speaker 5:Dude, the rich customers, they're scary, man.
Speaker 1:They're tough guys. So They're tough guys. I feel like you can't shave the beard now, at least at least as well while CEO of Ridge.
Speaker 5:No. I'm gonna keep throwing it out, dude.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wait. So how how did you actually win in phone cases? That feels like extremely difficult, the most competitive. Is it the strength of, like, the product development, the positioning, the marketing, the operations?
Speaker 2:Like, how how did that possibly work?
Speaker 5:That feels impossible. It's creative destruction. Right? So, like, the the number one name of phone cases is still Otterbox. They do a billion dollars a year in revenue.
Speaker 2:They we they do more than Apple directly
Speaker 5:or Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Third party? Yeah.
Speaker 5:I'm not taking down Apple. Okay. But like, yeah. OtterBox is sold into Verizon Sure. And Best Buy now.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I do see the memory.
Speaker 5:And they do a billion dollars Yeah.
Speaker 1:A year
Speaker 5:in sales. They've been, like, owned by private equity for four or five years.
Speaker 1:Just give it up for private equity.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Make it Pretty opportunities for him.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Can make it a killing, but then they're in the value extraction mode. They're Sure. Like Sure. They're not they're never gonna pay for marketing.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:They're going to fight tooth and nail Yep. A Best Buy of Verizon of the world. Right? And then it creates a market because Verizon's like, hey, I hate working with these new owners over here. Will you come in and take some of their shelf space?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:They want competition in their store.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 5:Yep. And it's incremental sales for me. Like, it's their lunch that I'm eating.
Speaker 4:So I'm
Speaker 5:like, yeah, I'd gladly go in there. I'll take lower I'll I'll work it out.
Speaker 2:So Wow. Okay.
Speaker 5:You could shop Ridge phone cases at your local Verizon stores, T Mobile's, Best Buys.
Speaker 2:Did you have deals with any of them beforehand? No. So is there a world where it acts as like a lever that opens a door to getting other products into these places? I don't know if a Ridge Wallet would make sense in a Verizon store, but probably.
Speaker 5:No. We we have Wallet there. Yeah. Yeah. Why not?
Speaker 5:And actually, the I did lie. The first thing we had was wallets in Best Buy.
Speaker 2:Okay. And it's like Yeah. Yeah. You told me about that.
Speaker 5:We're the only people ever selling wallets in a Best And I like, if we can make that work Yeah. Then we can make anything work. Yeah. And then we started just filling the rest of the catalog in You can buy our luggage in a Best Buy right now.
Speaker 2:Best practices for big influencer partnerships in 2026. What you got?
Speaker 5:I I think more and more the brands need to be somewhat creator led, and I think it's way easier to do that internally. Mhmm. Right? We you guys had, you know, a like a couple creator brands on today. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Right? You could say Mod Retro's a creator brand because Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Palmer it it is crazy how many views Palmer gets, you know, even though he's not an influencer. Just by going around onto Rogan, onto other shows Unplug it. He pulls it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And He pulls the audience.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I think there's free impressions to be had. Mhmm. And the most expensive part of my p and l is impressions.
Speaker 2:Impressions.
Speaker 5:Right? So if you can go out there and tell a story and be good, like, you'll get a ton of impressions. We we just an hour ago had an MKBHD video go live. Yeah. And it'll probably get 3,000,000 views.
Speaker 5:And sell a ton of stuff. Yep. And it just needs to be a tighter feedback loop there.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. MKBHD on Black Friday. I'm assuming that's only possible because you guys have had like a very long term relationship with MKBHD. And if if like Samsung came to him and they didn't have that relationship, he'd be like, I'll take $5,000,000 or something.
Speaker 5:I'm I'm sure it'd be a yeah. It would take a ton of money. You know, he's a equity partner in Rich. So he's one of our co owners. So he's on the board.
Speaker 5:We hang out. And as part of our relationship, we get like 20 spots a year. And he wants to maximize our revenue too. So Black Friday is a great spot to give to us.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Very, very cool. Anything interesting on the on the channel side? On like, what what's Connor up to today? He just got like like eight monitors set up just like fully locked into the vortex.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Dude, unfortunately, it's not a camera show in your guys' production studio, but that's what Connor's doing.
Speaker 2:I love it. We could be running a brand.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You can have a ton of ads going right now, guys. Yeah. I mean, Connor's behind the screen. We have a great team now.
Speaker 5:So there's there's 70 or 80 people at Ridge just grinding out today. Yeah. But the most exciting channel is is probably YouTube. They kinda
Speaker 2:YouTube.
Speaker 5:Yeah. They kinda fucked around for a long time and didn't have good performance
Speaker 2:was that the targeting or the actual like
Speaker 1:Yeah. It'd be nobody could get it was it is extraordinarily difficult to get programmatic ads on YouTube to work at all. Right?
Speaker 2:Yes. But what about them was wrong? Just like the targeting on like who the person was
Speaker 12:Well
Speaker 2:that you're reaching?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, their their number one business is AdWords and they want everything to work like AdWords. Sure. And that ad space doesn't work like AdWords. Yep.
Speaker 5:Right? Yep. Totally. They weren't willing to make the changes to make YouTube an actual functioning ad platform. Yep.
Speaker 5:But now that it looks like, you know, the Google Ads business could be threatened or or might be threatened, they're like, let's start finding all the dollars in the couch cushions.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 5:And that is YouTube ads. Okay. I mean, pull up their k one. It's the fastest growing part of their business. Yep.
Speaker 5:Right? Growing 50% year over year. Yep. And it's working. So YouTube has been like the second biggest channel for us this year.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Do you are you seeing strong results on basically vertical video, like repurposing TikTok assets into vertical video ads in the Shorts feed on YouTube? Or are you creating bespoke content for YouTube? Are you at the point where you notice that an edit that works on an ad that works on YouTube won't work on TikTok and vice versa?
Speaker 5:Well, I'll say that putting MKBHD in YouTube ads really works. Everywhere.
Speaker 6:I'm sure.
Speaker 2:Totally thumb stopping.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But what what you brought up is the beauty of you should be a creator brand. Yeah. Right? Like the real like alpha and leverage there is that a short form video is the same everywhere.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So you can run it on TikTok.
Speaker 2:You can
Speaker 5:run it on YouTube shorts, reels, app loving. You can put it on Twitter. Like Twitter ads are crushing. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 5:We put it everywhere.
Speaker 2:Twitter ads are crushing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Way. Interesting. No way.
Speaker 5:Dude, I mean, the guy that had that hired that new guy and he's like, yeah. He's crushing it,
Speaker 4:dude.
Speaker 2:He's crushing it? Yeah. No way. That's amazing. So like I'm the first person that's really called that out.
Speaker 1:That's Why so so why did it never work historically? Yeah. Why was it purely a brand channel where you'd have like Uber that's like, we're gonna we'll give some of our budget to x?
Speaker 5:Well, dude, it's the same thing as like why why did Applovin go from like a $20,000,000,000 company to a $200,000,000,000 company? It's like they built a really good ad engine. Right? Like, dollars will flow to whoever has the best ad engine. I think a lot of this space is the same.
Speaker 5:Right? They're like, oh, no, an x user is more valuable because it's into tech. Or no, it's bad because of all these bots. Interesting.
Speaker 1:At the
Speaker 5:end day, there's purchasers everywhere. And you've seen a really good ad engine. And Metis had a twenty year head start building the world's greatest ad engine. Now, the same people who built that are going to places like Twitter, going to places like AppLovin, and rebuilding better ad engines. And as long as they you could put it on Reddit ads.
Speaker 5:You could put it on Criteo horrible ads. And as you have a really good ad engine, it will find purchasers. Interesting. That's what I think they did over at at X, and it's been
Speaker 2:it's been working. Yeah. And video specifically too. You you've been running video
Speaker 5:ads there? Yeah.
Speaker 2:You were saying that you could bring your TikTok, YouTube ads, your MKVHD video ads all over. Has that been successful on x yet?
Speaker 5:Or Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is it more link based?
Speaker 5:We we throw all the stuff through there, but, like, but everything has a link to link out and purchase on our website. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, we gotta close out with Harley. Thank you so much for Will you hang out for
Speaker 1:a second?
Speaker 2:Hang out. Hang out. We'll we'll talk to you soon. We got Harley back in the in the studio closing out.
Speaker 6:Where did Sean go?
Speaker 1:Oh, Hang out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wanna hang out? Dude, what
Speaker 5:do you
Speaker 2:You look like his He
Speaker 6:like ran away. I guess Sean
Speaker 1:won't have audio.
Speaker 2:He'll be he's
Speaker 1:a pretty face.
Speaker 2:You look like his body's something.
Speaker 1:He's got it. He's got it. He'll hang.
Speaker 2:Oh. Oh, yeah. Okay. We have we have audience for him.
Speaker 6:Amazing. How are
Speaker 2:you doing? Close us out. Give us an update on the stats. What else is the what's what's the latest?
Speaker 6:Alright. Let's start with the stats, of course. Sean, can you hear me?
Speaker 5:Oh, I can hear you, bud. How are you?
Speaker 6:You can. How are doing? Congratulations.
Speaker 2:We pressed it. He said, has he ever flinched and thought about even for a second using a different e commerce platform? He said, never in the entire history of Never. The
Speaker 1:never even thought of In whole
Speaker 6:truth, Sean's one of those guys that he gives you tough love when you deserve it Yeah. But he gives you praise only when you deserve it also. And so that makes him a real one.
Speaker 2:He is. He's a real one.
Speaker 6:Okay. So let's check it out as we close this out. How are we doing? So $4,100,000 right now, sales per minute, 38,000 orders per minute, 30,000,000 unique shoppers today Wow.
Speaker 1:Across all shoppers. Try to hit
Speaker 2:the gong.
Speaker 5:Okay. John, go
Speaker 6:for the gong. John, do
Speaker 4:it for us.
Speaker 1:This is John.
Speaker 6:Give it
Speaker 5:to us.
Speaker 6:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Clean hit with the setup. With the prancing setup.
Speaker 6:Wow. Okay. So I also have a few other things for you.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 6:Okay. So I'm gonna wrap up some trending categories for the day now that we're getting to five PM EST. Skin care, vitamins, supplements, t shirts, active wear, makeup did really well. This is really interesting. At 5AM when I was on CNN, I I looked at trending products.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:At 5AM, it was Aloe Yoga with their crewneck pullover. It was Cozy Earth with their bamboo sheet set, and Merit Beauty with their flush balm. Mhmm. When I look at it now, it's totally switched up. You have Victoria Beckham's eyeliner.
Speaker 6:You have earplugs from a company called Loop. Loop switch two. Interesting. Yeah. Loop earplugs, the ones that's shredding is called the Loop switch two.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:And you have Lola blankets, the antique ivory blanket. Here's what's really interesting. If you go back to this time last year, last year was all about getting outside. You saw ski equipment, adventure stuff, outdoorsy stuff.
Speaker 1:That's over. We're going on. We're going
Speaker 6:we're going cozy on.
Speaker 2:We're going
Speaker 1:cozy on. Cozy on.
Speaker 6:We're going cozy. So things like bakeware sets, blankets, wooden toys, and coloring books are all up a 100% year over year. Interesting. Goose Creek candle, Christmas tree three week candle is killing it, and Caraway cookware set is also killing it. So those are the trends.
Speaker 6:It's been I I mean, the the cozy era is is definitely here.
Speaker 2:We're in the cozy
Speaker 1:era. Cozy era.
Speaker 5:Dude, all those are great brands. If you guys don't know Loop, like, they're
Speaker 6:don't know Loop.
Speaker 5:No. Oh, something, like, really old, like, the one with my earplugs. Yeah. They made it really cool.
Speaker 9:Is it
Speaker 1:for sleeping?
Speaker 5:No. It's for, going to concerts.
Speaker 2:Concerts and Okay. Yeah. Let check.
Speaker 5:Website, super gen z. Cozy Earth has a bunch of stores in LA.
Speaker 6:Like, all those Cozy Earth is really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Loop earplugs. Yeah. This is amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Wow. And then, obviously, Allo Alo is Allo. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We know Allo.
Speaker 6:They're course. They're serious. Of course. They're they're and actually, they're in LA also, an amazing company. But I I just wanna say, you know, couple things just I I know you guys have to wrap in in a minute, but Jordy, John, I just wanna say thank you so much for this.
Speaker 2:Of course. This was fantastic. This
Speaker 4:has been
Speaker 1:really exciting. Love celebrating was
Speaker 2:fun it was a fun tour talking to folks who today is the biggest day of the year for them to other folks who, you know, this is just another day or they're, you know, they're
Speaker 6:It was cool to hear the juxtaposition between, like, you know, even Kat had said, like, Kat Cole versus, you know, the David's guy. Like, David's like, no. No. It's January. And Kat's like, no.
Speaker 6:No. This is like Yeah. Is where you're able it was so the juxtaposition between two similar products.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 6:But I just wanna say thank you to you guys. This is my sixteenth Black Friday at Shopify, my favorite one yet. Huge thank you to Noel, Sarah, Peter, Torin, Kevin, Nish, Bene, Brian, Kat, and, of course, Sean and John. You guys are amazing. Sorry we stole your day off.
Speaker 6:Please apologize to
Speaker 13:your wives and your families.
Speaker 1:No days
Speaker 2:off. No days off. When capitalism is on the line, which is biggest day of the year. It's the biggest day.
Speaker 6:It's best.
Speaker 2:And we're we're
Speaker 6:still full of energy. But hopefully, you agree it was worth it. Oh, 100%. I will
Speaker 1:see 100%.
Speaker 6:I'll see you guys in q one for our next earnings call, I guess.
Speaker 1:We will. We can't wait for seventeen.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Dude, Cyber Monday. Run it back.
Speaker 2:Cyber Monday. We're joining our stream with the green suit.
Speaker 1:Carly, we join these. Join join join Cyber Monday.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we I would love
Speaker 6:to if you'll happy, I'd love to join Cyber Monday. Of course.
Speaker 3:If you can
Speaker 6:find a room. Maybe Sean and I come on together. We do a whole like
Speaker 2:back to
Speaker 6:back DJ thing.
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 5:Sales hour by hour. I'm gonna
Speaker 3:report in.
Speaker 2:Yes. I wanna know. I
Speaker 1:love it. Love it.
Speaker 6:Amazing. Thank you, Congrats to
Speaker 1:the whole Shopify team for another Another massive day. Thank you very much. Can't wait to see the final numbers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wanna know the final numbers. We gotta we gotta
Speaker 3:I'll figure that come back Monday. Can
Speaker 2:chat. Fantastic. Amazing. You so much.
Speaker 1:Talk to you, Harley. Talk soon.
Speaker 2:A good rest of your day.
Speaker 6:See you, Sean. Bye. Later, Harley.
Speaker 1:Wonderful, wonderful show. Thank you to everybody who has hung out with us today. Yeah. Celebrated commerce, celebrated entrepreneurship, celebrated the American The commerce corral. And the Canadian consumer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Commerce corral. And the Canadian consumers. We I wish we were podcasting tomorrow. We won't be.
Speaker 1:Tomorrow's Saturday. We will be back in full force on Monday. Back in full force. And, yeah, it'll be a busy weekend.
Speaker 5:Dude. Yeah. It's gonna be great. Thanks for doing this.
Speaker 2:Thanks shine
Speaker 5:some light on a small little company called Shopify. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yes. Fledgling start up.
Speaker 2:Twenty years twenty years next year. Twenty year old company. Fantastic. Well Amazing. Thank you so much for tuning in.
Speaker 2:Thanks Wonderful. For Leave us fresh starts on Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1:Holiday weekend. Sign up for
Speaker 2:the newsletter, tbpn.com. And we will see you on Monday. Cheers. Bye. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Thank you.