The Secret to Remaining Consistently Profitable

0:00There's no shame in being small and profitable. ignore the ego side of it and don't compare. There's no shame in being small and mighty. Hi, I'm Shuang Esther Shan, and you're listening to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. Consistent growth is something every founder strives for. That's why my guest today is Danny Buck. He's the co-founder of Craft It London, a jewelry line that has doubled its annual sales every year in the last three years. From running marketing agencies and experimenting with previous brands, Danny is here to share the blueprint that has allowed Crafted London to be one of the most popular direct-to-consumer men's jewelry brands.

0:48Danny, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Very excited to chat. You've had such an extensive entrepreneurial journey. from running marketing agency to running other brands you founded and now Craft It London. Tell us, what were some of those most memorable experiences that really prepped you to launch this new brand? So Craft It, would I consider it new now? I mean, it's still going into our sixth birthday next month, actually. It's been a strange journey for me, actually. So it kind of goes back That's when I was 22. I came straight out of university, college, and worked for a software company for a little bit, actually.

1:33And to cut a long story short on that, I ended up doing a management buyout of that company at 22. I borrowed six figures from the bank when it was a little bit easier to get money back then and basically bought the, we called it the web division. It was a development division back then. So I bought the client base, took them over, and then I wanted to create a marketing side to the business. I wanted to turn it into a digital marketing company because when I was 22, so that was 16 years ago. I can't show my age now, but it was like the emergence of SEO and pay-per-click and PPC. It was just in the early days.

2:13And I had an agency around that time when it was just kind of taking off. And we had to convince clients. So we'd build their website and then we'd have to convince them to do online marketing with us. And that grew from myself, a co-founder and two staff, so the four of us, all the way up to 105 staff when I left, which was 2016. And it was great. The biggest kind of negative was I didn't like having a business with that many people. so I kind of learned a lot about organizational structure and boards and things like that so that was kind of lesson number one for me I knew what when I started my next business I wanted it to be a small company but small and mighty so higher turnover less staff but the biggest positives were I actually learned a lot about how different businesses operate and that was better than college for me completely I learned so much about the ins and outs of a retail business so we We used to do a lot of e-commerce way, way, way back.

3:18I don't even think Shopify would have been around in the early days, but it was on the scene towards the end of it. But we'd basically just did the digital marketing strategy. And what I found is I was doing the digital strategies for these businesses. So it was SEO, PPC, email marketing. It was kind of the bulk of the work. And I was doing this work, and they were making a lot of money off this. And my ego grew a little bit. and I saw that some of these businesses were say 20 staff but doing 10 20 million so I thought I can do this myself I just need to work out the right product so I handed my shares back to the board and did a deal where they would buy my shares over the course of I think it was about 36 months so put a figure in like say it was a high six figure sum and I would get paid over 36 months.

4:09I got two payments and then the company got folded and they popped up again as a different company. So I got stabbed in the back basically and ended up with some personal debt problems.

4:29So whilst all this was going on, I'd left. I thought I'd done that deal. I thought I had cash flow for the next three years. I started my first brand, which was a watch brand called Circular. We did a Kickstarter. My inspiration was movement watches. I used to read a lot about hawkers and a lot of my client base were kind of in the fast fashion space. So I thought the best way to do this would be cheap watches. People would buy lots of them. We'd change the straps. We'd make it a fashion item, things like that. Totally got it wrong. People want to buy one watch. They don't want to buy multiple watches.

5:05They want to stick with one. And also people see watches as a kind of status item and they don't want a cheap watch because that kind of defeats the objects of what a watch stands for. So that brand, although it did possibly, I think it did about 600 ,000 in its first year, which you'd think was quite good. It made a loss of about 300 ,000 and I had a lot of debt. So not only did I have debt, I had an issue with the cash flow. So personally, we were really in a sticky spot and we had to kind of work a new strategy out, myself and my wife. So I ended up doing consultancy again. So I started doing brand consultancy and it kind of put me back.

5:49It kind of softened my ego again. I was back to kind of square one. I was doing consultancy for brands, but it paid the mortgage and helped allay some of the debts. so during this period i came up with the idea whilst i was doing consultancy that would actually start a brand record it on snapchat and show everybody how to do it snapchat and instagram so i ended up building a an audience actually on this and we the brand we created was a brand called shoppono which is a women's jewelry brand but more in the holiday space so holiday jewelry and the average value order was i think it was about 12 pounds for an item so it was super cheap jewelry so yeah 15 sort of jewelry and with the weird thing about that one was the day that we launched it we obviously launched on shopify the day that we launched it so the actual hour we launched it we got a sale and we didn't know what where it came from it's a lady in america we don't know how she found us she just bought and we're like we thought it was a mistake we thought how How does that happen?

6:51Because it hadn't ranked on Google. And then from that moment, that brand was profitable. So in its first year, it made about 60 ,000 profit, but the revenue was under 100 ,000. We had no costs whatsoever. It was just no ad costs, no marketing costs. It was just basically social media, email marketing, and it was a kind of high profit business. And again, the reason I'm telling the stepping stones of the stories because each checkpoint has taught me a large lesson. It sounds like you went through a lot of setbacks and you found yourself learning a lot through consulting for other brands. How did you start Craft at London?

7:33So my business partner, Alex Cannon, he approached me, having seen me on doing the consultancy, recording about this brand on social media, and said, would you ever consider doing a men's jewelry brand? Now, not to kind of do myself a little disservice, but I don't really wear jewelry i wear bracelets and things like i don't really wear men's jewelry and i didn't really understand if the the market was big enough and things like that but he mentioned a few a few ideas which he he would buy kind of cheap fashion jewelry because he was a model and he would do shoots and the the jewelry would go green so because it was cheap it would go green so i was like well maybe there's something in a a usp around no green necks so jewelry which is kind a cheat but wouldn't give you a green neck and we kind of we put the idea across and things like that and then we decided to do it and we launched in 2018 and the day we launched we did about 10 ,000 pounds which was incredible we launched with two products and again no no um no outside no marketing and no ad costs it was just Alex's uh social media we did quite a good pre-launch campaign showing the jewelry things like that but it was just two products in fact it was actually one product but in a gold and silver so two skews then we thought wow we're onto something here and then we launched a second drop we called it and that second drop within the first 15 minutes had done around 15 to 20 000 i think it was and we just thought wow and that had four products in two colors so eight skews and we just realized actually there is that there is a market for men's jewelry and it kind of crafted built built from there that's um yeah it went on to do i think in its first year we did 1.7 million pounds it's probably probably close to two million dollars in year one which and a lot and and high profit because there wasn't a lot of ad costs in that so it's kind of a hit that it looks like on the face of it that was a hit from the beginning but it wasn't there was a lot of mistakes made along the way that that kind of fell into the formulation of how we got how we were to set up crafted yeah so much to unpack here because you've really went through so much in your career, there was great success.

9:44And also there were great hurdles you have to overcome and also setbacks. I think with crafted what I can take away from the story that you've just told us here is you really thought about the components of what would actually make a successful direct to consumer brand. And you really thought about the certain things you wanted to check off on your checklist. So to that point for new founders, when they're evaluating new ideas, what should be on that essential checklist when they're considering different ideas to possibly pursue? So we've also had a lot of luck along this journey. So we were pretty much first mover on men's jewelry.

10:29And there's a couple of brands in the US that maybe had a stride on us. But in terms of our space and the style of jewelry which is more classical rather than like the hip-hop style sort of thing we were we had first mover advantage so the timing was great it was on an upward trajectory there's now obviously a lot more brands than than what there were when we started so i feel like that that's the first thing like it looks at the market and although it didn't seem like a massive market was it i'd consider is it actually a and is it going on an upward trend but then i'd look at the town as well like how big is the is the market and how long has it been around for so when i was 18 i would buy a very simple figaro chain i would wear a figaro chain around my neck and so so it had been around for 30 odd years anyway also 20 odd years so it shows that that that market can last you know so i don't believe men's jewelry will go away in the next 20 years the trends might change and different styles might change how people do it fashions will change always but there is longevity to it so I'd consider that first and foremost but the big takeaway would be that I I went into my first brand circular having come out of a an agency where we the turnover was four million I wanted to impress my previous co-founders or previous board who haven't essentially stabbed me in the back I went to right get I was going to beat them I was going to get to four million in like a year and a half and I went full on and tried to aim for revenue and the big mistake with that is if you get it wrong you end up in debt and you need finance and then you're apologizing to people that you can't pay anymore and it's just not not particularly peaceful it's quite stressful so I would recommend starting as slow as you possibly can understanding the market understanding the headaches grow slow and we although we've considered uh we would be considered kind of fast growth we've grown profitably every year we haven't pushed for maximum revenue we i i say this quite a lot but i could double crafted turnover today but we would break if we did that we could easily do it we'd increase our ad spend we'd increase our inventory we could do it but we would have to take finance we'd probably not make as much profit and it looks better i believe to grow slowly over time and coming into our sixth year you know we we'll survive to 10 years plus which which is a feat in itself but i think growing slowly making sure you're profitable is the big one these days definitely and too many too many brands also on shopify have gone heavy that they're lending they're getting bc funding constantly and and the money isn't out there anymore as well yeah and all of a sudden you know you're left with you're left with a void and i feel for us we've never relied on any outside finance we have made sure that all parts of the business are are profitable but just from a personal perspective i i that that having that big team i didn't want a big team so crafted only has 15 people uh it's turnover will be over 30 million this year and it's we consider ourselves small small and mighty we're we're growing yeah we'll grow double digit and we should be able to grow double digit again next year from what we've got planned so it's and we don't need to increase the team we don't we know we need 100 people to do it.

13:49It sounds like you were thinking about a lot of different components to make sure that crafted was an idea that was worth pursuing. Another area which fits more into the operational side was the fact that all of the products fit through a letterbox. Talk to us why that was so important for you. Yeah, so the letterbox thing, that was an idea by design, really so we always wanted to outsource our fulfillment and it can get quite costly with the the postage costs they definitely charge you more on postage than they should do so we wanted to look at how do we actually do this in a way that would make it cheaper than us getting a warehouse staffing up all the software all these things and we looked at the best the best way to do that was to get our packaging so the actual postage itself to fit through a letterbox without having to charge our customers stupid fees and the best way that we did that was was by the design of the products obviously men's jewelry is small anyway um and and now because of our rates because of our kind of economies of scale we can afford to make the packaging a little bit better so now we've got some sort of bigger boxes and gift boxes and things like that so and we're still paying the same rate so we don't have to pass it on to the customer but that's come through economies of scale.

15:02But at the start, having a high conversion rate because of a low shipping cost made just our ad dollars go a lot further. Yeah. And you mentioned that right now looking at Crafted, it has sustainable, consistent growth. And that's not something you achieved right away. You said that there were mistakes that you had to figure out. So what were some of those things that you had to learn the hard way? Yes, great question, actually. So we had an incredible growth during lockdown. And during that period, I actually thought no one is going to be buying men's jewelry and kind of panicked, thought, do I need to block all the bills or do we need to kind of squirrel away some cash?

15:44But the reverse happened, actually, what people started to do with some of the store closures, people would actually start to buy as gifts. And we hadn't considered that as a market yet so so we we grew quite a lot in 2020 then 2021 we beat 2020 which was good but obviously our growth went from here to here and then just a little bit more in 21 but then in 22 I think was kind of our complacent year so we thought right we need to we need to work on the brand we need to spend on influencer marketing brand costs brand marketing lots of activations things like that so we brought in um a couple of kind of famous faces we did a lot of podcast sponsorship we we basically did did things and we spent a few million quid on stuff that didn't actually add to the revenue and that in hindsight it might have done a little bit for the brand but my kind of takeaway from this is i think you care about your brand a lot more than your customers do and you think something you can justify oh that has worked as a brand cost because someone has said, oh, I've saw you on so-and-so's podcast.

16:48But whenever we went on a particular podcast, and I think it's actually number one podcast in the world now, or second at least, and we sponsored it for a year. And people say, I've seen you on so-and-so's podcast. And I'd go, great, did you buy anything? What was it? And he was like, oh, no. And it kept happening. So people would hear about us, but no one would buy anything. And I think that was a mistake in our growth, that we went too heavy on brand. and what we then did the following year is we took all that money and we put it into advertising so facebook google a bit of snapchat etc and and tiktok and and that brought that brought growth in 23 yeah you did spend a year investing in brand awareness which you didn't see a lot of conversions and then the following year you actually invested in channels that had a higher conversion that actually brought in sales yes correct yeah i think knowing that knowing your point when you can do that.

17:44We did it too. We went down the brand route too early, I think. It's very interesting to hear your journey and also the behind the scenes of some of those decisions. Very excited to dig into marketing even further. Before we get there, I just like to take a moment to thank our audience. Thank you for tuning in to Shopify masters and wherever you're getting your podcast, be sure to follow and subscribe to our show. Leave us a review with some feedback. We love reading them. So yeah, speaking of digging further into the marketing for crafted, I think, um, with your partner, Alex, he did come with his own following his fans that really helped to have this momentum and this notice on crafted.

18:37What were some of the strategies you used after to kind of build on that momentum and to actually follow up and engage with the community as you were growing the brand? Yeah, so yeah, you're right. Alex had an audience that helped us at the start. But what we did alongside that, which I'd recommend, is we turned Alex's audience on social media into email addresses. so we do before we launched we did a pre-launch campaign which was early access if you sign up here and and that kind of that we did that for about two weeks before we actually launched so that turned it into actual email addresses which obviously then we can then use in the future and that was quite useful for the for the second drops but because we were selling out and this i know some people artificially sell out but because we were actually selling out it created more demand for the next one so we once we've kind of used alex alex's audience turned it into email addresses We didn't really have to lean on the social media side after that.

19:32We still had the crafted social media, but it kind of snowballed on the back of that. But as it started to develop, we got quite a lot of data, which we could then, kind of first party, we could actually use that in Facebook. So we'd then upload the emails. I don't know if it even does it now. I'm kind of out of touch with it a little bit, but it used to be able to upload the email addresses into Facebook. and then it would allocate like high value AOVs and things like that. So we use that data that we've got through the pixel. We have a couple of thousand orders at this point, maybe on like the third drop.

20:08And we then use that as our data point for Facebook. So then we then use those audiences. It's very different now to how we did it back six years ago. But we then use that to then target different countries. So quite early on, we were targeting international. So our main territory is UK, Europe and America. And we managed to get quite a 24-hour sales cycle, which in the UK, it's obviously a lot smaller than the US and Europe combined. So we were able to increase our market quite quick. but a tactic which we did i probably i probably would you may or may not choose to to do this but it worked for us at the start was we we knew that we needed to get kind of the first 12 hours of the day uh in revenue from america in order to get this 24-hour sales cycle so we targeted america with discounts and we had quite high discounts because they didn't know who they didn't know who Alex was didn't know who Crafted was so it was a little bit more tough to actually get people to believe us but that we were like like we'd get their order and things like that kind of in in a world of dropshippers that might not deliver we needed to get cut through so we did like a discount and that seemed to work at the start but what it did was it kind of trained the pixel for a lower AOV so we had to flip that round later down the line but as a good way of getting American customers through our pixel we we did like quite a high incentive to get people through it.

21:39It's very interesting to hear how you were refining your ad strategy. And I think jumping to the present day, something that might be counterintuitive for our audience is your heavy investment into traditional out-of-home advertising, seeing crafted ads on the tube, on buses, which at this day and age, a lot of people are investing more, let's say, in TikTok. and you've actually moved away from investing in channels like TikTok to do this out-of-home campaign. What was behind this decision? It's just so cool to see your brand on a bus, really. It was like we just started thinking, what things that move can we put the brand on?

22:25We looked at, obviously, the Tube stuff, but we're doing way more as well. We're looking at taxis and just some other cool things as well. But the reason why we chose London is it's probably the only, this certain area is probably the only place where we get all of our customer base, our global customer base in a city. So America, Europe, some from Dubai, UAE, obviously English, and the tubes and the bus kind of routes that we picked were around those tourism spots because we've considered looking out of home in America, but it's obviously very difficult. It's so much more widespread. spread so to actually create impact is a little bit more it's more expensive basically so we're not there yet but in terms of what we've done it just I think it helps validate because one of the big issues that we have in our industry is we have a lot of copycats that copycrafted and then there's a lot of brands which also don't don't fulfill their orders as well they might they'll do advertising they'll look legit but then the order won't come or it won't be what's been advertised and and we unfortunately get brought into that because there's a lot more men's jewelry brands than what they used to be so we needed ways of making us look legitimate and this really legitimizes us you know i wouldn't say the cost of it would turn into absolute revenue we're a bit bigger than we were when we did the brand stuff in 22 so now we can afford more of a brand budget we're not spending anywhere near as what we did but it's now it's a point of actually how do we come across that we are actually a bigger brand we are legitimate you can trust us you will get your order, but also how do we create impact towards the audiences that we want to hit?

23:59Yeah. Well, London is definitely such a hub where you can have a big impact with out-of-home campaigns. But even for TikTok, you did experiment with that channel and you actually didn't find it as impactful. So where were some of the learnings from that? so yeah we were the second highest spender in the uk on tiktok i'm 23 i think but we just found that there was no scale there unfortunately so there is a place for it for in the advertising space so of course this is this isn't organic as well there's i know a lot of a lot of brands do amazing organically and we've just not been able to to kind of nail that that part of our strategy yet but in terms of the ad platform, it's super simple.

24:44It's great. But the creative fatigue that we would get versus our spend was that you could get an ad that would work one day and then decline the next day. So you need to then replace it. And if the ad isn't good enough, then the CPA was a lot higher. And it was so hard to actually get it to turn for us versus a meta or Google. So we decided to scale it back. and we still run ads on the platform, but it's around certain events for us, really. It's just not like an always-on, which is disappointing because TikTok were really behind us. The guys there are great. They were so helpful, and we just couldn't seem to get it to turn at our scale.

25:25There's obviously a level where it would work, but for us to put a creative strategist behind it as an example and things like that, it just didn't work on a broad level for us. I think that's very important to note because a lot of the times you might flock to a channel that wherever everyone else is at. And sometimes you need to evaluate and pull back on things that's not working for you. So based on all of your experience from agency, from running brands, what do you think founders should consider when they're evaluating different investments into different channels and different strategies they have for advertising nowadays?

26:07so I think everybody's different so if I owned a beauty brand I'm sure I could get TikTok to work a lot better than men's jewelry and there's certain niches that absolutely fly on TikTok the slime brands things that are really like tactile and visually appealing and things like that they work really well on those channels they work really well organically and you could say that for us there'd be certain things we could do strength tests where people are hanging off bars and things like that. And it's just whether we want our brand to look like that. So we consider ourselves attainable luxury. So we're not, we wouldn't say class ourselves as like Gucci and luxury sort of level brands, but we're not a lower like cheap brand.

26:50We consider ourselves perfectly in the middle where you get a great product at a great price. And we don't necessarily want to cheapen ourselves through kind of lower form content, which is native. and that's a decision which we've done from our side and we could do that we could like we did a street interview uh test on tiktok and i think we got like four million views on it or something like that but it we don't feel it really represented the brand how we how we'd like the brand to be so my point really is that i wouldn't have an ego with your brand i wouldn't be better than the channel because you might need it to work for you but for us how we want to appear and how we want to grow and how we want to fit into our market requires us to have a certain level of creative because it elevates the brand and that's what we want to do we don't want to cheapen our brand too much because that helps with the aspirational side of the product and people choosing us because in some cases we're more expensive than our competitors we consider our products better but they don't know that at this point and for them to choose us they have to aspire to want to wear our brand and if we're doing what everybody else is doing then we're just being everybody else.

27:57So I'd really consider that there's no fixed rule for everybody. So what works for me, meta Google email and some influencers and a bit of social, that might be the total wrong route for another brand who might go all in on UGC content on TikTok. And that might work really well. It just wouldn't work well for me. I'm very glad we're talking about TikTok in this way because to your point, you had successful content with those interviews, had millions of views, but it doesn't equate to sales. So looking forward, what are you investing in that you feel like would result in more impact? It's the most boring answer ever, but it's product.

28:43It's not marketing. We've kind of reached the point now where we don't consider ourselves a marketing company anymore. We consider ourselves a product. So that might sound, seem silly being an e-commerce brand but when we started it was heavy about marketing what how can we beat the the best performing ad how do we improve our emails how do we do and i feel like we've reached a point of saturation where we might marginally improve an ad but in terms of our concepts that we've got working now and and we do a lot of creative testing we spend a fortune on creative testing but it's it's it's always marginal gains it's not game-changing things so like when when we got an ad to work in like year two it could mean that we went from five grand a day to 20 grand a day we were like whoa that's all about the ad and at that point we've kind of our reaches our reaches now improve we can afford to spend more but the amount that we spend on advertising now it it doesn't necessarily move the needle a piece of creative but product categories wider inventories just a more expensive warehouse basically so instead of having two sizes we'll have six sizes instead of having five rings will have 30 rings things like that is that that's that's our next stage of growth so it's through product which some some people will argue that's where you should start but if you go too too heavy on your inventory and too small on your marketing you end up with a cash flow problem if you do the other thing too too wide you could end up with a cash flow problem it's just at what point in your journey that you need to be and maybe it'll push back we'll end up with a big inventory and that we need to increase our marketing a bit more.

30:18But that's kind of our strategy now. We consider ourselves a product-focused company, not just marketing. You've got to find that balance. And it's something that you kind of have to play around with every single day to make sure that you are achieving that balance between product and marketing. Something else you said earlier is that the fact that you didn't want to have a company with a huge team anymore. You actually want a manageable size team having talent that are truly impactful. So I guess when you're looking about hiring talent, what are you looking for to make sure that you're crafting the best team possible?

31:00Nice use of craft there as well. So we are fully, well, not fully remote. We have a funny setup actually. so before lockdown we would go into the office four days a week and have Fridays off or Fridays at home and then when lockdown happened we were geared for a fully remote team because we were quite small so obviously we weren't allowed to go to the office so at one stage so everyone worked from home and we only had five people at this point so we used some remote working software we use a company called Basecamp and it's been brilliant for us so everything's kind of central to Basecamp people will log on and instead of doing loads and loads of video calls and meetings people will put like threads in Basecamp and then upload pdfs and then we'll do a meeting afterwards but we kind of the company has been built remotely so as we've grown and as people have kind of come out of lockdown and found that they enjoyed working remotely in lockdown and they could walk the dog or go to the gym and things like that we found that and that people want to work for a company which has kind of remote values so our our kind of recruitment has been quite strong because we were kind of made we've been made remotely so all the setup is there and how we do it we go in the office once a week now on a wednesday and we have a couple of what we call hubs that people can meet up and things like that if they want to just for uh the social side of it but the best thing is like we have no set working hours so we have people who um we've got a girl who works for us in latvia we've got a girl who works for us in australia uh everyone works whenever they want to work as long as the work gets done the results get achieved it doesn't bother me it doesn't bother any of the board so it's it's quite uh it's quite a nice working environment the kind of the funny side or downside of it is when we bring someone who's quite corporate or they've been in a corporate background where they send reports every day where they're on calls all day where and and we've had we've had a few and for some it's worked for some it hasn't but in terms of our recruitment strategy now it's people that enjoy kind of a good work-life balance and are driven by themselves to get results that that's the biggest part the people that don't work out for us are the people that kind of need they just don't they just can't work for themselves if you know i mean they can't actually get the work done themselves and work things out but the people that are good setting their own tasks understand that there's a common goal so our communication is incredible because of base camp and the way that we we set things up so it's we have x target to hit in august as an example these are the budgets these are what we're trying to achieve this is our marketing calendar And then it's a case of everybody understands what they need to do as a component to hit that target.

33:55In terms of recruitment for us, it's people which are driven. It's people that understand that they can work remotely. They like the kind of the mental health benefits of working remotely. And yeah, just results, results driven mainly. And that sounds a bit of a cliche, but it really impacts our business. I think the main theme for our conversation is the fact that you've gone through so many setbacks, but you were always excited to find a new idea and try to find sustainable growth for those new brands. For new founders, what is your final piece of advice for them to think about when they're entering into a new business?

34:36I think I'd like to kind of take a different angle on the profit over revenue, just to kind of drill that point home. So I'm sure a lot of the listeners will go on Twitter and they'll see the brands posting Shopify screenshots. And I think it's good to understand what goes underneath that. So a clear example could be a fashion brand might post that they've done 100 grand in a day. But the net revenue of that might be something along the lines of 30 ,000. And that could come down for the taxes that need to come off. The returns could be 50%. And what actually comes out at the bottom might only be single-digit profit.

35:19Whereas you can achieve single-digit profit with a lot less revenue in a different niche. So the difference between Circular when it started and Honu was Circular's revenue was way higher, but lost 300. Honu's was not even 100 grand a year, but made 60. And on the face of it, if I was going to post the screenshots on Twitter, of circular everyone thinks circular is doing better than honu but under the hood honu was was the was bringing us the cash flow and i think that's that's really important for the people who are starting out that they they don't need to be ashamed of what a small business is and a small revenue as long as they're profitable because there's still a lot of brands out there that are growing and growing and you think wow they are doing 100 million but they have got vcs behind them they are losing money every every single sale is losing money and you and and they go bust they eventually some of them eventually go bust if they don't they get bought out but that model is finished and there is no money at the moment for d to c which might be economical but i think staying motivated being profitable and not being led by somebody else who you think is they could be on a year they could be on level five and you're on level one and comparing that but i think There's no shame in being small and profitable.

36:38Ignore the ego side of it and don't compare. Comparison is the thief of joy, as they say. But just, yeah, there's no shame in being small and mighty. Such great practical advice because at the end of the day, you do answer to yourself. Thank you so much, Danny, for being here and sharing your story with us. Thank you. That's Danny Buck, the co-founder of Craft It London. Our show is produced by Gogo Zoger and Megan Coyle. Our engineers are Miku Betlam and Matt Schwartz. Benjamin Gottlieb is our managing producer, and I'm your host, Schweng Esther Shan. Come back every Tuesday and Thursday to catch brand new episodes of Shopify Masters.

37:20And hey, if you're still here, go share this episode with another entrepreneur. Thank you so much.

37:33Thank you.