Why Founders Have to Become Their Own Best Marketer

30:49The Rings will do over$40 million this year in top line sales. But Sean, watches is a bad category. Lounge isn't. It's true, but I've also tried to make good categories work on my business. I try to sell t-shirts that didn't work. I try to sell socks that didn't work. And she already tried it. She already tried it, is what you're saying. We should just be open to the idea that maybe it won't work. Yeah, no, totally. I guess what I'm hitting on is she's already self-admitted that she's not a good marketer. Yeah. I wonder. I mean, I'll just call it like. That's but Elaine, maybe it wasn't product.

31:24Maybe it was just that you didn't put enough effort to it. Like we've definitely launched product categories that like the team just didn't put 100 percent into. Right. And I feel like we could have done better at it. And so now when we launch new product categories, we make sure that we're putting 100 percent effort in. But we go into it slowly. Like, Like, is there a space where you can, you clearly have a great customer base because you know she's going to come back as the Dippin' Daisies brand and buy something else from you. So what else would she maybe, I mean, have you thought of other categories that you can test and you can throw out some ads?

32:04I mean, Sean, I've heard you talk about like you basically post the ads and then you know right away if they start to get any kind of traction or not, right? And if they don't, you're just like, eh. Well, yeah, look, if I was prescribing, like, you know, the thing is we have an asset in that we have a customer base. We have an email list and we have the stuff already made. So it's like, how are we going to sell this stuff? I would make a different ad account and I would have a different pixel that is just trained on lounge cover-up accessories purchases. I would build a landing page for that stuff and see if you can acquire a lounge customer separately.

32:46And the answer is you should be able to. It's like you're selling cute stuff at cheap prices. You know what women love? Cute stuff at cheap prices. So you should be able to move through a ton of inventory. I just don't know if the customer is going to be good or if it's going to be profitable. Because it's a knife fight of a category, right? Let me ask you this question. if you if I spent like I do have a lounge collection coming up out this fall by the way if I if I'm spending like five hundred thousand dollars on this collection at cost for this lounge collection how much should I be spending on ads?

33:24Swimwear typically has like 90 percent margins so you have five million dollars of MSRP retail value let's say you have 3.8 million of after a higher discount net revenue coming into the business if you had 100 % sell through in the collection. Yeah, you should probably spend like one and a half million dollars trying to sell it, right? That would be like a really good MER for this. Did you place one large PO, that's where you're pulling out your 500 ,000, and the inventory's on its way? Yes, yes. I like front load all my inventory. Yeah. Like one big PO. Ooh, girl. Why? You own the factory. That's the point of the factory is to not do that.

34:09Because making one unit costs 10 times more expensive than making a thousand units. No, I know. But can you make$100 ,000 in units? That's close to the$500 ,000 price. Well, she's already done it. And I think it's I think Sean's right. I mean, Elaine, my gut is I don't because Dippin' Daisies to me isn't like it doesn't sound like it should only be a swim brand. So if you're stuck on, I really want to keep Dippin' Daisies as the brand, I do think you need to have a different UX. Like it's confusing for the customer, right? Us, you and I are your customer or the older version of her. We need to come and feel like we're not landing on a swim site that happens to sell lounge.

34:52I want to land on a page where like she's telling me how amazing her whole lounge collection is and the accessories of it. So maybe that's the first step. And then I think for your ads, so you're going to have two choices here. If you're going to keep it as Dippin' Daisies, to run a separate ad account, you have to have separate socials. You can't run them to the same social. So you'd have to create a new Instagram and a new Facebook to be able to split that off, which maybe isn't a bad idea. I mean, Sean, we keep ours all in the same. The only thing where, so we sell swim, lounge, gifts, personalized, everything all in the same ad account.

35:33Um, but pet that's launching in two weeks is the first time we'll have a separate ad account, Elaine. Uh, and I w because I wanted it to have that same, that different experience, like what you're talking about. But I guess I don't think she has to like Kate, Katie, your brand and dip and daisies are very, they can, you can basically, there's a strong analog here, right? Dippin' Daisies is a brand, can absolutely have multiple categories. And it's just a navigation and a user experience thing. It's also, when you're seasonal, you know what you can do? Take all the swimwear off the homepage, put the lounge stuff on.

36:05That's what we do, Elaine. Like, literally what Matt says. Like, you just kind of transition your homepage. So you would actually not put your products up live and it would just be sitting in your warehouse? No, I think it's just shifting where the spotlight is, right so we always talk about this at ridge it's like how many spotlights do you have and i do think the problem is you don't you don't have enough people shopping the clothing page because i'm looking at the clothing page and it's like as a product expert that you have a baby tea for 19 and i'm like yeah it would crush on tiktok shop right like these are the type of things cute things at low prices will really work on tiktok shop the problem is you don't have people going to find those products because you have everyone showing up for swim they're clicking and the swim banners, and that's what they're shopping.

36:49So you don't have any traffic that wants to shop the other stuff. And I think you solve that with, it maybe doesn't have to be a different ad account, but different campaigns that highlight the other stuff and drop them on landing pages designed for the other stuff. If you're a founder using AI for analytics, you know the trap. Claude plus BigQuery gets you answers that are fast and wrong, or slow and right, never both. The problem isn't your analyst, your data, or your tools. it's your business context gap. Sarah's IQ fixes that. Connor, who runs my marketing, cut his reporting time from 10 days to 45 minutes.

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38:01So like the basics of what Sean is hitting on is you start off with like, it's going to be a new campaign. It's going to have a completely separate set of creative. It's its own contained little unit inside of meta. That's like level one of category expansion. That's when you're saying the buyer is the same as my other products and their behavior isn't that different. Okay. Level one. Above that, where it gets harder is like, oh, we can't do a separate campaign. We need a separate ad account, probably a separate pixel, a separate page, like separate everything because the buyer is now different and their behavior is fundamentally different.

38:38That's why Katie's adding pet separate because her bet is that the buyer for pet is just going to behave wildly different than the buyer for all the other stuff. Sean did that with rings. I think Sean rings is just a totally different everything in rich, even though it's all flying the rich banner, he had to up the level of difficulty and complexity and how he advertises that category. Right. It was what you're talking about. What Sean's hitting on is you can just start off at Level one is like, let's create a new campaign. We're going to self-contain it away from Swim. Merchandise the site seasonally, also good.

39:19I think that then what I would say and what I've seen with lots of brands is what winning looks like when you expand a category, that is different. You have to have a different set of measures and expectations for what a new category will do for your brand and how long it will take before it starts to look as good as Swim. because like swim margins are amazing, but that is like crack cocaine. Not every category is going to be as good as the one that you have as a hero. So like maybe winning in lounge, Elaine, is like you just sell through most of that first big PO and then next year you up it a little bit again.

39:55Your margins are the same, are they not, Elaine? For lounge and swim? For lounge and swim. Yeah, but it's not even the margin. You have to train the buyer. Yeah, lounge requires more fabric. and swim is like one of one in terms of the apparel categories um look i agree with everything matt's saying um i i want to talk about the merchandising piece if just just i have a lot of thoughts on your website right now one i think risk k is a mistake this is like i i don't know your business very well but it's really confusing i do have a cookie banner over it so i didn't even when you're talking about risk k i couldn't even see it but then i click into the cookie banner And I'm like, oh, there's already a bifurcation of the website.

40:35And I bet nobody is clicking between the two. And it's like, you should either shut it down or just roll it into the main website as a separate function. And then the biggest lesson I've learned this year, if I could just impart something into you, is that the answer to all your problems is throughput. It's like, right now, you have a small amount of peanut butter and you're spreading it as far as possible across 20 ,000 styles or whatever, right? Across lounge, across all these different things. And your team is going to tell you that they can't cut things because, oh, we'd lose that revenue.

41:13The revenue flows back up to whatever the actual core styles are. If like you have a thousand different styles for sale right now, you would do the exact same revenue if you had a hundred, right? And maybe it falls down when you get to like five, like you need some variety for sure. But like Ridge lost a lot of money making all of these styles for all these different people. And you have hired merchandisers being like, we need this, we need this, we need this. When throughput is the answer, right? You've already seen this with your black, it's the bestseller. I think you said it does 20 % of your revenue and there's 50 other styles that do nothing.

41:46It's really trimming the long tail. And newness is important because newness works in the ad account, right? Like newness is incremental. It's like you want to make outlandish, crazy stuff that people click on an ad and they go to your website and they buy the black one anyway. So it's like the smallest. You talked about that, right, Katie? Like that's what that's like. And Curtis does that to Elaine. It's like Sean's a hundred percent bang on. It's like you actually design the style. You don't even need to actually have it in inventory. And that's where the whole pre-order function comes in is you should consider what Comfort used to do, or maybe they still do where like you have an ad to cart and then you have a pre-order at a lower price.

42:26So like you can actually give your customer an option to wait for things. So you could do a straight pre-order or you could do a dual add to cart pre-order button. But her season's so short, guys. Right. So remember if she's - I get it, but you can advertise that long in advance, Katie. Like you can get a sense for like, is this style going to pop off when it actually starts? Yeah, that pre-order would be amazing, but operationally that is a nightmare. and and um um so like when you launch a collection um typically like when i have when i have a collection drop i have 40 styles three prints three solids and the top six styles will drive 80 of the revenue and half of the time i'm shocked by what the top sellers are and it's unpredictable i'm guessing every single time what the best sellers will be you got test with your customer base way ahead of time?

43:22Which ones you think it's going to be? No, because when we tease it, we don't sell it on our website live. We like tease it on socials. He's saying like, if you have like a VIP group, you could maybe pull them on what their favorite ones were. Like, do you like this floral or this floral? Yeah, like insiders group on Facebook or like where you actually survey and show them ahead of time. No, I don't do that. So how do you guys know what are your best sellers going to be? I mean, we do that. Like, post on VIP and ask them what their favorite print is going to be. But, I mean, I'm listening to you and what you just said about the six prints in your drops, I think that's a really big collection to be dropping at one time.

44:08And I'm wondering if you should spread that out. We do a drop every week and so does Curtis. and I think you might see a better return rate with your customers. So think about it as a shopper, right? Like you send me an email and it's all your new swim collections. I'm more than likely because your swim's expensive. I'm going to just buy one or maybe two. But if you take all those SKU styles and break them out into two or three drops, you might be able to get me because I'm going to come by the first print, right, that you launch in January, but then you launch another one in February and I might like that one too.

44:45And I've already spent the money. So I might spend it again. Like, I wonder, have you tested breaking out? Cause that's a big drop. Six, three prints, three solids you said, and with multiple sizes and that's a lot. You're asking the customer to do a lot with that many styles on one drop. So Katie's hitting on Elaine is actually really, is if you, have you tested that before? Have you tried a moving to a weekly yes this june i did um i did six drop no i did four drops in six weeks that was a nightmare it was just but yeah but nightmare for you or what the numbers were not that great um unfortunately um we're having like a a meta problem right now so this year is a little bit tough oh june was really bad for most people uh elaine like the june was not a great it was great for sean because father's days in june it's crutch june is my peak peak month so i try to drop as many styles and more collections in june tried to capitalize on all the the the traffic coming in and it did not do good because i do feel like the customer doesn't buy a swimsuit every week on the vip group you should look at kitch jeremy and cassandra from kitch have an amazing vip group Portland Leather Goods is an amazing VIP group on Facebook.

46:07Join both of them. And you'll see thousands of customers posting and engaging with each other every single day. And like maybe you're, you know, what's the Gen Z version of that? Maybe it's, maybe it's still Facebook. Yeah, totally. So you should get all those people together, give them a free swimsuit and then just like poll them. Be like, hey, do you guys like this one or this one? On the more frequent drops, you know, Ridge used to do weekly wallet releases. And now we do like once every two to three weeks, we're doing, you know, bash wallet releases a couple at a time. And there is a happy medium there.

46:43I do think you, I would pair like two or two styles together, probably into your drops and tell people, hey, this is limited, only 50 pieces, right? Like put that in the email and drive that sort of awareness showing up. And then it just gives you like a very clear idea of what to shoot for ads and then try to run those to separate ad campaigns. So like you have newness and every two to three weeks, there's just two or three sets being put in there, right? And really focus on that one product specifically. How early do you post it in the VIP group so that you can get your production order in? I had an idea though, guys.

47:19If she doesn't have a VIP, Elaine, if you don't have a VIP group right now, it's gonna take you time to kind of build that up. I just saw the brand Loopy, which is the phone cases. sent an email out to all their customers and it had a poll in it and i'm like a sucker for that i clicked on it and it had me vote on next year's prints for them well that's just because they suck the the that's my competitor tell me how you really feel matt but she doesn't have a vip group and she's like what are you doing a year in advance polling for all you guys that don't have to do with apparel and seasonality need to shut up because this is hard you just you just raised my competitor, I can tell you, you don't have to do that.

48:02You can test like so, so much sooner. Also, she's got a down season. I know, but she just asks a question of how can she, how early in advance can she test for print? You know, asking the VIP group, right, Elaine? Like you're, because you have to, you're working on next season swim right now. Yeah. Yeah. So are we. So, and I, I mean, I think you can ask now. I think you can ask your customers now. Most AI tools and software don't give you direct ROI every month, but PostScript does. I run two PostScript AI products at Ridge, both show up on our P &L. Infinity Testing runs continuous A-B tests on our SMS automations completely in the background.

48:43It's driven$446 ,000 in incremental revenue, not just attributed, incremental. That's a 32X incremental ROAS with click-through rates up 43%. Then there's Shopper, an AI sales agent that answers every inbound text in under 40 seconds. We're running 23x ROI on messaging costs alone. If you want SMS software that gives a proven ROI, go to postscript.io and book a free demo. We've done the poll emails. The poll emails are good. Also, just post an Insta story. Just be like, hey, do you have this one or this one? Just so you could have people vote and engage. And you could do that every day for a week or whatever and just get some sort of insights.

49:19But going back to your actual question is, how do you know what the winners are? And you don't. A lot of it is, it's going to be your gut instinct. We just launched a collection. It's called Tiger Stripe and Neon Tiger. And you can go on our website and you can see this. And Tiger Stripe is classic camo, basically. And then Neon Tiger is like a Call of Duty skin. It's like a neon print. And I was so confident. I'm like, dude, Neon Tiger is going to rip. We're going to make so much money. Nobody wants classic camo. Totally inverse. The Tiger Stripe one did hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

49:52And yeah, you're still guessing, right? Like your best guess is putting out what you think is best in the market. Sean, you still had, I think what we're hitting on is some data is better than no data when you're making your guess. And you are your customer. You should always be the customer of your product. But I do want to say, going back to merchandising, more is less, right? There is diminishing returns. You have hit that level of diminishing returns. Especially, you have so much cute stuff on your website, but I do not think it gets surfaced correctly, right? Like your lounge business, your clothing business basically could be a whole section on Anthropologie that girls would love to shop, but like it's buried three menus down on your website.

50:34So it's not gonna be successful because nobody's looking at it. It's an intention game. You have to get eyeballs on that somehow and it's gonna be ad campaigns for it. So you're drowning in too much good stuff. Have you ever looked at how the dropshippers or how like people test brands before they launch them? Like they're basically fire up ads long in advance, even though they're never going to ship the damn thing. So they actually just like run ads to get signal on which ones get clicks, which ones are actually going to get people to buy, and then just refund the order. So like there's lots of ways to get signal before you ever have to make the thing.

51:10I'm not saying go do that, by the way. I'm just saying like people do this all the time. They test the market with products using ads just to get some data before they go do a run. Elaine, also maybe, like I'm really clicking. First of all, your swimsuits are so cute. I want all of them. Yeah. They're so good. Like her photography is gorgeous. She said she's a product person, guys. It's a great thing to be. Like Elaine, I think that's a huge advantage. Have you tried to move some of your inventory? Have you ever reshot? Like, so you know how you create ads and then there's always one ad that just runs it, right?

51:46And you sell out of that style and it's too late for you to reorder. And then you're like, okay, now I got to try to push these others. I mean, I will say like with AI now, you could take like the body and the woman of your top selling swim style and then just have it switch out into one of these other cute. Have you tried that yet with ads? No, my marketing team is totally against AI. Well, you need a new marketing team, sweetheart, because that is a no-brainer. And I'll tell you, we even had on one of our swim styles, because it's really hard to find hot dads and serious guys. And we had a swim style on a guy in ads that was like a daddy and, you know.

52:31Daddy and me. Daddy and me, basically. And we kept looking at him. We were like, we think it's because he's a little pudgy. we fixed him in AI and that ad started ripping. So yeah, you need to tell your marketing team to either like get on or get off because I think you could take some of your top, like I'm looking at your ads and the images. I can tell which ones are probably your top performers and your prints are all so good. Like you don't have a lot of duds, but you're sold out on some of your best sellers. That's an interesting take, Katie. How much does the model impact the sell-through?

53:07Huge. On everything. On Swim too? Elaine, would you agree with that? Do you think the model that you put the suit on has an impact on how much you sell? I always recruit the best models and LA has very expensive models. So I, I, I don't, I have never compared like an A plus model to like a C minus model. Elaine, stop paying excessive money for models in LA. Like our, every model on our website is our customer. And I think you could send out an email to like, there's so many ways you could save and LA's filled with gorgeous women. I mean, you should be, I'm not wrong. Like if you're spending crazy money, but I do to answer Matt's question and looking at your ads, like I think women want to see themselves, but also they want to see a better version of themselves, right?

54:06Like they want to picture themselves in that. And I just, you should just try it because you're still in the season. It's still swim season. Take your top performing, however that model was posed and the whole thing, put a different, have AI put a different swimsuit on. The way I understand meta and the way it works for us is it's going to push spin to it and it's going to work. I would bet money on it. I 100 % agree with Katie that you should be swapping out swimsuits on top performing ads and AI, like your marketing's against it. It's three clicks. Like you want me to do it for you? It's like, guys, like H &M is doing this.

54:44You have to do it too. One more tip on merchandising. I want to talk about the idea of site merchandising. I'm going through your site right now. You sell kid swimwear. You sell maternity swimwear. You even have the Ken shorts. You have swim trunks for guys. It is so hidden and so hard to find. If you want to sell more lounge, just put it in every fourth slot in your bestseller collection. Just like drop in a piece of, you know, the bikini tops or whatever. It was like the baby tee. Just like put that randomly throughout the collection. So it's inside of every single collection. More eyeballs on it, you'll sell more of it.

55:24And even if it's small wins, like right now you might sell one baby tee a week. We could probably get it to 10 baby tees a week with the exact same, like no marketing dollars spent on it, just surfacing it more places. Right. And it's like the cross shop. Sean, on that, Elaine, do you, which I agree with you, but do you, are your bestsellers collection on your page? Are those actually your bestsellers? Yes, those are my bestsellers. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you got to start lying. It doesn't work like that. It does not work like that. Yeah, when I design a core collection or a bestsellers collection, it doesn't sell.

55:57I found out that I have to get like the top units sold styles and put it in my bestsellers collection. That's how I can do it. No, no, I get it. Okay, so I'll give you two things. Obviously, it doesn't work like that. People want the bestsellers. So we actually broke out of bestsellers and then a trending. And we do what Sean does. In our bestsellers, we will absolutely merch in products that we want people to even be aware that we have. They don't even know that we sell them. So we'll put in a new category in there, even though it's not a bestseller. And I won't do that everywhere because it's not a bestseller.

56:31but it's good real estate and that page gets a lot of traffic. So when you want to introduce a new category, it's not a bad idea. But we created a trending sort. So people go to our bestsellers page and then we have a trending. Trending is where we put in all the weird that we try. And we have found new bestsellers. We find a new bestseller every month by just calling it trending and showing people stuff that we think should be better, like it should sell better. That people just, when you have a lot of styles, they can't find the damn things. If you're scaling an e-commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough.

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57:48So check out Aftersell and tell them that the operator sent you. I would bet that an ad drives your best sellers. I think you have a print and an ad that takes off every time you do a launch and that's what drives it. But Matt's right. Like you're if you get on a heat map on your site, Elaine, and you on mobile, not on desktop and everybody, the first two things are going to click on is either new arrivals or best sellers and you should break it out. Like your best seller. First of all, your new arrivals doesn't have lounge on it anywhere. And Sean's You need to add, you could even just have a dropdown that says New Arrival Swim, New Arrivals Lounge.

58:26And then for your best sellers, break that into more categories too. It will give you natural eyeballs on those products and there's a better way you can merchandise this. But your lounge is so freaking cute. I can't even find the kids stuff on your site. And your lounge is adorable. You should have, yeah, you should have this. The lounges, last season styles, those are on markdowns right now. But because I have a lot of inventory, I go on markdowns very often. 50 % of my assortment is markdown, like 50 % off. So, like sometimes I, like I, because I have fabric liability, because I don't know what styles will sell out, I have to like front load my fabric and prints are very specific and these prints they may not sell and I get because these prints don't hit I get stuck with the fabric inventory so then I have to go and make like markdown products off of those leftover fabrics and then sell it in season for 50 % off no and it will sell but you're not acquiring a customer you really want probably right she's only going to come back and shop when it's on sale I mean I it's like what Sean started with I feel like your whole it the production like the fact that you placed a half a million dollar PO on your lounge coming in the fall and you can't like there's it's going to be hard for you to adjust for it is yeah do do you guys make markdown products like do you guys produce markdown products just to like get the customer like an acquisition cost we do but we do it a few times a year we actually make we call them leftover cases so like we actually take all the leftover material and we grind it up so it's like think of these are like tons of colors and we just mash them together and it produces these weird looking ugly ass uh like tie-dye like it's just a strange collection of things and then we sell them as our trash.

1:00:40Like this is our waste, right? And we sell them for like 20 bucks a case. We sell them for way less. We do this. They crush. People think because people, there's weird people in the world, right? There's different buyers for different things. So we actually produce these things as like a discount collection of like, look, these are all the rejects that we just reformed into these new things. We can't control the colors. Every single case you're going to get is going to be unique. So none of them will, not one will look the same as the other person. Surprise when you get it. So we've done stuff like that.

1:01:11I know Curtis actually produces, well, no, he doesn't. He has like his seconds. What about mystery boxes, Elaine? Oh yeah, I have done that and it's done great for like the pop-ups and selling like high units, but for like Markdown products, it actually drives a lot of revenue because I could sell like a swimsuit for 50 % off. Um, and it's a good, yeah, it's a good volume driver for me. Uh, I like making discounted products. Yeah, but you don't, you, you gotta be careful on if you're going to be like a discounted brand or like, cause I do think like I'm shopping your lounge and it's a mix. Like if I was just merchandising it, I would say you need to move all your sale to the last page and the whole first page needs to be full priced items and right now it kind of like goes full price sale full price sale so i you have a lot of low-hanging fruit that you can optimize on like truly which is a good thing right katie and elaine can i ask you guys this uh this is more of a how women shop thing would it has anybody ever tried just doing like I've made a hundred of this style, that's it.

1:02:28And I sell it for way more money. And none of your friends are going to have this at the same spring break vacation spot. So like where you really use scarcity in your favor. So like we're talking about discount styles. What if you went the other way? What if it was like, no, no, no, I'm only making like 250 of this swimsuit and it's a$200 swimsuit or$250 swimsuit. I think it's a good thing you're not doing swimsuit brands, Matt. There are brands. Well, I don't know. I said it's a question. I'm not saying it's a suggestion. There are brands that sell out limited edition. Like, I'm sure you guys heard of Park, their mock net, and that active, their active wear.

1:03:08They sell out within the first 30 minutes. But they have a huge social TikTok following, Elaine. Like, that's very hard to recreate. Also, set is not very big. it's like you're you're getting very close to the size set is like i know that business a little bit and um you make way more money making stuff and selling lots of it uh i think you know to summarize your problems as i see them right um if let's talk with product expansion if you really want it to work you have to give it a really honest try and that is comes as a site merchandising you have to fix the discovery aspect of it and you have cute cheap clothing that will work on TikTok shop.

1:03:51So you should lean into that as a discovery channel. And this is really for the clothing side of the business. I think probably your biggest opportunity, because it solves a lot of things downline, it is like, let's get scale on this. The second problem I see is because you own the factory, you have to keep it running to cover fixed costs. I've been here before, so you make a bunch of stuff. Now I think you're over-inventoried and you just get into a lot of bad habits where you end up buying and expanding selection for customers. And then when you have too much of it, you dump it on TJ Maxx. But then you have to buy more of it because TJ Maxx wants it in January too, like everybody else.

1:04:32And it's like, if we can't actually fix this problem and actually get the new product stuff working, it just gets worse and worse and worse until I'm talking to you and you're like, yeah, I have five years of inventory on hand. I'm bankrupt. Like, I don't want that to happen to you, but it's happened to a lot of people I know. And then down the line from that is, yeah, your life would be way better if you could just sell black swimsuits. So how can we get all of the juice of new launches, but like hyper-focused on, you know, the winners, the blacks of the world, right? Well, the black swimsuits of the world need to be driving your new customer acquisition.

1:05:04Like that's why you need to not forget to keep creating new creative for your black swimsuits. Yeah, I think that's a great tip from Katie. It's like so often we forget about the winners because they're the winners, but you can get way more juice out of them. So anyway, that's probably what I would do. Focus on site merchandising and then focus on new ad campaigns with different pixels and TikTok shop focus on the clothing aspect of it. And it seems like launching new brands or selling or like making lounge for other people is off the table. So we'll just try to solve it through the ways I just described.

1:05:41But Matt, Katie, what are you guys thinking? I think it's, she needs more, at least some data to better predict what she thinks is going to be. Like she has a wicked advantage guys in having a factory. She doesn't need to, she doesn't have some factory saying, Hey, place your PO now for nine months from now or 12 months. Like she can actually be a lot more flexible than her competitors can. So like, to me, that's a huge advantage. I would, I would just think like, what data can I get that would tell me a little more about what I'm going to sell more. Maybe, Elaine, I know you said you don't want to manufacture for other brands.

1:06:15You want to just do your own. But maybe that's how you get the data. Maybe you manufacture for other brands, see what volume they're pushing. Oh, that's interesting. They're a different customer. But yeah, that could be good insight. But Matt says, like, the factory is, like, a great advantage. Katie and Sean are saying that get rid of my factory and just place POs with a big supplier instead. So we've not helped. So what she's saying is we've not helped her at all. She says she regrets coming on her for the past hour. No, I'm not saying that. I still got a lot of great insight about how to be a great marketer.

1:06:53No, we don't need to agree on everything. And I obviously have my bias, Elaine. Like in our business, the speed matters. And weekly drops for us absolutely matter. When we do less drops, we make less money. Like that's just how it works. so obviously different buyer different category i think i don't know i feel i feel like maybe elaine you're like you have a great thing going maybe you just need to focus on being a better marketer for a minute and maybe that or maybe that's a hire you need to make if you recognize that's not your strength maybe it's worth the investment because your photography and your product is gorgeous i mean i i'm inclined to tell you take lounge off discount try it again Oh, sorry.

1:07:34On the factory piece, the factory is an asset. I own almost every factory we do business with, or at least I have a JV with them, right? But it can be a liability when you have to keep the lines running, when you don't have the demand to satisfy it. And so you want to be in the position where you're always demanding more product from your factory, not the position where, oh, I have to keep the lines running. And that's like the problem, right? It's like, you know, what happened to, you know, GM Motors in 2008 is they have union contracts and they have to keep making cars, right? Because they have to pay these people, but nobody's buying cars.

1:08:09That's what you want to avoid, right? And just right now, we're on the wrong side of the supply-demand curve where we have too much supply. We have to generate the demand. i agree with katie that like the next year of your life you're gonna be the world's best marketer but you gotta just figure that out it's um you know it's funny i'll tell you two things that this reminds me of like we actually did look at making stuff for other people in our factory lane and uh i think i got the same advice from mike that uh i'll give you which is like it's the swan song of open of owning a factory is like well i'll just fill in all of my down cycles with like other people's stuff, which then means you're like, now you're a B2B salesperson and you're like, it's a, it's just a different business and it's very distracting.

1:08:50So what Katie and Sean are saying is ultimately where we landed, which is no, I just need to sell more of my own. And that, that meant being a better marketer and a better merchandiser and a better everything else. I'll tell you the thing I'm learning from this though. So like, this is less of advice. We get the outcomes we invest accordingly, right? Like, so I have, I've said, I've said this in the show before. I've never made Amazon work. But if I'm being honest, I have never really invested in Amazon in a way that Amazon should work for us. Like I have treated it like the redheaded stepchild.

1:09:23It's off in the corner. It gets, oh, sorry, Katie.

1:09:29Doing it on purpose. And we've just never really plowed into it. And I would say that five or six years ago on Pila, like it was the same thing with new products. We never really invested in them and gave them the time that they probably needed to become good new categories. Like I would, we killed them too fast or we just didn't care. Like that's the truth. So I think my takeaway from this is just invest according to the outcomes that you desire. If you want a new category to work, that category has probably got to take over the whole site for a period of time. And that's okay. Like, Swim lives on our site in Q3 and Q4, but you gotta dig for it.

1:10:13And it transitions completely. I also... One last line, you could throw it away, who cares? You call it lounge? I assume it's gonna be sweatpants. It's not sweatpants. It's like cute tops and skirts and stuff. So maybe... I'm not shopping a website, but it was confusing to me. I thought we were talking about doing sweatpants. Oh, my God. Elaine, you can keep calling it lounge. They're idiots. Don't listen to them. Sean doesn't know okay well thank you guys for all this advice it's like been amazing hopefully I can grow my businesses to like your guys' size but yeah fully bootstrapped so I'm hoping that I can I can make it you guys thank you

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