Black Friday Gigastream with Shopify | Harley Finkelstein, Noel Mack, Sara Foster, Sean Frank, Kat Cole, Peter Rahal, Farhan Thawar, Torin Herndon, Kevin Harwood, Nish Samantray, Bené Eaton, Brian Keller

25:03We haven't seen merchants change their pricing. all that much. And so I think that, again, it's not that consumers don't care about it. I just think that they're being more selective, which I think leads to kind of what you'll see, what you'll hear a lot over the next couple of hours on the show today, which is that brands really matter. Like the relationship that direct-to-consumer used to be this thing that effectively was a bit of a fad. Like, oh, this is that kind of business. And this is a different, this is a, you know, this is Sean at Ridge. He runs a direct-to-consumer wallet company. No one calls Ridge a direct-to - I think the advantage to direct consumer is because they have a direct relationship, they also have a direct connection.

25:41And they're able to cultivate a different type of dynamic with their customer base. And you'll hear that from across the board, I think, today. So generally, again, what I said to Steve and I'll say to you guys is we measure consumer confidence at checkout and people are buying. It's a great way to do it. Great way to do it. I was driving into the gym this morning before we got to the studio, and there was six people outside of a Target at 6 a.m. Is that low or high? That felt extremely low. That felt low. Well, there's probably 60 people outside of a Tecovis right now in somewhere in America.

26:19So that does feel low. Remember those videos of like they opened the doors, everyone like rushed in to get the TV? That's what I'm saying. But I never participated in that, so I completely missed that. And I don't know if it's like – I missed – yeah. Is it completely died off? It seems like it has. I never understood why people – how many people needed that many TVs. Like how many TVs does one person need? The TV thing is crazy. It's crazy. I guess it's just like one of the bigger purchases you make. And so if you can save a couple hundred bucks on it, it's like worth it or something. But yeah, it was a big meme, the last TV.

26:50I just – I think what you were saying earlier is true. It's like people have – everyone at this point, I like you don't even have to be like that. You don't even have to be like into shopping or into the different things. You have a handful of brands that you really love. They're probably independent. And when it comes time for Black Friday, you're like, OK, what are the brands that I like doing? And I'm going to put my dollars there and maybe I'm going to do some Christmas shopping, too. It feels a little bit like we're all kind of voting with our wallets to to have more of the brand that we love exists in the world.

27:22Like I wear a black T-shirt almost every day. It's a James Purse black T-shirt. I've got to know James really well. Like every time I buy a James Purse T-shirt, I buy it because I think he makes the best T-shirts. But it's also a vote of like I want more James Purses in the world. These like kind of quirky guys in his case out of California who is obsessed with making black T-shirts. And I like – as someone that is an entrepreneur myself, an entrepreneur my whole life, I just – I want more James Purses existing in the world across all different verticals. And so I'm willing to spend a little bit more money.

27:50And this is like I've been buying James Purse t-shirts before I could even afford them when I was a student because instead of buying like five Gildan t-shirts, which were kind of crappy, I would save my money and buy one James Purse t-shirt every six months. And it was because I like the shirt, but I also – I like the story behind it, and I think that matters to consumers. Give us the update on agentic commerce and AI. We've obviously spent the last couple weeks talking about the battle between ChatGPT and Gemini. but I'm curious what the update is. You guys are definitely the ground zero for that battle, it seems.

28:27The amount of debate from every one of your guests is amazing. Everyone is perfectly conflicted. And everyone has an opinion. It could be the battleground. Yeah, everyone has an opinion. Look, we are not trying to guess exactly what permutation is going to win. What we're trying to do effectively is whatever is the way that agentic is going to happen, we want to make sure Shopify is right there. We want to make sure more importantly that our merchants are there. So part of the reason that we built our agentic tools in a way that is more modular, like we built Catalog, which is effectively every SKU on Shopify.

29:00And we built, you know, checkout kits so you can actually effectively customize the checkout inside of the agentic application so it looks like it's natively integrated and it feels like it's part of the conversation. The reason we're building these sort of tools in that way is to effectively give these tools to every single application. and we've partnered with ChatGPT. Obviously, that got a lot of attention. We partnered with Perplexity. We're working with Microsoft as well. So our view is that in a similar way that when social commerce started to gain some steam, we didn't really know what platform was going to be the one that ended up being sort of the winner.

29:33Obviously, social commerce is a bit different. Now it feels like it's more about discovery, less about the transaction. No one's really checking out on these platforms, but they're learning a lot. The thing I'm super excited about and super bullish on is ChatGPT had some news. I think it was last week around deep research, focused on shopping. And it feels like that is the way that people, like that is a better way to do product research, discovery, which is just like, hey, fire off a prompt and then go do something else and then come back. Especially because it has all your context. It knows what you've been searching for.

30:03If my particular chat application knows that I deeply care about onwriting, that's my favorite stuff. If I'm looking to get gear for a camping trip or a hiking trip, first it should show me on running, you know, boots because it knows that I have a proclivity or some sort of connection to that brand. I think actually the coolest part, so one is we think that like it's, we think that it's going to change the way consumers shop. It may actually, remember e-commerce as a percentage of total retails is like sub 20 % in the US still. It's like 25 % in the UK, but it's still pretty small. So one thing that may happen is Agentic may invite non-traditional online shoppers into the online world, which we think is really good.

30:44But whatever permutation ends up being the winner, we want to make sure that our merchants are best set up. And I also think it creates a little bit of a leveling of the playing field whereby now if I'm using a search engine to do my shopping, I'm going to be, the first thing I'm going to be served is going to be whoever pays the most for an ad. Whereas on a Gentic, hopefully what I'm being served is the thing that's most relevant to me based on everything the chat application knows about my personal interest. So I think it actually may help a lot of smaller businesses get bigger. Totally. I'm curious by this point in the day, do you have a good sense of where the platform will land from a volume standpoint for Black Friday in total?

31:25No, no, not even close. Wait, really? You have 10 years of data. How can you not get the curve? Sorry, I should say, I'm not ready to disclose that. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I imagine that you have 10 years of data. I'm not asking you to disclose. I'm just saying, like, do you have – Can you get it within, like, five – You know, like – Our data team is legendary. I'm sure. I'm sure. Legendary. There's no way. You can't predict this. But, I mean, so far things are going really well. We did nine – So for the weekend, so for the four days, so Thursday night until, like, Friday – So Thursday night when sort of Thanksgiving starts until Monday night.

32:00I think we did$9.3 billion in 2023. We did$11.5 billion in 2024. Whoa. We'll see. See what happens this year. Let's, we got to take the over on this. Let's go. We're taking the over. I'm not participating. I'm not participating. But I will say this, we didn't, I didn't even talk about this. This guest list we have today is stacked. Yes. And what's really cool is it's sort of a mixture of like some of the people on here I actually haven't met yet. They're shopped by merchants. I don't know them. And some of the people that I, that I invited on, I don't think you guys have met yet. But it's, I mean, I don't know if you know, like favorite daughters coming on, Sarah Foster.

32:34I mean, Sarah Foster, like, Favorite Daughter is amazing. What you may not know is, like, she also has a hit Netflix show where everybody on the show wears Favorite Daughter. And she has, like, a hit podcast called – Yeah, it's so funny. When we introduced her earlier, I said podcaster because both of our wives – My wife, too. It's a podcast. But a lot of people know, you know, nobody wants this from Netflix. But this – like, you talk about the future of retail and how it all fits together. Or Cat Cole. I think you're having Cat Cole on. who's the CEO of AG1. Kat recently, you know, she said this publicly, Kat does like, they sell something like$600 million, is what Kat says, with one single SKU.

33:14I mean, that is unbelievable. You talk about this exciting new evolution of commerce and retail. Like, these are the people that are building it. And they're building it on Shopify, which we feel very honored. But these are the people on the show that are really leading, like, where this whole thing is going. Yeah, it's incredible. We're having Brian on the CEO of Rora later. new Shopify merchant. Brian and I started Rora together a while back. And this is Rora's first Black Friday ever. So I got the Shopify. How's he feeling? Oh, he's feeling great. He's feeling great. No, it's been an awesome year.

33:49You can tell Brian to send me all of his feedback and product suggestions and anything else he has there. Of course. That's really cool there. Of course. Yes, you have Kat, you have Brian, Nishant, you have on. And wow, I mean, this Peter, Sarah. Do you know Array yet, Nish's brand? No. I mean, I know the brand. I don't know that. Yeah, I mean, this is very under the radar because they raised one round, like right at inception. And then I won't dox their revenue because I don't know how much is public. But one of the biggest companies that's joining the show today, and hardly anyone, at least in the X world, is even aware of them.

34:30So excited. for that one. Incredible. Yeah, I'm just looking here. I mean, okay, so Noel Mack, who leads with Ben Francis, they live in Gymshark. He's actually calling in from his new store in Dubai. Yeah. Gymshark is the poster child for like online, you know, multi-billion dollar company. It's crazy. And now he's calling us from Dubai where he's opening a brand new store. So it'll be interesting to see like, I don't know if you've been to any of the Gymshark stores. They only have a couple of them, but they're like gyms and like, you talk about experiential retail. They're like, they're the best at that.

34:58Well, we're going to have them, We're going to have them go for – we should have them do a one-rep max on the show. That's a good idea. If they have the setup. Incredible. All right. Well, you'll be back on soon. Where are you headed out to? I'm heading right now to Takovas in Soho. They have a brand-new store they just opened, so I'm going to be calling in. Our next round, I will be at the store in Soho at their bar. A little over an hour. He'll be back in 1250. Incredible. Thank you for letting me co-host. And thank you for sending me this amazing outfit. I feel like I'm one of the boys. Thank you.

35:32And I'm very grateful for you guys doing this with us. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Awesome. We'll see you in a little bit. We'll talk to you soon. See you guys. Have a good one. Bye. We're about to hop on with Noel from Gymshark before he does. Let me tell you about Cognition. This is a great Christmas present. It really is. Get someone Cognition. Get him, Devin. Get him, Devin. The AI software engineer. Devin, under the Christmas tree. Say, hey, mom, I want you to crush your backlog with personal AI engineering team. Here's$100 ,000 of Cognition credits. Thank you so much to Cognition. Supporting the show.

36:05Our next guest is Noel from Gymshark. Let's bring him in from the rest of your waiting room. How are you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks for staying up late, right? You're in Dubai. Is that right? I'm in Dubai, but I'm on British time zone. So this is fine for me. I'm good, man. Don't worry about it. You're good. Awesome. How's the day been so far? Mello? we're just wrapping up here now right so it's 22 midnight right now here in dubai and my plan was to do this with the store in the background but there's still so many people in the store t-shirts of hangers you wouldn't have heard a word i was saying so yeah man it's been wild that's crazy wild uh when do you actually close this the the retail store this store closes in 20 minutes okay okay so did you do it 24 hours like did you start did you open at midnight last night or when did you actually open no it was you know it opened you know what i should know that Devil's in the details, right?

36:53But I don't know what time the store actually opened this morning. But I only arrived, I only got into Dubai at like 10 a.m. So I'm not sure. So that's going to be my excuse. Where did you, so did you start the day back in the UK? Yeah, started the day in the, did the red eye last night from the UK and landed here. They call Black Friday over here the Dubai Super Sale. So they do it a little bit differently to the way we do at home. And it's, yeah, it's wild. There's literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people walking around Dubai Mall outside right now, which is nuts. Wow. What's the shape of the business these days?

37:19is like what categories do you, like how do you segment out the business and sort of understand what you sell? Well, the key differentiator to understand about Gymshark is there's lots of sports brands out there, right? There's been a few brands in recent years. I think Lulu kicked the door down for the yoga brands and then a bunch of other brands came in after that. The really unique thing about us is we're not any of those things. We're a gym brand, right? And in the same way Lulu said to people, hey, you shouldn't wear sports clothes to do yoga. You should wear specific yoga wear to do yoga.

37:47We're trying to introduce people to the idea actually you should wear specific gym clothes to the gym so our brand platform is we do gym and we think we do that better than anybody else out there yeah what's the what's what was your interview process like did you have to like show off your one rep max or anything what was the process no you know what it's a common misconception that that you have to be some huge lifting person to come and work at gym shark but you really don't however one thing i would say is a lot of people fall in love with it once they start a gym shark and then they find themselves doing all sorts of crazy marathons for charity and lifting events and bodybuilding and all this crazy stuff.

38:20So it's a great environment, steel sharp and steel and all that. What about the geographical distribution? I mean, obviously a global brand, but like how global have you focused on any particular markets? Has Middle East been particularly important as a growth area? What's growing fastest? What's the most interesting thing happening geographically for Gymshark? So we ship to like 130 countries, something like that through several different Shopify stores. The UAE has been a real new thing for us. It's been going for about 18 months. You guys went international super early. You also worked with, from my understanding, thinking back a decade ago, you guys did influencer marketing probably better than any other brand and did it at a scale that no one had really done it before.

39:06I'm assuming you were working with 10 ,000 plus influencers at any given point. like it seemed like you guys were just everywhere did that force you guys to go international earlier than a lot of other brands yeah i had a really interesting moment once where i was sitting in the border and doing some work and an intern knocked on the door i was on my own and she said um no i can ask you a question when did gymshark enter the u.s and it kind of stumped me for a second i had to stand there and think about it and i said we never sort of entered the u.s that seems to be a thing that old old school businesses did sure we were we shipped to wherever people wanted to buy it from from day one of gymshark so we were technically global from the from the rip But you're right.

39:42We were very, very early to influence the marketing. A lot of people credit us as some of the real early pioneers of that. But actually, where you were slightly wrong was the point on 10 ,000 influencers, that was kind of the opposite of what we did. While a lot of people got into influence marketing early and just spread bet and hit as many people as they could, anybody with a few followers, we decided to sort of handcraft this select group of what we call Gymshark athletes who were like the biggest names in the fitness industry, the really, really revered ones. So what might have felt like a bit of a roadblock on social media to you was probably more depth as opposed to width, if that makes sense.

40:11Yeah, just working with the biggest names in the category. And in terms of 2025 now, take me through what's working on the marketing side. What strategy, what area has been the most exciting this year for Gymshark as a whole? To be honest, it's what I said a minute ago. It's less about, you know, it's not there's a particular channel that's ripping right now or there's a new version of Influencer Martin or it's TikTok Sharp or anything like that. it's finding our lane and sticking to it, right? And being relentless about the fact we make gym wear, that's what we do. And we're better than anybody else at it, right?

40:45We noticed a little while ago, everybody started to sort of spread really wide and start to try and hit a lot of different lifestyle and golf and surfing and all these different things. And, you know, there was a moment there where we were tempted to go that way as well. And then we sort of reminded ourselves who we were. We doubled down on the fact that we were the gym brand. We launched our brand platform, WeDoGym, and people have taken to it incredibly, incredibly well. There was an article I read on linkedin the other day that said the world doesn't need more bland brands it need more brands that stand for something and are willing to have enemies and i think that is exactly what we did not enemies per se but we're willing to say hey if you don't rock with us that's absolutely fine there's a million other brands out there that are probably for you but if you want great gym stuff you should come to gym shark how how is gym culture evolving i feel like the story of the last couple years was this like hybrid hybrid athlete movement uh we don't do a lot of running we probably should we we hit the we hit the gym as a team every single morning we got to get uh get into doing doing some more cardio but how has that kind of impacted the product strategy if at all we've got we've got about a 500 people run club this sunday in dubai so get me a green jacket you boys are happy to uh i'll happily have you host you down here we'll all run together uh yeah you're right so the first thing i'd say is the culture of like resistance training and quote unquote sort of traditional gym work has really, really grown in the past few years.

41:59So you talk to any of the big equipment providers and they're telling you that they're going into some of the big gym chains in the US. They're removing steppers, they're removing cross trainers by the bowl for and they're putting squat racks in, right? A little while ago, squat racks looked like a medieval torture device to some people if they didn't know how to use it. And now people are really learning how useful real resistance training is. But you're absolutely right. The rise of the hybrid athlete is a, it's a wild, it's like, it's a real step forward in people's understanding of fitness.

42:24So previously you saw a big guy, he's a big guy, he lifts weights, but he can't run. You saw a guy who weighed 120 pounds, he can probably run, but I doubt he can lift weights. And now the two things are merging massively. I ran the London Marathon last year and I had guys coming past me at like 230 pounds lean with a ton of muscle mass. And I was just like, man, that is so unfair. Yeah. And they're going past me as well. And they've got a hundred pounds on me, which I thought was wildly unfair. But yeah, this hybrid thing, you can still carry a muscle and you can be a runner and this and that and that.

42:53Do you know what I mean? Like it's a real new development and we're leaning into that pretty heavily. How are you thinking about competing with some of the older, more like legacy brands in the space, specifically in becoming like that household name breaking through across everything? Are you focused on just owning the next generation or do you eventually want to go and, you know, get to such saturation that you become a household name even with the older folks? How are you thinking about the different demographics that you're going after? I'll be honest, saturation and household names aren't, household name isn't something we put at the top of our Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right?

43:33Becoming the best version of us is what we do. If what comes with that is household name status and market saturation and that kind of stuff, amazing. If it doesn't, no problem. But we know we're going to be the best gym brand out there. So we're never going to beat some of the big players from your country or from Germany, you know who I'm talking about, being them. But what we can do is win it being us. Yeah, that makes sense. What about 2026? Are there any upcoming marketing or growth strategies that you're excited about potentially exploring next year? I personally, we don't have a huge plan for this yet.

44:06I love streamers right now. I'm like, streamers are doing a lot. And I think that feels like influencer marketing to me in the early days when it was kind of untapped and we dominated early. I like seeing what streamers are doing. There's something that we are doing that we are very good at is these IRL experiences. Like our last event in London had over 15 ,000 people come out to it. That was two days. There was stock for sale, but it was stuff they could buy on the website. There was a few exclusives. There was their favorite Gymshark athletes, the group of people that I talked to you about earlier on.

44:32They could hang out and lift together. We've done them in Miami. Again, the last Miami one, I think we had 13 ,500 people over two days. So those are just wild. and it's almost like a rock landing in a lake. The ripples that sends out across the fitness industry, across all of social media, across TikTok, everything is absolutely nuts. And that's not us, that's consumers coming along, creating their own TikToks, taking selfies with their own favorite influencers, athletes, creating their own content and spreading out into the world. So yeah, that works really, really well for us. We always say that Gymshark is an online brand that was built offline.

45:03Yeah, yeah. In the chat, they're saying people yearn for IRL events and I couldn't agree more. How are you guys thinking about the intersection of AI and commerce? Are people discovering Gymshark in different LLMs yet? It feels like a really tough channel from a brand standpoint because right now you don't even have the ability to do that great of imagery and just showing off products in the way that you might want to on your personal site. But what does that look like today and how are you forecasting out? Yeah, you're right. I think that literally AI is such a buzzword that absolutely everybody is using.

45:38And I tend to try and steer clear of talking about them when everybody else is talking about them. My thinking about stuff like this is a little bit Buffett-esque. Be brave when others are scared and be scared when others are brave. But you're right. AI results, AI search is absolutely huge. We already do pretty well on that front because there is such an organic groundswell of information on Gymshark, on TikTok, on Reddit, on a lot of the places that you scrape in for information. Exactly. So we do quite well. But you're right. I'm not going to give away the secret sauce now, but we are. Well, it's not my department, but somebody else at Jim Shark is working really hard on making sure that we do even better on that front going forwards.

46:11Yep, makes sense. Well, thank you for taking the time out of a very, very busy day. Where are you, how long are you going to be in Dubai? You're doing an event and then you're going back to the UK or are you doing a world tour? Yeah, we're launching our second Dubai store on Tuesday. So we've got a bunch of stuff leading up to it. Like I said, we have a really big run club in Jumeirah Golf Estates on Sunday morning. We have our conditioning club. We're doing a run club inside the Mall of Emirates, which is another mall because it's that big. You can do a 5K run inside the mall. on that that's the real that's real dubai stuff and we open our store on tuesday uh and then i get out of here and i'm back to the uk nice what uh when you when you say experiential retail is it running focused you have full like squat racks in there like what is what does experiential mean in the context of gym shark it depends on the uh it depends on the format of the store like we can scale it down and up like sometimes it's just we have a bunch of personal trainers come up we're doing pull-up competitions we're doing run closing and all that kind of stuff our latest store that we've just announced, the date isn't out there yet, but our latest flagship store, our first ever US flagship store is launching real soon in New York on Bond Street opposite Kiff.

47:14And that has, I mean, I can't reveal it yet, but that has the whole two floors of experiential. So anyway, keep your eyes peeled and you'll see what I mean when I say we can scale it from small stuff to really, really big stuff. Amazing. Well, great, great meeting you. Thanks for coming on the show. Fantastic to hear your approach to all this. I love the focus and just the intensity. Makes a lot of sense. Congratulations. Appreciate it. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, fellas. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.

47:44I asked ChatGPT. I put the shopping research mode to the test. I said, find me the most expensive elite luxury goods hosted on Shopify sites specifically. Basically, just one item per brand, but pull as many different products as possible. Take me on a full tour of top Shopify products. The best overall, a$28 million yacht, motor yacht, the Mangusta 165. Is it actually on Shopify? It is. It is. I can put it in. They're selling yachts on Shopify. They're selling yachts on Shopify. This is not a joke. I'm going to put this in the timeline so we can all pull this up. It's a$28 million yacht. It's 50 feet, maybe 50.

48:30Oh, 50 meters. They call it a super yacht. Few consumer products exceeded tens of millions of dollars. But this is a full 50-meter super yacht. It comes from a boutique broker using Shopify. Not a big generic marketplace. Third-party yachting press documented the yacht, noting the N1 was the first hull in the Mangusta 165 Rev series designed in collaboration with Overmarine and Labunov. It's listed at 28 million euros. This confirms it's not a speculative or unknown build. It's a real super yacht. You can buy it on Shopify. It's available in the shop app. Also, we are, of course, sponsored by Bezel.

49:09Getbezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. But I got to do say, there is somebody on Shopify selling a$5 million Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime. And even though it's a competitor to Bezel, we got to talk about it. We got to talk about it. Can you imagine? It's a$5 million. You got to see this. Can you imagine the credit card fees on that? Oh, yeah. That is wild. Hopefully, you've negotiated a fantastic rate with Shopify payments. You have the lowest possible payments. Maybe you're doing ACH at that level. I'm pretty sure Shopify offers something like that.

49:44I'm sure there's something that you can do. But this is a$5 million Patek Philippe Grand Complications, Grandmaster Chime. This is, of course, on Shopify. you save$208 ,000 when you buy it, this Black Friday. No way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That is so generous. $208 ,000 savings if you go with the Grandmaster Chime. I think this is a fantastic one. Great opportunity. If somebody out there really wants to stimulate the economy, this is a great option. I have another. I have another one. So have you ever wanted a supercar? And if you thought, I couldn't possibly get a supercar on Shopify. That's crazy.

50:24I couldn't get a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport on Shopify. No. Well, you can't, but you can get the front end because there's someone that's selling just the front end for$400 ,000. An LLM sourced this for you? Yes. Okay. AGI not achieved internally. What do you mean? This is a$400 ,000 Bugatti front end. What more do you want? I don't understand the problem. I guess this would be cool to use to build out the set here. Yeah. We could use it as like a really tacky table. This is the front of a Bugatti Chiron super sport. And where else are you going to get a front end if you smash your Bugatti Chiron because you're tracking it and you dig it into the gravel, the kitty litter, and you need a new front end?

51:09Where are you going to go? You're going to go to a Shopify store, of course, Jordy. Of course. You go to Shopify for this. The last one is there's a Richard Mill. There's an RM at a different store on Shopify. $500 ,000 for the Richard Mill. Let's see which one this is. I actually did check to make sure that these sites are actually using Shopify. And they are, which is crazy. It's the Richard Mill RM7201 black ceramic rose gold box and paper. Great. $525 ,000 on Shopify right there. You'll love to see it. I would encourage any venture funds out there. an RM would be a fantastic gift, end of year gift, you know, holiday gift for Port Co-Founder.

51:56I mean, only if the Mangusta 165 REV motor yacht is out of stock. True. But yes, I would do that. But an RM that's engraved on the back. Yes. Would be quite a nice holiday gift for like a Series A stage founder. You'd want to go maybe with the yacht for Series B and beyond, but Series A, perfect stage for a holiday. Or you can give them a Bugatti Chiron Supersport one piece at a time. Job's not finished. Job's not finished. But maybe by the time it is, you'll have a full Bugatti. No, it's just like, hey, keep delivering. And you'll keep getting pieces of Bugatti Chiron until you have a full car eventually.

52:37I wonder if you just buy up all the random pieces, if it'll come in at lower. No. It goes way higher. Just the front end was$400 ,000. That's not a$50 million car. I mean, if it's, that feels like a more expensive part of the car, it's probably fully carbon. I don't know. I feel like, what about the motor? What about the drive train? That's going to cost you. What about the interior? There's so many expensive parts. That'll cost you. Oh, yeah. Over on X, I saw a post here from Colin Slattery. He runs a digital advertising agency. Is he blackpilling? What's going on? He's blackpilling a little bit.

53:16Okay, well, before you read this post, let me tell you about Linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Continue. Colin Rock, strong name, says, super slow start in the U.S. so far, referencing his Black Friday. He's also managing the ad accounts for some DSE brands. Colin says, we are seeing the same. But the next post I have here from Jeremiah says, looks like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is perfectly tracking with the last two years, expecting a peak around 11 a.m. Eastern. So again, I don't think I'll be interested to see where today's volume actually nets out.

54:03Obviously, I think Harley had some probably nose to within, I feel like, do you think they could get it within$100 million at this point? 100 percent like at their scale they at this point but past the peak like it's we're three hours past the peak time like there's no shot that they uh that they don't know exactly what's going to happen um just from fitting to the previous curves i mean look at this look at this chart like it's very clear that you know you can fit a curve to the next to like the previous trend and project out i would be shocked but um i mean yes there probably is some error bar and what was he saying 11 billion dollars so within a few million is actually extremely precise yeah i was saying within 100 million within 100 million that's like within one percent like yeah they probably can yeah but not within like the single digit millions um anyway we gotta we gotta get to the bottom of how tiktok is performing on this black friday sean frank is joking around here he says he has a seven figure day because he made seven hundred and eleven dollars on tiktok shop all because of the halo.

55:09Absolutely crushing it. 700. And there's a lot of other, there's a lot of other. It says buy a Ridge Wallet to get my course. Yeah. There's something, yeah, there's something odd. I was hearing that TikTok shop was scaling like crazy. It sounds like it's pulled back. We'll have to, we'll have to ask more people about, are they getting value out of TikTok shop or any of the other vertical video platforms, short form, what's actually working. I would also be interested to see just are people actually timing up influencer marketing to Black Friday sales? Are they ramping on more programmatic platforms?

55:48I'm not. Zach Stuck, who runs a number of different brands, says, officially Black Friday, here's the media mix. So he's sharing a breakdown. He's spending$300 ,000 today,$220 ,000 on Meta,$30 ,000 on AppLovin, 25 ,000 on Google, 20 ,000 on YouTube, and then a handful of other buckets. But yeah, notable that spending more money on AppLovin than on Google or YouTube. Wow. And then David Herman, who's also runs an ad agency, he says AppLovin too low. So he's bullish on AppLovin. There's some people that are super bearish on AppLovin. But every time I talk to somebody who's actually using it or buying ads on it, they're always like, yeah, it's real.

56:33It's fine. It feels like Apple 11 has a weird disconnect with either, maybe it's like retail traders that are bearish or something. Or I've heard from like, you know, competitors being like, oh, it's not going to be true. Well, it's kind of like, I think it's kind of in the Palantir bucket of like fundamentally the business is working and scaling really quickly. But it's at a 103 PE ratio right now. Okay, okay. So it's highly valued. So it's highly valued. But yeah, it's also something something where I think because the Apple Evan brand and logo doesn't show up everywhere, whereas like Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, these ad platforms do.

57:12Apple Evan's like behind the scenes, a little bit below the surface. That just confuses people. And they're like, yeah, how can you possibly make money behind the scenes? David Herman says, cut ad spend so far for Black Friday, Cyber Monday for one client by 48 % year over year. And we're only down 6 % year over year. So interesting, interesting strategy there. Yeah. I mean, it is a big question about like on Black Friday, it is probably the highest intent shopping day of the year. Very much you, you're every, every person on Black Friday, almost all of them, they're not just sitting there being like, oh, I'm bored.

57:50I'm going to go shopping. It's more like, okay, I need gifts for this type of person. And let me work backwards. What brands do I know? What brands do I like? And so they're much more likely to react to brands that they've been seeing messaging from all year. Oh, yeah, I remember that brand. They had a funny Super Bowl ad. And then I saw what they did over the summer. And then I stopped by the store here. And I wound up getting retargeted and put some stuff in my cart over here. But now is the time to go buy. And so I'm going back to my favorite brands. It's not necessarily just the day where you're like randomly scrolling Instagram, clicking on whatever is coming across your feet.

58:25High intent. It's a high intent day, I would assume. David Herman also says, right now, Applovin's pacing has been insanely good, essentially reflecting the ad spend change swimmingly. Meta's not so much. We're down 30 % to 70 % day over day on meta spend despite increasing things 4x. So we increased budget 4x, but the actual spend that's happening is down. And so, yeah, basically, people are having some issues with ad pacing. As you can expect, this is like, I would love to know how much is actually spent on meta ads on Black Friday. I don't know if they disclose, actually break that out by the day.

59:01I doubt it. Someone else says, my Black Friday campaign spent 70 % of the budget by 9 a.m. Eastern. So that can be a problem and these things can get unpredictable. Other fun fact I love about David, he's obsessed with police chases. Did you know this about him? Oh, does he live post them? He live posts them. He's obsessed with watching them. It's like one of these funny, fun facts about him. Anyway, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Fall. Build and deploy AI video and image models. They're trusted by millions to power generative media at scale. Our next guest is Sarah from Favorite Daughter.

59:38We might have to change hats. I have a favorite sun hat here. There she is. Thank you for joining the stream. Thank you for sending these beautiful hats. How are you doing? Hi, guys. I got to tell you, a lot of tech bros texting me up this morning being like, this is so cool. I'm like, all right, all right. Well, our wives said the same thing. They listen to the podcast. They're fans. So everybody's excited. Yeah, we're super excited to have you on. I love it. Harley wrote me. He was like, you know, he's the e-com king. So when he asks, we show up. You know what I mean? We show up. My co-founder is probably watching, by the way.

1:00:18My other known is my little sister. Little sister. She's moving, so she's not joining. Moving on Black Friday. For the tech people that don't know, can you introduce the brand? Can you introduce yourself? How do you actually think about yourself? Do you use the term slash? I guess like we really give like a multi hyphenate a run for its money. We were speaking at a Bloomberg conference the other day and they're like, how do you actually describe yourself? It's weird. You know, we talk about our business as an ecosystem. We have all these things that feed each other. The same girl or guy who's buying Favorite Daughter is listening to our podcast.

1:00:56She is probably following us on socials. She's listening to the pod. She, you know, Aaron created, you know, a global phenomenon and nobody wants this on Netflix. So we got that girl now. It all feeds each other the flywheel. And then from a product perspective specifically with Favorite Daughter, how are you thinking about the shape of the business today? Where do you want to take it over the next few years? How big are the ambitions? I mean, look, we're growing fast. If you had told me that we'd be where we are right now. I mean, I said it at Bloomberg. I can say it now. We're going to do like$150 million in retail sales next year.

1:01:34We were profitable. We were. Woo!

1:01:39whoa i don't know is that tacky to give numbers whatever why do you think we have a gong the people want numbers we have the gong for numbers yeah okay that's cool um yeah so so basically you're saying you made 150 million dollars last year in your bank account it's it's in my account right now as as we speak no i could have never you know i could have never imagined of course i didn't even think that there was a customer from my sister and I, we were like, we're not fashion girls who, who want clothes from us. I could have never fathomed that this is where we'd be sitting now. And it turns out the girl that's not the fashion girl, but that wants to feel chic and cool is our customer.

1:02:20She's us. So I think that's why you've seen probably a lot of, you know, influencer celebrity brands, maybe not scaling as fast as we have is because we are the girl. We're not wearing Dior out in the world, but then telling you to wear favorite daughter, we're wearing favorite daughter out in Yeah, it's authentic. Talk about this year. We live in L.A. It's been, you know, it was obviously a super wild, stressful start to the year. You guys have had a store right in the Palisades. Is that correct? Yeah, we did. And then moving in a few months later, you're dealing with tariffs. I mean, it's been a really stressful year, but how have you guys navigated it?

1:02:58thing is the tariff thing is interesting. I mean, when it's it hit out of the blue, we were like, I'm sorry, and we kind of knew it was coming. But you don't really think it's gonna actually happen, you know. Um, and it really is us the business paying these tariffs. So we had to mitigate real fast. We're looking at, you know, India, we're looking at Turkey, we're looking to move from Mexico, but then it's it's it's changing in real time. Yeah. So it's been a real challenge. and I can't take credit for it. We have an unbelievable team. Jennifer Stender Hawkins, who is like our president, she does everything.

1:03:31She's like, the way that our team came together in that moment was, was iconic. I mean, it was elite. It was elite the way that the team came together and did what they did. And our profit, you know, our EBITDA is looking a lot better today than it was about four months ago. What categories are you most excited about in the future? Started it out with an apparel focus, but I imagine you guys can, in the fullness of time, do everything for your customer, or at least everything within reason. Yeah. I mean, look, our customer wants it all from us. She does. And we're learning that. We didn't know.

1:04:07Everything's been sort of, we didn't anticipate growing as fast as we did. And we didn't try to. We started sort of testing, like, would she want to spend over$1 ,000 for Outwear? Would she? And we sort of dipped into it. And, and now we know she does. We just launched shoes, um, a license with Calaris, because our thing is like, let's partner with the people who do it best. They do it best. Um, accessories is huge for us. Obviously like logo, it's a different girl. The girl buying the logo is not always buying the denim. And we always said the logo is going to pay for the women, for the ready to wear.

1:04:44Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. How are you thinking about, uh, AI, uh, specifically in AI generated content, I feel like you're going to hear from fans directly if they are not cool with AI generated imagery and marketing materials. At the same time, sometimes people want to see how it looks on them. And so they might want to see an AI image do something. Yeah, not all AI is created equally. Totally. I feel like consumers are going to have a massive aversion to AI generated ads, specifically of clothing, because if you buy something and then it fits terribly and you're like, I've been lied to, but then at the same time, AI try-on has been pretty amazing.

1:05:24I mean, look, the thing that we all talk about under the hood, all of us, is how to mitigate returns, how to help returns. That is something that we are talking about all day. So we will embrace the right AI in certain, but when it comes to e-com models, I don't know. I mean, And I think that's where it's going. Of course it is. We spend way too much money and too many days on e-com because we're perfectionists and we want it to look great. But I'm not going to lie. It's expensive and it's time consuming. And if all of a sudden they're introducing ways to change that. But I don't know. Do you guys think the customer is going to – we're nervous about it.

1:06:06I think that customers will want to try on products and see how they look on themselves. I don't think customers are going to be thrilled to be like, oh, I'm considering buying this item. And it's on a robot. Yeah, it's not real. At the same time, the line of AI is getting very, very blurry. There's a debate going on in the video game world right now because one of the biggest video game platform, Steam, has a tag, was this game made with AI? But the question is, what does that mean? If one of the software developers in the game used AI to write a little bit of code, that's very different than being like, we went to the AI and said, like, make a video game.

1:06:47Or, like, the entire characters are AI generated. Like, there's this huge continuum, and I think there'll be something similar where it's like, yeah, if you're at a photo shoot and there's a light stand in the background and you want to remove it, like, you go into Photoshop today, you do content-aware fill. In the future, you do generative fill. You technically used AI. Does the consumer care about that? There's going to be this back and forth around trust. And as long as you're not abusing the material or abusing the trust of the individual, of the consumer, I think you'll be okay. But you have to be more open about it.

1:07:18And I think that's probably where you have an advantage because you have such a direct line with the consumer that you can wrestle with these publicly, essentially, and then set a very clear boundary as opposed to some of the faceless corporations that will have to issue PR releases when they make mistakes. I know. Listen, it's so tempting, right? Because at the end of the day, your customers trust in you, your customers loyalty to you. It's all you have. So we've, we've before AI, we were like, should we start doing headless models? You know, because it speeds up that a lot of brands do it. Moda does it and they do beautiful, you know, everything they do.

1:07:58I'm like, I want it. I want it. So we've wrestled with all the ways to, of course, spend a little bit less, but it's tough. I mean, product, obviously, number one, at the end of the day, none of this matters if the product is not good. So that is like, first and foremost, that is our focus. How can we do better? How can we source better fabrics? How can we do better quality? How can we do better fit? But when it comes, you know, to your question about the AI, it's like, our customer doesn't always even want to see the clothes on me. You know, we and that's the thing like, of course, when I post something or when I push something it sells, but it sells just as well on girls that work in our office who are different shapes, different sizes, different ages.

1:08:38And that's what we've really leaned into in the video. I mean, video is crushing for us. Interesting. It is like video on on the on the page. You're saying like video on the page and in paid. Yeah, sure. Yeah, all of it. I mean, video is video is is. Is that the marketing strategy that you think worked best for you in 2025? Or is there another sort of growth initiative that as you look back on the year, you're really, really happy with how it panned out? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a it's a combination of so many things. But I do think that we hit this sort of this wide open white space for the working woman, you know, Like the biggest compliment, the most, the people that come up to me the most are career women.

1:09:27They're women who go, oh my gosh, my whole law firm, all we wear is favorite daughter because we're offering you chic, elevated, tailored suiting, good quality, but that's not, you know,$1 ,500. You don't have to spend$1 ,500 on a blazer to look great, to show up to work feeling like you look fashionable, like you belong, like you feel good. You don't have to spend that. Yeah. Yeah. How do you think about working with influencers? I feel like you're probably extra sensitive to this, given that you guys are creators and personalities yourself. And you're probably like, you know that you guys represent the brand.

1:10:06So if you're working with another creator, they're representing the brand. And I feel like in apparel, it can be way more sensitive than a supplement brand that just says like, hey, if you like share our values at all, like we'll work with you. yeah i mean you know we've we've really leaned into shop my which is a fantastic company which i actually looked at as an investment which i big mistake on my part um yeah i i i uh i was talking with my wife and she was telling me about shop my and i was like i i i haven't i was like i haven't heard of it and we we've interviewed a thousand companies this year and and i looked it up and i was like oh this is interesting and then the next week they announced like a i think a billion dollar round.

1:10:45So it wasn't on my radar, but they're ripping. It's genius. And it's like, it's made the whole process so much more seamless, to be honest with you. And it gives, you know, moms at home, an opportunity to move product to make a little cash to build some sort of audience. I mean, the celebrities with millions and millions and millions of fans have or followers have not sold as much for us as like a Dallas mom who has like the micro influencer. Yeah. Interesting. Very cool. How much time are you spending on the investing side? And you guys have a fund that you run. What's kind of the focus of the fund and what kind of companies are you really looking to meet?

1:11:30Yeah. I mean, we're a consumer focused fund. It's me, my sister, Erin, and Phil Schwartz is our partner. It's kind of a different kind of model. he well I could go into the weeds but we probably don't have time we're looking at companies that we are the customer for that's it it's very simple that's the thesis it's not only female founders or only you know female that's not what it is it's are we the customer can is our audience going to resonate with this product and it's that simple yeah taste smart makes 10 cents very cool well thank you so much for joining on on such a busy day really fun to have you on.

1:12:09We'll have to have Aaron on sometime soon and congrats to the whole team on all the progress it's incredibly impressive. Thanks guys and congrats to you guys congrats. Everybody loves your show We're having a lot of fun. Cheers. Bye Let me tell you about Graphite.dev Code Review for the Age of AI Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster and we're back in the cowboy hats and we got a cowboy in the studio, Peter Rahal from David Protein. Protein cowboy. Cowboy, how you doing? What's happening? It's great to have you back. Good to have you back. The cod king. The cod king.

1:12:51Yeah, we haven't talked to you since you did the cod. I was talking to Jordy, but I thought I didn't know it was real. It was real. You actually sold cod. Is that correct? Yep. And we still are selling it. No way. Wait, so are people just cooking up cod tacos at home? Where does this go? What if it's actually successful and then you just have to sell cod only? Yeah, I mean. Hard to outsell David protein bars. We don't have the same product market fit. Okay. With frozen blaze of cod. Yes. Amazing. How's it been since we last caught up? I know it sounds like the number one challenge for David is just keeping the product in stock.

1:13:35Is that true? Yeah, I would say building foundation for a big 26, getting the supply chain set up. Yeah, so mostly on the supply side. And this business is a little seasonal. Seasonal? yeah q4 is pretty slow pretty slow new year new you you go on a diet is that the idea well q4 you're just really eating turkeys yeah drinking alcohol um and then yeah january all the shame comes and you just start get on the ground yeah it'd be like uh it's like 50 percent month over month from january or december to january wow yeah how uh how is now that you're what how is it two years into David or around there?

1:14:28One year and three months. One year and three months. Um, how is it different than, uh, the journey, uh, from our X bar, like, like in the first year, it's obviously been accelerated on the capital side, but what, what are the big learnings? Like what's, what, what's the, what's the biggest difference? Um, so our X bar for the first two and a half three years was finding product market fit like sure and then um yeah once we hit it it's pretty similar actually once we hit it it was in 2016 um david was like right off the get-go so like year three of rx bar is like year one of david um and then um I'm trying to think like markets have changed, like marketing tactics have changed, like influencer marketing.

1:15:22Tell me more about the, the, what was the biggest, uh, tactic then? And then what was the biggest tactic of 2025 for you? So Instagram and influencer marketing was sort of the arbitrage. Um, and it was more that the influencers weren't aware of their influence. so um that was like a big mispriced opportunity so so there were opportunities like if you just showed if you just like shared someone like like sent them the product and they would just post about it for free almost or or just small little uh little like checks here and there as opposed to now there's like whole companies that intermediate you know oh this person has this many followers it's going to cost this much it's a whole machine now yeah totally like this is pre-stories, but like if Kim Kardashian posted a story of our expert, you, we would see it right in our sales today.

1:16:14I don't think you see it in your sales. So I think there's like, Oh, interesting fatigue. So, so, so it's actually becoming less effective as well as back then it was potentially underpriced. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Cause there's like novelty of like, Oh, these people that they're like, I haven't seen them promote products. Uh, so, so what is working on the growth side in 2025? Um,

1:16:40that's a good question. I mean, it's, it's, it's hard to attribute to, um, like one thing, you know, um, I, I think the, if you're in the health and wellness space, the health and wellness podcast are great um um huberman of course is really powerful um meta ads are working really well for us um and then like i'm kind of old school like just trial like sending product out sampling like the business is really simple we have a we have a bar it's really easy to sample it and if you do that at scale it really works um and so at scale sampling means you have hundreds of people out in the real world that are going to retail stores and and maybe fitness studios and just like physically sampling or is are you saying more like sending it you know sending out uh sample bars to individual consumers or both both sending up we don't have much retail so sending out individual sample packs to to consumers and influencers and people of influence and then um events doing good good events and micro influencers i heard your previous guest talk about that that like really powerful um because they have credibility um but from a growth like tactically speaking like everything is working for us and it's not to be arrogant it's just that the product's just really differentiated like no that's the key that's the key in cpg i've every time i've invested in a company where i try the product and i go this product is 10 out of 10 it's the best in its category the business just crushes and the founders can you can still make a bunch of mistakes you can you can you can not have the best ads you can not have the best website You cannot even have the best team, but if you have the best product, it just works.

1:18:40People come back. And so if you have the best product and the best execution, you're pretty much unstoppable and you just see this lift across the board. Yeah. And so it's really hard to attribute what's working because it just kind of works everywhere. I know where it doesn't work and it's usually like a price thing. But because our product is expensive. Yeah. What is the plan on the retail side? I'm assuming as soon as you have the inventory, you'll flip a switch and try to be everywhere? Or is there a more specific rollout? Yeah. In January, we're rolling out in Target and Walmart. That's a huge, huge lift.

1:19:22Then we'll be building the majority of the major distribution with great retail partners throughout 26. Yeah. And what about new product, like stuff on the new product side? You've talked before about being a house of brands and that being the way that you get to the multi-billion dollar scale. Any rough timelines you're thinking about? Yeah, we have a new product we're launching in January. Is that fish-based? No, no, it's legit. Is that another fish product? Yeah, it's not. So it's boiled trout now, John. That should be how you haze new employees, like how you ramp them up. It's like to earn a spot on like the core David team, you have to be able to sell fish online, like frozen fish online.

1:20:19On TikTok shop, you have to. Yeah, exactly. You got to hit a million dollars of sales on TikTok shop. So this is a new product under David or it'll be a new brand? Under David, it's a new bar. I'll flash it right here. Oh, leaking alpha right here. First time you've ever seen it. I was hoping you were going to pick it up with like two massive arms. Like it was a Duraflame fill like a cord of firewood. It's like, yes, this has enough protein for an entire year and you can slice off, slice off a chunk as you need. Yeah. So no, no stunts. That's a real product. um let me put on do not stir but um and chat is asking if it's a collab with nature's valley granola you know the crumb one that like you eat it and the crumbs go everywhere that one's so funny it's like it's like a it's a funny it's like a negative trait became a meme that actually brand yeah 100 and you have to imagine that those bars are like 100 carbs basically yeah energy bombs yeah but you know what uh place what are you seeing i know you have a big cpg portfolio what are you seeing on on the portfolio side what's working where are brands doing well where are they struggling uh not everybody can have a product that has as much product market fit as david uh so it's not always i mean i don't i um i don't spend any time on my portfolio and i don't um so i don't know um i've quickly focused on david um so i actually have no idea the one that is sticking out is this thc um boom the willies um oh yeah what is that yeah they're crushing it that was the kombucha the kombucha brand they didn't they like spin yeah it's june shine um and it's like a historic pivot because like the june shine or the hard kombucha tam is like 200 million yeah they pivoted this and it's like really really strong numbers um interesting yeah and i think it's you know macro trend is known people want to get high but they don't want alcohol um and they're seeing all that demand that is crazy uh what's the biggest fish you've ever caught a 33 inch lake trout lake trout we're gonna hit the gong for the lake trout last question uh what's the what's your prediction around 2026 revenue are you sharing any of those numbers.

1:23:06Yeah, I'll share it. Moving target. We should do north of 300 million. Wow. Masterclass. Crazy growth. That's a lot of bars. That's a lot of protein. That's a lot of protein. A lot of protein. We have a great team. Sort of trying to we're striking on all cylinders. How many millions of grams of protein? what will the team look like next year um well next year i mean we're we shoot for two million per head um so that will be north of 150 yeah um we're about 80 80 right now um i try not to comp these things because i find they're really bad um but um yeah we have a great we have a great team and super productive group.

1:24:09Two million ahead. It's good. It's a good benchmark. Keeps you honest. I love it. Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you. Thank you for joining. Always good to have you. And incredible to get the update on the business. No Black Friday talk? How's it going? Yeah. I mean, you mentioned that it's not the biggest day for you. Yeah. What's your strategy going into this? And what's your philosophy even around discounting? Like discounting, we're hearing different things from different people today. I know brands that their max discount ever is 15%, and they're super religious about that. They don't want to train their audience to kind of wait and buy a ton on a specific day because it hurts the rest of the year.

1:24:53But what's your approach? Well, we did this at Rx. We basically conditioned our customers to a quarterly clearance of some sort. So with David, we don't do discounts. Um, and then, um, yeah, so we don't do discounts. We just do a buy four, get the fifth free. And then, yeah, so I think it's important for us as a brand. Um, I think it's a, I think it hurts the brand to be discounting. Um, and then we just bring, we do bring a lot of value, like on a dollars per, um, protein perspective. um so uh and then with black friday uh it's just too competitive and then um yeah so it's even worth it to ramp do you ramp ad budgets at all or do you just let people not a gift yeah we basically we basically just run steady state yeah and we basically kind of hibernate and yeah or november december yep and you know like our sales are today are only going to be down 20 % from an average.

1:25:59Wait, so you're going to have 20 % less sales today, but, but, but less, sorry, explain. So you're just like, you're turning off. So, so we're not say ads are consistent at 15 K. Uh, uh, we're not like, you would think that all the consumer attention is going to Black Friday and our sales would be hurt pretty materially, but they're only down 20 % to a normal. Yeah. Got it, got it, got it. Which I think is interesting because we're not participating and it's actually not that. I thought it would be more impactful because people are just like – People are taking all their dollars to somewhere where they can save 30 % on their favorite apparel brand or something.

1:26:46Yeah, but it makes sense. I mean people need to order consumer staples on Fridays, and then they almost see it – they probably see it as like a different thing. It's like, yeah, I got to order groceries. I got to order protein bars. I got to order whatever my health products are. And then I also got to get that new TV. And then I also got to get the gift for grandma. But I'm not going to forget to get food for myself as well. So I show up and I get food. And then I go and get the TV. And then I go and get the gift for grandma or whatever. That'd be my mental model. I don't know. from a uh as you think about next year from a like how do you think about like just getting enough inventory to support that kind of revenue and how far how far in advance are you kind of uh doing demand planning given that you're you're on a rocket ship um and i know that you guys have a unique unique supply chain and some unique advantages but uh how are you thinking of scaling that up yeah so so since august we've been preparing more or less for 26 so we've we've actually had a throttle back demand to build safety stock to prepare for um to prepare for 26 um so um i always think like in growth like Like we don't have, you kind of want to oscillate between chaos and just like crazy growth.

1:28:07And we had to intentionally do that just to make sure we service and don't have service failures in 26. And service failures are like somebody's a subscriber on e-com and you actually cannot deliver the product. Yeah. And that's a failure. And then it's unacceptable, but it's more on retailers. like with you open up retailers it's a deal and you cannot you can't ship your p if you can't fulfill pos it's a huge problem yeah uh and so there's just not a tolerance for that how are you thinking about the long term of the business like you've sold our x bar i'm sure you know all the potential buyers in the category already uh they kind of know that you're trying they know you're a known quantity uh i'm sure they can dd this really quickly but do you want to ipo the company?

1:28:55Do you want to own it privately forever? Do you see yourself working on this in 20, 30 years? Is this like your life's work? It seems like to pull back from all the investing stuff, like you're pretty into it. Like you, you're enjoying what you're doing, but do you think you'll, do you think that'll be the case forever? Yeah. I mean, speaking personally, um, yeah, I mean, this is basically a platform for me to create new businesses and brands. Um, and if I were to sell it, I would just do it. He'd start another bar company. Yeah, yeah. You're like the ultimate, like, I know one thing guy, which I love.

1:29:28You're like Mark Zuckerberg of bars. Yeah, yeah. Mark Zuckerberg was like, if I sell Facebook, I'm just going to start another social networking. Yeah. And starting is a hard part. Yeah, starting is really hard, so I'd never want to do that. And like the asset becomes the organization, and that's the hard part. So, yeah, I mean, our vision is to create multiple brands to address different consumer needs and help remove a ton of excess calories from American diet. Yeah. And I think going public is something that's like a notch on the belt thing, but I would try to just be objective about it. What about reference points throughout CPG or consumer brand history?

1:30:14are you like i love the red bull model of like all this crazy marketing for a very narrow product do you like the budweiser model where you know the clydesdales come out every uh every super bowl like are there certain brands or founders that you look up to throughout history and draw like inspiration from um i look at mars yeah we're going we're going for mars yeah that's a fantastic one. There's that book, The Chocolate Wars, right? About Mars versus Hershey. I'm blanking on the name, but it's fantastic. All about the development of the M &M, how that was Mars and another company that was like the offspring and they did some joint ventures, crazy business.

1:30:57Yeah. Yeah. I think we're trying to build a house of brands. That's cool. I think Mars is a great role model. I love it. Do you think there's a finite amount of good consumer brand ideas? Um, like, do they come, do they come in like based on consumer preferences and then innovation, like innovation on the ingredient side? Like what are the, cause, cause David was coming into a category that people thought was noisy and, and, and had a number of, of winners. everybody could name like a protein bar company but clearly you came in innovate you know innovative product and and uh have just you know very quickly dominated so i'm assuming like whatever the next brand is it has to fit it kind of has to fit within that same criteria of like it doesn't matter if the category is noisy but there needs to be something that is like durable and differentiated about about the product yeah and i think the the both good thing and bad thing about food and it's similar to fashion like there's always a need for novelty with humans um and both food and fashion there's always going to be room for for something new um the the ugly side of that is there's like product fatigue and so you have staying relevant and innovating is is the challenge um but there's always room um and then there will be different sort of waves or opportunities that come um whether it's a trend or a new ingredient or uh something like that you have to spot um but in general my my approach to something new like we're planting a seed now for something to launch next year and the i would say like the product has to be 30 better like measurably better um brand cannot be a differentiation if i'm sitting here telling you how our brand is differentiated.

1:32:54Like, it's just like so abstract and doesn't mean anything. So it has to be, yeah, materially better than what's on the market. And I personally, I like categories that are sort of boring and would appear to be on the surface, like really competitive. Yeah. Do you spend any time at all thinking about the kind of strength of the consumer? Obviously, David customers are all strong because they're consuming a lot of protein, but more abstract. I think if you are a Mars and the strength and consumers aren't doing well, you're going to see contraction just because you basically are the TAM. And so if the economy is, if demand is falling, you're just going to see lower sales.

1:33:42You guys are growing rapidly in a big category. And so you're not necessarily going to notice the fluctuations. But any feelings around sentiment and overall strength? Yeah. And I feel like in our life cycle, yeah, we're not feeling the pricing issue, but you can tell by the retail. The retailers are constantly talking about it, which is a reflection. And then I always, I tell our team internally, like our product needs to get less expensive and crunchier. Like our portfolio needs to get less expensive and crunchier over time. and that is to address a larger group of customers because price really, really matters.

1:34:23The TAM for a bar will be really set on price. You need to get to the 10 for 10 promotion spot to get to a billion revenue.

1:34:39It's that Nature Valley angle. You're not going to be buying for your family $3 protein bars for everyone to eat. You're going to be buying this 49 cent snack bar. Yeah. And so for sure we think about it and it's becomes as our, as we go down our, our adventure and, and, and our life cycle, it becomes more and more and more important for sure. Well, thanks for taking the time to chat with us. Jason says hello, by the way, to you. Nice. He says, Hey, Hey, Peter. Hey, Jason. Legend. Have a great rest of your day. Yeah, great to get you out. Congrats on all the progress. Thanks so much for coming on.

1:35:20Give us the update. We'll talk again soon. It was fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Fin.ai. It's AI that handles your customer support. It's the number one AI agent for customer service from Intercom. Up next, we have Farhan. Farhan from Shopify in the Restream waiting room. Now he's in the TBP in Ultradum. How are you doing? Congratulations. I'm good. I'm trying. If you're here, who's keeping the servers online? I don't understand it. I thought you had to personally fan the GPUs. Wait, is this Shopify's advantage? The infra team is in Canada, so it's just a regular...

1:35:57It's colder, so the servers don't go on fire. You guys don't do American Thanksgiving, right? Oh, yeah. It's true that we are not on vacation today. I mean, a lot of our American employees are not on vacation today either. Yeah, but this is really why they won, because they're in Canada. It's cold up there, so the servers don't match. During the Super Bowl of commerce, they're locked in. And I'm trying to match you guys with my green sweatshirt. You look fantastic. You look fantastic. Thanks for taking the time out of a busy day to come talk to us. No worries. What are the biggest learnings, changes to how Shopify is doing Black Friday, or just infrastructure or technology this year?

1:36:34Has it been the diffusion of AI or other stuff? What are the big macro trends in your world? Yeah, so a couple of amazing things. One is we don't just roll into Black Friday, right? It's an all-year-round thing. We start planning, like, tomorrow. We'll start thinking about, or I mean, after the weekend, we'll start thinking about Black Friday 2026. And what's crazy about how Shopify's growth is, and really it's all about our merchants, it all comes from the fact that they're doing such an amazing job by creating great products for all of their buyers. And so what happens is there's Black Friday.

1:37:03It's crazy. You see our sphere. You see the globe. We're showing you all the crazy sales. and then by April, May next year, it's just going to be a regular day at Shopify because that's how fast our brands are growing. And yeah, the way we handle it is we do lots and lots of scale tests, man. Like it's crazy. We build up our infrastructure so that if an entire region goes down, we can just shift it to a completely new region and have no impact to buyers emergence. That's amazing. Yeah, I guess talk more specifically about like what part of the business at Shopify is getting less attention than it should right now.

1:37:36Now, obviously, people are focused on big headline numbers. They're focused on the sphere and some visuals. But how much of a role is the Shop app and ShopPay playing this Black Friday as a product that's now been in the wild for a while now? I think everybody listening to this will have used it probably multiple times at this point. But how big of a role is that or other parts of the business playing? Yeah, I would not sleep on the Shop app. It's amazing. Started off as just package tracking, and now I know lots and lots of folks, including myself, where I just start at Shop app to search for something from an amazing brand that is building something specifically for you.

1:38:12I mean, one of my favorite brands right now is this weights company called Motivate, M-O-T-V-8, number eight. And it's got these adjustable dumbbells from like five to 80 pounds. Beautiful. Matches my gym. Doesn't roll away. And I found it on Shop. I would not have found these adjustable dumbbells any other way. And so, yeah, you should look it up right now. I want to see. So we hunted around and we found a yacht for sale on a Shopify store, a 28 million euro super yacht, mega yacht. Somebody set up a Shopify site and they are trying to sell this yacht on Shopify. And I want to see if the shop app has it.

1:38:47We're going to dig in there. We're going to find it. Yeah, we should check. And then, I mean, you mentioned ShopPay. You mentioned ShopPay, right? I mean, ShopPay is the fastest way to check out. And we see, for example, if you just have the ShopPay logo, even if you don't click it, conversion goes up because people trust the merchant. Does that give me some buy now, pay later opportunities potentially? Yeah. I mean, obviously, as you know, we have lots of buyers who want to do a buy now, pay later. We have ShopPay installments, which allows you to do that. I'd love to just pay 1 million euros a month for 28 months to pay for my 28 million euro.

1:39:19Yeah, that would be fantastic. This is the future. I love it. Yeah, ShopPay, I still notice, even though I've been using it for years at this point, like the multiple times, probably a month that I'm willing to actually just buy something on my phone because I know it's going to be so fast when historically I'm like, if a store is not on Shopify, I'm just not going to buy. I'm not pulling out my credit card to buy your thing. I just don't want to do it anymore. Yeah, it's just, it's made really, really anything that speeds up that, But there's always those famous studies about if you cut down the time it takes to do something on the internet, you'll see massive conversion.

1:39:57And we look at it in very abstract, kind of quantitative, 3 % gains for one millisecond over here or whatever. But just the pain of actually having to go and find your credit card and stuff, it just brings actual delight to the entire process. And you have an entrepreneur who's focused on building a cool brand, promoting it with cool people, and the customer's feeling cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, and then miserable. And so if you can pull that out, it's a huge advantage. Yeah, and we see, for example, especially on your phone, right? It's like over three quarters of those checkouts happen on the phone, and you just want to be able to quickly check out.

1:40:32It's a trust builder. And by the way, imagine buying from a site that's not in your region, right? You're buying from Europe. You're in Europe and buying from the U.S. You want to make sure that's a seamless experience, and ShopPay will do that for you. It'll show your shipping rates. You can feel like it's trustworthy. You can see the delivery times. You click. You get the package tracking right away. You get the order confirmation. You get the little cha-ching in the shop app, and everybody's feeling good. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, giving us the update. Cha-ching. Massive day.

1:40:59Massive day. All right. Congratulations for all the progress. Yeah, thanks for keeping everybody online. We appreciate it. Keeping the orders coming in. It's not easy what you do, and we appreciate you. No worries. Unsung hero. Happy to be one. Thanks for having me on. Back to the war room. Back to the war room. Love it. We'll talk to you soon. How you doing? Let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat. GPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. No better day than today to check out Profound. Up next, we have Torrin from Mod Retro. Of course, the makers of the Chromatic.

1:41:35Welcome to the show. Good to have you. First time. First time. First time on the show. Thanks so much for taking the time. How is Black Friday for you? You're obviously focused on the Chromatic this year. Are there other ways that you're merchandising the product? How are you? Is this the best Christmas present ever? This must be huge for you, right? It feels like you kind of made the perfect Christmas present. It's this thing that we, you know, on our checkout flow, we have the post-checkout survey. And I think the biggest thing that we've been learning on this Black Friday is that it's just, it's such a unique and perfect gift.

1:42:12no matter if it's for a child or for somebody who is much, much, much older, because everybody can just appreciate that, that I have one right here, that simple idea of just turning it on. Turn it on. No, you're in the game. No, I was, I was experiencing this. I mean, like there's so many tech products today. And we talked to Palmer about this, uh, where just going from unwrapping it to setting it up to logging in with your, create an account, add two factor, like upload your DNA and all this other stuff. And it's like, can we just turn it on and have fun with it? And it's like, you can, we know we have the technology, but we've forgotten how to do it.

1:42:55And we, and, and fortunately we can make things that just turn on and are fun in this country. Powerful stuff. So, yeah. How is it going? Is it surpassing your expectations just financially? Are you happy with how things are going today? Yeah, it's been amazing. I don't know if you guys have been keeping up with this, but we also just unveiled the design of the M64 today. That's right. Yeah. And so we've seen a pretty massive spike in traffic and inevitably I believe people coming to look at the design of M64 are the exact same types of people who want to play a chromatic. Yep. Yeah, give me the rundown, the best practices for M64.

1:43:34I want it on day one. What do I have to do? And then I obviously want one as soon as I can get one. How do I do that? And then also, should I be digging through old crates of N64 cartridges and making sure that I have those ready to go on day one? yes you definitely should be doing that but we will also be announcing our biggest launch lineup of games that are going to be published in house and again okay just like with dramatic we re-release classic games we remaster classic games and we also make uh brand new games that are that are made by indie devs and things like that that's fantastic um and then what is the what is the value prop?

1:44:20Like, why M64? Why not just go on eBay, get something, get a bunch of adapters? Like, how are you positioning? I, you know, I've talked to Palmer about the Mod Retro Chromatic many times, and he talks about the materials and the screen is all one sapphire glass. I don't understand how it works, but it seems very impressive. And I certainly enjoy it when I look at it. But what are you most excited about with regard to the M64? M64 is, it's just like the chromatic, like with the chromatic, it is, it is the only way to play one of these games the exact way that the game artist intended for it to be seen and for it to be played.

1:45:03That's because, as you said, it has the only pixel perfect resolution display that's ever been made for a Game Boy clone. Whether that's software emulation or hardware devices, it's the only one in the world that has a pixel accurate display but it's a confluence of different factors that make it feel like this very authentically nostalgic experience it's the exact same way with the m64 it's from the translucent colorways and and the way that the design is uh is made for the actual physical console itself but also for the video output we're doing a few things that that add to the authenticity of the actual video out and what the game artists intend for you to see in those games that won't exist in any other piece of hardware.

1:45:55Is that because when the N64 was created, we were using much different televisions, and now everybody has flat screens, and so you need to actually, like, the video out needs to have a better understanding of, like, the final kind of, like, screen form factor? That's exactly right. The funny thing is that upscaling the video out to 4K, which the M64 will do, is actually the really easy problem. The hard problem is how are you going to have a modern M64 console video out to a CRT and to see the game exactly in the way that you used to see it. And that's something that the M64 is going to accomplish with a lagless analog video out as well.

1:46:41Yeah, when we talked to Palmer, he talks a lot about the pixel-perfect jumps that speedrunners do. It's a niche consumer, at least it feels like it is, but it gives me a lot of confidence in the quality of the product. If it's good enough for the speedrunner, like I can't speedrun Mario 64, but if it's good enough for them, it's probably good enough for me. It's probably going to be a good experience. Do you think that there's actually a benchmark where you would like to see the M64 in circulation at something like Games Done Quick, GDC, these different speedrunning competitions? Is that sort of your internal benchmark?

1:47:24If it's actually good enough for the speedrunners, then it's good enough for everyone? the only benchmark is that it is at feature parody in terms of video out and lag and things like that with the original consoles that's the only that's the only benchmark that makes any sense to compare against and so that's what we compare against i yeah palmer talked about that pixel perfect jump and we have slow motion cameras that capture the chromatic versus the game boy color and make sure that that is frame by frame accurate yeah it's the exact same thing with m64 In fact, we will be at GameStop Quick with chromatics and M64s.

1:48:04Amazing. Yeah, so it's already in process. We have questions from the chat. Any plans to do a clear case chromatic? Is that you keeping that in the chamber? Yeah, we get a lot of requests for it. That's what I'll say. What about reactions to more modern hardware? Valve just released the Steam box, the Steam frame. what was your initial reaction? Are you chomping at the bit? 25 years, you're going to be making one? Or are there any other kind of takes or opinions or thoughts that you can share about what that maybe means for the gaming ecosystem broadly? I'm a huge fan. I'm honestly a fan of all gaming harbor, and I think Palmer would say the same thing.

1:48:50For Mod Retro specifically, what we try to do is is kind of dig into the past for these threads that are still relevant today so like in the case of chromatic it's this idea that you can pick up a game and play it and the game doesn't ask anything of you after you're playing it most modern games they're constantly trying to get you to to pay more money after you've already bought the game for example this it's the same reason that you can pick up a Game Boy game that was left in your parents' closet today, stick it into a chromatic and have the exact same experience. That is the thread that we wanted to pull on for chromatic.

1:49:30So I think with mod retro, a lot of the hardware that we're going to make is have these elements of the past that are still valuable today that have just been kind of steamrolled by modern times. it's not to say that the devices aren't modern in their technology stack it's just that it gives you an experience uh that isn't common in in modern hardware ecosystems and so yeah you know all the stuff by valve i'm i'm obsessed with it i love it i'm a customer of it um but the types of experiences that mod retro creates live alongside that for somebody who is interested in gaming yeah and they're also better for people who actually just don't consider themselves to be a hardcore gamer but I still want to buy a round of Tetris on an airplane or something.

1:50:19Yeah. Obviously with Palmer, he can draw a ton of attention to the company, to the category. But what else is working on the growth side in 2025? Have you gotten into performance marketing, doing paid partnerships with other influencers? What does the growth engine at the company look like these days? Yeah, we're just starting to scratch the surface of that stuff because the product with no growth engine behind it at all does pretty well. And what we find is that the biggest thing for Chromatic, for example, is to get it into somebody's hands. And when you have it in your hands, it creates a network effect of other people buying it.

1:51:08especially just, yeah, you can't fully communicate that feel, that click of the cartridge. And it's also a forgotten feel. I think that people remember abstractly liking the Game Boy, liking physical handheld gaming, but they don't quite remember what it actually felt like to feel itself. It's too good. Last question. Anything you can share around the time horizon for the M64 pre-order? You know, when they can pre-order. They're excited. Chad is going crazy. I know. I'm sorry, but not right at this moment, but very, very soon. But there is something that you can do today, which is drop your email and you'll be the first to know if you're on that email list, correct?

1:51:55Drop your email on the wait list, which is on podwrencher.com slash M64. you will be prioritized in terms of shipping timelines. And you'll know the second that the pre-order is ready. We're in the early stages of production on M64. It's just that we don't like to jump the gun too much with taking your money ahead of being able to ship the product. Palmer lived that with the first Oculus. He was probably the most successful Kickstarter campaign in history. and still months of delays, of course. It's heart-wrenching going through that. And yeah, obviously a lot of other lessons. A lot of other companies would have launched the pre-order today.

1:52:38For sure. And it's very mature to say, well, take your money when we have a very fixed timeline. Yeah, it's going to ship next week. Who knows? But subject to delays. Yeah, we don't have the need to take your money ahead of time. We can shoulder the burden of the development and be confident that you're going to love the M64. Well, thank you so much for joining the stream. Congratulations on all the progress. Yeah, great to have you on finally. Have a good one, Tori. Congrats, guys. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

1:53:15You're right. Built by a Shopify alum, and we have a current Shopify, not an alum. We have Harley back with Kevin from Tekova's. in the recent waiting room. Now they're here in the TVP in Ultradome. Sorry, don't mind if I put my boots up on the table. Don't mind if I do, partner. I don't know if I can reach that high. This is actually the second pair of Tecovas I have. Somebody, a very nice enterprising young man who now works for us, came all the way to Los Angeles to interview me. And I think he'd interviewed you or someone from Tecovas because he brought me a pair of Tecovas. And I was like, are you guys sponsored by Tacovas?

1:53:56He's like, no, I just like giving them as gifts to people. And it made a really big impression. I wore them at a wedding in Mexico. It was fantastic. And we gave some Tacovas to a guest and friend of the show recently, Dylan Patel. Oh, yeah. A friend of ours is one of the top analysts in the semiconductor space. So he's always going around to different data centers. We're spreading the word. In the back of pickup trucks. And so we said, you should be wearing Tacovas when you're out on the road. Kevin, your work is done here. You should just log off now. Is that a read at this point? That's great.

1:54:23No, I just actually love it. But yes, how is the day going? Give us the update on your side. What's the latest? And you guys are in the Austin store, is that correct? It's 1 p.m. Pacific, 4 p.m. Eastern. Yeah, I'm here in Austin, South Congress, which is one of our flagship stores. Hall is actually in New York, in our Soho store. So the Soho store right now is packed. It's insane, Kevin. You'd be so impressed. It's amazing here. I was actually looking around going, I don't know if we can do a live interview in here with how crowded it actually is. So hopefully it sounds okay. But yeah, we're doing great.

1:54:54We've actually got a line of about 50 people still outside the door. We've had that since we've opened this morning. So just a constant stream of traffic. And things have been going just fantastic for us. We're having great sales online, great sales on all our stores. It's a great Black Friday so far. You'll be happy to know that Chanel is right across the street. And your line here at the Tacoma's and Soho is longer than the Chanel line across the street. I don't know what that means. I love how competitive you, Harley. But just to say, Chanel is not on Shopify. I knew you were going to say this.

1:55:25Correlation, conversation, guys. It was ridiculous. Well, Kevin, it's great. How did you guys first meet? You guys were born on Shopify, or did Harley bang down your door? Shame you publicly into getting on. So I've been on Shopify for almost 10 years now. Wow. And I've definitely, I guess, grown up on Shopify. But actually, the first time that Harley and I did something together, he basically said that he wanted me to do a little fireside chat with him in front of a top 100 Shopify employees on a retreat they were having. And he wanted me to tell them how Shopify sucks. And I told Harley, I'm in.

1:56:11Do I only get an hour? I don't know, four or five years ago. And so it was great. It was a great opportunity to get closer with all the product leaders at Shopify. and really talk about some things that we have on the outside. And it just was an awesome experience to get more embedded with that team. You know, I'm sure you guys have this also. I'm sure there's some, like, advertiser partners that you guys have that they're constantly just giving you great feedback. That's Kevin for Shopify. Kevin will text me at, like, Saturday night at 11 o 'clock and say, I have an idea about subscriptions. It may have nothing to do with Tecova's, but there's constantly this, like, incredible feedback loop.

1:56:44The one thing I will say that Kevin's quite modest, so I'm going to say it for him. You guys remember that era of retail where for some reason every store for a while had like a cafe and then eventually had like a DJ booth? Every store had it. And you kind of went in there and you're like, this doesn't feel right. It feels inauthentic. Tacovus is kind of the opposite of that. For some reason, and I think they're very intentional about it. I'm sitting at the bar right now where there's literally bourbon beer being served to all these people to get them drunk so they buy more boots and cowboy hats.

1:57:15It feels so authentic here. There is this like je ne sais quoi about the brand that makes them, the way that they handle themselves, the way that they build their stores, there is a certain thing that they do that I think is exceptional. Actually, I think like, and we're joking about Chanel, but like I think Chanel like lost a little bit of that. I think, you know, a lot of the luxury retailers want to, you know, try to expand it. Be careful how hard you go on Chanel because they're going to come on Shopify and next year you're going to be here being like Chanel is back. They never made a misstep in their life.

1:57:47I'd love to know. And just to piggyback on us, that's a mindset we have here called radical hospitality. And we are always looking for ways to kind of better serve our customers. We do have open bars and all the retail stores. I'm also sitting here at the Austin bar. That's great. Drinking a glass of whiskey. We do branding and customizations. There's actually, we have branding irons. Branding irons. In the store with floor torches. Yeah. And we will heat those branding irons up and kind of stamp the boots right there. We've got a boot shine station as well. And so really trying to create moments for people to come into the store, even if they're not looking to buy and just hang out and just create an awesome experience one there.

1:58:26The thing I'm most curious about is like how like how do you how do you view your role as CTO of a retail brand when you're powered by infrastructure like Shopify? We were talking with Harley earlier. I think a lot of CTOs of some legacy brands would say like, no, I'm going to own the full stack. That's my job. I don't want to let it go. Kevin, this is Kevin's favorite topic. Let's go. Yeah, I figured because there's so much more that you can do as a technical leader that's not just like the core commerce engine. There's so much more that sits on top of that. There's so many things that you can optimize, marketing, et cetera.

1:59:05But I'm curious how you view it. Yeah, there's no reason at this point, sure, we need to have a completely custom from the ground up built tech stack. I'm almost looking at it as I'm like the conductor of a symphony or an orchestra, you know, trying to bring together a bunch of different puzzle pieces and operate at a higher level. You know, we have obviously Shopify as our commerce platform. We have RFID deployed in all of our stores. We have email and text messaging and advertising and data feeds and AI now that we need to plug into different parts of the organization. Our retail business is absolutely taking off.

1:59:41And so there's a bunch of interesting kind of retail, physical technology challenges that are out there to solve. So I'm certainly thinking in a bigger picture. I don't want to be standing here at my own commerce stack. And Farhan handle all of those problems, and I stand on top of his shoulders on days like today and make sure that we're operating at the best efficiency possible. How much is that? Sorry, I was going to say, can you tell us how today's going for you? Yeah, it's going great. We have set multiple records in terms of orders per hour. I think we're on our six straight hours of breaking that record there.

2:00:17Six straight hours. Yeah, which is fantastic. Obviously, Black Friday is always our biggest day of the year, and we're seeing some fantastic growth year over year. And everything's running great, Farhan did a great job with the systems on his side. You don't keep the push notifications on the Shopify app anymore? I mean, I had to turn those off like nine and a half years ago. It's been a long time since I had the little bell on my phone going off there. Where are you getting leverage from AI on the engineering side? Are you using it to spin up landing pages faster? Like, where are you getting an edge there?

2:00:56Yeah, we're actually doing exactly that. My entire engineering team also is using Cursor and Cloud and a few different tools to be more efficient on that front. We also just deployed a tool here in retail called Invent AI, and it's designed to optimize all of our retail inventory for all of our weekly transfer orders and replenishments that we need to do to all of our retail stores. So we're still in a bunch of things for us that used to take three or four people a couple of days to bring together in spreadsheets now at our scale. And we've completely optimized that now with an AI system that we've been seeing some great leverage on here as we've run up the holidays.

2:01:33What about customer service? Because I feel like there's the natural progression of, you know, you have some knowledge base, then you have a whole bunch of back and forth and emails, like smart email responses. What are you doing there? Yeah, our CX team has been working hard on our AI assistant agent on the website. Our ticket volume that actually is making it to humans is down significantly year over year. Our CX team and our Black Friday channel is actually like, hey, things are going really smooth this year. And part of that's just because we've been able to offload a bunch of those requests directly to that agent.

2:02:08And so that's been super valuable for that team to be lean and efficient during our biggest time of year here. Yeah, let me sit in 10 seconds. Uh, what's your, uh, if you can share this, what's your, what's your biggest store by volume? I'm sitting in it here. Austin South Congress is definitely our biggest store. Nashville will give it a run for its money, depending on the day, depending on the country music concert that might be going on. But, yeah, our flagship here in Austin is our largest full-time. Is it twice as much from a gross revenue standpoint as, say, like a Manhattan, or is it closer than that?

2:02:46That's a good question. Yeah, so Soho, we've only been open for about three months now in Soho, so that's still a relatively new market for us. as we're growing and investing kind of up into the northeast here of the country. And we're super excited about that Soho store. It's an incredible – and honestly, I think it's probably our best store we ever built. We've kind of taken the best of it. It's beautiful in here. Like the floorboards, for example, Lee, like it is really spectacular. Can you actually talk about what your issue with opening these stores and like the free bar issue? Because I think the boys would love to hear like that issue.

2:03:19Yeah, I can't actually say that we have alcohol in every store. and there are some menus that are slightly curated in certain markets because we actually run into issues with certain city councils and kind of legalities in that area where they don't really have like a license for a retail store to offer hospitality, liquor, and a shopping experience without food also being served. And so we've had to get creative in some cases. We've had to actually spend some time with different city councils in other cases. and it's just... Let me explain how we do things around this retail store. Well, it's just the reason I love that story is because the genius of Tacovus and business models like this is that the traditional kind of city councils, they can't put them into any box.

2:04:07They don't know what to call them. Like the traditional, like it's a store or it's a place to hang or it's a saloon or it's a place to come and just like, you know, get your boot shine. Like they can't figure out what they are and I think that's, I think business models that are difficult to explain in that way, usually the ones that are most interesting. What's been your guys' policy around using AI on the content side? Any strong opinions or guidelines that you've been following? We've been asking some other founders. Yeah, that's a good question. We have not gotten to the point where we have deployed any AI-produced content into any of our ads for free.

2:04:46We've certainly used it to help brainstorm and come up with ideas of how things could look or, you know, get some storyboards or things like that. We haven't gone all the way off like the Coca-Cola rails here and like a weird AI ad. That's not something that we want to get to right now. We think the ads that we have right now are fantastic. We've actually got an ad that's probably airing right now in the Georgia Georgia Tech game. We've got an ad tonight in the Texas Tech and MN games. And those ads like to have storytelling elements to them. They're super gritty uh they fit real naturally into like landman and yellowstone and some of the other uh big uh commercial brands that we're sponsoring and being a part of um and we we couldn't be more happier with uh what we're doing right now from a creative perspective uh i'm curious how how much is uh counterfeiting an issue for you guys because we are now dealing with counterfeiting we just saw this morning somebody included a tbpn merch in a gift guide that they were doing that's not we We haven't sold any merch ourselves, but people are making counterfeit goods.

2:05:48I'm sure you guys have a bunch of issues with that, but I wonder what the approach is. I mean, I feel like I need to knock on wood right now. It's not a huge problem we're dealing with physically. We do see it more digitally with ripoff sites and scam sites that kind of pop up around the web and even the dark web. Yeah, and so we've got a partner named Bolster who helps monitor those kind of site developments in real time. They also help issue takedown notices and bring those things down as fast as possible. And really, since we probably started using that tool now three years ago, and it's something that I don't really even have to think about too much now because it's just up and running and serving as our frontline defense.

2:06:25That's great. We probably need to sign up for that. Can you talk a little bit about sort of this? How many stores do you have now? 40? 50? Five? Yeah. The pace, I mean, that's unbelievable. the pace you guys are opening right now is kind of unbelievable um can you talk a bit about how the relationship you have like i think it'd be valuable for for uh those listening and watching just how you think about like channels and like you know traditionally you think of channel conflict online turning offline with cowboy boots you kind of want to go into the store first to try it on but subsequent purchases maybe can be down the line you have a very i think a really great way to kind of think about that and how you think about expansion can you talk about how when you sit around and you think about where to go how to expand what what channels are producing How do you guys look at all that?

2:07:09Yeah, totally. So, you know, we started only as D2C. So we're website only for five or six years. And we got into retail, I think, like, it was December before COVID, which is a terrible time to start retail business. And basically opened eight stores and immediately closed them. But we kind of survived. We survived, obviously, that year and came back super strong from that. You mentioned cowboy boots. It's a very unique first-time purchase for someone who has never purchased a cowboy boots before. and can even be slightly intimidating. And so having a brick and mortar retail store to come in and get that experience, get that splitting, kind of understand how that boot is supposed to feel when you're wearing it is a massive unlock for us as a brand.

2:07:50Today, our retail business is larger than our e-com business. Both are super healthy, but retail is actually scaling even faster. So we're seeing fantastic results there. We actually see when we open a new retail store in a new market, we may actually see e-com dip just slightly when that store opens because there's so many customers which we wanted to go to the store because they've been waiting so long to actually have that experience in real life, which is, I think, a unique attribute of ours. Obviously, the whole market lifts over time, which is great. And then we've also just recently started partnering with specific wholesalers.

2:08:24So we see a great opportunity to go outside just of our direct channels and meet the customer where they're at. Cowboy Boots have been around for 150 years, and there's lots of great independent Western dealers out there that we're excited to get our products into And we certainly don't look at it as channel conflict. If we can get someone in a cowboy boot, we don't care what channel it comes from. And we know over time we're going to lift the whole market. So we don't really talk about that at all. Are you taking market share from anyone? Are you taking market share from a different company? Or is it like non-consumption you're competing with?

2:08:52Yeah, I mean, I don't want to talk bad about anybody, Harley. But there's only one line here today on South Congress. But there are multiple boot shops here on the street. Shockily in Soho, there's not that many boot shops. Yeah, our store is the most crowded. What about international? Are you guys thinking about, like, what country do you think will buy more cow or could come close to buying cowboy boots at the level that Americans can? Yeah, that's a good question. We still have not tapped international at all. So we are still United States only and still, I think we have a very large green field internationally.

2:09:29internationally. If you look at markets like Canada and Australia and Brazil and Mexico and Spain, Germany even has a pretty big team there. So we think there's a great opportunity for us to continue to expand internationally, but we also want to do it in a thoughtful way. We want to do it in a profitable way and make sure that it's the right decision for us to go that direction. Makes a lot of sense. Got anything else? Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for taking the time. You seem like you're just cruising through. Yeah. He's like, he's steady Eddie. He's getting things crazy, but throw the boots on the desk and just enjoy the rest of the day.

2:10:11I need the CTO who's on Shopify. It's not going down. This is my 10th Black Friday on Shopify. Wow. Amazing. We've come a long way and things are going really well. That's awesome. This is my 16th Black Friday. Almost half my life. This is great. honestly i'm not just saying this kevin because you're on the call but like you'd be so proud the store the staff here are doing amazing you can feel the energy people are just hanging out in the front there are people that are having um you know their their shoes their boots personalized you got a lineup of people drinking bourbon here you'd like as from one entrepreneur to another man like you should be really proud of this okay last question one more question for you you gotta ask what's the biggest fish you've ever caught kevin you know i i heard the last question you asked that I mean, I think I probably caught maybe like a five-pound catfish.

2:11:00Okay. Okay, catfish. Nothing wrong with catfish. That's on brand, catfish. Did you eat the catfish? I feel like if you catch it, you eat it. It was a catch and release situation. Okay. There you go. First catfish. Had to just feed it and put it all. That's the first catfish. We need to start putting them up on the wall when we get different fish that people catch. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us on such a busy day. Happy Black Friday. Yeah, I appreciate it. I appreciate it, Jordan. Thank you for those wonderful boots. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Cheers.

2:11:30See you soon. Look at that. Look at that, Dragger. Oh, we have a new record. We're up to$4.2 million in sales every minute, right? Isn't that it? It's every minute. Millions per minute. Wow. That is a fantastic amount. Well, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-ass investing, and they're trusted by millions. apparently someone found a company that might be slightly worse at naming than open ai i believe this is samsung have you seen this so they have a q5 max plus q5 pro plus q5 pro q7 max max plus max pro ultra have you seen these i think these are different phones it really makes you appreciate how how hard apple works to create like a logical flow between all of the different phones like Like, it really shows you that when you're like a massive company, it's so easy for it to get away from you.

2:12:26Because you're like, oh, yeah, there'd be like massive demand for like a mini pro version. And you're like, okay, yeah, let's do it. Whatever, let's green light it. And then you wake up and you realize you have 75 different permutations. And that's what people are doing. This, Hermes versus Gap.com, I thought it was somewhat relevant to Black Friday. uh airmez is pulling 25 million visits i guess per month or i guess from august to october so for that quarter 25 million gap 200 million so gap 10 times the viewership basically or the visits than airmez um and of course people are uh are this is in reaction to the difference between claude and perplexity in the app store claude has 33 000 five-star reviews perplexity has 370 80 ,000 five-star reviews is number 14 in productivity.

2:13:20Pretty remarkable results from perplexity. I think a lot of this has to do with the pricing strategy. I think there's a lot more to the free tier of perplexity, whereas I was even just trying to randomly pull up Claude just to run a quick test. It hit me with a sign-in page before you could even fire off a single prompt. A lot of people use perplexity. A lot of people use perplexity, and there's a lot of channel partnerships. Credit to perplexity. You heard Harley mention that they have a partnership. As much as ChatGPT is AI to most people out there, there's a lot of people where perplexity is AI to them.

2:13:59Totally, totally. They've done a really good job. Yeah, we'll see how they can continue to hold on and scale that user base over time. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Numeral.com. Let numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance. Compliance is handled so you can focus on growth. I wanted to share a potential gift for the AI lover in your life. The Welch Labs Illustrated Guide to AI. If you pre-order on or before December 15th, it'll ship. A lot of graphs in here. A lot of graphs. I thought this was interesting. I've seen this person on YouTube and it just seems like a fun, interesting book.

2:14:41I like these types of books. It's like almost a textbook, but a lot of interesting graphs just documenting some of the AI things. Also, I mean, if you need books, Stripe Press. I mean, you really can't go wrong. There's so many beautiful books there, so many interesting books about technology. Put some Stripe Press under the Christmas tree. I would agree. I think that's the way to do it. What else? What else? We have – this was crazy. We covered Giant Slalom, the FBI operation, to find Ryan Wedding. They were able to capture his 2002 Mercedes CLK GTR. And I put this in here because I thought it was a good gift idea.

2:15:25I know. Are they going to auction this off? Just get a 2002 Mercedes CLK GTR. The trouble is, if you're one of the world's most wanted men, it's kind of hard to be whipping around a Mercedes CLK GTR. It's going to turn some heads, for sure. You could make your own track. You could wind up turning police heads. It is a massive, massive car. The back of this car is just remarkably long. Just what an exquisite, exquisite vehicle. I love it. This feels like an under-discussed. You know, the Carrera GT gets a lot of love. The F40, LaFerrari, Enzo, like those get a lot. This is, it blends in almost like too much.

2:16:09But, I mean, obviously there are some people that has a ton of fans. But very, very, very cool. Well, if you, you know, if you're not living a life of crime, you've got to automate compliance and security on Vanta. It's the leading AI trust management platform. Look at that stinger for Vanta. That stinger. New Vanta stinger. Cath Corvex says, when my husband asks how many Amazon packages are still on the way. It's a quick clip for a meme from Ilya. There are so many good moments in this. Because the answer to that question will reveal itself. I think there will be lots of possible answers. You know, people were kind of dunking on Ilya for having this like vague response to Dwarkesh asking him, how will SSI make money?

2:16:52and I was just like, this is the most, like, this is not a bad answer. This is the perfect answer because he literally did this. He went to OpenAI for 10 years. They just worked on research and then wound up with a massive consumer business. They wound up with a consumer tech company that makes$20 billion a year in revenue. Did you read some of his answers though as they will likely release a product before? People were saying that. I don't know. No, I don't think so. I think he's actually just going to do the open AI thing again. He did it in open AI. People are like, how could he possibly be so vague that like, you know, he's vague posting, vague podcasting, thinking that like the answer will reveal itself.

2:17:32It's like, well, that's exactly what happened the last time he was in this role. He was in the role of, hey, go research. You have basically an unlimited budget, more or less, because there's just nonprofit dollars coming in. You can pay the bills. You're going to keep scaling up, doing experiments, do whatever. and then at the last possible second, once he'd done a lot of good AI research, someone came in and said, hey, why don't we wrap a chat box around that and put it on the internet? And then boom,$20 billion business. And so for him to be saying, yeah, we're going to run it back, it seems very logical to me.

2:18:07It seems like, yeah, that's a great plan. Although,$36 billion valuation, I'm sure that there are some reasons why people are like, oh, this is capital incineration, blah, blah, blah. But I don't think it's that crazy given that he literally just did this. If you need a place to park$3 billion in AI, I think it's as part of a basket of companies. I mean, it's certainly like a venture style risk. Like it could be a zero. But just like if anyone else was giving that pitch of like, oh, we don't know how we'll make money, blah, blah, blah. I'd be like red flag, but like not with Ilya. Like Ilya is the one person who's extremely qualified to say, we do a bunch of research and then we figure out how to monetize it later.

2:18:47and it actually works because it worked the last time. Did you know about this movie, Battle Royale from Japan? Tim Sweeney's posting about it. Yes, I haven't seen it, but I'm familiar. Battle Royale movie from Japan. Yes. It inspired movies like Hunger Games and games like PUBG and Fortnite. I've played PUBG. I've played a little bit of Fortnite. Player Unknown. Yeah. Battle Royale. And then it was adapted into the Hunger Games, of course. But I like that Quentin Tarantino, this post from Variety says, Quentin Tarantino starts to reveal his 20 best movies of the 21st century. This is how you reveal a list.

2:19:27This is what they should do with the Midas list. Should be like, they're starting to reveal it. He didn't tell the top 20. He just said, here's 11 through 20. You'll have to tune in next time to my next Variety article. I like it. It's a really good bait. Because now I'm like, well, what's his number one? I got to know. And he'll be like, okay, number 10, number nine. It's a great way of keeping somebody on the hook. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Our next guest is already in the restream waiting room.

2:20:02We have Nish, right? My dear friend. Your dear friend. I think we ran into each other. Did we run into each other in Nobu? How are you doing? Yes. Welcome to the stream. What's up? What's up, guys? How are you doing? How locked in are you right now, the last 24 hours? This is it, man. This is the Super Bowl, dude. It is. No sleep. It really is. Did you really not sleep last night? Did you get a couple hours at least? I'm joking. Thankfully, we have a team that does this kind of stuff now, so it's not that bad. Yeah, but I mean, some companies, it's like January 1st is their Super Bowl because it's like people are getting in shape, new year, new you.

2:20:36Other stuff, heavily gift-driven, so Black Friday is really big, heavily discount-driven. Where do you sit on the computer? How much bigger is Q1 than Q4 for you guys? Q1 is always bigger than Q4, especially the health and wellness space. So like they call Q1 really Q5. And so everyone's like, you know, ramping up towards Q1 January to March is your Super Bowl for sure. But this weekend is still going to be a really, really large weekend. And like these next four days, people are going to be like, the buying intent is just so high. So everyone is just really excited to purchase regardless. But even after this, December is usually a little bit of a lull in the health and wellness space, but you're still spending and building awareness.

2:21:17And then Q1 is just like, you know, that's where you're making as much money as possible. Yeah. Take us through the product set. Before, before, give an intro on yourself and the company. We're close friends. I don't want to skip over it for the audience. So yeah, introduce yourself and the company. Yeah. Hey guys, my name is Nish. I'm one of the co-founders of a company called Array. I started company with my wife and we're basically a um targeted supplements for unsexy problems so we started the company five years ago our hero product is bloat in the digestive health kind of category and since then we've expanded across multiple women's health uh problems so metabolic health sports performance digestive health and uh we have very few skews but we do you know nine figures of revenue um of um as a business and we're five years old so yeah oh well uh there we go

2:22:10And you guys have, you raised one round back in the day? Yeah, we raised like a really small, like a couple million dollars, super small seed round maybe three years ago, something like that. Yeah, we've been profitable since. Insane. What's been the strategy this year? I feel like other categories in e-com have had like more volatility this year, just like given the trade war and all that stuff. But how's it been so far? No. Okay. So the first half of this year was completely different than the second half of the year. So the first half, something about just buying sentiment was a lot better.

2:22:46And so the way you're able to grow these consumer businesses and just marketing in general was really efficient, really strong growth. Second half of the year has been really interesting. Something has changed in just like macro environment where people are not spending as much money just buying things online anymore. And so I'm noticing this across the board. If you look at like macro 10 data, look at even retail category data, just customer acquisition costs have really, really gone up. Meta acquisition costs have really gone up. Brands are still growing, but it's just harder than it was in the first part of the year.

2:23:16That's for sure, yeah. And so to counteract that, you guys are launching new products. You launched Target. Walk us through that. Yeah. So for us, you know, launching new products has always been a really big part of the strategy. I think innovation is so important because without innovation, you just can't really build the company and you kind of die. So we're always launching new products, but we try to launch very few products that have a really large TAM. And so this year we launched a Tone Gummy, which is basically creatine that was built in a form factor and has certain additional ingredients that is really geared towards women.

2:23:49And so a lot of women were so scared of taking creatine and so scared of bulking up. And so let's make this more approachable for them. That was a really strong product for us. we have another clear protein product in the protein category protein's been like going crazy this year uh so that was like that was another really big launch we have a clear protein with electrolytes in it so that did really well and uh and then more recently it was a product line extension we have a really strong mb1 metabolic health product and so we did that as well but the biggest thing for us is we've been expanding heavily into retail just because that's where the next kind of phase of growth comes from so we've went nationwide through target nationwide as Sprouts.

2:24:26Those two are really big launches. No, it's been a crazy year, man. Crazy year. What about online channels? How are things on TikTok Shop? I know we were in the Alps in December, January, and you said it was insane at that point. Has it kept up? I know that they subsidized demand on TikTok Shop? That's been my understanding of it. Has that continued? How are you thinking about it as part of this acquisition that's going on, all that stuff? TikTok is actually pretty insane. TikTok Shop is this crazy platform where you can go from doing nothing to doing multi-million dollars a month in three months.

2:25:09That's what happened to us. When we were in the Alps story, we were just ramping up. By March, we were doing seven figures per month just on TikTok shop. And so that was like, it was really, really cool, really fun. But what's crazy about it is the amount of investment that you need to get that going is just a lot. So TikTok is interesting because you get this virality, you get this insane amount of impression share, and you're really banking on the halo effect it has on other channels. So when TikTok goes viral, you're not really making any money on TikTok, but you're making money on Amazon, in retail, and even a spillover effect on DTC.

2:25:46And that's where you're seeing the results. So the thing about that is you do it, you know, you're not going to make a lot of money, but you got to like staff up and get really complex on like incrementality and just your overall marketing strategy and just getting really good at measurement. So, you know, where you're making money. But TikTok shop is really interesting because it's actually changed Black Friday behavior quite a bit. It's in a position where it's a constant deal seeking, like throughout the 12 months of the year, because they have so many sales and so many promos happening all the time.

2:26:17And so consumers on TikTok shop are like, okay, I'm just going to go look for the best deal. And I'm just going to go look for whatever creators are telling me are the best product, but also the best value. And so it's like really changed things because, you know, you really don't want to be on sale all the time, but you kind of have to be if you want to play competitively on that platform. But it's still really interesting because you can have certain products that are like really meant for TikTok shop, other products that you're kind of on your DTC and you're cross-selling, upselling, but it's a strong platform.

2:26:48Once it gets going, there's no denying the halo effect it has on everything else. Makes a lot of sense. How are you navigating growth and profitability? I know you've been generally profitable for a while now, but you still have your foot on the gas from a growth standpoint. What's that been like? I think right now we've been profitability first more than growth. And so we've just been like, okay, no matter what, even with the BFCM, even when we're doing these large sales and whatnot, we're not going to go above a number if you're going to become unprofitable. Now, obviously, that profitability takes into account a lot of LTV and it's a mechanic zone.

2:27:28We don't mind losing money as long as we're sure that we'll make money back within whatever, one, two, three-month payback period. So we'll have that type of mass and give the best possible value to the consumer. So we've still been very healthy LTV on that note, but it's interesting. I mean, we've been expanding so much in retail and all that kind of stuff. You just need money to grow that machine and you just need to market a lot more. So there's a world where regardless of how profitable you are, just the pure dollars needed to, you know, market. Scale into retail. You just really need money for that.

2:27:59So we're considering, okay, you know, how much do we need to increase that marketing budget by maybe reducing profitability even more and just like spending more because it's what you need to get successful. There's a flywheel effect that we'll take in later. so I'm sure this might be made later on that but right now we're profitability first but I think we'll maybe be more lenient on that even going into next year just because you want to grow the business more especially with the channel increasing. Do you track revenue per employee? We had David, not David, Peter, Peter, Peter Protein from David.

2:28:35He was saying he looks to keep like a couple million of revenue per employee? Is that something that you think about at all or just kind of a vanity metric? Yeah, we do actually. We do. We're probably like one of the leanest. I think we're sitting anywhere at like somewhere in the two to three million dollar range on revenue per employee. So like that's really, yeah, it's been really good. Maybe a bit too lean though, but yeah. It's incredible. I've had a front row seat to watching Sif and Nish, Bell DeRay and and just absolute, absolute monsters. Someday you'll go on like a nice podcast tour victory lap when it's all, when it's all over.

2:29:13But yeah. Awesome, dude. Well, thank you. Thank you for taking the time out of the day. Say hi to Sif and the whole team and I'll see you soon. Thanks guys. See you soon. Have a good one. Cheers. Our next guest is already in the news. What you got? I was just going to say, Nish is just the epitome of golden retriever. matching. He's an absolute animal. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. We will take it over to Figs. I believe we are inside of a store.

2:29:57There we go. Is this a virtual backdrop or are you actually in the store right now. I'm so confused. I am actually in the store. We're at our brand new store on Upper East Side here in New York City, and we just opened. Congratulations. Amazing. Good timing. Hit the gong for the store. There we go. What is Black Friday like in your category? I'm assuming a lot of your a lot of your consumers are like it's a normal work day is that true how do you guys approach the holiday yeah that's exactly right at FIGS you know we are building a brand exclusively for healthcare professionals and many healthcare professionals they're working the holidays they were working all day yesterday through Thanksgiving and they're working nights and weekends all the way through the new year.

2:30:55And so for us, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, it's really a moment for us to show up for them. These are the people that are showing up for all of us. And so we really approach this moment as a moment of gratitude and a moment to give back to our community. How are you positioning gifting the product? I can see, you know, it is a professional outfit, but it's also a product that people love. And so if your family member gives it to you, They're kind of giving you more work, but also it's a very nice thing to give. So how are you positioning the marketing around who should be participating in Black Friday, the gift giver or just the person who's shopping for themselves?

2:31:37Well, it's all of the above. I think everyone wants to thank all of the incredible healthcare professionals in their life for people that are being treated and cared for by healthcare professionals. And so it goes both ways. I think, you know, healthcare professionals are able to use this as a moment to stock up on their essentials and the uniforms that they need to wear every single day. But at the same time, Figs is a really premium brand. We've completely revolutionized the way healthcare professionals get dressed for work in the uniforms that they're wearing. And so it also is a really nice gift for, you know, someone to gift another healthcare professional or, you know, to gift the healthcare professional loved ones in your life.

2:32:20And so it really is all of the above. And I think it ties back to this feeling of gratitude, giving thanks to, you know, the most incredible people on this earth that are saving lives and carrying diseases. And so we position it both ways, both as a moment to stock up for yourself, but also as a moment to give back. What's the biggest, what was the biggest unlock this year from a marketing perspective? What was one campaign or strategy that you feel like as you look back on 2025, you feel like it went particularly well? Oh my gosh, we've had an epic year. It's been so awesome. And I think one of the things, and I was reflecting on it with a moment like today, Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

2:33:04For us, it's not just about these moments. It's about how we show up 24-7, 365 for our healthcare community, who we call autism humans. This year, we launched a year-long campaign called Where Do You Wear Figs? And it talks about all of the places that healthcare professionals wear things, which is literally everywhere. It's before their shifts, after their shift. It's to work every day. And so we've had a series of chapters throughout the year celebrating Women's Month, celebrating Nurses Week. most recently celebrating the holidays. And we've really shown the insides of what it's like to, you know, work within this industry and the space and all the different places where our brand shows up.

2:33:47And so I think what's so important on a moment like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is that, you know, you're building this brand equity and you're building this connection with your community throughout the year. And then that pays off in these big moments. And so showing up for them, listening to them, telling their stories throughout the year, which we've done with our Wordy Morphix campaign has been really incredible for us. And this is just another moment to celebrate that. Well, congratulations on all the progress on the epic year. And thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

2:34:19Yeah, thanks for bringing us into your new space. It looks amazing. Quite busy in there. Yes, it's packed. We have nurses coming in for hot cocoa. It's been really fun. Very cool. Very cool. Well, good to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. And let's go back to the timeline. The folks over a deal were having some fun.

2:34:57Have you seen this? This is an interesting trend. And I have Aaron resource, HR executing on this strategy very well. They say, I noticed one employee wearing noise canceling headphones, not earbuds. The big cushion over ear kind that create a tiny personal universe. I asked if everything was all right. He said, yes, he's just trying to focus. You do this in the morning. I do. You throw on your big earbuds. I told him we value focus, but isolation can misread as resistance to collaboration. He said he's literally sitting at his desk doing his job. I told him we track human presence, not just output.

2:35:34He asked how presence is measured. I said imperfectly, which is why it's so important. Then I logged, quote, avoiding spontaneous culture-building opportunities in his engagement profile. 10 million views. 50 ,000 likes, and it's an ad for deal. And it's so interesting because it feels like it's part of this new trend. There's that European VC guy who's really funny, who I believe is owned or partnered with a SOC 2 compliance competitor or company out there that does that, like a Vanta competitor. And it's just a very funny positioning of owning these accounts. We also saw, I think Polymarket bought Raw's alert for$500 ,000.

2:36:21That was leaked on the timeline today. And so there's like a whole bunch of interesting ways that companies are engaging with like different accounts, whether they're buying ones that are already existing or they're spinning up new ones. It just it feels like it's like part of the Go Direct story, but not entirely. You have to do it all on the founder's profile. But it's definitely blurring this line between like what's in-house and outsourced media. How are they getting attention? What's marketing? I have a friend who has an ad agency where he just buys ads for companies. And he set up an AI-based profile years ago.

2:37:02As soon as the AI dropped, it was not particularly good. It just has an anonymous picture, like an AI-generated image. And he posts just, here are the greatest ads in history every day. And so it's just great ads. And people will just, they go viral all the time because they're just interesting ads, funny ads. And then it's just a funnel to be top of funnel to just do lead gen on. And so there's all these different ways that companies are, like, plugging into, like, you know, social media these days. Very fascinating. Yeah, very interesting. Well, another way to advertise is, of course, with adquick.com.

2:37:34Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out-of-home with precision. Our next guest is Brian from Rora, your co-founder. No way. Brian, how you doing? Welcome to the show. I'm doing great. How are you guys? We're doing fantastically. So great to have you. So great to see you. Do you get any sleep last night? Yeah, got a little bit. This is a big day for Roar, right? Introduce the product, introduce the progress, and then take us through what some of the expectations are for Black Friday. Yeah, so Roar is a premium water filtration brand, primarily trying to build products that will extend people's lives and help people get access to cleaner water.

2:38:19So we're effectively trying to build the Dyson of water filtration, so an entire ecosystem of products that helps people get access to clean water wherever they are. And first Black Friday, but not your first Black Friday, went through a ton of them. Uh, maybe it'd be kind of interesting to hear like how, how, how Black Friday has changed even while you've been an e-commerce operator, you had a company, love your melon that, that did many, many millions of dollars of revenue, uh, and, and scaled profitably over, uh, close to a decade, I believe. Um, so yeah, I'd love to get a sense of like how, how this day and these kind of four days have changed.

2:39:02And then we can talk about Rora. Yeah, definitely. I think it's definitely changed quite a bit. And I think this is like my 12th Black Friday. But it used to be that Cyber Monday was really the day. And you kind of build everything up to that. And you could set budgets at 10x and things like that on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and you could just rip a ton of sales. Yeah. But in today's day and age, you really have to build up the learning on those ads. And you have to build a lot of that forward momentum really to maximize the potential of it. So I think now in today's day and age, it's really about obviously capturing the momentum.

2:39:42And so, you know, we did a couple of key things like, you know, having a product release about two weeks ago and really using that as an opportunity to build a lot of lead gen and a lot of interest around that leading up to this. So, you know, we did a lot of things focused on the top of the funnel leading into this. It was our first, you know, first Black Friday. but it's a lot cheaper obviously to get eyeballs on your product when you know it's a month before so we did a lot to fill the funnel and then you know this is also not a product that it's it's less of like an impulse buy i feel like is that correct like if you're if you're buying a product to that you're going to rely on for clean water for your family like you might just see an ad and immediately click through and buy but you also might want to learn about it over time.

2:40:32And I think top of funnel is like really important because of that. Yeah. So, you know, we allow people to find out what's in their water. They can go to our website. They can find out what's in their water. Then they go through a whole series of, you know, emails and informational aspects, them to learn more about the aspects about our product. And so we pushed a lot of that leading up to this. But we also know that a lot of people have been looking at our products for quite a long time. And so we felt that it was important to do a discount for Black Friday just to allow more people to have access to cleaner water.

2:41:06And so that was ultimately the biggest decision behind it. And we've seen a lot of great response from our customers and driven quite a bit of sales from it. What, tactically on Meta, what are kind of the risks? We were talking earlier about how brands are setting budgets and then blowing through them either way faster than they intended or not as fast as they wanted to. What's been your approach there, and where are you finding success? Yeah, I think for us being as young of a brand as we are, we launched about a year ago. It was really focusing on just top of the funnel. And so really keeping a lot of that budget on prospecting and, you know, continuing to funnel in your best, best ads into the prospecting side of it.

2:41:58but also making sure that we can come out of this and keep consistent sales for the brand. And so really building up the learning earlier than we typically would instead of saving all of our best assets and pushing it out, waiting for Black Friday or right when we start the sale. So I think we've done that fairly effectively so far. What are you seeing other brands do in in terms of just approaching this four days from Black Friday through Cyber Monday? Is it all just one continuous sale now? Or does it make sense to be launching different sales at different points? What's best practices that you're seeing?

2:42:39Yeah, I think consistency definitely is best practice. I've done so many different ways over the past, whether it's free gifts with purchase, whether you've got different products releasing, whether you've got a better deal on Cyber Monday. and I think a lot of those things worked well in the past but I think in today's day and age it's better to stay consistent with one sale I think starting that a little bit before you know a couple days before Black Friday so that you can build up the momentum with those ads tactically and then you don't have to decrease that spend because you don't have a big dip in overall volume so you can kind of just consistently then scale that up throughout Black Friday into Cyber Monday.

2:43:25And then also you get the lower CPM starting at a couple days before Black Friday, then trying to start it on Black Friday and experiencing those high CPMs out of the gate. And then what about from a, like, this is the first, like, real holiday season for Aurora, and then the first kind of, like, new year cycle that a lot of health brands go through where the business is like starting to, you know, be at a pretty meaningful scale. How do you, like, do you think this is kind of like, a lot of brands get the benefit of like, they're either a gifting brand and, or like, it feels like Rora could be.

2:44:05Or your new health brand. Yeah, Rora feels like it's like. Everyone's been split as we've talked to all the entrepreneurs. Yeah, if you're doing supplements, it's like people might buy this week. This isn't going to be the biggest thing for you. But January will be a lot bigger. whereas I feel like I expect January to be significantly bigger for Aurora, but really just because the business is scaling so quickly, but it should be a big gifting product. Yeah, I think we saw yesterday a large amount of organic sales of being Thanksgiving, and I think people go wherever they go for Thanksgiving, and a lot of people tried out Aurora system at somebody else's house.

2:44:42I think we'll see something similar around Christmas and the holidays. But I think going into January, there's going to be an entirely new demographic that kind of comes into the funnel that's focusing on their health again. And I think it'll be a big opportunity for us to capture that demand. We've also got some big partnerships that we're going to be launching right at the beginning of the year around that as well. So I think it'll all tie together. But I think there's an opportunity for both from a gifting perspective and the health and wellness for us leading into January. So close us out with a big number, which you got for us.

2:45:20What can you share? This Black Friday, this Saturday Monday, we should go over 20 ,000 systems sold for the year. There we go. We'll let people at home do the math. That's a lot of systems. Thank you so much for taking the time to come hang out on a busy day. But, yeah, watching you put on, you and Charlie put on just an absolute execution master class this year has been an honor. and, yeah, excited to see how the rest of today nets out. Well, we've got a great team, a lot of people around us. Thanks so much for having me on. Great check. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. 8sleep.com, exceptional sleep without exception.

2:46:01Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. I got an 81. Quality was not quite right. How did I do? Thanksgiving. I feel like I did okay. 83. Oh, are you back in the house? I'm back. You're back. Okay. I wasn't sure how long the renovation was going to happen. And congratulations. I'm glad it's over. Wait, what'd you get? 83? 83. Ooh, wow. Came back with some authority. With some authority. Well, we have Kat from AG1 in the reach room. Former guest. Welcome. Former guest. She's back. She's back. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It's such a busy day. Right after Thanksgiving.

2:46:37Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Great to see you. Since we last talked, what's new in your world? we've been sort of bucketing brands. Okay, someone's more of a, you know, this is Black Friday. It's the most giftable Game Boy possible. It's going to be under the Christmas tree. And then David Protein, you know, sales are down 20 % today, gearing up for January, New Year, New Year. Black Friday is not a huge focus for that. Yeah, how are you thinking about making the most out of today, Monday, the rest of the year, generally at AG1? You know, I think of today twofold. One is today is a day to capture demand we've been building throughout the year.

2:47:19When I was hanging out with you guys, I think it was in June, we had just launched in Costco. We had not even launched our new flavors. That was the number one tip we learned from you. If you're in consumer packaged goods, just launch in Costco, win in Costco, and then you're good. That's the tip. It's been incredible. But after that, we launched flavors for AG1 and we launched our first ever truly second brand and product with AGZ. So we went from one product to this. And so today is about capturing the demand we've been building throughout the year with these product launches, investments in upgrading the formula, multiple human clinical trials, really bridging into retail and having multiple products.

2:48:08So as we market, as we invest, as people flood into market for what are typically offers, but still to shop, to make purchases, it is absolutely a demand capture moment. That being said, much like some of the other premium brands you've spoken to, it's also a day just to be in front of people and build future demand for when more are in market at the end of December and in January. But we are we're up almost 40 percent Black Friday to Black Friday. Wow. And yes. And I think a big part of that is bring on the gong. Bring the gong. You know what? I shared this on X a little earlier that this is a brave new world for us having multiple products so we can create bundles.

2:48:55We don't discount per se, but we can add value with multiple products allowing people to bundle. And that is absolutely what's driving that year over year growth on Black Friday. People are adding AGZ to their AG1 orders. They're adding a flavor sampler to their order. They're bundling our omegas and D3K2. We didn't have that portfolio a year ago. You guys were playing on expert mode, just single skew. So up 40 % year over year, Black Friday to Black Friday. Obviously, that's driven by products, new products, expansion. But if there's one marketing or growth strategy that really stuck out over 2025 is particularly effective, what can you share about a strategy or a channel that you think you executed particularly well on this year?

2:49:49I'll share one strategy and one channel that stood out for us this year. One strategy was shifting the marketing focus from as influencer and creator forward to more science forward. You know, we invested over$10 million in four double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled human trials. And it makes a lot of sense to try to get credit for that and help to stand out in the crowd. So for the first half of the year, we pulled back marketing investment 40 % to focus on executing product launches, executing channel launches, and building the story around the real work of quality, science, and research.

2:50:29So that strategy, that approach, which colored everything we did from the actual marketing where we put up huge billboards, we invested millions in out of home advertising that said something like, please enjoy your your randomized double blind placebo controlled daily health drink.

2:50:49you know, I would say maybe like literally like 0.1, 0.01 % of supplement companies actually do like studies on their products. And they're just like, Hey, this study happened over here with this one ingredient. And so we're just going to apply that over here. Yeah. It's, you know, That strategy even colored our partnership approach. We, instead of partnering with athletes this fall, did NIL deals with nutrition students, college students. So we just, and we had them put on the hat, the jersey, everything and sign up. So the science strategy pulled through the year. The channel strategy that we are really starting to see the value of is actually TV.

2:51:35Lanier and CTV. We were on game seven of the World Series with our Good Morning Moon campaign narrated by the ever epic and a longtime AG1 drinker, Rick Rubin. And it was much more brand, top of funnel, emotional, like who are our people and what do they do when they get up early in the morning? And then we created 15 and 30 sub cuts of that for parents, for runners, for athletes. And so that's pulling through to the high season as we get into December and January. And we're starting to see, again, it's tougher to track those types of things, but there's incredible AI and technology out there to help with that.

2:52:15We're starting to see that channel contribute meaningfully, and especially now that we're in retail. And we're in Costco today. We'll launch additional national retailers next year, thoughtfully going direct to national. And so, you know, as many others have said today, when you have multiple channels, you make those top of funnel marketing investments. They have more places to contribute. Yeah. So we can expect to see a Super Bowl ad? One day. One day. One day. You can expect to see more human clinical trials. I got another 20 million going into research. Wow, 20 million. Amazing. How do you rate the overall health of the consumer and just kind of the macro over the last?

2:52:58We had a friend of ours, Nish, from Rayon. He said the first six months of this year felt wildly different from a macro standpoint than the last five or so months. But what's been your view? You know, certainly if you look at the economic data, it says there's a tale of two cities in the world of consumer with people who have higher income propping up spending versus those who don't. for us and our business, because about into the first quarter, but halfway through the calendar year, we had so many back-to-back launches of products, channels, and innovation. It masked what might have otherwise been bumpiness with a more mature model.

2:53:45And it gave some variety, again, some value creation for that consumer. What hasn't changed, and I've heard a few others on with you today reference this, is how deeply considered these premium purchases are. And so the investments we made a year ago in top of funnel marketing, six months ago in clinical trials, two months ago in launching AGZ, leaning in still to our podcast partners and the creator economy where we were early movers. And it's still a key part of our strategy today, but nowhere near the largest channel from a marketing perspective. All of that brings people to, for us, what on average is eight to 10 touch points before they purchase.

2:54:25I mean, it is a long consideration journey, and we're seeing it play out in multiple markets. In our partnership with Shopify, we launched Australia, we launched Japan. We are launching more of these products in our European business now, and we see very similar behaviors. So we are a premium price point, but it's also an incredible value because we consolidate an otherwise very expensive supplement stack in both AG1 and AGZ. Yep. Got anything else? We'd love to have you back on in January when we kick off the new year. That will be a massive period for you guys. Wish we had more time. And just to clarify, there's a question in the chat about AGZ.

2:55:09It's for sleep, correct? Yeah, AGZ. Where's my little AGZ? AGZ. I have it here. So it's a melatonin-free nighttime rest and restore product. So just like we did for AG1, we consolidated a multivitamin, a probiotic, and greens. For AGZ, we consolidated what most people are making their sleepy girl, sleepy boy mocktails with ashwagandha and magnesium, two types of magnesium, and an incredible research-backed herbal blend. So AG1 for the morning, AGZ for the night to calm and develop a restorative sleep. 24-7. Fantastic. 24-7. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Great to get the update.

2:55:48Great rest of your day. Congrats on the car. Have a good time. Thanks for having me. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Happy Black Friday. Happy Black Friday. Before we bring in our first in-person guest of the stream, let me tell you about Wander.com, Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel-graded menies, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. We have Sean Frank in the TVP and Ultradome. He's been on the show multiple times. This is the first time him seeing him in person. How are you doing, Sean? He is the world's number one wallet salesman. Good to see you. How you doing?

2:56:19And dominating every other category now. Yes, dominating. Dominating luggage, dominating knives, dominating... Consumer electronics. Consumer electronics. Batteries. Battery packs, correct? Yeah, man. It's game day, dude. I got the jersey on. It's game day. I love it. Have you guys been on Shopify the entire time? Dude, since 2012. There was never like a... Never even thought about it. You never blamed. You never blamed. You never blamed. You never like, let's just set up another little landing page over here. Maybe let's just have a side hustle page now. Shopify till I die, man. Wow. The best payment processing rates.

2:56:51All the perfect apps inside the app store. I'm a big Shopify fan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great to see you. Thank you for taking time out of your day today. Is this the most mellow Black Friday? Hopefully, you've been building the company, building the team. You guys are so dialed in so many different ways now. I would hope that every year is slightly less stressful than the last. Yeah, this has been the chillest Black Friday by far. It's the biggest Black Friday ever, but team's bigger, processes are dialed in, and the world's not on fire. When something does go wrong on Black Friday, how did it manifest in years past?

2:57:25Because it's obviously not like, okay, the website is down because you're on Shopify. It's never gone down before. It's never gone down. But there are things where it's like, okay, we've got to be a little bit more dialed as a team today. What are you actually monitoring? What is just inbound requests? Yeah, what situations are you monitoring? Yeah, what situations have you monitored in the past or do you need to monitor on a Black Friday? The most common problems would be credit cards going down. Okay. Right? What does that mean? Like payment processing or like Visa network is down? Yeah, like hitting limits on your credit card.

2:57:57Because like in a typical day, a brand might spend 50 grand on Facebook ads. And then you go to spend$500 ,000. Oh, okay. So your corporate card is going down. Yeah. So I just turn off and somebody is like not at their desk that moment. Yeah. Or your account gets frozen. so your actual Meta account gets locked up, and they're taking the week off. I love Meta, love my reps, but if you have a junior level of service, there's no way to escalate that, and then your whole weekend's screwed if you can't spend money on Meta. So that's the most common thing. Inventory issues always. How do you make sure things are staying in stock?

2:58:30How do you make sure your warehouse is actually working? Warehouses are in-person businesses, so it's kind of like retail stores. We have to staff up for it, but today our store will do 10x normal volume, How do you make sure those customers get their stuff when the whole three-week period is going to be huge? What percentage of a brand's Black Friday should come from advertising versus just, there's a lot of demand over the years. It builds up a bunch of email addresses. Their customers are coming back with a return by default. So, yeah, if meta goes down, that's maybe 5 % of Black Friday. But it sounds like it could be a lot more.

2:59:04What are you thinking? It should be your biggest spend day by far. Okay. But it should be one of your most efficient days of the year. Sure. So just because intent is so high. Intent is so high. So we'll spend, you know, in a typical day, we might be at a 2X MER, half of our money going to marketing for digital channels. But a day like Black Friday could be like a 4X MER. But we're still going to spend multi-million dollars today, right? So conversion rates shoot up. You can spend more money. CPMs are higher. And it varies by brand, right? If you're Takova's, you know, you might have a bigger spike because like, Like, oh, the boots that everybody wants are actually on sale right now.

2:59:41But if you're AG1, they're not going to have any spike at all. Like, nobody's, like, rushing out to get their supplements today. And I think we heard that from the David's Protein guy. Yeah, yeah. He was saying he was actually down a little bit because it's, like, it's a January product, and that makes a ton of sense. What, on the digital ads thing, like, what, I'm trying to think of where to actually dig in there. Yeah. Take me through TikTok Shop. You were saying that you made a seven-figure day? Yes. What's actually going on? Because reading behind that tweet, I was thinking like, okay, he's extremely bearish on TikTok Shop, maybe TikTok Broadly.

3:00:19How much should I read into that? Explain what happened. The general thesis on TikTok Shop is it's really, really good for a certain type of brand. If you're female-focused, if you are a supplement, if you can make pretty bold claims, TikTok Shop's going to print for you. Bold claims. That means people are like... You restores all your hair for$5, something like that because the brand doesn't make the claims the affiliates make the claims. The affiliates are incentivized to say crazy stuff to try to get the affiliate commission. This wallet will turn you into a millionaire. You put a$100 bill in here, it's going to change it into$200 out.

3:00:54You can get$200 out. And there's a whole cohort of Gen Z brands that are doing nine figures in six months off of TikTok shop. What are the categories? Supplements, for sure. Get jacked, look hot. Testosterone gummies. Testosterone gummies. They gummied everything Test gummies The biggest brand no one's ever heard of is Comfort You guys should just go on TikTok shop And just check out what Comfort's doing Publicly, so it's hoodies And it's like, you know Priced at$120, marked down to$35 And they'll do So they're like eating into Mad Happy They're like a Mad Happy clone Or really like a fast fashion clone Like a Timu Shein, like Zara type clone but like really high quality anxiety reducing hoodies.

3:01:43Anxiety reducing. That's the claims, man, the claims. But they'll do over 700 million this year. 700 million. Third year in business. Third year in business. Yeah, they're killing it. Wow. So TikTok shop can totally work. The joke there is that for a men's, like almost luxury good brand, it will not work at all. We did multi-million dollars yesterday. We did 700 bucks on TikTok shop. But I'm working, dude. I'm grinding now. Yeah. Bigger, bolder claims. Yeah. So do you think there's just like, there's no way for you to get it to work? Like you've tested everything. You've like done a bunch of specific TikTok creative and hired people who have gotten it to work in other categories.

3:02:21Like at this point, you know, it's not you. The shops program is way different than the ad program. Okay. I'll spend 50 grand on TikTok shop today. Or sorry, TikTok ads today. But that's driving my website. Yeah. To make TikTok shop work, it has to be an impulse purchase. But I haven't given it my all. In January, we're giving it our all. You are? Yeah, we're going to throw everything at it. Is it your number one big opportunity for 2026, or are you thinking AI, agentic commerce? I would say that there's probably six things a brand should be focused on in 2026, and I'll see if I can rattle them off.

3:02:52Yeah, six is a lot. Yeah, yeah. But I think social commerce is for sure one of them, but then that ties into point two, which is just getting way better short-form organic video, right? You guys post clips. Like more brands need to be clipping. And it's just because watch time on social media apps is continuing to be dominated by short form video. Nobody's scrolling feeds anymore. And it's just going to continue to take over long form YouTube and Twitch streams and everything else. It's just all for the clips. Yeah, no, it feels like the Instagram feed is just a catalog now. And I don't even know if you should care about engagement as a brand.

3:03:28Well, dude, and also, like, the idea of a brand has also been, like, dis-mediated because it's not about the brand page anymore. Like, the best TikTok shop brands have 50 TikTok accounts because it's just volume. And if you pull up, like, the number one TikTok shop affiliates, there's people making a million dollars a year, and they'll post 70 videos a day. And so many of those videos get 20 views, but then one will get 28 million, and it will just print for them. Yeah, yeah. Do you think that takes you out of building an enduring brand? Will the next Hermes really be doing that? Will the next iconic Louis Vuitton or the Ferrari be slopping it up on the short form?

3:04:12Well, no. I think they're going to be sponsoring DJ tables at F1 stuff. But the rest of us are going to be slopping it up, too. The slop comes for us all. Yeah. And I know you guys love luxury. the luxury space is super interesting because Richmont's actually the only brand dominating right now because they have Cartier, they have Van Cleef, like jewelry's taking over everything and LVMH and really curing has been wrecked for like two years so the world of luxury is undergoing a lot of changes right now as well I mean I'm sure they're still having a big Black Friday since people just go out and shop physically but so much of that is dependent on like the health of the economy So caring is up 41 % Year to date But they've been struggling Well look at the five year chart Okay Zoom out We're zooming out It's down 50 % Rough

3:05:10What's What's a white pill Where is their opportunity Peter protein earlier Peter Rahal was saying uh consumers will always want novelty yeah and so specifically in like supplements and cbg there's always going to be an incremental opportunity because people just want to have even the same things delivered to them differently but like where where are you seeing opportunity yeah i think i think david protein proved and he said that like there's white space and everything right um you know nobody thought you could build a hoodie brand like comfort and just dominate a new channel like TikTok shop and affiliate and get to$700 million.

3:05:50I think it's the fastest growing apparel brand of all time. And yeah, David's Protein, two years in,$300 million. Groon's, two years in,$300 million. So I think the standards are way higher. You have to be really good at operating. You can't just have a good website. You can't just have a good product. You actually also have to understand the ecosystem. But our fastest growing channel this year is consumer electronics, doing phone cases. Everyone told me phone cases were a stupid business to get into. And we bumbled along for four or five years doing it. And now it's an eight-figure business for us in six months or whatever.

3:06:22That's amazing. There's white space everywhere, man. What do you think about my idea post-purchase flow? We were working this out where you buy a product and then you have an opportunity to box somebody for a discount. You match locally to recreate the original Black Friday experience. So do both people want a discount and only the winner gets it? Yes. No, no, no, no. I think it's like I'm on Ridge.com. I check out with a bunch of stuff. Jordy's my next-door neighbor. He checks out with a bunch of stuff. We're both happy. We're having the modern e-commerce Black Friday experience, except there's one thing missing.

3:07:00We didn't get to fight each other. So then in the post-purchase flow, it says, hey, there's someone that's opted in to a fist fight in your area. Walk outside, meet at this address. You can scrap it out. It sounds asset light. So as a brand, I don't put up any boxers. No. You guys are fighting each other. No, it's purely peer-to-peer. You do have to give some of the margin back to the winner, though. That's the only thing. Oh, so the winner does get a coupon or something? Yeah, a little incentive. You get like a gift card or something. And the Ridge customers, they're scary, man. They're tough guys.

3:07:28Yeah, they're tough guys. I feel like you can't shave the beard now, at least as well as CEO of Ridge. No, I'm going to keep throwing it out, dude. Yeah, wait, so how did you actually win in phone cases? That feels like extremely difficult, the most competitive. Is it the strength of the product development, the positioning, the marketing, the operations? How did that possibly work? That feels impossible. Yeah, it's creative destruction, right? So the number one name in phone cases is still Otterbox. They do a billion dollars a year in revenue. Wait, they do more than Apple directly? Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

3:07:59Like third party? Yeah, I'm not taking down Apple. Okay, okay. Otterbox is sold into Verizon's and Best Buy and everywhere, right? I do see them everywhere. And they do a billion dollars a year in sales. They've been owned by private equity for four or five years. Let's give it up for private equity. Yeah, yeah. Great opportunities for him. Yeah, they're making a killing, but then they're in the value extraction mode. They're just like, they're never going to pay for marketing. They're going to fight tooth and nail a Best Buy of Verizon of the world, right? And then it creates a market because Verizon's like, hey, I hate working with these new owners over here.

3:08:28Will you come in and take some of their shelf space? They want competition in their store, and it's incremental sales for me. It's their lunch that I'm eating, so I'm like, yeah, I'd gladly go in there. I'll take lower margin. I'll work it out. Wow, okay. You could shop Ridge phone cases at your local Verizon stores, T-Mobiles, Best Buys. Did you have deals with any of them beforehand? No. So is there a world where it acts as like a lever that opens a door to getting other products into these places? I don't know if a Ridge wallet would make sense in a Verizon store, but probably. No, we have wallets there now.

3:08:57Yeah, why not? And actually, I did lie. The first thing we had was wallets in Best Buy. Okay. Yeah, yeah, you told me about that. We were the only people ever selling wallets in a Best Buy. And it's like, if we can make that work, then we can make anything work. And then we started just selling the rest of the catalog in there. You can buy our luggage in a Best Buy right now. Best practices for big influencer partnerships in 2026. What you got? I think more and more the brands need to be somewhat creator-led, and I think it's ways you to do that internally. You guys had a couple creator brands on today.

3:09:28You could say Mod Retro is a creator brand. It is crazy how many views Palmer gets, even though he's not an influencer. just by going around onto Rogan, onto other shows. And plugging it. He pulls it, yeah. He pulls the audience. Yeah, so I think there's free impressions to be had. And the most expensive part of my P &L is impressions. Impressions. Right? So if you can go out there and tell a story and be good, you'll get a ton of impressions. We'd just an hour ago had an MKBHD video go live, and it'll probably get 3 million views and sell a ton of stuff. And it just needs to be a tighter feedback loop there.

3:10:02MKBHD on Black Friday? I'm assuming that's only possible because you guys have had like a very long-term relationship with MKBHD and if like Samsung came to him and he didn't have that relationship he'd be like I'll take five million dollars or something I'm sure it'd be yeah it would take a ton of money you know he's an equity partner in Rich so he's one of our co-owners so he's on the board we hang out and as part of our relationship we get like 20 spots a year and he wants to maximize our revenue too so black friday is a great spot to give to us that's awesome very very cool uh anything interesting on the on the channel side on like uh what what's connor up to today he just got like like eight monitors set up just like fully locked into the vortex yeah dude unfortunately there's not a camera showing your guys production studio but that's basically what connor's doing i love it we could be running a brand yeah you could have a ton of ads going right now guys yeah i mean connor's behind the screen uh we have a great team now so there's there's 70 or 80 people at Ridge is grinding out today.

3:11:04But the most exciting channel is probably YouTube. They kind of fucked around for a long time and didn't have good performance marketing. Was that the targeting or the actual like... Yeah, it would be nobody could get... It was extraordinarily difficult to get programmatic ads on YouTube to work at all, right? Yes, but what about them was wrong? Just like the targeting on like who the person was that you're reaching? Yeah, I mean, their number one business is AdWords and they want everything to work like AdWords. And that ad space doesn't work like AdWords. Yep, yep, totally. And they weren't willing to make the changes to make YouTube an actual functioning ad platform.

3:11:39But now that it looks like, you know, the Google Ads business could be threatened or might be threatened, they're like, let's start actually finding all the dollars in the couch cushions. Yep, yep. And that is YouTube ads. I mean, pull up their K1. It's the fastest growing part of their business, right? Growing 50 % year over year. And it's working. So YouTube has been like the second biggest channel for it this year. Interesting. um do you uh are you seeing strong results on basically vertical video like repurposing tiktok assets into vertical video ads in the shorts feed on youtube or are you creating bespoke content for youtube are you at the point where you notice that an edit that works on an ad that works on youtube won't work on tiktok and vice versa well i'll say that putting mkbhd in youtube ads really works.

3:12:25Totally thumb stopping. Yeah. But what you brought up is the beauty of you should be a creator brand, right? Like the real like alpha and leverage there is that a short form video is the same everywhere. So you can run it on TikTok. You can run it on YouTube shorts, reels, app loving. You can put it on Twitter. Like Twitter ads are crushing, right? You can put it everywhere. Twitter ads are crushing. Yeah. No way. No way. Dude. I mean, the guy they had that hired that new guy and he's like, yeah, he's crushing it. He's crushing it. Yeah. No way. That's amazing. The first person that's really called that out.

3:12:53So why did it never work historically? Why was it purely a brand channel where you'd have Uber that's like, we'll give some of our budget to X? Well, it's the same thing as why did AppLovin go from a$20 billion company to a$200 billion company? It's like they built a really good ad engine. Dollars will flow to whoever has the best ad engine. I think a lot of the space is the same. They're like, oh, no, an X user is more valuable because it's into tech. or no, it's bad because of all these bots. At the end of the day, there's purchasers everywhere and you just need a really good ad engine. And Meta's had a 20-year head start building the world's greatest ad engine, right?

3:13:28And now the same people who built that are going to places like Twitter, going to places like Applovin and rebuilding better ad engines. And as long as they, you could put it on Reddit ads, you could put it on Criteo horrible ads and as you have a really good ad engine, it will find purchasers. And that's what I think they did over at X and it's been working. Yeah, and video specifically too. you've been running video ads there? You were saying you could bring your TikTok, YouTube ads, your MKVHD video ads all over. Has that been successful on X yet? Or is it more link-based? We throw all the stuff in there, but everything has a link to link and purchase on our website.

3:14:03Well, we've got to close out with Harley. Thank you so much for having us on the show. Will you hang out for a second? We'll talk to you soon. We've got Harley back in the studio closing out. Where did Sean go? Oh, Sean, hang out. You want to hang out? Dude, what do you... You look like his... He ran away. I guess Sean won't have... If he sits here... He's a pretty face. You look like his boss or something. He's got it. He's got it. He'll hang out. Oh, yeah. Okay, we have items for him. Amazing. How are you doing? Close us out. Give us an update on the stats. What else is... Okay, let's go. What's the latest?

3:14:38All right, let's start with the stats, of course. Sean, can you hear me? Oh, I can hear you, bud. How are you? You can. How are you doing? Good, man. Congratulations. We pressed it. We said, has he ever flinched and thought about even for a second using a different e-commerce platform? He said, never in the entire history of the bridge. Never. Never even thought. You know, actually, in truth, Sean's one of those guys that he gives you tough love when you deserve it. Yeah. But he gives you praise only when you deserve it also. And so that makes him a real one. He is. I appreciate that. He is a real one.

3:15:06Okay. So let's check it out as we close this out. How are we doing? So$4.1 million right now sales per minute. 38 ,000 orders per minute. 30 million unique shoppers today. Wow. Let Sean hit the gong. Sean gong. Go on, do it for us. Give it to us. Let's go. We hit with the setup. With the prancing setup. Wow. Okay, so I also have a few other things for you. Yes, yes. Okay, so I'm going to wrap up some trending categories for the day now that we're getting to 5 p.m. EST. Skincare, vitamins, supplements, T-shirts, activewear, makeup did really well. This is really interesting. At 5 a.m. when I was on CNN, I looked at trending products.

3:15:47At 5 a.m., it was Aloe Yoga with their crew neck pullover. It was Cozy Earth with their bamboo sheet set. And Merit Beauty with their flesh bomb. When I look at it now, it's totally switched up. You have Victoria Beckham's eyeliner. You have earplugs from a company called Loop. Loop Switch 2. Interesting. Yeah. Loop earplugs. The ones that's trending is called the Loop Switch 2. Okay. And you have Lola blankets, the antique ivory blanket. Here's what's really interesting. If you go back to this time last year, last year was all about getting outside. You saw ski equipment, adventure stuff, outdoorsy stuff.

3:16:22That's over. We're going on. We're going. We're going cozy, man. We're going cozy. We're going cozy. So things like bakeware sets, blankets, wooden toys, and coloring books are all up 100 % year over year. Interesting. Goose Creek candle, Christmas tree, three-way candles, killing it. and Carraway cookware set is also killing it. So those are the trends. It's been, I mean, the cozy era is definitely here. We're in the cozy era. Cozy era. Dude, all those are great brands. If you guys don't know Loop, like they're - I don't know Loop. Oh, something like really old, like earplugs. They made them really cool.

3:16:57Is it for sleeping? No, it's for like going to concerts. Concerts and stuff. Okay, yeah. You pull up the website, Super Gen Z. Cozy Earth has a bunch of stores in LA. Like all those brands. Cozy Earth is really cool, yeah. Loop earplugs. Yeah, this is amazing. Wow. And obviously, Aloe is Aloe, right? Yeah, we know Aloe, of course. They're serious. Of course. And actually, they're in LA also, an amazing company. But I just want to say a couple things. I know you guys have to wrap in a minute. But Jordi, John, I just want to say thank you so much for this. Of course. This was fantastic. There's nothing we love more than celebrating commerce.

3:17:28It was a fun tour, talking to folks who today is the biggest day of the year for them, to other folks who, you know, this is just another day or they're, you know, they're just completely focused on January. It was cool to hear the juxtaposition between like, you know, even Cat had said, like Cat Cole versus, you know, the David's guy. David's like, no, no, no, it's January. And Cat's like, no, no, no. This is like, this is where you're able. It was so, the juxtaposition between two similar products. But I just want to say thank you to you guys. This is my 16th Black Friday at Shopify, my favorite one yet.

3:17:55Huge thank you to Noel, Sarah, Peter, Torrin, Kevin, Nish, Benny, Brian, Cat, And, of course, Sean and Jordan, John, you guys are amazing. Sorry we stole your day off. Please apologize to your wives and families. No days off. No days off when capitalism is on the line, when commerce is on the line. It's the biggest day of the year. It's the best. And we're still full of energy. But hopefully you agree it was worth it. Oh, 100%. 100%. I'll see you guys in Q1 for our next earnings call, I guess. We will. We can't wait for it. I can't wait for 17. Dude, Cyber Monday. Run it back. Cyber Monday. We're doing it on stream with the green suit.

3:18:30Harley, join Cyber Monday. I'd love to. If you'll have me, I'd love to join Cyber Monday. Of course. You can find me. Maybe Sean and I come on together. We do a whole back-to-back DJ thing. Let's do it. Sales hour by hour. I'm going to report in. Yes, I want to know. I love it. I love it. Amazing. Thank you, guys. Congrats to the whole Shopify team for another blowout day. Thank you very much. Can't wait to see the final numbers. Yeah, I want to know the final numbers. We've got to figure that out. I'll come back Monday. We can chat. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Great to see you, Harley. Talk soon.

3:18:59Have a good rest of your day. See you, Sean. Goodbye. Wonderful, wonderful show. Thank you to everybody who has hung out with us today, celebrated commerce, celebrated entrepreneurship, celebrated the American consumer. The Commerce Corral. And the Canadian consumer. Commerce Corral. I wish we were podcasting tomorrow. We won't be. Tomorrow's Saturday. But we will be back in full force on Monday. Back in full force. And yeah, it'll be a busy weekend. Dude, it's going to be great. Thanks for doing this. Shining some light on a small little company called Shopify. Yeah. Fledgling startup. 20 years next year.

3:19:4520-year-old company. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for tuning in. Thanks for listening. Have a wonderful rest of your holiday weekend. Sign up for the newsletter, tbpn.com. And we will see you on Monday. Cheers. Bye. Goodbye. Thank you.