Ep 553: How Dad Gang Scaled from 100k to 700k Hats Without Changing Their Simple Playbook

0:00Bart Szaniewski:One of my biggest fears for this would be, oh, you're just a gimmicky dad brand. There's enough of those. I don't want to fall into that. Even our ads recently have a picture of our hat or a person wearing it, but then some good quotes about fatherhood and what it means. This summer, we saw Giannis Antetokounmpo wearing our hat on iShowSpeed's stream. He was in Greece, and then Giannis shows up in a dad gang hat, and we have no idea how he got it. Organic content is still the kind of like indicator and the lifeblood of your overall strategy. Depending on what you post on Instagram or TikTok, you'll get real reads of how people react to that content.

0:42Bart Szaniewski:There's too much stress around posting the perfect thing. I would just rather post anything.

0:53It's the D2C podcast. It's the D2C podcast. I should get my mic in front of me because I've got Bart Zanuski here, chief dad of the Dad Gang. I think we've done two podcasts with you. We flew out to Victoria for our fantastic event. Welcome back to the podcast, man. How are you doing?

1:11Bart Szaniewski:Thanks, man. Good to be here. Yeah, super exciting to catch up again. I appreciate you having me on just to see where Dad Gang is these days and what we've been doing and just share our journey and our story a little bit more. It's funny. I've had a couple, I've had this happen a couple of times. I was just at a conference and I met a guy who I did a podcast with about two years ago. And it's like, I already assumed, like you were crushing it when we had last spoke. And it's like, I, you had all the fundamentals in place. It feels like, I like to say, it feels like you're doing this thing on easy mode somehow, where it's like, you're not overcomplicating it.

1:45You're just, you're getting it out there and doing really well. But I think your growth has definitely caught up to where I assumed you were back then. Talk to me a little bit about how much you've grown. I think our last podcast was from an Instagram post to 100 ,000 hats sold. So how do you quantify how much you've grown in the last little while?

2:02Bart Szaniewski:Yeah, it's kind of funny you say, you know, like easy mode and all this stuff. And I honestly feel like that sometimes too. Not to say that like, you know, building a company is easy, but EJ, Grant and I have been doing this for, I don't know, We say like a combined of 36 years between all of our experiences. And when we finally decided to do something together, that was like a, you know, a combination of all those years working for other brands and working at different roles. And then, you know, finally taking all that experience and timing and opportunity and luck and kind of making it happen.

2:39Bart Szaniewski:And so a lot of a lot of hardship and a lot of like struggle on our own and our own individual career paths had to happen in order for this thing to work. And we kind of bring in a lot of experience on what to avoid. So when we when we work on this brand, we really try not to overstress ourselves with unrealistic goals or projections or things that will just stress the business because we woke up one day and thought, hey, that would be an awesome ego goal to hit. So we kind of stay away from bringing stressors onto the brand, bringing too much overhead, over hiring or anything like that. So I think that's where it's true that it is on easy mode is because we've kept all of that kind of stress away.

3:22Bart Szaniewski:But, you know, there's also the hardships of like growing a brand and making it bigger. But, yeah, I mean, since we last talked, you said we were at 100 ,000 hats or so. And now we're at a little bit past year three, three full years of running the brand. And we're either there or approaching 700 ,000 hats sold. Oh, my God. Yeah, since that beginning of 100 hats in that tiny garage. So it's still like when I say that out loud, I almost feel like I'm talking to somebody else and asking them because it's not, I don't really believe it that much. And we are very fortunate and lucky to be able to be growing this thing for a deeper meaning of celebrating fatherhood and making great hats.

4:10Bart Szaniewski:So, yeah, that's where we are now. But it's still just the three of us. We don't have any employees. That's wild. Still basic, the most basic Shopify theme for free that you get immediately when you sign up for a Shopify account. It's that default theme. still shooting everything on iphone outside of like some of our athlete collaborations we bring in you know a couple dslrs for those and some microphones but we still don't have the need or or the want for some like massive production over hiring big studios and you know that kind of stuff i'm currently actually at a free office uh for true golf shoes uh our buddy jason owns true golf shoes if you ever want to talk to him a great guy yeah um yeah every once in a while.

4:56Bart Szaniewski:He's like, Hey, if you guys ever want to use the office, get out of your home, uh, environment, then come here. So today we're doing a day at the office and, but yeah, just still simple. This office is free to us. You know, it's not like we're buying a bunch of property or anything. I think one of the reasons I mentioned easy motives, cause I'm in this Slack channel with you. And I think you were just talking about a recent promotion that you ran where it's like, Like you still are also just like from your thoughts to your email list in like an hour's time sometime. I think you came up with the idea of the of any hat for$20 for a 24 hour period.

5:32And people in the group were asking you like, oh, how much did you preempt your list? Or do you do that? You're like, nope, I just said that's what it is. And then we did it. And then it was done and it crushed. Is it like how much how much planning out are you doing with your I guess you've got so many different SKUs at this point, so many different promotions. are you kind of gripping and ripping them at the moment? Are you, because I remember like Brandon Harojo and when we did our event in Victoria had his promotion calendar built out for like two years in advance. How much planning goes into that side of things?

6:00Bart Szaniewski:Yeah, Brandon's a good dude. Him and I stayed in touch afterwards too, just chatting about strategy and I love everything they've built at Montana Knife Company. But it's still, honestly, it's still very grip and rip. Like we launched a Halloween hat yesterday and there was just a little bit of an issue on like the hats being delivered because of some weather delays and stuff. But like, you know, I, I was here in this building shooting with Kyle, who like I brought him out to shoot like a mini horror film on his one camera. And I'm like, let's, it's our hat for Halloween is called the spooky season dad gang hat.

6:41Bart Szaniewski:and I was like, let's just make some like really scary footage and then, you know, put it together, send me what you have and then Tuesday I want to launch the hat. And so it's just a matter of me like collecting those assets, whether I shoot them on an iPhone or have my buddy shoot it. And then as long as I have those and the hats are in the warehouse, then the kind of like short hype build up to the hat starts. And then shortly after is the release, just because, I don't know, this is me trusting myself and not data but i think people just don't think that much about your product at all only you do and so if i can tell you hey this is coming and then hey this is here within like 48 72 hours i have enough of your attention to like impact your thought process a little bit but if i tell you this hat is launching in two weeks you're gonna forget you're gonna need another reminder, all these things.

7:37Bart Szaniewski:So we're still like, all right, the hats are on the way, shoot content. Once they get here, release all of that, hop into Canva, create the assets and let it launch. I'm not like Brendan. I don't have lengthy calendars for launches at the moment. What would you say? It's kind of astronomical the amount of growth you've experienced just in the last little while. What have been the major levers for that? Has it just been more of the same? Or is there anything specific you point to that really added gas on the fire? I think the community that we've built with Dad Gang and the private Facebook group, and just how much our customers are engaged.

8:17Bart Szaniewski:And I don't even like, labeling them as just customers isn't fair. Like these people really help us think of new hats, develop new hats, give us real time feedback and tell us what they want. So when we have, you know, designed by dads on the hat we don't just put that there because it's a good little tagline like truly everything here has been designed by either myself ej or grant and then at the same time loyal customers that give feedback that tell us what to make and and you know even give us like sample iteration feedback so we can go back to the drawing boards and make stuff i think that kind of long tail approach of trusting in the community to kind of pull through for you has been a giant lever that isn't seen like the day it happens, you know, if you get a big celebrity post or a big endorsement or something like that.

9:08Bart Szaniewski:I understand those are like direct impact things that maybe you could feel the next day, but we like to chip away, you know, bit by bit every day to create long time loyalty to the brand. I think that is like truly the main lever. And then if you want to sprinkle some like, you know, instant results when we do collaborations with athletes or influencers or any of that. I think those are good brand lifts. And I love it the most because we get to sit back and lean into what the brand is all about, which is fatherhood. And I don't want to stray away from that. I feel like when we launch a hat, it needs a story of why and how it ties back to fatherhood.

9:48Bart Szaniewski:Otherwise, we're just another brand slapping dad stuff on hats just to get some sales. So the storytelling is a big aspect of that. And your products themselves sell themselves so well. Like dads hang out with other dads. Dads are increasingly proud of being dads. Like every dad hat you sell probably sells three more in a way that other products maybe don't have that like built in. You've done such a good job with your community, but you've done such a good job with the product relating to the community. I feel like it's just such a strong through line that it must give you a lot of momentum that as you grow, it begets more growth.

10:25Bart Szaniewski:Yeah, yeah. I like to say we sell billboards for your head, too. I think if you are with a dad that has a dad gang hat and you like it, you know, standard interaction, you ask him where he got it and so on and so forth. But yeah, people that follow us, people that are engaged with the brand really will see that we lean into the deeper meaning of fatherhood. And it's not like just a surface level, funny stuff. Even I've even changed my ad strategy over the past, like two, three months recently to even in the ads lean into the emotional stuff. Cause I don't, I don't know. One of my biggest like fears for this would be like, oh, you're just a gimmicky dad brand.

11:09Bart Szaniewski:And there's enough, there's enough of those, you know, I don't want to fall into that bucket. So even our ads recently, like have a picture of our hat or a person wearing it, but then some good quotes about fatherhood and what it means, you know, living, living a legacy, your children will want to be a part of those kinds of things. I'm throwing that into the ads because I don't, I don't want people to lose sight of, of why this all happened. I love it. Uh, it's my friend, Eric Tosco from shine on says crying is buying. So if you can make that, you say that too, because if you can make that emotional connection, it's unbelievable.

11:43Like, do you do much in the way of like unboxing? Cause I feel like that's another angle that for you like on father's day people receiving these hats from their kid or something like that that must be a powerful angle as well yeah we do some content around that i

11:55Bart Szaniewski:actually recently just uh on in the vein of uh you know keeping things simple i bought this funny like i might even have it here hold on but it's a my backtack's just down there but it's a neck rig that you like put around your neck and it has a magnet right here and you just place your phone and it allows you to do like all hands-free kind of filming so i've done some unboxing with that we have some beanies coming out for the uh for the holidays and we're actually believe it or not for the first time doing a box that isn't a standard just shipper box something fun for the holidays and i did a video yesterday of that so yeah that experience is really cool because hats need to be in a nerdy hat talk but they need to be packaged in a certain way and dimension to not get crushed while they're being shipped so it's one of those products one of the only products that you open up on the apparel side that comes in you know the perfect display already whereas you know if you buy a sweatshirt or a t-shirt it's vacuum sealed it kind of bagged up um so our unboxing actually looks good so we do try and get like an apple product just like little dry ice coming out the side so when you open it up not that great but it's a$35 hat, but, uh, but still, yeah, some, something special when you, when you open it at least.

13:15When it comes to either product lines, specific products, cause I know you guys, you've launched runners hats. You've got, I think you've gone into other kinds of apparel and things like that. What's been the most successful extension of your original product line?

13:27Bart Szaniewski:Yeah, I think, so we still consider ourselves, uh, at the core headwear brand and then any, um, apparel that comes out like a sweatshirt or a t-shirt tank top that kind of stuff is just a little kind of i just call them like extra credit product or a bonus product um that lives on the site in in much smaller quantities and um if you are you know a diehard of of dad gang and you want to rep it a little further with a t-shirt or a sweatshirt then that's what that's there for but our apparel extensions do really well when we it's tough to break through in t-shirt graphics just like you know especially with like chat gpt and all these ai design things and pinterest and all this inspiration around like a lot of people are making the same graphics and that's not like a knock on on anything but a lot of the like vintage-esque type stuff ends up looking very similar in the long run and band t-shirts that kind of stuff so if if we bake in like deeper fatherhood meaning that's when when apparel does really well so just recently did a t-shirt called the dad gang world tour and on the front it's like just a little patch that says dad gang world tour and on the back is like a you know a tour t-shirt that you get at a rock show or something and then at the at the bottom, instead of tour dates and locations, it says just the little things you do as you are a father, like throughout your life.

14:55Bart Szaniewski:So like diaper changes, sleep schedules, college send-offs, sports practice. And that's the kind of stuff that's like, okay, like, yes, I want to represent that because it holds it down for everything that dads go through. We have another one that says like you only get 18 summers, which is just a testament of like, yeah, yeah. 90 % of the time you've ever spent is 95 % of the time is before that age, right? Yeah, exactly. And so it's that, that shirt, like you just did, a lot of dads are like, damn, you're making me cry. But I also want this because it's a deeper meaning. And then we have another one that says like presence over presence.

15:33Bart Szaniewski:So be there instead of buying them a bunch of shit. So that's where our products that just have like dad gang on them do okay. But the ones that the apparel stuff that has like a hidden deeper meaning type stuff is is what really does it for us that that world tour t-shirt did so well we sold it out and brought it back twice now and launched like two weeks ago so and that was just was that just your idea or was that something that came from the community that was that was mine i just was like looking for some inspiration and i saw some old like vintage tour t-shirts i was like okay i love this i love this style but how can we like really tie it into fatherhood.

16:13Bart Szaniewski:So yeah, we might, I don't know. I want, I want to look for more stuff like that without like flipping anything. Cause I don't really enjoy like when people take like, you know, sports teams logo and flip them into their brands logo, that kind of stuff. So just taking concepts and working them into fatherhood, I think is what we want to look at. You don't want to be too cheesy, but you should look at shine on if you have it. I don't know if you know Eric Tosco, but their whole thing where these jewelry pieces, where they had sentimental messages, like very custom sentimental messages. And it kind of got over the top with theirs where they're like, I'm the daughter of a firefighter.

16:47And I know that you might not always be there, but you'll be there. If there's smoke, there's fire. And it's this whole like long thing written out on a pendant, but it's when you can narrow cast with those kinds of emotions, right? It's amazing how powerful they can be.

17:01Bart Szaniewski:Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I'll look into it. Definitely want to, yeah, a lot of this stuff just like comes to us as we are fortunate enough to also just be like living as our customers. I know that won't always be the case, but I have a two and a four-year-old, like I'm always going through it, raising little kids. Grant has a nine-year-old and a six-month-old, I believe at this point. So he's seen it all to age nine and now he has a newborn and then EJ's got a 10 and six. So we're like in it and we experience things on a daily basis that were like, I bet you other dads are going through this. And so let's turn it into a product or a story.

17:43To keep the business going, you might all need to have a third. Just so you're constantly in the shit forever. Yeah.

17:50Bart Szaniewski:Hot topic lately. Hot topic, that's for sure. We'll leave that off this podcast. The one thing I noticed again and again, I'm a big sports fan and I just see again and again, more athletes just natively and organically Talk a little bit about maybe how that part of the business has grown both organically and how you've been able to spin those organic engagements into like actual creator influencer type stuff. Yeah, I think lately it's just been once again, like baseball, football, basketball season start back up and we get those tunnel photos of athletes wearing our hats. And like, honestly, at times we'll miss them.

18:28Bart Szaniewski:And it sucks because we'll read a DM request from like three months ago. They'd be like, oh, this guy on the 49ers wore your hat. Like, damn, we missed that one. But we, you know, just being self-aware, we realize that we're very popular amongst new dads. So when an athlete is about to have their first child or become a dad or has babies at the house, that's the hat to wear. And I think a lot of dads with kids that are older still wear hats. But it's in that moment where you're just so enamored with becoming a father, it's cool to throw on a dad gang hat. So we see a lot of that around athletes.

19:08Bart Szaniewski:And then this summer we saw Giannis Antetokounmpo wearing our hat on iShowSpeed's stream, which, you know, he's like top five streamers in the world. And he was in Greece. And then Giannis shows up in a dad gang hat. And we have no idea how he got it. Why is he wearing it in Greece? But it turns out we did some trail digging and found out that his wife bought him a few dad gang hats. And so, but yeah, for him to wear that on stream and get tagged a bunch and have no idea how it happened is so cool because I'd rather have it that way than some forced like product placement, working with an agency to get our product on a model or an athlete.

19:47Bart Szaniewski:So that's been happening. And then, yeah, recently we did a collab hat, which is close to sold out now, but with Juwan Johnson, he's on the New Orleans Saints tight end. And he was another guy that his wife had bought him some hats. He was wearing them all the time. We'd see all these NFL and Saints photos of him wearing our hat. And to the point where it gets where you're like, hey, we'd love to do something here. Because, yeah, it just gets to a point where you're like, come on, we have to like work together. We obviously both represent fatherhood and you like our product. So let's make it happen.

20:25Bart Szaniewski:And yeah, similar story to like Mookie Betts or any of the athletes we've worked with is we try not to force any kind of collaboration or partnership. Just people that are already using wearing your product, I think, is the is the best approach because that way you're not you're not forcing a new relationship and you're not paying people to like you. What is your current content strategy kind of look like from a paid and organic standpoint? I remember, you know, boosting is a big, you're bringing boosting back into the conversation, I think, because you guys have such a successful organic platform.

20:59How do you think these days about organic versus paid content?

21:02Bart Szaniewski:I think organic content is still the kind of like indicator and the lifeblood of your overall strategy. Depending on what you post on Instagram or TikTok, you'll get real reads of how people react to that content. You know, if you post something organically and it gets a ton of comments and engagement and shares and now reposts the new feature on Instagram, that's just a good indication that that post might do well across paid. Because then you are paying to amplify that content to get in front of more eyeballs and hopefully in turn get a lot more reactions. But it's still like it has not changed much.

21:40Bart Szaniewski:Honestly, when it comes to paid and the assets I put there, you know, I still take some of our best organic content and throw copy on it, make it a little more direct. If I have a cool video that I posted on on reels and it did well organically, then maybe I'll throw, you know, some copy over that and be a little more like understanding that you might be a first time viewer of a dad gang ad. but it's it's still fairly simple still shooting everything with with my iphone i was just here laying on the floor earlier because there's some good lighting getting pictures of hats and just understanding that like you said the hat does kind of do its own selling by saying dad gang on it so how do we amplify that with quotes or testimonials that kind of stuff and then organic i don't jump into the paid dashboard every single day to change a bunch of things because I'm in fear of something not performing for a day.

22:43Bart Szaniewski:I think that's a weird way of looking at things. I give it some time to show life on Meta. But with Organic, I'm just posting something every day. If I got a good photo or a video, put it up and continue on with your day. I think there's too much stress around posting the perfect thing or I would just rather post anything. so yeah that's kind of the flow i get a little anxious when i haven't put up a post for the day that's my only time i'm like oh shit it's seven o 'clock like i haven't posted anything yet get something up so i try to go like two or three or four just to just to get that out of the way but yeah i think organic super important and then reposting organic stories like our our stories on instagram are always on there's never like a day where there's not a re-shared story of someone tags us.

23:32And then when it just comes to your, I think you talked about it a little bit in both the Halloween launch and this offer that you had the$20 hat offer. What's this, what's your sort of approach and anatomy to a successful launch? How are you, uh, sequencing your various touch points for maximum effect?

23:49Bart Szaniewski:I think a sellout rates are obviously like a really good read of a successful launch. Um, so, you know, if we launch 2 ,500 hats or 3000 hats and they sell out within like three days. That's a really good launch for us. We've had some sellout day off. That's a great launch for us. So really watching the numbers on how much stuff is selling. And then also just paying attention to overall engagement around that launch. Like if I just announce a hat, here it is. It's green and it's got a white dagging logo on it. And I don't add like enough story or meaning behind it. the engagement around that is usually pretty weak, which leads to sales being not as strong.