Capitalizing on Virality: How Transformer Table Turned Views into Sales

0:00We got a bunch of fines, got back, zero sale. So again, it goes back to the trial and error, not be afraid to take those risks, even those crazy risks, because sometimes those crazy ideas, they work.

0:19Hey, what's going on? I'm Benjamin Gottlieb and you are listening to Shopify On Location, a special series from the podcast team. We're back in Montreal this week, hanging out with entrepreneurs who call this city home. You know, sometimes all it takes is one moment, one single moment that can set your idea down the path of becoming a successful, sustainable business. The trick is to be ready when it comes around. But don't take my word for it. I'm in studio today with Artem Kuzmichev and Richard Mabley. They are two of the co-founders of the Montreal-based brand Transformer Table. And at its core, the company makes multi-purpose furniture.

1:00Tables that can expand, retract. And their moments? One viral video. That's among the most watched product clips on Instagram ever. Gentlemen, what a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. Hi, Ben. Thank you for having us. Thanks. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. We just met. Always a pleasure. I know. I know. Well, fellas, let's get into it. Your viral Instagram video. So many entrepreneurs have that goal, right? They're waiting for that moment. They would do anything for it. Walk us through how that happened. How did you create such a viral moment? Well, okay, so I'll start here. And it's just one of the viral videos.

1:37So this really is the one, though. So, and I'll have to take it back a bit to give you a bit of an idea of why we did it. Well, and how we did it or tried to do it. So this entire company basically started from a viral video. In 2016, one of the co-founders, Alex, just took a camera, went to his place and filmed this table that we had. So that video got 5 million views in a week on Facebook in 2016, completely organically. And we thought, okay, we got something here. And many, many years, you know, pass and the same, but a much bigger effect. So another video goes viral. So we started our influencer program that year.

2:17So in September, I believe, where we basically share product in return for content. So Rasha, who still to this day, we have a good relationship with, and we send her flowers, and we talk to her all the time. And this is the person who's in the video. Yeah, exactly. So she makes a video, and we didn't like the first one she made, to be honest with you. And we waited a few months, like a month or two months go by. And she's like, you know what? Let me try another time. And she was about to post it, and we're like, okay, no, redo this again. So it was a bit of a back and forth, you know? and then she's like no i like this one i'm gonna post it i'm like okay post it and within days like minutes days hours like it's just kept going going going going millions millions millions of views and we're just like wow when is it gonna stop like it's crazy i uh i remember that moment when that first happened at first i'm not really on the influencer side of things so and i'm really not a tech guy i'm not i'm the sales guy so i'm really hands-on i go talk to people i go meet the people i go play golf with guys you know that's that's my role and the thing is i remember that day when we saw that influencer video go viral and it's just seconds like million two million three million and artem was going crazy i was like guys 10 20 30 40 50 60 and then like hitting 131 million it's it's actually in the top 10 just most viewed videos on instagram just total in general And especially for a furniture company collaboration with an influencer, like it is literally the number one video of a product on Instagram.

3:52This video was last year, 131 million downloads and counting. It's an incredible story. But from what I'm hearing from you two, it just kind of happened. I mean, what was it about the video itself that you've now that you're looking back at it? What was it that made the video so popular? And it's a good question because it's really tough to understand how the algorithm works and like what is going to go viral? what is not going to go viral. And actually, most of the stuff doesn't go viral. But when the stars align and you hit those specifics, and I'll tell you, I have an idea of why it went viral.

4:23So the audience of this influencer was not only US-based. It was also a lot of Middle East. It was European audience. So it was kind of spread around the world. What we think and how we think the Instagram platform works is that on the first amount of time that the video is posted, it gets pushed to different people. And if those people start sharing it, then it picks up, picks up, and eventually goes viral. So because her audience was not only U.S.-based, and I'm assuming that a lot of people in U.S. have seen our product, you know, it was less shareable for the U.S., but it was a lot more shareable for the rest of the world.

4:57So I think— Folks hadn't seen anything like that before, is what you're saying? No, no, no. And actually, a lot of her audience is in the Middle East, so it just went ballistic. We were on TV in Lebanon. I had people from Dubai call me and say, dude, have you seen this? I was like, yes, I've seen it. We did it.

5:14It was just an incredible moment and it's definitely a huge milestone because it's not easy to do this, but I'm very proud. I think one thing that's also important to mention was we're an action kind of team. When we see an opportunity, we take it and we go for it. And once we saw that Rashida video, we didn't wait one second and we sent the container. We sent the container to buy. Containers. Containers. And sales. One second, we're on a roll. So to make sure that you had the stuff stocked They're ready to buy. And it just kept going. We did the math. We're like, okay, 131 million views. Let's say 0.1 % of those people want to buy.

5:49It's great. It's a good market. So I think that's one of the great values and also the great kind of attitude we have in the company is that the thing is we're able to take those risks and willing to take those risks. Moving, you know, moving stocks from. That's really how we grew. Like we just. We didn't know anything about Dubai. About anything. We didn't know anything about anything. You've heard it right here, everyone. listening right now, you don't need to know anything. No, I'm just joking. But if we could take a step back. So it's one thing to have a viral video, right? There are viral videos every day, every hour, every minute, all over the world.

6:23It's another thing to take a video like that and turn it into sales to be ready to sell what you've got after the product goes viral. So Richard, if I can ask you, how did your team get in the right position to, okay, we're going in now when this happens, just in case something happens like this, we're ready to go. How'd you guys put yourself in that position? On the B2B side, this is a unique kind of opportunity that we saw where I was like, okay, well, on the B2B side, we hadn't really kind of navigated the influencer marketing with our present retailers. At the moment, we had Costco. Costco was our big client in Canada.

6:59We just started in the US and we were killing it on Costco. So then since that video, obviously a lot of it was in the Middle East. So obviously I had that opportunity. It's like, wow, if there's an opportunity there, why not look at different retailers and position ourselves to be that kind of modular piece of furniture that's kind of authentic, premium also, because Rasha, that influencer, has that kind of premium look. She's a woman that has a family and it was perfect targeting for basically our consumers. And on the B2B side, we're like, you know what? Let's try this. Let's try to adapt influencer with retail.

7:39And to be honest, in the industry of retail, it was unheard of. Most retailers, what happens, you go into Costco. What do you do? You think, hey, I get lost in Costco. I got a wallet. I got a wallet. It's a cool wallet. All right. I'm going to sell it to Costco. What do you do? Let's just sell it to Costco. And then you see the type of sales. We never really took that like that. We're like, you know what let's drive sales let's drive the consumer so then costco started seeing wow this company is driving new members to our retail stores it's important to say that we took the influencer program and we pushed it to costco meaning that we found influencers that were costco specific like they call it costco finds so they go to costco they film themselves like finding oh yeah i've seen them yeah for sure yeah so we took all of them we found all on instagram And you said, hey, review our stuff.

8:29Yeah. We're in Costco. Go to Costco, shoot our product. And our Costco sales just went ballistic. In May, it was over$3 million just for Costco online. Wow. It was crazy just that influencer push. It was insane. Yeah. But then the perfect example of that, what's cool talking about influencer, is Mexico. Yeah, Costco, Mexico. Remember when we launched Mexico? And to be honest, this is a funny story. We love funny stories. Mexico is such a unique market. I'm not discouraging people to go to Mexico. However, be ready, you know? So - When you say go to Mexico, you mean you're selling in Mexico. Selling to Mexico.

9:02Be ready. Because the taxation system is different. The custom system is different. Everything is different. And the thing is, the way consumer react and act and think are completely different. But when we did launch Mexico, we're like, you know what? We got Costco. Costco has 40 stores in Mexico. You know what? Instead of going all in, you know what? Let's start with Costco. So what we did is my colleague Mauricio found an influencer. So he took that Rasha kind of influencer idea and brought it to Mexico to launch Costco. Senor de Costco reached 9.5 million views in a month. We were the most viewed video on her influencer page.

9:42Then Costco Mexico, their official account says, wow, this is incredible. Okay, I'll post it too. We became the most viewed video on their Instagram account, but tenfold. Yeah, like 5 million, I believe. 5 ,000, 10 ,000. We reached 4 point something million views. You've both, and the entire company has been very successful, leaning into influencer marketing. Today I'm chatting with Artem Kuzmachev and Richard Mabley. They are two of the co-founders of Transformer Table here in Montreal. Artem, if I could, you have taken a lot of what a traditional company might do and outsource and you brought it in-house, right?

10:19You've got PR, content creation. It's pretty evident with what you've been able to do here with the influencer marketing campaign, which has been very successful. Why? Why not outsource this stuff to people that do it every day? Why bring it in-house? Well, first of all, I don't like to say I, I like to say it as a team, we did it. And that's how we got here actually by being a team. And that's actually the core of why we decided to bring everything in-house. And our entire company and our entire, all the teams that kind of combined to make this beehive, That's what we like to call it in reality, because it's all working together.

10:49It's like mini companies working within one company for one major goal.

10:57But the reason why we decided to bring everything in-house is for sure because of speed, because of the time it takes to do things. When you have people in-house, in the building, this synergy exists where people talk to each other all the time. And we like to call our company family. And it really is a family company. Like, I'll give you an example. My wife works for this company. Even my dad works for us at the company. Like, Soslan and Zara, they're also family. We have many other couples who are married in the company also. So it's really, really like a family. When I say it, I really mean it.

11:32And that works to your benefit, you think? Of course, of course, because people care. Everybody cares. Nobody's going to just leave not finishing what they wanted to finish. and bringing everything in-house gives you such a control in terms of how things happen and what actually comes out of it. Like I told you before, we were chatting, our marketing team consisted of four people two years ago. Now we're almost 20 people. So we have an entire video production team. We have our own 20 ,000-square-foot studio in Montreal here. That's a very big studio. I mean, we have everything state-of-the-art, like equipment, everything that we build ourselves here locally.

12:08We have a social media team. We have an influencer marketing team. We have our designer that's in-house. We have a development team that's in-house. We have our media buying that's in-house. So a photographer in-house. Manufacturing. Manufacturing. So the list goes on. But if I can drill in on this one point, which I think is kind of interesting, you have this really huge success because of a viral video. And when you're working with an influencer, sure, you have maybe an influencer marketing person. But at the end of the day, the story you just told me, the influencer said, you know what? I'm just going with this video.

12:39This is what I want to do. So you have to kind of cede some control. Yeah, for sure. So how do you deal with this kind of uncomfortable space of wanting to bring things in house, wanting to be family, but also realizing that sometimes you got to just kind of let it go and let the waters take it where it goes. I think it's a good mix of knowing what you're doing, a little bit of luck and just a lot of hard work because at the end of the day, that's what it is. If you're there and you're doing the most you can for 18 hours a day, 15 hours a day, and I think that's the best advice I can ever give to somebody.

13:14If you try hard enough, you're going to get it. Eventually, you're going to get it. For folks listening to this program, a lot of folks that are listening that tune into our program, they are curious. They want to emulate the success that a business like yours has had. How do you know when to bring this stuff in-house? I would imagine when you're small, you don't have the capital to hire an influencer marketing team or a PR team, production team to build a big studio. When do you make that call? How do you make that decision? Well, ideally, you should not hire outside. That's just my opinion. Because believe me, when it was just seven of us in that small little office and we all had 15 ,000 jobs each and we had to wear different hats.

13:55And Richard, I'm sure like you can shine in on this. You wanted to hire folks when that was happening, right? Trust me. Well, first of all, like I said, like the focus and what you have control on, it's in your building, right? So I would advise not to hire outside help. I would just always say do the best you can yourself because you're the one that controls your result. You can rely on yourself. Part of just expanding on what Artem is saying about trying hard enough is also about trial and error. Remember when we had the idea of buying that pickup truck and setting up that mechanism and that table?

14:28and then we drove it down to Manhattan. And we're like, this is going to work. This is great. People are going to react. We had a mechanism. A mechanism on a pickup truck. On the back of a pickup truck. Close and open the table. It would close and open the table, but people wouldn't even get it. It's a table. They'd just look at it bizarrely and be like, what's this? So basically, me and Sauce, we drove down to Manhattan, stayed there for three days and just parked the truck in different... it didn't work. Got a bunch of fines and came back. That's it. And we got a bunch of fines, got back, zero sales.

15:09So again, it goes back to the trial and error. Not be afraid to take those risks, even those crazy risks. Because sometimes those crazy ideas, they work. Well, just hanging out with you two. You're both hilarious. I love the story. I'm chatting with Artem and Richard from Transformer Tables. And I just, let's hold that thought for a moment. A plea to our audience, to you listening right now, if you're enjoying our program, please do us a favor. Let us know with a comment, review us, or hit the follow button wherever you listen to your podcast. That way you'll never miss an episode. And thank you so much.

15:46I'm back with Artem and Richard from Transformer Tables. So back in 2016, when the business was first starting, you had a few sales, but it wasn't until you entered this trade show in Toronto that things really started to take off and you got into the retail space right walk us through how that happened that's a cool story uh so meanwhile Artem and Alex they're doing their business on Shopify actually we weren't even on Shopify back then we built our first website on Wix ourselves it was Wix I'm not advertising Wix though uh Shopify is the best so this is kind of looking at the whole business and how we did things I used to work in aerospace and defense.

16:23So before coming in and deciding to join the company and start selling tables, I used to sell armored vehicles. So kind of a different. Hence the truck idea. Is that right? Hence the truck idea. Exactly. So it says it works in aerospace and defense. It'll work for tables. So I had some government contacts and I said, you know what? It's been a year. Remember? It was a grueling year for me because I was in B2B and my goal was to sign big clients, big customers, retailers. These guys were making sales and I was just there pushing and pushing and struggling. I says, I got to sign somebody, you know?

16:59I need to get my groove, my vibe on. So I contacted my government folks and they said, oh, there's a trade show in Toronto about retail. Wonderful. So me and Sus, we asked his father for the minivan. We didn't even have a car back then. So we hop into the minivan and we're like, all right, let's go to Toronto to this trade show. And on the way, me and Suss were chatting, and Suss wasn't in a good mood. And he says, nah, I don't know why we're going here. It's not going to work. He says, okay, Suss, there's a two-day trade show. I promise you, let's bet right now, whoever does 100 push-ups, I'm going to sign at least minimum one big retailer at this show.

17:38So you set that goal for yourself. I set that goal for myself. Suss is like, bah, you're never going to do it.

17:47We get there day one, nothing, nothing. Not even one person talking. And then I didn't sleep well. Okay, day two, I'm like, I got to do this. I got to do it. Motivate myself. I says, you know what? I have these flyers. I'm going to go to every single table at this show. And I'm going to ask them if they know transferable table. And chances are they don't. I started in, I got in, I went to, I think. And these are paper flyers you had printed out. These are paper flyers. Like, it didn't look like nothing. So I would just go in and say, do you know transferable table? Do you know Transformer Table?

18:17And then at one point, there was one lady. I still remember this lady. She was sitting alone on this big round table. I said, next door, she says, oh, do you know Transformer Table? I says, oh, I don't, but this is a really cool product. You guys should really sell it to Costco. I'm there. I'm like, of course. Right. So, they says, oh, you should go meet Guillaume, my friend. My friend. The buyer. I'm like, of course. Let's go.

18:47Obviously, I didn't have enough money to actually pay for the seminars. So what I did, took my flyers. I stayed in front of room 106 for about half an hour and waited for people to come out. And at one point, the Costco buyers came out. And believe it or not, I went in and I said, hey, guys, are you Guillaume? I said, yeah, that's me. I says, do you know Transfer My Table? He looks at the flyer. he says my wife's been trying to sell me this table that she's been seeing on facebook for the past three months so just serendipitously you're in the right place at the right at the right time you know these learnings it's a great story and these learnings sometimes when people listen they're like yeah right that's not going to happen to me right like that is so cliche like right place right time like if you try hard enough it's going to happen so then what is it how do you know what to go to what not to go to where when to build the the truck and drive it to manhattan when to go to the trade zone toronto i mean how do you how do you identify if you're trying to advise someone how do you identify those moments i think i'll take that rich i think the like i think the the key to this is for us we had seven just crazy guys that all had different skills and different abilities and different things they were good at these are the seven yeah and i'll name them because i want to make sure they're they're shouted out here obviously because they deserve it that so it's me artem richard suslan zaur cedric holland and alex so it's seven of us completely different people completely different walks of life completely different skills but when this group came together it was just fireworks because the ideas were just completely on other side like of of the magnet like they were just completely different so So what that created is that rolling ball effect that like, okay, let's try this.

20:34No, let's try this. No, let's try that. And it's continuing to this day. We're doing this and we're trying different things every single day. Doesn't work? Okay, maybe we'll try it later again. It's just continuous entrepreneurship, like want to succeed. And how do you succeed? Just by trying. Because if you sit there and you're not trying anything, you're not going to get anywhere. And I think just that energy and that want to try new things every single day is what gives us that ability to be successful. And it sounds like, too, that your team is also built off of each other, right? Absolutely.

21:08So you're gaining energy, you're gaining momentum from collaborating with your fellow co-founders, which is incredible. I think a lot of the entrepreneurial story is the one person and their journey from item to success. but really you've leaned into this familial aspect, which I think is really cool. Gentlemen, if we can take a step forward now, you've been very successful, especially as you mentioned the last year or so, maybe a little bit more selling abroad. And as we know, selling in different countries has different issues attached to it, right? A country might have a different tax law, a different tariff law, shipping could be an issue.

21:44Can you walk me through some of the challenge that you've faced working in other countries and some advice you might have for folks who want to do that? I think we can both answer that question because we both kind of work in different side of the business, but both internationally. And both comes with different challenges. Yeah, absolutely. So on the B2B side, obviously, I channel my launches internationally with my retailers. What do you mean by that? So look at Costco. Costco is a worldwide partner for us. So that's a channel for me. So being successful in Canada made me successful in the U.S.

22:22How do you think I got into Mexico? It was one phone call. One phone call to my U.S. buyer. And my U.S. buyer saw the good sales and said, you know what? Let's introduce Richard to Gabriella. So in terms of reaching out to international markets, the way I do it on the B2B side, it's piggybacking over my large retailers. It's an easy way in. And also an easy way out if it doesn't work.

22:51So you don't have to invest all that, all those funds and the cash flow that you possibly probably need for the rest of your operations that's funding your international endeavors. So piggybacking over Costco was the way to go. So have you found a place where you're like, you know what, transformer table just doesn't work in this country? At this point, no. I don't think we've found that it doesn't work. It's just it actually works in a lot of places. And the moment that we knew that it was working in other countries is we've actually ran, I think, five Kickstarters until now. And, well, the last one was a while ago.

23:26But, and the company also kind of started on a Kickstarter platform. So the first Kickstarter we did was 120K, no advertising, just pure organic stuff. So the next one we did as well, the third one was the big one. We hit a million dollars and we're like, wow, it's a million dollars. That's not bad. But the fourth one we did, it was over 4 million Canadian. But what that showed us is that people from all over the world were purchasing this product. So we saw, okay, we got a pocket in Germany. That's a big pocket of customers that people like our product in Germany. We started to focus on Germany later on.

24:00Obviously, we kind of been an international company all the time because we are Canadian. But most of our sales come from the US. So it is international. So we expanded to US with our own warehousing and, you know, putting more money in advertising and working on different programs to sell our products there. Like Germany, there's France, there's, you know, other countries, especially the UK, which is a good opportunity for us for Costco and for B2C as well. So, but really, I think to answer the question, has it really not worked anywhere? No, it's just, have we put enough effort there to make sure it works?