The Man who accidentally sold $100M on Shopify by Travelling the world - Danny Buck, CRAFTD London

0:00You engineered the Ronaldo billboard moment quite perfectly. It's funny that you think that was planned. No? In the world of e-commerce, few stories capture the essence of modern entrepreneurship quite like Danny Bucks. From car boot sales with his father to building what has become a£100 million empire. I remember one guy, he totally tricked me and he robbed me. And he actually robbed me and I just thought like... At just 22, he orchestrated a£160 ,000 management buyout of a digital agency division before a dramatic exit that left him nearly bankrupt. So you've been effectively an entrepreneur and doing sales since you were five.

0:36Oh, I've gone that far back, yes. Has that been a massive impact on your life, being involved in that sort of thinking so early? I probably paid myself$250 a year, acting like a multi-millionaire, going on a holiday, buying fast cars, all that sort of stuff. Never invested a penny. So you left your boss, started another business, and then you bought your boss's old business? Yeah. Wow. Don't hear 22-year-olds doing that. Doing that at 22 is pretty scary, having six figures on the line. Today will be a masterclass in e-commerce, a revolution in business philosophy, and an example of what you can achieve with an entrepreneurial spirit.

1:09Danny, welcome to London and welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. Crafted London and not even in London, mate. We're dragging you down here. I know, I know, I know. To be honest, I'm here once a month anyway. It's summer. Yeah, it's cheaper. We looked at this. It's cheaper for me to come here and stay here for a week than it is to rent. Wow. you know so we stay in like usually i'll do it most most of the time in the first quarter do all my meetings things like that down here and then but yeah yeah i like manchester but we travel so much so crafted manchester is a bit long as well yeah it doesn't sound the same either does it no it's not it's not as sexy when you're even saving letters and the name crafted adding a whole bunch for manchester and it's pretty exactly yeah yeah we got rid of the e yeah good spot so you've been effectively an entrepreneur and doing sales since you were five oh you've gone that far back yes Can you tell us about like the early experiences with your dad at boot sales?

2:01Has that been a massive impact on your life being involved in that sort of thinking so early? Yeah, I didn't expect you to go that far. Yeah, so yes. So you probably won't know this at all. Maybe if there's anyone from Manchester. There used to be a car boot sale every weekend called Bowlers. And it was really popular. so you could go and you could get colgate and a bit like costco pre-costco you imagine that so if you were you needed one colgate you wouldn't get one colgate you'd get 50 and they'd work out about 20p sort of thing so we would go and we'd do that and there was there was all these car boot sales there and and i i loved it because i could get like a pair of adidas predator football boots like worn a little bit but get them for like 30 quid instead of like 100 quid and all this sort of stuff and and this so this went round for a little bit and then my dad said we should start doing these ourselves so so we did but what we used to do is we used to buy things for the car boot sale so i'd send me around and i'd look around other people's tables and be like dad this like travel tv thing i think this will sell really well and we buy it for like six quid and we'd sell it for 10 and and it was just i think if you like it might sound a little bit cliche or whatever but like i honestly think i learned like core skills at that age by those things buying and selling literally and um i remember one guy he he totally tricked me and it was for a hoover and this hoover was it was awful it's just an awful hoover i think we're selling it for a tenner and he was he came up and he said i'll give you a fiver for it i was like no my dad's uh he's just gone to get a coffee he said don't take less than 10 pound for it so he said well why don't i why don't i give you a fiver now i'll go and plug it in make sure it works over there and then i'll come back give you the fiver if it does and he robbed me and he actually robbed me and I just thought like again like these skills I was like so then I started to learn a little bit maybe in the like like the long run it was to do some sort of like contracts or something that I came back to and like but in that little period and it was when it was just me and my dad and he had got I don't know like 20 quid I think you know it just it was such a good good time but thanks for digging that up actually I totally buried that memory yeah so that was your first experience in business technically But at 22, you convinced a bank to lend you some money.

4:17So I've got£160 ,000 from management buyout. Yes. That's a big leap from stealing five quid from a Hoover. So yeah, what gave you that kind of confidence? I didn't actually. I definitely didn't have any confidence then. It was pure winging it. So I joined fresh out of uni. I joined a company which sold e-commerce websites and also some like IT to the NHS. and I was there for about a year and a half long story short um SEO and PPC was emerging said to the managing director can we do it and he said no I'm not interested in it whatsoever so I was like well I think this is going to be the future of marketing so I'm going to go and set up my own digital marketing company right off he off you go then honey um my as as I kind of made this move my brother-in-law Graham he said oh if you're going I'm going to go with you well let's let's do this together so I was like okay so we kind of set up this company it was called Webties and we we realized at that point that actually if we could take some of the clients over we wouldn't be starting from zero so we went back to Graham then went back to the managing director and said he was leaving and then he was this guy was like he was a he was a little bit loose this guy and he just went nuts he said he went nuts anyway and then his dad was the chairman and the chair he he was much more level-headed said well actually if they're going the two of them we're kind of fucked so why don't we sell them the contracts so we went well if we get in the contracts we know that these contracts are worth roughly 15k a month why don't we take that to the bank amortize the whole deal and see if we can pay in tranches so it was over two years that we we we did this and or graham helped me a lot with this he'd been through this but then we went to our parents i I think my mum and dad lent me 10K, which was super, super lucky to do.

6:10But because we had the forward order book, the contracts, it felt less risky. And I think the bank looked on us that way and overlooked that I was 22 and looked at the contracts. I think that's how we got it. But yeah, doing that at 22 is pretty scary, having six figures on the line. So you started, so you left your boss, you started another business, your friend left your old boss, joined your business, and then you bought your boss's old business a portion of it a portion of it yeah wow that's quite cool yeah it's pretty baller you don't hear 22 year olds doing that no no i was a bit of a dick afterwards as well because i was proper yeah proper like chuffing myself and then i thought i was like because because i came out of uni i thought i was going to get like 25 30 grand a year back then yeah um and i think i got 16 and which is great it's a great like great job great salary all that sort of stuff but i was just like my expectations are so much higher out of coming out of university and when i went into the real world i got hit in the face how do you like just after that you said i was a bit of a dick go on just a bit so at that point so when i realized like then i could i've got my own business i can start to draw money out and as a bit like over the next sort of let's see seven probably maybe more like five years i started earning money i thought i was wadded absolutely wadded um at most maybe i probably paid myself 250 a year but I thought that was it I thought it was like multi-millionaire acting like a multi-millionaire going on holiday buying fast cars all that sort of stuff never invested a penny um which I'm sure you'll get to eventually but yeah I my um my high had a crash yeah um but that was that I was that not in terms of like my personality I've never really been a dickhead in terms of personality I was just a little bit more arrogant I thought I was doing phenomenally well thought I was like in there with the elite when obviously I was I was miles off the pace so but I mean you at that age you've been paying yourself 250 that business must have done well quite quickly so it took a while to get to that point so I'd say I probably got to about 100k within the first three years and then we hit when we started a month so 100k I was paying myself sorry it because we had so we got it to about started about 15k from the amortized contracts then we got to about 2025 and And this was all digital marketing that grew it, so PPC SEO.

8:30We then had a web development side, so we used to make Magento websites. Originally it was BigCommerce, I don't even remember BigCommerce, but yeah, we used to BigCommerce skins. Talking my language. Yeah, that was great. It was so easy, so easy. And Magento, oh God, like, as it grew, so we went, the story is we went from four staff to 115, 110, something like that. We bought an app company. We brought in a C-suite. We brought in an operational board. Honestly, this was by the eighth year. And by the eighth year, I hated it. Absolutely hated it. I did not like that company. It was my own company.

9:07It was my own kind of detriment. But yeah, I didn't like it in the end. How did the business go? In the end, badly. We tried to sell it. It was on the market. We interviewed buyers. Yeah, the people that came on board, we brought a CEO on board. In the end, we didn't see eye to eye. He didn't like me and it thought it was best that I leave as part of the sale. That's what we were gonna do. And we got an offer and my offer was half what everybody else, there was another director we brought the app company, he joined the board as well. And they all got a very similar offer and I got half what they got.

9:44I was like, no, I started this business. I'm leaving with the share price as it should be. That caused animosity against me versus the other three. And then I got a few bad emails off this guy, this CEO. And I just thought, you know what? Fuck it. I'm not coming back. I had the majority share at that point as well. They had 37.5 amongst four of them. But everyone thought they had 25 each. But the documents weren't signed. I still had my 37. So I thought, fuck it. You're being a dick. So I'm just going to sit back. So I think it was July 16, I think it was. Something like that. July 2016. I just, I went on holiday.

10:26He sent me a really nasty, we used to call them like nasty letters or love letters, I can't remember. And he wrote me this email. He kept doing it when I went on holiday for something like that, just to piss me off and ruin my holiday. And he just didn't want it many times. So I never went back, came back from that holiday and played golf for about three months. Yeah, with my dad, which was great. What happened? I think you're just sitting on 115 staff. 115 staff, yeah. Split between development and marketing. we had some incredible clients I had great relationship with with the clients and the clients didn't like the CEO as well they all came to me afterwards asking like why have you left all that sort of stuff but I think it was just it was just one of those businesses that got too big it didn't suit my personality because people would be hired they didn't know who I was I didn't know who they were walk around the office and they'd be like who's that face I don't know who it is and just didn't feel like my company anymore and there was some things in there which really micro details but kind of added up for me uh i would come in at half eight uh having been the gym and one of the other guys would say we've been in since half seven why are you always late we're working harder than you but like i think my sales target was 300 grand a month and i never missed it i was like does it really matter if i'm in an hour early if i'm still going to get this sales target and the fact that i go the gym makes me feel better so i kind of learned lots of lessons of how not to be a like peer or whatever you want to call it on like these these but old school maybe um so is it still running uh no so after i left about so they owed so i had my shares which had a value but between me and my brother-in-law who was still uh there the guy the co-founder he offered me a settlement and i took it i thought great i'll take it and that settlement was going to be paid out in i think 24 payments something like that and i got one and then they put it into administration yeah i saw that so they put it into administration because it was failing or as a way to tactically not pay you you'd have to ask them i don't know that's obviously my my view what do you think so it popped up as a another company which i bought the domain for um called we influence and which went on further to kind of join another company called velstar um which has all gone like now which has been successful and my brother-in-law has done great and i don't think any of the decisions with my brother-in-law's because after the company went into administration these pops of another one that other person then left that subsequent company and it went kind of down down that route um i have a great relationship with Graham who that's his name uh still we still um we're still still good mates but it's uh yeah because he yeah yeah he had yeah he got a lot of shit from uh doing that as well because there was other debts that weren't mine um there was a there was yeah there was all sorts of other things so but they the kind of when I'm looking at it I went from like yeah good six figures to nothing uh which left me in a massive cash flow hole at the point when I decided to start my new business and I'd committed to a lot of costs and I had a lot of debt as well how old be then 30 yeah 30 and presumably like you said also built up a bit of an ego a bit of like possessions like things yep which you know yeah what's a reputation like you know you were a successful entrepreneur yeah so because I'd left I don't think I got a lot of reputational damage at that point um okay I think because a lot of people like understood um why I'd left and the motivation for leaving it wasn't just the the negativity why i left there's a few times before i tried to uh sell up because i wanted i had this this is this is so you think this is like the start of instagram so when this was going on and there was people like i'm friends with the guy now guy called johnny who owned a brand called like booty i don't know if you remember booty so he went from like if he's probably watched this but like these numbers might be wrong so i'll try and get them right but he went from something like nothing to six million turnover in like 11 months or something and this is with influencers on instagram and stuff like that and i was watching this happen i was watching some of our clients with our digital strategies and like just seo ppc influencer marketing they'll have like 10 staff and they'll be doing 20 million and i'm like what am i doing like i think we did 4 million at the time with 100 and odd staff like why am i in this game like i I should start a brand.

14:58And so I was trying, there was a couple of times I tried to do it and then stuck around. It'd be like, well, we should sell it. I was like, right, okay, let's sell it and then I'll have cash and I can do my own brand. And so I kind of stuck around for that. But yeah, at the point when I turned 30, I was ready for the brand attempt. Let's talk about Brand Builder then. Brand Builder, yeah. So that's the holding company now. So that's sort of a world of change as well. Yeah, so tell us about that. So Brand Builder didn't actually exist at the start. so I started circular that was the first brand that was a watch brand which was going to be called how do I say this it was going to be called Miss Tick because of Miss Guided and Miss Pap and whatever you're in Manchester and you're like everything's Miss up here so it was a Miss I'm just wearing an Apple watch yeah Apple watch not wearing circular so yeah can you relaunch circular with sunglasses or something yes yeah yeah yeah so basically I had this big idea i'll do fast fashion watches and people will buy different straps and all this sorts of stuff like a larson and jennings type daniel wellington type yeah yes yeah i worked for larson jennings back the day when it took off oh really i did that andrew yeah andrew jennings yeah i did their like i did what you did as in my agency was the same right so i did digital marketing for premium luxury brands yeah and so i remember at that age doing the marketing for larson jennings and them exploding yeah it's not and seeing their daily sales and their team size and being like i'm in the bronco yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so it was that era where that was the golden era wasn't it for e-com well let's see if we have another one but that was that was you look back then you think wow that was this was so easy like two pound cost per acquisition on facebook and stuff like um so so yeah so we we launched circular we launched as a watch brand uh i thought people would buy multiple watches they don't and the reason people buy watches is mainly for status or a memory so no one wants a 50 quid watch so it just if it didn't work it just we tried to make it work i committed to a bunch of influencer contracts for over 12 months to get them out of other watch brand deals um i'd forked out a fortune in stock and i'd like you pointed out i had my personal bills to pay and eventually ended up with pretty much 300k of debt and i think it was 15 grand a month of committed costs to influencers and zero income none zero yeah and so the vision for brand builder was initially was actually just one brand or was the vision i'm going to build lots of these brands so it developed into that so originally it was going to be i just start a fast fashion brand called circular that was that was the first step the second was i when circular wasn't working and then i got the news about the agency being folded i then moved into a consulting i was like right i'm gonna have to go back to do what i do best i'm gonna sell my time and i did i was doing skype consulting in jesus nine years ago now um so i'd like 16 yeah 16 as if someone would skype you and from america you'd advise them I'd advise them.

18:04750 quid an hour. Yeah. I was doing it back in the day. I was doing that. And that's how I paid my mortgage to start with. And then I developed this thing called Money While. So moneywhile.com. And that was going to be Money While Sleeping. I was going to teach people how they can create a brand to make money whilst they sleep. And I was doing all these, this had my patter. I wrote a couple of mini eBooks, like how to start a fashion brand, all these things. And then I created this thing called the, I think it actually might have been when Brand Builder came about. I was trying to work out when it actually came, but we created these plans called Brand Builder Plans because what happened was I was booking in these calls and it was great, but I was thinking, actually, I'm talking about making money whilst you sleep to these people, but I don't actually make money whilst I sleep myself.

18:48So I thought, yeah, so I thought what I'll do is I'll create these business plans. So someone would buy 250 quid, they'd buy, they'd fill in a, what's it called? A big form, digital form thing, and then it'd email me through the night i can't remember and i'd get like a big uh summary and i'd just go boom boom like take me about an hour an hour and a half and i'd create a business plan for these people for 250 quid so i was doing those and they were if when i didn't have a call i'd do them i was doing all right i was maybe five six grand a month something like that so but it was coming in cash was coming in again and uh i was trying to defer influencers they just back me and the business coming in and circular wasn't making money but it was making revenue so i could pay than with some of the revenue and kind of the debt would build.

19:33I remortgaged the house, so I got 50 grand on the house, which I extracted again to put more into circular because I thought this is going to turn surely. There was definitely an ego going on because I had 4 million. I thought I want to be bigger than the agency boys really fast. So I was chasing revenue, which is the worst thing to do. And yeah, that was it. but there was positivity coming because of the plans and making that revenue back. And I hired a couple of guys and they started doing the plans. So there was a business developing, but it seemed to have a cap. It seemed to have a cap of max, I think it was max about eight grand a month.

20:15So it just wasn't enough for everybody to eat properly. So there was a couple of people who joined the business and left. and then i'd i'd kind of well there's two things that happen one as i was doing this my wife had an idea for a business called honu which is a women's jewelry brand and we decided to set the business up so it would it wouldn't hit the vat threshold that was the goal we we didn't want to give 20 20 away so we made sure i think it was 76 and a half grand back then so we made sure that the turnover was under the vat threshold so we'd keep most of the profit and this became a little concept in itself because that was netting about three or four maybe maybe even five on some months profit so that was a great business in itself and and i mean to this day they were like the glory days it was great fun like we just do that i did i do the ads she would do the packing we'd then take all the um the parcels to the post office and then we'd stop uh for a drink in uh gusto uh on the way back yeah and that summer was just we talk about it a lot it was just a brilliant summer for us because it felt like momentum was starting to come and never above 76k never we kept wait it eventually did yeah um that was the that we just said we'll just do this because of circular kind of not doing very well and we'll just go under we'll keep it really small that was the that was the idea of it brand builder started with this vision of building five to ten small companies right that's what it developed into yeah so at this point i had circular i had plans and i had honu so i was like right well what i'm going to do is i'm going to be a digital property developer that's what i decided and i'm going to build brands like honu i'm going to sell them and that was it uh and then i had one couple of conversations with uh with alex cannon so he did a promo uh promotion alex cannon is a co-founder of crafted he did a promotion for circular so met we talked and then we did a couple of other like collaborations we did one with alex bowen which as a just a watch collab but it did okay but Alex kind of liked my philosophy on um working remotely traveling and working from wherever you you want to work whenever all this sort of stuff and this was the this was the whole concept of this money while brand builder kind of thing was I'd been going to the same place for eight years or nine years whatever it was uh in a place called Bromber which was which was lovely when my agency was based but that was a decade of my life that I went to the same same office and i was in there like nine hours a day like it's he'd come home and you'd either do more work or you'd fall asleep and then you'd go back and do it all again so i just wanted a different life and that was part of the whole it sounds a bit like sales but it wasn't really it was a lifestyle i was trying to build this lifestyle of people if you weren't happy with your job you could create a honu which is under under the vat threshold we'll sell you how to do it with for 250 quid and you'll be able to then travel and work remotely and all that sort of stuff and that was the whole concept and i was kind of doing this on social media and alex saw that and then we had a chat in anando's and then crafted happened after yeah what brand number was crafted then technically four yeah yeah and you stop as in is it like you're building this portfolio brands shit we've got a hit like let's focus on the hit and not focus on like building more and more and more.

23:36Because we interviewed Nicola Kilner from Dessiem. And, you know, Dessiem stands for 10. And their whole thing was similar, right? We're just going to launch more and more skincare brands of different categories and stuff. But they'd got to 10 and hadn't had a hit. And The Ordinary is number 11. Wow. But then they hit The Ordinary. Quarter brand as well. Right. And then they hit The Ordinary. And they're like, I mean, let's focus on The Ordinary. Yeah. This all makes sense. And now, like, everywhere you go in the world, there's Ordinary stores. There's Ordinary everywhere. Yep. And they still have the other brands, but it's a teeny part of it.

24:07And if they'd hit The Ordinary first, you wouldn't be seeing the other ones. Because if you see a hit, you stick with the hit. So what was it for you? Yeah, it was a hit at first because it stood out way more than the other ones. The first launch did amazing. The second launch did 10 grand in 15 minutes. And we went, right, we're on. This is something. But as it's gone on, yeah, it's absorbed everything. I think it was natural. I mean for me it was a guy who's a good friend I don't remember a brand called Hawker's sunglasses yeah so he Alejandro is we met met in Madrid and then we've kind of become friends since and he said if you're looking at all your businesses now and you wanted to add five million would it be easier for you to start a brand and do five million or would it be easier for you to do five million more with crafted and it kind of hit home I was like yeah it's very very hard to get a brand off the ground but to then go from where we were at the time probably five five ish million lucky lucky enough for some um covid hit and we we did that um but yeah yeah it's a bit like you'd rate your chances at that point you'd rate it 25 chance at best to grow another five percent to grow another five mil but low percentage chance of getting from zero to five to five mil exactly always yeah it doesn't matter what the brand is like it's always a low percentage chance Yeah.

25:28And what I think happened with Crafted is we got the same start or first mover advantage or whatever you want to call it as Movement Watches did, as Hawkers did, and maybe even like Pura Vida or something like that. We just got it at the right point when men's jewellery wasn't really a thing. There's a couple of brands bubbling, there's High Street. But when we got it and the marketing we put behind it, I think we've now created the market. There's obviously people who've joined it. I think it was just it was that it was it was the timing thing that really nailed it for us when you were pre-launching that business were you sitting there thinking men's jewelry as a category could be enormous no no way no um like what does a business plan look like for someone like you in that moment uh so I was I was concentrating on paying the bills I was concentrating on building this whole brand builder concept all that and then alex came and spoke to me we met we had that we had that meal in nando's and then he said he basically pitched me the whole kind of concept because i'm not a massive jewelry wearer or anything like that like i did when i was younger and stuff but like um i was expecting more on you today i'm the operator i'm the guy behind the scenes yeah so um and i like bracelets i think like things like that but some of the and things i don't know never really suited me i don't think but the um the alex was on he was a model so he was doing a lot of shoots and he was doing shoots in like pools and stuff and he found the jewelry was just tarnishing leaving his neck green all that sort of stuff so i was like neck green i'll make a great advert and that's like it was similar to like it wasn't out on the first meeting but like it bubbled and it bubbled and bubbled anyway so like that went the whole green neck thing went on the back burner and then we he said well do you want to do it i was like oh you want me to do it with you i didn't even i thought he was just trying to pitch me because he wanted me to do my plan or something like that i was like yeah okay if you think so because we had the women's jewelry with honu men's jewelry let's give it a go but he knew the product way more than i do and that's kind of how the business has developed i i have product suggestions based on data or search data or whatever but he'll he'll does it he'll come up but he's the trend setter if you like it's the original crafted plan you know fits on one page right you've shared it that is still valid so that weirdly is the is the brand builder concept originally it was outsourced to 3pl it's start as lean as you possibly can start with a small skew count there's like there's a bunch of things which crafted that business plan you could say if i wanted to if i wanted to big myself up you could say that my entire history led to that moment and everything all my experience was there ready to go all that but it wasn't as wasn't as uh hollywood as that it was it was more just it was a great it felt like a great product because the the size of the product makes it cheap to post which is a big plus so the the 3pl costs are really cheap it's cheap to store cheap to ship over from manufacturer uh the margins are uh good and uh returns what's return rates like in your industry uh so it's about six percent for us okay so it's decent yeah because when you're trying to work the stuff out it's a bit higher It is interesting because e-commerce is hard, but harder in most categories that aren't ours.

28:49I just realized it has been 4 % and we were trying to work out why it's 6%. And then we realized that we've done a lot of pre-sale, pre-order, and people don't realize that they've pre-ordered and that's where the increases come from. But the revenue benefit that we've had from doing pre-order, it totally outweighs it. But yeah, 6 % is still, yeah. Some fashion brands were in the 40s, aren't they? Well, that's the thing. So trying to work out how to build an e-commerce business. It's interesting because you both come from an agency background and you're like, look at these brands and the money they're making and all this stuff.

29:25And it's true. But because, and even Grable, my last business, right? So we were platforming all the e-commerce brands and stuff. So you have a really good sense of how much money people are making. But given that most of the stuff that happens in e-commerce is fashion, it's a nightmare. and is not good. So there are some categories that are great. Jewelry? Yes. Watches? Yes. Sunglasses? Yes. Vitamins? Sex toys? Yes. Sex toys? Yes. Why? Because you just don't have to worry about terrible returns. Yeah. And they're small. Yeah, totally. And so if you can remove, but if you can remove that part of it, if you can remove that part of it, then you can start to build a business case.

30:04Once you're working on 40 % returns, I mean, that's just so, it makes it a complicated business. Yeah, and why you should never believe a Shopify screenshot, of course. And I think this is where I believe, I've definitely changed as a person because I was chasing revenue and now I want growth. Of course, everyone wants growth, but I'm not competing with someone who's a fashion brand doing 100 million that might actually be doing a similar turnover to us because of their returns. But I can't, you know, if everyone in the business is looking at that going, wow, they're doing amazing because they're growing, but actually with a smaller turnover we might be in a similar size and that's why net revenue and contribution margin obviously profit is is where we focus on our growth yeah one of the i used to talk about this quite a lot one of the best things about working on like at an agency and working for loads of e-commerce brands was that you quite quickly worked out which businesses were good and so like i spent literally 11 years working for other people's e-commerce brands from the ground up doing their marketing etc so when i then started doing it for myself i just spent 10 years making a billion mistakes but other people's money so it's a great advice it's a great place to start like yeah i say it a lot to people they say what what uh what what should i do as a career or what brand should i start i say go and work in an agency for five years you'll learn so much more i think jimmy hill as well if you he did the same thing um uh heatherst he did the same thing worked for a big agency branded three is it um and yeah i just think it's great because like you say it's that you learn not only do you learn how the business itself works as an agency but you're working on you're learning like 10 15 whatever clients you've got so nowadays people would refer to you as the king of e-commerce yeah you said this on the way and i don't know where you got this from but yeah not at all absolutely not no queen of e-commerce prince prince maybe prince yeah one day yeah so what we'd want to do for our audience as much as anything is try and put on a bit of a master class on how to start and scale an e-commerce business okay it's very different now very very different because my philosophy was always get the platform in place get the operation in place and then ads ads are expensive and organic strategies i have a i have a couple of things i don't know we're talking about this later but like the um the whole personal brand thing and organic i think it's okay to get to a point but then there's a certain point i believe where the business owner if they are the brand becomes attached to the brand and makes it hard to exit i think if the the owner makes a mistake it can cost the cost revenue and i also really hate the thought of having to rely on somebody to post as a channel because the person doesn't want to or the person for whatever reason has a period off or anything like that it just it doesn't seem to fit so my whole philosophy was get the get the products whatever it's going to be start as as low as you possibly can one skew would be great you'll you'll like your business amazing and then get the ads right but to get the ads right now is very is a lot more expensive than what it was when i started so for me if i was doing it again i would make sure the business works in uh in the ad ecosystem system so high enough aov i'd love a business with a high return um what is a average average average order value yes i'd love one with a repeat purchase rate a high repeat purchase rate so subscriptions all that sort of stuff i think is great at the moment but i think the days of just copying a band a brand and doing it cheaper are gone you can't you can't do that well you get to our detriment and complacency, hopefully not.

33:54But we talk about, it feels like a lot of them have fell out of the market. We feel like we've gained a lot of market share recently because we've not really changed that much, but we've grown a lot. We have an analogy, which we talk about, where in Forrest Gump, where the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company has all the storm and then there's no boats and there's just Forrest and Lieutenant Dan with all the shrimp. We feel like at the moment, a lot of the boats have gone. and we're left with a lot of shrimp. But that's not to say our customers are shrimp. We feel that the market at the moment is a lot more buoyant for us for whatever reason.

34:32But over Black Friday, we always get loads of copycats and they pop up and they disappear. I'm guessing dropshippers, things like taking the chance and full respect to them. I would have done that back in the day as well. But there wasn't a lot of them this year. And I think one of the main reasons for that is are the AOV on jewellery is really high. What it used to be. Sorry, the cost per acquisition is really high. 1.8 million in your first year. 11 million in your second year. 20 million in your third year. Break down that growth strategy. God, year two. That was a wild one, yeah. That was COVID.

35:07That was COVID. That was COVID. So, yeah, and we were talking. But why was everyone jumping to men's jewellery in COVID? honestly I cancelled every single bill I said no one is going to buy men's jewelry we need to we need to hibernate so I cancelled everything I could cancel I just software everything the lot have cancelled everything because I just thought it was going to kind of cry why would people buy men's jewelry but we changed our marketing and our message went from just like green necks all that sort of stuff to gifting and that's what we did it was like cheer somebody up someone who's feeling a bit down all that sort of stuff and that's that's what really worked they had the same thing across all of luxury and it turns out it's because people weren't spending their going out money elsewhere but they're actually being presented in front of people so often including more people than they were before because of zoom and stuff so they were just i'm going to be wearing this you know originally obviously started off loungewear who gives a fuck and then actually people were like no i guess i i might as well spend it on luxury and the luxury market had a massive boon and you could never have logically predicted that no no i mean i It makes no sense.

36:13I had, on the way into COVID, I had about 70 staff. And I was living in New York, launching the business in America. I can't remember what turnover we were doing, maybe like four or five million. And COVID hit. I had to furlough 80 % of the staff. All the clients, all the contracts disappeared. Everyone was like, we can't pay. It was like Aston Martin, Bugatti, all ringing, being like, we can't pay. And I was like, okay. So the business just died. And I was like, wait, that's it. you know nine eight nine years of works finished and then luxury was so undigitized that the digitization of luxury over the next two years was mental because everyone wanted to be like like fashionable at home during code and these businesses rocked and obviously we were so well placed on the pickup back from covid that we then basically doubled and became four times more profitable in the next two years and then sold that's amazing it was wild that everyone was buying so much stuff at home it's yeah yeah exactly exactly the same for us we didn't no one expected it yeah it's an example like in e-commerce you know in e-commerce is obviously there are things you can predict and things do make sense but in sort of global trends you know if you're like doing uh you know i did a marketing masters and one of the things in a marketing masters they talk about all the time you do the seven p's and all the foundational principles of marketing right yeah and you know one of them is just you know you're learning about the things that are outside of your control like a global disaster and you're like what's all of the point in planning that like you know whatever it's just so when you're learning all the other stuff you just do not focus on that because it's so unlikely if there's something like covid does come along and that would count in that bucket all of the predictions and things you would ever probably do to understand how to build your business or not, they're not really, it's not worth preparing for in a sense.

38:08Because like you, again, never would have been able to predict that the way people behave during COVID is to spend more on luxury when they're not meeting people. It's crazy. It's a bit like, you know, the other thing that's always, the analogy I find really similar is how much luxury is sold in the Middle East, particularly Muslim countries where people are under burqas and broadly people can't see it, but they're doing it for themselves and they're doing it for their families who can see it. But you wouldn't logically, you'd say like that would be the opposite trend. You would expect them not to because the simplicity of the clothing doesn't allow itself for jewellery and for handbags and all of those things.

38:43You'd expect it more in America. That is pretty much the core luxury market in the Middle East. So it was like just these fascinating things that you couldn't really predict human behaviour around until you're just in the market with it and just see how it unfolds. Do you remember buying things in COVID? i definitely bought a lot of clothing i was like why am i buying this clothing but i think you're right disposable income was a was was higher obviously i was i was right in the start of starting heights i was like really not paying myself and all this stuff so no but uh like we launched in 20 january 2020 so you know i was in like panic mode i was buying a lot of wine i was definitely buying a lot of wine i drank a lot of every day i drank a lot of whiskey actually that was my thing i basically shut my business down basically like completely mothballed the whole thing uh and then just got back into gaming and then gamed my whole way through covid getting pissed and then and then the phone like started going again people started emailing and i was like the business is still going like you know this is wild and then just took back off that's nuts yeah i know but um so okay so you went from 1.8 to 11 to 20 so how does that like it went 15 15 20 yeah but okay yeah yeah but you know back to the question yeah explain yeah how you can't just say covid because there's more to it than that yeah so there's a few things that happened in in that year so i think it was around april wasn't it lockdown happened um i definitely panicked but we'd we'd had it we'd um we'd had a good year for the first year anyway so cash reserves had been built up and that is money i've never seen before really and like in a in a leading digital high street, whatever you want to call it, bank account, which is one we probably shouldn't have used.

40:26But the money built up, and we basically said to the factory, can you cope with, because we could see the growth happening. And with this, I saw the cost per acquisition going down. So it was market conditions I'd never seen before. People were buying, so demand was high, but our costs were lower. And we were getting like 11 to 1, something like that ROAS like wow serious like you just don't hear of this so like and it's never been the same since return on ad spend so return on ad spend yeah sorry so we just um we just started spending more so we piled up and it went from one grand a day to two grand to five to ten we're like but we're still making over treble like keep spending keep spending so we just kept spending and then stock obviously would would become an issue and the factory that we work with and we worked with them since day one said we're struggling to cope with the demand so i said what do you need can can we help and she said well basically we need to employ some more people do this and i was like well what if we gave you 100k up front you gave us better terms and that 100k allows you to to scale the warehouse and she was like can't believe it like absolutely and our terms now are 60 days after delivery so our cash conversion cycle is amazing like amazing and um yes we we basically helped scale the factory to help scale us and we had we did i think we had a time when stock was out but that time was only our second year so our inventory wasn't huge we didn't we didn't have we i think we had some chains some pendants there wasn't really again a lot of competition at that point and we just we cleaned up but we we in that year we also let me think if it was that year i think we opened an american warehouse some stage in that year as well yeah because we did for some reason i think in was it 1920 wasn't it yes in 19 i went to america and i saw every guy in a chain like everybody a crucifix or a chain everybody whereas in the uk none of us are wearing necklaces it was like it was a thing which you either do or you don't So I was like, oh, we need to get into America.

42:41Like everybody. So I think towards Black Friday, we started advertising in America. So that helped us a lot going into 2020 as well. And it is still our biggest market. And I think that was it. So we had a full year of marketing in America. We had COVID. We had the lowest cost per acquisition. We scaled the factory. I think we got ourselves in a really good operational point of view, but we had five people. Five people like that. You had five people at 20 million? At 11, yeah. wow that's pretty amazing yeah it's amazing i've got i've literally i have actually worked across so many e-commerce businesses and so like when i hear that i'm like i've never seen that before really you know like larson jennings was a pretty special business at the time you know there were days where they were doing like 100 grand in a day or you know crazy crazy launches of watches and stuff but other than that nowhere near even close it's amazing yeah it was because of the outsource model so 3pl was outsourced if we didn't in-house there's no way we could do it with five and it was customer support myself and alex i was doing all the ads i was doing all the products and creative we had josh who was doing email and e-com and then we had a girl who was doing social yeah that was it and you engineered the ronaldo billboard moment quite perfectly so what's your what's your framework for thinking about creating viral moments well what was that funny that you do you think we can put that on the screen yeah it's funny that you um you think that was um planned no uh so basically i'm a massive united fan yeah there's a there's a i can show it to the camera yeah but up on the screen there's a red one which uh we actually we did on the day he signed.

44:24So, okay. So I'm a big United fan. My dad is... Sorry about that. Yeah, it's not great at the moment. My dad is probably more a Ronaldo fan than a United fan. And the murmurs were coming out. He was going to... He was leaving Juventus. He was going to go somewhere else. I don't know where he was going to go. Then he was going to go to City. I was like, dad, this is PR. There's no way he's going to City. And I was sat in the pub with Natalie, who's our COO now. I was like, nah, get Manchester screens on the phone and let's get a pre-auth plan in case Ronaldo comes to United. There's no way United will let him go to City.

45:05No way. And I said, get Faye, who's a girl who did the artwork for us. I said, get her to just mock something up. And this was about half four. And at 5 p.m. he signed. but in the period the half an hour before i was negotiating with manchester screens because a leading fast fashion brand in manchester were also doing the same thing so well we outbid them um because it definitely meant more to me than it did and there was there was a lot of emotion in it because i wanted to do it for my dad as well and but also what happened i knew it would get press because you remember the welcome to zlatan thing i think uh steven bartlett did still social chain did i knew it would get press and it was right it was the biggest it's the biggest screen in manchester and uh and we did it we just did it it costs way more than we should have paid how much does that cost go on tell us oh i don't know go on 25 we paid 25 gram yeah but what's the what's the rough roi on something like that from eyeballs and stuff do you reckon vibes and emotions yeah No, we got...

46:10Do you know what? Good to know. Welcome to the Equal Host Masterclass, everyone. Get some vibes going first. No, honestly, it got us on the BBC. So Crafted was featured on the BBC. It was the fastest growing men's jewellery brand in the world. They actually said that. That alone, no. It got us... So I had to do an interview on the BBC. That's about it. Sky Sports News. Keep going. Yeah. Sky Sports News. A bunch of local papers and stuff like that. Social shared it. Lad Bible shared it. It got PR. so if we were like going to do activation and all these things that people plan and you're like right do this activation where you stand in the middle of london and it's going to cost you 50k like i don't think we would have got the press that that got so i think if we looked at it as a brand activation i think it was a good good job but did it turn to revenue did fuck like a lot of these things don't turn to revenue that there was ego in it but it it did something for the brand most of the stuff and i think that's a good lesson in marketing and brand marketing as well most of the stuff is nothing more than making people who've never heard of you before aware of your brand and that it exists you still have to do the exact same e-commerce marketing strategy to reach them it's just you know they say it takes seven times to hit a customer before they purchase maybe that just makes it six yeah yeah maybe maybe i just i've only got i've got so you're on so if you go through our journey and you get to the 11 and then you get to 15 in our third year we then it was 15.5 and then we did 15.6 the year after it's the first year that we had kind of stagnation and that was because we spent seven figures on brand marketing i believe and that's kind of my only real world example of it we we did a lot of podcast sponsorship we did just a bunch of stuff pr stuff and the year after we've stuck it straight back into ads and we we went to 17.6 so wow oh interesting so you don't yeah you don't think don't work sponsor podcasts the podcasts were great and i'll tell you why i'll tell you i'll tell you the the you know the secret sauce because not a lot of people let you do it anymore so it's kind of out in the open the reason we sponsored podcasts we we didn't get a lot from the actual podcast itself but what we did get was the use of the content so we spoke about this i remember years ago because uh we were both using stephen bartlett and the ads right yeah um but you were an official sponsor or he was just a customer and just letting us do it.

48:29That was the real gem because... You were using him in your ads? We were. It was the ad that he was saying. Yes. And then you would boost that ad? Yeah, so we sponsored Dairavi CEO 21 or 22. And Modern Wisdom as well, right? Sorry, 22 and Modern Wisdom, yeah. Two, obviously, wonderful speakers. And when they endorse your product, your cost per acquisition is lower. So that was the deal for us. that's how we monetize the deal because men's jewelry is difficult for these things clothing might be a lot easier um subscription businesses might be a lot easier but jewelry it's very difficult no matter what it's hard with influencers so it's going to be hard with podcasts so it's probably unique to our situation anyway but when the person would do an endorsement film it and then we'd use that as an ad it was always a great ad for us um mid funnel upper funnel or whatever, but that was the secret sauce.

49:24But then Stephen didn't want us to do it anymore. And so the deal didn't make sense for us. So there was that. And the same with Chris, he didn't want us to do it anymore. We'll stop it immediately as soon as we're asked. We're not like, you know, we're not like this is the contract. Like, but like, cause it's obviously their personal reputations on the line too. So, but the secret sauce for that was using that. So if you can get that to work, that's a, that is a great, that's a great job. You use that strategy quite a lot, didn't you? Yeah, we, and Danny and I spoke about it at the time. it's a very successful strategy.

49:54If you can get a podcaster or a creator to speak about your product like you say and then run it through ads it's incredibly powerful because their audience their audience buy into you on a podcast but they don't buy but they do get the awareness and they do listen and they will follow that person on social. So the loop is complete and there's something about and obviously the conversion rate is much better and when you're in control of the ad account and you're good at it which you guys are amazing at you know it you are going to get conversions out of doing it that is a fact there's a much but it's a good like um all-round strategy and similarly to you it doesn't just work so well if you've just got that ad you can't run it through social oh you know we do the same thing now like high performance and elizabeth day and how to fail like there's a few that target like different customer bases and yeah it's got to be the full cycle they have to do the stuff on social too so jake for example on high performance would talk about your product and then your ad would be him talking about the product well yeah if you think about it he's doing a youtube ad of the product anyway right and so you're just cutting that and saying hey like do it as a short or usually do a specific read or two with different hooks and stuff for social but it's all part of the same thing like his audience on high performance are expecting him to do it because we sponsor that podcast and so when they see him do an ad on it it's not awkward or weird or whatever like people like oh he's a sponsor of the pod you know you've got spencer with untapped like it's all it's all baked in audiences that listen to podcasts know that they're advertising and know that it's free because there are ads and so there's no irritation or upset or anything and that's why it's so consistently fine and actually works because people totally have that expected relationship with that podcaster i think i think there's a responsibility on the advertiser as well because we to say using that content on as a tiktok ad the frequency that that was shown to a user will piss somebody off way quicker than it might do on meta uh or instagram or facebook so i think that if if um if that deal happens and somebody is being served an ad way too many times because the advertiser's in control of it then that could damage the reputation of the of the talent yeah so i feel there's there's something that needs to happen from both sides so for for Yeah, I feel like the advertiser needs, like, I don't know, a frequency cap or some sort of limit.

52:15That's what we do now. And we impose it. To your point, we imposed it in advance. Mostly because we learned that the more sophisticated person you work with, they will realize that and ask for it themselves. So you're better off being on the front foot of it and looking like a really conscious brand who cares about the client because you do. And so it's all baked in in advance of our contracts, which is this is the frequency cap. like and actually even you know even more specific things about how much retargeting you will do for them and like there won't be too much frequency on the same ad like you've got to be really conscious of these things yeah yeah and it still works you don't it doesn't matter like as you know if you have to show someone the same thing fucking 100 times anyway not buying just pissing them off yeah exactly um the conor mcgregor pendant pendant that you did yep um tell me a little bit about that yeah that went massive yeah it did that was that was mainly alex uh he through his network and his growth he became friends with Conor McGregor's friends and decided he wanted to make a custom pendant that's it he made a custom pendant he flew over to Ireland and met his best mate and he just said I've got this for Conor and he's always in the back if you want to meet him so he did he gave it him Conor loved it wore it for I think two years or something like it was just like it was on everything we just kept seeing it he never tagged us he never mentioned it never endorsed it but it was always on so we we took whatever we could organically and use it that way what can you take organically in a situation like that because it's sort of a quid pro quo right where if he's not tagging you and stuff it's obviously because there's no commercial agreement and he seems exceptionally commercially on yeah um but at the same time it's yours you made it and so that's also your ownership like it's your thing so that's like an interesting gray area right Because you probably can use it quite extensively and push the boundaries of it.

54:04Is it one of those push it to the boundaries of reason until they say one thing and then you're like, okay, we'll take it down? Maybe. We were always aware because there's a personal relationship. We're always aware not to take the piss. So we never used it on an ad as an example. If we used that on an ad, that would have been great. But because it was a one-off piece and the customer couldn't buy it, there's also no real commercial edge to it. It was just pretty cool that we'd created something and Conor McGregor wore it. I think it was that we used it in as much of an organic channel that we could.

54:31That was not, and how I'd classify that is not a commercial channel. So we weren't trying to make money off it. We were just saying, look how cool this is. Speaking of, you know, relatively cool, semi-controversial, ginger, MMA-loving people, Mark Zuckerberg? What was that about? I don't know if that's ours, but I claimed it. Oh, really? I don't even know. context he started wearing a chain oh of course this is it was crafted yeah so we we're just i mean the same with um brian johnson as well if you he's wearing a very similar crafted chain could be well could be us we don't know that's the book with this so annoying sorry but what no no not annoying for me but that's annoying that you wouldn't be able to know and verify it if that makes sense the amount the amount we sell there's a chance it's it is yeah it is ours but and especially in america um but what we did with that was we did a blog post saying zuck's chain and it ranked number one when people are googling Zuck's chair.

55:27Very good, very good. You've got to respect that. You've got to respect it. That's a great hustle. Exactly, digital marketing skills, so handy. I just respect it. You talk a lot about prioritising profit over revenue necessarily and I think that sort of comes when you've been doing business for a long time and that turnover tends to be sort of vanity more than anything. But what are the things that you think you do differently in your business that allows you to be so profitable? Like we've talked a little bit about product, but how do you think about pricing? Are there other things that you think have allowed you to maintain that profit?

56:02So we don't, there's definitely scope for us to grow way faster than we are. But there's two reservations for that. One is if we went for a 100 % growth year, which I know exactly how we would do it, we then got to do it again next year so i i don't necessarily see my job as like grow revenue grow profit i see my job as grow the value of crafted so for one day if somebody wants to buy us for the right price we're ready and that's how i that's how i look at this so i look at how how are businesses being valued and there was that whole model previously of people would get valued on revenue they'd then take it forward they'd float whatever they do and there's a massive crash it didn't work for a lot of a lot of secondary sales so what i've decided is the most valuable business at the moment is yes growth we want growth in at least 20 and i want margin at least in the teens and i feel if i hit those two things that's a valuable business and especially in today's market and last year we outperformed both of those which is great like brilliant good year for us because again i think that necessarily think the market grew i think we just took more of the market but i think that's that's how i focus i don't necessarily look at like we need to go profit this year or we need to grow revenue i look at what is the most valuable business in today's market so that in the future because this all matters for things like uh if we need funding and things like i want to be able to present the best the best business forward i think and so the position you're in now is you haven't had any funding none no so you own 100 between between the two of you?