Ryan Bartlett - How a Failed Poker Pro Built a $1 Billion Business

23:28Right. And that's what they did. And now they're all benefiting because of it. They bet on us. We bet on them. We created that relationship and it all worked out for the better. Yeah. I mean, for us, our production is an investor in our company. Obviously every company has its ups and downs. And when we were having rough times, being able to extend terms to net 90, hypothetically, I'd have to pull a completely different lever to even keep the company alive unless they did that. But yeah, it's pretty crazy to think going back. What would you say from a scale perspective, what are the hardest things as a CEO when you're scaling a company at the speed at which you guys did?

24:00I would say that one of the hardest things is scaling people. People are always the hardest part of a business because they're the most complex and they all have their different needs and wants and things going on in their life that can affect their work. It's very difficult to scale people, especially when you're trying to find the A players. You know, we've been on this five-year journey of getting to the team we have now, which is unbelievable. And I'm just so grateful that we've been able to get to this place. A lot of it is because of Ben and Adam and all the people that have implemented these processes in hiring that have gotten us these A players.

24:37And it's been a difficult road to get to those A players. You've got to go through a lot of people. You have to let some people go that you love. You love them as people. but sometimes they're just not right for the business. And if you're truly being honest with yourselves, a lot of time you're holding them back from their greatness at another company. I feel that so heavy. But that's a really tough conversation to have and they're not gonna understand it in the moment, right? Because all they see is you stripping everything that they have today, but they don't see the long-term. But I'll promise you, you know how many people that we've let go that have come back to me four or five months down the line and just said like, thank you.

25:14Like, I really appreciate what you guys did because you put me in such a better spot. And I love you guys for that. And at the time, I didn't realize it. But thank you for everything you guys taught me. And I just appreciate the journey. And I mean, the CMO that you have from zero to 10 is different than 10 to 50, 50 to 100, 100 to a billion. And I can imagine, I haven't obviously gone to that scale, but having to let someone go just because they don't have the experience at that scale is tough. The business outgrows you very quickly at these levels. And that's been one of the hardest things that I've had to wrestle with is like, you're right.

25:50The people you start with are not the people you end with. And either that person that you start with evolves and grows and does become that greatness, or they got to go to another company where they're just not growing as fast and it's a better fit. So you do have to end up replacing roles based on where the company is at, the life cycle. Yeah, I think it's very dangerous to hire someone based on what they can be in a year or two years, especially at the speed at which you guys are going. It's a very rare thing that they're able to evolve as fast as the business is evolving. Only a very small percentage, and it's less than probably 5 % have been able, Nicholas is a great example of someone who started with me from the beginning and has evolved with us, and his creative has gotten better and better and better over the years, and that's really what it takes.

26:36You have to get better if you're gonna grow with a business that moves this fast. What would you say are the core principles of hiring for True Classic? We look for grit. I would say grit is probably one of the most important pieces because grit allows you to just figure it out. Whatever that thing is, whatever that problem is, grit and determination are so underrated. And where I really look for that is people that have been in the military, like Ben is ex-military. I really love hiring military guys because they get what grit is. They've been beat down in the field. They know what it's like to be stripped of everything, all their ego, everything.

27:16Just let it go and just keep moving in the right direction. You know who else has that quality? Our people in sports. People that have been part of big sports teams. Whenever I interview them and I talk to them, and that's one of the things I say, I'm like, that's our guy. It's so funny you say that because I always say wrestlers. Show me the guy that had to make 96 pounds in seventh grade. They just have discipline since the start. And it's one-on-one. It's like entering an octagon by yourself. you're forced to be self-reliant. And that's why we bet on guys like Will and Taylor, the Bussin boys.

27:49And I love those guys because they're pro athletes. They did the hard work. They know what it looks like to work their ass off and push through and figure things out. And by the way, that's why MMA, it's another one. And that's why I'm investing in MMA. And I'm looking at these fighters and I just appreciate their DNA so much because I know how difficult it's gotta be to do what they do for a living. and make your money that way, right? I have such an appreciation for it that I'm like, when I go to the UFC, I'm like, what can I do to give back to the fighters? Because that's really, I care about the fans and I care about the fighters.

28:24And so I have a lot of conversations with them about that. But to go back to your question, grit is a huge one. And how do you quantify grit outside of the background? Are you guys doing any type of tests or putting them through different scenarios? Yes. We have a whole homework assignment that we give them. and then they have to present that homework assignment. Tell me more, this is getting interesting here. So honestly, I like it and I don't like it because it is good to get the insight of what the work is gonna look like in the future. The problem is that the work, they always go overboard and crush it on the homework assignment, right?

28:55So it's not truly indicative of what their work life is gonna be once they're here, but it is a good indication as to what it could look like. So there are a lot of times where we're like, this guy is a home run, we're gonna hire him, I'm so happy about him. And then he does a homework assignment and we're like, nevermind. Like he didn't put any thought into the homework assignment. Can you give me context of like a homework assignment would be? You can just pick like a random role and tell me what an example would be. So like products, for example, if we're going to hire a head of product, we're going to ask him, what does the roadmap for 2026 look like?

29:25Given what you've seen with True Classic and what we've done, come up with a roadmap and that'll be their homework assignment. And they'll go through, here's what I'm thinking in month one, month two. Here's what it would look like. Here's what you guys haven't done enough of that I think you should do more of. That's what we're looking for. like super intentionality, not just like, well, here's what Abercrombie's doing. You guys should do that. Yeah, I find with that too, we do something similar and just keeping it very broad and macro and then just seeing how much they dial it in from a granular perspective tells you a lot if they're like detail-oriented.

29:54Exactly. So we do that with everything, finance, any department gets a homework assignment and we really run them through the ringer. And it's like a month to a month and a half long process to get hired here. Personality test, do you guys do this? We do. We have a whole personality test that Ben has employed here. And I love it. It really does show you what kind of person they're going to be. And we know which personalities work and which ones don't here at True Classic. Is it Myers-Briggs or something like that? It's something like that. Yeah. I would imagine you're saying grit. You guys are just looking for people that are entrepreneurial in nature.

30:25I was having this conversation the other day. If it was up to me, I would only hire entrepreneurs because they will always find a way out of a solution or into a solution, right? They have no ego. They move with impunity. They're not afraid to fail. They're great problem solvers. They're multitaskers. They can wear a ton of hats. And they're not like super masters of one thing, but they can wear a lot of different hats. And I find that incredibly useful in business. I would way prefer a generalist, a Swiss Army knife in the marketing side that understands paid and brand and creative and ads. Obviously you need specialists for other stuff.

31:04Yeah. How are you attracting this type of talent? Because for me, let's just say 200 million plus in ARR with 60 employees. You're talking about three plus million dollars per employee. Yeah. That is fucking unheard of, bro. That is literally unheard of. Are you guys using recruiters? Are people reaching out to you directly? Both. You know what's actually helped a lot, which I didn't anticipate, was this podcast stuff. So doing these clips and putting those clips out to the world, spreading it on LinkedIn really gives a feel for what this business is going to be like if you were to work here. And it gives people a really good insight to how we think, how we operate, how we deal with employees, how we think about customers, how we think about the business.

31:48And the more context you give people, the easier it is for them to want to be a part of it. You're communicating like the business vision and everything so well on LinkedIn. Specifically, I see a lot. Thank you. How do you get a guy like Ben? Ben, I know, came into the business a couple years in, out of Meta. I spoke to him briefly. He's a very, very intelligent guy. How do you get a guy like that? Well, first of all, you gotta be able to afford a guy like that. So early on, we couldn't hire him because he was working for us. So let me back up. I told Nick early on, and I was running the Facebook ads, I'm like, Facebook's making updates literally every week, and I don't know what the hell's happening.

32:22Sometimes my ads are working, sometimes they're not. I need someone on the inside. Go find me someone at Meta. And he found Ben. and he brought me him as a consultant. And he's like, look, this guy will charge us 500 bucks a month. And then I would get on the phone with him once a week for an hour. And we would just shoot the shit about Meta. And he would look through my campaigns and he would give me some like, oh, this is working for some of the other brands. I'm working with Bumble. This is working for them. Try that. I would structure the campaign like this instead of that. And so over time, what happened is we just inevitably grew a friendship.

32:53And then the calls would transition from talking about Meta to talking about whatever business we would wanna build together in the future. CRO agency, we have a lot of ideas of what we wanted to do. As we were going, he would come back and tell me, because he was part of the disruptors program at Facebook. He got to see all the hottest moving companies. And he would tell me, he would be like, dude, I don't know what the heck is going on over there, but whatever you guys doing is really special. I'm telling you, because I get to see all these other guys and I'm telling you how different what you're doing is.

33:22Inevitably, it piqued his interest and he got really excited about our growth. and then he would be like, well, what do you think about me coming over there? And we'd be like, well, we can't afford you. And then eventually it got to the point where we could afford him. And we had hit our 100 million and we were like, let's sit down and talk. We met in Calabasas. We had a really great lunch together and he was completely on board when we left that lunch. And we negotiated and he was part of us within about a month after that. So to button that up, what would you say is the single best piece of advice you'd give someone if they're looking to acquire A plus talent?

33:56you have to have the right culture, I would say. And Ben loved our culture. Even though it wasn't as good as it is now, you have to have a really good culture. You have to have a really good business, right? Like the business has to feel like it's really going somewhere. But Ben was really behind the vision, more importantly. He saw what we were trying to do and how fast we were moving and the levers we were pulling. And he got behind this thing of like, look good, feel good. Create a product that helps people feel good and you're changing their life. You know, when you enhance somebody's confidence, it is an absolute game changer in terms of what that business can do.

34:37And so he got behind the vision. He absolutely loved it. He wasn't a big apparel guy, neither was I, but he saw the bigger picture, which was that when you create something great with a lot of intentionality and it makes people feel a little bit better about themselves and how they look, it really makes a difference. So even in the early days, I would say, look good, feel good. And Ben would always say, look good, feel good, do good. Because what we realize is so much of the message that we put out to the world is bigger than just t-shirts and clothing. We really try to follow through and show up for people, which is why you see so much philanthropy that we're doing and so much giving.

35:15And we feel like that's just such an important component to business and having a lot of resources to wield into the world. Well, obviously that look good, feel good. And then Do Good was an internal kind of strategy session that you guys had. What are the biggest kind of systems and processes that you guys use to scale as fast as you did? Like, do you guys use some sort of, like my company uses EOS? We do EOS, but we didn't start doing EOS till the last year or so. Before that, we were just running and gunning. It was like 12 people trying to do as best as they could and hang on for dear life.

35:52It was a bunch of scrappy entrepreneurs in the beginning. Like when I look back at like our core team of like Remy and Nicholas and Boris and Brianna and all of our young gunners, it was all entrepreneurial DNA. And that's really what made it work because we were 12 people doing the work of 50 people. And that's why it was able to look the way it did because if those 12 people were just specialists, we would have never been able to get to the scale that we got. You know, Boris, for example, our original ops guy, I mean, he was managing all these platforms, NetSuite integrations. The job of like 10 people now that we have, and you need it at our scale, but it was crazy what we were doing early on.

36:29Obviously, you guys have a super strong culture. We talked a little bit off camera, like understanding and knowing your guys' core values. What do you guys do as a team to build team camaraderie and culture? Not enough. I would say that we, that is something we should do a lot better at. Number one, first and foremost. I would say we do a lot of all hands where we all get on and we try to converse with customers on a call with the whole company and really flush out how they feel about the brand, what we could do better. It's not just about it fitting a little bit better. It's about the bigger picture of what the brand has been able to do for their life.

37:02And I think that really gives people a North Star of like, this is what we're after. And this is why we do what we do, is to make these people feel good. So we do a lot of touch points as far as that's concerned. Ben and Adam are constantly having touch points with everybody in the company. Asking for feedback is a really big one from people like, you know, how is this going for you? Anything I can do better for you? Just really trying to show up as well as they can. What about this Slack channel? I saw in some interview that you guys have some Slack channel where if people exemplify the core values, they get some sort of currency.

37:37Yeah, kudos. It's called kudos. That was a really cool thing that I found early on. It was a way of showing appreciation in Slack, which I just thought was the coolest thing. I wanted to be able to reward people. If they're here, you can high five them. You can give them a present. You can tell them to their face how great it was what they did. But on Slack, you're so massively disconnected that there has to be a way to reward people or some kind of system. So I found this Kudos app and it was a game changer overnight. That is the name of the app, Kudos app? Yes, it's been amazing. And every week, everyone gets a certain amount of coins to deploy.

38:15And if you don't use them, they go away. So you're forced to give, essentially, which I love that aspect of it. And so you get a certain amount and you can convert those coins into real dollars. You know, you can spend it on anything. You can spend it on Amazon, Starbucks, Uber Eats, whatever you want. And it's been great for the culture because people every week, it's like, okay, this person exemplified going fast. This person did this. And it's not just us leadership rewarding the people. The people are rewarding the people and their peers around them. So it just turns into this big love fest of everybody appreciating each other and high-fiving as a team digitally.

38:49And it was one of the best moves that we made early on. This is genius. So it's a fixed cost that you have on your P &L that you know on a per-employee perspective, bacon per week, they have X amount of dollars, but it's just gonna go all around the company. You basically just say like, we're gonna take a hundred grand and it's just gonna go to giving away to people. Like you're just gonna take that number and then divide it by the amount of coins. and then that's just what everyone's going to get. And now, of course, I'll go in there and throw some big ones around here and there if I really see something amazing.

39:20But people love it, man. It's been great for morale. And that is just, I just want to keep diving in deeper into that. And that is just, someone gets, let's just say, 250 coins and they're a dollar each and they can just give anybody any amount of coins and they just need to make it very clear on what they did in relation to core values. It asks you when you're going to deploy the coin, which value you want to give them. So out of our five values, they'll pick whatever one makes sense. And then you can write a little message in there to basically double down on why. And so everyone does that, obviously.

39:52They give it more context. Instead of just like, hey, you did this, you get that. It's like, no, no, no. You helped me so much on the merchandising. You basically took all this work off my plate this week and you made it easier for me. And thank you so much for executing like a pro. Boom, here's 250 coins. I've never heard or seen anybody doing this. I think this is brilliant. I think when you think, when people look at your company, they see it as a marketing company, I know you look at it as product and storytelling, I would say. For me, unequivocally at the top is the word customer obsession.

40:24And when I first looked into your company, you guys inspired me and my company that we actually made additional hires, customer engagement. We've tightened up our customer service so hard. Literally about two and a half months ago, you directly inspired me and my company. So I wanted to thank you for that. Love that. What is your thesis on customer service? It's really a lost art. And it's not everybody's fault. We're all so detached from humans these days. And we're on computer screens. We're on phones. We're not there to really appreciate each other in the human form, which is a bummer. And Ben and I talk a lot about how to get people back in the office because we just, we want that camaraderie.

41:03But customer service has has gone digital. It's become automated. And that's not to say we don't use some AI in some of our conversations for the sake of getting them to the right live person. We still do that, but we don't let AI just take over the whole conversation. I just think that such a big miss for most companies. Listen, the person you're selling to is all that matters at the end of the day, right? You don't have to love your own product, but the people you're selling to have to absolutely love it. And not just that, they have to love the experience that they're having with your product.

41:38And if something goes wrong, you better show up for them or you don't deserve to keep them as a customer. And I just believe so wholeheartedly that you have to go so overboard in a world where everything has been done already. Everything's been commoditized. Every business has pretty much been done and replicated. It's such an easy differentiator because most people do a 50 % job of it. So even if you're coming at it from a 75%, you've already cornered the market. Like if your product is the same as everyone else, but you just treat everyone better, you're going to crush it. I would argue that it's way lower than 50%.

42:12And I'm not knocking overseas talent, but to think that overseas talent that costs a fifth of price is going to be better than domestic talent that is embedded in your, I think that that is a huge miss. It was a miss in-house and domestically. That's smart. Because you realize what we realize, which is that people are not stupid. You're not going to fool them with hiring outside talent from other countries that aren't speaking the language as well as you are. They're going to immediately be defensive under that context. So you better have some killers in there that can jump in and grab those calls.

42:53And I do that now because I'll get emails from random customers. Somehow they get my email. I don't know. I'm with you on that too. But I always reply. And I always give it to Jordan, who's one of our absolute killers here, who heads up CX. And I know when I give it to her, everything's gonna go great. Because I trust her and I know her and she's got the right skillset and the right talent that when I give her something and a disgruntled customer is sitting there, I can close my eyes and go, she's gonna crush it for this guy and she's gonna go over the top. She's gonna find out what he likes. She's gonna send him something that isn't even true classic.

43:25She's gonna go overboard and really make a moment out of it because that guy, was really upset enough to search out my email and contact me directly, I owe him something big in return. I owe him my time. I owe him my best people. And I also owe him some sort of gift outside of True Classic because he took extra time. So funny you say that because starting January 1st, we created a wow budget and it's a per week fixed amount of dollars to either reverse people that are angry and or look in our CRM and get those big LTV customers. and give them random things. Yeah, I took that directly from you.

44:01Thank you for that. Dude, and you will be so pleasantly surprised at what happens when you deploy that on the world because those people become your best LTV customers of all time because they will be in a room and they will tell a story about that happening. And all those people will suddenly become fans of your brand because they love that guy that told that story. So what's the best form of advertising? Word of mouth. And that guy telling that story was the best word of mouth voucher he could have ever given for your company. And people will never forget that. And then they become big fans, obviously.

44:38Here's the thing too, nobody does it. People don't have one of those stories. It's incredible. I used to, and I've talked about this before, I used to call in the beginning every single customer that spent over$1 ,000. I would spend all day Friday calling people. And again, going back to what I said before, I would always be focused on the inputs and the outputs. What was the actual value I got out of that? And I wasn't just like, this is obvious it's creating value. And I think on the customer service side, you need to overextend yourself and just do what's obvious. I always have Gary Vee in the back of my head when I'm thinking about these things, because he's one of the guys who talked about it early on at Wine Library.

45:15I've heard of the story too. And it working for him. And I remember hearing that story six or seven years ago, and I never forgot it. And so when you think about how to index for the customer or over index, it goes to those kinds of stories. And those end up just being the greatest stories you can have about the business because they live on forever. And someday you'll meet somebody that got told that story and it'll come full circle and you'll realize how impactful those moments are for people in the absence of not a lot of other companies doing that. So for context for people listening, it was something like one guy bought a bottle of wine and they bought, you know, a Peyton Manning jersey or something.

45:51and then like six years later or something, a guy called with a big order and it turned out to be from that guy. Exactly, dude. You don't really understand it until you start doing it. I think people think like, yeah, but that's not gonna net out later. But when you do it at scale and you do a lot of it, boy, does it net out in the word of mouth as a percentage of post-purchase survey. So like when we look at our post-purchase survey, that's the greatest indication of what's happening in your business. Where are people finding you? and you watch that word of mouth segment continue to increase and increase and increase over time, that means you're doing the right thing organically to push you past paid media.

46:32And everyone, that's where everyone's trying to get to, right, is like, how can I just shut off paid media and let the business just be the business and let the word of mouth take over? You have to do things like this. You have to scale the unscalable surprise and delight moments and be genuine about it, right? It's not just like, hey, we're doing this to arbitrage cap. It's like, you need to be doing it because it's the right thing to do for people that are upset about something you created. If you made them upset, you owe them something to make them happy. So you better figure out a way. Seems as though you're really meshing customer service with your retention strategy.

47:08I want to get into really hard tactics on what you're doing. So what would you just say are a couple key things as low-hanging fruit that a business owner can do to improve their customer service? Number one, you have to get the right software. And that is evolving very fast. We've had a bunch of different platforms and it's changing so fast that we're having to revisit it. And so you need a AI first software that can do some of the legwork early on to get them in front of the right customer rep. That's a big thing. And that is the bucketize, the query to see who the correct person is. Exactly.

47:47So it's not the AI agent going and handling your entire situation. The AI is just really good at who's the best fit on the team to deal with this type of person or this type of interaction or whatever. It could be product, could be shipping, could be a lot of different things. Who's the service provider? Just tell us, Sue. I know it's not like a Gorgeous or one of those. It was Gorgeous. Now we're at Zowie. And Zowie's done amazing for us. Gorgeous was amazing for us. But we're always kind of like looking to see like who's innovating and who's crushing in this space. And by the way, like who are my friends using?

48:20Who's Roenick over at Obby using? I want to know. Who's Sean using over at Ridge? Like I want to know from these guys because these guys are boots on the ground operators like we are. And so when we hear it from them, that's what really piques our interest. The first and foremost, you would say is the software. Quite frankly, I completely agree is making sure it gets to the right person because our customer service department, you know, it is a pretty big delta between the one that's the best and the one that's the worst. And then from there, do you guys have, what do you guys have, like a customer service Bible?

48:51Like what else do you guys have to kind of decipher between how people respond? Training's huge, obviously. Like they have to fit into our core values and those core values really help them move the right way within interacting with customers. So, you know, they try to move quickly. They try to be creative with their solutions. Like all of our core values really fit into every part of this business seamlessly. And so training is obviously a huge one. And we rely on our leaders in CX, like Jordan. If someone comes on that team, she is working with them very hands-on early on to get them caught up to speed on the way that we deal with customers.

49:30I know from a customer service perspective, you guys are also using customer feedback to then drive kind of products, initiatives, marketing and such. You guys have a membership club. What has that done for you guys? It's an LTV game changer. No surprise because people that are invested as members obviously love the brand. What I love about the membership is that people get to be integrated with us. They get into a Facebook group and I'm in there and I'm talking with them and I'm going over product with them. We had a guy standing next to a display in Target the other day and I'm asking him, where was the display?

50:05And next time you're there, try to move it closer to the aisle and also try to restack the shirts if you can. And they do it because they love the brand and they don't like to see things all messy in the display unit. So these people are out there and they're loving what we do for them. And then we listen to their feedback because without that, you have hot air as a product. You have to take the feedback and you have to take it very seriously. It is not just one guy's opinion. It's like, what he's saying, is that really, we should really think about that actually. And then we'll like spread it across many people.

50:38And we'll say, what do you guys think as a broader group? Is this something that affects you? And then we act on it. So the membership has been great for bringing people in as a community. And yes, they're going to save 20%. They're going to get free shipping and all the things that are obvious that comes with the membership. So we have a hundred thousand members now. Yeah. A hundred thousand in the membership active active yes but in the facebook group we only have 5 000 so those 5 000 are really getting the value because those are your true true fans hardcore and i think a lot of the people in the 100k don't really know how valuable it is because we're all in there and they can ask the product team is in there as well so they can ask very specific product like when are you guys coming out with a 36 length gene instead of all 34 and 32 and 30 and 28 and the product team will be like yeah, we're thinking June of next year.

51:29What other company can you go to and ask that kind of question and get a very specific answer? Like that's the value is that we're just, or they'll say, are you guys ever gonna do a version of this style that could be better? I love this style. Can you guys do that? And we'll be like, we'll consider it. Absolutely. We didn't think about that. But now that you're mentioning it, we might just do that. So the funnel is a membership club to get aggregated all of your highest LTV clients and people that are stickiest, bring them down funnel into some sort of comm channel to see who most wants to engage with the brands.

51:58Yes. And then use that for customer engagement and feedback for product marketing and make it even stickier. Yeah, dude. And it's good for them, but it's so good for the business because you get to bring to light so many things that you weren't thinking about originally and they flush it out for you. And as soon as they know that they have a voice, well, now they're really on board. Now they're like, oh, the thing I just said can get implemented and affect millions of other men. This is amazing. How do I speak more into this group and give more of what I want? Because they're gonna see the fruits of their voice come through in the company.

52:36And that is extremely rare. Then they really feel like they're a part of the brand. Dude, how can it not be? We have guys that recommended a product a year ago that is now coming out this year. And they're like, I cannot believe that you guys took a suggestion and brought it to fruition on literally a comment on a Facebook group. It's just crazy. But when you think about it, it's like, well, why wouldn't we? If we were completely out of touch with the customer, we wouldn't even consider it, right? But like, we're so in tune and we care so much about giving them what they want that if you're not listening, you're missing out on tremendous product innovation because they're just giving you the answers.

53:11You don't have to guess anymore about what's next. Ask the people what they want next. That's crazy. And then Johnny, who told you that idea, he can go from the hero to superhero if you can then gift him that right out the gate and kind of give him that credibility. Absolutely. dude. You just empower the people. That is so crazy. I have so many communities. I don't know if you know the company Dad Gang, my buddy Bart. Yeah. Very fast growing company. So happy for those guys. The secret weapon for them is the Facebook community. Yeah. I've seen it time and time again. And that's something that we do not do.

53:40For everybody listening, that's a great, easy, low lifting, at least to start to get going. So let's shift to core KPIs with the company from a scale perspective. You've probably shifted from generalists to specialists, generous to specialists. Right now, you're definitely a generalist kind of just putting out all of the big fires. If you were to go away for a week and look at the business one time that week, what are the core KPIs that you look at? The ones I'm looking at pretty sharp on Triple Whale are obviously blended ROAS, which is everything with everything. Like what's the in, what's the out?

54:14That really gives me a feel for is the business operating well today? or haven't we sent enough emails out today to boost profitability so that the blended ROAS looks better? And very quickly, if it's a low blended, I can go and say, okay, we probably didn't send any emails today or we didn't drop any new product or fill in the blank on the retention side because the retention side of the business really is the crux of all the EBITDA and profitability. So if that's missing, the company looks rough. But as soon as those come through, like later in the day. So I'll look at the, the, the metrics on the beginning of the day, it'll look one way.

54:52And then halfway through the day, they could completely flip and the business looks much healthier. And then you go back and you start digging and you see, okay, an email went out at noon and that's why it looks the way it looks. But from a high level KPI, I'm looking at new customer acquisition ROAS, new customer acquisition CAC. What is that looking? Is it trending higher? What are the CPMs lately? How much are those fluctuating? Like it was kind of crazy in November, the CPMs, we were paying through the nose because of the elections and everything that was happening and just like the high demand of everyone advertising.

55:24So CPMs are really important. Any kind of other, like I'm always looking at Facebook ROAS, Facebook spend across every single channel. So TikTok, Google, like what are those channels looking like? Are they looking better or worse comparatively week over week? Mostly around spend and acquisition is what I'm focused on personally. Question for you, with the scale that you guys are at, how many weeks in a row of ROAS below what your goal is until you start getting concerned? Because I think that's a huge problem with e-com founders is they get a little bit kind of schizophrenic in nature. And if they see the numbers down for a week or two, it's something I've had to get better at and look at.

56:02I look at it from a monthly scope. At one point, I was looking at a daily scope like a crazy person. What's the timeline where you're getting concerned? hourly. It's so insane, dude. If you were to ask Ben that, he would say the same thing. We're so crazy about like intraday metrics that it kind of drives everybody crazy. But we're so in tune with the business that we know that quickly if something's off or not within an hour. But what I would say is like, I'll let you know once we roll out this brand transition of media spend, how much we can stomach it. It's gonna be very interesting. I would say that I'll be able to stomach it longer than most.

56:39Everyone in the respected department, especially paid media, is going to be very worried about what this looks like when we make this transition. Even just talking to Nicholas today, he was like, I just want to say I'm totally against this. I don't think it's going to work. And I'm like, I know, dude, but like, we got to make this bet and just see where the cards fall. So I think what we'll do is we'll transition away from like daily ROAS and being super focused on that to your point, which is probably the Holy Grail, which is like monthly or dude, if you could go yearly, it would be unbelievable.

57:14But it's so hard when you're operating a fast company to not look every day and be focused on why and what we can do better. So we'll see, we'll see where it goes with this brand transition and allocation of budget. And just for context, you know, 90 % of our budget spend goes against assets that are, you know, very direct response, focus, UGC, very value prop salesy. And we are now transitioning all of our comedy brand stuff to be over 50%, which is a huge shakeup to the mix, which will clearly disrupt ROAS on some level. Let's just hope it's not enough to where it affects the business. And that's where we're gonna look to the unit economics of the business.

57:55And we won't be looking so much at intraday ROAS. We'll be looking at, does it net out on the P &L after a week? What does the business look like? Forget about ROAS. Just forget about Triple Whale. Forget about what the metrics look like. what does the business look like as a whole week over week because of this change that's more of the way we're thinking about it now i love that bet you need to just sit tight and let it happen for more of like the first the first time entrepreneurs that are listening you know for me in my business if they're all ass is down a bit the most obvious lever is a discount i'd love to just know if you're below performance what are the key levers that you can push send more emails do better on retention, send more SMSs, find ways to get people back to the website.

58:40Everyone constantly lives in this acquisition mode, which I understand, you have to acquire more customers. But your best customers are gonna be the ones that come back. It's a difficult business if you don't have the repeat. The repeat drives the whole thing. And that's where you really grow by leaps and bounds is when you can figure that department out. So I would say that for growing entrepreneurs, one thing you can't invest enough time on early on is getting that retention leader into that business so that they are building out that welcome flow and those funnel flows and those abandoned cart flows and recoveries so that you are making those sales and they're coming to fruition.

59:19And they wouldn't if had you not had that person really leading that charge. That is a huge point. And the welcome flow. I cannot stress how important. And for people that don't know, a flow in general is basically just a stream of emails that a customer gets based on a journey, right? There's a lot of different flows. The welcome flow is the first email they get from your company. And it's the most important touch point you will ever have with that customer because it's where the rubber meets the road. It's where they basically decide if they're going to try you or not. And if you can figure out a way to make, number one, the offer better, like when we went from 10 % to 20 % on the welcome flow.

59:57Dude, it was astronomical. And we couldn't even believe it, looking back how much we left on the table, not starting with 20. Guys, they have the discount crack pipe though. Be careful, but keep going. And so then we tested 10 to 20 to 30 because we're like, oh, we're going to the moon. 20 to 30 didn't do anything. So we were like, okay, 20 is the sweet spot. So we left it and we've left it to this day. Then we did the cash back instead of the 20 % off the top. another amazing transition for the company, going to Fondue, which is a company that does this cash back. But I would say like, in terms of strategy and impact, you cannot obsess enough about the welcome flow and tweaking that and making sure that people understand on that first email, what it is you stand for and why they should adopt your product and purchase it.

1:00:40And what's really good about that is ultimately at the bare minimum, it could be a one-time lift where you put these automated flows one day, five day, two weeks, out to however long. Yeah. We also do Hail Marys too. Like if someone comes into the flow and they haven't bought anything for 120 days, we'll give them like a deeper discount to see if they're a valuable customer or not. Also, another good one is that a lot of people would argue, well, they don't get free shipping. Okay. Well, the third email in your welcome flow should be a free shipping offer. That takes care of that. Now you can just take that off the table because everyone's like, oh, we live in an Amazon world.

1:01:13Everything's free. It's like, okay, well then for that customer, give them free, but make it sure it's down the line a little bit. But to button up just e-com as a whole, what would you say has been the most critical factor in true class this e-com success? A couple of things. Doing unbelievable content at scale is like the obvious one, but making it unbelievable is the not so obvious part. People make creative. They try to make funny creative, but it's a four out of 10. and they can't be objective about it being a four out of 10. And that's the big miss. No one's in that department going, hey guys, this sucks.

1:01:51That's a hard conversation to have with people. But you have to, for the sake of the customer and your business, have those hard conversations with people and go, you know what? We missed it on this one, guys. We just didn't nail it. You don't have to kill their confidence, but you have to be honest about what you're showing people. And you have to at least get it to an eight out of 10, in my opinion, before the market can see it. So you have to do a lot of internal, objective, hard conversations to get it to that point. You also have to have the talent, right? Like you can't force it with some agencies.

1:02:23Like we've worked with some agencies where we've gotten the creative back and it's just not there. They just didn't care enough. They didn't put the time or we had to do a bunch of work to get it to an eight out of 10. It started as a six. We got it to an eight because our internal team is just more talented and now it's okay. but you have to build that internal team in my opinion. They have to be completely on board with what you're trying to do and you have to be testing and testing and testing and reiterating much like the tube science model of just like, okay, you start in one place and you're gonna end in a completely different place.

1:02:54So e-commerce to me, a lot of it revolves around just what are you showing the world? Once they get to the website, different conversation. Now, how are you telling the story and why should it matter to them? It's like why we do the side-by-sides. on the homepage, which is very atypical. I would say most people show like some fancy, sexy guy chilling in the park, looking the coolest he can be. And we're like, well, they don't care about that. They care about I'm here to buy a product and why should I buy it? Right. So that's why we go so big on the side by sides, because that speaks to what they want.

1:03:29And not to say we don't do some cool guy creative in the PDPs, but there's a balance. And I think that you also just cannot obsess enough about CRO, conversion rate optimization. It's something I am absolutely obsessed with. And I have taken this AOV from$36 to$112 because of it, right? It's because you figure out on the website how to just drive more value to people. It's the reason that we pack everything. When you go to the website, it's very not typical to see everything in packs. It's very weird. You go on Gap, it's just all singles. So everything's in a single. But what I realized early on was like, well, you're not really doing right by the customer if you're charging full price for one thing.

1:04:11You should lump it into a larger pack and allow them to get that discount off the MSRP. It was super intentional why we went with packs early on. It was just a no-brainer for me. So we do things in packs. We allow them the pack builder experience where if they want to build their own packs, they can do that. And then when you hit the cart, and by the way, everyone should go on our cart and just see what kind of magic we have running through that. I've seen the magic. It is insane. It's like you're gambling. It's like I even wanted to do a slot machine and everyone's like, hold on, gambler. Like chill out with your slot machine because I wanted it to be like you won something.

1:04:50I didn't want it to feel like, oh, you're just going to get something and it's like a beanie, whatever. I wanted like a real experience where you were going to win something. And that's, by the way, we ended up doing that for the UFC where I created a parlay page. So we used to send people to IG and we'd send them free credit through the buffer announcement, which is magical. Now we're sending them to a page where it looks like DraftKings and they can pick the parlay for the event with what the winners are going to be. And based on how many guys they win, they get a certain amount of store credit.

1:05:21So the first thousand people to play our parlay, we've gamified it. And so I try to infuse that kind of gambling into the website. And the more you navigate with them, the more you'll see just like my lifeblood in there trying to make it a more fun experience. It's great. I love it. Ultimately, from a CRL perspective, it's just one huge split test. Yeah. What are you guys doing from a split testing perspective? It's a lot of IntelliGems. I was just going to say that. So it's but it's difficult because we'll make bets and we have good intuition on what's going to work and it doesn't always work.

1:05:55And then you have to go back to the drawing board and pick it apart and say, okay, we rolled out four new changes. I think we need to go back and just roll out one change at a time because it just, we got to figure out what the thing was that didn't work. That is the biggest mistake my company would always do is from a split testing perspective, you change too many things at once and then you can't pinpoint what actually changed it. Exactly. And it's difficult. And sometimes you make changes that you, in your gut, you're like, There's no way this is going to lose. Here's a good example. When you hit the PDP, PDP is a product page for people that don't know.

1:06:26When you hit the product page, we used to have breadcrumbs at the top that would navigate you to other product categories. Because I was like, well, I don't want the customer to have to look around too much. I want them to just be able to go quickly to where they need to go. We lost revenue on that. And the more I thought about it, I was like, oh, because you're giving them more opportunity to leave and search around. And then they forget. And then they go on and do other things in their life. and they just forget about buying. That's why it lost revenue. And so there's like a balance between like, I want that to win though because I want to give people more usability and the ability to navigate to things easier.

1:07:03And I'm actually okay with losing a little bit of revenue on the surface because of that, because I'd rather have a better product mix in the cart and allow them to get to the thing they wanted to get to versus confusing them and losing short-term revenue. So looking at the website, but whether it be increasing conversion or driving AOV, what are some key tips you would give? Intelligems is a great one and Bundle Builder is another one. What would you say some other tips to increase conversion? I would say that the most impactful stuff is gonna be in your cart. You can't obsess enough about what's in your cart.

1:07:36So create a gift with purchase experience where once they hit a certain threshold, call it a hundred bucks, they get free shipping. You get to 150, you get a free shirt. You get to 200, you get free joggers. The great thing about this is that you can get people into other categories that they weren't gonna buy necessarily. So if you just came to buy t-shirts and you spent$150, well, you just got our active t-shirt with that$150 purchase that you weren't expecting. Guess what? You love the active t-shirt. Now you're gonna come back to the website and go, oh, the activewear line. This is actually pretty good.

1:08:09And I wouldn't have known if they hadn't sent it to me for free. Now let me go try that. And now you've gotten them into all these other categories. is super important. Also, just it drives up AOV massively because they want to keep getting free stuff. So I would say that focus on the homepage, focus on simplicity over everything. It's kind of the endless journey that we're all trying to get to. The site that does it the best and they go way overboard is Zara. Go onto Zara's website. It's like they're not even selling anything. You're just looking around and you're like, where is, it's like I'm lost in a white room.

1:08:43What is this? This is a website. It's so different than everything on the market. But that's what I love about it. They basically went to zero-based budgeting with their website. First principles, start with a white screen and just add back what you think you need on the website at the absolute core. Not what everybody wants in the company, but really what you just need to get by. Add a product, no crazy upsells or animations. And I think you just can't obsess enough about simplicity. So we took our PDP and we massively simplified. We overhauled it completely. And we saw a game changing amount of revenue out of that.

1:09:27And so it inspired us to go back and obsess about everything in simplicity. So we went back to the homepage. Our homepage used to be incredibly long. I hate to tell you guys, but if you do any heat map testing, no one is scrolling past the fold basically, which is like crazy to think about. You have a look, you look past the fold at all the stuff that you have and you're like, no one's even looking at any of my stuff. It's like, sorry, they're just not. So you better create an incredibly concise, compact website on the homepage experience and funnel them, like treat it like a landing page. Don't make it too long.

1:10:01Don't make it too short, but like make it concise and easy for people to navigate And make sure it hits all the core kind of value props you're looking at. I saw that you guys have on the homepage. You have the comedy at the bottom of the homepage, which is what I enjoyed most and it got me going deeper in. Yeah. You guys are on Shopify, right? Yes. What would you say are the top couple apps that you guys use to just optimize all types of performance? I'll tell you what is an absolute EBITDA printing machine. Let's go. Is Aftersell, which is such a simple piece of software. but it's the post-purchase sale, basically.

1:10:37So they check out, all of a sudden in checkout, they get another option to get something for like 70 % off. And it's just like - And is this post you putting in the credit card and putting it through? Yes. It's on like the thank you, thank you. It's already authorized and ready to go. So all they have to do is just say yes to it and it immediately just adds it to their cart with everything that they already purchased. Dude, it is printing money. It's just the easiest low hanging fruit that you can do overnight to start generating more profits. And when you look back at your profits, it could very easily account for 5%, 10%, 15 % of your net profit.

1:11:12And you'd be shocked. That's a bar right there, guys. It's unbelievable. And we look back at it now, and basically we were watching the graph of where it was going, and we weren't paying enough attention. And all of a sudden we got one guy to sit there and obsess about it. We hired him, and he took that graph, and that graph is now off the charts. And it went from making us, you know, a couple hundred thousand a year to multi-millions a year in just pure profit. It's straight to the bottom line because you didn't have to do anything to acquire that customer. They're already there. So everything is upside in the aftersell.

1:11:43What was he obsessing over? Was he understanding this cohort that bought X, you want to show them X product? Dude, just being more thoughtful about what you're showing the people. Like it's so simple. And we were just not being thoughtful about it. We were kind of just like throwing whatever was there. And now they have logic to where it takes into account what's already in the cart, what you should show the customer. So you're giving them native product to what is already there for them, which makes a lot of sense. If they're buying one thing, let's just give them a little bit more of that one thing for a bigger discount.

1:12:12Specialized pricing for what it has on the front ends. Absolutely. For the CAC has already built in. Exactly. You got to give me one more. That's a good one. We're using that one. AfterSales is amazing. If you do it right, you have to have someone go in there and actually do the work to make it right. You can't just like set it and forget it kind of thing. And who is the person that is doing that work? Is that someone that has like a data analyst background? Data analyst, understands marketing, understands consumer insights. And then obviously we'll check it like after the fact to see if it passes our sense check.

1:12:41But yeah, I would say that you can't obsess enough about post-purchase anything. Both the after-sell and the other app that I would say is this no commerce app. I don't know if you use them for post-purchase survey. Dude, it is magical because when you're spending a lot of money and we're spending north of 80 million a year now. When you're spending that kind of money, you better know where that money is going in terms of how it's coming back to you. Like you're spending it one place, but it may not be showing up on the other side. The best place for you to figure that out is the post-purchase survey.

1:13:15And that's what no commerce powers. So when we're spending, say, out of that 80, we spend 40 on Meta. You better hope that on those post-purchase survey results, It's 40 % of the responses are coming from meta. You would hope, right? You would hope it nets out. And if it doesn't, you know you're spending into a black hole. So you need to diversify your spending mix based on what it's telling you, which is a game changer because you cannot trust the in-platform metrics of what these guys are telling you. You know, a lot of times you will look at the ROAS on Facebook and you'll be like, oh my God, I'm crushing.

1:13:52This is great. And then you look at the profitability in the company and you're like, it's just not netting out. Like, where is this profitability? I don't see it. Well, that's because they're over-attributing in platform and everyone knows that, right? But where it doesn't over-attribute is in the survey because that's the actual data, right? So you have to take that data, run it against your other data and see if it matches. And if it doesn't, you got the wrong mix of spend. Quite frankly, I would lean on the post-purchase survey. Of course, because that's the truth. That's what actual customers are telling you at scale where you showed up for them.

1:14:32I want to know, you said 40 of the 80 ballpark is in meta. What are the other kind of big pockets you're pushing? The other big pockets are always Google. So AdWords, YouTube is a big part of that. And obviously our creative plays really well on YouTube because we do a lot of long form. Let's say 50 % is meta. Google and YouTube is how much? 15%, 20 %? Yeah, around there. I would also say a shining star out of nowhere this year, Apploving, which is a publicly traded company. We didn't really know about them. All of a sudden people are talking about it in the industry. We tried it. Game changer.

1:15:07It was the first time in true classic history where it was competing against the same ad spend as Facebook. And we could not believe it because you're just showing mobile ads on a platform to strangers. It's like a middle-aged women cohort. Yes. But guess what? Those middle-aged women are buying a lot of things for their guys. It did well in Q4 because they were buying. Let's see if it does well in Q1 and Q2 for you. Exactly. We'll see how it next is now. Wow, so you're saying you were spending - The same amount. We were shocked. We've never had anything to be able to compete with Facebook. We always thought Facebook is it.

1:15:41It's the mecca. We're never going to beat it. But Facebook has progressively gotten worse over the years for everybody, not just us, but just like, basically, it's put you in a spot as an operator where you can't rely on them to do the work anymore. You have to do the work as a company to create unbelievable content for the customer. That's where the magic happens, not in Facebook's conversion optimization algorithm anymore like it used to be. Facebook could take your crappy content in the old days and show it to a customer and it would win because you found exactly the right customer. Now you're just showing everything to everyone.

1:16:18So the only differentiator is how good you can do on your side, creative wise. And do you treat it like real art or do you just check the box of creative like everybody else and create subpar content for your audience? Yeah, I think the age of media buying is done and the creative is, you've heard it over the years, but I now I think more and more with AI and broad winning, I really, truly think the creative is going to rule. So 50 % meta, let's just say 25 % Google and YouTube, app loving. We're going to kind of push that aside for a second. What other little guys you got here? Maybe a little like...

1:16:49TikTok. TikTok. Is that what we're doing? We're spending five figures a day on TikTok. I wouldn't say that we've really crushed it there. I think that environment lends itself better to beauty and fashion. From what I've seen, our friends at Mary Ruth are absolutely crushing it on that platform. All the winners that I see are predominantly in that space. I think once we roll out a women's line, it would do a lot better on TikTok. but we can just never really get the traction we're looking for to scale it past like low five figures a day. But I think any entrepreneur, those first three are the core ones that they would go with.

1:17:30You guys obviously have very big budgets. So I would imagine that you've gone pretty deep down the road. What would you say is next? Is it out of home? Is it podcast? Is it Remnant TV? What else have you guys tried? TV works well. It works well for our creative as well because we do good creative. I would say podcast is a big one. And I invest really heavily in the comedy space because we do so much comedy and I love comedy. I really invest in that community. I really love the way these guys do ad reads. They're wordsmiths. They can sit there and really talk about the product at length because they love it and they can speak honestly to it.

1:18:03And so I have a real sweet spot for comics in general. And I would also say we are now dipping our toes into the brand pool. So we did a deal with the Clippers. We did a deal with the LA Kings. We did a big deal with the UFC, the LA Rams. And now I'm playing in a space where I'm looking at the Bud Lights of the world and I'm looking at all these big brands and the way they advertise. And I'm just trying to find a way to do better and show up for the fans in those environments. So the way you do that is you do what are called trigger events, similar to the Chick-fil-A in the free throw in the NBA, where in the last two minutes of the game, if an opposing team misses a free throw, everyone gets free Chick-fil-A.

1:18:43I'm going to create experiences that trigger Free True Classic based on something that happens in the game. So I'm trying to find ways to hack the live experience, but it's brand new for me. And by the way, it's really expensive and it's almost impossible to track unless you're looking at the post-purchase survey where it should show up if it's great. But it's very difficult because we're new to this and these big brands are spending so much money on it that they look at me and they come with these proposals And I'm just like, you guys are charging all this for that? Like, it's just crazy what they value in these environments.

1:19:18Like the logos everywhere and these little things that to me, no one really cares about. And what I go back to them with is like, go back and redo this proposal and show me thoughtfulness as it relates to the fans that are there. I only want to do things that are valuable to the consumers that are there watching the game. So that could be giveaways. It could be seat upgrades, taking the little Johnny that's in the top row and putting him in the front row. I'll pay for that Delta. Just budget that into my deal. That's what I want. Or take the guy that's not even at the game and put him in there.

1:19:47And let's call it a true classic moment where we took that fan and made him a lifelong fan because he wasn't expecting to be at the game. So I'm really just trying to go back to customer-centric things that these other big brands have forgotten and they just want to do the big logo splashes. And I'm just not with it. And I'm definitely not with overspending when we can spend on Facebook and somewhat attribute that revenue to sales, it's like, I'm just trying to make an emotional connection in a live environment, which is very tricky to do, but we're figuring it out slowly, but surely we're learning the hard way, what works, what doesn't, but it's, um, it's tough.

1:20:23It's a tough new environment for us. And contextually, how much does something like that cost? I mean, you could spend seven figures very easily with any of these companies. It just depends on what you're getting. So if you're looking for like on ice or on court or on field placement, hundreds of thousands of dollars and on the higher side of that, I would say you have to at the minimum spend somewhere in the six figures, right, to work with them. I think the hard part though is that you're going to have to try to give up on some level of tracking this thing because it's very much an upper funnel brand awareness play.

1:21:01But if you can basically put your best foot forward on the upper funnel, which is the emotional connection aspect, you're setting yourself up for success. And when I was at the Rams game the other night, they really took care of me. Thank you so much, guys. If anyone's watching this, I got to see what worked and what didn't from the Halo board that they have and the unbelievable so far. They did such an incredible job. What was working was the games that were interacting with the fans. where they got to be on the screen seeing themselves, doing like a VR version of a game where it's an overlay, where they could sit there and interact in a gamified environment.

1:21:37And they were going crazy for it. And the fans were rooting the people on that were playing the game. And I'm like, that's what we need to do. I was telling the executive, like, I want to create a game. I want to try to create a true classic game where we show up for the fans in some way and we gift everybody true classic, not just the people playing the game. I want to make it everybody wins. You know what I mean? Kings did a version of this where they froze a t-shirt. They froze like eight t-shirts and they made the eight fans go on the ice and break the t-shirt and have to put it on. And the first person that put it on won.

1:22:09And so everyone got to just watch and root for these people. And I thought it was just a great idea that they came up with, but it's like that kind of stuff is what I'm after. What do you say is the single biggest mistake people make when they go do these corporate sponsorships? Well, they massively overpay for assets they just are not gonna net out long-term. So like the splashy logo stuff, it's not worth it for me. I would say that what these companies value is static, splashy logos, meaning like on ice logo etched into the ice. On the basketball court, it's big vinyl placements on the courts.

1:22:49They charge so much money. Logo, you wanna put your logo on a jersey? multiple millions of dollars per year, per team. So good luck, like if you're trying to like spread awareness across the entire league and you're gonna do those kinds of deals, good luck. You're gonna spend 150 million across 10 teams. So that's what I'm looking at on these brand deals is just gut the bloat, get to what matters. I will spend on that all day. Avoid the static integration. Exactly. So I wanna just button up everything on the scale and the e-com and the marketing side. I would love to know from you, what is one contrarian KPI that you look at that a lot of people are overlooking?

1:23:29You've mentioned CAC, you've mentioned ROAS. To give you context, the simplest way that I look at my company is from a revenue perspective. What is COGS as a percent of revenue and marketing as a percent of revenue and SGA as a percent of revenue? I get concerned if, for me, it's a two-week window. Things are starting to kind of look out of whack. What for you is like that one metric? Like, are you guys tracking almost like an RFM model, like from an LTV perspective, like knowing if customer comes in in X week or X month, that's a more valuable customer, like something like that? I'm sure we are.

1:24:04I'm not smart enough to understand those metrics, to be honest with you. That's a great Ben question. And someday you should have him back here. I would say that one thing I'm obsessed with, and this was very intentional early on, which was, and you said it earlier, our revenue per employee and looking at OPEX, it is so incredibly important to stay lean and tight early on, especially, or you will just be digging yourself a big hole and inevitably you'll have to raise money. And that's one of the biggest reasons we haven't had to raise money is because we're so obsessed with keeping OPEX incredibly low.

1:24:39So the way you do that is you don't overhire. You hire killers, a talent who can do the work of 10 people. And that's how you save on OpEx. You hire those leaders who can be the generalists and the entrepreneurs and that kind of DNA. Those guys save you so much money because they're so talented that you just don't need 10 people for that position anymore like you thought you did. You get the killer in there and you see how they operate. And guess what? But the killers, they only want to be around other killers. So you bring in C-level talent with a killer, they ain't happy. They're starting to ask questions.

1:25:16They're starting to push back. They're starting to tell us like, hey, I don't know if it's going to work. We need a higher caliber because they want to operate at the same level that they're operating at and they want leverage. So they don't want to have to sit there and do everybody's work, you know, even though they're talented enough to do that. So it's like, I would say the OPEX KPI that I look at is just how do we maintain that even at our scale? But in the beginning, the path to profitability has to be that you just as an entrepreneur have to do all the work. Sorry, I hate to break it to you.

1:25:47You're not gonna be able to hire 100 people and just sit back and kick your feet up. And like, you're actually just gonna have to run the business and do everything. That's just the way it's gonna go for a while. Now, eventually you'll have the luxury of stepping back and living the chairman life. but for a while, you are gonna have to just bleed out your eyes and make it work and not hire everyone to make your life so much easier. It's just gonna be a hard life and that's okay to have a hard life for a while. It's not forever. Just a couple years of a hard life. You'll get that balance later.

1:26:16Don't sweat it early on but it'll be so much better for you when you look back and you do end up doing a fundraiser or whatever to be able to say, we never had to raise a dollar and they're gonna look at you like you're a complete anomaly, right? Like they do now when we talk to bankers and when we talk to the El Catertons of the world, they just can't wrap their head around how we were able to do it. It's such a great piece to the story. And that's not to say we may not do some secondary and sell some equity in the future, but we don't need primary. We don't need cash on the balance sheet. You know what I mean?

1:26:49There's ways around that. You can raise debt. You can get a credit line with a company like eCapital or Waveflyer or one of these companies that can help you with a revolving line, there's ways around it. But they will look at your OPEX when they're underwriting. And that is really important because they understand that your profitability is completely tied to that. So if you think you need this big fancy office, chill out, dude. Do it from your apartment and make it work until you can really sustain that revenue and that profitability and then start building into the OPEX. That's something there that I'm not very versed in.

1:27:28and I'm curious before we get into retail, equity versus debt. I raised a round of equity. I've never raised debt. What would you say are the biggest mistakes people make when they're raising debt? Well, I would say the biggest mistake is taking it on when you're not sure about the business and whether or not it's actually gonna work. I think people use it as like a short-term solution and they're not actually thinking about like, well, what's gonna happen if the business goes south? We're going to be screwed if we take on all this debt. So I think number one, and look, they will probably not underwrite you if they don't feel like the business is going to be a good business.

1:28:06I know Wayfire, I've talked to their CEO and they turn down most business, right? Like they only work with people who have a really healthy financial profile. And that's really smart of them because they don't want to have to chase and they want good businesses under their umbrella. And they'll make you connect your Shopify, the balance sheet, P &L, everything. Absolutely. They integrate directly and they will see very quickly if you have a real business or not. So you can raise debt through your manufacturers very easily. That would be the first lever that I would pull and a lever that we pulled very early on.

1:28:40That was huge to the growth because we didn't have to bring in any cash. So you work out lines with them. And when you say lines of credit with your production, you just mean extending out the net terms to just pay them later? No actual credit. Terms and credit. Terms and credit. Yes, because the terms - Let's explain that for the autumn. So terms is just net terms is, you know, January's bill, net 30, you'd pay on March 1st. You pay it 30 days later. Net 60, net 90, the longer you can float the money. Yep. But you're saying they actually invested in your company. Not invest directly, but they basically bet on the upside.

1:29:14And you tell them, look, we're doing 15 million. We're going to do 90 million next year. Do you want that business or not. And if they believe you and you're compelling and you have a real business and they see it, maybe they'll buy into it and they'll believe you. But you have to be a hell of a salesman and you have to really tell the story correctly to them. And you have to follow through, by the way, with actually driving that revenue. So you can, to your point, terms is a big one. And early on, you won't even get terms. They'll just say money up front because we don't know you. We don't care.

1:29:46You're a small guy. Prove it to us. We'll give you better terms later. So you start out with no terms and then you go to 15 day terms. Then you go to 30 and then you go to 45. And eventually, if they're really big partners, you can go to like 90 or 180 if they're like really unbelievable. But that's rare. That's really rare. But then as you grow with them, you can do the other side of it, which is just like, hey, we need 25 million of credit to be able to just revolve. And we need that to be able to make big bets on certain categories and see if it's going to work or not for us. And what are they, they're actually buying into the raw materials, correct?

1:30:23And then you're putting in the POs on the specific SKUs. Exactly. Like they're just floating it basically for you. But you have to pay it back, right? Like you have to pay it back. And sometimes with interest, if you go over the terms, like if they say 45 days and you're like, sorry, guys, I can't pay, I can pay in 60 days. Well, you're going to have to pay some interest on that. And that's the penalty. And you lost. So you must do something about that. But like, I really believe that if you go over the terms, you owe them something in return. Maybe it's the future business. Maybe it's interest, whatever.

1:30:53But you got to figure something out for them. For people listening, I would just say the biggest piece of advice outside of believing in your business is go to your production partner. That's where you have the most amount of leverage. Absolutely. Start with net terms, then see if they can float your money. Absolutely. I would say pushing out the net terms is the biggest thing. That's first for me. All right, let's get into retail and then we're going to get into the last sprint at the end. So retail, I'm going to break this up into a couple because you guys have owned retail partnerships, Omnichannel and International.

1:31:20For context, for everybody listening, you have nine of your own stores. You just launched in Target. You're in a bunch of other like Kohl's available in 190 plus markets. I guess let's just start with what role does brick and mortar have in True Classic? It's pretty special. I would say we're so new to retail that we're learning it as we go. You know, we started with Leap. We're now doing our own stores and we've learned a lot from them. We've learned a lot from doing it the wrong way. We've learned what doesn't work. I would say for people that are starting out in retail, what doesn't work are standalone stores.

1:31:55Very hard to be profitable on four walls. I would say that the easiest, most obvious stuff is to go into a mall that has a lot of foot traffic. And guess what? those leases are going to be expensive in a mall with a lot of foot traffic. So you better be ready to pay 20, 30, sometimes$40 ,000 a month for a lease. It's very expensive. And you're going to look at your P &L at the end of the month and it's not going to look pretty. But what you have to think about is getting closer to break even in profitability in four walls so that you can then attribute all the advertising that comes with having a store to the upside, right?

1:32:35So it may not look like it nets out in the store, in a vacuum, basically. But stores are not a vacuum. They are very much atop a funnel. Because when you're walking around in a mall, what are you looking at? Store sign, store sign, store sign. And you're getting all that visual upper funnel traffic headed your way from the brand recognition side. And you could see and feel the product. Right. So you have to somehow quantify that and just say, okay, as long as we can get break-even, I think we're happy there. Now, there are cases very much with some of our stores where they're just profitable right off the rip.

1:33:07And that's because we put them in like Mall of America. That was a great store for us. Insane foot traffic, huge demo for us. Midwest is like one of our biggest demos. So that one just worked right off the bat. Same with Florida. We have a huge density of customers there, which is why our targets are crushing in Florida. No big surprise, because we tested on a retail and it crushed. The way I'm thinking about retail now is let's get close to profitability. Even if we're losing a little bit, it's okay. And then let's scale to 50, 100 stores within the next two years and really see what that can do for us.

1:33:42And inevitably it should show up again, going back to the post-purchase survey. It should show up there somewhere. I was gonna say that. Right? Like if you heard about it there first, you should see that somewhere show up. So we're kind of like watching that very closely. One thing I wanna touch on, you mentioned them briefly, is the company called Leap for people listening. They're basically a partner for different brands to stand up retailers and they put in your staff. They take on a lot of the costs. And I do think, you know, we talked a bit about this off camera. It's a great for if you want one or two stores or to get started to at least see what it feels and looks like.

1:34:15Yes. What is the biggest mistake you made when opening up a store? I would say overthinking the location and betting on the density over the foot traffic, which we have gone completely away from. And the stores that were standalongs lost a lot of money. And we just could never make them win, even though they were in prime locations as a standalone. The thing is, they were destinations. So people would have to leave and go just to that one place to buy. That's a difficult thing to do unless you're getting food or something. It's like, unless you absolutely love True Classic, you're never just going to randomly go to one place one time.

1:34:52You're just in the mall and you're there and you're shopping and it's easy, right? Even if it means taking a smaller store than you would originally want to do. Our stores are between 1 ,000 and 1 ,500 square feet. So it's hard to fit everything in 1 ,000 square foot. But sometimes we'll take those leases because we just want to get into those doors because it's a great mall. Let's talk about the big retailers. What was the process of securing a partnership with Target? So that one came through Harley, our president of Shopify, who's a good friend of ours, big supporter of the brand. I'm a big supporter of him.

1:35:25I think he's an unbelievable operator. And Toby is another unbelievable operator. He came into our office last year and we hung out with him. Great guy. Love those guys. They're doing everything right. He mentioned us on an integration to do it digitally first. So to basically get into their marketplaces. And we were one of the first apparel companies through Shopify to integrate into Target. What does that actually mean? That means taking like your catalog on your Shopify store and then integrating the backend so it's seamless? Exactly. Exactly. And integrating into them. so when you would buy on target, the product would ship and go directly to the target customers.

1:36:01So it started with that, just basically like, let's do a test and let's see how it goes. Tested well, did great and then we did the rollout and the rollout crushed and we sold through everything. We're now doing reorders and they're going to expand the assortment, which is awesome for us and we were able to tell the story we wanted to tell in that retail environment, which is the side-by-side once again and showing our guys on that display and really giving people something to hang their hat on visually. And that was the difficult part about retail was like in our controlled environments, we can tell that story.

1:36:34But when you go to a Target or a Kohl's, how do you tell that story? So we had to really think through that on the display unit and be like, look, if we can't tell the story, it's gonna be very difficult. That's kind of what we explained to them. If you wanna put our best foot forward, we need to tell the kind of story we need to tell. And we did that. So it crushed. And it's been an amazing experience. I just heard the other day, the CEO was wearing True Classic. So I'd love to hear that. It's been great. It's so interesting. And I don't know if this was by design or not, but it's brilliant looking back.

1:37:06Too many people go in too early and are looking to build brand and revenue through retail. You guys went in, you're doing 100 million plus. Yeah. The sell-through is already there and you already have this huge cohort of people that are buying you anyway. Right. Is that by design or no? You know, I wish I was smart enough to say yes, but it wasn't. Basically, I just do digital because it's what I know. Yeah. It's my world. It always has been my world. It's what I put all my effort into early on in my career. So if I had retail, I would have done it a lot earlier. But like, it was just something that was very uncomfortable for all of us.

1:37:38Because everyone that came in here, Ben included, we were all digital first guys and we didn't know any difference. So this retail thing is kind of like, do we do it? Do we not? Is it accretive to the business? Like even Amazon, we were like weary about, which is a huge business for us now. But early on, we're like worried about cannibalization. What's it going to do to the business? We don't know. And so you have to just kind of dip your toe into them and see how it goes and then ramp up if it goes well. So wholesale was no different. We should have been doing it way earlier. And now I look back and I'm like, this was such a no brainer.

1:38:08But to answer your question, I wish we had that much thought behind anything that we did. But like with anything in this company, we're just running and gunning and moving and going. And we learn the hard way on a lot of stuff for better or worse, but it's just who we are. We just, we're not afraid to fail forward and just break stuff and keep moving. So now you know what you know, and let's look back then. What's the best piece of advice you'd give an entrepreneur that's looking to get into a big retailer like Target, like Kohl's? You have to really build the audience first and foremost, because they're never gonna bet on you unless they have something to sink their teeth into.

1:38:42So you have to have not just an active community. It needs to be large enough to where that person walking through Target can recognize that brand. And had we done this a couple of years ago, maybe it wouldn't have gone so well because we didn't have as much visibility. But because we've become such a bigger brand visibly through digital, people are walking through the Target now and recognizing us and buying us because of that upper funnel visibility. So what I would say is focus on the product and the customer. and that will get you to where you need to be in all things wholesale because you will finally be able to build that community and grow it to the size that it needs to for Target to care.

1:39:19How else are you going to get them to care? Unless you build a big business and develop a community that cares so much of your product, they'll buy you no matter where you are. I would also say that dipping your toe into retail can be a good introduction into if wholesale is going to really work or not, right? If you test one store, did it go well? If it did, you can go to those retailers and go, look, we have a case study. We did retail and it worked well. It'll work well in your store too because of X, Y, and Z. I also think, you know, we touched on net terms. There's a fundamental difference from a leverage perspective on you being big and then wanting you versus you banging down their door.

1:39:57They have all the leverage. 100%. So internationally, you guys are in 190 plus countries. International is the biggest conundrum in the art space. It is the most annoying problem that I've had for eight plus years. What's your strategy for international? So in the beginning, and we sound so crazy when I say this, we had no strategy. We just literally turned the light switch on. We just like, for better or worse, we're just going to let this fly and see what happens. It was a disaster as it always is because you don't think about stuff. You don't think about how people in foreign countries are going to interact with the website.

1:40:31You don't think about your ads and how they look at those and how they're not in their native language. And all these things are afterthoughts. So it was a bit of a disaster early on. But what we realized is that our product works so well. There's just no bounds for plain clothing. Like it works in every country. Everyone loves plain clothing. And then what happened is we're like, okay, now how do we optimize this? And how do we really show up for these countries? And the way you do that is you start building out the website in all their native languages. You also start building out all your creative in all their native languages.

1:41:04and like the comedy ads, for instance. How do we take the comedy ads and redo them with their local talent in Germany, in Mexico, hire those actors and have them do it in their native language, but in the same produced, directed skit, essentially, everything the same except the language and the actors. It's a heavy investment. It's a big investment, but it's worth it because if you're connecting with them on that level, it's just a game changer. What about for someone that's looking to take that first step? Like for us, for our company, it was a little bit pricey, but we used FedEx cross border where we'd have to double ship where we ship stuff to Florida and then to other countries because our production couldn't ship for whatever reason to some of these other countries.

1:41:46Were you guys just offering shipping to England on trueclassic.com in the beginning and just the high shipping price? We had an integrator that we had to use and it was, we've had our love and hate relationship with them. I love them now, but early on it was really tough because things would break all the time. And it's very stressful when you're trying to run a business and things are breaking on the website because of an integration that you have with a partner. So you immediately look to the partner like, dude, what's going on? Like, yes, you flick the light switch on for us, but it's breaking the website for our US customers, which is driving the entire business, by the way.

1:42:26It wasn't entirely their fault. Like we had a lot of bad tech. We had a lot of things going wrong on the backend as well. But I would just say that like, you have to really be ready. I don't recommend doing it the way we did, which is just flick it on and let it go and figure it out as you go. In most things in the business, I would say that's okay. In this one where it's customer facing, I think you gotta be a little bit more thoughtful. In hindsight, I wish I would have slowed things down and tested into it a little bit more. That's my best advice is just go slow and really work your way into it.

1:42:58By the way, you don't need to go everywhere. That can also present other problems. I would go to the major markets and the major markets are UK, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Germany, and France. Start with just the big markets and win those over. Maybe just start one at a time. Start with Canada and then go to Mexico, then go to the UK and which one at a time and work your way through that. So you're not just like flooded with all. And by the way, CX nightmare, absolute nightmare on the CX side. All these people in different languages were like, oh my God, what do we do? We don't even speak like, dude, it was chaos.

1:43:36And we didn't go back. We probably should just roll back and figured it out. But like, we just were like, we'll just figure it out as we go. But looking back, it's interesting. you said that. You're a fail fast, fail forward guy. Is there any other parts of the business outside of international that you could look back and say, hey, I wish I would have done this slower and been more thoughtful? Because quite frankly, even international, it's very rare that the people that are winning the most for me are the people that are just going the fastest, quite frankly. Take your time on this one too. Is there anywhere you would have been more methodical?

1:44:09I would say that our finance department is now a 10. And it used to be a lot of running and gunning and let's figure it out and let's take bets and let's gamble. And we did not have that super high level could take you public kind of CFO guy early on. We had great CFOs that were good for the company early on. But if I could go back, I wish I could get our Alex and Sarah, who are our killers now in finance, to be a part of the company early on. It would have saved us so many headaches. And they would have also been the voice of reason in a room full of gambling idiots who are just like, well, let's just do this and that and see what happens.

1:44:54And let's just go. They would have been like, hold on a second, guys, like slow down a little bit. Let's think about this and let's really formulate a rolling forecast that makes sense and let's model it out. We didn't even have models until like a year ago. Probably the most important part of the business early on is just getting your finance team correct. And I don't just mean an accountant. I mean like a real CFO that can grow with the company and can level up and put you in a good place to win and keep you accountable on profitability and really help you understand what P &Ls should look like instead of just spend at all costs, burn everything, have a huge burn rate, raise money if you have to.

1:45:35That should be the last possible option, not the first option that everyone looks to. It should just be like, if I have to keep this business afloat, fine, I'll raise money. But you should really treat it like it's just, like Gary says, the worst day of your life is raising money. You should treat it that way because then you're going to have a boss. You're going to have a lot of scrutiny on the business. You're going to have observers and board seats and all these other things that come along with raising money, which you don't think about. You're just thinking, I need the cash now and I have no choice.

1:46:03Not having a boss and having the freedom I do allows me to run this company however we see fit. And I don't have to deal with anybody. No one gets to tell me what to do. And that's a huge advantage in moving and being nimble and moving quickly. Guys, that's a great piece of advice. CEO of Athletic Brewing, I asked him the same thing and he came from a finance background and he said that very exact answer saying he wish I would have got it organized. I wish I had a stronger financial background myself. I was never that guy. I'm just like dumb musician guy who's a gambler. And luckily, Matt, my co-founder, had a strong finance background that helped us tremendously.

1:46:43So Nick was really cut from the apparel side of the business. Matt was more like the M &A CFO kind guy. So I appreciate that. And it speaks to the finance that you have to have someone like that early on. Guys, pay attention to Microsoft Excel in college. I've said that a million times. I wish I'd be more nasty with it. A last question before we get to the home stretch here is, what are you most excited about? Is it wholesale? Is it international? You mentioned women's. What's a big initiative for True Classic? A couple of things. Pima is going to be huge for us. I am really excited about releasing an elevated version of the t-shirt that puts us in a completely different world.

1:47:22So this is like making the affordable James purse, like really for the masses. And I, and we've developed it. It's a 10 out of 10. It's a better version of our existing 60-40 that I'm wearing now. So it really makes our 60-40 look like an undershirt. This is like the going out shirt. This is like, I can wear this. Hey, slow down there. You don't want to undersell that. Nilsson, I will always have a big business for the 60-40, but I would say that if you're going to go out to like a Mastro's or a nice restaurant, I don't recommend the 60-40. I recommend this for at home or working out. This new version will be the going out shirt.

1:47:57And that is really exciting because we've never had that level of sophistication on our crew neck t-shirts. And we're going to roll that across every style, the polos, the long sleeves, you name it. So I'm really excited about that fabrication. Ballpark MSRP for that t-shirt? Probably about$10 more a shirt, but you're going to be able to get that way down once you buy in packs. So I'm guessing like our MSRP on the 6040 is 29. This will probably be 39 or in that ballpark, but I'm going to get the price down for you if you buy six, nine, 12 at a time. So you'll be able to get a value deal. The other thing that I'm excited about is obviously expanding with Target.

1:48:32They've been such an unbelievable partner and I just can't wait to see what that looks like because it's really working and I want to show up on a bigger scale and put more of our SKUs in store so they can see that we're more than just t-shirts. We're denim, we're fleece, we're boxers, we're everything. So that's really exciting. I would also say women's is one of the things that we've been toying around with for years. I've been building collections for women, putting them out into our ambassadors and they've been hating them and I've been killing the whole project. I've done that probably three times over three years where everyone's really excited to launch it and then you give it to the market and the market's like, not ready.

1:49:10But the team's like, yeah, but we did it. And maybe they're just not our audience. I'm like, if they're not our audience, no one's our audience. That's how I look at it. If these hundred people don't like it, then a hundred million people won't like it. It's just, I have to have the right feeling releasing something into the market that I did with True Classic. And by the way, on any product that we put out, unbelievable amount of scrutiny goes into the product. Like when we did denim, It wasn't just roll out denim. Let's check the box of denim. It was, how do we make it better than the market, number one?

1:49:44How do we fit it better? How do we get it softer? How do we develop it so that we can get the price down to literally nothing? $59.99 for like a$200 jean. How do we do that? So you're basically doing a focus group for any and all new products? Absolutely. And in the early days, it was a lot of gut. It was a lot of just like, what do I love to wear now? and how do I make a better version of that? And so on the surface, it was just very simple. Now it's like, now we get really, really detailed. The stitching, the way that it hangs, the way that it flows, like how does it wash? Like we may have a product that we think is a winner.

1:50:20We wash it 10 times, didn't wash well, go back to the drawing board. Like we really scrutinize it to death because we want the customer to know that if they buy something, they can have that confidence that we've done our work to make it great. It's that important to us. So I'm really excited about women's because I feel like there is a white space there. And if there's not a white space, it's gonna be a tough road for you in any business that you're in. The reason I started True Classical was because I identified a white space. And that white space was the market overcharging and underdoing it on the fit and the comfort.

1:50:55And so I went down that journey the same way I'm going on women's. And I looked at the market and I looked at what was working and I just kept coming back to like, why is everyone overcharging for premium? Women's is the same thing. I look at the market, they're overcharging. I know what it costs them to make something. So I know what their profit margins are. And I just don't need that much profit for the business to make it work. So we're gonna develop something better. We're gonna charge less. And eventually we're gonna capture market share because they're gonna see what we're trying to do.

1:51:28And no one's opposed to spending less. Everyone's on board with that. What they're opposed to is making a lesser version of a product, something that's not as comfortable, something that's not as fitted. That's what they don't want. So we're going to obviously elevate the product, make sure it's better and fitted better and more comfortable, but make that price palatable for the masses. That's what I want for women. We'll do a little poll and there'll be one more touch point. You'll have the focus group, the customer feedback and the poll. We'll do a big one for women's. This has been an absolutely amazing conversation.

1:52:00We're going to get into the last part, which is the lightning round. I'm just going to fire off questions. Do it. Give me your answers. Unopened pot, you're on the button. What do you take? King Jack suited or pocket eights? I'm going to judge you here too. For you and me. You said I'm on the button? Unopened pot, on the button. Okay. King Jack suited or pocket eights? Is it a cash game or a tournament? Good question. Cash. You said King Jack or pocket eights? Yeah, King Jack suited or pocket eights. Pocket eights all day. Wow. Yeah. Why? I love the setup and the nuance of hitting a set on a board with nobody knowing.

1:52:37Because it's obvious when you have King Jack and you hit a King or a Jack. Guys, this guy is a no risk, no reward. I already know what you're going to say. It's that sneaky. Yeah, it's sneaky. Anything could come out. A King or a Jack could come out and if an 8 comes out, I'm fucked. Exactly. The reason why I don't like it, I play twos to Jacks basically the same way. and king's jacks, you know, if it kind of goes to your argument as well, if a jack or a king comes out and everything else is lower, it's obvious. I'm pushing. Right. It's obvious what you have when a king or a jack comes out and you're betting.

1:53:09It's like, he's clearly got it. But when the board comes six high and someone has ace six and you have pocket eights, dude, you're going to win a big pot. Or if they have ace king and it comes king eight four and it's rainbow, you're going to scoop a monster pot. Right. If you just hit a king, you're going to bet and they're going to fold. You're going to win the minimum. Guys, this guy's going a home runner strikeout and that's going to be a good leeway into the last question. What was the closest True Classic came to going out of business and what happens? The darkest days were the days of over betting and not having the receipts to match the payments to the vendors where we realize, oh, darn, we are not going to make the kind of money we thought we were going to.

1:53:55Thus, in a few months, it's gonna get really dicey. It means you're not gonna be able to pay them, period. It basically just means everything's at a standstill. And guess what? It may not matter so much that you can't pay them, but they have to pay people too. That's where the hard part comes in. So a lot of times they would say, listen, I get it. We work with apparel all the time where they just can't pay us right away and we work it out. But like the problem is we have to pay our people. And if those people don't get paid, then it's a real problem because they'll just go rogue. And that's where we were like, okay, we have to figure this out.

1:54:29Like we can't put them in a vulnerable spot. And if enough of them band together, they can put you into bankruptcy, right? Very easily. But you're talking about vendors. Yes. But what they saw was that the revenue was coming in and this wasn't product that was egregious. Like it wasn't a bright orange and bright yellow shirts. This was like black and white and green and like something was going to sell. So they knew eventually it was going to It was just a short-term problem. Intelligence or curiosity? Curiosity all day. Let me tell you why. I know you said lightning round. No, I want answers.

1:55:04It's a slow thunder. Yeah. The curiosity takes you so much further than intelligence. And the intelligence only gets you so far because you won't be able to break yourself out of that narrow focus box that intelligence puts you in. A lot of times with these really smart guys, I've realized they get so focused on what they think is the answer because they're smart, they're data-driven, they see the data, this is what it is. But then you got me with half the IQ coming in with a creative solution out of that that they never thought of. And I realize how important that creativity is in these board meetings when they're not thinking about that.

1:55:42And that you need that voice of reason on the creative side to help you break outside of the box. There is no box, by the way. There's no anything. It's just what solutions are on the table outside of what this one thing that you think is the right move on. And it may not be the smartest decision, but it ends up being the best decision. So smart people get trapped in their way of thinking a lot of times. And I bet on the curiosity and the creativity all day. Curiosity to me just means learning. And for me, this is why I'm selfishly doing this podcast because I know that I'm becoming a better entrepreneur.

1:56:16Obviously, I'm able to give all other entrepreneurs this information, But I found I like myself best when I'm growing and getting smarter as quick as possible. And these conversations get me there the fastest. All the good guys that we know that are big operators are that way, by the way. And it's no wonder they're at the scale they're at because they didn't stop evolving and learning. They just kept going because it fed them. And when it feeds you, to your point, it drives the business because the business is going to thrive because of that learning. It's a crazy flywheel, not to go too deep into it.

1:56:49But like for me, from a day-to-day perspective, the amount of time I'm putting since I've started filming has been a little bit less with Iconic, but I'm going back on a per episode. This one will be about four. So you guys have some good apps there too, as well, too. Definitely doing that post-purchase. Just being able to go back with these one, two, three, four things. I'm going to get so much more. My company is going to get so much more value out of that. So you have to just look at just what are you getting out of it. let's go one word to describe Matt killer Nick killer Ben the cyborg Robot.

1:57:35Robot in a good way, though. The guy, just to give Ben his flowers, the guy is an absolute machine. He's the hardest worker we have by far. And that's the kind of guy you want leading a company. You want a guy who cares so much about the business that he bleeds it and thinks about it and he drives him. And on the weekends, we're texting and we're thinking about it. And even when he comes to my house, we hang out as families, like our families together. We're talking about it and we love it and we bleed it and we just obsess about the business. But on the flip side, he cares a lot about the people here.

1:58:07He cares a lot about the customer. He has all the right aspects that you need as a leader, because if you're just a workhorse, but you're missing out on the empathy component, people aren't going to love that because you're just going to be pushing them and pushing them and not appreciating them. So he has a very well-rounded mentality that I just love for this company. But he's just a workhorse. He's a robot. He's AI first on everything. He challenges all the status quo and just says, how do we do better? to your point on the curiosity, he's infinitely curious. And so am I, which is why we work so well.

1:58:41We're always so excited to see the next thing that's coming on the horizon. Like we just tried this new AI thing called Maverick. Have you ever seen this on email where it's basically me sitting there? Like you see the welcome flow comes and this is the first email they get. It's me going, Hey Mark, good to see you. Thanks for making a purchase. I really loved that you bought our 6040 t-shirt. You're going to love that. And I'm literally saying it like that. And you can't tell the difference. You really think it's me making a personal video. And I'm really excited about it because - And this is video.

1:59:14It's video. I've seen it from an audio. So you have to sit there and record it for like an hour. It takes a long time because you have to say all the names and everything. But then they just infuse the name into the mouth and it looks like totally real. And I love it because it gives the customers a good feeling and it doesn't feel forced or fake or weird or any of that because they know it's not really real, but they just are like, oh, this is kind of cool. Like it's cool seeing the founder talk about, you know, my name and say it. I want to see how good that is. And to give people context right now, listening, it's the Friday after New Year's.

1:59:44There's nobody in the office except Ben. That should tell you a lot. Exactly. If you weren't running True Classic, what would you be doing? I would probably be making music again. I would be, um, that's really, that really feeds my soul. I would be playing poker more. I would be showing up for people in some way, somehow, which was the whole reason I started True Classic was to make an impact and show up for people in a large way and provide real value. I would be constantly, I would be doing my hobbies, but I would also constantly be thinking about, am I doing enough for the world? And no matter what I did in life leading up to True Classic, I never felt like I was doing enough for the world, which is what led me to try to create something big so that I could feel like I was doing enough.

2:00:32Ironically, here I am giving away 9 million in inventory in a month and doing all these things and I still don't feel like it's enough. I still just like have this like one life mentality of like, you better hurry up. Because if I, I'm 43, if I die at 45, I better feel like I did enough. So I'm just constantly moving at a fast pace for better or worse, because I wanna always be thinking that my life's going to be short and that I better hurry up and get there now so that I can feel fulfilled much later in life. Preach my man. Guys, urgency. Love it. Favorite book or podcast and why? There's a lot of books.

2:01:14I'll tell you, man. Seth Godin's books are great. I love Gary Vee's books. Or the second one with Purple Cows. I'm big on the Simon Sinek's of the world, the Gary Vee school of thought, the Seth Godin school of marketing and the way he thinks about it. I'm big on those guys because that's who I learned from. There is really no true classic without those guys preaching everything they know about business the right way. And then me taking all that over the years and bleeding it into the company and trying to lead with all that empathy and be like, this is the way it should go. And now we've proved it out it at scale that everything those guys say is real.

2:01:57I mean, look, they've all done great. And obviously Gary's built some big businesses and all that. But like, I'm always thinking about what they say as gospel and I'm proving it out through True Classic. And it really does work. The stuff that they say that you need to do. Focus on leadership, focus on the customer, focus on the employees and goodness will come out of it. The crazy manifestation that you look to Gary for that customer obsession. And then True Classic was mentioned in his book. I know. And now we're like working with Gary and I get to talk to him and text him and it's totally surreal.

2:02:27And I love AJ. And I just love those guys. Those guys are doing things the right way. And someday Gary's going to buy the Jets or buy one of those teams. And he's going to get to put his Gary V flavor on what that live environment's going to look like. And it's going to be fucking magical. And people aren't going to, all the other owners are going to go, that's the model we need to go after. Once he does it, I can already see his creativity being infused into a live environment and what that's going to mean. It's going to be amazing when it gets there. I'm just excited for him. One of the first times when I met him and when he came on board with our company, I said, I just want to be a part of helping him buy the Jets.

2:03:03Yeah. Really obsessed. Last thing, weapons of choice. Just a couple of key things you need to perform as an entrepreneur. It could be a tech. It could be an app. It could be a piece of clothing. What are a couple of things that you need in your life to just operate? Absolutely. I would say the fundamentals are Shopify. Number one, I was a WordPress guy for 15 years, open source. You just aged yourself, bro. Dude, I know, I'm old. I mean, look at the white in my beard. Shopify, what Shopify does so well is it takes a complex system and simplifies it, which is what I was looking for. And even though I had built every website previously before Chiu Classic on WordPress, I know going into it, I want no headache.

2:03:47I want no problems. Number two, I would say triple whale for analytics. I love what they're doing. They've gotten so much better over the years and they owe me some equity for all the feedback we've given them. We can blurt this out or not blurt this out and send it to them. No, I'm going to put it on the record so that I actually get the equity. I mean, look, those guys are amazing, so they don't owe me anything. But what I will say is analytics, post-purchase survey, no commerce, Shopify. In terms of acquisition, be really focused on Facebook, but also entertain a split across, I mean, obviously Google, YouTube.

2:04:27But then also on the tech side for email and retention, Clavio. I would use Clavio. They're still the leader in my opinion. I know I have friends that have big email businesses that are doing great things. But right now we're still with Clavio. I would recommend that. What about in your personal life? Last one. Personal life as it relates to what? Helping you operate as an entrepreneur. It could be a fit. It could be a watch. It could be a book. It could be a routine. I would say at home life, what matters the most to me, even though I have three kids, eight, six, and four, who are all just in that age where it's complete chaos at the house.

2:05:10I would just say that what really motivates me at home and what gives me a ton of peace is just being with the kids and being with my wife and being there as the nucleus and making sure they're all good so that I can just be the best version of myself for them. So what that means is like keeping the kids occupied, not allowing them to be on iPads. We don't believe in giving them too much screen time because it really, they become obsessed, right? just like we all do with our screens. So I don't know if there's like any one thing that makes my home life great on the tech side or the apparel side or anything like that.

2:05:50What I really care about is just being at peace at home and we live on the lake. So it's really magical when you're there, but like just making sure that the kids are in a good place. They're all happy. They're not going through something, which they always are at this age. So navigating parenting and showing up for them the right way is a constant evolution. And since it's so new and no one ever knows until you start doing it, you just have to be going pedal to the metal, learning, learning, learning, just like you do in business. You have to be learning from experts in parenting what works and what doesn't.

2:06:24And that doesn't mean being their best friend and doing everything crazy nice. It just means showing up for the kids in the way that they understand and trying to build a good blueprint for them so that they can succeed later in life. That's all you really care about is like, I don't wanna damage them so that when they get out in the world, they can't have a good relationship or they can't work for anybody or they're just spoiled so they don't wanna do anything. I'm always thinking about like, how do I get them working around the house? How do I build that muscle now? Because my parents had our asses working nonstop and thank God they did because it helped me understand that like life is about work.

2:07:07Sorry, it just is. You're just gonna have to work all the time until you find a way to retire later and be fine. But like that helped me tremendously early on was just like, I'm going to put my head down and thank God my parents forced me to work very young and get a real job. And I'm trying to do it with my kids, but it's obviously tough and you learn as you go. But I know it's a super long-winded answer, but family's important. Got to get them the grit, an entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why? It could be anybody. Like consumer goods or like tech? Anybody. My God, there's so many.

2:07:45You're going to give one person the floor here. Who's it going to be? Let me tell you someone that I love. I think Sean over at Ridge is doing everything right. And he's a smart guy. I've met him. I've hung out with him. I can see why he succeeds. And you meet other operators that are curious like you, and they build amazing product, it's no wonder they succeed. And one thing I really respect about him is that he's not scared to try things, for better or worse. He came out with luggage, which everyone thought was why. That doesn't make any sense. For context, this guy has a wallet company. Yes, a Ridge wallet.

2:08:22And you would say on the surface, if you were a big corporate America, you would go, it's not our demo, won't work, too risky. But what he has discovered is the same thing that we've discovered. It doesn't matter what you do. If you build a better product than the market, the market doesn't care. Yes, they're all buying Tumi right now or whatever the brand is, Samsonite. But if you build an unbelievable luggage or suitcase that is priced better and built better, people don't care. They will buy your luggage from Ridge all day. and it became a big success for him. And it's the same way I think about product innovation here.

2:08:59We're building all sorts of things. We're doing backpacks, we're doing cologne, we're doing watches, like, oh, cologne. Dude, we don't care. We're just like, why shouldn't we build a great cologne that is gonna be the scent of what we think guys will like or a watch that will complete the outfit? Why should we be scared to do that? We can build something great. We already build great denim and everything else we've done other than t-shirts. We proved that out. why does it have to stick in the apparel world? And that's a very entrepreneurial way of thinking. And that's why I respect the way he thinks about product innovation because it's hard to make those bets and it's hard to get buy-in from other people around you.

2:09:37I just love that about him. And he's built a great business and hats off to them. But I have a lot of those buddies that are just like complete anomalies. Ronick's another one with Abvi doing amazing things. I love Moyes and the Sharma. I love all those big DTC operators Sean over at Dude Wipes These guys are just all cut from the same cloth Is what I've realized They all have a lot of things in common They all have the entrepreneur DNA They're not scared to make bets They're not scared to move fast They lead with empathy They are creative guys They execute at a high level And they all have a tremendous amount of grit Which is the DNA that we're looking for here at True Classic Love it, man Last question.

2:10:21How big can true classic be? I think the sky is the limit. I mean, look, you look at the other big guys in our space, they're doing five, six billion a year, but they're just doing apparel. They're just doing apparel. So it's like, if we're doing apparel at five or six billion a year, but then we're also doing luggage, we're also doing watch, we're also like, I mean, dude, I don't see why we can't be doing 20, 30, 40 billion a year. You look at like the Kirklands of the world, these brands that are doing 40 billion a year. Guess what? They do everything. They make everything from soap to chocolate-covered almonds, everything.

2:11:00And they're at Costco and you're buying Kirkland in paper towel and then you're buying a t-shirt and then you're buying a soap and you're buying like liquid detergent and you're just like, dude, these guys like run the world. Clearly, that's why they're doing 50 billion of revenue a year. So I think the limit is not the sky. The limit is your creativity on product expansion and how well you can execute on that. Legend. Amazing episode. I had a great time. I'm excited for the journey, man. I truly do believe that, you know, I didn't know much about your company outside of the funny ads, ironically, until a couple of months ago when I was building a list of people I wanted on.

2:11:38Immediately, you were one of the first people. Super excited we chatted. And where can people find you? WhoClassic.com. my name, Ryan Barlett on basically everything, all the platforms you can find me. Um, if you have ideas, anything you think we should do, how we can be better. I am all ears and I will reply. Um, I just love having that interaction with people. Blast all of his channels, guys. Appreciate you. Thank you, buddy.