Bonus: How &Collar Uses Intelligems to Drive Growth with Pricing, Persona & Shipping Tests

0:00We partnered with IntelliGems to A-B test prices on our core product, our dress shirt. We said, hey, let's set up a four-way price test lower than$48, which was the base price at the time. Let's do a$45, let's do a$48, let's do a$49.99, then let's go to a$55, see if we can meet that$50 ceiling. And this was right when tariffs launched. And so customers were price sensitive. We were obviously margin sensitive. $49.99 was basically a split with$48, which was encouraging because it's like, hey, if there's no conversion loss, no profit per visitor loss, then why wouldn't we go the extra$1.99? Paying IntelliGems$3.99 a month, finding$2 a unit times 500 ,000 units a year, it's like, oh, that test paid for itself.

0:50Ben Perkins:Ben, welcome to the D2C podcast. Super excited to talk about and caller. It's my first brand with an ampersand in it. Talk to me about why you built Ancaller. Well, first to the ampersand comment, would highly recommend not having that as the first, you know, letter, if you will, or first character in a brand name. Half the people it seems like in America don't know what it is. We get called at caller a lot. A little bit damning when you're looking at education systems. You've made it this far. Yeah, yeah. We made it this far, apparently, in spite of our name. I said on any future brand, whatever it is, just choose a word that's in the English dictionary or multiple words, very easy to pronounce and that don't get stuck in the throat.

1:36That's not what you asked. You said, why we built it? Yeah, it was just to keep men comfortable. I mean, I had to wear a dress shirt all the time and it was to keep men comfortable. And specifically for me, it was supposed to be a college resume or uni resume builder, if you're Canadian, so that I could get a real job. and tell someone in an interview that I had enough initiative and drive to go source and sell$50 ,000 worth of product.

2:01Ben Perkins:Amazing. And talk to me about your growth journey. How long has it been and how do you characterize where you're at right now? Started in 2017, very passively. Launched on Kickstarter that first year. We did 20 ,000 and that's where we are. And we've been fortunate and have grown top line every single year since 2017. And this year, hopefully we'll end up, let's call it 13 or 14 million in top line. So you've got a couple trends. You've got one, everyone wants to be more comfortable, but two, people are going to offices less where they even have to wear button downs. How do you think about that sort of those two market forces?

2:40Ben Perkins:I think about it every day. A little bit less now today than I did in 2020, where that was when we decided to really go all in and pursue it full-time and talking about market forces. That was the worst possible market force for a dress shirt company with one of its founders talking his brand new wife into selling dress shirts online for a full-time gig. And so, yeah, 2020 was very freaky. And that's where we, the way we think about it is, okay, who still has to wear dress shirts? So we call it recurring and required. It's like, okay, what segments are recurring and required as it relates to wearing dress shirts or dressing up?

3:23And let's go own them. Let's own those micro segments. But today, thankfully, fingers crossed. I mean, it's unfortunate as an employee, but as a brand outfitting employees, it's great to see back to office mandates where it's almost this pendulum where people now are being required to go back to work. It's harder to find a job than it has been in a while. And one way to differentiate yourself in a candidate pool is to dress up again. So it's almost like the demise of a great work-life balance is to our benefit, which I know sounds horrible. But as someone who had to buckle down during COVID when literally everyone stopped wearing dress shirts, it's nice to see that market force, if we're calling it, or pattern or trend.

4:11swing back in our favor.

4:13Ben Perkins:But you might as well be comfortable. Well, at least you can be comfortable if you're forced to wear a shirt, right? So some of the copy you'll start to see now in our creative testing is kind of a riff off of like Blink-182, work sucks, but you can still be comfortable. Something there that you can bring work from home comfort back to the office. So talk to me about, I know we're going to talk about testing. I'm excited to jump into that, but talk to me about the growth levers. You guys right from the beginning probably had a lot of SKUs or did you just launch, did you just launch shirts and then expand into other items?

4:46Ben Perkins:Or did you launch with a bunch of SKUs? Pretty limited compared to other clothing brands. So very, to begin, we had 10 SKUs. We only had one fit of a white dress shirt in short and long sleeve. So basically five SKUs across both fits are for each fit. So 10 total. Then we've expanded that now we have two fits so a classic fitness slim fit so now it's i mean it almost spiraled out of control where if you looked on our balance sheet number of skews and then just inventory allocation was all wrong when white dress you know white dress shirts drives 50 of revenue for the business so it's like oh now in some way shape or form because we have more skews of the white shirt, but less than 40 SKUs powers 50 % of the business.

5:36And that's top line. We're really at powers even more of our bottom line. So all of that to be said, we got excited, over eager to expand SKUs where it's like, hey, there's still a lot of runway left in North America to be North America's white dress shirt, everyday value white dress shirt. So SKUs got up to as high as 1 ,500. Now active SKUs are closer to 1 ,100. And we want to keep it that way, even as we grow.

6:04Ben Perkins:I have a friend who runs Outweigh Socks here in Victoria. And all of his marketing is about brightly, beautiful, dramatic socks. But I think 50 % or more of his sales are millennial ankle socks, white ankle socks, right? So it's like the staples still are what sell the most in a lot of cases. So how have you grown this brand? Is it a meta? Has meta been your darling when it comes to bringing new eyes to the brand? You know, I subscribe to just about every newsletter on the planet. I think DTC is a great one. And we have grown almost in spite of our paid spend, where we've never been good at it.

6:50I've never been brought on as an expert in that field. So, I mean, really the growth levers we've spent, if you talk about NER, it's like, oh, when we had our big jump in COVID, you were talking about baseball right before this, Eric, talking about the Blue Jays and Dodgers. I mean, we said in COVID, my co-founder and I, we said, hey, let's like swing for the fences or let's at least get out. Let's get out fast. and so we spent 800 ,000 on 2.1 million in top line and that doesn't include content creation which was another 200 ,000 at the time so it's like oh I mean we know to spend in probably irresponsible ways so I mean that was the first growth lever where it's like just kind of spend in a crazy irresponsible way now we've tried to be a little bit more dialed but I'd say more than anything the growth lever has been that recurring and required micro segmentation So saying, hey, rather than spending against everyone, all advertisers on the same 25 to 38-year-old, slightly more athletically inclined, has certain disposable income, all the same interest basically.

8:00where, I mean, that was just a bloodbath on CPMs and CPAs or whatever KPAs, whatever metrics you want to call them, all those acronyms that you always talk about. It's like, oh, there's a bloodbath there. But then when you start to drill it down, say, okay, well, what about if you go after public school male teachers? It's like, oh, that's a little bit more palatable. And then you can create content specific to them. And in that way, do a little bit more of a personalized funnel. We're working on it, but that has been really what's helped us grow and what we forecast helping us grow even more is kind of running away from the competition.

8:36Ben Perkins:This is the third podcast in a row where the guest has talked about drilling down into their personas, real motivations, not just the segments of who they are, but like why they buy the product. Like for you, it's this idea of being required or whatever. And then how it's, I know you're not a, an algorithm wizard, but that's what Andromeda is meant to do, right. In a lot of ways is to really, is to match up the right creative with the right person for the right reason. So if you, if you're thinking about your audience and their reasons and really who they are at a, at a, at a, like it, what's it called?

9:13Ben Perkins:Like avatars versus segments is how Andromeda is prioritizing how they serve ads. So it's really cool to hear that, that, that, that level of like depth of understanding your customers, what's really allowing you to drive the sales. Yeah. And hopefully we get even better where we just talked yesterday, our big sprint through the end of the year, other than surviving Black Friday to set up sub for 2026 is saying, hey, let's whatever personas, avatars, whatever you want to call it, let's do six that are representative of basically 100 % of your total customer base. Can we tag them within Shopify?

9:50some of that self-reported from like post-purchase surveys. So we do no commerce. It's like, okay, can you attach a tag to anyone who reports or if they follow under the same parameters or behaviors and then hopefully feed that into our ESP? It's like, oh, can we never, other than new product launches or Black Friday type sales, can you never send a list blast email again? Where it's like, okay, we've got teachers as one of the six. You've got everyday guys. you've got Orthodox Jews or whatever the six buckets are. It's like, okay, those are the only emails that they're going to see basically.

10:27And hopefully have it be this flywheel. That's the hope. And then, you know, then it serves back into top of funnel ads and landers. If we get there, who knows? If we do, I think we'll be, then you can talk to me about being a marketing expert. But until then, don't feel like we are.

10:43Ben Perkins:Did you have a career? Did you do marketing before this? Are you from a performance marketing or affiliate marketing background? No, this is my first job out of university, other than some internships. Technically, I had a digital marketing internship, but I didn't do anything. I just was working on the website for Endcaller back then. So no expertise. How have you thought about pricing in your space? And how have you gone about finding the right price, right thresholds for that? Yeah, for just listeners, I'm doing finger in the air on initial pricing. For the first five years, six years, it was, hey, this seems about right.

11:23You do, let's call it competitor analysis. You lay it all out on a spreadsheet. Okay, this group's in this band, price band, this group's in this price band. I mean, that's as scientific as it got, but it's, hey, it seems like there's a spot for a sub$50 shirt where you've got Roans, Mizzen and Maines, Lulu now has... Performance Dresshirts, Ministry of Supply. I mean, I could name a bunch who were all at the time in the$120 range. Now they've raised prices up to$150, where we said, hey, we could do a comparable product, much lower gross margin, but I think we, on a units basis, could really compete for a sub$50.

12:01So as the hypothesis, there was no math or reasoning behind it other than that feels right. Pricing adjusted a little bit during COVID. We went all the way down to$35 because We thought we were going to be out of business and just needed to move units back up to$40 and then$45 with no testing. And we gauged success on number of support tickets we got. And we got very few, if any, on those price changes. But then for the first time this year with tariffs, got scientific. We partnered with IntelliGems. And by partnered with, we paid them. A partner is me doing myself a service. We just paid the money to test A-B test prices on our core product, our dress shirt.

12:46I said 50 % of revenue comes from the white version, but then in the patterns and solid colors, then you find another 20%. So 70 % of the business is from one style, essentially. And we said, hey, let's set up a four-way price test lower than$48, which was the base price at the time. Let's do a$45, let's do a$48, let's do a$49.99. And then let's go to a 55, see if we can beat that$50 ceiling. And this was right when tariffs launched. And so customers were price sensitive. We were obviously margin sensitive and aware. And so it was a great test. And it found us an extra$1.99. $49.99 beat all the, well, it was basically a split with$48, which was encouraging.

13:30Because it was like, hey, if there's no conversion loss, no profit per visitor loss, then why wouldn't we go the extra$1.99? And so, yeah, I found an extra$2 per unit, which had trickle-down effect to wholesale and so on and so forth. So paying IntelliGems$3.99 a month, I mean, finding$2 a unit, if you extrapolate, I mean, it's not totally clean because of sales and stuff, but let's call it, yeah, extra$2 a unit times 500 ,000 units a year. It's like, oh, that test paid for itself.

14:02Ben Perkins:Yeah. And how does it work with IntelliGems? Like when you're running those four different tests, are they basically just four different versions of the website or purchase funnels where the prices are consistent with whatever the test is? Yeah, that's what we were most worried about was, okay, how is there going to be consistency across the purchase funnel for Eric versus Ben? Really, really incredible where we had one ticket across however many thousands of orders in the three-week period it was live. when we had one ticket mentioning, hey, this price was this yesterday and it was just a visitor coming back.

14:36And we didn't do enough cleanup on like abandoned cart to clean that up. I mean, apparently we did because there was only one ticket. But yeah, what they do is basically replicate and command search and find almost and replace any mention of price. And so they do a really thorough job of like our flyout cart, which is an after-sell or up-cart product. Our post-purchase, which is after-sell and order editing everywhere in the purchase journey from top of funnel to end of funnel, inside of FAQs, inside of flyout cart, they replace and find any mention of price.

15:11Ben Perkins:And does it happen over time or is it all happening simultaneously? Simultaneously is my understanding. I mean, I'm not technical, but so when we were setting up the test, they do a really good job of hands-on. They have a CSM that walks you through it and you set up the test exactly the way that you want. They have you kind of go incognito mode across your team so that you see each of the four variants or three variants of the site with the different three or four pricings. And then, yeah, it works. That doesn't really answer your question, but - It works. Yeah, it works. Any other examples of tests?

15:46Ben Perkins:I see a note here about free shipping thresholds, which is something I think people don't think about testing or they, like they say, they finger in the wind, they see what their competitors are doing and they're like, Like this is what it is. But what kind of impact can testing that have on the biz? Yeah, that one was even more significant in terms of like result impact. Probably not as much when it's, I mean, still significant impact. Not just not as much as a style that does 70 % of revenue. That was our second test. We've got pretty major seasonality. We've got Father's Day, weddings, end of school, new jobs coming in May, June through August.

16:22And that's the only time of year that competes with Black Friday. And so we got two quick wins under our belt with IntelliGems. Within six weeks, we got the price test and free shipping threshold. Free shipping threshold was$100 because that's what we set it at in 2017 because everyone else had it. Never had been touched. And so we did four variants, 100 versus a$75, 125, and 149.99 option. Reasonings were 75, AOV is 123, but median, AOV, if we're calling it AOV still, median is quite a bit lower, where average is, we've got pretty significant outliers with$800,$900 carts. but median, especially when you look at new customers, is quite a bit lower than that.

17:14So we said, hey, can you increase conversion rate if you lower it at$7 ,500? Let's keep. $125, can you maybe get someone to add one more item per cart just to get over the$125 when AOV is anywhere from$121 to$123 in the year for us? And then$149.99, can you get them

17:32Ben Perkins:to add another shirt. $149.99, major flop for us. Similar, you know, with the price test, as was the$55 ceiling. So it's like, okay, we've got pretty elastic customers, or at least price-sensitive customers to a certain point. IntelliGems were really fascinated with the findings. Two major winners were the$75 and the$125, which matched our hypotheses. The$125 did get people to add an extra item. 75 just got people to check out. We ended up going with the 125 mostly because of worries about tariffs. We're like, ah, we just need to extract as much value as we can. Where in 2026, the name of the game for us is new customer acquisition.

18:16So we'll probably revisit that test and see if, just see how you can drill down even more because 75 was the winner for just getting people over the line.

18:25Ben Perkins:New customer acquisition is the word of the year or incrementality. Everyone's talking about incrementality, top of funnel. What are some of the ways that you're optimized? Like, I guess there's obviously the in-platform stuff where you're using exclusions to make sure that you're not oversaturating the bottom part of the funnel with retargeting campaigns and things. But what are some ways that you think about shifting your company's focus towards new customers? Yeah, the past four years or three years, even though revenues have increased, there's been a decline in new customer cohorts, which is encouraging that, I mean, we've got really resilient repeat purchasers, but it's worrying because it's like, okay, at what point, like, are we going to start to see the drop off?

19:08So that's why more than anything, the next 12 months, we're going to push for that new customer count, where now we've established a pretty decent and healthy level of profitability as a business. And we've got really strong, you know 30 60 90 180 360 ltv lifts so the way we're thinking about it is one i mean you talked about the exclusions of a little tinkering really mostly just kind of platform testing more than anything where we're starting to spend more significantly on youtube uh and just launched with the tatari so tv saying hey let's do pure top of funnel plays uh we've spent a lot on production.

19:50So can you let this million dollars worth of content we've had finally fly and see the light of day? Or it's a little discouraging we've spent that much. And still what happens is retargeting. You've got the DPAs or whatever catalogs crushing it. So hopefully just putting net new eyeballs.

20:09Ben Perkins:I love hearing you. We're actually releasing a podcast on Friday that you should listen to. That's our Google guy at Pilot House just talking about all the ways that those campaigns can be reaching the wrong people, how they built the, really how to, how to audit them to make sure that you're actually bringing the right top of, top of funnel people and not like men who click on bra ads or something like that, right? Like, which is, or children who are just streaming, you know, streaming the show or whatever. Cause, cause Google tends to want to include as much volume as it can always. How do you think about testing?

20:44Ben Perkins:Do you always have a next test in the hopper? Are you guys kind of ABT, always be testing? Is that how that works? Yeah, trying to be ABT. We've slowed down a little bit the last few weeks. But yeah, trying to build out our full 2026 roadmap. Obviously, we're flexible. And it's like, oh, if something new comes up, i.e. a tariff or whatever, oh, yeah, then we can change the priority or if there's something fundamentally wrong. But yeah, trying to do it all. That's why we went with IntelliGems, where before we were paying for three different kind of CRO type apps. I mean, we're the experts at having more apps than you need.

21:21So we had Shoplift, which was content first, you know, content testing first. Then we had PDQ, which is checkout testing. And then IntelliGems, which makes it tough where it's like, oh, always, always, always be testing. So much so that those interfere with each other. So it's like, okay, let's pair it, you know, let's strip it back. Let's go to IntelliGems who can do all of them. So yeah, hopefully we've got our 26 roadmap and it's high impact stuff rather than testing against the test.

21:50Ben Perkins:You mentioned your first two tests, which are there any tests that you've run in the run-up to Black Friday that have informed how you're going to approach your offer or anything in Q4? We were a little bit behind the ball on that one where we should have. So, I mean, we did a little one over Labor Day, which was let's discount basically site-wide everything but the white shirt, almost Trojan horse our way in there. That turned out really well. The findings were people still buy full-priced white shirts, but seeing everything else on discount, one, increases conversion rates, but two, increases units per transaction.

22:26And for us, we've got two types of customers, white shirt-only customers. And you can guess that those economics are much worse than white plus customers, which means at some point you've migrated to a non-core SKU or style, which is basically all incremental at that point. So Labor Day, we were informed that we can drive that behavior to get you to migrate to something new while not discounting the real breadwinner.

22:58Ben Perkins:How do you take into account things like LTV? You were mentioning your 150 day or whatever, your long-term metrics for customer value. How does IntelliGems, which I imagine is looking at things in the moment, increasing your conversion, how does it take into account LTV over a long period of time? Does it estimate it or is it something that it checks back in on? How does that work? They're building it out to be more robust because that was one of our things. It's like, okay, we don't want short-term wins. at the expense of long-term profitability. And that's where I do like the way it's built right now.

23:34The whole thing is profit per visitor on that particular transaction, where they do a good job of stripping everything, where I think most other tech that we use has over-attribution, where it's very stringent on IntelliGem's side. It's like, hey, this transaction, Eric is making you this amount of money, or this unidentified visitor is making you this amount of money. And it's like, oh, I mean, we're setting up the business to be like 90 day break even where their tests are purchase you know first purchase or whatever purchase it could be purchase 15 for you but being specific purchase break even and that's where we like it where you know if they can beat 90 days we'll take that all day so it doesn't really answer your question they're building that out but profit per visitor is the north star metric within the platform and it's like okay if you if you can do it on a transaction level, then you can do it on a 150, 360 level.