How BLD BRO Built a 7-Figure DTC Skincare Brand From 250 Followers | Tariq Kazemi

0:00James Burtt: How bad did your anxiety of losing your hair get during that period? You're risking nearly your life to a certain extent taking those things. Bandwidth that they're dedicating to the negative emotion is incredible. Hence why there's an$8 billion industry built around the fears and anxieties of those young men. We started Bullbro because we were sick and tired of this narrative that exists that there's something wrong with hair loss. Why did you take the decision to go the harder route of making and manufacturing something from scratch? None of us knew anything about cosmetics, but it feels like sometimes you're lucky enough to get this one thing in your life that really is your shot.

0:35And it feels for us, Ballbro is definitely that.

0:37James Burtt: From fans and followers to clients and customers, I think that's always a very interesting journey. Once we saw that people really loved it, we sold out and had to turn off marketing. I genuinely believe Ballbro is starting to impact society towards acceptance and build a global brand.

0:58James Burtt: So as you can see, we have got an amazing show lined up. But before we get into the main content, please, please, please do me a favour. I know I'm begging here, but all of the podcasters and YouTubers have to do it. Please subscribe if you're watching on YouTube. And if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, click the follow button at the top right hand corner of your app. And it will mean that you'll never miss an episode of Booing the Brand and you'll be massively helping us out as well. Let's get into it. Tarek, I'm intrigued by your journey because you're a man who's now selling multi-million pounds worth of your product every year.

1:25James Burtt: And you didn't even start this company to be a company in the first place how have you how have you turned a desire for a community into what's now a multi-million pound brand that people absolutely love i'm not sure i really have the answer to that question i mean um if i reflect it's just been an organic process i mean we started ball bro because we were sick and tired of this narrative that exists that there's something wrong with hair loss we were three bald guys who had accepted being bald realized that this destination of hair loss, being bald is totally fine, but that journey can be really difficult.

2:03And we just wanted to shorten that for young guys, wishing there was someone like us that could tap us on the shoulder as a 22-year-old, 25-year-old and say, hey, you know, there's nothing wrong with being bald. The sooner you accept this, the happier you're going to be. There was one downside to being bald, which is you're seven times more likely to get skin cancer on your head wow you're you get sort of certain cosmetic issues like dryness flakiness shine so we understood that and we also saw that there was no products for bald guys either so there was a negative narrative and the the market for skincare was being underserved so that's how we sort of kept the community but it evolved into a community and a brand and it just seems to have resonated but i don't know the uh certainly doesn't do it i got excited

2:49James Burtt: I saw some of your out of home campaigns with the bottle on somebody's head. And I was like, oh my God, there's a ball pro. I sent it to Gary, who's the connection of how I know of you guys in the first place. Like, this is so cool. He's just one of those brands that I think because it stands for something, it really has an affinity to even someone like me who isn't going through hair loss. I mean, it's getting there. We are getting there. I'm sweeping it. I'm sweeping it for the time being. But it's just one of those brands I'm like, I love what these guys stand for. When you talk there about you sort of the three co-founders of this initial community, which has morphed into a company.

3:31James Burtt: Yeah. We're going through this hair loss journey. Can you just touch on that a little bit? Because I know that you had been, I don't know if battling is the right word, but you'd been having a challenge around your hair loss for a decade. Yeah, definitely a decade or so. So when I first saw that I was losing my hair, and it came as no surprise with most male members of my family being bald yeah it still felt like you know being the wind had been taken out of me what was i going to do you're you're told throughout your life right when you lose your hair you're losing your attractiveness your mojo your confidence so you do everything you can to prevent it so you were quite young as well yeah i mean in my 20s or like early 20s at uni um at uni okay yeah at uni i mean not going completely bald but you start to see yeah the the thinning i'll call it um and the other guys richard and ben the co-founders of bulbro had been on their own personal journeys but similar and all of us had come to this conclusion that that journey was horrible we'd done all these things to you know prolong it like wearing hats looking at hair transplants taking you know hormone altering drugs to try and prevent what was always destined to happen and the actual the result was when we accepted being bald we all liked it and that was like no one no one tells you that no one's yeah you know to the extent now where if someone offered me a pill which would say okay one pill no side effects all your hair grows back i wouldn't take it so yeah i like being bald there's so many benefits you don't have to get haircuts you don't have bad hair days you don't have to worry about styling you don't have to worry about thinning you know i mean that's the big one and it just as soon as you embrace being bald the the worry the anxiety the pressure just disappears and it's just like an enlightened sense which is i think was shared amongst my co-founders and it's a message we just wanted to spread and how did you guys come together in the first are you all just sort of mates from outside of this entrepreneurial world yeah so richard and ben were friends they were born in south birmingham they've been friends since they were four um ben you know they went on their own journeys ben was an award-winning filmmaker he had an amazon bestseller richard was working in property i was working in e-commerce and had been at university in wales with richard and um just during lockdown where I'd actually got the confidence to shave my head like a lot of people people had you know barbers were closed and so on uh Richard called me up and said look now you've finally joined the club they'd been bold you know they'd accepted it a lot longer than uh before me and said we want to start something we want to start a community we want to start a movement that just rather than saying to bald guys you're suffering from something we just want to celebrate it like this is not a self-help club but this is just a um a community that showcases bold confidence and that was what we wanted to do so it was you know inspirational quotes maybe a little bit cheesy some cool bald guys bald celebs a lot of jason statham i imagine yeah there was a lot of statham kelly slater stanley you know you know you know we had we were reaching where the the obvious yeah yeah sure um the rock not so much because he went and started his own skincare brand of course he did yeah i think it's for i don't think it's particularly you know it's not for bald guys no yeah it's just mass market exactly exactly um so that's how it started so richard reached out said we want to do this um and for about two years from that moment in 2020 i mean we didn't have a product it was all community um it was us you know arguing about what to put on instagram with our 200 followers it was i love those days though yeah it was meeting in co-workings near king's cross yeah stuff out you know um doing uh sort of talking podcast style stuff on youtube with seven views um but it you know it was fun and it was something that early on even with a very small community that it was at that stage you could see that it resonated the message resonated finally there was someone talking the truth about hair loss which is that it's nothing to worry about rather than this sort of mass media portrayal of baldness or hair loss that it's something negative.

7:35James Burtt: Can you remember one of the sort of any of the first early comments or early members of the community when you were like oh my god we've actually really helped we knew that we were feeling this way and we've luckily got the I guess the emotional intelligence and the self-awareness to have this conversation amongst the three of us but there's somebody out there who was sat in a bedroom by themselves during lockdown that we've actually really helped you like that's the if that's the avatar if we only ever helped one person that was worth it for that one comment yeah i mean look that happens a lot more now now that we're a much bigger brand with a following on instagram a lot of our instagram is still very much topic focused not product focused um but from the early days i mean the fact that even 200 people followed these three guys with a few pictures of bald celebs i mean it meant something and there were comments and and actually at the beginning we were a bit worried because so many people would reach out asking for advice sort of psychological advice right you guys are not qualified at all right at all we were just saying you know it's it's perfectly fine being bored we like it that was the message when you then you've got someone contacting you being like i'm suffering from anxiety and depression what do i do responsibility isn't it it's a lot of responsibility and it's not something that we were qualified to handle so it's obviously the response would be speak to a professional but what we can say from our experience is it's not something to worry about once you accept it And all those fears and anxieties that build in the hair loss journey disappear as soon as you're bald.

8:59James Burtt: Can you remember what it was like emotionally the first time that you put the clippers to your hair and went, fuck, I'm just going to do it? Yeah. Well, I'd done it before. Right. So I'd sort of tested it in my later 20s and didn't mind it. So I knew to an extent what was coming. But at that point, I was taking Propecia, the hair loss drug. Right. And I knew that it would grow back. It wasn't this definitive moment. But I do remember when I did decide to really take the plunge and shave it off. And it was, it felt like a moment of maturity. It felt like sort of becoming a man in a way. Like I'm finally accepting myself for who nature determined that I should be.

9:46And it felt good. It felt really good. And obviously you're looking, you know, the first day you've had this hair and you're like looking in the mirror and how will it look and sending the pic. Because I'm touching it. Yeah, I'm touching it.

9:56James Burtt: Sending the pic to people. Yeah. And then within a week you've like forgotten that you used to have hair. And now people see pictures of me with hair and go, you look so weird. You look ridiculous. What is that? But that's nice, right? That shows that, you know, being bald becomes just a sub note to your identity. and no one no one right now goes oh you're bald it's just accepted and much more so than when you're thinning right because that's when people in society like to call it out yeah especially your friendship groups and so on what's the um and again i'm not trying to get diverse eos tears out of you here but on that journey of a decade and you were you know you were quite seriously trying to retain your hair as many people do yeah as many people do yeah um you know taking the drugs and you know wearing hats and all this sort of stuff how how bad did your sort of anxiety of losing your hair get during that period i think the thing is the drugs work to a certain extent right they do prevent hair loss so once you once you start taking them in the majority of cases they work right they have a whole array of side effects of course yeah right i mean and we don't need to go into those but they're really really serious and there's a spectrum of them so i was lucky that mine were moderate but they can be awful so you're you're you're risking nearly your life to a certain extent taking these things um but it was all mine was all front loaded because it was once i realized it was happening panic disaster anxiety what am i going to do conditioned to take action which is what i did and once you take action you i mean there's no immediate cure you have to keep taking the drugs or you know if you're going to have a have a hair transplant you have to redo it and take the drugs as well to supplement that so there's no sort of immediate cure but you or whatever the word would be but i realized that the anxiety and stuff was at the beginning and once i'd taken these drugs it was sort of okay that's fine you've done what you can do i've done what i can do fine i prevented what this this hair loss journey and only till about 10 years later when I started to feel, I think, some anxiety linked to the drugs, as well as - So you've taken them for a decade?

12:14Yeah, a decade. Wow. Yeah. And I mean, most people who take them do, because as soon as you stop, the hair starts falling out. Right. But I think somewhere along that journey, as I matured, I realized that it was maybe a little bit ridiculous. And that if I was going to let myself be defined by hair and take potentially hormone altering drugs in order to prevent hair loss is that really you know is that really who i was is that really what defined me and i decided that it didn't so i stopped taking them you know the hair started to thin again as it was doing in my earlier 20s and then that's when in

12:49James Burtt: 2020 i just sort of blocked it all off and when you're sort of going through that journey and is is there a moment in my naivety which is a point i'm pretty going to get to in the not too distant future is do you have a moment where you're like fuck it enough is enough or is it gradually you're like i think i could be okay it's i think both in a way so you sort of start to question and and wonder and i mean this is my journey so i can't sure i can't speak for anyone else and then there was a moment where it was just enough is enough i'm just tired of worrying about hair loss. I think it got to that point.

13:29Yeah. Just so tired of worrying. So, and, you know, my theory proved right. As soon as you took ownership, you stopped worrying. I don't think about my hair at all. In fact, the only time I worry about my hair now is if I feel it's like too long. Too long.

13:42James Burtt: Yeah. I need to get rid of it. Exactly. So, and during that time when you sort of make that decision, is there, again, not to put words in your mouth, just try to understand the psychology of it. is there a not self-loathing maybe that's too strong a term but is there a do you not like yourself when there's something about yourself that you dislike so intently you'll take drugs for 10 years exactly and it's not even you're not even there yet so i remember we are so conditioned in hair loss to assume that it's like a disease you see adverts are you suffering yeah i got i got the cure i mean i even used the word earlier a cure to hair loss well the cure to hair loss is acceptance not any kind of not any kind of yeah sure but um yeah you see i remember looking on the tube or something and seeing a guy with thin hair and sort of manifesting it to myself having negative thoughts about it and really being consumed by it and you sit and you meet guys who are losing their hair and the amount of you know bandwidth that they're dedicating to their the hair or the hair loss or what they'll look like or how they're feeling about themselves or the negative emotion is incredible, the amount of thought process that goes into it.

14:57Hence why there's a sort of$8 billion hair loss industry built around the fears and anxieties of those young men.

15:04James Burtt: And what is the catalyst to that industry? Is it because of how big it is and any other form of big pharma, if they provide or if they can media narrative a problem, then they can provide the solution and cash in on it? Exactly. You say, you know, this is something bad happening to you you need to cure it and we have the cure right i mean that's it's a manufactured emotional response that they're you know in some societies if being bald is considered masculine or accepted or not even thought about you know the hair loss industry has nothing to profit from because no one would buy it they manufacture they turn a natural process into a problem and then sell you the cure and and so we sort of skip forward a little bit so you've built the community you started to develop it you guys and the three co-founders are arguing about which legendary ball dude to take a picture of that day on instagram way too many way too many arguments about that kind of thing but what was the but also those arguments have show how much you actually cared about the thing which doesn't probably justify every argument you had about that post that's going on instagram but at least it shows the intent that you had is there what was the catalyst of you guys going oh there's something more than just help and supporting people and showing that baldness is cool not a concern when did you go oh there's a mark there's a gap in this market we should go and fill it what what justified you guys be we're the three dudes to go and build this thing now well we knew it ourselves i mean we knew it that there was there weren't any companies or brands that were offering any skincare products to bald guys we were aware of the science and stuff behind it but it was more a thought as we started the community not something that we actioned then through the community we used to get a lot of dms saying what do you do for skin and sun care like sun creams are greasy shiny i don't want to wear it every day but my dad's got a whole load of melanomas on his bald head i'm super worried or what shaving products use or what moisturizer do you use and we sort of had a broad it wasn't aligned what we used or what we did but it showed us that there was a want and a need and an interest in protecting and looking after bald heads.

17:14And it said, well, okay, if we want to make this something that's full time, if we want to make this more than just a side passion project, there should be a commercial arm to this. As long as it's something that specifically, like in the interest of bald guys, it's not just white labeling something and calling it bald broads. It's the development of products that actually are not in market to help and protect and take care of bald guys' heads. So it was born out of a knowledge that there was nothing, but also an indication from the community that they wanted something.

17:45James Burtt: Let's pause there for a second. Listen to what Tarek just said, an indication from the community that they wanted something. Now, I think this shows the power of community, but proper community, not community that is done as a marketing hack or a marketing employee or those things that you used to do on Facebook back in the day, like let's create a group, but actually that group of people is just there to ultimately engage with your content and then be sold to. And it's a big difference in the world of brand building right now. The difference between that genuine community and the impact that can have and one that you are just doing for trite reasons, which are effectively just tied to hack the system a little bit.

18:22James Burtt: Look at something like Gymshark, for example. Gymshark, yeah, they make great clothing. It's nice enough clothing. It's probably no better or no worse than a bunch of other stuff that's out there in the gym wear market. But the reason why it has taken off in the way that it has, much like Ball Bros, is because of the community that they've built around it. Things like workouts together, things like the run clubs that they run, things like making an experience in store all adds to that element of community. And even if you're a smaller business owner, there's a great coffee company that I know over in East London, and they do run clubs, book clubs.

18:57James Burtt: They just do all this stuff that's got nothing to do with coffee, but it's got everything to do with community. and building community is, in certain sectors, building your brand. Right, let's get back to Tarek for some more Absolute Podcast Gold. We're going to touch on the white labeling, the decisions that you make, because I think you guys have gone the right way, but that's also the hard way, the more expensive way, the braver way, I think as well. But we'll touch on that in a minute. So you realize there's a gap in the market. Any of the three of you got experience with D2C, online, e-commerce?

19:34James Burtt: You can go, oh, there's a gap in the market and we've got the skill set. Or did you come into it? A little bit. I mean, it's a bit why Richard and Ben reached out to me initially because I was working in e-commerce. So I had started a company. I mean, I was operations only, so not marketing. It was very much more of sort of functional e-commerce doing fashion and so on rather than a brand. It was selling other brands. So your back-end logistics rather than front-end attention. Negotiating supplier contracts or logistics contracts. It wasn't marketing, design, creative, branding. So I had that more practical experience.

20:10Ben had created a bestseller on Amazon called Box of Favors. It was something where you paid 10 quid and you got this well-designed box that was sort of, I will do the ironing.

20:18James Burtt: I will do the laundry. Oh, okay. I think I've seen this. Yeah, it was, I mean, for a while, it really, I mean, it kept him well here for a while. Right. It did really well on Amazon. But it was, I think for him, you know, he had broader ambitions than just one-off, one-hit wonder. Yeah, sure. On an Amazon product. So he had some experience there. And Richard had actually worked in the music industry, had been promoting bands, had been a musician himself. And, you know, there's not a lot of money in the music, if you don't know, the very, very higher end of it. so he'd gone into property management or so on in birmingham um so none of us had created a real brand before but we were all commercial savvy like entrepreneurs yeah we all made something out of nothing and i think that was that gave us the confidence to do this and it also the fact that we had something that we could not nine to fives where we could we knew how to arrange our time so we could dedicate time to bull bro um in the early days when obviously we weren't being paid or anything like that we we saw that there was something bigger here and we could dedicate time and resources towards it so you guys stop arguing about the the the posts on instagram and go right let's focus our attentions on more important brand building aspects of it was there that first meeting when you're like come on we've just got to do something what was that like well i mean it was not necessarily skincare by the way richard wanted to do an app that would like help bald guys in their journey with fashion with workouts with i mean that was where he wanted to take it sure something that would really hold your hand as a guy trans you know moving from having hair to being bald and that journey seamless um bet and i were more on the cosmetic angle because we realized that just it just wasn't there um so it took a while it wasn't an overnight decision and none of us knew anything about cosmetics but we did know what we wanted so i mean not to get too sort of salesy or product but we wanted something that would protect us against the sun and look after our head but that wouldn't be like a greasy sun cream so we set on a course to try and find if it existed could be made would be made and if if it wasn't could we make it there's something that was really interesting i was doing a bit of digging in the in the run up to this i kept coming back to it and i sort of i wrote it down oh that's a good little line it was almost like you didn't go and find the market you were the market and then you made the fit around what you already wanted if that makes sense yeah when you were going well should we do an app or like a coaching support kind of offering versus the other two of you go no no we need to go like a dcl product was there are you crowd sourcing the information from the community at this point are you polling them and going right we're gonna we're gonna do something what do you want us to do yeah i think we we got to the conclusion that an app was just too much heavy lifting ben had actually built an app and it had been so complicated and it just seemed it just seemed too much from my perspective um and then we asked the community we said okay we want to do a product let's say it's a sun cream that's a gel that would take away the shine because we don't like shiny heads not that we don't like them but we don't want a shiny head yeah um does the community agree so we polled the community would you prefer a matte or a shiny head and something like 90 said we'd prefer a matte head oh wow okay that's an indication that's an indication yeah so like that it's not just us can is there anything that does that there's sort of powders or little strips of these paper strips you can put on your head i think it's come from female skincare ah okay stuff but nothing that seemed like let's say bloke-ish which i just put it on it's you're good to go you're good to go yeah you're mad you're protected everything which is what we wanted to develop so yeah we we fed our in you know our instincts into the community and have continued to do so up to this day and to see you know is it a lie is our thinking aligned but it it did help because we we were the perfect guinea pigs we are just bald guys we we know what we want there's three of us so at least if we if we're aligned on something it's a good indication that more than likely the rest of the community will be too and the fact that we have access to that community makes it even you know even easier to to check in on our assumptions so when you make the decision that okay we we know what we want and actually 90 % of people are saying that we want matte skincare as well rather than sort of a shiny option you've then got the opportunity to and we touched on it a minute ago to go the fast quick, not quick buck, but quicker revenue route of going, well, there's already formulations.

25:05James Burtt: There's loads of white labeling. There's loads of standardized formulas. Yeah, they might not quite do what you want, but maybe we'll get close enough and you can badge it up and you've already got the brand affinity and you've got an audience. Why did you take the decision to go the harder route of making and manufacturing something from scratch rather than trying to find something that fitted what was already there close enough to get off the ground um i would like to give a really altruistic like go on just do it yeah no but it would be a lie yeah no it just didn't exist like what we wanted to create didn't exist so if there was this awesome matte moisturizer with spf on the market at the time that we wanted to make one maybe we would have yeah yeah sure i can't answer that why would we have created something if it had already existed but it didn't so what we wanted wasn't there so we had to create it and it's as simple as that really and what was that process that you went through because again you guys are uh you know one of you's made a very successful product but not in that kind of marketplace you understand the logistics on the back end the other co-founder sort of understands attention and building an audience through the music industry but not in that regard sure i mean i think i'd seen it in in fashion where you have sort of oem so or co-manufacturers where you you with a quick google search you can see okay there are a whole array of cosmetic manufacturers that can create bespoke formulas that have expertise in dermatology and so on that you can go to with a brief like in in most industries and say we want to create this so we went to about 10 with our brief got costings got proposals development costs etc and basically outsourced the cosmetic expertise to build us what we wanted but to be sure that we would own the ip and so on so it would be sort of it's like hiring your own chemist essentially um so that's what we did to create what what it is that we wanted and it took a further year of i mean i can't count how many samples we went through and so on and is it the sense and is it too runny or too viscous or this or that which filters and so on and finally i remember one day sitting in the garden with ben and richard's at my mom's place and we just got i remember that It was a sunny day a few summers ago now.

27:21This is it. That's it. That's the formula.

27:24James Burtt: What did that feel like? Oh, thank God. It felt great. It felt great. I remember because we were holding, because it's clear gel, but we wanted it to be quite firm. Right. And so we'd had all these samples and they'd drip and drab and they wouldn't feel nice. And then I remember just holding it upside down. And it didn't drip. And it didn't drip. And it just had like this perfect gleaming translucent gel that we put it on and it made your head stop being shiny. And it was an SPF. It's the one. you know that kind of moment and uh yeah it was a great moment and we talked to manufacturer okay let's you know we're all self-funded there so let's produce a thousand units and yeah you know take another four months or whenever it was that that would that would happen so it took a while um and then we had to design the packaging and all this kind of stuff that before it would actually be ready to be released and at that point i'm not even sure we'd registered a company it was you know i mean really it was yeah yeah our instagram page started in 2020 we didn't register until october 2021 so i'm sure and i think yeah the first invoice from the manufacturers was paid from personal bank accounts right there was no there was you know we weren't that great origin yeah yeah we weren't that great origin story so you so you realize that you got the formulation correct and you sort of joked about that we're gonna do we're self-funded we're gonna do a thousand units yeah i've i've done some like small-scale manufacture in in a different lifetime that is scary as hell when you put your own money on the line and also when you go from a formula and a brief and sign-offs and samples to actually knowing that someone somewhere is now making a thousand of these things for you what did it feel like placing that first order and was that the smallest order you could get away with yeah definitely sure smallest order and thankfully they even accepted it because what i see now on moqs and things yeah nowhere near that We got away with a thousand units, 50 ml, little plastic tubes.

29:14We don't use plastic anymore. But it was looking back, it looks pretty. I mean, it looks like what it was. It was three guys just figuring stuff out. But we went, OK, it was significant amount of money for us at the time. And we said, OK, worst case scenario, we've got this lifetime supply of something that we love.

29:35James Burtt: Yeah. And, you know, there's a good shelf life. So probably would have not quite lasted a lifetime. But we said, okay, it's the risk is not that great. Like if this doesn't work out, it's not going to bankrupt us. It's going to be annoying. We're going to have crates of this and, you know, like sat in the garage. Yeah, exactly. But it was a risk we were willing to take. And, you know, as a reference, we were all hungry, entrepreneurial. We wanted it. You know, we've always been so engaged in this community and this brand. And so it just seemed like a no brainer. so were you were you looking obviously you can't speak for your co-founders or maybe you can but were you looking for a new opportunity because you were already sort of running a co-founder of another company or was this did the love of this thing as it started to build momentum pull you away from the other company a mixture of both i mean we started this really as a passion project like with no expectation you know you you go i'm gonna do bald skincare i mean it doesn't sound like a thing really because it wasn't a thing before you invented it you're gonna do bold skincare okay right sure good luck with that yeah yeah good luck yeah so we didn't you know we had we were all ambitious but we weren't expecting you know what has become to become um but i was in a you know i'd started a company in the gulf in dubai it is done well continues to do well but i wasn't really happy it wasn't fulfilling me so i was looking it was it was sort of the perfect thing in a way that it was a passion project that I was super interested in that actually built momentum to be able to pull me away from everything else I was doing and become fully focused on that.

31:15And I think, again, like you mentioned, we have different backgrounds, different stories, but we were all ready for this. It feels like sometimes you're lucky enough to get this one thing in your life that really is your shot and the thing that you've been waiting for. and it feels for us bald bro was definitely that well for all three of you yeah i think so we'd all had you know we were all doing right you know ben had a bestseller on amazon i'd started a company that was doing over two million dollars a year in revenue not in profits but like we we had some levels of achievement yeah but it there was there was a there was a gap so there was a whole fulfillment something like something we're really passionate about which i you know i don't think any of us had really been passionate about what we were doing maybe richard with the music um but something that had commercial upside that had a community that we were really passionate about and obviously that has its um restrictions you know there's much there's different markets if you if you're doing it purely commercial there's other things you can look at um but for us it just really felt like a calling so to speak and the fact that hair loss had been such a difficult journey in its own way for all of us as it is for most people who who go through hair loss the fact that we could actually do something positive for young guys as well as create a really cool company was just

32:39James Burtt: unbelievable i suppose the the passion in this instance is almost driven potentially through through pain whereas it's almost like some some things you'll walk you'll walk into like i'm i love what i do for a job you know i make podcasts i produce podcasts for other people is great fun. I'm passionate about it because of the enjoyment that I get from the thing that I do, but I haven't suffered. I haven't got a yearning that, you know, podcasting has to exist. Maybe it does because I've got sacked from the radio, so I'm probably still bitter about that. But I suppose in your instance, the levels of the neurological levels of meaning behind this are so deep because for a decade, it was something that caused you so much psychological pain.

33:21Yeah. I mean, I don't think we thought about it to quite that extent. yeah we wanted to help we wanted to help yeah shorten that journey for for other guys that we knew would be suffering and um and predominantly suffering not because of what's happening to them but because of the narrative that exists around what's happening to them so it's not like suddenly you could you know you can't run as fast or you know it's it's not a real physical

33:46James Burtt: issue it's just there's a psychological yeah it's more psychological yeah there's a bit less hair but what does that mean nothing yeah like that changes nothing in your life um but i suppose your mentality towards it changes everything as well doesn't it correct correct exactly that's right so that the very small physically and huge psychologically based on this narrative but yeah i think that the fact now that i genuinely believe bulbro is starting to impact society to to move it towards where it should be which is just acceptance around hair loss that young guys can stop worrying like no one likes to worry right and if hair loss is causing all this worry and you just need like a bald bro switch to say actually don't worry about it sweet perfect are you side side sort of segue are you do you feel proud yeah of not what you've done as a company but do you feel proud of you and the role that you've played within this in what sense like in the sense of like bald bros is having an impact yeah and i've definitely seen that because obviously i've produced other podcasts that you've done for for clients and there's i've then been sort of like watching what the brand's doing and all the rest of it i'm very interested in how brands build um communities and movements i think there is a movement that you guys are building but that's almost under the guise of the brand itself but are you proud of the role that you played within this because as a group you mean yeah as in as in you personally because obviously ball bros is the three of you originally yeah and now the brand is creating a movement but it wouldn't exist if it wasn't for you personally and the other and the other guys obviously do you feel when you look at it when you have like bald fest which we'll talk about later on and you see a thousand people come together and that change do you go i feel good about what i've done or the role that i've played yeah definitely like i'm really happy to be in a part of that like and and to go back to your previous question about the the negative impact that hair loss had on my life and the worry that it caused me it sort of feels a bit like revenge psychological revenge on yourself yourself yeah but you know what i mean it's like this causes me the suffering and now we're breaking it we hopefully break that chain because that would happen infinitum where each generation lose their hair worry about it do everything they can worry worry worry if ball bro is this sort of line in the sand which says okay we put out a fag here's this flag don't worry anymore and this is the moment that this society stops worrying about hair loss, if we can be a small part of that, or Balbro can be a big part of that, and I personally or the other founders are a smaller part of that, then yeah, definitely proud to be that.

36:19Amazing.

36:20James Burtt: If you're loving this conversation, please do us a favor by clicking the subscribe button if you haven't yet done so. Click the follow button if you're listening on Apple or Spotify at the top right-hand corner of your podcast. Plus, if you're loving the learnings and lessons from this episode, every single week, as well as doing the video and the audio sort of things. We also do a handwritten blog and we do a breakdown of the key learnings and lessons as a blueprint that you can implement into your business as well. If you'd like to get all of that, click the link that's in the show notes or the description and you can join our Building the Brand exclusive newsletter.

36:50James Burtt: So you get the MOQ as low as you can because you're going to cash it and self-fund it. You land the stock and then you have to go from concepts and crystallists of an idea and fans and followers to clients and customers i think that's always a very interesting journey what happens when people who love your content then have to give you a quid out of their pocket that's that's a different journey walk us through that when it lands and you're ready to go to market how did the first run of stock go um i mean we had no idea how it was going to go yeah a lot of prep had gone in building websites you know but um ben was supremely talented so built the web we built the website ourselves ben did the first creative i mean he was instrumental it still is but in that first stage i mean there's no way we'd have done any of it without him and created the first ads created the first video created the website okay set up you know set up i had you know i hadn't done meta accounts before because i'd been on the operational side and he'd just been amazon where it's not linked so we had to figure out all those things hired a couple of questionable upwork and fiver advisors along the you know the cheaper you know i heard you talk about this in another podcast yeah no there's a few there's a couple that were questionable in their their credentials you paid a few but didn't get a lot out of them yeah something like that i mean a few ghosted you yeah one one ghosted and one i mean i don't know what the other one did but um no and then let me say okay we launched so we had i think we'd pre-launched so it's we'd you're given a you know sign up with your email so we started to collect a few email addresses i mean in the hundreds not any more than that so we sent out an email we did an instagram post we did an ad on meta and we sold like 20 on our first day wow you know how did that feel amazing i mean yeah wow someone someone bought it and as that you know that was the first day so it was the other days were one three five with a you know a budget i think was 10 pounds a day as a yeah yeah yeah standard test budget yeah yeah but like hang on this is this is actually working okay and then plugged in a review software review comes back wow what the ron sill of skincare where's this been all my life okay hang on wow you know the reviews were incredible because the formula and the formula has not changed much since you know we'd spent so long making it with these cosmetic experts that it was all the things around it were a bit you know figure it out and budget but we'd invested everything into the formula with experts to make it for us so um it really resonated and i think it's if it if the for if the product had not have resonated as much then we wouldn't be where we are today but the fact it's the brand that's brilliant the community is amazing and the product's really good as well so once we saw that and we saw that people really loved it uh it's an amazing feeling and then we you know we sold out and had to turn off marketing because we didn't you know the lead time was four months we hadn't bought any more stock just in case yeah yeah so so after a couple of months we just had to stop stop yeah we just stopped like okay what do we do now and what did you do in that interview um well we said okay take pre-orders and say sorry yeah pretty much no we'd kept enough so we also started a subscription um so we had like 10 subscribers so we kept enough to fulfill the subscribers and we went so could you do some short cut over you so you could subscribe or you could do a one-off purchase correct yeah same as now um and we said okay what don't we like right we don't like the plastic you know that's not something we if we do really well now we don't want to create millions of plastic tubes and also contamination risk for you microplastics we don't know if it's in plastic does it go to the product etc um the packaging we were sending out in this black envelope we thought that can that can be improved so it was it really that initial run just gave us the confidence to um to really go in to say we then went to raise some money as well for like and do an angel round because we understood that if we wanted this to be something more than it was it was going to take investment then we didn't have you know stock issues you had to prepay stock and so on so we knew we needed a bit of cash um and just a side note someone who bought from that first order that first email um he emailed us the other day and he said you know i've been with you guys since the beginning and i just saw your ad on sky oh amazing that it's unbelievable he's like really proud of you really happy that i was there from day one i looked in he's made like 40 orders over the full circle moment yeah it was amazing i mean obviously we were like do you want some merch you know realized he hadn't tried the shave range and so but it was just that it really showed me you know an exemplary example of we really gave a community and a product to people that had neither to that point because it's not just guys who are losing their hair and worrying it's that it's the confident 45 year old 50 year old bald guy yeah no no brand is there for them speaking to them they're happy involved they don't need to be told it's they know it's sweet they like being bald but when they're watching the cricket all they get is you know famous cricketer telling them to get a hair transplant yeah they've got no time for so um to have that kind of full circle moment from from that first launch and then turning off i think he was actually one of the subscribers that we were oh really yeah and then we relaunched a year later from the initial date so i think it was june 2023 where we had then at that point we invested in 3 000 units and then had to turn off marketing about four times again so yeah i mean i think june 2024 is when we really launched proper we'd done a fundraising round yeah had an amount of stock there's a funny story because we had a vat return and because we'd been so we haven't really done many sales but we'd managed to raise money and placed a huge stock order so we had this vat bill no so like the opposite like we had a fat credit right and the government nice problem to have yeah so the government owed us like 20 grand or something from the vat from our order because we hadn't sold anything we paid all this fat and uh they sent an inspection around and at that moment we were operating out of the spare room of a friend of ours house so it was gonna be like a really weird like how do you how does hmrc owe you guys 20k but luckily we just moved to a warehouse didn't expect to actually come to physically oh wow you've had a proper inspection he was super scary of course he was yeah yeah and he'd had a hair transplant had a uncomfortable yeah super uncomfortable it's like what is this all about and we're like it's about embracing being bold it's like oh i've just had a hair transplant but i mean see you in five years yeah we're on target market we hadn't done anything wrong but it was a super worry because for cash of course you've got hmrc are holding 20k of your money yeah yeah you're expecting back yeah and uh where is it guys and then like they're very quick to take money off you hmrc they're a bit slower to give it back yeah seems so yeah what's the um so obviously you're scaling and growing during that period of time you do the the sort of the angel round is that like a friends and family round yeah or did you go out to sort of instant not institutional money but sort of professional vcs and angels at that point we did we did we got some good into you know we got through the door with our branding and our deck like we spoke to jam jar and some other bigger oh nice some other bigger vcs yeah yeah point but we were well under the thresholds for revenue and stuff that they'd sort of these consumer uh vcs would look at so and we had seis which is this sort of tax incentive so it was very much a personal network raise um a couple of customers had reached out and and said are you guys raising money when you know i'm head of a fund in london or something amazing so that was incredible to the strangers who bought the product not not in a crowdfunding way but as a you know sort of a professional individual yeah yeah sure so that was incredible and then some friends family you're not allowed in seis so no family investments because oh is that right well they can invest but they don't get the the tax benefit close family but yeah sort of personal network and personally the extended networks that we had that we were lucky enough to to do our first pre-seed round and was that to just be able to increase the levels of stock so you stopped the ebb and flow of like pay dads are working turn them off they're working yeah exactly so it was just we need we needed stock and at that point no one would lend us money to the credit because you know we're too young in this the business is too young and there's not enough trading history so just needed some capital to pay for stock and are you guys in this full time by this point or is this still a side project at this stage?

45:40Well, I mean, we didn't pay ourselves to 2024. So we were raising prior to that. And in fact, we only started paying ourselves when there's regular revenue. We didn't pay, the raise wasn't to pay ourselves. Yeah, yeah. It was to just buy stocks.

45:54James Burtt: So you still want the other jobs to sort of pay the mortgage at this point? Yeah, yeah, pretty much, yeah. But so, you know, Ben would have gone, he also moonlighted as a drone pilot. So suddenly there'd be three or four days where he'd be shooting an ad in Scandinavia. yeah sure like so he's and then richard would have two phones one was for his property business the other was normal and then it would always be like a piper's burst yeah of course so it was all these kind of things going on um but yeah so at that point somewhere in 2024 where it suddenly became a proper thing proper thing that we'd really and i think by the end of 2024 we were sort of all full-time on it and because i when i was sort of looking at the chronology that i could find and do it used a bit of ai to sort of like work out what scales you got to at each point it seemed like you'd scaled rather than being like a hockey stick like oh we've got product market fit let's just go and like i say just and it take off like a rocket you've you've scaled but it's like steadily yeah it feels almost when i was looking it's almost like there's these little glass ceilings and you have to get past that bit to get into the next bit so i'm guessing it's like a friends and family round or a network round and then your first did you sort of raise again after that point we've just we've just raised again okay so there's been a sort of what i would call a seed round that is again i would say a broader you know this time it's not just broad network there's some more not institutions but people professional investors and then we're currently talking to uh an institution about a sort of an institutional addition to the to that seed round so and you mentioned as well before that the origin of the sales model was subscription and or uh sort of one-off purchase and that's still the the case yeah i don't like this and some brands kind of force people into subscription trying to sort of artificially tweak their ltv and things like that lifetime value so you make people subscribe i don't really like that i think it's psychologically the wrong way around if people if people really like your product and they'll stay they'll stay there's a discount to subscription they'll take it so just have it as an option no no kind of lock-ins or anything like that because i've always hated that yeah and so i didn't want to be someone who purported that um we have even say subscriptions it might be 25 of our business but repeat customers of 50 of our business so it shows that you don't need subscribers to have retention was the subscriber thing that's going to change massively i think obviously andy burnham's come out yesterday in one of his many very well crafted uh instagram posts going oh we're going to make it easier for people to cancel subscriptions this like dark sass oh right yeah he's come out and basically said no we're not going to have that anymore yeah i mean we don't i mean for us you just click cancel yeah which is how it should be it's actually but it's not for a lot of yeah i mean we don't even have those you know those well do you really want or do you here's a discount yeah yeah i mean like we don't have any of that it's just cancel okay cancel yeah i mean if we believe in what we're doing and if we don't obviously from an analytic standpoint and a retention standpoint we want to lower the amount people cancel if there's something we're doing wrong like we're delivering too quickly or there's the oversupply or whatever it might be but we don't want to lock people in because you did have that a bit to start with as well didn't you wasn't your the bottle was too big and you actually give it too much product yeah i can't use it quick enough yeah well the bottles changed with the tube so it went from a um plastic pump that was 50 mil to and then we arbitrarily decided to make it 75 mil and it basically lasted two years and was super expensive you know yeah of course it was so expensive to make and we couldn't the way you know the inflation happens sort of since covid and ukraine you know like there's shipping everything's got more expensive so we had a choice um about 18 months ago which was do we increase the prices or do we just reduce the size slightly and we felt like this wasn't you know cadbury's doing shrinkflation we're still a really small brand we're really small uh comparatively customer base that we felt we better do it now and get the right size that lasts you know with daily use still lasts three months which is not bad for a 25 quid product yeah so obviously there's some kickback at that because people had got used to this 75 mil and a lot of shrinkflation complaints and so on but we talked to each of those individually and tried to explain that this was not like mr corporate being like how can i get 10 more margin it was three bald guys like how can this business survive yeah yeah how can we actually not lose money exactly yeah you know exactly exactly so with um again when i was sort of looking through the sort of the journey so far you guys had uh built this great community you had you know used the internal skill sets you got to the capacity that you could was there a tipping point because there's one very key hire that i could see maybe there's been more than one key hire but and there's a guy who used to be content lead i think at lad bible correct who came in and just like ramped up what you were doing took what was good and made it great effectively what was that a big sort of jumping off point we talked a minute ago about sort of hitting certain glass ceilings as you're sort of gently scaling was that a point where you were like oh now we've we've really hitting flow social media was always a problem for us the three of us the three co-founders about what do we post who handles it who does it how do we we don't want to post for posting safe yeah you bring something of value and we never got it right so we'd managed to grow the page a little bit 5 000 or something which is still decent for people had no idea what they were doing um and then the guys said to me oh jake massey he's left lab bible and it's posted on LinkedIn that he's like, you know, open for offers, contract offers.

51:59I'm like, no offense to Jake.

52:00James Burtt: I was like, who's Jake Massey? But they clearly knew they'd followed Ladbible. I had never followed Ladbible, so obviously I didn't know. I looked into it, suddenly there's this bald guy, super confident, super relatable, interviewed the who's who, you know, Tom Hanks, like everyone, had done really interesting creative content and happened to be bold so we said let's talk to him so we reached out to him first meeting he's sort of in a dr evil chair turns around he's wearing a wig and we're like okay we like this guy like i mean i mean that's what he did for the first interview and he's wearing a wig and i think the conversation was um we don't know what to do with our socials you know what to do with socials and he was and i think he was a bit wary because he'd not heard of the brand before he didn't want to you know he he was quite high profile really like he was someone who had a public image had had to be careful about his next step super yeah super talented guy doesn't just want to like take the first offer yeah and we said look bald bro is not we're not hiring you to sort of just shill random cosmetic products we are trying to change the narrative around hair loss through our social media we are also doing a cosmetic brand to take care and protect bald guys heads this is what ball bro is about the social media side we're really struggling with like the product's great the reviews are great everything's going but we don't really know what to do with social media and we don't really know what to tell you to we sort of want someone to take it and run with it and that's exactly what he did and he is jake's bit was the first official pay he hire oh was he really oh wow first full hire um and yeah really can i we consider him now sort of a fourth founder um we've we have some other really key people that non-founders in the business but jake is certainly one of the most important and has he is somehow he represents what ball bro is about like just he is he he's a ball bro he's a ball bro yeah he's that guy who's been through the journey suffered with the journey come through the other side likes being bold and can relate and talk to people about that and uh it's been brilliant and it was his wedding on the weekend Oh, really?

54:12James Burtt: Congratulations. Oh, amazing. What's it like for those who are earlier in their journey? And there's a bunch of listeners to this podcast. Primarily, they are 80 % UK entrepreneurs. Sure. Some will be quite far down the journey. Some will be new-ish to the journey. What does it feel like when you've got something great, you're building community, you're doing the hard yards, you know that you've got a mission and a vision and a purpose, and then you find someone who slots into it perfectly like, oh my god that's the person to to go from here to there what does that feel like it feels really lucky i mean we've had it a few times with guy our cmo with kevin our chair um and with jake these these are the first sort of three really important people that have come into the business and um you know we're building on that and now there's others and there's valuable people in different areas, but it feels lucky.

55:10Sort of kind of, is that normal? You know, like, is that our good judgment? Is that luck? And I think it's a bit of both. I think you have to, when the feeling's right with someone, it's good, you've got to double down and you've got to really involve them, incentivize. And I think, I hope I speak on their behalf that the community within Bullbro, not just the broader community, we're trying to make a fun like a fun brand to be around fun brand to be involved in fast growing with a you know even guy who's got hair like believes in the mission right like you were saying at the beginning of this podcast that you you relate to the mission despite having a full head of hair yeah so you know we're doing um something positive whilst being a really exciting

55:56James Burtt: commercial prospect as well so talking about sort of fun stuff and growing the exciting brand that people want to be around talk to me about um there's two bits what i'll talk about one was the accidental tv adverts which i think is gonna be fascinating for people but before we get to that point the the sort of the live irl stuff that you do where you've done it recently um and you had you know a thousand people descend on a pub in soho for an entire day what was that board fest so ball fest like what's the the crystal of that idea and what's it like to be stood amongst obviously no there's not a thousand at any one time but across the day you see a thousand people who you've directly and indirectly supported through the brand you've created tell us a bit about ball fest the origin of ball fest was something last year in birmingham that we did outside our warehouse called free beer for the bald and we sent an email to any customer that was near our warehouse and said hey on this sunday and i think it was in june last year we're going to be hosting uh with the birmingham brew co who are in the same trading estate so like literally an industrial estate on a sunday south birmingham i think it was maybe it was a thursday um industrial estate south birmingham free beer free pints for the bold free curry and like some games like there was a cornhole version but it was called bald hole and you had to throw a wig into a vortex or something and um we thought okay like we just wanted to have a bit of fun um and we thought we could get some good content out of it as well if anyone showed up and they did 50 people came to this industrial estate brilliant and we were just sitting having pints with some of our customers they're like yeah i've used your products really good it was it was awesome did any people with hair turn up and you have to say you can't have a freak well one guy did and he shaved his head which really we should grew into a bigger idea for bald fest 2026 um and so we really loved the day and we thought how can we you know put fuel on this and make it something much bigger and really jake took control of that um with our prs and we said okay let's go big with this one so let's do it in soho not an industrial estate in birmingham let's still do free beer free pints for the bald let's do head shaves and let's just have like this big community day where we just have a bit of fun and i think that's for us it was we did that as much for us to have a laugh as much as as for a pr event or for a community event you know like it was awesome to meet our community but it was also just awesome for us to get together and have beers and organize it and have this day out in london and it was brilliant it was really really cool and they got a bunch of press so it was it was a pr success but that's not necessarily the core of why we did it was to hang out with our with us and our community so and and a thousand people on this second iteration of it turned up hard to say exactly i mean because you know there were free beers going around so no one could remember no one was counting yeah i mean that pub was busy from you know all day basically and there was a lot of bald heads and there was a lot of as the day progressed it got not leery but there was a the volume increase volume increased and random bald guys on the street were being accosted and taken away from their families and given yeah it was very much like that and it was very cool it was really really cool and actually we can see now it's being copied so there's other really all kinds of bald fest clones are going on around the world wow the other us and other and germany and like it's not we've got nothing to do of them could become an international day you can just make these days up can't you yeah well i mean that's i mean there is the um bald is beautiful day in september so we might do another different region bald fest or something but it certainly will be annual like we enjoyed it so much yeah um and it's just so cool because i think there's seven guys that turned up who had were not bald but were thinning and they shaved their head at bald fest like they that was the day that was like having beers and so on it was just awesome and you could see the lot most i think they all look better because yeah because actually you know board does look better than thinning really aesthetically so they all look better they loved it and there was this community there to support them to support them and just you know put their arm around and give a beer and and have fun on the day that's amazing talk to me about the accidental advert that you ran on tv because you guys again i heard this on another podcast i've got to give them a shout out and I'll tag them in the link as well so the guys at Revwise Gary and Jamie are clients of my podcast production company so I had already heard about Ball Bro before because I've basically edited content previously and I was like this is fantastic and there's a mention on this but it's almost like an accidental TV advert opportunity came up and you're like we're not ready for that but you just had to get ready for it before you were ready.

1:00:49Basically we Guy our CMO who is brilliant he said i want ball bro to be on tv in 2025 and we're like ridiculous no way we haven't got the money it's just not going to happen and we'd actually been talking with um callum at itv ignite who it's sort of an incubator for small brands that help them get on see the benefits of advertising on television and i'd said to callum there's no way we're doing tv it's okay done done deal and And we said, oh, but we need a YouTube ad. We need like a brand Christmas YouTube ad, high production to go into Christmas. And we spoke to a couple of firms to make it for us.

1:01:31And it was all like, the cheap ones look terrible or it was going to cost us like 50 grand.

1:01:37James Burtt: Yeah, yeah. Okay, what do we do? Jake comes along and says, I've got an idea. I'm going to play every role and it's going to be a bald guy at Christmas. And everyone's, the whole family's there getting presents related to hair. and then he's just looking sad and so you know like getting a hair dryer or curling tongs or whatever it might be and he's playing every role he's playing every role nutty professor style this is great nutty professor style and um we can use that as this funny relatable brand ad that will just use as our youtube video it's okay fine you know it's not a good idea where we're going to shoot it all right who's like has anyone got red room i'm like my mom's living room is red so they shot it in my mom's living room um and it was three of them jake ben creative director and co-founder and a will of a videographer for on a budget like a grand this is great wigs ordered from amazon stuff like that they presented that what they created and i i still think it's a masterpiece it was it's just genius it's so funny it represents the brand so well it's just this kind of you're like what was if you had never heard of bull bro you'd be like what is that and um it's the reaction that we wanted it to make so we said this is too good to just run on youtube and we just successfully raised some money so there was a little bit of money there so i got on the phone to callum and was like and said i think we have an asset and i think we want to do tv and then he presented this deal which was sort of a national itv2 and then itv1 in central and granada and i called guy the cmo said and i'm like i think we want to do like this massive for us not massive in context tv campaigns that you're mad you shouldn't do that you definitely shouldn't that it's too there's no like and that analytics analytics yeah yeah and we're like contract the call to action on tv yeah all this stuff all this stuff and we're like okay no this just feels right let's do it so we did it and um the response was incredible like really we'd have in some of the ad breaks a thousand people go to site from a team which is not why you do tv you do so you need to like build brand brand awareness yeah sure direct action so you could track you could attribute a thousand hits to a website yeah when you break it would be sort of 15 30 25 15 tv break where we know we're being yeah yeah thousand and wow in granada region or whatever so you could see great advert for power tv as well which is what they're trying to do with that incubator yeah well look i mean tv is definitely a trusted medium right like the fact you have to go through clear cast like you can put pretty much whatever you want on meta um but to get that on tv you really have to justify the claims you're making and so yeah um and yeah i mean the reaction was was incredible some people because drake jake was dressed as the whole family including the wife it caused some consternation among certain groups like we thought we might oh of course yeah we thought we might offend this community but it turns out it was we offended somebody else we offended someone else and obviously not you know we're just not trying to yeah we're just a bald skincare brand um we actually got in trouble this summer with a an ad we did um really so we did some out of home and we were doing um we do service station urinals toilet i've seen this i saw it the other day i was coming back that's why i saw it yeah i got so excited i've never been more excited in a welcome break toilet well there's a good there's a good the sort of uh attention time sort of uh where you're just looking ahead of you yeah yeah and although our brand's premium is premium product we don't take ourselves too seriously to not appear there like yeah we don't mind um and anyway the um the advertising company that sells that space i said look you've bought this many so we're going to give you an additional you know um allocation of space but it will be in the women's urinals at the women's toilets and i'm like okay well we have to have some specific messaging we can't just put like a bald skincare ad yeah so really innocently and 30 percent times of our 60 percent of our customers are women at christmas and so on buying us gifts so we thought we thought oh right like let's do a um you know let's do some messaging saying you know bald heads as you know help protect his head this summer bald heads are seven times more likely to get skin cancer bald bro just saying like bringing attention just to a fact that not many people know like not many people realize how vulnerable a bald head is yeah and we have lots of customers that want to take care of um their husbands sons brothers uncles whatever but actually we ended up offending quite a few people because it was sort of you know don't imply that women have to look after guys heads um so yeah oh why yeah yeah so it was so that was you know that shocked us because that obviously wasn't our intention the intent at all we were not saying that's a woman's responsibility to look after a husband's head it was just more of an information piece but so we managed the summary of this is we managed to offend someone that we're not expecting brilliant every time pretty much the tv or the toilet pretty much whatever we do so yeah and again we are just a bald skincare brand trying to promote self-acceptance and prevent bald guys getting skin cancer so i think like where we come from it's pretty positive yeah just we yeah we always manage to step on do you know what i think also if you are if you never offend somebody and if you never it just means you're not doing it enough or if you don't rub somebody up the wrong way that you just haven't got enough awareness out there yeah i think i'm like oh publicity is good publicity i don't necessarily believe that either but i think especially when you come to something with good intent yeah if someone's you know gets offended because jake's wearing a wig and pretending to be the wife in the christmas scene like are you being really offensive or are you just playing on traditional stereotypes we're trying to take the piss out of a john lewis act of course yeah annoy john lewis but i mean even in this case like we we obviously we understand that people coming from all kinds of different perspectives so we take the time if they do reach out to us and complain we respond to them with you know just trying to justify and say this is not what you know this is not the intention at all um i did feel a bit bad that someone gave us a one-star trust pilot review for for our for a for a toilet it's like it's not really you can't It's not what Trustpilot is there for.

1:07:52Yeah, but it's not like the product. You didn't try the product. Yeah. You didn't like the poster, not the product. Yeah, exactly.

1:07:57James Burtt: Pick your battles. Yeah. Right, let's pause there because I think Tarek has just touched on something very interesting there. And that's the unusual marketing opportunities that has really elevated their brand and their business moving forward. The thing like Baldfest, for example, great idea, great concept. Now, you might look at it now and go, a thousand people in a pub in Soho. It's become quite a big thing. Now, obviously, if you're a small business, you might be going, well, I haven't got the budget to do that, the ability to do that, the team to do that. I couldn't pull that sort of thing off.

1:08:24James Burtt: But that's not where it started. Again, let's look back where the first Ball Bros Festival was. It was just getting a bunch of people together in an industrial state in the Midlands just to give, again, something we touched on earlier, that sense of community. So is there something that you can do within your brand and business, your marketing, that actually helps you to stand out? Is there an unusual marketing opportunity that you could deploy right now that would actually be what I class as a six-pointer? So it means like it's a win on top of a win, if that makes sense. So, for example, it could be something as simple as a piece of content that you make.

1:08:55James Burtt: Could you syndicate that piece of content into an online publication? Could you get a big community group to share that out? Could you get that into print press? There's all these other opportunities that might be the sort of thing that moves the needle just a little bit. If you're a localized business, for example, localized press, community groups, online forums, online WhatsApp groups, those unusual marketing opportunities that are not actually that difficult to pull off, might be the sort of thing that actually means that you get much more reach and much more impact from the content that you're creating.

1:09:25James Burtt: In a world where we're told you've got to put out, you know, three, five, 10, bloody 30 pieces of content a day. Yeah, you might have to do that sort of stuff on social media in certain organisations and certain verticals. But is there a way that you can stop, take a step back, look at what you're doing and find out, is there a way to tweak it just a couple of degrees to be a little bit more unusual to have a little bit more impact. It's not about taking a thousand people down to the pub. That's not what I'm telling you you have to do for your brand and your business. I couldn't take a thousand people down to a pub.

1:09:55James Burtt: I haven't got the team, the scale and the size to do that kind of thing. But what could you do that would have that impact in an unusual way? Because sometimes taking unusual action will lead to unusually good results. Right, let's get back to it. What's coming up now then? What's happening up for for you guys because i've seen the adverts are in i'd forgotten that's where i saw i saw one in the service station i've seen a lot in bus shelters at the moment the brands getting out there what's what's coming next yeah i mean that was our intention we understood that we um were defining a category and a part of defining a category is bringing attention to that category and so part of the reason we raised money was to build um a budget to be able to advertise more broadly and bring attention to a the fact that bald guys need skincare and be that there is a brand there for them that is not only representing them but also providing these products so um our growth is the plan is to really build a multi-omnichannel uh offering in the in the uk really become a brand that you can find in you know retailers amazon where we already exist online or TikTok, whatever, something that's really, we really want to establish and entrench this brand for, you know, decades to come as in the UK, and then also build on some of the work that we've done in other markets and really try and build a global, bold skincare brand and community.

1:11:17James Burtt: Is the sort of going to retail, is that part of the plan in the near to sort of immediate future? I thought it was. And the more I think about it, the less I think it is, just because it's something that we certainly will have at some point but i think you only get one shot at it to do it well i mean you might do too but it's so we don't need it right that we definitely don't need it right now uh and we don't need the sort of the headache either that it will bring so i'd much rather push further with what we're doing in dc and amazon and so on but professionalize build our team build our capacity and then do retail not when it's like an aspiring semi-unknown brands just trying to broaden their channel but more like okay well it's just so obvious you've got the cloud you've got exactly so it's just a no-brainer where it just makes total sense so i'd rather get there um than try and push and fail and and you know it's not necessarily there's not a high contribution or profitability in retail for a lot of brands huge amount of cash flow issues come from it and a huge amount of headaches so we're growing so much just on online and amazon that i think if we tried to do retail now we would have messed it up so let's just hold off a bit what's the what's the one channel um that you think you should be if retail is now not the choice what's the one channel that you think right we've got to double down on that is it like a tiktok shop or i know timu's doing stuff on site now and i don't think i think timu like we're maybe a bit no offense to timu maybe a bit premium for that yeah something like as much as we can you know take the piss out of ourselves we still are like quite inexpensive high-end high quality skincare product that not necessarily doesn't necessarily belong on certain platforms tiktok shop working for you guys um never really tried just start okay sort of well i think one try and we didn't we didn't know what we were doing so it just everything else was going on so we said okay let's park it later um now um we are starting to test it again so starting to just do very little just to see is it a channel is it somewhere where we can where we resonate maybe more on the gifting side so something we can push in father's day and christmas oh no i don't know like like i don't know how many 40 plus year old bald men are on tiktok but more and more so yeah so yeah it's definitely something we're looking at i don't think i don't have that view of oh we've got to double this or do that we we're organic and we reactive to what what the opportunities that are there so we might test amazon in another market we might look at distribution somewhere but really you know the foundation of dc and amazon has been working out for us so far and i want to see how far that can go before we start to over complicate things but do you do you see from sort of website traffic and searches and people reaching out because it seems like you've got a very proactive community is there a region that's the logical next step i guess you know america and canada because of the size and the scale of north america and obviously if you're doing uh amazon you could obviously syndicate it through fulfilled by amazon quite quickly i guess is that the next market or do you want to go smaller and dominate a space more we'll see we'll see i think english-speaking markets obviously we we know we resonate as a brand yeah they're obvious like ireland canada us australia maybe some things in the middle east where it's sunny a lot european markets let's see i think we'll do tests whether it's small digital campaigns or amazon and then where we see resonance will double down yeah australia be a great one of you guys actually the skincare thing is so i was there at christmas and it was obviously summer at christmas weirdly in australia or not weirdly if you're from australia shout out to australia i'm making your geography sound weird but the the skincare messaging is constant out there i think because the ozone layer yeah i mean they're aware right yeah yeah anything less than spf 50 isn't really um the done thing um but let's see there's so much the uk is a brilliant place brilliant market there's still a lot of work to do here i don't like we're becoming more known but we're certainly not a household name and i think we we should be you know there's this four million bald guys in the uk another four million thinning there's all the people around them that you know we make a perfect gift so there's a lot of lifting still to do here before we get lost in other uh in other markets but certainly that they're there for us to tackle when the time is right finally then what's the what are you most personally excited about in the next 12 to 18 months on this on this entrepreneurial adventure well it's been full of surprises so i don't know what's coming yeah i mean the thing that i like the most is just that we've managed to grow this far and still be a place that is really fun to turn up and be with the people that are in it you know like the jigs the guys the kevins the ben the rich co-founders nikki head of customer service it's just an awesome bunch of people and just seeing what's next with them you know we like things like board fest we do retreats where we just because a lot of us are remote we have our warehouse in south birmingham but a lot of us are remote meeting up having fun just going on this and it's trope a bit cliche but like the journey is what i'm really excited by seeing what's next for bulbron in this quest to a change the narrative around hair loss and b build a global brand that's a kind of exciting thing to be doing so i said final question i lied i've got one more final question what does if we scale out so you're enjoying the journey of what it is i think it's very rare as well and congratulations to you to to scale in the way that you are to have the brand affinity that you've got and to still really enjoy it and like the people that you're around i think that's very rare and she is a credit to the brand that you've created if we future forecasted because i think it's like the moon horse moon or something today isn't it so let's go along with it although i'm not sure how legitimate that is but let's just go with it refute forecast 60 months into the future five years half a decade what would success look like to you or could you just not see that far down the road because it's so organically grows the way it grows we've always had like a mantra on the on the commercial side and then a mantra on the community side it's one is to really bring boldness into the mainstream and say make it cool is just never you can never make something cool by saying it's just like But by making it something that guys don't worry about anymore.

1:17:48And so they just accept and like sweet and bold. If we can help anyone do that, that's success. And the more people we help globally, that's success. And then the bigger we build the brands to become a global skincare brand for bald guys, that's success as well. So the more places, the more markets, the more awareness and the more like happy bald guys that there are, you know, finally having a brand that champions them and feeling good about being bald, that's the win for us.

1:18:14James Burtt: amazing well thank you so much for your time we'll put links in the show notes to the christmas video some of the footage of ball fest which i think is amazing and all your socials and stuff but thanks for your time i appreciate it thank you for having me cheers mate thank you so much for watching this episode of booing the brand i genuinely hope that you absolutely love this episode if you want to click here there's another great video that you can watch or this one here oh i've picked it just for you it's an absolute banger click that one right now go on and i'll see you on the next one