Inside True Classic’s Billion-Dollar Content Marketing Playbook

0:00Did you know Shopify Masters is on YouTube? Lucky for you, you can go catch this episode on video. Just follow the link in the show notes and let us know what you think. Or stick around and hang out with audio only. Up to you. We bet roughly 40-ish million. We had so much confidence that we were going to be able to navigate our way out of it if it all went down and it was to go bad.

0:29Hey, what's going on? I'm Benjamin Gottlieb, and this is Shopify Masters. It's your companion for starting and building a business. Find smart people, bet on yourself, put on a show. That is one of Ryan Bartlett's recipes for success. And let me tell you, the proof is in the results. We hit 100 million in two years, which was just still mind-blowing number to this day. Ryan is the founder of True Classics, one of Shopify's fastest growing brands ever. And his clothing brand started with one simple idea. make a better t-shirt for men. The more I dug and I looked at the competitors and I looked at the offerings, the more I realized what an enormous white space this is.

1:10You are in for a real treat today as I've got Ryan here on set in studio in Los Angeles. And I am telling you, you will not want to miss his sage advice for your own business idea. Ryan, let's get going. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So happy to have you. Let's start with the idea itself, because I think it really is cool. A better t-shirt that's, well, let's face it, is for a guy like me, maybe rocking a dad bod, so to speak. Where did this idea come from? Ironically, I didn't intend it to really be the dad bod thing, which is funny. And most people think that that was like my angle from the beginning.

1:42It was really just about kind of improving a super archaic industry. The reason I started with the t-shirt is because it was very simple and easy for people to focus on. If I just came out and I was the gap for everyone and everything, people wouldn't have been able to hang their hat on anything and really pin me to it. So I wanted to start with the t-shirt and really nail that and then eventually move into other SKUs using the same model that I applied to the t-shirt. Really what it came from was me just being really underwhelmed with the, you know, unintentionality of the way these brands were delivering products to people.

2:20It's kind of like how anyone starts anything. They just see an opportunity and they kind of jump at it. But I just felt very underwhelmed going into my closet and I didn't know anything about fashion. I just knew that I wanted things to look a little bit better. What do you mean by underwhelmed? How would you describe that? Everything in my closet just didn't feel like it was made for my body. Like my wife would put on clothing and it looked amazing on her. Everything was fitted perfectly. It looked right and it was built for her. And then I'm looking at my closet and I'm just thinking like, why are guys an afterthought?

2:50Why are we just neglected on this front. And so the deeper I went on it, the more kind of excited I got about the opportunity. Cause at first I didn't think it was really even something I wanted to do, but the, the more I dug and I looked at the competitors and I looked at the offerings, the more I realized what an enormous white space this is. Your story is so relatable because it wasn't like you had spent your whole life building to this moment. You had a whole other career. We just talked about this offline, whole other career in audio design. You were interested in music. And here you are opening your closet, seeing an opportunity.

3:26How did you link aha moments to business? Because that is maybe where I think folks who are watching or listening might be like, okay, cool. You saw the idea. What did you do about it? Well, I didn't know in the beginning that it was really going to be something unbelievable. I was really setting up to be like a side project and let's just kind of see what happens. I'm not going to put a lot of money into it. I'm just going to try my best, create an offering and see what the market takes. And so originally it was just, let me put together a silhouette. Let me build a tech pack. Let me try to figure this out myself.

3:57Cause I was running an agency before True Classic, which helped build a lot of my digital marketing skills, which paid massive dividends after I started it. But I would say that I knew very early on that like, I'm not the apparel guy. I knew what I wanted and I knew how I wanted it to look, but I needed a guy that could bring my vision to life. And that was Nick, one of my co-founders who really helped talk to the manufacturers and figure that portion of the business out. And without him, and also without my other co-founder, Matt, who had a relationship with a manufacturer, this thing would have taken a lot more money to get off the ground.

4:29So that really helped us stay bootstrapped, which was, you know, a great thing in hindsight, because we didn't need to raise any money. We weren't digging ourselves in a bunch of debt. We definitely had some credit card debt early on. We definitely negotiated lines with our manufacturers, which helped us, again, not have to raise money. But we were super smart about how we allocated the dollars and how we drove the business. And a lot of that came from just my previous knowledge of running paid media and knowing how to wield the dollars correctly and not just burn through cash. So we're going to get to your comfortability, so to speak, with debt, what you ended up doing a little bit later in the interview, but before we continue there, just to take a quick step back to the beginning of this business, you started the brand basically outside of your own intellectual capital with three grand.

5:20That's all it took. What did you spend that money on and why was that enough to get started? Part of it went into building the shirt. So when you're dealing with manufacturers, especially in the beginning, they're not going to front your samples, right? Like now they just eat the costs because we're big. But in the beginning, it was like, it's going to cost, you know, 800 bucks to build a shirt sample. Cause there's going to be iterations. You're gonna have to go back and forth with them and figure all that out. So it was probably like 800 to a thousand in building the, what you call a tech pack, which is like the design of the shirt and the specs and everything.

5:53And then the other two grand went into Facebook ads and, um, I didn't need anything else because I already knew, like, I didn't have to hire anybody cause I was just going to do all the work. You had this expertise already. Exactly. So I saved all the money in the beginning, just doing everything myself. I wouldn't have been able to do that, obviously, without putting in the work beforehand. So it wasn't just like$3 ,000 miraculously built this big company. It was just like I had the knowledge going into it, which saved me a fortune in the beginning. Facebook early days, 2019, pre-iOS 14, this was back when we had all the data and no one was opting out of anything just yet, which it became a much harder game after that.

6:32For sure. So this was pre-iOS 14. We have much less visibility when it comes to marketing. A hundred percent. It's way more difficult. And now it's more about just making great creative. But back then you could target very, very specific demos. And so I had a lot of that going for me in the early days, but I also just knew how to hack Facebook ads. I knew how to flip the money, spend$25, make$50, and so on and so on. So we started out, spend 50 bucks a day, make$100 or$300 it was in the early days. Everything was like three or four to one. It was really amazing ROAS early on. And then as you scaled up, like very quickly within a few weeks, I was spending 150 a day and then 200 a day.

7:13And as long as the ROAS was somewhere between two to three to one on what I was spending, we were profitable. And, um, we were using a little simple BI program to kind of measure the profitability of the company, but just really staying honed in on that ROAS on Facebook was the whole game in the beginning. And even today it drives a significant amount of our profitability. I was going to ask you if it still does. Absolutely. I mean, today it's like a blended ROAS across everything. And just really quickly for our audience, ROAS return on ad spend is what you're saying. Return on ad spend, And more specifically, new customer ROAS is like what we look at now more than anything.

7:49So we get even more granular because repeat, you just don't even really care about focusing on, you know, getting people to convert on Facebook because they're going to convert anyway, right? They're going to convert on email, SMS, just coming back to the website whenever they need stuff. It's really about figuring out how to get in front of new customers. Top of the funnel. Exactly. So that's where the ROAS really meets the road as far as that's concerned for us now. That number is like laser focused every single day. Like when I wake up and I open up triple whale and I look at our dashboards, NC ROAS is like my number one metric.

8:21And if it's like 0.7, we way overspent this morning. Things aren't looking good. What happened? What do we got to do? If I wake up and it's like one and a half, we're like, wow, today's going to be wildly profitable. Like, I don't know what happened yet. I'll figure it out as the day goes on. But that is kind of our North Star metric right now. And you are still, it sounds like, actively involved in the monitoring of your return on ad spend on your ROAS, right? yeah I mean I have to be because there's just so many components to it so much of it is driven by just how great is the creative what's working what's not video versus statics like right now I'm finding that statics are just crushing it's very kind of old school thinking but like it works statics just for our audience static images like basically just a picture of a shirt not even like a lifestyle or an editorial like actually just a generic picture of a shirt on a static, but it'll have like the review count and it'll say like 3000, you know, four and a half reviews, which allows people to connect the dots and go, Oh, this might, this should mean something like clearly a lot of people are buying this.

9:25I should go check it out. And it works really well still to this day. It's not all about video. Well, speaking of video, let's, let's be real. Some of your creative is just hilarious. It's engaging. You're in many of these ads as well. Um, what is it about having great creative? And if you could break down the, uh, the DNA, so to speak of a great ad, a great ad can't feel like an ad that's kind of like one-on-one marketing. Like it needs to feel real. It needs to feel like you're not overselling. What I learned early on was like, whatever we do marketing wise, I want it to be super authentic. And I think if we're living by the look good, feel good mantra of true classic, if we can make the ad allow them to feel good, then that's the best version of an ad that I want for the customer.

10:14Because that's how you create a true emotional connection with people. And at the end of the day, that's all you can ask for. And the way that you do that is through comedy. And comedy is the ultimate equalizer. And it's also the only form of ad that people are really going to share at scale. People will share wholesome content and they share comedy. I just knew that like, if we're going to show up for customers at a 10 out of 10 in every single department of this business for specifically ads, I want it to be a feel good component. And so that was really how we thought about it. And now today, obviously there is portions of the comedy that speak about the product that you have to have something in there about the product, right?

10:51It can't just be comedy for comedy sake. We've tried that too. And that just doesn't really net out because if you're not selling anything, it's like the ROAS isn't going to reflect the sales. yeah so hilarious uh video but nothing to buy for what exactly so we we do try to incorporate some value prop conversation within the scripts but it's just a lot of fun i mean we have really talented people you know we have like nicholas does a lot of our script writing and producing and directing we have greg and nate out of philly that crush it for us on the comedy ads so i'm lucky to be surrounded by really talented smart capable people who just produce great assets and this goes back to one of the self-proclaimed mantras that I put on you at the beginning of this interview, which is find smart people.

11:34Clearly you've been effective with that. You've been talking about them throughout this interview, who you leverage, but also leveraging your own strengths here as well. You really have bet on yourself and that can be very daunting for some folks, right? To take a big risk, to bet on yourself, to have that confidence. Is that something that you can learn? Is that something that's innate to you? How do you bet on yourself in an effective way if you're starting a business? I got really lucky with that in the fact that I had great parents. I had really great parents that really built up my self-esteem and did it right.

12:08And I was an only child, so I'm sure that helped as well. Anything I wanted to do, they were behind me and they were super supportive. And they just wanted the best for me. So when people talk about luck, I always attribute most of my luck to just that. I was just lucky to grow up in a great house with great parents who drove my self-esteem and did anything that I wanted to try music-wise. Like I got into drums, they got me a drum set. I got into piano, they got me a piano. Like it was just, they were really trying to mold me into the best version of myself. So if I'm someone, and let's say I don't have a great upbringing, what I'm just doubling down on is trying a lot of different things until I find what I'm great at.

12:49And it's not always so obvious on the surface. I think you just have to get used to trying and failing and trying and failing until something clicks and everyone just starts saying around you, like, wow, you're really good at that. You should think about, like, a career in that. Ironically, I led myself down a huge line of debt in music doing that. But it paid off because, you know, obviously I over-indexed on creative massively with True Classic. And that's to no surprise because I started out in creative. So I just care so much that it's great. that you see it now in the company. So it did play a part later.

13:25And creative is something that often larger brands or brands that have had the success that you've had will outsource, right? But not for you, because that is you leaning into yourself, betting on yourself. I had a friend of mine who founded a big company just yesterday ask me, I saw you guys use this agency, should I use them? And I said, listen, we only used them because we needed a significant volume. Because when you're spending six figures a day, you burn through creative very fast, even if it's great. So I told him, I'm like, no one's going to do better than you. You know, the brand better.

13:57You need an in-house team to really get that off the ground. And they were, they're starting a new company. So I'm like, it matters so much in the beginning, especially. So you have to go really deep on yourself and what the company stands for and what you think is going to resonate with the customer. But ultimately, yeah, you get to a point where you need leverage and we can't do it all. We do have outside agencies, not that many anymore, but, um, it does require a significant amount of logistics and capital and know-how and people to make this whole thing kind of work. Speaking of getting things to work, we do a lot of these interviews and we get feedback from our audience.

14:34Folks that are watching right now are listening. And a common question has to do with what is the appropriate content mix for my ads? Do I want organic? Do I want paid? Uh, do I post every day? Just, what I'm doing behind the scenes. If you were starting a t-shirt business today or a clothing business, but maybe we can stick with t-shirts, what would be your advice for the appropriate mix of content? Early on, you have no choice but to make content that converts. That is just kind of the reality. And in the beginning, that was the focus. We didn't have a choice. You have to build the company on the backbone of the profits.

15:10So if you can't make it work on Facebook, good luck. Like you really need to start on Facebook and get it to work there. And then you will really be onto something because I see people that make it work on really subpar content. So even people like drop shipping in third world countries can crush. I've seen these guys make hundreds of thousands a month with static images off Ali express. So it doesn't take a lot. You just have to think about the customer, what they care about. ultimately the best content early on is always the content that revolves around problem solving right because you can show a static image but like if you think about from a drop shipping perspective the ads that always crushed from back when i was doing that kind of stuff were the ones that would start out with a problem and by the end of the video they were showing you that this tool you were about to buy solved this thing could be something in the kitchen with cutting or whatever Like it's, it could be very simple.

16:06And so with true classic, I started out like, okay, I'm going to create a shirt. It's going to solve a problem. It's going to solve the fit problem, right? It's also going to solve comfort and it's going to be priced, not outrageously. Like the rest of the market is for the premium shirts. So I was solving three problems ultimately. And I had to get that across in the early content to sell t-shirts. If I were to just show funny guy ads, it would have never worked in the beginning because the ROAS would have been terrible and I wouldn't have been able to build the company. So the mix to your question is early on, it should be all DR.

16:41It should be all direct response ads solving problems. That will work better than anything that you can show people. then as you get to a place where you have a little bit more money to work with and you don't need to ride the whole business trajectory on dr you can take your foot off the gas a little bit and start to do the fun stuff even at our stage you'd be surprised to know that 90 of our ads are still dr even though most of what you see is comedy and stuff in out in the wild we still rely so much on just converting people on these platforms because it drives the business. And I made this test about a month ago where I said, you know what?

17:21We're big enough now. We're just going to go all brand and see what happens. It was a disaster. It was. Yes. I was going to ask you because it's remarkable to me to hear that 90 % is still that DR stuff. I know. And even at our level, it still is like, it doesn't make sense to me. I'm just like, ah, I think we can make it work with brand, but I will tell you having lived through this, the reason it really didn't work was because the short term we're so used to the drug of sales that when it starts to dip, you just start freaking out and everyone starts like, well, like, well, what are we going to do?

17:50It's like, so the brand will work long-term. The problem is we're not looking long-term. We're just like, what about today? What about this hour? You know what I mean? So, well then where does brand branded content fit in? I mean, why even do it if that's the case? I think it fits in great on social, Instagram, TikTok. I think it's a great component there. And that's not to say it can't still work on paid media. And we still run it. And it is becoming a bigger part of the ad spend mix. It's bigger than 10 % now. It's probably closer to like 25 now. And so we're finding that sweet spot where we don't dip sales and we get the wholesome, great content out there that establishes us in the market as a brand that really just shows up for humans one way or the other, whether it's through the clothing, whether it's through our initiatives that we drive a lot of value through.

18:42We just want to let people know that we're here with a great product. We're here to do right by people and consider us in the future, basically. Remind me to bring up the initiatives a little bit later because I do want to touch on that before this interview ends. Sure. But let's transition to this idea of betting on yourself a little bit more. Let's drill deeper. I think I'm, if I'm not mistaken, you have a background in poker. Is that right? Yes. And so making bets is not something you're uncomfortable with. And you found yourself a couple times, really, extending lines of credit, being comfortable carrying debt when you were trying to build this business.

19:18Walk our audience through what that was like and how you made the right bets there. It's just great entrepreneurial DNA to not be afraid to fail. Like we all know that everyone says you got to fail a million times. You don't fail more than playing poker for a living because it literally is like 90 % failure and then tiny little wins here and there that keep you above water. So I got so numb to losing that business was so easy for me. Let's just say it doesn't work out with True Classic. I'm just going to try another product and we're just going to see what happens from there. I'm just going to keep going until I nail it, essentially.

19:51So I was just so comfortable by that time. So not to say you should go out and lose all your money at poker and fail, but I would just say it was great training ground for me to just get numb to the feeling of, like, it's just okay to lose. It's part of the game, right? And poker players know that better than anybody. They're just, it's so normal to go through slumps where you are losing and losing and losing no matter how good you're playing. It can just be, it's not your time to win right now. The cards aren't falling or whatever it is. Sounds like you're describing my Thursday night garage game I played last week.

20:21Exactly. I mean, part of it was that, but part of it was also just, I had the confidence through all my experiences to know that if I was going to bet on an industry or a product, that I was going to do my homework before I launched something. It wasn't just like one day I did it and I launched it and that was it. I spent probably a year before True Classic building the idea in my head, doing competitor research, going to Amazon, just going to Amazon and seeing what kind of shirts are people buying, you know, and just taking all that agri data and saying, okay, there's something here. And then just adding it up and adding it up and looking at the competition and saying, how can I be better?

21:00How can I show up better? How can I do better creative? How can I build a better product? And then just like eventually saying, okay, now I have all the components ready to go. Now I'm ready to launch it and see what happens. So there was a lot there that people didn't see leading up to launching it. It also helped that I had great partners that fulfilled really specific buckets and skill sets that I just didn't have. So going back to like the betting on people part, you know, Matt was our finance guy that he dealt with that. Nick was manufacturing and I was everything marketing. And the trifecta of that DNA allowed us to not have to hire anyone for almost a year and a half and do all the work.

21:39And this is what back in 2019? This is in 2019. So fast forward a few years later, it's 2022 and you make a multimillion dollar big bet on true classics, right? Tens of millions. Tens of millions. So tell me about that. This was right after we hit 100 million in two years, which was just still mind blowing number to this day. But I distinctly remember us knuckleheads all sitting around the table going, well, we just can't lose guys. What should we do? How big a bet should we make this year on inventory? And we bet roughly 40 ish million. That was our buy. Essentially, we were going to just bet that big and then just see what happens for better or worse, which is insane to think about now.

22:20But I'll tell you why we did it. Ultimately, we had so much confidence that we were going to be able to navigate our way out of it if it all went down and it was to go bad. So bad meaning the sales aren't coming in the way you think. People aren't going to get paid on time, meaning the vendors. And how do you work your way out of that? Well, you're going to have to have some really awkward, difficult conversations with people. You're going to have to level set with people and go, look, we're going to the moon. You guys have seen what we've been able to do. Give us a little time to make these payments.

22:53It's rough right now. You can even charge us interest. Like we'll pay that penalty, but just work with us. Right. And sure enough, we were able to convince our manufacturers to work with us and stay with us. And we were very, we weren't running from them. That's the perfectly wrong thing to do. When you get into a bad situation, if you are to just not answer their emails or calls, that is a disaster. They will come after you. You'll, you'll start getting lawyers coming after you. You have to just be a human and go, listen, guys, we bet too big. We were a little bit crazy and we'll learn from this obviously, but, um, stick with us.

23:31Yeah. Because it's like, we're, we're only two years in, like, we don't know it all. We're, we're, and they, they have seen this many times before. Trust me, every big retailer over bets. It happens all the time. Well, because you can't afford to under bet. Is that right? Exactly. Because you're leaving so much on the table. And since we didn't know how to demand plan against our insane growth, it was just like, how else were we going to do it? So we wanted to bet on the upside and on the downside, inevitably it came, but we got through it and we found ways like we got credit lines. We figured out how to navigate that.

24:05Matt being a big proponent of like having those hard conversations and talking to banks about getting private lines or whatever he had to do to figure that out. It was like having that guy in your corner was pretty pivotal early on for True Classic. You know, Matt is really that guy. He's kind of like the lawyer CFO who just has to level set with people, but he will walk out of that room victorious. He's the guy that I will send in there and you just know the deal's going to get done. It's just that he's that kind of guy. So having him in our corner was great, but it was crazy, man. It was scary.

24:37But, um, we had a lot of confidence in ourselves. And that confidence has paid off. I mean, now we're approaching what? 500 million, almost half a billion dollars, almost a billion in revenue. Now we're getting close. Yeah. Getting close. So I mean, that is remarkable. But what is interesting is that you started very small now approaching a billion dollars and Shopify is part of this journey. why why Shopify because I knew having been a WordPress open source guy my whole life building everything for all my clients on WordPress I knew what a nightmare it was I have had the white screen of death more times than you can count where you're in a PHP file and a period is off and the whole site goes black or white and you're sitting there and the client's going what's happening.