eBay Resellers to 14M Pairs of Underwear: Shinesty’s Co-Founders

29:57We're using them for the new brand that Operators is launching. Check it out at GetSerral.com. That's G-E-T-S-A-R-A-L.com. You think about like the collective knowledge of consumer now, it's wild at how much, like even just like in our groups, how much everybody shares and how much we know. And I just think back to 2015, like I remember running ads, thinking like, does anybody else do this? Like does Facebook, do they have lots of advertisers? Or is it like me and these six dips? Yeah, but now if you started a business, there's so much literature about like, what are the metrics you should track?

30:33You could go into forums and things and get benchmarks. But at that time, obviously those numbers were incredible by any measure. And you're still sitting there questioning, should we keep spending? I don't know if this is right. So then go forward to the COVID. We're launching. We're going to go all in. I'll buy as much underwear as this money can buy me. How quick was the ramp from there? Very quick. Very steep. Yeah. Very quick. Like, give us a sense, like you went from, you know, selling hundreds of pairs of underwear. So at what point were you like, oh, we're going to sell like millions of pairs of underwear?

31:09By the end of that year, we were selling millions of pairs of underwear. Holy hell. Probably from like - Like here was, you were almost vertical. It was probably from like, maybe in early 2020 before we were selling thousands a month. Yep. To selling multiple hundreds of thousands a month. Wow. How did you manage that kind of inventory bringing in? Because that's hard. I feel like you just went. You're looking at the number. You're like, I don't know how many we can get. How many can we get? How fast? Okay, yeah. Put them all on an airplane. Do whatever it takes. Just get them. Were you launched?

31:43Because right now your model is you guys launch new prints all the time. And they're fantastic. Were you launching new prints? Or was it just you had this core 10? We were launching new prints. So you were already into the launch. While it was still a small overall part of the business, it had been growing rapidly before that. So we had started to create product roadmaps and what's going to launch every month, which was really fortunate because we had novelty every month. We were just upping our POs left and right. Yeah, because costumes is a part of our history. We already were used to that seasonal cadence.

32:12We were like, we're going to make a St. Patrick's Day print and then an Easter print and a Derby print. I forget what releases was this one for underwear. Similar to you guys, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Same thing. That's actually, we're all very design drop. Yeah. Like every week is like design drop. Yeah, exactly. That's like why we all started. That's how we all started talking. with all these like super simple categories with low skew counts. You know, like three of us. Everybody with the like, we have one catalog and all of us are like, we hate you. But now it makes you feel better because everyone's trying to do product expansion.

32:39Yeah. Right. And you're like, it's so much more fun to do like fashion items compared to just like the same. Yeah. If you're in it fun, it's great. But yeah, it's hard to like recreate the wheel over and over and over again to find the next thing and the next thing. And it's easy to be envious of people who like can sell the same thing for like a decade I think it's easier to make people like love, love your brand compared to like song, just one unit, one utilitarian type thing. You know, I like the creatine that I take, but I don't love that brand. Right. Have you seen, I mean, now that you have all this data, if you were to look at like underwear as a category, do you guys have like a much higher retention just because of the way that you've built the brand?

33:21Like relative to like other underwear brands? Oh, yeah. I mean, and we have a subscription business. Like people have been on our, people, people have what? A hundred pair. I think there's a couple of people who are like in the like. In the hundreds. Yeah. Okay. So I feel like we're missing a very big aspect of this. Cause these aren't just normal underwear that you can buy anywhere. Like there's something that really differentiates shynessy underwear from other underwear brands. Right. There's a couple of things. Yeah. And actually we have, we have some, so let's, uh. Oh yeah. Okay. I like visuals.

33:50I do like visuals. We brought some gifts for you guys. yeah so um i do think we don't bring enough product on this show but this is you know in general this is a good way to start it out you know in general like our our product is super premium so we use fun crazy artwork that can sell in a lot of different places with a lot of different people so it's the materials the materials super premium the materials like a lot of people like will come in because they'll see the print right yeah and they'll be like that's ridiculous i've never seen that on a pair of underwear and then they'll get down there and that oh my god like i've never felt underwear like that that men's have a ball hammock pouch on the inside which is you know spacious and supportive feels really great um so it's like underwear that's like funny at first glance and then people like oh my god i can wear this i want to wear this underwear every day we brought you guys some of our new product both of you actually this is for kinky wait so you make women's too we do yeah so we brought you guys what kind of special features do we have?

34:48This one has a lot of special features. I'll just let you read the card. This one's for you, Matt. Oh my god. You seem like a chilly dog kind of guy. Oh my god. I have so many problems right now. Is that what this is, actually? Is that the Wienerschen's old collab? No, this is fart blocking underwear. No, mine is fart blocking underwear. Well, how does that work? So, we didn't invent this. What magic science is this? We partnered with this Swiss fabric. Of course they're Swiss. Developers. They're hilarious. Oh, my God. Like, really, guys. I don't understand. Yup, yup. I mean. You can wear them on the airplane.

35:29Watch out. You know, no problem. Yeah. There's a user manual for this art. There's a user manual, yeah. Shows you how to make sure you know, you got to make sure it works. Oh, wait, look. It says, so you can't stand and fart. You can, you just don't want to smash it through, right? It has to sit on the fabric for a little bit. It's just so, like, if you can see this. But you can sit on a chair and casually fart it out. Yeah, I've been farting this whole time. We had a few drinks last night, so. I've actually seen that. We also have non-fart blogging. Brandon's like, oh, I don't know. What happens if they put on, but how do they know if this is in their drawer and they have all these different kinds of shiny and see underwear?

36:10How do they know they're pulling out the fart blogging ones? that are like related to... Because how embarrassing if Matt wears his non-fart blocking underwear. And I think I'm pretending. And then he's here interviewing these guys, Titans. That would be bad. Yeah. This one's for you too. Oh, it's like a buffet. Deviled eggs. Deviled eggs. Deviled eggs. It's deviled egg fart blocking underwear. Oh, the sulfur is here. Yeah. Okay. Is this a new product or is this like been around a long time? Very new. Those are just really... Yeah, we met these guys at a fabric fair and they've been trying to sell this product to athletic brands.

36:48And we were like, well, we have a different idea. Tell me that you had a focus group though. Many focus groups. There's literally these Swiss guys in a lab and they called us and they're like, we're so excited to share the results with you. We have a 98 % efficiency rate. It is working. Wait, and then did you get a box? and you had gins and you had gins like how did you discover it doesn't work if you're standing we're like literally driving in a car I'm driving us like down to Denver for like some dinner or something and he's like did you smell that and I was like no and he's like I think it's really good it's working I'm wearing a far popping underwear I'm like ah I still hate that so you two were the focus group to make sure we sat in the car you sat in the car and ate a lot of cabbage like hotboxed each other basically and then ate cabbage and then discovered we really had something a lot of employees torture tested them yeah like in your office like you just and did you ever do like did you really ever test it and like give some people non fart blocking underwear like double blind yeah double blind like really no we didn't do that stupid stupid stupid but like you know the ultimate test I think is like you're in bed with your wife and you're like

38:11Still reading your book? And just so everybody was listening, you guys are parents, right? Like you were raising children. The next generation is going on. Yes. Between us, we have seven kids. Yeah. Jen's just had his four. Jen's had seven. Jen's just had seven.

38:29I have one, he has six. No, I have four, he has three. All boys? I have a daughter. I have four boys. Yeah. Poor girl. I know. Her house is so calm. Yeah. So how do you decide, what's the process creatively in the company to decide what goes on? Like, where do all the ideas come from? Because I think this is like the volume that you put out is mental. How does that happen? I think it comes from everyone, right? Like, we just have it. Do you have a Slack channel? Do you do a, is there like a writer's room every week? Like, what's the process? Yes. it's it's all of those things oh I just like you know just did our counting team sit in the right different no but like we have channels where great ideas can come from anywhere and like the people who want to work in China Sea or they're generally because they absolutely love the culture they love the product they love the mission of forcing the world to take itself less seriously and so it doesn't matter what your background or what your function is like those ideas come from all over the place and then yes there's like you know the product team and the marketing team that probably over indexing these ideas Yeah.

39:35Writers are in for both product and for marketing. There is. Separately. Okay. And those do cross over too. I was going to say, because like, you know, you make something like this, that marketing team, you're just making marketing job easier. Exactly. I picture their culture being, remember the show, The Office? Yeah. Like, I just feel like that's exactly. Yeah. Like meets, meets like a Hollywood, like, you know, like a comedic, you ever watch them like write a, like Seinfeld or something? Like South Park. Yeah. They just, yeah. Or like South Park guys just sit around a table and they just think of ridiculous things.

40:02And they're like, we should put air fresheners on women's underwear. Have you ever had an idea that was like, oh yeah, we definitely can't do that? At Hexclad, Apple Open has been our highest spending new channel since the start of last year. Mid seven figures and growing. It almost wasn't. My team was skeptical. So I stepped in to push them. First, I had them pull data on the overlap between Meta and Apple Open customers to find out if the platform was really just retargeting. Then we ran multiple holdout tests. The results, 90 % new customers, 53 % higher ROAS, 36 % higher new customer ROAS, 27 % lower new customer CAC.

40:42The numbers were just bang on. If you create an Apple of an account and launch on day one, you're going to get$1 ,000 in free ad credit, plus another$5 ,000 when you spend$5 ,000. Audio on vertical videos, unskippable ad units, new reach for new customers. Check it out today. Go to nineoperators.com slash applovin. You're going to get our guide to new channels, recordings of our live expansion events with us and 25 of our friends. Nineoperators.com slash applovin. Back to the show. Like, is there a line? There is a line. Yeah, we don't make jokes about race, religion. We used to make a ton of jokes about politics.

41:25Now we don't. And it was just like, it didn't matter. It was just like, lose, lose. So you walk the line of being canceled. Yeah. We will make any joke about sex or about farts or literally anything. It's literally just religion, religion and race. We never made jokes about just because there's that's a lose lose. We're a clothing brand still at the end of the day. We're not South Park. Yeah. And then, yeah, politics because of the last five years, things just got so polarizing. Polarizing. And that doesn't work algorithmically. We could take a joke on the - Algol wise, that didn't work. I would think that the ad algos would love that.

42:03Facebook would just be like - We thought the exact same thing. And it was not. And you tried it. Oh yeah, we like, I forget what election, but we had like all of the primary candidates. We had underwear with every primary candidate. Yeah. And people were like, ha ha ha, yeah, you put Trump on it, that's funny. And some of them go, I won't ever buy from you ever again. Oh, so it was so polarizing. It was so polarizing. There's enough people that didn't like you. Yeah, exactly. And who, tell me about the customer for the brand. Like, is it just like 25-year-old dudes? You'd think, but you'd be wrong.

42:39I would think it would be grandparents. Like my mom and Tad live in a retirement golf course community outside of Phoenix. I'm like, I just think it's all of those people. I think it's the women. I would absolutely buy these underwear for my husband. But as gifts? Yeah. Or just for your - Oh my God. What is better than a gift that makes somebody laugh? Right? That's good. That's literally our hook and our pitch. Yeah. It's like the - It is women, for sure. It's the majority of women. They're like in their 30s and 40s. That surprises me. Yeah. They're buying for their husbands, boyfriends, brothers, fathers, whatever.

43:12And then literally our hook is, I bought this because it's hilarious. And this is our number one review too. It gets repeated every single week. Bought this because it's hilarious. My husband loved them. Now the joke's on me because he's addicted to$30 underwear. Yeah. And so he comes back and buys black and blue and gray. A lot of guys buy them. A lot of guys do buy them in front of themselves. But it's like a shockingly broad audience. It's male. It's female. It's, you know, from 25 to 65. It's crazy. Is that why you expanded into women's underwear? Because I know my, you know, my CFO is one of your best customers.

43:42She literally lives in your underwear. Specifically the fart blocking one. She's very proud of that too. And she's very proud of it. she wants to be an official test yeah we had like we started with men's underwear but we had so many people going these are so soft and comfortable why don't you make women's or why don't you make ones that matcha and matching is like a huge business for us like we've got so thousands of matching subscribers yeah i don't i mean if i yeah i totally get it and it would be if that what a fun like wedding gift too to a couple like matching underwear for their honeymoon and for sure so do you guys have a massive q4 then because of the gifting element we do we do have a much bigger Q4 yeah definitely I mean there's like peaks right Father's Day Valentine's Day he's gifting holidays yeah people where people buy underwear as gifts for you do an exclusive Black Friday drop we do exclusive drops a lot like more than just Black Friday but yeah and on Black Friday we actually don't we've never done sales so we always do gift with purchase but we do like a stacking gift with purchase so like if you spend 400 bucks or 350 it's up to seven gifts which has which has like crazy crazy value yeah almost like i think we've gone up to like 380 dollars like in free stuff what's the craziest promotion you guys have ever run because i i feel like you have the humor and the brand has the humor that you could literally might say the uh one minute man oh yeah yeah oh i remember this i know this story you have to tell this it's amazing the one minute man sale is the whole site is uh full size 50 off for one minute that's as long as we could last.

45:16Which is long enough, right? Look, debatable. You guys, a lot of people were really pleased with this. A lot of people were... There was a lot of satisfaction. Five stars. Yeah, a lot of satisfaction. Was that the email afterwards? Satisfaction. Did your numbers rebound quickly?

45:40No, no, we've got like a... six months refactored period.

45:47It's awful. It's just going to be an entire interview of laughing. I'm learning a lot. It's great. This is great. People are going to love this. It's actually like, this is an episode No, but it's going to be like I've learned nothing. We're all dumber forever. Honestly, it's the most extreme version of marketing. I think it's great. I'm actually learning a lot, so I hope people are. I want to know, though, does anything actually surprise you guys like can i go back because i think there's something like to say to to make it a little bit more applicable to the audience here which is like entertainment for us is the reason like people will continue to like tune in sure and pay attention and it helps differentiate us in a way from like no one else and like for us that's like deep comedy and everything from the tags in our underwear to the sales that we run but i think any brand can benefit from having some angle that gives people like an emotional connection with the brand and keeps them coming back for more.

46:43Because you can only push like so many promotions and so many products on somebody before they're like, I don't need more right now. This promotion looks a lot like the last promotion. You know, you got up the ante for me. And so having like something about your brand that keeps people tuning in, which for us is comedy entertainment. It doesn't have to be humor. It doesn't have to be humor, but it's got to be something. It's the emotion. It's attaching emotion. Yeah, humor is such a powerful one. To a product? I think it's either emotion or value. Value could be not just the product, but educational value, right?

47:13Or emotional connection could be like, maybe you give back, or maybe people just love your cause, or maybe people love your sense of humor. But there's a lot of ways that you can have an angle for your brand that is seeded into everything that you do that gives you an edge. Oh, yeah, for sure. I think that's actually, that is definitely the big brand building takeaway. way. I think I'm actually, as you're speaking, I'm thinking Pila, we started as cause. And then I think what we figured out was, uh, we're really good at like the docu style storytelling. It's like, we'll find stuff through history and then we'll just tie it back to us at some point.

47:47It's like, we'll make one minute, two minute, five minute videos of like, let us teach you about this part of the world in like 1928. People are just like, Oh my God, these guys are storytellers. I love what they stand for. I love their content. They're not always trying to get me by another case, right? Yeah, and what we found too is that ads that do this, so ads that entertain first or teach them first, they're the best ads, right? The ad platforms love it. Meta wants people to stay on ad platform. They don't want them coming off. That's their inventory. You can not take it from them. So as advertisers, that's the big battle we're all in.

48:19And when you go out and you make something really funny, Meta's super happy because that particular piece of creative is doing what they want creative to do. We'll just like share like all the viral mechanisms that are built into the platform. And like, I mean, we have tried stuff where at some point we had this like hypothesis where like maybe we're too polarizing. Maybe we're like too funny. And, you know, maybe we're turning off some would-be buyers. And so we made some tamer creative from Meta. Sucked. Terrible. It was like compared to our other stuff that was just like pushing every line that we could.

48:53Like people weren't engaging with it. It wasn't standing out. Meta wasn't pushing in the algorithm. It wasn't converting as well. It wasn't unique from a brand perspective. And it wasn't doing those levers that are important to Meta if they're going to push the reach on something. But I do feel you're the brand that could take it all the way to the extreme of that and just do a boring day where the whole site is black and white and you have no idea what you're buying. I don't like that. Right? That's the shyness-y version of. We're like every other underwear company today. We've always actually thought about it in the inverse, which is we had this idea at one point, like, what if there was a toggle on the site that was like the after dark mode?

49:32We had to push the toggle and like a little warning box would come up. Like, are you sure? Because the jokes we make in this mode are like a lot crazier. Honestly, I think that's brilliant. I would click it. Yeah, that's like, yeah. Yeah, vibe code that. Shoplift is a CRO platform built for e-commerce operators and the only one that's Shopify Plus certified. We're using them for the new brand the operators ourselves are launching. They've built a free CRO resource hub at shoplift.ai slash operators. Real conversion benchmarks by category, the seasonal patterns most tools hide, and practical CRO for how you actually run your store.

50:11Two ways in, get your free benchmarks or start a free trial at Shoplift. Go to shoplift.ai slash operators. i want to i'd love to hear more like i mean so you went from costumes to underwear is there more i mean i know you lean into print but is there new products on the horizon like would have you considered going into shirts and yeah we uh like we thought about that over the last i guess two years and we've been kind of like doing the shift with the brand like so like the tagline used to be stay weird and shine on stay weird is definitely still like our culture everything we do but from a product standpoint we're going dangerously comfortable and so like what are the other products that we can make that are dangerously comfortable next to skin probably but that we can use as canvases for art so socks we launched socks and oh yeah it's natural yeah has it been great it's amazing we use the same yarn right so it's a super premium yarn like we that micro which is really hard to do like basically no other sock brands can put micro mode all into socks but it gives you kind of like a similar hand field of underwear yeah that's actually it's really important to call this out so that people don't miss it you also have a really good product yeah like you keep talking about material it's like it's not just like cheeky and funny like it's actually really freaking good yeah because it's great you can market people and get them to buy something novelty yeah but like i think it's really hard to build a business off of one-time novelty.

51:40You need to have a product that people want to keep coming back for over and over and over again and collect dozens, if not hundreds and some cases of... Subscribes. Or subscribe to. Yeah. You wouldn't subscribe to a product that you genuinely don't want to. Which I think would be really interesting to talk about. But also, don't you still kind of sell costumes, right? Don't you have suit sets still? We still do, but it's really small. Okay. You guys still do onesie ski suits. We do, yeah. Yeah, I had friends of mine that it's a couple and they come on some of our like cat and heli trips and they showed up one day in this like crazy ass like matching onesie did you know it was shinesty no and i'm like where the hell did you buy that and he's like oh there's these ridiculous company in boulder in colorado and he starts telling me like i know yeah like oh i've met and then he's away and it's jen's naked on the back of this makes lots of sense to me now yeah so i had i actually did not know that you guys did that until i saw it on this trip and And then the funny thing is, I believe people from that trip went and bought some.

52:43Not that set, but they were showing people your site. This is where we bought these things. I just remember seeing the Derby ones, and they were incredible. Yeah. Oh, at the Derby? If you watch the Derby, you'll see our seats every year. Every year. For sure. Front row, owners wear them. What would you say is the... It's going to be a hard answer, but if you were to think percentage of time in the company spent just on coming up with ideas, what is that number man for us or for you guys well like for the whole team like if you were just look at the company like there's how many employees you guys have we have like 30 kind of like okay office yeah like office so like all those 30 people like how much of their week is just spent on like what's the next greatest idea what's the next thing if we're just talking about like marketing and product yeah like there are people who that's all they do that's all they do yeah but the total i think it's actually less than you think because i think there are a lot of it's a kind of an endless well of ideas i think actually more of the time is on bringing the ideas to life well and the actual production oh tell me more about that what do you mean like the the like the boring parts like the supply chain the production or i'm talking about more on like the actual like marketing creative like i don't i don't know that maybe yes there are people like our graphic designers spend all of their time designing great products that's a lot of time for sure i think on the marketing team we have like so many ideas and more of the time is spent Like, how do we actually go out and shoot and produce this stuff?

54:03That's what came to mind. Have you seen their product photography? Oh, yeah. Which now has got to be a lot easier for you guys. Because you can think of extravagant. Like, the best part is some of their - Yeah, we're unbounded by producing now. Which is like, that leans into your superpowers, right? Totally, yeah. Yeah, I find like, I meet, I do find in marketing, you meet one of, it's like extremes, like anything else in life. There's people like you guys where ideas just, you can sit here for a day and like come out with 500 of them and it's no problem. And then there's people who are like, this is the hardest thing I could ever do is to come up with something original.

54:34And they're really like, there's nobody in between. But coming up with something original and then what Jens is talking about and actually executing it and not just taking it halfway is probably one of the hardest parts, especially for brands with frequent launches and multiple product types. Like it is an underrated. And we failed at that. Yeah. The execution part of it. You have to fail. I mean, it's taken us years and years and years to execute really like some kind of process. Oh, weekly launches. I don't know if I ever showed you this. I think I've shown you, but like my team built a like literally, we step by stepped out what it takes to take an idea up to like we're selling it.

55:15And that spreadsheet is like 126 different jobs that have to be done. And there's like names beside each one and like roles and like who has to do what. And it's crazy at how much work goes into like, this looks simple. It's like, that's a print on a pair of underwear. You're like, oh, it's always the same pair of underwear, same shape, same sizes. But the work, the like actual production line is probably like, we're probably similar there. I know you're right in yours. What do you guys do if you see like a trend online? Like say there's something that you can really lean into, right? Do you fast track it?

55:50Like take it outside of your normal process and like push it to the front of the line so you can get a PO placed and airship it in just to capture it. We normally do like six months at a time of design. And that's like kind of your foundational layer. And then we're saving capacity, both with our manufacturer and with our design team, to like do these quick drops, which we can do in like 30 days. It's really, I mean, and at their size, to be able to maintain that fluid kind of ability to take something and push it to the front of the line is a huge unlock. and something I tell smaller companies do not ever stop doing.

56:25Do you have a surprise? Well, speaking of, you were talking about fast fashion and being able to react to trends. Adapt quickly. So we started studying. Wait, I feel like, are you about, is this for Matt? This is for Matt. I feel like you gave me a little bit of insight to this, but I'm a visual person. So I might need to see this product, actually. We were fast following, like studying his Instagram. Yeah. And his Facebook photos. Oh my god, they're actually bringing like nobody else has brought such a trendsetter. We just need to be doing one. Okay, so what did you see that was missing in his Instagram feed?

57:03We just saw a certain like desire for like a level of sexiness that he had not yet achieved. If you look at his earlier post, he was like really repressed clearly. And then like as you get to his later stuff, he was like blossoming like a flower. You could just see it in his eyes and he desired it, you know. No, that's called deadness. so you designed a product just to help matt step into some level we did a one and we did it fast we used the capacity that we had for a quick turn brilliant yeah right so what did what did we do so um we brought it it's a very special shine to see product it uh you know has the front of course but and it also has um it's a nice pass are we getting this i changed my mind on him modeling it so we're definitely not modeling this today guys is this an actual thing that you make though like you make this and sell this not yet i feel like with ai we could probably get matt's face though on one of the model photos i think definitely yeah definitely that happen we'll have to make it happen can you send me one so i can send it in some of our brand yeah i feel like just you know updating the operator oh my god yeah the operators merch is gonna be yeah this This is operators merch, Aaron.

58:16We should do that. If we made a line of operators... I'm looking at our CEO over here. He's going to... We're going to make this happen. Jason will be here later. I bet he could try that. He'll put them on. We'll get Jason's terms on. Small, right? Yeah. I'm sure that'll go well with... It's an extra... He said it's an extra small. Extra small. Perfect. We're going to be like, Does this company make a real pair of... I don't believe that anybody wants to wear this underwear. Yeah. Trust us. We've sold like over 14 million pairs. Do you make extra small men's underwear? is there men that actually like, I feel like if I wore an extra small, I would still just buy a medium to make myself feel better.

58:51So you don't muffin top really hard or something? Yeah, I don't know. We make, uh, that's what I do. We make, I only make extra large. We have, we have two different sizes of crotch. Do you really? So it's not just waistband. You actually have to have different. Oh, you actually added another layer to it. We added another layer to it. Just because you didn't, you liked inventory so much. We loved inventory so much. I love that they don't discriminate. night. I mean, it's amazing. Let's do long, short, brief. Now a thong. Now a thong. Yeah. How do you find. And that's just on the men's. Oh, okay.

59:22I have a question. Magnum pouch, standard pouch. And then the women's side. How many skews do you have at any one time for sale? We have like roughly 12 ,000. Wow. Yeah. So many. And that's all in inventory. Like so far on it's so far. Yeah. Inventory and demand. Did we ever talk about this like how come you guys never went into uh like what we did which is go like just go completely vertical like own the factory put it in your backyard so you can basically go from like you can trend jack like day off it's super hot how do i just do this tomorrow i think as soon as sewing is robotic and you can do that we probably would try it and maybe we could start a factory together you know because um it's just sewing is done by hand and that skill just definitely doesn't exist in colorado i'll give you another one socks you can buy the machines That's a good point.

1:00:12Yeah, socks are good. It used to be the toe box that had to be hand-stitched. And I'm pretty sure now there's machines that would do the... Yeah, you get a Lonati machine from Italy. I feel like you could even import in blanks almost. We've tried that. Yeah, we have tried that. That's like part of the product quality dance, because you can sublimate on top of polyester, but we don't use polyester. To make the pouch a really joyous, spacious place, Like we gather extra material there and like, you can't, you know, you can't print on that little ruffle. It does feel very joyous and spacious to me.

1:00:45It's a joyous place to be. This is, I would do want to call it, what was the machine you called it? The Lennonati. Yeah. So this is, he and I were talking about t-shirts yesterday. And I think this is like unique amongst consumer people, but they know a weird amount about how things are made. Yeah. Right. Like we were talking Suriyami machines. He's like, oh, I know what those are. And I'm like, who the hell knows what those are? Like I went down a rabbit hole. He's like, oh yeah, there's like three of those in the world. When we were making socks, we lived in Asia. Me and our designer stayed there for three weeks, just iterating every day.

1:01:16Okay. To try to get it right. I love how on the weeds they are. I know. And still, to this day, if I talk to Jens about marketing and ads, he's probably one of the smartest marketers I know. Oh, yeah. Hands down. Shucks. Thanks, Katie. You just have to deal with a couple jokes. Tell me more about myself. I love this. Okay, so as a brand then, has there ever been a customer story or something that actually surprises you guys. I feel like surprise is not high on the list of emotions that you feel in a week. And given that what you do, you're the one surprising people. Because it's constant. Yeah, that's what you do.

1:01:50It's like literally like you're in almost a shock business. Yeah. I mean, we piss people off all the time. That's what I mean. Oh, I remember one. This was like April Fool's like, you know, this is 2017 or 2018. And, you know, again, it's like Thursday at like 10 p.m. And I'm sitting there with our copywriter, now our creative director. the awesome guy and we're like wow what are we gonna do what are we gonna do and we're like let's do a press release that we've been acquired by kohl's i know this story and so we wrote this like very like tongue-in-cheek plain text email and have any time maybe it was like midnight already we're not we're not designing we're just writing like an actual press release style email and it's like very snarky very sarcastic we're probably like you're you know, concerned if you're gonna be able to use your Kohl's cash on Shynesty now.

1:02:47And don't worry, the answer is yes. With no Kohl's party, he's just name dropping. All the stuff that we thought was so tongue in cheek and obviously sarcastic. And we sent that email, woke up the next morning. And it was like, I don't know that I've, I don't think we've ever received maybe more emails than this. Oh, except for catalogs. That's what I was gonna say. Direct mail. We got another one then. Okay. Waking up to just like a wall of like literally thousands of replies, like broke our CX team. Upset people or happy people? But I would say like 30 % people are like, oh my God, you guys have worked so hard.

1:03:28I followed you from the beginning. Congrats on the amazing success. And other people are like, you sell out. You sell out. Okay. We thought you were an authentic brand. costume brand that we liked. Yeah. No. Did you reply again? I was just like, oh, and we replied to every single one, like me, Chris, our copyright, because we didn't have a big team at that time. We didn't have like a huge CX team, a bunch of offshore people we could scale up. We just sat there for like three days. Were you screenshotting like best replies and sending them to each other? Like, look what I got. Yeah. Yeah. Or you were just trying to get out of them.

1:04:03That was a good one. You should tell the catalog. Oh, man. We've gotten like throughout the years, every single year we send out a catalog for the holidays like between one and two million you know holiday catalog it's honestly one of the best pieces of like creative that we put out ever okay and every year uh and so you know it has things in it that are like funny and slightly inappropriate so it's underwear wait like give an example what do you mean by things because like uh you know one year when the karen thing was trending we wrote a piece an op-ed piece that was like how How to tame your Karen.

1:04:38How to seduce a Karen. How to tame and sleep with a Karen. And it was things like, you know, give her two glasses of Pinot Grigio and never three. Don't feed her after midnight. Don't feed her? Yeah. It was like, make sure you're careful because her claws can come out, right? Things like that. And this is a whole two-page spread in your catalog? Yeah, it's an opportunity. Which, guys, it's not cheap. When you print catalogs, it's about how many pages you have. And you dedicated a whole two-page spread to how to tame people. Yeah, you guys should find it. I think the PDFs are on our site. You could grab some.

1:05:13Of course we're going to have this. We're going to find it. It was like, you know, I had actually a picture of my brother who still works for us. He's got a long mullet. And he's holding like this glass crystal ball to 69. With the how to tame a character. It was like him telling you as a character how to do it. Or one year we had this outrageous Thanksgiving scene when somebody's like fisted the turkey and holding it in the air in this raucous dinner scene. And the number of people who are like, you meat eaters, I can't believe you meat eaters. People will complain about everything. But the thing that was the most surprising, we do, we put funny content in there that people absolutely love.

1:05:56It's far and away the best piece of content that we put out for the whole year. I mean, it's, I don't even know. I can't even, like it's a profitable thing for you. It's an amazing, it is an amazing, it was an amazing acquisition channel for a real time. It's also now an amazing retention channel. We pour our hearts and souls into that. Like the first couple of years, well, still, the number of people who will go out of their way to mail you back their catalog is astounding. Like with a handwritten note, like take me off your list, you savages. No. That's surprising. Yeah, that's surprising. Did they sign it?

1:06:32Or the other one that was hilarious was like, I don't like the waste of paper and carbon sending paper mail, and they sent it back to us. I'm like, don't you have a little self-respect for your time? Don't you just do what everyone does, just stand in front of your trash can and go, no, no, no. Maybe. No, no. But some part of you anticipates this. You guys definitely are aware of like, oh this is gonna make a little segment mad but you must be seeking reaction we are 100 we are we don't i think we are writing for our customers we know how they want to be entertained and we're trying to live up to that every time and yes there are people like we are still a polarizing brand and there are we know that there are people who are not going to like it but we're not writing for them yeah do you think it holds you guys back do you think that the polarization holds you back from a scale?

1:07:25That's a good question. I mean, yeah, probably to some extent, but also like... I don't think they care. That's not why we exist. We're never going to be groomed. Oh, I am certainly not suggesting you change it. I'm wondering if you've thought through that. Is there any downside? I do think there's a potential. And like I was saying before, we've tested more moderate stuff and it just doesn't click. It doesn't have the efficiency. It doesn't have the uniqueness that makes other content work so well for those people. I've never been more certain that they need to go into EDE. Ever. It's just so obvious.

1:07:57It is so, the marketing alone. Under the shyness-y name. A picture, like you can put it in the catalog that you're sending, like you can cross market these things. Like I just feel like. I actually have a guy for you. Like not the tester, but like a person that you can talk to on how to build this. I got you guys, we'll talk after. How do, do you have approvals for creative? I'm just still obsessed with the creative process. Like when somebody has an idea, does somebody in the company get like a, the ultimate, we can't do that vote or is there any kind of approval process? I don't think it's like formal necessarily, but probably me and Jen's both have like the, all right, we can't do that.

1:08:38But I would say like, when does that happen? I'd say like 1 % of things, like less than 1 % of things. Like we really need a tie break on this. We've got a great like senior creatives that are like, that get it and can make those decisions. And if something's really contentious at that level, they might like ask us. There's been a couple of things that have gotten past that we would certainly, we would have like shut down probably. You'd like to take those back. Just because they were like, it was like graphic art. I'm thinking of that was on one of the prints. You know what I'm talking about?

1:09:07No, but now you definitely have to tell all of us because I thought you approved that one. I did not approve it. It got through. I approved it with a change. I don't think I can say it on camera. I don't think I can say it either. I think we got to, I'll say it, but you might have to cut it. Maybe just give like an idea of it and don't be specific. I'll say it. We just might bleep it out. You just might have to cut it because it is like vulgar as s***. It was like, we try to like, I think we try to be like. Okay, it's going to be bad. We try to like do clever and innuendo and this one was just like.

1:09:34There was no innuendo. You know like Olympics uses a lot of condoms. Yeah. The Olympics uses a lot of condoms. Yeah. So like athletes. Olympic Village is like the STD. I did not know this. They're known for just. You know, they've all been working out and then you got all these hot bars. in the same place and they just 20 year olds competing Olympics all they do is have sex in the Olympic Village yeah this is a well known thing I don't know that's why they incinerate the mattresses yeah it's like 600 ,000 or something oh my god it's like the average of like 7 or 8 condoms per athlete is used like yeah it's a every Olympics it's like so did you make an Olympics rings out of condoms we did but not just that they were also like this is I can't be saying this

1:10:22i was just like and i said like oh this is a funny concept guys but you got to cut that part so like just the condoms with the rings and generally we tell our creative team like go far it's better to like go a little far and like have to cut back a little bit and not go far enough as condoms correct with dripping correct yes uh and we were like you got to cut that part out just the condoms is funny and they did not in production they accidentally sent it to production this is the amazing thing it's like how do you run a company where the point is to be ridiculous how do you have any discipline in the business when you go to somebody you're like okay look we have to talk how do you even have a serious conversation with someone because it's their job it's a good question we're having serious debates about Halloween prints we got this one Halloween print we licensed it from this awesome illustrator it's

1:11:16like with a with a shite what was it and me and jen are both like guys i don't think we could do it do you have an hr or is there no way you can't it's jen's hr what is hr yeah you're about ali and karen oh yeah we have like yeah yeah i mean we have like consultant who helps us you know oh that person we make everyone sign i mean like we have had very little problem with this very yeah A, we're very upfront. And everybody knows what they're saying. Everyone knows what they're getting in for. And I think even our employee back there, it's like, hey, due to the nature of our brand, our product, they're talking about sex.

1:11:53You will be exposed to that you might not run into it in the course of other ordinary business. But you understand by working here, we sell underwear. We make jokes. Yeah. You're... But yeah, we've had... You guys are incredibly close to... You're basically a media company that just happens to monetize media with... The hardest product category. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We're going to figure that out. To me, it's just the best example of brand at its core. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like there is personality behind that brand. You know what I mean? Like there's just, you can describe it. Like I can describe the person that, I can describe your customer.

1:12:32Like exactly. Yeah, you know who it is in your background. I know exactly who it is. Yeah. Well, you're looking at them. Yeah. Like they're their customer. They might be a little better looking. has it been uh ever since that sort of like big hockey stick up from covid was it a pretty smooth ride did you guys hit like any bumps along the way on this like the last five six years yeah no we've had like years in there that were we're like you don't think it's just been a perfect beautiful no no that's why like i don't get like a lot of people and a lot of people in media you know everyone everything's always like great great it's always really yeah i'm like that's not true like it's no in reality like yeah we all have like flat here if if you have a business for long enough you're gonna have a flat year you're gonna have a down year right for sure and so we've experienced that uh and over the last i guess probably 2021 two and three were great and then 2024 24 was hard it was hard 25 was some people that was hard yeah um yeah and we're seeing growth again now which is awesome and um it's like the best growth we've had in like yeah since the early 20 what changed like what what how do you get it back like when when you go flat for a bit or down like i think what did you guys how do you think about that what'd you do i think we you you like tend to like freak out a little bit obviously because you've never experienced that before and you're like oh maybe i think one of the things we did which is a mistake was what jen said where we're like oh maybe we're we're too immature for our audience remember our audience is outgrowing which is wrong like no straight up wrong that was a bad conclusion and so like some of the products that we made at that time just didn't have the shinesty ethos or like brand behind them comfortable there were high products but they didn't have that like shinesty twist yeah on them and they took a lot of time to build they took a lot of time to market and test which you know takes your eye off of like the big category that does work um we up we wanted to up level the brand's aesthetic so it kind of has this like high low like martinis with french fries martinis and cigarettes you know yeah a long dirty heater and a beautiful elegant like they can't just stop it has to go you know there's a line yeah it's like where whole thing is over the line i think we didn't communicate that properly and our team heard oh we're trying to back it down a bit we're trying to back down the craziness and really what we were saying is we just want the production value to look better but to still have those elements of kind of yeah we wanted to be beautifully composed with irreverent elements and copy is what we wanted and what they heard was like tone it all down.

1:15:01That's how I would describe your brand today. Yeah. Like when I was talking about the product photography. I mean, it's truly. Yeah, if you want a good example of this, if you're listening or watching, go to their, even just like your hero creative on ChinaSea.com. It's like elevated humor. Yeah, I saw one, my wife sent it to me. When you guys got into bras, that campaign was freaking genius, man. Like all of her friends were sharing it. They're like, this is just, this is the way you sell it. And they're like, those are also super comfortable. Those are great. I would know. Yeah, yeah, thanks.

1:15:37No, I think we wanted to make this change with the brand because the product is so much more, it's expensive. Most people aren't accustomed to spending$30 on a pair of underwear, right? Or$20 even if you're subscribing. And we wanted the premium of the brand and the visuals to incite and everything to match the premium of the product. And the team just kind of like... I think it was our problem. Yeah, we communicated that wrong. Oh, dude, yeah. When you're like the CEO of a company, your job is... Great communication is largely just great comprehension. You might think you're speaking really clearly, but if somebody's not getting it, it's like, yeah, that's a new problem.

1:16:19I picture you two being like grandpas and rocking chairs on a patio, still creating these... Jess is like, I hope that's not true. I hope that's not true. But I just see so much joy. And you two clearly love working together, which is probably part of the magic behind all of it, too. You're a great partnership. It's my second marriage. Do you guys ever get into disagreements? disagreements like do you have moments where you're like oh i we get at it all the time yeah a lot like about what i feel like where do you not where are you not aligned yeah oh we always get aligned we all get along but it's yeah it's usually like we both are convicted in something and it's like well let's have like constructive healthy debate to see which position is stronger and then i think we know there's like there's a time to debate and then there's a time to make a decision and then everyone gets on on the bus after that we let our team see that too like we want that's one of our core values yeah healthy debate you want to see the disagreement you don't want to see the you can challenge anyone we do respectfully we're not like but you know i say that i'm on like take out of this no it's fine it's actually great i'm just happy that somebody cusses more than i do It's perfect.

1:17:40Is there a year, if you guys look back, forget the ads years, because those are always easy, but is there a year in the business journey where you'd love to go back and just do more of something? I mean, yeah. Just don't say spend Facebook ads. It's too easy. No, right when we started the company, we should have liked it. But to be clear, let's go back to that. I've heard a lot of your advice and your advice about some of the people you've interviewed about like knowing your unit economics down pat oh yeah right from the start i think maybe it was the grun's guy yeah oh yeah which is so i mean that's such good advice we were selling chad chad but yeah like the problem every time somebody refers to chad from grun's problem is you have to remember like chad's genetically engineered yeah he's building a lab yeah he's totally built in a lab to like do that business yeah it's not a fair i think 99 of consumer brands founders are just like you guys.

1:18:33Minus not as funny. They're just like you but not as funny. They're the garbage that got taken out of the lab. In a dumpster, trash can with a bottle of Jack in her hands. But we're all just figuring it out as we go. You can't look back and wish you understood what the units of... You know what I mean? We were so far in before we even knew what the acronyms were for things. which I'm just I'm certain y 'all are the same way yeah I think if I go I would go back it would be to like that time frame you know 27 2018 where we were kind of like things were still working in these like now what we would call our like legacy categories but it was like such a you know felt like such a big business at the time really small by comparison to where we are now I wish we'd thought more about like the tam and the opportunity and the like strategic value of like underwear and basics and leaned into that like way more heavily but at the time it was kind of like well why would you take your eye off of the like 10 million dollar category to focus on the you know million dollar category like you're saying you weren't even really thinking about an LTV of a customer you were just trying to acquire customers we were just like yeah we were like ripping out new I mean the products that we launched were absurd and ridiculous and some really stupid like so yeah like but just for like a very small audience for a very specific time of the year like always good it was gonna be hard to like get scale and maintain so yeah and like i wish we'd like zoomed out and been like wow this underwear thing's actually like okay it's small today but like strategically it checks like a bunch of boxes and i wish we'd been like we should lean way more heavily into that and not you know not that we like we we did we like grew with it and then you know we really ran with it in covid but had we started that like two years earlier back in the good old days that i'm not supposed to talk about apparently when we spend money on Facebook like that was gonna be my answer to him as you yeah is uh do you feel like you're good at this now like you've been at a long time like just running the company and like understand all these things you're talking about like the numbers and the the cat thinking about categories and which ones do we lean into and where we not like do you guys feel like you're getting good at it you've been in business a while I think it's dangerous to think you're good at it because then you get punched in the face with something brand new so I mean no I'm like Jen's the same way we always are like learning, trying to get what we can from other people, listening, learning, asking questions.

1:20:58But do you feel more resilient? Definitely more resilient. You've taken a lot of airs. So for people listening, we had an event at Katie's Lake House. There's 30 people. There's probably, I don't know, I did say this, but there's probably more than$4 billion in GMV between 30 people. So it's like a pretty good room. And at the end of the day, when we were all talking, you see how many people were taking notes. Yeah. And I'm like, these are all killers. And I'm like, look at them all. Like, they're just writing down stuff. And I'm like, this is badass. And it just shows you that like some of them do almost a billion dollars.

1:21:26Like there's a couple I'm like, and they're still sitting there like scribbling things. Cause there's still just all these little ways you can win. The guy who does more than a billion takes the most ferocious notes I've ever seen. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So like when you think about like your own expertise, was there, when in the company did you hire somebody where you realized there's people like you could bring someone in who was really freaking good at something? You're like, Oh, I'm the dumbest person in the room now at this. Yeah. Who was that first hire? Honestly, probably our first designer.

1:21:52who's still with us and she's our chief creative officer now like um we hired her 2015 mid like about a year in about a year and we like poached her from the only other apparel brand and halter and boulder they like they were like falling on hard times and so they uh like canceled their office and we were like you can work out of our office for free oh that's dirty yeah the ultimate poach move yeah i like that and then she like slowly was like oh i like these guys and we're like you should work for us yeah uh so yeah so does she manage designers under her or is she just okay yeah but like everything visual from like product to graphic design and and so she's like the one where we're like oh this is like what she's a talent she's a savant at that yeah like she can do it all she can do anything she can tell you if that shoulder should move she can tell you if that pixel should be pushed she can tell you if that ux is going to be clean like she's and then probably like the other time would be like when we hired COO we hired her from she was at Otterbox oh yeah great great Colorado company Otterbox before and just like amazing supply chain experience have you guys found it easier to hire people over time like just as the brand got built the culture got better definitely I feel like if you're people know about you at first at first when you're like this kind of tiny startup with this really like irreverent angle to the brand people are like I don't know if I want to get on that shit yeah that's a little that's a little weird and you're all in office right we are not like a hybrid it's a hybrid yeah yeah we i would love to all be in office the cove kind of messed that up because we started hiring people we'll see we might i don't know but now like the people that we get now that you know we're big people have heard about us like yeah the people who apply apply because like oh my god i want to work there that's the type of culture i want to be a part of so that that it's gotten every one of our job listings says art director with a sense of humor everything's with a sense of humor control warehouse fulfillment you know 15 16 like you guys are writing the organic facebook buzzfeed like really good content you discovered paid yeah how what else has like really turned on over the years like new chance like new places to spend money anything that surprised you that worked really well anything you're like why doesn't this work for us you're great i think uh direct mail was like a real immediate success and surprise and like a little scary because like the expense is so high a lot of cash out front yeah you think about like spending 60 or 60 cents 60 cents for one person to receive something like it feels like a huge gamble but that did really well and like the ability to tell a big story um did you guys ever do youtube like organic like i feel like just set up an office like a camera in your office It's interesting.

1:24:40I feel like organic storytelling stuff like that, we didn't end up doing on YouTube, which is interesting. I think, at least I always thought, our ads have this balance of being very educational on the product and very entertaining that they somehow satisfy both brand building and driving conversion. I do think there's a time when we should lean into other content strategies like that. But I feel like we've been able to get a lot of mileage by having that kind of hybrid approach to advertising yeah we do this kind of storytelling like on tick tock organic yeah tick tock like the behind the scenes kind of like the office style um and so we've had some really good success over when we've half a million followers on tick tock whoa it's kind of okay it's making like which as a brand is like pretty exceptional because people don't like to follow brands they like to follow people totally uh and so yeah like that's do you all lean into creators and influencers like in especially with tick tock we talked a lot about that this we're we're getting back on that that is one that i think would has surprised me like i finding influencers for us like that works for like everybody and that has never really like worked as a big strategy for us like free free like gift funnels and things like that and i think we kind of figured out yeah you're probably shocked right why do well i'm shocked right now because like we're we're seeing the re-rise of actual comedians yeah and like i don't know anybody who does brand deals with comedians like outside of the extremely big ones like you know uh hex clad did the uh what's his face pete whatever that guy is that guy yeah uh you just don't see it like you like most stage performing comedians there's nobody doing maybe we haven't i think like when you get to like that tier that's like something we haven't actually dressed it really well yet i'm talking about like a lot of people i think use micro influencers and that level and do huge funnels on that.

1:26:32That actually doesn't surprise me. We've tried that a lot and I think we finally figured out why. And it's like, while there are a lot of people who have, you know, rabid followings, create great content, the number of them that are willing to do that in an intimate category, if that's not like what their channel is all about. Also with your sense of humor. With our sense of humor, it really shrinks the base of people. But every up and coming comedian would 100 % do it. That's their job. Their job is to do exactly what you guys do, except they go up and embarrass themselves. Yeah. And slightly offend.

1:27:00And be very offensive. Oh, yeah, man. Every time I go to a... I love stand-up comedy. I feel like female or male comedians would really lean into me. Oh, yeah. For sure. Yeah, yeah. Plus, you're giving them something to have content about. Yeah. Yeah, they all need it.

1:27:17Okay, so we usually end these things. We do this thing called the Titan 10. Questions, we'd like you to answer them as fast as you can. Gut feel. But stay on brand, please, because I feel like it might be the best answer you've ever had. They don't need to be serious. You can do whatever you guys feel is the right answer. Okay. And you can each answer if you want, unless you agree and you can just vote the answer. Okay. So first one, I'm going to drop you guys on a desert island. You get nothing but a piece of paper. On the piece of paper is three numbers. You have to run the business just with those three numbers.

1:27:46What are the three numbers? That's a good one. I thought you'd have read these questions before yeah well it's really three so yeah three the three metrics damn can't even be like three dashboards no three numbers jen's on paper there's no dashboard he wants three dashboards that are 150 kp as well i really like my data for me uh new customers returning customers and cac probably because if the cac's at the level then you're gonna know i really like this one that is uh i just call it marketing contribution margin but it's like you're basically net revenue minus your ad spend because i think like sometimes when you look at like cpa or roas and then you have to like it normalizes spend and efficiency so you know if like are you scaling and actually like holding you know this like simplified version of contribution margin i like that it's just like a quick signal of how is spam versus revenue tracking.

1:28:43It's a health check. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I only look at contribution dollars daily. It's the only number I will look at daily. It's total contribution dollars. I would have said, Mark, I would have said contribution dollars, except I think if you want, it's not as actionable if you don't, unless you get the full breakdown. That's true. Yeah. You need to see though. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Okay. So you also get to take a book, but the book can't be about business or music. If you want to bring it like something just to like entertain you. That's easy. I'm going to bring the fattest, thickest Tom Clancy book I can find because it's also the only way I can go to sleep at night and turn off my brain from kids and work.

1:29:18I've never read fiction since then. I didn't read much in school. I'm sure you can see that. He's still a little illiterate today. Sometimes he asks me, like, how do you pronounce this word? I'm like, the? Oklahoma school system, man. Got a good basketball team. Nice people, but school leaves something to be desired. Just kidding, Oklahoma. Unless I cut it. Still in my heart. Mike's going to be like, no. Mike knows. Did he answer the question yet? Well, that's what I was saying. I didn't read any fiction books. So he's not bringing you. No, I recently asked a friend. I was like, hey, give me a recommendation on something that I can do that's not related to business.

1:30:07it's a banger it's called red rising it's like a dorky sci-fi gladi it's like uh game of thrones in space but it's epic and i read all six books in 30 days ironically surprise red storm rising is a tom clancy book so you could have red rising and red storm rising perfect so sick book if you don't read fiction check it out it's dope you're a reader now i guess i don't know what else to read i read all six books now i'm back to dude i have uh original copies of every tom clancy book because I got them from my grandpa aren't there like thousands? no like the big ones like all the original big ones I'll send you a photo I got them all love it did not know about you okay so contrarian belief about business most people would like it's contrarious what do you think that people would disagree with about business

1:31:01it can be really fun if you surround yourself with the right people and do something that's like personally satisfying to you. And I think a lot of people, I mean, that's not a new concept, the Ikigai thing. Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of people in business still, especially in e-commerce, are like, oh, product, make money. I'm grown in a lab, that type of thing. Yeah, yeah. It's just straight up just financial. It's like, yeah. And like, it's kind of boring. I think it wouldn't work for me, right? It's just boring. Cool. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I like that one. I have like some more tactical ones, but I don't think it's just that.

1:31:32All right, okay. so single most important word leadership accountability like knowing who's accountable for what and how to mold into that I would agree with that and then I'd also say just like fun love it single most important word business

1:31:53momentum hell yeah because I think if you've got it it's easy to sustain and people are excited and motivated and by the time you start losing it it takes a long time to like put the stuff in place to even be able to like get back up turn it around and it's like a really it's like demotivating it's scary you generally don't make your best decisions under like pressure yeah i'd agree with that like um cycle being able to overcome adversity because you're gonna get punched in the face and you're gonna hear like i feel like everyone on media just always talks about only the good stuff You can tell in like group chats or in forums.

1:32:33I hear these guys do a pretty good job. They do, yeah. But like in just, yeah, we suck. We just tell people we suck. Can you guys, I want them to get on and just start like, y 'all need to be the commenters. Yeah. Commenting on your YouTube? Yeah. Oh no, we should just get you guys a short form video where you add your commentary to it every time we do a show. Oh yeah, like talking head style. Yes. That would be funny. All right, so you guys hang on. You spent a lot of time together. We didn't even talk about how you guys travel, which I thought would just be awesome. because those are great. So what's your, give me the like, given your relationship, best meal of the day and why?

1:33:09And are you eating it together? Oh, we do good dinners. Yeah, if we're eating together dinners, I mean, we like definitely like partying a little bit. We know. Yeah. You guys too. Whose idea was it to like start a podcast this early in the morning after feeding us drinks for 12 hours? You signed up. You signed up for this time slot. We have a CEO in this company. It's his idea of everything. He takes all blame for all things. We believe in accountability. If you're listening... It's his fault. If you're listening on non-video, thank you. Because we look bad. We do not look good right now. This is crazy for a 25-year-old.

1:33:52It's not tight enough. Yeah. Yeah. With seven kids. All right. So most overrated growth tactic. What do you think it is? Most overrated. Okay. I think you can't, you know, there's things that work for a couple people. I would maybe say this idea of memberships I think is like so crazy to me versus like a subscription that actually just generates money all the time, meaningful money in the background versus some like modest thing that maybe offsets some like free shipping thing for the sole reason that a membership still puts the like onus on the customer to like think about your brand see actually open your email you paid for them to see an ad and then they go and use that membership benefit like i think it's the thing that a lot of brands have like been cornered into because they're able to like figure out yeah you guys are big subscription people right like very very deep in it and if you haven't if you're listening you're in this business obviously because why the hell would you listen to this show if you're not in this business uh seriously yeah thanks mom uh you gotta go check out how they do subscription because you guys you built like your own subscription software because like that's how deep you were in that yeah you had to build a bunch of custom tech too yeah that's so dope okay so then most underrated tactic uh i think independent boutique retail oh which we were learning very recently but um like the points of distribution that you get contribution margin is going to break down to be similar i think in most businesses and then you're getting profitable free ads with retailers who are all independent so you don't have the risk and i it's definitely not as easy as target or walmart which probably has tons of value too i wouldn't know we don't have express that but like it's also not rocket science yeah right yeah um it's doable for i think most brands and you can be in any kind of store you guys get so much range yeah but I think people they neglect to think about the lift that you're going to get in all of your other channels especially Amazon by having more points of distribution absolutely we did for a long time I love it boys we're done that's the pod